It’s May fourth today.

It’s May fourth, and the sky is gray and spitting rain. Seems fitting, I suppose, considering. Could it really have been two years? We’ve all moved on with our lives; we get up, drive to work, come home and have supper and watch TV and even laugh sometimes. Is it unfair to them that we’ve gone ahead and left behind all they were, all they could have been?

I haven’t forgotten them; I could never forget them, but sometimes simply living feels like a betrayal. I carry on with life, with my daily routine, doing small insignificant things they’ll never get to do again.

Sometimes the reality hits me suddenly, evoking a sharp, tearing pain in my chest. I’ll be sitting at my desk on a completely ordinary morning, sipping coffee, when it strikes me that he’ll never drink coffee again, that I’ll never see her big blue eyes light up as she discusses her newest technological discovery. We’ll never again meet over coffee on some boring morning to discuss anything and everything.

They’re gone.

Permanently.

Forever.

They won’t come strolling down the hall together, one cracking a corny joke and the other trying to hide her smile. They won’t tumble onto the gate ramp from some distant planet, yelling “Close the iris!”

They won’t annoy me or argue with me or complain about trees or giggle despite an order not to giggle or invite me to go fishing. It’s funny the things you regret most after someone’s gone. I should have gone fishing with Jack. It probably would have been thoroughly boring, but what I wouldn’t give now for the chance to be bored with Jack by my side, sipping a beer and cracking a smart-ass comment every now and then.

They won’t ever again do even the simplest of things, like breathing or blinking or smiling. They’re gone. After two years, you’d think I would have finally realized that. You’d think I wouldn’t always be expecting one of them to walk through the door.

Like now. I tidy up my desk in preparation to leave work, but hesitate for a moment in the doorway, wondering if Sam has left yet, if she’d mind if I run my latest translation by her.

Daniel, you idiot, Sam isn’t here. Sam has been dead for two years. Two years since those stunning long-lashed blue eyes finally flickered closed. She’d hung on for a long time, but when Jack went down she finally gave up.

It had been a battle with the Jaffa, just another of our hundreds of battles with the Jaffa, and Sam had gotten hurt fairly early on. We all knew it was bad, really bad.

Jack kept her alive, talked to her nonstop, ordered her not to lose consciousness. He channeled every iota of energy and resolve within him into getting Sam through that gate to safety, to medical help. I never saw a man more set on a single goal. We almost made it, too, but none of us saw the Jaffa hiding in the brush near the gate.

Two staff weapons fired as one, both blasts striking Jack in the chest, and before he even fell I knew he wasn’t going to make it. Heaven only knows what gave him the strength to look straight into my eyes and say, “Get Sam to ... ”

She’d been awake, had seen the whole thing. I think she’d been hanging on mostly for him, willing herself to live, and when she watched him die, her will vanished. She looked at me, as he had done, and blinked twice, and closed her eyes.

There were no last words, no background music, not even a shrilling monitor. Just a final flutter of long lashes, then silence. Teal’c had taken out the Jaffa, and we made it through the gate. Neither of us could speak as we walked numbly out onto the ramp. We couldn’t say to close the iris or call in a medical team that neither Jack nor Sam would ever need.

Teal’c had flung Jack over his shoulder; he lowered him gently to the floor at the end of the ramp. I placed Sam next to Jack. Their faces were still and pale, their skin already cooling. They were dead. They were dead.

General Hammond was reserved as always but I saw the raw grief in his eyes. Teal’c was the same way. I was in shock for a while, but after it wore off I cried more than any grown man wants to admit.

Jack was a man who sometimes annoyed the hell out of me, but a man who would have died to save my life. Sam was a sister and a friend, one of the most intelligent and caring people I have ever known.

It’s been two years, and they’re still gone, and we’re still here. They’re silent and cold, and we live and laugh, but I’m not laughing today. I never laugh on May fourth.

I don’t go straight home from work any more; that’s one of the many things that have changed in my life during the last two years. I have to stop by day care and pick up my daughter.

Sam’s daughter.

Her name is Hope, and she just turned three years old. Sam was very close-mouthed about the identity of Hope’s father, but I think we all knew, even General Hammond.

Sam’s daughter ... and Jack’s.

She’s my daughter now, the bright star who keeps me going. I’ve suffered a lot of loss in my life, Sam and Jack just the latest, and Hope is the one person I’m absolutely determined to hang onto.

She’s brilliant already, like her mother, and sometimes impulsive, like her dad. She has brown eyes and blond hair and I’m teaching her to say “for cryin’ out loud” and “yeahsureyoubetcha” and to recite the atomic weight of boron and the names of obscure elements.

Sam and Jack are gone, but maybe, some small part of them lives on in Hope. I’m going to make sure she knows about her parents, all about them, about the people they were and the lives they saved, and classified information be damned. Hope deserves to know.

Jack and Sam lie silent and cold beneath gray headstones, but I’m fighting to keep something of them alive in Hope.

She’s all I have left of them, of the friends I lost a billion miles away on a day much colder than this.