Somewhere (in another iteration, across versions and reversions, in any one of the thousand million universes touching their own like soap bubbles) Cam insisted on bringing them all home to his momma and his gran'ma for Thanksgiving dinner. Somewhere there's a version of them sitting down at a table in an old farmhouse with Daniel earnestly explaining the origin and history of all sorts of traditions, Cam rolling his eyes and stuffing a biscuit in his mouth to shut him up. Somewhere in the multiverse, right now, Teal'c is eyeing Cam's gran'ma, and Gran'ma's eyeing him, and they're trying to decide if they really are going to be lifelong friends.

Here, Samantha Carter is lying spread out on her chest, her forehead pillowed against her folded hands, telling a bunch of aphysical glowing squid how divine and all-powerful and benevolent they are.

Hallowed be the Ori.

*

The cities have emptied now; nobody trusts their neighbors not to be carrying the Ori Plague, walking among them like death come calling. Transportation was the first ring of infrastructure to fall, as frightened governments locked their borders and went to go cower under their beds. Then manufacture. Food production. Water. Electric. There are still hospitals, but hospitals without medicine and power are nothing more than places for people to go to die.

Their tiny hamlet is no different than any one of the other dozens of refugee shantytowns that have sprung up around (what used to be) major metropolitan areas. It's neither more nor less squalid than any other; it isn't bigger or smaller, has no more or fewer resources, has the exact same struggles for food and clean water and sanitation and medical care.

There's nothing about it to indicate, in any way, that this is the camp that houses St. Mitchell, houses the Blessed Lady. The people around them -- Nathan, Amelia, Rosita, Josh, Dana, Troy; old friends, good people, people who know what they're doing and why they're doing it -- won't let there be.

They're all so careful. One wrong move and it'd all be over. They've come close a few times. More often in the first days, before they hit on the tactic of couching their counter-insurgency in the language of myth and legend. The Priors are careful to root out anything that suggests the Ori are anything but the One True Gods, but they leave the folk superstitions and heroes alone.

The Blessed Lady appears to comfort the dying, to heal the sick. (Sam managed to get the Goa'uld healing device out of the Mountain with her; using it still makes her feel dizzy and scared, but it's the only hope some of these people have, and she swore an oath -- to her country, to its people -- that keeps her from giving up.) St. Mitchell is her guard and protector: defender of the weak, champion of the downtrodden, the man who rides out of the darkness to face down those preying on the innocent, particularly the predators who walk on two legs. (They ran out of bullets in the first week, have barely been able to supplement with salvage and scavenge, but it's the easiest thing in the world to cut a tree branch down to a quarterstaff and chisel out spear-heads from rock, and Cam spent weeks with the Sodan; what works for krantu staff works just as well for spear.)

"Momma always said I'd never be a saint," Cam said, once, when word came back around, when they realized the stories had taken on a life of their own and they were being given credit for miracles they hadn't been within five hundred miles of. "Only time she ever didn't know what she was talking about." She's not sure how Cam can still make jokes. They've tried to send word through the network, through the imperfect flawed grapevine, to see if his family's all right. They haven't gotten any word back yet, and every time she suggests they travel eastward on their next sortie, he always finds an excuse to turn them north or west instead.

She thinks he doesn't want to know for certain; as long as they don't go, he's free to imagine them all, surviving just like she and he are surviving, whole and healthy and well. Self-delusion is a powerful thing. She knows enough to think they would have stood up and said I will not obey, and they both know what happens to those who offer resistance.

General O'Neill would have called their tactics samizdat. She wonders sometimes if he managed to escape D.C. before it went up. If anyone could have, it would have been him.

She thinks he'd be proud of her.

*

I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command, I will never surrender the members of my command while they still have the means to resist. If I am captured, I will continue to resist by all means available. I will make every effort to escape and aid others to escape.

The Code of Conduct doesn't cover your planet being taken over by killer lightbulbs and their psychopathic encyclopedia-salesmen tent preachers.

They've learned to extrapolate, these days.

*

Nat (Colonel Reynolds; they've all been on a first-name basis since the day the Mountain fell; hard to keep military discipline when there isn't a military anymore, and they don't want to arouse suspicion) comes to wake her for her watch. They can do that much, at least, without being too much of an oddity. Every camp's different. Some of them are just a collection of tents and shacks and falling-down buildings that all happen to be near each other. Some of them have banded together, working to keep some level of cooperation and civilization while the rest of the country backslides to barbarism.

(Sam knows those are the camps that receive the most attention from the Priors -- the Ori have a vested interest in returning Earth to the Dark Ages, so that all benevolence comes from the Ori, so that desperate people will believe instead of just paying lip service -- but none of them are willing to cede that much ground. Their camp posts guards, and shares chores, and pools what few resources they're able to find or build or barter. They can't not. Every one of their forty-three survivors came from the SGC, or is a spouse or child of someone who died with the Mountain. Some of them have served together for years; some of them are strangers to each other. Sgt. Acevedo had transfered in three days before the plague first hit. But they're family now, the only family most of them have left, and they're all working towards a common goal. They aren't going to lose anyone else if they can help it.)

Sam comes awake between one heartbeat and the next when Nat crouches down beside her pallet and touches her ankle. It's dark in their shack -- Stygian blackness, Daniel would have called it -- and Sam's ears recognize the anechoic silence indicating that snow's falling outside, audible only by its lack of sound. They've been talking about moving en masse into one of the abandoned industrial sections of Commerce City or Brighton, to have better shelter for the winter, but she and Cam have found too many dead bodies in the remnants of cities and towns.

She's pretty sure the Priors are trying to keep them all scattered, keep them from cooperating with each other and shoring each other up. It's pretty stupid, if you ask her. The Ori came here to harness the power of billions of believers, and the first thing they did was kill half their potential batteries and set it up so that half the remaining wouldn't last out the year.

She's also pretty sure that the proper response to the destruction of everything she ever knew isn't to get pissy that the conquerors are being stupid, but she's kind of gotten used to mortal peril over the years, and being conquered by idiots just galls.

"Quiet night," Nat says, so softly she has to strain to hear. "Should be good. Nothing's going to want to be out in this weather."

Sam sits up and drags a hand through her hair. "I don't want to be out in this weather," she grumbles. The blankets next to her are cold; she'd worry, except she'd woken up when Cam climbed over her, just far enough to recognize it was him getting out of the bed. The rest of the room is colder. They've got the fire banked for the night; they don't want to risk it getting out of hand. And they're all a little touchy about fire these days, anyway.

Nat strips off the down jacket he's wearing (one of their only bits of heavy-winter gear; by the time they'd accepted it would be salvage, not looting, most of the shells of stores had been picked fairly clean) and drapes it around her shoulders. "It's not that bad," he says. "The snow makes it a little bit warmer, at least."

Sam puts her arms through the arms of the jacket, accepts the gloves and hat and scarf (all Cam's doing; she'd thought he was crazy when he'd demanded they salvage a yarn boutique, of all places, but apparently he'd learned to knit as a child, and he'd said that they'd have better karma making their own and leaving the ready-made items still there for someone less talented who needed them; his are warmer, too). She'd kill for a toothbrush and some toothpaste. They ran out a while back, and haven't been able to find more. Her teeth are fuzzy, and her mouth tastes like something died in it.

But they're alive.

"Happy Thanksgiving," she says. They've all agreed. They're going to cling to as much normality as they can keep.

"Yeah," Nat says. He kicks off his boots and climbs behind her, falling into the other half of the bed. None of them sleep alone anymore. It's too cold. You wake up whoever's relieving you on watch, and you go back to sleep in the bed they've already warmed with their body-heat. Modesty was the first thing to go.

She's lacing up her boots, thinking he's already asleep, when he adds, his voice thick and blurry, "'M thankful the bastards haven't managed to kill all of us yet."

"Yeah," Sam says. "Me too."

*

Toothbrush, toothpaste. Vitamins, candles, salt, alcohol. Soap. Antibiotics. Aspirin. Coffee.

Daniel would have been able to walk out into the woods and come back with a substitute for half of the things they're missing. Sam's working with nothing more than ten years of half-remembered lectures Daniel had given, absently, information falling from his lips while he worked at this or that. She'd never paid more than half-attention. She'd done the intensive survival training Colonel O'Neill had insisted on, and she remembers some of that, too -- they all remember bits and pieces, and with their knowledge pooled, they're managing to scrape by -- but Daniel had always been a bizarre repository of information both esoteric and arcane; they'd always joked that she was their expert on 20th century technology, and he was their expert on anything older than that.

She can't mourn Daniel's loss. He stuck with them through the first month or so, was the one to first suggest their resistance-through-propaganda, worked side-by-side with them to set up as much safety and security as they could scrounge. Then he'd come to the three of them, late one night, spring shading into summer and the plumes of smoke from cities burning on the horizon, to say that it didn't look like help was coming so he was going to go fetch it.

It had taken her and Cam a few minutes to realize what he'd been proposing. Teal'c had understood immediately. Orlin had said there was no way the Ancients would help them, but Daniel's always been persuasive when he needs to be; he's talked entire species into doing crazy things more times than Sam can count. There's only one way to be guaranteed an audience with the Ascended, though.

Teal'c had been the one to -- no, even now she can't think of it. But Daniel had smiled and said I love you all in the seconds before his dying body turned to light and fell away, and she can't mourn him, can't, but she misses him so fiercely it makes her chest ache.

She misses Teal'c too, so goddamn much. But they'd only had a three-month supply of tretonin, and even Daniel -- if he'd stayed -- couldn't have figured out a way to make that.

For the first few days -- after -- they'd walked around in the perpetual state of indrawn breath, waiting for the cavalry to come. But summer had turned to fall, fall is fading into winter, and there hasn't been any sign. Still. Every morning -- whether there's a Prior there to lead them in Prostration or not -- Sam makes sure to take the time to send Daniel her belief. Not prayer; Daniel would be too busy laughing his ass off to get any use out of it. But her belief. If the Ori need it, Daniel might, too, and whatever otherworldly politics he's fighting against to get them help, she'll do her part by believing he'll be leading the cavalry charge over the hill.

Any minute now.

What are you waiting for, Daniel?

*

Sam hears a footfall in the snow behind her just as she's finishing her first circle around the territory they're holding. Guard duty mostly consists of fending off feral dogs, coyotes, raccoons, anything that might want to get into their food storage, but sometimes they get people, too. Some of them are good, and some of them have gone just as feral. (They can't even shelter the good ones, and that burns them, but they agreed up front that nobody who didn't know the true story of what was should be taken in; there's too much at risk.) She turns around, bringing up the shotgun with the ease of long practice. It's not loaded -- out of ammo again -- but usually just brandishing it is enough to buy her time to get her gloves off and close in with the knife she's got tucked in the small of her back.

It's only Cam, though, and he's smiling at her and holding --

Oh, God, he's holding a cup and it smells like coffee.

"All hail the Blessed Lady," he says. He holds out the mug. It's one of their good ones; heavy pewter that would probably survive the Apocalypse. The next one. "Happy Thanksgiving, baby."

"Oh my God," she says, "where did you find that?" She takes the mug from him. It warms her hands, even through the gloves; the smell alone is enough to make her dizzy.

He falls into step beside her. She can't decide if she wants to gulp it down before the frost and the snow cool it off, or if she wants to savor every last tiny sip. "Here and there," he says. "Had a bit put by. Don't tell anyone else, they'd kill me."

"I am going to nominate you for sainthood," she says. "Wait. Nevermind." She settles on the sips, but she makes them quick. It's bitter -- no sugar, no milk, and she (used to) usually takes both, and she's pretty sure (can't quite remember the taste, just the longing for it) that it's shit, but it's coffee.

He laughs, a soft chuff of sound that the silence of the snow eats up and dampens. They tease each other outrageously about the roles they're playing; nobody else dares to, but they're SG-1. They understand black humor. "Got the bird on the spit," he says. "Knew you had dawn watch, thought I'd come and keep you company a while."

They hadn't even had to go much out of their way to find the turkey; that's another thing to be thankful for. Pueblo County isn't wild turkey country, but Josh and Rashid (Major Levy, Lieutenant ibn'Khaldun) both used to hunt as a hobby, and they put their heads together and took out a party to the spot in Fremont County where they thought they'd have the best chance. Cam had pronounced the turkey scrawny, their 'kitchen' hopeless, the available supplies utterly inadequate for providing a proper set of side dishes -- but he'd been smiling the whole way, and afterwards, Sam had seen him slapping Rashid on the back and saying thank you.

Thanksgiving dinner had been Cam's idea. Sam's still a little baffled by how much she's been looking forward to it.

"Thanks," she says.

She holds out the mug and its last sip to him, an offering. She loves all of them, all her insane tribe (and she doesn't mean the adjective flippantly; this life is taking its toll), but Cam's the one she loves enough to share a single scavenged cup of coffee with, and she's the one Cam loves enough to scavenge the coffee for. Theirs is a strange partnership.

He shakes his head and tucks his bare hands under his armpits to warm them. "Got mine already," he says. She thinks he's probably lying. "That one's yours. Didn't wake you when I crawled out of bed, did I?"

"No," she says. She's pretty sure he thinks she's lying, too, but it's all right. They all lie to each other, with words and face and voice, every day. It's the only way they can get through it. It doesn't matter that she and Cam can see through each other's polite little fictions; in a way, it's almost a relief. To have someone who can see her that clearly.

He's the only one left who can.

She doesn't let herself think about it -- all the things she's lost, all the things she could have been. It's Thanksgiving. She tucks her arm (left arm; she's still on watch) through Cam's. "I figure -- Santa Fe, next," she says. "We were just there, I know, but I remember there were a couple of people who might work out well as cell leaders." If they're still alive.

Cam nods, amiably. "Sounds good," he says. "And if you're up to the long haul, I wouldn't mind swinging out around Vegas, drop in by Nellis and see if anyone's still home."

See if there are any 302s left, he means. He knows there won't be. She knows he knows it. The Prometheus, the Daedalus; both had been on-or-near-planet when the Ori had come screaming in. Sam knows the fact the two of them are here now, instead of on the bridge of Prometheus overlooking the world, means the ships didn't do Earth a damn bit of good. It hurts her to think of her beautiful machinery in pieces or blown to atoms, but they have to go look anyway.

Vegas is as good a place to spread the "gospel" as any. If there's a part of her that hesitates at couching their basic message (that the Ori can be resisted, that there are people still looking out for humanity, that the Ori actually can't tell the difference between honest belief and dishonest recitation so the best thing to do is to just mouth the words, lie back, and think of England) in the same sort of religious framework the Ori use, well. It's working.

And a new mythology is starting to spring up -- around them, around the Ori. The liberation myth, Daniel had called it. He'd said that every oppressed culture in the recorded history of time had one. L'shana haba'ah b'Yerushalayim, Josh says, and Sam knows exactly what he means by it. People need stories. People need legends. Sam's gotten used to being someone else's legend, over the years.

"I wouldn't mind Vegas," she agrees. "Warmer, at least."

Wherever they go, there'll be plenty of work to get done. They aren't the only people who are fighting back. They're just the only ones who know exactly what they're up against.

*

The turkey's burned; the potatoes are raw. But they open one of their few tins of dried apples for dessert, passing it around like the most precious of fine jewels, and they all go around the circle and everyone finds something to give thanks for.

When it's Sam's turn, she meets Cam's eye, half a heartbeat, and then looks away. She says, I'm thankful for people to love.

*

Later that night, Sam asks, absently, "Do you ever think about them?"

Cam's sitting next to the fire, a lap full of mending sprawling across his thighs, frowning at the stitches he's putting in the pair of pants he's attempting to save. "Them?" he asks.

So many of their hallowed dead she could mean by it, and he can't know that she means the other Samantha Carters. The other Cameron Mitchells. The other versions of SG-1, their universes strung out like a string of pearls, connected by nothing more than a few moments of similarity that then drift together and diverge again. For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a cure, the world was lost. Somewhere, there's a universe or a thousand where the Ori never came for them. She isn't sure if it makes her feel better or worse to know it.

She turns her head. Cam's sucking on his thumb where the needle just pierced his skin, and she thinks: this is not the life I ever thought I'd have.

"Nevermind," she says. He looks up at her, puzzled, and smiles. She brushes her fingers against his cheek, and goes to scrub the dishes. They'll be leaving again in the morning, but until then, it won't hurt her to get her hands a little dirty.

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