The Lemming Effect

She stands fearlessly at the edge of the cliff, staring down at the valley miles below.

"Uh…Sam…" Daniel calls from the safety of the forest, "Wouldn't it be safer to stay away from the edge?"

Her mouth curves in a smile, "Perhaps," she calls back, her eyes fixed on the green valley beneath, a river winding lightly through it, shimmering silver-blue in the bright sunlight like the surface of an active wormhole. "But not as much fun."

This is what an old friend calls 'the lemming effect'. Standing on the edge of a cliff, with a wide open space before you, the mind yearns to take that step off the edge, to leap into nothingness and float through the air, landing gently as a leaf in the valley floor below.

Reality check.

She knows she will plummet like a stone, but nevertheless something intangible and passionate draws her to briefly fantasise that freedom. To deny it would be to choke herself. It is in her nature; the drive to fly, to rise, to soar.

It always has been.

When she was a child, she would dream of the stars. Her entry into the Air Force was not for her father, or for the chance to serve her country, but for the dream of flying. Her study of astrophysics was entirely to do with the fascination of not only the unknown, but the uncharted.

She hides it beneath a military exterior. Obeys the rules, observes the regs, salutes perfectly, and strides off to do her duty.

But a fire burns inside that makes her duty no duty at all. Instead it is a passion that she feels when the comprehension comes. A naquadah reactor. A solution home. Another tidbit of knowledge fed to her by the universe.

Her team see it in her, briefly. As they work shoulder-to-shoulder, they could not miss seeing the banked fires in her soul. But they don't understand the full nature of what she keeps hidden inside. They see what she wants them to see: the hard-working, rule-bound Captain Sam Carter of the USAF. And none of them know that her dreams are of flying.

"Carter…would you mind stepping back from the edge?"

There's a note of concern in his voice and she smiles, "Yes, Sir." Meaning she's not going to.

It takes him a moment to work this out. "Dammit, Carter, what are you trying to do? Get yourself killed?"

She turns a little and laughs at him, standing a few feet from the edge and to her right, "No, sir."

Turning back, a moment later, she sees him from the corner of her eye as he steps up to the ledge beside her. "Nice view."

A sideways glance where she meets his eye and she laughs again, "You're not even looking at the view, Colonel!" A light breeze ruffles her hair and his, and she turns her face back to the valley below and raises her arms out to either side, poised to soar.

"And you're not going to try to fly, either, Captain."

But he lays no hand on her to stop her from stepping off. He understands. It is the challenge within yourself - to resist what the mind knows cannot be, but which the soul longs for.

It cannot be forced, cannot be bound, cannot be tamed.

The choice must be made - to soar and maybe die, or to remain bound to the earth and live another day.

Jack O'Neill knows this as does Sam Carter.

It is the nature of the bond between them.

As she feels him beside her, she knows why he stepped up to the ledge himself. What she hides in her own nature behind the safety of regulations, he reveals in his own actions. They are both born to soar, and soar they will.

A smile touches her lips.

We always wanted to fly, didn't we, Colonel?

"O'Neill." Teal'c observes, "It is a long way down. DanielJackson and I are concerned for your safety. Would it not be better to stand further from the edge?"

Neither Teal'c nor Daniel understand the lemming effect.

But the Colonel does.

"Perhaps it would be better, Teal'c." He gives her a dark smile, secret and warm. "But it wouldn't be as much fun, would it?"

*