Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, I don't own the concepts, I make no money, I make no sense and I get no sleep.

Note: A tiny one shot and an epilogue to A Matter of Time.

P2A-270
(Sam's POV)

They are still celebrating and I guess they have plenty of reasons to do so, I mean, we saved the world... again, but I just can't stop thinking about the price, about how much I don't know about the consequences of my actions. I know I did the right thing but...

I don't think they understood what I said, all they cared about was the fact that our own world was safe, even though we'd lost Major Boyd, Col. Cromwell and SG-10. I know that once the relief wears out that's going to be a hard thing for them to come to terms with but I don't think they understand the full scope of what's happened here. For them the loss of SG-10 and the colonel are the obvious consequences of our latest adventure, as is a fairly banged up Col. O'Neill, but I do know better, I know that's just the tip of the iceberg.

We managed to succeed, we managed to get the wormhole to jump to a different gate and that caused it to disengage, it enabled us to shut down our own gate... but there was nothing we could possibly have done to get it to disengage from the gate in P2A-270. Whether I like it or not I saved my world by dooming another one... I doomed a world I know absolutely nothing about. Was P2A-270 inhabited? It is possible, it is even likely. Statistically speaking and basing my observations on the random sampling of worlds we've explored so far I can say that a little more than half of the planets with stargates have human inhabitants and almost all can sustain life in one way or another. That means that chances are a little better than 50/50 that the planet I sacrificed to save my own was inhabited by beings just like me but I'll never know, not really. Whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, the fact is that chances are better than 50/50 that countless men women and children will die as a consequence of our actions.

I had to save my world, there's no question about that in my mind but each time someone slaps my back and congratulates me for a job well done I have to struggle to keep myself from revealing what the price for that rescue might have been. They are happy, they are alive, they are relieved... they don't need to know, especially because there's nothing anyone can do. P2A-270 is doomed, it was sacrificed by a random fluctuation when we detonated that bomb to save ourselves.

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Author's note: Yes, I know in the show the wormhole disengages from the black hole when it jumps to P2A-270, leaving earth and P2A-270 connected, in fact without that we couldn't have Sam blowing up a sun a couple of seasons later, the problem is that this doesn't make much sense. Toward the end of that episode it is the black hole that is powering the wormhole, in that regard there's been a role-reversal between the two stargates. The way I see it, while the connection could jump from earth to a different planet, an explosion that would be negligible when compared to the black hole's power is unlikely to cause that black hole to relinquish the wormhole from its end. I hope this explains that apparent discrepancy (I know this is way less detailed than it should be but I'm trying to keep the explanation shorter than the fic).