Five reasons Vala envies Sam.

[vain_glorious]

 
Word Count: 660

1. People know how smart she is.

And they call it that. Smart, not cunning, not manipulative, not calculating, not even clever or resourceful. Those adjectives are applied to Vala, and not usually with the same kind of admiration that Sam gets.

And there’s a certain advantage to it, of course, which Vala has used her entire life. But she uses it less often at the SGC, now, than she ever did before, and sometimes she wishes that her ideas got some genuine consideration as valid plans of action. She wouldn’t have to manipulate people, after all, if they would just listen the first time.

She’s not saying that she gets the math bits, or can handle the chemistry or physics, or any of that stuff. Sam has that all to her own, and Vala has no pretensions about it.

But she would, on occasion, like to be recognized as more than lucky, more than accomplishing things through pure self-serving rational.


2. Blondeness.

Vala rocks what she’s got, but blonde hair? Is an awesome asset in the industry of conning people out of various possessions and valuables.

If Vala were still in that profession, she would be very envious.

3. Her relationship with her father.

Somehow, Sam ended up telling her the whole story, how it was bad and how it got fixed.

Vala will never tell anyone how much she wishes for the same opportunity and knows it will never come.

4. Daniel loves her.

Wholly and completely, without any complications.

Vala is not jealous, not at all. She doesn’t want that kind of love.

It’s a family love. Which Vala does want, does envy – in general, not with Daniel. She’s certainly not intimidated by the way Sam and Daniel operate as if connected by some umbilical, able to finish each others sentences whether they’re talking about the past – shared experiences – or the future – shared minds.

She doesn’t want, and she knows she’ll never have it. Daniel’s too often busy being pig-headed and wrong, anyways, so they’d never achieve that much cohesion.

So, just to be clear, she’s doesn’t want any of that.

She just wants his love to come to her as easily as it comes to Sam, without the doubts, the hesitations, and the unsubtle insults that are less effective at shoving her away than they probably should be.

5. Her Patience

Not in general, since Vala feels that waiting for things is generally a waste of time and that one should always just go get whatever it is that one is waiting for. You get a lot more done that way, and whatever unexpected consequences – she usually finds its angry armed men – can be dealt when they show up.

In specific, she’s thinking of the timeline where SG-1 spent decades waiting in space – waiting for something they couldn’t just go out and get.

She has no memory of this, of course. Only Teal’c does, and he won’t tell them anything about it. She’s tried every trick in her book, and he won’t even say a word.

He doesn’t really have to. Vala knows what probably happened. Teal’c was stoic and tolerant. Cameron, she guesses, vacillated between channeling his stress into some useless physical activity and having violent tantrums. Vala can picture this, clear as day, and she wonders if she ever played the role of physical distraction. Daniel certainly had tantrums, too, no doubt. But he doesn’t get violent, he gets cold and mean. When he puts his mind to it, he can use that fabulous intellect in really cruel ways.

Sam had her patience. Vala can imagine that she waited out those decades with ridiculous serenity and nobility.

It’s ridiculous, but Vala gets upset just thinking about that. Because she knows how her own behavior would compare.

Spending that long trapped in space would have driven Vala bugfuck crazy.

So, she knows that the Vala who experienced that timeline must have really envied Sam’s patience.