Chapter Text
I.
That’s no way to live
All tangled up like balls of string.
— Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s, “A Light On A Hill”
— — — — —
“Why are we even considering this, sir?” Colonel O’Neill says. “They murder teenage girls. Period.”
Sam could swear she used to enjoy their mid-briefing debates. Everyone trying so passionately to do the right thing, to make the right choice – even when there were no good choices left.
But like so much from before Daniel died, now it’s only tiresome.
Today’s topic is P3X-426, where the city-dwelling people, twice a year at religious festivals, perform the human sacrifice of young virgins.
“That may be true, Colonel –” says General Hammond.
“Personally –” the colonel tosses his pen down on his notepad – “I don’t know why we’re not talking about going in there and rescuing every female between the age of ten and twenty.”
“We can’t go imposing our own moral standards on every native culture in the galaxy,” says General Hammond. “The Vorandese are willing to trade naquadah, and they’re allies against the Goa’uld – no matter how personally abhorrent we may find their beliefs.”
“The girls actively compete to be chosen,” Jonas says. “They think of it as serving their people. It’s considered a great honour.”
“There are many cultures in the galaxy that engage in similar practices,” adds Teal’c.
“And right here on Earth,” Sam points out, more because she feels like someone should say it than because she really disagrees with the colonel.
She doesn’t know what she believes, actually. She’s too tired these days to believe much in anything. And today in particular has been full of minor miseries, in the way that more of her days seem to be now. This morning, one of her garbage bags tore open as she was carrying it to the street, strewing half-rotted kitchen scraps across her driveway. The commissary had been out of coffee. Airman Morris had misfiled the schematics she’d asked him to put away, so she’d spent forty minutes searching for them, and then she’d immediately fumbled them all over the floor. It’s as if the one big misery is casting off sparks, like a grinding stone spinning against steel.
“Historically speaking,” she goes on, “our aversion to human sacrifice is extremely recent. For thousands of years, it was the norm. There’s a long history of these practices on every continent, from the Mayans to the Celts to the pre-antiquity cultures of the Near East.”
The colonel glowers at her. “‘History’ being the operative word there.”
“It still happens,” she says, needled. Half a minute ago, she didn’t care about the outcome of this fight. “More than you probably think.”
“We do have laws against that kind of thing nowadays,” he drawls.
“Yes, sir,” she fires back, “because no one on this planet ever breaks a law.”
“Okay, people,” the general tries to interject, but the colonel isn’t looking at him.
“The point,” he says, “is that we like to discourage it. Not give biannual government-sponsored performances of child murder.”
“No, sir,” she says. “The point is that maybe we’re not so morally spotless ourselves that we can make snap judgments.”
“Look, can we at least tell them that we’ll maybe – just maybe – consider trading with them –”
“Colonel,” says Hammond.
“– if they can see clear to their rain god or whatever –”
“God of clouds and storms,” says Jonas.
“– being satisfied with, I don’t know, a couple goats? A jug of wine?”
Sam shakes her head, hearing her voice become shrill with frustration. “Sir, we can’t just barge in out of thin air and tell people they’re living their lives wrong.”
“Oh, come on, Major, we do it all the time!”
“Colonel –”
“When they’re enslaved, maybe, but –”
“A few goats, is all I’m saying. A calf, if they must. A nice side of bacon?”
“Sir, that’s not…”
“They’re killing kids, Carter!”
“I think Daniel would say –”
“Well, Daniel isn’t here, now is he?”
Sam reels back as if he’s hit her.
In the wake of the colonel’s raised voice, she can hear the air hushing through the vents. Voices from the control room downstairs. The colonel’s face has gone hard and cold the way it does when he’s furious to the point of violence. It’s a look Sam doesn’t like seeing. She resents being reminded of what kind of man he’s been – still is. She’s aware that it’s moral squeamishness.
It makes her a coward. A delusional coward.
“No, sir,” she says stiffly. “He isn’t.”
There’s silence.
General Hammond seizes control of the meeting again. “Let’s table this for now,” he says. “When SG-11 pays them a visit later this week, we should have a better understanding of the extent of their naquadah resources. Until then, it’s not worth discussing.”
They move on to other topics, but Sam sits silently in a blaze of petulance. Colonel O’Neill scowls at the tabletop for the remainder of the hour. At the end of the briefing, for the first time in six years, she stands at attention when he gets up, and she stays that way until he’s left the room.
He doesn’t look at her once.
If Daniel were here, he’d be baffled at her formality. He’d turn to her and raise his eyebrows. He’d say, Okay, what the fuck?
But Daniel isn’t here now. Is he.
— — — — —
That evening, she’s at work on a device that SG-3 brought home from their latest exploratory mission: a sphere surrounded by a series of rotating, interlocking rings inscribed with symbols. It looks like an instrument for making precise astronomical calculations, but it’s emitting a faint EM signature, as if there’s a small power source hidden in there, and Sam can’t figure out why.
It’s late. She likes working late in her lab, when no one will interrupt her. She likes the dimness of the corridors. She flicks off the overheads in her workspace and just leaves on her desk lamp, which doesn’t illuminate much past the edges of her lab bench. The red and blue and white and green lights of her electronics blink out of the enveloping darkness of the lab, and she can hear, as she can’t ever during the day, the cool whir of the system servers. Sometimes, when she’s working on a naquadah generator, she feels the traces of the element in her bloodstream come alive and hum, a resonance in her bones.
Colonel O’Neill breaks the quiet with a perfunctory knock on the door jamb. He strides right in, and then proceeds to not say anything. At all. Just hovers, standing at the side of the table, watching her work.
She tries to settle back to it. The colonel picks up objects and sets them down again. A pair of precision wire cutters, a dead D-cell, a sticky note that says c.f. Binney/Merrifield pg. 142.
Sam rotates the sphere’s outermost ring on its gimbal and feels it slot into place.
The colonel drops a pencil. It rolls loudly along the floor and disappears underneath her shelving unit.
Sam sighs and puts down the device.
“Come to apologize, sir?”
It’s snarky. Insubordinate, actually. But he’s been unbearable, and she’s still pissed at him, and it’s nearly midnight, so she thinks, all in all, she’s entitled.
He scowls. “No.”
Want to leave me alone, then? she’s tempted to ask, but this time she restrains herself. He picks up her smallest screwdriver and promptly drops that, too. Before she can even shoot him an exasperated look, he scoops it off the floor and holds up his hands in apology.
It’s hard to concentrate. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches him pace a slow lap of the room. He stops to get eye to eye with the winking lights of her radio receivers, to peruse the books on her shelves. The gimbals have a few set positions, and she sees that if she can align them, she’ll be able to access a panel, which is probably where the power source is –
“Carter, I wish you’d just yell at me and get it over with.”
Sam slowly sets the sphere back down on the table.
“Yelling at you won’t help, sir,” she says carefully. Half a cup of cold coffee is sitting by her elbow. There are very slight ripples in the surface, low-level vibrations from the Stargate five storeys below them. She watches the way the velvet white light of her work lamp shimmers in the wavering liquid. There must be a way to infer the vibrational frequency of the Gate from the amplitude and waveform of the ripples, even accounting for the mediating dynamical variables of the five levels of military base in between, but to be exact, she’d need air temperature, the percentage of steel and concrete in the walls and floor, their precise densities. Sam starts to work through the equations, assigns the variables weight.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not mad at you.”
He gives her a look.
“Okay,” she amends, “I’m not mad at only you.”
He’d put the screwdriver back in very slightly the wrong place. She adjusts it, fussing, to make it line up with the edge of her notepad.
“I’m mad at Daniel,” she says. The top page of the pad is full of her notes on Jonas’s partially completed translation of the sphere symbols. Orb ~ head? Observe/view/interpret, being–fire. She thumbs at a red smudge beside the words. Jam, she thinks, from the half of a Danish that Jonas had given her in his office. “For being so immovably noble that he got himself killed. And then – according to you, anyway – he chose to die, and I’m mad at him for not being noble enough to try to stay. I’m mad at General Hammond for being so understanding about it, and also for not being one whit more understanding than he’s allowed to be. I’m mad at Jonas for… well,” she looks up at him and quirks a half-smile, “for the same reasons you’re mad at Jonas.”
(For not doing what Daniel had done back on Kelowna. For being brilliant and competent and giving no cause for complaint. For smiling. For giving her the last half of his Danish. For being perky, for being desperate to please, for being useful. For not being Daniel.)
“I’m mad at our allies for being flaky,” she says, “and I’m mad at my brother for not calling me back, and I’m mad at my grocery store for changing the brand of garbage bags they carry because the new ones rip when I take them out to the curb.”
There. In the silence between them, she picks up the orb and twists one ring. Back, around. The next gimbal slots into place.
The colonel clears his throat.
“You should fill them less. The bags. So they won’t be as heavy.”
Sam says nothing. The colonel fiddles with the knob of a radio pulse emitter. It buzzes, startling him, and he puts his hands in his pockets.
“You left out Teal’c.”
“Yeah, actually, I’m good with Teal’c,” she snaps.
He nods, his jaw twitching like maybe he’s a little hurt. He puts his back to her and returns to the emitter, carefully rotating the knob back to where she’d had it. 75.2 hertz. They both listen to the waveform modulate.
“You didn’t mention me, either.”
Now she can tell for sure that he’s hurt, and she softens, because that’s not what she’d intended. Or maybe it was, and now she regrets it.
“Sir…” she says, and it makes him face her.
The truth is, she is mad at him. It hasn’t been that long since he’d insisted on keeping them on active duty. He barely mentions Daniel’s name, and when he does, it’s to wound. And she’s holding it against him, maybe, that he was the one that Daniel had appeared to when he’d been dying. The two of them had had some sort of understanding that she was on the outside of, and now Daniel is gone, and she wants any part of him that she can cling to, and she resents it.
She sighs. “I guess I’m still angry about, you know…”
“Yeah.” He steps toward her. Close enough that she can feel the air currents from his movement, hear the canvas rustle of his BDUs. His gaze is sad and dark and uncomfortably direct. The pure white of the lamp, 5800 Kelvin light temperature, catches the short silver hairs above his ears as if he’s just stepped out of a snowfall.
“And –” She tries to tell him with her eyes. That she’s angry at the longing, the breathless wanting every time he’s near, the endless, exhausting, utterly futile love. Sometimes she feels like the entire territory inside her skull is about him, about what he’s thinking and what he says and how he smiles, or doesn’t. And that makes her angry, too.
The lab is hushed around them. Jack looks at her in the shadow. The light from the corridor slants in and settles across their feet.
Then he takes her wrist in his hand and lifts it to his mouth and presses a kiss to the inside of it, in the tender place where the skin is thin over the pulse.
Sam is breathing, breathing, breathing, not.
His mouth is open, and she feels the pressure and the dryness of his lips and the hot huff of his breath as he holds her wrist there for a moment.
He lowers it and walks silently from the darkened room.
— — — — —
They almost drown, and Sam tastes salt for days.
She’ll be typing a formula, or sitting in a briefing, or putting on her pyjamas, and all at once her mouth will be thick with the taste of sea.
Down to the last of her stale air, her lungs on fire, she’d inhaled too soon, and she’d gotten a mouthful of water.
They almost drown and it’s just another day at the office. Janet gives her a course of oral antibiotics – Who knows what’s in that water, she’d said, and our lungs are very sensitive organs, Sam; I don’t want you developing pneumonia – and Sam takes the pills with a glass of lukewarm tap water each morning and goes to work, only she still feels it. Still tastes it.
She almost returns to the infirmary and tells Janet that she thinks there might still be seawater in her respiratory system, but she doesn’t. She rolls the tack of brine around the crevasses of her mouth and says nothing.
Her lungs seizing fruitlessly in the grip of a cold fate. No air, no way out, a searing flame beneath her ribs.
Her chest aches and aches and aches.
They almost drown and Sam thinks, this feels familiar.
— — — — —
The first weekend of October is unseasonably warm, and the general spontaneously throws one of his day-long barbecues. The air smells like dry leaves and ripened apples, and Sam brings a sweater for when the sun goes down.
The afternoon light is thick as honey, and she leans back in a folding chair on the lawn and lets it warm her face and turn the space behind her eyelids a shimmering vermilion. The gentle heat drives off the lingering chill from Antarctica and the infirmary where the colonel nearly died and the observation room where, two weeks later, Sam had sat with a hot knife in her belly watching him sweat and rage through his post-sarcophagus DTs. It’s distant now, everything is distant now, and the trees behind the house swish softly in the breeze. The general’s granddaughters are practicing cartwheels on the grass, and she listens to them argue about whose form is better until they badger Jonas into being an impartial judge.
“There’s no way to come out of this with dignity, is there,” she hears him ask General Hammond.
Janet is sitting beside her, shading her eyes as she looks up to chat with Captain Forrest from the quartermaster’s unit. Sam has mostly tuned them out. She lets sounds wash over her – murmur of conversation, clink of glass bottles, hollow scrape of plastic cutlery on paper plates, clank of the grill opening and closing. It sends fragrant washes of blue smoke across the yard.
“Hm, I can’t tell,” Jonas tells the girls, teasing. “You’ll have to do it again.”
The cooler lid slams down, and Colonel O’Neill calls from across the deck, “Hey, Michaels, toss me a Yuengling, would you?”
There’s the rockslide rattle of ice. “Looks like we’re down to just Miller Lite, sir.”
“National tragedy,” says the colonel. “Well, time to save the world again. I’ll go for a beer run.”
“You will not,” says Janet sharply, right next to her ear, and Sam’s eyes fly open. “You’ve already had about three too many to be driving on.”
“I’ll go,” says Sam, levering herself out of her chair before her languid limbs meld to it.
“You’ll buy shitty beer,” the colonel protests. “Wheat ale and IPAs and nothing in between.”
Sam tilts her head, amused. “I know how to buy beer, sir.”
“You know how to buy whisky,” he retorts. “And tequila. Beer is my thing. Don’t horn in on my thing.”
Sam’s mouth twitches. “You know, sir, you could always come, too.”
They take Sam’s car.
Most of the houses in Colorado Springs are packed right up against each other, but the general lives in a neighbourhood of stately, well-spaced homes on curving streets named for trees, and Sam threads through them to the main road amid a companionable silence. In the air-conditioned chill of the store, she lets Colonel O’Neill select cases of Guinness and Blue Moon and Magic Hat #9, and she pushes the cart. He’s had just enough beer this afternoon to be loose and amenable, and it’s easy to be with him. She’d parked close, so they carry the boxes out by hand and load them into her trunk. The sun is heating the asphalt, and Sam takes pleasure in the waver of the air above its surface, the way it looks like jellied water. She can almost see the thermal currents, track the world’s hidden movements. The colonel looks where she’s looking and smiles and puts a hand on the back of her neck before they get back in the car.
She reverses out and navigates around the line of parked cars, and then without thinking about it she pulls back into a spot at the rear of the lot.
She puts the car in park and stares through the windshield. There’s a bit of concrete-curbed grass, looking parched just now, and then four lanes of traffic bunching up at the red light, and across the street, a Texaco station. The shade cast by its roof is like a quarry full of water in the heat.
She turns her head toward Jack and they gaze at each other in silence.
His look is steady and he lets her scrutinize him as if he knows what she’s doing, which she most certainly does not. But he doesn’t give her anything back. He’s just the colonel, the way he always is.
She doesn’t know what she was expecting. She supposes she was thinking of his mouth on the tender, exposed curve of her wrist. That hot puff of breath on her skin.
She shakes her head a little at herself and throws the car into gear.
But as she lets go, he puts his hand over hers on the shifter and guides it back into park. The bones of her fingers press into the round head of the gearshift under his grip.
The colonel lifts her hand and touches the inside of her wrist where he kissed it. He skims over the swell of her thumb muscle, hooks his fingers into the hollow of her palm. His eyes stay on her hand as if it’s a new phenomenon to him. The nails cut short so they don’t snag on anything off-world, the cuticles fraying because she doesn’t like to put on lotion, in case it gets grease on her equipment. There’s a callus on her trigger finger.
The colonel examines the creases and joints, the first knuckles. He draws the tips of three of her fingers to his mouth and kisses them, holding them between gently parted lips.
Sam sucks in a hard breath.
He opens his mouth and guides her fingers inside.
At the feel of the hot, slick inside of his mouth, the labile muscles and the hard ridge of his teeth, Sam is swamped by a rush of arousal. Heat flushes up from her stomach; a charge zings straight to her nipples. She presses her lips together and shifts in her seat. It’s so quiet in the car, under the faint rush of traffic, that the slide of fabric against leather is loud.
She understands what he’s doing, the thin edge they’re walking: they’re not kissing, so they’re not breaking the regs. It’s a flimsy justification, so obviously facetious that it could only ever stand up in the courtroom of their own minds.
But if this is as far as they take it, that’s the only place that matters.
Jack manipulates her fingers in his mouth, sucks them between tongue and teeth. She flexes the whorls and loops of her fingerprints against the yielding mound of his tongue. He lets go, and her fingers slide from his lips. The air feels cool against her wet skin. She touches his bottom lip, his cheek. She rubs her thumb against the shell of his ear like it’s a worry stone. All in silence.
No kissing. No confessions of attraction. Nothing suspect, Senator. Nothing immodest.
Sam drives back to the general’s house with every square inch of her skin fizzing like a sparkler. All the blood in her veins is leaning rightward, rushing toward him as he sits beside her, staring out the window at the green lawns, at the parked cars and the rotating sprinklers, at the trees turning bronze and sienna in the last of the evening light.
— — — — —
“Teal’c,” Sam says on a Thursday. “Do you have plans tomorrow night?”
She hasn’t driven her P1800 in months because the pistons are wearing out and she hasn’t been able to source original parts as replacements. But it’s getting too late in the year for the Indian, and she wants something good in the few weeks before the dark and the cold close their fist around Colorado. Some small joy to come back to that reminds her why this world is worth fighting for.
So for three weeks, she’s been machining custom parts for the P1800’s engine in Siler’s workshop on base. Now she needs to move the car from its rented storage space into her garage – which means finally clearing out the second bay, still jammed full of the contents of her dad’s old house.
“I need to move about fifty boxes into my guest room,” she explains. “I’ll buy you pizza?”
The next day, he follows her home from the mountain. In the west, streaks of cirrus cloud are lit pink against the turquoise sky. Sam gets out of her sedan and watches a single bird sweep across the blue, high up. This far away, it’s just a black speck against the glow of the atmosphere.
After an hour of ferrying boxes, Sam takes a break to call in their order – one large pie, half pepperoni, half sausage and mushrooms. Teal’c is dismantling a stack of boxes labelled Mark’s room. He’s wearing an old hoodie with the sleeves cut off and his biceps bulge beneath the frayed hems. They’ve left the rolling door open to the autumn evening and the garage is cold, but his forehead is shiny with perspiration. Sam hands him a chilled bottle of water and he nods his thanks, leaning back against the boxes as he drinks.
Sam cracks her own bottle and they stand in shared silence for a few moments.
“You and O’Neill appear to have overcome your personal difficulties,” says Teal’c.
Sam takes a slow sip of water, stalling. She rolls it around her mouth before swallowing. “I guess.”
“It is well. I believe you need each other.”
“We have you.”
“You do,” says Teal’c warmly.
“And Jonas now,” she points out.
“Indeed,” says Teal’c, this time with a little less conviction. Sam laughs.
Teal’c tilts his head in acknowledgement. “Jonas Quinn is quite eager to prove himself.”
“He’ll settle in.” Sam watches insects flit around the exterior light above the garage. The sky is royal blue now, edging toward navy. The stars will be coming out. Planets, nebulae. “The colonel isn’t helping.”
“O’Neill is not a man who trusts easily.”
“He trusted you pretty quick,” says Sam. She pauses. “And Daniel.”
Venus is visible now, just above the treeline. The equation relating apparent brightness to luminosity is a simple function of the square of the distance; twice as far means four times dimmer. Most celestial bodies are too distant to be seen. They still exert a gravity. Like dark matter, which is known by the force of its absence.
Where is Daniel, she wonders. How far.
“He trusts you as well, Major Carter,” Teal’c says gently.
That’s exactly the problem, Sam thinks. Because sometimes, she doesn’t trust herself.
— — — — —
You used his humanity against him, Jonas had said, as they left the human-form replicators behind, locked in an endless second.
Jack had revved up to be furious with him – and then Carter had gone and agreed. That’s exactly what we did.
So then he had to be angry at both of them.
And it hadn’t escaped his notice that she didn’t call him sir once in the whole conversation.
She doesn’t speak to him, either. She doesn’t laugh when he tries to break his team’s tension, sitting in the captain’s seat of the X-303 and pointing ahead with a British “Engage!” when Thor begins to tow them home. She doesn’t ramble about the Asgards’ hyperdrive technology when he notes how smooth the ride is.
She doesn’t say a word.
Not on the hop back to Earth, not in the infirmary as they get their post-mission checkups, not in the debriefing. Oh, sure, she answers direct questions – the “sir” very politely and very coldly back in place – but no more.
The perfect soldier. Buttoned up. Disciplined. Following orders without question.
When the debriefing wraps up, she’s out of her seat like a shot. Jonas isn’t far behind.
Jack looks at Teal’c. “I suppose you’re pissed, too?”
“No,” says Teal’c. “I believe you made the right decision.”
“That makes two of us.”
“We are at war,” says Teal’c. “Difficult actions must be taken. I understand this, even if Jonas Quinn does not.”
Jack drops his eyes, picking at the edge of the table. He tries with all his strength not to ask.
He fails. “And Carter?”
“I believe that she, too, will understand, once her head has cooled.”
Jack opens his mouth, but just shakes his head and lets it go.
Daniel wouldn’t have understood, he knows, wouldn’t have ever understood, and his opinion of Jack might have been altered forever. But Carter – Carter should know better. Carter is a soldier. She should have been able to see their array of bad-to-worse options with the same tactical clarity that he did. She should get that duty doesn’t just mean willingness to give your life, but readiness to sacrifice your soul, one inch at a time.
There’s no such thing as moral purity in battle. Everyone is stained.
If Carter thinks otherwise, she’s being deliberately naïve.
And it’s far easier for him to stay angry at her for it than it is to remember the disappointment in her eyes as she’d followed his lead.
— — — — —
She comes home from the debriefing and takes the motorcycle out despite the cold. She feels balanced on a razor-thin peak of rage, like pictures she’s seen of the Patagonia Mountains. The sun is setting, staining the sides of buildings and the edges of the last leaves to the golden red of Indian paintbrush.
She drives out of town, west.
Past the turnoff for Pikes Peak, in civil twilight now, Sam opens the throttle, feels the engine rip and the air shred past her like tearing paper. Normally she’s careful on these narrow, winding roads, but her caution – her fear – has all been burned out. She throws herself around the curves, flat against the handlebars. Her helmet cuts into the static air and she imagines the eddies of wind she’s leaving in her wake. Even she can’t compute those trajectories: the physics of turbulence are complex and chaotic and unsolvable.
It feels good, to leave something inscrutable behind.
She wings a left onto the smaller Highway 67, heading south. Her headlight catches fluttering moths and night insects in its white beam. The black air smells of juniper and pine and sagebrush, and the crisp mineral scent of rock in a cold mountain night. The abyss of a drop yawns to her right; she can’t see it, but she can sense it, a void beyond the thin thread of the guard rail. The cliffs throw back an echo of her engine, loud enough to bring the rocks down on her.
An hour and a half later, the mountains release her and Sam bursts out of the foothills and into open prairie. She leans even lower and edges the throttle up over 90. Loops back north on 115 towards town with three thousand points of scintillating light above her shattering the hull-smooth metal of the sky.
Sam is soaring in a cloud of her own unabated anger, and she takes even the roads in her neighbourhood way too fast. There’s an excessively large pickup parked behind her house near the garage access. She ignores it, fishtails neatly into her driveway, and skids to a stop on a wave of gravel. When she kills the motor after four hours of engine roar, her ears ring.
“Jesus, Carter, take it down a notch.” The colonel had been leaning on his car door with his arms crossed. His breath clouds in front of his face when he speaks. Sam pulls her helmet off, trying to shake her cold, cottony ears clear. “Don’t you think one dead team member is enough?”
Sam works her jaw and manages not to say anything until she’s punched in her code on the garage keypad and stomped to the kitchen door. She doesn’t invite him in, but as she opens the fridge, she hears him catch the door on its backswing.
Beer in hand, she turns and says, “I thought he wasn’t dead. Sir.”
Jack shoves his hands in his pockets. “Close enough, don’t you think?”
“I do, actually,” she shoots back. “You’re the one who’s been making that distinction.”
Jack looks away, leaving the smart of his needless cruelty unassuaged. Sam bites her lip. She doesn’t mean to say anything more, but she hears herself rasp, “So do you maybe want to stop hurting me?”
He raises his eyebrows. “Do you want to stop punishing me?”
Sam clenches her teeth. “Not particularly.”
She’s reminded of P4X-347, on the beach, when they were in withdrawal from the light before they’d realized it, and neither one of them had the presence of mind to back off from a fight.
“You’re out of control, Major,” he says.
“And you’re out of line, sir,” she snaps.
Jack sighs, his shoulders dropping. He nods at her bottle. “Got an extra one of those?”
“No.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Fine,” he says, and swipes hers right out of her hand.
Sam’s so pissed at the entitlement of it, so angry at his callousness and stubborn righteousness and smug superiority that she wants to hit him. He must see it, because triumph flares in his eyes. He steps close.
“Come on, then, Carter,” he says with a sardonic tilt to his mouth. “Let me have it.”
She realizes that he wanted this. He wanted her to open a release valve on her own internal pressure. And because he’s angry, too, and no longer being careful of her feelings, he’s done it by manipulating her into lashing out, and that makes her angrier than ever. On a savage surge of wrath, she smashes the beer bottle out of his hand, curls her fists into the front of his shirt, and kisses him.
It’s all teeth and fury, and Jack presses forward, their lips still fused, and shoves her into her refrigerator. Her back crashes against it and her head strikes hard enough that she sees a white flash, and over her own moan of pleasure, Sam can hear bottles clank on the inside of the fridge door. Jack forces her mouth open and strokes his tongue against hers, and, without subsiding at all, Sam’s anger flares into arousal.
He tastes like coffee and copper, and she devours him as long as she can, and when she needs to breathe, she rips her mouth away and puts her teeth on the muscle of his neck where it meets his shoulder and digs in, not sure whether she means to cause him pleasure or pain.
Jack hisses and twists his fist into her hair hard enough to pull, then tugs her away from his neck and kisses her again. Sam pours her ferocity and her bitterness into it, and he takes and takes it, swallowing her incandescent rage like a neutron star.
With the hand tangled in her hair, he tilts her head to change the angle, and she whimpers. Tendrils of her anger are starting to flicker lower, into the more manageable burn of her arousal. Sam feels her white-knuckled grip on his shirt begin to relax. She starts to come back to her body, starts to feel the hard planes of his chest beneath her hand, his heart pounding like a sprinter’s feet in the dust.
The ebb of her anger is like the tide riding out, and it’s a sweet, sore relief. The pressure she’s putting on his lips eases into something less like a blow, more like a benediction. In return, Jack loosens his hold on her hair and moves his hand to cup her cheek with a tenderness Sam knows she wouldn’t have accepted a minute ago.
She can press into him now the way she’s always wanted to, kiss him how she’s imagined, thick with longing and wanting and the love that’s turned lonely from being locked inside. He moans, and his fingers stroke a soft caress around her ear before he draws back to breathe, his forehead pressed to hers.
“Sam,” he whispers, eyes closed, his lips roaming her face – the crest of her cheek, her nose, her eyelashes, her jawline. His forehead rocks back to hers. It’s like they’ve been lost off-world and only just found each other again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Sam touches the hollow of his collarbone, the underside of his jaw, fingertips like a butterfly that doesn’t know where to land. “Me too, sir,” she says, and then, in disbelief, “Jack.”
He smooths the hair away from her temple and shifts to draw back, but Sam makes a noise of protest and takes two fistfuls of his shirt on either side of his collar, holding on. She doesn’t want to lose the feel of him, the heat of his skin radiating onto her still-cold face, the way she’s lit up in all the places they touch. He settles back against her, pulling her head forward to rest on his chest and stroking her hair over and over.
He mumbles, “I’m sorry,” again, and turns his head to press his cheek to the crown of her head.
His jaw moves against her hair as he speaks. “I don’t know how to be, without him,” he admits. She hears him swallow. “Sometimes I think he was the only thing keeping me human.”
She pulls away so she can see his face, his dark eyes. “Sir, no. He wasn’t,” she says fiercely. The man in front of her is one of the most honourable human beings Sam knows. His private morality is carved into him like runes into stone, and sometimes it bleeds. Still, she knows what he means: Daniel was their best selves, their better angels. Maybe they got too used to outsourcing their humanity to him. Once it’s gone, it doesn’t come back.
And the empty, gaping place it left is the ragged hole she’d just stumbled into, the reason she’d just thrown away three degrees, twenty years of decorated military service, and six years of soldierly restraint and kissed her commanding officer in her kitchen.
Sam breathes water, tastes salt.
“But…” Her voice cracks. “I miss him.”
“Yeah,” says Jack, closing his eyes. “Me too.”
— — — — —
They clean up the broken glass and spilled beer from her kitchen floor, and then Sam gets out two fresh bottles and they play chess at her kitchen counter.
She hasn’t eaten since eleven a.m. and she’s hungry, so they order Thai food, shrimp green curry and drunken noodles with beef. When it arrives, they put the containers on either side of the chess board to share. They play three games and it’s nearly two by the time he leaves, but something has eased between them. A complicity has been reestablished, some sense that the two of them are a team within a team, in a way that Daniel and Teal’c had not quite been a part of. There is an understanding, one that does not need to be articulated or even acknowledged, that they are on each other’s side.
Together, they shuttle the beer bottles into her recycling bin and throw away the takeout containers, and Jack takes her kitchen trash out to the garage.
“See,” he says, “half-full. So it won’t rip,” and it’s not an I-told-you-so in his voice, but a soft, solicitous care. She smiles at him, as he hauls the awkward bag across her kitchen with the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled up, and the smile he gives her back has nothing in it except uncomplicated affection.
When he heads to his truck, there’s only a light goodbye, casual and taken for granted in the way of two people who see each other daily. He leaves, and she waves at him when he’s in his pickup, and he waves back and drives off, and it’s okay again, for a little while.
— — — — —
Monday the guilt sets in. She’s too busy over the weekend to think: she pulls twenty-hour shifts on the Prometheus, trying to repair the damage from Simmons and his goons and the rough landing on Hala. By the time 0600 Monday rolls around, she’s running on more caffeine than sleep. But it isn’t the coffee causing her gut to churn.
It would never have happened if they hadn’t been angry. Sam’s too rulebound, she thinks in self-disgust. And the colonel is scrupulously conscientious of their power imbalance. In her least generous moments, Sam thinks that it’s almost performative, the way he’s so careful to put the ball in her court.
But it turns out that all that care and consideration can get wiped clear out of him by anger, like the sweet tissues of petrified wood ossifying under the cold mineral seep of silica.
If she presses on the back of her skull, she can still feel the tenderness there, the bruise of impact.
At eight a.m., Jonas knocks on her open lab door. “Breakfast?”
Sam winces. “Not really hungry.”
He gives her a once-over. “You okay? You look kind of rough.”
“Thanks.”
“I just mean…”
“Long couple of days,” she explains, taking pity on him.
“Come on, then,” he wheedles. “Take a break. Teal’c convinced General Hammond to let me off base for a couple of hours on Saturday so we could see that new sci-fi movie. You can tell us everything it got wrong, it’ll be fun.”
Sam hesitates, hands hovering above the keyboard. “Wait, you guys saw that thing with the robots?”
“Yeah.”
“That looked terrible,” she says with fascination.
“It was.” Jonas grins. “We loved it.”
She puts some plain toast on her plate just to stave off questions, but she mostly shreds it between her fingers as she listens to the guys talk. When she takes a bite, it’s like sawdust and she has to choke it down. The heavy stone in her gut doesn’t leave room for much else. It turns over in her stomach as Colonel O’Neill walks in, frowning, and makes a beeline for the coffee carafe.
Mug in hand, he pauses in front of the pastry case, and his BDU pants are baggy and his shoelace is untied, because in some ways he’ll always be squared-away special ops and in others he’s a slob. Sam’s mouth is dry, and then it’s not. The fluorescents flicker, and the colonel’s hair is sticking up a little in the back from where it had been pressed against his pillow, and Jonas and Teal’c are saying something about special effects, about green screens and practical models, and Sam thinks that if she speaks, the vibration of her own voice will make her sick.
She shoves her plate away and swallows twice. “Listen, guys, I really should get back to work.”
They protest, but the colonel has spotted them and is heading over, and Sam can’t breathe. Her mind is screaming mistake, mistake, we made a huge mistake, but her body is stretching toward him, a reaching in her muscles and her fingers and her toes. A skeleton trying to get out. There’s something fracturing under the surface of her skin. She can feel his breath, his palm cupping her cheek, the force of his lips against hers.
She tastes acid at the back of her throat.
She stands, panicked, and her chair squawks against the floor. As she turns to leave, she catches a glimpse of confusion on the colonel’s face, and it hurts and it hurts and it won’t ever stop.
— — — — —
A week, and she’s been pretty successful at avoiding him. In bed at night, she thinks of court martials and demotions and dishonourable discharges, and she makes herself imagine bad field decisions that leave one of them dead or permanently disabled. Her dreams are full of his scent, and she wakes in the dark before dawn.
She works, she leaves, she sleeps, she drinks coffee, she works again. There are deadlines and reports, there’s the Prometheus, there’s Dr. Lee, who thinks he has an idea of how to develop a Goa’uld sensor that can detect the naquadah in the host’s blood, and SG-11 needs her help cataloguing technological artifacts from P4X-221. It’s easy to attend meetings perfunctorily, to keep her brain engaged on whatever she’s working on back in her lab, to be only half-present and then to be gone.
Or it’ll get easier, she tells herself. She’s making it work. She slipped, and now it’s a slog back up to where she’d been, to the mostly stable footing she’d had before. That’s all. She won’t slip again.
Sam breathes through her nose on the way to her car and feels the air pinch at the inside of her nostrils. Her exhale plumes into the darkness. It snowed earlier, the first snowfall of the year, but it’s just a thin, dirty film of translucent white over the asphalt.
There’s a scum of frost on her windshield and Colonel O’Neill is leaning against her driver’s side door. His truck is parked beside him.
Sam stops out of arm’s reach.
“Sir.”
“Major.”
He doesn’t say anything else and Sam wonders why he’s bothered to seek her out if he’s just going to stand here.
“Can I get in my car, sir?”
“Dammit, Carter,” he growls, and takes one step forward.
Sam squeezes her eyes shut and then looks up at the nearest lamppost, which is throwing industrial halogen white over three rows of parked cars. There’s a dark orb on the top of it, a mechanical eye. “Not here, sir,” she says.
He nods once, tightly, and then gets in his car and she gets in hers. He follows her out of the lot, the pickup’s high headlights relentless in her rearview. Flecks of water appear on her windshield. It’s flurrying again. Sam flicks on the wipers, but there’s not enough moisture, and the rubber squeals over the glass, so she turns them off again.
She takes the first turnoff she comes to, a lot for a hiking trailhead and campground. It’s empty. There’s a signpost and outhouses and a map under a wooden roof. Sam pulls in and sits silently. The colonel parks two spots away and climbs out of his truck and waits. She sits for another moment and then turns off her engine and gets out.
He stops in front of her. “Carter –”
She clenches her teeth and he lets out a breath of frustration. “I thought we were good,” he says. “Where we left things.”
She shakes her head. “It was a bad idea, sir.”
His eyes darken. “It wasn’t my idea.”
“I know that,” she says through gritted teeth. “You think I don’t know that?”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“Why do you think it’s eating at me?” The lot is unlit, except for one sulphurous light over the map. Sam thinks about the people who must come here in the summer, with hiking packs and water bottles and dogs, getting on the trail in the cool dew of morning, limbs loose and carefree. She feels a pressure behind her eyes.
“I did it to punish you,” she says. “Us. And now I can’t live with it.” Speaking hurts, as if the words are a tapeworm being drawn out. Her chest aches and aches and aches. “Kissing you is the only truly terrible thing I’ve ever done.”
His face freezes.
“Well, bully for you,” he says.
She stops, ashamed. “Sir, I didn’t mean –”
“No, no. You did. That’s a nice life you must lead, Carter. Sorry to have ruined your streak of moral superiority.”
“Sir, stop it.”
He opens his hand in sarcastic invitation. “Please, tell me more about how I’m your biggest regret.”
Sam shakes her head again in aggravation, working her jaw back and forth.
She broke the regulations, betrayed her position as an officer and her commitment to everything she cares about. That’s bad enough. But she hadn’t just broken the rules, she’d broken them.
“I can’t… –”
“Can’t what?”
“I can’t fix it! I can’t – God,” she bites, tilting her head back in exasperation. The sky is black, blank with cloud. “Do you know how badly I want to touch you all the time?”
It’s like she’s cut a wire under tension: he snaps forward, slams his hands onto the car on either side of her, and presses his body against hers. He’s rough and their jackets rasp against one another and Sam’s face is wet with pinpricks of falling ice.
Jack is half-hard against her thigh and heat flushes through her, and she lets her head fall back with a moan, and he tucks his face into the side of her neck. His breath is hot and wet, and he whispers her name, and Sam imagines it condensing onto her cold skin into the word mistake. Mistake, he’s mouthing against her. Mistake, mistake. Something is exploding, something must be exploding. There are snowflakes falling in her eyes.
He nudges a thigh between her legs and Sam bites her lip and arches against him.
“I miss you,” he says, helplessly, and touches his forehead to hers. Both of his hands come up to hold her face, his thumbs pressing painfully into the hollows of her cheeks and his big palms on the sides of her neck. His hands are cold from the metal of the car.
“I miss you, too,” and her voice comes out of her throat choked off, like there are more words stuck in it, but she doesn’t know what to say. There’s nothing to say. “I miss you all the time.” He rocks his thigh and she gasps. The pleasure is sweet and everything about this hurts. “Jack, Jack.”
“My idea this time.” He moves his face back to her neck and scrapes his teeth along the corded muscles. “Mine.”
“Yes,” Sam hisses. “Yes,” and then he’s kissing her with bruising force, and just as suddenly tearing himself away and walking back to his truck, and he’s driving off before she can even process that he’s gone.
It’s snowing harder now and the flakes melt on her hot face, glazing her cheeks. Sam leans against her car, empty and wet and breathing hard, her face tilted up to the sky, to the clouds and the snow and all the stars that aren’t there.
— — — — —
Sam feels nauseous all the time, the sick feeling in her throat she’d get as a kid in stop-and-go traffic, Mark in the backseat next to her and her dad swearing at the cars, and really, she thinks, maybe that’s the best way to describe how her relationship with the colonel has been lately, stop-and-go traffic.
Sometimes they’re fine; it’s like nothing has changed, like they were a year ago, so in sync off-world and on that it’s like they’re thinking the same thoughts, hearts throbbing to the same frequency. And then other times they bait each other and snap, and they’re petty and ungenerous. He invites her to come fishing, half-heartedly, because he knows it’ll be safe, and she declines, as if there’s any other choice –
(There’s always something, isn’t there, he says, and she rolls her eyes, frustration bursting through the surface like bubbles in magma, Oh, come on, sir. We both know the only reason you asked is because you knew I had something else to do.)
– and Sam is never sure what’s going to come out of her mouth to him until she hears it.
“Hey Carter, what was that planet with the little fuzzy armadillo things?” he asks, and she opens her mouth and is terrifyingly certain she’s going to say, I forget, because I can’t think when you’re in the room, my brain is too stuck on the way the light catches on your throat and how raspy your stubble is and the way your mouth moves, that little twist sideways it makes when you’re trying to show that you’re trying not to show you’re amused – yes, like that – so please, for the love of God, would you shut up and kiss me again because I’ve been turned on since you half-ravished me in the parking lot and I really, really need you to finish the job.
“P3X-198,” she says.
When she was little, she’d always thought that the see-saw was the most boring part of the playground. She couldn’t understand why anyone would bother with it, not when there were swings that flung you weightless into the sky at the top of every arc. So maybe she shouldn’t be surprised that she’s the one who disrupted the teeter-totter they’d been poised on for years, crossing to his side, only now they can’t find their balance again and the up-and-down is giving her permanent vertigo.
“Major Carter,” says Teal’c, “are you well?”
“What? Yeah, Teal’c, I’m fine.”
“You have been notably absent from meals.”
“Hm? Oh, I’ve been busy. Eating at weird times.”
That’s true, actually, but mostly what she’s been eating at four p.m. and nine at night and five-thirty in the morning is blue jello and buttered toast and coffee. She sends Teal’c a polite smile that she knows he sees through immediately, but she can’t do any better. “I appreciate the concern, though.”
“Sam,” says Janet, the next day, “come for dinner tonight. Cassie misses you.”
Does she, Sam wants to ask, or did Teal’c recruit you, but she can’t say that, so instead she accepts the invitation, and if Cassie isn’t really the instigator, she at least does a good job pretending. She prattles about her basketball team and the clutch of boys in her AP bio class who have made it their personal mission to harass the teacher – “She’s pretty young, so I guess they, like, smell blood in the water or something, but it’s super annoying, last week she gave up and made us sit in silence for like forty-five minutes and read the textbook” – and Sam eats the chicken marbella that Janet puts on her plate and drinks two glasses of fruity red wine. No one brings up work, and Sam leaves by nine o’clock because she has a mission in the morning.
Twenty-nine hours later, she gets zatted by Maybourne, and her eyes close on the sight of her commanding officer leaping through a portal after him.
She doesn’t see Colonel O’Neill again for thirty-three days.
— — — — —
“Sam.” Janet. “You should eat something.”
Sam should eat something. She should take a break, she should shower, she should change clothes, she should do her laundry. She should run the power analysis on the Prometheus’s sublight engine start-up routine, she should read that new paper on quantum thermodynamic information theory, she should put together the SGC science department’s budget projections for next quarter, she should go home. She should go home.
She should not be completely losing her mind because her CO is missing.
“Sam.”
“I will,” Sam says, “in just a bit.” She’s reviewing the UAV footage, in case there’s something there she might have missed the first fourteen times. A half-second nova of sunlight reflecting on a watch face, a movement in the trees by the river. Her eyes are gritty. Her houseplants are dead. Her fridge – she should – She should find him, she should have found him.
“Sam,” says Janet. And then, a minute later, “Sam.” But there’s something there, on the edge of the frame, and she rolls back the tape and plays it again, twice more, and by the time she realizes it’s just an odd shadow and looks up, Janet isn’t there anymore.
It’s fine. It’s fine.
“Major Carter,” asks General Hammond, “how are you doing?”
Good, sir, she thinks. I’m good. I haven’t slept in four days and it’s like my liver is gone, or like a slow bleed, and I can’t say anything because you’ll have to fire me, and probably Colonel O’Neill too, if we ever find him, if he’s alive, and I need to be doing my job right now, I need to be good at my job right now, I need to be smart about this and find the solution, only I can’t even do the one thing that I’m supposed to be good at, and Colonel O’Neill is suffering for it, and maybe it’s killing him, and the worst part is we haven’t even slept together.
“I’m fine, sir,” she says. “No progress.”
Teal’c watches her. Like he watched her the whole week they were together on the planet, when she was examining the door portal and operating the UAV and tramping through miles of forest and lying outside of the tent in her sleeping bag, staring at the curve of the galaxy.
Teal’c watches her and Sam sleepwalks through the corridors of the SGC with the unshakeable conviction that there’s a black abyss just to the right of where she’s walking that she can’t see and no one else can even sense. The concrete cuts off just past her feet, wires and rebar suspended over space, and the solid floor she sees is a hallucination. She walks as if it’s real. She fills pages and pages with half-completed equations: trajectories, power fluctuations, wormhole physics. Descriptions of geodesics through distorted Minkowski space. General relativity field equations. She scribbles on napkins, on the backs of reports and manila folders, in briefings, in the commissary. The numbers and Greek letters accumulate and fall apart, abandoned halfway through proofs. Pages litter her office and pockets and desk, dense with graphite.
She’s crossing through a T-junction on sublevel 15 and sees a light at the far end of the hall, coming from Colonel O’Neill’s practically unused office. Her stupid, tired heart leaps into her throat, as if he could have found his own way back, and dialed the DHD, and gotten home to the SGC, and debriefed, and showered and changed and retreated into his office to clear out his accumulated paperwork, all without her knowing about it, without anyone saying a thing or the Gate klaxons alarming.
She trots along the darkened hall and looks in. It’s empty, and the inbox isn’t overflowing, which means that Walter came in earlier and took the more urgent folders up to the general’s office, leaving the light on. He must have neatened up; the desk is clear and there’s a coffee ring on it where a mug had been calcifying for two weeks.
Sam sits at the desk. She pulls out the top drawer. Notebooks, pens, erasers, a ruler, all rigidly neat. The second drawer is locked. The third is file folders, corners sticking out at angles, one page accordioned where it had gotten jammed in the drawer mechanism. The fourth contains a pair of gym shoes, a hand pump for a basketball, a Gameboy, a plastic yo-yo, a half-full bag of pretzels, three rubber bands, a stack of napkins and a ketchup packet, two beer cozies, assorted ballpoint pens, a broken comb, and a yellowing paperback copy of The Sun Also Rises with the cover torn off. Sam closes the drawer and runs her fingers around the coffee stain over and over.
She wakes up with her mouth mashed into the desk. It tastes like metal and dust. Teal’c is standing in the doorway. She wants him to stop looking at her like that, like she’s a pane of broken glass and he’s waiting for a tiny vibration, a shift in gravity or the strike of a photon, to shatter the tension holding her together.
Sam sits up and wipes her mouth. “Something to say, Teal’c?” she asks. Self-revulsion makes it come out more acidly than she’d meant.
“I believe the accepted wisdom at the SGC is that I rarely have anything to say, Major Carter.”
She looks up at him. His mouth just barely twitches with amusement. After a long moment, she huffs a laugh.
It gets her through the next few days. It lets her put herself back together and look at the problem straight. She taps her pencil eraser on her lab bench. Data, it’s a problem of data. Any problem is solvable if you know enough. Fill in the variables, calculate the wave function, work out the probabilities. They got insufficient visuals from the UAV, so they need more aerial footage. Photography, heat signatures. A satellite. Sam can get it through the Gate; she can deconstruct and reconstruct and launch, she can compute the trajectory and the required force and – and then Jolan of the Tok’ra calls in to say that there are no human life signs on the planet.
She can’t find him. She can’t find him, and she can’t breathe, and she needs to hide it and she can’t do that either. People bring her food, coffee. She eats what’s put in front of her and sleeps on her desk, in her base quarters, twice in the back seat of her car because she’s too tired to drive home. Once she stays in the SGC lot; once she drives to the campground parking lot and sleeps there.
Edora was easier. That was a problem with a definite, known shape to which there was a definite, technical solution. This is just absence. When she finally breaks down, it isn’t because she’s lost hope but because she doesn’t see a next step.
Teal’c hugs her like he doesn’t know how, and maybe he doesn’t; they’ve hugged before in relief, in friendliness, to say hello or to congratulate each other, but never has she hugged him like she’s drowning and she needs him to hold her above the water. Yet here they are.
She’s been like this since Daniel – weaker, smaller, less brilliant, less shining. Fallible. Her head hurts from crying. She did what she was supposed to do today. She ate yogurt and fruit for breakfast, drank only two cups of coffee; she completed all her paperwork and cleared at least a hundred emails from her inbox. She had lunch with Jonas and worked out after she went off duty. And then she walked through the women’s locker room and straight into the shower and stayed there for an hour and a half, turning the water hotter and hotter and hotter.
It feels like we just lost Daniel, she tells Teal’c, because it does. And because she can’t say, even to him, Teal’c, if I lose Jack, it will kill me, too.
— — — — —
The colonel is due to be released from the infirmary today, but he’s not home yet. His windows are dark. He was only stuck on that moon for a month, but the house has a derelict look. Sam parks around the corner and walks slowly up his street and then to his front door. The day is damp, biting, the air frigid and chafed like ragged skin. She spends a long time standing on the front porch. There’s a tiny snowdrift where the concrete meets the wall of the house, melted and recrystallized into grainy chunks of ice.
Névé, is what this kind of granular snow is called on a glacier. Thawed and refrozen, again and again.
She should leave, she thinks.
Instead, she stares blankly out at the gray street. Like in the general’s neighborhood, the homes here are wide-spaced, full-yarded, with stretches of lawn in the front and the back. Houses like gemstones, nestled in broad old-fashioned settings that are ornamented with trees and shrubs and flowerbeds. They’re all bare now and rattling in the wind. It’s been snowing again, and the roads haven’t been well cleared, and the dirty slush shushes when cars roll softly through.
It’ll be slippery and treacherous for the colonel to navigate up his walk, and the cold will make his injured leg worse, make the wound contract and the muscle achy and stiff. She should go in and turn up the heat in the house to drive off the chill of a month’s disuse. Start a fire, run the HVAC fan to circulate the dead air. Clean out the fridge. Maybe fetch a shovel from the garage and clear the walk for him. That would be the act of a good coworker, a friend.
Sam unlocks the door with the key she keeps on a ring with her own house key and the key for her SGC locker. She goes in and takes off her wet, gritty boots. She places them on the rubber mat next to the door, and then she takes two steps toward the short wall that divides the dining room from the living room, and turns her back against it and slides down to the floor.
She sits in her jacket on the cold tile, arms wrapped around her knees. The house is dark and smells desolate and stale, and vaguely of old garbage and spoiled milk, and the air is chilly against her skin. Through the narrow windows flanking the front door, she watches the gray light darken to slate-blue, then dull navy. The furnace kicks on and off, running a minimal cycle.
After a long time, she hears a car pull up outside, splattering liquid ice. A car door opens, voices, the door closes. The car drives off. There are slow steps up the walk, painfully uneven. The grind of a key in the door, a pause at the realization that it’s already unlocked, and the front door opens in a wash of winter air.
The colonel looks at her briefly, then turns his back to close the door. It’s hard to see now. He locks up, flips the light switch, hangs his key on a small hook underneath it.
Without looking at her, he says, “Go home, Carter.”
She doesn’t move. Her knees are warm where she’s been gripping them, but the rest of her is still cold. She’s so tired. She leans her cheek against one knee. The colonel takes off his boots, leaning one hand against the wall for balance. First the right one, carefully. Then a tentative shift of his weight to his bad leg, so that he can lean down and ease off the left one. His leg doesn’t quite hold, and he has to hurriedly slap the left foot down again, his boot half off, splashing muddy slush on the tiles. Sam doesn’t try to help him.
In socked feet, he brushes by her into the kitchen, his jacket unzipped but still on. He adjusts the thermostat, flicks on the lights, opens the fridge. Glass clinks. He comes back out with a bottle in hand and goes past her again to the living room.
After a minute, Sam gets up and follows. She turns on a lamp. He’s sitting on the couch with his right foot up on the coffee table, sipping from a bottle of stout. She grabs his ankle, uses it to gently turn him ninety degrees so he’s lengthwise on the sofa, then props a cushion under his knee to support it. He lets her, saying nothing, not looking. That done, she goes through the routine motions of building a fire. Newspaper. Airflow. Spark, match, flame. The newsprint takes, then the splinters and small kindling. She waits until it’s steady, then sets a couple of crossed logs on the grate. Raw heat beats against her face, but she still feels like there’s a membrane of ice between her muscles and her bones. It isn’t cold, exactly. She sits back on her heels.
“I said, go home.”
“I tried,” Sam says dully.
“Try harder.”
The flames blur. Blue zone, luminous zone, dark zone.
“Teal’c talked to you,” she says.
“Yeah.”
Sam nods.
“So did Hammond.”
She flinches. He must see it, but she doesn’t turn to look. She watches smoke curl up the flue. Incomplete combustion. She can balance the chemical equation, if she can remember the composition of wood. Cellulose is C6H10O5. Lignin is – lignin is –
“You’re the one who said it was a mistake,” the colonel says. “You were right.” There’s a pause. A swallow of beer. “You usually are.”
Sam blinks. “You think it’s because of the last few months?” she asks. She stands, faces him. The fire snaps at her back, but the heat seems to stall out in the air and not make it into the room. “You think that if it hadn’t been for the parking lot and my kitchen and that night in my lab, I would’ve acted any different? I’d have held it together?”
He shrugs, picking at the label on his beer bottle.
“I wouldn’t,” she tells him. He doesn’t acknowledge it, and after a second, she sighs and walks over, her socks silent on the carpet. She crouches down beside him, in the small space between coffee table and sofa. “What we were doing before – it wasn’t working. But what we’re doing now isn’t working, either.”
“So, what then?” he asks. “Carter, what option do we have?”
She looks at him steadily.
“We can’t,” he says.
“Why not?” she says, reckless. “Sir, why not?”
She’s expecting his anger, ready for it, prepared for the way his eyes will narrow and his face will take on that hard cast like plaster, but instead he says, gently, “You know why not,” and somehow it’s so much harder to bear.
“Because we might let our personal feelings interfere with the performance of our duties?” she asks, bitter as quinine. “Because we might not think clearly and disobey orders? Because I might ignore all my report deadlines and break down in Teal’c’s arms and yell at Dr. Lee off-world and try to convince General Hammond to spend four and a half million dollars in satellite equipment and manpower to find you?”
“Carter…” Jack’s voice sounds all wrung out, like he’s been left for a month in the rain.
She dashes off her wet cheeks with the backs of her wrists. “I can’t, I can’t, sir,” she gasps, “I can’t do this anymore.”
“Carter,” Jack repeats, breathing her name, and his hand comes to rest on her hair, and Sam is crying. He shifts, reaching to put his beer bottle on the coffee table, and then wraps her up into his chest. They’re both still wearing their coats; his is an old ski jacket, at least ten or fifteen years out of date, scratchy Gore-Tex in shades of light gray and dark gray and white. The fleece lining smells of frost and dirt and cedar, and beneath the thin cotton of his black t-shirt, his chest is warm and hard.
She clutches fabric in her fists. “Please,” she hears herself say, muffled into him, but she’s so tired and out of herself that it doesn’t seem to be her speaking, “please, you have to help me, I can’t –”
She’s trying to say that there’s nothing they can do that will make this harder than it already is. She wants to tell him how, while he was missing, everything that made her her, everything she’d considered core to her identity, seemed to unravel and dissolve like proteins denaturing.
But she doesn’t know how to explain it, and, besides, he’s here now, he’s turning onto his back and pulling her with him up onto the couch. He touches her tear-flushed face, tender, with fingers cold and wet from the beer bottle; she shudders and he wraps the unzipped flaps of his jacket tight around her, and his breath is even in his chest, and beneath her ear, under his now-damp t-shirt, his heart clocks a steady fifty-six beats per minute. If it were an EM wave, Sam thinks, he’d be emitting below the radio spectrum, like the fading plasma lobes of a Kerr black hole, six degrees of arc across the night sky, and she closes her eyes, feeling the weave of his shirt on her skin, to picture the glow of it ebbing out against the stars.
When she wakes, the fire has subsided to low flame and hot embers, but the room is warm with furnace heat. Jack is asleep, one arm loosely holding his jacket around her, the fingers of the other hand buried lightly in her hair. Sam feels her whole body rise and fall with his breath. After a minute, she turns her head so that her chin is propped on his chest. His breathing doesn’t change, but his eyes blink open. Sam watches, then presses one deliberate kiss to the skin at the base of his throat, just above his shirt collar.
His eyes close again briefly, and when they open, they’re hot, and as dark as the void between galaxies. The hand in her hair tightens a little, and Sam settles, her chin digging into his sternum again. He lets her go, and swipes his thumb across her eyebrow, then along the top of her cheekbone, where Sam knows her skin looks bruised from a month of late nights and bad dreams.
His voice is rough with sleep and arousal. “It’s late,” he says. “You hungry?”
Slowly, Sam shakes her head.
“Good,” he whispers, and draws her up to kiss her.
He’s stubbly and his lips are dry, and he tastes of beer and sleep, and Sam wants to curl up small inside of him, into the cave of his mouth and the curve between his jaw and his chin, into the shell of his ear and the dark hollow inside his lungs, wants to fuse to him like sand into silica, so close that all the individual fibers of their muscles are intertwined. He kisses her deeply and without any doubt, slanting his mouth against hers. They’re both sleep-warm and soft, and her coat rustles against his as she presses herself into him, mindful of his wound. He shuffles a little to get his arm between them and tugs the zipper of her jacket down. In the fireplace, a log settles, a whoosh of sparks.
Sam shrugs off the coat and shivers a little in the cooler air. Jack rubs his hands up her arms. “Cold?”
“I’ll be okay,” she says.
“Come on.” He nudges her. She doesn’t want to move, and she thinks in any case that moving will mean that she’s not pressed tight against him, which is guaranteed to make her colder than she is now. But he seems insistent, so she rolls upright off the couch and he struggles to his feet beside her.
Limping over to the armchair, he snags a throw blanket off the back of it and lays it on the carpet in front of the fire. Sam grabs the poker and billows and a fresh log and coaxes the flame back to life. When she’s done, Jack is lying on the blanket, watching her with dark eyes, his skin warmed in the light of the lamp and the fire, one hand resting just below his ribcage. He’s taken off his jacket and the light catches the fine hairs on his arm, turning them into thin gold and silver wire.
“C’mere,” he says, and she settles on her side next to him with her head propped on her hand. She’s still tired, drugged with the feel of him and lethargic in the warmth of the fire. She traces the rim of his ear and he shivers, eyes falling shut. Her fingers dip to his hair, cut neat and silver behind his ears, and she marvels at the softness of it, back and forth under her hand. She’s always wanted to touch his hair like this.
“You got it trimmed.”
“On base,” he confirms, and she smiles. Unlike her, the colonel never lets his hair get a little too long – although, in fairness, it’s easier for him to visit the barber on sublevel six of the SGC for a ten-minute trim than it is for her to attempt the same. Last time she’d tried it, she’d ended up borrowing a hat from Teal’c to wear out of the mountain and straight to her usual salon downtown.
She leans in to kiss him again, capturing his lower lip between hers, and after a moment he tries to flip them and settle over her. She stops him with a hand on his chest.
“Your leg.”
“It’s fine,” he says, but he doesn’t try to move again, and when instead she throws one knee over his hip and kneels above him, he doesn’t stop her.
She’d built the fire up to roaring, and when Sam slides her fingers under the hem of his shirt, the skin she finds is soft and hot. She strokes his flanks, his belly, runs her fingers over the ridges of his ribs, more prominent after a month on survival rations. She eases the shirt up as she goes, and he lifts up and lets her pull it off.
He’s gotten rangier in the last few years, all lean strong muscle like a long-distance runner. His skin was smoothed and polished by Ba’al’s sarcophagus a few months ago, but it seems that it didn’t affect the older injuries, the ones that have no wound left in them, the ones that are only visible memory. She touches the puckered scar on his shoulder, a white knife mark on his chest, the bullet scar in his upper arm where Simmons shot him. She tracks the swell of his bicep into his pec, draws her hand over his peaked nipple, and he shudders once, hard.
“Sam,” he says, with wonder, “Sam.”
“I’m here, sir.”
“Me too,” he says. “Oh – God. Me too.” The oath is because she’s leaned down and taken his nipple into her mouth.
They’re, yes, here. Yes. “Missed you,” she whispers to his skin, feeling her breath move the wiry hairs on his chest, beginning to feel a little frantic, a little crazed. “Missed you, missed you –”
He’s tugging at the bottom of her sweater, so she breaks from him and strips it off, then her bra, and seizes his hands and places them on her breasts. He swipes his thumbs across them and she gasps and grinds into him, where he’s hard right underneath the seam of her jeans, and she bites her bottom lip on a groan.
“Jesus,” he says, helplessly, and surges up to lock his lips onto one of her nipples.
She whimpers, and he tries again to switch positions with her, but she mumbles, “No, don’t, let me –” because she wants to do this for him, she wants to do everything in the world for him. She wants him to be okay; she wants him to lie there and let her take care of him. She’s overwhelmed by a burning tenderness, a compassion that’s almost painful for them both. She shimmies away so that she can slip his sweatpants down over the points of his hips, and off. His boxers come with them. Above his right knee is a neat square of gauze, held on with clear medical tape. Sam is careful of it as she slides her palms back up his shins, his knees, his thighs, as she settles between his legs.
Jack is half-propped on his forearms, watching her, when she takes him in her mouth.
He hisses, and she opens her eyes to see his head thrown back, the long line of his throat mounded by his Adam’s apple, bobbing as he swallows hard. She swallows around him in response, and he groans, and she swirls around his head, tasting salt and skin, and then takes him deeper. He smells of bar soap and musk and woodsmoke and feels like satin on her lips. She likes the weight of him, the sear of skin, the way she can feel his heart beat in the vein against her tongue. She pulls off, licks her lips and slides back down. He breathes hard, ragged-edged, as she moves over him, until she cups her hand to take the soft weight of his balls in her palm. Then he gasps, and one hand shoots out to tangle in her hair.
“Christ, Carter,” he says. “I want – fuck, I want everything.”
“Yeah?” she asks, pulling off him slow enough that he groans again. Breathing hard, she rests her cheek against the inside of his left thigh. “Like what?”
“Like –” She licks a lazy stripe along his length, and he seems to lose his train of thought for a moment before he rallies. “Well, for starters, I really, really want to take your pants off.”
“Yeah,” says Sam, “okay,” and slides back up his body so that he can reach the closure of her jeans. He pops them open and shoves them past her hipbones, and she works to tug them all the way off, although she’s hampered by the way his hands are roaming around her back and hips and cradling her ass.
“Sir,” she chides.
“Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all, and then sucks her nipple back in his mouth, and she squeaks and falls over on top of him, and he has the temerity to laugh.
She finally manages to kick her jeans away, and as soon as she does, she feels his fingers pushing aside the strip of her soaked panties and stroking at her center, knuckles nudging, fingers gliding, almost petting, as his mouth continues to work at her breast. Sam’s gasping, moaning; she’s still above him but her control is absolutely shattered and she hears herself chant, “Please, please, please,” until he sinks two fingers into her, and even then it isn’t long until she’s pleading again.
Jack detaches from her chest. His lips are swollen and wet, and Sam feels her whole body twitch. She’s on fire, she feels flushed from her cheeks to her neck to her chest, and she wanted to let him lie and drift, to take his weight for a little while, but instead it feels like he’s the one holding her up, or maybe tethering her to the earth, she can’t even tell anymore.
He plucks at the elastic waistband of her underwear. “Off,” he orders, no laughter now, and she complies. His gaze has the intensity it normally only acquires when he’s making command decisions or speed-stripping his P90. He positions her with his hands on her hipbones, and she sinks down onto him, all the way, and then settles further, letting their chests press together and her forehead touch down on his.
She lifts her hips slowly and lowers them again, fluid, letting them both feel every inch. On the next stroke, he drives up into her, and it feels so good that Sam’s eyes lose focus, like a string of lights has flared up along her spine and out to each of her fingers and the flash has blurred her vision.
Jack sets the pace, and Sam holds on, feeling that chasm in the earth just beyond her feet that she’d felt the whole time he was gone. Heat from the fire washes over them, and Jack’s body under hers is damp with sweat at the top of his chest and the back of his neck, where she slides her hand briefly, just to be touching him in one more place, before she has to put it back on the floor for balance. She’s cushioned on a film of air, flying along the rim of a canyon, and then Jack gets a hand between them and finds her clit and she tumbles off, a long long way, hearing herself cry out. He swears below her, hips firing up, and mashes his face into the curve of her neck and lets out a long groan.
They breathe hard, Jack cupping the back of her neck with one large hand. After a minute, Sam shifts onto her side, rearranging her limbs so she’s lying half over him. She lets her fingers rest lightly on the gauze on his thigh as if she can feel the stitches underneath.
“How many?” Her heart rate hasn’t come back down yet, quite.
“Eight.”
She traces the edge of the dressing and hears him judder an exhale. “It hurt?”
“Not too bad. Muscle’s weak. And there was infection.”
Sam nods. She knows; it was why he had to spend a few days in the infirmary. She lets her cheek settle on his chest. It’s so calm here, so quiet and enclosed that Sam can feel the sky swinging above them, stars wheeling, the grass of the yard spinning a slow circle. At the still point of the turning world … at the still point, there the dance is. Still. She wants to rest. She wants them both to rest.
She can’t stay. He doesn’t offer, and she doesn’t ask. After a while, she gets up and puts her clothes on. He dons his boxers and sweatpants, but doesn’t bother with his shirt, just watches her reassemble herself. Wrecked underwear. Jeans, bra, sweater. Jacket.
He moves then, comes close and zips her into her coat, frowning as if he’s focusing on something important. He kisses her once, chastely, and she touches her fingertips to his jaw, and then she walks to the front door and puts on her boots and lets herself out into the winter.