Fic: 'Falling Back to Earth' (1/7)
Falling Back to Earth
Chapter One
The one-year anniversary of Jack’s return-from Abydos, from fatalism, from whatever-slides around without his notice. It’s not like he commemorates that date any more than he does any of the other milestones he’d rather forget. Letting go of them is the only way he stays sane, most days.
Only then the call comes.
He’s been keeping busy. Mostly with an endless stream of projects required by the little house he bought just far enough out of DC to ensure trees and privacy and a clear view of the night sky.
The stars mean a hell of a lot more now, not just pretty twinkles and the odd meteor shower anymore. It should be frightening: this knowledge that there are things out there bigger and more powerful than anyone on Earth can hope to imagine, but mostly he doesn’t think about Ra and his cold, sinuous features. He thinks of mastadges and giant tent cities and lizard monsters that taste just like chicken. He wonders, sometimes, what Dr. Daniel Jackson may be up to, if Sha’re still has him wrapped around her little finger.
He’ll find himself grinning as he tries to imagine it. There’s an ache maybe, the knowledge that he will never see that place or those people again, probably never walk through the Stargate. But he’s already gotten more out of it than he ever would have dared imagine-a second chance he still spends time convincing himself he deserves.
There’s progress though. Tiny steps in the right direction that he usually only recognizes long after the nausea fades, the sound of children’s shrieks straining to be commonplace rather than torturous.
He thinks he’s still a hell of a long way off from fine, but he has things to do and a woman who may not think he’s a waste of space, and as she’d once told him, it’s a place to start.
At least it had been, before the call comes.
Colonel O’Neill they call him, and just like that the waiting is done. He thinks he should have been cynical enough to know it was all too good to last.
* * *
“Hey,” Sam calls out. Jack hears the front door shut behind her, her bag hitting the floor with a soft thump.
It’s like this a lot lately, nothing but a lazy weekend and the two of them, no need for knocking on the door or calling ahead. Or at least it had been.
“Jack?”
She pokes her head into the family room. Jack doesn’t get up, still sitting in his leather lounger, a beer open in one hand despite the indecently early hour. He idly glances around and thinks, I just started getting this room exactly how I want it.
“Jack?” Sam asks again, crossing the room to touch his arm. “What’s wrong?”
His arm flexes under her touch. They’ve been taking things really slow with a million steps back in between, and he’s not sure what this little monkey wrench is going to do to their carefully stacked deck of cards. Or maybe he knows exactly what it’s going to do and that’s the problem. But not saying the words won’t make it any less true.
“I’ve been recalled,” he says.
She lets out a soft sound, leaning against the arm of his chair. He looks up at her, sees that her expression is distant in a way he knows means her brain is zipping through the possibilities.
“Do you think they know?” she asks, flawlessly zeroing in on the same question that’s been plaguing Jack all morning.
He still doesn’t know what possessed him to actually tell her what happened on Abydos. Hell, maybe he’d just needed to tell someone. Her clearance level hardly makes it any less criminal.
Maybe he thought she deserves to know that the gate still goes somewhere, buried by rocks or not.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know how they could. But I can’t think of any other reason for them to bother with me.” He’s just a twice-retired colonel with a colorful file and a penchant for staring up at the stars.
“Something must have happened,” she says, and Jack thinks if it did, she’d have a much clearer picture why, still being in possession of both position and clearance.
As if to offer further damning evidence of just how screwed he is, her cell phone chooses that moment to ring. They look at each other like they somehow know the moment she answers it everything will change.
She pushes off the edge of the chair, pacing to the window before answering the phone. “Captain Carter,” she says. She doesn’t have a poker face to speak of, and he suspects that’s why she’s got her back to him. “Yes, sir. I understand, sir.”
The conversation, if it can be called that, continues in this vein for a while. Every new ‘sir’ that passes her lips just layers more and more tension on his shoulders. He’s considering a trip to the kitchen for another beer when she finally hangs up, pocketing her phone and leaning on the window casement in front of her.
“You too?” he asks, staring at the empty bottle in his hand.
She doesn’t answer right away, and when she finally turns to look at him, she’s gnawing on her bottom lip like she’s working out all the permutations. “Yeah, me too,” she confirms.
Jack nods. “You get any clearer idea why?”
Pushing off the wall, she crosses the room, sitting down on the arm of his chair. “Just something with the Stargate.”
He touches her back, his fingers trailing down the length of her spine. “You going to come visit me in the big house? Bake a file into a cake for me?”
“You did what you thought was right,” she says, her voice fierce and protective.
It means a hell of a lot to hear her say that, probably more than it should, but that doesn’t change the material facts. “I doubt they’ll see it that way.”
She shakes her head. “I still don’t think that’s what this is about.”
She’s probably right. Criminals don’t get polite calls asking them to get on a plane. They get MPs.
“If there’s a mission…,” she says and here it finally is, the real reason Jack’s sulking with a beer in his favorite chair.
“Yeah,” he says.
She takes a sharp little breath like she’s steadying herself. “We’d have to tell them.”
Jack isn’t surprised by her adherence to their oaths of honor. Hell, he admires the heck out of it, despite what it means. “Yeah.”
Her back is stiff as she sits perched on the edge of the armchair, and she doesn’t look back at him. “They’re going to make me choose.”
Jack doesn’t fool himself. He knows perfectly well that the cards aren’t stacked in his favor, knows just how much she wants the Stargate. But for something that had started out as the very definition of casual and with as few strings attached as possible, the thought of her walking away now burns way more than he’s prepared for.
“Jack?” She says it like a question, a request for an answer he doesn’t have, her hand blindly reaching back for him.
Abandoning the beer bottle, he wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her back into his lap. He kisses her, his hands slipping into her hair. He doesn’t miss the way she kisses him back-a little too hard, like she’s trying to imprint this memory.
It tastes too much like goodbye.
* * *
Sam’s reporting time isn’t until 24 hours after Jack’s. It’s been complete silence between them since he left for Colorado, and she has no idea what’s going on-what she might be walking into-as she arrives at the SGC. She tells herself the unexpected mission is what has her on edge and not Jack’s silence, his sudden disappearance from her life.
She tries to believe it, distracting herself with the possibilities in front of her.
Abydos.
It’s like a dream, if not for the nightmarish quality lent by their mission prerogatives laid out carefully in the file in her hand: determine if a threat to Earth exists on Abydos, and if it does, finish what Jack failed to do a year ago.
Reaching the end of the hall, Sam pauses just long enough to remember that this is the same stretch of hall where she first saw Jack.
You won’t appreciate it.
“I’m assigning Sam Carter to your team, Colonel,” she hears from the briefing room, General Hammond’s voice carrying out into the hall.
Smoothing one hand down the front of her jacket, Sam takes a deep breath and steps inside.
She barely recognizes Jack in his uniform because that man had been the stranger, the one she never really knew. There’s something in his eyes as she salutes him though, in the insouciant little flick of a salute he sends back to her. Just familiar enough that she feels all her nerves settle, despite the uncertainty of these treacherous waters they are wading into.
At least he’s not in the brig.
“Captain Samantha Carter reporting, sir,” she says.
“But of course you go by ‘Sam’,” a major at the other end of the table remarks with a sly glance at his buddy next to him. Ah, the classics. Either she’s a weak girly-girl or she’s a raging lesbian hard ass. She thinks she should take comfort in the predictability of it all. At least this she knows she can handle.
“You don't have to worry, Major,” she tosses back. “I played with dolls when I was a kid.”
Across from her, Jack winces.
“G.I. Joe?” the major parries, refusing to let go of the overburdened innuendo.
“Oh, for crying out loud, Kawalsky. Cut it out,” Jack snaps, apparently already having lost his patience for the little show. “General, can I speak to you for a moment? In private?”
General Hammond doesn’t seem pleased by the request, but nods his head nonetheless.
Jack follows Hammond to his office, but pauses right before the door. “Uh, Captain Carter? You wanna step inside?”
She stares back at him, the other men at the table overly intent at the little beat of byplay. Jack jerks his head towards the door.
“Yes, sir,” she says, taking perverse pleasure in the way he flinches at the honorific. Maybe his silence has put her more on edge than she thought.
Hammond eyes her as she enters and carefully closes the door behind her. “Colonel, I’m afraid Captain Carter’s position on this mission is not negotiable, if that is what this is about.”
“Sir,” Jack says. “I don’t know what sort of file you have on me...”
“I assure you, I know enough,” Hammond says, his voice hard and Sam catches the edge of Jack’s grimace. Apparently things are not off to a good start between the two of them.
“I meant…uh.” Jack darts a glance at her. “Personally.”
Sam closes her eyes.
“I’m not sure I understand you, Colonel.”
Sam looks up to see that Hammond isn’t directing the comment to Jack though, instead he’s staring right at her and it’s a little too close to a concerned friend of her father’s rather than her new commanding officer.
Taking a breath, she dives in, saving Jack from his typical gracelessness. “Colonel O’Neill and I are acquainted, sir.”
“Personally,” Hammond repeats and Sam can only be thankful her father isn’t here for this. She’s convinced that is the only way this could be more uncomfortable.
She nods.
Hammond’s brow furrows. “And you are still currently…involved?”
Next to her, Jack is conspicuously silent, and it finally clicks into place, the reason he hasn’t contacted her even once after shipping out-plausible deniability. She can in good faith say they stopped seeing each other, that the relationship is in the past even if only by a matter of days.
This is all Jack’s way of telling her it’s up to her.
She can take this easy out, erase it all as a mistake, and go on this mission she damn well deserves to be on. The one she’s been waiting for her whole life. She’s not going to throw that away because of a man, because of a relationship that is still undefined at best. They’ve never made any promises to each other.
All she has to do is say, ‘No.’
She thinks it’s probably a bit of a toss up who is the most surprised when what she actually says is, “Yes,” all stubborn and unapologetic.
She is so monumentally screwed.
Hammond clears his throat. “This…complicates things.”
Sam feels her stomach twist. She’s going to be dismissed from this mission. Again. And this time it will have nothing to do with preconceptions and boys’ club bullshit. She’s let herself become the stereotype.
She thinks she may throw up.
“I’ll step aside, sir,” Jack says, and she shouldn’t be surprised that he’s willing to take the bullet for her.
Hammond, on the other hand, is less than impressed. “Excuse me, Colonel?”
“Hey, I’m retired,” Jack says with a shrug. “I’ve got this knee thing too…”
Hammond looks like his head is about to explode. “Colonel, I don’t think you understand the severity of your position at the moment. The only reason you are not down in the brig where you belong is because you are leading this mission. I think I already made it clear that I am not sending in others to clean up your mistakes.”
Now it’s Jack’s turn to look murderous. “Are you saying that if I don’t take this mission you’re going to nuke the hell out of hundreds of people just to teach me my lesson?”
“You’re not exactly leaving me with a lot of choices,” Hammond shoots back, his voice edging towards a deep bark, a Texas twang building in his agitation.
Sam takes a step forward before it can escalate any further. “Remove me from the mission, sir.”
“Like hell,” Jack says.
She tries to smile, but knows she doesn’t quite pull it off. “It’s the only decision that makes sense.”
“You are the foremost expert on the Stargate, Captain Carter,” Hammond says, and it’s nice to hear that acknowledged for once, openly and without conditionals, but it doesn’t change anything. She made her choice.
“And I would have loved the chance to live up to that, sir.”
“Then give me an alternative.”
She knows what he’s asking her.
Next to her, Jack shifts and for the first time since she stepped into this office, she allows herself the luxury of looking at him. She sees it in the gaze he’s leveling on her. Just do it. He doesn’t think he’s worth losing this over.
Somehow, that just makes her even more certain that he is.
God, when did this happen? How did she let him get so far under her skin?
She swallows, turning back to Hammond. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t have one to offer you.”
“You’re certain?” he presses, trying to give her a chance to salvage her career.
She feels like she’s got a stomach full of lead, but somehow manages to nod.
Hammond echoes the gesture, short and clipped and pissed like he’s been pushed to a decision he never wanted to have to make. He stands up and Sam feels her heart stutter in her chest because nothing he feels the need to deliver from his feet can be good.
“Then you leave me no choice,” Hammond says, his posture shifting.
Both Sam and Jack stand a bit more at attention in response.
“Because your relationship-deemed unprofessional through the potential to erode morale, discipline, and unit cohesion-is unacceptable, I hereby order you both to cease and desist your personal relationship from this moment forward.”
Sam sucks in a breath. She knows the rules well enough, understands the need for them, just never thought to have them apply to her. Only on the other end of it does it seem quite so ridiculous, this concept that an order can just erase it all like it never happened.
Hammond leans forward on his hands. “I take it you both understand the severity of potential penalties should you choose to ignore this order.”
Sam would just have her career ruined. Jack would no doubt also get to spend some quality time in prison, in no small part thanks to his actions on Abydos.
She can’t believe this is happening.
“Have I made myself clear?” Hammond says.
“Yes, sir,” they answer together. Dutiful. Compliant.
Only more like left without any choice.
“Good,” Hammond says. “Then let’s finish this damn briefing.”
And just like that, it’s over, just as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had begun.
:: next::
Chapter One
The one-year anniversary of Jack’s return-from Abydos, from fatalism, from whatever-slides around without his notice. It’s not like he commemorates that date any more than he does any of the other milestones he’d rather forget. Letting go of them is the only way he stays sane, most days.
Only then the call comes.
He’s been keeping busy. Mostly with an endless stream of projects required by the little house he bought just far enough out of DC to ensure trees and privacy and a clear view of the night sky.
The stars mean a hell of a lot more now, not just pretty twinkles and the odd meteor shower anymore. It should be frightening: this knowledge that there are things out there bigger and more powerful than anyone on Earth can hope to imagine, but mostly he doesn’t think about Ra and his cold, sinuous features. He thinks of mastadges and giant tent cities and lizard monsters that taste just like chicken. He wonders, sometimes, what Dr. Daniel Jackson may be up to, if Sha’re still has him wrapped around her little finger.
He’ll find himself grinning as he tries to imagine it. There’s an ache maybe, the knowledge that he will never see that place or those people again, probably never walk through the Stargate. But he’s already gotten more out of it than he ever would have dared imagine-a second chance he still spends time convincing himself he deserves.
There’s progress though. Tiny steps in the right direction that he usually only recognizes long after the nausea fades, the sound of children’s shrieks straining to be commonplace rather than torturous.
He thinks he’s still a hell of a long way off from fine, but he has things to do and a woman who may not think he’s a waste of space, and as she’d once told him, it’s a place to start.
At least it had been, before the call comes.
Colonel O’Neill they call him, and just like that the waiting is done. He thinks he should have been cynical enough to know it was all too good to last.
* * *
“Hey,” Sam calls out. Jack hears the front door shut behind her, her bag hitting the floor with a soft thump.
It’s like this a lot lately, nothing but a lazy weekend and the two of them, no need for knocking on the door or calling ahead. Or at least it had been.
“Jack?”
She pokes her head into the family room. Jack doesn’t get up, still sitting in his leather lounger, a beer open in one hand despite the indecently early hour. He idly glances around and thinks, I just started getting this room exactly how I want it.
“Jack?” Sam asks again, crossing the room to touch his arm. “What’s wrong?”
His arm flexes under her touch. They’ve been taking things really slow with a million steps back in between, and he’s not sure what this little monkey wrench is going to do to their carefully stacked deck of cards. Or maybe he knows exactly what it’s going to do and that’s the problem. But not saying the words won’t make it any less true.
“I’ve been recalled,” he says.
She lets out a soft sound, leaning against the arm of his chair. He looks up at her, sees that her expression is distant in a way he knows means her brain is zipping through the possibilities.
“Do you think they know?” she asks, flawlessly zeroing in on the same question that’s been plaguing Jack all morning.
He still doesn’t know what possessed him to actually tell her what happened on Abydos. Hell, maybe he’d just needed to tell someone. Her clearance level hardly makes it any less criminal.
Maybe he thought she deserves to know that the gate still goes somewhere, buried by rocks or not.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know how they could. But I can’t think of any other reason for them to bother with me.” He’s just a twice-retired colonel with a colorful file and a penchant for staring up at the stars.
“Something must have happened,” she says, and Jack thinks if it did, she’d have a much clearer picture why, still being in possession of both position and clearance.
As if to offer further damning evidence of just how screwed he is, her cell phone chooses that moment to ring. They look at each other like they somehow know the moment she answers it everything will change.
She pushes off the edge of the chair, pacing to the window before answering the phone. “Captain Carter,” she says. She doesn’t have a poker face to speak of, and he suspects that’s why she’s got her back to him. “Yes, sir. I understand, sir.”
The conversation, if it can be called that, continues in this vein for a while. Every new ‘sir’ that passes her lips just layers more and more tension on his shoulders. He’s considering a trip to the kitchen for another beer when she finally hangs up, pocketing her phone and leaning on the window casement in front of her.
“You too?” he asks, staring at the empty bottle in his hand.
She doesn’t answer right away, and when she finally turns to look at him, she’s gnawing on her bottom lip like she’s working out all the permutations. “Yeah, me too,” she confirms.
Jack nods. “You get any clearer idea why?”
Pushing off the wall, she crosses the room, sitting down on the arm of his chair. “Just something with the Stargate.”
He touches her back, his fingers trailing down the length of her spine. “You going to come visit me in the big house? Bake a file into a cake for me?”
“You did what you thought was right,” she says, her voice fierce and protective.
It means a hell of a lot to hear her say that, probably more than it should, but that doesn’t change the material facts. “I doubt they’ll see it that way.”
She shakes her head. “I still don’t think that’s what this is about.”
She’s probably right. Criminals don’t get polite calls asking them to get on a plane. They get MPs.
“If there’s a mission…,” she says and here it finally is, the real reason Jack’s sulking with a beer in his favorite chair.
“Yeah,” he says.
She takes a sharp little breath like she’s steadying herself. “We’d have to tell them.”
Jack isn’t surprised by her adherence to their oaths of honor. Hell, he admires the heck out of it, despite what it means. “Yeah.”
Her back is stiff as she sits perched on the edge of the armchair, and she doesn’t look back at him. “They’re going to make me choose.”
Jack doesn’t fool himself. He knows perfectly well that the cards aren’t stacked in his favor, knows just how much she wants the Stargate. But for something that had started out as the very definition of casual and with as few strings attached as possible, the thought of her walking away now burns way more than he’s prepared for.
“Jack?” She says it like a question, a request for an answer he doesn’t have, her hand blindly reaching back for him.
Abandoning the beer bottle, he wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her back into his lap. He kisses her, his hands slipping into her hair. He doesn’t miss the way she kisses him back-a little too hard, like she’s trying to imprint this memory.
It tastes too much like goodbye.
* * *
Sam’s reporting time isn’t until 24 hours after Jack’s. It’s been complete silence between them since he left for Colorado, and she has no idea what’s going on-what she might be walking into-as she arrives at the SGC. She tells herself the unexpected mission is what has her on edge and not Jack’s silence, his sudden disappearance from her life.
She tries to believe it, distracting herself with the possibilities in front of her.
Abydos.
It’s like a dream, if not for the nightmarish quality lent by their mission prerogatives laid out carefully in the file in her hand: determine if a threat to Earth exists on Abydos, and if it does, finish what Jack failed to do a year ago.
Reaching the end of the hall, Sam pauses just long enough to remember that this is the same stretch of hall where she first saw Jack.
You won’t appreciate it.
“I’m assigning Sam Carter to your team, Colonel,” she hears from the briefing room, General Hammond’s voice carrying out into the hall.
Smoothing one hand down the front of her jacket, Sam takes a deep breath and steps inside.
She barely recognizes Jack in his uniform because that man had been the stranger, the one she never really knew. There’s something in his eyes as she salutes him though, in the insouciant little flick of a salute he sends back to her. Just familiar enough that she feels all her nerves settle, despite the uncertainty of these treacherous waters they are wading into.
At least he’s not in the brig.
“Captain Samantha Carter reporting, sir,” she says.
“But of course you go by ‘Sam’,” a major at the other end of the table remarks with a sly glance at his buddy next to him. Ah, the classics. Either she’s a weak girly-girl or she’s a raging lesbian hard ass. She thinks she should take comfort in the predictability of it all. At least this she knows she can handle.
“You don't have to worry, Major,” she tosses back. “I played with dolls when I was a kid.”
Across from her, Jack winces.
“G.I. Joe?” the major parries, refusing to let go of the overburdened innuendo.
“Oh, for crying out loud, Kawalsky. Cut it out,” Jack snaps, apparently already having lost his patience for the little show. “General, can I speak to you for a moment? In private?”
General Hammond doesn’t seem pleased by the request, but nods his head nonetheless.
Jack follows Hammond to his office, but pauses right before the door. “Uh, Captain Carter? You wanna step inside?”
She stares back at him, the other men at the table overly intent at the little beat of byplay. Jack jerks his head towards the door.
“Yes, sir,” she says, taking perverse pleasure in the way he flinches at the honorific. Maybe his silence has put her more on edge than she thought.
Hammond eyes her as she enters and carefully closes the door behind her. “Colonel, I’m afraid Captain Carter’s position on this mission is not negotiable, if that is what this is about.”
“Sir,” Jack says. “I don’t know what sort of file you have on me...”
“I assure you, I know enough,” Hammond says, his voice hard and Sam catches the edge of Jack’s grimace. Apparently things are not off to a good start between the two of them.
“I meant…uh.” Jack darts a glance at her. “Personally.”
Sam closes her eyes.
“I’m not sure I understand you, Colonel.”
Sam looks up to see that Hammond isn’t directing the comment to Jack though, instead he’s staring right at her and it’s a little too close to a concerned friend of her father’s rather than her new commanding officer.
Taking a breath, she dives in, saving Jack from his typical gracelessness. “Colonel O’Neill and I are acquainted, sir.”
“Personally,” Hammond repeats and Sam can only be thankful her father isn’t here for this. She’s convinced that is the only way this could be more uncomfortable.
She nods.
Hammond’s brow furrows. “And you are still currently…involved?”
Next to her, Jack is conspicuously silent, and it finally clicks into place, the reason he hasn’t contacted her even once after shipping out-plausible deniability. She can in good faith say they stopped seeing each other, that the relationship is in the past even if only by a matter of days.
This is all Jack’s way of telling her it’s up to her.
She can take this easy out, erase it all as a mistake, and go on this mission she damn well deserves to be on. The one she’s been waiting for her whole life. She’s not going to throw that away because of a man, because of a relationship that is still undefined at best. They’ve never made any promises to each other.
All she has to do is say, ‘No.’
She thinks it’s probably a bit of a toss up who is the most surprised when what she actually says is, “Yes,” all stubborn and unapologetic.
She is so monumentally screwed.
Hammond clears his throat. “This…complicates things.”
Sam feels her stomach twist. She’s going to be dismissed from this mission. Again. And this time it will have nothing to do with preconceptions and boys’ club bullshit. She’s let herself become the stereotype.
She thinks she may throw up.
“I’ll step aside, sir,” Jack says, and she shouldn’t be surprised that he’s willing to take the bullet for her.
Hammond, on the other hand, is less than impressed. “Excuse me, Colonel?”
“Hey, I’m retired,” Jack says with a shrug. “I’ve got this knee thing too…”
Hammond looks like his head is about to explode. “Colonel, I don’t think you understand the severity of your position at the moment. The only reason you are not down in the brig where you belong is because you are leading this mission. I think I already made it clear that I am not sending in others to clean up your mistakes.”
Now it’s Jack’s turn to look murderous. “Are you saying that if I don’t take this mission you’re going to nuke the hell out of hundreds of people just to teach me my lesson?”
“You’re not exactly leaving me with a lot of choices,” Hammond shoots back, his voice edging towards a deep bark, a Texas twang building in his agitation.
Sam takes a step forward before it can escalate any further. “Remove me from the mission, sir.”
“Like hell,” Jack says.
She tries to smile, but knows she doesn’t quite pull it off. “It’s the only decision that makes sense.”
“You are the foremost expert on the Stargate, Captain Carter,” Hammond says, and it’s nice to hear that acknowledged for once, openly and without conditionals, but it doesn’t change anything. She made her choice.
“And I would have loved the chance to live up to that, sir.”
“Then give me an alternative.”
She knows what he’s asking her.
Next to her, Jack shifts and for the first time since she stepped into this office, she allows herself the luxury of looking at him. She sees it in the gaze he’s leveling on her. Just do it. He doesn’t think he’s worth losing this over.
Somehow, that just makes her even more certain that he is.
God, when did this happen? How did she let him get so far under her skin?
She swallows, turning back to Hammond. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t have one to offer you.”
“You’re certain?” he presses, trying to give her a chance to salvage her career.
She feels like she’s got a stomach full of lead, but somehow manages to nod.
Hammond echoes the gesture, short and clipped and pissed like he’s been pushed to a decision he never wanted to have to make. He stands up and Sam feels her heart stutter in her chest because nothing he feels the need to deliver from his feet can be good.
“Then you leave me no choice,” Hammond says, his posture shifting.
Both Sam and Jack stand a bit more at attention in response.
“Because your relationship-deemed unprofessional through the potential to erode morale, discipline, and unit cohesion-is unacceptable, I hereby order you both to cease and desist your personal relationship from this moment forward.”
Sam sucks in a breath. She knows the rules well enough, understands the need for them, just never thought to have them apply to her. Only on the other end of it does it seem quite so ridiculous, this concept that an order can just erase it all like it never happened.
Hammond leans forward on his hands. “I take it you both understand the severity of potential penalties should you choose to ignore this order.”
Sam would just have her career ruined. Jack would no doubt also get to spend some quality time in prison, in no small part thanks to his actions on Abydos.
She can’t believe this is happening.
“Have I made myself clear?” Hammond says.
“Yes, sir,” they answer together. Dutiful. Compliant.
Only more like left without any choice.
“Good,” Hammond says. “Then let’s finish this damn briefing.”
And just like that, it’s over, just as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had begun.
:: next::