Fic: Mimesis (3/3)
Mimesis :: Part One :: Part Two :: Part Three ::
Things change from then on. It’s like the Replicator isn’t trying to fool him anymore, to lure him in, rather is running through a dizzying list of partially constructed realities. It’s almost as if she’s looking for something, running scenarios. He’s beginning to feel a lot like a specimen in that Petri dish Carter had mentioned.
There are long-forgotten childhood memories, missions that never happened, strange mutations of things that were, only changed in inexplicable ways.
The Replicator is there, always there. Watching mostly, sometimes staring back at him through eyes that aren’t hers. He wants to ask her what she’s looking for, what this is all about, but doesn’t want to play into her hand. Instead he concentrates on letting everything roll by, not letting the horrific memories she prods him with ripple his surface.
He’s not giving her a thing.
It’s getting easier. He tries not to let that lull him into making the mistake of lowering his guard.
Even so, he does allow himself a nice breakfast of porridge with Laira just because it feels like it’s been a while since he’s sat down and eaten, and not because he feels any particular attachment. He thinks the Replicator is interpreting it differently. Her mistake. Because the truth is that his thoughts have never lingered in this place; he’s never felt the urge to wish it back. He takes in all the details that are wrong, misplaced, rubbed shiny clean when those days had been dark and brutal and limned with regret, and he has to wonder where this construct was really pulled from.
He shakes his head. This place had always only been a distant second.
She’s begun to believe she’s finally found something on him though, letting herself think he’s buying this reality. He lingers just long enough to make her lower her guard.
“This isn’t going to work,” he comments blandly into his cup of not-coffee, feeling Laira’s eyes on him.
The urn in her hand hits the wall with a crash.
Jack smiles and drains his cup.
She spends the next five constructs rubbing his failures in his face.
He still thinks it was worth it.
* * *
The planet is distinct for its silence. Jack supposes he should just be thankful there’s no Maybourne.
“Really?” he calls out, looking around the landscape. “Think you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel this time!”
There’s no answer.
Sitting down in the grass in the lonely, empty landscape, he feels an impulse tickling at the back of his mind, but leaves her be, watching the sway of flowers in the soft breeze.
There are worse things to be than alone.
Leaning back in the grass, Jack stretches out and takes a nap.
* * *
The church is the perfect mix of quaint and cozy, nothing ostentatious or overwrought, just the simple comfort of a sanctuary. Exactly what he imagines she would want. No attendants, no roses, just two people standing in front of an officiate. Skimming the crowd, Jack recognizes familiar faces-friends, family, comrades-the groom’s side suspiciously empty and out of focus.
She’s beautiful, a clutch of soft lavender tulips against the creamy white of her dress in some simple cut he’d never be able to name. He just knows she looks amazing in it. She’s a spot of light against the dark suit of the man next to her.
The guy’s face isn’t quite in focus, warping slightly like this world isn’t complete. Just enough details to make it clear who it isn’t. It’s every man but Jack.
He wonders if the Replicator thinks this is more punishment, sitting here watching this. Clearly she doesn’t know him as well as she thinks.
This isn’t his nightmare. It’s an inevitability. One he’s always been prepared for. He’s spent their entire acquaintance getting ready to let go of her, never really having a hold in the first place.
This scenario isn’t what he fears.
The bride turns abruptly, her blue eyes focusing in on him, something like triumph on her face.
Shit.
* * *
He opens his eyes and looks into Carter’s face.
Where has she been?
They are back on the ship now, pretext finally falling away under the harsh light reflecting off living, breathing metal walls.
She doesn’t look scared anymore, or even resigned. She just looks confident and capable and just how he wants her to be.
Only more illusion, because it’s her, only something isn’t quite right.
“Sir,” she says, her eyes traveling across his face. “It’s okay.”
“I don’t believe you,” he says.
She smiles. “Good. You shouldn’t believe anything.”
“This isn’t real.”
“No,” she says. “It’s not.”
Only when she steps back does he notice the gun. It’s heavy in his hand, pressed tight up against her chest, the trigger sharp under his finger.
Why the hell is he…?
But he knows. Knows that if he just does this one thing, it will be over. It will all stop. It’s like this fact is being whispered in his ear or maybe it’s always been there all along.
Just do it.
He has to kill her or this will never end.
It’s the only way.
Carter looks from the gun to Jack, something like understanding in her eye. “It’s okay,” she says, her hand closing over his on the gun, not to push away, but to hold in place. “I’m almost there.”
The gun fires.
* * *
Carter is lying on the floor, her eyes staring. Empty.
“You killed her,” the Replicator says, and the memory is suddenly there in Jack’s mind-reaching out and grabbing for Carter from behind, bumping the gun. The sharp retort and acrid taste on his tongue.
“No,” he denies.
“You killed her,” she says into his ear from behind, her body brushing close to his. “You know it to be true.”
He can smell her blood, feel the gun in his hand. So real.
He squeezes his eyes shut. “No. You wouldn’t let her die.”
“She was of no more use to me. I collected all the data I needed.”
Is that really what all of this has been? A set of fucking experiments? “I don’t believe you.”
She steps away, her arm sweeping wide as if presenting a prize. “You don’t have to. She’s right there. What you did is right in front of you.”
He can’t move, can’t step closer to confirm one way or another. He tries to call her, to drag her into this place like he’s done before, kill the illusion, but he just can’t feel her anymore. Like there’s this giant gap.
“No,” he says, but even he can hear the defeat building in his voice. What has he done?
“She is not completely gone.” She changes, morphs in front of his eyes, suddenly soft and rumpled in blue BDUs.
She crosses behind him, fingers trailing across his shoulders. “I can give you everything.”
For a full second he’s weak enough to consider it, to take the lie in the face of the unacceptable truth lying at his feet.
Don’t trust her.
“No,” he says, pulling away from her.
Forcing his feet across the room, he drops to his knees by her body, hovering just out of reach. He reaches out, his fingers shaking, knowing with every fiber of his being that he has to do this. Has to know one way or another.
He makes contact.
Nothing.
“What if I am all that is left of her?” the Replicator whispers in his ear.
He closes his eyes, anger boiling up and over the grief, snapping everything into bright clarity. Including one inescapable fact: “Then she really is gone.”
The Replicator turns, her hand ripping out of Jack’s forehead with nothing close to gentleness. He sags forward, his body trapped by something hard and metal. Opening his eyes, he can see that the room has shifted yet again, the light bright and painful against his eyes, his body sluggish as if from long immobility. He’s partially encased in the wall itself, blocks covering his body, holding him in place.
Next to him, there’s a second alcove. Empty, nothing but a trail of blood leading away from it.
Oh, God.
Only the Replicator looks confused, staring at the empty alcove like she’s misplaced something.
“I suppose I should thank you.”
They both turn to see Carter leaning against the doorway, her face pale and drawn, but decidedly not dead. Free, he thinks, glancing at the empty alcove, finally understanding.
Disconnected.
The Replicator tilts her head to one side. Shifting her variables, Jack thinks. “For what?” she asks.
“For teaching me about our greatest weakness.”
The Replicator smiles, like this is all playing perfectly into her hands, like she’s finally getting what she’s really wanted all along-Carter. Every single manipulation leading to this moment.
“Don’t you want to know what it is?” Carter asks.
The Replicator’s eyes dart to Jack. You hold her back. Is that what this was really all about?
Carter smiles. “This whole time, you were looking in the wrong place.”
“You’re confused,” the Replicator says, taking a step towards Carter.
Only Carter has never looked farther from confused. “It’s arrogance,” she says.
The Replicator stops, her brow furrowing in confusion that makes her look alarmingly childlike. A machine trying to understand things way beyond her.
Carter lifts her arm from behind her back, the Replicator weapon swinging into view. “What else could have possibly driven you to bring one of these with you?” Carter twists it to the side a bit, looking down at it. “I have to admit that I didn’t know what it was at first, but while you were busy playing your little games, running your experiments, it wasn’t too hard to figure out. To take what I needed.”
The Replicator seems to visibly relax, the cruel smirk back on her face. “Even if you did, you must also know that it can’t hurt me.”
“Can’t it?” she asks, something in her expression sending a thrill up Jack’s spine.
There is a flicker of real alarm on the Replicator’s face. “You couldn’t possibly have--.”
Carter pushes off the doorjamb, her expression hardening, anger radiating from every angle of her body. For a moment she seems to glow with it, weeks of righteous indignation and helplessness bursting out through her skin.
“You don’t tell me what I can and can’t do,” she bites out, each word like a bullet.
She fires the weapon.
Jack expects a scream, a tearing of metal, but the machine wearing Carter’s face simply falls away, a rain of silver metal scattering like sand across the floor.
Tiny little pieces.
Carter sags back against the doorway, more than simple relief, as if she’s been finally cut free, released from a web she’s been tangled in for weeks and weeks. She did it. Jack has no idea how. But that’s normal, he tells himself.
When her face lifts though, there is nothing of friendly camaraderie or triumph, simply sick resignation as if there is one last terrible task before her.
“Carter,” he says, feeling his stomach drop.
She won’t look him in the eye.
She lifts the weapon to his chest, pausing the barest second before firing. The blocks around him melt away, setting him free, nearly dumping him to the floor when his legs unexpectedly wobble under the weight of his body. Just how long has he been in there?
Carter is staring at him like she’d expected him to disappear too.
He steps out of the alcove, one hand on the wall as he cautiously moves towards her. “Carter.”
She tentatively reaches out to touch his chest, palm flat against his heart. “You’re real.”
“Told ya,” he says with a smile.
She stumbles, and now he sees it, the blood staining her shirt.
“Dammit,” he swears, lowering her to the floor and pressing his hands against he wound in her shoulder. Wasn’t that a ploy? Had the gun been real? “I actually shot you. I remember--.”
“No,” she says, grimacing under the pressure, head dropping back to the wall behind her. “This isn’t a gunshot wound.”
He glances skeptically at the wound, a thin, perfect puncture. Too perfect. “Then how?”
“It was her,” she says. “Her hand--.” She falters, her eyes closing as if to ward off an unpleasant memory.
“But why?” He would just assume Carter had pissed the Replicator off, but looking at the wound, it seems rather carefully placed to be painful as all hell, but not fatal.
Carter’s brow furrows as she thinks it through. “She must have wanted you to think you’d killed me. It was the only way to--.” She trails off, darting a glance at him.
“The only way to get me to choose to stay,” he finishes for her. Not need. Just want.
Because it was the final puzzle piece, the one thing Jack really fears more than anything-Carter dying because of him. If he’d really killed her, he never would have been able to forgive himself. And if he took it badly enough, he might have been tempted to stay, to buy the fantasy.
She’s looking down at her hands, a small subterfuge that normally he’d grateful for, but he thinks they are well beyond that now.
“She said I hold you back.”
She looks up in surprise. “She was wrong.”
“Was she?”
“If she wasn’t, we’d still be in there.” The fact that they very well still could be seems to occur to her. She looks unnerved, pulling slightly back away from him.
“This is real,” Jack says.
“How do you know?”
He’s not sure how to put it into words, the millions of tiny things that alone mean nothing, but together mean everything. How to explain that Skaara was right. That he knows her, knows she’s real.
Because I can’t feel you in my head anymore, he imagines saying.
“Can you think of a way out of here?” he asks instead.
She glances around the room, no doubt running the variables of a ship with no controls or interface, just a pilot dead and gone and in pieces on the floor. There very well may be no exit for them.
“No,” she admits.
“Exactly,” he says. “It’s way too messy not to be real.”
She laughs, her smile turning to a grimace as she grabs her shoulder. “I suppose if this were fake, I could dream up some morphine and a last second Tok’ra rescue.”
They both look up, as if waiting for either to appear.
Nothing happens. They catch each other’s eye. “Worth a shot,” Jack says, pulling off his jacket to start working on a rudimentary bandage for Carter’s shoulder.
She closes her eyes, letting him work in silence, and he’s almost convinced she’s drifted off when she speaks again.
“I think maybe she thought bringing you in there would weaken me.”
“Yeah?” he says, voice carefully neutral as he tears his shirt into strips.
She nods, her fingers twisting into the fabric of her pants as Jack starts wrapping his impromptu bandage around her wound. Her breathing is a little uneven when she talks, sucked in against the pain. “Instead you helped me remember.”
“Sorry. Almost done,” Jack says, grimacing when she hisses as he wraps the bandage around a second time. “Remember what?”
She opens her eyes. “Why I was fighting. Who I am, and not who she wanted me to be.”
It had been confusing as hell in there, the Replicator attacking from all sides, tearing things apart, moving the pieces as she saw fit. It could have been so damn easy to get lost. But he thinks that might have been the fatal flaw too, the thing that in the end kept the Replicator from succeeding-her endless drive to fix and correct things, thinking that they needed to be changed.
Jack carefully ties the last strip of fabric into place. “Because you never needed to be fixed in the first place.”
“No. I guess not.” He doesn’t particularly like the way she makes that sound like a something she’s only just started believing.
He smiles. “I could have told you that a long time ago.”
She regards him, clearly surprised by the statement, but also…also something else that he really hopes he isn’t imaging.
“You always knew when it was me. How did you always know?”
Faith has never been her thing, not in the unknown, not in others, not even in herself. She can execute a plan, substituting with confidence and skill and knowledge, but blind faith? That will never be her thing.
So how to explain that faith in Sam Carter is one of the things he has come to fundamentally rely upon to keep them all alive? But she isn’t asking for a lesson in faith. She’s saying she needs to hear him say it.
“Because I may not know a whole lot, Carter, but I know you.”
She grabs his hand. “Thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
She shakes her head, like there are too many things to choose from. “For trusting me. For not giving up on me.”
He glances at her hand in his. “That’s just never gonna happen, Carter,” he says.
The ghost of a moment that technically never happened, never existed, flows between them, and for a frightening moment Jack thinks he can almost taste it, that afternoon on his dock. You still want this. But the scenery doesn’t change, reality remaining unshifted, leaving them with nothing but the memory of the very things they’d almost been tempted enough to believe.
He touches her face, like it’s a tic now, this need to feel her. To be sure.
“Jack,” she says.
He starts to pull away, to apologize, but she leans forward and kisses him.
This time there are a million reasons why this is a bad idea and Jack knows each and every one with a sharpness that no justification can ease. He still kisses her back. Maybe it’s driven by relief, maybe by a need for just a little more proof, but mostly he thinks it’s driven by the fact that he’s tired of pretending not to want this.
Carter is the one to pull back, her eyes uncertain as she stares at him. She darts a glance around the room, waiting for things to change, he thinks. When you kiss me back…that’s when I know it’s not really you.
The room remains as it is though, her blood still warm under his fingers. The situation just as impossible as ever.
Real.
He raises his eyebrows at her. “Carter?”
She focuses back on him, eyes a bit wide as if she’s just realizing what she’s done. Maybe she still hadn’t quite believed. The slight blush in her cheeks tells him she does now.
She gives him a helpless shrug, but doesn’t pull away, doesn’t reclaim the distance between them. “Just checking?”
He grins, thumb brushing her cheek. “Feel free to check as often as you like.”
Her blush deepens, but her forehead also smoothes out, her shoulders relaxing, and he knows then that despite the mess, the insurmountable obstacles, things are going to be different between them from now on.
Not perfect. Not fixed.
But different.
“I have some questions, Carter. Important questions. Questions I’m not going to put off anymore.”
Her hand wraps around his-tight, determined-as she nods against his palm. “Okay,” she agrees.
“But I thought we’d get out of here first. What do you say?”
She smiles. “I say, help me to my feet.”
He double checks the bandage one last time and carefully pulls her up to her feet, arm supporting across her back. They pause, just a moment standing close together.
“I may have some ideas,” she says. “But they’re a long shot.”
Possible. But not easy.
He smiles. “Just what I wanted to hear.”
They will figure this out. Together.
In that simple fact, he has all his faith.
* * *
Jack wakes in his bed, the sounds of the cabin familiar around him. He listens for a moment, cataloging the sounds, judging them against memory.
Everything is okay.
The woman next to him shifts, the skin around the still angry looking scar splayed across her shoulder prickling in the cool night air. Reaching down, he pulls the quilt up and over their bodies, his face pressing into the back of her neck as he slides up behind her, holding her close.
She sighs in her sleep, something that sounds like his name.
He smiles and closes his eyes.
.fin.
Things change from then on. It’s like the Replicator isn’t trying to fool him anymore, to lure him in, rather is running through a dizzying list of partially constructed realities. It’s almost as if she’s looking for something, running scenarios. He’s beginning to feel a lot like a specimen in that Petri dish Carter had mentioned.
There are long-forgotten childhood memories, missions that never happened, strange mutations of things that were, only changed in inexplicable ways.
The Replicator is there, always there. Watching mostly, sometimes staring back at him through eyes that aren’t hers. He wants to ask her what she’s looking for, what this is all about, but doesn’t want to play into her hand. Instead he concentrates on letting everything roll by, not letting the horrific memories she prods him with ripple his surface.
He’s not giving her a thing.
It’s getting easier. He tries not to let that lull him into making the mistake of lowering his guard.
Even so, he does allow himself a nice breakfast of porridge with Laira just because it feels like it’s been a while since he’s sat down and eaten, and not because he feels any particular attachment. He thinks the Replicator is interpreting it differently. Her mistake. Because the truth is that his thoughts have never lingered in this place; he’s never felt the urge to wish it back. He takes in all the details that are wrong, misplaced, rubbed shiny clean when those days had been dark and brutal and limned with regret, and he has to wonder where this construct was really pulled from.
He shakes his head. This place had always only been a distant second.
She’s begun to believe she’s finally found something on him though, letting herself think he’s buying this reality. He lingers just long enough to make her lower her guard.
“This isn’t going to work,” he comments blandly into his cup of not-coffee, feeling Laira’s eyes on him.
The urn in her hand hits the wall with a crash.
Jack smiles and drains his cup.
She spends the next five constructs rubbing his failures in his face.
He still thinks it was worth it.
* * *
The planet is distinct for its silence. Jack supposes he should just be thankful there’s no Maybourne.
“Really?” he calls out, looking around the landscape. “Think you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel this time!”
There’s no answer.
Sitting down in the grass in the lonely, empty landscape, he feels an impulse tickling at the back of his mind, but leaves her be, watching the sway of flowers in the soft breeze.
There are worse things to be than alone.
Leaning back in the grass, Jack stretches out and takes a nap.
* * *
The church is the perfect mix of quaint and cozy, nothing ostentatious or overwrought, just the simple comfort of a sanctuary. Exactly what he imagines she would want. No attendants, no roses, just two people standing in front of an officiate. Skimming the crowd, Jack recognizes familiar faces-friends, family, comrades-the groom’s side suspiciously empty and out of focus.
She’s beautiful, a clutch of soft lavender tulips against the creamy white of her dress in some simple cut he’d never be able to name. He just knows she looks amazing in it. She’s a spot of light against the dark suit of the man next to her.
The guy’s face isn’t quite in focus, warping slightly like this world isn’t complete. Just enough details to make it clear who it isn’t. It’s every man but Jack.
He wonders if the Replicator thinks this is more punishment, sitting here watching this. Clearly she doesn’t know him as well as she thinks.
This isn’t his nightmare. It’s an inevitability. One he’s always been prepared for. He’s spent their entire acquaintance getting ready to let go of her, never really having a hold in the first place.
This scenario isn’t what he fears.
The bride turns abruptly, her blue eyes focusing in on him, something like triumph on her face.
Shit.
* * *
He opens his eyes and looks into Carter’s face.
Where has she been?
They are back on the ship now, pretext finally falling away under the harsh light reflecting off living, breathing metal walls.
She doesn’t look scared anymore, or even resigned. She just looks confident and capable and just how he wants her to be.
Only more illusion, because it’s her, only something isn’t quite right.
“Sir,” she says, her eyes traveling across his face. “It’s okay.”
“I don’t believe you,” he says.
She smiles. “Good. You shouldn’t believe anything.”
“This isn’t real.”
“No,” she says. “It’s not.”
Only when she steps back does he notice the gun. It’s heavy in his hand, pressed tight up against her chest, the trigger sharp under his finger.
Why the hell is he…?
But he knows. Knows that if he just does this one thing, it will be over. It will all stop. It’s like this fact is being whispered in his ear or maybe it’s always been there all along.
Just do it.
He has to kill her or this will never end.
It’s the only way.
Carter looks from the gun to Jack, something like understanding in her eye. “It’s okay,” she says, her hand closing over his on the gun, not to push away, but to hold in place. “I’m almost there.”
The gun fires.
* * *
Carter is lying on the floor, her eyes staring. Empty.
“You killed her,” the Replicator says, and the memory is suddenly there in Jack’s mind-reaching out and grabbing for Carter from behind, bumping the gun. The sharp retort and acrid taste on his tongue.
“No,” he denies.
“You killed her,” she says into his ear from behind, her body brushing close to his. “You know it to be true.”
He can smell her blood, feel the gun in his hand. So real.
He squeezes his eyes shut. “No. You wouldn’t let her die.”
“She was of no more use to me. I collected all the data I needed.”
Is that really what all of this has been? A set of fucking experiments? “I don’t believe you.”
She steps away, her arm sweeping wide as if presenting a prize. “You don’t have to. She’s right there. What you did is right in front of you.”
He can’t move, can’t step closer to confirm one way or another. He tries to call her, to drag her into this place like he’s done before, kill the illusion, but he just can’t feel her anymore. Like there’s this giant gap.
“No,” he says, but even he can hear the defeat building in his voice. What has he done?
“She is not completely gone.” She changes, morphs in front of his eyes, suddenly soft and rumpled in blue BDUs.
She crosses behind him, fingers trailing across his shoulders. “I can give you everything.”
For a full second he’s weak enough to consider it, to take the lie in the face of the unacceptable truth lying at his feet.
Don’t trust her.
“No,” he says, pulling away from her.
Forcing his feet across the room, he drops to his knees by her body, hovering just out of reach. He reaches out, his fingers shaking, knowing with every fiber of his being that he has to do this. Has to know one way or another.
He makes contact.
Nothing.
“What if I am all that is left of her?” the Replicator whispers in his ear.
He closes his eyes, anger boiling up and over the grief, snapping everything into bright clarity. Including one inescapable fact: “Then she really is gone.”
The Replicator turns, her hand ripping out of Jack’s forehead with nothing close to gentleness. He sags forward, his body trapped by something hard and metal. Opening his eyes, he can see that the room has shifted yet again, the light bright and painful against his eyes, his body sluggish as if from long immobility. He’s partially encased in the wall itself, blocks covering his body, holding him in place.
Next to him, there’s a second alcove. Empty, nothing but a trail of blood leading away from it.
Oh, God.
Only the Replicator looks confused, staring at the empty alcove like she’s misplaced something.
“I suppose I should thank you.”
They both turn to see Carter leaning against the doorway, her face pale and drawn, but decidedly not dead. Free, he thinks, glancing at the empty alcove, finally understanding.
Disconnected.
The Replicator tilts her head to one side. Shifting her variables, Jack thinks. “For what?” she asks.
“For teaching me about our greatest weakness.”
The Replicator smiles, like this is all playing perfectly into her hands, like she’s finally getting what she’s really wanted all along-Carter. Every single manipulation leading to this moment.
“Don’t you want to know what it is?” Carter asks.
The Replicator’s eyes dart to Jack. You hold her back. Is that what this was really all about?
Carter smiles. “This whole time, you were looking in the wrong place.”
“You’re confused,” the Replicator says, taking a step towards Carter.
Only Carter has never looked farther from confused. “It’s arrogance,” she says.
The Replicator stops, her brow furrowing in confusion that makes her look alarmingly childlike. A machine trying to understand things way beyond her.
Carter lifts her arm from behind her back, the Replicator weapon swinging into view. “What else could have possibly driven you to bring one of these with you?” Carter twists it to the side a bit, looking down at it. “I have to admit that I didn’t know what it was at first, but while you were busy playing your little games, running your experiments, it wasn’t too hard to figure out. To take what I needed.”
The Replicator seems to visibly relax, the cruel smirk back on her face. “Even if you did, you must also know that it can’t hurt me.”
“Can’t it?” she asks, something in her expression sending a thrill up Jack’s spine.
There is a flicker of real alarm on the Replicator’s face. “You couldn’t possibly have--.”
Carter pushes off the doorjamb, her expression hardening, anger radiating from every angle of her body. For a moment she seems to glow with it, weeks of righteous indignation and helplessness bursting out through her skin.
“You don’t tell me what I can and can’t do,” she bites out, each word like a bullet.
She fires the weapon.
Jack expects a scream, a tearing of metal, but the machine wearing Carter’s face simply falls away, a rain of silver metal scattering like sand across the floor.
Tiny little pieces.
Carter sags back against the doorway, more than simple relief, as if she’s been finally cut free, released from a web she’s been tangled in for weeks and weeks. She did it. Jack has no idea how. But that’s normal, he tells himself.
When her face lifts though, there is nothing of friendly camaraderie or triumph, simply sick resignation as if there is one last terrible task before her.
“Carter,” he says, feeling his stomach drop.
She won’t look him in the eye.
She lifts the weapon to his chest, pausing the barest second before firing. The blocks around him melt away, setting him free, nearly dumping him to the floor when his legs unexpectedly wobble under the weight of his body. Just how long has he been in there?
Carter is staring at him like she’d expected him to disappear too.
He steps out of the alcove, one hand on the wall as he cautiously moves towards her. “Carter.”
She tentatively reaches out to touch his chest, palm flat against his heart. “You’re real.”
“Told ya,” he says with a smile.
She stumbles, and now he sees it, the blood staining her shirt.
“Dammit,” he swears, lowering her to the floor and pressing his hands against he wound in her shoulder. Wasn’t that a ploy? Had the gun been real? “I actually shot you. I remember--.”
“No,” she says, grimacing under the pressure, head dropping back to the wall behind her. “This isn’t a gunshot wound.”
He glances skeptically at the wound, a thin, perfect puncture. Too perfect. “Then how?”
“It was her,” she says. “Her hand--.” She falters, her eyes closing as if to ward off an unpleasant memory.
“But why?” He would just assume Carter had pissed the Replicator off, but looking at the wound, it seems rather carefully placed to be painful as all hell, but not fatal.
Carter’s brow furrows as she thinks it through. “She must have wanted you to think you’d killed me. It was the only way to--.” She trails off, darting a glance at him.
“The only way to get me to choose to stay,” he finishes for her. Not need. Just want.
Because it was the final puzzle piece, the one thing Jack really fears more than anything-Carter dying because of him. If he’d really killed her, he never would have been able to forgive himself. And if he took it badly enough, he might have been tempted to stay, to buy the fantasy.
She’s looking down at her hands, a small subterfuge that normally he’d grateful for, but he thinks they are well beyond that now.
“She said I hold you back.”
She looks up in surprise. “She was wrong.”
“Was she?”
“If she wasn’t, we’d still be in there.” The fact that they very well still could be seems to occur to her. She looks unnerved, pulling slightly back away from him.
“This is real,” Jack says.
“How do you know?”
He’s not sure how to put it into words, the millions of tiny things that alone mean nothing, but together mean everything. How to explain that Skaara was right. That he knows her, knows she’s real.
Because I can’t feel you in my head anymore, he imagines saying.
“Can you think of a way out of here?” he asks instead.
She glances around the room, no doubt running the variables of a ship with no controls or interface, just a pilot dead and gone and in pieces on the floor. There very well may be no exit for them.
“No,” she admits.
“Exactly,” he says. “It’s way too messy not to be real.”
She laughs, her smile turning to a grimace as she grabs her shoulder. “I suppose if this were fake, I could dream up some morphine and a last second Tok’ra rescue.”
They both look up, as if waiting for either to appear.
Nothing happens. They catch each other’s eye. “Worth a shot,” Jack says, pulling off his jacket to start working on a rudimentary bandage for Carter’s shoulder.
She closes her eyes, letting him work in silence, and he’s almost convinced she’s drifted off when she speaks again.
“I think maybe she thought bringing you in there would weaken me.”
“Yeah?” he says, voice carefully neutral as he tears his shirt into strips.
She nods, her fingers twisting into the fabric of her pants as Jack starts wrapping his impromptu bandage around her wound. Her breathing is a little uneven when she talks, sucked in against the pain. “Instead you helped me remember.”
“Sorry. Almost done,” Jack says, grimacing when she hisses as he wraps the bandage around a second time. “Remember what?”
She opens her eyes. “Why I was fighting. Who I am, and not who she wanted me to be.”
It had been confusing as hell in there, the Replicator attacking from all sides, tearing things apart, moving the pieces as she saw fit. It could have been so damn easy to get lost. But he thinks that might have been the fatal flaw too, the thing that in the end kept the Replicator from succeeding-her endless drive to fix and correct things, thinking that they needed to be changed.
Jack carefully ties the last strip of fabric into place. “Because you never needed to be fixed in the first place.”
“No. I guess not.” He doesn’t particularly like the way she makes that sound like a something she’s only just started believing.
He smiles. “I could have told you that a long time ago.”
She regards him, clearly surprised by the statement, but also…also something else that he really hopes he isn’t imaging.
“You always knew when it was me. How did you always know?”
Faith has never been her thing, not in the unknown, not in others, not even in herself. She can execute a plan, substituting with confidence and skill and knowledge, but blind faith? That will never be her thing.
So how to explain that faith in Sam Carter is one of the things he has come to fundamentally rely upon to keep them all alive? But she isn’t asking for a lesson in faith. She’s saying she needs to hear him say it.
“Because I may not know a whole lot, Carter, but I know you.”
She grabs his hand. “Thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
She shakes her head, like there are too many things to choose from. “For trusting me. For not giving up on me.”
He glances at her hand in his. “That’s just never gonna happen, Carter,” he says.
The ghost of a moment that technically never happened, never existed, flows between them, and for a frightening moment Jack thinks he can almost taste it, that afternoon on his dock. You still want this. But the scenery doesn’t change, reality remaining unshifted, leaving them with nothing but the memory of the very things they’d almost been tempted enough to believe.
He touches her face, like it’s a tic now, this need to feel her. To be sure.
“Jack,” she says.
He starts to pull away, to apologize, but she leans forward and kisses him.
This time there are a million reasons why this is a bad idea and Jack knows each and every one with a sharpness that no justification can ease. He still kisses her back. Maybe it’s driven by relief, maybe by a need for just a little more proof, but mostly he thinks it’s driven by the fact that he’s tired of pretending not to want this.
Carter is the one to pull back, her eyes uncertain as she stares at him. She darts a glance around the room, waiting for things to change, he thinks. When you kiss me back…that’s when I know it’s not really you.
The room remains as it is though, her blood still warm under his fingers. The situation just as impossible as ever.
Real.
He raises his eyebrows at her. “Carter?”
She focuses back on him, eyes a bit wide as if she’s just realizing what she’s done. Maybe she still hadn’t quite believed. The slight blush in her cheeks tells him she does now.
She gives him a helpless shrug, but doesn’t pull away, doesn’t reclaim the distance between them. “Just checking?”
He grins, thumb brushing her cheek. “Feel free to check as often as you like.”
Her blush deepens, but her forehead also smoothes out, her shoulders relaxing, and he knows then that despite the mess, the insurmountable obstacles, things are going to be different between them from now on.
Not perfect. Not fixed.
But different.
“I have some questions, Carter. Important questions. Questions I’m not going to put off anymore.”
Her hand wraps around his-tight, determined-as she nods against his palm. “Okay,” she agrees.
“But I thought we’d get out of here first. What do you say?”
She smiles. “I say, help me to my feet.”
He double checks the bandage one last time and carefully pulls her up to her feet, arm supporting across her back. They pause, just a moment standing close together.
“I may have some ideas,” she says. “But they’re a long shot.”
Possible. But not easy.
He smiles. “Just what I wanted to hear.”
They will figure this out. Together.
In that simple fact, he has all his faith.
* * *
Jack wakes in his bed, the sounds of the cabin familiar around him. He listens for a moment, cataloging the sounds, judging them against memory.
Everything is okay.
The woman next to him shifts, the skin around the still angry looking scar splayed across her shoulder prickling in the cool night air. Reaching down, he pulls the quilt up and over their bodies, his face pressing into the back of her neck as he slides up behind her, holding her close.
She sighs in her sleep, something that sounds like his name.
He smiles and closes his eyes.
.fin.