Five ways Jack and Sara reconciled
I wrote some Jack / Sara! But not my ficathon fic, oh no, because why would I make a start on that when I could do a very old happy-ish five_things prompt in celebration of the first day of the holidays? I'm an idiot.
Of course, because I'm me, they didn't all turn out to be what I would call happy, exactly. And, not like me at all, I got a wee bit carried away and it all became very very big. I mean, this is a monster of a five things thing!
Also, I'm not sure about #2. I've just finished re-reading the The Dark is Rising Sequence and I decided to try out the omniscient-author thing that Susan Cooper does, but I don't think I did it right. Ah well.
Five ways
1)
Jack goes straight from the gateroom to Hammond's office. The general tells him the cover story that somone more inventive than either of them has worked out, reminds him that for everyone outside the SGC, the official version of events is the only version, looks at him with compassion and concern and a hint of warning. Jack nods, I understand, sir, requests permission to leave base.
He starts to tell Sara the official story, something about experimental technology and laboratory accidents, and he knows even before he starts that there's no point. She's too smart, she spent too much time with the not-Jack-not-Charlie alien, she knows Jack too well. She stops him before he makes it through the first sentence, raises one hand abruptly, a shadow of pain twisting her face and relaxing into weariness. "Jack. Don't. Please. I understand that whatever happened, whatever that thing was, it's classified. I get that you can't tell me. But don't give me any of the Air Force bullshit. I can't...I don't want to hear it."
He wants her to be angry, to lash out at him, to say I saw Charlie last night, Jack. I spent the day with someone I thought was you and then I saw our dead son and I'm scared and upset and I want to know what the hell is going on. But she just sits there, with the resignation of one who has learned by long experience what the military means by 'classified'. He watches her for a long moment, this woman who was the mother of his child, whom he loved and still loves and maybe always will, and he is angry on her behalf. She deserves the truth.
Jack O'Neill sits with his ex-wife on their dead son's bed and for the first time in his life, he discloses information that the US Air Force has ordered him not to disclose.
He talks for a long time about the Stargate, SG-1, the Goa'uld. He tells Sara what the alien said to him and then he tells her all the things he should have said months ago, the things he should have been saying since the day Charlie died. He manages to stop short of begging her to forgive him and take him back.
When he gets back to the mountain, George Hammond doesn't ask him how it went.
He comes home three days later to a blinking light on the answer machine, and he'd forgotten the subtle change in her tone when she's talking to a machine, the way she always says her name, as if he wouldn't recognise her voice.
"Hi, Jack, it's me. Sara. I just wanted to thank you for the other day, and for the things you said afterwards. I should have thanked you then, but it was pretty hard to take in. All of it. I know how hard it must have been for you to tell me everything that you did, so...thank you." There's a long pause, then, softly, "I miss you, Jack. I love you. Call me."
He plays the message again for the pure pleasure of hearing Sara talk. Then again, thinking this time of the secrets he has already told, and those that he will have to keep in the future. He thinks maybe now that he's been honest with her about the big things, the things that really matter, she will let him lie to her about the rest.
He picks up the phone.
2)
The day Jack gets out of the infirmary is the day it really hits him that Frank Cromwell is dead. It shocks him, despite the fact that he saw it happen, and it hurts a hell of a lot more than he would have expected. It hurts, in fact, almost as much as knowing that Hank is probably still dying by interminable seconds six hundred thousand light years from home.
He's getting ready for bed, taking his shirt off in careful wincing movements when he catches sight of the scar low down on the right side of his abdomen, faint now and well-healed, and significant only in that the bullet that caused it knocked him out and he woke up in hell. He hasn't thought consciously about it in years; hasn't noticed it except in the same abstract way that he sometimes notices the other scars in his collection or the spreading grey in his hair. Now, though, he can't look away. He covers the scar with one hand and ignores the sudden pain in his left knee, because it's stupid to have psychosomatic pain in a joint that's been messed with enough times since the original injury to be genuinely sore. What he can't do is block out his own thoughts.
We used to be friends, Jack...
You want me to forgive you, is that it?...Well, that's tough!
Eventually, he gets dressed again and goes to find the one person whom he is sure will understand.
When she sees Jack standing on the step, Sara has a fleeting thought of slamming the door shut. The last time Jack came to her house, he was quite literally not himself, and the experience was far too disturbing for her to want to risk a repeat. But when he turns and she sees his face, she knows - he has lost someone, someone important - and it touches her that he would still think to come to her for comfort.
"Jack. Who was it?"
He ducks his head, lost and in pain and completely unsurprised at the fact that she knows why he's here. It takes effort to force the words out. "Frank. Frank Cromwell."
"Oh, god." She draws him inside, pushes him gently down on the couch, hunts out a bottle of whiskey and pours them both a drink, moving in a kind of shocked daze. "You want to talk about it?"
He does, he realises, and that surprises him even though it's the reason he came. It surprises Sara, too, but she helps him start. "Does it have anything to do with you walking like an old man and having cuts all over your face?"
"Yeah. I was...I was in trouble, we all were, and they sent Frank's unit to get us out. I hadn't seen him in years...He asked me to forgive him and I said no. I said what happened in Iraq was his fault, he left me behind." He stops, takes a gulp of whiskey and retreats for a moment into a semi-formal report. "We had to abseil down a, a sort of shaft, and detonate a bomb. A pane of glass shattered above us and one shard cut part way through Frank's rope. I got tangled and he came down to help me rather than get himself up above the damage and arm the bomb. He helped me release my rope, but his own rope split and he fell. I couldn't catch him." Jack puts his glass down and rubs both hands over his face. When he speaks again his voice is softer, and the formality is gone. "I always thought there'd be time. I thought one day I wouldn't be angry any more and I could call him and we would go out for a couple beers and get back to the way we were. But I was still angry. I was always angry. One of the best friends I ever had just died saving my life because he thought he had a debt to repay and he died thinking I hated him because I'm a stupid son of a bitch who can't let go of a grudge."
Sara feels the tears well up and doesn't bother trying to blink them back. She sits there clutching her whiskey, thinking of two laughing, wise-cracking flyboys back when she first met Jack, of Frank as Jack's best man, both slightly older but not noticeably wiser, and of the time after Iraq, with Frank's shattered grief that turned into sick guilt and Jack's terrible, bitter fury.
"You know what I was thinking of, on the way here? I kept thinking about that day he came to see me after I got out of hospital. You said I should try to forgive him, that I was cutting my nose off to spite my face and one day I would regret it. And I threw him out of the house anyway and I told him not to come back. And here we are. Thanks for not saying you told me so."
Sara makes a quiet, incoherent noise, still crying, and suddenly Jack is taking her glass, tugging her into a close tight embrace and saying into her hair, in a voice that, in anyone else, would be a sob, "Sara. Are you still angry?" She understands the oblique plea for forgiveness and thinks oh, thank God in overwhelming relief. They still have time.
3)
They argue, afterwards, about who exactly is responsible.
Jack says it's Cassie, on the basis that if she hadn't suggested ice cream on the way home from school, he wouldn't have been in Culver's for Sara to bump into in the first place. Cassie agrees with him - she approves whole-heartedly of Sara, who has apparently promised to teach her to swim. She approves even more whole-heartedly of Jack's gratitude, which is currently taking the form of ice cream and skating lessons and a surfeit of exuberant affection.
Janet points out that she could as easily have asked someone else to pick Cassie up while she was stuck on base.
Carter tries to argue that if she hadn't accidentally uploaded a virus into the base computers while playing with the brand new doohickey SG-7 brought back from P6A-725, General Hammond wouldn't have ordered a lock-down and Janet would have been able to leave at the end of her shift. She shuts up fast when Daniel and Janet turn in unison and fix her with identical accusing glares.
Daniel makes a good case for himself, citing the first mission to Abydos and Jack's subsequent return to something resembling a human being. Jack disqualifies him because, he says, Daniel is being entirely too smug, and anyway, having saved Jack from doing something stupid doesn't make him special.
Teal'c says nothing, but accepts as his due any praise that comes his way.
4)
"It's Daniel, isn't it? Jack's friend?"
The guy stiffened and his eyes flicked round the store before settling on Sara's face. It was a strange reaction, she thought - surprise, confusion, more than a little wariness. "Uh, I'm sorry. Do I know you?"
"Sara O'Neill. We met a few years ago, when, at the hospital?"
Sara had heard the phrase realisation dawned before, but she'd never seen it happen. Daniel - she was sure now that this was him - frowned at her, pursed his lips, then suddenly his eyes widened and he relaxed into a polite smile. "Oh. Of course. I'm sorry, Mrs O'Neill. You'll have to forgive me, there was...an accident, I'm suffering from, uh, temporary amnesia. I'm getting better, but names and faces are still a bit...problematic." He twitched his eyebrows, seemingly resigned to being accosted by apparent strangers. "How are you?"
"Oh, I'm so sorry, are you alright? Apart from...but you're getting better?" Sara shook her head, irritated by her own awkwardness. "I'm sorry. I'm fine, thank you. And it's Sara, please...how's Jack?"
"He's fine," Daniel said, and hesitated slightly before going on, "He misses you, you know."
Sara let out an undignified snort of laughter. "He told you that?"
Daniel smiled, and it felt like the best kind of conspiracy. "Oh, no. No. He does, though."
That evening, Sara took out her address book and a map of the Springs and drove to Jack's house. She found him sitting on a wooden deck at the back of the house, his feet up on the railing, a beer in his hand, cooler by his side and a radio playing commentary on a hockey match. She watched him for a few seconds, standing at the corner of the house just beyond his peripheral vision. He'd gone grey since the last time she saw him, but the sprawl of long limbs and the muttered commentary on the commentary were achingly, delightfully familiar. "Hey, Jack."
His head whipped round. "Sara."
His voice was welcoming enough, through his surprise, for Sara to step up on to the deck and sit down beside him. He watched her sit and she thought he was about to say something, but instead he looked away, reached down to the cooler and wordlessly offered her a beer.
"I met your friend Daniel today," she said, conversationally. "He said something interesting. About you."
Jack looked slightly worried. "Yeah, well, you can't believe everything he says. Man's just barely compos mentis these days, he tell you that?"
They grinned at each other, a moment of shared amusement and understanding, and Sara reached out to take the bottle from Jack's hand. Later, they could talk about lost sons and second chances and compromises and love. For now, there was a hockey game and a cold beer and a quiet, easy companionship. For now, that was enough.
5)
Sara visits Charlie's grave a few times a year, on his birthday, at Christmas, sometimes just because it's a nice day and she wishes he were there to enjoy it. Once she went on the first day of the baseball season and once when the Cubs got a wildcard berth in the World Series. She's never met Jack there. But then, she prefers to mark happy occasions and she's pretty sure Jack goes once a year, and once only. She doesn't need to see him to know that annual pilgrimage is his way of paying penance for the one thing he still can't forgive. But Sara has forgiven him, if she ever really blamed him at all; it would be nice if he would stop beating himself up long enough to let her tell him.
On the tenth anniversary of her son's death, Sara breaks her own rule and goes to his grave early in the morning. It's a warm, bright day, incongruous in its perfection and oddly comforting. She's almost at the grave before she notices the figure in Air Force blue sitting on the grass, forearms resting on drawn-up knees, and she stops, torn between wanting to join his vigil and not wanting to intrude on him. She stands there indecisively until Jack says, without looking round, "You gonna stand there all day?"
Sara rolls her eyes, falls into the old game. "I hate when you do that."
"Yes, my extraordinarily keen, Special Forces-trained ability to hear footsteps on gravel can be unsettling to civilians." He glances up at her then with a lopsided smile and pats the grass at his right side. "Come squash some daisies with me."
Sara settles cross-legged beside him. Serious now, he says, haltingly, "Sara. I'm sorry for what I did to you. For Charlie, and for afterwards. I wish...I just...I'm sorry."
She wants to cry, to hug him, to hit him. It's ridiculous that it's taken them ten years to have one of the most important conversations of their lives. She seizes the opportunity that has unexpectedly presented itself. "I never blamed you for Charlie, Jack. Well, maybe I did, a little, for a while I blamed everyone and everything. But it wasn't your fault. I did blame you for leaving me alone, I hated you for it. But I forgive you, Jack. I forgave you years ago, and you were too busy avoiding me to see it."
He takes a deep, shuddering breath, pushes it out with a sound that is almost a laugh, but has no humour. "You're amazing, you know that?" He seems to relax, a tension going out of him that Sara hadn't noticed until it was already gone. "Thank you. I think I needed to hear that."
He's smiling at her now in the same way he used to smile the first few days at home after a long trip away, and the whole time she was pregnant, a small private smile that holds affection and gratitude and awe and has never failed to make her smile back. They sit there in contemplative silence with the sun warm at their backs, and it's surprisingly easy. After a while Jack unfolds himself enough to wrap his right arm round Sara's shoulders and she leans into his solid support.
Of course, because I'm me, they didn't all turn out to be what I would call happy, exactly. And, not like me at all, I got a wee bit carried away and it all became very very big. I mean, this is a monster of a five things thing!
Also, I'm not sure about #2. I've just finished re-reading the The Dark is Rising Sequence and I decided to try out the omniscient-author thing that Susan Cooper does, but I don't think I did it right. Ah well.
Five ways
1)
Jack goes straight from the gateroom to Hammond's office. The general tells him the cover story that somone more inventive than either of them has worked out, reminds him that for everyone outside the SGC, the official version of events is the only version, looks at him with compassion and concern and a hint of warning. Jack nods, I understand, sir, requests permission to leave base.
He starts to tell Sara the official story, something about experimental technology and laboratory accidents, and he knows even before he starts that there's no point. She's too smart, she spent too much time with the not-Jack-not-Charlie alien, she knows Jack too well. She stops him before he makes it through the first sentence, raises one hand abruptly, a shadow of pain twisting her face and relaxing into weariness. "Jack. Don't. Please. I understand that whatever happened, whatever that thing was, it's classified. I get that you can't tell me. But don't give me any of the Air Force bullshit. I can't...I don't want to hear it."
He wants her to be angry, to lash out at him, to say I saw Charlie last night, Jack. I spent the day with someone I thought was you and then I saw our dead son and I'm scared and upset and I want to know what the hell is going on. But she just sits there, with the resignation of one who has learned by long experience what the military means by 'classified'. He watches her for a long moment, this woman who was the mother of his child, whom he loved and still loves and maybe always will, and he is angry on her behalf. She deserves the truth.
Jack O'Neill sits with his ex-wife on their dead son's bed and for the first time in his life, he discloses information that the US Air Force has ordered him not to disclose.
He talks for a long time about the Stargate, SG-1, the Goa'uld. He tells Sara what the alien said to him and then he tells her all the things he should have said months ago, the things he should have been saying since the day Charlie died. He manages to stop short of begging her to forgive him and take him back.
When he gets back to the mountain, George Hammond doesn't ask him how it went.
He comes home three days later to a blinking light on the answer machine, and he'd forgotten the subtle change in her tone when she's talking to a machine, the way she always says her name, as if he wouldn't recognise her voice.
"Hi, Jack, it's me. Sara. I just wanted to thank you for the other day, and for the things you said afterwards. I should have thanked you then, but it was pretty hard to take in. All of it. I know how hard it must have been for you to tell me everything that you did, so...thank you." There's a long pause, then, softly, "I miss you, Jack. I love you. Call me."
He plays the message again for the pure pleasure of hearing Sara talk. Then again, thinking this time of the secrets he has already told, and those that he will have to keep in the future. He thinks maybe now that he's been honest with her about the big things, the things that really matter, she will let him lie to her about the rest.
He picks up the phone.
2)
The day Jack gets out of the infirmary is the day it really hits him that Frank Cromwell is dead. It shocks him, despite the fact that he saw it happen, and it hurts a hell of a lot more than he would have expected. It hurts, in fact, almost as much as knowing that Hank is probably still dying by interminable seconds six hundred thousand light years from home.
He's getting ready for bed, taking his shirt off in careful wincing movements when he catches sight of the scar low down on the right side of his abdomen, faint now and well-healed, and significant only in that the bullet that caused it knocked him out and he woke up in hell. He hasn't thought consciously about it in years; hasn't noticed it except in the same abstract way that he sometimes notices the other scars in his collection or the spreading grey in his hair. Now, though, he can't look away. He covers the scar with one hand and ignores the sudden pain in his left knee, because it's stupid to have psychosomatic pain in a joint that's been messed with enough times since the original injury to be genuinely sore. What he can't do is block out his own thoughts.
We used to be friends, Jack...
You want me to forgive you, is that it?...Well, that's tough!
Eventually, he gets dressed again and goes to find the one person whom he is sure will understand.
When she sees Jack standing on the step, Sara has a fleeting thought of slamming the door shut. The last time Jack came to her house, he was quite literally not himself, and the experience was far too disturbing for her to want to risk a repeat. But when he turns and she sees his face, she knows - he has lost someone, someone important - and it touches her that he would still think to come to her for comfort.
"Jack. Who was it?"
He ducks his head, lost and in pain and completely unsurprised at the fact that she knows why he's here. It takes effort to force the words out. "Frank. Frank Cromwell."
"Oh, god." She draws him inside, pushes him gently down on the couch, hunts out a bottle of whiskey and pours them both a drink, moving in a kind of shocked daze. "You want to talk about it?"
He does, he realises, and that surprises him even though it's the reason he came. It surprises Sara, too, but she helps him start. "Does it have anything to do with you walking like an old man and having cuts all over your face?"
"Yeah. I was...I was in trouble, we all were, and they sent Frank's unit to get us out. I hadn't seen him in years...He asked me to forgive him and I said no. I said what happened in Iraq was his fault, he left me behind." He stops, takes a gulp of whiskey and retreats for a moment into a semi-formal report. "We had to abseil down a, a sort of shaft, and detonate a bomb. A pane of glass shattered above us and one shard cut part way through Frank's rope. I got tangled and he came down to help me rather than get himself up above the damage and arm the bomb. He helped me release my rope, but his own rope split and he fell. I couldn't catch him." Jack puts his glass down and rubs both hands over his face. When he speaks again his voice is softer, and the formality is gone. "I always thought there'd be time. I thought one day I wouldn't be angry any more and I could call him and we would go out for a couple beers and get back to the way we were. But I was still angry. I was always angry. One of the best friends I ever had just died saving my life because he thought he had a debt to repay and he died thinking I hated him because I'm a stupid son of a bitch who can't let go of a grudge."
Sara feels the tears well up and doesn't bother trying to blink them back. She sits there clutching her whiskey, thinking of two laughing, wise-cracking flyboys back when she first met Jack, of Frank as Jack's best man, both slightly older but not noticeably wiser, and of the time after Iraq, with Frank's shattered grief that turned into sick guilt and Jack's terrible, bitter fury.
"You know what I was thinking of, on the way here? I kept thinking about that day he came to see me after I got out of hospital. You said I should try to forgive him, that I was cutting my nose off to spite my face and one day I would regret it. And I threw him out of the house anyway and I told him not to come back. And here we are. Thanks for not saying you told me so."
Sara makes a quiet, incoherent noise, still crying, and suddenly Jack is taking her glass, tugging her into a close tight embrace and saying into her hair, in a voice that, in anyone else, would be a sob, "Sara. Are you still angry?" She understands the oblique plea for forgiveness and thinks oh, thank God in overwhelming relief. They still have time.
3)
They argue, afterwards, about who exactly is responsible.
Jack says it's Cassie, on the basis that if she hadn't suggested ice cream on the way home from school, he wouldn't have been in Culver's for Sara to bump into in the first place. Cassie agrees with him - she approves whole-heartedly of Sara, who has apparently promised to teach her to swim. She approves even more whole-heartedly of Jack's gratitude, which is currently taking the form of ice cream and skating lessons and a surfeit of exuberant affection.
Janet points out that she could as easily have asked someone else to pick Cassie up while she was stuck on base.
Carter tries to argue that if she hadn't accidentally uploaded a virus into the base computers while playing with the brand new doohickey SG-7 brought back from P6A-725, General Hammond wouldn't have ordered a lock-down and Janet would have been able to leave at the end of her shift. She shuts up fast when Daniel and Janet turn in unison and fix her with identical accusing glares.
Daniel makes a good case for himself, citing the first mission to Abydos and Jack's subsequent return to something resembling a human being. Jack disqualifies him because, he says, Daniel is being entirely too smug, and anyway, having saved Jack from doing something stupid doesn't make him special.
Teal'c says nothing, but accepts as his due any praise that comes his way.
4)
"It's Daniel, isn't it? Jack's friend?"
The guy stiffened and his eyes flicked round the store before settling on Sara's face. It was a strange reaction, she thought - surprise, confusion, more than a little wariness. "Uh, I'm sorry. Do I know you?"
"Sara O'Neill. We met a few years ago, when, at the hospital?"
Sara had heard the phrase realisation dawned before, but she'd never seen it happen. Daniel - she was sure now that this was him - frowned at her, pursed his lips, then suddenly his eyes widened and he relaxed into a polite smile. "Oh. Of course. I'm sorry, Mrs O'Neill. You'll have to forgive me, there was...an accident, I'm suffering from, uh, temporary amnesia. I'm getting better, but names and faces are still a bit...problematic." He twitched his eyebrows, seemingly resigned to being accosted by apparent strangers. "How are you?"
"Oh, I'm so sorry, are you alright? Apart from...but you're getting better?" Sara shook her head, irritated by her own awkwardness. "I'm sorry. I'm fine, thank you. And it's Sara, please...how's Jack?"
"He's fine," Daniel said, and hesitated slightly before going on, "He misses you, you know."
Sara let out an undignified snort of laughter. "He told you that?"
Daniel smiled, and it felt like the best kind of conspiracy. "Oh, no. No. He does, though."
That evening, Sara took out her address book and a map of the Springs and drove to Jack's house. She found him sitting on a wooden deck at the back of the house, his feet up on the railing, a beer in his hand, cooler by his side and a radio playing commentary on a hockey match. She watched him for a few seconds, standing at the corner of the house just beyond his peripheral vision. He'd gone grey since the last time she saw him, but the sprawl of long limbs and the muttered commentary on the commentary were achingly, delightfully familiar. "Hey, Jack."
His head whipped round. "Sara."
His voice was welcoming enough, through his surprise, for Sara to step up on to the deck and sit down beside him. He watched her sit and she thought he was about to say something, but instead he looked away, reached down to the cooler and wordlessly offered her a beer.
"I met your friend Daniel today," she said, conversationally. "He said something interesting. About you."
Jack looked slightly worried. "Yeah, well, you can't believe everything he says. Man's just barely compos mentis these days, he tell you that?"
They grinned at each other, a moment of shared amusement and understanding, and Sara reached out to take the bottle from Jack's hand. Later, they could talk about lost sons and second chances and compromises and love. For now, there was a hockey game and a cold beer and a quiet, easy companionship. For now, that was enough.
5)
Sara visits Charlie's grave a few times a year, on his birthday, at Christmas, sometimes just because it's a nice day and she wishes he were there to enjoy it. Once she went on the first day of the baseball season and once when the Cubs got a wildcard berth in the World Series. She's never met Jack there. But then, she prefers to mark happy occasions and she's pretty sure Jack goes once a year, and once only. She doesn't need to see him to know that annual pilgrimage is his way of paying penance for the one thing he still can't forgive. But Sara has forgiven him, if she ever really blamed him at all; it would be nice if he would stop beating himself up long enough to let her tell him.
On the tenth anniversary of her son's death, Sara breaks her own rule and goes to his grave early in the morning. It's a warm, bright day, incongruous in its perfection and oddly comforting. She's almost at the grave before she notices the figure in Air Force blue sitting on the grass, forearms resting on drawn-up knees, and she stops, torn between wanting to join his vigil and not wanting to intrude on him. She stands there indecisively until Jack says, without looking round, "You gonna stand there all day?"
Sara rolls her eyes, falls into the old game. "I hate when you do that."
"Yes, my extraordinarily keen, Special Forces-trained ability to hear footsteps on gravel can be unsettling to civilians." He glances up at her then with a lopsided smile and pats the grass at his right side. "Come squash some daisies with me."
Sara settles cross-legged beside him. Serious now, he says, haltingly, "Sara. I'm sorry for what I did to you. For Charlie, and for afterwards. I wish...I just...I'm sorry."
She wants to cry, to hug him, to hit him. It's ridiculous that it's taken them ten years to have one of the most important conversations of their lives. She seizes the opportunity that has unexpectedly presented itself. "I never blamed you for Charlie, Jack. Well, maybe I did, a little, for a while I blamed everyone and everything. But it wasn't your fault. I did blame you for leaving me alone, I hated you for it. But I forgive you, Jack. I forgave you years ago, and you were too busy avoiding me to see it."
He takes a deep, shuddering breath, pushes it out with a sound that is almost a laugh, but has no humour. "You're amazing, you know that?" He seems to relax, a tension going out of him that Sara hadn't noticed until it was already gone. "Thank you. I think I needed to hear that."
He's smiling at her now in the same way he used to smile the first few days at home after a long trip away, and the whole time she was pregnant, a small private smile that holds affection and gratitude and awe and has never failed to make her smile back. They sit there in contemplative silence with the sun warm at their backs, and it's surprisingly easy. After a while Jack unfolds himself enough to wrap his right arm round Sara's shoulders and she leans into his solid support.