Big Bang Fic #4: Work in Faith
Author: Regency
Title: Work in Faith
Rating: PG-13 for subject matter
Pairing: Sam/Jonas, Sam/Jack UST
Warnings: implied violence, canon character death, AU
Spoilers: Children of the Gods (1 & 2), First Commandment, Cold Lazarus, Broca Divide
Word count: ~2,282
Summary: Three years ago, Sam performed the most damned distasteful act of her career when she carried out her orders to eliminate a young boy. Now, three years later, that act has come back to haunt her. Because she’s slowly falling for the father he left behind.
Author’s Notes: Written for the stargateland Big Bang challenge. Under revision.
Disclaimer:
~!~
She’d been raised to be dangerous. Her father probably hadn’t meant to make her so, simply trying to turn any shared time they’d had during her childhood into quality time. The first time a boy stuck gum in her hair, he’d taught her how to put the fear of god into him with just her words. The first time that same boy had kissed her, he’d given her a crash course in how to tell a boy no and put the fear of god into him with her fists if her words failed. The boy had asked her to be his valentine afterward. Jacob Carter had rolled his eyes and Sam had decided right then that boys, big and small, were weird and should be avoided. Dad had been overjoyed.
He was less overjoyed at her choice in fiancée. Jonas Hanson was a man who’d dragged her from her job slaving away in the bowels of the Pentagon on a project that would never the see the light of day to a field that definitely never saw the light of day. With all her father had told her, Sam Carter definitely should have stayed away from Black Ops. With all Jonas made it his job to teach her, she couldn’t see going anywhere else. She was made for this.
Every day was a new challenge. Find a new way to get in and get out without being seen. Find a new way to convince men too powerful for the good of the Free World to let their guards down. Find a new way to clean blood off her hands without leaving epithelial cells behind. She was particularly good at that.
She and Jonas had started off as a matched set of opposites attracting; she all light where he was dark. The longer they were together, though, the less the difference. She hadn’t minded that so much, someone had to be the monster and Sam had followed willingly while he led. They were similarly pragmatic minds, always aware that the decision made for the Greater Good was not always the better or easier one to make. They’d cracked each other’s rose-colored glasses and threw away the shards. He had made a harder woman of her and she had made him indestructible.
They were still neck-deep and drowning in love the day she walked away. He never understood why and years went by before she did.
~!~
She’d waited in a tree of their neighbor’s backyard for twelve hours. Her ass was numb and her knees had surpassed sore to reach a stage of persistent aching. At least it meant she wouldn’t fall asleep and fall out of the tree. There was a dog bowl down there and a treasure trove of squeak toys. She didn’t think her ego could stand that kind of indignity.
She wasn’t exactly worried about being found here. Experience had taught her that people tended not to look too hard at their surroundings when they felt safe. This was their home, why should they feel anything less than utterly secure? In the back of her mind, she felt a little sorry for sullying their sanctuary this way, but needs must….
Fifteen minutes, she reminded herself. Fifteen minutes and she could get the hell out of dodge, go home and crawl in bed with Jonas for a week. She probably wouldn’t stay the entire week since the Stargate Project was due to go live anytime now and they’d need her, but the idea-she loved the idea of it.
Sam brought the bedroom window upstairs into her cross hairs for the second time in the last ten minutes. The window was open, the work of the unseen operative who’d acted prior to her arrival. She noted an unsecured lockbox sitting on the dresser and frowned. It didn’t seem in keeping with the studied neatness of the place, but she figured that everyone slipped up sometime.
With an eye on her watch, she slowed down her breathing and prepared to get down to business. She kept her eye to the scope and began counting down the last few minutes in her head. The target would enter and approach the lockbox. That was when she’d take the shot. It’d be easier to get them at the door, but then it would also be clear it was a takedown.
Sam could hear the super-duty pickup as it was parked in the driveway. She could hear the door open and close, heavy boots and lights steps crossing the grace. She could hear…She closed her eyes and listened to the quiet banter that came with love and marriage and knowing you’d come home. Without meaning to, she smiled. Jonas sometimes made her feel that way.
She was still distracted by the score of absent kisses and sultry chuckles when the door to the bedroom opened in her scope. She didn’t watch, knowing it would take a second for the mark to reach prime position. Her instincts pulled her through the motions as one ear remained focused on the sound of the couple on the front porch. It didn’t occur to her until she was about to take the shot that neither adult was anywhere near the bedroom.
Her lungs seized up at the sight of the young boy turning the handgun wondrously in his hands. He looked at it the way she looked at her motorcycle, like it was art. He has no idea. She’d had no idea. She could hardly breathe. This was-she couldn’t, how could she?
The face of her watch began to flash a fluorescent green in her periphery. It was zero hour.
Neither of the adults was the target, it was him. A little boy, her country had targeted a little boy for elimination and made her their kill-switch.
She wanted to jump the fence and climb the side of the house to pull the weapon out of his hands. He has no idea. And he wouldn’t, because if that gun wasn’t faulty, Sam wasn’t Black Ops.
Ninety seconds passed and she hadn’t taken the shot. She was waiting for his parents to find him, to stop being so preoccupied with each other that they didn’t see the danger over head. Find him, find him, she chanted nearly out loud. She could have killed them for not seeing what they weren’t supposed to see.
He turned the thing toward himself in a demonstration of the universal truth of what never to do with a gun. His clumsy fingers caught on the trigger guard and then on the loose trigger as he nearly dropped it. Sam’s finger twitched in time to the sound and their bullets landed nearly in tandem.
It’ll be over faster this way. Please, let it end faster this way.
She’d hear that little sound he’d made in her sleep, hear the rampaging steps of his parents as they raced up the stairs every time a door slammed from now on.
Probably.
She’d deserve it.
Unable to make herself stay to see the aftermath, Sam scrambled down the tree and past the dog, who’d gone nuts at the cry of the handgun next door. Her weapon had been silenced, no more audible than the displacement of air.
She felt sick. Her knees shook for the duration of her mad dash out of the red zone. Her palms were cold and clammy and she couldn’t stop gagging. The adrenaline was making her want to vomit, but nothing would come. She hadn’t eaten this morning, knowing that her nerves would make her nauseous and nausea would make her inaccurate. She’d always sublimated her own needs to the needs of the mission.
This had been necessary. This had been the cost levied for the Stargate Project to be reinstated. She just…hadn’t realized it would be a child.
She’d been given a time and a location. She had taken her shot. It had killed more certainly than anything the little boy could have done to himself. Her bullet would disintegrate amid the biological material and the only thing left would be the shell from what she supposed was his father’s gun.
I can’t do this anymore, I can’t do this. Can’t do this, can’t do this, can’t do this.
This couldn’t have gone down any other way, they’d tell her when it came time to debrief. She knew it already and she’d know it for the rest of her life.
What she didn’t know, though, was why she couldn’t stop shaking.
Cantcantcantcantcantcant.
Sam realized that maybe it was time for a career change.
~!~
Three years later, Captain Samantha Carter no longer talked about her time in Black Ops. She no longer had a fiancé named Jonas and she no longer spoke to her father. She’d thrown herself wholeheartedly into her work with the stargate and she was never looking back.
Although she’d been pissed to be denied a place on the first excursion through the gate, she’d been gratified when her new commanding officer had finally accepted her on the first official mission afterwards. Colonel Jack O’Neill was an enigma wrapped in a riddle, to use the old cliché. He played at being open with his humor but was a closed a book as they came. He liked women well enough but had no use for scientists. He was precise about everything except tradition.
She liked him and he adored her already.
Try though she might, she had a feeling this was going to be a problem.
~!~
It was a problem.
She was out of her head with an alien virus, sprouting hair in embarrassing places, and acting out her fantasies in public.
The colonel had a body of tense, unyielding planes and his lips were no more forgiving in that respect. His hands while she touched him were at turns cautious and grasping, his mouth resisting and acquiescent.
She’d wanted surrender and he’d given her common sense.
Afterwards, she’d spent many nights embarrassed by how much she remembered and how much he clearly did. She was fairly sure they’d never be discussing their little infected detour to the supply room in Level 19 any time soon, if ever.
That was for the best, definitely.
Also, definitely a problem.
~!~
And then there was Jonas.
She’d known he was there, here, on-base. Different team, different worlds it felt like at times. Their paths didn’t cross often, but when they did all he wanted to talk about was the past. Sam didn’t, she never wanted to talk about that again. The thought of it made her too bitter, too sad. She had to live in this Air Force, salute it, and be proud of it.
She couldn’t do that if she couldn’t stand the sight of stars and eagles and even the bars on her own shoulders. Damned distasteful things were a part of her past and that’s where she wanted them to stay. If that meant she had to leave Jonas there, too, so be it.
That left her wondering, in the aftermath, if she could have saved a few lives if she’d just been more willing to listen. He’d hardly been in the lunatic fringe alone; listening was the least she could have done. But if she’d listened, she was afraid she wouldn’t have only heard him, but the sounding of two guns, a dog, and a mother who wouldn’t stop screaming.
~!~
And then she couldn’t breathe because he was dying. Not Jonas, not the man she loved so darkly the first time; the one who had her now. It was cake and not love and some kind of marriage. She couldn’t decide who she was angrier at; him for taking it, the girl for giving it, or herself for not intervening at all. He was wasting away and she couldn’t see how to save him. He was wasting away and the feeling was like watching Jonas die all over.
She just wanted to go back to yesterday, she just wanted to do this again but right! But if she’d gone backwards every time something went wrong, she’d never have been here at all. So, all Sam could do was work like her life depended on it and pray that what had gone around didn’t come back around quite yet.
~!~
Sam didn’t say a word on the ride back from the hospital. She’d thought she’d been slowly suffocating when the colonel had eaten that damned cake and was dying of old age by hours rather than decades. Now, she was out of air and words and courage. He’d see through her if she spoke, she knew he’d see through her. So, she said nothing and tried not to look at the face of the boy whose life she’d ended.
He was a beautiful little boy. He had grey eyes like his mother and every bit of his quiet confidence was his father. Even if he wasn’t real, even if he was just a facsimile of everything that boy had been, Sam couldn’t deny that she was sitting in a car with Charles Jonathan O’Neill. Here with the boy and the father who mourned him so thoroughly he’d nearly ended his life.
This is the price we paid to bring the stargate to life.
And as she watched him say goodbye again to the being that was both closure and renewed heartbreak in one, Sam couldn’t say it had been worth it. Not at all.
Her secret wasn’t just a secret anymore; it was alive and living right beside her every day.
This was the mother of all problems and it was bound to get worse. Because if he looked at her once more as though she could make this better, she just might try.
Title: Work in Faith
Rating: PG-13 for subject matter
Pairing: Sam/Jonas, Sam/Jack UST
Warnings: implied violence, canon character death, AU
Spoilers: Children of the Gods (1 & 2), First Commandment, Cold Lazarus, Broca Divide
Word count: ~2,282
Summary: Three years ago, Sam performed the most damned distasteful act of her career when she carried out her orders to eliminate a young boy. Now, three years later, that act has come back to haunt her. Because she’s slowly falling for the father he left behind.
Author’s Notes: Written for the stargateland Big Bang challenge. Under revision.
Disclaimer:
~!~
She’d been raised to be dangerous. Her father probably hadn’t meant to make her so, simply trying to turn any shared time they’d had during her childhood into quality time. The first time a boy stuck gum in her hair, he’d taught her how to put the fear of god into him with just her words. The first time that same boy had kissed her, he’d given her a crash course in how to tell a boy no and put the fear of god into him with her fists if her words failed. The boy had asked her to be his valentine afterward. Jacob Carter had rolled his eyes and Sam had decided right then that boys, big and small, were weird and should be avoided. Dad had been overjoyed.
He was less overjoyed at her choice in fiancée. Jonas Hanson was a man who’d dragged her from her job slaving away in the bowels of the Pentagon on a project that would never the see the light of day to a field that definitely never saw the light of day. With all her father had told her, Sam Carter definitely should have stayed away from Black Ops. With all Jonas made it his job to teach her, she couldn’t see going anywhere else. She was made for this.
Every day was a new challenge. Find a new way to get in and get out without being seen. Find a new way to convince men too powerful for the good of the Free World to let their guards down. Find a new way to clean blood off her hands without leaving epithelial cells behind. She was particularly good at that.
She and Jonas had started off as a matched set of opposites attracting; she all light where he was dark. The longer they were together, though, the less the difference. She hadn’t minded that so much, someone had to be the monster and Sam had followed willingly while he led. They were similarly pragmatic minds, always aware that the decision made for the Greater Good was not always the better or easier one to make. They’d cracked each other’s rose-colored glasses and threw away the shards. He had made a harder woman of her and she had made him indestructible.
They were still neck-deep and drowning in love the day she walked away. He never understood why and years went by before she did.
~!~
She’d waited in a tree of their neighbor’s backyard for twelve hours. Her ass was numb and her knees had surpassed sore to reach a stage of persistent aching. At least it meant she wouldn’t fall asleep and fall out of the tree. There was a dog bowl down there and a treasure trove of squeak toys. She didn’t think her ego could stand that kind of indignity.
She wasn’t exactly worried about being found here. Experience had taught her that people tended not to look too hard at their surroundings when they felt safe. This was their home, why should they feel anything less than utterly secure? In the back of her mind, she felt a little sorry for sullying their sanctuary this way, but needs must….
Fifteen minutes, she reminded herself. Fifteen minutes and she could get the hell out of dodge, go home and crawl in bed with Jonas for a week. She probably wouldn’t stay the entire week since the Stargate Project was due to go live anytime now and they’d need her, but the idea-she loved the idea of it.
Sam brought the bedroom window upstairs into her cross hairs for the second time in the last ten minutes. The window was open, the work of the unseen operative who’d acted prior to her arrival. She noted an unsecured lockbox sitting on the dresser and frowned. It didn’t seem in keeping with the studied neatness of the place, but she figured that everyone slipped up sometime.
With an eye on her watch, she slowed down her breathing and prepared to get down to business. She kept her eye to the scope and began counting down the last few minutes in her head. The target would enter and approach the lockbox. That was when she’d take the shot. It’d be easier to get them at the door, but then it would also be clear it was a takedown.
Sam could hear the super-duty pickup as it was parked in the driveway. She could hear the door open and close, heavy boots and lights steps crossing the grace. She could hear…She closed her eyes and listened to the quiet banter that came with love and marriage and knowing you’d come home. Without meaning to, she smiled. Jonas sometimes made her feel that way.
She was still distracted by the score of absent kisses and sultry chuckles when the door to the bedroom opened in her scope. She didn’t watch, knowing it would take a second for the mark to reach prime position. Her instincts pulled her through the motions as one ear remained focused on the sound of the couple on the front porch. It didn’t occur to her until she was about to take the shot that neither adult was anywhere near the bedroom.
Her lungs seized up at the sight of the young boy turning the handgun wondrously in his hands. He looked at it the way she looked at her motorcycle, like it was art. He has no idea. She’d had no idea. She could hardly breathe. This was-she couldn’t, how could she?
The face of her watch began to flash a fluorescent green in her periphery. It was zero hour.
Neither of the adults was the target, it was him. A little boy, her country had targeted a little boy for elimination and made her their kill-switch.
She wanted to jump the fence and climb the side of the house to pull the weapon out of his hands. He has no idea. And he wouldn’t, because if that gun wasn’t faulty, Sam wasn’t Black Ops.
Ninety seconds passed and she hadn’t taken the shot. She was waiting for his parents to find him, to stop being so preoccupied with each other that they didn’t see the danger over head. Find him, find him, she chanted nearly out loud. She could have killed them for not seeing what they weren’t supposed to see.
He turned the thing toward himself in a demonstration of the universal truth of what never to do with a gun. His clumsy fingers caught on the trigger guard and then on the loose trigger as he nearly dropped it. Sam’s finger twitched in time to the sound and their bullets landed nearly in tandem.
It’ll be over faster this way. Please, let it end faster this way.
She’d hear that little sound he’d made in her sleep, hear the rampaging steps of his parents as they raced up the stairs every time a door slammed from now on.
Probably.
She’d deserve it.
Unable to make herself stay to see the aftermath, Sam scrambled down the tree and past the dog, who’d gone nuts at the cry of the handgun next door. Her weapon had been silenced, no more audible than the displacement of air.
She felt sick. Her knees shook for the duration of her mad dash out of the red zone. Her palms were cold and clammy and she couldn’t stop gagging. The adrenaline was making her want to vomit, but nothing would come. She hadn’t eaten this morning, knowing that her nerves would make her nauseous and nausea would make her inaccurate. She’d always sublimated her own needs to the needs of the mission.
This had been necessary. This had been the cost levied for the Stargate Project to be reinstated. She just…hadn’t realized it would be a child.
She’d been given a time and a location. She had taken her shot. It had killed more certainly than anything the little boy could have done to himself. Her bullet would disintegrate amid the biological material and the only thing left would be the shell from what she supposed was his father’s gun.
I can’t do this anymore, I can’t do this. Can’t do this, can’t do this, can’t do this.
This couldn’t have gone down any other way, they’d tell her when it came time to debrief. She knew it already and she’d know it for the rest of her life.
What she didn’t know, though, was why she couldn’t stop shaking.
Cantcantcantcantcantcant.
Sam realized that maybe it was time for a career change.
~!~
Three years later, Captain Samantha Carter no longer talked about her time in Black Ops. She no longer had a fiancé named Jonas and she no longer spoke to her father. She’d thrown herself wholeheartedly into her work with the stargate and she was never looking back.
Although she’d been pissed to be denied a place on the first excursion through the gate, she’d been gratified when her new commanding officer had finally accepted her on the first official mission afterwards. Colonel Jack O’Neill was an enigma wrapped in a riddle, to use the old cliché. He played at being open with his humor but was a closed a book as they came. He liked women well enough but had no use for scientists. He was precise about everything except tradition.
She liked him and he adored her already.
Try though she might, she had a feeling this was going to be a problem.
~!~
It was a problem.
She was out of her head with an alien virus, sprouting hair in embarrassing places, and acting out her fantasies in public.
The colonel had a body of tense, unyielding planes and his lips were no more forgiving in that respect. His hands while she touched him were at turns cautious and grasping, his mouth resisting and acquiescent.
She’d wanted surrender and he’d given her common sense.
Afterwards, she’d spent many nights embarrassed by how much she remembered and how much he clearly did. She was fairly sure they’d never be discussing their little infected detour to the supply room in Level 19 any time soon, if ever.
That was for the best, definitely.
Also, definitely a problem.
~!~
And then there was Jonas.
She’d known he was there, here, on-base. Different team, different worlds it felt like at times. Their paths didn’t cross often, but when they did all he wanted to talk about was the past. Sam didn’t, she never wanted to talk about that again. The thought of it made her too bitter, too sad. She had to live in this Air Force, salute it, and be proud of it.
She couldn’t do that if she couldn’t stand the sight of stars and eagles and even the bars on her own shoulders. Damned distasteful things were a part of her past and that’s where she wanted them to stay. If that meant she had to leave Jonas there, too, so be it.
That left her wondering, in the aftermath, if she could have saved a few lives if she’d just been more willing to listen. He’d hardly been in the lunatic fringe alone; listening was the least she could have done. But if she’d listened, she was afraid she wouldn’t have only heard him, but the sounding of two guns, a dog, and a mother who wouldn’t stop screaming.
~!~
And then she couldn’t breathe because he was dying. Not Jonas, not the man she loved so darkly the first time; the one who had her now. It was cake and not love and some kind of marriage. She couldn’t decide who she was angrier at; him for taking it, the girl for giving it, or herself for not intervening at all. He was wasting away and she couldn’t see how to save him. He was wasting away and the feeling was like watching Jonas die all over.
She just wanted to go back to yesterday, she just wanted to do this again but right! But if she’d gone backwards every time something went wrong, she’d never have been here at all. So, all Sam could do was work like her life depended on it and pray that what had gone around didn’t come back around quite yet.
~!~
Sam didn’t say a word on the ride back from the hospital. She’d thought she’d been slowly suffocating when the colonel had eaten that damned cake and was dying of old age by hours rather than decades. Now, she was out of air and words and courage. He’d see through her if she spoke, she knew he’d see through her. So, she said nothing and tried not to look at the face of the boy whose life she’d ended.
He was a beautiful little boy. He had grey eyes like his mother and every bit of his quiet confidence was his father. Even if he wasn’t real, even if he was just a facsimile of everything that boy had been, Sam couldn’t deny that she was sitting in a car with Charles Jonathan O’Neill. Here with the boy and the father who mourned him so thoroughly he’d nearly ended his life.
This is the price we paid to bring the stargate to life.
And as she watched him say goodbye again to the being that was both closure and renewed heartbreak in one, Sam couldn’t say it had been worth it. Not at all.
Her secret wasn’t just a secret anymore; it was alive and living right beside her every day.
This was the mother of all problems and it was bound to get worse. Because if he looked at her once more as though she could make this better, she just might try.