Fic: And Selfishness Its Shadow Casts
Title: And Selfishness Its Shadow Casts
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: K+
Genres: gen
Recipient: mackenziesmomma
Prompt: Stargate, Anna Williamson, For passion tempts and troubles me/A wayward will misleads
Summary: Anna Williamson neé Lorne is alone for the first time after marrying Charlie Williamson. Because the idiot had to go and get himself deployed to Bosnia.
A/N: Holiday Fic Request Meme. I kind of squeed when mackenziesmomma requested something for Anna Williamson, Evan Lorne's sister in my Protect and Survive 'verse but it kind of surprised me how far back into the past I went for this. It takes place in early 1998 and only mentions Evan in passing. Otherwise it really focuses on Anna and how it was for her as a young Air Force wife (she and Charlie got married in early 1995, if my calculations are worth anything, and I'm glad ancient_leah said it's okay for Anna to be like this) with her husband away on deployment for the first time so it's not really Stargate (not yet, anyway ;)) but I still like it very much. I just won't post it anywhere else for the time being until I'm caught up with posting Protect and Survive here. Everyone who knows the 'verse (and hasn't read it before posting...): have fun!
And Selfishness Its Shadow Casts
“A little kingdom I possess
where thoughts and feelings dwell,
And very hard I find the task
of governing it well;
For passion tempts and troubles me,
A wayward will misleads,
And selfishness its shadow casts
On all my words and deeds.”
Louisa May Alcott, “My Kingdom”
Fuck Denver, she thinks as she tries to cross the campus of the University of Denver in a raging January blizzard to get to her car and back to Buckley Air Force Base. Fuck Denver and base housing and graduate school and basically everything. Fuck SFOR, most of all. Without SFOR Charlie would be home with her and volunteer to pick her up from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies and drive the damn car through the damn snow storm.
But her husband First Lieutenant Charles Williamson is in Bosnia, keeping the peace with NATO and probably - hopefully - freezing his ass off just like her. That’s what he deserves for being so eager to get deployed to a country somewhere in Europe where they probably still eat dogs or something when he could have stayed with her in a civilized country. Or at least have fixed the leaking roof and the cold nonresistant plumbing. Really, who builds houses like that in an area where it seems to snow half the year and…
Okay, no, this is ridiculous. This stupid ranting won’t get her anywhere and if she’d ever muttered it aloud to anyone, she’d seriously embarrass herself. She knew what she was getting into when she married Charlie almost three years ago and that included postings to bases that actually have seasons and winters that get way colder than 50 degrees. She knew she’d be on her own for probably half their marriage. Also, she knew how to fix roofs and the plumbing herself even before she got married to Charlie. So she doesn’t have any reason to be pissed like this.
Except that her boots are soaked through and she’s shivering even in a coat that makes her look like the Michelin guy and two sweaters and long underwear, for Heaven’s sake. And her fellow students that are from the area keep telling her that this is normal here and that this is not a blizzard but damn there’s snow coming down from the sky like there’s no tomorrow and there’s wind that makes her feel like she’s slamming into a wall constantly. If that isn’t a blizzard what the fucking hell is?
She sighs and tries to retreat deeper into the heavy scarf draped around her face and neck. She misses California and Berkeley and the sea. She misses not having to spend fifteen minutes to bundle up before leaving the house for a dash to the PX. She misses snow free roads and sidewalks that don’t bear the danger of slipping and seriously injuring yourself every couple of feet. But most of all, most of all, she misses the man who made all of that so easy to bear until now.
When they’d moved here in 1996, she’d borne with every nuisance and every difficulty that meant living on an Air Force base as the wife of a young officer and attendant of grad school. She’d contributed her share to the military spousal charity and duty they expected of her and taken care never to disappoint or embarrass her airman and diminish his chance at success. She’d even gone so far as to neglect her own chance at success once or twice when attendance to one or the other meeting had coincided with her duties as a grad school student.
And all of that had been weirdly easy because he'd always been there to encourage her and appreciate her efforts and listen to her rants about yet another boring meeting with military wives that didn’t seem to have any other purpose in life than their husbands and their career. He’s not here now and she’s supposed to go to yet another one of those meetings tonight when all she’d rather do is hole up in their house, leaky roof and all, and bury herself in her research books for her latest grad school project.
So she isn’t really enthusiastic when she reaches her car. The only good thing about that is that she’s at least out of the wind. It’s still freezing cold in here but that’ll hopefully change when she starts… wait. Why didn’t anything happen when she just turned her key? Let’s try this again, she thinks and then hears the engine sputter and is about to grin triumphantly… when it dies again. Crap. Crapcrapcrap. One more try, she thinks, and even goes as far as praying, one more try and please don’t… but there’s not even a sound emanating from the engine this time.
Cursing non-stop under her breath - Evan might still think it was Berkeley that taught her how to curse up a shit storm but she knows it were Charlie and Tom and even Evan himself who did that during their Academy years - she rummages around for a flashlight in the glove compartment and then leaves the car again when she found it.
Fumbling clumsily with her thick winter gloves, she pries the hood open and shines the flash light on the engine to try to determine what the hell is wrong with this scrap heap of a car now but after ten minutes spent aimlessly poking and prodding she’s ready to give up. She’s just a damn social sciences major, not an engineer and there’s only so much even a self-sufficient young woman like her can learn about car engines before her husband departs for stupid Bosnia. She just should have taken her brother up on his offer to teach her a little more than just the basics before he departs for Bosnia.
That won’t get her very far now, though. Now she needs… “Need a hand with that?” What?
She turns around and squints into the dark to see another bundled up figure approaching her. The only features visible are the person’s eyes and from the voice she just heard, she determines it must be a woman. That doesn’t mean she’s going to be sociable, though. “No, thanks. I’ve got it all under control.”
It’s a lie, of course. But maybe the scarf muffled her voice enough not to betray that. “Really? Checked the battery yet?”
No, she didn’t. Because she’s stupid like that. Like hell she’s gonna tell the other woman that, though. She frowns. “None of your business, is it?”
She’s pretty sure she just heard the woman snort and unfortunately her rebuff didn’t stop the other one from walking up to her and saying, “Hey, I think I know you.” She’s pretty sure she doesn’t. “You’re… hey, you’re the wife of my husband’s boss!”
Most certainly not, she wants to answer but now that the woman pulled down her scarf a bit and she could hear her voice better over the howling of the wind, she starts to look familiar. Somehow. “Do I know you?”
Now the other one did snort. “Sure you do. Or you would, if you’d actually talk to us at the meetings. But okay, I get that you always look like you’d rather be somewhere else. Usually, I feel the same way.”
“What?” Like always, she hears her mother reminding her to say “Pardon?” instead of “What?” but ignores her, like always. The situation certainly warrants blunt speech.
“Oh, sorry. Lena Krystowksy, nice to meet you.” The other woman - Ms. Krystowsky - sticks out her hand and grins at her. The name doesn’t ring any bell at all so she just stares shortly at the hand and keeps hers to herself. “Wife of… Tech Sergeant Mike Krystowsky?”
Who… oh, wait. Mike K… Mike K… oh yeah, that sounds vaguely familiar. Charlie did talk about someone with a Polish sounding name a couple a times… she blinks and looks at the woman in front of her again. There’s a lock of dark hair peeking out from under her woolen cap and she thinks she remembers a young woman in the back of the audience during a couple of meetings smirking and rolling her eyes. And shaking that same woman’s hand at a base picnic during the summer before hurrying back to her computer and that damn publication after the obligatory thirty minutes of meet and greet.
Slowly, she reaches out with her hand and grips Mrs. Krystowsky’s one. “Anna Williamson… nice to meet you.”
“I bet it is. Let me have a look at your car?” She shrugs and gestures at the open hood.
“Sure. Knock yourself out.” Mrs. Krystwosky - Lena? - dives into the engine bay with uncanny enthusiasm and rummages around while directing the flashlight to wherever she needs it.
After a couple of minutes, she emerges again and says, “Alright, I guess your battery’s pretty much fucked. We could try to jump start it but my car is on the other side of the parking lot. Hey… are you going to that meeting tonight?”
She’d like to say no but she’d get Charlie in trouble if she wouldn’t go to the third meeting in a row. She sighs. “Yeah, I am. Or… I was.”
“Nuh-uh, you’re not getting out of this, honey. If I have to go there, you have to, as well.” No one calls her “honey” and most of all not some other Air Force wife. Or at least that’s her first impulse to say.
And the second is, “Do not call me a coward. I can’t go there because I don’t have a car and obviously you are not willing to…”
“Hey, hey, don’t get your panties in a twist, Anna,” Lena - she figures if the other one calls her by her first name, she’s at liberty to do the same - says and raises her hands defensively. “I was going to suggest we share a ride back to base. My car’s not the best one in the stable, either but… I guess it’ll get us where we want to go. Or, okay, don’t want to go.” With that, she jerks her head into the general direction of the other end of the parking lot. “Come on. Don’t want to be late, do we?”
She couldn’t care less about being late or not but she cares about Charlie. Sighing, she closes the hood of her car with a thud and locks her car. Against what thieves, she wonders because seriously, what had Charlie and she been thinking when they purchased that pile of junk? “Alright, fine. But just for the record, I think it’s a waste of time.”
“Amen to that, sister. I could very well use that time to study.” Oh. Oh right. Lena is… a student. She’s the wife of one of Charlie’s subordinates and a student at the University of Denver. Idiot, she scolds herself. Of course she would. Why else would she hang around the campus? Just because her husband is a Sergeant, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t have the brains for a university degree.
So much for a liberal education in a liberal city, she thinks but instead of rolling her eyes at herself, she simply asks, “What exactly is that? Mechanical engineering?” while they’re tromping through the steadily increasing snow.
There’s another snort from Lena.” Heavens, no. Tourism Studies, junior year. That car thing… I’ve probably just been doing this Air Force wife thing longer than you is all.” Then she stops in front of a car that doesn’t look much better than her own car, even in the dark. “Alright, get in before you freeze your little officer’s wife ass off.”
What, and now she’s being insulted because her husband is a Lieutenant? Why ever did she… “Don’t look at me like that. I’m from Texas. Refined language isn’t our specialty. Now hop in, I’m sure we’re gonna have a lot of fun gossiping about Colonel Merrywig’s wife and Major Langborn’s husband.”
That… actually that sounds like fun. Because, you know, she’s been having her suspicions for a while now and… and she gets into the passenger seat, somehow not minding her soaked boots and the Denver cold so much anymore.
She smiles. Next time she talks to Charlie she’s going to ask him a little about Tech Sergeant Mike Krystowsky and how his team is doing over there and she’ll probably even attempt to knit a pair of gloves for him because she’s seen Lena doing that during the meetings and it seemed to have made it easier to bear them for her.
Maybe Lena can teach her how to. Maybe Lena is worth getting to know a little better. She could certainly use a friend who can fix cars and curse like a sailor and knows how it is to miss her husband while trying to juggle about a thousand things at the same time. She decides to start making friends. No better time to start than right fucking now.
Fandom: Stargate
Rating: K+
Genres: gen
Recipient: mackenziesmomma
Prompt: Stargate, Anna Williamson, For passion tempts and troubles me/A wayward will misleads
Summary: Anna Williamson neé Lorne is alone for the first time after marrying Charlie Williamson. Because the idiot had to go and get himself deployed to Bosnia.
A/N: Holiday Fic Request Meme. I kind of squeed when mackenziesmomma requested something for Anna Williamson, Evan Lorne's sister in my Protect and Survive 'verse but it kind of surprised me how far back into the past I went for this. It takes place in early 1998 and only mentions Evan in passing. Otherwise it really focuses on Anna and how it was for her as a young Air Force wife (she and Charlie got married in early 1995, if my calculations are worth anything, and I'm glad ancient_leah said it's okay for Anna to be like this) with her husband away on deployment for the first time so it's not really Stargate (not yet, anyway ;)) but I still like it very much. I just won't post it anywhere else for the time being until I'm caught up with posting Protect and Survive here. Everyone who knows the 'verse (and hasn't read it before posting...): have fun!
And Selfishness Its Shadow Casts
“A little kingdom I possess
where thoughts and feelings dwell,
And very hard I find the task
of governing it well;
For passion tempts and troubles me,
A wayward will misleads,
And selfishness its shadow casts
On all my words and deeds.”
Louisa May Alcott, “My Kingdom”
Fuck Denver, she thinks as she tries to cross the campus of the University of Denver in a raging January blizzard to get to her car and back to Buckley Air Force Base. Fuck Denver and base housing and graduate school and basically everything. Fuck SFOR, most of all. Without SFOR Charlie would be home with her and volunteer to pick her up from the Josef Korbel School of International Studies and drive the damn car through the damn snow storm.
But her husband First Lieutenant Charles Williamson is in Bosnia, keeping the peace with NATO and probably - hopefully - freezing his ass off just like her. That’s what he deserves for being so eager to get deployed to a country somewhere in Europe where they probably still eat dogs or something when he could have stayed with her in a civilized country. Or at least have fixed the leaking roof and the cold nonresistant plumbing. Really, who builds houses like that in an area where it seems to snow half the year and…
Okay, no, this is ridiculous. This stupid ranting won’t get her anywhere and if she’d ever muttered it aloud to anyone, she’d seriously embarrass herself. She knew what she was getting into when she married Charlie almost three years ago and that included postings to bases that actually have seasons and winters that get way colder than 50 degrees. She knew she’d be on her own for probably half their marriage. Also, she knew how to fix roofs and the plumbing herself even before she got married to Charlie. So she doesn’t have any reason to be pissed like this.
Except that her boots are soaked through and she’s shivering even in a coat that makes her look like the Michelin guy and two sweaters and long underwear, for Heaven’s sake. And her fellow students that are from the area keep telling her that this is normal here and that this is not a blizzard but damn there’s snow coming down from the sky like there’s no tomorrow and there’s wind that makes her feel like she’s slamming into a wall constantly. If that isn’t a blizzard what the fucking hell is?
She sighs and tries to retreat deeper into the heavy scarf draped around her face and neck. She misses California and Berkeley and the sea. She misses not having to spend fifteen minutes to bundle up before leaving the house for a dash to the PX. She misses snow free roads and sidewalks that don’t bear the danger of slipping and seriously injuring yourself every couple of feet. But most of all, most of all, she misses the man who made all of that so easy to bear until now.
When they’d moved here in 1996, she’d borne with every nuisance and every difficulty that meant living on an Air Force base as the wife of a young officer and attendant of grad school. She’d contributed her share to the military spousal charity and duty they expected of her and taken care never to disappoint or embarrass her airman and diminish his chance at success. She’d even gone so far as to neglect her own chance at success once or twice when attendance to one or the other meeting had coincided with her duties as a grad school student.
And all of that had been weirdly easy because he'd always been there to encourage her and appreciate her efforts and listen to her rants about yet another boring meeting with military wives that didn’t seem to have any other purpose in life than their husbands and their career. He’s not here now and she’s supposed to go to yet another one of those meetings tonight when all she’d rather do is hole up in their house, leaky roof and all, and bury herself in her research books for her latest grad school project.
So she isn’t really enthusiastic when she reaches her car. The only good thing about that is that she’s at least out of the wind. It’s still freezing cold in here but that’ll hopefully change when she starts… wait. Why didn’t anything happen when she just turned her key? Let’s try this again, she thinks and then hears the engine sputter and is about to grin triumphantly… when it dies again. Crap. Crapcrapcrap. One more try, she thinks, and even goes as far as praying, one more try and please don’t… but there’s not even a sound emanating from the engine this time.
Cursing non-stop under her breath - Evan might still think it was Berkeley that taught her how to curse up a shit storm but she knows it were Charlie and Tom and even Evan himself who did that during their Academy years - she rummages around for a flashlight in the glove compartment and then leaves the car again when she found it.
Fumbling clumsily with her thick winter gloves, she pries the hood open and shines the flash light on the engine to try to determine what the hell is wrong with this scrap heap of a car now but after ten minutes spent aimlessly poking and prodding she’s ready to give up. She’s just a damn social sciences major, not an engineer and there’s only so much even a self-sufficient young woman like her can learn about car engines before her husband departs for stupid Bosnia. She just should have taken her brother up on his offer to teach her a little more than just the basics before he departs for Bosnia.
That won’t get her very far now, though. Now she needs… “Need a hand with that?” What?
She turns around and squints into the dark to see another bundled up figure approaching her. The only features visible are the person’s eyes and from the voice she just heard, she determines it must be a woman. That doesn’t mean she’s going to be sociable, though. “No, thanks. I’ve got it all under control.”
It’s a lie, of course. But maybe the scarf muffled her voice enough not to betray that. “Really? Checked the battery yet?”
No, she didn’t. Because she’s stupid like that. Like hell she’s gonna tell the other woman that, though. She frowns. “None of your business, is it?”
She’s pretty sure she just heard the woman snort and unfortunately her rebuff didn’t stop the other one from walking up to her and saying, “Hey, I think I know you.” She’s pretty sure she doesn’t. “You’re… hey, you’re the wife of my husband’s boss!”
Most certainly not, she wants to answer but now that the woman pulled down her scarf a bit and she could hear her voice better over the howling of the wind, she starts to look familiar. Somehow. “Do I know you?”
Now the other one did snort. “Sure you do. Or you would, if you’d actually talk to us at the meetings. But okay, I get that you always look like you’d rather be somewhere else. Usually, I feel the same way.”
“What?” Like always, she hears her mother reminding her to say “Pardon?” instead of “What?” but ignores her, like always. The situation certainly warrants blunt speech.
“Oh, sorry. Lena Krystowksy, nice to meet you.” The other woman - Ms. Krystowsky - sticks out her hand and grins at her. The name doesn’t ring any bell at all so she just stares shortly at the hand and keeps hers to herself. “Wife of… Tech Sergeant Mike Krystowsky?”
Who… oh, wait. Mike K… Mike K… oh yeah, that sounds vaguely familiar. Charlie did talk about someone with a Polish sounding name a couple a times… she blinks and looks at the woman in front of her again. There’s a lock of dark hair peeking out from under her woolen cap and she thinks she remembers a young woman in the back of the audience during a couple of meetings smirking and rolling her eyes. And shaking that same woman’s hand at a base picnic during the summer before hurrying back to her computer and that damn publication after the obligatory thirty minutes of meet and greet.
Slowly, she reaches out with her hand and grips Mrs. Krystowsky’s one. “Anna Williamson… nice to meet you.”
“I bet it is. Let me have a look at your car?” She shrugs and gestures at the open hood.
“Sure. Knock yourself out.” Mrs. Krystwosky - Lena? - dives into the engine bay with uncanny enthusiasm and rummages around while directing the flashlight to wherever she needs it.
After a couple of minutes, she emerges again and says, “Alright, I guess your battery’s pretty much fucked. We could try to jump start it but my car is on the other side of the parking lot. Hey… are you going to that meeting tonight?”
She’d like to say no but she’d get Charlie in trouble if she wouldn’t go to the third meeting in a row. She sighs. “Yeah, I am. Or… I was.”
“Nuh-uh, you’re not getting out of this, honey. If I have to go there, you have to, as well.” No one calls her “honey” and most of all not some other Air Force wife. Or at least that’s her first impulse to say.
And the second is, “Do not call me a coward. I can’t go there because I don’t have a car and obviously you are not willing to…”
“Hey, hey, don’t get your panties in a twist, Anna,” Lena - she figures if the other one calls her by her first name, she’s at liberty to do the same - says and raises her hands defensively. “I was going to suggest we share a ride back to base. My car’s not the best one in the stable, either but… I guess it’ll get us where we want to go. Or, okay, don’t want to go.” With that, she jerks her head into the general direction of the other end of the parking lot. “Come on. Don’t want to be late, do we?”
She couldn’t care less about being late or not but she cares about Charlie. Sighing, she closes the hood of her car with a thud and locks her car. Against what thieves, she wonders because seriously, what had Charlie and she been thinking when they purchased that pile of junk? “Alright, fine. But just for the record, I think it’s a waste of time.”
“Amen to that, sister. I could very well use that time to study.” Oh. Oh right. Lena is… a student. She’s the wife of one of Charlie’s subordinates and a student at the University of Denver. Idiot, she scolds herself. Of course she would. Why else would she hang around the campus? Just because her husband is a Sergeant, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t have the brains for a university degree.
So much for a liberal education in a liberal city, she thinks but instead of rolling her eyes at herself, she simply asks, “What exactly is that? Mechanical engineering?” while they’re tromping through the steadily increasing snow.
There’s another snort from Lena.” Heavens, no. Tourism Studies, junior year. That car thing… I’ve probably just been doing this Air Force wife thing longer than you is all.” Then she stops in front of a car that doesn’t look much better than her own car, even in the dark. “Alright, get in before you freeze your little officer’s wife ass off.”
What, and now she’s being insulted because her husband is a Lieutenant? Why ever did she… “Don’t look at me like that. I’m from Texas. Refined language isn’t our specialty. Now hop in, I’m sure we’re gonna have a lot of fun gossiping about Colonel Merrywig’s wife and Major Langborn’s husband.”
That… actually that sounds like fun. Because, you know, she’s been having her suspicions for a while now and… and she gets into the passenger seat, somehow not minding her soaked boots and the Denver cold so much anymore.
She smiles. Next time she talks to Charlie she’s going to ask him a little about Tech Sergeant Mike Krystowsky and how his team is doing over there and she’ll probably even attempt to knit a pair of gloves for him because she’s seen Lena doing that during the meetings and it seemed to have made it easier to bear them for her.
Maybe Lena can teach her how to. Maybe Lena is worth getting to know a little better. She could certainly use a friend who can fix cars and curse like a sailor and knows how it is to miss her husband while trying to juggle about a thousand things at the same time. She decides to start making friends. No better time to start than right fucking now.