Safe in Magnetic Fields (Sam/Jack, PG)
Title: Safe in Magnetic Fields
Rating: PG
Pairing: Sam/Jack
Summary: Established S/J, Jack/alt!Sam. Guy walks into the wrong reality, girl tries to get him home. He lets her lead him to the VIP quarters and he knows that, as soon as the door is shut behind him, she’s going to scurry off to her lab and try a different algorithm or dig out a fourth set of questions from the bottom desk drawer.
“I hate you,” she says flatly, her arms crossed over her chest as she half-sits on the desk behind her. She tilts her head, looking at him as if he’s something to be studied, just another artifact in her lab to be analyzed, understood, reported on and boxed up and sent to Nevada.
“That’s fair,” he says in return, though he isn’t entirely certain it is.
She shrugs and slides into her chair. A few keystrokes later and a program begins to load on her screen and she gestures for him to take a seat wherever he can find one. “I’m going to ask a lot of questions. None of them are going to seem relevant, but they are.”
“Okay.” He lifts a stack of papers from a chair and carefully sets them on the floor.
“Full name?”
“Jonathan Jack O’Neill.”
“Rank?”
“Lieutenant General.”
“Current date?”
“February 3rd, 2010.”
He watches as she types his answers into a form on the monitor on the right. A list on the other monitor refreshes with each answer. They’re standard, biographical questions: birthday, birthplace, where did he grow up, what were his parents’ names, when did he join the Air Force, his favorite color.
“Any children?”
“One.” He swallows, hard.
“Name?”
“Charlie.”
A flicker of emotion crosses her face and he can tell she doesn’t want to ask the next question. She’s shown him exactly zero kindness, except for an obligatory offer of a glass of water which he now wishes he’d accepted, but he saves her the trouble and answers it himself. “Deceased, aged eight.” He’s amazed at the steadiness in his voice as he recites the date and reason and even more amazed at the number of lines that are deleted when she’s finished entering all the details.
“Marital status?”
He hesitates.
She looks over her shoulder at him. “Marital status with Sara?” She rephrases.
“Divorced.”
“Current marital status?”
“Married.”
“To whom?”
Her fingers are already placed on the right keys so he assumes she knows his answer. “Samantha Carter.”
Her jaw tightens, but it’s the only indication of her opinion on the matter. “Her current rank?”
“Colonel.”
“Current assignment?”
“Commander of the George Hammond.”
They deviate into Sam’s life for a while and his eyes narrow at the inevitable Pete questions and widen at the number that disappear when he offers up her middle name. He thought things like that were standard. After Sam comes Daniel and after Daniel, Teal’c, at which point he asks for that glass of water and wonders out loud why they haven’t figured this out yet.
She smiles at him, and it strikes him how warm that smile is despite her stated feelings, and gestures at the monitor on the left: the scrollbar is still there, but considerably longer than it was when they started.
He tries to remember everything - like that there are realities out there where Daniel didn’t Descend or Teal’c’s hallucination wasn’t a fire department or that sometimes Sam hadn’t even joined the program - because he knows she would find it fascinating, but long after his glass is empty and he thinks his left foot is asleep, he decides that what she should find fascinating is that he ended up in this situation at all and, more importantly, that there are ways to get him home.
“So why do you hate him?” He’s careful of his phrasing (because it’s some other version of him, long dead, deserving of her anger; he just happened to be bored and hit a wrong button) and stares at a piece of penne at the end of his fork, still amazed that the Air Force can screw up pasta. He eats it anyway.
She spares a glance at him, finding him more interesting than her salad for a few seconds, and he worries that he stepped out of line. He’s only a lab experiment to her, a practical test for a program she wrote when they were concerned about their quantum mirror misbehaving, and he’ll be gone in a few hours, tomorrow afternoon at the latest. “He left,” she says, spearing the last tomato more violently than necessary. She shoves the salad aside after frowning at the remaining lettuce, and starts in on her own overcooked pasta.
He can’t imagine why the other him would leave, but the past few hours have taught him that not every Jack O’Neill out there thinks the way he does (“NID allegiances?” she’d asked. “None,” he’d answered, bitterly. Five options, that he saw, blinked out of existence). He wants to offer up an apology, because she deserves one, but her shoulders tighten and he chooses silence. He also wants to ask why, because he thinks that even if he was a terrible person he must have whispered a deathbed confession to someone with enough connections to relay it to her (or there was a card upon some important birthday milestone, directed toward the son he sees laughing in pictures on her desk, lamely explaining it all knowing that any information would be shared), but it’s absolutely none of his business.
After an hour spent on the Tok’ra, only five options remain. He wonders how long it took her to build the database and how she compiled all the details. He realizes that it must be late (he checks his watch and corrects himself; early) if he’s choosing to be interested in how something works more than whether it simply does.
Twenty minutes (and twice as many questions) later and she frowns. The screen still shows five.
“You mean there are five realities that are identical and I could walk into the wrong one?”
“Let’s pick up in the morning,” she says.
He lets her lead him to the VIP quarters and he knows that, as soon as the door is shut behind him, she’s going to scurry off to her lab and try a different algorithm or dig out a fourth set of questions from the bottom desk drawer.
Three days pass and they’ve only managed to knock off one of the options; a story about trying to drive on a back country road by the light of the fireflies that had sacrificed themselves on his windshield proved relevant to only four of the remaining five.
He meets the boy one day when he stops in after school and his mother helps him with a particularly difficult algebra problem. He understands, then, why his other self might have ran: the boy looks enough like Charlie to cause him to look twice, but nothing like Charlie upon the second look. It unsettles him. She notices and doesn’t speak to him for a day and a half; his punishment for acting enough like her ass of an ex-husband is a silent threat that she’ll withhold his ability to get home to his life if he’s anything less than helpful. He feels like he needs to apologize, but can’t figure out how to phrase it; sorry for finding this very weird situation to be very weird.
Assuming that time passes at a standard rate across the multiverse (and when did he start thinking like that?), he’s been gone for almost three weeks before they have it narrowed down to two choices. The level of detail needed to get even that far exhausts him to the point where he needs a full eight hours of sleep every night and two cups of coffee before he’s coherent enough to respond to good morning. He’s positive that the difference between the two remaining choices is something idiotically miniscule, like what color shirt he wore to Daniel’s wake (the first one, when they left him on that planet with the weird underwater guy) or what Maybourne thought the plant tasted like when they were stranded on that moon together (it was either arugula or spinach, and he can’t remember).
He tries to be patient with her (God knows, she’s been a sport about all this; taken off her own research and projects and stuck working with him, a guy she hates) but he’s about had it with her constant advice on how to make this easier.
“Think. What could make your experience unique from the other guy?”
He throws up his hands. “Can’t we dial them up and ask ‘Hey. Which one of you is missing a Jack O’Neill?’” Her mouth is set in a hard line when he looks back at her. “Right, you already did that.”
To her credit, all she does is nod. She’s certainly earned the right to make a smart comment or seven about his behavior, but she stays silent. It’s not the rank that’s keeping her mouth shut - she’s a civilian, here, and he’s not sure whether that makes this easier or harder - and he can’t tell what it is, but he’s glad for it. He apologizes with a smile and sits back down.
They start talking. She’s not his Samantha, but there are enough similarities that the conversation is easy, comfortable, if not quite familiar. Some days they meet in her lab, others it’s outside or in the mess, occasionally in the lab of another scientist if the work needs supervision or guidance. He’s glad to be simply the guy from the other reality, without any rank or stories or reputation. In fact, most people he’s introduced to don’t even blink at his name; they simply offer their hands in requisite greeting. He doesn’t have to answer questions on the Ancients or the Asgard, be in meetings about system lords, or get roped into some crazy off-the-wall scheme to save the world again.
He’s just a man who walked through a ring of water and is a very long way from home.
“When did you realize you were in love with her?”
He blinks at the question. They’ve spent the past month pointedly ignoring that, in his reality, they’re married and, in her reality, they’re divorced. He’s divulged his fair share of secrets to her, personal history he’s not even sure his Sam knows, but they’ve danced around their shared personal life. “Two days after I met her,” he says, confidently, remembering the distinct feeling of oh, shit that had swept through him.
She types his answer into her computer. It’s the first time he’s seen her type anything since they narrowed it down to two, but he realizes that she must have been taking everything he told her and trying to squeeze a solution out of it. She hits the enter key.
The single remaining reality stares back at him. He thinks it’s mocking him for taking this long to figure out.
“Want to go home?”
“Yes, please.”
They’re standing in the room with the quantum mirror and a whole host of other gadgets he doesn’t recognize. Apparently they have a room dedicated entirely to the problem of reality. He shakes his head and thinks that life may have been simpler before reality became a problem; but then, he wouldn’t have met her. “Oh, hey,” he asks as she spins the dial to find the right one. “The other guy. What was his answer to that?”
She grins, and there’s a twinkle in her eye that he hasn’t seen since he left his house that morning four weeks ago. “Three days after he met her.”
He returns the grin. “Thank you.” He steps through the mirror and waves at a surprised young lieutenant, sorting through a bin of things that look like rocks but probably aren’t. It turns out that they have their own room dedicated entirely to the problem of reality, too, and he vows to do everything in his power to avoid it. He looks over his shoulder to wave goodbye at her, but the mirror is blank.
He tells the lieutenant to please, continue looking for that specific not-rock, and then leaves the room in search of someone who can send a message to his wife and tell her that her husband has returned.
Rating: PG
Pairing: Sam/Jack
Summary: Established S/J, Jack/alt!Sam. Guy walks into the wrong reality, girl tries to get him home. He lets her lead him to the VIP quarters and he knows that, as soon as the door is shut behind him, she’s going to scurry off to her lab and try a different algorithm or dig out a fourth set of questions from the bottom desk drawer.
“I hate you,” she says flatly, her arms crossed over her chest as she half-sits on the desk behind her. She tilts her head, looking at him as if he’s something to be studied, just another artifact in her lab to be analyzed, understood, reported on and boxed up and sent to Nevada.
“That’s fair,” he says in return, though he isn’t entirely certain it is.
She shrugs and slides into her chair. A few keystrokes later and a program begins to load on her screen and she gestures for him to take a seat wherever he can find one. “I’m going to ask a lot of questions. None of them are going to seem relevant, but they are.”
“Okay.” He lifts a stack of papers from a chair and carefully sets them on the floor.
“Full name?”
“Jonathan Jack O’Neill.”
“Rank?”
“Lieutenant General.”
“Current date?”
“February 3rd, 2010.”
He watches as she types his answers into a form on the monitor on the right. A list on the other monitor refreshes with each answer. They’re standard, biographical questions: birthday, birthplace, where did he grow up, what were his parents’ names, when did he join the Air Force, his favorite color.
“Any children?”
“One.” He swallows, hard.
“Name?”
“Charlie.”
A flicker of emotion crosses her face and he can tell she doesn’t want to ask the next question. She’s shown him exactly zero kindness, except for an obligatory offer of a glass of water which he now wishes he’d accepted, but he saves her the trouble and answers it himself. “Deceased, aged eight.” He’s amazed at the steadiness in his voice as he recites the date and reason and even more amazed at the number of lines that are deleted when she’s finished entering all the details.
“Marital status?”
He hesitates.
She looks over her shoulder at him. “Marital status with Sara?” She rephrases.
“Divorced.”
“Current marital status?”
“Married.”
“To whom?”
Her fingers are already placed on the right keys so he assumes she knows his answer. “Samantha Carter.”
Her jaw tightens, but it’s the only indication of her opinion on the matter. “Her current rank?”
“Colonel.”
“Current assignment?”
“Commander of the George Hammond.”
They deviate into Sam’s life for a while and his eyes narrow at the inevitable Pete questions and widen at the number that disappear when he offers up her middle name. He thought things like that were standard. After Sam comes Daniel and after Daniel, Teal’c, at which point he asks for that glass of water and wonders out loud why they haven’t figured this out yet.
She smiles at him, and it strikes him how warm that smile is despite her stated feelings, and gestures at the monitor on the left: the scrollbar is still there, but considerably longer than it was when they started.
He tries to remember everything - like that there are realities out there where Daniel didn’t Descend or Teal’c’s hallucination wasn’t a fire department or that sometimes Sam hadn’t even joined the program - because he knows she would find it fascinating, but long after his glass is empty and he thinks his left foot is asleep, he decides that what she should find fascinating is that he ended up in this situation at all and, more importantly, that there are ways to get him home.
“So why do you hate him?” He’s careful of his phrasing (because it’s some other version of him, long dead, deserving of her anger; he just happened to be bored and hit a wrong button) and stares at a piece of penne at the end of his fork, still amazed that the Air Force can screw up pasta. He eats it anyway.
She spares a glance at him, finding him more interesting than her salad for a few seconds, and he worries that he stepped out of line. He’s only a lab experiment to her, a practical test for a program she wrote when they were concerned about their quantum mirror misbehaving, and he’ll be gone in a few hours, tomorrow afternoon at the latest. “He left,” she says, spearing the last tomato more violently than necessary. She shoves the salad aside after frowning at the remaining lettuce, and starts in on her own overcooked pasta.
He can’t imagine why the other him would leave, but the past few hours have taught him that not every Jack O’Neill out there thinks the way he does (“NID allegiances?” she’d asked. “None,” he’d answered, bitterly. Five options, that he saw, blinked out of existence). He wants to offer up an apology, because she deserves one, but her shoulders tighten and he chooses silence. He also wants to ask why, because he thinks that even if he was a terrible person he must have whispered a deathbed confession to someone with enough connections to relay it to her (or there was a card upon some important birthday milestone, directed toward the son he sees laughing in pictures on her desk, lamely explaining it all knowing that any information would be shared), but it’s absolutely none of his business.
After an hour spent on the Tok’ra, only five options remain. He wonders how long it took her to build the database and how she compiled all the details. He realizes that it must be late (he checks his watch and corrects himself; early) if he’s choosing to be interested in how something works more than whether it simply does.
Twenty minutes (and twice as many questions) later and she frowns. The screen still shows five.
“You mean there are five realities that are identical and I could walk into the wrong one?”
“Let’s pick up in the morning,” she says.
He lets her lead him to the VIP quarters and he knows that, as soon as the door is shut behind him, she’s going to scurry off to her lab and try a different algorithm or dig out a fourth set of questions from the bottom desk drawer.
Three days pass and they’ve only managed to knock off one of the options; a story about trying to drive on a back country road by the light of the fireflies that had sacrificed themselves on his windshield proved relevant to only four of the remaining five.
He meets the boy one day when he stops in after school and his mother helps him with a particularly difficult algebra problem. He understands, then, why his other self might have ran: the boy looks enough like Charlie to cause him to look twice, but nothing like Charlie upon the second look. It unsettles him. She notices and doesn’t speak to him for a day and a half; his punishment for acting enough like her ass of an ex-husband is a silent threat that she’ll withhold his ability to get home to his life if he’s anything less than helpful. He feels like he needs to apologize, but can’t figure out how to phrase it; sorry for finding this very weird situation to be very weird.
Assuming that time passes at a standard rate across the multiverse (and when did he start thinking like that?), he’s been gone for almost three weeks before they have it narrowed down to two choices. The level of detail needed to get even that far exhausts him to the point where he needs a full eight hours of sleep every night and two cups of coffee before he’s coherent enough to respond to good morning. He’s positive that the difference between the two remaining choices is something idiotically miniscule, like what color shirt he wore to Daniel’s wake (the first one, when they left him on that planet with the weird underwater guy) or what Maybourne thought the plant tasted like when they were stranded on that moon together (it was either arugula or spinach, and he can’t remember).
He tries to be patient with her (God knows, she’s been a sport about all this; taken off her own research and projects and stuck working with him, a guy she hates) but he’s about had it with her constant advice on how to make this easier.
“Think. What could make your experience unique from the other guy?”
He throws up his hands. “Can’t we dial them up and ask ‘Hey. Which one of you is missing a Jack O’Neill?’” Her mouth is set in a hard line when he looks back at her. “Right, you already did that.”
To her credit, all she does is nod. She’s certainly earned the right to make a smart comment or seven about his behavior, but she stays silent. It’s not the rank that’s keeping her mouth shut - she’s a civilian, here, and he’s not sure whether that makes this easier or harder - and he can’t tell what it is, but he’s glad for it. He apologizes with a smile and sits back down.
They start talking. She’s not his Samantha, but there are enough similarities that the conversation is easy, comfortable, if not quite familiar. Some days they meet in her lab, others it’s outside or in the mess, occasionally in the lab of another scientist if the work needs supervision or guidance. He’s glad to be simply the guy from the other reality, without any rank or stories or reputation. In fact, most people he’s introduced to don’t even blink at his name; they simply offer their hands in requisite greeting. He doesn’t have to answer questions on the Ancients or the Asgard, be in meetings about system lords, or get roped into some crazy off-the-wall scheme to save the world again.
He’s just a man who walked through a ring of water and is a very long way from home.
“When did you realize you were in love with her?”
He blinks at the question. They’ve spent the past month pointedly ignoring that, in his reality, they’re married and, in her reality, they’re divorced. He’s divulged his fair share of secrets to her, personal history he’s not even sure his Sam knows, but they’ve danced around their shared personal life. “Two days after I met her,” he says, confidently, remembering the distinct feeling of oh, shit that had swept through him.
She types his answer into her computer. It’s the first time he’s seen her type anything since they narrowed it down to two, but he realizes that she must have been taking everything he told her and trying to squeeze a solution out of it. She hits the enter key.
The single remaining reality stares back at him. He thinks it’s mocking him for taking this long to figure out.
“Want to go home?”
“Yes, please.”
They’re standing in the room with the quantum mirror and a whole host of other gadgets he doesn’t recognize. Apparently they have a room dedicated entirely to the problem of reality. He shakes his head and thinks that life may have been simpler before reality became a problem; but then, he wouldn’t have met her. “Oh, hey,” he asks as she spins the dial to find the right one. “The other guy. What was his answer to that?”
She grins, and there’s a twinkle in her eye that he hasn’t seen since he left his house that morning four weeks ago. “Three days after he met her.”
He returns the grin. “Thank you.” He steps through the mirror and waves at a surprised young lieutenant, sorting through a bin of things that look like rocks but probably aren’t. It turns out that they have their own room dedicated entirely to the problem of reality, too, and he vows to do everything in his power to avoid it. He looks over his shoulder to wave goodbye at her, but the mirror is blank.
He tells the lieutenant to please, continue looking for that specific not-rock, and then leaves the room in search of someone who can send a message to his wife and tell her that her husband has returned.