Buffalo (sam fic)
This is a fic I wrote right after Threads aired for the first time. It's, well, I don't know what it is. I do like Sam/Jack, but I wasn't the biggest fan of Threads. I found it a bit painful. This story is a 'what if Jack stayed with Kerry' sort of thing. Because... ouch, man. It's less about Sam/Jack and more about Sam herself though.
I'm very pro-Sam, which means I don't really get the hate that I see on both the slash side and the S/J side. Well, that's not altogether true, but maybe this isn't the time to go into that...
Buffalo
By Jennghis Kahn
~~
Disclaimer- Oh, like this makes any difference at all.
Rated- R for language
Spoilers- Threads, although this is based on a very different possible ending to Threads.
Pairing- None. Sam/Jack RST. (Yes, that is Resolved Sexual Tension) Um. Not in a shippy way.
Summary- When you have nothing left to lose, it’s time to take a journey.
~~
There’s something… soothing about a well-running engine. Especially when you’ve handled every part within the machine, put it lovingly into place, stroked it with oil and cloth, fed it fuel. When it rumbles into life and works for you, it is joy pure and simple.
Sam takes the bike because it is her machine. She is the one who put the parts into place and can imagine each piston sliding smoothly. She knows exactly when the spark plugs will fire and in what order. She knows how much gasoline it takes to make a spark transform into flame, exactly how much oxygen is needed to make it into combustion. She pictures it in her mind as she rides. Things with rhythm and pattern are a balm to her mind. She likes things that work the way they’re supposed to.
Not like her father, whose body still failed after his Tok’ra-induced reprieve. Not like Pete who didn’t hold up his part of the bargain and become someone else for her. Although maybe if she’d told him who she wanted him to be, he’d have tried harder.
Not like Jack O’Neill.
Especially not like Jack O’Neill.
She can still feel her face burning as she stood in his back yard. Her words falling over one another as her mind raced ahead of her mouth and then seemed to simply self-destruct. Her so-called genius mind. Traitorous at the last. Fuck. For all her intelligence, she could be blindly stupid sometimes.
And Jack had stood there, that idiotic look on his face, pretending he didn’t know that she was finally trying to tell him how she felt about him after all these years. Like he didn’t have a clue what she could possibly want. But he had of course. And still he’d let her fumble about until Kerry had come out the back door and stuffed a figurative boot into Sam’s gut.
Then her father and his failing body had saved her any further fumbling.
She doesn’t fumble now. She is all speed and smoothness and attention to detail.
She reaches a gloved hand up and flips a vent open on her helmet. Air rushes in, cool and sweet, drying the sweat on her upper lip and easing the tightness of her skin.
And that’s exactly how it has felt the past week since her father’s funeral. Her skin is tight and suffocating. Like if she could just shed it, she’d feel fine.
She feels bad that she doesn’t think about Pete much or how she hurt him.
~~
Daniel calls her when she’s half an hour out of Laramie, Wyoming. The wind howls into the hands-free mouthpiece and they’re shouting to each other as she tells him that her skin is too tight and nothing belongs to her anymore. He doesn’t make her explain but asks where she’s going and she tells him.
“The buffalo.”
“What?”
“The buffalo. I’m going to see the buffalo.”
“What buffalo?”
“The. Buffalo.”
“Sam… you’ve only got two days of leave left.”
“I know.”
“Are you okay?”
She wants to laugh, but she knows it’ll only worry him more. And rightfully so.
“Daniel. I don’t think I can do math anymore.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“One plus one doesn’t always equal two.” Jesus, what is this shit coming out of her mouth?
“Sam… Jesus… “
When they hang up, she feels a little better. He calls her back ten minutes later and she can hear in his voice that he’s been mulling things over. She thinks there’s a chance she might have loved him in a different way if she hadn’t been so blinded by Jack.
“Sam? Are you even coming home at all?”
She wants to say yes, but the words catch in her throat. She sighs and just quietly presses the ‘end’ button.
~~
I don’t know what you want from me, Carter.
Like hell, she thinks bitterly. She squeezes the clutch, kicks the bike into a higher gear, and then lies on the throttle. The machine jumps beneath her, and she leans down over the gas tank. Not her machine anymore, it’s her. More power. More rhythm. More order. She flies down the road and the wind rips at her body. The speed seems to even out her pain. The racing of her heart dulls the ache.
And yet how fucking fitting that the moment she finally feels the most comfortable, the most normal she’s felt in weeks, is the same moment that will kill her in an instant if even the slightest thing goes wrong. Same old, same old.
That tiny bit of annoyance in his voice was what got to her. That slight edge of … long suffering frustration. She’d realized then. Really got it. And even though she knew that some part of her would always love him, she’d felt a glimmering and crisp glint of hatred for him. Just for being Jack O’Neill. Just for being all warm affection and piercing brown eyes and rebellious humor and grace under pressure and dear god, she’d never had a chance in hell.
That fucking prick.
She was being hard on him, but… She couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that if she’d never started with Pete that he wouldn’t have started with Kerry. It had been an impossible situation from the start, so how had they made it worse? How had this all gotten so hopelessly out of control? She’d felt it all slipping helplessly through her fingers and, for once, she’d had no idea how to stop it.
He couldn’t be a man and just tell her that there was no room to go back to. More irony since she was aware the reason he didn’t spell it out for her was most likely because he was a man. Men. If they weren’t breaking your figurative balls, they were falling all over you.
Or worse, they died on you.
~~
She works her way through the Black Hills in late afternoon. It’s not quite tourist season yet. The road winds sinuously up and down the hills in Custer State Park. The pavement goes right to the edge of the mountain and when she rides too close to the gravel shoulder, she can almost see down into the park below. She doesn’t see a soul. At a scenic turn-off at the top of the road, she parks the bike. The hills really do look black and stretch as far as she can see. Sometimes she forgets that there’s a world outside of Cheyenne Mountain with blue skies and wind and nature that isn’t part of another world, but of her own.
She walks right up to the edge, where the gravel ends and the grass begins, long and waving down the slopes to tumbled rocks and steep cliffs and forests of pine and fir. She puts the toes of her boots right over the rock holding the entire slope from falling into the forest below. When she leans forward and looks down, she feels her heart speed up and her mouth run dry and her mind races, unbidden, with the thoughts of what could happen. What might happen if she slipped or jumped or fell either on purpose or by accident.
She reasons that standing on a cliff is a lot like falling in love with Jack O’Neill. There’s that same rush of feeling, that same hint of sanity that told you to stop doing something so stupid. That same unbearable desire to ignore that sanity and just plunge to your fate.
Fucking A. How sad is she? Standing on a damn cliff and waxing all poetic about the unfairness of love.
Shoot me now.
She wonders if he’d have given Kerry up for her if she’d ever been able to call him “Jack” to his face and not “Sir”. She wonders if it would have been different if she could swear out loud and not just inside her head. She thinks that Kerry probably swears at him without any problem. He probably likes it.
“Fuck.” She says it out loud to the mountains. It echoes just slightly. She shouts it. “FUCK!”
…uckuckuckuckuck-k-k…
The birds around her fall silent and listen. The clouds blow fast and white across the sky. She watches their shadows slide across the tree-covered hills. Time goes slow for once. She sits and breathes and tries not to think.
Tomorrow morning, she’ll go see the buffalo.
~~
The buffalo are huge and peaceful and quiet. She watches a small herd in the late morning, just as the sun is growing warm. They graze with immense heads near the ground, the hump in their shoulders supporting powerful necks. The shaggy brown fur is starting to shed in clumps. She sits above them on a small shelf of rock, her bike tucked up tight against the hill.
She imagines them the way they used to be, herds so vast that they covered the plains to the East as far as the eye could see. The Earth trembled when they ran.
Her father would have sat here with her and told her the entire history of the buffalo and the people who had once, and still did, find these hills sacred.
You ready to see the buffalo, Samantha?
They’d planned a family trip for nearly a year when she was a kid. It was put off time and time again when her father was called up for duty. The life of an Air Force family. They were weeks away from the trip, and she’d just known they really were going to make it this time. And then her mother had been killed.
Her father had stopped promising her anything after that.
Life had gone on. When she was in the Academy, he’d called one day.
I thought you could take a day or two. Let’s drive up to South Dakota and finally take that trip!
What? Dad, are you insane? I’ve got finals next week, and I’m way behind on my dissertation. Just no.
He hadn’t asked again. She’d never brought it up again.
Now, of course, it’s too late.
At first, she’d thought she was hollow. That all of it had carved her insides out and…
Now she realizes that she’s not all shell, she’s all core. She was hit with too much at once, and the shielding is gone for the moment. She’s walking wounded and contact with other human beings rubs her bones painfully raw.
The buffalo casts a dark and watchful eye in her direction and then grazes again. The grass bends in the wind, long waves of light and shadow rippling across the prairie. It’s good to smell something besides ozone and mold and cafeteria food.
She’ll go back, she thinks. She’ll drive in tomorrow afternoon and let Daniel and Teal’c hug her tightly and then follow her protectively, trying to act as if they’re doing nothing of the sort. She’ll get right back to working in her lab and missing lunch.
She’ll see Jack and act as if everything is A-OK. And maybe it will be eventually. Someday she’ll even be happy for him. Someday.
She hates that she used to shake her head at other women when they’d get stupid over a man. She’s seen some of the most intelligent and bad-ass women in the world go to pieces over men. She used to think she was smarter than that.
Now she knows better. Now she knows that you can’t ever plan for it, and saying ‘never’ is as good as dooming yourself. Now she knows she can be just as stupid. Now she knows she can cause just as much destruction. She hopes Pete forgives her eventually. She hopes she can forgive herself.
Pick yourself up and start again, Sam.
It’s exactly what her father would have said--after telling her exactly what he thought she’d done wrong, of course. She supposes she has no choice. One way or another, this will be a new direction for her.
**
She sits at a stop sign at the exit of Mount Rushmore. Her legs ache a bit from balancing the bike for so long. It idles quietly beneath her. She can turn right and head back to the SGC. If she rides all night, she’ll just make it back before her leave is up. She can change and be at the nine a.m. briefing right on time.
Or she can turn left and ride straight into the Badlands. She can drive through the maze of buff buttes and red sand all the way to Wounded Knee, where the ghosts of Chief Big Foot and his people dwell. Then onto the Great Plains and down into the Mississippi River valley, the deepest heart of America. Would they find her there?
She sits on the idling bike and ponders this. It feels good to think she might do something unpredictable, but she knows there was never really any question. She’s freed herself of a lot of baggage in the last week. Things and people she thought she ‘should’ love but didn’t. People she really did love but who couldn’t stay.
When nothing around you makes sense anymore, what do you do?
Pick yourself up and start again.
She kicks the bike into gear and takes off. She turns right.
~end~
I'm very pro-Sam, which means I don't really get the hate that I see on both the slash side and the S/J side. Well, that's not altogether true, but maybe this isn't the time to go into that...
Buffalo
By Jennghis Kahn
~~
Disclaimer- Oh, like this makes any difference at all.
Rated- R for language
Spoilers- Threads, although this is based on a very different possible ending to Threads.
Pairing- None. Sam/Jack RST. (Yes, that is Resolved Sexual Tension) Um. Not in a shippy way.
Summary- When you have nothing left to lose, it’s time to take a journey.
~~
There’s something… soothing about a well-running engine. Especially when you’ve handled every part within the machine, put it lovingly into place, stroked it with oil and cloth, fed it fuel. When it rumbles into life and works for you, it is joy pure and simple.
Sam takes the bike because it is her machine. She is the one who put the parts into place and can imagine each piston sliding smoothly. She knows exactly when the spark plugs will fire and in what order. She knows how much gasoline it takes to make a spark transform into flame, exactly how much oxygen is needed to make it into combustion. She pictures it in her mind as she rides. Things with rhythm and pattern are a balm to her mind. She likes things that work the way they’re supposed to.
Not like her father, whose body still failed after his Tok’ra-induced reprieve. Not like Pete who didn’t hold up his part of the bargain and become someone else for her. Although maybe if she’d told him who she wanted him to be, he’d have tried harder.
Not like Jack O’Neill.
Especially not like Jack O’Neill.
She can still feel her face burning as she stood in his back yard. Her words falling over one another as her mind raced ahead of her mouth and then seemed to simply self-destruct. Her so-called genius mind. Traitorous at the last. Fuck. For all her intelligence, she could be blindly stupid sometimes.
And Jack had stood there, that idiotic look on his face, pretending he didn’t know that she was finally trying to tell him how she felt about him after all these years. Like he didn’t have a clue what she could possibly want. But he had of course. And still he’d let her fumble about until Kerry had come out the back door and stuffed a figurative boot into Sam’s gut.
Then her father and his failing body had saved her any further fumbling.
She doesn’t fumble now. She is all speed and smoothness and attention to detail.
She reaches a gloved hand up and flips a vent open on her helmet. Air rushes in, cool and sweet, drying the sweat on her upper lip and easing the tightness of her skin.
And that’s exactly how it has felt the past week since her father’s funeral. Her skin is tight and suffocating. Like if she could just shed it, she’d feel fine.
She feels bad that she doesn’t think about Pete much or how she hurt him.
~~
Daniel calls her when she’s half an hour out of Laramie, Wyoming. The wind howls into the hands-free mouthpiece and they’re shouting to each other as she tells him that her skin is too tight and nothing belongs to her anymore. He doesn’t make her explain but asks where she’s going and she tells him.
“The buffalo.”
“What?”
“The buffalo. I’m going to see the buffalo.”
“What buffalo?”
“The. Buffalo.”
“Sam… you’ve only got two days of leave left.”
“I know.”
“Are you okay?”
She wants to laugh, but she knows it’ll only worry him more. And rightfully so.
“Daniel. I don’t think I can do math anymore.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“One plus one doesn’t always equal two.” Jesus, what is this shit coming out of her mouth?
“Sam… Jesus… “
When they hang up, she feels a little better. He calls her back ten minutes later and she can hear in his voice that he’s been mulling things over. She thinks there’s a chance she might have loved him in a different way if she hadn’t been so blinded by Jack.
“Sam? Are you even coming home at all?”
She wants to say yes, but the words catch in her throat. She sighs and just quietly presses the ‘end’ button.
~~
I don’t know what you want from me, Carter.
Like hell, she thinks bitterly. She squeezes the clutch, kicks the bike into a higher gear, and then lies on the throttle. The machine jumps beneath her, and she leans down over the gas tank. Not her machine anymore, it’s her. More power. More rhythm. More order. She flies down the road and the wind rips at her body. The speed seems to even out her pain. The racing of her heart dulls the ache.
And yet how fucking fitting that the moment she finally feels the most comfortable, the most normal she’s felt in weeks, is the same moment that will kill her in an instant if even the slightest thing goes wrong. Same old, same old.
That tiny bit of annoyance in his voice was what got to her. That slight edge of … long suffering frustration. She’d realized then. Really got it. And even though she knew that some part of her would always love him, she’d felt a glimmering and crisp glint of hatred for him. Just for being Jack O’Neill. Just for being all warm affection and piercing brown eyes and rebellious humor and grace under pressure and dear god, she’d never had a chance in hell.
That fucking prick.
She was being hard on him, but… She couldn’t quite bring herself to believe that if she’d never started with Pete that he wouldn’t have started with Kerry. It had been an impossible situation from the start, so how had they made it worse? How had this all gotten so hopelessly out of control? She’d felt it all slipping helplessly through her fingers and, for once, she’d had no idea how to stop it.
He couldn’t be a man and just tell her that there was no room to go back to. More irony since she was aware the reason he didn’t spell it out for her was most likely because he was a man. Men. If they weren’t breaking your figurative balls, they were falling all over you.
Or worse, they died on you.
~~
She works her way through the Black Hills in late afternoon. It’s not quite tourist season yet. The road winds sinuously up and down the hills in Custer State Park. The pavement goes right to the edge of the mountain and when she rides too close to the gravel shoulder, she can almost see down into the park below. She doesn’t see a soul. At a scenic turn-off at the top of the road, she parks the bike. The hills really do look black and stretch as far as she can see. Sometimes she forgets that there’s a world outside of Cheyenne Mountain with blue skies and wind and nature that isn’t part of another world, but of her own.
She walks right up to the edge, where the gravel ends and the grass begins, long and waving down the slopes to tumbled rocks and steep cliffs and forests of pine and fir. She puts the toes of her boots right over the rock holding the entire slope from falling into the forest below. When she leans forward and looks down, she feels her heart speed up and her mouth run dry and her mind races, unbidden, with the thoughts of what could happen. What might happen if she slipped or jumped or fell either on purpose or by accident.
She reasons that standing on a cliff is a lot like falling in love with Jack O’Neill. There’s that same rush of feeling, that same hint of sanity that told you to stop doing something so stupid. That same unbearable desire to ignore that sanity and just plunge to your fate.
Fucking A. How sad is she? Standing on a damn cliff and waxing all poetic about the unfairness of love.
Shoot me now.
She wonders if he’d have given Kerry up for her if she’d ever been able to call him “Jack” to his face and not “Sir”. She wonders if it would have been different if she could swear out loud and not just inside her head. She thinks that Kerry probably swears at him without any problem. He probably likes it.
“Fuck.” She says it out loud to the mountains. It echoes just slightly. She shouts it. “FUCK!”
…uckuckuckuckuck-k-k…
The birds around her fall silent and listen. The clouds blow fast and white across the sky. She watches their shadows slide across the tree-covered hills. Time goes slow for once. She sits and breathes and tries not to think.
Tomorrow morning, she’ll go see the buffalo.
~~
The buffalo are huge and peaceful and quiet. She watches a small herd in the late morning, just as the sun is growing warm. They graze with immense heads near the ground, the hump in their shoulders supporting powerful necks. The shaggy brown fur is starting to shed in clumps. She sits above them on a small shelf of rock, her bike tucked up tight against the hill.
She imagines them the way they used to be, herds so vast that they covered the plains to the East as far as the eye could see. The Earth trembled when they ran.
Her father would have sat here with her and told her the entire history of the buffalo and the people who had once, and still did, find these hills sacred.
You ready to see the buffalo, Samantha?
They’d planned a family trip for nearly a year when she was a kid. It was put off time and time again when her father was called up for duty. The life of an Air Force family. They were weeks away from the trip, and she’d just known they really were going to make it this time. And then her mother had been killed.
Her father had stopped promising her anything after that.
Life had gone on. When she was in the Academy, he’d called one day.
I thought you could take a day or two. Let’s drive up to South Dakota and finally take that trip!
What? Dad, are you insane? I’ve got finals next week, and I’m way behind on my dissertation. Just no.
He hadn’t asked again. She’d never brought it up again.
Now, of course, it’s too late.
At first, she’d thought she was hollow. That all of it had carved her insides out and…
Now she realizes that she’s not all shell, she’s all core. She was hit with too much at once, and the shielding is gone for the moment. She’s walking wounded and contact with other human beings rubs her bones painfully raw.
The buffalo casts a dark and watchful eye in her direction and then grazes again. The grass bends in the wind, long waves of light and shadow rippling across the prairie. It’s good to smell something besides ozone and mold and cafeteria food.
She’ll go back, she thinks. She’ll drive in tomorrow afternoon and let Daniel and Teal’c hug her tightly and then follow her protectively, trying to act as if they’re doing nothing of the sort. She’ll get right back to working in her lab and missing lunch.
She’ll see Jack and act as if everything is A-OK. And maybe it will be eventually. Someday she’ll even be happy for him. Someday.
She hates that she used to shake her head at other women when they’d get stupid over a man. She’s seen some of the most intelligent and bad-ass women in the world go to pieces over men. She used to think she was smarter than that.
Now she knows better. Now she knows that you can’t ever plan for it, and saying ‘never’ is as good as dooming yourself. Now she knows she can be just as stupid. Now she knows she can cause just as much destruction. She hopes Pete forgives her eventually. She hopes she can forgive herself.
Pick yourself up and start again, Sam.
It’s exactly what her father would have said--after telling her exactly what he thought she’d done wrong, of course. She supposes she has no choice. One way or another, this will be a new direction for her.
**
She sits at a stop sign at the exit of Mount Rushmore. Her legs ache a bit from balancing the bike for so long. It idles quietly beneath her. She can turn right and head back to the SGC. If she rides all night, she’ll just make it back before her leave is up. She can change and be at the nine a.m. briefing right on time.
Or she can turn left and ride straight into the Badlands. She can drive through the maze of buff buttes and red sand all the way to Wounded Knee, where the ghosts of Chief Big Foot and his people dwell. Then onto the Great Plains and down into the Mississippi River valley, the deepest heart of America. Would they find her there?
She sits on the idling bike and ponders this. It feels good to think she might do something unpredictable, but she knows there was never really any question. She’s freed herself of a lot of baggage in the last week. Things and people she thought she ‘should’ love but didn’t. People she really did love but who couldn’t stay.
When nothing around you makes sense anymore, what do you do?
Pick yourself up and start again.
She kicks the bike into gear and takes off. She turns right.
~end~