A Billion Stars, All Falling
Title: A Billion Stars, All Falling
Author:
triplesnap
Written for:
deejay435 for
loose_ends_fic
Prompt: What will happen between Mark and Sam when the Stargate becomes public?
Pairing: S/J
Rating: R for language and adult situations
Thanks: Big Ups to Sid and Bridget for their fabulous, last minute betas!
Part I: Jack
He’s not sure how it began, really. What he remembers is this: one minute he’s standing on his deck with a beer in one hand and a skewer in the other, and the next he’s being pushed into the house with Carter’s tongue down his throat. Yes, Carter. In all the scenarios he’d imagined-and he’d imagined plenty-he never pictured her making the first move because, Jesus, this was Carter, self-possessed and so damned professional, but if he’d known, Oh God, if he’d known she could do *that* with her tongue, he’d have pressed the issue years ago.
He protests, albeit half-heartedly, because he’s only human, but words die on his lips the minute her fingers dance along the fly of his jeans. For that matter, he forgets to breathe until she smiles against his lips and pulls away, her eyes dark with desire and just a little mischief and he thinks maybe she’s been toying with him this whole time (God, no, please). She reaches out and smoothes the front of his shirt, leaving her hand to rest low on his abdomen, heat and want and things too complicated to name radiating from the simple touch.
“Hi,” she says huskily.
And he knows, he just knows, that the universe is playing a joke on him. She’s drunk, or infected by some goddamned alien virus, or possessed, or *something*, because this woman isn’t Carter.
“I never thought I’d say this, Jack, but,” she pauses to grin at his expression, “stop thinking so much.”
Or maybe she is because no one has ever been able to read him like Carter.
He licks his lips, then, tastes her cherry lip balm, and furrows his brow. “You just called me Jack.” Eloquent, he is.
Her smile falters, but she recovers quickly and moves to press her body firmly against the length of his, and he’s almost positive that his pounding heart is going to explode right there in his chest.
“Is that a problem?”
Up this close he can see the dark shadows under her eyes, and the hollowed cheeks, and even the prominence of her collarbone peeking out through her half-buttoned blouse. He thinks about those fucking television interviews and the sad way she’d smiled at the camera when Jacob was mentioned and he knows she’s confused and hurt, but God, she’s looking at him the way he’s looked at her for years. She’s vulnerable, and maybe a little shattered, and he should walk away.
“No,” he finally whispers, allowing his hand to rest against the elegant curve of her neck.
She closes her eyes briefly, dark lashes sweeping across the top of her cheeks and he thinks he’s never seen anything as beautiful as Carter. Shadows play across her face and he spans the small distance between them to capture her already kiss-swollen lips with his own. She sighs into his mouth and curls her fingers against his forearm. Stars don’t explode, the earth doesn’t move, exactly, and maybe his toes aren’t curling, but he’s never felt this kind of peace before.
He pulls away just a fraction. “What do you want, Carter?” he asks quietly, cupping her cheek. She arches an eyebrow eloquently and he realizes his mistake. “Sam, I mean, Sam, Sam, Sam,” he corrects himself, kissing her forehead and the tip of her nose before settling comfortably against her lips in apology.
“Take me to bed, Jack.”
He does.
~*~
Muted light filters through the slats of the blinds, bathing the expanse of Carter’s-Sam’s, he silently amends-naked back almost ethereally. He trails a finger along her spine, a touch not meant to entice, exactly, but to reassure. She shivers and buries her face further into the pillow, murmuring incoherently. He smiles and rests his chin at the juncture where her shoulder meets her neck and presses a gentle kiss behind her ear. She doesn’t stir, so he does it again.
Her hand comes up to swat against the disturbance and he catches it just before she makes contact with his cheek. He begins to nibble the pads of her fingers, grinning when her breathing becomes shallow and slightly erratic. She moans suddenly and with a cat-like grace flips onto her back and glares at him through narrowed eyes.
“You are insatiable,” she says, though her smile softens the rebuke.
“Good morning.”
“No.”
Damn it if he isn’t grinning again. He’s never seen her like this, soft and sleepy and slightly petulant.
“No?”
“Wanna sleep,” she explains, closing her eyes firmly and turning her head away from the window.
He pushes her bangs off her forehead and simultaneously pulls the sheet up across her chest. He’d like nothing more than to kiss a blazing path across her naked body, but he knows how exhausted she is and so instead he rubs the back of his fingers against her furrowed brow, trying to smooth out the worry.
“I’m going to jump in the shower.”
“Have fun,” she says softly, half-asleep already.
He allows himself a few moments to just watch her, smiling affectionately as she finally succumbs to the fatigue that has been stalking her for days, if not weeks. He knows she’s been holed up in her lab, backwards engineering some alien technology or other while the world outside the mountain heaves, forgetting to eat and stealing twenty-minute power naps when no one is paying attention. Oh, yes, and avoiding his calls, which explains his presence at his home in Colorado, but certainly not hers.
She sighs softly and his heart literally aches. Yeah, he’s screwed.
~*~
He knew it would be like this, perfect and absolute, with the sun streaming in through the kitchen window and Sam standing in the doorway wearing only his t-shirt, her hair impossibly tousled. Christ, he’s seconds away from sweeping everything off the table and taking her right there, and maybe she realizes this because she grins and shakes her head.
“Coffee first, please.”
She touches him briefly as she walks past him to the coffee maker, fleeting and ephemeral and almost gone before he registers the pressure. Despite all this, he shivers because everything he’s ever wanted is rooting through his cabinets in search of a coffee mug and he tries, he really tries, not to watch the way his t-shirt rides up the backs of her thighs so goddamned enticingly.
Sam makes a small noise of disbelief as she glances at the clock over the sink and then turns to face him accusingly.
“Noon, Jack?”
Ah, the eyebrow arch and one hand on her hip.
“Hey, you said you wanted to sleep,” he protests, throwing his hands in front of him in the universal ‘don’t-blame-me’ gesture. And then he smiles because she doesn’t realize that the clock is actually an hour behind. Maybe he’ll tell her later.
“Sleep, not slip into a mini-coma,” she mutters under her breath while sweetening her coffee.
He doesn’t miss the way she gazes out of the window, nonchalant to the casual observer, but he knows her well enough to catch the vigilant way her eyes search his back yard and it takes him a few moments to realize what she’s looking for.
“Uh…I don’t think anyone knows I’m in town, Sam.”
Her mouth tightens almost imperceptibly. “Yeah, but my car’s been parked in your driveway for the last sixteen hours and it usually takes those bastards a quarter of that to find me.”
Bitterness rolls off her in waves, tempering the air between them with something indefinable and encompassing. She looks small and so fucking tragic and not like Carter at all. He slides his chair away from the table, ready to stand and take the coffee from her trembling hands, but she preempts him by sliding into his lap and straddling him, smiling when his breath catches quietly- and unmistakably- in his throat.
“We need to get going.”
His hands come to rest lightly on her hips and he finds himself drowning in an endless sea of blue. He really hates clichés. Really.
“Okay,” he replies, wincing at how strangled his voice sounds. Jesus, you’d think he was some hormone-addled teenager. He clears his throat. “Where to?” Much better.
He’s thrown by the sudden change in her demeanor, but becomes terribly distracted by the way she worries her bottom lip between her teeth. She smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes, and links her fingers behind his neck, rubbing her thumbs absently across his nape. Sweet Jesus, she has no idea what she’s doing to him.
“San Diego.”
Or maybe she does.
“San Diego?” he manages to sputter, surprised at his ability to string together anything coherent, which was her intent, he supposes.
She leans down to nip lightly at his lips. “Yes, San Diego. Home of Balboa Park, Coronado, Sea World and-“
“Mark Carter,” he finishes for her, stilling her hands with his own.
She stiffens but still meets his gaze, her eyes inscrutable. “And Mark Carter,” she agrees quietly.
“Have you spoken to him since, you know?”
“Very briefly.”
“And?”
She stands abruptly, tearing her hands from his grasp and moving to lean one hip against the sink. He’s not surprised, really, because when Carter’s not talking about things like chromatic aberration, or pair production, she can be devastatingly reticent.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Ah,” he replies, idly tracing circles on the table with his fingertip. He gazes at her reflectively; admiring the way the sunlight bathes her hair and cheekbones. “There’s a lot you don’t want to talk about.”
He silently acknowledges the fact that, yes, he is a hypocrite, but more than that, he’s in love, and somehow he thinks this absolves him. Their eyes clash and he has the good grace to look away when she pins him with a perceptive glare.
“I know what you’re trying to do.”
“Oh?” And yes, the nonchalance is so feigned.
She doesn’t smile exactly, but the corners of her mouth quirk upward slightly. “You’re trying to bait me so that I’ll confess everything to you in an emotional tirade.” She runs slender fingers through her hair, tugging uselessly on the ends. “You seem to have forgotten one thing, though.”
Raised eyebrows serve as his riposte.
“That only works on Daniel.”
He purses his lips, and then quietly, “Right.”
Sam expels an explosive breath and closes her eyes briefly. “Look, I’m not trying to be difficult. If I had known the whole goddamned world was going to find out about the Stargate,” and here she pauses to look at him accusatorily, “I would have flown out to San Diego immediately to brace Mark.”
Jack moves fluidly from the table to stand in front of her, closer than is probably comfortable for Carter, but she doesn’t back down. “I swear to God I had no idea they were planning to--”
“But I didn’t know,” she continues over him as if he hadn’t spoken, “ and I had to find out from watching the six o’clock fucking news and by then it was too late because there were reporters camped out in my front yard and I was ordered by the President of the United States to cooperate with the media and I was mic-ed and powdered within an inch of my life and Christ there wasn’t any time to book a flight, much less make a telephone call.”
“Shh,” Jack murmurs as Sam rests her forehead against his chest. He rubs her back soothingly.
“He wasn’t angry, really, when he called, more confused and hurt than anything. I just need to make this right, Jack.”
“You will, Sam,” he assures her quietly. “Why don’t you go take a shower and I’ll call the airport?”
Sam raises her head. “Actually, I was planning on driving.”
“You want to drive to San Diego?”
“It’ll take sixteen hours tops. Please?”
He sighs, thinking of his knees and back, and feeling incredibly old despite the nubile body pressed securely against his. She turns her imploring and achingly beautiful eyes to him and his resolve literally melts away.
“Well, then, why don’t you take a shower while I pack up the truck?”
What a sad, fucking sap he is.
Author:
triplesnap
Written for:
deejay435 for
loose_ends_fic
Prompt: What will happen between Mark and Sam when the Stargate becomes public?
Pairing: S/J
Rating: R for language and adult situations
Thanks: Big Ups to Sid and Bridget for their fabulous, last minute betas!
Part I: Jack
He’s not sure how it began, really. What he remembers is this: one minute he’s standing on his deck with a beer in one hand and a skewer in the other, and the next he’s being pushed into the house with Carter’s tongue down his throat. Yes, Carter. In all the scenarios he’d imagined-and he’d imagined plenty-he never pictured her making the first move because, Jesus, this was Carter, self-possessed and so damned professional, but if he’d known, Oh God, if he’d known she could do *that* with her tongue, he’d have pressed the issue years ago.
He protests, albeit half-heartedly, because he’s only human, but words die on his lips the minute her fingers dance along the fly of his jeans. For that matter, he forgets to breathe until she smiles against his lips and pulls away, her eyes dark with desire and just a little mischief and he thinks maybe she’s been toying with him this whole time (God, no, please). She reaches out and smoothes the front of his shirt, leaving her hand to rest low on his abdomen, heat and want and things too complicated to name radiating from the simple touch.
“Hi,” she says huskily.
And he knows, he just knows, that the universe is playing a joke on him. She’s drunk, or infected by some goddamned alien virus, or possessed, or *something*, because this woman isn’t Carter.
“I never thought I’d say this, Jack, but,” she pauses to grin at his expression, “stop thinking so much.”
Or maybe she is because no one has ever been able to read him like Carter.
He licks his lips, then, tastes her cherry lip balm, and furrows his brow. “You just called me Jack.” Eloquent, he is.
Her smile falters, but she recovers quickly and moves to press her body firmly against the length of his, and he’s almost positive that his pounding heart is going to explode right there in his chest.
“Is that a problem?”
Up this close he can see the dark shadows under her eyes, and the hollowed cheeks, and even the prominence of her collarbone peeking out through her half-buttoned blouse. He thinks about those fucking television interviews and the sad way she’d smiled at the camera when Jacob was mentioned and he knows she’s confused and hurt, but God, she’s looking at him the way he’s looked at her for years. She’s vulnerable, and maybe a little shattered, and he should walk away.
“No,” he finally whispers, allowing his hand to rest against the elegant curve of her neck.
She closes her eyes briefly, dark lashes sweeping across the top of her cheeks and he thinks he’s never seen anything as beautiful as Carter. Shadows play across her face and he spans the small distance between them to capture her already kiss-swollen lips with his own. She sighs into his mouth and curls her fingers against his forearm. Stars don’t explode, the earth doesn’t move, exactly, and maybe his toes aren’t curling, but he’s never felt this kind of peace before.
He pulls away just a fraction. “What do you want, Carter?” he asks quietly, cupping her cheek. She arches an eyebrow eloquently and he realizes his mistake. “Sam, I mean, Sam, Sam, Sam,” he corrects himself, kissing her forehead and the tip of her nose before settling comfortably against her lips in apology.
“Take me to bed, Jack.”
He does.
~*~
Muted light filters through the slats of the blinds, bathing the expanse of Carter’s-Sam’s, he silently amends-naked back almost ethereally. He trails a finger along her spine, a touch not meant to entice, exactly, but to reassure. She shivers and buries her face further into the pillow, murmuring incoherently. He smiles and rests his chin at the juncture where her shoulder meets her neck and presses a gentle kiss behind her ear. She doesn’t stir, so he does it again.
Her hand comes up to swat against the disturbance and he catches it just before she makes contact with his cheek. He begins to nibble the pads of her fingers, grinning when her breathing becomes shallow and slightly erratic. She moans suddenly and with a cat-like grace flips onto her back and glares at him through narrowed eyes.
“You are insatiable,” she says, though her smile softens the rebuke.
“Good morning.”
“No.”
Damn it if he isn’t grinning again. He’s never seen her like this, soft and sleepy and slightly petulant.
“No?”
“Wanna sleep,” she explains, closing her eyes firmly and turning her head away from the window.
He pushes her bangs off her forehead and simultaneously pulls the sheet up across her chest. He’d like nothing more than to kiss a blazing path across her naked body, but he knows how exhausted she is and so instead he rubs the back of his fingers against her furrowed brow, trying to smooth out the worry.
“I’m going to jump in the shower.”
“Have fun,” she says softly, half-asleep already.
He allows himself a few moments to just watch her, smiling affectionately as she finally succumbs to the fatigue that has been stalking her for days, if not weeks. He knows she’s been holed up in her lab, backwards engineering some alien technology or other while the world outside the mountain heaves, forgetting to eat and stealing twenty-minute power naps when no one is paying attention. Oh, yes, and avoiding his calls, which explains his presence at his home in Colorado, but certainly not hers.
She sighs softly and his heart literally aches. Yeah, he’s screwed.
~*~
He knew it would be like this, perfect and absolute, with the sun streaming in through the kitchen window and Sam standing in the doorway wearing only his t-shirt, her hair impossibly tousled. Christ, he’s seconds away from sweeping everything off the table and taking her right there, and maybe she realizes this because she grins and shakes her head.
“Coffee first, please.”
She touches him briefly as she walks past him to the coffee maker, fleeting and ephemeral and almost gone before he registers the pressure. Despite all this, he shivers because everything he’s ever wanted is rooting through his cabinets in search of a coffee mug and he tries, he really tries, not to watch the way his t-shirt rides up the backs of her thighs so goddamned enticingly.
Sam makes a small noise of disbelief as she glances at the clock over the sink and then turns to face him accusingly.
“Noon, Jack?”
Ah, the eyebrow arch and one hand on her hip.
“Hey, you said you wanted to sleep,” he protests, throwing his hands in front of him in the universal ‘don’t-blame-me’ gesture. And then he smiles because she doesn’t realize that the clock is actually an hour behind. Maybe he’ll tell her later.
“Sleep, not slip into a mini-coma,” she mutters under her breath while sweetening her coffee.
He doesn’t miss the way she gazes out of the window, nonchalant to the casual observer, but he knows her well enough to catch the vigilant way her eyes search his back yard and it takes him a few moments to realize what she’s looking for.
“Uh…I don’t think anyone knows I’m in town, Sam.”
Her mouth tightens almost imperceptibly. “Yeah, but my car’s been parked in your driveway for the last sixteen hours and it usually takes those bastards a quarter of that to find me.”
Bitterness rolls off her in waves, tempering the air between them with something indefinable and encompassing. She looks small and so fucking tragic and not like Carter at all. He slides his chair away from the table, ready to stand and take the coffee from her trembling hands, but she preempts him by sliding into his lap and straddling him, smiling when his breath catches quietly- and unmistakably- in his throat.
“We need to get going.”
His hands come to rest lightly on her hips and he finds himself drowning in an endless sea of blue. He really hates clichés. Really.
“Okay,” he replies, wincing at how strangled his voice sounds. Jesus, you’d think he was some hormone-addled teenager. He clears his throat. “Where to?” Much better.
He’s thrown by the sudden change in her demeanor, but becomes terribly distracted by the way she worries her bottom lip between her teeth. She smiles, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes, and links her fingers behind his neck, rubbing her thumbs absently across his nape. Sweet Jesus, she has no idea what she’s doing to him.
“San Diego.”
Or maybe she does.
“San Diego?” he manages to sputter, surprised at his ability to string together anything coherent, which was her intent, he supposes.
She leans down to nip lightly at his lips. “Yes, San Diego. Home of Balboa Park, Coronado, Sea World and-“
“Mark Carter,” he finishes for her, stilling her hands with his own.
She stiffens but still meets his gaze, her eyes inscrutable. “And Mark Carter,” she agrees quietly.
“Have you spoken to him since, you know?”
“Very briefly.”
“And?”
She stands abruptly, tearing her hands from his grasp and moving to lean one hip against the sink. He’s not surprised, really, because when Carter’s not talking about things like chromatic aberration, or pair production, she can be devastatingly reticent.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Ah,” he replies, idly tracing circles on the table with his fingertip. He gazes at her reflectively; admiring the way the sunlight bathes her hair and cheekbones. “There’s a lot you don’t want to talk about.”
He silently acknowledges the fact that, yes, he is a hypocrite, but more than that, he’s in love, and somehow he thinks this absolves him. Their eyes clash and he has the good grace to look away when she pins him with a perceptive glare.
“I know what you’re trying to do.”
“Oh?” And yes, the nonchalance is so feigned.
She doesn’t smile exactly, but the corners of her mouth quirk upward slightly. “You’re trying to bait me so that I’ll confess everything to you in an emotional tirade.” She runs slender fingers through her hair, tugging uselessly on the ends. “You seem to have forgotten one thing, though.”
Raised eyebrows serve as his riposte.
“That only works on Daniel.”
He purses his lips, and then quietly, “Right.”
Sam expels an explosive breath and closes her eyes briefly. “Look, I’m not trying to be difficult. If I had known the whole goddamned world was going to find out about the Stargate,” and here she pauses to look at him accusatorily, “I would have flown out to San Diego immediately to brace Mark.”
Jack moves fluidly from the table to stand in front of her, closer than is probably comfortable for Carter, but she doesn’t back down. “I swear to God I had no idea they were planning to--”
“But I didn’t know,” she continues over him as if he hadn’t spoken, “ and I had to find out from watching the six o’clock fucking news and by then it was too late because there were reporters camped out in my front yard and I was ordered by the President of the United States to cooperate with the media and I was mic-ed and powdered within an inch of my life and Christ there wasn’t any time to book a flight, much less make a telephone call.”
“Shh,” Jack murmurs as Sam rests her forehead against his chest. He rubs her back soothingly.
“He wasn’t angry, really, when he called, more confused and hurt than anything. I just need to make this right, Jack.”
“You will, Sam,” he assures her quietly. “Why don’t you go take a shower and I’ll call the airport?”
Sam raises her head. “Actually, I was planning on driving.”
“You want to drive to San Diego?”
“It’ll take sixteen hours tops. Please?”
He sighs, thinking of his knees and back, and feeling incredibly old despite the nubile body pressed securely against his. She turns her imploring and achingly beautiful eyes to him and his resolve literally melts away.
“Well, then, why don’t you take a shower while I pack up the truck?”
What a sad, fucking sap he is.