commentary track: "Car Trouble"
gvambat requested commentaries on about half my fics. I'm doing Car Trouble first for no reason except that I wanted to.
[fic is SG-1, Jack/Sam, set pre-"Lost City". Commentary track spoils almost nothing, really. Read the fic first, probably.]
Title: "Car Trouble"
Fandom: Stargate: SG-1
Pairing: Jack/Sam
Rating: PG-13
Timeline/Spoilers: post-"Homecoming", pre "Lost City"
Notes: For qwirky in the sjficathon. Her requests (as always) at the end. Thanks to ladybeth and scrollgirl for being fantabulous betas. Apologies for posting this... 37 minutes early, but I need to get to bed and I'm impatient!
Words: 2312
Summary: Some things never change.
Worst. Summary. Ever.
Car Trouble
qwirky's requests were winter and cake, which were pretty easy to work with. I had this image of my head as Sam's car not starting and this being a metaphor for her relationship with Jack. Let's see what came of this idea...
Sam's car won't start. It's an ugly, gray winter day, the kind that promises snow but doesn't follow through. The snow already on the ground is brown with dirt and yellow with urine from the yappy suburban dogs that trot over her yard every day on daily walk to nowhere. She taps the accelerator anxiously, then pops the hood. There's nothing to be done. The snow refuses to fall and the car refuses to start.
When I wrote this, I was thinking of winters in New Jersey. The suburbia Sam lives in is the place I grew up.
"Got car trouble?" calls a gruff older man with two golden dogs in tow. She nods at him rhetorically, and he continues down the block, his long blue scarf waving goodbye to her. The starter fluid hasn't frozen, and she doesn't have time to give the engine a more thorough inspection. She takes out her cell, calls her mechanic, then Colonel O'Neill.
Sam knows something about engines, but I don't. And she's running late, so a cursory inspection is all she has time to do. I'm trying to evoke this scene with as much sensory detail as I can because it's rare that I get an image this powerful in my head and when I do, I want to share it.
"My car won't start," she tells him. "Literally." A long time ago, they had a code, and "my car won't start" meant "I want to have sex, preferably immediately," but she doesn't want to get into that now, just wants to get to the SGC and start looking at possible missions for next week, divvying up research for the techs. It's funny, she's lost count of how many months it's been. There was a time when she called every on-world morning, for weeks in a row, to tell him her car wouldn't start. She spent a lot of mornings in the passenger seat of his truck, not talking. She always worried that they'd be so late to work that General Hammond would start to wonder. But he never did. If they went a morning without stolen kisses on exposed snatches of skin, without her quickie, she felt itchy and irritable all day. Now it's been so long she's lost track of the months. Years.
Exposition girl! Because I'm not a Jack/Sam shipper, it's obviously hard for me to get into their heads and to know why Sam could possibly be interested in Jack. So pretty much, it's all about sex. Though of course it's not. And it's also a past-tense affair, because this here is not first time fic. Which is unusual for me.
"Car trouble?" the Colonel asks. He sounds suspicious.
"Really," she assures him. "Will you give me a ride?"
There's a long pause and she's afraid she's come too close to a taboo. But finally he says, "Sure. No problem."
The ride to Cheyenne Mountain is silent, as in her memories. Once, maybe about four months after they first slept together, she thought his hand fondling the gear shift was too much, that they had to pull over, that she had to pull her shirt off and give herself to him, the wanton, desperate girl she never was as a teenager. And they did. They pulled over and made love three feet from the road, hidden by overgrown brush and tall trees that threatened to topple any minute.
I have an obsession with stick shifts. They're so very phallic! I have very few ways to conceptualize Crush On Hot Older Guy (since most of mine are on Hot Older Women), and the stick-shift thing is one of them (ah, the male ministerperson. I'm so not going there), so I put it in Sam's head.
Reminding Jack of this would be emotional suicide.
Which doesn't mean Sam wouldn't do it.
"Here we are." the Colonel says. "Would you look at the meter? You owe me ten bucks." She laughs, and that makes him laugh too, easily. I had the darndest time getting this joke to parse right. They make their way down together, sliding their IDs a dozen times. At every checkpoint, Sam says, "My car broke down," and a dozen SFs tell her "That's too bad, ma'am. Anything I can do?" She feels they all must know, must think this is a ruse, and she's more cautious now than she was three years ago. There must be some clue in her expression, something in the way she speaks, some indication that she's not innocent.
Isn't this always the way? I know I mentioned in the header that this is during S7, but I need to establish it in the text of the story itself, too. My idea was that their affair started in S4, becasue it was easiest that way.
"I'm going to go find Daniel. I'll send him to the lab when I'm done with him. You can tell him all about your car." She looks up, but his expression is even. No indication that he remembers the hurried kiss he gave her in this elevator seconds before the door opened on level 28, the kiss that turned into an embrace that they pulled away from, guilty, startled, in front of Teal'c.
I love that Jack's noticing how careful/cautious she's being about the car and calls her on it. Also note the slashy subtext I just can't stay away from.
She can't concentrate on her work, and planets start to blur together in her mind, something that only happens when she's very tired or distracted. Usually each world they visit is as distinct in her memory as her lovers -- all three of them -- Jonas Hanson... Jack... and... CJ Cregg? Beats me. but this morning, the trees of one world are just trees, not unique indigenous flora.
This line belongs in a Firefly fic.
"Hey Sam." Daniel looks surprisingly happy, almost bouncing into her lab. His hands are full of charts. "I've got my half done," he tells her. "I got in early." This is a code, too. It means Daniel never left work last night. It's a good sign -- he's recovered his memory, and he seems to be recovering his bad habits too.
I adore bouncy!Daniel so much. Another theme (as I mentioned in the "Abominable" commentary) is giving all my characters my insomnia. But still. I also need to nod at the Sam/Daniel friendship or I won't feel right with myself about writing Jack/Sam...
"Sorry I'm late," she says, leafing through his papers absentmindedly. "My car wouldn't start."
"Jack said," Daniel says with a grin. "Quite a story, huh?"
What did Jack tell him? I'm amused by all the subtext here.
"Not really. I tried to start my car. The engine didn't ignite; I didn't have time to look at it more closely. Colonel O'Neill drove me to work."
"Yeah." Daniel seems to be trying to remember something. "I remember he used to do that a lot."
My S7!Daniel doesn't remember as much as he claims to. Sometimes this is a more serious problem than it is here.
"Oh." She feels like her father's caught her in a lie. Daddy issues, yay! Dunno why Daniel=Jacob, though. "I have a lot of car trouble." She hopes he won't press the issue, but there really isn't any point in hoping. This is Daniel Jackson, after all, and he's never been known to stop questioning when he's latched onto an intriguing puzzle.
Have we mentioned lately that I love Daniel?
"Same car?" he asks, and, with a sigh, Sam spins on her stool so she can talk about it.
Now she remembers why they stopped, the week after Daniel died. Diedascendedwhatever. That's how he talked about, when he did, which wasn't often. No need to visit the Unas again, now that Daniel's deadascendedwhatever. Poker's just not the same since Daniel diedascendedwhatever.
Language is a problem in any fic dealing with Daniel's death(ascensionwhatever). I'm not sure how Sam and Jack and Teal'c thought about him while he was gone, or talked about him... I figure it's within the realm of possibility that Jack would make a joke out of it.
Tiny meta nod to the fact that they couldn't do any Unas eps with MS gone...
She missed him through the week of impossible grief and endless phone calls to Daniel's contacts, missed the warmth of a body touching hers. When things calmed down somewhat -- when she felt almost normal enough to touch someone without flinching -- she called him. "My car broke down," she said, though she couldn't make the words sound flirty.
You'd imagine it would be hard for a dyed-in-the-wool Daniel fangirl to write Jack/Sam fic. Not so much. Sam misses Daniel and wants human touch to comfort her -- I think this is okay. Daniel's death matters to her.
"That's too bad," he said. "Why don't you call a cab?"
Jack, on the other hand, doesn't express his emotions that way. Daniel diedascendedwhatever, and he closed down.
"Sam?" She shakes her head; Daniel is looking concerned. "You were talking about your car. But that's okay; it's probably not that interesting, anyhow. Listen, I've got lots to talk to you about. This one planet," and he taps a large folder, "is really promising. Look it over, and let me know at lunch what you think of the chemical content of the air."
I hate the neccessity of technobabble. HATE IT.
"Sure, Daniel." She smiles as brightly as she can and hopes Daniel buys it.
Daniel is hard to deceive, which ultimately is why they stopped. Jack said no first, of course, but Sam agreed, after a month or two. It wouldn't be fair of them. With Daniel around, there was always the feeling that they were clever and careful to get away with it, that the lengths they had to go to were an indication of how much they loved each other, how far they'd go to be together. It was an elaborate game, intended mostly for Daniel's benefit -- he was closer to them than Hammond, and it would be harder to explain themselves to him if he found out. Hammond would lecture them, of course, but Daniel would look at them.
This made sense in my head but it was hard to put on paper, especially since it's not totally rational.
But with only Teal'c watching them... they tried, once, a few weeks after Daniel's deathascensionwhatever. Off-world, which was never possible with Daniel around. But Teal'c kept watch. If he knew, and of course he did, he never said anything. Because he didn't think it was important, or because he realized it was. It's really easy to marginalize Teal'c in SGfic of any variety. I tried my best here, but I could have done better. Sam never asked him, wouldn't dare. So they stayed in the tent and kissed as quietly as they could. She felt the familiar sensation of falling when he let his tongue through her lips, but when he started to unzip her, she felt her grief-guilt too heavily, and put her hand over his, whispered no.
Daniel complicates Jack/Sam as much as Jack complicates Daniel/Sam and Sam complicates Jack/Daniel. *loves on the OT3 like whoa*
With Jonas around, it was even worse, because deceiving him would have been too easy, and Jonas, bubbling and earnest and young, wouldn't have cared if he had known. It was remarkably easy to look at Jack and not want to kiss him, and Sam told herself that she was growing away from him, didn't need his love anymore.
I don't like Jonas, but Sam does. I'm not entirely sure why deception is neccessary at all, except that it sort of lies at the heart of the pairing.
But this was -- and is -- a lie. It's a persistent lie, and has worked its way into her heart, but she knows it's a lie. Her heart beats too quickly when she sees him in civilian clothes for this to be platonic love, and she's spent too much time this morning ignoring Daniel's data to think she's fallen out of love. His hand on a gearshift is still arousing. His bad jokes are still funny.
I told you I didn't know why Sam loves Jack, and this is as close as I can get.
That afternoon, he swings by her lab a little too casually. He does this often enough that she doesn't really take notice until he sits next to her, gives his stool a couple of good swivels, and says, "You think your car will be in the shop awhile?"
"Probably," she nods. "I'll give my mechanic a call in a few hours."
"Tomorrow I'll come by your place early," he says. "We can get breakfast."
They have a breakfast place, an ugly diner with huge red tables and ten-page menus, that seems to be made for clandestine Danishes. It's been a long time since they've been there -- not since the one night they spent together. They had two days of leave and Sam spent the first day working, but Jack came by with videos and a huge pizza, and they ate their slices in front of a movie about aliens set on destroying Earth, with bad science that made her cringe and bury her head against Jack's shoulder. Before the movie was half over, they kissed, and the kisses moved from lips to collarbone to breasts, and then they were making love, once again. First on her couch, then her bed, and then, late that night, in the kitchen. She thought they both knew this was their only chance at her house, and Jack wanted to christen every room. Two weeks later, Daniel died (ascendedwhatever).
The diner is, like Sam's neighborhood, lifted straight from my home in New Jersey. The way tense shifted in this story is pretty much classic Ari, if there is such a thing -- I love writing stories that are about a particular moment (in this case, these two days that Sam's car is in the shop), but with that moment put into context. The context here is a two-year-long affair; it ended because of Daniel and is starting up again because Daniel descended... but this story is, I hope, about the context that makes the love affair make sense in the first place.
The breakfast place has added an entire page of omelettes to the menu and started serving lunch all day, but their booth hasn't changed at all -- there is still a tiny hole in the seat on her side where foam pokes through, still a scratch on the table that reminds her of the point of origin on Chulak. The waitress who waits impatiently for them to make up their minds is of the same mold as the waitress who grumpily gave them endless refills that last day of their last leave before Kelowna.
Details. I love details.
Sam wants coffee and fruit; Jack orders his coffee then stares at the menu for a good minute (possibly intentionally to annoy Anita the waitress) before asking for chocolate cake. "Make it a big piece," he says. "I'm hungry."
I love Jack because he's normal enough most of the time that when he does completely whackball things, it's funny.
"Cake isn't breakfast food," Sam tells him, but he just shrugs. They sit in silence, sipping bad coffee and staring at the table, then Sam tries again. "I'm sorry about my car," she says. "I'm putting you out of your way."
"Not a problem," he says, and she can feel the sincerity in his voice.
"Maybe we should talk," she suggests, but of course they won't.
I'm told this is why non-crazy Jack/Sam shippers love the pairing. :)
Sex with Jack is complicated and stupid, Sam reminds herself, because she desperately wants to crawl across the table and kiss him, as desperate as the first kiss, just weeks after they met, Yes, I do mean "Broca Divide" as needy as the first kiss before they first made love, a surprising dip in self-control for both of them on a perfectly ordinary drive to her house when her car really had, as now, been out of commission.
Connecting the past and the present. The chemistry between them is a constant thing.
"This is really good coffee," Jack says. "Think we could get them to make this on base?"
I don't believe there's such a thing as bad coffee.
Sam doesn't even know what to say to that. "You're kidding, right?"
"Would I joke about something as serious as coffee?"
Sam doesn't have a therapist, of course. If she had an Air Force appointed shrink, she couldn't tell him about Jack, and if she had a civilian, she couldn't tell her about the SGC. Either way, it would be pointless. But she sometimes imagines she has a therapist named Martha. When Martha asks what it's like to make love with her commanding officer, Sam tells her, "Sex with Jack is... complicated."
The fantasy never gets any further than that. A real therapist would probably ask her to elaborate, but Martha never presses, so Sam doesn't know whether she approves of their relationship or not.
I was really, really attached to Sam having this conversation with her therapist (who has the same name as my mom's one-time shrink), but realized that she couldn't. I have imaginary conversations with non-existant therapists too.
Jack offers her a bite of cake. "Chocolate," he says, waving the fork in front of her nose. "It's good."
She takes the cake of his fork -- bait fishing as metaphor! -- and he's right, of course. It's delicious, and she wishes she'd had more to eat than a bowl of fruit. When Anita comes to refill their coffee, Sam tells her she'll have a piece of cake, too.
"I'll take another," Jack adds. "Extra icing." He looks away from Anita to grin at Sam.
Eating cake with Jack should be uncomfortable, especially since all she's been thinking about for the past two days is having sex with him and why she stopped, but Jack's devotion to his cake is remarkably calming. Another thing I love about Jack, and so imagine Sam would too. So she focuses on eating her cake and drinking her coffee, sipping around the chip in her mug. "Hey, you've got something on your..." Jack gestures towards the bottom of his own face, but before she can wipe it off with her oversized napkin, his finger is under her chin. He recovers a piece of icing and slips it into her mouth, letting his finger stay there just a fraction of a second too long.
"More coffee?" Anita asks, clearly bored.
"No thanks," Jack says. "The bill."
Before Sam can ask him why they're leaving, he has his cell phone out. "Hey, sir. O'Neill here." He's called Hammond, then. "Postpone the briefing, willya? Carter and I will be maybe an hour -- make that an hour and a half." Another pause. "Yeah." He winks at Sam. "My truck won't start."
I had the darndest time getting this ending to parse. There was a long digression about how Sam had programmed Jack's cell phone and Sam was #1 and Daniel was #2 and it was all extremely complicated and pointless. I had this really great image of them using the codeword again and it being really clear that they were going to have sex but it was difficult to translate onto paper, which is the problem with having really detailed mental images and not wanting to give up on them.
Still in all, I am really pleased with how it turned out.
[fic is SG-1, Jack/Sam, set pre-"Lost City". Commentary track spoils almost nothing, really. Read the fic first, probably.]
Title: "Car Trouble"
Fandom: Stargate: SG-1
Pairing: Jack/Sam
Rating: PG-13
Timeline/Spoilers: post-"Homecoming", pre "Lost City"
Notes: For qwirky in the sjficathon. Her requests (as always) at the end. Thanks to ladybeth and scrollgirl for being fantabulous betas. Apologies for posting this... 37 minutes early, but I need to get to bed and I'm impatient!
Words: 2312
Summary: Some things never change.
Worst. Summary. Ever.
Car Trouble
qwirky's requests were winter and cake, which were pretty easy to work with. I had this image of my head as Sam's car not starting and this being a metaphor for her relationship with Jack. Let's see what came of this idea...
Sam's car won't start. It's an ugly, gray winter day, the kind that promises snow but doesn't follow through. The snow already on the ground is brown with dirt and yellow with urine from the yappy suburban dogs that trot over her yard every day on daily walk to nowhere. She taps the accelerator anxiously, then pops the hood. There's nothing to be done. The snow refuses to fall and the car refuses to start.
When I wrote this, I was thinking of winters in New Jersey. The suburbia Sam lives in is the place I grew up.
"Got car trouble?" calls a gruff older man with two golden dogs in tow. She nods at him rhetorically, and he continues down the block, his long blue scarf waving goodbye to her. The starter fluid hasn't frozen, and she doesn't have time to give the engine a more thorough inspection. She takes out her cell, calls her mechanic, then Colonel O'Neill.
Sam knows something about engines, but I don't. And she's running late, so a cursory inspection is all she has time to do. I'm trying to evoke this scene with as much sensory detail as I can because it's rare that I get an image this powerful in my head and when I do, I want to share it.
"My car won't start," she tells him. "Literally." A long time ago, they had a code, and "my car won't start" meant "I want to have sex, preferably immediately," but she doesn't want to get into that now, just wants to get to the SGC and start looking at possible missions for next week, divvying up research for the techs. It's funny, she's lost count of how many months it's been. There was a time when she called every on-world morning, for weeks in a row, to tell him her car wouldn't start. She spent a lot of mornings in the passenger seat of his truck, not talking. She always worried that they'd be so late to work that General Hammond would start to wonder. But he never did. If they went a morning without stolen kisses on exposed snatches of skin, without her quickie, she felt itchy and irritable all day. Now it's been so long she's lost track of the months. Years.
Exposition girl! Because I'm not a Jack/Sam shipper, it's obviously hard for me to get into their heads and to know why Sam could possibly be interested in Jack. So pretty much, it's all about sex. Though of course it's not. And it's also a past-tense affair, because this here is not first time fic. Which is unusual for me.
"Car trouble?" the Colonel asks. He sounds suspicious.
"Really," she assures him. "Will you give me a ride?"
There's a long pause and she's afraid she's come too close to a taboo. But finally he says, "Sure. No problem."
The ride to Cheyenne Mountain is silent, as in her memories. Once, maybe about four months after they first slept together, she thought his hand fondling the gear shift was too much, that they had to pull over, that she had to pull her shirt off and give herself to him, the wanton, desperate girl she never was as a teenager. And they did. They pulled over and made love three feet from the road, hidden by overgrown brush and tall trees that threatened to topple any minute.
I have an obsession with stick shifts. They're so very phallic! I have very few ways to conceptualize Crush On Hot Older Guy (since most of mine are on Hot Older Women), and the stick-shift thing is one of them (ah, the male ministerperson. I'm so not going there), so I put it in Sam's head.
Reminding Jack of this would be emotional suicide.
Which doesn't mean Sam wouldn't do it.
"Here we are." the Colonel says. "Would you look at the meter? You owe me ten bucks." She laughs, and that makes him laugh too, easily. I had the darndest time getting this joke to parse right. They make their way down together, sliding their IDs a dozen times. At every checkpoint, Sam says, "My car broke down," and a dozen SFs tell her "That's too bad, ma'am. Anything I can do?" She feels they all must know, must think this is a ruse, and she's more cautious now than she was three years ago. There must be some clue in her expression, something in the way she speaks, some indication that she's not innocent.
Isn't this always the way? I know I mentioned in the header that this is during S7, but I need to establish it in the text of the story itself, too. My idea was that their affair started in S4, becasue it was easiest that way.
"I'm going to go find Daniel. I'll send him to the lab when I'm done with him. You can tell him all about your car." She looks up, but his expression is even. No indication that he remembers the hurried kiss he gave her in this elevator seconds before the door opened on level 28, the kiss that turned into an embrace that they pulled away from, guilty, startled, in front of Teal'c.
I love that Jack's noticing how careful/cautious she's being about the car and calls her on it. Also note the slashy subtext I just can't stay away from.
She can't concentrate on her work, and planets start to blur together in her mind, something that only happens when she's very tired or distracted. Usually each world they visit is as distinct in her memory as her lovers -- all three of them -- Jonas Hanson... Jack... and... CJ Cregg? Beats me. but this morning, the trees of one world are just trees, not unique indigenous flora.
This line belongs in a Firefly fic.
"Hey Sam." Daniel looks surprisingly happy, almost bouncing into her lab. His hands are full of charts. "I've got my half done," he tells her. "I got in early." This is a code, too. It means Daniel never left work last night. It's a good sign -- he's recovered his memory, and he seems to be recovering his bad habits too.
I adore bouncy!Daniel so much. Another theme (as I mentioned in the "Abominable" commentary) is giving all my characters my insomnia. But still. I also need to nod at the Sam/Daniel friendship or I won't feel right with myself about writing Jack/Sam...
"Sorry I'm late," she says, leafing through his papers absentmindedly. "My car wouldn't start."
"Jack said," Daniel says with a grin. "Quite a story, huh?"
What did Jack tell him? I'm amused by all the subtext here.
"Not really. I tried to start my car. The engine didn't ignite; I didn't have time to look at it more closely. Colonel O'Neill drove me to work."
"Yeah." Daniel seems to be trying to remember something. "I remember he used to do that a lot."
My S7!Daniel doesn't remember as much as he claims to. Sometimes this is a more serious problem than it is here.
"Oh." She feels like her father's caught her in a lie. Daddy issues, yay! Dunno why Daniel=Jacob, though. "I have a lot of car trouble." She hopes he won't press the issue, but there really isn't any point in hoping. This is Daniel Jackson, after all, and he's never been known to stop questioning when he's latched onto an intriguing puzzle.
Have we mentioned lately that I love Daniel?
"Same car?" he asks, and, with a sigh, Sam spins on her stool so she can talk about it.
Now she remembers why they stopped, the week after Daniel died. Diedascendedwhatever. That's how he talked about, when he did, which wasn't often. No need to visit the Unas again, now that Daniel's deadascendedwhatever. Poker's just not the same since Daniel diedascendedwhatever.
Language is a problem in any fic dealing with Daniel's death(ascensionwhatever). I'm not sure how Sam and Jack and Teal'c thought about him while he was gone, or talked about him... I figure it's within the realm of possibility that Jack would make a joke out of it.
Tiny meta nod to the fact that they couldn't do any Unas eps with MS gone...
She missed him through the week of impossible grief and endless phone calls to Daniel's contacts, missed the warmth of a body touching hers. When things calmed down somewhat -- when she felt almost normal enough to touch someone without flinching -- she called him. "My car broke down," she said, though she couldn't make the words sound flirty.
You'd imagine it would be hard for a dyed-in-the-wool Daniel fangirl to write Jack/Sam fic. Not so much. Sam misses Daniel and wants human touch to comfort her -- I think this is okay. Daniel's death matters to her.
"That's too bad," he said. "Why don't you call a cab?"
Jack, on the other hand, doesn't express his emotions that way. Daniel diedascendedwhatever, and he closed down.
"Sam?" She shakes her head; Daniel is looking concerned. "You were talking about your car. But that's okay; it's probably not that interesting, anyhow. Listen, I've got lots to talk to you about. This one planet," and he taps a large folder, "is really promising. Look it over, and let me know at lunch what you think of the chemical content of the air."
I hate the neccessity of technobabble. HATE IT.
"Sure, Daniel." She smiles as brightly as she can and hopes Daniel buys it.
Daniel is hard to deceive, which ultimately is why they stopped. Jack said no first, of course, but Sam agreed, after a month or two. It wouldn't be fair of them. With Daniel around, there was always the feeling that they were clever and careful to get away with it, that the lengths they had to go to were an indication of how much they loved each other, how far they'd go to be together. It was an elaborate game, intended mostly for Daniel's benefit -- he was closer to them than Hammond, and it would be harder to explain themselves to him if he found out. Hammond would lecture them, of course, but Daniel would look at them.
This made sense in my head but it was hard to put on paper, especially since it's not totally rational.
But with only Teal'c watching them... they tried, once, a few weeks after Daniel's deathascensionwhatever. Off-world, which was never possible with Daniel around. But Teal'c kept watch. If he knew, and of course he did, he never said anything. Because he didn't think it was important, or because he realized it was. It's really easy to marginalize Teal'c in SGfic of any variety. I tried my best here, but I could have done better. Sam never asked him, wouldn't dare. So they stayed in the tent and kissed as quietly as they could. She felt the familiar sensation of falling when he let his tongue through her lips, but when he started to unzip her, she felt her grief-guilt too heavily, and put her hand over his, whispered no.
Daniel complicates Jack/Sam as much as Jack complicates Daniel/Sam and Sam complicates Jack/Daniel. *loves on the OT3 like whoa*
With Jonas around, it was even worse, because deceiving him would have been too easy, and Jonas, bubbling and earnest and young, wouldn't have cared if he had known. It was remarkably easy to look at Jack and not want to kiss him, and Sam told herself that she was growing away from him, didn't need his love anymore.
I don't like Jonas, but Sam does. I'm not entirely sure why deception is neccessary at all, except that it sort of lies at the heart of the pairing.
But this was -- and is -- a lie. It's a persistent lie, and has worked its way into her heart, but she knows it's a lie. Her heart beats too quickly when she sees him in civilian clothes for this to be platonic love, and she's spent too much time this morning ignoring Daniel's data to think she's fallen out of love. His hand on a gearshift is still arousing. His bad jokes are still funny.
I told you I didn't know why Sam loves Jack, and this is as close as I can get.
That afternoon, he swings by her lab a little too casually. He does this often enough that she doesn't really take notice until he sits next to her, gives his stool a couple of good swivels, and says, "You think your car will be in the shop awhile?"
"Probably," she nods. "I'll give my mechanic a call in a few hours."
"Tomorrow I'll come by your place early," he says. "We can get breakfast."
They have a breakfast place, an ugly diner with huge red tables and ten-page menus, that seems to be made for clandestine Danishes. It's been a long time since they've been there -- not since the one night they spent together. They had two days of leave and Sam spent the first day working, but Jack came by with videos and a huge pizza, and they ate their slices in front of a movie about aliens set on destroying Earth, with bad science that made her cringe and bury her head against Jack's shoulder. Before the movie was half over, they kissed, and the kisses moved from lips to collarbone to breasts, and then they were making love, once again. First on her couch, then her bed, and then, late that night, in the kitchen. She thought they both knew this was their only chance at her house, and Jack wanted to christen every room. Two weeks later, Daniel died (ascendedwhatever).
The diner is, like Sam's neighborhood, lifted straight from my home in New Jersey. The way tense shifted in this story is pretty much classic Ari, if there is such a thing -- I love writing stories that are about a particular moment (in this case, these two days that Sam's car is in the shop), but with that moment put into context. The context here is a two-year-long affair; it ended because of Daniel and is starting up again because Daniel descended... but this story is, I hope, about the context that makes the love affair make sense in the first place.
The breakfast place has added an entire page of omelettes to the menu and started serving lunch all day, but their booth hasn't changed at all -- there is still a tiny hole in the seat on her side where foam pokes through, still a scratch on the table that reminds her of the point of origin on Chulak. The waitress who waits impatiently for them to make up their minds is of the same mold as the waitress who grumpily gave them endless refills that last day of their last leave before Kelowna.
Details. I love details.
Sam wants coffee and fruit; Jack orders his coffee then stares at the menu for a good minute (possibly intentionally to annoy Anita the waitress) before asking for chocolate cake. "Make it a big piece," he says. "I'm hungry."
I love Jack because he's normal enough most of the time that when he does completely whackball things, it's funny.
"Cake isn't breakfast food," Sam tells him, but he just shrugs. They sit in silence, sipping bad coffee and staring at the table, then Sam tries again. "I'm sorry about my car," she says. "I'm putting you out of your way."
"Not a problem," he says, and she can feel the sincerity in his voice.
"Maybe we should talk," she suggests, but of course they won't.
I'm told this is why non-crazy Jack/Sam shippers love the pairing. :)
Sex with Jack is complicated and stupid, Sam reminds herself, because she desperately wants to crawl across the table and kiss him, as desperate as the first kiss, just weeks after they met, Yes, I do mean "Broca Divide" as needy as the first kiss before they first made love, a surprising dip in self-control for both of them on a perfectly ordinary drive to her house when her car really had, as now, been out of commission.
Connecting the past and the present. The chemistry between them is a constant thing.
"This is really good coffee," Jack says. "Think we could get them to make this on base?"
I don't believe there's such a thing as bad coffee.
Sam doesn't even know what to say to that. "You're kidding, right?"
"Would I joke about something as serious as coffee?"
Sam doesn't have a therapist, of course. If she had an Air Force appointed shrink, she couldn't tell him about Jack, and if she had a civilian, she couldn't tell her about the SGC. Either way, it would be pointless. But she sometimes imagines she has a therapist named Martha. When Martha asks what it's like to make love with her commanding officer, Sam tells her, "Sex with Jack is... complicated."
The fantasy never gets any further than that. A real therapist would probably ask her to elaborate, but Martha never presses, so Sam doesn't know whether she approves of their relationship or not.
I was really, really attached to Sam having this conversation with her therapist (who has the same name as my mom's one-time shrink), but realized that she couldn't. I have imaginary conversations with non-existant therapists too.
Jack offers her a bite of cake. "Chocolate," he says, waving the fork in front of her nose. "It's good."
She takes the cake of his fork -- bait fishing as metaphor! -- and he's right, of course. It's delicious, and she wishes she'd had more to eat than a bowl of fruit. When Anita comes to refill their coffee, Sam tells her she'll have a piece of cake, too.
"I'll take another," Jack adds. "Extra icing." He looks away from Anita to grin at Sam.
Eating cake with Jack should be uncomfortable, especially since all she's been thinking about for the past two days is having sex with him and why she stopped, but Jack's devotion to his cake is remarkably calming. Another thing I love about Jack, and so imagine Sam would too. So she focuses on eating her cake and drinking her coffee, sipping around the chip in her mug. "Hey, you've got something on your..." Jack gestures towards the bottom of his own face, but before she can wipe it off with her oversized napkin, his finger is under her chin. He recovers a piece of icing and slips it into her mouth, letting his finger stay there just a fraction of a second too long.
"More coffee?" Anita asks, clearly bored.
"No thanks," Jack says. "The bill."
Before Sam can ask him why they're leaving, he has his cell phone out. "Hey, sir. O'Neill here." He's called Hammond, then. "Postpone the briefing, willya? Carter and I will be maybe an hour -- make that an hour and a half." Another pause. "Yeah." He winks at Sam. "My truck won't start."
I had the darndest time getting this ending to parse. There was a long digression about how Sam had programmed Jack's cell phone and Sam was #1 and Daniel was #2 and it was all extremely complicated and pointless. I had this really great image of them using the codeword again and it being really clear that they were going to have sex but it was difficult to translate onto paper, which is the problem with having really detailed mental images and not wanting to give up on them.
Still in all, I am really pleased with how it turned out.