surprise! fic!
HOW DID THIS EVEN HAPPEN. I blame you, insomnia. And you, Netflix instant-watch. I should be writing a million other things right now, but I finished this instead. Maybe now I can actually sleep. GOODDAY TO YOU ALL.
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fandom: stargate sg-1
characters: sam carter, jack o’neill (sam/jack)
title: black holes and revelations
rating: teen
words: 3,300 (ish...)
disclaimer: I do not own these characters. like, not even a little bit. D: I don't even have a damn stargate, how lame is that.
notes: this thing is just a slapdash series of drabbles that can all be strung together as deleted/alternate/post-ep scenes between Grace and New Order. this is Kate’s writing on Sam Carter-angst. glorious, heart-breaking Sam Carter angst. title nicked from Muse, ofc.
summary: It’s late and dark and as far as she’s concerned, the world has stopped for them (they’d done the Earth a few favors, it's time one was returned).
happiness hit her
like a bullet in the back
-florence + the machine
∞
When Sam Carter was a little girl, there was an old oak tree in the backyard that her mother instructed her explicitly not to climb.
It’s too old, Samantha. It’s rotting from the inside out. It’s unstable and dangerous - you could fall.
She climbed it anyway, because something deep inside of her ached to see the stars through the branches, and in the emergency room with a broken elbow her dad looked at her with your-mother-told-you-so eyes.
Years later, Sam realizes maybe that’s what love is like.
∞
“Carter.”
It’s Jack’s voice. The one she wants to make tangible, to wrap around herself as armor. It’s his hand on her shoulder, the one she wants to hold, to kiss, to press to her cheek and to her chest and to lay her fingertips against to feel that firm, steady, solid, predictable pulse that means Jack O’Neill is alive and breathing, that means the world is right-side up and that everything will be all right eventually, everything will be okay.
“Sir?” She asks instead. She’s surprised by how exhausted she sounds even now, days after she's been cleared for duty.
He looks at her in that funny way he sometimes looks at her (the one that means there’s something they both want to say, something they both want to do; they both know neither of them ever will).
“It’s good to have you home.”
After he leaves she locks the lab door and crumples against the wall. She lets the sobs rack a tornado-like fit through her chest and she can’t breathe, she can’t think, because it wasn’t until she got home that she realized the tragedy of knowing finally what you want, everything that you want, but like those stars from her childhood that everything is too numerous, too elusive, too expansive to grasp.
∞
There were things that got her through the day: manuals, equations, playing connect-the-dots and after one problem was solved, moving onto the next (always, unendingly, the next problem).
Jack’s voice again. The way she knew he’d always catch her eye during the morning’s briefing.
There were years of small touches, desperate, fleeting touches masked in all the nonchalance and normalcy they could muster. A hand on the shoulder. Jack grabbing Sam’s arm to get her attention even though she was already paying attention (Sam resisting the urge to brush her fingers against his as he pulled away too soon).
These things didn’t make her heart race, didn’t leave her head spinning. Those were clichés for people who’d never been in the sort of love that aches, that rings hollow and impossible and gushing and unfulfilled in the chest, rushes like a river when the sun sets and there’s tossing and turning in the moonlight, in the empty bed.
And yet she doesn’t even know if he’s really what she wants and love seems like such a strong word, because every moment that her hands aren’t busy fixing, learning, figuring, is a waste of time. Her mind is a constant flowing stream. There’s no off-switch here. She’d burn that never-ending midnight oil forever if they’d let her. They save the world time and time again, this team of hers. She’d never give that up, none of them would. This is more than wonder. This is responsibility.
She yearns for knowledge like some people yearn for another drug fix and she treats puzzles and telescopes like old, old friends. She generally feels more comfortable around celestial bodies than she does around human ones, and that deep, shuddering, all-encompassing silence is a language they share, a secret she’s allowed to keep and to understand.
She needs that sense of awe to feel whole, to feel accomplished, to feel worth something. And she has it.
But she still wants more.
She wants something human, after all. She wants something warm and solid and real, something to ground her. She wants to make her father happy. She wants him not to worry.
She finds it in Pete (kind of). Except that his aren’t the arms she wants holding her, his isn’t the voice her heart shamelessly responds to. And there's something else. He doesn't understand her. She feels like she has to push that yearning part of her away when she's with him, like she has to be someone else (and that's not necessarily a bad thing, she thinks, is it?).
It kills her because he’s a good man and she’s going to try to make this work, she wants to make it work so badly she can taste it, so badly that she can almost pretend she’ll get over him someday, can almost pretend she's that person instead of this one. For now, she decides, she’ll give Pete what she can. And someday, maybe, when it doesn’t belong to someone else, she’ll give him her whole heart, too.
∞
The shindig is nice. Friends and co-workers linger and chatter in the doorways of her home and lean against the countertops and Sam watches as if from a balcony (she’s sitting on a stool beside the porch door but it feels distant, so distant) and she smiles, feeling a bizarre mix of contentment and melancholy as she pulls slowly at her single bottle of beer.
By midnight everyone has filed out and touched her hand, hugged her, kissed her cheek, told her they were glad she was home (there’s that word again) and safe.
By twelve thirty it’s she and Jack alone in the kitchen and he’s wandering around with a plastic bag collecting beer bottles and paper plates strewn with cake crumbs, cracking jokes that aren’t really funny but the she smile she gives in involuntary response is the only honest thing she’s felt in days. It hurts, a little, at the corners of her mouth.
“-know what they say, Carter. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Or…longer. Blonder. Whatever it is they say.”
She shakes her head, half-amused. “That is what they say, sir.” A pause. “Listen, you don’t need to stick around. I can clean this up in the morning.” She begins to stand up.
His hands are there suddenly, pressing her back into the stool with surprising insistence. “Sit. Rest. You need it. I don’t. Garbage?”
She decides not to argue (she smiles again - it hurts a little less, now that he’s assured her he’s not going anywhere). “In the garage, sir.”
He disappears for a little while and when he comes back it’s quiet for awhile again, the sort of quiet that means it’s after one AM and the world is asleep but you’re awake and maybe, because you’re lonely and a little desperate and having some sort of bizarre identity crisis and you’re feeling even more acutely than usual the unfairness of having your touchstone be the one person in the world you can never actually have, you chance to reach out and touch your CO’s hand as it moves to snatch the empty bottle in front of you that it missed the first time around.
“Jack,” Sam says quietly, with no intention of following it up with a question, or a statement, or anything else. Just his name. As if tonight, things are different. As if right now, nothing counts.
“Sam?” He responds dutifully, adjusting to match her tone, but his face is creased with the tiniest lines of confusion and concern. It makes Sam smile a little wider and she feels like she’s not really there, like she’s not really the one who reaches her hand up to brush the backs of her fingers against the tensed lines at his forehead.
“Hey,” he says, and takes hold of her wrist. He’s only half-concerned that this is venturing into familiar inappropriate territory; mostly he’s worried about that faraway look in her eye. “You’re not up there anymore, you know. You came home. To the people who care about you, want to see you happy.” He shouldn’t reach to brush his knuckle against the corner of her mouth, but he does, and any reflexive regret he feels dissipates as her lips quirk upward in immediate response to his touch. Like a charm, like a key clicking into place. His heart flutters hopelessly in his chest and he concentrates with all the energy he can muster on thinking about anything besides how in love with this woman he is.
It’s late and dark and as far as she’s concerned, the world has stopped for them (they’d done the Earth a few favors, it's time one was returned). Sam’s in the right headspace to accommodate uncharacteristic recklessness. It’s not that she doesn’t feel like she can take accountability for her actions, it’s that for once in her life she feels like she can deal with it all later. Right now, she wants (needs) to let impulse guide her. Just to see if she can. Where it leads. If it will. If she can’t rely on the honesty that comes out of doing the first thing that comes into her head, if she doesn’t try it to see what it feels like, she’s not sure she’ll ever overcome the fear and earn anything really worthwhile.
So she’s very aware of herself when she suddenly curls one finger into the waist of his jeans and the other hand finds itself tugging against his t-shirt for leverage so that she can lean up and kiss his lips.
The stool scrapes against the tile in the silent kitchen as she pulls herself in deeper closer against him and it’s only been a moment but he’s not stopping her, he’s not stopping he’s just pulling fingers through her hair and kissing her back so she’s caught slightly off-guard. Her feelings begin to pile up and then start whirling out of reach, sparking and spitting like some sort of supernova explosion sped up on film. He’s not putting out the fire, he’s fanning it.
She pulls her mouth away for a hot second when it’s too much, mutters a breathy “fuck”, and then her lips are right back against his, working and pulling and their tongues are slipping warm and wet against each other and she’s wanted this too much and too long.
She kisses him like something is trying to crawl out of her, like she might be able to find herself (finally) somewhere in the dark depths of him. She kisses him like she means it, like she wants him to wrap her up in his arms and skin and scent and let her hide there, safe, protected, until the world stops spinning out of her control, until she feels like a grown woman and not some frightened little girl, until his calm and his strength and solidity rubs off on her and she can sling it across her neck like a talisman.
She kisses him like she respects him. Like she’s been in love with him for so long she can’t even remember what not loving him feels like. She kisses him like she owes her life to him. Like she’d follow him to the end of the earth and back forever if it meant they’d be together and she’d weave this notion, her following him following her, into a pattern so infinite it’d stretch across the universe a thousand times over.
She opens her mouth again and pulls him in deeper and for that moment she forgets everything, all the problems to be solved and the codes to break, all the circuits that need rerouting in her mind. He lets her, realizes maybe this is kind of about him but not really about him at all, and he’s kissing her back with a little passion and a lot of care, cupping the back of her head gently, ready to catch her when she falls. Ready to guide her head to rest against him when that swift sob cracks inevitably in the back of her throat, and it does, not long after.
“Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she’s whispering against him now, forehead against his shoulder, frantic, unraveling and unraveling and unraveling, a spool of yarn all unwound and pooling at his feet. Time’s speeding up for her now, to make up for its stillness earlier. “I feel crazy. I feel so crazy right now, sir.”
“Sam,” he says, and her name feels foreign and familiar and wonderful and strange against his tongue just like it always does. “Shh. Just…stop. Stop. Breathe.”
She’s always been good at this part. Following his instructions.
She stops. She breathes.
He pulls her down with him onto the mattress in her own dark bedroom. His arms wrap around her, warmer, more comforting than anything else she could imagine.
“Sleep,” he instructs now.
Her fingers curl and tug gently at the collar of his t-shirt and she’s sniffling, tears still wet against her cheeks. But she nods and closes her eyes. She can smell him (wood smoke, hops, aftershave, something else she can’t name) and she can feel the rise and fall of his chest and his fingers tumbling down her spine - she’s not thinking about the stars anymore; she thinks maybe, just maybe, in the morning she’ll wake up to realize that this right here is all she’ll ever need to be happy.
∞
She’s had this dream, lately, the one where she’s lying on the beach of some planet they’d visited years ago, and the moonlight is golden like the sun, there are dust motes floating all around but they’re soft and cool like snowflakes that never touch the ground and her hands are palm to palm with Jack’s, their fingers interlocking against the white sand.
She can feel his mouth hot against the curve of her inner thigh, charting a course straight to the center of her, telling her without speaking that she’s worth something; he won’t let her go, he won’t let her fall. He’s going to take her all apart slowly but he’ll keep her safe (she needs to be taken apart for once, to be stripped down by someone who won’t use it against her, she needs it so badly).
She’s saying his name over and over, mindless, and she can’t tell whether she’s going to come or say I love you right out loud (both on the tip of her tongue) - but then everything goes black. In the blink of an eye she’s alone, and there’s ice for miles - there’s this sadness, this loneliness, that wells and crashes over her like a tidal wave on repeat and it’s too much, it’s too much for one human being to feel, she just knows it, and she’s not going to be able to contain it much longer. It’s going to spill out over the rim and pour and pour and pour until she’s empty, until there will be nothing left of her for anyone else to find.
∞
“I’ll make it easy for you. I resign.”
And just like that, she’s in charge. The full weight of whatever’s about to transpire is hanging between them heavy and electric, and they’re sharing a look that’s going to falter at any second and break this rare spell between them. They don’t have much time.
But she barely misses a beat. “Kiss me,” she says, and despite the frantic trembling in her voice it certainly sounds like an order.
The lights are flickering, strobe-like, bright and dark and bright and dark and it feels like the end of one world and the beginning of a new one inside this ship, with its ubiquitous hum that they can feel vibrate at the soles of their feet and deep inside their bones and the lost forgotten city hiding somewhere outside its walls.
He’s looking at her like she’s the only thing in the world he’s ever seen with his own two eyes (he’s still her Jack, he hasn’t faded yet).
He meets her halfway.
The world is changing without her permission and she’s not going to be able to face it without a little of his strength.
∞
It seems like it’s been weeks, maybe months, since she’s been trapped inside this dream (nightmare). He keeps changing the rules; just when she figures it all out he resets the game and it starts, torturously, all over again.
He wants to see her break. She’ll die first (she wants to believe out of defiance, not surrender).
The sharp, murky scent of lakewater. The tinge of moss-hugged earth, breezes whispering through pines. Clear blue skies for miles and miles.
The chair rocks back and forth, back and forth gently against the creaking porch. She feels the air around her still, calm, and warm. The bright wind through her hair.
Her eyes snap open when she feels him kneel beside her.
“Hey. Almost time for dinner. You dozed off a little there.”
His scent is the same, the touch of his fingers the same. His brown eyes, his smile. She reaches out to touch his face, hazy inklings of the reality lingering beyond this tissue paper-thin hallucination working their way once again to the surface of her mind, questions like how, sir, we left you in Antarctica, this isn’t possible, why are we here, how did we get here, why, why, and how--
--but it’s then that she notices the ring on her finger, and then the matching one on his, and her mind starts to spin and tumble and she can’t breathe. She thinks this might be relief, this feeling that’s slowly spreading warm and anxious and breathless from limb to limb. He looks at her a little funny and says, in that wonderfully familiar voice dripping with deadpan humor, “You look a little woozy, oh darling wife-of-mine.”
He hooks his hands around her hips in a way that’s obviously comfortable, painfully intimate, and she kisses him right then and there, sliding her arms around his neck.
“Jack.”
If this isn’t real, she isn’t sure that she wants to know.
∞
It’s a little ridiculous that just the knowledge that Jack O’Neill exists in the world makes Sam Carter so goddamn happy.
She doesn’t need to be with him, or even to see him (although that she can do both of these things is really nice). She just needs to know he’s out there somewhere, somewhere in his corner of the universe, spreading that unique Jack-ness around like birdseed or fishing tackle and being a tall solitary oak in a world of saplings.
He's taught her to breathe when she didn't even realize she'd been holding her breath. And she wants forever to thank him for that.
When she looks up at him from that forest floor and she knows it's all okay, that Fifth's gone and Jack and Teal'c and Daniel are all safe, that's when she thinks she knows.
She knows for sure later when she's up on that podium (and she thinks she'll forever link this promotion to a profound sense of equilibrium, and that equilibrium will forever be linked to the color of Jack's eyes). She knows two things for sure in that moment: she's in love with him (completely, helplessly, irrevocably) and even though the worst might be yet to come, everything's all right, everything is just fine. Everything will be okay.
It’s not until later, much later, years later when Pete's a distant memory and she’s dividing her time between the wide open universe, ancient mythical cities and Jack’s arms, learning more things about life and what it means to be human than she’d ever thought a living person could, that she realizes something else, too.
It was never about the things she thought it was about. None of it, all that time, all that want, all that fear and uncertainty and all the so-called rules. It wasn’t even about love, not really. The love was already there whether they wanted it or not. It was about finding the one person who sees you and knows you better than you ever knew yourself. Knows you’d never be satisfied with anything less than everything you can reach and just a little beyond that. It's about realizing that it's okay, that you can have both, that you don't have to choose because someone understands and won't let you choose. Someone who fosters all of it, all of you, holds it close, reminds you that it’s precious and then sends you out to chase it with kiss and a promise that they’ll be here, right here, waiting until you come home.
--
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fandom: stargate sg-1
characters: sam carter, jack o’neill (sam/jack)
title: black holes and revelations
rating: teen
words: 3,300 (ish...)
disclaimer: I do not own these characters. like, not even a little bit. D: I don't even have a damn stargate, how lame is that.
notes: this thing is just a slapdash series of drabbles that can all be strung together as deleted/alternate/post-ep scenes between Grace and New Order. this is Kate’s writing on Sam Carter-angst. glorious, heart-breaking Sam Carter angst. title nicked from Muse, ofc.
summary: It’s late and dark and as far as she’s concerned, the world has stopped for them (they’d done the Earth a few favors, it's time one was returned).
happiness hit her
like a bullet in the back
-florence + the machine
∞
When Sam Carter was a little girl, there was an old oak tree in the backyard that her mother instructed her explicitly not to climb.
It’s too old, Samantha. It’s rotting from the inside out. It’s unstable and dangerous - you could fall.
She climbed it anyway, because something deep inside of her ached to see the stars through the branches, and in the emergency room with a broken elbow her dad looked at her with your-mother-told-you-so eyes.
Years later, Sam realizes maybe that’s what love is like.
∞
“Carter.”
It’s Jack’s voice. The one she wants to make tangible, to wrap around herself as armor. It’s his hand on her shoulder, the one she wants to hold, to kiss, to press to her cheek and to her chest and to lay her fingertips against to feel that firm, steady, solid, predictable pulse that means Jack O’Neill is alive and breathing, that means the world is right-side up and that everything will be all right eventually, everything will be okay.
“Sir?” She asks instead. She’s surprised by how exhausted she sounds even now, days after she's been cleared for duty.
He looks at her in that funny way he sometimes looks at her (the one that means there’s something they both want to say, something they both want to do; they both know neither of them ever will).
“It’s good to have you home.”
After he leaves she locks the lab door and crumples against the wall. She lets the sobs rack a tornado-like fit through her chest and she can’t breathe, she can’t think, because it wasn’t until she got home that she realized the tragedy of knowing finally what you want, everything that you want, but like those stars from her childhood that everything is too numerous, too elusive, too expansive to grasp.
∞
There were things that got her through the day: manuals, equations, playing connect-the-dots and after one problem was solved, moving onto the next (always, unendingly, the next problem).
Jack’s voice again. The way she knew he’d always catch her eye during the morning’s briefing.
There were years of small touches, desperate, fleeting touches masked in all the nonchalance and normalcy they could muster. A hand on the shoulder. Jack grabbing Sam’s arm to get her attention even though she was already paying attention (Sam resisting the urge to brush her fingers against his as he pulled away too soon).
These things didn’t make her heart race, didn’t leave her head spinning. Those were clichés for people who’d never been in the sort of love that aches, that rings hollow and impossible and gushing and unfulfilled in the chest, rushes like a river when the sun sets and there’s tossing and turning in the moonlight, in the empty bed.
And yet she doesn’t even know if he’s really what she wants and love seems like such a strong word, because every moment that her hands aren’t busy fixing, learning, figuring, is a waste of time. Her mind is a constant flowing stream. There’s no off-switch here. She’d burn that never-ending midnight oil forever if they’d let her. They save the world time and time again, this team of hers. She’d never give that up, none of them would. This is more than wonder. This is responsibility.
She yearns for knowledge like some people yearn for another drug fix and she treats puzzles and telescopes like old, old friends. She generally feels more comfortable around celestial bodies than she does around human ones, and that deep, shuddering, all-encompassing silence is a language they share, a secret she’s allowed to keep and to understand.
She needs that sense of awe to feel whole, to feel accomplished, to feel worth something. And she has it.
But she still wants more.
She wants something human, after all. She wants something warm and solid and real, something to ground her. She wants to make her father happy. She wants him not to worry.
She finds it in Pete (kind of). Except that his aren’t the arms she wants holding her, his isn’t the voice her heart shamelessly responds to. And there's something else. He doesn't understand her. She feels like she has to push that yearning part of her away when she's with him, like she has to be someone else (and that's not necessarily a bad thing, she thinks, is it?).
It kills her because he’s a good man and she’s going to try to make this work, she wants to make it work so badly she can taste it, so badly that she can almost pretend she’ll get over him someday, can almost pretend she's that person instead of this one. For now, she decides, she’ll give Pete what she can. And someday, maybe, when it doesn’t belong to someone else, she’ll give him her whole heart, too.
∞
The shindig is nice. Friends and co-workers linger and chatter in the doorways of her home and lean against the countertops and Sam watches as if from a balcony (she’s sitting on a stool beside the porch door but it feels distant, so distant) and she smiles, feeling a bizarre mix of contentment and melancholy as she pulls slowly at her single bottle of beer.
By midnight everyone has filed out and touched her hand, hugged her, kissed her cheek, told her they were glad she was home (there’s that word again) and safe.
By twelve thirty it’s she and Jack alone in the kitchen and he’s wandering around with a plastic bag collecting beer bottles and paper plates strewn with cake crumbs, cracking jokes that aren’t really funny but the she smile she gives in involuntary response is the only honest thing she’s felt in days. It hurts, a little, at the corners of her mouth.
“-know what they say, Carter. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Or…longer. Blonder. Whatever it is they say.”
She shakes her head, half-amused. “That is what they say, sir.” A pause. “Listen, you don’t need to stick around. I can clean this up in the morning.” She begins to stand up.
His hands are there suddenly, pressing her back into the stool with surprising insistence. “Sit. Rest. You need it. I don’t. Garbage?”
She decides not to argue (she smiles again - it hurts a little less, now that he’s assured her he’s not going anywhere). “In the garage, sir.”
He disappears for a little while and when he comes back it’s quiet for awhile again, the sort of quiet that means it’s after one AM and the world is asleep but you’re awake and maybe, because you’re lonely and a little desperate and having some sort of bizarre identity crisis and you’re feeling even more acutely than usual the unfairness of having your touchstone be the one person in the world you can never actually have, you chance to reach out and touch your CO’s hand as it moves to snatch the empty bottle in front of you that it missed the first time around.
“Jack,” Sam says quietly, with no intention of following it up with a question, or a statement, or anything else. Just his name. As if tonight, things are different. As if right now, nothing counts.
“Sam?” He responds dutifully, adjusting to match her tone, but his face is creased with the tiniest lines of confusion and concern. It makes Sam smile a little wider and she feels like she’s not really there, like she’s not really the one who reaches her hand up to brush the backs of her fingers against the tensed lines at his forehead.
“Hey,” he says, and takes hold of her wrist. He’s only half-concerned that this is venturing into familiar inappropriate territory; mostly he’s worried about that faraway look in her eye. “You’re not up there anymore, you know. You came home. To the people who care about you, want to see you happy.” He shouldn’t reach to brush his knuckle against the corner of her mouth, but he does, and any reflexive regret he feels dissipates as her lips quirk upward in immediate response to his touch. Like a charm, like a key clicking into place. His heart flutters hopelessly in his chest and he concentrates with all the energy he can muster on thinking about anything besides how in love with this woman he is.
It’s late and dark and as far as she’s concerned, the world has stopped for them (they’d done the Earth a few favors, it's time one was returned). Sam’s in the right headspace to accommodate uncharacteristic recklessness. It’s not that she doesn’t feel like she can take accountability for her actions, it’s that for once in her life she feels like she can deal with it all later. Right now, she wants (needs) to let impulse guide her. Just to see if she can. Where it leads. If it will. If she can’t rely on the honesty that comes out of doing the first thing that comes into her head, if she doesn’t try it to see what it feels like, she’s not sure she’ll ever overcome the fear and earn anything really worthwhile.
So she’s very aware of herself when she suddenly curls one finger into the waist of his jeans and the other hand finds itself tugging against his t-shirt for leverage so that she can lean up and kiss his lips.
The stool scrapes against the tile in the silent kitchen as she pulls herself in deeper closer against him and it’s only been a moment but he’s not stopping her, he’s not stopping he’s just pulling fingers through her hair and kissing her back so she’s caught slightly off-guard. Her feelings begin to pile up and then start whirling out of reach, sparking and spitting like some sort of supernova explosion sped up on film. He’s not putting out the fire, he’s fanning it.
She pulls her mouth away for a hot second when it’s too much, mutters a breathy “fuck”, and then her lips are right back against his, working and pulling and their tongues are slipping warm and wet against each other and she’s wanted this too much and too long.
She kisses him like something is trying to crawl out of her, like she might be able to find herself (finally) somewhere in the dark depths of him. She kisses him like she means it, like she wants him to wrap her up in his arms and skin and scent and let her hide there, safe, protected, until the world stops spinning out of her control, until she feels like a grown woman and not some frightened little girl, until his calm and his strength and solidity rubs off on her and she can sling it across her neck like a talisman.
She kisses him like she respects him. Like she’s been in love with him for so long she can’t even remember what not loving him feels like. She kisses him like she owes her life to him. Like she’d follow him to the end of the earth and back forever if it meant they’d be together and she’d weave this notion, her following him following her, into a pattern so infinite it’d stretch across the universe a thousand times over.
She opens her mouth again and pulls him in deeper and for that moment she forgets everything, all the problems to be solved and the codes to break, all the circuits that need rerouting in her mind. He lets her, realizes maybe this is kind of about him but not really about him at all, and he’s kissing her back with a little passion and a lot of care, cupping the back of her head gently, ready to catch her when she falls. Ready to guide her head to rest against him when that swift sob cracks inevitably in the back of her throat, and it does, not long after.
“Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she’s whispering against him now, forehead against his shoulder, frantic, unraveling and unraveling and unraveling, a spool of yarn all unwound and pooling at his feet. Time’s speeding up for her now, to make up for its stillness earlier. “I feel crazy. I feel so crazy right now, sir.”
“Sam,” he says, and her name feels foreign and familiar and wonderful and strange against his tongue just like it always does. “Shh. Just…stop. Stop. Breathe.”
She’s always been good at this part. Following his instructions.
She stops. She breathes.
He pulls her down with him onto the mattress in her own dark bedroom. His arms wrap around her, warmer, more comforting than anything else she could imagine.
“Sleep,” he instructs now.
Her fingers curl and tug gently at the collar of his t-shirt and she’s sniffling, tears still wet against her cheeks. But she nods and closes her eyes. She can smell him (wood smoke, hops, aftershave, something else she can’t name) and she can feel the rise and fall of his chest and his fingers tumbling down her spine - she’s not thinking about the stars anymore; she thinks maybe, just maybe, in the morning she’ll wake up to realize that this right here is all she’ll ever need to be happy.
∞
She’s had this dream, lately, the one where she’s lying on the beach of some planet they’d visited years ago, and the moonlight is golden like the sun, there are dust motes floating all around but they’re soft and cool like snowflakes that never touch the ground and her hands are palm to palm with Jack’s, their fingers interlocking against the white sand.
She can feel his mouth hot against the curve of her inner thigh, charting a course straight to the center of her, telling her without speaking that she’s worth something; he won’t let her go, he won’t let her fall. He’s going to take her all apart slowly but he’ll keep her safe (she needs to be taken apart for once, to be stripped down by someone who won’t use it against her, she needs it so badly).
She’s saying his name over and over, mindless, and she can’t tell whether she’s going to come or say I love you right out loud (both on the tip of her tongue) - but then everything goes black. In the blink of an eye she’s alone, and there’s ice for miles - there’s this sadness, this loneliness, that wells and crashes over her like a tidal wave on repeat and it’s too much, it’s too much for one human being to feel, she just knows it, and she’s not going to be able to contain it much longer. It’s going to spill out over the rim and pour and pour and pour until she’s empty, until there will be nothing left of her for anyone else to find.
∞
“I’ll make it easy for you. I resign.”
And just like that, she’s in charge. The full weight of whatever’s about to transpire is hanging between them heavy and electric, and they’re sharing a look that’s going to falter at any second and break this rare spell between them. They don’t have much time.
But she barely misses a beat. “Kiss me,” she says, and despite the frantic trembling in her voice it certainly sounds like an order.
The lights are flickering, strobe-like, bright and dark and bright and dark and it feels like the end of one world and the beginning of a new one inside this ship, with its ubiquitous hum that they can feel vibrate at the soles of their feet and deep inside their bones and the lost forgotten city hiding somewhere outside its walls.
He’s looking at her like she’s the only thing in the world he’s ever seen with his own two eyes (he’s still her Jack, he hasn’t faded yet).
He meets her halfway.
The world is changing without her permission and she’s not going to be able to face it without a little of his strength.
∞
It seems like it’s been weeks, maybe months, since she’s been trapped inside this dream (nightmare). He keeps changing the rules; just when she figures it all out he resets the game and it starts, torturously, all over again.
He wants to see her break. She’ll die first (she wants to believe out of defiance, not surrender).
The sharp, murky scent of lakewater. The tinge of moss-hugged earth, breezes whispering through pines. Clear blue skies for miles and miles.
The chair rocks back and forth, back and forth gently against the creaking porch. She feels the air around her still, calm, and warm. The bright wind through her hair.
Her eyes snap open when she feels him kneel beside her.
“Hey. Almost time for dinner. You dozed off a little there.”
His scent is the same, the touch of his fingers the same. His brown eyes, his smile. She reaches out to touch his face, hazy inklings of the reality lingering beyond this tissue paper-thin hallucination working their way once again to the surface of her mind, questions like how, sir, we left you in Antarctica, this isn’t possible, why are we here, how did we get here, why, why, and how--
--but it’s then that she notices the ring on her finger, and then the matching one on his, and her mind starts to spin and tumble and she can’t breathe. She thinks this might be relief, this feeling that’s slowly spreading warm and anxious and breathless from limb to limb. He looks at her a little funny and says, in that wonderfully familiar voice dripping with deadpan humor, “You look a little woozy, oh darling wife-of-mine.”
He hooks his hands around her hips in a way that’s obviously comfortable, painfully intimate, and she kisses him right then and there, sliding her arms around his neck.
“Jack.”
If this isn’t real, she isn’t sure that she wants to know.
∞
It’s a little ridiculous that just the knowledge that Jack O’Neill exists in the world makes Sam Carter so goddamn happy.
She doesn’t need to be with him, or even to see him (although that she can do both of these things is really nice). She just needs to know he’s out there somewhere, somewhere in his corner of the universe, spreading that unique Jack-ness around like birdseed or fishing tackle and being a tall solitary oak in a world of saplings.
He's taught her to breathe when she didn't even realize she'd been holding her breath. And she wants forever to thank him for that.
When she looks up at him from that forest floor and she knows it's all okay, that Fifth's gone and Jack and Teal'c and Daniel are all safe, that's when she thinks she knows.
She knows for sure later when she's up on that podium (and she thinks she'll forever link this promotion to a profound sense of equilibrium, and that equilibrium will forever be linked to the color of Jack's eyes). She knows two things for sure in that moment: she's in love with him (completely, helplessly, irrevocably) and even though the worst might be yet to come, everything's all right, everything is just fine. Everything will be okay.
It’s not until later, much later, years later when Pete's a distant memory and she’s dividing her time between the wide open universe, ancient mythical cities and Jack’s arms, learning more things about life and what it means to be human than she’d ever thought a living person could, that she realizes something else, too.
It was never about the things she thought it was about. None of it, all that time, all that want, all that fear and uncertainty and all the so-called rules. It wasn’t even about love, not really. The love was already there whether they wanted it or not. It was about finding the one person who sees you and knows you better than you ever knew yourself. Knows you’d never be satisfied with anything less than everything you can reach and just a little beyond that. It's about realizing that it's okay, that you can have both, that you don't have to choose because someone understands and won't let you choose. Someone who fosters all of it, all of you, holds it close, reminds you that it’s precious and then sends you out to chase it with kiss and a promise that they’ll be here, right here, waiting until you come home.
--