Waves are Universal - Chapter 3
part two: if the stars were mine
Sitting in Alle’s lab, Sam takes a break from working out a reality equation (that there are equations for these things still boggles her mind) and stretches her neck. Her eyes settle on Alle on the other side of the room, bent over a table intently building a model out of Legos. Dressed in black leggings, yellow rain boots and a strappy sapphire blue sundress, Alle would look completely out of place in any lab Sam ever called her own but manages to fit right in here.
Sam, however, feels like she missed a memo somewhere. Her standard-issue jeans and t-shirt combination isn’t nearly enough to blend in with the eclectic clutter scattered around the lab, even if her t-shirt today is advertising Ed’s Feed and Seed in McCool Junction, Nebraska. Two entire shelves of the bookcase are occupied by apocalyptic and time-travel fiction (highlighted, notated and tabbed during a four-day espresso bender in which Alle attempted to make life imitate art). Stuck next to a Darth Vader Mr. Potato Head is a neon green Post-It with phone numbers of long-dead friends and relatives, as if the key to the entire problem will lie within her dentist’s fax number. Near the coffee pot, where most people would keep a jar for loose change, stands an empty bottle of hand sanitizer with “Today is NOT a good day to die” scrawled on the side.
But most of all, Sam feels out of her element because she feels like a complete idiot. She likes to classify herself as moderately intelligent when in the company of fellow physicists, but after two days of doing nothing but asking questions and needing clarification, she downgraded herself to having potential and was grateful when Alle handed her a stack of textbooks and mission reports and mouthed “homework” to her at the end of the day. She devoured the material (and did her best to ignore Jack’s efforts to distract her) and showed up the next Monday fully aware that she had been demoted to lab assistant until she got her feet under her. It’s only in the past two weeks that Alle has upgraded her to a full-bird scientist, and did so with mock ceremony, presenting Sam with her very own lab coat, her name neatly printed on the lapel in pink Sharpie.
She is, at least, starting to not hate the hip-hop that always filters out from a pair of speakers hidden somewhere amongst the clutter. Either she’s certifiably insane or it means that she’s getting used to how screwed up this reality is, with its district attorneys serving scrambled eggs and coffee shop baristas walking perimeter boundaries. She’s not sure which she’d prefer, but she has a sneaking suspicion that the volume control is turned down for her sake.
“You busy tomorrow night?” Alle asks from somewhere on the floor, crawling on her knees to find an orange lightsaber piece that had the audacity to roll off of her desk. She misjudges the width of her desk and curses when she bangs her head on it. She glares at the offending furniture as she stands up, missing piece in hand, as if that’s going to prevent it from happening again.
Sam blinks. “No. Why?”
“Good,” Alle says, making a face as she snaps the piece into place, “a couple of us have had it with the saving the world thing and intend to forget about it for a bit. You in?”
***
A little bit after nine, Sam makes her way down to Alle’s lab. She’s not sure what a Forget About Saving the World Night entails, but she suspects that there’s a certain amount of alcohol involved and more than a few jokes beginning with a room-temperature superconductor walks into a bar. Jack had teased her on her way out, demanding that she be home by two or else there would be trouble, but she’d laughed and told him not to wait up.
She overhears the tail end of the Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar joke (and doesn’t) as she walks in and laughs with the rest of the group because no matter how many times she’s heard it, that one never gets old. Several of the scientists wave excitedly at her and invite her to help herself to the booze on the table. She pours herself a beaker of something bright blue from an Erlenmeyer flask and decides that she’s better off not asking what’s in it. She finds a seat on the floor and figures that despite its smooth taste the drink is going to give her one hell of a headache in the morning.
The conversation moves off of science jokes they’ve all heard and to things they’d like humanity to remember. Sam suspects this is a topic these four walls have heard much of over the past years, but that the list has gotten increasingly ridiculous (and there is a list - one of the engineers produces a waterlogged notebook from her back pocket and ceremoniously clicks a pen as if to say you can start now) as they ran out of things like indoor plumbing and vaccines.
There’s an entire collective of civilians dedicated to preserving humanity should their efforts fail. But Sam understands this need, the need to shout out the little things that made life a bit better, to remember the things that the anthropologists and archaeologists and sociologists and teachers that work on Level 3 would otherwise forget.
“Lady GaGa.”
“Oh my God. ‘Bad Romance’ got me through o-chem.”
A chorus of me toos goes around the room and Sam doesn’t have a clue who they’re talking about. She stays silent on the matter, figuring that saying something about Joan Jett and the Heartbreakers would date her more than she’s willing to admit.
“LOLCats.”
“I can see Russia from my house!”
“IKEA.”
“You know what word needs to stick around?” Alle speaks up from the corner, swirling the amber liquid in her glass before finishing it in one graceful sip. “Cocksucker.”
Sam blinks at the vulgarity but realizes that she’s heard it quite a bit over the past few days, usually in a string of nonsensical curses, and that if she were in charge of altering the timeline of an entire galaxy, she’d resort to wanting to preserve profanity too.
“Muggle.”
“I solemnly swear I am up to no good.”
“Bootylicious.”
“Actually, I think we could do without that one.”
“Staple removers.”
“What, why?”
“They’re handy!”
“Lost!”
“Oh, fuck, that show.”
“Don’t start, Kate.”
“But!”
“No.”
“Zombie movies.”
“Frak.”
“Sonic screwdrivers!”
“Iron Chef!”
The list goes on and every so often a topic will come up that deserves further discussion, discussion which gets increasingly sillier as the contents of the alcohol bottles decreases. People begin to filter out around midnight, citing early mornings or expectant partners and by one, it’s only Sam and Alle.
Alle’s managed to slide off of her chair and lie on the floor, her bottle of K’Taaran Fire Whiskey that had started the evening mostly full now sits entirely empty next to her. Her head is somewhere near Sam’s and there’s a light shining right in their eyes but neither one of them wants to put up the fight with gravity and turn it off.
“How long have you and Zach been together?” It takes Sam a couple tries to get the words in the right order.
“Uhm,” Alle starts and fiddles with her engagement ring as if that’s going to help her remember. “Eight? Ten years? Something like that.”
“Wow,” Sam says.
Alle shrugs as best she can. “Five of those were in this mess.” She gestures aimlessly and knocks the bottle over. “Damn,” she giggles and it takes her six tries to set it upright again, which causes Sam to start laughing, too. “Asked me to marry him and eight months later…boom,” she pantomimes an explosion, careful to avoid the bottle this time. “World ended.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Things happen.” Alle blows past it. “I made him promise that if I fix this, we’re goin’ to Hawaii.”
Sam chuckles at that and imagines all of the future conversations or arguments that could be ended with just that phrase. I saved the world; you can take out the trash this time. That neither Zach nor Alle will remember the promise doesn’t seem to matter.
“What ‘bout you and Jack? When did that happen?”
Sam blushes. “What? Hasn’t.” And it hasn’t. Sam knows that she’s probably lying to herself, but she’s been calling their hugs and forehead kisses and the few nights they’ve shared a bed coping and comfort because they’ve been displaced in reality and time and they need a little bit of that.
Alle turns her head, resting her cheek on the concrete floor to look straight at Sam. “Please,” she says, a moment of sobriety coming through, “I watched my mother look at my father for thirty-two years the exact way you look at him. Don’t tell me nothing’s going on.”
“S’not,” Sam slurs, giving in to the unconsciousness tugging at the corners of her mind.
She wakes up in her own bed with a pounding headache and a strong desire to stay horizontal. But the smell of coffee drags her upright.
“Morning, sunshine,” Jack smirks when Sam shuffles bleary-eyed into the main room of their quarters.
She stops in the middle of the room and runs a hand through her hair. The motion doesn’t do much to tame the wild bedhead. “How did I get here?” The last thing she remembers is lying on the floor in Alle’s lab, discussing Hawaii and how this thing between Sam and Jack is most definitely not a thing.
He pours her a cup of coffee and offers her some aspirin. “When you weren’t back around three, I went looking for you.”
She falls into the chair across from him and dry swallows the aspirin. “Thank you.”
***
Jack’s intention was to go to the mess to pick up a piece of fruit, but the unmistakable smell of something freshly baked distracts him and he opens the door to the main kitchen to find the source. He follows the sound of clattering baking sheets until he finds Alle in the midst of a heart attack-inducing balancing act, taking a tray of chocolate chip cookies out of the oven with one hand, replacing the tray with a second batch with the other and using her foot to kick the door closed. It’s only when the warm cookies are safely resting on the stove top and being transferred to a cooling rack that he breathes. Blinking, he notices the scars on her upper back that her tank top does nothing to hide. “Ouch,” he says, unable to mask his shock.
Alle jumps, startled, but doesn’t break the stubborn cookie that won’t unstick from the sheet, only smushes it against the side. “What?” She looks over her shoulder at Jack and realizes what she’s wearing. “Oh, yeah. Usually forget about those.” She grasps the hot baking sheet with a potholder and waves the metal tray in the air to cool it down before balling the remaining dough on it.
“What happened?” He knows that what happened in this reality before he showed up is absolutely none of his business but as the owner of several impressive scars of his own, he likes to know the stories behind those of others.
She shrugs and places her palm on the center of the tray to test the temperature. Satisfied, she reaches into the mixing bowl and begins rolling the dough into balls. “Misadventure fermenting alcohol when I was fifteen.” She smirks. “Wash your hands and help me out with this.”
Jack raises an eyebrow as he turns to the sink. “That must’ve gone over well.”
Laughing, Alle shakes her head. “It blew up and threw me out of the attic window. I think Dad was impressed with the concept, but Mom lectured me all the way to the hospital.”
He runs his hands under hot water and tries to be upset with a hypothetical fifteen year-old child of his distilling alcohol in the attic and causing an explosion. He can’t and finds himself agreeing with his alternate self, though he’s sure that there was a safety lecture buried underneath the amusement. “What’s with the baking?” He picks out some dough and does his best to mimic the size of those she’s already placed onto the tray.
Alle sighs softly. “Sam’s birthday is tomorrow.” She gestures with her elbow in the general direction of a cake sitting on the counter waiting to be frosted. “And I bake things when I get stuck. Usually it only takes one to get unstuck, but I’m still lost after the cake. So, cookies.”
Jack sneaks a bit of cookie dough after watching Alle do the same. He hadn’t put much thought into Sam’s birthday besides noticing that it was coming up. He usually gets her a card and something small, a plant she can talk to or a book in hope that she’ll take the hint and relax a little; last year he gave her a box of Legos that she quickly turned into a model naquadah reactor. Since they’re lacking in the gift department, he’s hoping that a hug and a happy birthday will do for this year. “You’re making Sam a cake?”
“Yeah,” Alle says, biting her lip. She rearranges a few of the cookie dough balls so they won’t run into each other when they flatten out. She sighs again and turns to face him, bracing her arms on the counter behind her. “The only way we haven’t all killed each other yet is by trying to pretend that the universe isn’t a complete clusterfuck. And life needs to go on. Life has to go on because if we can’t undo the apocalypse, this is what we’re stuck with. And no one should have to forgo birthdays because we couldn’t figure out how to fix it.”
“So Sam gets cake.”
She nods. “Sam gets cake.”
***
Sam first notices the vibration when her pen falls off the table. She frowns and puts down her fork, leftover piece of birthday cake forgotten as she reaches down to the floor to pick up her pen. The vibration is faint and she’s almost ready to write it off as a test explosion whose warning memo she missed but as she sits up again, she catches Alle’s worried look. The intensity grows and the Darth Vader Mr. Potato Head crashes to the floor just before a high-pitched whine cuts through the rumbling.
“Not good,” Alle says, her eyes locking with Sam’s. She jumps up, knocking her stool over, and sprints out of the lab, Sam close on her heels.
Sam picks up fragments of conversation as she and Alle rush to the surface, pushing against a sea of people who all seem intent on getting as far underground as possible, and pieces together that the Rak’har are back and there was no warning. Alle’s not good seems like an understatement when paired with the sheer panic around them.
They finally break free of the crowd and step outside. As Sam squints and shades her eyes to look at the sky, she gets the feeling that maybe they were heading in the wrong direction. She vaguely registers the commanding shouts of the military as they scramble for surface-to-air missiles and what few nuclear rockets they have left. The ship hovers in the atmosphere, hulking and awkward. It’s unmistakably a warship, though it’s bulky where it should be sleek, shimmering as if its cloak is malfunctioning.
Sam tilts her head, studying, aware that she should be doing something more useful than standing around and looking at it, but she can’t tear her eyes away or force her feet to move. After a few seconds, she realizes that it isn’t a cloaking system but the ship phasing in and out of their reality and time coordinates. She shudders, thinking that there are countless others out there - perhaps even herself - seeing the exact same image, feeling the exact same fear. The warship looms heavily above her and she feels targeted, like someone up there is looking for her. She doesn’t want to, but her mind duplicates the ship, mentally creating a picture of multiple warships darkening the sky, the sight seen by everyone on this Earth on that fateful day five years ago. She shivers.
“Carter!”
Jack’s voice breaks her gaze and she whips her head around to find him.
“Feel like helping?” He grins, but the tension in his voice gives away his thoughts that this situation is in absolutely no way funny.
“Yes, sir!” She says, reverting back into combat soldier mode, and runs to his side to assist the setup of a grenade launcher. He hands her a radio and an earpiece and she turns it on, catching the middle of an order for all pilots to get their asses in the air right fucking now.
A wide red beam shoots out from the underbelly of the ship and begins moving slowly across the ground.
“All birds, weapons free. Air assault only. Repeat, air assault only. Take out that scanner.”
Sam watches in dismay as the scanning beam moves closer and none of the fighter jets’ weapons seems to even hit the ship.
“Peace out, kids. If you don’t take this bitch down, I’m gonna come back and haunt all of you.”
“Cowboy, what in the hell are you doing?”
“Taking out the scanner, sir. Just like you said.”
Sam holds her breath and tracks the plane across the sky as the pilot breaks formation and flies far enough away to pick up the speed required to blow up on impact.
“Aw, hell. Everyone else, out of his way. If this doesn’t work, Cowboy, I will kill you myself.”
“I hear you, General. Been an honor, folks.”
The collision isn’t much, the small fighter jet is no match for the behemoth warship, but the beam disappears. Sam and Jack catch each other’s gaze. Sam wants to cry. Jack wants to put a really big hole in the ship.
“Come on home, birds. It’s gonna get messy out there. Ground team, weapons hot. You heard Cowboy, and we are not going to spend eternity unable to find our car keys.”
The ground shakes on impact as the ship begins to fire at the surface, evidently deciding that the sudden malfunction of its scanner indicated human life.
“Ground team, weapons free. Repeat, weapons free. Bring it down.”
Sam engages the launcher and nods to Jack who fires it into the air. She isn’t sure that any of their weapons will do a damn bit of good, since it took a direct collision to take out the scanner, but they don’t have much of a choice.
“Einstein, any time you got a solution for us, it’d be appreciated.”
“Roger that, General. Give me a few minutes.”
“Now, please.”
“Well, if you’d stop bugging me…”
“Got it.”
Sam can’t stifle the laugh that bubbles out of her when she overhears the conversation between Alle and General McLaggen. She spares a glance at Jack and grins: he’s laughing too, despite the firefight around them. It’s an exchange they both know well.
“Got it, General. Everyone hold your fire!”
Jack mouths what the hell at Sam and Sam shrugs; without a pen and some paper and a clue what Alle’s thought process is, she has no idea what’s planned.
An eternity passes in eight seconds.
“Fire!”
The warship breaks apart and crashes to the ground.
***
Jack thinks that if he ever survives the end of his own world only to have that survival threatened a second time, he’d probably want to get ragingly drunk, too. He’s not sure about the wisdom of the inebriated target practice going on outside, but since they seem to be mostly hitting the bull’s eyes that have been painted sloppily on a large broken piece of hull, he lets it go.
They each grab a beer - whatever’s in the garbage can in the back that people are dipping their cups into smells like it would be more useful greasing engines - and stand in line for food. Jack’s eyebrows skyrocket when he sees that there’s actually meat involved and wonders aloud whether they need to do a dance of some sort. The chef smirks at him and says that it’s a special occasion: the cows understand.
If he hadn’t spent the past six months with these people, Jack would’ve been perplexed at the presence of DJ equipment in the corner. But he’s learned that not only are they incredibly resourceful, they’re also really into forgetting that all hell broke loose on their planet. The music is innocuous and appropriate for dinner, the station currently manned by someone’s iPod on shuffle, but he knows that in an hour or two it’ll be loud and thumping.
“Apparently there’s cake,” Sam says. She steals a cherry tomato from Jack’s plate, knowing he won’t eat it.
“There’s cake? How is there cake?” Jack shakes his head in amazement. It’s only been a few hours since the warship was shot down - during which there have been debriefings, announcements and a memorial service - and though his baking skills are limited to eating, he knows that the process of cake can take a while, especially if there’s icing.
Sam shrugs and pops the tomato in her mouth. “There’s cake.”
They don’t stay long. They each finish a couple more beers and a piece of cake (Sam pretends not to notice when Jack goes back for seconds) and leave before the music gets too loud and someone gets the bright idea to start dancing. They’re not sure where they fit in with the party: this isn’t their reality, but they almost died today, too.
By unspoken agreement, they head back to their quarters. They’ll never understand what it means to survive again, so they leave the music and suspiciously strong alcohol behind. Instead, they walk close to each other, unwilling to bend to ideas of personal space and step a few inches away from the one person who makes surviving alone, without the people they know, with a daughter that’s theirs but not, in a reality and time so removed from their own, seem okay.
The walk from the mess hall to the building housing their quarters is short but they make it last, walking every inch of concrete sidewalk even if it means detouring past the front door three times. Somewhere near the flagpole, its faded American flag still fluttering proudly in the wind, their hands brush against each other. They glance at each other in the starlight, smiling softly, and their fingers tangle together, holding on tightly. They keep walking.
Some of the party has moved outside and they walk by groups of people passing around bottles and cups. Someone’s started a bonfire. Jack’s thumb rubs against Sam’s palm and they turn a corner into the shadows of the building.
His lips brushing against hers catches both of them off guard.
Jack pulls away, an I’m sorry forming on his lips as he searches her eyes for some sign that this isn’t the stupidest move he’s ever made.
Sam tilts her head, studying his face as she licks her lips, thinking he tastes of cake and that his hand could stay warm on her lower back for all eternity and it would never get old.
He opens his mouth to fumble through an apology but his words are stopped by her finger on his lips, gently shushing him. She drops her hand to his shoulder and leans in, tentatively kissing him in return. Her hesitation dissolves when his hand urges her body closer to his and she loops her arms around his neck, her eyes fluttering shut as he slips his tongue past her parted lips. His fingers glide underneath her shirt, gently caressing the sensitive skin of her sides. She moans and the sound travels straight to his groin and he kisses her harder. Her back hits the brick wall.
They break away, breathless, and Jack rests his forehead against hers. “Sam,” he whispers, voice low with arousal. The stolen kiss during the time loop was great but this, this is wonderful and he wonders how he ever thought that one kiss would be enough. He’s having trouble keeping himself from stripping her shirt off right there.
She looks at him through heavy eyelids and any thoughts of the last time she kissed him, with the damn alien virus coursing through both their veins, are pushed aside when his thumb dips just below the hem of her pants. “Let’s go inside,” she breathes, answering aloud the question that’s been burning in the back of her mind for months.
Jack smiles and clasps her hand in his. They retrace their steps, unnoticed by the drinkers and partiers and those intent on staying awake to greet the dawn in celebration of surviving yet again. Once inside their quarters, Sam locks the door behind them as Jack pushes her up against it to kiss her more thoroughly. She gasps, his lips finding her neck, and tugs his shirt out of his pants so she can run her hands along the hard muscles of his back. Needing more - so much more - of her, Jack reluctantly pulls away from that sensitive spot behind her ear and begins slowly walking them backward to the bedroom. Clothing is discarded piece by piece along the way as they pause to tug shirts over heads or laugh as they trip when they try to remove pants without first casting off shoes, and by the time they reach the bed, it’s only skin.
***
He’s watched her wake up before. Offworld, her eyes snap open at the first beep of her watch alarm and she sits up, blinking away the last vestiges of sleep while she neatly folds her sleeping bag and calls out to whoever is on watch that coffee had better be ready; by the time she unzips the tent and breathes in fresh morning air, she’s alert and focused, ready to face the day not five minutes after it begins. And in the past weeks, when they’ve slept with limbs tangled around each other, searching out for comfort and familiarity even in sleep, she’s awoken similarly, sliding out of bed before him, careful to extract herself from his embrace without waking him. But as she begins to stir, still tucked in his arms, he thinks that Sam waking up is a thing of beauty.
She sighs sleepily and shows signs of consciousness. Cat-like as she arches her back and stretches her legs, pointed toes creating an elegant, clean line from her hip downward, she shifts to reach her arms over her head and complete the ritual. Her hand’s usual uninterrupted path is blocked by his chest and her eyes flutter open at the obstacle. “Hi,” she says quietly, mid-breath.
“Morning,” he smiles. He moves backward a little, lifting his arm from her bare hip so she can finish stretching. She cuddles back into his chest when she’s done and he tucks his arm around her again. “Sleep well?” He kisses her forehead.
“Mmm,” she hums happily.
Jack smiles, taking it as a yes. He runs his fingers through her hair, shoulder-length now and free from its usual ponytail. The sunlight glints off the golden strands. Though he misses The Simpsons and fishing and Guinness, he would be okay if they never made it back. This life is simpler and less complicated and while there is a bit of weirdness with the not-his-daughter and not-his-reality thing, Samantha Carter is naked in his arms and kissing his chest and looking for all the world like she has no intention of talking about what this means.
He rolls so he’s on top and she pouts at him, frowning at her sudden inability to touch him the way she wants. He smirks at her crookedly, plotting, and dips his head down to catch her nipple in his mouth as his fingers dance down her stomach. Her eyes close and her legs open for him and a small noise escapes her throat that he’s pretty sure means more, please.
He’s more than happy to comply.
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