The Strangest Thing: Sam/Hammond fic
The Strangest Thing
Rating: R
Pairing: Sam/Hammond
Spoilers: Better if you've seen Secrets and Tok'ra
Season: 5
Warnings: Ooh, boy. Feelings of the Jack/Sam variety. Angst and then some. Cross-gen. More than you probably wanted to know about George Hammond.
Summary: A conglomeration of moments and memories with a side of weirded-out teammates and some unsettled Electra issues.
Notes: For the Behind Every Good Woman Rare-Het Challenge. Feedback, including critical response and "What the fuck were you smoking to write this pairing??" would be adored.
Disclaimer: Created by others, taken out to play. Sam Carter and George Hammond belong to each other. Really.
Between us
twenty years of age
between your lips and my lips
when they meet and stay
the years collapse
the glass of a whole life shatters.
-Nizar Qabbani
"Well, this is... awkward," says Colonel O'Neill.
"That's, um, interesting," says Daniel.
"I too find it strange, MajorCarter," says Teal'c.
But it isn't so strange that Sam ended up with her commanding officer. Daddy issues, says that voice in the back of her head that insists she's made a mistake. And it isn't so strange that she's violating all the rules. A rule-follower like Sam, who taught herself a proper salute when she was three, was bound to get whiplash eventually. And it isn't so strange that she decided to freefall now and that he was there to catch her. It isn't strange that she finds herself at General Hammond's house during most of her downtime. Not strange at all.
And she supposes it isn't really strange that the rest of her team just doesn't understand. They've never understood her, didn't know her father before he became Selmak, didn't seen her growing up. God, they are all so blind. Living their lives, their tragedies, and here is Sam Carter, with her weekend Heather Has Two Mommies play dates with Janet and Cassie and her late-night motorcycle rides and her trips up to Canada to go fly-fishing by herself.
She doesn't understand her teammates either. She doesn't understand their star-crossed tragedy makeshift lives built out of splintered dreams. She knows that this is the second-best alternative for all of them, but her first choice. Sam excels while the rest of them muddle through. Colonel O'Neill can't negotiate, Daniel doesn't understand the military, and Teal'c doesn't understand earth customs, but Sam is good at everything.
Some things about her teammates are obvious though. Daniel is an archeologist. Teal'c doesn't drink beer. The colonel loves kids.
So yes, she does understand that Colonel O'Neill spends time with Tessa and Kayla the way she spends time with Mark's kids, the way they all spend time with Cassie. So she wasn't really surprised when he showed up at George's door last Saturday with his arms full of art supplies for the girls. He was very surprised to see her. They hadn't been doing anything, just helping the girls make cookies, but the colonel had made a lucky guess or two and deduced the truth. Sam had a big apron on that said, "Kiss Me, I'm Cooking," and George had one that said, "CHEF," and Tessa's was blue with handprints on it and Kayla's said "Grandpa's Littlest Helper." They were all covered in cookie dough and there was a speck of flour on Kayla's nose.
"Jack," said George, and he wasn't at all startled. "Come in." He said it with such smooth precision that Sam couldn't have added her own greeting. She did stand at attention for the colonel though, until he gave her a Look and muttered, "At ease, Major." She couldn't still the butterfly effect in her stomach though. A butterfly flaps its wings in Sam Carter's stomach when her CO finds out about her indiscretions and thirty years later Kayla is in therapy because when she was eight, her granddaddy's lover dropped the cookie sheet, saluted everyone in sight, and left the house, leaving her coat behind, still wearing her apron.
The colonel wants to talk about it. He summoned them all up to the lake, had Sam and Daniel search the whole place for NID bugs twice while Teal'c and he started the barbecue, and now flips burgers relentlessly while the rest of them stand around and eat the carrot sticks that Sam brought. They are very busy feeling awkward.
"Sam's sleeping with Hammond," says the colonel--Jack, now, because this is personal.
Teal'c raises an eyebrow. Daniel looks like he's been stung by a hornet.
"It's true," she says simply.
And this summons their litany. Awkward, interesting, strange.
It is strange. Sam has been doing something so strange that even her teammates, her teammates who watch The Simpsons and Ricki Lake and The History Channel on their downtime, her friends who understand Jello wrestling and drink too much coffee and beer and once pooled their money to buy her a pedicure kit but could not, between the three of them, ever remember her birthday--her friends don't understand. No one says anything for the longest time.
Sam thinks about the feel of George's fringe of gray hair when she embraces him, about his jowls and his deep, low laughter and his matter-of-fact dismissal of her when she's in his office on official business.
She drove to his house the first time ostensibly to see the girls, and then, somehow, she can't even remember how, the girls weren't there one Wednesday night when they were both off-duty, and she'd driven over anyhow. He called her by her name that night, and they started talking about life before, about her father, but they stopped, because suddenly the knowledge that he was her father's contemporary seemed very, very strange. In the silence, she rested her head against his shoulder and pretended it was someone else's. The next week, she didn't bother pretending.
"Why?" asks Daniel, not judging yet, gathering all the facts before he pronounces his verdict.
Because he trusts me to make the right decisions in the lab, Sam thinks. Because he never tells me to get out of bed and go home until I'm ready. Because at the Mountain, he's still my commanding officer (Colonel O'Neill would never do that. Colonel O'Neill would become Jack so quickly that she would never respect him again. Jack would wink at her outrageously in the middle of battle and would make emotional decisions that left the rest of the team in peril. Jack would care too much.) Because he kisses all the science away. Because he's got a big dick, dammit. She sniggers to herself.
"What?" asks Jack, with suspicious jealousy.
"Nothing," says Sam. "I just am, Daniel. It's one of those things."
"I'll understand when I'm older?" asks Daniel, and Jack bites back a chortle.
And Sam sees sand pouring over Sha're's grave. She sees the flowers that they bought in Cairo and took to Daniel's parents' grave, seven miles out. She sees Shifu vanishing through the Stargate, but she can't see behind Daniel's eyes, and he keeps secrets. Daniel is old enough to understand, but too old.
She is, after all, just a little girl, removing the pink streamers from the handlebars of her bicycle, balancing a washer in her hand and testing the weight before she uses it to attach a headboard to her bed, running to meet Daddy and Uncle George, who are home on leave. Even when they are making love, she cannot help thinking of him in those days, when he had more hair and a wife, before he grew old and serious and daring.
She wishes everyone could wake up with George Hammond just once. When he wakes up, he grunts and sighs and rolls over and when he finds Sam naked next to him, he smiles at her, and she shatters. He touches her like she's all there is, then crawls out of bed and brings her orange juice in a blue glass that his wife bought. Sam wonders what it would be like if Lydia were still alive, if they would rent motel rooms and always carry condoms instead of lounging in George's huge king size bed and kissing lazily all day.
"Sam?" says Daniel, gently, and Sam knows she's zoning badly. Teal'c's hand on her shoulder hardly feels real.
"Is it really so strange?"
"You're having highly illegal sex with someone your father's age. Strange," says Jack, "does not even begin to cover it."
When Sam finally figured out how to save the world the last time, she wanted to collapse with exhaustion, not crunch equations for five hours. Jack said, "You deserve a breather, Major. You did well. I'm proud of you," and Sam blushed and stammered. Then George said, "Finish the job, then take three days' leave, Major." And her face reverted to white and she smiled confidently and the world was saved, after all.
Her teammates are still looking at her anxiously, waiting for her to come up with the answers the way she always does, with cunning visual aids and nasty-looking equations to back her up. She wants to take the magic markers Colonel O'Neill brought to George's house and draw stick figure images of a blonde woman with a blue body and a man with no hair sitting together and thinking about the past (Christmases with the Hammond and Carter clans and piano lessons paid for and a beaming smile at Academy graduation and Lydia and Martouf) and the present (candlelit dinners and striped comforters and slow kisses and granddaughters playing tag and mission reports, regular like the rainfall on P7X-386) but never the future. She doesn't have the words to tell them.
"I can't really explain it," she says.
"You are in love with General Hammond?" asks Teal'c. He's probably thinking that the Tau'ri are very weird.
She isn't in love with General Hammond, though. She's in love with George, and the difference is a smile's width and tastes like Christmas morning.
"Not really." They look at her expectantly, all of them, waiting for the punch line, maybe. And it's the strangest thing, but Sam doesn't really care what happens next, what they think of her now that they know, or even what will happen when they get back to Colorado. She doesn't care whether she sleeps with George again, whether they both get dishonorable discharge, whether she ever again discovers that George loves backrubs and has a foot fetish.
"I'm going home," she says, walking away from angry Jack, bewildered Daniel, puzzled Teal'c. "I think you can figure me out better without me here."
Rating: R
Pairing: Sam/Hammond
Spoilers: Better if you've seen Secrets and Tok'ra
Season: 5
Warnings: Ooh, boy. Feelings of the Jack/Sam variety. Angst and then some. Cross-gen. More than you probably wanted to know about George Hammond.
Summary: A conglomeration of moments and memories with a side of weirded-out teammates and some unsettled Electra issues.
Notes: For the Behind Every Good Woman Rare-Het Challenge. Feedback, including critical response and "What the fuck were you smoking to write this pairing??" would be adored.
Disclaimer: Created by others, taken out to play. Sam Carter and George Hammond belong to each other. Really.
Between us
twenty years of age
between your lips and my lips
when they meet and stay
the years collapse
the glass of a whole life shatters.
-Nizar Qabbani
"Well, this is... awkward," says Colonel O'Neill.
"That's, um, interesting," says Daniel.
"I too find it strange, MajorCarter," says Teal'c.
But it isn't so strange that Sam ended up with her commanding officer. Daddy issues, says that voice in the back of her head that insists she's made a mistake. And it isn't so strange that she's violating all the rules. A rule-follower like Sam, who taught herself a proper salute when she was three, was bound to get whiplash eventually. And it isn't so strange that she decided to freefall now and that he was there to catch her. It isn't strange that she finds herself at General Hammond's house during most of her downtime. Not strange at all.
And she supposes it isn't really strange that the rest of her team just doesn't understand. They've never understood her, didn't know her father before he became Selmak, didn't seen her growing up. God, they are all so blind. Living their lives, their tragedies, and here is Sam Carter, with her weekend Heather Has Two Mommies play dates with Janet and Cassie and her late-night motorcycle rides and her trips up to Canada to go fly-fishing by herself.
She doesn't understand her teammates either. She doesn't understand their star-crossed tragedy makeshift lives built out of splintered dreams. She knows that this is the second-best alternative for all of them, but her first choice. Sam excels while the rest of them muddle through. Colonel O'Neill can't negotiate, Daniel doesn't understand the military, and Teal'c doesn't understand earth customs, but Sam is good at everything.
Some things about her teammates are obvious though. Daniel is an archeologist. Teal'c doesn't drink beer. The colonel loves kids.
So yes, she does understand that Colonel O'Neill spends time with Tessa and Kayla the way she spends time with Mark's kids, the way they all spend time with Cassie. So she wasn't really surprised when he showed up at George's door last Saturday with his arms full of art supplies for the girls. He was very surprised to see her. They hadn't been doing anything, just helping the girls make cookies, but the colonel had made a lucky guess or two and deduced the truth. Sam had a big apron on that said, "Kiss Me, I'm Cooking," and George had one that said, "CHEF," and Tessa's was blue with handprints on it and Kayla's said "Grandpa's Littlest Helper." They were all covered in cookie dough and there was a speck of flour on Kayla's nose.
"Jack," said George, and he wasn't at all startled. "Come in." He said it with such smooth precision that Sam couldn't have added her own greeting. She did stand at attention for the colonel though, until he gave her a Look and muttered, "At ease, Major." She couldn't still the butterfly effect in her stomach though. A butterfly flaps its wings in Sam Carter's stomach when her CO finds out about her indiscretions and thirty years later Kayla is in therapy because when she was eight, her granddaddy's lover dropped the cookie sheet, saluted everyone in sight, and left the house, leaving her coat behind, still wearing her apron.
The colonel wants to talk about it. He summoned them all up to the lake, had Sam and Daniel search the whole place for NID bugs twice while Teal'c and he started the barbecue, and now flips burgers relentlessly while the rest of them stand around and eat the carrot sticks that Sam brought. They are very busy feeling awkward.
"Sam's sleeping with Hammond," says the colonel--Jack, now, because this is personal.
Teal'c raises an eyebrow. Daniel looks like he's been stung by a hornet.
"It's true," she says simply.
And this summons their litany. Awkward, interesting, strange.
It is strange. Sam has been doing something so strange that even her teammates, her teammates who watch The Simpsons and Ricki Lake and The History Channel on their downtime, her friends who understand Jello wrestling and drink too much coffee and beer and once pooled their money to buy her a pedicure kit but could not, between the three of them, ever remember her birthday--her friends don't understand. No one says anything for the longest time.
Sam thinks about the feel of George's fringe of gray hair when she embraces him, about his jowls and his deep, low laughter and his matter-of-fact dismissal of her when she's in his office on official business.
She drove to his house the first time ostensibly to see the girls, and then, somehow, she can't even remember how, the girls weren't there one Wednesday night when they were both off-duty, and she'd driven over anyhow. He called her by her name that night, and they started talking about life before, about her father, but they stopped, because suddenly the knowledge that he was her father's contemporary seemed very, very strange. In the silence, she rested her head against his shoulder and pretended it was someone else's. The next week, she didn't bother pretending.
"Why?" asks Daniel, not judging yet, gathering all the facts before he pronounces his verdict.
Because he trusts me to make the right decisions in the lab, Sam thinks. Because he never tells me to get out of bed and go home until I'm ready. Because at the Mountain, he's still my commanding officer (Colonel O'Neill would never do that. Colonel O'Neill would become Jack so quickly that she would never respect him again. Jack would wink at her outrageously in the middle of battle and would make emotional decisions that left the rest of the team in peril. Jack would care too much.) Because he kisses all the science away. Because he's got a big dick, dammit. She sniggers to herself.
"What?" asks Jack, with suspicious jealousy.
"Nothing," says Sam. "I just am, Daniel. It's one of those things."
"I'll understand when I'm older?" asks Daniel, and Jack bites back a chortle.
And Sam sees sand pouring over Sha're's grave. She sees the flowers that they bought in Cairo and took to Daniel's parents' grave, seven miles out. She sees Shifu vanishing through the Stargate, but she can't see behind Daniel's eyes, and he keeps secrets. Daniel is old enough to understand, but too old.
She is, after all, just a little girl, removing the pink streamers from the handlebars of her bicycle, balancing a washer in her hand and testing the weight before she uses it to attach a headboard to her bed, running to meet Daddy and Uncle George, who are home on leave. Even when they are making love, she cannot help thinking of him in those days, when he had more hair and a wife, before he grew old and serious and daring.
She wishes everyone could wake up with George Hammond just once. When he wakes up, he grunts and sighs and rolls over and when he finds Sam naked next to him, he smiles at her, and she shatters. He touches her like she's all there is, then crawls out of bed and brings her orange juice in a blue glass that his wife bought. Sam wonders what it would be like if Lydia were still alive, if they would rent motel rooms and always carry condoms instead of lounging in George's huge king size bed and kissing lazily all day.
"Sam?" says Daniel, gently, and Sam knows she's zoning badly. Teal'c's hand on her shoulder hardly feels real.
"Is it really so strange?"
"You're having highly illegal sex with someone your father's age. Strange," says Jack, "does not even begin to cover it."
When Sam finally figured out how to save the world the last time, she wanted to collapse with exhaustion, not crunch equations for five hours. Jack said, "You deserve a breather, Major. You did well. I'm proud of you," and Sam blushed and stammered. Then George said, "Finish the job, then take three days' leave, Major." And her face reverted to white and she smiled confidently and the world was saved, after all.
Her teammates are still looking at her anxiously, waiting for her to come up with the answers the way she always does, with cunning visual aids and nasty-looking equations to back her up. She wants to take the magic markers Colonel O'Neill brought to George's house and draw stick figure images of a blonde woman with a blue body and a man with no hair sitting together and thinking about the past (Christmases with the Hammond and Carter clans and piano lessons paid for and a beaming smile at Academy graduation and Lydia and Martouf) and the present (candlelit dinners and striped comforters and slow kisses and granddaughters playing tag and mission reports, regular like the rainfall on P7X-386) but never the future. She doesn't have the words to tell them.
"I can't really explain it," she says.
"You are in love with General Hammond?" asks Teal'c. He's probably thinking that the Tau'ri are very weird.
She isn't in love with General Hammond, though. She's in love with George, and the difference is a smile's width and tastes like Christmas morning.
"Not really." They look at her expectantly, all of them, waiting for the punch line, maybe. And it's the strangest thing, but Sam doesn't really care what happens next, what they think of her now that they know, or even what will happen when they get back to Colorado. She doesn't care whether she sleeps with George again, whether they both get dishonorable discharge, whether she ever again discovers that George loves backrubs and has a foot fetish.
"I'm going home," she says, walking away from angry Jack, bewildered Daniel, puzzled Teal'c. "I think you can figure me out better without me here."