Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I.

That’s no way to live
All tangled up like balls of string.

— Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s, “A Light On A Hill”

— — — — —

“Why are we even considering this, sir?” Colonel O’Neill says. “They murder teenage girls. Period.”

Sam could swear she used to enjoy their mid-briefing debates. Everyone trying so passionately to do the right thing, to make the right choice – even when there were no good choices left.

But like so much from before Daniel died, now it’s only tiresome.

Today’s topic is P3X-426, where the city-dwelling people, twice a year at religious festivals, perform the human sacrifice of young virgins.

“That may be true, Colonel –” says General Hammond.

“Personally –” the colonel tosses his pen down on his notepad – “I don’t know why we’re not talking about going in there and rescuing every female between the age of ten and twenty.”

“We can’t go imposing our own moral standards on every native culture in the galaxy,” says General Hammond. “The Vorandese are willing to trade naquadah, and they’re allies against the Goa’uld – no matter how personally abhorrent we may find their beliefs.”

“The girls actively compete to be chosen,” Jonas says. “They think of it as serving their people. It’s considered a great honour.”

“There are many cultures in the galaxy that engage in similar practices,” adds Teal’c.

“And right here on Earth,” Sam points out, more because she feels like someone should say it than because she really disagrees with the colonel.

She doesn’t know what she believes, actually. She’s too tired these days to believe much in anything. And today in particular has been full of minor miseries, in the way that more of her days seem to be now. This morning, one of her garbage bags tore open as she was carrying it to the street, strewing half-rotted kitchen scraps across her driveway. The commissary had been out of coffee. Airman Morris had misfiled the schematics she’d asked him to put away, so she’d spent forty minutes searching for them, and then she’d immediately fumbled them all over the floor. It’s as if the one big misery is casting off sparks, like a grinding stone spinning against steel.

“Historically speaking,” she goes on, “our aversion to human sacrifice is extremely recent. For thousands of years, it was the norm. There’s a long history of these practices on every continent, from the Mayans to the Celts to the pre-antiquity cultures of the Near East.”

The colonel glowers at her. “‘History’ being the operative word there.”

“It still happens,” she says, needled. Half a minute ago, she didn’t care about the outcome of this fight. “More than you probably think.”

“We do have laws against that kind of thing nowadays,” he drawls.

“Yes, sir,” she fires back, “because no one on this planet ever breaks a law.”

“Okay, people,” the general tries to interject, but the colonel isn’t looking at him.

“The point,” he says, “is that we like to discourage it. Not give biannual government-sponsored performances of child murder.”

“No, sir,” she says. “The point is that maybe we’re not so morally spotless ourselves that we can make snap judgments.”

“Look, can we at least tell them that we’ll maybe – just maybe – consider trading with them –”

“Colonel,” says Hammond.

“– if they can see clear to their rain god or whatever –”

“God of clouds and storms,” says Jonas.

“– being satisfied with, I don’t know, a couple goats? A jug of wine?”

Sam shakes her head, hearing her voice become shrill with frustration. “Sir, we can’t just barge in out of thin air and tell people they’re living their lives wrong.”

“Oh, come on, Major, we do it all the time!”

“Colonel –”

“When they’re enslaved, maybe, but –”

“A few goats, is all I’m saying. A calf, if they must. A nice side of bacon?”

“Sir, that’s not…”

“They’re killing kids, Carter!”

“I think Daniel would say –”

“Well, Daniel isn’t here, now is he?”

Sam reels back as if he’s hit her.

In the wake of the colonel’s raised voice, she can hear the air hushing through the vents. Voices from the control room downstairs. The colonel’s face has gone hard and cold the way it does when he’s furious to the point of violence. It’s a look Sam doesn’t like seeing. She resents being reminded of what kind of man he’s been – still is. She’s aware that it’s moral squeamishness.

It makes her a coward. A delusional coward.

“No, sir,” she says stiffly. “He isn’t.”

There’s silence.

General Hammond seizes control of the meeting again. “Let’s table this for now,” he says. “When SG-11 pays them a visit later this week, we should have a better understanding of the extent of their naquadah resources. Until then, it’s not worth discussing.”

They move on to other topics, but Sam sits silently in a blaze of petulance. Colonel O’Neill scowls at the tabletop for the remainder of the hour. At the end of the briefing, for the first time in six years, she stands at attention when he gets up, and she stays that way until he’s left the room.

He doesn’t look at her once.

If Daniel were here, he’d be baffled at her formality. He’d turn to her and raise his eyebrows. He’d say, Okay, what the fuck?

But Daniel isn’t here now. Is he.

— — — — —

That evening, she’s at work on a device that SG-3 brought home from their latest exploratory mission: a sphere surrounded by a series of rotating, interlocking rings inscribed with symbols. It looks like an instrument for making precise astronomical calculations, but it’s emitting a faint EM signature, as if there’s a small power source hidden in there, and Sam can’t figure out why.

It’s late. She likes working late in her lab, when no one will interrupt her. She likes the dimness of the corridors. She flicks off the overheads in her workspace and just leaves on her desk lamp, which doesn’t illuminate much past the edges of her lab bench. The red and blue and white and green lights of her electronics blink out of the enveloping darkness of the lab, and she can hear, as she can’t ever during the day, the cool whir of the system servers. Sometimes, when she’s working on a naquadah generator, she feels the traces of the element in her bloodstream come alive and hum, a resonance in her bones.

Colonel O’Neill breaks the quiet with a perfunctory knock on the door jamb. He strides right in, and then proceeds to not say anything. At all. Just hovers, standing at the side of the table, watching her work.

She tries to settle back to it. The colonel picks up objects and sets them down again. A pair of precision wire cutters, a dead D-cell, a sticky note that says c.f. Binney/Merrifield pg. 142.

Sam rotates the sphere’s outermost ring on its gimbal and feels it slot into place.

The colonel drops a pencil. It rolls loudly along the floor and disappears underneath her shelving unit.

Sam sighs and puts down the device.

“Come to apologize, sir?”

It’s snarky. Insubordinate, actually. But he’s been unbearable, and she’s still pissed at him, and it’s nearly midnight, so she thinks, all in all, she’s entitled.

He scowls. “No.”

Want to leave me alone, then? she’s tempted to ask, but this time she restrains herself. He picks up her smallest screwdriver and promptly drops that, too. Before she can even shoot him an exasperated look, he scoops it off the floor and holds up his hands in apology.

It’s hard to concentrate. Out of the corner of her eye, she watches him pace a slow lap of the room. He stops to get eye to eye with the winking lights of her radio receivers, to peruse the books on her shelves. The gimbals have a few set positions, and she sees that if she can align them, she’ll be able to access a panel, which is probably where the power source is –

“Carter, I wish you’d just yell at me and get it over with.”

Sam slowly sets the sphere back down on the table.

“Yelling at you won’t help, sir,” she says carefully. Half a cup of cold coffee is sitting by her elbow. There are very slight ripples in the surface, low-level vibrations from the Stargate five storeys below them. She watches the way the velvet white light of her work lamp shimmers in the wavering liquid. There must be a way to infer the vibrational frequency of the Gate from the amplitude and waveform of the ripples, even accounting for the mediating dynamical variables of the five levels of military base in between, but to be exact, she’d need air temperature, the percentage of steel and concrete in the walls and floor, their precise densities. Sam starts to work through the equations, assigns the variables weight.

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not mad at you.”

He gives her a look.

“Okay,” she amends, “I’m not mad at only you.”

He’d put the screwdriver back in very slightly the wrong place. She adjusts it, fussing, to make it line up with the edge of her notepad.

“I’m mad at Daniel,” she says. The top page of the pad is full of her notes on Jonas’s partially completed translation of the sphere symbols. Orb ~ head? Observe/view/interpret, being–fire. She thumbs at a red smudge beside the words. Jam, she thinks, from the half of a Danish that Jonas had given her in his office. “For being so immovably noble that he got himself killed. And then – according to you, anyway – he chose to die, and I’m mad at him for not being noble enough to try to stay. I’m mad at General Hammond for being so understanding about it, and also for not being one whit more understanding than he’s allowed to be. I’m mad at Jonas for… well,” she looks up at him and quirks a half-smile, “for the same reasons you’re mad at Jonas.”

(For not doing what Daniel had done back on Kelowna. For being brilliant and competent and giving no cause for complaint. For smiling. For giving her the last half of his Danish. For being perky, for being desperate to please, for being useful. For not being Daniel.)

“I’m mad at our allies for being flaky,” she says, “and I’m mad at my brother for not calling me back, and I’m mad at my grocery store for changing the brand of garbage bags they carry because the new ones rip when I take them out to the curb.”

There. In the silence between them, she picks up the orb and twists one ring. Back, around. The next gimbal slots into place.

The colonel clears his throat.

“You should fill them less. The bags. So they won’t be as heavy.”

Sam says nothing. The colonel fiddles with the knob of a radio pulse emitter. It buzzes, startling him, and he puts his hands in his pockets.

“You left out Teal’c.”

“Yeah, actually, I’m good with Teal’c,” she snaps.

He nods, his jaw twitching like maybe he’s a little hurt. He puts his back to her and returns to the emitter, carefully rotating the knob back to where she’d had it. 75.2 hertz. They both listen to the waveform modulate.

“You didn’t mention me, either.”

Now she can tell for sure that he’s hurt, and she softens, because that’s not what she’d intended. Or maybe it was, and now she regrets it.

“Sir…” she says, and it makes him face her.

The truth is, she is mad at him. It hasn’t been that long since he’d insisted on keeping them on active duty. He barely mentions Daniel’s name, and when he does, it’s to wound. And she’s holding it against him, maybe, that he was the one that Daniel had appeared to when he’d been dying. The two of them had had some sort of understanding that she was on the outside of, and now Daniel is gone, and she wants any part of him that she can cling to, and she resents it.

She sighs. “I guess I’m still angry about, you know…”

“Yeah.” He steps toward her. Close enough that she can feel the air currents from his movement, hear the canvas rustle of his BDUs. His gaze is sad and dark and uncomfortably direct. The pure white of the lamp, 5800 Kelvin light temperature, catches the short silver hairs above his ears as if he’s just stepped out of a snowfall.

“And –” She tries to tell him with her eyes. That she’s angry at the longing, the breathless wanting every time he’s near, the endless, exhausting, utterly futile love. Sometimes she feels like the entire territory inside her skull is about him, about what he’s thinking and what he says and how he smiles, or doesn’t. And that makes her angry, too.

The lab is hushed around them. Jack looks at her in the shadow. The light from the corridor slants in and settles across their feet.

Then he takes her wrist in his hand and lifts it to his mouth and presses a kiss to the inside of it, in the tender place where the skin is thin over the pulse.

Sam is breathing, breathing, breathing, not.

His mouth is open, and she feels the pressure and the dryness of his lips and the hot huff of his breath as he holds her wrist there for a moment.

He lowers it and walks silently from the darkened room.

— — — — —

They almost drown, and Sam tastes salt for days.

She’ll be typing a formula, or sitting in a briefing, or putting on her pyjamas, and all at once her mouth will be thick with the taste of sea.

Down to the last of her stale air, her lungs on fire, she’d inhaled too soon, and she’d gotten a mouthful of water.

They almost drown and it’s just another day at the office. Janet gives her a course of oral antibiotics – Who knows what’s in that water, she’d said, and our lungs are very sensitive organs, Sam; I don’t want you developing pneumonia – and Sam takes the pills with a glass of lukewarm tap water each morning and goes to work, only she still feels it. Still tastes it.

She almost returns to the infirmary and tells Janet that she thinks there might still be seawater in her respiratory system, but she doesn’t. She rolls the tack of brine around the crevasses of her mouth and says nothing.

Her lungs seizing fruitlessly in the grip of a cold fate. No air, no way out, a searing flame beneath her ribs.

Her chest aches and aches and aches.

They almost drown and Sam thinks, this feels familiar.

— — — — —

The first weekend of October is unseasonably warm, and the general spontaneously throws one of his day-long barbecues. The air smells like dry leaves and ripened apples, and Sam brings a sweater for when the sun goes down.

The afternoon light is thick as honey, and she leans back in a folding chair on the lawn and lets it warm her face and turn the space behind her eyelids a shimmering vermilion. The gentle heat drives off the lingering chill from Antarctica and the infirmary where the colonel nearly died and the observation room where, two weeks later, Sam had sat with a hot knife in her belly watching him sweat and rage through his post-sarcophagus DTs. It’s distant now, everything is distant now, and the trees behind the house swish softly in the breeze. The general’s granddaughters are practicing cartwheels on the grass, and she listens to them argue about whose form is better until they badger Jonas into being an impartial judge.

“There’s no way to come out of this with dignity, is there,” she hears him ask General Hammond.

Janet is sitting beside her, shading her eyes as she looks up to chat with Captain Forrest from the quartermaster’s unit. Sam has mostly tuned them out. She lets sounds wash over her – murmur of conversation, clink of glass bottles, hollow scrape of plastic cutlery on paper plates, clank of the grill opening and closing. It sends fragrant washes of blue smoke across the yard.

“Hm, I can’t tell,” Jonas tells the girls, teasing. “You’ll have to do it again.”

The cooler lid slams down, and Colonel O’Neill calls from across the deck, “Hey, Michaels, toss me a Yuengling, would you?”

There’s the rockslide rattle of ice. “Looks like we’re down to just Miller Lite, sir.”

“National tragedy,” says the colonel. “Well, time to save the world again. I’ll go for a beer run.”

“You will not,” says Janet sharply, right next to her ear, and Sam’s eyes fly open. “You’ve already had about three too many to be driving on.”

“I’ll go,” says Sam, levering herself out of her chair before her languid limbs meld to it.

“You’ll buy shitty beer,” the colonel protests. “Wheat ale and IPAs and nothing in between.”

Sam tilts her head, amused. “I know how to buy beer, sir.”

“You know how to buy whisky,” he retorts. “And tequila. Beer is my thing. Don’t horn in on my thing.”

Sam’s mouth twitches. “You know, sir, you could always come, too.”

They take Sam’s car.

Most of the houses in Colorado Springs are packed right up against each other, but the general lives in a neighbourhood of stately, well-spaced homes on curving streets named for trees, and Sam threads through them to the main road amid a companionable silence. In the air-conditioned chill of the store, she lets Colonel O’Neill select cases of Guinness and Blue Moon and Magic Hat #9, and she pushes the cart. He’s had just enough beer this afternoon to be loose and amenable, and it’s easy to be with him. She’d parked close, so they carry the boxes out by hand and load them into her trunk. The sun is heating the asphalt, and Sam takes pleasure in the waver of the air above its surface, the way it looks like jellied water. She can almost see the thermal currents, track the world’s hidden movements. The colonel looks where she’s looking and smiles and puts a hand on the back of her neck before they get back in the car.

She reverses out and navigates around the line of parked cars, and then without thinking about it she pulls back into a spot at the rear of the lot.

She puts the car in park and stares through the windshield. There’s a bit of concrete-curbed grass, looking parched just now, and then four lanes of traffic bunching up at the red light, and across the street, a Texaco station. The shade cast by its roof is like a quarry full of water in the heat.

She turns her head toward Jack and they gaze at each other in silence.

His look is steady and he lets her scrutinize him as if he knows what she’s doing, which she most certainly does not. But he doesn’t give her anything back. He’s just the colonel, the way he always is.

She doesn’t know what she was expecting. She supposes she was thinking of his mouth on the tender, exposed curve of her wrist. That hot puff of breath on her skin.

She shakes her head a little at herself and throws the car into gear.

But as she lets go, he puts his hand over hers on the shifter and guides it back into park. The bones of her fingers press into the round head of the gearshift under his grip.

The colonel lifts her hand and touches the inside of her wrist where he kissed it. He skims over the swell of her thumb muscle, hooks his fingers into the hollow of her palm. His eyes stay on her hand as if it’s a new phenomenon to him. The nails cut short so they don’t snag on anything off-world, the cuticles fraying because she doesn’t like to put on lotion, in case it gets grease on her equipment. There’s a callus on her trigger finger.

The colonel examines the creases and joints, the first knuckles. He draws the tips of three of her fingers to his mouth and kisses them, holding them between gently parted lips.

Sam sucks in a hard breath.

He opens his mouth and guides her fingers inside.

At the feel of the hot, slick inside of his mouth, the labile muscles and the hard ridge of his teeth, Sam is swamped by a rush of arousal. Heat flushes up from her stomach; a charge zings straight to her nipples. She presses her lips together and shifts in her seat. It’s so quiet in the car, under the faint rush of traffic, that the slide of fabric against leather is loud.

She understands what he’s doing, the thin edge they’re walking: they’re not kissing, so they’re not breaking the regs. It’s a flimsy justification, so obviously facetious that it could only ever stand up in the courtroom of their own minds.

But if this is as far as they take it, that’s the only place that matters.

Jack manipulates her fingers in his mouth, sucks them between tongue and teeth. She flexes the whorls and loops of her fingerprints against the yielding mound of his tongue. He lets go, and her fingers slide from his lips. The air feels cool against her wet skin. She touches his bottom lip, his cheek. She rubs her thumb against the shell of his ear like it’s a worry stone. All in silence.

No kissing. No confessions of attraction. Nothing suspect, Senator. Nothing immodest.

Sam drives back to the general’s house with every square inch of her skin fizzing like a sparkler. All the blood in her veins is leaning rightward, rushing toward him as he sits beside her, staring out the window at the green lawns, at the parked cars and the rotating sprinklers, at the trees turning bronze and sienna in the last of the evening light.

— — — — —

“Teal’c,” Sam says on a Thursday. “Do you have plans tomorrow night?”

She hasn’t driven her P1800 in months because the pistons are wearing out and she hasn’t been able to source original parts as replacements. But it’s getting too late in the year for the Indian, and she wants something good in the few weeks before the dark and the cold close their fist around Colorado. Some small joy to come back to that reminds her why this world is worth fighting for.

So for three weeks, she’s been machining custom parts for the P1800’s engine in Siler’s workshop on base. Now she needs to move the car from its rented storage space into her garage – which means finally clearing out the second bay, still jammed full of the contents of her dad’s old house.

“I need to move about fifty boxes into my guest room,” she explains. “I’ll buy you pizza?”

The next day, he follows her home from the mountain. In the west, streaks of cirrus cloud are lit pink against the turquoise sky. Sam gets out of her sedan and watches a single bird sweep across the blue, high up. This far away, it’s just a black speck against the glow of the atmosphere.

After an hour of ferrying boxes, Sam takes a break to call in their order – one large pie, half pepperoni, half sausage and mushrooms. Teal’c is dismantling a stack of boxes labelled Mark’s room. He’s wearing an old hoodie with the sleeves cut off and his biceps bulge beneath the frayed hems. They’ve left the rolling door open to the autumn evening and the garage is cold, but his forehead is shiny with perspiration. Sam hands him a chilled bottle of water and he nods his thanks, leaning back against the boxes as he drinks.

Sam cracks her own bottle and they stand in shared silence for a few moments.

“You and O’Neill appear to have overcome your personal difficulties,” says Teal’c.

Sam takes a slow sip of water, stalling. She rolls it around her mouth before swallowing. “I guess.”

“It is well. I believe you need each other.”

“We have you.”

“You do,” says Teal’c warmly.

“And Jonas now,” she points out.

“Indeed,” says Teal’c, this time with a little less conviction. Sam laughs.

Teal’c tilts his head in acknowledgement. “Jonas Quinn is quite eager to prove himself.”

“He’ll settle in.” Sam watches insects flit around the exterior light above the garage. The sky is royal blue now, edging toward navy. The stars will be coming out. Planets, nebulae. “The colonel isn’t helping.”

“O’Neill is not a man who trusts easily.”

“He trusted you pretty quick,” says Sam. She pauses. “And Daniel.”

Venus is visible now, just above the treeline. The equation relating apparent brightness to luminosity is a simple function of the square of the distance; twice as far means four times dimmer. Most celestial bodies are too distant to be seen. They still exert a gravity. Like dark matter, which is known by the force of its absence.

Where is Daniel, she wonders. How far.

“He trusts you as well, Major Carter,” Teal’c says gently.

That’s exactly the problem, Sam thinks. Because sometimes, she doesn’t trust herself.

— — — — —

You used his humanity against him, Jonas had said, as they left the human-form replicators behind, locked in an endless second.

Jack had revved up to be furious with him – and then Carter had gone and agreed. That’s exactly what we did.

So then he had to be angry at both of them.

And it hadn’t escaped his notice that she didn’t call him sir once in the whole conversation.

She doesn’t speak to him, either. She doesn’t laugh when he tries to break his team’s tension, sitting in the captain’s seat of the X-303 and pointing ahead with a British “Engage!” when Thor begins to tow them home. She doesn’t ramble about the Asgards’ hyperdrive technology when he notes how smooth the ride is.

She doesn’t say a word.

Not on the hop back to Earth, not in the infirmary as they get their post-mission checkups, not in the debriefing. Oh, sure, she answers direct questions – the “sir” very politely and very coldly back in place – but no more.

The perfect soldier. Buttoned up. Disciplined. Following orders without question.

When the debriefing wraps up, she’s out of her seat like a shot. Jonas isn’t far behind.

Jack looks at Teal’c. “I suppose you’re pissed, too?”

“No,” says Teal’c. “I believe you made the right decision.”

“That makes two of us.”

“We are at war,” says Teal’c. “Difficult actions must be taken. I understand this, even if Jonas Quinn does not.”

Jack drops his eyes, picking at the edge of the table. He tries with all his strength not to ask.

He fails. “And Carter?”

“I believe that she, too, will understand, once her head has cooled.”

Jack opens his mouth, but just shakes his head and lets it go.

Daniel wouldn’t have understood, he knows, wouldn’t have ever understood, and his opinion of Jack might have been altered forever. But Carter – Carter should know better. Carter is a soldier. She should have been able to see their array of bad-to-worse options with the same tactical clarity that he did. She should get that duty doesn’t just mean willingness to give your life, but readiness to sacrifice your soul, one inch at a time.

There’s no such thing as moral purity in battle. Everyone is stained.

If Carter thinks otherwise, she’s being deliberately naïve.

And it’s far easier for him to stay angry at her for it than it is to remember the disappointment in her eyes as she’d followed his lead.

— — — — —

She comes home from the debriefing and takes the motorcycle out despite the cold. She feels balanced on a razor-thin peak of rage, like pictures she’s seen of the Patagonia Mountains. The sun is setting, staining the sides of buildings and the edges of the last leaves to the golden red of Indian paintbrush.

She drives out of town, west.

Past the turnoff for Pikes Peak, in civil twilight now, Sam opens the throttle, feels the engine rip and the air shred past her like tearing paper. Normally she’s careful on these narrow, winding roads, but her caution – her fear – has all been burned out. She throws herself around the curves, flat against the handlebars. Her helmet cuts into the static air and she imagines the eddies of wind she’s leaving in her wake. Even she can’t compute those trajectories: the physics of turbulence are complex and chaotic and unsolvable.

It feels good, to leave something inscrutable behind.

She wings a left onto the smaller Highway 67, heading south. Her headlight catches fluttering moths and night insects in its white beam. The black air smells of juniper and pine and sagebrush, and the crisp mineral scent of rock in a cold mountain night. The abyss of a drop yawns to her right; she can’t see it, but she can sense it, a void beyond the thin thread of the guard rail. The cliffs throw back an echo of her engine, loud enough to bring the rocks down on her.

An hour and a half later, the mountains release her and Sam bursts out of the foothills and into open prairie. She leans even lower and edges the throttle up over 90. Loops back north on 115 towards town with three thousand points of scintillating light above her shattering the hull-smooth metal of the sky.

Sam is soaring in a cloud of her own unabated anger, and she takes even the roads in her neighbourhood way too fast. There’s an excessively large pickup parked behind her house near the garage access. She ignores it, fishtails neatly into her driveway, and skids to a stop on a wave of gravel. When she kills the motor after four hours of engine roar, her ears ring.

“Jesus, Carter, take it down a notch.” The colonel had been leaning on his car door with his arms crossed. His breath clouds in front of his face when he speaks. Sam pulls her helmet off, trying to shake her cold, cottony ears clear. “Don’t you think one dead team member is enough?”

Sam works her jaw and manages not to say anything until she’s punched in her code on the garage keypad and stomped to the kitchen door. She doesn’t invite him in, but as she opens the fridge, she hears him catch the door on its backswing.

Beer in hand, she turns and says, “I thought he wasn’t dead. Sir.”

Jack shoves his hands in his pockets. “Close enough, don’t you think?”

“I do, actually,” she shoots back. “You’re the one who’s been making that distinction.”

Jack looks away, leaving the smart of his needless cruelty unassuaged. Sam bites her lip. She doesn’t mean to say anything more, but she hears herself rasp, “So do you maybe want to stop hurting me?”

He raises his eyebrows. “Do you want to stop punishing me?”

Sam clenches her teeth. “Not particularly.”

She’s reminded of P4X-347, on the beach, when they were in withdrawal from the light before they’d realized it, and neither one of them had the presence of mind to back off from a fight.

“You’re out of control, Major,” he says.

“And you’re out of line, sir,” she snaps.

Jack sighs, his shoulders dropping. He nods at her bottle. “Got an extra one of those?”

“No.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Fine,” he says, and swipes hers right out of her hand.

Sam’s so pissed at the entitlement of it, so angry at his callousness and stubborn righteousness and smug superiority that she wants to hit him. He must see it, because triumph flares in his eyes. He steps close.

“Come on, then, Carter,” he says with a sardonic tilt to his mouth. “Let me have it.”

She realizes that he wanted this. He wanted her to open a release valve on her own internal pressure. And because he’s angry, too, and no longer being careful of her feelings, he’s done it by manipulating her into lashing out, and that makes her angrier than ever. On a savage surge of wrath, she smashes the beer bottle out of his hand, curls her fists into the front of his shirt, and kisses him.

It’s all teeth and fury, and Jack presses forward, their lips still fused, and shoves her into her refrigerator. Her back crashes against it and her head strikes hard enough that she sees a white flash, and over her own moan of pleasure, Sam can hear bottles clank on the inside of the fridge door. Jack forces her mouth open and strokes his tongue against hers, and, without subsiding at all, Sam’s anger flares into arousal.

He tastes like coffee and copper, and she devours him as long as she can, and when she needs to breathe, she rips her mouth away and puts her teeth on the muscle of his neck where it meets his shoulder and digs in, not sure whether she means to cause him pleasure or pain.

Jack hisses and twists his fist into her hair hard enough to pull, then tugs her away from his neck and kisses her again. Sam pours her ferocity and her bitterness into it, and he takes and takes it, swallowing her incandescent rage like a neutron star.

With the hand tangled in her hair, he tilts her head to change the angle, and she whimpers. Tendrils of her anger are starting to flicker lower, into the more manageable burn of her arousal. Sam feels her white-knuckled grip on his shirt begin to relax. She starts to come back to her body, starts to feel the hard planes of his chest beneath her hand, his heart pounding like a sprinter’s feet in the dust.

The ebb of her anger is like the tide riding out, and it’s a sweet, sore relief. The pressure she’s putting on his lips eases into something less like a blow, more like a benediction. In return, Jack loosens his hold on her hair and moves his hand to cup her cheek with a tenderness Sam knows she wouldn’t have accepted a minute ago.

She can press into him now the way she’s always wanted to, kiss him how she’s imagined, thick with longing and wanting and the love that’s turned lonely from being locked inside. He moans, and his fingers stroke a soft caress around her ear before he draws back to breathe, his forehead pressed to hers.

“Sam,” he whispers, eyes closed, his lips roaming her face – the crest of her cheek, her nose, her eyelashes, her jawline. His forehead rocks back to hers. It’s like they’ve been lost off-world and only just found each other again. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Sam touches the hollow of his collarbone, the underside of his jaw, fingertips like a butterfly that doesn’t know where to land. “Me too, sir,” she says, and then, in disbelief, “Jack.”

He smooths the hair away from her temple and shifts to draw back, but Sam makes a noise of protest and takes two fistfuls of his shirt on either side of his collar, holding on. She doesn’t want to lose the feel of him, the heat of his skin radiating onto her still-cold face, the way she’s lit up in all the places they touch. He settles back against her, pulling her head forward to rest on his chest and stroking her hair over and over.

He mumbles, “I’m sorry,” again, and turns his head to press his cheek to the crown of her head.

His jaw moves against her hair as he speaks. “I don’t know how to be, without him,” he admits. She hears him swallow. “Sometimes I think he was the only thing keeping me human.”

She pulls away so she can see his face, his dark eyes. “Sir, no. He wasn’t,” she says fiercely. The man in front of her is one of the most honourable human beings Sam knows. His private morality is carved into him like runes into stone, and sometimes it bleeds. Still, she knows what he means: Daniel was their best selves, their better angels. Maybe they got too used to outsourcing their humanity to him. Once it’s gone, it doesn’t come back.

And the empty, gaping place it left is the ragged hole she’d just stumbled into, the reason she’d just thrown away three degrees, twenty years of decorated military service, and six years of soldierly restraint and kissed her commanding officer in her kitchen.

Sam breathes water, tastes salt.

“But…” Her voice cracks. “I miss him.”

“Yeah,” says Jack, closing his eyes. “Me too.”

— — — — —

They clean up the broken glass and spilled beer from her kitchen floor, and then Sam gets out two fresh bottles and they play chess at her kitchen table.

She hasn’t eaten since eleven a.m. and she’s hungry, so they order Thai food, shrimp green curry and drunken noodles with beef. When it arrives, they put the containers on either side of the chess board to share. They play three games and it’s nearly two by the time he leaves, but something has eased between them. A complicity has been reestablished, some sense that the two of them are a team within a team, in a way that Daniel and Teal’c had not quite been a part of. There is an understanding, one that does not need to be articulated or even acknowledged, that they are on each other’s side.

Together, they shuttle the beer bottles into her recycling bin and throw away the takeout containers, and Jack takes her kitchen trash out to the garage.

“See,” he says, “half-full. So it won’t rip,” and it’s not an I-told-you-so in his voice, but a soft, solicitous care. She smiles at him, as he hauls the awkward bag across her kitchen with the sleeves of his flannel shirt rolled up, and the smile he gives her back has nothing in it except uncomplicated affection.

When he heads to his truck, there’s only a light goodbye, casual and taken for granted in the way of two people who see each other daily. He leaves, and she waves at him when he’s in his pickup, and he waves back and drives off, and it’s okay again, for a little while.

— — — — —

Monday the guilt sets in. She’s too busy over the weekend to think: she pulls twenty-hour shifts on the Prometheus, trying to repair the damage from Simmons and his goons and the rough landing on Hala. By the time 0600 Monday rolls around, she’s running on more caffeine than sleep. But it isn’t the coffee causing her gut to churn.

It would never have happened if they hadn’t been angry. Sam’s too rulebound, she thinks in self-disgust. And the colonel is scrupulously conscientious of their power imbalance. In her least generous moments, Sam thinks that it’s almost performative, the way he’s so careful to put the ball in her court.

But it turns out that all that care and consideration can get wiped clear out of him by anger, like the sweet tissues of petrified wood ossifying under the cold mineral seep of silica.

If she presses on the back of her skull, she can still feel the tenderness there, the bruise of impact.

At eight a.m., Jonas knocks on her open lab door. “Breakfast?”

Sam winces. “Not really hungry.”

He gives her a once-over. “You okay? You look kind of rough.”

“Thanks.”

“I just mean…”

“Long couple of days,” she explains, taking pity on him.

“Come on, then,” he wheedles. “Take a break. Teal’c convinced General Hammond to let me off base for a couple of hours on Saturday so we could see that new sci-fi movie. You can tell us everything it got wrong, it’ll be fun.”

Sam hesitates, hands hovering above the keyboard. “Wait, you guys saw that thing with the robots?”

“Yeah.”

“That looked terrible,” she says with fascination.

“It was.” Jonas grins. “We loved it.”

She puts some plain toast on her plate just to stave off questions, but she mostly shreds it between her fingers as she listens to the guys talk. When she takes a bite, it’s like sawdust and she has to choke it down. The heavy stone in her gut doesn’t leave room for much else. It turns over in her stomach as Colonel O’Neill walks in, frowning, and makes a beeline for the coffee carafe.

Mug in hand, he pauses in front of the pastry case, and his BDU pants are baggy and his shoelace is untied, because in some ways he’ll always be squared-away special ops and in others he’s a slob. Sam’s mouth is dry, and then it’s not. The fluorescents flicker, and the colonel’s hair is sticking up a little in the back from where it had been pressed against his pillow, and Jonas and Teal’c are saying something about special effects, about green screens and practical models, and Sam thinks that if she speaks, the vibration of her own voice will make her sick.

She shoves her plate away and swallows twice. “Listen, guys, I really should get back to work.”

They protest, but the colonel has spotted them and is heading over, and Sam can’t breathe. Her mind is screaming mistake, mistake, we made a huge mistake, but her body is stretching toward him, a reaching in her muscles and her fingers and her toes. A skeleton trying to get out. There’s something fracturing under the surface of her skin. She can feel his breath, his palm cupping her cheek, the force of his lips against hers.

She tastes acid at the back of her throat.

She stands, panicked, and her chair squawks against the floor. As she turns to leave, she catches a glimpse of confusion on the colonel’s face, and it hurts and it hurts and it won’t ever stop.

— — — — —

A week, and she’s been pretty successful at avoiding him. In bed at night, she thinks of court martials and demotions and dishonourable discharges, and she makes herself imagine bad field decisions that leave one of them dead or permanently disabled. Her dreams are full of his scent, and she wakes in the dark before dawn.

She works, she leaves, she sleeps, she drinks coffee, she works again. There are deadlines and reports, there’s the Prometheus, there’s Dr. Lee, who thinks he has an idea of how to develop a Goa’uld sensor that can detect the naquadah in the host’s blood, and SG-11 needs her help cataloguing technological artifacts from P4X-221. It’s easy to attend meetings perfunctorily, to keep her brain engaged on whatever she’s working on back in her lab, to be only half-present and then to be gone.

Or it’ll get easier, she tells herself. She’s making it work. She slipped, and now it’s a slog back up to where she’d been, to the mostly stable footing she’d had before. That’s all. She won’t slip again.

Sam breathes through her nose on the way to her car and feels the air pinch at the inside of her nostrils. Her exhale plumes into the darkness. It snowed earlier, the first snowfall of the year, but it’s just a thin, dirty film of translucent white over the asphalt.

There’s a scum of frost on her windshield and Colonel O’Neill is leaning against her driver’s side door. His truck is parked beside him.

Sam stops out of arm’s reach.

“Sir.”

“Major.”

He doesn’t say anything else and Sam wonders why he’s bothered to seek her out if he’s just going to stand here.

“Can I get in my car, sir?”

“Dammit, Carter,” he growls, and takes one step forward.

Sam squeezes her eyes shut and then looks up at the nearest lamppost, which is throwing industrial halogen white over three rows of parked cars. There’s a dark orb on the top of it, a mechanical eye. “Not here, sir,” she says.

He nods once, tightly, and then gets in his car and she gets in hers. He follows her out of the lot, the pickup’s high headlights relentless in her rearview. Flecks of water appear on her windshield. It’s flurrying again. Sam flicks on the wipers, but there’s not enough moisture, and the rubber squeals over the glass, so she turns them off again.

She takes the first turnoff she comes to, a lot for a hiking trailhead and campground. It’s empty. There’s a signpost and outhouses and a map under a wooden roof. Sam pulls in and sits silently. The colonel parks two spots away and climbs out of his truck and waits. She sits for another moment and then turns off her engine and gets out.

He stops in front of her. “Carter –”

She clenches her teeth and he lets out a breath of frustration. “I thought we were good,” he says. “Where we left things.”

She shakes her head. “It was a bad idea, sir.”

His eyes darken. “It wasn’t my idea.”

“I know that,” she says through gritted teeth. “You think I don’t know that?”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“Why do you think it’s eating at me?” The lot is unlit, except for one sulphurous light over the map. Sam thinks about the people who must come here in the summer, with hiking packs and water bottles and dogs, getting on the trail in the cool dew of morning, limbs loose and carefree. She feels a pressure behind her eyes.

“I did it to punish you,” she says. “Us. And now I can’t live with it.” Speaking hurts, as if the words are a tapeworm being drawn out. Her chest aches and aches and aches. “Kissing you is the only truly terrible thing I’ve ever done.”

His face freezes.

“Well, bully for you,” he says.

She stops, ashamed. “Sir, I didn’t mean –”

“No, no. You did. That’s a nice life you must lead, Carter. Sorry to have ruined your streak of moral superiority.”

“Sir, stop it.”

He opens his hand in sarcastic invitation. “Please, tell me more about how I’m your biggest regret.”

Sam shakes her head again in aggravation, working her jaw back and forth.

She broke the regulations, betrayed her position as an officer and her commitment to everything she cares about. That’s bad enough. But she hadn’t just broken the rules, she’d broken them.

“I can’t… –”

“Can’t what?”

“I can’t fix it! I can’t – God,” she bites, tilting her head back in exasperation. The sky is black, blank with cloud. “Do you know how badly I want to touch you all the time?”

It’s like she’s cut a wire under tension: he snaps forward, slams his hands onto the car on either side of her, and presses his body against hers. He’s rough and their jackets rasp against one another and Sam’s face is wet with pinpricks of falling ice.

Jack is half-hard against her thigh and heat flushes through her, and she lets her head fall back with a moan, and he tucks his face into the side of her neck. His breath is hot and wet, and he whispers her name, and Sam imagines it condensing onto her cold skin into the word mistake. Mistake, he’s mouthing against her. Mistake, mistake. Something is exploding, something must be exploding. There are snowflakes falling in her eyes.

He nudges a thigh between her legs and Sam bites her lip and arches against him.

“I miss you,” he says, helplessly, and touches his forehead to hers. Both of his hands come up to hold her face, his thumbs pressing painfully into the hollows of her cheeks and his big palms on the sides of her neck. His hands are cold from the metal of the car.

“I miss you, too,” and her voice comes out of her throat choked off, like there are more words stuck in it, but she doesn’t know what to say. There’s nothing to say. “I miss you all the time.” He rocks his thigh and she gasps. The pleasure is sweet and everything about this hurts. “Jack, Jack.”

“My idea this time.” He moves his face back to her neck and scrapes his teeth along the corded muscles. “Mine.”

“Yes,” Sam hisses. “Yes,” and then he’s kissing her with bruising force, and just as suddenly tearing himself away and walking back to his truck, and he’s driving off before she can even process that he’s gone.

It’s snowing harder now and the flakes melt on her hot face, glazing her cheeks. Sam leans against her car, empty and wet and breathing hard, her face tilted up to the sky, to the clouds and the snow and all the stars that aren’t there.

— — — — —

Sam feels nauseous all the time, the sick feeling in her throat she’d get as a kid in stop-and-go traffic, Mark in the backseat next to her and her dad swearing at the cars, and really, she thinks, maybe that’s the best way to describe how her relationship with the colonel has been lately, stop-and-go traffic.

Sometimes they’re fine; it’s like nothing has changed, like they were a year ago, so in sync off-world and on that it’s like they’re thinking the same thoughts, hearts throbbing to the same frequency. And then other times they bait each other and snap, and they’re petty and ungenerous. He invites her to come fishing, half-heartedly, because he knows it’ll be safe, and she declines, as if there’s any other choice –

(There’s always something, isn’t there, he says, and she rolls her eyes, frustration bursting through the surface like bubbles in magma, Oh, come on, sir. We both know the only reason you asked is because you knew I had something else to do.)

– and Sam is never sure what’s going to come out of her mouth to him until she hears it.

“Hey Carter, what was that planet with the little fuzzy armadillo things?” he asks, and she opens her mouth and is terrifyingly certain she’s going to say, I forget, because I can’t think when you’re in the room, my brain is too stuck on the way the light catches on your throat and how raspy your stubble is and the way your mouth moves, that little twist sideways it makes when you’re trying to show that you’re trying not to show you’re amused – yes, like that – so please, for the love of God, would you shut up and kiss me again because I’ve been turned on since you half-ravished me in the parking lot and I really, really need you to finish the job.

“P3X-198,” she says.

When she was little, she’d always thought that the see-saw was the most boring part of the playground. She couldn’t understand why anyone would bother with it, not when there were swings that flung you weightless into the sky at the top of every arc. So maybe she shouldn’t be surprised that she’s the one who disrupted the teeter-totter they’d been poised on for years, crossing to his side, only now they can’t find their balance again and the up-and-down is giving her permanent vertigo.

“Major Carter,” says Teal’c, “are you well?”

“What? Yeah, Teal’c, I’m fine.”

“You have been notably absent from meals.”

“Hm? Oh, I’ve been busy. Eating at weird times.”

That’s true, actually, but mostly what she’s been eating at four p.m. and nine at night and five-thirty in the morning is blue jello and buttered toast and coffee. She sends Teal’c a polite smile that she knows he sees through immediately, but she can’t do any better. “I appreciate the concern, though.”

“Sam,” says Janet, the next day, “come for dinner tonight. Cassie misses you.”

Does she, Sam wants to ask, or did Teal’c recruit you, but she can’t say that, so instead she accepts the invitation, and if Cassie isn’t really the instigator, she at least does a good job pretending. She prattles about her basketball team and the clutch of boys in her AP bio class who have made it their personal mission to harass the teacher – “She’s pretty young, so I guess they, like, smell blood in the water or something, but it’s super annoying, last week she gave up and made us sit in silence for like forty-five minutes and read the textbook” – and Sam eats the chicken marbella that Janet puts on her plate and drinks two glasses of fruity red wine. No one brings up work, and Sam leaves by nine o’clock because she has a mission in the morning.

Twenty-nine hours later, she gets zatted by Maybourne, and her eyes close on the sight of her commanding officer leaping through a portal after him.

She doesn’t see Colonel O’Neill again for thirty-three days.

— — — — —

“Sam.” Janet. “You should eat something.”

Sam should eat something. She should take a break, she should shower, she should change clothes, she should do her laundry. She should run the power analysis on the Prometheus’s sublight engine start-up routine, she should read that new paper on quantum thermodynamic information theory, she should put together the SGC science department’s budget projections for next quarter, she should go home. She should go home.

She should not be completely losing her mind because her CO is missing.

“Sam.”

“I will,” Sam says, “in just a bit.” She’s reviewing the UAV footage, in case there’s something there she might have missed the first fourteen times. A half-second nova of sunlight reflecting on a watch face, a movement in the trees by the river. Her eyes are gritty. Her houseplants are dead. Her fridge – she should – She should find him, she should have found him.

“Sam,” says Janet. And then, a minute later, “Sam.” But there’s something there, on the edge of the frame, and she rolls back the tape and plays it again, twice more, and by the time she realizes it’s just an odd shadow and looks up, Janet isn’t there anymore.

It’s fine. It’s fine.

“Major Carter,” asks General Hammond, “how are you doing?”

Good, sir, she thinks. I’m good. I haven’t slept in four days and it’s like my liver is gone, or like a slow bleed, and I can’t say anything because you’ll have to fire me, and probably Colonel O’Neill too, if we ever find him, if he’s alive, and I need to be doing my job right now, I need to be good at my job right now, I need to be smart about this and find the solution, only I can’t even do the one thing that I’m supposed to be good at, and Colonel O’Neill is suffering for it, and maybe it’s killing him, and the worst part is we haven’t even slept together.

“I’m fine, sir,” she says. “No progress.”

Teal’c watches her. Like he watched her the whole week they were together on the planet, when she was examining the door portal and operating the UAV and tramping through miles of forest and lying outside of the tent in her sleeping bag, staring at the curve of the galaxy.

Teal’c watches her and Sam sleepwalks through the corridors of the SGC with the unshakeable conviction that there’s a black abyss just to the right of where she’s walking that she can’t see and no one else can even sense. The concrete cuts off just past her feet, wires and rebar suspended over space, and the solid floor she sees is a hallucination. She walks as if it’s real. She fills pages and pages with half-completed equations: trajectories, power fluctuations, wormhole physics. Descriptions of geodesics through distorted Minkowski space. General relativity field equations. She scribbles on napkins, on the backs of reports and manila folders, in briefings, in the commissary. The numbers and Greek letters accumulate and fall apart, abandoned halfway through proofs. Pages litter her office and pockets and desk, dense with graphite.

She’s crossing through a T-junction on sublevel 15 and sees a light at the far end of the hall, coming from Colonel O’Neill’s practically unused office. Her stupid, tired heart leaps into her throat, as if he could have found his own way back, and dialed the DHD, and gotten home to the SGC, and debriefed, and showered and changed and retreated into his office to clear out his accumulated paperwork, all without her knowing about it, without anyone saying a thing or the Gate klaxons alarming.

She trots along the darkened hall and looks in. It’s empty, and the inbox isn’t overflowing, which means that Walter came in earlier and took the more urgent folders up to the general’s office, leaving the light on. He must have neatened up; the desk is clear and there’s a coffee ring on it where a mug had been calcifying for two weeks.

Sam sits at the desk. She pulls out the top drawer. Notebooks, pens, erasers, a ruler, all rigidly neat. The second drawer is locked. The third is file folders, corners sticking out at angles, one page accordioned where it had gotten jammed in the drawer mechanism. The fourth contains a pair of gym shoes, a hand pump for a basketball, a Gameboy, a plastic yo-yo, a half-full bag of pretzels, three rubber bands, a stack of napkins and a ketchup packet, two beer cozies, assorted ballpoint pens, a broken comb, and a yellowing paperback copy of The Sun Also Rises with the cover torn off. Sam closes the drawer and runs her fingers around the coffee stain over and over.

She wakes up with her mouth mashed into the desk. It tastes like metal and dust. Teal’c is standing in the doorway. She wants him to stop looking at her like that, like she’s a pane of broken glass and he’s waiting for a tiny vibration, a shift in gravity or the strike of a photon, to shatter the tension holding her together.

Sam sits up and wipes her mouth. “Something to say, Teal’c?” she asks. Self-revulsion makes it come out more acidly than she’d meant.

“I believe the accepted wisdom at the SGC is that I rarely have anything to say, Major Carter.”

She looks up at him. His mouth just barely twitches with amusement. After a long moment, she huffs a laugh.

It gets her through the next few days. It lets her put herself back together and look at the problem straight. She taps her pencil eraser on her lab bench. Data, it’s a problem of data. Any problem is solvable if you know enough. Fill in the variables, calculate the wave function, work out the probabilities. They got insufficient visuals from the UAV, so they need more aerial footage. Photography, heat signatures. A satellite. Sam can get it through the Gate; she can deconstruct and reconstruct and launch, she can compute the trajectory and the required force and – and then Jolan of the Tok’ra calls in to say that there are no human life signs on the planet.

She can’t find him. She can’t find him, and she can’t breathe, and she needs to hide it and she can’t do that either. People bring her food, coffee. She eats what’s put in front of her and sleeps on her desk, in her base quarters, twice in the back seat of her car because she’s too tired to drive home. Once she stays in the SGC lot; once she drives to the campground parking lot and sleeps there.

Edora was easier. That was a problem with a definite, known shape to which there was a definite, technical solution. This is just absence. When she finally breaks down, it isn’t because she’s lost hope but because she doesn’t see a next step.

Teal’c hugs her like he doesn’t know how, and maybe he doesn’t; they’ve hugged before in relief, in friendliness, to say hello or to congratulate each other, but never has she hugged him like she’s drowning and she needs him to hold her above the water. Yet here they are.

She’s been like this since Daniel – weaker, smaller, less brilliant, less shining. Fallible. Her head hurts from crying. She did what she was supposed to do today. She ate yogurt and fruit for breakfast, drank only two cups of coffee; she completed all her paperwork and cleared at least a hundred emails from her inbox. She had lunch with Jonas and worked out after she went off duty. And then she walked through the women’s locker room and straight into the shower and stayed there for an hour and a half, turning the water hotter and hotter and hotter.

It feels like we just lost Daniel, she tells Teal’c, because it does. And because she can’t say, even to him, Teal’c, if I lose Jack, it will kill me, too.

— — — — —

The colonel is due to be released from the infirmary today, but he’s not home yet. His windows are dark. He was only stuck on that moon for a month, but the house has a derelict look. Sam parks around the corner and walks slowly up his street and then to his front door. The day is damp, biting, the air frigid and chafed like ragged skin. She spends a long time standing on the front porch. There’s a tiny snowdrift where the concrete meets the wall of the house, melted and recrystallized into grainy chunks of ice.

Névé, is what this kind of granular snow is called on a glacier. Thawed and refrozen, again and again.

She should leave, she thinks.

Instead, she stares blankly out at the gray street. Like in the general’s neighborhood, the homes here are wide-spaced, full-yarded, with stretches of lawn in the front and the back. Houses like gemstones, nestled in broad old-fashioned settings that are ornamented with trees and shrubs and flowerbeds. They’re all bare now and rattling in the wind. It’s been snowing again, and the roads haven’t been well cleared, and the dirty slush shushes when cars roll softly through.

It’ll be slippery and treacherous for the colonel to navigate up his walk, and the cold will make his injured leg worse, make the wound contract and the muscle achy and stiff. She should go in and turn up the heat in the house to drive off the chill of a month’s disuse. Start a fire, run the HVAC fan to circulate the dead air. Clean out the fridge. Maybe fetch a shovel from the garage and clear the walk for him. That would be the act of a good coworker, a friend.

Sam unlocks the door with the key she keeps on a ring with her own house key and the key for her SGC locker. She goes in and takes off her wet, gritty boots. She places them on the rubber mat next to the door, and then she takes two steps toward the short wall that divides the dining room from the living room, and turns her back against it and slides down to the floor.

She sits in her jacket on the cold tile, arms wrapped around her knees. The house is dark and smells desolate and stale, and vaguely of old garbage and spoiled milk, and the air is chilly against her skin. Through the narrow windows flanking the front door, she watches the gray light darken to slate-blue, then dull navy. The furnace kicks on and off, running a minimal cycle.

After a long time, she hears a car pull up outside, splattering liquid ice. A car door opens, voices, the door closes. The car drives off. There are slow steps up the walk, painfully uneven. The grind of a key in the door, a pause at the realization that it’s already unlocked, and the front door opens in a wash of winter air.

The colonel looks at her briefly, then turns his back to close the door. It’s hard to see now. He locks up, flips the light switch, hangs his key on a small hook underneath it.

Without looking at her, he says, “Go home, Carter.”

She doesn’t move. Her knees are warm where she’s been gripping them, but the rest of her is still cold. She’s so tired. She leans her cheek against one knee. The colonel takes off his boots, leaning one hand against the wall for balance. First the right one, carefully. Then a tentative shift of his weight to his bad leg, so that he can lean down and ease off the left one. His leg doesn’t quite hold, and he has to hurriedly slap the left foot down again, his boot half off, splashing muddy slush on the tiles. Sam doesn’t try to help him.

In socked feet, he brushes by her into the kitchen, his jacket unzipped but still on. He adjusts the thermostat, flicks on the lights, opens the fridge. Glass clinks. He comes back out with a bottle in hand and goes past her again to the living room.

After a minute, Sam gets up and follows. She turns on a lamp. He’s sitting on the couch with his right foot up on the coffee table, sipping from a bottle of stout. She grabs his ankle, uses it to gently turn him ninety degrees so he’s lengthwise on the sofa, then props a cushion under his knee to support it. He lets her, saying nothing, not looking. That done, she goes through the routine motions of building a fire. Newspaper. Airflow. Spark, match, flame. The newsprint takes, then the splinters and small kindling. She waits until it’s steady, then sets a couple of crossed logs on the grate. Raw heat beats against her face, but she still feels like there’s a membrane of ice between her muscles and her bones. It isn’t cold, exactly. She sits back on her heels.

“I said, go home.”

“I tried,” Sam says dully.

“Try harder.”

The flames blur. Blue zone, luminous zone, dark zone.

“Teal’c talked to you,” she says.

“Yeah.”

Sam nods.

“So did Hammond.”

She flinches. He must see it, but she doesn’t turn to look. She watches smoke curl up the flue. Incomplete combustion. She can balance the chemical equation, if she can remember the composition of wood. Cellulose is C₆H₁₀O₅. Lignin is – lignin is –

“You’re the one who said it was a mistake,” the colonel says. “You were right.” There’s a pause. A swallow of beer. “You usually are.”

Sam blinks. “You think it’s because of the last few months?” she asks. She stands, faces him. The fire snaps at her back, but the heat seems to stall out in the air and not make it into the room. “You think that if it hadn’t been for the parking lot and my kitchen and that night in my lab, I would’ve acted any different? I’d have held it together?”

He shrugs, picking at the label on his beer bottle.

“I wouldn’t,” she tells him. He doesn’t acknowledge it, and after a second, she sighs and walks over, her socks silent on the carpet. She crouches down beside him, in the small space between coffee table and sofa. “What we were doing before – it wasn’t working. But what we’re doing now isn’t working, either.”

“So, what then?” he asks. “Carter, what option do we have?”

She looks at him steadily.

“We can’t,” he says.

“Why not?” she says, reckless. “Sir, why not?”

She’s expecting his anger, ready for it, prepared for the way his eyes will narrow and his face will take on that hard cast like plaster, but instead he says, gently, “You know why not,” and somehow it’s so much harder to bear.

“Because we might let our personal feelings interfere with the performance of our duties?” she asks, bitter as quinine. “Because we might not think clearly and disobey orders? Because I might ignore all my report deadlines and break down in Teal’c’s arms and yell at Dr. Lee off-world and try to convince General Hammond to spend four and a half million dollars in satellite equipment and manpower to find you?”

“Carter…” Jack’s voice sounds all wrung out, like he’s been left for a month in the rain.

She dashes off her wet cheeks with the backs of her wrists. “I can’t, I can’t, sir,” she gasps, “I can’t do this anymore.”

“Carter,” Jack repeats, breathing her name, and his hand comes to rest on her hair, and Sam is crying. He shifts, reaching to put his beer bottle on the coffee table, and then wraps her up into his chest. They’re both still wearing their coats; his is an old ski jacket, at least ten or fifteen years out of date, scratchy Gore-Tex in shades of light gray and dark gray and white. The fleece lining smells of frost and dirt and cedar, and beneath the thin cotton of his black t-shirt, his chest is warm and hard.

She clutches fabric in her fists. “Please,” she hears herself say, muffled into him, but she’s so tired and out of herself that it doesn’t seem to be her speaking, “please, you have to help me, I can’t –”

She’s trying to say that there’s nothing they can do that will make this harder than it already is. She wants to tell him how, while he was missing, everything that made her her, everything she’d considered core to her identity, seemed to unravel and dissolve like proteins denaturing.

But she doesn’t know how to explain it, and, besides, he’s here now, he’s turning onto his back and pulling her with him up onto the couch. He touches her tear-flushed face, tender, with fingers cold and wet from the beer bottle; she shudders and he wraps the unzipped flaps of his jacket tight around her, and his breath is even in his chest, and beneath her ear, under his now-damp t-shirt, his heart clocks a steady fifty-six beats per minute. If it were an EM wave, Sam thinks, he’d be emitting below the radio spectrum, like the fading plasma lobes of a Kerr black hole, six degrees of arc across the night sky, and she closes her eyes, feeling the weave of his shirt on her skin, to picture the glow of it ebbing out against the stars.

When she wakes, the fire has subsided to low flame and hot embers, but the room is warm with furnace heat. Jack is asleep, one arm loosely holding his jacket around her, the fingers of the other hand buried lightly in her hair. Sam feels her whole body rise and fall with his breath. After a minute, she turns her head so that her chin is propped on his chest. His breathing doesn’t change, but his eyes blink open. Sam watches, then presses one deliberate kiss to the skin at the base of his throat, just above his shirt collar.

His eyes close again briefly, and when they open, they’re hot, and as dark as the void between galaxies. The hand in her hair tightens a little, and Sam settles, her chin digging into his sternum again. He lets her go, and swipes his thumb across her eyebrow, then along the top of her cheekbone, where Sam knows her skin looks bruised from a month of late nights and bad dreams.

His voice is rough with sleep and arousal. “It’s late,” he says. “You hungry?”

Slowly, Sam shakes her head.

“Good,” he whispers, and draws her up to kiss her.

He’s stubbly and his lips are dry, and he tastes of beer and sleep, and Sam wants to curl up small inside of him, into the cave of his mouth and the curve between his jaw and his chin, into the shell of his ear and the dark hollow inside his lungs, wants to fuse to him like sand into silica, so close that all the individual fibers of their muscles are intertwined. He kisses her deeply and without any doubt, slanting his mouth against hers. They’re both sleep-warm and soft, and her coat rustles against his as she presses herself into him, mindful of his wound. He shuffles a little to get his arm between them and tugs the zipper of her jacket down. In the fireplace, a log settles, a whoosh of sparks.

Sam shrugs off the coat and shivers a little in the cooler air. Jack rubs his hands up her arms. “Cold?”

“I’ll be okay,” she says.

“Come on.” He nudges her. She doesn’t want to move, and she thinks in any case that moving will mean that she’s not pressed tight against him, which is guaranteed to make her colder than she is now. But he seems insistent, so she rolls upright off the couch and he struggles to his feet beside her.

Limping over to the armchair, he snags a throw blanket off the back of it and lays it on the carpet in front of the fire. Sam grabs the poker and billows and a fresh log and coaxes the flame back to life. When she’s done, Jack is lying on the blanket, watching her with dark eyes, his skin warmed in the light of the lamp and the fire, one hand resting just below his ribcage. He’s taken off his jacket and the light catches the fine hairs on his arm, turning them into thin gold and silver wire.

“C’mere,” he says, and she settles on her side next to him with her head propped on her hand. She’s still tired, drugged with the feel of him and lethargic in the warmth of the fire. She traces the rim of his ear and he shivers, eyes falling shut. Her fingers dip to his hair, cut neat and silver behind his ears, and she marvels at the softness of it, back and forth under her hand. She’s always wanted to touch his hair like this.

“You got it trimmed.”

“On base,” he confirms, and she smiles. Unlike her, the colonel never lets his hair get a little too long – although, in fairness, it’s easier for him to visit the barber on sublevel six of the SGC for a ten-minute trim than it is for her to attempt the same. Last time she’d tried it, she’d ended up borrowing a hat from Teal’c to wear out of the mountain and straight to her usual salon downtown.

She leans in to kiss him again, capturing his lower lip between hers, and after a moment he tries to flip them and settle over her. She stops him with a hand on his chest.

“Your leg.”

“It’s fine,” he says, but he doesn’t try to move again, and when instead she throws one knee over his hip and kneels above him, he doesn’t stop her.

She’d built the fire up to roaring, and when Sam slides her fingers under the hem of his shirt, the skin she finds is soft and hot. She strokes his flanks, his belly, runs her fingers over the ridges of his ribs, more prominent after a month on survival rations. She eases the shirt up as she goes, and he lifts up and lets her pull it off.

He’s gotten rangier in the last few years, all lean strong muscle like a long-distance runner. His skin was smoothed and polished by Ba’al’s sarcophagus a few months ago, but it seems that it didn’t affect the older injuries, the ones that have no wound left in them, the ones that are only visible memory. She touches the puckered scar on his shoulder, a white knife mark on his chest, the bullet scar in his upper arm where Simmons shot him. She tracks the swell of his bicep into his pec, draws her hand over his peaked nipple, and he shudders once, hard.

“Sam,” he says, with wonder, “Sam.”

“I’m here, sir.”

“Me too,” he says. “Oh – God. Me too.” The oath is because she’s leaned down and taken his nipple into her mouth.

They’re, yes, here. Yes. “Missed you,” she whispers to his skin, feeling her breath move the wiry hairs on his chest, beginning to feel a little frantic, a little crazed. “Missed you, missed you –”

He’s tugging at the bottom of her sweater, so she breaks from him and strips it off, then her bra, and seizes his hands and places them on her breasts. He swipes his thumbs across them and she gasps and grinds into him, where he’s hard right underneath the seam of her jeans, and she bites her bottom lip on a groan.

“Jesus,” he says, helplessly, and surges up to lock his lips onto one of her nipples.

She whimpers, and he tries again to switch positions with her, but she mumbles, “No, don’t, let me –” because she wants to do this for him, she wants to do everything in the world for him. She wants him to be okay; she wants him to lie there and let her take care of him. She’s overwhelmed by a burning tenderness, a compassion that’s almost painful for them both. She shimmies away so that she can slip his sweatpants down over the points of his hips, and off. His boxers come with them. Above his right knee is a neat square of gauze, held on with clear medical tape. Sam is careful of it as she slides her palms back up his shins, his knees, his thighs, as she settles between his legs.

Jack is half-propped on his forearms, watching her, when she takes him in her mouth.

He hisses, and she opens her eyes to see his head thrown back, the long line of his throat mounded by his Adam’s apple, bobbing as he swallows hard. She swallows around him in response, and he groans, and she swirls around his head, tasting salt and skin, and then takes him deeper. He smells of bar soap and musk and woodsmoke and feels like satin on her lips. She likes the weight of him, the sear of skin, the way she can feel his heart beat in the vein against her tongue. She pulls off, licks her lips and slides back down. He breathes hard, ragged-edged, as she moves over him, until she cups her hand to take the soft weight of his balls in her palm. Then he gasps, and one hand shoots out to tangle in her hair.

“Christ, Carter,” he says. “I want – fuck, I want everything.”

“Yeah?” she asks, pulling off him slow enough that he groans again. Breathing hard, she rests her cheek against the inside of his left thigh. “Like what?”

“Like –” She licks a lazy stripe along his length, and he seems to lose his train of thought for a moment before he rallies. “Well, for starters, I really, really want to take your pants off.”

“Yeah,” says Sam, “okay,” and slides back up his body so that he can reach the closure of her jeans. He pops them open and shoves them past her hipbones, and she works to tug them all the way off, although she’s hampered by the way his hands are roaming around her back and hips and cradling her ass.

“Sir,” she chides.

“Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry at all, and then sucks her nipple back in his mouth, and she squeaks and falls over on top of him, and he has the temerity to laugh.

She finally manages to kick her jeans away, and as soon as she does, she feels his fingers pushing aside the strip of her soaked panties and stroking at her center, knuckles nudging, fingers gliding, almost petting, as his mouth continues to work at her breast. Sam’s gasping, moaning; she’s still above him but her control is absolutely shattered and she hears herself chant, “Please, please, please,” until he sinks two fingers into her, and even then it isn’t long until she’s pleading again.

Jack detaches from her chest. His lips are swollen and wet, and Sam feels her whole body twitch. She’s on fire, she feels flushed from her cheeks to her neck to her chest, and she wanted to let him lie and drift, to take his weight for a little while, but instead it feels like he’s the one holding her up, or maybe tethering her to the earth, she can’t even tell anymore.

He plucks at the elastic waistband of her underwear. “Off,” he orders, no laughter now, and she complies. His gaze has the intensity it normally only acquires when he’s making command decisions or speed-stripping his P90. He positions her with his hands on her hipbones, and she sinks down onto him, all the way, and then settles further, letting their chests press together and her forehead touch down on his.

She lifts her hips slowly and lowers them again, fluid, letting them both feel every inch. On the next stroke, he drives up into her, and it feels so good that Sam’s eyes lose focus, like a string of lights has flared up along her spine and out to each of her fingers and the flash has blurred her vision.

Jack sets the pace, and Sam holds on, feeling that chasm in the earth just beyond her feet that she’d felt the whole time he was gone. Heat from the fire washes over them, and Jack’s body under hers is damp with sweat at the top of his chest and the back of his neck, where she slides her hand briefly, just to be touching him in one more place, before she has to put it back on the floor for balance. She’s cushioned on a film of air, flying along the rim of a canyon, and then Jack gets a hand between them and finds her clit and she tumbles off, a long long way, hearing herself cry out. He swears below her, hips firing up, and mashes his face into the curve of her neck and lets out a long groan.

They breathe hard, Jack cupping the back of her neck with one large hand. After a minute, Sam shifts onto her side, rearranging her limbs so she’s lying half over him. She lets her fingers rest lightly on the gauze on his thigh as if she can feel the stitches underneath.

“How many?” Her heart rate hasn’t come back down yet, quite.

“Eight.”

She traces the edge of the dressing and hears him judder an exhale. “It hurt?”

“Not too bad. Muscle’s weak. And there was infection.”

Sam nods. She knows; it was why he had to spend a few days in the infirmary. She lets her cheek settle on his chest. It’s so calm here, so quiet and enclosed that Sam can feel the sky swinging above them, stars wheeling, the grass of the yard spinning a slow circle. At the still point of the turning world … at the still point, there the dance is. Still. She wants to rest. She wants them both to rest.

She can’t stay. He doesn’t offer, and she doesn’t ask. After a while, she gets up and puts her clothes on. He dons his boxers and sweatpants, but doesn’t bother with his shirt, just watches her reassemble herself. Wrecked underwear. Jeans, bra, sweater. Jacket.

He moves then, comes close and zips her into her coat, frowning as if he’s focusing on something important. He kisses her once, chastely, and she touches her fingertips to his jaw, and then she walks to the front door and puts on her boots and lets herself out into the winter.

Chapter Text

II.

And her dignity
Shone so bright like a light on a hill.
And she burned for me
And no other man came near the flame.

— Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s, “A Light On A Hill”

— — — — —

Colonel O’Neill has two weeks of medical leave while his leg heals and he regains the weight he’d lost. He and Sam seem to have agreed, without talking about it, that she shouldn’t come over too often. They shouldn’t be doing this at all, and she burns with shame whenever she thinks it.

Before, they’d had the invincible defence against any suspicion of impropriety that no impropriety was actually occurring. Now, they’ve blown that defence to hell.

Careful: they have to be careful.

They try.

The first time, she’s only supposed to be fixing his coffee maker. He calls her at the mountain, late, and the call is patched through to the control room, where she’s running security diagnostics on the Gate with Walter.

“None of the buttons work,” he says, “it’s just making this sad little beep. Two tones, like boop-buhhhh. And the LED isn’t showing anything.”

“Is it –”

“Yes, it’s plugged in properly, Carter.”

Sam collapses forward, elbows on her knees, and pinches the bridge of her nose.

“Sir, what are you doing making coffee at eleven-thirty at night anyway?”

Beside her, Walter does a slow turn of disbelief at the revelation of what the call is about.

“I’m trying to set the timer for tomorrow morning!”

“Can’t this wait, sir?”

“Hey, you’re the one who convinced me to buy the damn thing, Carter. If you hadn’t, I’d still have my perfectly functional percolator – which lasted decades before you came along, thank you very much – and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“The coffee from that percolator was vile.”

“Just get over here and fix it, would you, Major?”

Sam checks the progress of the diagnostic. It’s nearly done. Walter flaps a hand at her, indicating that he’s got the shutdown and data retrieval procedure in hand.

Sam sighs. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

“Perfect.”

“It’ll be after midnight, sir. Are you sure –”

“Coffee, Carter.”

They don’t even make it to the kitchen.

He’s left the door unlocked for her so that she doesn’t have to wait in the cold. It’s icy out tonight, and Sam is tired, always tired now; she hasn’t really recovered from four weeks of nearly no sleep. The cold comes in her coat and clenches around her bones. She hopes the colonel has the fire lit. She hopes this doesn’t take long; she wants to change into something thick and fleecy, wants to lie down, wants sheets and blankets and the feel of stretching out on softness. It’s Saturday tomorrow, and there are – she has bills, needs to go to the grocery store. Her towels should get washed; her powder room faucet is rusty; there’s calcium buildup on her showerhead. She hasn’t winterized the Indian, because she’d meant to do that in the month she’d ended up spending at the mountain.

Sam shudders once, hard, as she walks up the steps to the colonel’s door, her breath a cloud of hard-edged silver so precise that she can see the individual water droplets in it. She hopes that it’s warm inside, and that all the lamps are on, and that he offers her a hot cocoa, or an Irish coffee once she’s fixed the machine, and that he’s in pyjamas already, an old Academy shirt, or a college football jersey, and thin flannel pants that will be soft and warm under her hand –

She opens the door and he’s with her before she has her boots off.

“Hi,” he says, getting in her way as she tries to remove her coat, and it’s late, and she’s so, so tired, and he’s barefoot, with his hair sticking up, and she kisses him. Because, yes, the fire is going, and as soon as Sam walked in the door, she felt warmed all over, and kissing him is like falling into gravity, a physical compulsion, an immutable law. Because it feels so good to simply be touching him, good enough that while she’s doing it she can forget all the reasons she shouldn’t. His skin is soft on the top of his shoulder, just under his collar. Sam curls her fingers there, fingering the fabric, and then draws them out, sliding her palm down the front of his shirt to rest over his heart. He puts his hand on top of hers and holds it there and breaks the kiss.

“Come on,” he says, and tugs her by their linked hands down the hall to the bedroom.

After, he falls asleep, still healing. She gets out of the bed and looks at him. He’s tangled in the blanket, a cheap red comforter. He should buy a nicer one, something breathable; he usually sleeps warm off-world. Sam can research a good duvet, find a sale maybe, and they could –

She stops here. Looks away from him.

She’s never been in his bedroom before. The rest of the house isn’t much like Jack, but he’s here, in this room. Heavy, dated wood furniture, matching like he got it out of a Sears catalogue. Medals and commendations in frames on the wall. The dresser crowded with mementos and loose slips of paper. Pictures of Charlie. Sam touches Jack’s face in one of them, unlined and laughing, his arm looped around his son. On the nightstand, carelessly splayed face down, is a ragtag paperback copy of Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars. It’s easy to forget sometimes that Jack is, over and above and before anything else, a pilot, attached to the history of aviation, an heir to the pioneers and heroes who first pushed through the virgin air of the unmapped dark.

Sam flips the book over, skims the page. He’s marked a passage: We felt ourselves lost then in interplanetary space, among a hundred inaccessible planets, searching for the one true planet that was our own, the only one with landscapes we knew, houses we loved, all that we treasured.

A little on the nose, she thinks, with a swell of affection. He probably hated the cliché but couldn’t help underlining the sentence anyway, this sentence that rang so perfect a note in his heart, like a small bell struck with a metal mallet. She looks at him again. The ragged healing cut on his thigh and the lines in his face, smoothed a little in slack sleep, in the yellow glow of the bedside lamp. He’s on his back, breathing deeply. The blanket is rumpled on the empty side of the bed. It’s chilly in here. Last stop on the heating duct. The blanket looks warm, soft. Sam thinks of Walter flapping his hand at her. She wraps the blanket over Jack and gathers her clothes and leaves before she fails again.

She intends to stay gone, but on Sunday at ten p.m., he calls her. When she answers, he just says, “Carter,” and nothing else.

“Yeah,” she breathes.

He still says nothing.

“Yeah,” she says again. “Okay.”

This time, she drives to the shopping center and takes a bus from there, paying in loose change. In his bedroom, Jack undresses her, one item of clothing at a time. He folds them. Sweater, shirt, bra, socks, jeans, underwear. The blinds are drawn, and Sam watches him move in the lamplight, the shadows it casts so rich she could bite into them. He stacks her clothes one on top of another and sets them on his dresser, leaving her naked against the dark red of the bed.

“Don’t move,” he says, his voice a rasp. “Stay there. Close your eyes.”

She does, and feels his mouth on the cap of her shoulder, a stubble-burn drag of his chin down to the center of her chest. She shivers. Feels his hands on her ribs, her elbow, opening her curled fingers like a clamshell. He sucks an open-mouthed kiss over her navel, the inside of her thigh, the arch of her foot. He takes so long over her that her pleasure turns in on itself, a self-enclosed de Sitter space that she thinks she’s never been outside of. She’s no longer sure where she ends and anything else begins – the bed, Jack’s fingers, his lips, the air.

Only then does he put his tongue on her, sucking her clit into his mouth with a suddenness that makes her arch off the bed and cry out. He works her deliberately, determinedly, with mouth and fingers, taking a long time here, too, bringing her to the edge and then backing off, again and again. Sam’s thighs tremble, and his jaw must be aching, and she’s babbling, a nonsense string of words and syllables. Her hair is wet at her temples and she can feel her lower back slicking with sweat, but every other sensation is Jack, his tongue and hands and the raw silk of his hair under her hands.

Finally, finally, he slides two fingers into her and curls them, stroking her from the inside, and flicks at her clit with his tongue. Sam comes so hard that it whites out all the sensation in her entire body for a long minute. When she comes back to herself, Jack is slipping inside of her. She’s so exhausted and her nerve endings are so burned out that it only registers as a cottony pleasure, maybe a little raw. He’s too far gone to be careful, but the pleasure builds anyway. She won’t come again, not after that and not so soon, but each stroke sends a delightful little shockwave through her, and Sam manages, with incredible effort, to put her hands on his ass and feel the muscles clench as he mumbles compliments into her neck. When he goes still, it’s with an ah, like he’s finally understood something for the first time.

He’s awake enough to watch her get dressed through half-lidded eyes, and it looks like he’s going to say something, but he doesn’t.

It happens again four days later, and then two days after that, and three days after that.

On the evening before he’s due back at work, Sam sits in her living room with jittery hands, her phone off the hook. The TV is on, but she isn’t watching it. Her fingers twitch. Need is like a heated wire inside of her.

They just may, she allows, be in trouble.

— — — — —

“You’re telling me your DNA was scrambled?” General Hammond asks. His voice is unusually high. “By a Goa’uld?”

“And then unscrambled, yes, sir,” says Sam, feeling like this is an important point to clarify.

“SG-1, report to the infirmary immediately,” he says.

Janet lets Colonel O’Neill and Teal’c go after a cursory examination, but she keeps Sam and Jonas.

“I’m fine, really,” Sam says. “I feel fine. Eggar fixed me.”

“And you trust him implicitly, do you?” Janet asks.

“I… take your point,” Sam concedes.

It had only been a token protest, anyway. She’s shaken. The colonel and Teal’c both know it – Teal’c, as always during these last few months, having watched her carefully and been far too observant. If she hadn’t been actively dying at the time, she’s sure her heart would have flopped to the bottom of her stomach when he’d given her that little nod and deliberately turned his back so she could lean on the colonel’s shoulder.

In retrospect, he may not suspect anything has changed; she and Jack have always bent the rules in physical extremity, and Teal’c has always silently watched them do it.

Sam stays in the infirmary. She lets herself be swaddled in scrubs and rough industrial sheets, she eats her bland dinner and watches Janet’s people stolidly tend to their duties, and she thinks of nothing.

She sleeps, and she dreams of water.

Water pressing all around her, and she’s trying to escape, and she swims to the surface, but there’s no surface, because she is the water, her lungs and skin and blood and cells are water, and when she breathes out the air is water, and she gasps and takes in water, and she’s going to drown, but how can you drown when you’re the ocean, you’re the ocean, you’re the flood, and she gasps –

She gasps awake silently, dragging in a lungful of antiseptic air. The infirmary is dark and quiet. In the next cot, Jonas is breathing steadily. Sam sits up and wraps her arms around her knees. Her fingers toy with the weave of the thin blanket. She watches Jonas’s chest rise and fall until a nurse comes between their cots to take vitals.

“Hey, Stevens?” Sam asks him. “Is it okay if I go get my laptop? I can’t sleep and I’d like to get some work done.”

“I can give you something to help you sleep,” Stevens offers.

Sam makes a face. “No, thanks. I’d rather be productive.”

He hems and haws. “You’re not really supposed to leave the infirmary…”

“Come on,” coaxes Sam. “If I can walk to the bathroom by myself, I can go to my lab and back. Seven minutes, tops.” Two and half minutes there, two and a half back, and a generous two in between because the laptop is showing its age, and if she boots up all her programs when it’s unplugged, the battery life nosedives by an hour. She really needs to get the colonel to requisition a new one.

Stevens checks the door as if he thinks Janet will suddenly walk in. “Make it six,” he says.

Sam grins. “I won’t tell.”

She doesn’t bother with shoes, just pads along the corridors to the elevator. The concrete is icy underfoot. In deference to the late hour, half the ceiling fluorescents are dark. It could be eerie, but it’s home, so it’s not. Sam runs her hand along the steam pipes on the trot through sublevel 19, absently pats the doorjamb of her lab as she ducks in. There’s enough illumination from the hallway and the hundreds of steady LED status lights around the walls that she can see her laptop on the workbench, right where she left it.

She opens it, powers it up. The hard drive chunks, the processor whines, the fan reluctantly chugs, under protest, into its loudest whir. Sam watches the startup status bar, which is barely moving. She digs the meat of her thumb into her browbone. The status bar clicks two percent higher. She sighs and hooks a stool over with her foot, then props her chin on her hand, waiting, blinking in the dark.

“Sam.”

Sam’s eyes open. Somehow, her head is pillowed on her arm, outstretched on her workbench. Her fingers are numb. Janet is standing on the other side of the table with her arms crossed, looking severely unimpressed. In the doorway, Colonel O’Neill is beaming, the exact same expression Mark used to wear when Sam was in trouble with their dad and he wasn’t.

Sam’s laptop is blithely running its screensaver.

“Oops,” she says.

“Yeah, oops,” says Janet. “Get your butt back to the infirmary.”

“Can I still bring the laptop?” Sam offers a winning smile. It usually works on the colonel, anyway.

Apparently not on Janet. “No.”

“Sir?” Sam asks hopefully.

“Oh, hell no,” says the colonel. “Don’t you try to get me in trouble, Major.”

“Worth a shot,” Sam mumbles, and pushes herself to her feet.

She’s spent too long sleeping on a lab stool, though; her head is flooded with a dizzy rush. Sam dips her chin and grips the edge of the table and waits for it to pass, but it doesn’t, and doesn’t, and when she tries to step away from the bench, her legs don’t work the way she expects and she pitches sideways and would fall, except that the colonel gets in her way.

“Sam?” asks Janet, alarmed. “Colonel, lay her down on the floor.”

“Just dizzy,” Sam tries to say, but her lips and tongue feel swollen, and she knows that the words don’t come out right.

Colonel O’Neill has her under the arms and Sam feels him gently lower her until her legs, then her back, then her shoulders are horizontal; at the last moment, he shifts one hand to the back of her head and cushions the final few inches. His hands are strong, warm. His fingers flex into the muscle at the base of her skull.

“Carter?” he asks, but his voice sounds muffled; there’s a strange pressure behind Sam’s face, behind her cheeks and nose and in her ears. She feels like her skull is going to explode. Cold sweat all along her spine and under her arms, a sick churn in her stomach.

“Call for a medical team.” Janet is beside her now. Sam senses her crouch down, hears the rustle and feels the sudden chill of the colonel rising, and then his voice at the phone. Janet’s small cool fingers are at her wrist, her forehead, comforting in their brisk professionalism.

“What’s happening?” The colonel. She hears him take up his position by her head, kneeling. Sam wants him to touch her, wants the firm press of his hand on her shoulder, and then remembers he can’t, not now. There are cameras here. Careful, careful.

“Sam, are you nauseated?” Janet asks.

Sam makes an affirmative noise.

“Don’t you ralph on my shoes, Major,” the colonel jokes gently.

“Do my – best, sir.”

There’s a commotion at the door, and then Janet is cinching a blood pressure cuff around Sam’s arm.

“Sixty-one over forty. I’m amazed you’re still conscious.”

“Takes a lot to knock Carter down,” and there’s a note of pride in his voice, but it fades quickly to concern. “Doc, what’s happening? Is this – is she –”

“I suspect it’s her body’s reaction to the extreme trauma it was put through sixteen hours ago,” says Janet. “It’s not unexpected. Which is why I wanted her to stay in the infirmary.”

“Sorry,” Sam whispers, and she is. For causing a scene, for being an inconvenience. There’s a fuss, now. She hates a fuss. Her ears are roaring. It sounds like surf, a whole ocean’s worth of pressure in her ear canals. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Now Colonel O’Neill does squeeze her shoulder, once, and then lets go again. It’s too quick for her to put her hand over his, which is probably for the best.

“Bring that gurney over,” Janet says to someone.

Sam’s eyes fly open. Overhead, the lights that Janet must have turned on take a slow, sickening swoop, and she hastily closes her eyes again. “No gurney,” she says. “Please.” She can’t think of anything more humiliating than having to be wheeled through two levels of the SGC for this. It’s full morning now; it must be, because the colonel wasn’t supposed to be on duty until 0700. The mountain will be at full capacity.

“Sam –”

“I’ll walk,” she says, stubborn. “I can do it. Just give me a minute. I’m already starting to feel better.”

“Fine,” says Janet. “If after two minutes, you can make it to the hallway without falling over, you can walk the rest of the way.”

Sam counts only to a hundred and ten in her head, then grits her teeth and pushes herself upright. Two of Janet’s nurses are hovering, the gurney between them. Sam wobbles in the right direction and makes it, although the last few steps are one long stumble, and she catches herself on the doorjamb.

“No,” says Janet.

“You said the doorway,” says Sam. “I made it to the doorway.”

“Carter,” says Colonel O’Neill, “get on the damn gurney.”

She sends him a look – et tu, Brute? His face is drawn and tight with worry. He missed a spot shaving, on the corner of his jaw. Sam wonders if he slept at all.

It’s an order. “Fine,” she says, with ill grace, and glares at the ceiling all the way back to the infirmary.

They heave her from the gurney to her cot and Sam’s head feels like it keeps moving long after her body stops. Her brain hammocks in her skull. Jonas is sitting up, eating oatmeal, which makes her stomach turn.

“Where’ve you been?” he asks, chewing.

Sam catches a whiff of his orange juice, the tinny sweet-acid scent of juice concentrate. The colonel must see her blanch because he grabs a kidney dish and gets it to her in time. He holds her head while she retches into it, hands in her sweaty hair, thumb brushing over her damp brow.

“Okay, Carter,” he says. “You’re okay.”

“Sorry, sir,” she whispers. She falls back against the pillow, shaking.

“You’re all right,” he says. “Missed the shoes.” Then, “Doc?”

“Sam, I’m going to give you IV fluids and an anti-emetic,” and there’s a prick on the back of her hand, then the pull of medical tape. “And I’m running some tests.”

“Make a fist,” says a voice, and Sam does, and this time the prick is on the inside of her elbow. Sam waits for the vial to fill, hearing Janet’s heels clack over to the other side of the room. She’s covered in clammy sweat.

“Can you manage some water?” Colonel O’Neill is much closer than Sam had thought. His voice is quiet in her ear. She shakes her head. “Ice chip?”

Sam considers. Nods. There’s a short wait, and then he’s back, and Sam feels a slick cold nudge at her lips. She opens, lets the ice slip in. Even through her eyelids, the lights of the infirmary seem too bright, the voices and footsteps and beeps too loud.

“Okay?” he asks.

Sam nods. “Headache.”

A cool, damp cloth drops over her eyes, wrapping her in dark. “Better?”

“Yeah. Thanks.” The ice is gone; he offers another, and she takes it, and another, and between one and the next, she falls asleep.

— — — — —

In a way, it’s a relief, the enforced time in the infirmary. She doesn’t have to keep herself from him, or decide to go to him; it’s out of her hands.

When she gets out a few days later, he’s waiting for her in the hall.

“Going home?” he says. He looks wrecked. Sam wants to touch the dark skin under his eyes. She locks her hands behind her back.

“Sir, I don’t think –” she starts to say, and then she looks at his hand. It’s trembling. Maybe too much coffee. She doesn’t think so.

He shoves his hands in his pockets.

“No,” she says.

She follows him in her car and parks three streets away. It’s nearly Christmas, and the houses are all alight. There’s ice on the sidewalk. A family is walking past on the other side of the street, a father pulling two kids on a sled over the snow-covered lawns. Strings of lights wash the snow electric blue and emerald and crimson. There’s light in most of the windows, candles in some of them. Sam smells frost and fir.

It’s lonely outside. Quiet. She feels alienated from the families she sees at their dinner tables, from the Christmas trees in the living rooms beyond the bay windows, isolated from these routine joys and everyday miracles. It’s like this whole time she’s been misremembering her life, and her real childhood took place somewhere cold and distant, a pinprick of ice in the dark universe, and she came through a Stargate to Earth; it’s not her home here and never has been. There’s a sharp ache in her; it jabs unwieldy corners into her ribs like a hardcover textbook. She pauses at the end of Colonel O’Neill’s front walk, trying to get accustomed, until he opens the door. He’s been watching through the window.

She’s had four days of downtime in the infirmary to come to terms with how close a call it was, to adjust again to being alive. To begin to believe that she does feel right in her skin, and she isn’t about to dissolve from the inside out.

The colonel hasn’t. He falls on her with urgency, mouth hard against hers as he strips her coat and tosses it on the floor. He kneels, yanks off each of her boots. When he stands again, he shoves the collar of her shirt aside and latches onto the muscle there. Sam’s knees go weak, arousal zapping through her like a magnetic field. Jack wraps a hard arm around her back and hauls her close, foxtrots her backwards to the wall. His hand shifts lower, nail scritching along the inseam of her jeans, and even those faint vibrations are enough to make Sam moan. His face is still buried in her shoulder, in her neck, his nose mashed into her skin, breathing her in like he’d forgotten how.

Something about his neediness feels off, feels wrong and dangerous, but it’s also contagious. Sam clasps her hands around his nape and slides one thigh up his hip; he grabs it, pulling her impossibly closer, and then tugs at the other one until he’s got both legs wrapped up under his arms and she’s levitating, back against the wall. She can feel the drywall on each bump of spine. She wonders if it’s leaving bruises, the way Jack’s mouth is surely leaving bruises on her shoulder. She hopes so. She wants him to take her right here against the wall, and she wants it to hurt, and she wants this fire running through her to drive away any thought of liquid in her veins, to vaporize, burn everything dry.

But Jack is already stumbling them along the hallway to the bedroom, refusing to let go enough for her to walk under her own power. When they breach the entrance to the room, he kicks the door shut and shoves her back up against it.

It’s one of those winter nights when the air is as thin and clear as a film of ice and seems to possess the intense focusing properties of an optical lens. Through the window, the moon is so sharp that its edges look drawn in ink. The silver light it sends through the panes is bordered with blade-hard shadow, mingling with the softer watercolours of the neighbours’ Christmas lights. Jack switches to the other side of Sam’s neck and she half-closes her eyes, blurring the green and blue and amber glow. Jack is shaking, maybe with the effort of holding her up, maybe not. Sam unclasps her hands from behind his neck and runs one palm down his shoulder to his delt muscle. It’s rigid, and his neck is corded, and his thighs are tensed.

“Sir,” she whispers, and moves her hand back up to sketch one cool finger along the flushed curve behind his ear. He keens into her neck, an animal sound. “Sir,” she says again, with that upwelling of tenderness she remembers from their first night. He needs her so badly that it’s almost pity she feels. “Jack.” She nudges her hips forward, into his, to try to get him to move to the bed, but it backfires, because through both their pants his hard length grazes her clit, and she gasps, and her head falls back and knocks against the door.

But it seems to do the trick anyway, because he releases her, letting her slide down his body until she’s standing on shaky feet, and then reclaims her mouth. The kiss is all-encompassing, insistent, relentless; Sam feels like it’s stretching backwards and forwards in time and across all dimensions. Every Sam and every Jack in every reality must be imprisoned in the singularity of this same kiss in this same moment; there are no alternatives; and Jack’s tongue is tangled up with hers, then tracing along her top lip, and his hands are burrowed into her hair, and Sam can’t breathe.

When she breaks away to try, he wrestles her toward the bed and divests her of her clothes, and lets her scrabble at his until they’re off. As he settles back over her, the tip of his cock bumps against her entrance. He stills, holding himself trembling above her.

“Sam,” he grits out, “I can’t, I have to –”

She wraps her legs around his and tilts her hips up, encouraging him. “It’s okay, I want you to – I want you –”

He slams into her, and Sam cries out in pain, but he’s already drawing back and driving into her again, a hard, fast, utterly unsustainable pace. His face is twisted into what looks like agony, so she places a hand on his cheek and tries to smooth away some of the deep crevasses. It brings him back to her, a little; he turns his head and presses a kiss to her palm, but he doesn’t stop, still so deep that she aches. Sam is slipping up the bed with each thrust, until she reaches back to grab the headboard for balance. It scares her, the depth of his urgency, as a child is scared when she sees her mother crying.

But then he changes the angle, and Sam practically sobs, and all she can do is whimper incoherently. Yes, she thinks she’s saying, more, and every time he drives in, a blue-white bolt fizzes up into her brain. He fumbles a hand free, taps her clit once lightly, circles, taps again.

“Come on, Carter,” he growls, and she does, with a loud cry, and he swears and follows her.

He doesn’t even pause to rest; as she lies there, spent, he pulls out and immediately devotes himself, with single-minded determination, to trying to run his lips over every inch of her body. Like he needs to devour her, Sam thinks through a haze of silver and blue and gold pleasure, to bring her inside him where she’ll be safe. He noses into her armpit, finds the tiny mole on the side of her right breast, nips at the thin skin on the inside of her forearm. Tracks the divots between each rib with his tongue, brushes his lips across the wide expanse between sternum and navel. He runs his hands down her legs to her ankles and nudges them wider apart so that he can lave at the crease where her thighs meet her labia. It’s almost invasive, almost clinical. He flicks over her soaked, sensitive clit, making Sam twitch, but doesn’t spend any more time there than any other freckle or curve or hidden vein or open pore.

Not like he’s devouring her, she realizes. Like he’s drawing every single cell back into existence.

“Hey,” she says, struggling to open her eyes. “Hey.”

He puts one heavy hand over her hip to quell her, but she seizes it in hers and pulls him up to lie alongside her. “Hey,” she says, “Jack,” looking him in the eye for what might be the first time since they came through the door. She tilts her head and kisses him slowly, trying to drip warmth and sweetness into it, and then lets him go and leans her forehead against his.

After a moment, he lets out a long, shaky breath and allows his eyes to close.

He falls asleep like that in the end, but he comes awake when she slips away to get dressed. She has some trouble finding her underwear, discovering them, after an interval, behind the laundry hamper. Jack watches her from the bed, head propped on one hand. His eyes are glassy, like he’s already a long way from her, though she hasn’t even left the room.

As she puts her hand on the doorknob, he says, his voice rough, “Don’t go.”

Sam slams her eyes shut.

“Sir,” she says angrily, “don’t do this.”

There’s silence from behind her. Sam can picture him, lying there on his side in the moon and snowlight. She knows the subtle shading of desperation and self-loathing and hurt that will be shadowing his blank expression. She doesn’t turn back to look. The silence goes on, and she opens the door and walks through it.

The drive home feels long and frigid, and she blinks against the dark to stay awake. Her house is cold. The microwave clock reads 23:03, but it feels later. She dumps her purse on the counter and doesn’t bother with lights until she gets to her bedroom. When she flips the switch, ready to collapse face-down into her pillow, she sees, laid out across the bed, a shirt with a missing button that she’d meant to sew back on. She’d taken it out – when, a week ago? – before she’d left.

She stares at it. She doesn’t even like this shirt. She’ll fix it and then it’s just going to sit in her closet, taking up space.

Sam fetches a trash bag from under the kitchen sink and shoves the shirt into it, then opens her closet. She throws away running shoes she’s worn to the sole, heels she bought that she’s never worn at all. A stretched-out cardigan, a sundress, one belt she’s never really liked and another that she only wears with one specific outfit. There are three or four blouses that she loves but hasn’t worn in months because they won’t survive longer than another wash or two, and she’s been subconsciously saving them. Saving them for what, she thinks. Might as well toss them now as later.

Jeans that shrank in the dryer. A purse with a broken strap. Six unisex t-shirts emblazoned with the logos of various marathons and recreational sports teams.

She hauls the bag across the carpet, out the bedroom door and into the office.

She opens the top drawer of the filing cabinet and begins tossing out entire folders. There’s so much here that she doesn’t know why she’s been holding onto, all neatly organized and labelled, as if she’ll ever need it again. As if any of it is important. She junks the remains of brainstorming sessions that never went anywhere, papers she wrote at the Academy, drafts of her PhD dissertation. She drags the trash bag to the garage – it’s already too full, heavy with paper, and she knows it’s going to tear – and gets another one. Bank statements, paid bills. Textbooks she thought might be helpful but aren’t, paperbacks she’s not going to reread. Some of her notes might be useful to her, but aren’t worth anything objectively; these she puts into file boxes, and scrawls Toss across the lids in Sharpie. She stacks reams of other papers into bins that she labels for storage in her basement: Records, Finances, Wormhole Stability, Superstring, Power Generation.

After a while, she realizes that for the last hour she’s been picturing Teal’c, sweaty in her garage. Teal’c, moving boxes down the hall. Reading the labels on the lids, going through the files.

Teal’c, clearing out her house.

Sam sits back on her heels and presses the base of her palms hard into her eyes. They’re dry. She can feel her pulse in one of her eyelids, thrumming. The tiny orbital muscles twitch as they move.

She thinks of Jack, lying alone in the dark.

She goes back across the hall into the bedroom, changes into sweatpants, and snags her purse off the kitchen counter on the way out.

In the open door, she hesitates. If she’s only going back for herself, she should stay here.

Because he doesn’t deserve that pitch of cruelty. Especially not from her.

Cold air swirls into the kitchen. The moon has just barely swung behind the trees across the street, but Sam can still see its aura, the bright space it makes in the sky. One-point-three light-seconds away, like a brief time delay on a live broadcast. Sam feels the lag in her bones, her blood off-kilter. She closes her eyes and sees the moonlight on Jack’s floor, the glow of silver and the warm twinkle of multicoloured LEDs, like the whole room was full of a thick vapor of light. She regrets not looking at him when he asked her to stay.

She closes the door behind her.

She leaves her coat on the floor of his bedroom and crawls into bed with him. “Jack,” she says, plucking at the back of the t-shirt he’s put on. Her eyes burn; her throat is flooded and her voice clogged with water. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Carter?” he asks sleepily, half turning.

“Yeah.” She presses her face into his shirt, between his shoulder blades, stopping him from rolling over any further. “I’m sorry.”

He rubs one eye. “You came back.”

Her laugh is watery. “Turns out I couldn’t get through tonight without you.”

“I thought – you seemed okay.”

“I thought so, too.”

There’s a brief pause. “I’m not,” he says.

“No,” she whispers. “No.” Then, suddenly fierce, she says as if claiming something, “I’m glad we’re…”

“Yeah.” He shifts her so that he can turn onto his back, wrap an arm around her and draw her close. The skin of his forearm is hot and flushed from being beneath the blanket. She pushes her face into the cavity under his arm and feels his shirt dampen with her tears.

“I need you. I need you.” It seems like she has to say everything at least twice, just to hear herself speak it, to know that she’s speaking at all.

He contorts to kiss the top of her head. Strokes her hair. “Can you sleep?”

Sam snorts humourlessly. “Maybe a year from now.”

She isn’t looking, her eyes closed and her face squished hard into Jack’s side, so she can’t tell whether he’s examining her, but she suspects from his silence and stillness that he is. After a moment, he shifts, his far arm stretching for something, and then Sam hears paper rustling and smells dust and vanilla. She cracks her eyes open. Wind, Sand and Stars is propped on Jack’s chest next to her head.

He flips a couple of pages. “Chapter three,” he reads. “The Aircraft.”

She smiles into his shirt, a little. “For me?”

“Uh-huh. Hush,” he says, and starts reading. Saint-Ex is rhapsodizing about the sleek machinery of aeronautics, the way an aircraft is more like an artist’s medium than a vehicle. It is as if only the experimentation of several generations can define the curve of a column or a ship’s hull or an aeroplane fuselage, and give it the ultimate, elementary purity of the curve of a breast or a shoulder…

She nods off repeatedly only to startle awake in terror, and each time, Jack’s voice is going on, steady as highway lines across the prairies. From deep in the chasms of troubled nights, you have willed so often the coming of that pale flower, that gleam of light which rises from the dark lands of the east. Sometimes that miraculous spring has unfrozen slowly before your very eyes, and healed you when you thought that you were dying. Your use of a scientific instrument has not made a dry technician of you… Sam huddles against him. Slowly the hours pass. The dark is unchanged; the moonlight drifts across the room and disappears as the night grows stale and thin.

The alarm goes off at 0500, catching them both in a light doze, the colonel’s finger jammed into the book’s spine to mark their place.

There’s no coffee.

“I can fix it,” Sam says uncertainly, bleary-eyed in her sweatpants and a Caltech t-shirt, with an exploratory poke at the Brew button. The colonel’s impression of the beep a few weeks ago had, she realizes, been extremely accurate.

He checks his watch. “No time. Commissary.”

Sam scrunches her nose.

“I know,” he says.

“And they’ve been out a lot recently.”

“It’s because you’ve been drinking it all overnight, Carter,” he says with audible patience.

Sam pushes away from the counter. Outside, it’s still dark, and the harsh white light of the kitchen is bruising. She needs a shower, a change of clothes. She needs to have slept last night, but in the absence of that, she needs coffee that doesn’t taste like battery acid.

“I have to stop at home,” she says.

“Shower here,” he suggests, and it’s a little pathetic, so she smiles at him fondly.

“I need clothes. I’ll drop by Starbucks on my way in. What do you want?”

“Coffee,” he says, blankly, and Sam shakes her head.

“See you at work, sir,” she says, and braces herself for the cold that’s coiled beyond the walls of his house.

— — — — —

She can’t find her good needle-nose pliers. She has other pairs, at least three or four, but these are her favourite. There’s nothing particularly special about them; she just likes the way they feel in her hand, and they’re the right size for just about everything, and a little rounded on the tips, not like the ones with the gray handles. She needs pliers to finish wiring this circuit board. She lifts up all her notebooks and looks under the table, and on all the shelves, and then she goes to find Sergeant Lansford, who’s in charge of security.

The colonel comes in as she’s loading the DVD into her laptop.

“Carter,” he says, suspiciously. “Whatcha doin’?”

When she looks at him, the longing hurts like all her organs are being wrung out. “Tapes from the other morning,” she explains. There she is, on screen, backlit as she comes in the door. Turning on the laptop, sitting down, almost immediately slumping forward onto the table. It’s eerie to see. Sam glances up at the corner where the camera stares back with its red gaze.

She fast-forwards until 0705, then runs it. “I can’t find my pliers. I think they may have – Ah.” She backs up, runs it again at half speed. Janet must say her name – the tape is silent – and then the Sam on screen stands, and flails to grab the edge of the table for balance, and something skitters off the surface. It slides across the floor and out of sight into a corner.

Sam pauses the image. “Over there. They went behind that shelf.”

“Out of frame,” says the colonel mildly.

She looks up at him. He looks back. Wordlessly, she gets up, and he comes after. She glances back at the laptop screen, frozen on a shot of him holding her up by the armpits. Sam judges the distance, takes one large step toward the corner, and he follows.

He crowds her against the cinder block. She smells base laundry detergent and chocolate and gun oil. He plunges into her mouth, twists their tongues together. Sam clings, feeling herself already wet and throbbing, one leg wrapping his as she tries to climb his body, but he pulls away almost immediately.

“Can’t,” he whispers.

“I know,” she says. She’s panting. “Just the once.” They can’t be off screen too long; they’re already pushing it.

He kneels, sweeps a hand across the floor, and comes up with her pliers. “Found them,” he says, and tosses them onto the table on his way out the door.

— — — — —

The SGC’s mission schedule is scaled back while the international politicians wrangle over the newly disclosed program. SG-1 is taken out of rotation completely.

Sam works. She works like a fiend; she works like an animal. She works with a trapped, choked intensity, like there’s a deranged god inside her that’s trying to birth itself from her dumb human shell, and she can feel the flailing of its blind monstrous limbs.

She empties her inbox; she grinds away at all the piled-up work that she’s always behind on; she considers seven projects that have been waiting until she has a free minute and then embarks on all of them. She works through meals, through the night, through dry eyes, through sheer stubbornness and blind fear, because every time she stops working she finds herself at Jack’s house.

She shows up on his doorstep, and he draws her inside, and they cling to each other through kisses tasting of saltwater and despair. She collapses into bedsheets that smell like him and her, and when she wakes, it’s to nip a line of bruises down his chest; or it’s to his palms drifting across her ribs, flipping her onto hands and knees; or it’s to spend too long running their hands over each other in the steam of the shower, her back against the cold tiles and two of his fingers driving hot and relentless into her. They always end up having to rush out the door. She doesn’t eat breakfast anymore, doesn’t drink any coffee that isn’t the burnt-tasting acid from the commissary.

He never sends her away.

“Why,” she says into his neck one night. They’d landed on the floor of his bedroom, and the carpet is leaving friction burns on the backs of her shoulders. “Why did it have to be like this, why did it have to be –” He slams into her, and her next word is lost in the cry he wrings out of her, which is just as well, because she wouldn’t ever want to have to see the heartbreak on his face when she said you.

She doesn’t want to hurt him.

Please, God, let them stop hurting each other.

She wants to be better than this, she wants – she wants for the fractures she feels in her bones to knit up, for that gaping ragged hole in her center to scab over. When she’s with Jack, she feels momentarily a little more able to stand – and then she leaves, and she’s smaller and more fractured than ever, and what’s more, she’s failed again, she’s failed her duty and her own best self, and each of the failures cracks her into more shattered pieces.

In utter helplessness, the mathematician Paul Ehrenfest had once written, I crave your proximity, and if that craving gives me neither warmth nor strength, then I am overcome by desolation.

She can’t stay away. Her every cell misses him when he’s not there, a yearning completely out of her control, like an addiction.

So she works. There’s bad coffee, there’s sandwiches, there’s her base quarters, more coffee, the gym, the showers, coffee. Outside her door, the hallway lights flick on, pause, dim, pause, turn on, as if the rest of the world is running on a time-lapse.

It’s not entirely about the colonel. Sometimes she feels like her own curiosity is a spiked whip inside her, driving her on. Discovery is an unbending dogma. She’s never been one for religion, but science can be just as cruel as God.

“I thought the point of the reduced schedule was that we were supposed to be taking it easy,” says Jonas.

“Well.” She’s soldering a circuit, and it’s fiddly work, so she doesn’t look at him. “I finally have the time to work on some of these projects, which doesn’t happen that frequently. I might as well make use of it.”

“Still, couldn’t someone else –”

Sam’s hand moves and the component she’d been working on slips out of place. She dials down the flame in the soldering iron and turns to him in frustration. “Jonas,” she says, “do you have any idea how much stuff comes across my desk on a daily basis?” She shakes a cardboard box; inside, discs in their plastic cases rattle on top of a stack of manila folders. “These are engineering reports and diagnostics data from the Prometheus that I have to analyze. This –” she scoops a paper off her desk – “is a memo from General Hammond telling me that the Pentagon is cutting 2.7 million dollars from the science department’s budget for next calendar year and requesting that I find a way to shave it off, which I honestly don’t know how I’m going to do without firing most of our civilian scientists.”

She points at a side table. “That is my backlog of alien devices brought back for study by SG teams from off-world missions in the last four months, which Area 51 is champing at the bit to get their hands on, so they’re sending me three emails a day asking me when I’ll be done with them. I have to update the Gate dialing program and write a security patch for the control systems. Dr. Lee and Dr. Felger have submitted twelve proposals that the general has asked me to review to determine their viability. And none of those are the projects I actually want to be working on. Do you know how long I’ve been trying to find time to take apart a zat and see if we can replicate or repurpose the stun technology? Three years. Three years.”

Jonas looks shell-shocked.

“Sam,” he says, “are you okay?”

“I just – I want to go off-world!” she yells. “I want…” She looks away. There’s a pressure behind her eyes. Sam covers them, pressing hard on her browbone. “Never mind.”

“Sam…”

Behind her shielding hand, she says, “Jonas, just drop it.”

There’s a pause. “Okay,” he says quietly. She hears his footsteps cross the room and then fade down the hall.

Sam breathes out, steadies herself. The universe can be simplified down into a set of true statements, unbreakable laws. Sine squared of x plus cosine squared of x is always 1. A particle’s wavelength always equals Planck’s constant over its momentum. Gas pressure is inversely proportional to volume. A charged particle generates a magnetic field perpendicular to the direction of its motion.

She takes her hand away from her face and gets back to work.

A few hours later, she’s interrupted by a “Heya, Carter.”

She doesn’t look up. “Sir.”

He shifts in the doorframe.

“You, ah, you good?”

“Yes, sir,” she says firmly.

“Oh,” he says. He clears his throat and plows on. “Because Jonas mentioned that you were sort of… stressed.”

“That little twerp,” she mutters. She’s still building the circuit board. She snaps off a piece of plastic vindictively.

“He’s right,” says the colonel. “You’re missing the point. This is the time for lazing around! Slacking off!” He finally leaves the safety of the threshold and comes near. In her peripheral vision, Sam sees his hand twitch, like he wants to put it on her fingers to still them.

“Come on,” he urges. “Let’s go get a beer.”

White-hot rage slams through her.

Let’s go get a beer. Just like that.

The obliviousness of it sets her fury ablaze. The blithe thoughtlessness with which he’s forcing her to be the one to say what they should both know.

It’s taking all her concentration not to grip the circuit board so hard that it breaks, which would be hours of painstaking work down the drain. Fighting to keep her voice even, she says, “I don’t think that’s such a good idea, sir.”

“Carter –”

“Sir,” she cuts him off, “I really have to finish this.” She grits her teeth. “Would you please just go.”

He goes.

— — — — —

Carter has asked him to fill out a requisition for a new laptop for her – actually, she’s asked a few times now, with increasingly performative politeness and less patience, so he’s doing the goddamn paperwork, which means that he’s into his inbox now, and it’s therefore impossible to keep pretending he hasn’t seen the personnel requests and leave forms to approve and the reports he’s supposed to read and co-sign, and it’s a long time before he looks up and realizes that Teal’c is standing in his office.

“Hey, buddy,” he says, putting down his pen with relief.

“O’Neill, I wish to speak with you about Major Carter.”

Jack suddenly misses the paperwork.

Thank God for special ops training, he thinks, as he keeps his face perfectly blank. “What about her?”

“I am concerned about her wellbeing. She has not been entirely herself since the death of Daniel Jackson.”

Jack moves some papers busily around his desk, avoiding Teal’c’s eye. “You don’t think she’s been… better, the last little while?”

“No,” says Teal’c flatly.

“What do you mean?”

“She seems…” Teal’c pauses. “Afraid to go home.”

Jack’s mouth is dry. His office smells like dust, one of the reasons he hates being in here. Maybe it would smell less like dust if he used it more often, but he doubts it. The dust tastes like gunmetal. Jack wonders if that means there are iron shavings in it, if he’s inhaling slivers of metal and they’re building up in his lungs. Can people be magnetic if there’s enough metal in their bodies? Carter would know.

“She just gets caught up sometimes.”

“O’Neill.”

Jack needs to get him out of his office. “I’ll talk to her,” he agrees, out of desperation.

“Talk,” repeats Teal’c evenly.

Jack sends him a sharp look, but Teal’c stares blandly ahead. His hands are clasped behind his back.

After a moment, Jack sags. He scratches his thumbnail along his brow. “This downtime… it maybe didn’t come at the best moment,” he admits.

Teal’c inclines his head.

“Hey, T?” Teal’c raises an eyebrow. “Thanks. For keeping an eye on her.”

Carter’s not in her lab, which is odd. Maybe she’s gone home after all and Jack will be spared this conversation.

He moseys to the front gate. The guy with the sign-out sheet is so new that Jack can smell the plastic packaging on him. Ramirez is his partner on duty.

“Hey,” says Jack. “Carter sign out?”

“Uh,” says the new guy. “Carter who?”

Jack stares in disbelief. “Major Carter. Member of SG-1? Head of astrophysics?” He gets a blank blink. “Only one of the most important people on this base, Airman.”

“Um. Hold on, sir.”

Seething, Jack turns to Ramirez, who holds her hands up helplessly. “I’m supposed to let him figure it out himself,” she says.

“I’m not seeing a Carter here,” says the new guy.

“Please,” Jack tells Ramirez. “You gotta help me out.”

“Haven’t seen her, sir.”

“Thank you,” Jack says, and turns back toward the elevator. From behind him, he hears the new guy whisper, “Carter’s a girl?”

Jack stops dead.

“No, sir,” calls Ramirez, “you can’t shoot him.”

“Damn,” mutters Jack, punching the elevator button.

He checks the control room. Two Gate technicians and an empty pot of coffee. He gives up and dials security.

“Her ID was last registered on level 22, sir,” says Sergeant Lansford.

Level 22 is the armory and weapons range. Jack nods to the staff sergeant at the desk and accepts a pair of earmuffs. He swipes his card at the blast door and goes in.

It’s nearly twenty-hundred hours and the range is all but empty. Jack hears one muffled set of detonations. Evenly spaced. No echo. Like a door slamming in a padded room, over and over.

Carter’s in the last booth, pointing a Beretta M9 at a silhouette target. Her P90 is on the ledge beside her.

Her form is textbook. Jack watches her squeeze the trigger between heartbeats. From behind, all he can see is the rigidity of her shoulders, set against the recoil. The back of her neck.

Killshot. Killshot. Killshot. Killshot. Killshot.

She empties the mag and slaps the button to switch out the target.

“Major,” he says, loud enough for her to hear through her muffs.

She pauses. “Sir,” she says. She puts down the pistol and picks up her P90 and inserts a new cartridge.

Jack watches her empty it. Then he goes back to the desk and signs out a rifle and magazines for himself.

He selects the booth two down from hers and lets himself get lost in it. His whole focus narrows to one square inch, and Jack disappears. He becomes small enough to fit inside a bullet. He forgets the war and the Goa’uld, his paperwork and Teal’c, forgets the chill of the basement air and the time of day and the season and who’s president and his own name, forgets being on that moon with Maybourne and Nirrti holding an unconscious Carter with a gun to her head and Daniel saying goodbye and how a gunshot sounds from his own front stoop. Everything goes away. It feels good. It feels a little like dying.

After a while, he realizes that the only shots he’s heard for the last few minutes are his own.

Carter is standing behind him. Her sleeves are pushed up past her elbows, and the skin of her forearms is milk-pale over corded muscle. Strong hands. She waits while Jack secures his firearm, and they walk back out to the desk to sign their weapons back in. It’s silent in the elevator, too, up one level to the locker rooms. He’s faster by a little less than a minute, and waits for her in the corridor. She comes out in a hat and coat. Boots. They take the elevator again, up to the surface.

“You found her, sir,” says Ramirez.

“I did,” says Jack. “And if she tries to get back in here before 0830, you call me.”

“Ramirez, you pulled graveyard?” asks Carter, signing her name on the sheet.

“You can’t bribe her with coffee, Carter,” says Jack. “That’s cheating.”

The new guy is wearing a baffled expression. Carter turns a welcoming smile on him. “Hi. Samantha Carter. What’s your name, Airman?”

“You can’t bribe him, either,” drawls Jack.

Carter glares. “I’m just being nice, sir.” As she brushes past him to the door, she mutters, “You should try it sometime.”

In the parking lot, she tries to break off from him toward her car, but Jack grips her elbow and shakes his head.

He skipped dinner, and she probably did, too, but he’s only hungry in an abstract way. He thinks about what it would be like if they could go out for a nice meal together. A steakhouse, or Italian. Somewhere with white tablecloths and a house wine. He never really enjoyed those kinds of dates with Sara, used to go through the motions just to make her happy when actually he’d have preferred sitting side by side at a bar, chatting and shucking peanuts while they watched a game. Feet knocking together on their barstools.

But Carter looks good in candlelight. She’d probably wear jewelry, a little sparkle at her ears and wrists. He wonders if she has a necklace of blue topaz to match her eyes. Someone ought to have gotten her one. It would be a waste if they hadn’t.

They’re at his truck. He opens the door for her and she climbs in. She’s quiet, and Jack can’t figure out why until she lets her head tilt against the door, exhausted, as he pulls out of the lot. She opens her eyes when he turns right instead of left.

“Sir?”

Jack shrugs, looking out the window. It’s a clear winter night. A breeze raises wisps of diamond-dry snow from hummocks and fenceposts. Across the fields, at the base of the foothills, the drifts ripple like sand. Sometimes, when he wakes in the middle of the night from a dream and looks out the window, he gets confused, thinking he’s still in the Iraqi desert, and he listens for boots on stone and wonders when the taste of blood will penetrate his muddled fog.

He drives for ten minutes and then pulls off onto an unpaved road, hard-packed with snow. The tires squeak. They bounce along for another few minutes, and then Jack kills the engine. From the back of the cab, he grabs his stash of emergency blankets. Carter follows him out and then up, into the pickup bed. She watches as he lays out one of the blankets and lies on it. Even through the fabric, the metal radiates cold.

“C’mon,” he says. After a moment, she settles beside him, curls in with her head on his shoulder, and he covers them with two more blankets.

She doesn’t speak. Jack is patient. He floats up out of the truck, into Orion, Sirius, the Pleiades. M31 in Pegasus. Saturn is visible. Carter’s head is heavy on his arm.

“Moonrise is late tonight,” she says.

“Yeah.” He tucks the blanket a little tighter around her shoulders. “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

She shakes her head.

Jack’s eyes have adjusted enough that he can pick up the open star cluster of M41. He could see more if he had a telescope. Binoculars, even. Although Tycho Brahe managed to revolutionize astronomy with the unaided eye.

“Did you know,” he says, “that Tycho Brahe had a pet moose?”

He feels Sam nod. “He used to throw huge parties,” she says, “and the guests would feed it alcohol. It died because it got drunk and fell down the stairs.”

Jack nods sagely. Then asks, “Carter, how much alcohol would it take to get a moose drunk?”

“I wouldn’t recommend trying to find out, sir,” she says. After a pause, she offers, “Brahe also lost part of his nose in a duel with his third cousin. He wore a prosthetic made of silver-gold alloy.” She contemplates. “Scientists and mathematicians used to get in a lot more duels.”

“Ah,” says Jack. “The good old days.”

He wonders what Brahe would have been able to do with a single magnifying lens. An incredible innovation, the lens. The smallest flaw would distort the image, make it completely useless. Someone had had to invent better ways to manufacture glass. New methods of grinding it down, precision instruments to define its curvature. All to get not even to a discovery, but the thing that made discovery possible.

That’s what SG-1 does, he thinks. Carter makes it possible, with her equations and her mechanics and her mind, and then they all go out and explore. They’re the lens, the focusing mechanism. Earth’s aperture onto the universe. They’re just an instrument – a tool of those politicians fighting over whose back gets patted during election season, whose ass isn’t sufficiently covered when blame time comes around.

Jack is used to this. He’s always been just the guy pulling the trigger. But Carter deserves more.

“I wish I could buy you jewelry,” he says. His throat is tight. The cold has gotten into it.

Carter tenses. They’re so close under the blankets that Jack can feel her mentally reviewing and discarding responses, trying to find something that’s true and yet somehow not the wrong thing to say. I don’t need jewelry misses the point. The anger of Well, tough shit is honest, but doesn’t change anything. I wish that, too will only get them into trouble.

But he hadn’t said it to get a response out of her. Only because it needed to be said. Because it’s a way to confess how he feels without saying what he can’t say, to acknowledge how much she deserves and how incapable he is of giving her any of it, and that the injustice and guilt of that lodges in his throat like the words of a hymn.

“It’s okay, Carter,” he says. “You don’t have to say anything. It’s just – it just is.”

“Okay, sir,” she whispers, and he shifts his leg insistently until it’s wedged under hers and she’s half on top of him, her breath warm and even on his neck.

Soon, Carter’s body is heavy, her breathing deep. Jack tracks the arc of the stars near the horizon, five degrees in twenty minutes. The temperature is dropping from cold to frigid, and the air is sharp. He smooths a hand down Carter’s back, drawing her out of sleep. She blinks her eyes open. Their blue drinks down the night sky and deepens to a midnight purple, shining with points of starlight, and she’s so beautiful that he feels it like a thin blade to the ribs.

“Hey,” he rasps. “Getting cold.”

She nods and disentangles from him, and then it’s colder than ever.

In the car, he blasts the heat and drives as slowly as he can towards the lights of the city. Carter leans her head on the window again, face averted, and stares out at the lapis-shadowed snow.

They pass the first housing developments, bleeding white streetlight into the car. The light slides across her cheek, catches the edges of her hair where it sticks out under her hat. Jack signals, merges, takes his exit.

“I wish I had a better way to explain it than gravity,” she says into the silence. Her voice is slow and sleepy. She hasn’t turned; she’s speaking to the window, or to the homes and yards and endless strip mall restaurants beyond it. “Only, general relativity tells us that gravity doesn’t exist. It’s just that mass bends spacetime, and what we perceive as gravity is simply the movement of objects continuing along the shortest straight line in space.”

“I know this one,” says Jack. “Einstein said there’s nothing actually pulling us to Earth. That our natural state is freefall. It’s standing still that’s the anomaly.”

“Exactly.”

He struggles with it for a while, but gives in. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“For years, I was trying to be a good person,” she says. “The kind of person and officer who’d never break the rules. I was thinking about it in terms of fighting something, some cosmic force. Struggling against gravity. But it isn’t there to fight.” Her voice sounds flat. Resigned, or defeated, or just tired of everything. Jack can’t tell. He has to be able to tell, it’s important, and now of all times he can’t read her. “It’s just how things are. I’d have to change the structure of everything, the whole fabric of it.”

Jack eases to a stop at a red light and looks over at her. She rolls her head along the back of the seat toward him. “It’s not that I don’t want to be the kind of person who wouldn’t ever do this,” she says. “I want to be the kind of person who doesn’t even want to.” She holds his gaze. “But if I could stop, I wouldn’t.”

He sees now. He’d uttered his confession already; this is hers.

He doesn’t know what to say, how to tell her that he understands the weight of her offering. So he speaks his only prayer, which is her name, which has always, always been enough for him.

“It doesn’t make it okay,” she says. “It doesn’t mean I –”

She cuts herself off with an expression he recognizes but can’t place. She’s staring out the window again. The streetlights stutter over her.

“It doesn’t make it okay,” she repeats.

Later, when she’s finally dozed off beside him and he lies sleepless in bed, hands on his stomach as he frowns at his ceiling, he places the expression on her face. It’s the one she wears in the field, when he’s been winged by a staff blast or grazed by a bullet or scraped over rocks, and she’s sterilizing the wound with alcohol and iodine.

That’s how she’d looked:

Like she’s trying not to hurt him.

Chapter Text

III.

Let me off the bus; I’m tired and sore
and should probably change clothes.
And the circuits are blown
My woman is cold…

— Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s, “A Light On A Hill”

— — — — —

“Carter, I think your ship is cursed,” the colonel says.

They’re overseeing the transport to Tagrea of the supplies needed for repair of the Prometheus. Or, rather, Sam is overseeing. The colonel is lounging around the Gate room, with his arm resting on his slung P90.

“It’s not my ship, sir,” she says.

“Did you or did you not design it?”

“Well, not the whole…” She sees his look. “Yes.”

“Your ship,” he repeats, “is cursed.”

His jacket collar is popped in anticipation of the desert sun on the other side of the Gate. It looks casual. Louche.

He’s teasing, bantering as they often do, but Sam can’t think of anything to say. Her mind feels fuzzy and slow, like her brain has been slowly leaking out through her ears while she sleeps. She wonders if some of her cells haven’t broken down from Nirrti’s machine after all. She wonders if she hasn’t had one too many concussions.

It’s just fatigue, she knows, just the stress of the last few months, but she can’t think, and if she can’t think, she’s useless.

“Well,” she says inanely. “We knew there’d be wrinkles.”

He looks at her intently like he’s going to ask whether she’s okay, and she needs him not to.

“Sir, ma’am?” says Airmen Pavetti, coming down the ramp. “That’s the last of it.”

The intercom clicks. “You’re clear to go,” says General Hammond from the control room. “Colonel, I’ll expect you back shortly with Teal’c and Jonas. Major, you have twenty-four hours to get the repairs underway, and then you’re to leave it in the hands of Colonel Ronson and his crew. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

The colonel raises a hand in acknowledgement, and they turn in unison and head up the ramp.

On the other side, a clutch of airmen are already carrying the boxes and crates and equipment to the Prometheus. Sam and the colonel pause as the wormhole shucks itself out at their backs. Sam feels her shoulders relax. They’re off-world. Things are easier between them, off-world. Everything is easier.

From a position halfway across the wide expanse of sand between the Gate and the ship, Teal’c and Jonas notice them; Jonas waves and starts walking in their direction. For the moment, there’s no one around, and nothing for them to do.

“I love supervising,” says the colonel. He digs in his tac-vest. “Power bar?”

“No, thanks, sir.”

He chews meditatively. They watch Jonas approach. The sun is bright, the shadows sharp on the sand, the hot blue sky edged with bronze. It’s difficult to believe they’d nearly found themselves adrift on the Prometheus in the cold, dark void of space – difficult in this light and heat even to believe in the existence of the void of space.

The Tagrean military forces have been recruited to haul and carry, Sam notices.

“You did great, Carter,” says the colonel. “With the –” He waves his hand. Grimaces. “Diplomacy.”

Sam keeps her eyes on the sand. There have been numerous attempts, by various scientific teams, to calculate whether grains of sand on Earth outnumber stars in the known universe. The problem is that it’s nearly impossible to pin down either number. You’re comparing two estimates that are hardly more than guesses, multiplying uncertainty by uncertainty. It should be determinable, Sam thinks. We should know the order of magnitude of these things.

“I was thinking of Daniel,” she says. “What he’d say, if he were here.”

The sand wavers in the heat. Jonas is halfway to them now, taking long, easy strides. His shadow stretches out in front of him.

The colonel turns his head toward her. Sam sees it out of the corner of her eye.

“Carter,” he says, “we’re going to be okay.”

“Yes, sir,” she says. “I guess we are.”

— — — — —

They’re not.

Jack doesn’t speak after Abydos, and Sam doesn’t know what to say to him. On the walk back to the Stargate, tramping through sand, she’d caught up to him and drawn close and bumped his shoulder with hers, and he’d looked at her and bumped back. But the loss of Skaara and his people is a wound that can’t be sutured. Jack slips into it, beneath his own skin, and doesn’t come out.

She doesn’t really see him for four days after the debrief, and then she seeks him out in the gym, where he’s pounding the treadmill. The colonel hates running.

She stands beside the machine and waits.

“Busy, Carter.”

She hadn’t formulated a plan. There are several things she can say to him, but none she can think of that will thaw the thick radiative atmosphere he’s flying around inside of, like the nucleus of a comet shrouded in its coma of dust.

She could say, It wasn’t your fault; she could say, They’re better off now, they’re safe, safer than we’ll ever be, but that’s not how the colonel sees things and he’d only be contemptuous if she pretended she didn’t know that. She could say, Let’s go to your place and I’ll finally fix your coffee maker, because this morning she’d watched from across the commissary as he’d upended three-quarters of his mug of muddy water into the trash can. She could say, Let’s go to your place, but then his eyes would rime cold as superfluid helium and he’d answer, Leave me alone, Carter, which is what he’d said after the Abydos debriefing when she’d told him that Teal’c and Jonas were ordering pizza to the main gate and they could all eat it in Teal’c’s room.

She says, “There’s Black Forest cake in the mess.”

The treadmill hits the nine-mile mark and beeps once. The colonel dials up the speed, and Sam stands there and watches him run one mile more. It takes six minutes and thirty-two seconds. She doesn’t move. At the end of it, the colonel slams the “off” button with the heel of his palm, leaving a long smear of sweat across the controls, and hops down and heads straight to the erg machine.

After few seconds, Sam grabs a paper towel and the spray cleaner off its little shelf and wipes down the treadmill for him, and then she follows him and stands next to the erg machine instead.

The colonel pulls, grunting. She watches him do a 1,500-meter interval. Thirty seconds of rest. He starts the next one.

She leaves.

That night, she opens his front door and finds him slouched on the sofa, his feet on the coffee table and a basketball game on the television. He’s holding a beer bottle, but in a way that means it’s almost empty. Without taking her jacket off, she goes into the kitchen, grabs a plate, opens the plastic bag she’s brought and unwraps the takeout burrito inside. From the fridge, she fishes out another beer, then carries plate and bottle into the living room, deposits them on the table, and walks out.

Two days later, he wanders lost into her lab like he’s a Roomba discovering thresholds by bumping through them. Without looking up from her laptop, Sam nudges a white doughnut box on her lab bench toward him – leftovers from the science department meeting that morning. He takes a Boston crème and sits on the extra stool and watches her work. He’s chewing slowly, like his jaw hurts, and Sam hears it but she’s tracking the best fit line of a sequence of photoelectric pulses and there’s a variable missing, some absent shape like the gap left in bullet percussions for a heartbeat. When he leaves, twelve minutes later, neither of them has said a word.

That night, he calls her cell.

“I do have organs other than my stomach,” he says.

Sam wedges the phone between her cheek and shoulder so that she can drop a piece of mail into her shredder.

“I expect your liver’s been getting a pretty good workout,” she says mildly.

“Bladder, too. What’s your point?”

Sam straightens and moves her hand to hold the phone in place. He’s being purposely curt, trying to create some distance between her and the broken glass of his pain.

“There’s no point, sir,” she says softly.

He breathes down the line.

“Stay away,” he says, but he doesn’t mean it.

She’s gentle with him, patient. For a week, then another one, and he doesn’t speak, and he’s snappish and moody in his grief, and Sam tries to tamp down the source of her own anger, because after all, it seems a small thing in comparison to the annihilation of a planet and a people and a boy to whom Jack had laid claim with his heart. Even if her resentment at his self-pity is slowly working itself to the surface of her skin like a splinter.

“Sir,” she says, at the end of the third week of surly silence.

She’s fiddling with the edge of the blanket. Jack is propped up on his pillow beside her, reading Saint-Ex. She’s realized by now that as soon as he finishes, he flips to the beginning and starts over again. Sometimes, for variety, he starts in the middle instead.

“Sir,” she repeats.

He grunts.

Sam takes a deep breath. “Why didn’t you tell me about seeing Daniel?”

Jack turns a page. Sam doesn’t think he’s reading anymore.

“It was when Ba’al had me,” he says. “I wasn’t exactly keen to run through the postgame analysis.” There’s an edge to his voice.

She ignores it. “Still.”

Jack plants his book face-down on his chest and huffs an irritated sigh.

Sam’s been trying to keep a lid on her anger, but that – that pisses her off. She sits up, turning to face him. “You knew I wasn’t convinced he’d ascended. You knew how I felt, how much I missed him.”

They’d never talked about it: one of the first few missions off-world after Daniel. Teal’c on watch and Jonas lightly snoring. Sam overtired but unable to sleep without the whistle of Daniel’s breath reeding through his half-blocked nose. She’d been worn thin with exhaustion and grief, and, thinking herself alone in consciousness, she’d let her face crumple and turned over and sobbed quietly into her pillow. Only after a few minutes had she heard the colonel – who sleeps, when he sleeps, like the motionless dead – shift in his sleeping bag. Neither of them had ever mentioned it.

“You couldn’t talk to me for fifteen seconds? Just a little heads up, you know, ‘Hey Carter, Daniel showed up, turns out he’s not really dead, so you can stop crying yourself to sleep like you have for the past three months straight’? God, Jack.”

She throws off the covers and stands. There’s nowhere to go. She hesitates by the bedside table, her toes digging into the carpet, then turns and stalks out of the room.

In the cold kitchen she winds to a standstill. The linoleum is a sheet of ice under her bare feet. Jack has followed her down the hall. He leans against the wall, arms crossed.

“Been wanting to get that off your chest for a while, Carter?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anything else?” He waves one hand around. “While we’re clearing the air?”

“Actually, yes, sir, now that you mention it.” Sam holds her anger and grips tight. “On Abydos, when you threatened to blow up the Eye of Ra and all of us with it, I asked if you would really do it, and you said, Sure, why not?”

Jack’s jaw works. “I was there.”

She crosses her arms.

“That’s the job, Carter,” he growls. “You know that. The mission is what matters. Earth is what matters.”

“As a last resort. You seemed just a little too eager for that to be the job this time around,” she says. “We could’ve come up with something, we could’ve –”

“See,” Jack yells, “this is the problem with us doing…” He gestures savagely between them. “Whatever the hell it is we’re doing.”

That hurts more than Sam was expecting. She looks away, blinking.

“Now you think you have a right to –”

“To what?” she snaps. “To want you to live? Jack –”

Sam swallows. Her throat is tight. There’s a certainty that sits in her breastbone like a lump of cold iridium.

She breathes water. Tastes salt.

“Jack,” she rasps. “If you die, I’ll die.”

He scoffs. “That’s what you think.”

Silence.

“What?” she whispers.

“You don’t. You think you will, but you don’t.” His voice. Like frozen rebar. “You just go on existing with a part of you gone. You don’t die,” he says, relentless. “You just feel like it.”

The clock ticks on the kitchen wall.

What a stupid place for a clock, Sam thinks. It seems to be running too fast, as if she’s being sucked into the time dilation bubble of a black hole. Like there’s been a break in the flow of the universe, a howling void in the throughline of Jack’s life that sucks all of time into it. A front stoop, an upstairs room, a sunny day. Her breath is gone. You just feel like it.

“Jack –”

“Don’t.”

She tries to school the pity out of her face, but she doesn’t succeed. She knows this because he takes two strides toward her and wraps his hand into her collar and jerks upward and drives her back hard. Her head thunks hollowly against the cabinet door.

Jack’s mouth twists as he leans in close. The muscles of his face are rigid.

“You should get this by now,” he says. “I am broken, Carter. I’m never going to be fixed.”

Sam gets her hands under his arm and shoves at his chest, hard, and he releases her and stumbles back a few steps.

“Fuck you,” she spits, and pushes him again, out into the hallway. He doesn’t stop her. She follows him, and this time she grabs two fistfuls of his shirt and kisses him, furious and too hard, and when she breaks away she expects both their mouths to be bloody, but there’s nothing there. “Fuck you, you’re not broken,” she says, and he seizes the hair above her nape and kisses her like he hates her, kisses her like kissing her will keep him alive and he’d rather die, and Sam wants to cry, but instead her eyes just burn red and dry, until he moves his mouth to the slope of her neck, and they slip shut.

— — — — —

It’s been raining on P3L-881 for four days. Sam shifts on her stomach so she can get her elbows underneath her and raises the binoculars back up to her eyes. The cold thick mud of the hilltop sucks her down. Her forearms sink into it.

“Anything?” asks Jonas.

“No,” says Sam, scanning the Jaffa encampment on the plain below. “No, wait – there they are.” The colonel and Teal’c are emerging from a tent, hands tied but ankles free, three Jaffa prodding them along with staff weapons. “They’re moving them toward the rings.”

It’s been a disaster from go, this mission.

The planet was rumoured to have a defensive weapon that drove off any Goa’uld that tried to attack, but when they’d asked the village headman about it, he’d started babbling.

“Lately,” the headman had said, “the ritual has not succeeded. We’ve increased its frequency, and now we are making the sacrifices monthly –”

The colonel held up his hand. “Sacrifices?”

By stoning. One person, to death, on the xakstral platform, every year.

“With stones from the river,” said the headman, earnestly. “To bind their lifeblood to the lifeblood of this place.”

The colonel had turned aside. He walked away a dozen yards. Two dozen. He put his hands on his head. They all watched him. He paced a small circle in the rain.

Sam thought of P3X-426, the human sacrifice of willing girls to please a rain god. What people did, to appease whatever brought death, the kinds of doors they tried to open toward escape. What crimes could be brought on by grief. Because the human heart, unique among all creatures, is capable of breaking.

Jack had paced one more tight circle, then returned. Rainwater poured off his nose. “You know,” he’d said bitterly, “the people of this galaxy don’t even need the Goa’uld. We’re doing a bang-up job killing each other off ourselves.”

No one said anything.

“Carter.”

She’d nodded. Wanted to touch him. Because the human heart can break. Because it knows the value of a life, and knows how much it means to take one.

And this – Sam has never known how to think about this. To wish it away, or not. Whether it’s possible to care for someone and still be glad of the worst thing that ever happened to them.

She’s a physicist. Quantum properties come in pairs: position and momentum, energy and time. Matter, too: Electron and positron. Neutrino, antineutrino. One moving forward in time is, physically, exactly the same as its antiparticle moving backward in time. Everything has its counterpart. Every possibility its negative.

Charlie lives, and Sam never meets Jack. No SG-1. Very possibly no Earth. It’s a gravitational event with the impossible geometry of a singularity.

“I’ll look into it,” she’d said.

It was shortly afterward that things had gone to hell.

“Ready?” Jonas asks now.

Sam bites her lip. If ever there was a time to disobey an order… but – “What if the colonel has a plan?”

Jonas raises an eyebrow. “What if he doesn’t?”

Sam tilts her head. “Good point.” She sets the binoculars back to her face. There’s mud on the lenses. Her hair is dripping into her eyes. “Okay, on my mark. Three, two, one, mark.”

Jonas thumbs the detonator and the C4 in the eastern clearing lights up the ashy dusk. A rumble rolls through the valley, a gut-quenching boom and the oscillating roar of the echoes. The ground shudders beneath her, like a dog in pain.

“Good,” says Sam, watching half the Jaffa contingent break off to investigate, taking the forest path toward the explosion. After twenty seconds, the first of the claymores along the path trips, and another punishing boom cracks back and forth along the valley. More Jaffa run off.

“Now,” says Sam.

She and Jonas charge down the slope.

Off in the woods, the second claymore trips.

Taking advantage of the distraction, Teal’c has secured a staff weapon and is firing, clumsy with his bound hands. Sam unsheathes her knife and slashes the colonel’s wrists free. She wonders if he’s remembering, like she is, the night before they left. How he’d twisted her wrists together with a necktie from his closet, how the navy silk had looked like a blood-darkened sapphire against her pale skin. Wonders if he remembers that he’d turned her onto her stomach before he’d fucked her, that he’d held the knot of the necktie for leverage and that even when he’d let go she’d kept her hands where he’d put them, straining the tie as far as she could, because then when she gasped with pain it was because the fabric was grinding against the bones of her wrists, and not because she wanted to see his face and he wouldn’t, couldn’t, let her.

She hands Jack her pistol and does Teal’c’s hands. The colonel covers their flank. He’s squeezing off shots like the bullets are roundhouses.

“Carter,” he yells, “Correct me if I’m wrong. I thought I was extremely clear.”

“Yes, sir.” She sends a spray of gunfire towards their eleven o’clock and they all shuffle slightly closer toward the Gate. “Crystal.”

“I told you to start up the defensive weapon and get yourselves through the Gate. Did I misspeak? Was there –” he glances at her, her BDUs coated in muck from collar to boot soles – “mud in your ears? Were you distracted by a – a passing data stream?”

The taunt muscle of his haunch, the lamp-shadow in the hollows of his collarbone. The flex of his quad under her hand when she’d leaned on it to nuzzle her nose into the soft skin of his balls, musky and a little sweat-sour and briny with her own scent. And after, she’d gone home, because she needed fresh clothes and she needed to sleep and make it to work for their 0500 departure and she needed to sit on the floor of her shower and trace the angry red lines in her wrists, over and over, and wonder which of the two of them had put them there.

“You didn’t have all the relevant information, sir,” yells Sam over the sharp report of gunfire. “The xakstral locks out the Gate.”

“We wouldn’t have been able to get back through with reinforcements,” calls Jonas.

The colonel wipes muck from his face, scowling. “And?”

Sam bites her tongue.

If you wanted to die, she should say, you should have told me before I came all over your bedsheets and then went to my knees at the edge of the mattress and sucked the taste of myself off of you.

She should say, It felt like dying anyway.

But she’s a good little soldier. She doesn’t pick fights. Doesn’t break regs or disobey orders or let her CO bind her wrists with the tie of his dress blues.

They take cover behind a tumble of boulders. Teal’c lays down fire; the colonel pokes his head up and picks off a couple of enemies; Sam slams a new magazine into her P90. There’s the crunch of energy blasts against stone, the crack of staff weapons and the avalanche-patter of gunfire and the drench of pounding rain. Jonas’s hair is plastered to his head. The colonel’s torn BDUs hang off him in wet rags.

“What were we supposed to do,” Jonas says, “leave you?”

“Yes!” The colonel leans around the boulders and fires. He misses more than he hits. “Yes, Jonas,” he says, but he’s glaring at Sam, “that’s exactly what you were supposed to do.”

“We made a judgment call,” says Sam.

“It wasn’t your call to make!”

“O’Neill,” says Teal’c. “Major Carter. Perhaps it would be wise to reschedule this disagreement for a later time.”

Sam glances up and sees what he’s noticed: the return of the Jaffa – their numbers somewhat reduced – from the direction of the eastern clearing.

“We make a run for it,” the colonel says. “On three. One, two –”

They dash for the Gate, which is barely visible. The air is gray soup. It’s like running through successive sheets of solid water. Swollen raindrops smack their faces, Sam and Jonas in front, the colonel and Teal’c covering their six. Jonas dials, ducking.

The ground at the colonel’s feet disintegrates in a violent cloudburst of mud under a staff weapon blast. “Any time now,” he yells.

Jonas pounds in the IDC. “Got it!”

“Go, go, go” – and they run – a bolt sears past Sam’s ear – Jonas stumbles but keeps his feet – the Gate is only five yards away –

They explode with a clatter onto the ramp, mud flung from their boots, sodden and shouting.

“Close the iris!” the colonel screams, and then it’s quiet. Sam’s ears ring. She shakes sopping hair out of her eyes.

General Hammond is standing at the bottom of the ramp.

“SG-1, welcome back,” he says. “Debrief will have to wait. We have an emergency. Major, you’re needed in the science lab.”

The Prometheus has dropped off the sensors on a milk-run recon mission. Sam jumps straight into work with Dr. Lee to figure out what happened. She doesn’t even change out of her muddy BDU pants for six hours, and Janet has to come to her lab to take the protocol post-mission blood sample, and when Jonas drops by around twenty-thirty hours to deliver half a pizza, she sends him off with her P90 and Beretta to return to the armory.

They work for two and a half days without a break, and there are sandwich crumbs on plates all over her lab and five half-drunk mugs of cold coffee and the whole place reeks of old ham and unwashed scientist and tannic steel and the marsh mud on the boots she stashed in the corner. She wishes that they’d used Dr. Lee’s lab for this, but Sam’s optimized her processor speeds and there’s more room in here anyway.

When she figures it out, her eyes are so tired they won’t focus. She rubs at them and a crust comes away from the corners.

“Got it.”

“What?” squawks McKay’s voice from her laptop, tinny through the video call. “No, because you were checking the trajectory and it’s definitely just a malfunction in those communication patches you pushed through last week –”

“Shut up, McKay.” She points at a spot on the star map, Dr. Lee over her shoulder. He smells like Axe body spray and gym socks and modelling paint.

“This quasar is directly along their trajectory,” she says. “They’d pass through the plasma cocoon –”

“The synchrotron radiation!” Dr. Lee shakes his head in admiration. “I don’t know how I didn’t see that.”

Sam pushes away from her desk. “I’ll tell General Hammond.”

But she runs into Walter in the corridor outside the control room, and he tells her that Hammond is on the phone with the President, so she leans against the bulkhead and lets her head tip onto chilly painted cinderblock as she explains to Walter what went wrong.

“So they can just… move out of the plasma cocoon and try again?” he asks. “Right?”

“It’s not that easy.” Sam scrubs a hand over her face. Her lab is a high-ventilation area so that foreign particles are rapidly filtered, and her skin is dry from the base HVAC blowing across it for two days. Her cheeks are rough. When she pulls her hand away, tiny white flakes of dead skin cling to her palm. “The hard drop out of hyperspace may have damaged the drive, and they’re being bombarded by relativistic electrons and alpha particles and cosmic rays, which the shields weren’t designed to withstand for long periods –”

“Someone else’s problem,” says the colonel. He’s come up the corridor behind them. “We have a mission on P4X-779. Gear up.”

Sam stares. She’s slept four hours in two nights. She’s only just realized that she’s not wearing shoes, that she’s standing in socked feet in the middle of an SGC corridor. The colonel seems a lot taller than usual.

“Are you serious?”

“You heard me,” he says.

P4X-779 is a grassy, uninhabited planet where SG-1 is scheduled to be accompanying a mining survey. It’s the least urgent mission possible.

“Sir,” she says. “I have to run these calculations to see how long the shield will last and then figure out how to get the Prometheus out of there.”

“Hasn’t McKay been on speakerphone in your lab for three days? He can do it. Gear up, Carter.”

He’s setting her teeth on edge. “SG-11 can go.”

Colonel O’Neill rocks onto his heels. “It’s SG-1’s mission, Major. Last time I checked, you’re on SG-1. Am I wrong?”

“No, sir.”

“You sure? Because if you’d rather spend your time in your nice, warm lab with your squad of geeks, I’m sure Hammond could find a replacement.”

To Sam’s embarrassment, she realizes that Walter is trying to slip away. “What is your problem, sir?” she hisses.

The colonel shoves his hands in his pockets. “No problem, Carter.”

She should let it go. She’s overworked and exhausted, and he’s grumpy and territorial, and – “Clearly there is, sir.”

“I just don’t remember authorizing you to drop your normal duties for this. We have other scientists.”

“They needed me,” she says, feeling like she’s walking into a trap.

“Sure,” he says easily. “Needed. Past tense. I heard what you told Walter. I might be a scientifically illiterate meathead to you –” Sam rolls her eyes – “but I got the gist. No one is in immediate danger. Don’t make this more than it is.”

Sam narrows her eyes. “And what exactly am I making it, sir?”

“Oh, come on, Carter. Not everything requires you to swoop in and save the day.”

She reels back. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.” He turns away. “Forget it.”

Sam can feel her heartbeat pulsing behind her eyes. “No, sir,” she says. “I don’t think I will. Why don’t you say whatever it is you want to say?”

“Drop it, Major, that’s an order.” His voice rises.

“Well, it’s a shitty one!” she snaps. She’s tired of him throwing his weight around, and now the lines have all gotten crossed, and what should be a professional tiff feels a hell of a lot more like something else, and the colonel’s use of rank to shut her down in a lover’s quarrel is wildly unfair.

“That!” he shouts. “That is what I’m talking about. I don’t know what’s happened to your ego, but I guess you’ve spent one too many times playing the hero, because you don’t get to question my calls. Not here, and not off-world. You need to get your head on straight, Carter. It’s bad enough that you’re clearly distracted by I don’t know what other bullshit –”

“It’s not bullshit, sir, it’s my job,” she says.

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t,” she calls his bluff. “Why don’t you just say it?”

Except he’s always been the better poker player. “Really?” he asks. He steps forward, eyes hard and dark like struck obsidian. “You really want me to say it, Major?”

There are airmen stopped up and down the corridor, mouths agape. She and the colonel don’t fight. Not on base, not publicly. Not ever. People are staring. Sam’s neck flushes in mortification, heat crawling up her rib cage and behind her ears.

She tries to drop her voice. “I’m doing my job. As your 2IC and as lead astrophysicist for this program. I’m sorry not everything on this base revolves around you –”

“You’re a member of a field unit, Carter, and your job is in the field, with me,” he yells, “and Jonas and Teal’c. We need you, much as I sure as shit wish like hell we didn’t –”

It would have hurt less, Sam thinks distantly, if he’d put a pistol muzzle into one of her ball-and-socket joints and pulled the trigger.

“Then maybe,” she challenges, and her voice is shaking, so she raises it again, audience be damned, “Then maybe you should talk to General Hammond about that replacement after all.” She steps forward and they’re nearly touching, nose to nose, and the colonel’s stubble is catching the light and Sam’s skin is so dry that it feels like it’s sloughing off because otherwise how could everything hurt her like this. “But it’s not your call, sir.”

“It’s my team, you bet your ass it’s my call –”

“Colonel! Major!” General Hammond’s roar cuts through the hallway. “What the hell is going on here?”

Sam snaps to attention. She and the colonel both take an instinctive step back, and then the whole corridor is between them. Air hushes through the vents. Electricity hums in the wires. There are footsteps, and then none, as someone comes around the corner and stops stock-still at the edge of the tableau.

“My office,” says the general. “Now.”

Sam stands stiffly beside the colonel in front of Hammond’s desk. He looks from one of them to the other.

“Do we have a problem here?” he asks.

Sam stares straight ahead. “No, sir.”

“No problem, sir,” says the colonel.

General Hammond stares hard at both of them, then at Sam. She keeps her gaze locked on the wall just above his head.

“Major Carter, you’ve logged a hundred and fifty-six hours of overtime in the past four weeks.”

His voice is even, no accusation. It’s not a question, so answering it would be pointless. The colonel and Teal’c would be able to stay silent. Sam twists desperately in the brief pause. Her sweaty fingers tangle behind her back, like a child’s.

“You don’t have to pay me for it, sir,” she blurts. “I’ll amend the timesheets.”

General Hammond sighs and digs a thumb into the hollow at the corner of his eye. “Go home,” he says finally. “Both of you.”

“Sir, the mission –”

“I authorized SG-11 to take over the mission two hours ago, Colonel. Go. Get out of my sight. I don’t want to see your faces until tomorrow.”

Sam feels like she’s being punished. She and the colonel walk out of the office, not looking at each other. They go for the elevator button at the same time, and he pulls back and gestures with exaggerated courtesy for her to hit it.

In the elevator, they stare at the LED screen and watch the numbers change. Sam seethes.

Melodic machine hum of the cables. The floor indicator beeps.

“We have to stop this,” says Jack.

Sam wants to tear his eyes out with her pipe wrench. She wants to rip his larynx from his throat. Maybe with her teeth. It seems like an awful lot of effort. It’s cold in here, metal-box cold, and she’s still in her socks. She stares at her toes. They’re muddy. She wants a shower. She wants to go to bed, and for Jack to tuck her in with the awful red blanket and she wants to curl up in his sheets. She wants him to pick her up and carry her to his truck.

“It’s not working,” he says.

She could say, It was a mistake.
She could say, We knew that.
She could say, I’d rather keep ripping each other to shreds than stop.

Her skin hums with his nearness, the rustle of his clothes. His car keys in his hand. The smooth skin behind his ears where his hair is cut short and soft.

“No,” she says. “It’s not.”

Her voice breaks. She bears down on it. She can’t cry. She can’t cry. She has to make it to her locker, then past the guards at the front gate, all the way down the long metal corridor.

She hears Jack shift to face her. “Carter…”

Sam shakes her head and screws up her face against the tears. “Don’t,” she chokes. “Let’s not – dwell, sir.”

The doors open on the upper level. Jack clenches his hands at his sides. Unclenches them. He balls them into fists.

“Bye, Carter,” he says, voice hard.

Sam squeezes her eyes closed and the elevator slides shut on the hallway, on Jack, on his upright back, walking toward the door.

And then she’s alone in the box and

thank God

it’s over.

— — — — —

Two days later, they get Daniel back.

— — — — —

When she sees him and he flinches from her, it hurts like plasma fire, it hurts like fishing barbs in her liver. She misses Daniel, she misses Daniel, she misses Jack. She misses Jack.

He comes home, and if he doesn’t remember them, they don’t remember him either, this stranger with whom they have no history. The colonel makes jokes, because that’s what the colonel does, and Teal’c says nothing, because that’s what Teal’c does, and Sam escapes to her lab, because that’s what Sam does.

Hands, she thinks. Something to do with her hands. But she’s not building anything right now, just tinkering, and besides, she likes the physical work because it occupies enough of her brain that the rest is free to think, and she wants –

Water. Salt. She wants to drown.

She rips the top page off her legal pad and sits on her stool and taps a pencil eraser against the sheet, and realizes she’s thinking of mud and rain gods and – Maybe because there’s still a faint scent of bog in here. Synchrotron radiation, she thinks instead, and Rodney did the calculations in the end but she wants to grind through them herself and there’s something clean about the way the graphite crumbles in the swift lines and curves of the letter beta as she starts sketching out the equations for the Prometheus’s shield decay over time.

She likes this, the step-by-step of it, the complexity that requires her to keep the overarching shape in her head and tick through the subcomponents one by one, like she’s turning a rendered 3D form to view from every angle, and someone clears their throat.

“Major Carter,” says Teal’c.

Sam blinks. She’s standing in the commissary, the coffee carafe half raised, and only now does she realize that she’d made the decision to get herself a cup while she thought about how to elegantly set up the next step of the problem. Rodney probably modelled it on the computer because working in the unpredictable variations in the precession of the plasma jets is messy, but Sam doesn’t want to brute-force it.

“Are you all right?”

“Working through an equation,” Sam explains, checking that she hasn’t filled her cup already before she sloshes some coffee into it.

“I know,” says Teal’c, a little fondly. “I am asking if you are all right.”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Daniel Jackson’s return is… unexpected.”

“Yes.” Sam turns her back to put the carafe down. “For some of us.”

She winces and immediately wishes it unsaid. It’s old news, now. She doesn’t want Teal’c to think she’s been keeping a grudge all this time. She keeps her back turned.

Teal’c hesitates. “I am sorry.”

He’s apologizing for not telling her that he’d seen Daniel after he ascended. He’s apologizing because he believes he caused her distress, and he thinks she doesn’t deserve that.

I fucked Jack in the passenger seat of his truck, she wants to tell him. When you were recovering from losing your symbiote and could barely walk. You asked if I wanted to come over to your room and order Chinese and play checkers, and I lied. I said I had plans with Cassie, could we have a raincheck, and instead I got into Jack’s truck and we made it halfway home before I told him to pull over. I let him fold me over the dash and put two fingers inside me and his thumb up my ass and then I fucked him. At eleven-thirty at night, in a T.J. Maxx parking lot.

She remembers the precise sensation of the rubber-plastic dash under her open mouth, the way she’d bitten at it and it had knocked hard against her teeth, making her feel each ridge of her incisors, the way they weren’t quite smooth along the bottom. The blunt edge of Jack’s thumbnail, catching her tender skin a little, at first, and then not. She hadn’t even taken off her shirt, and she’d sat in his car naked from the waist down all the way back to his garage.

I’m not who you think I am, she should tell Teal’c. She should tell Teal’c.

“Don’t apologize,” she says. “You don’t need to apologize.”

Teal’c reaches out and turns her and takes her free hand. Sam stares at her coffee cup, at the liquid trembling in the heavy white mug, and then she looks at her small pale fingers in Teal’c huge palm. He turns her hand over and Sam is caught, fascinated. His grip is warm and dry and he smells like candle wax and green tea.

“I wish I knew how to help you, Major Carter,” he says.

“I don’t need help.” Sam takes her hand away. When she looks up, she sees Jack, in the doorway of the mess hall, watching across the broken sheet of empty tables.

— — — — —

There’s a bubble and that’s where Sam lives. Inside a skin that isn’t quite the real world but lies within it. For weeks, Daniel’s there but he’s not Daniel, and they’re searching the ruins of Vis Uban for something but they don’t know what, and they’re waiting. Waiting to find something. Waiting for Daniel to remember. Waiting for the colonel to finish his meatloaf and leave the table so that Sam can go get a sandwich without having to talk to him.

She goes home on time and she cleans. She finishes clearing out her office and then it’s done and it’s better except she can’t find her notes from four years ago about the effects of solar flares on Gate travel, until she remembers that they were on the back of a map of the Field Museum dated July 30, 1969, and she’d it thrown away. She cleans the blackened clumps of leaves from her eaves, re-secures the drainpipes with plastic brackets because the metal ones have rusted out. She washes all the windows, front and back. Cassie calls and on Saturday they get manicures and play three games of laser tag and then have diner pancakes and milkshakes for dinner.

“This was fun,” says Cassie, hugging her as they stand up from the booth. “I’ve missed you,” and Sam feels bad about that but she goes home and clears the serving dishes she doesn’t use from the credenza. There’s space again and she thinks maybe she could use it for her home server and her modem and external drives because then she could fit a small drafting table in her office.

On Monday night, she moves the modem and the drives and tames the tangle of cables with a pack of zip ties. She bundles them tightly, smoothing the kinks into neat snakes and curls, and she’s not thinking of the briefing that day, of Daniel sitting in his spot like he knew it was his and throwing their plans into disarray, and how that means there’s nothing to do next, nothing to wait for – she’s not thinking about it because there’s a lot of dust on the shelf behind where the network hub used to be, so she’s wiping a Pledge-soaked rag over the wood with grimy hands when Jonas calls and says he’s had an idea.

She pulls an all-nighter running the models for powering the X-302’s hyperspace generator with naquadria, and spends the next afternoon talking over the schematics of Anubis’s new ship with the Tok’ra. She likes their holographic imaging device, which is easier than having three people lean over a screen. Maybe after all this, she can ask for one.

Mellina and Lanar, the Tok’ra she’s working with, are almost friendly, as their people go: still arrogant but young enough to be eager, happy to work with allies. They eat dinner together and Sam asks them about how the Tok’ra developed their tunnelling technology, and she stays at the table when they leave, working through a thought about how technology is shaped by evolutionary pressures the same way that DNA is. Tok’ra innovations are sly and subtle, crafty, not just in purpose but in methodology; they conceal themselves, masquerade, work through natural processes. Different from both Goa’uld and Ancient technology, in that sense.

It’s exactly counter to the way the colonel functions, which is why she isn’t surprised when he loses his cool in the next planning meeting.

“Once we’ve eliminated the target –” Sam is saying.

“We don’t have a target,” he cuts in. “We have a half-cocked plan to find the target. What if Dr. and Mr. Translator over there can’t read the schematics on the mothership?”

“The Tok’ra gave us samples of roughly contemporary writings, and we managed that without a problem,” says Daniel. “They say that Anubis encoded everything in a very similar dialect.”

“They say,” bites the colonel. “They say, and we trust them. They say you’ll be able to access the blueprints. They say you’ll be able to read them. They say that overloading the weapon won’t blow up the whole ship and you with it.”

“I checked that out, actually, sir,” says Sam. “With the schematics that we do have. It seems right, which is why we need Teal’c to talk to Yu.”

“And that’s another thing,” says the colonel. “I never thought we’d be working with someone I trust less than the Tok’ra.”

“Enemy of my enemy,” points out Jonas.

“He’s not!” yells the colonel. “He is the enemy!”

“Sir, I think what Jonas means –”

“I know what Jonas means, Carter. He doesn’t need a translator.”

“We can’t do this alone, sir.”

“I believe you, I’m just not sure why we’re doing it at all, with this ridiculous screwball-comedy version of a strategy –”

“I understand, Colonel, but this is our best option.” The general holds up a hand. “Now, if we’re done here?” he asks politely. At Sam’s nod, he rises. Chairs squeak as she and Colonel O’Neill get up, too. They stay standing when he’s gone, glaring at each other across the table.

“Team lunch,” the colonel growls.

He’s been on this team-lunch kick for two weeks, saying it will be good for Daniel. If it is, no one has noticed, and it’s painful for the rest of them. The stranger living in Daniel’s skin isn’t someone that Sam’s sure she would bother to get to know.

Still, the boys troop obediently out, and the colonel is halfway to the door before he realizes that Sam isn’t following.

“Carter.”

Sam gathers up her notes. “Can’t, sir. I have more of the screwball strategy to work out.” She doesn’t try to hide the rancor.

“It can wait. Lunch. Let’s go.”

Sam sets her jaw. “Is it an order?”

“Do I need to make it one?”

She squares her shoulders. “You know what, sir? Yes, you do.”

The colonel’s brows rise. “Fine. Major Carter, report to the commissary.” He turns away, then spins back. “And none of that three salad leaves and coffee bullshit, either. You’ll sit, you’ll eat, you’ll make some goddamn conversation with your teammates, is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.” She salutes. “Am I required to smile as well?”

“No. Now move your ass. And get your head,” he yells, “out of there, while you’re at it.”

Better to have my own head up my ass than the big stick you clearly have up yours, she thinks, and she manages to avoid saying it, but it must be pretty clear on her face. She sees him gearing up to get angrier, and then the fire goes out of him.

“Carter…”

It deflates her, too. She collapses back into her chair, running the soft pad of her thumb along the side of her notepad. A legal pad, like she prefers. Something about the yellow makes it feel temporary. Easy to scrawl ideas without feeling like she’s stuck with them. She can always scrub it out, start again. Nothing is irrevocable.

Irrevocable. Irrecoverable. So similar: a slippage of syllables, a couple of transposed consonants.

“Yeah,” she says.

Jack sighs and comes back, leaning on his knuckles on the table. “You gotta stop being like this.”

“It isn’t that easy, sir.”

“Yes,” he says, “it is.”

“You think I like being like this?” she says, disbelieving, and she doesn’t voice the accusation but he knows it’s there anyway.

Colonel O’Neill turns and looks through the glass to the Gate room below. It’s dark and quiet, waiting. Sam traces the familiar lines of the symbols with her eyes and Jack doesn’t move and they both watch a technician enter from one side of the room and trot across to the other. If you’re coming from the west half of the mountain, you have to go all the way around to the rear wall of the base and use Corridor D to connect back to the east-facing workrooms, so a lot of people cut through the Gate room instead. The SG teams never do.

“You stayed,” says Jack. He says it like his mouth hurts. A fat lip, or a bitten cheek. “On P3L-881. You and Jonas, you stayed.”

They’d have stayed no matter what was happening between her and Jack, and he knows it, but. It’s not like she doesn’t understand.

The edge of her notepaper is just a little rough where it’s been cut to fit the pad. Not something you’d notice. Sam drags her thumb along it.

“You could still look into that replacement, sir,” she says. “I could ask for a transfer.”

“You don’t want that,” Jack says, but he sounds like he’s guessing. Sam feels her face go cold with anger, and he must intuit that he’s said the wrong thing. “I don’t want that,” he corrects, and he turns away from the window to look at her. “Okay?”

Sam hesitates, then nods. “Okay,” she says.

— — — — —

Jonas and Daniel go with her when she returns to Vis Uban to supervise the construction of the runway for the X-302 and the reassembly of the plane itself. They’re helping relocate the nomads, and then Jonas wants to go back to the ruins with Daniel and an archaeological team.

It’s busy but somehow restful, being useful, in command, pulling long hours outside. On the third day, she takes a lunch break around fourteen-hundred and wanders over to the ruins to see how they’re getting along. There’s a hill between the runway site and the part of the grid where Jonas and Daniel are working with four airmen and SG-8’s anthropologist, and she watches them for a while from the height, small figures crouched against the earth in a colossal space under the vast unblinking vault of sky. Half-walls and columns structure the shimmering air into a space with tangible dimension, making the height and depth of it visible. It’s a cloudless day and the shadows of stone pillars and rubble fall in diagonal slits across the ground. There’s lush teal grass and starry wildflowers growing in the shade, vines curling around crumbling plinths and mats of flowering bracken filling in the pits that used to be fountains.

“I thought we’re not going to find anything there,” Sam had said to Jonas, when he’d told her he was coming.

“We’re not going to find anything about the lost city there,” he’d corrected. “It’s still a half-built Ancient metropolis. We could learn so much about how they constructed things, the way they thought about architecture and city planning. What they started with, how they went about designing streets and digging foundations. I’m not looking for their battle secrets, I’m interested in who they were.”

Sam watches the team move under the archaic sunlight, in and out of cool shadow, and considers how little she’s thought about the Ancients as a race, with their own tribal logic and their own characteristic mentality, with all its genius and all its flaws. Lovers of divine beauty, like the Greeks; like the Romans, an engineering, practical people, who colonized via bathhouses and arcades and straight streets and arching bridges until there was nothing left of the local culture. War-like but tolerant, as the Mongols; fond of secrets and shadows, like the Celts in their dripping forests. Pushing to dangerous heights of architecture, invention, research. Proud, inflexible, innovative people. People.

Sam – and the general, the colonel, Teal’c, everyone at the SGC – they’ve given thought to the Ancients only insofar as they believe their technology can help in the war against the Goa’uld. Sam thinks about Kant, who declared it a categorical imperative that every human be considered as an end in himself, not merely a means.

Jonas – her former fiancé Jonas, not the sandy-haired one tenderly brushing grit away from an inscription on the plain below – had read Kant, talked about him a lot. He’d been fond of rigor, of absolute philosophy and its demanding dogma. He’d liked the challenge of it. Sam prefers to think of him that way, as he’d been when they’d met. It’s too easy and self-serving to write him off as a fanatic, when really he was a casualty of war. Parts of you die away, like nerves flickering out beneath scar tissue. It doesn’t excuse him. It doesn’t excuse any of them. But it makes it worthwhile to remember when they were whole.

Below, one arch is still standing, the entrance to a building or a colonnade, and Daniel calls Jonas over beneath it. They stand shoulder to shoulder, gazing up at something on the underside of the monumental structure, sun shining on their hair, the two of them just passing pinpricks of fire on the curve of the planet. Then Daniels half-turns and he sees her, and he raises a hand, and she trots toward them down the hill, and the tide of time recedes until she’s out of its depth, and Jonas and Daniel are just her friends, talking over each other near some stones on a sunny day.

She leaves again not long after and goes back to the meadow where Siler is directing the team to smooth tarmac over the flat bare strip they’ve made through the grass. She looks at the X-302 they’ve partially assembled under a canvas roof. You can tell, she thinks, when a thing is half-built. When it’s waiting for someone to put their hands back on it.

Daniel comes to sit beside her that night at dinner. Sam’s perched on a rock a little back from the others, close enough to the fire that she can see her MRE, not close enough to be talked to. She’s tired, her limbs are pleasantly sore, and she chews dreamily in the flame-light. Daniel wanders up, points questioningly with his spoon, and Sam scoots aside to make room.

Once they’ve both dropped their spoons back in the pouches – shredded beef for Daniel, chili and mac for Sam – Daniel sets his trash to the side and leans back on his hands.

“So,” he says. “That briefing last week.”

Sam is breaking her oatmeal cookie into bite-sized pieces and offers him one. He takes it and then stares at it between his fingers like he’s not sure what he’s supposed to do now.

“Cookie,” she says. “Eat it. Did you forget about cookies?” It’s getting easier to joke about it, and Daniel gives a half-smile but doesn’t bite. He lowers his hand with the cookie bit into his lap and looks at it there instead.

“Is Jack always so mean to you?”

Daniel doesn’t even know.

Let’s not dwell, Jack had said, quoting her. She hadn’t meant to, but she’d hurt him then. But if Jack knows anything, he knows how to hurt back.

If you strike a horse in exactly the right spot on its forehead, it will die. This is Jack’s genius. Pinpoint annihilation.

“He wasn’t – he wasn’t mean. Exactly. He was… We know this is a long shot. He’d already made his opinions about that clear.”

“You don’t have to defend him,” says Daniel. “I know he’s your commanding officer. It just seems to me – Well.”

She waits, until she can’t. “Well, what?”

“You’re brilliant, Sam, I’ve seen that and I don’t even know you –” she winces – “and I don’t think you have to work this way.”

“It’s…” Sam lets out a breath that blows her bangs away from her forehead. “Look, it’s complicated. You just – you don’t remember.”

“Yeah,” says Daniel, watching her. “Maybe.”

— — — — —

She tries not to think he’s right, but then she and the colonel snipe at each other even in the X-302, pursued by enemy ships. With Daniel and Jonas still stuck on the ha’tak and Teal’c only God knows where, they fight in front of Hammond, barely pretending that’s not what they’re doing, and it’s like looking up from the bottom of a deep black well, because she misses him, even though he’s standing right there, smelling of chocolate and laundry soap and gun oil and the scorched iron smell of energy weapon ionization.

After Kelowna, Sam thinks about bailing on team dinner. But even weeks later, Daniel’s miraculous restoration still holds such evanescent unreality that she can’t bring herself to do it. She’s afraid that if she stops looking at him, he’ll disappear again. Still, she arrives at Jack’s ten minutes late, with apologies to a clearly famished Teal’c, just to make sure she isn’t the first one there.

The sun’s been growing warmer with the lengthening days, but the evenings are still cold after sunset, and they congregate in the colonel’s living room and wait for the rib-eyes to come off the grill. Through the sliding door, Sam watches Jack babysit the steaks in the twilight. He rubs his arms briskly, stamps his feet, huffs open-mouthed to watch his breath turn to silver smoke. His hair has gotten long. Somehow she hadn’t noticed before. There are fine lines and pouches under his eyes, like he hasn’t been sleeping. If he turned, he’d see her watching through the window. He flips the steaks and hangs the tongs on the end of the grill. Jack’s kitchen is a frat house in the aftermath of rush week, but he always stows his gear.

Daniel plunks a beer down on the mantel for her. “So. I miss anything good?” The fire is going and it’s warm, and it was like this, it was always like this.

Sam takes a swig. “Let’s see… almost drowned in a mothership, almost died of an Ancient plague, almost got killed by Jaffa, almost got taken out by an Ashrak assassin, almost got killed by Colonel Simmons and Adrian Conrad, of all people…”

“We almost fell victim to the human-form replicators,” puts in Teal’c.

“Right,” says Sam. “Plus, there was that time the colonel got framed for murder, the time he and Maybourne got stuck on a moon for a month, the time when Nirrti rewrote my DNA…”

“Same old, same old,” concludes Daniel.

“Pretty much.”

“Okay, kids,” says the colonel, striding through the door on a wave of cold air. “Food time.”

After, Teal’c offers to wash up and Daniel helps him, and Sam escapes onto the deck and stares out at the patches of stale snow on the browned lawn. The chill is sharp and her eyes water but there’s a drift in the air that tells her it’s spring. Things turning over under the soil. The overcast sky is tinged an ashy purple.

The door slides open. Sam turns and the colonel is coming through it. He heads to the grill, checks that the propane is off. Wrangles the cover over the lid. The house is glowing through all the windows, every light on, and he stares into it like a snow globe with a scene from a place he’s never been.

“Hey,” he says, “I know I’ve been…”

He doesn’t go on. He’s waiting for her to make it easier on him.

She doesn’t feel like it.

“Mean,” Sam finishes. “You’ve been mean, sir.” Her cold hands tighten on the thick top plank of the deck rail. The crumbly edges of the snow patches double, then blur.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, okay?”

Sam shakes her head, and feels the hot tears fall. “No.”

“Carter…”

Sam is tired. Tired of managing him, tired of his snarking and biting at her, taking little chips out of her armour just because he knows how.

“I needed you, sir,” she says. “Not… this. You. My commanding officer. Daniel was back, but not really, and the only plan I had to save us was wildly implausible, and it had to work because they always have to work, and – I needed you behind me.”

What Jack needs, she doesn’t know. But she knows now that it isn’t her.

It doesn’t matter. It never mattered.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, helplessly. She says nothing. He turns to go in. The house glows warm and yellow. There are no stars above, no snow, just a charcoal-violet roof of cloudy sky in early spring, a colour without light in it.

For the first time since Daniel’s death, Sam allows herself to think of Los Alamos. Of the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear bomb. The Manhattan Project scientists had all described the moment after the explosion the same way: They said the light was different. There was a blinding flash, and when it was dark again, all the air was filled with a purple glow, like they were standing in the center of the Northern Lights. The air itself was incandescent. It was as if they’d broken the world. No light like that had ever existed before.

Hand on the door, Jack pauses.

“You staying?”

He doesn’t say what they both know: that stopping only made things worse. That in trying to peel themselves apart, they have been flaying each other alive. That as painful as it was to be together, at least they’d never hurt each other on purpose. Not until the very end.

She’d wanted to punish both of them. And she had. They’d locked themselves together, and they couldn’t undo it. Like the physicists at Los Alamos, who had felt the icy clench of horror as they looked upon what they had wrought, and knew it to be irreversible. They’d seen a light the colour of annihilation. None of them had ever been the same.

Sam swallows. Tastes salt. An airless crush of cold, and salt, salt, salt, salt, salt.

This feels familiar.

“Yeah,” she says.

Chapter Text

IV.

All waiting for you to tell them the truth
The truth is a line that you’ll never use

— Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s, “A Light On A Hill”

— — — — —

She’s building a light-up yo-yo for the colonel's birthday. Six colours of tiny LEDs in concentric circles. They’ll ignite in kaleidoscopic patterns based on spin rate and vertical movement. It means miniaturizing a half-dozen accelerometers to detect motion in every dimension and then fitting them into the circuits. She has to work hard not to throw off the yo-yo’s balance.

It’s good work, absorbing, a little tedious, and she likes working with her hands. The forces break down neatly in her mind’s eye. String tension, angular velocities. The constructive and deconstructive interaction of radial and angular acceleration that makes the yo-yo speed up, bounce, pause, slow, hover. Sam places the second-last sensor with a pair of ceramic tweezers and pictures the bond between atoms on the rim of the disc, the electrostatic forces that stop them from accelerating apart under centripetal violence.

She thinks of spin, orbits. Objects on divergent trajectories, and how the spacetime fabric between them expands faster and faster the greater their distance from each other grows.

There’s a clatter to her left and Sam jumps about a mile. Half the LEDs erupt into a frantic dance. Green and blue and white, and then they flicker off.

It’s only Daniel, pulling up a stool. He freezes.

“Sorry. Didn’t realize you were so focused.”

“Oh!” Sam picks up the yo-yo so it’s out of the way and gestures for him to finish sitting. “No, I was just thinking.”

“About what?” He’s holding a mug of coffee and he hands it to her; Sam smiles at him and breathes it in. She cracks her neck back and forth. She’s stiff and cold from sitting on the stool, and the hallway outside is quiet.

“The Hubble constant,” she says.

Daniel squints. “This has something to do with … cosmology.”

Sam grins. “The Hubble constant defines the rate of expansion of the universe. If we knew it more precisely, we could answer all sorts of fundamental questions, like the age of the universe, and its geometry, and even the initial conditions of the Big Bang.”

“But we don’t?” Daniel guesses. His face is scruffy. She wonders how he’s been sleeping, if he’s been staying up late going over his notes from two years ago, five years ago, seven, convincing himself they don’t sound like a stranger’s life.

“We don’t. And we’ve been trying to home in on it for three-quarters of a century.”

Sam passes the yo-yo from one hand to another and back again. The metal-carbon composite is warm from her hands and the circuit wires and the LEDs. It’ll always be warm to the touch, like it’s begging to be picked up. Always feel comforting to hold. She hadn’t thought of that, when she’d drawn up the specs. She’d missed the most important thing about the design.

“You know,” she goes on, “Max Weber called politics the slow boring of hard boards, but that’s really more true of physics. We think of the history of science as a series of intellectual peaks, these major discoveries over the centuries. But it’s painfully incremental. Reaffirming what we know and building it up, little by little, until one of those tiny motions breaks through the board.”

“It’s not that I don’t get what you’re saying,” Daniel says, “but…” He gestures broadly at her lab. “I think you yourself have sort of blown that theory out of the water. Look at the Prometheus. We went from Mach 9 to interstellar travel in, what, three years?”

“That’s different,” Sam says. “We didn’t do it ourselves. It’s not… right. It’s not normal.”

“Well,” says Daniel, with a shrug. No shit, he means.

“Look,” she tries, “there’s a PhD student at Princeton who just proved that there’s no preferred direction to the universe to four significant figures more than previously confirmed.”

Daniel stares blankly. “I don’t know what that means.”

Sam waves this away. “If there were a preferred direction, a lot of the basic assumptions of physics would be wrong. It would be a big deal if there were one, so it’s a big deal that there’s not. But all that happened is that this doctoral student confirmed something we were pretty sure about already, with a little more certainty than we had before.”

“The slow boring of hard boards,” says Daniel.

“Eighty years,” she agrees, “and all we know about the value of the Hubble constant is that it falls within a very fuzzy range.”

Sam’s coffee cools by her elbow. She spins the yo-yo and it lights up. White, red, purple.

“For Jack?”

Sam nods. “You remembered,” she says. Clarifies, “That he likes yo-yos.”

“I remember everything now.”

Her mouth twists, but it isn’t funny. “How would you know if you didn’t?”

“Don’t say that,” says Daniel, “I already think it enough.” They lapse again into quiet, and then he says, “Sam? What’s wrong?”

She shakes her head. “Just – my dad once said that we should be taking small steps. We couldn’t just slap a U.S. Air Force sticker on a death glider, we had to earn our advancement. What if he was right? What if we’re breaking some fundamental law?” She spins the yo-yo again. Slowly. Blue, white, blue. “Maybe you can’t just… skip to the end on these things.”

“Sam,” says Daniel. “The only fundamental laws are gravity and – I don’t know, entropy.”

“I’ve broken those a few times, actually,” she says.

“And the world didn’t end,” says Daniel. “You’re tired. Go home. The world will still be here tomorrow.”

“Don’t say that,” Sam warns him, and thinks, I already think it enough.

— — — — —

They’re smart enough that it isn’t every night, not even most, and the string of evenings after Jack’s birthday – which Daniel, who is observant regarding the big things and hopeless with the everyday ones, apparently did not connect with the yo-yo, because he forgets it completely – she spends at home.

Which turns out to be a good thing, since she’d have been at some pains to explain waking up with a Jack who was suddenly three decades younger.

At the end of one of the more bizarre weeks she’s had since joining the SGC, the colonel calls her cell. The clone is staying with him for a single night, before going… Sam isn’t sure where. She didn’t ask.

“Sir?”

“He wants to talk to you.” He still sounds as grumpy as he was last night on Loki’s ship. Considering how intolerable Jack finds living with himself to begin with, she can’t imagine that having to live with two of himself is going very well.

“Okay,” she says. “Put him on.”

“In person,” says Jack. She hears a muffled yell in the background, and he adds, testier than ever, “and in private, he says.”

“But… he’s, you know, you. What could be private?”

There’s a scuffling sound, and then the other, younger Jack is on the line. “For crying out loud, would you just get over here, Carter?”

He’s the one who answers her knock, already wearing a jacket. Without letting her in, he steps onto the porch, firmly shutting the front door behind them. “Let’s walk.”

The silence holds for four blocks. It’s been gray and cold and wet, endlessly, but the breeze this evening has a hint of softness.

“Warm front moving in,” Sam comments.

The clone nods. The field jacket he’s wearing is too big on him, gaping at the collar, and his oddly delicate hands are swallowed up by the heavy cuffs. He shoves his fists deep into his pockets.

“I told him,” he says abruptly, “that every time I needed to know something, they had you talk to me. Always you.”

“Who?”

“Frasier. Daniel. Teal’c. Even Hammond.”

“You think they suspect.”

He shrugs, a motion that’s simultaneously very teenaged and very Jack. It’s not just, she thinks, that Jack is, or was, or used to be, this boy. It’s that this boy is still inside Jack, all the time. She aches for both of them, for all of them – the boy he used to be, who looked like this but wasn’t, and the man that Loki trapped inside this boy, and the lost boy trapped inside the man currently watching The Simpsons in his living room.

They’ve wandered into a neighbourhood park. Soccer field, picnic tables, playground, baseball diamond. The clone stops at the chain link fence behind home base and curls his fingers around the wires. She wonders if he used to take Charlie to this park, to swing on the swing set and clamber across the monkey bars, to throw a baseball back and forth before dinner. She wonders if Charlie would have grown to look like the teenager standing before her, if he had lived.

“I think…” he says, “we – you. You should be careful.”

“We are.”

He scoffs. “Please.”

Jack’s habitual look of cynicism shouldn’t be possible on such a young face. She presses three fingers to his cheek to turn him and traces them across his brow bone, around the corner of his eyes, over the ears he hasn’t quite grown into, seeking the shadow of familiar features beneath, like a double-exposed photograph. His eyebrows are thicker than she’s used to, his lashes darker as his eyes flutter closed.

“Jesus, Carter,” he rasps. “How am I supposed to let you go?”

Her eyes blur. “I’m sorry, Jack,” she says. “I’m so sorry. It’s not fair.”

“I didn’t even know that last time was going to be the last.”

“Every time could be the last,” she points out.

“Yeah, but in most of those scenarios, I’m dead,” he snaps.

“Or me.”

He looks at her sidelong, then cuts his eyes away. “Not if I’m living,” he says quietly.

It stutters her to silence. What did you say, to this. In the face of this.

“But now,” he says, “I have to live out this whole life that you’re not in. Remembering what it’s like when you are.”

Sam wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. The wet streaks left on her skin are cold in the breeze. “Where will you go?”

“Back to school,” he says. “To start with.”

“Really?”

“Gotta kill a few years,” he explains. “Can’t exactly get a real job looking like this. So might as well, right?”

“Right,” she repeats faintly.

“Then… Dunno.” He shrugs again, hunching over with his hands back in his pockets. “Someplace warm. Maybe San Diego, run a deep-sea fishing business.”

“You could learn a language,” she says. “And move abroad. A beach in Mexico.”

“Maybe Australia,” he says. “I always wanted to try surfing.”

“Greece,” she suggests. “You’d like Greece. I can see you in one of those town squares, playing chess with the old men.”

They’re smiling at each other, a little, and in the darkness of the unlit baseball field, the outlines of his face are hard to see, and it feels almost normal. He falls silent, an odd, twisted expression on his face.

“What?”

“It’s weird being shorter than you,” he says, and she can’t help it, she reaches out for him again. He slams his eyes closed and takes a ragged breath.

“Jack…”

“You should go.” His voice scrapes.

“It’s not fair,” she says again. “You didn’t ask for this.”

“Can’t be helped, Carter.”

No. It was done, and couldn’t be undone. Like Trinity. Which ionized the very air so it glowed lilac over the decimated sands. Cosmic, they called that light: unearthly. Because the only other place where light like this could exist was the interior of a star.

“Go,” he says. Clumsily he clutches at her hand, and brings it to his lips and kisses it, and suddenly drops it as if it’s scorching. She isn’t sure which of them has burned the other. “I’ll be okay.”

She nods. Wipes her eyes again. “Bye, Jack,” she whispers, and turns quickly so she doesn’t have to see him alone there by the fence, coat too big, hands in his pockets, watching as she walks away.

Back at the house, Jack is standing at the end of the driveway in a long-sleeved shirt, hands jammed into his jeans pockets in exactly the same posture as the boy she just left.

“Carter?” he asks, seeing her puffy eyes, her blotchy face.

She wants to walk to him and let him put his arms around her and rest his cheek against her hair, and she wants not to feel like she’s betraying one or both of him, and she wants to say to him, Tell me this will stop hurting us, but she knows she would be hurting him just by asking. For a man who spent decades in black ops, he doesn’t like to lie.

— — — — —

The summer is long and they spend all of it worried about Teal’c.

The colonel expresses his concern with sarcasm, which is of an even more acerbic strain than usual because the general has told him in no uncertain terms that he’s to spend the weeks they’re off rotation catching up on overdue paperwork. Sam dives into the extra lab time like a swimmer into a breaking wave, but it’s not long before she feels the itch in her hands and the irritation in her soul that means she’s spent too long dockside. More and more she finds herself in the base gym, timing her sessions to coincide with Teal’c’s physical therapy and dragging out her sets as long as she can.

The downtime hardly touches Daniel. He departs for Ancient ruins and abandoned Goa’uld sites on off-world hops attached to other teams, and takes weeks of accumulated leave to jet off to excavations in northern Egypt, the Yucatan, Peru, Crete.

“Come with me,” he tells her as he packs for the latter.

She’s at his place to collect whatever will go bad in his fridge while he’s gone, but instead she’s wandering around looking at all his relics and art and souvenirs from digs while he lays folded shirts into his suitcase. He nods at a small wine jug on the overcrowded bookcase.

“Minoan,” he said. “That was found ten miles from the dig site.”

Sam touches the cool clay. Its paint has faded, muted red and dusty blue, but it’s unbearably beautiful. Something about its stylized form is so perfect, balanced and clean, as if its lines are reaching out invisibly toward the horizon. Sam finds herself blinking back tears. This thing was made carefully. With skill and tenderness. Three and a half thousand years ago, someone put their hands on a lump of cold earth and painstakingly shaped it into this. All they needed was something to hold wine at the table. But they choose to make it beautiful. Not for any practical reason. Only because they could.

Daniel comes up quietly behind her and puts a hand on her shoulder.

“Come to Crete,” he urges. “Sit in the sun all afternoon under the grape vines in a sleeveless dress. Drink white wine. Eat olives. You know. Vacation.”

The picture he paints is so at odds with her dark, cold, cement-metal lab under the mountain that for a moment it’s incomprehensibly alien, in a way that distant planets never are anymore.

She tells him no, but she regrets it by the following week. She takes the Indian out for longer and longer rides, even though it’s not built for cruising and gets uncomfortable after forty minutes. Two weeks after Daniel leaves for Greece, an early chinook blows through and Sam stays out for four hours. The wind is strong and it feels good to have to fight it a little.

The colonel’s up for his quals, so he spends a day at Peterson flying F-22s and Pave Hawks, and Sam thinks she might expire from jealousy.

“Is it weird to have cabin fever when the cabin’s a whole planet?” she asks Janet wryly. Janet laughs, but Sam doesn’t.

“Oh, Sam,” says Janet. “Want to do drinks? Blow off a little steam?”

Sam shakes her head. She wants to cut loose in a way that she can’t even with Janet. Janet is a friend, but she’s still a friend from work, an officer in the U.S. Air Force, and a mother. She’s also a good girl. Ran cross-country, played the flute, studied hard to go to med school. Never busted curfew. Never drove too fast or broke into the science lab or did more behind the bleachers than kiss one of the shyer boys after the game when the sun went down.

Saturday night and Sam takes the bus downtown and flags down cabs until she finds one willing to take her to Denver. It smells like cleaning solvent and artificial pine scent but she doesn’t mind. She sits in the back and watches the trees toss in the wind, black against a western sky that still holds a dying tinge of blue.

She pays cash and gets out onto the sidewalk in front of the bar. They stamp her hand and she goes down a few steps, already feeling the bass in her chest, like a concussion retort. Inside is dark and smells of weed and sweat and cheap spilled beer, and the light is red and pulsing, with the occasional strobe like blue lightning, and Sam makes her way across the sticky floor to the bar through a heave of bodies. She orders two tequila shots and waits for them with her forearms on the counter. She slams one back and then takes out her phone.

Meet me, she texts Jack, and tells him where, and then throws down the second shot and lets the burn wick her into the crowd.

There’s music or at least a beat, and she lets herself loose into it. There are people, men mostly, because she’d put on a leather miniskirt and boots and a shimmery silver halter top and lined her eyes in black, and she dances with them but moves their hands off her waist, smiling. The two shots in quick succession are keeping her where she wants to be, the lights smearing a little, the music just a little too loud, and Sam’s edges dissolve away.

A hand lands on her hip again from behind, firmer than most, and she turns, and it’s Jack. She surges up and kisses him. She likes his hot breath, his silence, the way he breaks off to mouth at her ear, and she stays close. In one hand he’s holding three more shots, and he passes one to her and takes two himself and clinks her glass and they drink. He’s not dressed for this place, in baggy jeans and a madras shirt, but his eyes are dark and he puts his hands on her like he means it, and Sam loops her arms around his neck to reel him in.

The music kicks up and Sam presses to him all along her front, crushing her breasts and her thighs, until he spins her around, back to his chest, and pulls her close. Moaning, she throws her head back against his shoulder in the throbbing dark, hot with gyrating bodies, and winds one arm back up to its place behind his neck. She draws his head down to the slope of her shoulder. Her halter top is loose and flowy, and one of Jack’s hot hands slips up under it to her ribcage, his thumb brushing the underside of her bare breast. She feels him half-hard behind her and grinds back against him and his tongue flicks out to taste the salt on her skin.

She loses track, moving, feeling Jack lean and hard behind her, the sear of his hand on her hipbone. After a while, the music changes and the light with it and it’s even darker, just the blackness and the strobe, everyone’s movements flip-booked and dreamy in the heavy trance beat.

The music throbs, everything throbs through her, and Jack moves his hand under her halter to palm her breast, and Sam gasps, rolls her head against his shoulder in pleasure. He captures her lips and bites, tequila and salt and blood, and when Sam needs air, she pulls away and takes his hand and tows him through the lurching dancers. The light makes her feel drunker, and Jack’s crowding step behind her makes her feel drunker, and the summer and the wet heat and the music.

There’s a line for the bathroom so she keeps walking and they round a corner and Jack shoves her up against the wall near an emergency exit. It’s black-painted cinderblock, not well smoothed; clumps of paint and trapped grit scrape Sam’s bare shoulder blades. Jack ruts against her, once, and she finds his earlobe and sucks it in. When he gasps, his hand flies up to her throat, holding her still. Her neck fits easily in his grasp. He leans in and she kisses him, a filthy kiss, her tongue entirely in his mouth, open and wet and telling him exactly what she needs, until he breaks away.

“Christ, Carter,” he says, biting up and down her neck, “I want you.” His free hand touches the inside of her knee, skims up the long, exposed sweep of her thigh. “I want to fuck you right here against this wall.”

Sam swallows, feeling the pressure of his palm against her windpipe. “I wouldn’t complain.”

“It would probably,” says Jack, “not be ideal for us to be arrested together for public indecency.” His eyes are pits of black. His fingers have reached the bottom of her miniskirt and Sam squirms, trying to get them where she wants them.

“Like anyone would notice in this place,” she gasps.

“Someone might come,” says Jack, and Sam smirks, and about then is when Jack realizes she isn’t wearing any underwear. He shoves her harder into the wall.

“You planned this,” he growls, mouth at her ear. “You wanted me to take you up against a wall in a club. Just like this.” His fingers circle her entrance. “Or in a filthy bathroom stall. With the drug deals right outside the door.”

“That possibility had –” Sam gasps – “occurred to me, yes. Yes. God. Or I thought I might – suck you off – on my –” a groan – “on my knees. In the dark.”

“Too bad,” he says. “This is what you get.”

He’s aiming for speed, two fingers curled inside her and his thumb at her clit, and Sam works her internal muscles around him to show him what he’s missing. She’s buzzed on alcohol and pleasure and recklessness and she lets the night go neon around her. The only light is the red glare of the emergency exit sign, glinting off the silver of his hair like it’s been limned in glowing paint.

He’s getting off on it, can’t help small juts of his pelvis into her thigh, and Sam gets a hand between them and cups him through his jeans.

“Fuuuuck me,” he says, and bites her bottom lip hard enough to hurt. “You devil,” he breathes into her mouth, her cheek, back down to her chest, “You’re a fucking menace.” The music is still loud here, the thick beat and the electronic oratorio, but just muted enough by the length of the hallway that she can hear him.

He shifts his chokehold, keeps the pressure on with the heel of his palm but turns it so he can stroke one finger down her cheek. The gritty wall scores thin lines of pain across her back with every thrust of his hips. “So dangerous,” he murmurs, and presses just hard enough to still her breathing, and she stutters and keens and comes, shaking. Jack surges in and swallows down her sounds with her tongue.

He draws his fingers out of her slowly and wipes them on her thigh. Slowly, he peels his mouth from hers, Sam snagging his lip for a moment before she lets him go.

She drinks him in with hot eyes, his arousal drilling a hole in her hipbone, but his face shifts toward softness. He brushes sweaty hair off her forehead.

“Better?” he asks quietly.

Sam pulls a sheepish half-smile. “A bit,” she says. “Sorry, sir.”

“Hey,” he says, “do you see me complaining?”

“Well,” she says, “not exactly.” But he wouldn’t. Even if he wanted to; even if he would have preferred a bed, and light, and something closer to tenderness. She doesn’t say it out loud. Doesn’t say, I don’t want you not to complain, I want it to be okay, because it’s not. It’s not, and it won’t be; and so instead she hides her face in the join of his neck and shoulder and muffles out, “I want Teal’c to be okay.”

Jack’s hands come up to soothe her bare back, brushing away dirt and bits of paint and cinderblock that have adhered to her sweat-sticky skin. “Teal’c will be fine,” he says.

“But he isn’t.”

“But he will be.”

Promise? she wants to ask, but she doesn’t, because she’s never made him promise and she’s not starting now. The music is still thrumming through her, so loud Sam thinks it’s pulling her heartbeat off-sync. She wants to let it take her again, the pulse and the alcohol and the surge of the crowded dance floor, but everything in this hallway is very dark and very present, like she’s flying along the inside of a cloud in a storm.

“I know,” she says finally.

— — — — —

It takes the edge off, at least, and Sam is able to settle to things in the next few days. It’s temporary; she feels a current of restiveness in her blood like a river that’s subsided briefly to run lazy in the summer heat. Waiting for rain.

Tuesday afternoon, there’s a knock at her lab door and Cassie pokes her head around the frame.

“Cass!” Sam beams, pushing away from her laptop, and Cassie comes in for a hug. She grips hard before letting go. She’s always been a good hugger.

She gives Sam’s lab a once-over. The surfaces are clear of electronic bits for now, and a half-completed lightweight version of a naquadah generator Sam has been working on is neatly tucked under the central table. The metal worktop gleams back the modulating waveforms on the high-frequency receivers. There’s Sam’s legal pad, two pencils, an empty coffee cup, a napkin with some banana-bran muffin crumbs that Sam scoops into the trash.

“Ugh,” Cassie says, “it’s bleak in here. Didn’t there used to be at least, like, a plant or something?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “I gave it to someone who works here as an engagement present.”

“Forgot to buy something off the registry, huh?” says Cassie knowingly.

Sam’s ears heat. “So, what’s up?”

Cassie slings her backpack to the floor and flops dramatically on the extra stool. “I can’t even believe I’m asking this.”

Sam settles beside her. “What? You can ask anything, you know that.”

Cassie slumps forward and lets her forehead thump against the lab bench. “I need help with my physics homework,” she mumbles. She’s spending the summer taking extra courses at the CU campus: physics, calculus, Psych 101, Introduction to Ancient Religions. Her idea, Janet had said. “Argh. This is going to suck.”

“Why?” Sam asks, baffled.

Cassie rolls her forehead along the table until she’s glaring with one eye and a look that says Sam is being very stupid. “You’re going to be super nice and explain it like I’m five, and I still won’t get it and I’ll feel dumb.” She sighs. “It’s all so easy for you.”

“You think physics is ingrained?” Sam raises her eyebrows. “Like being, I don’t know, a natural distance runner or having good hand-eye coordination?”

“Well… yeah, kinda. Basically.”

“In high school, physics was my worst subject. I had this teacher, Mr. Scott, and if we came in before school, he’d check our homework against the answer book and tell us what we got wrong so we could redo it before he graded it. You’d go in and he’d circle all the answers you got wrong, and I would get my paper back with more than half the problems circled. So I’d sit down and try them again, and bring it back to his desk, and he’d give it back and there’d be a third of them still circled. I’d spend an hour sitting there, redoing the same problems over and over. For weeks.”

“Oh,” says Cassie.

“After a while, he started lending me books. Not textbooks. Richard Feynman’s memoir and In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, which is about quantum physics. He had a friend at the university observatory, and at the end of the semester he brought the whole class there one night so we could see Saturn’s rings and the Orion Nebula and the Andromeda Galaxy.”

“Let me guess,” Cassie says. There’s a sardonic tilt to her mouth, but her tone is dry, not acidic. “You were hooked?”

“Pretty much.” Sam shrugs. “So now that I’ve told my cliché story about the teacher who changed my life, what are we working on?”

“Circular motion.” Cassie unzips her bag and pulls out a printed problem set. “ ‘Box 1 and Box 2 are tied together by a string and attached to a vertical shaft, around which they are whirling with a constant angular velocity of magnitude w. Box 1 is at a distance d from the central axis and Box 2 is at a distance of 2d from the axis. You may ignore the mass of the strings and neglect the effect of gravity. Find an expression for a) The tension in the string between the boxes, and b) The tension in the string between the shaft and Box 1.’ ”

“Yikes,” says Sam. “All right, let’s draw the force diagram.”

Together they work through the problem, which Cassie pretty much gets by herself once Sam asks a prompting question or two. For a while after, they work side by side in silence, Cassie tackling the rest of the problem set and Sam back at her laptop, running simulations on the X-302’s control systems for managing power fluctuations. Cassie finishes and she packs up her papers and zips them back into her bag, then settles it on her lap with her chin resting on top.

“You really went in for an hour before school just to check your homework for your least-favourite subject?” she asks.

“Well, I hated the subject, but I cared about my GPA. I was,” Sam admits, “maybe a little obsessive about my prospects.”

“Yeah, I know,” says Cassie. “You were super concerned about your future. Which is I guess why you got yourself arrested for trespassing in eleventh grade, right?”

Sam’s mouth falls open. “Who told you that?”

“It’s in your file, Carter,” says the colonel from the door.

Cassie leaps up, sending her bag tumbling. “Uncle Jack!”

“Cassie!” He puts her in a headlock and smacks a loud kiss to the top of her head. Cassie rolls her eyes, but Sam notices that she doesn’t even try to pull away. The colonel keeps his arm around her shoulder, squeezing her to his side. “What’s this? You don’t call, you don’t write, and then I find you engaging in –” he puts his hand to his heart in genteel shock – “science?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m a big disappointment.” Cassies pushes him gently away with an elbow to his ribcage, which he makes a big deal over. “Oh, how’s Teal’c?” she asks, rescuing her bag from the ground.

“Frustrated,” says Sam, at the same time Colonel O’Neill pipes up, “Grumpy.”

Cassie raises an eyebrow at both of them. “I know you are, but what is he?”

“Har-de-har,” says the colonel. “Come on, George Carlin, I’ll get you a soda. Carter?”

Sam looks back at her blinking cursor and glowing equations and is about to say no. Then she slams the laptop screen down. “Ah, hell,” she says. “Why not.”

“Yep,” deadpans Cassie, “that’s our juvenile delinquent,” and the colonel high-fives her on their way out the door.

— — — — —

Daniel is Daniel, so he reacts to coming down with a massive dose of multiple personalities and then negotiating a peace treaty for the Unas of P3X-403 by suggesting that he and Sam co-write a paper.

“About something unclassified, obviously,” he says.

“Unclassified?” jokes Sam. “What’s that?”

“Ha. Hilarious.” He spins in the empty technician’s chair beside her. She’d sent Staff Sergeant Whitman home an hour ago. His wife is pregnant, and Sam’s going to be here in the control room all night anyway.

“I was looking at the algorithm you built to find patterns in the Abydos cartouche Gate addresses,” says Daniel, “and I was thinking that maybe it could be adapted to analyze ancient languages we can’t decipher. Ancient Earth languages, I mean.”

“Daniel, I…” She hasn’t touched that algorithm in years. She’d created it to interpolate potential new addresses based on the patterns in the ones they had, so she can see what Daniel means, because he’s complained about the fact that the only uncracked ancient languages are the ones with corpuses too small to work with, and so if they could interpolate new words like new Gate addresses –

No. She has so much to do that she’s here at nearly midnight, for God’s sake, because she’s supposed to go off-world in two days and this overhaul of the diagnostic systems has to be done, and she still has reams of paperwork waiting for her once she’s back, and every brain cell she isn’t using for work is going into hiding from all of her best friends that she’s sleeping with her commanding officer, and – she can’t. Sam opens her mouth to tell him so, and what falls out is, “What did you want to try?”

Hanging out with Daniel is easy, and it helps scar over that hole in her middle that never quite filled in when he returned. It’s good to have something in her life that isn’t about work and isn’t about Jack. The summer and its heat are gone but the agitation has lingered. Off-world missions have been sporadic for months and her restiveness is back. Not just hers. Half the time when she gets to work too early and wraps her knuckles to take it out on the punching bag, Colonel O’Neill is already in the gym, racking the weights higher and higher on the bench press.

It makes them testy.

It makes them reckless.

For Sam, that’s insisting on going halfway across the galaxy to fly a lethal space race. For Colonel O’Neill, it’s throwing out every rule they’ve ever left unwritten.

Two days after she gets back from Hebridan, Sam’s standing at her lab bench in the middle of the night, fiddling with the power output of her lightweight naquadah generator pet project, when the colonel walks in. She looks up briefly and nods.

Then he closes the door behind him and she looks up for real.

“Sir?”

“As you were, Major.”

He snags a stool and drags it across the floor. Slowly. The plastic feet bump and squeal on the concrete. He tows it until he’s behind her, and then all the way to the back wall, to the corner by the storage shelf.

The corner where the camera doesn’t reach.

Sam gulps. Her heart thuds. She watches her screwdriver tremble in her hands, and sets it down on the table.

“Sir –” she whispers. It’s not quite the protest she’d meant it to be.

“Shh,” he says. “Focus, Carter.”

There’s a dull snap as he pops the buttons on his BDU pants. The first. Second, third. Fourth.

Slide of skin on fabric, then on skin. He palms himself, making her hear it.

Sam whimpers.

“Pick up your screwdriver,” Jack orders softly. “Don’t turn around.”

Sam fumbles with the power coupling. Switches out the screwdriver for needle-nose pliers, the ones she’d briefly lost under that storage shelf. She can hear a rhythmic rustle at her back, Jack’s hand hitting his pants each time he bottoms out. With him behind her, she feels exposed. Abased. Aroused. She knows the back of her neck is burning with embarrassment, and her ears are so red she can feel them radiating heat. But it’s nothing to the heat that has pooled between her legs, throbbing. If she checked, her panties would be soaked. From her CO sitting behind her, stroking himself off while he watches her work. Sam’s face flares with shame.

There’s no more efficiency she can coax out of the power generation unit. She unscrews a piece of titanium casing to access the converter.

There’s a slow exhale from the corner. Sam squeezes her eyes shut and presses her legs together. Any minute, someone is going to come through that door and find them. The colonel apparently isn’t concerned; he’s taking his time, letting her hear him. It seems to last forever, pleasure and the edge of panic drawn out and out like gold wire pulled through a jeweler’s plate.

It’s dangerous. So, so dangerous. Sam is melting from the inside. She’ll sink into a puddle for the morning shift to find at 0800.

Jack stifles a groan, and her hips snap forward, seeking the edge of her lab bench, a stool, anything.

Finally, finally, she hears his pace pick up, which, no, that’s worse, she takes it back, because now the sounds are the slide and squelch of slick skin. Sam’s core clenches emptily, as if she’ll be able to get stimulation that way.

There’s a grunt and then a long, quiet sigh.

Jack tucks himself back in. Fixes his buttons, not rushing. He leaves the stool where it is and walks past her and opens the door and leaves.

He doesn’t touch her. Doesn’t say a word.

Sam presses flushed hands flat onto the cool metal of her work bench and breathes.

It’s only later that she realizes he’s left her to clean up her floor.

— — — — —

Daniel’s been kidnapped by armed rebels, so of course Carter is working. It’s late, and the overheads are off in her lab. When he comes in, she looks up from what looks like the arm weapon from the super soldier’s armour. She turns off the soldering iron and then it’s very quiet.

Jack needs to go rescue Daniel, but it means sending her into the middle of Anubis’s base without him. She’ll have her father and Teal’c, but it doesn’t help. Ever since Hammond told him that Burke is the CIA’s man in Honduras, he’s had a bad feeling he can’t shake. Nothing like wading into combat with a man whose last play out on the field was shooting his own teammate.

He’s not sure he’s coming back from this one.

The darkness of her lab deepens his unease. Something about the way her face looks too pale in the work lamp, purple under the soft skin of her eyelids, the way the light picks out the lines forming around her mouth. He wants to watch those lines deepen. He wants – he wants – His chest hurts. Burke liked big guns. No pistols. He liked pinochle and Kurt Vonnegut novels and he always gave Jack his Playboy first when he’d finished with it. He could only sleep with his feet pressed flat against the inside of a fuselage or a ship’s bulkhead or a pack or Jack’s arm. He had a flask with a knife gouge in it. He had a birthmark on the outside of his left thigh. He had shot Woods three times at thirty-seven meters with a semi-automatic.

She must see something in his face. “Sir?” she says, unsure.

“I’m going after Daniel,” he says, and she says, “Good,” like it’s one more task checked off her list. Behind her, LEDs blink green and red, reflecting on her face so that her eye nearer the lamp is blue and the other looks olive drab. He wants to memorize her like this, he wants –

She’s strong because he’s not right now, and when he tells her he’s leaving immediately, she doesn’t hesitate to wish him luck. What he wishes is one more night, holding her as the autumn air wafts through the window and spills across the bed like moonlight.

Instead, he tries to smile, and he goes.

He goes. He walks himself back in time. He leaves her behind and he leaves the SGC behind and he leaves himself there with them.

In Special Ops they’d carried no insignia. No photographs. No labels. They wore black.

They spoke Spanish in the Central American jungle. In Europe and Africa, French. In Asia, anything but English.

Or they were silent.

They shot German guns. Or Uzis, Kalashnikovs, Glocks. No American weapons.

No, not even knives.

They fought entire wars that no one knew happened. They put away their dog tags before missions. They threw their love letters into the sea.

They wore black. They had no names. No one knew they were there. They were vapour. They were ghosts and when they killed they killed as ghosts and when they died they died as ghosts and when they loved –

Ghosts don’t love. They have no hearts.

— — — — —

He gets back with Daniel leaning on his shoulder and Bill Lee clutching his arm, and the first thing he asks Hammond at the bottom of the ramp is, “Are they back?”

Hammond shakes his head. “Not yet.”

Jack nods. It doesn’t mean anything, he tells himself. Hammond’s mouth is a tight line. Jack walks the scientists to the infirmary and submits to Frasier’s checks.

“I didn’t even leave Earth,” he says, in token protest.

“Did you get bitten by a mosquito?” she asks, unimpressed. “Because you were in the jungle for two days, so I think you probably got bitten by a mosquito. Which means a blood test, Colonel.”

“If I get dengue fever,” he says, “you will absolutely be the second to know.”

She jabs him with the needle harder than strictly necessary, and he tells himself that’s why he flinches, and not because she asks, “Are you sure?”

He showers and changes into track pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt and signs out and drives to Carter’s house. Late October and it’s raining, and dark, and the light that falls through her living room window is like ash speckled with charcoal. Jack doesn’t turn on the lights. He toes off his shoes and walks through the house and crawls into her bed. He loves that she’s set it diagonally, headboard against a corner. It’s bonkers, just enough to be breaking all the rules that don’t matter. Very Carter.

The rain gusts against the panes in waves. The rhythm seeps into Jack’s head. He thinks of Burke, hiding another man’s sins under his own, slowly going insane. Years of bitterness and he’d never once told the truth. He’d destroyed himself instead. Because he’d loved the man he’d killed. Because they’d all loved each other. Jack’s brain stirs like molasses under the weight of the rain. It would be funny, he thinks, if Carter got back and went to his place and he’s here at hers. Like The Gift of the Magi. He read that once in high school.

He falls asleep and wakes up to his cell ringing. It’s Daniel.

“I tried your home phone, but you didn’t pick up.”

Jack rubs his face with one hand and tries to sound awake. The message apparently does not reach his mouth. “I’m at Carter’s.”

“But Sam is on Tartarus.”

“I know that,” Jack says. “I’m …. watering her plants.”

“Sam doesn’t have any plants.”

She used to have plants. Hydrangeas in the front garden, a spider plant on a shelf in her kitchen, a monstera in the corner of the dining room. An African violet on a side table, a jade plant and some kind of cactus in her home office. A fern, somewhere. She’d even had some little flower things in pots in her lab. But that was when she didn’t spend days at a time on base, weeks at a time on other planets. The plants had disappeared, one by one. Jack isn’t sure exactly when.

“Yes, she does,” he says. “I bought her a – what’s it called, one of those vine things, for Christmas.”

“So you’re watering her plant. At eleven thirty at night.”

Jack opens his mouth to grump I can’t believe I ever missed you but the words get stuck in his throat. “Did you need something, Daniel?”

“Oh, uh, yeah. Can you swing by my place on your way in tomorrow and get my extra pair of glasses? They’re in the medicine cabinet.”

“Sure,” Jack says, and yawns. “Shouldn’t you be in the infirmary?” Frasier had stitched Daniel up and wrapped his thigh. There wasn’t any serious damage, but she’d wanted to keep him for a night. He’ll be on crutches for a week or two.

“They have a phone in the infirmary,” Daniel says dryly. “Although actually, I’m using the one in Janet’s office. Bill is driving me nuts. I’m hoping he’ll be asleep by the time I get back out there.”

Dr. Lee is annoying at the best of times, but the man did just survive nearly a week of torture, so Jack thinks Daniel’s being a little uncharitable. “God be with you,” he says anyway. “See you in the morning.”

“Why did you get Sam a plant as a Christmas present?” Daniel asks before he can end the call.

“Well, it was less a Christmas present and more a I’m-happy-you’re-not-dead present.” There’s a brief silence. “Last year was kind of a weird time.”

“I’m touched,” says Daniel.

“Go the fuck to sleep,” says Jack, and hangs up.

— — — — —

When she wakes up, there’s music. A radio, playing from a car paused at the stop sign at the end of the block. Sam listens to it drive away. The trickle of air coming through the bedroom window is very cold and smells like rain.

It takes a long time for her to collect herself. Back home. Day off. She has what they all call space-lag. It’s morning. She thinks it’s morning. Her regular partner of exhaustion is despair, and it leadens her limbs. It’s a bad day, she can tell. And she’s so tired. Maybe she could just stay here all day. She closes her eyes, and tears threaten to fall.

But she hates herself for lying around about as much as she hates the idea of getting up. She makes it to the kitchen and pours herself a bowl of Raisin Bran. The kitchen is dim, the sky outside so bleak it could be dusk. Her milk has gone bad. Sam leans on the counter for a long moment in the ocean-gray light, staring at the waiting bowl. Finally, she locates a spoon and eats a few bites dry. She gives up and goes to get dressed.

It is morning; Saturday, too, and the grocery store parking lot is nearly full. She’s only managed to grab the milk and a half-dozen Galas when her cell phone rings. She answers it while pushing the cart with one hand. Tortillas, she needs a pack of tortillas. Then it’ll have to be back to the produce section because she forgot tomatoes.

It’s her brother. “Hey! You answered.”

“Yeah, sorry, I’ve been … working. A whole bunch.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Oh,” she says. “You know. Always a crisis.”

He chuckles. “I know that feeling.” Mark works as a financial advisor. She tries not to be annoyed, and fails. “You busy right now?”

“I’m at Safeway,” she says.

For a moment, she leaves her body. Safeway. She’s at Safeway. Thirty hours ago, she was halfway across the galaxy, staring down at an army of half-human unkillable super soldiers. The linoleum glares under the fluorescents. In the next aisle, she can hear a child whining, louder and louder. A young man wearing white earbud headphones brushes past, bumping her a little with his basket, which contains a box of pasta and a package of chicken and a bag of barbeque potato chips. He glances back in apology. There’s a pop song she doesn’t know chirping through the store speakers.

Sam stares at the display of Asian condiments in front of her. Seven brands of soy sauce, red and green and gold, impossibly bright. It’s like she’s seeing it from ceiling height. The top of her own blond head, paralyzed in the middle of the ethnic food aisle.

“I can call back,” offers Mark.

“No, no.” Sam steers her cart forward. “Now’s good.”

She jams the phone between her ear and her shoulder, which gives her a crick in her neck but lets her keep shopping while he tells her about Jenny and the kids. Sam makes the right noises and asks polite questions about David’s debate team and Lisa’s violin recital. Eggs, yoghurt, broccoli, tomatoes, a bag of mixed greens. She vacillates for a while over a pack of Italian dinner sausages, then tosses them in her cart.

“Speak to Dad recently?” asks Mark.

Her phone bleeps, the call-waiting signal, but – “Uh, yeah, actually,” Sam says. “Yesterday.”

“Do you know if he’ll be around for Thanksgiving?” Mark asks. “You’re still coming, right?”

The call-waiting bleep again. “Um,” says Sam. “I –” She takes the phone away from her ear and sees it’s Colonel O’Neill’s cell. Not his home number. Work, then. “Mark, hang on a sec, I have to put you on hold, my CO is calling.”

“Sam –”

She hits the button. “Carter.”

“Finally. It almost went to voicemail.”

“Sorry, sir,” she says, but she’s as peevish as he is, and she knows she sounds it. “Busy.”

“With what?” he asks, like the fact that she could be doing anything other than hunching over her laptop solving a problem for him is ludicrous.

None of your business, she almost snaps, because it’s not, either professionally or personally – except, it sort of is, in both cases, isn’t it? Sam puts the heel of her hand to her eye. Her cell phone beeps twice to remind her there’s a call on hold.

“It’s my day off,” she says finally.

“Not anymore,” says the colonel. “There’s some kind of problem with the computers. They’re all wonky.”

The computers could mean anything from the dialling protocols to the internal security system to the Gate energy analysis program to the infirmary research network to the fucking base-wide ethernet. “Which computers? What kind of problem?”

“Are you on a secure line, Major?” he asks, and they both know perfectly well that she isn’t, because he’s the one who punched in her mobile number on his cell and she’s the one who picked up, so he asks the way he’d ask a barefoot toddler whether he’d put his shoes on yet.

Sam grinds her teeth. “Just give me an idea,” she snaps. “Sir.”

“The dialling ones. They’re giving an error code.”

“Urgent?”

“Well, they’re still working. For the moment. But they’ve called me in just in case they stop. I’ll be there in fifteen.”

Sam sighs. “Fine.” If the dialling protocol hasn’t given out yet, it’s probably not going to. Most likely a tech forgot to run a firmware update, but it could also be a low-level safeguard triggering. She’d set up a priority rating system so that the Gate wouldn’t lock out for minor warnings. “I’ll see you in an hour, sir.”

“You can’t make it sooner?”

“I’m at the grocery store. I’ll drop my food at home and come straight there.”

He sucks in a breath between his teeth. “Can’t that wait?”

Sam looks up at the ceiling in frustration. The fluorescents buzz and smear. She wants to ask him to cut her a break, once in a while. He’s been hard on her ass for a year now.

It’s not like she doesn’t know why.

“Sir –” she says, and to her horror, her voice comes out thin like she’s about to cry. “I’ll see you soon,” she says shortly, then claps her phone closed before she realizes that she’s also hanging up on Mark.

She calls him back. “Sorry,” she says. “About those crises I mentioned…”

“It’s okay,” he says.

“Tell Jenny and David and Lisa I say hi,” says Sam, and for no reason she can think of, she adds, “I’m looking forward to seeing you all at Thanksgiving.” Now she’s committed. Great.

“Let me know if, you know…”

“What?”

“If you’re bringing someone,” says Mark.

“Oh,” says Sam. “Probably not. But I’ll talk to you soon.”

She pushes her half-full cart toward the checkout. She’s still missing granola bars and olive oil and rice. Nothing for it now. She waits in line, eyes drifting over the tabloids. Prince Harry partying in Cancun! ETs land outside Lincoln, Nebraska! She gets to the front and the cashier scans her items. Sam watches them fly off the conveyor. She’d bought the strawberry yoghurt Jack likes. Broccoli, not asparagus, because he won’t eat asparagus. The sausages, she realizes, she’d been picturing on his grill.

“You paying card?” asks the cashier, popping her gum.

“Um,” says Sam, realizing all her groceries are bagged already. “Oh, yeah, um, credit, please.”

There’s only five bags, and she leaves the cart inside and carries them out to the car and stows them in the trunk. The parking lot is wet and it looks like it’s going to rain again. The sky is still dark, a grim gray-blue, and Sam still wants to weep. She slides into the driver’s seat but doesn’t start the engine. Just folds her hands, one over the other, on the steering wheel, and carefully leans forward to rest her forehead on top of them.

It’s very quiet, behind the glass and steel and fabric. A car door slams out in the lot, but it’s muffled. Rattling, a cart goes by. Then nothing.

There’s a knock on the passenger window.

Sam jumps. Colonel O’Neill is standing outside.

Numbly, she hits the unlock button and he pulls the handle. There’s a brief burst of noise – wind, voices, engines – and then quiet again. The colonel settles his hands on his lap. He’s brought the smell of ozone and shaving cream with him.

“You drove the boring car,” he says, finally.

“It’s raining,” says Sam. “And. Trunk space.”

“Right.”

They’re like figures in an Edward Hopper painting, she thinks. Inhabiting the canvas together, but so isolated it’s like they’ve been painted as separate works and someone’s collaged them together without bothering to let them know. There’s an unbridgeable metaphysical chasm in the eight inches between them, and the sense that there’s a howling abyss just out of frame that they’re refusing to look at. She’d always thought that must be what the dog in Cape Cod Evening was staring toward.

She thinks of when he was missing, on the moon with Maybourne, and every corridor seemed to cut off into a yawning pit beyond her feet.

“I thought you wanted me to hurry. Sir.”

He winces, a little, at the honorific.

“Carter… Sam,” he corrects. He sounds like he wants to apologize. But he can’t. Not for treating her like his junior officer. Not for not treating her like his junior officer. Sam’s throat closes up, but she can’t cry. She’s not allowed to cry about this. It’s not fair to. It’s her own fault. She’d locked herself in, same as she’d shut herself in the car.

“Don’t,” she chokes. “Just – just go.”

His mouth hardens. “Don’t play the victim,” he says.

Sam shakes her head, pressing her lips together to hold in sobs. She could tell him about her brother calling, about Thanksgiving. If you’re bringing someone. She won’t.

“I’m just – having a bad day,” she manages. “Please, please just go. I’ll see you at the mountain.”

He hesitates, then puts his hand on the door release and goes. Sam lets her head fall forward on the steering wheel again and lets her nose block up and the skin of her hands grow wet with tears.

— — — — —

She runs into Teal’c near the control room on lap three of the base.

“Major Carter,” he says.

“It’s late,” Sam notes, inanely.

“Yes,” says Teal’c.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Teal’c can always sleep. He can always eat, he can always sleep, and he can always work out. It’s the Teal’c trifecta.

“We had a scheduled radio report from Bra’tac.”

Sam frowns. “Wasn’t that supposed to be Thursday?”

“It is Thursday, Major Carter.”

“Oh.”

“I was on my way to the commissary,” Teal’c says, gesturing her ahead with a slight bow. “If you would care to accompany me.”

“I guess,” says Sam. “Sure.”

“You could go home,” says Teal’c.

“I’d prefer coffee,” says Sam.

But once they get to the mess, it seems like too much effort. It’s not that late, really – only twenty-three hundred. There’ll be a fully staffed shift on base for another hour. But she’s an edgy combination of exhausted and jittery, like she’s been locked in a ten-foot cage for three days and hasn’t slept the whole time. She trails Teal’c through the late-night snack array and he piles his plate with a banana and two single-serve yogurts and a pack of pretzels and a container of peanut butter. Sam grabs an apple and sits at the table rolling it back and forth between her hands as Teal’c works his way through his food.

“How’s Bra’tac?” Her head is heavy, so she puts her arm on the table and rests her cheek against it, looking sideways up at Teal’c.

Teal’c swallows half his cranberry juice in one go. “He is well. He reports that the Kull warriors continue to carry out attacks on the Jaffa armies of system lords. The remaining system lords have retreated to the safety of isolation.”

“So now he can pick them off one by one.”

“Indeed.”

“I haven’t figured out a way through the armour yet,” says Sam, ashamed. She’s so tired, but she can’t stay here. She straightens and stands, picks up her apple, then puts it down on Teal’c’s plate. “I should get back to it.”

“Major Carter,” says Teal’c. “It is not only up to you.”

“I know,” says Sam, and leaves before he calls her out on her lie. She shoulders sullenly through the commissary doors and stops in the hallway, moody and restless. The corridor is deserted. She’s been bumming around the base for hours. The last useful thing she accomplished was at sixteen-thirty, when she’d finished plotting a course back from Tagrea for the Prometheus, which has finally finished repairs. Six hops of sixteen hours each, with three hours of cool-down between each one. Just over four and a half days, and the route takes them right past the gas cloud at 15h 41m 45.5s, −03° 56′34.2″. Sam had been pretty excited about that, this afternoon. She probably will be again once she’s slept.

She should go back to her lab. She shoves her hands in her pockets and slumps toward the elevators. She doesn’t want to go back to her lab. She doesn’t want to go home. She wants to do something, but nothing appeals. Working out would help, but she’s too tired, and losing herself in a project would help, but she’d tried to start three things and couldn’t get into any of them.

Restlessness is supposed to be treatable, she thinks. Isn’t that why they’d all joined the military? Not Teal’c. The rest of them. Except maybe Daniel. Daniel’s restlessness is intellectual, a roving and sleepless curiosity that manifests as a certain impatience of spirit.

She goes to Daniel’s office. He’s there, at his desk, leaning over a printout of a tablet that SG-10 found on P3X-229 and was too fragile to move. He glances up, hums in greeting. His lamp is a warm yellow, and his cheek looks flushed and healthy. Sam stares at the objects on his desk. A reed stylus, a broken pottery cup, a wooden crate full of parchments and leather-bound books, a clay Hittite figurine of the storm god of Nerik, three piles of messy papers, five textbooks, two notebooks, and four replicas of Linear A inscribed tablets held by the Archaeological Museum of Chania, which they’ve been working on for their interpolation project.

Sam gazes at the stubbornly uninterpretable inscriptions. Idly, she thinks about some equations for the X-302’s inertial dampeners, but they’re plug and play, not enough to hold her interest. She could work on the Kull armour instead, but it’s too complicated right now. She picks up half of the broken cup, then puts it down. She wishes she’d kept the apple, because she’s sort of hungry now.

“Let’s go somewhere,” she says.

Daniel is making a note, his forefinger marking his place on the photocopy of the tablet, and he doesn’t look up. “Like where?”

“Anywhere. I don’t know. Bowling.”

“Bowling?” He leans back and raises an eyebrow. “Sam, I really do have to do this.”

“Right.”

“Why don’t you just go home? Get out of here. Get a drink, catch a late movie.”

“Don’t feel like it.” Even to herself she sounds sulky.

“You’ve been here for days.”

“No one seems to think that’s a problem.”

“That’s because everyone on this base subscribes to the theory of Samantha Carter that says the best thing to do is to let you work like a demon, discover twelve new laws of physics, and then wander around bumping into things until you tire yourself out,” Daniel says. “Like a five-year-old, or a blind golden retriever.”

“Gee, thanks,” she says dryly.

“Plus, one of the few times you did get sent home, as I recall, an alien built a Stargate in your basement.”

“Yeah,” says Sam. “That was kind of cool.” The bill for all that titanium was way less cool, but on the bright side, she hadn’t known about the online supplier that Orlin had used and she’s been ordering specialty equipment from there ever since.

She wonders if Daniel saw Orlin when he was ascended. She wonders what they’d have had to talk about.

“Can I stay here a while?” she asks.

“Sure,” says Daniel.

“I’d have to borrow your computer.”

Daniel picks up the stack of papers currently occupying his keyboard, then holds it in the air, flummoxed by his lack of free desk space. “Uh,” he says.

Sam holds out her hand for the papers, then flops them on the floor beside her.

“You have a lot of stuff,” she says. “For someone who was very recently just a soul.”

“That’s not quite – you know what, sure,” says Daniel. “Also, I happen to like my stuff.”

“I like it, too,” she admits. Turning his monitor towards her, she draws his extra chair up to the back side of the desk, and boots up the code for their language algorithm.

— — — — —

Going off-world has felt like a respite ever since Jack went missing on the moon of P5X-777, but it’s different now. Like Sam’s holding her breath for days until they step through the Gate.

On P3X-991 she watches their shadows. They ripple over grass and wildflowers, distorted as they pass across the tall weeds, like radio signals stretched by gravitational lensing. The overgrown trail is barely visible, just a break in the grass leading toward the forest. Pines, mostly, at the edge of the meadow. Below the fallen needles, the ground is sandy. Sam scuffs at it with her foot.

It’s a long walk, long enough that they’d had to send a UAV instead of the MALP, but Sam doesn’t mind. There’s clear sky, blue with a tinge of teal, and the gravity’s just a little weaker than on Earth. She feels light, floating in the sun. The wildflowers are fragrant, and the grass smells like cut saplings. Out at point, Teal’c is pushing on with his dead-steady march, and Daniel’s saying that the location of the village they’d seen on the aerial imagery had clearly been chosen for astrological reasons. When she looks back, Colonel O’Neill is ambling along with a loose, easy stride. It’s dry here; his knees must, for once, be giving him no pain. Small planets are good for him.

The forest fades into a long low clear space and they emerge on a gravelly riverbank. On the far shore is the village they’d seen in the UAV footage, nestled between the riverbank and a steep grassy rise. Up close, it’s clearly been deserted, and for so long that the site is mostly ruins.

Colonel O’Neill suggests they head home, but Daniel wants to poke around, and it doesn’t take much convincing to get the colonel to agree to stay on a temperate, empty, sunny planet, so their possibly tense first contact and cultural exchange turns into a lazy archaeological expedition. The colonel and Teal’c take the long trek to the Gate and back to report to the general, leaving Sam with Daniel.

There’s always a niggling worry about native fauna, unexpected weather, atmospheric events, forest-dwelling tribes, but they all know that this is now basically an overnight camping trip. Daniel pulls out his gear, looks unenthusiastically at the remains of what’s obviously a temple, then decides to stay out in the sun and brush dirt away from the runes around the village square. Sam lounges on a fallen column and watches and they talk about nothing. Base gossip. The chicken recipe Daniel made on Sunday. Popular television. Sam hasn’t known where her television remote is for months, but Daniel says he’s into some new show called Navy NCIS.

“Who’s in it?” Sam asks, then yawns. She leans her head back and closes her eyes to feel the sun on her face. God, when was the last time she was in the sun? She’s going to burn. Daniel has the high-SPF sunscreen in his pack and she should ask him for it, but she can’t be bothered. If the colonel gets back, she thinks, he’ll ream her out for napping on the job when she should be watching Daniel’s six. He’s still not as comfortable with combat as the rest of them. Never trained. Sam should be tearing herself a new one for this. She’d never have done it a few years ago. They could be attacked.

Pigs could fly, she thinks.

“Michael Weatherly,” says Daniel, “you know, from Dark Angel –”

“That show had such potential,” she laments, “and then it had to go and suck. Of all the most contrived –”

“– and Mark Harmon.”

“Oh, I liked him in that lawyer show Reasonable Doubts with that fantastic deaf actress –” Sam sits up and snaps her fingers – “what’s her name, the one with the recurring role on The West Wing…”

“Marlee Matlin? I didn’t know she was in a legal drama. The only series I’ve seen with a deaf lead is that absolute garbage show Sue Thomas, FBEye.”

“I love that show,” Sam confesses.

“What? It’s terrible!”

“I know!” she groans.

“The writing is so clunky! And the stories are bland. The characters are flat, the plots are boring –”

“But there’s a dog! Also,” she confides, “Yannick Bisson is really hot.”

“Well,” Daniel says, “that’s true.”

“Really?”

“Hey, I’m male, not blind.”

“Tell me honestly, Daniel,” she says seriously, “it’s the guyliner, isn’t it?”

When the colonel and Teal’c get back, Sam ropes Teal’c into a desultory game of cards. He doesn’t really enjoy trick-taking games and Sam always wins at rummy, so they choose war, which they play without really paying attention until they both get bored and Teal’c stands up with the excuse that he wants to check the perimeter.

“Sir?” calls Sam. “Game of cribbage?”

“Make it crazy eights,” says Colonel O’Neill, meandering over.

“Crazy eights, sir?”

“I’m feeling frisky.”

“All right,” says Sam, cutting the deck, “crazy eights it is.”

At some point, Daniel gives up on pretending to work and wanders over to watch, cross-legged in the overgrown grass, until Sam and the colonel lose steam. Daniel flops onto his back and stares up at the sky, and Sam slips off her seat and hugs her knees beside him.

“This is nice,” he mumbles.

“Mm,” says Sam.

“What do you think, almost dinnertime?” asks the colonel.

“Indeed.” Teal’c has, apparently, come back from his walk, and his answer to food is always yes.

They set up the tents at the foot of the rise, Sam with Daniel and Teal’c with Colonel O’Neill, and then light a fire under the slowly fading sky. They don’t need it; it’s warm enough here, and it’s not like they’re cooking, but it’s nice, to sit near the flames, to see each other’s faces in the light. The colonel hands out the MREs.

“ChiliMac –” he lobs it at Daniel – “beef stew, beef stew, Mexican chicken.”

They tear in, Daniel tossing his orange drink mix to Teal’c in return for the lemon-lime.

“So,” says the colonel, with his mouth full. “We miss any exciting discoveries while we were walking three hours to the Gate for a thirty-second radio call-in?”

Teal’c gives him a look like he can’t believe the colonel would ever betray him like this.

“Yes, sir,” says Sam, jumping in before Daniel can. “Daniel digs guyliner.”

“What’s guyliner?” asks the colonel, and both Sam and Daniel snort into their food packs.

“It is eyeliner applied by men for aesthetic effect,” provides Teal’c, “with historical usage reaching back to the Egyptians. Currently popular with the subcultures of glam rock, punk, and emotional music, also known as emo.”

The colonel is staring. “Where’d you get all that?”

“O’Neill,” says Teal’c, deliberately, around a bite of bread, “are you aware of a technology known as ‘the Internet’?”

Sam is still grinning by the time the guys have finished their mains.

“Carter, trade you my pound cake for your chocolate.”

“No way, sir,” she says, but in the end she only takes a bite and passes him the rest.

They linger over the fire until long after the sun has set, Sam and Daniel collectively ripping into the unrealism of CSI until Colonel O’Neill stands and stretches. “Okay, watches. Teal’c, your turn for fourth.”

Fourth is second-best because it’s just getting up early. The colonel gets first watch, ostensibly because he has seniority, but really because they all know he’s getting enough older that it’s hard for him to recover from several hours of wakefulness and interrupted sleep.

“I’ll take third,” says Sam. Third’s the worst. It’s dead in the middle of the night, the coldest, sleepiest hours. But the sun and the company and the ease of the day have her feeling warm and generous.

She wakes up when Daniel comes into the tent and she lets him shuck off his shirt and pants in the small space before she moves. Once he’s rustling around in his sleeping bag, she sits up and digs around in her pack for her jacket.

“Anything going on out there?”

“Ha,” says Daniel, and wads his shirt over his ear.

She could kick up the fire again, but she’s okay in her jacket, so instead she climbs the grassy rise behind the village. Because of the refractive properties of this planet’s atmosphere, the flush of middle twilight lasts nearly all night, a long radiative afterglow of turquoise and cobalt tinged with magenta. Only in the deepest valley of the night are the stars all visible in a blackened sky. Sam sits and watches them. The grass is bluer than at home, and in the starlight it looks silver-indigo, the colour of an ice moon. There’s wind, not too much, and it whistles through the grass, and the river chuckles along its stony bed. The pines sway against the sky, slow and stately.

Eventually, she hears the faint bleep of Teal’c’s watch alarm going off, and a minute later he comes out, and she waves at him but stays where she is. Teal’c nods to her, then sits on a stone near the ashes of the campfire and brings back the flame and huddles near it for a while. The fringes of dawn begin to osmose in from the far horizon, draining into the sky in between the stars like water seeping among the stiff grass roots of a seasonal stream bed. It’s rose and lavender and apricot, bright gold on the tips of the cirrus clouds above the forest.

The colonel emerges from his tent and claps Teal’c on the shoulder, and Teal’c hands him a titanium cup of instant coffee. The colonel looks up the hill, says something to him, and Teal’c gives him a second mug. Carefully, the colonel navigates across camp, up the slope of slippery grass, and passes her one of the mugs. It’s vile, but it’s hot, and Sam nods her thanks and holds it between her palms and blows on it. With a creak in his legs, Colonel O’Neill settles down beside her and they watch the sun come up over the hills to the east.

Sam’s thinking about time again, wondering how long it’s been since the ruins below sheltered living beings who laughed over a fire, wondering who they were and why they left. It’s melancholy to think of this place missing them, to imagine these stones they’d assembled with their own hands being left behind.

“Do you ever miss Jonas?” she asks.

“No."

“Me neither.” It feels wicked, and they smirk a little cruelly at one another.

No one bothers to wake Daniel, but fifteen minutes later he emerges of his own accord. Sam hears Teal’c wish him a good morning.

“Hi, gotta pee, really gotta pee,” says Daniel, shuffling as quickly as he can behind the nearest building, and Sam hides her grin in her coffee mug.

“Time to head down?” asks the colonel.

Sam peers into her mug. It’s empty. He’d finished his ages ago. She turns her face up again to the sky, where the cadmium-yellow light is fading to a pale lemon wash, the poppy red at the bottoms of the clouds easing into blush.

“One more minute,” she says, and when she glances up, he’s still looking at her.

“Yeah,” he says. “One more.”

— — — — —

Sam wakes up in engineering and there’s nobody there.

Sam wakes up in Corridor F-7 and there’s nobody there.

Sam wakes up in the mess hall and there’s nobody there.

The Prometheus groans like a 17^th-century galleon in a gale. Metal pops and settles. Sam sits at the console and thumbs the mic on. “The structural damage remains contained to Decks 2, 4, and 5.” The schematic blurs. “I’m trying to calculate –” She looks at her notes. She was trying to calculate something. Wasn’t she? She shakes her head. “– to calculate how long the hull integrity will hold at the current rate of corrosion…” She’d inventoried the food. It had taken two hours. Enough to last for several months, she’d found. She wants to laugh.

Is it better to die of rapid decompression than to drift alone out here for the next sixty years? Salt, she thinks. She’s drowning alone in this ship’s silence. Salt, salt, salt.

“Samantha!” says Teal’c, and Sam starts. “Remain awake! You will die.”

“No…” she mumbles.

“You are in enemy hands.”

“Real,” she argues. “It’s real.”

“You would think so.” Sam turns around at the voice. Teal’c is gone. It’s Rodney McKay.

“Shut up, Rodney,” she says.

“You’re wrong,” he says, gleefully. “You’re wrong about everything.”

Sam stands and shuffles toward the door to get away from him. She’s started eating portable food – power bars, bananas, slices of bread – in tiny little bites while she’s working, to stay awake. There are packs of trail mix in the pantry. The floor bucks up beneath her and she stumbles into a bulkhead, then along down the corridor.

She wakes up in the bathroom and no one is there. It’s unbearably quiet. The lights are blue.

“Hello?” she calls. “Teal’c? Daniel?” She lets her head fall back against the wall she’d woken up leaning against. “Anyone?” she whispers.

“Well,” says Narim, “isn’t that pathetic.”

“Hey,” says Sam, using the wall, hand over hand, to stand up, “you cloned my voice for your house computer. Let’s not be throwing stones.”

Her face in the mirror is ice-pale. She opens the tap and stars pour out.

“Which is less real,” he asks, “the you that I spoke to or the me that you’re speaking to?”

Sam shakes her head and it sloshes like a hot water bottle. There’s singing, from down the hall. “I don’t have time for riddles. I have to find a way to get the sublight engines operational.” The singing is distracting. Her notes are on the bridge. She has an idea – the atmosphere. Drowning, she’d thought. She’s dying anyway. She doesn’t need the air. She can vent it, get clear.

She wakes up on the floor of the infirmary, and her mother is there.

“Sam,” she whispers. She’s just how Sam last saw her: in a blue cardigan, hair coming loose of its bun. Sam’s eyes blur, and her mother puts a cool, slim hand on her burning chin to lift it. “Wake up, Sam.”

The tears fall. Sam turns her head. “Go away,” she mutters. “Go away, go away, you left.”

Her mother sighs. There’s a flutter of air as she sits on the floor beside Sam. “I didn’t leave you, I died. You know the difference.”

Sam works her chin mulishly. “Daniel died and he didn’t leave.”

“Hey, don’t bring me into this,” says Daniel.

“That’s not fair,” says her father.

“That’s not fair,” says Narim.

“That’s not fair,” says Cassie.

“None of this is fair!” yells Sam.

“No,” says Martouf. “It’s not.”

Sam clamps her hands over her ears and screams. When she wakes up her throat tastes like blood.

She hears an echo and it’s the sound of Jack’s name on her lips.

“I miss you,” she whispers, but there’s no one else in the room. She stands and drags herself toward the elevator and watches the numbers change. Deck 3, Deck 4, Deck 5, Deck 6. She gets off and ping-pongs toward the security office. She cues up the ship’s footage and watches herself talk to the empty air on 3x speed for seven minutes and then she erases everything since the alien vessel’s attack and causes a short in the camera network.

Food. She’s hungry, she thinks. She sits at the table and puts cardboard in her mouth. She’s dying anyway, she thinks. Decompression or brain bleed or a long lonely silence. There’s ice cream in the freezer box in the pantry.

Instead she goes to the bridge and tries for the console but doesn’t make it. She sinks down against the wall. The little girl comes. She’s blowing bubbles. Surface tension, thinks Sam. Iridescence. It makes her smile. She blows some bubbles, when the girl tells her to. She’s good at following orders.

— — — — —

Sam wakes up in bed and Jack is there.

She says his name before she realizes that she’s not in his bedroom or on the Prometheus anymore. They’re under Cheyenne Mountain, in the infirmary, and the camera blinks in the corner.

“Excuse me?” he says, mildly, but there’s no mistaking his meaning. Her head still hurts. She can’t bring herself to put on the cape of Major Carter, quite. It makes it hard for the colonel to know what to say.

That’s not fair, says her father.

Wake up, Sam, says her mother.

The colonel vacates the room quickly. He’s making sure she doesn’t have time to fuck up again. He’d immediately donned an impenetrable protective layer of faux-cheery jokes that hurt more than that cold Excuse me.

She understands: she’d scared him. First by disappearing, and then by slipping so badly. She’d hurt him, and like a blindly biting cornered animal, he always hurts back.

Pinpoint annihilation, she thinks, swallowing. Like the Jack she’d dreamed up on the Prometheus: trying to push her away. She does understand him. That much, at least.

It doesn’t help. Sam turns her head into her pillow, squeezing her eyes shut on tears.

Isn’t that pathetic, says Narim.

Her head hurts. Her chest is burning. Her eyes.

No, says Martouf, it’s not.

Chapter Text

V.

She whispers to me, I was meant to be free
This life that we’ve built is deadly.
She crawls from my bed, runs a comb ‘cross her head
She crawls to the train
and drives herself home.

— Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s, “A Light On A Hill”

— — — — —

“Sam?” Daniel’s voice, from upstairs.

It’s been twelve days since her return from the Prometheus, and though the headaches and fatigue are gone, she’s still got two days left in her sentence of medical downtime and she’s starting to go stir-crazy. On the phone that morning, listening to her summarize the findings in one of last month’s astrophysics journals, Daniel had shut her up by promising to drop by with homemade lasagna for dinner.

“You don’t cook,” she’d said suspiciously.

“I don’t,” he’d confirmed. “My neighbour brought it over.”

“What, she has a crush on you?”

“No!” said Daniel, then paused. “Well, I don’t think so. Maybe it’s – Probably not. No, she had a potluck and ended up with way too much food.”

“She’s pawning off the worst stuff,” Sam had teased. “It’s probably terrible.”

“Why do you think I’m giving it to you?” he’d retorted.

Sam hears the fridge open and close. “Down here,” she calls.

He finds her at the bottom of the stairs, kneeling on the basement floor amid plastic bins and sports equipment and woodworking tools and family hand-me-downs and a bulging trash bag and a lot of paper. There’s a pile for keep and a smaller pile for toss and a pile for stick in a closet for a year and then toss.

“Do you want this?” she asks.

Daniel squints at the device in her hands. “What is it?”

“It’s a label maker.”

“Why would I want a label maker?”

“Don’t you ever want to label things?”

“I have pens,” says Daniel.

She bobs her head sideways, conceding the point. The label maker crashes onto her ‘toss’ pile.

“Oh, I should – Come here.” Sam draws a hand over her forehead and grimaces at the feel of dust turning to grime on sweaty skin. She scrubs her hands on the thighs of her jeans.

He follows her up the stairs to her office. She opens the bottom drawer of the desk and sorts through the files. “You should know where this stuff is,” she says.

“What stuff?”

“This is my life insurance paperwork,” she says, pointing to the file tab so he can see. “And a record of my bank accounts and assets, so nothing gets missed. There’s a key to my safe-deposit box in there. And –” she pulls out a notarized document, tucked into a plastic sleeve – “my will. The house goes to Mark and all the liquid assets go to his kids, held in trust. There’s some stuff from my mom’s family that I’ve set aside for my niece – china, silver, stuff like that. Everything else goes to you guys.” She closes the drawer. “My lawyer’s number is written on there, if there are questions.”

“Sam.”

“It should be pretty clear, anyway. I left instructions.”

Daniel looks sick.

“It’s no big deal,” she says. “You have to be practical about these things.”

“Okay, fine, I know now,” Daniel says. “Can you please put that away?”

He’s brought a tin-foil casserole half-full of lasagna, and they play cribbage while it reheats in the oven. Sam skunks him before the timer beeps.

“This was a bad idea,” Daniel says woefully, staring at the board as Sam skips her peg to mark 121 points. His is stuck on 59.

Sam sweeps up the cards. “Screw it,” she says, “let’s watch TV.”

Daniel trawls through her DVDs and picks The Mummy – “You would,” she rolls her eyes – and they sit on the couch with two forks and cheerfully tear the movie to pieces while decimating the lasagna straight from the dish.

“This is really good,” Daniel says with his mouth full.

Sam nods, breathing open-mouthed through a too-hot bite of melted cheese. “Béchamel instead of ricotta. Forget the neighbour, find out which of her friends made this and date them.”

Sam’s cell phone rings on the side table as Brendan Fraser’s two-seater open-cockpit biplane sights a supernatural sandstorm. Daniel’s closer and he reaches for the phone.

“Ignore it,” she says.

“What if it’s the base?”

Sam shakes her head. “They always call my landline first.”

“All right,” says Daniel, skeptical. “Oh, come on!” he yells at the screen as Fraser, in the gunner’s seat, takes aim at the storm. “What’s shooting it going to do? Hey,” he adds to Sam, “there’s one kind of plane I bet you haven’t flown.”

Sam hums. “Looks fun, though.”

Her cell starts up again.

This time, Daniel does lean over to look. “It’s Jack. He’s being persistent.”

Sam holds out her hand for the phone.

“Hi, sir.”

“Busy?” the colonel asks with asperity.

“Daniel’s here. We’re watching a movie.”

“What if I were calling about something important?”

“Are you?” Sam asks.

He pauses. “No. Whatcha watching? Anything good?”

Daniel can clearly hear Jack’s side of the conversation, because he rolls his eyes.

Sam sighs, but she’s fighting a grin. “Did you want to come over, sir?”

“Tell him we ate all the lasagna,” says Daniel.

“I heard that,” the colonel says. “Tell Daniel that I do occasionally have motivations other than food.”

“Well, tell Jack that –”

Sam slaps the phone into his hand. “I’m not a carrier pigeon,” she says. “You talk to him.”

She gathers the aluminum dish and the forks and paper towels and dirty glasses and ferries it all to the kitchen, turning on the sink to rinse the silverware for the dishwasher. Daniel has taken her cell into the dining room, but over the noise of the running water, she can still hear bits of his conversation.

“– think it spooked her a bit – …her will –”

There isn’t much to wash, but Sam keeps the tap running anyway and slams the dishwasher closed so it sounds like she’s busy.

“No, I think she’ll be fine, just –”

Sam runs out of things to do and is now flirting with the limit of how much time she could reasonably have spent in the kitchen. She knocks the tap off and comes back around to the couch.

“If he’s going to come, tell him to invite Teal’c, too.”

Daniel relays this.

“And bring dessert,” Sam adds.

At that, there’s an indignant squawk from the cell phone, and Daniel holds it away from his ear with a wince.

“He says he’s got it,” he says.

— — — — —

At Christmas, Sam takes a full week off and visits Mark in San Diego. She’d missed Thanksgiving, still in the infirmary. Daniel had preordered a cooked turkey and roasted sweet potatoes and brought them to the base, and they’d all eaten around Sam’s cot. After, the colonel had pulled out a store-bought apple pie. There had been pastry crumbs all over the blanket.

Sam plays stickball in the cul-de-sac with her niece and nephew. She lounges in a lawn chair in the backyard and feels the sun on her face. She watches the jets launch from Miramar, Hornets and Harriers and the blue blue sky.

She wakes up in the lawn chair. On the couch mid-afternoon. It’s been six weeks since the alien attack on the Prometheus, and she’s still prone to falling asleep in the middle of the day. She’s back on desk duty, but Janet says it’ll be another month or even two before she’s cleared for combat missions. Sam wants to be frustrated, but it’s a struggle to feel hard done by when she can’t stay awake for more than six hours at a time and standing up too fast makes her dizzy.

“You seem tired,” says Jenny as Sam slices bread for the stuffing.

“It’s been busy,” says Sam. “And I was… sick. For a while.”

She takes advantage of the one-hour time difference to go running in the early mornings. Up and down hills, along quiet residential streets. There are dog walkers, commuters in their cars, kids on bicycles. Monday, before the sun’s fully risen, she drives to La Jolla and runs along the beach. It’s chilly and damp, with a mist off the ocean, and the hard-packed sand by the waterline slips beneath the soles of her sneakers.

She only does three miles, still working back to her baseline, then sits for a long time on the rocks to watch the waves. There are a few other early risers out, guys in wetsuits and people with their dogs, other joggers. Someone is kite surfing out on the water. A cormorant banks overhead in the fading fog. The boom of the waves echoes against the sandy cliffs at her back, chaparral waving in the wind. Before she leaves, she takes a long walk along the beach. She finds a huge nacreous shell that she’ll give to Daniel, and a chunk of serpentine for Teal’c that she can polish up with fine-grit sandpaper.

She wakes up in her brother’s guest room and there’s nobody there.

From the bed, she watches sunlight dance on the sage-green wall, moving with the leaves of the trees in the front yard. Two jets roar past above and Sam’s muscles clench with the memory of flight. The magic of my profession is revealing to me a world, wrote Saint-Exupéry, where within two hours I shall confront the dark dragons and the crests crowned with a mane of blue lightning; and then, set free by the coming of night, I shall chart my course in the stars.

On the morning of New Year’s Eve, Mark asks for her help setting up a new vegetable bed along the side of the house that he wants ready by spring. He has two spades, stones for edging, a half-dozen bags of planting soil. It’s the warmest day of her trip, and Sam puts on a worn pair of gym shorts and a sports bra and tank top and spends the morning feeling like she’s sweating out what’s left of her concussion. An hour in, Mark strips off his t-shirt and Sam watches him grimace at the blisters emerging on his palm. They have the same freckles on the backs of their shoulders. She thinks of him as a twelve-year-old, when he’d wanted to make the travel basketball team. That summer had been endless driving heat, the kind of heat that made you crazed, and he’d spent all of it shirtless in the driveway, shooting free throw after free throw. He hadn’t made the team – he had been a shrimp of a kid, and he was just too small.

Once they have the grass dug up, Mark goes inside and comes back out with two plastic bottles of water.

“Thanks,” says Sam. She thrusts her spade into the turned soil and props an elbow on it while she drinks.

They sip for a while in comfortable silence. “You know what I was thinking about the other day?” Mark asks eventually. “How we always used to get strawberry Pop-Tarts. I liked the cinnamon ones better, but we always got strawberry, because strawberry were your favourite.”

“Well, I did the shopping,” says Sam. Her bottle is still a third full, but she screws the cap on anyway, watching the threads line up with a lot more focus than she needs to. “I guess I didn’t really think about it,” she admits, ashamed.

Mark shrugs easily. “You had your own stuff going on. I knew that. It just… wasn’t always easy being Sam Carter’s brother.”

Sam can see that. “I didn’t exactly try to make it easier.”

“Still, I could’ve reacted better,” says Mark. “Speaking of which, sorry I ratted you out to Dad about keeping that bottle of vodka behind the calculus textbooks.”

Sam gapes. “That was you? I thought he just figured it out!”

“…Oops.”

“Come here, you little twerp!” Sam tosses her water bottle aside and lunges as Mark ducks out of the way.

He’s taller than she is, but he spends his days behind a desk and Sam spends hers sprinting under fire with a thirty-pound pack, so it doesn’t take long for her to snag him in a headlock and give him a thorough noogie. When she lets him go, they both collapse on the grass.

Sam watches the slivers of sky through the oak trees, the glowing apple-green of backlit leaves and the darker shades – jade and moss and ivy – where the leaves overlap. Most things are translucent if you throw enough electromagnetic energy at them. For leaves, stained glass, water, it’s in the visible light range. But it’s true for people, too. You just need x-ray radiation. More energy.

“But you’re okay?” Mark asks. “You’re, you know, happy?”

“Yeah,” says Sam. “I’m doing okay.”

“I worry about you.”

Sam swallows slowly, not letting herself jump to anger. “Why?”

“You work all the time,” says Mark, and, well, Sam can’t exactly argue with that. “You never do anything fun.”

“My work is fun.”

He turns his head in the grass and gives her a wry look. “Not what I mean. Are you getting out at all? Doing anything?” He pauses briefly. “Dating?”

“Yeah,” says Sam, lying through her teeth.

“Because I have this friend in Denver – he’s a detective there, really good guy –”

Sam cuts him off. “Mark, I just – I can’t right now, okay? It’s not that I don’t appreciate the thought, it’s just… My head’s just not in a good place. It’s been kind of a tough year.” Sam swallows again, this time against an unexpected lump in her throat. It’s been over a year and a half since Daniel died, technically. Maybe she should say a tough two years. Maybe she should say a tough seven.

Her brother turns on his side to face her, propping his head on his hand. “I didn’t know that,” he says. “What happened?”

“I can’t say.”

“Sam –”

“Mark, I swear, I can’t say.”

“Okay, but I didn’t know that, because you never talk to me! You can’t tell me what happened, fine, but you can tell me that it’s been hard, right? That you’re sad, or angry, or whatever? Your feelings aren’t classified, Sam! And you don’t talk to me.”

Sam’s first instinct is to agree, apologize, end the conversation, and she recognizes the impulse even as she yields to it. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” Mark glares, and she turns on her side too so they’re face to face. “I really am. I’ll do better.”

Mark sighs. “Do you talk to anyone?”

“I have friends,” says Sam, defensive. It hadn’t always been true.

“I know, Sam,” he says gently. “That’s not what I asked.”

She lies there trying to think of how she can answer him. She talks to Jack. Does she talk to Jack? Not about them; they can’t talk about them. She can’t talk to Daniel or Teal’c or Janet about them, either. She talks to Daniel about work frustrations a lot, but she doesn’t think that’s what Mark means. And in the meantime she’s been quiet and thinking hard for too long, thirty seconds, forty-five, a whole minute of Sam trying to think of when she’d last shared personal feelings, until Mark takes pity on her and changes the subject.

— — — — —

Her brother sends her home with a stack of photos that Jenny had found in some boxes of his old college gear, and over the weekend Sam goes to Staples and buys a cheap photo album. Most of the photos are ridiculous without being embarrassing, so she brings it with her to the base on Monday morning to show the guys. They’ll at least be tickled by what her father looked like with hair. She opens the album as she stands at her lab bench with her first mug of coffee.

Daniel leans his head around the corner. “You’re back! What are you doing back?”

She was supposed to take today off, too.

“Okay,” says Sam, “look. I booked eight days of leave if you don’t count Christmas and New Year’s and I took 87.5 percent of it.”

Daniel slow claps.

She huffs. “If you didn’t think I’d be here, why did you come looking?”

“Sergeant Lansford tattled on you.”

“Fucker,” mutters Sam.

“Oh, but as long as you’re here – I just got a call from a grad school friend who’s now at Princeton’s Art and Archaeology Department –”

“You still have friends in archaeology departments?”

“…That was for guilting you about vacation time, wasn’t it.”

“Yes.”

“Fine, fine, I take my ribbing in peace. Whatever. So anyway, Bill was saying that they’re involved in this conference the university is hosting, something about arts and sciences in the nation’s service, blah blah blah, and he needs someone for the interdisciplinary humanities and hard sciences panel.”

“And he wanted you? In academia, aren’t you, like –” Sam nearly swallows her tongue. Radioactive. Radioactive, she was going to say.

“Laughed out of any room full of archaeologists I enter? Why yes, yes, I am. Which is why he was only asking me if I knew anyone who might be interested, and I said I’d ask you.”

Sam sighs. “Daniel…”

From way down the hall, there’s an echoing “Daniel!” It’s the colonel and he does not sound like he’s had coffee yet.

“In here!” Daniel bellows. Sam winces and raises two fingers to her temple before she forgets not to. Daniel looks at her with alarm.

“Still with the headaches?”

“No,” lies Sam.

“You should tell Janet.”

Sam turns from him to open up her laptop. “She’ll just say to take Advil. She can’t do anything.”

“She can take you off the combat-ready list.”

“Yes,” says Sam, tapping in her username with care, “exactly.”

Teal’c and Colonel O’Neill appear at the door. “Hey! You’re back! Thank God.”

“Indeed,” agrees Teal’c, coming forward and hugging her firmly.

“What?” Sam, panicked, cranes over Teal’c shoulder to look from Daniel to the colonel. “What happened?”

“McKay was here,” growls the colonel.

“Here here,” clarifies Daniel as Teal’c releases her. “In your lab.”

“Your lab,” repeats the colonel.

“Jack almost punched him in the face,” says Daniel gleefully.

“What? Why?”

“He implied,” rumbled Teal’c, “that it was due to some error of yours that the crew of the Prometheus was captured and the ship imprisoned in the gas cloud. If the colonel did not take physical action, I was prepared to.”

“I hope no one did any punching of anyone,” says Sam.

“Well, no,” says Daniel. “But only because Hammond showed up.”

“A lucky happenstance for McKay,” says Teal’c darkly.

“Anyway, we’re glad you’re back, and –”

“What’s that?” asks the colonel, pointing to the album open on her lab bench.

“Oh my God, Sam,” says Daniel, “is that you? Your hair…”

“It is violently purple,” says Teal’c.

The colonel tilts his head. “I’d call it more of a fuchsia.”

“But…” Daniel splutters. “Why?”

“Because my dad hated it.”

“Ah, yes. Let me guess, sixteen?” The colonel is already turning to the start of the album.

“Seventeen, sir.”

They flip through, Sam naming relatives and friends. The last page, she’d filled with her favourites: a shot of her standing in front of the Kennedy Space Center at age eight, her mouth wide open with excitement; a snap of Mark and her looking eminently bored and hormonally angry, respectively, at the Grand Canyon; a candid of the two of them and their father fishing on a dock somewhere; and a photo of Sam, age ten, with her mother. Her mom’s arm is draped over Sam’s shoulders, and they’re both smiling, squinting a little against the sun of some day that she doesn’t remember. There are trees behind them. It could have been anywhere.

“That’s it,” Sam announces.

“Thank you, Major Carter,” says Teal’c. “A most enjoyable opportunity to share your memories. May I suggest breakfast?”

“Seconded,” says the colonel.

“Starving,” says Daniel.

“Teal’c,” says the colonel, “did you forget to set the automatic Daniel feeder this weekend?”

They troop toward the door, but Sam lingers for a moment longer. She rests her fingers lightly on the photo of her and her mom. The more she stares at it, the more unfamiliar her mother looks, like she’s been misremembering her face all these years.

“Hey.”

It’s the colonel; he must have circled back for her. “Okay?” he asks.

He’s close. The room smells like coffee and metal and Jack and home. He puts his hand on the lab bench beside hers, so their pinkies just touch. Sam wants to turn and bury her face in his neck. She moves her hand away.

“Yes, sir,” she says.

“Good trip?”

“Yeah,” she says. “It was.”

— — — — —

In March, Sam and Daniel fly to Dover and are met in the pouring rain by an Airman FC, who hands over the keys to a car from the motor pool and promptly takes himself and his umbrella off to the shelter of the nearest hangar. No one knows them here, so they’ve been stuck with a scuffed Ford compact, seven years old, and Daniel has to fold himself into the front seat.

“If I’m going to this panel,” Sam had told him in January, “so are you.” He won’t say so, but she knows he’s nervous.

North of Wilmington, just across the state line, 295 is a parking lot. Sam noses up, brakes. Taps the steering wheel with her thumbs and squints at taillights through the rain.

Daniel is sulking, bored and contorted in the passenger seat. “I could read you something,” he says, without much enthusiasm.

“All right,” she says.

He starts on a journal article by two of their fellow panelists, a biologist and sociologist who used viral propagation analysis to track the spread of disinformation across a population, but the rain is so loud that Sam can barely hear him, and he gives up partway through the methodology section.

Daniel crumples the article into his messenger bag and knocks his head back against the seat. There’s a hole in the fabric of the head rest, on the side near Sam.

“I hate New Jersey,” he says.

Sam doesn’t reply. Daniel gets like this when he’s been crammed into claustrophobic Earth transportation for too long, or when he’s been stuck on a spaceship for more than four days and didn’t bring enough to read. He’ll be better once he’s had real food and the chance to stretch out on a bed. The colonel is the same. When they’re on a long haul in a tel’tak, she and Teal’c have to keep the two of them apart.

The traffic gets better after the Philly exits, and they stop near the Princeton campus for Chinese. Sam orders them egg rolls as soon as the waiter swings up with water, and they come out fast, greasy and steaming. Sam juggles one as she peruses the menu.

“Kung Pao chicken,” Daniel divines. It’s a game they all play, sometimes, guessing each other’s orders.

“I was actually thinking about beef and broccoli today,” says Sam.

“No, you weren’t.”

“No,” she agrees, grinning, caught. “I wasn’t.”

Daniel folds his menu and gestures at her.

“Fried rice with shrimp,” she says. “Too easy.”

He raises his brows. “Okay, then. Do Teal’c.”

“Hm.” It’s harder; she didn’t see Teal’c before she left, so she doesn’t know his mood today, and he doesn’t have a go-to order for Chinese. At their Thai place, he always gets the drunken noodle with beef. “Sweet and sour pork,” she decides.

Daniel makes a face, which Sam takes to mean that he agrees. “Fine. Jack?”

Sam’s insides twist. She hides her face in the menu and pretends to examine it deeply. She takes so long that the waiter comes back, and Daniel orders for them both.

“So?” he prompts, once they’re alone again.

“No idea.”

“You’re lying,” he says.

She’s lying. Jack would get the orange chicken. She knew it before she knew her own order.

“I haven’t seen the colonel all day,” she demurs.

“Like that matters. I actually don’t know what he’d get. You do.”

“I don’t have some –” she waves a hand, too broadly – “magical O’Neill insight.”

“Really?”

“Oh, are we talking about this?” Sam snaps. “Is that what we’re doing?”

Daniel pauses. “No.”

“Good,” she bites, and takes a big gulp of water to signal that the conversation is over.

But Daniel decides to be earnest. “We don’t have to, Sam,” he says. “But we’re across the country from him. From everyone. And maybe… we should talk about this. Maybe you should talk about it.”

“Why?” She means it to sound sarcastic, but it doesn’t, quite.

“I see you, and you’re just – waiting. Both of you. Circling and circling, like a bird that’s never going to land. It hurts to watch. It must hurt more to do it.”

“Daniel…” Mortifyingly, Sam feels tears prick at the backs of her eyes. He’s not right, not in the way he’s thinking. But his observation is also so accurate that it feels like falling through the ice of a frozen pond: that swoop of shock in your stomach, and then a cold god swallows you whole. They have been circling, she and Jack. Sleeping together has just been another way of waiting. At a certain point, she realizes, settling for this painful simulacrum of what they wanted was the only way they could keep waiting for the real thing.

She swallows. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You know the story about the boy who sticks his finger in the dike?”

“Sure.”

“Well. It’s like that. It’s like that all the time. And what you’re asking, you’re asking for me to take my finger out of the dike.”

“Ah.”

“So.” She takes another sip of water. “I can’t.”

“All right,” he says. He rearranges his silverware, moves his napkin. Nods. “So. Tomorrow, you want to start with the science part or the language part?”

They refine their talking points over dinner, and then Sam drives them the short distance to their hotel through the lessened rain. The hotel is nice enough, the room chilly and dark. Sam bumps up the thermostat a couple of degrees and takes a hot shower to get the smell of the troop transport off her skin. She puts on pyjamas and gets between the cool sheets and closes her eyes and opens them again.

The ceiling is smooth white plaster. After five minutes, it gets old. She switches on the bedside lamp, then the television. She’s still flicking through channels when there’s a quiet knock on her door.

“I was getting ice,” says Daniel when she cracks it, “I heard the TV,” so she opens it wider and lets him in.

“Can’t sleep?” he asks. “Me neither.”

“It’s only eight p.m. at home.”

“Yeah,” says Daniel. “But I don’t think that’s why, do you?”

There’s a pause.

“Probably not,” Sam agrees.

He gets into the bed beside her, on top of the covers, and Sam flips another channel and lands on a hockey game. Chicago Blackhawks at the L.A. Kings. It’s the first period, tied one-all. She imagines Colonel O’Neill, in his living room 1,600 miles away, watching the puck bounce off the boards.

“I bet Jack’s watching this game,” says Daniel.

“Yeah.” Nothing happens on the screen, except that the announcer gets tired of calling the play and talks instead for a minute about the state of traffic on the 405. “We don’t have to,” she says, half-heartedly. “I’ll change it.”

But she doesn’t.

The game isn’t exciting, but Sam can’t look away. Her thumb hovers over the channel-up button. The Blackhawks take the puck across the blue line and lose possession. The Kings put together a three-on-two, and the Hawks defend.

Finally, Daniel says, “Let’s just watch this.” His voice is full of pity.

Sam is ashamed. But she puts down the remote.

— — — — —

When she wakes in the morning, Daniel is conked out beside her, face mashed into the pillow, glasses askew. Sam sneaks out from under the covers so she doesn’t wake him, and takes a change of clothes into the bathroom to shower.

As she’s smearing concealer under her eyes, she hears her cell phone ringing out in the room. She gets the bathroom door open just as Daniel snakes out a hand to pick it up.

“ ‘Lo? Mm. Oh, hey Jack.” He turns over, groaning. “Yeah, sure. Here she is.”

“Something to tell me?” says the colonel when she takes the phone. He sounds only half joking.

“Yes, sir,” says Sam. “The hockey game last night was really boring.”

“It was,” agrees the colonel.

“At least it put us to sleep,” she says, then snaps her fingers at Daniel, who’s upright and poking at the terrible coffeemaker in the hotel room. “Don’t do that, I’ll go get us real coffee.”

He waves a sleepy acknowledgement and disappears into her bathroom.

“Everything good there?” asks the colonel.

“Yes, sir. And there?”

“Yep. Yessiree Bob. Nothin’ doin’.”

“It’s early,” she says. She rubs the heel of her palm into the eye that she hasn’t yet put makeup on. It isn’t yet 0500 in Colorado.

“I know. Just wanted to check in.”

“Well,” says Sam. “I should go.”

“Knock ‘em dead. Not literally dead, because that sounds like a lot of paperwork for me, and maybe they wouldn’t let you go on missions anymore, but… you know.”

“I know,” says Sam. “I’ll check in later, sir.”

“Right,” says the colonel.

There’s a gap, right then, in the conversation. A lacuna. They both hear it.

It’s where the I love you would go.

If they could. If this could be real.

But it can’t, so Sam just hangs up.

Daniel comes out of the bathroom, scratching his head blearily.

“Go shower,” she says. “I’ll come back with coffee.”

Sam forgets, sometimes, that she likes being a scientist with other scientists. She settles into her seat at the front of the auditorium and there’s a feeling squeezing her chest, nervousness and anticipation and something bigger. This is where she’s supposed to be, right here, in this room where she can hear three students in the front row going over a graph theory problem set, and two of the panelists are reading the new issue of Nature, and the table with its strict row of microphones smells like Pine Sol and very bad coffee.

Émilie du Châtelet once called physics an immense building that surpasses the power of a single man, and Sam used to know the truth of it in her bones. She’d spent so much time sitting in rooms like this one, trying to absorb every atom she could, electric with a restlessness that she hadn’t realized was her own potential and her desperation to spend it out in the vast joint undertaking that was the monument of physics. There was so much they still didn’t know and Sam used to feel like she’d die if she couldn’t figure it out. The Hubble Constant, yes, and the operation of quantum gravity, and the geometry of the universe and its density parameter, and the content of dark matter and the precise mechanism of plasma jets around neutron stars and the viability of the quantum tunnelling hypothesis –

But the great project went on without her. This world has forgotten her, and she’s forgotten that feeling, and now, most days, remembering it feels less like recalling a past she’d been a part of and more like how Daniel must feel when he reads the faded Goa’uld on the plinths of vanished nations.

It does not feel like that now.

Sam leans toward Daniel. “Thank you,” she says.

“What?”

“I missed this. I missed – this part of it.”

“I know,” says Daniel, with that peculiar skill he has at making her instantly swing from loving him to wanting to punch his teeth in.

The panel goes well, and their fellow panelists are fascinating, and all the questions are actual queries from interested people, not occasions for grandstanding. Daniel takes the first question about their interpolation project, explaining that they’d created a weighting system for word clusters, since so much of ancient writing revolved around – was in fact, invented to track – the economy: receipts, lists, inventories.

The second question is for her.

“Dr. Carter,” says a dark-haired woman in the fifth row, “how are you allowed to work on something that isn’t for the Air Force?”

A current of mumbling makes its way through the audience, but whether because the question isn’t on topic or because the mumblers share this woman’s skepticism of military research, Sam isn’t sure.

“It’s true I’m an officer of the Air Force,” she says, “but the Air Force doesn’t own my brain.” Then she frowns, because she’s not sure that’s technically true. “Well, they sort of own my brain. But I also own my brain –”

Daniel leans forward into his mic to save her. “Sam’s brain is like a supercomputer,” he says, “that’s hosted by the Air Force but sometimes chooses to run its own programs. And is occasionally lent out to someone else.”

Sam looks at his wryly, because that last sentence could mean several things, some of which are extremely classified.

“Everyone, Daniel Jackson, linguistic and cultural genius,” she says, gesturing. “He just called my brain a supercomputer and still managed to make me feel insulted.”

The audience laughs, and no one comes up at the coffee break afterward to tell Sam that she’s a traitor to Science for conducting classified research, and no one laughs at Daniel.

The last morning, one of the keynote speakers gives Sam a tour of the Plasmic Physics Lab and then points her toward the local java joint. It’s spring break, but there are still some undergrads around, browsing the internet and sipping lattes, and grad students hunched over their laptops in ones and twos, and a couple of locals jawing over the crumbs of decimated scones.

After a while, Daniel re-emerges from the library, where he’s somehow finagled access, to join her for lunch, and then Sam drives them back to Dover. It’s a cruddy drive, and a long wait for the plane, and then a long flight back home.

It’s raining again when she leaves the base, and the wipers squeak against the glass. Sam blinks, exhausted and crabby and sore from travel. She wants her own bed.

Jack is in it. She stands and watches him for a while, his hands folded on his stomach, rising and falling with his breath. Then she quietly walks into the bathroom and shuts the door before she turns on the light.

He stirs when she emerges. “Hey,” he rasps.

“Hey, yourself.” She shucks her shirt, unclasps her bra.

“How was Princeton?”

Sam thinks about the Gothic chapel among the carefully tended emerald lawns. The gardeners clipping shrubs, the sculptures scattered across campus. Brick residence buildings circling quads, the science library with its hundred hanging lights. The students in the café reading Tolstoy or running regressions on their laptops. All those historic stone buildings full of classrooms, and books, and stained glass, and offices where professors sit in the sunlit dust instead of a concrete bunker, and chase down references and talk to each other about what exactly what the universe is like, and how to find out.

“I could work someplace like that,” she says.

Jack stops rubbing a hand over his face and props himself on his elbow. He looks at her through the dark. She can’t see his face. “Do you want to?”

It’s something she’s thought about, of course – teaching at one of the Ivies, or Stanford or MIT. Physics and aerospace engineering. Writing papers, lecturing. She wants to want to.

She wishes it were as easy to lie to him as it is to lie to herself.

The problem is it never has been.

“No,” she says.

“Good.” He sounds relieved. Maybe satisfied. Settling back down, he says, “Come to bed.”

“Yeah,” says Sam. “All right.”

— — — — —

The fabric under her cheek is rough and warm and the sun is too hot on her raw face and every muscle in her body aches, separately. Her head is on fire.

She’s leaning on Colonel O’Neill, she realizes, and he’s talking quietly. To Teal’c, who’s no longer standing over the corpse of the super soldier. She’d fallen asleep.

“Hey,” the colonel says, when she moves.

“Hey,” she rasps. Her lips stick together. Her mouth is parched. Sweat and grime cling to her like a film of pond scum.

He unclips a canteen and hands it to her, and it’s so good to be able to sit and drink her fill and not worry about water-borne illness or what’s coming for her while she drinks that she gulps a third of it down, until the colonel gently puts his hand over hers on the bottle.

“Easy,” he says, and she lowers it. He’s right; the water sloshes in her empty stomach, and the faint buzzing in her ears mixes with the unbalanced whirl that’s afflicted her brain since the explosion, and it all threatens to turn to nausea.

“Dad?” she asks. It sounds like there are river stones in her larynx.

“We got him. He’s fine,” the colonel says. “I radioed Reynolds. SG-3 is on their way to take charge of Daisy over there.” He jerks a thumb at the drone behind the rocks.

“We will take you home, Major Carter,” says Teal’c.

Sam nods and pulls herself up, hand over hand on the pile of stones behind her. She’s so tired. For two days, she’s been animated by adrenaline and terror and now both have ebbed like floodwater and her muscles are silted over with exhaustion. Everything hurts.

“Ready?” asks the colonel.

Sam nods, glances around. Dirt, stones, grass, forest. Dead drone. “Which way’s the Gate?”

The colonel’s head swivels toward her with poorly concealed alarm. Rule number one off-world: Always know where the Gate is. Everything else is negotiable.

“West-northwest,” he says cautiously. “Nine klicks, nine and a half.”

Sam can’t stifle a small noise.

“You going to make it?”

She mentally takes stock of her condition, then shoots a look at the sun. She’d been asleep for half an hour. Forty-five minutes, maybe.

“Not before dark,” she admits.

“I can call for a stretcher,” he says. “SG-11’s not far from the Gate. They could come meet us here.”

“It’ll be hours, sir,” she says. “I’ll manage. Slowly.”

“Here.” He digs in his vest for a power bar, but Sam waves him off.

“No, thanks, sir.”

“Carter, you haven’t eaten in two days.”

“It’ll just come back up.” She wants to sit down in the late afternoon sun and fall asleep again on Jack’s chest, only she’s so uncomfortable and gritty and sore. She thinks with longing of his bedroom, the ugly dresser, the sound of pages turning near her ear. Starlight silvering in the open window, the moon a clot of light bleeding veins of mercury into the black.

Jack looks like he’s going to argue, but only nods grimly. Grips her bicep, gets her moving. Teal’c is in front, scouting their trail. Sam turns herself over to them entirely, flotsam in the current.

She walks. Examines the leaves under her boots. Something like oak, dry crunch and rustle, then fir needles and it’s quiet. Shadows deepen under the trees and the light sighs out, colours shifting. She squints up at the sky and tries to guess the wavelengths that have struck the cone cells in her retina to create the precise hue of pink underlighting the clouds. Equal red and blue scattering, maybe, less green. Human colour sensitivity peaks around 540 nanometers, 560, 420. EM radiation at 420 nm is a nice blue. Cobalt-violet. Her brain feels like water. Her legs feel like water. She’s the ocean, she’s the ocean, she’s the flood –

She stumbles on a tree root and pain slices up her wounded leg and she gasps, and Jack’s there, warm against her side. She hadn’t realized how cold she’d gotten, in the dark.

“Carter?”

“I just – I need to rest,” she says. “I – I need –”

“Okay,” he says, gentle, “you’re okay,” and he eases her down. Still now, she feels a slow gyration in the earth under her feet. The rock beneath her is cold and she shivers once, a hard shudder that hurts deep in her bones. Her exhausted eyes catch flashes, static in the cool forest twilight, and she closes them, but it ruins her shaky balance and she sways a little before she can catch herself.

“Carter?” asks the colonel again, this time more urgently, and she shivers, and he slaps a palm to her forehead and curses. “She’s feverish,” he says over her head.

“Probably infection,” she mutters.

“No kidding,” he snaps.

“Sorry, sir,” she whispers, and finds that the iron weight of her skull is now leaning into his warm hand, which he hasn’t moved from her forehead. He lets her rest like that.

“Teal’c, can you get her?”

“No,” mumbles Sam, pushing clumsily at Jack’s arm so she can stand. “No, sir, I’m good.”

She can’t see the forest floor anymore, so she focuses on the pale slash of improvised bandage around her thigh, on how it presses into the wound whenever she flexes the muscle. One step automatic, one agony. Right, left. Jack’s hand on her bicep, too hard. She tries to shake him, but he won’t go, and she thinks she’s still moving but maybe she isn’t. She’s so tired that she can’t tell, and now there’s a heavier, warmer bulk holding up her left side. He smells like smoke and cinnamon.

“Teal’c,” she divines.

“I am here, Major Carter,” he says.

There’s gravel, then, and the sound of a DHD dialling breaks through her fog.

“We’re here?” She sees the Gate, but she can’t quite believe that she’s not still stumbling along in the forest.

“You bet we are, Carter,” says Jack. Teal’c is on the radio, calling for a gurney to the Gate room. “You did great. Here we go.”

The vortex swirls a stain of blue-white light on Sam’s corneas and, blindly, she follows the colonel. Gravel, dirt, a cold microsecond and then metal ringing. As soon as she’s through, Sam sits down hard on the ramp. The swimming-pool shadows flicker across her, curl their soft edges around her fingers like silk. Spectral analysis of the wormhole would show… what? Why has she never thought to do this before? There’s a lot of noise, echoing. The holes of the metal grating press circles into the skin of Sam’s palm. The wormhole dissolves behind her, and she misses the light.

Two orderlies wheel up a gurney, kneel beside her, and then she’s swinging onto the padded surface and it’s blessedly soft. They roll her down the ramp, and the colonel and Teal’c are speaking with General Hammond at the bottom.

“– sitrep, Colonel,” the general is saying.

“Sir…”

“Now, please,” the general says, and then, more softly, “Jack, there’s nothing you can do right now.”

“Sam.” Janet’s voice, keeping pace. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired,” Sam thinks she says, but answering seems like a lot of work. Her muscles are sinking. There’s a thread that ties her to the magnetic core of the Earth. She closes her eyes.

“Sam, I need you to answer me.”

“I just wanna sleep,” Sam says. “Just let me go to sleep.”

“Sam!” That’s Daniel, out of breath. “I’m here,” he says, and grabs her hand, but her hand is burned and she whimpers, and he tries to let go but she clings tighter and won’t let him.

“Sam,” says Janet, insistently, and Sam really wishes everyone would stop saying her name like they need something from her.

“Please,” she begs, thinks she begs, “please, I’m so tired.”

“I can’t let you sleep until you’ve had an MRI and EEG,” says Janet. “I’m sorry, but your fatigue and vertigo could be caused by a brain bleed.”

No, Sam wants to tell her, I just need to sleep, just let me sleep.

“Couldn’t those symptoms also be caused by exhaustion?” asks Daniel, and Sam wants to kiss him.

“I’m not willing to take that chance,” says Janet, “are you?”

They send her through machine after machine: MRI, CT scan, x-ray, and then they have to wait for the results. Sam’s on a cot in the infirmary. She should have a regular cot, she thinks. It would nice to have the same view every time, so she could know exactly where she was.

“If I have to stay awake,” she says, “can I at least shower?”

“Sponge bath or nothing,” says Janet, and Sam groans but takes the deal, because it feels like the stickiness of old sweat and the clamminess of fever-chills is at least thirty percent of her discomfort.

A nurse helps her re-dress in a clean gown, and she doesn’t remember anything after that.

— — — — —

Daniel comes in less than a minute after her father leaves. She wonders if he’d been waiting outside. She tries to wipe her eyes before he can see her, but one arm is in a sling and the other feels too heavy to move.

“Hey, you’re awake,” he says. Then, “Sam?”

She’s still so tired, too tired to pretend.

“My dad’s gone.” Even the small movement of her facial muscles from speaking disturbs the half-healed scrape along her cheek, which is now scabbed and pulls painfully, and she winces.

“I know,” he says softly. “I’m sorry. I did everything I could.”

“I know.” Sam tries to smile, but she can’t quite see him through the haze of tears, and smiling hurts anyway.

Daniel pulls his sleeve over the knuckle of his thumb and wipes her eyes. It surprises a wet laugh out of her.

“How long was I out?” Her mouth feels sticky and rancid.

“Um, let’s see… you got back on Tuesday night. So, all that night, all day yesterday, last night, and today. It’s just after nine. Nine p.m.,” he adds helpfully. “Thursday.”

“So long?”

“Not surprising,” says Janet, bustling over. “You were in bad shape. You only just finished your course of IV antibiotics. You’re lucky you made it back when you did.”

“What’s this for?” Sam asks, jiggling the arm in the sling.

“You chipped the end of your ulna,” says Janet.

Sam frowns. “I did?”

“I’m sending a tray over,” she says, and, to Daniel, “Make sure she eats.”

She tries, but it feels like her stomach has contracted during the last four days, and chewing hurts more than talking. The overcooked pasta on her tray tastes like cardboard and Sam has to fight off a surge of revulsion.

“I can’t,” she says, pushing away the tray.

“Try,” Daniel urges.

“I can’t,” she says, and she’s so tired and everything hurts so much that tears spring back to her eyes at this small failure.

“Okay,” says Daniel quickly, “that’s okay.”

He’s so gentle that Sam can’t bear to have him look at her. She wants Jack, who’ll have something other than care and compassion in his eyes, but she can’t ask for him.

She turns her head on the pillow, throat thick with misery. “I think I’m just going to sleep,” she says.

“All right,” says Daniel, but he doesn’t leave. He draws a chair to her side and rests a hand on her calf. She can feel it there, warm and heavy, like a brand.

When she wakes, it’s dark and Jack is standing at her cot.

“Hey.” His voice is quiet. Daniel is still slumped in his chair, asleep with his mouth open and his glasses askew.

“Sir.”

Something moves over his face, but in the dimness she can’t see what. A ripple, like the bright lines of light that flutter across the surface of a wormhole. His eyes are black, his voice even. “Water?”

She nods, and as he comes near to hold up a glass for her, she notices something in his other hand. He holds it up: a bowl of blue jello, sapped of colour in the low light. Blue sky at the Alpha site, blue of the wormhole, blue jello. Different blues. Or, rather, one blue, with different reds and greens. Same blue underneath, 420 nanometer wavelength. You can’t tell, she thinks. Your eye doesn’t know the difference.

“Heard you didn’t eat,” he explains.

“Not hungry.”

“No one eats jello because they’re hungry, Carter.”

She smiles, a half-smile so that it doesn’t twist the scab on her face. “Fair enough,” she whispers, and he’s right, the jello is good. It melts in her mouth so she doesn’t have to chew, and she takes small bites slowly and lets the chemical sweetness coat her scraped throat and sit heavy on her tongue. Jack sits next to her on a stool and watches.

She sets down the spoon. It makes a small clink against the side of the bowl. The smooth planes and sharp edges of the jello catch the light like a crystal in a Goa’uld control panel. Her throat is tight.

“My dad left,” she says, as if trying out the truth of it again.

“Yeah,” says Jack.

She’s glad that her father had stayed until she could say goodbye, and she understands that he’d then had to leave immediately, but she wishes that he hadn’t sprung it on her right when she’d woken up. Everything is too much – too painful, too raw, too confusing, too exhausting. She’ll feel better in a day or two, but right now, she doesn’t feel like she can handle the small frustration of maneuvering a spoon with a burned hand, let alone the idea of not hearing from her dad for the foreseeable future. And the future isn’t foreseeable for her right now, it’s not; she doesn’t have the fortitude or mental coherence to look down the road and see what’s coming next – which is how she’s always able to tell herself she can handle whatever it is that’s coming next. Knowing the possibilities, running down the options.

“Hey,” says Jack. “He’ll be okay.”

“I know, sir,” says Sam, but her throat still hurts.

“Eat your jello,” he coaxes, and she tells herself it’s an order and nods and takes another tasteless bite.

Then, under the sound of her spoon hitting the bowl, he whispers, “You scared me.”

Sam freezes. Jack isn’t looking at her. He’s gazing at Daniel, the softness of his sleeping face, his wild hair, so much shorter than it used to be. Sam’s heart clenches with tenderness for both of them. She thinks of the early days, of the sand of new planets and how little they’d understood anything at all, and the cold clutch of the wormhole before she’d known to adjust the dialing protocols. She feels empty, creaky. The wind blows through her.

He doesn’t want her to respond. She nods toward his pocket instead. “Did you bring your yo-yo?” He fetches it out and she says, “Show me,” and he sets it in motion. The lights blur, pure white for a basic sleeper, now with a touch of blue on walk-the-dog, red and purple as he throws an around-the-world, and Sam lets her eyes unfocus and watches the wavelengths blur until the bowl of jello tips in her loose grasp.

— — — — —

Teal’c drives her home in a car borrowed from Walter and drops her at the end of her front walk.

“Is there anything you require, Major Carter?”

“No thanks, Teal’c, I’ll be okay,” says Sam, opening the door of the sedan.

“Do not hesitate to call,” says Teal’c, “for any reason.”

With her arm still in a sling, she can’t use crutches, so Janet had given her a cane to take some weight off her injured leg. Sam watches the rubber end of it thump slowly along her front walk, industrial gray on the paving stones. It’s a blue-gray twilight, air the colour of cut slate. Wet wind slapping her cheeks. Teal’c waits until she has the door open before he drives away.

She changes into pyjamas, takes one of the pills Janet gave her, wades into bed one limb at a time. In her dream, the drone is chasing her again, but instead of the forest around the Alpha Site, she’s in an enormous hospital, the patients mostly gone and those that remain cowering in paralyzed terror. She flees through room after room after room, seeking somewhere safe, looking for a way out. She knows she can’t escape, so she hides: behind a door, crumpled into an under-sink cabinet, beneath a cot, behind a desk in an administrator’s office. But each time, she hears the crunch of boots on gravel, nearer and nearer, and she has to move on, keeping running, has to run and run and run and –

She wakes up and Jack is climbing into her bed.

“Okay?” he asks.

“Mm.” Her pain meds have left her muzzy. She’s not sure she hurts any less, exactly, but there’s a wad of cotton batting between her and the pain. “Sore. I’ll be all right.”

“I know.”

She’d been sleeping pretty much in the center of the full-size bed, as usual, and she makes a few desultory attempts to scooch farther right. Jack squeezes in next to her, warm against her injured left side. She’d taken the sling off to sleep, and the elbow is stiff and swollen and doesn’t want to bend. His heat soothes it some.

Jack works an arm under her pillows so he can wrap it around her shoulders and pull her closer.

“Christ, Carter, your bed is small,” he grumbles. He’s moving still, hot and alive. His chest muscles flex and shift, and the circuits of her body sputter alight, fire and spark.

“Good,” she whispers, and nuzzles into his neck. His breath catches and she turns, throws her leg over his.

“Carter…”

“Please, sir,” she says, and she doesn’t know exactly what she’s asking for, but she knows he can give it to her.

He hesitates only a moment. “C’mere,” he whispers, and slides his fingers into her hair as he kisses her. It’s so tender and he’s so soft that he must be worried she’ll break apart at his touch, and she doesn’t want that, doesn’t want to feel fragile, even if it’s true. Especially if it’s true.

She hooks her uninjured leg around his and uses the leverage to haul their hips together, encouraging him to rock against her, and she bites his lip just this side of too hard, and Jack gasps and tightens his grip on her hair. Yes, she thinks, yes, because it hurts differently than everything else, more present and more real, and his mouth is so familiar she wants to cry. Hot breath on her thin skin, like that far-away moment in her lab when he’d kissed the pulse point of her wrist and kept his lips there so they could both feel the relentless pounding of her heart.

Jack presses his mouth to her jawbone, the soft flesh under her chin, the tendons of her neck, and Sam burns, white flame and phosphorescent, her head thrown back. Her good hand gropes under the back of his shirt, greedy for touch, tracing networks of fire back and forth across his spine.

“Up,” he says, and helps her sit so he can skim off her tank top, then her pyjama pants, easing them carefully over the long rectangle of gauze on her thigh. He sheds his t-shirt and boxers – and then hesitates, seeing for the first time the full extent of the bruising and burns and cuts on her body.

He swallows. “Sam…”

“I’m fine,” she says. “It’s superficial.”

Maybe he believes her, maybe he doesn’t, but he doesn’t deny her. She wants to feel not less injured but more – wants the rends in her skin to be from his teeth, wants the singe of his fierceness and the raw pulsing blood of his fury. She wants his kisses to burn and his every touch to bruise. She wants to be ransacked and ransomed, gorged upon and glutted.

His skin is flushed even in the low light, and Sam’s eyes drop to where his cock juts up in front of lean abdominal muscles. When he settles onto the bed again, she pounces, capturing his mouth with hers, scraping her nails up his back. She turns them so Jack is on top of her and she mouths mindlessly at the junction of his neck and shoulder like a blind bird. He sweeps hands along her belly, over the point of her hip, and finds her clit with his thumb, and the bright bolt of pleasure blanks out her mind for a moment. Groaning in relief, Sam closes her eyes and feels the craving for him crawl through her veins like a thirst, like an endless pursuit. There’s an emptiness in her core, and she rolls her hips against his fingers.

She finds his mouth with hers again and he strokes his tongue along her lip, drawing her open, and she sinks deep into the kiss. Jack shifts the hand that isn’t drawing small circles on her clit, floating it up along her ribs, across the soft space under her sternum, and then higher, toward her breast. The slight change in position puts more of his weight against her left arm just as he jostles her left leg, and the clotted ache of her injuries momentarily flares black and crimson in her frayed nerves, and she can’t help the pained noise that escapes her.

Immediately, Jack pulls back, and she garbles out a No, clamping her fingertips deep into his latissimus dorsi.

“I’m hurting you,” he demurs.

“I don’t care.”

He doesn’t do her the disservice of saying, But I do. For a moment, he stops, and then he lies down on his back. “Like this,” he whispers, and gently tugs her on top of him, her back to his front, every inch of her skin against his; “Just lie there,” he says into her ear, and she feels her hair stir softly at his breath.

His hard length is trapped against her lower back, and her legs fall open on either side of his. He puts one hot palm back on her breast, her nipple between his thumb and middle finger, and circles the index finger of the other hand around her slick clit. Lying this way, it’s like his hands are her own, and it feels so good she almost can’t believe it.

“Oh,” she says, “oh,” and he noses behind her ear. After a moment, he lifts his palm off her chest and commands, “Touch yourself,” and she shivers and takes over, rolling her own nipples between her fingers. Each squeeze sends a jolt up and down her spine, and Jack waits until he’s satisfied with her obedience and then draws his newly free hand down her body, palming her hip, skating over the crease of her right thigh, and dips two fingers inside her.

He’s surging gently against her back, his pace lazy and syrupy, and he keeps the same rolling rhythm with his fingers. It’s not enough.

“More,” she says. “Harder.”

Jack sets his bared teeth into the side of her neck, not even a nip, just letting her feel him not bite down.

“No,” he says, and changes the angle of his fingers so they’re curled into her, stroking along her inner walls.

The pleasure is thick and too sweet, and Sam wants instead to feel the flinty edge where it meets pain. She feels like she deserves it – she, who tried to kill an unkillable thing and survived. If she’s going to live, she needs him to flay her alive; she needs to be ravaged and devoured.

If she’s going to be all but char and ashes, she wants him to be the flame that burns her down.

“Harder,” she insists, and she tries to slam herself down onto his fingers, but she doesn’t have the leverage, and she’s so wet now that there isn’t even any friction to lean into, no resistance at all. Jack pauses to tug his cock free and coat it with her slickness, and Sam feels his blunt head nudge at her entrance, but he just tucks himself once more against her lower back and resumes his rhythm with his fingers and hips, slow oceans swells without a crest, his hands holding her down even as they move inside her.

“Please,” she pleads.

“No,” growls Jack, and it’s good anyway: his denial just hurts differently. It spikes her need, sharpens her desire for roughness into a blade. She’s won, she realizes; no matter what he does, he can’t help hurting her, one way or another; and the dark triumph lances through her kindled pleasure like a stellar absorption spectrum. Jack twists his fingers and plunges them deeper, and she arches her back against his chest, keening, and he curses and snaps his hips reflexively, his slick cock sliding easily against her skin, and she clenches and comes with all the premeditation of a plane crash, and dimly she feels him pulse between their bodies as he follows.

She lies for a few moments on top of him, her whole body keyed to the air in his lungs.

Finally, he kisses the top of her shoulder and says, “Roll over. I’ll be right back.”

She follows his quiet footsteps on the carpet to the bathroom, senses the sudden light through her closed eyelids, hears the faucet turn on. It runs for a long time, and then it thunks off. Jack pads back and there’s a warm wet cloth stroking over her lower back, the nubbly nap of a well-worn washcloth. He’s more thorough than he needs to be.

The pain pill is back, an anchor line around her ankle.

“Almost went to your place,” she hears herself say, mouth moving against the sheets. Speaking is an effort, but once she starts she can’t help it. “But would’ve had to take a cab. I missed your bed.”

Jack’s finished cleaning her up, he must be, but he keeps laving her skin with the cloth. It’s starting to cool already. He says nothing.

“Thought of it,” she rambles. “While I was out there. Kept me going. ‘’Nother few hours, Carter, and then you can lie down in Jack’s bed.’” The pillows smell stale, but they’re soft, and the cotton batting is back, only this time it’s somewhere between her brain and her mouth. “And Saint-Ex.”

Jack sets aside the cloth and traces his fingers all the way up her spine to the hair at the nape of her neck, toying with the short strands. “What about him?”

“Crashed in the Sahara. Just praying for rescue. Someone to save him.”

Jack’s blunt fingers are warm on the base of her skull. “You saved yourself.”

“Only same way he did,” she slurs. “Surviving long enough.”

Far away, his voice. “Still counts, Carter,” he murmurs, and kisses the back of her shoulder blade. The mattress shifts as he rises to return the wet cloth to the bathroom, and Sam drops off before he hits the light switch.

She doesn’t realize until the next morning that he never comes back to bed.

— — — — —

Sam wakes up in her lab and there’s nobody there.

Sam wakes up in her bed and there’s nobody there.

Sam stares down at Janet’s muddy face,
and there’s nobody there.

— — — — —

Night and clouds. Night and it closes in on the windows. Night and night and only ever night, and Cassie is sobbing in Sam’s guest room.

She is sitting under the covers, curled over on herself, flushed with tears, crying as if it will never stop because it won’t ever stop, it will never stop feeling like this. The tears cease but it never feels like they do. Inside, the rain never ends. Sam knows.

“I want to die,” sobs Cassie.

You don’t die. You just feel like it.

Maybe if Sam were her mother, she’d say, Oh sweetie, No you don’t. Instead, she says, “I know. Me too.”

Cass sits up and hugs her knees. “Please don’t.” Her voice is raspy. Tears are still sliding down her face. She must have a whale of a headache, Sam thinks. Her voice bubbles, skips like a record. “I can’t lose you too.”

Sam leans forward and hugs her close. The sheets smell stale, like detergent and the inside of her linen closet. This room is never used except for when Daniel stays over late and crashes here. There’s a beige duvet, a white IKEA dresser with a lamp on top. Four hangers in the closet. Sam thinks of Cassie’s room at Janet’s house: the wall they’d painted dark purple together, the posters of the solar system from when she was in grade six and the more recent ones of Avril Lavigne and Coldplay and Pink Floyd. The carved owl that Jack brought her from P4X-939, the cedar box that Daniel had given her for her thirteenth birthday, stuffed with notes from her friends, the blue paper crane from her ex-boyfriend. The pile of dirty clothes in front of the closet that Janet was forever telling her to put in the hamper. Cassie had woken up in that room the last two days, but today she’d decided she couldn’t look at it anymore.

“I have some sleeping pills,” says Sam. “From when I was hurt. I think you should take them.” She smooths Cassie’s tangled hair back from her wet face. “Just for a few days.”

Cassie shrugs listlessly. Her arms are still around her knees.

In the bathroom, Sam holds on to the edge of the counter for a moment before she opens the medicine cabinet. The light is very bright and her eyes look red and sunken. Sam stares into them and breathes and thinks of nothing and feels the ocean in her chest tug with its riptide current. It tastes like drowning. Like venting atmosphere.

She brings Cassie one pill and a glass of water, and then Cassie grips her hand so Sam lies next to her until she falls asleep. She is drifting a little when her cell phone buzzes, and she slips it from her pocket and eases out of the bed before it can rouse Cassie.

“Did I wake you,” asks Jack.

“Not really.” She closes the door most of the way behind her, leaving it open a crack. Her toes are bare and she watches them sink into the ivory carpet. They’re painted hot pink.

“Cass okay?”

Sam leans against the hallway wall and closes her eyes. “Not really,” she says again.

“Yeah.” He pauses. “You?”

Sam doesn’t reply for a moment. “I’m fine,” she says, but her voice betrays her.

Jack is quiet for a long time. Then in a very low voice he says, “I wish you wouldn’t lie to me.”

“Well,” says Sam helplessly.

No sound on the phone line. She makes herself put her weight on her own two feet again and walks to her bedroom. Closes the door, shuffles to the bed. Jack listens silently as she gets in.

“How about you, sir?” She leaves the lamp on. She can’t bear to turn it off: that would mean she intends to sleep. “Pain okay?”

He shrugs; she hears it.

“Yeah,” she says, and because she almost lost him, because she’s worn out with Cassie’s grief and her own, she chokes, “I miss you,” and starts to cry. “Jack,” she says. “Jack.”

“Carter –” he grates, and Sam should know what he means, but she doesn’t, she can’t think.

“Stop,” he says, “you gotta stop,” and when she fails, he snaps, “Don’t do this.”

“Fuck you,” she snarls through tears. “Fuck you, sir, you asshole, fuck you fuck you –” because she’d told him how she felt, right there in the infirmary so he could see that she meant it, so that they couldn’t twist it up like they are doing right now, like they do when they’re alone –

“Carter.”

“Make it stop!” She wants to scream, but night, but Cassie, so it comes out strangled and cuts out partway through.

He doesn’t reply immediately, so it just hangs there, making Sam ashamed and vulnerable, making her hate herself.

She gets a hold of her voice, just enough to bite out, “Good night, sir.”

As she pulls the phone away from her ear, she hears him say, “Carter –” but she’s already hanging up.

— — — — —

Cassie shuffles into the kitchen at ten-thirty and stops short when she sees Sam sitting at the counter with her laptop.

“What are you doing here?”

Sam sips at her third coffee of the morning. “I live here.”

“Don’t you have to be on the base?”

“I’m here with you. For as long as you need me.”

“Oh,” says Cassie. “I just thought… you know.”

“Did you really think I’d leave you alone?” Sam is a little stung, but she tries not to show it. That’s so not the point right now.

“Well,” says Cassie. She’s backpedaling. “Your job is important.”

“I don’t like holding this over your head,” Sam says, “but remember that time I risked my life to stay with you because I didn’t want you to be scared and alone after I’d known you for like two days?”

“One. One day.” Cassie looks at her feet curling away from the chill off Sam’s kitchen tiles. Her toenails are bright purple. They’d done them together, over the weekend. Janet’s had been pale blue. “I don’t really like thinking about that day.”

“I do,” says Sam firmly. “Because it gave us you.”

They’re still clasped in a hug when there’s a knock on the kitchen door. Cassie smells like sleep and Sam’s guest room sheets and the vanilla body spray she uses before school. Sam is reluctant to let go of her to get the door.

Colonel O’Neill is standing outside, holding a take-out coffee tray with two cups. Sam takes them from him so he can hug Cassie.

“Hi, Uncle Jack,” she mumbles into his chest.

“Hey, kiddo.” He rubs her back, up and down, and lets her pull away first. Sam is already setting aside her drip coffee in favour of the latte he’s brought her. He’s ordered it sweetened, something she only does on her worst or most exhausted days. This qualifies.

The colonel leans on the counter, turning a bowl full of green grapes between his palms. Sam watches his hands, the wiry fingers and tanned backs dark against the white ceramic. “Did you sleep?” he asks Cassie.

She nods. “Sam gave me something. I’m really groggy.” She picks up Sam’s mug of black coffee and sips at it and makes a face. Sam takes it from her and passes her the paper cup with the sweetened latte instead.

They drink their coffee in silence. Sam holds her mug between her hands. It’s her favourite, heavy and glazed blue. She traces the curve of the handle with a finger. Janet is dead, she thinks. Janet is dead. It’s hard not to cry.

Cassie is crying again, quietly, like she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it. “What do we do now?” She looks at Sam, lost. Yes, Sam thinks bitterly. She is the expert at losing mothers. “What do you do?”

It’s Jack who answers. “You make it through the day,” he says grimly. “And then the next one. You distract yourself. You do whatever you have to do.”

Sam clears her throat. “Usually there’s arrangements, and stuff. Calls to make. You don’t have to do that. General Hammond called your mom’s siblings. Your aunt Jennifer is coming.”

Cassie swipes at her cheekbone with the heel of her palm and looks at Sam. Her eyes are pleading and wet. “Please tell me I don’t have to stay with Aunt Jennifer.”

“You don’t have to stay with Aunt Jennifer,” says Sam firmly.

“Well,” says Jack to Cassie. “That was easy.”

“I had to stay with my version of Aunt Jennifer when my mom died,” Sam explains. “It was awful.”

Jack is hunched over with both forearms on the counter, but he leans up on an elbow so he can pop a grape into his mouth. “Didn’t you have your dad?”

“For a couple days,” says Sam. “Then he flew to Turkey.”

They stare at her.

“He… flew to Turkey?” asks Cassie. “Two days after your mom died?”

“He was in over his head,” Sam says. “He couldn’t manage. Work was how he dealt. And he was mourning, too.” She traces the curve of her mug handle again, dragging her fingertip over the rough edge where the clay has been left textured. Her nails are clean and buffed. Cassie had painted hers, but she and Janet couldn’t. “I understand him a lot better than I used to.”

“No wonder you dyed your hair purple.”

Cassie’s mouth pops open. “You dyed your hair purple? Wait, was it purple when you did your trespassing? Where did you even trespass?”

“The planetarium. And yes.”

“You broke into the planetarium,” Jack repeats.

“I wanted to turn on the projector and sit there under the dome by myself. With all the stars on.”

“There’s this thing,” says Cassie, “called the sky.”

Sam shrugs. It’s not the same, but she can’t explain. She’d wanted it so much. She was going to set the projector to run through the local night sky at 10x speed and she’d imagined that she’d sit under the wheeling stars and her head would go quiet. It goes quiet now, for just a nanosecond, when she walks through the Stargate. Otherwise the closest she can get is narrowing the aperture of her attention to a single problem, complex enough to be all-encompassing, so she can’t think about anything else, there isn’t space for anything else. She wants that now. Her stomach clenches. She wants – she wants to be off-world, she wants her lab, she wants her tools – there’s this problem that she’s been wanting to work on, the maximum neutron density tolerable by the Prometheus’s shields – her hands sweat, she needs a pencil and a legal pad –

“I get it,” says Cassie. She’s sitting on the other bar stool and she leans her head on Sam’s shoulder. “And I’m glad you’re not like your dad.”

Sam swallows the thickness in her throat. “I am.” She’d wanted to be. For a long time.

Colonel O’Neill looks at her. “We don’t have to talk about this.”

“No,” says Cassie. “Let’s. Sam’s dad taking off to Turkey might make my mom so angry that she’ll sit up in her grave –” She chokes and Sam stands and hugs her, and Jack comes around the counter and hugs her, too. Behind Cassie’s back, his hand finds hers and he intertwines their fingers. Sam can feel his pulse in the vein on the back of his hand.

After a while, Sam makes them have lunch even though none of them want to eat.

“I remember this part,” she says. “People make you eat. Right, sir?” she asks Jack.

“Right,” he says, so Sam heats up a frozen pizza and chokes down a slice to set a good example. Cassie picks the cheese and pepperoni off half her piece and then gives the rest to Jack.

They spend the afternoon watching movies. Cassie and her friends had gone to see The Italian Job last week and she’d liked it, but the colonel says there are much better heist films, so they watch Ocean’s 11 and The Taking of Pelham 123 – “Is this really a heist movie?” asks Cassie, “Because it feels like a train movie” – and Out of Sight, and then Sam makes instant noodles for dinner, and then the colonel says The Simpsons is on, so they watch that and an episode of CSI, and then it’s bedtime and they’ve survived.

Cassie had asked at dinner if Colonel O’Neill could stay the night, so the first time they have a foolproof excuse to sleep under the same roof planetside is also the first time they absolutely cannot share a bed. Lying in the living room in the middle of the night, Sam hears footsteps in the hall and then a shadow passes in front of the microwave light and someone opens the cabinet where the water glasses live.

She sits up on the couch. “Cass?”

“Sam?” She shuts the cabinet door and pokes her head into the living room. “I thought Uncle Jack would be out here.”

“I gave him my bed.”

“Why?”

“Did you really want to listen to him groan about his back all day tomorrow?”

The colonel’s voice drifts down the hall from her bedroom. “I heard that, Carter.”

He follows his voice in and they all sit in the living room. It’s twelve forty-three.

Cassie is curled on the armchair, clutching her shins to her chest again. She drags her face across the knees of her pyjama pants. “I’m so tired of crying,” she mumbles. “I can’t believe it’s been another day.”

“I know,” says Sam. “It feels like you’re betraying them. Making it to tomorrow again.”

Cassie props her chin on her knees. “Does it get better?”

“No,” says Sam. “It gets easier. Or some days, it’s easier. But every day it’s there.”

“The rain it raineth every day,” says Jack, and they look at him. “Shakespeare.”

Sam smiles a little, the corner of her mouth. “Nerd.”

Cassie yawns. “What movie is up next?”

“I think we’ve managed to transition from heist movies to George Clooney movies,” says Sam. “I vote for The Peacemaker.”

“Batman,” says Jack, and Cassie groans a drawn-out Noooo.

“Don’t worry, I don’t own that one,” says Sam.

In the end, they watch Shakespeare in Love.

“I feel ambushed,” says the colonel. “I don’t even know how this happened.”

“You were the one who quoted him,” says Cassie. “You put Shakespeare in our heads,” and he can’t argue with that, or at least he doesn’t try.

— — — — —

On Sunday afternoon, Cassie announces that she’s going to stay with her friend Hannah.

“I sleep over there all the time. When Mom works – when she worked overnight. It’s practically home. I think I need that, you know, without being at home. Not that this isn’t good,” Cassie rushes to assure her, “but you need to go back to work, don’t try to tell me you don’t. The SGC needs you, and I know that you need the SGC. It’s how you process. What?” she adds, when Sam only stares at her, hands on her hips and lips slightly pursed.

“You’re so practical,” says Sam. “It’s just very obvious who raised you.”

Cassie wraps her arms around Sam’s middle. “You all did,” she says. “Mom, and you and Uncle Jack and General Hammond, and everyone. You’re all very practical people, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Not Daniel,” says Sam automatically.

“No,” agrees Cassie. “Not Daniel.”

Sam rests her chin on top of Cassie’s head, which is getting pretty hard to do. Her scalp is warm and her hair smells like coconut shampoo. “Do you want anything from your room at home? I can bring it,” but Cassie shakes her head.

It turns out to be a good thing, because at 0300 Monday morning, Sam’s phone rings and General Hammond tells her that Agent Barrett at NID wants them in L.A.

“Sir, I’d prefer not to leave right now. Cassie –”

“I’m sorry, Major,” he says, “but this is not optional,” and by sunrise, she’s rolling up to a warehouse in East L.A.

By sunset, they’re on their way back home.

None of this was officially sanctioned. They’re flying commercial, not in uniform. The three of them squash into seats 22A–C: Teal’c on the aisle and Daniel in the window and Sam in the middle. As soon as they board, Daniel curls toward the wall of the cabin and refuses to respond to anyone. He hasn’t said a word since they left the warehouse. Over his shoulder, Sam watches the land fall away beneath the plane. Human-made lights, horizon to horizon even from up here, and Sam thinks about the bomb that didn’t go off and wishes she could think of it as a good day.

The lights peter out into the wilderness and there’s a bright moon, too bright for stars. When they reach the Rockies, the moonlight casts the peaks in a ghostly etching, silver chalk on black paper. Leaning past Daniel, Sam watches the mountains slip beneath the wing of the plane.

“It’s horrible,” she says quietly to his back, “but I’ve been jealous of you.”

Daniel doesn’t move, but she knows he’s listening. There’s something about the set of his neck. He got a haircut two days ago and the hairs above his nape are buzz-short and fine, in a line so perfectly clean it’s beautiful, and Sam looks at the backs of his ears and loves him so much she can’t bear it.

“You got to be with her until – until the very end. The very last seconds. And no one had to, to tell you. You didn’t have those few minutes when you were walking around thinking about other things, thinking she was alive when you were wrong, when all along she’d –”

She’s crying on a plane, right there in row 22, and when Daniel turns and touches her shoulder and says, “Sam” she puts her hands over her face.

“I’m sorry, Daniel,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

“For what?” he asks.

She’s sorry that this, out of all things possible, is the hand that fate has dealt. Sorry that the world’s unequal misery always seems to fall harder on them, and hardest of all on him, whose shoulders are least able to bear its weight. She’s sorry that he’s had to watch someone die twice in a month, one a friend and the other someone he was desperate to help, as he is desperate to help everyone, stranger and friend, known and newly met. She’s sorry to be so selfishly countering his sorrow with her own, sorry she has nothing with which to fill absence but more absence, that she can only soothe pain with more pain. She was assigned to the SGC and she received a gun, a uniform, a toolkit. It only comes with so much.

Teal’c unbuckles his seat belt and shifts so he’s blocking the view into their row, and Sam sinks over and puts her head on his broad lap, and Daniel half-lies along her back, cheek pressed to her spine so that he slowly dampens the tail of her shirt, and that’s how they land at Colorado Springs Airport.

They’ve been gone less than a day. Sam doesn’t even have luggage, just a backpack with a change of clothes and a toothbrush.

She waves goodbye to Teal’c and Daniel and gets into her car in the long-term lot and drives straight to Jack’s house.

He opens the door.

“Do you know what I thought I saw you go down,” she says. She swallows. “Anyone but him.” Please, she’d prayed. Let it be anyone but him.

Other people would tell her it’s not her fault, but Jack just looks at her with his dark eyes which at night are always black, like space filled with stars.

“Let me see,” she says, and he opens the door wider to let her in.

He’s only wearing boxers and a t-shirt, and he sits on the bed and gingerly pulls his shirt over his head. He’d gone in to the infirmary two days ago so the doctors could assess how the wound is healing. It looks like they’d taken off the bulky bandages and switched to a gauze dressing stuck on with tape, and one skein of athletic wrap around his abdomen to hold it all in place. Jack unwinds the wrap, picks at the tape. Beneath the gauze is a clear, nonstick burn dressing that he leaves alone. It’s a large area, a wound through the skin surrounded by several square inches of third-degree burns and then blisters that have started to heal. Without the vest insert, the blast would have put a hole right through his body. Sam looks at it for a long time. Her fingertips hover over the dressing.

There are medical supplies on his nightstand, more gauze and scissors and tape, and Sam cuts new gauze and rips off tape and rewraps it all firmly but not tight, and then she leans over and presses a kiss just above the tape, on the hot hot skin of his stomach.

He twitches. She does it again. Rests her forehead against his sternum and feels the edge of the gauze against her chin.

It’s all so much. “I need it to stop,” she whispers. Just for a few minutes. That’s all. For just a few minutes, she wants it all to stop.

He grips her hair and brings her face to his and kisses her with intent, his tongue slick against hers.

He retreats, flicks his tongue instead against her upper lip and sucks the lower one between his teeth. Sam is straddling him now and he falls back onto the bed, taking her with him and it makes the kiss messy, wet and their mouths sliding off each other, so Sam licks the side of Jack’s mouth. He’s scratchy with stubble and she remembers clocking it now, when he’d opened the door, the porch light catching on the silver-gray shadow across his jaw, his starry eyes hollowed out in the strong downlight. He was so hurt. She envies him this, an external wound as strong as the internal, instead of this endless nowhere pain –

She sits up and he wraps his hands around the sides of her ribcage and shoves them up under her bra so it pops above her breasts, still fastened. His thumbs smoothing over her nipples as she grinds down onto him. It’s hot; even with the window open and the darkness of the cold spring night creeping in Sam is burning. She grasps at her shirt and bra, but it’s all tangled now and won’t come above the points of her shoulders, until finally Jack lets go and helps her, pulling it all over her head so forcefully he leaves red streaks on her back. She fumbles her pants and underwear off, too, and then it’s suddenly cold, and Sam misses Jack’s skin on hers, she’s so desperate, so she lies down over him and feels the prickle of his chest hair as she slants her mouth back on his.

She wants it, she wants all of him at once, clutches at his smooth strong biceps, and it feels like the muscle is leaving bruises on her clenching fingers instead of the other way around. He bites hard at her lip and that hurts, too, it all hurts, everywhere she’s touching him and everywhere she isn’t but is desperate to.

The lamp is on amid the mess of used tape and gauze, and it throws strong shadows as Sam presses her hands into the mattress to prop herself up. Jack chases her mouth with his, leaning up, forgetting, and he makes a little gasp of pain, and Sam –

Sam realizes that she is furious.

She understands, suddenly, those myths of women, Greek or Norse or Celtic, who murdered kings and clawed down cities and massacred their warriors. She’s not angry at the world, at the hand of fate – she’s mad at Jack, rage so towering she could stand and pull helicopters out of the sky, like King Kong. Seething because he’s hurting himself, hating him because if he hadn’t made her want him so badly in the first place, none of this would have happened – furious that he’s made her care so much, so stupidly much she’s making deals with God – Anyone but him – If you die, I die – and almost leaving her –

She grits her teeth and pushes him back down on the bed. “Don’t move,” she bites out. “Don’t fucking move. Just – lie there.”

It’s implausible she can want him this direly when she also wants to rip his throat out with her animal teeth. Her anger sparks his, kindles like to like. “No,” he says, and clenches his jaw against the pain and flips them both over.

He seizes both her wrists and pins them above her head on the mattress with one hand and uses the other to shove her knee up and to the side, baring her to him as he bites at her nipple, not at all gently. She thrashes and fights him, her hair wild and matted about her face with the friction of the bedspread, but he’s got weight and gravity on his side and Sam even in her fury understands distantly that she’s trying not to hurt him, and that he is trying to reach her, deep in her anger and her savage grief, in the only way she’s ever let him.

You can’t save me, Sam wants to tells him. We can’t save each other. He’s trying to rescue her, but she has always been drowning and she has never, not once, found the surface; and then he takes his hand off her knee to line himself up and pushes into her.

They might not survive this. Might not survive each other, might not survive this desire whipping them before it, like an inferno in the dry pine woods chases away all oxygen. Jack is rough in all the ways he wasn’t when she’d asked him before, hands squeezing her wrists with enough force that she can feel her own bones grinding, the strength in them, and every time he draws back out and pushes back in, the drag of him inside her sets off sparklers in Sam’s brainstem, her stomach, her breasts, the skin of her elbows.

Bitterly, through what must be enormous agony, Jack keeps a furious pace. He didn’t – she wasn’t prepared, and it’s painful at first, the friction and the way he bottoms out against her cervix. He bites at her shoulder so hard she cries out and then, satisfied, finally lets her hands go so he can better support himself. He’s shaking, and they hurt, and what hurts most is how good it all feels; it always does, it’s why she’s angry.

She wraps her legs around his thighs and hikes her hips up and throws her head back with a cry. Tears, from her endless store of them, leak from her closed eyes. If you die –

“I need you,” she sobs. “I need you so much it’s not fair.”

She pounds her closed fist against his chest and he thrusts into her roughly, vindictively, and even that feels so good. Circling his ribs with her arms, she feels his smooth skin, his raw heat and the dampness stirring on his back, above the athletic wrap. He must be sweating into the gauze.

He drives into her like he’s either trying to cold-fuse them or to shatter them both into a trillion scintillating pieces, and Sam thinks of orbital bodies colliding, white dwarf stars revolving faster and faster, exchange of matter and angular momentum until the balance shifts and they tip into Type Ia supernova. Burying his face in her neck, Jack gasps, “Carter,” just the once, and struggles a hand free to touch her, but he groans with pain, so she does it instead, working her fingers between them, between the skin of her abdomen and the mangled bandaging on his, and pauses to feel him sliding in and out of her.

He comes a second before she does, releasing a noise into her neck that’s barely human, and then it’s over for her, nova, and the noise she makes is definitely human. As soon as she’s done, she pulls away and curls up with her back to him, sobbing.

His hand, when it lands on her shoulder blade, sears. “Sam,” he rasps.

“We’re killing you,” she says.

“No. No.”

Has he always been this kind? He’s lying, for her, to make it easier, and she cries harder.

“And this is killing me, but I don’t want to stop.”

“Sam.”

“It isn’t supposed to hurt this much!” she screams, bawls, into his over-warm, familiar red comforter. Please, she’d thought. Anything but this.

He tugs at her shoulder to turn her and holds her close, so they are coiled around each other, clinging. Desperate and irreparable and praying in each other. Let there be something else but this. Please.

Please, God, let there be a door beyond this suffering.

That opens on a room which is not so dark.

— — — — —

In the morning, she gets up before he does and drives to the base and doesn’t leave for nine days.

She spends the whole time avoiding the colonel, and she knows he’s avoiding her because she doesn’t see him. SG-1 is grounded until he recovers, and without a Chief Medical Officer, all active teams are only approved for urgent off-world travel. Sam doesn’t know what the other teams do when they’re not working. She doesn’t know anything outside the four walls of her lab. Concrete and metal, two stools, one chair. She calculates the upper limit on shield-tolerable neutron density. She files budget amendments. She upgrades the security triggers on the dialing protocols. She strips the portable naquadah generator and rebuilds it nineteen ounces lighter.

In the very first hours of what Sam thinks might be a Friday, Daniel appears in the doorway of her lab. The only light she’s lit is the work lamp on her table; it’s harsh and pure white and throws grotesque grasping shadows across the walls. In comparison, the backlight from the hallway fluorescents looks almost warm as it slides around the curve of Daniel’s cheek and flares the edges of his hair golden.

“I’m taking you to breakfast.”

Sam sets her tiny screwdriver down very carefully. Her hands are shaking with exhaustion and caffeine. She doesn’t bother telling him it’s two a.m. – it wouldn’t dissuade him, and her schedule is so screwed up that it doesn’t matter. Her philosophy for the past four days has been that if she isn’t eating more than one meal a day anyway, then it’s irrelevant what meal the commissary is serving. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, it’s all the same.

“I guess I have fifteen minutes,” she says.

Daniel shakes his head. “Off base. Come on.”

He doesn’t stick around long enough for her to tell him no, although she would have.

Outside, the air is damp, and warmer than she expected. Spring has started without her. In the parking lot, the scent of soil finds them, loam and grass and the earliest blooms – columbine, yellow forsythia, lilacs wearing their clouds of fragrance like old ladies at the opera in their heavy perfume. It astounds her, the world’s continued presence, its vivacity, the unquenchable authority of its sheer existence. Utterly indifferent to her. Daniel has parked in the far corner of the lot, where an oak branch leans over the pavement. She touches the soft new buds with one finger. He watches her and says nothing.

The inside of his car is fabric-muffled and peaceful, and they float over the black roads. He takes them to an all-night diner that blazes white squares of light onto the sidewalk. Inside, they shuffle into a booth and examine sticky laminated menus for several minutes in silence. There’s almost no one else in the restaurant: an older man at the bar, a young couple at a table in the middle, sipping milkshakes.

Sam isn’t sure what they’re doing here. She’d assumed Daniel had something to say, but if so, he isn’t saying it. Maybe he was just trying to get her out of the mountain.

The waitress comes by to take their drink orders.

“Coffee,” says Sam, folding up her menu. “Black is fine.”

Daniel leans in and puts his hand over her wrist. She flinches like a startled sparrow. “Sam,” he says, “I don’t think more coffee is what you need right now.”

Her eyes flick to him; he’s raising his brows and peering sideways at her in anticipatory defensiveness. She feels the fire of her resistance flare up only briefly and then flicker out. She’s so tired. She drops her eyes to the table in a kind of nod.

“Do you have milk?” Daniel asks the waitress.

“Sure.”

“Can you heat some up?” he says – without consulting her, without even looking back at her. “And I’ll have a Sprite.”

Sam wants to protest being treated like a kid, overtired and condescended to. But it also feels good to let someone else make a decision for her, even one this small, to have this one thing taken blessedly and entirely out of her hands.

“You bet, honey,” says the waitress, and retreats.

Daniel leans back and rolls his head along the booth’s back to gaze out the window. He’s waiting, she realizes, for her to come to him, like a fawn in a meadow. She doesn’t.

The waitress returns with their drinks. Sam sips her milk, looking out the window, as Daniel orders a western omelette. She hasn’t had warm milk since she was a little girl. It tastes insipid, and it’s thick on her tongue.

“Sam?” Daniel prompts. She shrugs, not looking, and he orders her buttermilk pancakes and blueberries.

In the waitress’s absence, Daniel says nothing, for a very long time. He’s patient. Not always, not even usually, but he can be. Right now, it could be condescending again, but instead Sam is grateful for his undemanding presence – for making her leave, for bringing her here but not pushing. It feels like he loves her, like he’ll love her regardless.

She props her elbow on the table, pushes her hand through her hair, and lets her forehead rest on it. Her eyes won’t focus. The gray formica swims in her vision. The silence chokes her. The old man at the bar clinks his coffee cup into its saucer.

“I’m sleeping with Colonel O’Neill.”

“Yeah,” says Daniel, drawing it out.

She looks up. “You knew,” she accuses.

“Sam,” he says, and means, Please, like he’s insulted.

He’s trying to lighten the atmosphere, but she doesn’t think it can be lightened, not for her. It’s been pressing in on her lungs for weeks. Months. Sam can’t breathe, can’t shift her shoulders to ease it or stand up under the weight. She can’t bear it. She isn’t strong enough.

“It was supposed to make things easier.”

“Has it?”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. No.” She traces looping patterns on the tabletop, watching her finger move aimlessly. “Now it just hurts differently. We have each other to lean on, but this is – it’s also something we’re doing to each other. Before, it was something painful that was being done to us. Now, it’s something we’re hurting each other with.”

“You were always hurting each other with it,” he says gently.

He’s talking about all the longing, all the agonizing, futile, fruitless closeness. She nods in admission.

“But now we’re lying all the time.” There’s nothing outside the window, just blackness and empty street. The nothing blurs with tears. “And we’re betraying everything we care about, which means we’re also betraying each other. But we only have each other, and it has to be worth the sacrifice, so we cling even tighter – but it’s like…” Her voice cracks, and she can’t stop it. “– The more we do, the more we break things between us. It’s destroying us.” She rubs the heels of her palms into her eyes. “Daniel,” she pleads into her hands, “I don’t know what to do.”

Their food arrives. Sam tries to surreptitiously wipe her eyes as the waitress sets down the plates. She’s also brought a small stack of napkins that she drops on the table next to Sam’s elbow, nudging them toward her in wordless sympathy. As she walks away, Sam grabs one and dabs at her eyes.

“Sam.” Daniel’s voice is low, warm. “We’ll figure this out.”

Sam scoffs, sniffing. “You think I haven’t thought about it?” Working things out is what she does, but she hasn’t been able to think of a way out of this. Not ever. “It’s unsolvable.”

“Nothing’s unsolvable. Come on, we’re proof of that.”

“You died, Daniel,” she snaps, reminding him, furious that he has to be reminded. She still sees him sometimes when she closes her eyes, when it’s late and she’s heartsore: covered in bandages, reduced to only his eyes and his endless, astronomical pain.

“I came back.”

Sam shakes her head. She doesn’t know how to tell him that it isn’t that neat. Too much was lost in the intervening time. Whether he’d stayed gone or not, he’d died. And so had all the best parts of her and the colonel, all the belief and virtue in them. All the hope, the unbending rectitude and diligent faith in duty and purpose. Turned corrupt, gray and caking and withered into dust.

“I came back,” Daniel insists, and Sam closes her eyes against his goodness.

— — — — —

Daniel drops her back at her car and stays until she gets in it and turns the key. He makes a stern “I’m watching you” gesture, then drives off.

It’s 4:13 a.m. Sam sits in her car with her hands on the steering wheel, listening to the growl-hum of the engine. She pictures her cold house. The build-up of mail, the Sunday paper on the doorstep, the darkness inhabiting all the stale rooms. She pictures it until the dashboard clock turns over to 4:17, and then she turns the car off and goes back under the mountain.

She shakes with fatigue every time she stands still, so she doesn’t. In the gym, she lifts weights until the pancakes settle, then keys up the treadmill. At 5:45, Teal’c comes in for his morning workout. He nods to her and mounts a treadmill two down from hers. He always runs three miles before he hits the weight room.

The only sound is their breathing, Teal’c’s measured and even, Sam’s raspy and rapid. She feels the shake start up in her legs, grits her teeth, and dials up the speed out of contrariness. She’s been running for forty minutes and there’s a knife in her throat. It presses its blade against her windpipe and she can’t breathe. She can’t breathe. She thinks of Daniel saying, You were always hurting each other. She gasps, blinks tears away, and then the knife hurts more because there’s a lump in her throat along with it. She swipes at her face, grits her teeth again, tunes the machine faster. She’s sprinting now, flat out, legs flying. She jabs the button again. Faster. Faster.

“Major Carter.”

Sam gasps one more choked sob and smacks the red panic button on the control panel. She clutches the handgrips, head bowed, panting and sweating. Lifts her shoulder and draws it across her wet cheek.

To her left, she hears Teal’c’s treadmill wind down to a stop.

“Do you wish to talk about it, Major Carter?”

Sam shakes her head. Fumbling for her water bottle, she fails to get the top open on the first go and has to try again. She misses her mouth, then just pours it over her face instead.

From the darkness of her eyelids, she asks, “What should I do?”

“I cannot say.”

That’s fair. Sam wasn’t sure what she’d wanted him to tell her.

She breathes out slowly. Steels her liquid muscles to get her off the treadmill, out of the room, into the shower and through the unspooling day.

“You are one of the strongest people I know,” says Teal’c.

Her breath catches. Teal’c says so little that every word matters. He hadn’t said warriors; he’d said people.

“Perhaps you have merely lost faith in that strength.”

Sam looks up at him. His face is open, warm. Her throat closes tight again, but this time the ache is good.

“Thanks, Teal’c,” she says.

— — — — —

She was always going to wash up at his door eventually. They come together slowly and tenderly this time, as if they’re both apologizing, and they’re careful because Jack is still healing, still sore and broken. It’s a lot like waiting for shields to regenerate, now that she thinks about it. That barrier between you and the dark world, the skin that keeps out fire and radiation and the airless void, and cradles the precious cargo of life – it was damaged, and it must regenerate. Be it Asgard technology or epithelial cells.

He dozes, and then she wakes him and he slips back inside her, lazy and sweet. He kisses her on the forehead and she pants into his sleep-warm skin. It should have been like this the last time, Sam thinks. It should always be like this.

After, they lie facing each other and Jack traces meandering patterns on her hip. The lights are off but the window is open, and slats of moonlight and streetlight draw his face out of shadow. There are lines around his eyes, from squinting and smiling and pain, and Sam touches them with a fingertip. He closes his eyes. She caresses down his cheek, along the vertical line there that always deepens when he grimaces, and rests two fingers on his lips. He kisses them.

“Jack,” she says, and he only hums, so she says it again, more firmly, and he opens his eyes, and she looks at him helplessly.

“I can’t breathe anymore. Can you?”

“Not without you.”

“Not with me, either,” she says sadly.

He shifts to prop himself up on an elbow, and brushes her hair back with the backs of his fingers, and cups her face in one hand. His palm is hardened, and as warm as desert sand, and it’s impossible not to close her eyes. “I can’t lose you. Even with – I can’t lose you.”

“That’s what you think.”

A tear escapes from her closed eyelids, and he swipes it away with his thumb.

“It’s not supposed to hurt this much,” he says, echoing her.

He sounds so hopeless that she opens her eyes. He’s crying, too, in perfect silence. She gathers his head to her chest and kisses his hair and scratches at the nape of his neck.

“It’s not,” she agrees.

Nothing is unbearable, wrote Saint-Ex, of his time dying in the desert. Tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, I shall learn definitively that nothing is unbearable… I thought one day that I was drowning, imprisoned in a cockpit, and I did not suffer much.

Her suffering has always been survivable; his suffering has always been theoretical. Obviously, foundationally true, but still theoretical, like gravitational waves, or the Higgs Boson. Not anymore. It isn’t, she realizes, that they are two bound objects trapped inescapably in each other’s orbit. It’s that they became caught in the same external gravity well, of misery and despair.

Faith, Teal’c had told her. That’s what he said she’d lost. Faith in her own strength. She’d thought they were drowning, and she couldn’t save them. They hadn’t been able to save themselves on that freezing mothership at the bottom of the ocean, and they couldn’t do it here, either.

But she’d been wrong. They weren’t drowning. It just felt like it. Their despair had taken them under, for a while. It isn’t a failure; there is nothing shameful in surrender. But they aren’t sinking. They can breathe.

Jack is still weeping soundlessly, drenching the skin of her chest, and she cradles his head and rocks him. It’s the middle of the night, and outside there is nothing. There is only this bed, and them in it. Beyond, no moon, no stars. But she has seen the stars: from Earth, from orbit, from the foreign soil of hundreds of planets with their varying gravities and strange-tasting air. Even behind the clouds, the stars are still swinging wildly. Like that that first night together, this, here: they remain, the still point of the turning world.

She presses another kiss to the top of his head.

“It’s okay,” she whispers, as he fades into sleep. “It’s okay, Jack. I’m going to fix it.”

— — — — —

When he wakes in the morning, she has been sitting at his dining room table for an hour. There is a mug of coffee in front of her, his Bart Simpson mug that he keeps in the cabinet next to the fridge. She sees him notice. On the kitchen counter, the coffeemaker is gurgling out a second pot.

He looks from her to it, and he knows.

He clenches his fist at his side, and then lets it go. He nods, once.

“You always were good at saving yourself, Carter.”

But she doesn’t even have time to feel the wound before he shakes off the bitterness.

“No,” he corrects. “You’re always good at saving us.”

If she stays, she will weep. She puts down the mug with shaking hands and gathers her jacket off the back of her chair. Outside the front windows, the sky is shading toward gray.

She opens her mouth to say something, but doesn’t. Instead, she walks to the door. He’s standing utterly motionless in the hallway. She walks past him, and opens the door and goes out.

As she steps off the porch, she looks back. All the kitchen lights are on, so she sees him clearly, as if she’s looking through a frame at a painting. He takes a few stiff steps to the table and reaches out and touches her still-warm mug, as if it were someone he’d loved.

She turns away again. The neighborhood is silent, the street empty. There is only the dark stale end of the night.

And at the very last moment, morning.

— — — — —

She goes home every night now. She does small, human things: she plants flowers, cooks dinner, reads, watches television. Cleans out the gutters. After the school year, Cassie moves back home for the summer and Sam goes with her, for these last few months before Aunt Jennifer puts the house up for sale. Together, they pack up Cassie’s room into two piles. One will go in the back of the colonel’s truck to Stanford, the other to Sam’s guest room. On a Sunday, Teal’c and Daniel come over to Sam’s place and the four of them paint an accent wall in Cassie’s new room.

When Sam opens the can of paint that Cassie and Daniel brought back from Home Depot, she’s surprised. “You didn’t want purple again?”

Cassie shrugs. “I had purple for a while. I wanted something new.”

It’s a slate blue, the colour of summer storm clouds. Sam runs her fingertip around the edge of the can. “I like it,” she says.

In August, on a scouting mission on P4X-558, she walks side by side with the colonel over sandy soil. There’s scrub brush and a bird, high on a thermal above.

“Carter,” he says abruptly. They’ve been silent for an hour. “I’m – sorry. For everything.”

It’s a lot to apologize for, and little of it is his fault. Nor is it really hers. It was just – something had broken. She thinks about the conversation she’d had with Daniel, eons ago, about the slow boring of hard boards. Maybe that’s all this was. She and Jack, they’d skipped to the end. And you can’t do that.

He’s not looking at her. His dark sunglasses are clipped to his face and he stares at the trail, going on and on ahead into the shimmering air. The sun is hot and the ground smells like baking dust, and there’s a blister starting up on Sam’s left heel. The back of her neck is beginning to burn, and she’s – happy. Here, with him, just like this.

“We were just asleep for a while,” she tells him. “And now we’re waking up.”

They are. She is: waking up. It all seems like one long, black, tangled night, and when she looks back she’s convinced that the last two years took place entirely in darkness. She isn’t sure she can remember the sun of this planet ever making an appearance at all.

Now the summer is here and the air is wild and sweet, and kids play on the street outside her house until the lights come on in the long slow gloaming. Cassie’s room is the blue of summer rain. Sam reads in the evenings: physics journals and mystery novels and Jules Verne. She wakes up in her bed, and there’s nobody there.

They hadn’t drowned. They’d survived, like Saint-Exupéry in the Sahara, who’d rescued himself the only way he could: by living long enough to be saved. They’d only forgotten: forgotten what her father had said about taking the long road, forgotten the lessons learned by the first pilots to break into clear thin air and find another world above the Earth.

Experience, Saint-Ex wrote, teaches us that to love is not to gaze at one another but to gaze together in the same direction.

Sam touches the colonel lightly on the shoulder, briefly, like a bird alighting on the edge of a pool to sip cool water before it takes to the sky again. Then she drops her hand and follows his eyes to the horizon.

Chapter Text

VI.

And we woke at dawn
and watched the sun glide over the hill.
I just said the first
three words that popped into my head.

— Margot & The Nuclear So and So’s, “A Light On A Hill”

— — — — —

After her father dies, Sam takes three weeks of leave – “Wow, Sam,” says Cassie, on the phone from Stanford, “like a normal person and everything” – and spends the first two at Mark’s house in San Diego. The kids are unaffected. They barely knew their grandfather. Sam and Mark stay up late drinking wine after Jenny’s gone to bed, talking.

“Are you well, Major Carter?” Teal’c isn’t much for phone calls, but apparently he feels that this is worth an exception. Sam’s sheepishly touched.

“Well, I’m crying a lot,” she says. Outside, the trees sway in the wind like the ocean, cresting and falling back. The sun shards through their twisting leaves.

“It is good to mourn,” says Teal’c. “It means the one we miss lived a life of meaning, and the absence of that meaning will be deeply felt. The only lives worth living are those that touch others. I hope one day to be as mourned as Jacob Carter.”

It’s sweet, in a way that only he could manage. “Thanks, Teal’c.”

Her conversations with Daniel are more frequent.

“Oh,” he says in the middle of one of them, “Jack and that CIA liaison broke up.”

“He told you that?”

“Yeah,” says Daniel. “Which took some explaining, because I didn’t even know he was seeing the CIA liaison. I’m actually not sure I knew the SGC has a CIA liaison…”

“Then why did he want you to know?”

“I do realize that I have a reputation as the base gossip,” says Daniel. “I’m not ashamed.”

“So?”

“Sam,” he says with evident patience, “he wanted you to know.”

Sam shakes her head, even though he can’t see her. “That seems unlikely.”

“Oh my God,” mutters Daniel. “It’s like being ascended again.”

“In what way?”

There’s a pause. “I’m going to hang up now,” says Daniel in a very measured tone.

“Okay,” says Sam, trying to keep the grin out of her voice. “Talk to you soon.”

The night before she goes back to work, she slips onto base without telling anyone she’s coming. She doesn’t want to be hit all at once by the minutiae of it all, the emails and forms and spreadsheets. Better to organize things now, just for an hour. Soften the blow.

Over the weekend, General O’Neill had called to ask whether she wanted to start with half-days. She’d said no.

“Good,” he’d said. “I mean – we miss you here.”

It had felt easy to say back to him, “I miss you, too.”

There are a couple of personnel requests on the top of her inbox that Sam goes ahead and signs. She’s threading through the darkened halls to drop them on the general’s desk when she hears music. Strange music, thin with distance. She follows it down the corridor and around the corner.

It’s coming from Daniel’s office. He’s at his desk but isn’t doing anything, just sitting, just listening. The music has a slightly foreign tonal pattern, haunting, joy and melancholy all mixed together. Daniel reaches up and takes his glasses off and wipes his eyes, which is how she notices he’s crying. It’s strange, to think of other people mourning her father.

She knocks on the doorframe, and he smiles and replaces his glasses as he waves her in. She sits in one of his extra chairs and props her chin on crossed forearms on the desk.

“What is this?” There’s a picked string instrument like a lute, a windy pipe, drums, voices.

“The – it’s called the Seikilos Epitaph.”

“It’s nice,” says Sam.

“It’s the oldest tune we know. From Ancient Greece.”

“It’s from Earth?” Somehow this surprises her.

He nods. “It was carved on a tombstone. We didn’t even know how to read it until a few decades ago. We found the Stargate before we could read Greek musical notation, actually. But we wanted to. You ever notice that? We want to bring everything back. We make things and we don’t want to lose them. Eventually we figured it out. So here it is. Three thousand years later.”

Sam turns her head, presses her cheek to the back of her hand. There’s a whole chorus of voices, singing in harmony. “What does it mean?”

Daniel clears his throat. “While you live, shine. Have no grief at all. Life exists only for a short while, and Time demands his due.”

They listen to the music fade, the drums lingering.

“We really haven’t changed at all.” Sam laughs, a little wetly. “My dad said basically the same thing to me. Before he died.”

“I was in Our Town in high school. You know – ‘Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?’ ”

“Were you George? Or the Stage Manager?”

“I played Editor Webb.”

Sam shakes her head, amazed. Daniel is just so inexhaustibly Daniel. He can never be anything else.

“Of course you did,” she says.

— — — — —

The following week, the general finds her in her lab. She’s peering closely at the mechanism on a battery device from P3X-773. The people there are agrarian, but they’d found a cache of staff weapons left behind by Ra’s Jaffa hundreds of years ago and managed to adapt them into a power source for their irrigation system, which is so cool that Sam can’t tear herself away from examining the one they’d let SG-5 borrow. Plus, she wants to get it back to them. It’s almost harvest time there.

She’s so absorbed that she doesn’t notice the general right away. The corridor lights are half-dimmed, so he doesn’t cast a shadow into the globe of illumination from her work light, and it isn’t until he shifts to lean against the doorframe, watching her, that she hears him and looks up.

Without backlighting, his face is clear, his expression surprised and open and a little resignedly soft. The white light catches on his stubble and draws deep shadows at his collar, and Sam looks back down at the battery in her hand. Lines up her screwdriver again to lift a panel made from a woody, fire-hardened reed.

“It’s two-thirty in the morning.”

She doesn’t answer, because something that obvious doesn’t deserve a response. The panel pops loose. It’s been carefully grooved so it snaps in and out – delicate work, by hand.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, and she puts down the screwdriver and the reed panel and raises her eyebrows at him.

“What are you doing here, sir?”

He grins a little wryly. “Carter,” he says, “what do you say we get out of here.”

While you live, she thinks, shine.

“Yes, sir,” she says. “Let’s.”

It’s that time in mid-June when the sun is hot during the day and the air is chilly at night, and Sam stops by her locker to change into motorcycle boots and jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and a leather jacket and pick up her helmet before she meets the general at the front gate. They sign out together, first him, then her. He waits while she signs her name, and they walk out into the fresh slap of pre-dawn air.

Out under the sky, he stretches, works his shoulders a little. He squints at the parking lot. “You took the bike?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can we –” He’s still gazing across the lot, self-consciously. “Can we take it out?”

He’s never ridden on her bike before. She keeps an extra helmet in a saddlebag. No storage in the Indian. “You might be cold like that,” she says. He’s wearing a fleece over a gray t-shirt, nothing wind-proof.

He zips the fleece all the way up the collar. “I’ll be fine.”

She takes him up Pikes Peak.

It’s a long drive, and the passenger seat isn’t as comfortable as the driver’s position, and they’re both cramped, but the general doesn’t seem to mind. There aren’t handholds for him, so he grips the sides of her jacket, and when she stops at a red light twenty minutes into the drive and takes off her glove to check her watch, she brushes his fingers. They’re so cold that she nudges his hands into her jacket pockets instead, and he holds on like that for ninety minutes, a warm bulwark against her back.

By the time they’re winding their way up the mountain, there’s enough light enough to see the slope above them and the shape of the ridges between the road and the drop-off below. Sam parks in the lot and switches off the motor, and they leave the helmets and walk past the visitor’s center and find a perch looking east toward the city. The rock they’ve chosen is flat but small, and they’re pressed together all along Sam’s left side. It’s the frosty hour just before dawn, and Sam is grateful for his warmth.

Slowly, other people arrive – eager tourists with yawning kids, early hikers, intrepid bikers – to catch the sunrise. The air is clear, some streaks of cirrus cloud and nothing else but blue atmosphere, and when the sun crests the horizon, the reddish sandstone and the green of new-summer trees sparkle to life. Sam squints into the light, following the line of the backlit ridges. It looks like the peaks are pulled up by fishing line anchored to eyehooks in the sky.

“Better than the planetarium,” says the general.

“I don’t know, sir,” says Sam. “I never got to find out.” She shoots him a grin. “We could always give breaking in a second try.”

“What are you doing tonight?” he jokes.

He’s so present, so solid next to her that she almost can’t believe it, and she scoots just a little closer to feel herself butt up against the ungiving muscle and bone. Jack brings his arm to her far shoulder and rubs briskly up and down.

“Cold?”

She looks up at him. His iron-gray hair is sparkling in the sunlight and she thinks of how she’s watched it change colour over the years. It suits him better this way. He’s still looking at her questioningly, and he’s squinting against the white early sunlight, and it makes fine lines wrinkle into folds at the corner of his eyes, and she looks at his face and thinks his name and feels a happiness balloon up through her like the expanding envelope of a red giant.

Jack, she thinks. Jack, Jack, Jack.

“I love you,” she says.

It’s maybe the sunlight. The cool dawn air. Because he had sat quietly at her side for the last hour as they watched the sky begin to glow, and a Greek poet said three thousand years ago that Life exists only for a short while, and only a few decades back people made the words sing out again, and her father said, I just want to know you’re going to be happy. It’s because she owes them all that much.

He looks at her with stunned wonder, and she can’t help but laugh.

“You knew that,” she says.

Jack doesn’t laugh. His left hand flutters, like he wants to put it somewhere.

Sam feels her expression grow serious. “I never want loving each other to be a problem. I don’t think it ever was, really. The problem was that we treated it like a problem. Like it was some kind of a failure.”

“We did fail, Carter.” Jack’s voice is rough.

“In our actions,” says Sam. “Not in our feelings.” His right arm is still wrapped around her shoulders, his hand on the upper part of her jacket sleeve, and she reaches across her body to intertwine her fingers with his. “It was never an existential question. It was logistical. Maybe tactical.”

He clears his throat. Then he clears it again, as if he’s afraid. “I’m good at tactics,” he says finally. “You’re good at logistics.”

Sam nods. “In two hours, we’re going to go back to the SGC and I’m going to put in the paperwork for a transfer to Area 51.”

“That’s…”

“Not ideal,” says Sam. “No, sir. It’s not perfect. But I don’t want to wait for perfect anymore. I want –” She swallows. It will be hard, giving up going off-world. She closes her eyes and thinks with a stab of pain of the sunrise above the ruins on the small planet P5X-777. She thinks of Jack handing her a mug of coffee and then she opens her eyes and looks up at the cirri hanging in the blue, shading from tulip-pink to white. Earth has better coffee than anywhere else in the galaxy. Well, maybe not the coffee in the commissary. But elsewhere.

“I want to buy you a new duvet,” she finishes. “If I’m going to come back on weekends.”

“Long drive,” says Jack.

“We send cargo flights back and forth all the time,” says Sam. “I can hitch a ride.”

Jack gazes at her. He still looks stunned.

“Why?” he asks.

“Something my dad said. Also, there’s a part in there about an Ancient Greek song inscribed on a tombstone.”

“Remind me,” Jack says faintly, “to thank Daniel sometime.”

Sam adjusts her grip on his hand and tilts her head into his chest. “Think he’ll be mad? That I’m leaving?”

“I’ll send him back to P3Y-323 with SG-5, to translate that whole temple they found. I’m not sure he’ll notice for three months.”

There’s a long silence. A little boy, maybe eight years old, clambers around them on the rocks, followed by his older sister, who is putting sincere effort into looking too cool to be there. A few cyclists up on the road laugh as they re-mount their bikes, clipping into their pedals. Off to Jack’s left, a hiker unwraps a granola bar. A breeze is coming up, and it ruffles the hair on Sam’s forehead. The sun is soothingly warm on her black leather jacket.

Jack picks up his left hand and puts it on her jaw, and turns her head and kisses her.

It’s slow and sweet and relieved, and Sam sinks against him. He tilts his lips against hers, mobile but unhurried. Sam inhales sharply at the change in angle, and Jack teases at her upper lip with his tongue but doesn’t push farther. They stay there so long that he’s panting, a little, when he lets her go.

“We haven’t signed the paperwork,” he says. “I know we’re doing it right this time. But I just wanted to…”

Sam’s struggling to breathe, still. Her eyes are wet. “God,” she says. “I missed you. Jack. I missed you.”

He turns his head to kiss her temple. The sun rises a little higher.

“I want to buy you something,” he says suddenly.

“What?” Sam wipes the corner of her eye and squints at him, suspicious. “It’s not expensive, is it?”

“No, I mean… just something. Anything. A flower. A book.”

Sam looks across the ridges, down to the plain below, where Colorado Springs is laid out like imagery from a UAV. It’s beginning to get tiring, gazing into the relentless sun.

“How about a coffee and a breakfast burrito?” she says.

She drives them slowly down the mountain and back into town, and stops at the diner she’d gone to with Daniel. They order coffee before they’re finished sitting down and wait quietly for a few minutes, looking at their menus. It’s nearly seven and the place is full of breakfasters, elderly men and pre-work commuters and two couples with babies. Sam still feels buoyant with happiness, like the balloon of it is pressing out against the inside of her skin.

“Jack,” she says.

“What?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing. I just like saying your name.”

He looks bemused.

Sam does order a breakfast burrito, and Jack gets scrambled eggs and toast and bacon. When they’re done, he pays the bill and they head back out into the sunlight. There’s a pearly haze coming up now from the horizon. It will be hot later, Sam thinks.

At the front gate, they sign back in.

“Morning, sir,” says the airman on duty. “Morning, ma’am.”

“Hey, Garcias,” says the general easily.

They wait together at the elevator. Once the door closes, he rests a hand on her lower back.

“Sir,” she says, and he sighs, caught, and takes it away again.

The elevator stops at his floor. “See you shortly, sir,” she says.

“I’ll be waiting,” he answers.