Chapter 14
Jack's Descent
Jack finds himself parked in Sam’s driveway more evenings than not since he left her on Votan and tonight’s no different. He doesn’t sleep. He’s not really eating. He’s living off hot showers, black coffee and a blind rage that’s going to get him killed or fired one.
After the debrief – and the thrilling tale of SG-1’s failed attempt at a rescue – Hammond had sent a MALP through the gate and Jack hadn’t even had to ask. When it was blown to smithereens by a staff weapon upon arrival on the other side, however, even Jack had admitted that sending a contingent of personnel through the gate was more stupid than risky.
And as if the oppressive guilt weren’t enough, he’s got the way Daniel looks at him all the time like Jack just shot his puppy. Or, in reality, like he just left Daniel’s best-friend-cum-little-sister in the hands of a First Prime who they knew for absolute certain was using her for things none of them would even begin to abide on Earth.
Yes, on day one, Jack was angry, scared, lost, beaten, but above all motivated. He knew precisely where Sam was and what wouldn’t get her back. Then they couldn’t use that knowledge. Jack took little comfort in those first days when Teal’c insisted – with setup they had on Votan – that Sam was unlikely to be moved. But now, here on day five, he’s already grasping at straws and while knowing Sam’s likely precisely where he left her is a small comfort, it’s a comfort nonetheless.
He sits in his truck until a shaft of moonlight seems to illuminate her house key where it swings slightly on the key ring that dangles from his ignition. Deciding he’s a man who should start looking for signs he uses his key to let himself into her home. He finds it oddly clean – clean in the way things are when they’re simply undisturbed. He’s not really sure how much time she ever spent at home or what she did when she was here, but it feels like whatever it was it wasn’t actually living in her house. Things are placed so specifically as if for decoration – even the reading glasses on the end table next to the couch.
Since it’s been too many days since he’s seen her, and since it’s been so many nights since he slept, and mostly because it’s been too long since his hands had a purpose, he finds himself collecting her mail in the dark. Then, a few hours later he finds himself soaking up a bit of quiet in the armchair in the corner. A few hours after that and his cell phone is ringing.
“Jack, where the hell are you?”
“What do you need, Daniel?”
“It’s... The MALP, Jack. Today’s MALP – it’s still transmitting signal.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Gear up.”
“General Hammond’s already made the order, Jack. We’re just waiting on you.”
He’s already in the truck when he hangs up on Daniel. His first reaction is elation – they’re going to go get Sam and bring her home. His second reaction is self-loathing – they’re doing it twenty minutes later than they should be doing it because he had to go stroke an emotional bruise. What the hell kind of man is he anyway these days?
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
George tries not to show his disappointment and frustration when teams 1, 5 and 13 come back through the gate. Dixon gives a rough shake of his head when he chances a look at George and all the other men’s eyes are affixed to the ramp when they hand over their guns.
He sighs heavily before keying the button for the intercom system. “Med evals, gentleman. Debrief in an hour.”
Then he holes himself up in his office and tries to remind himself he’s a General in the God Damned Air Force and not a grieving man. A commotion in the Gate room draws his attention and he sees Colonel O’Neill losing his shit on a young Lieutenant and watches as that young Lieutenant stands there and takes it like a man, just like O’Neill needs him to. These people are all far too good at being what everyone else needs and far too bad at taking care of themselves. Proof positive, he thinks, illustrated by Samantha Carter’s capture in the first place as she was doing far too good a job at protecting her team and too doing damn little to protect herself.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Daniel cringes when he hears Jack’s heavy and angry sounding footfalls stop inside the door of his office. He steels himself while his back is still turned to his always surly teammate and then turns around, schooling his expression into some combination of hope and will. “What’s up, Jack?”
“Do you have anything?”
Daniel indicates the books scattered around him – most open – and the sheaf of papers in his hand. “Nothing you haven’t already been briefed on.”
“It’s been almost a week since you came up with anything new.”
“You think I’m…what? Playing hooky or something, Jack? That I’m wasting time the three or four hours a night I’m sleeping? Or maybe you’re objecting to those breaks I take here and there to eat and shower.”
“Carter is being tortured right now, Daniel.”
“And I’m working as fast as I can.” Daniel tries so hard to be angry at Jack – for leaving Sam, for putting so much pressure on him, for just basically being an ass since the first SGC sanctioned rescue attempt had yielded little more than a couple of staff blast injuries for SGC personnel – but he finds all he’s really got the gumption for is another round of tears. He squeezes his eyes shut and hopes to keep from falling apart in front of Jack completely. The last time that had happened both men walked away feeling worse than they’d felt beforehand.
Jack turns to go but Daniel feels compelled to…what? Soothe Jack? Defend himself? He’s not entirely sure. “I’m working as fast as I can,” he repeats but this time with earnest. He just hopes Jack believes him.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Teal’c flattens O’Neill to the mat for the fifth time since they have been sparring. He thinks the younger and still hotheaded man may need the physical reminder of his body’s limitations as he seems fairly intent on pushing himself past the point of usefulness. His surly attitude and short tempter have intensified and those things, coupled with the physical manifestation of his anger and frustration, have made for a man most on base avoid and would brand as a loose cannon.
“You should stay down, O’Neill,” he advises when O’Neill rolls over with a groan and pushes himself onto his hands and knees.
“Or what? You’ll put me back down?” Jack looks over his shoulder and meets Teal’c’s eye.
“Yes.”
O’Neill rolls his eyes and then does not follow Teal’c’s suggestion. So they square off once more. While O’Neill strikes with more force than usual and while the blows he lands are sharp and jarring he is predictable in his unpredictability and Teal’c has no problem knocking him down once more.
“You know, a real friend might throw a bout or two so I could get my head straight.” O’Neill throws an arm over his eyes.
“I do not believe that to be true, O’Neill.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“Looks like Mister Teal’c got the better of you tonight, Colonel.”
Jack just grunts while Janet swabs antibiotic ointment on the cut over his eyebrow and tapes it closed with a butterfly bandage.
“I’ve patched you up a handful of times over the last few weeks, sir,” she notes.
“I’m fine, Janet.”
She doesn’t say anything but he doesn’t like the knowing look she gives him. She hands him a prescription bottle with a few painkillers inside and sends him home. It’s not until he’s checked the mail, sorted it and twisted a cap off a bottle of beer that he’s aware sometime over the course of the last couple of weeks home became Sam’s place.
The next day when he checks her mail there’s a late notice. He starts ripping through envelopes and makes sense of all the mail that’s arrived in her absence. When he sees the reminder notice for the mortgage followed by a much more strongly worded demand letter he knows he’s got to do something.
He looks around him at the place that should remind him so much of her but really only serves to remind him she’s gone because until her capture he’d probably only been here a couple three times. So he sits down and writes a few checks, makes notes on the payment slips, wipes the thin layer of dust off all the surfaces and mows the yard. After a day of putting her world back in order he feels just a little better – just a little more in control – and he feels a little bit like she’s rescue-able now. So he puts on a uniform and heads back to base. Time to get his head back into the game.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
It’s only three days after he’s put Sam’s life on Earth back in order when Daniel comes bursting into the conference room with success painted all over his face. He’s so excited that he forgets to use words Jack will understand but he gets the gist. Daniel’s figured out how to circumvent the security measures that had previously kept the SG teams out of the fortress and out in the open long enough to be vulnerable to attack.
Just a couple hours later they’ve got a plan and a fifteen-person extraction team ready to cross the galaxy.
Twelve hours later eleven guys return with grim looks on their faces.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Daniel watches as Jack slams dangerously around the locker room. They’d hadn’t saved Sam and had lost two members of SG-3 and two members of SG-5 in the process. Daniel tries to speak but Jack whirls around with fire in his eyes.
“How long has she been gone, Daniel? A month! A mother-fucking month! Garrett and Nelson had kids. Bowman was getting married next month.”
“What, you think I don’t know that? You think I don’t care?” When Jack doesn’t say anything, when his eyes turn from fire to ice, when his nostrils flare and fists clench and he takes a menacing step in Daniel’s direction, it all becomes clear. “Oh my God. You think it’s my fault. You think we don’t have Sam and that those four men are dead because I screwed up.” Daniel rakes a hand through his hair as he waits for familiar feeling of self-loathing to sweep through him. Instead, though, he finds anger licking like flames up from his toes. When the fire reaches his throat he spews it at Jack.
“There was absolutely no way any of us could have known there were that many Jaffa there – in all the previous trips we’d made to the fortress we saw one tenth that number and you know that. The translation was flawless and I know that because of what was missing at the fortress. But most of all, I resent the implication that I’m not intimately aware of how long Sam’s been missing – as if I somehow don’t care as much as you do. And I’m not indifferent to the lives that were lost today in the pursuit of saving hers. So you can take your sanctimonious attitude and go to hell!”
He’s not at all surprised when Jack hits him.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Jack knows it all started to go downhill after that second rescue attempt when they lost four members of the SGC and yet still failed to rescue Sam. Since the disastrous encounter in the locker room Daniel had given him a wide berth. Teal’c has been looking at him askance since he found out what happened. Most everyone else looks at him like he’s an explosive device with a countdown timer approaching zero. Hell, Hammond had even put a reprimand in his file. Apparently decking your subordinates was a no-no – even when you had a tenuous grip on reality.
Anymore, he stops at his house only long enough to grab clean clothes and make sure his own finances aren’t going to hell in a hand basket. But he continues to sleep on Sam’s couch and drink her fancy coffee that just doesn’t hit the spot quite like Folgers seems to.
He listens to scary music at an inappropriate volume whenever he’s not on base simply because the noise keeps him from thinking too hard. Because when he thinks he thinks about how the next rescue mission is more than likely going to be a recovery mission and how he’s pretty sure he’s not going to be able to handle that.
Still he keeps her life in such impeccable order no one else outside the SGC would ever suspect there’s anything amiss. It makes him feel in control. It also makes him feel a little crazy.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Weeks go by before Hammond authorizes another rescue attempt and this time it’s only after an undercover Tok’ra operative gets some intel that there’s a new plaything at Votan’s fortress of evil entertainment.
The mission is SNAFU from the word go, of course. But they opted against another guerrilla style extraction and decide on a more covert surgical strike. Hammond sidelines Jack as the mission commander, but at this point Jack figures he’s lucky Hammond’s even letting him go. His temper has become legendary and just about all the team leaders recommend against his involvement. Jack figures it is only the desperate look in his eyes that secures his position on the team.
When they make it inside the fortress with no loss of life, Jack’s so stunned he nearly loses the thread of the mission objective. Hell, he was pretty sure this part was never going to happen. Thank god he isn’t in charge after all, he supposes. But once they’re inside they realize why the Tok’ra operative had kept referring to the place as a labyrinth.
They’re overrun after an hour and make a strategic retreat.
They make camp several klicks east of the gate and try again after the next nightfall but this time the Jaffa are awaiting their return. They don’t even venture inside.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
By now what little sleep he’s getting is fraught with nightmares about finally getting to Sam only to find her half dead, then later fully dead, then later dismembered, and then after that snippets of her funeral and his own downward spiral into a bottle. After that it’s random dreams of what might have been. Sometimes he dreams about other close calls that didn’t end quite so well. Then he starts dreaming about Charlie again.
He can feel his long tenuous grasp on reality slipping through his fingers like so much sand.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
He thinks he should be embarrassed one night when he saunters out of the shower and finds himself standing in Sam’s kitchen with Daniel and Teal’c. He’s not – not really. Okay, maybe about only being dressed in a towel.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
He’s definitely embarrassed when he answers the door for pizza a few nights later and is face to face with General Hammond.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
The next day he’s off the mission roster for Sam’s rescue. He fractures a bone in his hand when he slugs the metal lockers.
Janet tisks while she wraps him up; she warns him to take care of himself because Sam’s going to need him.
She may be right. But maybe not. So he tries not to think about it too much.
He still picks a fight in a bar later but he’s careful to not throw any right hooks. The kid’s got three inches, thirty pounds and twenty fewer years on him and it feels good when he lays the kid out.
The barkeep calls him a cab rather than the cops but Jack walks home instead and collapses into Sam’s bed.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
He awakens in the middle of the night just to stumble into the bathroom and puke his guts out. He’s not sure if it’s the alcohol or the scent of her that clings to the pillowcases.
But he always was able to hold his liquor.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
The next day he changes her sheets, berates himself for being an idiot and vows not to step foot in her bedroom ever again.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
He starts to clean up his act a little after that – in public at least. People still look at him like he’s unhinged but they don’t look scared of him anymore. Sorry for him, sure, but not scared. He knows he’s not acting much like anybody’s commanding officer these days – and especially not hers.
He sits at home and climbs the walls while two more rescue missions are conducted. Mission failure. Mission failure.
It’s no wonder people are treating him more like a grieving widower than anything else.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
It takes him five weeks but Hammond’s finally looking at him like he’s got two feet firmly on the ground. Nobody has asked if he’s still staying at Sam’s and he hasn’t volunteered the information – but he is. He doesn’t venture any further down the hall than the spare bathroom, though. He keeps the place up, he keeps the bills paid, and he shows up for work every morning. If anybody has anything more to ask of him, though, he might lose it.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
And then the Tok’ra operative comes through again. Most of Votan’s Jaffa have moved on.
Jack pleads with the General in a way he’d never thought he’d do but somehow Hammond relents and Jack finds himself commanding a mission they’re only hoping at this point is rescue and not recovery.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
When they find her she’s strung up but he thinks she’s breathing and he’s got about thirty good minutes before he breaks down. While he contemplates his descent he hears conversation around him.
“Easy, we’ve got you now,” Janet soothes.
“I think there’s something wrong with her arms,” Daniel says as he crouches down next to her. The way he averts his eyes makes Jack realize Daniel’s eyelevel with Sam’s naked breasts. Then he realizes Sam’s completely naked.
Nobody else seems to notice, though, so Jack isn’t sure whether he should feel chivalrous or lecherous. “She needs fluids,” Janet stresses.
“She needs to be down from there,” and Jack hopes the edge in his voice reads as urgency rather than a struggle against his inner demons.
“I believe she is conscious,” Teal’c prompts and Jack’s eyes fly to Sam’s in time to see them slam closed.
She’s conscious. She’s cognizant. He starts repeating it like an inner-mantra as they release her from the shackles that keep her hanging upside down.
“Her pulse is very weak. She needs fluids immediately. We’ll need a stretcher.” Janet says the last into the walkie-talkie on her shoulder and Jack remembers they’ve got rear-D up top.
“She going to be okay going through the gate?” He’s not sure why he asks. Hell if he’s leaving her behind again.
“She’ll have to be,” Janet responds in a way that makes him feel like an idiot.
“It is unwise to remain here any longer,” Teal’c says and Jack follows the big man’s line of sight but can’t hear whatever it is that piqued the Jaffa’s interest.
“Can you hear me?” Janet prompts Sam and inexplicably Sam nods. “Good. We’re going to move you now.”
Sam passes out when they pick her up and he amazed she held out as long as she did. She looks just this side of death.
But they made it. They got her back.
And now he’s got about twenty-eight minutes until he completely loses his shit.
“Let’s move out.”
After the debrief – and the thrilling tale of SG-1’s failed attempt at a rescue – Hammond had sent a MALP through the gate and Jack hadn’t even had to ask. When it was blown to smithereens by a staff weapon upon arrival on the other side, however, even Jack had admitted that sending a contingent of personnel through the gate was more stupid than risky.
And as if the oppressive guilt weren’t enough, he’s got the way Daniel looks at him all the time like Jack just shot his puppy. Or, in reality, like he just left Daniel’s best-friend-cum-little-sister in the hands of a First Prime who they knew for absolute certain was using her for things none of them would even begin to abide on Earth.
Yes, on day one, Jack was angry, scared, lost, beaten, but above all motivated. He knew precisely where Sam was and what wouldn’t get her back. Then they couldn’t use that knowledge. Jack took little comfort in those first days when Teal’c insisted – with setup they had on Votan – that Sam was unlikely to be moved. But now, here on day five, he’s already grasping at straws and while knowing Sam’s likely precisely where he left her is a small comfort, it’s a comfort nonetheless.
He sits in his truck until a shaft of moonlight seems to illuminate her house key where it swings slightly on the key ring that dangles from his ignition. Deciding he’s a man who should start looking for signs he uses his key to let himself into her home. He finds it oddly clean – clean in the way things are when they’re simply undisturbed. He’s not really sure how much time she ever spent at home or what she did when she was here, but it feels like whatever it was it wasn’t actually living in her house. Things are placed so specifically as if for decoration – even the reading glasses on the end table next to the couch.
Since it’s been too many days since he’s seen her, and since it’s been so many nights since he slept, and mostly because it’s been too long since his hands had a purpose, he finds himself collecting her mail in the dark. Then, a few hours later he finds himself soaking up a bit of quiet in the armchair in the corner. A few hours after that and his cell phone is ringing.
“Jack, where the hell are you?”
“What do you need, Daniel?”
“It’s... The MALP, Jack. Today’s MALP – it’s still transmitting signal.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Gear up.”
“General Hammond’s already made the order, Jack. We’re just waiting on you.”
He’s already in the truck when he hangs up on Daniel. His first reaction is elation – they’re going to go get Sam and bring her home. His second reaction is self-loathing – they’re doing it twenty minutes later than they should be doing it because he had to go stroke an emotional bruise. What the hell kind of man is he anyway these days?
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
George tries not to show his disappointment and frustration when teams 1, 5 and 13 come back through the gate. Dixon gives a rough shake of his head when he chances a look at George and all the other men’s eyes are affixed to the ramp when they hand over their guns.
He sighs heavily before keying the button for the intercom system. “Med evals, gentleman. Debrief in an hour.”
Then he holes himself up in his office and tries to remind himself he’s a General in the God Damned Air Force and not a grieving man. A commotion in the Gate room draws his attention and he sees Colonel O’Neill losing his shit on a young Lieutenant and watches as that young Lieutenant stands there and takes it like a man, just like O’Neill needs him to. These people are all far too good at being what everyone else needs and far too bad at taking care of themselves. Proof positive, he thinks, illustrated by Samantha Carter’s capture in the first place as she was doing far too good a job at protecting her team and too doing damn little to protect herself.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Daniel cringes when he hears Jack’s heavy and angry sounding footfalls stop inside the door of his office. He steels himself while his back is still turned to his always surly teammate and then turns around, schooling his expression into some combination of hope and will. “What’s up, Jack?”
“Do you have anything?”
Daniel indicates the books scattered around him – most open – and the sheaf of papers in his hand. “Nothing you haven’t already been briefed on.”
“It’s been almost a week since you came up with anything new.”
“You think I’m…what? Playing hooky or something, Jack? That I’m wasting time the three or four hours a night I’m sleeping? Or maybe you’re objecting to those breaks I take here and there to eat and shower.”
“Carter is being tortured right now, Daniel.”
“And I’m working as fast as I can.” Daniel tries so hard to be angry at Jack – for leaving Sam, for putting so much pressure on him, for just basically being an ass since the first SGC sanctioned rescue attempt had yielded little more than a couple of staff blast injuries for SGC personnel – but he finds all he’s really got the gumption for is another round of tears. He squeezes his eyes shut and hopes to keep from falling apart in front of Jack completely. The last time that had happened both men walked away feeling worse than they’d felt beforehand.
Jack turns to go but Daniel feels compelled to…what? Soothe Jack? Defend himself? He’s not entirely sure. “I’m working as fast as I can,” he repeats but this time with earnest. He just hopes Jack believes him.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Teal’c flattens O’Neill to the mat for the fifth time since they have been sparring. He thinks the younger and still hotheaded man may need the physical reminder of his body’s limitations as he seems fairly intent on pushing himself past the point of usefulness. His surly attitude and short tempter have intensified and those things, coupled with the physical manifestation of his anger and frustration, have made for a man most on base avoid and would brand as a loose cannon.
“You should stay down, O’Neill,” he advises when O’Neill rolls over with a groan and pushes himself onto his hands and knees.
“Or what? You’ll put me back down?” Jack looks over his shoulder and meets Teal’c’s eye.
“Yes.”
O’Neill rolls his eyes and then does not follow Teal’c’s suggestion. So they square off once more. While O’Neill strikes with more force than usual and while the blows he lands are sharp and jarring he is predictable in his unpredictability and Teal’c has no problem knocking him down once more.
“You know, a real friend might throw a bout or two so I could get my head straight.” O’Neill throws an arm over his eyes.
“I do not believe that to be true, O’Neill.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“Looks like Mister Teal’c got the better of you tonight, Colonel.”
Jack just grunts while Janet swabs antibiotic ointment on the cut over his eyebrow and tapes it closed with a butterfly bandage.
“I’ve patched you up a handful of times over the last few weeks, sir,” she notes.
“I’m fine, Janet.”
She doesn’t say anything but he doesn’t like the knowing look she gives him. She hands him a prescription bottle with a few painkillers inside and sends him home. It’s not until he’s checked the mail, sorted it and twisted a cap off a bottle of beer that he’s aware sometime over the course of the last couple of weeks home became Sam’s place.
The next day when he checks her mail there’s a late notice. He starts ripping through envelopes and makes sense of all the mail that’s arrived in her absence. When he sees the reminder notice for the mortgage followed by a much more strongly worded demand letter he knows he’s got to do something.
He looks around him at the place that should remind him so much of her but really only serves to remind him she’s gone because until her capture he’d probably only been here a couple three times. So he sits down and writes a few checks, makes notes on the payment slips, wipes the thin layer of dust off all the surfaces and mows the yard. After a day of putting her world back in order he feels just a little better – just a little more in control – and he feels a little bit like she’s rescue-able now. So he puts on a uniform and heads back to base. Time to get his head back into the game.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
It’s only three days after he’s put Sam’s life on Earth back in order when Daniel comes bursting into the conference room with success painted all over his face. He’s so excited that he forgets to use words Jack will understand but he gets the gist. Daniel’s figured out how to circumvent the security measures that had previously kept the SG teams out of the fortress and out in the open long enough to be vulnerable to attack.
Just a couple hours later they’ve got a plan and a fifteen-person extraction team ready to cross the galaxy.
Twelve hours later eleven guys return with grim looks on their faces.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Daniel watches as Jack slams dangerously around the locker room. They’d hadn’t saved Sam and had lost two members of SG-3 and two members of SG-5 in the process. Daniel tries to speak but Jack whirls around with fire in his eyes.
“How long has she been gone, Daniel? A month! A mother-fucking month! Garrett and Nelson had kids. Bowman was getting married next month.”
“What, you think I don’t know that? You think I don’t care?” When Jack doesn’t say anything, when his eyes turn from fire to ice, when his nostrils flare and fists clench and he takes a menacing step in Daniel’s direction, it all becomes clear. “Oh my God. You think it’s my fault. You think we don’t have Sam and that those four men are dead because I screwed up.” Daniel rakes a hand through his hair as he waits for familiar feeling of self-loathing to sweep through him. Instead, though, he finds anger licking like flames up from his toes. When the fire reaches his throat he spews it at Jack.
“There was absolutely no way any of us could have known there were that many Jaffa there – in all the previous trips we’d made to the fortress we saw one tenth that number and you know that. The translation was flawless and I know that because of what was missing at the fortress. But most of all, I resent the implication that I’m not intimately aware of how long Sam’s been missing – as if I somehow don’t care as much as you do. And I’m not indifferent to the lives that were lost today in the pursuit of saving hers. So you can take your sanctimonious attitude and go to hell!”
He’s not at all surprised when Jack hits him.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Jack knows it all started to go downhill after that second rescue attempt when they lost four members of the SGC and yet still failed to rescue Sam. Since the disastrous encounter in the locker room Daniel had given him a wide berth. Teal’c has been looking at him askance since he found out what happened. Most everyone else looks at him like he’s an explosive device with a countdown timer approaching zero. Hell, Hammond had even put a reprimand in his file. Apparently decking your subordinates was a no-no – even when you had a tenuous grip on reality.
Anymore, he stops at his house only long enough to grab clean clothes and make sure his own finances aren’t going to hell in a hand basket. But he continues to sleep on Sam’s couch and drink her fancy coffee that just doesn’t hit the spot quite like Folgers seems to.
He listens to scary music at an inappropriate volume whenever he’s not on base simply because the noise keeps him from thinking too hard. Because when he thinks he thinks about how the next rescue mission is more than likely going to be a recovery mission and how he’s pretty sure he’s not going to be able to handle that.
Still he keeps her life in such impeccable order no one else outside the SGC would ever suspect there’s anything amiss. It makes him feel in control. It also makes him feel a little crazy.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Weeks go by before Hammond authorizes another rescue attempt and this time it’s only after an undercover Tok’ra operative gets some intel that there’s a new plaything at Votan’s fortress of evil entertainment.
The mission is SNAFU from the word go, of course. But they opted against another guerrilla style extraction and decide on a more covert surgical strike. Hammond sidelines Jack as the mission commander, but at this point Jack figures he’s lucky Hammond’s even letting him go. His temper has become legendary and just about all the team leaders recommend against his involvement. Jack figures it is only the desperate look in his eyes that secures his position on the team.
When they make it inside the fortress with no loss of life, Jack’s so stunned he nearly loses the thread of the mission objective. Hell, he was pretty sure this part was never going to happen. Thank god he isn’t in charge after all, he supposes. But once they’re inside they realize why the Tok’ra operative had kept referring to the place as a labyrinth.
They’re overrun after an hour and make a strategic retreat.
They make camp several klicks east of the gate and try again after the next nightfall but this time the Jaffa are awaiting their return. They don’t even venture inside.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
By now what little sleep he’s getting is fraught with nightmares about finally getting to Sam only to find her half dead, then later fully dead, then later dismembered, and then after that snippets of her funeral and his own downward spiral into a bottle. After that it’s random dreams of what might have been. Sometimes he dreams about other close calls that didn’t end quite so well. Then he starts dreaming about Charlie again.
He can feel his long tenuous grasp on reality slipping through his fingers like so much sand.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
He thinks he should be embarrassed one night when he saunters out of the shower and finds himself standing in Sam’s kitchen with Daniel and Teal’c. He’s not – not really. Okay, maybe about only being dressed in a towel.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
He’s definitely embarrassed when he answers the door for pizza a few nights later and is face to face with General Hammond.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
The next day he’s off the mission roster for Sam’s rescue. He fractures a bone in his hand when he slugs the metal lockers.
Janet tisks while she wraps him up; she warns him to take care of himself because Sam’s going to need him.
She may be right. But maybe not. So he tries not to think about it too much.
He still picks a fight in a bar later but he’s careful to not throw any right hooks. The kid’s got three inches, thirty pounds and twenty fewer years on him and it feels good when he lays the kid out.
The barkeep calls him a cab rather than the cops but Jack walks home instead and collapses into Sam’s bed.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
He awakens in the middle of the night just to stumble into the bathroom and puke his guts out. He’s not sure if it’s the alcohol or the scent of her that clings to the pillowcases.
But he always was able to hold his liquor.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
The next day he changes her sheets, berates himself for being an idiot and vows not to step foot in her bedroom ever again.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
He starts to clean up his act a little after that – in public at least. People still look at him like he’s unhinged but they don’t look scared of him anymore. Sorry for him, sure, but not scared. He knows he’s not acting much like anybody’s commanding officer these days – and especially not hers.
He sits at home and climbs the walls while two more rescue missions are conducted. Mission failure. Mission failure.
It’s no wonder people are treating him more like a grieving widower than anything else.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
It takes him five weeks but Hammond’s finally looking at him like he’s got two feet firmly on the ground. Nobody has asked if he’s still staying at Sam’s and he hasn’t volunteered the information – but he is. He doesn’t venture any further down the hall than the spare bathroom, though. He keeps the place up, he keeps the bills paid, and he shows up for work every morning. If anybody has anything more to ask of him, though, he might lose it.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
And then the Tok’ra operative comes through again. Most of Votan’s Jaffa have moved on.
Jack pleads with the General in a way he’d never thought he’d do but somehow Hammond relents and Jack finds himself commanding a mission they’re only hoping at this point is rescue and not recovery.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
When they find her she’s strung up but he thinks she’s breathing and he’s got about thirty good minutes before he breaks down. While he contemplates his descent he hears conversation around him.
“Easy, we’ve got you now,” Janet soothes.
“I think there’s something wrong with her arms,” Daniel says as he crouches down next to her. The way he averts his eyes makes Jack realize Daniel’s eyelevel with Sam’s naked breasts. Then he realizes Sam’s completely naked.
Nobody else seems to notice, though, so Jack isn’t sure whether he should feel chivalrous or lecherous. “She needs fluids,” Janet stresses.
“She needs to be down from there,” and Jack hopes the edge in his voice reads as urgency rather than a struggle against his inner demons.
“I believe she is conscious,” Teal’c prompts and Jack’s eyes fly to Sam’s in time to see them slam closed.
She’s conscious. She’s cognizant. He starts repeating it like an inner-mantra as they release her from the shackles that keep her hanging upside down.
“Her pulse is very weak. She needs fluids immediately. We’ll need a stretcher.” Janet says the last into the walkie-talkie on her shoulder and Jack remembers they’ve got rear-D up top.
“She going to be okay going through the gate?” He’s not sure why he asks. Hell if he’s leaving her behind again.
“She’ll have to be,” Janet responds in a way that makes him feel like an idiot.
“It is unwise to remain here any longer,” Teal’c says and Jack follows the big man’s line of sight but can’t hear whatever it is that piqued the Jaffa’s interest.
“Can you hear me?” Janet prompts Sam and inexplicably Sam nods. “Good. We’re going to move you now.”
Sam passes out when they pick her up and he amazed she held out as long as she did. She looks just this side of death.
But they made it. They got her back.
And now he’s got about twenty-eight minutes until he completely loses his shit.
“Let’s move out.”
Chapter 15
Tertiary Emotion: Disgust
“Just stop it, okay?”
Jack realizes that while she phrases it like a question there no real room for argument. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t try. “I can’t just stop looking at you completely.”
“You can. You will. Or you’ll leave.”
“Carter, you’re being unreasonable.”
“Well, if anybody’s going to be unreasonable, I think I’ve earned the right, don’t you?” she asks waspishly.
“I think you’ve got the right to feel whatever you’re feeling. But every now and again I’m going to look at you. If only so I don’t run into you in the hallway.”
“Don’t be glib with me Jack O’Neill. You’re not nearly as cute as you seem to think you are. You know what I meant.”
“You mean you don’t want me to see you when I look at you.”
“I don’t even want to have to see me right now.”
“There’s something I want you to understand.” When she turns away from him and busies herself with straightening the folds in a used dishtowel he places a hand on her shoulder. “Sam. Look at me.” She sighs deeply and turns to face him. “Yes, you look different. Considering what you’ve been through it would be shocking if you didn’t. But everyday – even on the days you don’t change out of your sweats or comb your hair – the sight of you is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Because you’re here and you’re alive and I wasn’t sure both those things would ever be true again. So believe what you like, but I’m not thinking what you think I’m thinking when I look at you. Okay?”
“Okay,” she finally says after much consideration.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“I’ve got a lot of weight left to gain back.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I want to gain it back healthily.”
“I want that, too.”
“No, Janet, really. I can’t look like this anymore. I need to look like me again.”
“Is this about health or vanity?”
“Is there something wrong with me if it’s about both?”
“No.”
“So, you’ll help me?”
“There are some protein powders and special dietary shakes I can give you. But it’s mostly about healthy exercise and putting the right number of calories into your body. It’s going to take a while, Sam.”
“How long?”
Janet’s heart breaks a little as she watches insecurity flash across her friend’s face. “How long until what?”
“How long until I’m pretty again?”
“Oh, Sam—“
“He said I’m beautiful because I’m alive. And I don’t want that to be the reason.”
“That’s a good reason, Sam,” and she doesn’t even have to ask which he Sam might have been referring to. Her live-in ex-CO, perhaps?
“Not a good enough reason, it isn’t. I want him to look at me the way he used to. I want him to look at me the way he wasn’t supposed to.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
She’s taken to wearing some of his large sweatshirts that have migrated over to her house. They are too large by half and have unattractive holes and fraying. She seems to seek them out. She seems to hide in them. He contemplates buying her some more attractive outerwear but thinks the old sweatshirts aren’t just about warmth and the ability to hide in extra yardage but also, maybe, something about him. Which feels kind of nice, all things considered. All things being the tendency he has to come down on the bad side of her lately. Not that ferreting out a good side has been altogether easy in recent days. It seems like everybody and everything rubs her the wrong way.
He cooks dinner every night he’s on world and for the past few days she’s stood in the kitchen with him and used the blender to whip up one of the fancy weight-gaining shakes Janet gave her. He’s not sure he likes how little food she eats once she sucks one down, but at least he knows she’s getting the necessary nutrients and anything she eats on top of the shakes is added calories – so he tries to cook healthily, despite his own habits and desires. Sometimes, when he encounters her in the hallway in the middle of the night he’s momentarily taken aback by how frail she is. And then he’s instantly reminded how far she’s come since her rescue. He feels bad for a moment for thinking she looks bad now, but he realizes that while progress is important it’s still good to keep your eye on the prize, so to speak. And he’s looking forward to the prize that is the return of her former figure.
Not that he’d even think of mentioning that to her. He hadn’t lied when he told her she was beautiful just for being alive. Hell, he thinks she’s beautiful all the time. Always has. But he can feel their relationship shifting – even if he created that shift artificially by simply moving in. And he can’t help but hope that the shift will still be in play when she does have her figure back. Because, after all, he’s just a man; and sometimes it’s fun to revel in those kinds of thoughts. Especially when you’ve spent so long just being thankful that someone’s alive.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
She doesn’t mention the shards of glass in her bedroom trashcan that used to be the face of the pretty gilt mirror she’d picked up at an antique shop in Alexandria back during her tenure at the Pentagon. Nor does she mention the little crystal crumbles that were once her parent’s wedding toast glasses. She knows he saw the begonias he’d planted that she’d ripped up and threw into the trashcan in the garage but he didn’t mention it and neither did she.
He doesn’t say anything when she walks into the kitchen one night and her hair is well past regulation-short. He cracks a grin when he sees she’s ripped the sleeves off one of his old sweatshirts in deference to the milder spring days. But they don’t talk about the little fractures that have become part and parcel of her life. Things she’s made – or he’s made – part of his life as well. He didn’t really sign on for all manner of hell, she supposes, but then again she’s practically riding along with the four horsemen these days so what, precisely, does he expect?
He overlooks beer bottles in the back yard, wet towels on the bathroom floor and the fact that he’s the only one who bothers to do laundry anymore – or dishes for that matter, and, more’s the pity, seems to overlook how desperately she’s crying out for contact. She’s doing everything she can to push him; she’s doing everything she can to pull him to her. He’s oblivious.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore.”
“How’s that, Colonel O’Neill?”
Natalie studies him as he seems to collect his thoughts. Things have been progressing with Sam about the way she expected: slowly, painfully and with at least as many steps back as steps forward. It’s been three weeks since Sam walked in and declared herself ready for treatment and Natalie can’t say it hasn’t at least been interesting. But while she’s experienced enough things in her career to predict how her patients may react she finds herself consistently flummoxed by their loved ones – perhaps because relationships are so complicated. None of them are more so than whatever it is that the colonel and Sam are trying to juggle.
“I’m not sure exactly how much you know about what’s been going on and the truth is, Doc, I haven’t exactly been leveling with you.”
“About what, exactly? That you’re living with Sam? Or that you’re in love with her? Or that she probably loves you, too – or at least she did before she was taken? Or maybe that you’re letting her get away with working more hours than she’s cleared to? Or maybe that she’s having caffeine and alcohol on top of her meds?”
“Wow, those are an awful lot of blind shots in the dark.”
“Even money says I’m right, though.”
“So I guess Carter’s really been talking to you.”
“She has. You want to address any of those things?”
“She’s destroying things that really matter to her.”
“Like what?”
“She broke her parent’s wedding crystal. Those two glasses have sat under the light in her china cabinet the whole time I’ve known her. Then one day they weren’t there. I found pieces of them in the trashcan. Before that was the antique mirror that I thought was an accident. I planted some flowers at the front of the house and she pulled them up. Just days before she had sat out there and watered them and weeded and said how much she loved them…”
“Anything else?”
“I don’t know. She’s not acting like herself.”
“You mean she’s not acting like she acted before she was held captive on Votan?”
“Well, of course she’s not.”
“And yet you find her behavior surprising?”
“Yes!”
“Why did the flowers upset you so much?”
“They didn’t. Not really. They were just flowers.”
“You sounded pretty upset.”
“They were just posies, Doc. Don’t read too much into it.”
“I think they were more than that. I think they were symbolic. Colonel, you planted flowers for her. You planted something in her garden that was going to grow into something beautiful. She loved them. She tended to them. Then, in a fit of pique you didn’t see coming, she ruthlessly ripped up that beauty that you planted in her garden that was going to grow and threw it away. She threw it away, Colonel.”
“They were just flowers, Doctor Jordan,” he says quietly.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
They fight sometimes and she tells him to go. Screams it at him, really. He thinks she’s equal parts pissed and grateful when he simply closes himself inside the guestroom or disappears out to the garage. He knows she’s trying to run him off to prove something to herself. But he’s got something much more important to prove to her – even if she’s hell-bent on hurting him while he shows her. In the mean time she’s taking the anger out on her house. She’s slammed just about every door she owns. He fixed the first two hinges and the first cracked jam. After that he brought her the toolbox and set it down at her feet.
She fixed the door and came to him later with a cold beer and an apology. Somewhere along the way he held her and she sobbed against his shoulder in a way she hadn’t in weeks.
After the door slamming finally settles down – but only because she’d flat out broken her bedroom door and the whole thing needed to be replaced – is when it happens. He just happens to pass by her bedroom while she stands in front of a full-length mirror dressed in nothing but a pair of jeans. In a former life he probably would have been caught up by the reflection of her breasts but in the here and now he can’t take his eyes off the scars that crisscross her back.
He must say something or maybe he gasps because she looks up sharply and their eyes meet in the reflective glass. He steps into the room and she doesn’t avert her gaze so neither does he. Not until he’s within reaching distance, anyway. But he keeps his arms resolutely by his sides. He clenches his fists. “I thought you had your dad heal you.”
“Those are from before.”
“Before the capture or before your rescue?”
“Votan’s Jaffa gave them to me,” she confirms.
When he reaches out to touch is when she realizes she’s naked. She covers her breasts with her arms and drops her eyes but she doesn’t turn away from the fingers that he glides over the silvery scars.
“I thought I asked you not to look at me.”
“And I told you you’re beautiful and now I’m telling you I’ll look at you if I damn well want to. I know all this is hard for you, Sam, and I really want do whatever it takes to help you get better; but you seem to forget how hard this has been on the rest of us. How hard this has been on me. This happened to me too, Sam.”
She opens her mouth to speak but he cuts her off. “I don’t mean back then, Sam. Yeah, bad shit happened to me back then but I’ve moved passed that. I mean, what happened to you, the fact that you were missing and that I had something to do with that, that happened to me. And I need a little help dealing with it, too. You know I don’t do too well with all that touchy-feely psycho crap.” He waits for the corner of her mouth to tip up and he’s not disappointed. “So I kind of think I’m going to need you. And maybe you could need me too, a little.”
She’s quiet for a long time but finally she meet his eyes in the mirror again. “Okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
He’d thought they were making progress. And then, just a week later he comes home one night and the mirror in the entranceway is broken. At first he thinks it’s an accident but then he sees the little one in the hallway between two old Carter family photographs. Dread settles in the pit of his stomach. Sure enough the huge mirror in the spare bathroom is a spider web of cracks. In her bedroom the mirror on her dresser is broken in two by a large, diagonal crack. The full-length mirror they’d stood in front of and shared something profound is overturned and cracked.
Cautiously he looks into her bathroom. He finds more broken mirror along with broken woman. She sits despondently on the floor. She doesn’t cry. She’s holding one palm-sized piece of mirror out in front of her and staring through her reflection.
He pulls her up by her elbow. “C’mon.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere, Jack.”
He pauses over his first name. The first time in a long time he can recollect hearing her use it to address him and he can’t even enjoy it. “Too bad.”
“I’m sorry about the mirrors.”
“They’re your mirrors, Carter.” He pulls her into the bedroom and sits her down on the edge of her bed. He’s taking her to the base but he’ll be damned if he’s taking her dressed in nothing but a button down shirt that looks like it was his before she’d streaked it with the blood that was the byproduct of her apparent outburst.
She sits there and waits for him to turn a circle in her bedroom before deciding on a course of action. He snatches jeans from her dresser and a one of his sweatshirts from the laundry basket on top of her chest of drawers. She lets him thread her legs into her jeans and allows him to coax her to stand. She doesn’t flinch when his hands brush against her belly to button her pants and she doesn’t blink when he unbuttons the shirt and pushes it off her arms. He puts the sweatshirt on her in a way that makes him think of dressing Charlie and tears gather thickly at the back of his throat. “You’ve got to see the docs. Tonight, Carter. We’re done with this, okay?”
“I really hate it here.”
“Earth?” His blood runs cold while he waits for the answer. He’s not sure what he’ll do if she answers in the affirmative.
“This house.” He releases a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.
“That’s okay. We’ve got another one we can go to.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No.”
“I’ve been breaking things.”
“Yeah, you’ve got to stop that.”
“I know.”
“Doctors. Then home.”
“If I have to.”
“Tonight, you have to.”
“Doctors, then home,” she repeats. She says it like a mantra as they move through the house collecting what they’ll need. And then, it’s like a weight is lifted as soon as she’s buckled safely into the truck. Halfway to the mountain she’s asleep and he turns up the Puccini flowing out of his speakers. It’s beautiful and slightly haunting. He embraces the familiar emotions and drives on.
Jack realizes that while she phrases it like a question there no real room for argument. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t try. “I can’t just stop looking at you completely.”
“You can. You will. Or you’ll leave.”
“Carter, you’re being unreasonable.”
“Well, if anybody’s going to be unreasonable, I think I’ve earned the right, don’t you?” she asks waspishly.
“I think you’ve got the right to feel whatever you’re feeling. But every now and again I’m going to look at you. If only so I don’t run into you in the hallway.”
“Don’t be glib with me Jack O’Neill. You’re not nearly as cute as you seem to think you are. You know what I meant.”
“You mean you don’t want me to see you when I look at you.”
“I don’t even want to have to see me right now.”
“There’s something I want you to understand.” When she turns away from him and busies herself with straightening the folds in a used dishtowel he places a hand on her shoulder. “Sam. Look at me.” She sighs deeply and turns to face him. “Yes, you look different. Considering what you’ve been through it would be shocking if you didn’t. But everyday – even on the days you don’t change out of your sweats or comb your hair – the sight of you is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Because you’re here and you’re alive and I wasn’t sure both those things would ever be true again. So believe what you like, but I’m not thinking what you think I’m thinking when I look at you. Okay?”
“Okay,” she finally says after much consideration.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“I’ve got a lot of weight left to gain back.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I want to gain it back healthily.”
“I want that, too.”
“No, Janet, really. I can’t look like this anymore. I need to look like me again.”
“Is this about health or vanity?”
“Is there something wrong with me if it’s about both?”
“No.”
“So, you’ll help me?”
“There are some protein powders and special dietary shakes I can give you. But it’s mostly about healthy exercise and putting the right number of calories into your body. It’s going to take a while, Sam.”
“How long?”
Janet’s heart breaks a little as she watches insecurity flash across her friend’s face. “How long until what?”
“How long until I’m pretty again?”
“Oh, Sam—“
“He said I’m beautiful because I’m alive. And I don’t want that to be the reason.”
“That’s a good reason, Sam,” and she doesn’t even have to ask which he Sam might have been referring to. Her live-in ex-CO, perhaps?
“Not a good enough reason, it isn’t. I want him to look at me the way he used to. I want him to look at me the way he wasn’t supposed to.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
She’s taken to wearing some of his large sweatshirts that have migrated over to her house. They are too large by half and have unattractive holes and fraying. She seems to seek them out. She seems to hide in them. He contemplates buying her some more attractive outerwear but thinks the old sweatshirts aren’t just about warmth and the ability to hide in extra yardage but also, maybe, something about him. Which feels kind of nice, all things considered. All things being the tendency he has to come down on the bad side of her lately. Not that ferreting out a good side has been altogether easy in recent days. It seems like everybody and everything rubs her the wrong way.
He cooks dinner every night he’s on world and for the past few days she’s stood in the kitchen with him and used the blender to whip up one of the fancy weight-gaining shakes Janet gave her. He’s not sure he likes how little food she eats once she sucks one down, but at least he knows she’s getting the necessary nutrients and anything she eats on top of the shakes is added calories – so he tries to cook healthily, despite his own habits and desires. Sometimes, when he encounters her in the hallway in the middle of the night he’s momentarily taken aback by how frail she is. And then he’s instantly reminded how far she’s come since her rescue. He feels bad for a moment for thinking she looks bad now, but he realizes that while progress is important it’s still good to keep your eye on the prize, so to speak. And he’s looking forward to the prize that is the return of her former figure.
Not that he’d even think of mentioning that to her. He hadn’t lied when he told her she was beautiful just for being alive. Hell, he thinks she’s beautiful all the time. Always has. But he can feel their relationship shifting – even if he created that shift artificially by simply moving in. And he can’t help but hope that the shift will still be in play when she does have her figure back. Because, after all, he’s just a man; and sometimes it’s fun to revel in those kinds of thoughts. Especially when you’ve spent so long just being thankful that someone’s alive.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
She doesn’t mention the shards of glass in her bedroom trashcan that used to be the face of the pretty gilt mirror she’d picked up at an antique shop in Alexandria back during her tenure at the Pentagon. Nor does she mention the little crystal crumbles that were once her parent’s wedding toast glasses. She knows he saw the begonias he’d planted that she’d ripped up and threw into the trashcan in the garage but he didn’t mention it and neither did she.
He doesn’t say anything when she walks into the kitchen one night and her hair is well past regulation-short. He cracks a grin when he sees she’s ripped the sleeves off one of his old sweatshirts in deference to the milder spring days. But they don’t talk about the little fractures that have become part and parcel of her life. Things she’s made – or he’s made – part of his life as well. He didn’t really sign on for all manner of hell, she supposes, but then again she’s practically riding along with the four horsemen these days so what, precisely, does he expect?
He overlooks beer bottles in the back yard, wet towels on the bathroom floor and the fact that he’s the only one who bothers to do laundry anymore – or dishes for that matter, and, more’s the pity, seems to overlook how desperately she’s crying out for contact. She’s doing everything she can to push him; she’s doing everything she can to pull him to her. He’s oblivious.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore.”
“How’s that, Colonel O’Neill?”
Natalie studies him as he seems to collect his thoughts. Things have been progressing with Sam about the way she expected: slowly, painfully and with at least as many steps back as steps forward. It’s been three weeks since Sam walked in and declared herself ready for treatment and Natalie can’t say it hasn’t at least been interesting. But while she’s experienced enough things in her career to predict how her patients may react she finds herself consistently flummoxed by their loved ones – perhaps because relationships are so complicated. None of them are more so than whatever it is that the colonel and Sam are trying to juggle.
“I’m not sure exactly how much you know about what’s been going on and the truth is, Doc, I haven’t exactly been leveling with you.”
“About what, exactly? That you’re living with Sam? Or that you’re in love with her? Or that she probably loves you, too – or at least she did before she was taken? Or maybe that you’re letting her get away with working more hours than she’s cleared to? Or maybe that she’s having caffeine and alcohol on top of her meds?”
“Wow, those are an awful lot of blind shots in the dark.”
“Even money says I’m right, though.”
“So I guess Carter’s really been talking to you.”
“She has. You want to address any of those things?”
“She’s destroying things that really matter to her.”
“Like what?”
“She broke her parent’s wedding crystal. Those two glasses have sat under the light in her china cabinet the whole time I’ve known her. Then one day they weren’t there. I found pieces of them in the trashcan. Before that was the antique mirror that I thought was an accident. I planted some flowers at the front of the house and she pulled them up. Just days before she had sat out there and watered them and weeded and said how much she loved them…”
“Anything else?”
“I don’t know. She’s not acting like herself.”
“You mean she’s not acting like she acted before she was held captive on Votan?”
“Well, of course she’s not.”
“And yet you find her behavior surprising?”
“Yes!”
“Why did the flowers upset you so much?”
“They didn’t. Not really. They were just flowers.”
“You sounded pretty upset.”
“They were just posies, Doc. Don’t read too much into it.”
“I think they were more than that. I think they were symbolic. Colonel, you planted flowers for her. You planted something in her garden that was going to grow into something beautiful. She loved them. She tended to them. Then, in a fit of pique you didn’t see coming, she ruthlessly ripped up that beauty that you planted in her garden that was going to grow and threw it away. She threw it away, Colonel.”
“They were just flowers, Doctor Jordan,” he says quietly.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
They fight sometimes and she tells him to go. Screams it at him, really. He thinks she’s equal parts pissed and grateful when he simply closes himself inside the guestroom or disappears out to the garage. He knows she’s trying to run him off to prove something to herself. But he’s got something much more important to prove to her – even if she’s hell-bent on hurting him while he shows her. In the mean time she’s taking the anger out on her house. She’s slammed just about every door she owns. He fixed the first two hinges and the first cracked jam. After that he brought her the toolbox and set it down at her feet.
She fixed the door and came to him later with a cold beer and an apology. Somewhere along the way he held her and she sobbed against his shoulder in a way she hadn’t in weeks.
After the door slamming finally settles down – but only because she’d flat out broken her bedroom door and the whole thing needed to be replaced – is when it happens. He just happens to pass by her bedroom while she stands in front of a full-length mirror dressed in nothing but a pair of jeans. In a former life he probably would have been caught up by the reflection of her breasts but in the here and now he can’t take his eyes off the scars that crisscross her back.
He must say something or maybe he gasps because she looks up sharply and their eyes meet in the reflective glass. He steps into the room and she doesn’t avert her gaze so neither does he. Not until he’s within reaching distance, anyway. But he keeps his arms resolutely by his sides. He clenches his fists. “I thought you had your dad heal you.”
“Those are from before.”
“Before the capture or before your rescue?”
“Votan’s Jaffa gave them to me,” she confirms.
When he reaches out to touch is when she realizes she’s naked. She covers her breasts with her arms and drops her eyes but she doesn’t turn away from the fingers that he glides over the silvery scars.
“I thought I asked you not to look at me.”
“And I told you you’re beautiful and now I’m telling you I’ll look at you if I damn well want to. I know all this is hard for you, Sam, and I really want do whatever it takes to help you get better; but you seem to forget how hard this has been on the rest of us. How hard this has been on me. This happened to me too, Sam.”
She opens her mouth to speak but he cuts her off. “I don’t mean back then, Sam. Yeah, bad shit happened to me back then but I’ve moved passed that. I mean, what happened to you, the fact that you were missing and that I had something to do with that, that happened to me. And I need a little help dealing with it, too. You know I don’t do too well with all that touchy-feely psycho crap.” He waits for the corner of her mouth to tip up and he’s not disappointed. “So I kind of think I’m going to need you. And maybe you could need me too, a little.”
She’s quiet for a long time but finally she meet his eyes in the mirror again. “Okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
He’d thought they were making progress. And then, just a week later he comes home one night and the mirror in the entranceway is broken. At first he thinks it’s an accident but then he sees the little one in the hallway between two old Carter family photographs. Dread settles in the pit of his stomach. Sure enough the huge mirror in the spare bathroom is a spider web of cracks. In her bedroom the mirror on her dresser is broken in two by a large, diagonal crack. The full-length mirror they’d stood in front of and shared something profound is overturned and cracked.
Cautiously he looks into her bathroom. He finds more broken mirror along with broken woman. She sits despondently on the floor. She doesn’t cry. She’s holding one palm-sized piece of mirror out in front of her and staring through her reflection.
He pulls her up by her elbow. “C’mon.”
“I don’t want to go anywhere, Jack.”
He pauses over his first name. The first time in a long time he can recollect hearing her use it to address him and he can’t even enjoy it. “Too bad.”
“I’m sorry about the mirrors.”
“They’re your mirrors, Carter.” He pulls her into the bedroom and sits her down on the edge of her bed. He’s taking her to the base but he’ll be damned if he’s taking her dressed in nothing but a button down shirt that looks like it was his before she’d streaked it with the blood that was the byproduct of her apparent outburst.
She sits there and waits for him to turn a circle in her bedroom before deciding on a course of action. He snatches jeans from her dresser and a one of his sweatshirts from the laundry basket on top of her chest of drawers. She lets him thread her legs into her jeans and allows him to coax her to stand. She doesn’t flinch when his hands brush against her belly to button her pants and she doesn’t blink when he unbuttons the shirt and pushes it off her arms. He puts the sweatshirt on her in a way that makes him think of dressing Charlie and tears gather thickly at the back of his throat. “You’ve got to see the docs. Tonight, Carter. We’re done with this, okay?”
“I really hate it here.”
“Earth?” His blood runs cold while he waits for the answer. He’s not sure what he’ll do if she answers in the affirmative.
“This house.” He releases a breath he didn’t realize he was holding.
“That’s okay. We’ve got another one we can go to.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No.”
“I’ve been breaking things.”
“Yeah, you’ve got to stop that.”
“I know.”
“Doctors. Then home.”
“If I have to.”
“Tonight, you have to.”
“Doctors, then home,” she repeats. She says it like a mantra as they move through the house collecting what they’ll need. And then, it’s like a weight is lifted as soon as she’s buckled safely into the truck. Halfway to the mountain she’s asleep and he turns up the Puccini flowing out of his speakers. It’s beautiful and slightly haunting. He embraces the familiar emotions and drives on.
Chapter 16
Tertiary Emotion: Resentment
Sam sits quietly brewing dark emotions while Janet places three careful stitches on the side of her hand below her pinky. It’s not the stitches that irritate her but Janet’s incessant questions.
“How’d you do this to yourself?”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Is there anything else I should know?”
“No, really, Sam – how’d you do it?”
Sam simply doesn’t answer the questions and Janet moves on to Jack.
“Where were you when she did this?”
“Do you know what happened?”
“I think we should keep her in the infirmary overnight,” Janet murmurs. Then she apparently decides to leave it up to Jack, “ Do you want me to keep her?”
Her eyes fly to Jack’s. He assesses her quickly and catalogues the emotions that must be clear on her face. “Nope. We’ll be fine at home.”
If Janet has any thoughts on the idea that the two of them are going to one home together she, thankfully, keeps them to herself. Sam’s hardly dealt with the idea on her own and certainly isn’t prepared to justify her behavior to anyone else. It’s bad enough people are aware. She’s without capacity or desire to explain.
She closes her eyes and takes deep breaths. She pictures the confused look on Jack’s face when he helped her up off the bathroom floor and then, later, out of her clothes. She’s breaking him. She knows she is. She’s been intentionally hurting him though her reasons for doing so continue to shift.
When Janet finishes the stitches she issues an ointment along with her disappointed look. The disappointment isn’t entirely unexpected. Sam knows Janet has noticed the distance she's put between them and the doctor is both worried and wounded. Having someone you'd previously assert to be your best friend pull away was hard for anyone. The forced incarceration while recovering could be blamed originally, but no longer. Now Janet's just confused by the disconnection between the two of them and Sam knows she's nowhere near ready to fixing that divide.
If Sam had to put a fine point on it she’d probably say that she’s pulling back from any relationship that isn’t the one she has with Jack if for no other reason that she still feels like whatever it is they’re doing is terribly, completely, against-the-regs wrong. She’s mad as hell that she feels that way because she knows that, technically, they’re in the clear. Whatever happens can happen. Except – she’s not quite sure how she feels anymore. It’s clear his feelings for her haven’t changed. But she vacillates almost minute-to-minute between needing him in a way that frightens her and wishing he’d drop off the face of the earth and leave her alone for good. Besides, she’s spent so long spitting out the old rhetoric that she’s actually started to believe it.
And anyway, when she needs him to be close and quiet, he prods and pushes to touch or talk. He pokes and opens old sores. And then, when she’s at her absolute worst, when she’s sure she’s done the thing that will drive him away for good, he pulls her close and holds her while she cries, or breathes or laughs maniacally.
She hates him for it.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Natalie’s locking her office door when the Colonel and Sam appear. She quickly notes the grave look on the Colonel’s face and the bandage on Sam’s hand and turns back towards her office beckoning them in. She’s not surprised to see the Colonel accompany Sam to the conversational area of the office and she doesn’t object when he sits down.
Natalie sets her bags down and then joins them. “I don’t normally treat patients when there are other people in the room. Sam, is it okay to talk with Colonel O’Neill here?”
Sam nods. But doesn’t lift her gaze from her lap.
“Okay. Why are you here this evening?”
“Sorry to have caught you so late, Doc,” the Colonel tries to object but she waves him off.
“It’s fine. Really. Erin’s out of town anyway. No need to rush back to an empty house.” She tries for a disarming smile.
Sam’s eyes snap up to meet Natalie’s. “You’re married?”
“I am.”
“You hadn’t mentioned.”
“I’m not sure why I would have.”
“It’s just…whenever I complain about what it’s like to be living with someone again you always seem as if you can’t empathize.”
Natalie notes how the Colonel’s eyes lock on Sam’s face with a bit of hurt. “I’m sorry you felt like I couldn’t empathize. But your therapy is about you and your feelings. It wouldn’t be fair for me to impress my own needs and desires onto you. Nor the conditions of my own household, now that I think about it.”
“Oh.”
“So, what brings you here tonight?”
Colonel O’Neill clearly gives Sam a moment to answer but when she makes no move to her steps in. “She broke all the mirrors in the house tonight. Got three stitches for her efforts.”
“Wow. Physically, are you okay?”
Sam holds up her hand and flashes an uncharacteristically easy smile. “Yep. Just three stitches, like he said.”
“How are you otherwise?”
Sam gives her a wry look and Natalie smiles in return. “Okay, how about this instead: why’d you break all the mirrors?”
The slight smile drops off Sam’s face. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”
Colonel O’Neill murmurs to Sam but Natalie thinks she hears him say, “Doctors, then home, remember?” They must have made some sort of deal, she figures. Louder he asks her, “Would you like me to go?”
She meets his eyes then and places a hand on his forearm. After staring for a moment she shakes her head, takes a determined breath and turns back to Natalie. “I can’t stand to look at myself anymore and I don’t know what to do about that. I hate that I have to look at myself. I hate that other people look at me because I can’t control what they see. They’re either seeing the me I’m not anymore or they’re seeing me as I am now and neither one is okay.”
Natalie’s momentarily taken aback by the verbosity of Sam’s statement considering getting her talking had been more akin to pulling teeth since Natalie had taken her on as a client.
“You’re not comfortable with who you are now. I get that. Things are still pretty bad, yeah?” Natalie waits and Sam nods. “And what you want more than anything else is to go back to before any of this happened and to be that woman. But you can’t be. Right? You can’t just undo what’s been done to you. As awful as it was, it’s important. It’s an integral part of who you are as a person now.” Again, Sam nods in the pregnant pause. “So having people see you as the old Sam, treat you as her, is painful. Because you want to be her again so badly but it isn’t going to happen.”
Natalie trains her eyes on Colonel O’Neill. “But there are some people who don’t see the old you when they look at you. They see the you of the here and now.” The colonel bites his lip and steadfastly refuses to meet Natalie’s eyes. “And it’s horrible. It’s awful. You know what they’re seeing when they look at you, don’t you?”
“You see me like I was when I was hanging in that cell,” Sam says quietly and Natalie is fascinated as the Colonel’s eyes snap over to Sam.
He struggles to swallow and visibly takes a moment to collect his thoughts and Natalie wonders if he’s going to lie to Sam. “Yeah, Carter, I do.” Sam meets the colonel’s eyes and Natalie can feel the heat of the fire from four feet away but she’s impressed with the colonel pushes on. “I don’t want to, but I do. You looked dead when we got there. You were covered in blood and muck. And then I saw you take a breath and it went from the one of the most terrifying sights of my life to,” he stops and takes a breath, clenches his fists the reaches out and strokes the delicate bones of her wrists with the side of his index finger before skipping the rest of that thought and forging ahead. “Anyway, I said beautiful when I described you there before. You didn’t believe and I’m not going to force it on you. But watching you take a breath, Sam? It absolutely saved my life and I’m not being melodramatic. You know I don’t really do that crap.”
Sam’s eyes soften for half a heartbeat and then harden again.
“And now? Now all you see are the scars.”
His jaw goes slack and his eyes widen until it looks like she’s slapped him and Natalie wonders precisely what happened between the two of them that such a statement would have a visceral effect on him.
“That’s not true,” he says in a voice that makes the hairs on Natalie’s arms stand on end. “Yes, I saw your scars. But I saw the rest of you, too.”
“And it didn’t matter.”
“It mattered. But some things matter more. You matter more. More than that. Always.”
“You know I might never—“
“I don’t care.”
Natalie is utterly fascinated and completely confused but she doesn’t dare interrupt what is apparently an open, honest and healing conversation between the two of them.
“Could you ever even—“
“I can. I do. Now.”
When tears spill out of Sam’s eyes, Colonel O’Neill cradles her face in his hands and wipes her tears away with his thumbs. They look into each other’s eyes for a moment and then eventually Sam nods.
Jack gives her a crooked smile. “I’m going to go get a cup of coffee. Maybe check my inbox. Come get me when you’re done.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” He gets up. “Thanks, doc. See ya tomorrow.”
Natalie can’t help but feel like she’s just a bystander in her own office and he’s gone before she can even answer.
She slumps back into her chair just now realizing she’d literally been at the edge of her seat. “Well. Okay then. What else you got?”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Jack’s not altogether surprised to find Daniel and Teal’c sitting in the commissary. He grabs a cup of coffee and sits down with them.
“How’s Sam?” Daniel asks before Jack can even get the cup halfway to his lips.
“She’s fine.”
Daniel looks at Jack askance, “She had to get stitches?”
“How did you even know we were here?” Jack evades.
“It’s not exactly a big base, Jack.”
“Hasn’t anybody in this place ever heard about doctor-patient privilege?”
“Hey, Janet’s just worried about her friend. Since when don’t we share information, anyway?”
Jack exhales with frustration. “Sam should be allowed to have some privacy with this, guys..”
“Yeah? Is that what you’re giving her?” Daniel throws his hands up and crooks his index and middle fingers, “Privacy?”
“I’ve had a long night and I don’t want to hit you, Daniel. But I will.”
“Your implication was offensive Daniel Jackson,” Teal’c interjects and Jack sees steel in the older man’s eyes. It’s nice to know he wasn’t the only one upset by Daniel’s insinuation.
“Oh, please,” Daniel says in anger. “He keeps her from us. He’s moved into her house. How long before he moves into her bed?”
“It wouldn’t be any of your business if I had,” Jack grinds out. “What’s between me and Sam is just that – between us. I don’t need your approval. I damn sure don’t need your permission. And neither does she.”
And even though he half understands what has Daniel’s back up he’s not really sure where the outrage is coming from. It’s not like his staying with Sam is anything new. He’s certainly not been saying anything to anybody about sleeping with her. Not just because he hasn’t been but also because he’s not that kind of guy anyway. He’d have thought the guy he considers his closest friend would know that. So even as he wills his fists into unclenching, he finds himself taking deep breaths and hoping for a little perspective.
“You’re seriously out of line Daniel. You’d better have a damn good reason.”
While Daniel waxes poetic about the recent machinations of the rumor mill, Jack sips coffee feeling his blood pressure rise.
“I’m going to tell the two of you this and after that I don’t want to hear anything anybody else is saying because I just don’t give a damn. What happens between Sam and me is between the two of us. Period. I’d remind you that I haven’t made a habit of lying to you and neither has she.”
“But do you really think now’s the right time to start a relationship with her?”
“What makes you think we’re starting anything, Daniel?” He pushes away from the table and ignores Daniel’s further questions. He told Sam he’d be in his office; he really thinks he ought to be there.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
It’s after midnight when he leads Sam through his front door. He drops her bag by the front door – she can decide where she wants to spend the night. She’s been over enough to know where the spare room is if that’s what she wants. Hell, he remembers one particularly raucous party that eventually had seen her swathed in three layers of sleeping bag and passed out in the old hammock out back. Anyway, he’s not pushing.
She walks around slowly and looks things over. He’s suddenly embarrassed by how apparent it is that he hasn’t really lived here in a while. But an hour later she’s got every light on in the house, laundry going and a dust rag in her hand. He sits at the dining room table with a cup of coffee and doesn’t try very hard not to smirk at her whirling dervish routine.
“What?” she asks with a scowl when he catches her eye on a trip between the cleaners under the kitchen sink and whatever-the-hell she’s trying to clean in the living room.
“You know you’re crazy, right?”
“This place is a disaster, Jack.”
He just smirks harder and takes a sip of his coffee while she huffs and stalks off.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Later, she brushes her teeth self-consciously as he stands in the doorway of the spare bathroom. “What?” she finally asks around a mouthful of toothbrush and toothpaste.
“You know what I meant earlier, right?”
She spits. “When?”
“In Natalie’s office.”
“Which part?”
“The part when I said I saw you. I saw all of you Sam - not just the parts you wanted me to see.”
She kills some time by rinsing then wiping all the water droplets off the sink and countertop. “Would it have killed you to say something?
“I kind of thought you’d kill me if I brought up your,” he gestures in the general direction of her breasts and she smirks.
“I’m unpredictable.”
He grins. “You are.”
He turns to go but she stops him. “Thanks for tonight.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Thanks for everything,” she says shaking off the levity of their short conversation.
“Thanks for being alive when I showed up to get you.”
She bites her lip and blinks back tears but offers him a slight smile and a nod. He taps his fist against the doorframe a couple of times in some sort of secret male code. He shoots her a wink and he’s halfway down the hall before she realizes she’s grinning like an idiot.
“How’d you do this to yourself?”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Is there anything else I should know?”
“No, really, Sam – how’d you do it?”
Sam simply doesn’t answer the questions and Janet moves on to Jack.
“Where were you when she did this?”
“Do you know what happened?”
“I think we should keep her in the infirmary overnight,” Janet murmurs. Then she apparently decides to leave it up to Jack, “ Do you want me to keep her?”
Her eyes fly to Jack’s. He assesses her quickly and catalogues the emotions that must be clear on her face. “Nope. We’ll be fine at home.”
If Janet has any thoughts on the idea that the two of them are going to one home together she, thankfully, keeps them to herself. Sam’s hardly dealt with the idea on her own and certainly isn’t prepared to justify her behavior to anyone else. It’s bad enough people are aware. She’s without capacity or desire to explain.
She closes her eyes and takes deep breaths. She pictures the confused look on Jack’s face when he helped her up off the bathroom floor and then, later, out of her clothes. She’s breaking him. She knows she is. She’s been intentionally hurting him though her reasons for doing so continue to shift.
When Janet finishes the stitches she issues an ointment along with her disappointed look. The disappointment isn’t entirely unexpected. Sam knows Janet has noticed the distance she's put between them and the doctor is both worried and wounded. Having someone you'd previously assert to be your best friend pull away was hard for anyone. The forced incarceration while recovering could be blamed originally, but no longer. Now Janet's just confused by the disconnection between the two of them and Sam knows she's nowhere near ready to fixing that divide.
If Sam had to put a fine point on it she’d probably say that she’s pulling back from any relationship that isn’t the one she has with Jack if for no other reason that she still feels like whatever it is they’re doing is terribly, completely, against-the-regs wrong. She’s mad as hell that she feels that way because she knows that, technically, they’re in the clear. Whatever happens can happen. Except – she’s not quite sure how she feels anymore. It’s clear his feelings for her haven’t changed. But she vacillates almost minute-to-minute between needing him in a way that frightens her and wishing he’d drop off the face of the earth and leave her alone for good. Besides, she’s spent so long spitting out the old rhetoric that she’s actually started to believe it.
And anyway, when she needs him to be close and quiet, he prods and pushes to touch or talk. He pokes and opens old sores. And then, when she’s at her absolute worst, when she’s sure she’s done the thing that will drive him away for good, he pulls her close and holds her while she cries, or breathes or laughs maniacally.
She hates him for it.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Natalie’s locking her office door when the Colonel and Sam appear. She quickly notes the grave look on the Colonel’s face and the bandage on Sam’s hand and turns back towards her office beckoning them in. She’s not surprised to see the Colonel accompany Sam to the conversational area of the office and she doesn’t object when he sits down.
Natalie sets her bags down and then joins them. “I don’t normally treat patients when there are other people in the room. Sam, is it okay to talk with Colonel O’Neill here?”
Sam nods. But doesn’t lift her gaze from her lap.
“Okay. Why are you here this evening?”
“Sorry to have caught you so late, Doc,” the Colonel tries to object but she waves him off.
“It’s fine. Really. Erin’s out of town anyway. No need to rush back to an empty house.” She tries for a disarming smile.
Sam’s eyes snap up to meet Natalie’s. “You’re married?”
“I am.”
“You hadn’t mentioned.”
“I’m not sure why I would have.”
“It’s just…whenever I complain about what it’s like to be living with someone again you always seem as if you can’t empathize.”
Natalie notes how the Colonel’s eyes lock on Sam’s face with a bit of hurt. “I’m sorry you felt like I couldn’t empathize. But your therapy is about you and your feelings. It wouldn’t be fair for me to impress my own needs and desires onto you. Nor the conditions of my own household, now that I think about it.”
“Oh.”
“So, what brings you here tonight?”
Colonel O’Neill clearly gives Sam a moment to answer but when she makes no move to her steps in. “She broke all the mirrors in the house tonight. Got three stitches for her efforts.”
“Wow. Physically, are you okay?”
Sam holds up her hand and flashes an uncharacteristically easy smile. “Yep. Just three stitches, like he said.”
“How are you otherwise?”
Sam gives her a wry look and Natalie smiles in return. “Okay, how about this instead: why’d you break all the mirrors?”
The slight smile drops off Sam’s face. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”
Colonel O’Neill murmurs to Sam but Natalie thinks she hears him say, “Doctors, then home, remember?” They must have made some sort of deal, she figures. Louder he asks her, “Would you like me to go?”
She meets his eyes then and places a hand on his forearm. After staring for a moment she shakes her head, takes a determined breath and turns back to Natalie. “I can’t stand to look at myself anymore and I don’t know what to do about that. I hate that I have to look at myself. I hate that other people look at me because I can’t control what they see. They’re either seeing the me I’m not anymore or they’re seeing me as I am now and neither one is okay.”
Natalie’s momentarily taken aback by the verbosity of Sam’s statement considering getting her talking had been more akin to pulling teeth since Natalie had taken her on as a client.
“You’re not comfortable with who you are now. I get that. Things are still pretty bad, yeah?” Natalie waits and Sam nods. “And what you want more than anything else is to go back to before any of this happened and to be that woman. But you can’t be. Right? You can’t just undo what’s been done to you. As awful as it was, it’s important. It’s an integral part of who you are as a person now.” Again, Sam nods in the pregnant pause. “So having people see you as the old Sam, treat you as her, is painful. Because you want to be her again so badly but it isn’t going to happen.”
Natalie trains her eyes on Colonel O’Neill. “But there are some people who don’t see the old you when they look at you. They see the you of the here and now.” The colonel bites his lip and steadfastly refuses to meet Natalie’s eyes. “And it’s horrible. It’s awful. You know what they’re seeing when they look at you, don’t you?”
“You see me like I was when I was hanging in that cell,” Sam says quietly and Natalie is fascinated as the Colonel’s eyes snap over to Sam.
He struggles to swallow and visibly takes a moment to collect his thoughts and Natalie wonders if he’s going to lie to Sam. “Yeah, Carter, I do.” Sam meets the colonel’s eyes and Natalie can feel the heat of the fire from four feet away but she’s impressed with the colonel pushes on. “I don’t want to, but I do. You looked dead when we got there. You were covered in blood and muck. And then I saw you take a breath and it went from the one of the most terrifying sights of my life to,” he stops and takes a breath, clenches his fists the reaches out and strokes the delicate bones of her wrists with the side of his index finger before skipping the rest of that thought and forging ahead. “Anyway, I said beautiful when I described you there before. You didn’t believe and I’m not going to force it on you. But watching you take a breath, Sam? It absolutely saved my life and I’m not being melodramatic. You know I don’t really do that crap.”
Sam’s eyes soften for half a heartbeat and then harden again.
“And now? Now all you see are the scars.”
His jaw goes slack and his eyes widen until it looks like she’s slapped him and Natalie wonders precisely what happened between the two of them that such a statement would have a visceral effect on him.
“That’s not true,” he says in a voice that makes the hairs on Natalie’s arms stand on end. “Yes, I saw your scars. But I saw the rest of you, too.”
“And it didn’t matter.”
“It mattered. But some things matter more. You matter more. More than that. Always.”
“You know I might never—“
“I don’t care.”
Natalie is utterly fascinated and completely confused but she doesn’t dare interrupt what is apparently an open, honest and healing conversation between the two of them.
“Could you ever even—“
“I can. I do. Now.”
When tears spill out of Sam’s eyes, Colonel O’Neill cradles her face in his hands and wipes her tears away with his thumbs. They look into each other’s eyes for a moment and then eventually Sam nods.
Jack gives her a crooked smile. “I’m going to go get a cup of coffee. Maybe check my inbox. Come get me when you’re done.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” He gets up. “Thanks, doc. See ya tomorrow.”
Natalie can’t help but feel like she’s just a bystander in her own office and he’s gone before she can even answer.
She slumps back into her chair just now realizing she’d literally been at the edge of her seat. “Well. Okay then. What else you got?”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Jack’s not altogether surprised to find Daniel and Teal’c sitting in the commissary. He grabs a cup of coffee and sits down with them.
“How’s Sam?” Daniel asks before Jack can even get the cup halfway to his lips.
“She’s fine.”
Daniel looks at Jack askance, “She had to get stitches?”
“How did you even know we were here?” Jack evades.
“It’s not exactly a big base, Jack.”
“Hasn’t anybody in this place ever heard about doctor-patient privilege?”
“Hey, Janet’s just worried about her friend. Since when don’t we share information, anyway?”
Jack exhales with frustration. “Sam should be allowed to have some privacy with this, guys..”
“Yeah? Is that what you’re giving her?” Daniel throws his hands up and crooks his index and middle fingers, “Privacy?”
“I’ve had a long night and I don’t want to hit you, Daniel. But I will.”
“Your implication was offensive Daniel Jackson,” Teal’c interjects and Jack sees steel in the older man’s eyes. It’s nice to know he wasn’t the only one upset by Daniel’s insinuation.
“Oh, please,” Daniel says in anger. “He keeps her from us. He’s moved into her house. How long before he moves into her bed?”
“It wouldn’t be any of your business if I had,” Jack grinds out. “What’s between me and Sam is just that – between us. I don’t need your approval. I damn sure don’t need your permission. And neither does she.”
And even though he half understands what has Daniel’s back up he’s not really sure where the outrage is coming from. It’s not like his staying with Sam is anything new. He’s certainly not been saying anything to anybody about sleeping with her. Not just because he hasn’t been but also because he’s not that kind of guy anyway. He’d have thought the guy he considers his closest friend would know that. So even as he wills his fists into unclenching, he finds himself taking deep breaths and hoping for a little perspective.
“You’re seriously out of line Daniel. You’d better have a damn good reason.”
While Daniel waxes poetic about the recent machinations of the rumor mill, Jack sips coffee feeling his blood pressure rise.
“I’m going to tell the two of you this and after that I don’t want to hear anything anybody else is saying because I just don’t give a damn. What happens between Sam and me is between the two of us. Period. I’d remind you that I haven’t made a habit of lying to you and neither has she.”
“But do you really think now’s the right time to start a relationship with her?”
“What makes you think we’re starting anything, Daniel?” He pushes away from the table and ignores Daniel’s further questions. He told Sam he’d be in his office; he really thinks he ought to be there.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
It’s after midnight when he leads Sam through his front door. He drops her bag by the front door – she can decide where she wants to spend the night. She’s been over enough to know where the spare room is if that’s what she wants. Hell, he remembers one particularly raucous party that eventually had seen her swathed in three layers of sleeping bag and passed out in the old hammock out back. Anyway, he’s not pushing.
She walks around slowly and looks things over. He’s suddenly embarrassed by how apparent it is that he hasn’t really lived here in a while. But an hour later she’s got every light on in the house, laundry going and a dust rag in her hand. He sits at the dining room table with a cup of coffee and doesn’t try very hard not to smirk at her whirling dervish routine.
“What?” she asks with a scowl when he catches her eye on a trip between the cleaners under the kitchen sink and whatever-the-hell she’s trying to clean in the living room.
“You know you’re crazy, right?”
“This place is a disaster, Jack.”
He just smirks harder and takes a sip of his coffee while she huffs and stalks off.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Later, she brushes her teeth self-consciously as he stands in the doorway of the spare bathroom. “What?” she finally asks around a mouthful of toothbrush and toothpaste.
“You know what I meant earlier, right?”
She spits. “When?”
“In Natalie’s office.”
“Which part?”
“The part when I said I saw you. I saw all of you Sam - not just the parts you wanted me to see.”
She kills some time by rinsing then wiping all the water droplets off the sink and countertop. “Would it have killed you to say something?
“I kind of thought you’d kill me if I brought up your,” he gestures in the general direction of her breasts and she smirks.
“I’m unpredictable.”
He grins. “You are.”
He turns to go but she stops him. “Thanks for tonight.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Thanks for everything,” she says shaking off the levity of their short conversation.
“Thanks for being alive when I showed up to get you.”
She bites her lip and blinks back tears but offers him a slight smile and a nod. He taps his fist against the doorframe a couple of times in some sort of secret male code. He shoots her a wink and he’s halfway down the hall before she realizes she’s grinning like an idiot.
Chapter 17
Secondary Emotion: Torment
They’re sitting on the mats in the gym after a workout that was punishing in its intensity when she finds the courage to ask, “How do you live with it?
“With what, Major Carter?”
“The things you did in Apophis’ name?”
Teal’c is quiet so long that she begins to feel heartless for asking him a question to which there is only one correct answer. “I do not live with it. I am aware of what I have done. I am conscious of it. But while that knowledge endures, I do not dwell upon it.”
“How do you put something so awful out of your mind?”
“It is not possible to live a productive life if we focus on our mistakes and misfortunes. I choose to let that experience be a part of the past that helped me choose a different future.”
“Do you think I can choose a different future?”
He takes several deep breaths and bends deeply through a stretch. “I think it is a very different situation for you.”
“But do you think I can?”
“I think you must.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“How’s the tough case coming along?”
Natalie takes a deep breath, digs her toes into the cooler parts of the sheets and turns further into Erin’s embrace. “I don’t speak her language. I’m not sure I’m actually helping her at all. I feel like I’m relegated to the side lines whenever any of the others are around.”
“If the usual methods aren’t working, you have to try something else. She deserves your help, Nat. You’re good at what you do. You can help her.”
“She doesn’t need me.”
“Do you mean you or do you mean treatment?”
“I don’t know.” She breathes deeply and pulls the soft scent of the Jasmine lotion that Erin put on after her shower deep into her lungs. “Maybe me.”
“If she doesn’t have you, what does she have?”
“She has her,” Natalie pauses while she considers the best way to describe Colonel O’Neill but finally decides less is more as she protects Sam, “she has someone.”
“Is that enough?”
“Maybe for her it is.”
“You should hang in there until you know for sure.”
“I should.” Natalie means it like a statement but she thinks it sounds like a question.
“It’s not like you to be so insecure.”
“I don’t know if I can do this job.”
“Of course you can. You’ve never backed down from a challenge before. And on the days you don’t see this patient you come home like you’ve slayed the dragon. You’ll slay this one, too.”
“You know that’s not really up to me.”
“You’re a good therapist, Nat, and you’re a good doctor. You’ll figure this out.”
“For her sake, I hope that’s true.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“I screwed up,” Daniel says as he finishes drying a dinner plate and hands it over.
“How?”
“I confronted Jack about his relationship with Sam. I might have implied he was insinuating himself where he shouldn’t.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” He contemplates the soapy dishwater for a moment. “Also, he knows you sometimes share information about Sam’s recovery with me that you shouldn’t.”
“Oh,” Janet says. “Did you tell him why?”
“I told him we’ve all always shared information.”
“But not that we – “
“No.”
“Why not?”
“With everything that’s been going on, with the way things are between him and Sam – not to mention the things I said, I didn’t think it would be good to point out that we...you know.”
“Don’t live with our heads up our assess?”
He quirks a grin at her. “I wouldn’t have put it like that, but yeah.”
“It was a lot easier for us. We didn’t have the same hurdles they did. The same hurdles they still do.”
“I know.”
“Then cut him some slack, okay? And apologize.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“I owe you an apology.”
Jack looks up from the paperwork on his desk and gives Daniel a once over. The man looks contrite enough. “Yeah. You do.”
“I didn’t really mean what I said.”
“Yeah, you did.”
Daniel sighs and sinks heavily into a visitor’s chair. “Yes. I did.”
“The fuck, Daniel?”
Daniel flinches at the crude language Jack knows he hates – that is, of course, the main reason he used it. “I’m worried about her.”
“We’re all worried about her.”
“And I’m not sure she’s made enough progress to be worrying about being in a relationship you two have avoided like the plague for a long time now.”
Jack pushes back into his chair and leans back enough to feign nonchalance. “Until a few months ago she was a subordinate officer.”
“Isn’t she still a subordinate officer?”
“Yes,” Jack concedes, “but she’s no longer in my chain of command. If she and I decide to change the nature of our relationship we won’t be doing anything wrong.”
“If?”
“Yeah. If.”
Daniel exhales. “Why’d she have to get stitches?”
Jack studies the younger man and wonders exactly how much is his to tell. He figures he can play this one of two ways – either Daniel’s his friend and confidante and he talks about the things that are plaguing him about the demons inside the woman he loves or
Daniel’s just some guy he works with that he’s sometimes friendly with and Jack sends him off to get whatever information he can straight from the source.
“She’s not doing so hot, Danny,” Jack finally decides to confide.
“What happened?”
“She broke all the mirrors in her house.” Jack scrubs a hand over his face and tries to forget the look on her face when he pulled her off her bathroom floor two nights ago. And also that he hasn’t slept since then for fear she’ll try the same thing at his place after
another bad moment.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know what we can do. Be there?”
“That’s your plan? Be there?”
“It’s a pretty damn good plan.”
“It doesn’t feel like enough.”
“No, it doesn’t.” And that’s the rub of it. It doesn’t feel like enough because it isn’t enough. But it’s all he can do.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“The Goa’uld have something we call pain sticks. Imagine a cattle prod with two big prongs like a barbeque fork. And imagine an arc of electricity that rivals the energy burst from the zat we showed you a couple of weeks ago. Then imagine that those prongs were pushed into your skin. And that the outpouring of energy was so huge that it had nowhere to go but out of you through your open orifices. And then understand that they don’t just touch it to you once – not when they want to torture you.”
Natalie’s stomach twists and flops and she’s suddenly certain she’s going to vomit.
“So they hold the pain stick to you until every part of you is seizing and you can’t control your tears or your bladder or your vocal chords. So you’re covered in your own fluids and your throat is raw. Then they take the pain stick away and for a brief moment you’re sure you’re dead because it feels so much better when the energy stops. But in the span of a heartbeat your nerves catch up and the pain races up to your brain and then flares out to your fingertips.
“And now it’s like you’re on fire. You’re burning from the inside out. You’re sure you can feel your muscles liquefying and your skin sloughing off against the abrasive clay floor.”
Natalie presses her eyes closed and hopes Sam doesn’t see the tears that have accumulated there. She’s supposed to be detached, after all. Clinical.
“The Jaffa wear naquadah boots. That’s a super-dense metal. They kick at you, hit you, take relish in the sound of your bones as they break. So now imagine that it feels like your soft tissues are melting and someone is macerating your flesh with a metal pestle against a gritty mortar. And that treatment, as awful as it sounds, isn’t nearly as sadistic as your tormentors are going to get. That the scent of your urine is what carries them home on the wings of a job well done. That they go home and fuck their wives with your blood on their faces.
“And then imagine that they’ll do that to you twice a day for weeks and the only thing they’ll trade that for is the ability to do the same thing to the inside of you.”
Unable to further quell the urge to be sick, Natalie excuses herself with half phrases and mumbled curses. A few biting words from Sam follow her out the door, “Yeah, well, you asked.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Three days after her last session with Natalie, Jack’s concerned that Sam’s still not talking. Not just about the session but about anything. She flat out ignores even direct questions. She won’t go near the stove and when he took over the dishes the night before he noticed the water was tepid at best. She’s washing clothes in cold water and the dryer is set to the no-heat fluff cycle. It’s still cold at night but the electric blanket he gave her sits folded on the trunk at the foot of the guest bed despite the fact that she turns the heat off at night.
The quiet is disconcerting enough but her sudden aversion to both heat and comfort are down right screwing with his head. Or maybe that’s the lack of sleep. Either the way the combination has him clinging to the edges of sanity.
When she makes it to yet another bed time without saying a word he decides it’s time to force the issue. He snags her hand when she walks by him and he pulls on her until she’s forced to stand in front of him where he sits on the couch. “Sam,” he starts and finds he doesn’t have the words to continue. Any semblance he had of an ability to draw the right words together is lost when he looks into her eyes and sees the pain there.
“Sam?”
“Please don’t make me,” she says as her chin trembles and tears spill over onto her cheeks.
“I don’t want to. I’m going to. We need to talk about it.”
He spends a few minutes searching her eyes and running his calloused fingers over the scars on her wrists. She alternates between meeting his eyes with a pained expression that practically begs to talk and then dropping his gaze as if it’s all become too much. When she seems to spend more time focused on their hands or his face than she does on the carpet, he suggests a pot of coffee, a few sleeping bags and some time in the old hammock she long ago developed and affinity for. It’s too cold and he’s too old, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to deny her something that might get her talking.
She starts by confessing her macabre rehashing of events to Natalie and how she feels awful for going about sharing that information in the way she did. When he nods in understanding his whisker stubble catches the hairs on the crown of her head.
They’d poured some of the coffee into one tall coffee mug that he’d long ago gotten as part of a gift set from someone who never really knew him and they pass it back and forth as she recounts precisely what she said to Natalie and he tries hard to make sure she can’t feel him wince. But as she’s all but sitting in his lap he’s pretty sure he’s not hiding from her. Not tonight. But she’s not hiding from him either. So that’s okay.
Then she says rape in the hushed tones she hadn’t bothered with months ago and starts telling him about the sodomy that both preceded and followed the actual act. She describes uses for Goa’uld pain sticks that had previously only existed in the nightmarish parts of his psyche. She talks about being chained to a wall and made to accept what was given in any way it was given. She talks until they empty the thermos he’d carried outside of the rest of the pot’s worth of coffee they’d made.
He reassures her of so many things until they have to pull the several layers of sleeping bags up to their ears.
Hours later he watches the sun rise and traces her spine through her sweatshirt and revels in her moist breath against his neck as she pants through bad dreams.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
The next morning she awakens alone in the hammock. She surprised to find the sun so high in the sky and realizes it must be approaching noon. She makes her way into the house feeling off balance and unsure of everything she’d shared with Jack the night before. She’s been stripped bare in a way she hadn’t even felt while she’d been captive on Votan. She told him things she swore she’d never tell anyone. In return she’d accepted assurances and declarations she never felt she deserved – even before her captivity.
She makes her way down the hall to the guest bath but is stopped when she encounters a shirtless Jack O’Neill in the hallway. He appears startled as well but all she can focus on is the heat that blooms in her belly when she sees him. She’s struck dumb by a flash of arousal she doesn’t feel entitled to. Most certainly it’s a feeling she’s not currently equipped to handle. She catches his eye in the moment before she turns to run and she watches realization dawn over his face. His mouth drops open but she’s gone before he can speak.
“With what, Major Carter?”
“The things you did in Apophis’ name?”
Teal’c is quiet so long that she begins to feel heartless for asking him a question to which there is only one correct answer. “I do not live with it. I am aware of what I have done. I am conscious of it. But while that knowledge endures, I do not dwell upon it.”
“How do you put something so awful out of your mind?”
“It is not possible to live a productive life if we focus on our mistakes and misfortunes. I choose to let that experience be a part of the past that helped me choose a different future.”
“Do you think I can choose a different future?”
He takes several deep breaths and bends deeply through a stretch. “I think it is a very different situation for you.”
“But do you think I can?”
“I think you must.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“How’s the tough case coming along?”
Natalie takes a deep breath, digs her toes into the cooler parts of the sheets and turns further into Erin’s embrace. “I don’t speak her language. I’m not sure I’m actually helping her at all. I feel like I’m relegated to the side lines whenever any of the others are around.”
“If the usual methods aren’t working, you have to try something else. She deserves your help, Nat. You’re good at what you do. You can help her.”
“She doesn’t need me.”
“Do you mean you or do you mean treatment?”
“I don’t know.” She breathes deeply and pulls the soft scent of the Jasmine lotion that Erin put on after her shower deep into her lungs. “Maybe me.”
“If she doesn’t have you, what does she have?”
“She has her,” Natalie pauses while she considers the best way to describe Colonel O’Neill but finally decides less is more as she protects Sam, “she has someone.”
“Is that enough?”
“Maybe for her it is.”
“You should hang in there until you know for sure.”
“I should.” Natalie means it like a statement but she thinks it sounds like a question.
“It’s not like you to be so insecure.”
“I don’t know if I can do this job.”
“Of course you can. You’ve never backed down from a challenge before. And on the days you don’t see this patient you come home like you’ve slayed the dragon. You’ll slay this one, too.”
“You know that’s not really up to me.”
“You’re a good therapist, Nat, and you’re a good doctor. You’ll figure this out.”
“For her sake, I hope that’s true.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“I screwed up,” Daniel says as he finishes drying a dinner plate and hands it over.
“How?”
“I confronted Jack about his relationship with Sam. I might have implied he was insinuating himself where he shouldn’t.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.” He contemplates the soapy dishwater for a moment. “Also, he knows you sometimes share information about Sam’s recovery with me that you shouldn’t.”
“Oh,” Janet says. “Did you tell him why?”
“I told him we’ve all always shared information.”
“But not that we – “
“No.”
“Why not?”
“With everything that’s been going on, with the way things are between him and Sam – not to mention the things I said, I didn’t think it would be good to point out that we...you know.”
“Don’t live with our heads up our assess?”
He quirks a grin at her. “I wouldn’t have put it like that, but yeah.”
“It was a lot easier for us. We didn’t have the same hurdles they did. The same hurdles they still do.”
“I know.”
“Then cut him some slack, okay? And apologize.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“I owe you an apology.”
Jack looks up from the paperwork on his desk and gives Daniel a once over. The man looks contrite enough. “Yeah. You do.”
“I didn’t really mean what I said.”
“Yeah, you did.”
Daniel sighs and sinks heavily into a visitor’s chair. “Yes. I did.”
“The fuck, Daniel?”
Daniel flinches at the crude language Jack knows he hates – that is, of course, the main reason he used it. “I’m worried about her.”
“We’re all worried about her.”
“And I’m not sure she’s made enough progress to be worrying about being in a relationship you two have avoided like the plague for a long time now.”
Jack pushes back into his chair and leans back enough to feign nonchalance. “Until a few months ago she was a subordinate officer.”
“Isn’t she still a subordinate officer?”
“Yes,” Jack concedes, “but she’s no longer in my chain of command. If she and I decide to change the nature of our relationship we won’t be doing anything wrong.”
“If?”
“Yeah. If.”
Daniel exhales. “Why’d she have to get stitches?”
Jack studies the younger man and wonders exactly how much is his to tell. He figures he can play this one of two ways – either Daniel’s his friend and confidante and he talks about the things that are plaguing him about the demons inside the woman he loves or
Daniel’s just some guy he works with that he’s sometimes friendly with and Jack sends him off to get whatever information he can straight from the source.
“She’s not doing so hot, Danny,” Jack finally decides to confide.
“What happened?”
“She broke all the mirrors in her house.” Jack scrubs a hand over his face and tries to forget the look on her face when he pulled her off her bathroom floor two nights ago. And also that he hasn’t slept since then for fear she’ll try the same thing at his place after
another bad moment.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know what we can do. Be there?”
“That’s your plan? Be there?”
“It’s a pretty damn good plan.”
“It doesn’t feel like enough.”
“No, it doesn’t.” And that’s the rub of it. It doesn’t feel like enough because it isn’t enough. But it’s all he can do.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“The Goa’uld have something we call pain sticks. Imagine a cattle prod with two big prongs like a barbeque fork. And imagine an arc of electricity that rivals the energy burst from the zat we showed you a couple of weeks ago. Then imagine that those prongs were pushed into your skin. And that the outpouring of energy was so huge that it had nowhere to go but out of you through your open orifices. And then understand that they don’t just touch it to you once – not when they want to torture you.”
Natalie’s stomach twists and flops and she’s suddenly certain she’s going to vomit.
“So they hold the pain stick to you until every part of you is seizing and you can’t control your tears or your bladder or your vocal chords. So you’re covered in your own fluids and your throat is raw. Then they take the pain stick away and for a brief moment you’re sure you’re dead because it feels so much better when the energy stops. But in the span of a heartbeat your nerves catch up and the pain races up to your brain and then flares out to your fingertips.
“And now it’s like you’re on fire. You’re burning from the inside out. You’re sure you can feel your muscles liquefying and your skin sloughing off against the abrasive clay floor.”
Natalie presses her eyes closed and hopes Sam doesn’t see the tears that have accumulated there. She’s supposed to be detached, after all. Clinical.
“The Jaffa wear naquadah boots. That’s a super-dense metal. They kick at you, hit you, take relish in the sound of your bones as they break. So now imagine that it feels like your soft tissues are melting and someone is macerating your flesh with a metal pestle against a gritty mortar. And that treatment, as awful as it sounds, isn’t nearly as sadistic as your tormentors are going to get. That the scent of your urine is what carries them home on the wings of a job well done. That they go home and fuck their wives with your blood on their faces.
“And then imagine that they’ll do that to you twice a day for weeks and the only thing they’ll trade that for is the ability to do the same thing to the inside of you.”
Unable to further quell the urge to be sick, Natalie excuses herself with half phrases and mumbled curses. A few biting words from Sam follow her out the door, “Yeah, well, you asked.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Three days after her last session with Natalie, Jack’s concerned that Sam’s still not talking. Not just about the session but about anything. She flat out ignores even direct questions. She won’t go near the stove and when he took over the dishes the night before he noticed the water was tepid at best. She’s washing clothes in cold water and the dryer is set to the no-heat fluff cycle. It’s still cold at night but the electric blanket he gave her sits folded on the trunk at the foot of the guest bed despite the fact that she turns the heat off at night.
The quiet is disconcerting enough but her sudden aversion to both heat and comfort are down right screwing with his head. Or maybe that’s the lack of sleep. Either the way the combination has him clinging to the edges of sanity.
When she makes it to yet another bed time without saying a word he decides it’s time to force the issue. He snags her hand when she walks by him and he pulls on her until she’s forced to stand in front of him where he sits on the couch. “Sam,” he starts and finds he doesn’t have the words to continue. Any semblance he had of an ability to draw the right words together is lost when he looks into her eyes and sees the pain there.
“Sam?”
“Please don’t make me,” she says as her chin trembles and tears spill over onto her cheeks.
“I don’t want to. I’m going to. We need to talk about it.”
He spends a few minutes searching her eyes and running his calloused fingers over the scars on her wrists. She alternates between meeting his eyes with a pained expression that practically begs to talk and then dropping his gaze as if it’s all become too much. When she seems to spend more time focused on their hands or his face than she does on the carpet, he suggests a pot of coffee, a few sleeping bags and some time in the old hammock she long ago developed and affinity for. It’s too cold and he’s too old, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to deny her something that might get her talking.
She starts by confessing her macabre rehashing of events to Natalie and how she feels awful for going about sharing that information in the way she did. When he nods in understanding his whisker stubble catches the hairs on the crown of her head.
They’d poured some of the coffee into one tall coffee mug that he’d long ago gotten as part of a gift set from someone who never really knew him and they pass it back and forth as she recounts precisely what she said to Natalie and he tries hard to make sure she can’t feel him wince. But as she’s all but sitting in his lap he’s pretty sure he’s not hiding from her. Not tonight. But she’s not hiding from him either. So that’s okay.
Then she says rape in the hushed tones she hadn’t bothered with months ago and starts telling him about the sodomy that both preceded and followed the actual act. She describes uses for Goa’uld pain sticks that had previously only existed in the nightmarish parts of his psyche. She talks about being chained to a wall and made to accept what was given in any way it was given. She talks until they empty the thermos he’d carried outside of the rest of the pot’s worth of coffee they’d made.
He reassures her of so many things until they have to pull the several layers of sleeping bags up to their ears.
Hours later he watches the sun rise and traces her spine through her sweatshirt and revels in her moist breath against his neck as she pants through bad dreams.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
The next morning she awakens alone in the hammock. She surprised to find the sun so high in the sky and realizes it must be approaching noon. She makes her way into the house feeling off balance and unsure of everything she’d shared with Jack the night before. She’s been stripped bare in a way she hadn’t even felt while she’d been captive on Votan. She told him things she swore she’d never tell anyone. In return she’d accepted assurances and declarations she never felt she deserved – even before her captivity.
She makes her way down the hall to the guest bath but is stopped when she encounters a shirtless Jack O’Neill in the hallway. He appears startled as well but all she can focus on is the heat that blooms in her belly when she sees him. She’s struck dumb by a flash of arousal she doesn’t feel entitled to. Most certainly it’s a feeling she’s not currently equipped to handle. She catches his eye in the moment before she turns to run and she watches realization dawn over his face. His mouth drops open but she’s gone before he can speak.
Chapter 18
Primary Emotion: Anger
He doesn’t want to waste time bothering with a shirt, but he saw the way her eyes had gone wide at the sight of his bare chest just moments after a pretty flush stained her cheeks. He’s been a man a damn long time – he knows what that look was in the split second before her panic. So, he spares a half-minute to return down the hall for his t-shirt before following her out the sliding glass doors and towards the woods he think she probably disappeared into.
He stands at the edge of his yard in bare feet and shouts after her, “Sam!”
He can hear the snap and crackle of twigs and leaves beneath her feet and thanks goodness that while she did flee she wasn’t exactly beating a hasty retreat. “Sam? Can you come out here, please?”
He shakes his head feeling like an idiot. “Sam, c’mon. I’m not wearing any shoes. Don’t make me come in there.” The footsteps stop. “I’m dressed.” After a moment he hears footsteps again. They’re a little slower now, but definitely moving toward him.
When she appears she looks both nervous and embarrassed.
“Well, that wasn’t exactly unexpected, was it?” he says with a crooked smile. And that’s when she starts yelling.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“I yelled at my commanding officer for not wearing a shirt,” Sam moans after burying her face in her hands.
Natalie tries not to laugh but manages only to dial it back to a chuckle. “Sam.”
Sam shakes her head but doesn’t look up.
“Sam, you yelled at Jack.”
“I know,” Sam wails.
“No, Sam,” Natalie says in her best teacher’s voice and Sam looks up, “I mean, you didn’t yell at your commanding officer. You yelled at Jack.”
Sam looks shocked for a moment and then she slumps back into the couch with the revelation. “He’s not my commanding officer right now.”
Natalie waves that off. “That’s not even the important part.”
Sam raises an eyebrow.
“You’ve got to start separating the man from the uniform, Sam. The relationship you’ve had with Jack for the past several months doesn’t have anything to do with the relationship you had with Colonel O’Neill for the past several years. You’ll be doing both of you a favor if you don’t make them interchangeable in your head.”
When Sam doesn’t say anything Natalie moves on. They can make progress on that front another day. “How’re things going at home? How’s the hand?”
“It’s only been four days.”
“Does that make the questions irrelevant?”
“No.”
“So, how’re things going at home? How’s the hand?”
Sam sighs. “My hand’s fine. The stitches will come out in about a week. You know we’re staying at Jack’s now? Because of the mirrors.”
“Yeah. How’re you doing with the mirrors?”
“Mostly, I avoid them.”
“How’re you doing with Jack?”
“I don’t avoid him.”
“That’s good.”
“I’m really angry.”
“At him?”
Sam wrings her hands. “Yes. A little. Maybe. Only about some things.” She says it all so fast Natalie can’t imagine what that must have felt like inside her head.
“Things like sometimes he doesn’t wear a shirt?”
Sam starts to shrug but then stops with a wide-eyed look on her face. “Actually, he’s pretty careful to be dressed,” she says with slow suspicion.
“That sounds okay considering your response to his being shirtless.”
“No, that’s not like him.”
“So he’s not all that modest?”
“Well, no. We’re in the military. It’s pretty hard to maintain a lot of modesty,” but Sam waves off that line of thought. “Wait a minute, I’m angry about something,” but she pauses like she’s not sure about what, exactly. She stews a moment and then, with vigor, “He’s mollycoddling me!”
Natalie swallows back a guffaw at Sam’s choice of words. “Mollycoddling you?”
“He’s walking on eggshells trying not to provoke me.”
“Is that so bad?”
“It’s so not Jack.”
“He cares about you. About how you’re feeling. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that he’d be protective.”
“Well, yeah, but even I didn’t expect those feelings.”
“Which feelings?”
“The ones I got when I saw him in the hall.”
“What did you feel?”
Sam blushes a vivid pink and presses her lips tightly together.
“Sam, it’s okay. Whatever you felt, it’s okay.”
Sam shakes her head.
“It’d really help if you said it out loud.”
“We both know what I felt.”
“It’s okay to feel however you felt.”
Sam shakes her head again. “No. It’s not.”
“Desire is a perfectly acceptable response.”
“Not from me, it’s not.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t deserve it.” And just like that the fear, the anguish, the embarrassment…it’s all replaced with a seething black anger that shadows Sam’s face.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not blameless.”
“What do you mean?”
And then Sam reveals something Natalie already knows because it had brought Colonel Jack O’Neill to tears when he’d repeated it during his own session, but having heard it once before doesn’t really prepare her for the anguish in Sam’s voice when she says, “Because I begged more than one of them for sex.”
“You didn’t,” Natalie objects.
“I did,” Sam counters.
“A choice between two awful things isn’t a choice. Choosing intercourse over near fatal beatings makes that intercourse rape, Sam, not sex. It doesn’t make you undeserving of a sex life later on if that’s what you want. It certainly doesn’t mean you don’t ever deserve to feel desire or arousal ever again.”
“What kind of man could want me?”
“You think Jack doesn’t want you?”
“He wouldn’t if he really thought about what happened to me.”
“Outside you, Sam, I don’t think anyone has thought harder about what happened to you than he has.”
“Then no, I don’t think he could want me.”
“Before all of this, did knowing what happened to him in Iraq make you want him any less?”
“He was my commanding officer, I didn’t want him at all.”
“Lying to me doesn’t help you. And we both know that isn’t true.”
Sam doesn’t say a word; she just storms out of Natalie’s office. She slams the door so hard behind her when she goes that a picture slips off its hook and slides precariously down the wall. The glass breaks when it hits the floor and Natalie starts at the sound.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“She looked at me like I was …ah, a man.” He shifts his eyes downward and grasps the back of his neck as he blushes. “You know, in the good way.” Then he swallows and seems to shore up his resolve, and Natalie has to give him credit for reestablishing eye contact.
“Does it make you uncomfortable that she thinks about you sexually?”
A lazy grin spreads across his face. “Hell no, doc. It makes uncomfortable talking about it.”
“But then she ran.”
The grin falters and a shadow darkens his eyes. “Yeah.”
“Why do you think she did that?”
“Isn’t that sorta your department?”
“Humor me.”
His gaze turns steely in a way that tells her he hates having to answer the question. He does it anyway. “I think a lot of bad things happened to her. I think more than one individual in a position of authority raped her. I think she equates power with pain. And I think she equates me with power.”
Natalie nods. “Several kinds, as a matter of fact.” She pauses and takes a sip of water just to give him a chance to absorb that before moving on. “Neither one of you are doing a very good job separating the individual from the officer.”
“Look, you’ve gotta know, Carter and I haven’t talked about this. We’re just, sorta…doing it. Not it it,” he rushes to supply. “But being together. It just…is.”
“Is that what it is? You’re together?”
“Yeah,” he says with a shrug. “I mean, that’s what it is for me. I’m all in. Whatever she needs. Whatever she wants.”
“You should talk about it, you know,” she says and he shrugs. “What if she doesn’t need you? Doesn’t want you?”
He’s silent for a moment. “Well, then I guess I’d have to convince her she’s wrong.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
When Jack walks into Janet’s office, it’s just in time to see Daniel brace one hand against her desk and lean down to press a heated kiss against her lips. When the two part, Janet is flushed and smiling happily.
“Tonight?” Daniel asks and Janet tosses him a wink.
When he turns comes face to face with Jack. He stops for a half a moment, flicks his eyes towards Janet, and strides forward. “Jack,” he says with a nod. Then he’s gone.
“Be right back,” Jack lobs at Janet then takes off after Daniel.
“Wait a minute,” he calls to his friend’s retreating form. “Daniel!”
He jogs a couple of step until he’s right beside the younger man. “Are you serious?”
“About what?” Daniel detours into the commissary and grabs an apple off a cart of fruit.
“The accusations you’ve been hurtling my way for weeks about hiding a relationship with Sam and you’re, what, screwing the chief medical officer?”
Daniel whirls on him. “Hey! I don’t think I like your tone.”
“I don’t think I like your sanctimonious double standards.”
“Janet wasn’t just rescued from a Goa’uld prison. Besides, I apologized,” Daniel wheedles.
“How long?”
“Since you broke your hand.”
“Wow. That’s…quite a while.”
“Yeah.”
“So.”
“So…” Daniel leads.
“Well. Congratulations.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s it?”
Jack grins. “Yeah, that’s it.” He turns to leave but pauses at the door and looks back over his shoulder. “You see how easy that was?” Jack’s grin turns icy. “Remember that. You might be on the other side of that conversation one day.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“I saw something today that you might find interesting,” Jack says with a smirk as he chops vegetables and she dumps a scoop of protein powder into the blender.
This is the part about living with someone she doesn’t like and, moreover, doesn’t really remember how to do. She’s mad at him. Really, really, mad at him – though probably unrightfully so. And he wants to talk about something trivial like nothing’s wrong? Has he forgotten how she laid into him this morning? Isn’t he mad at her?
He sighs and when she chances a look at his face she realizes he has, indeed, read her silence as lingering anger rather than confusion. Well, that solves that, she supposes. “Are you really so mad at me that you don’t want the juicy gossip?”
Juicy gossip? Well, she could do with a little of that. It’s been a long time since she’s been interested in idle passings and longer still since there’s been any juicy gossip to be had. On one hand, if she gives in and gets the salacious details, how is she supposed to revert back to angry without seeming shrewish? On the other hand, she is sort of mad at Jack for something that’s not his fault. She could let him off the hook and get the gossip.
Then his fingers curl around the back of her neck and he’s maneuvering her so they’re face to face. “Sam.”
She waits but he doesn’t continue. Instead there’s a sad look in his eyes. “Jack?”
He sighs and takes a half step closer to her. He’s in her personal space and he’s got a grip on her and she can feel something akin to panic scratch at the edges of her insides. Instinctively she reaches up and plants her palms against his chest and pushes. Hard. He stumbles back a little. “What are you doing?!?” she hisses.
A shocked look crosses his face. “Jesus, Sam. I’m sorry. I didn’t think—“
“No, you didn’t!” she cuts him off with a shout. “You can’t do that to me.”
“I didn’t know,” he says with hurt in his voice as if she accused him of doing it on purpose.
But now she’s really in touch with her anger from this morning again. “Don’t touch me.”
“I touch you all the time.”
“Don’t touch me like that.”
“Okay.”
But his easy acquiescence just irks her further. “And don’t walk around the house naked!”
“I didn’t,” he points out unnecessarily. “And I thought you were outside when I walked into the hall this morning.”
“Do you know what seeing you like that does to me?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Do you?”
“What?”
“Well, yeah I know what it did to you. Why are you mad at me for that? Not being ready isn’t my fault, Sam. So is it that you’re mad because you’re embarrassed because I know what it did to you, or are you mad because you were turned on in the first place? Because that’s not my fault either.”
“How can you just talk about things like that?”
And then he takes his life in his own hands and she’s got to give him a little credit for that, at least. He reaches back toward her and lays his hand on the place where her shoulder turns into her neck and runs his thumb lightly up and down the tendon that’s straining with her anger. “Because it’s okay, Sam. It’s okay if you’re turned on. It’s okay if I know. It’s okay if we talk about it. There’s no pressure here. No pressure to feel something you’re not feeling or to not feel something you are feeling. And certainly no pressure to act on anything.”
And there it is. He really doesn’t care if she’s turned on by him because he doesn’t want her anymore. She shakes off his hand and flees to guestroom she’d appropriated as her own. A loud thump followed by a curse comes from the direction of the kitchen. His patience with her, it would seem, is wearing thin.
She flops onto the bed ready to commit to a night of staring at the ceiling. Twenty minutes later she hears the engine of his big truck roar to life. She starts putting the planets in the SGC database in order by median observed temperature and hopes to keep her mind mostly quiet.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Daniel swings the door open to find a sheepish Jack O’Neill on the other side holding one hand cautiously against his body.
“I’m guessing you’re not here to see me,” he says with a lopsided smile and steps back so Jack can step into Janet’s living room.
Jack looks amused when Janet steps into the living room in bare feet with a dish towel flung over one shoulder.
“Colonel O’Neill!”
“Hiya, Doc. I need you to patch me up and then go see Sam.”
“Patch you up?” Daniel watches as his girlfriend shifts from the soft woman with whom he’d just been cooking dinner to the in-command CMO he’s used to dealing with on base – all without donning a lab coat (or shoes). And it’s pretty damn sexy.
“Damn it; I think you re-broke it.” She gestures towards the couch then looks over her shoulder at Daniel. “Can you get the white kit out of my bathroom, please?”
Daniel retrieves the first aid kit as requested and when he returns it’s clear he’s missed the ‘what happened?’ portion of the conversation because Janet’s replying, “I don’t know if I’m the best person for the job, Colonel.”
“She needs a friend right now.”
“Like I said…”
“She’s having problems reconnecting with everybody.”
“She’s been outright avoiding me, Colonel,” Janet says quietly.
“Janet,” Jack starts and Daniel looks up abruptly – he can’t ever remember hearing Jack use her given name, “please. I need your help. She won’t talk to me about this. Not right now.”
Janet prods at Jack’s hand gently but he still hisses in pain. “Yeah, it’s definitely broken.”
“If I promise to make Daniel take me to the ER, will you go talk to her?”
“Hey, how did I get dragged into this?”
“Daniel,” Janet says in a voice she hasn’t used on him since before they were sleeping together and he takes it as a warning.
He raises his hands in supplication. “Two stupid men going to the ER.” He pulls her up off the couch and into a hug so he can whisper into her ear, “Don’t let her bully you too much, okay? It’s been long enough.”
Janet kisses him once on the mouth, hard, and then pulls his head down so she can kiss his temple. She turns back to Jack, “Deal.”
“Need anything while I’m out?” he asks just so she knows they’re still spending the night together when they’ve done their respective duties.
“No. And Colonel, let him drive, okay?”
To Daniel’s surprise, Jack hands over the keys without any argument. They’re only minutes down the road when the silence – and curiosity – get the better of him. “What happened?”
“I broke my hand.”
“I know that.”
Jack heaves an aggrieved sigh. “Sam and I had an…argument…and I hit the countertop.”
“Jack! Don’t you think she’s been through enough without you scaring her by getting violent around her?”
“For crying out loud, Daniel, what do you take me for? She wasn’t even in the room when I did it. And it’s not like I meant to hit the countertop hard enough to break my hand.”
The two ride in silence for a few minutes more. “When did we stop being friends?” Daniel finally asks because he knows Jack isn’t going to broach the subject.
“What?”
“We used to talk about things. Now it’s just revelations and arguments. You feel like I don’t trust you and I kind of don’t. I want to know how that happened.”
At a stop light, Daniel turns to face him and is taken aback by the thoughtful look on Jack’s face where he thought he’d see distaste for the subject matter. But then Jack turns to look out the window and Daniel watches how the red traffic light cuts a swath against a more-defined-than-normal cheekbone and Daniel realizes that Jack’s not holding up as well as he’d like people to think and if anyone’s at fault for their changing relationship it’s Daniel himself.
“I made you deal with it alone,” Daniel realizes aloud.
Jack just grunts non-committedly.
“I did,” Daniel insists. The light turns green and Daniel applies a little pressure to the gas pedal. “I felt guilty, you know?”
“We all did.”
“But it was worse for you.” Daniel is sure he’s going to deny it. He watches out of the corner of his eye as the muscles in Jack’s jaw tense then release.
“Yeah. It was.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“You broke your hand?” she asks unnecessarily when he walks through the front door. She’s sitting against the wall there on the floor.
“How long have you been sitting there?”
“And then you sent Janet over here to talk to me because you, what? Thought maybe it’s just that I didn’t want to discuss something incredibly embarrassing with you but that I’d be okay discussing it with someone else?”
“Hey, I didn’t say anything to her about what you were upset about.”
“You broke your hand?” she asks again, only this time it’s with more concern and she pushes herself up off the floor so she can take his bandaged hand gently in hers.
“Just a little bit.”
“Jack,” she admonishes him in a soft voice that makes him tingle in the wake of that look she gave him in the hall.
He threads the fingers of his good hand into her hair and pulls her against his chest into a hug and he relaxes when he feels her arms wind around his rib cage. “I’m glad you weren’t serious about not touching you.”
“I was serious about not touching me the way you did earlier. I don’t know why, but that wasn’t okay.”
“It’s okay,” he soothes as he tucks his face into her neck.
“And I’ve been really careful not to say or do something that might make you uncomfortable. I swear I thought you were still asleep outside or I’d have put on a shirt.”
“I didn’t know I’d feel that way.”
“Sam, I know we’ve done a really good job of not talking about it, but we’ve…felt things… It would be strange if physical attraction wasn’t one of ‘em.”
“No,” she huffs and buries her face in the hollow of his shoulder, “I mean my reaction to the…attraction.”
“I was serious when I said I didn’t care if you never felt like…”
She stiffens against him.
“Hey? What’s wrong?”
She pushes against his chest and he wars with whether or not he should hold her tighter or let her go. He errs on the side of caution and releases her. Her eyes flick between hurt and angry. “What did I say?”
“You don’t have to keep pointing it out, you know?”
“What?”
“That it’s one sided.”
“That what’s one sided?”
“The attraction,” she spits. All the traces of the soft, warm woman he’d held in his arms moments ago are gone.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I get it. You don’t want me anymore. Not like that.”
“Again, what the hell are you talking about?”
“You don’t care if I never feel like being intimate again? There’s ‘no pressure to act on anything’?” She flings his words back at him.
“What are you accusing me of? Because the way I see it, I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. For crying out loud, Sam! Of course I want you! You. However you come. But what kind of man would I be if I pressured you into something after everything you’ve been through?”
“What kind of man wants a woman he might never have a sexual relationship with?”
“Okay, now I really don’t like what it sounds like you’re accusing me of.”
She just stands there, breathing heavily.
“Doc Jordan said we should talk about what we’re doing here. I think she’s right.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You don’t want to talk about anything, Sam. It’s not okay anymore. You need to keep talking to the doc about what happened to you. And you need to talk to me about how you’re feeling about all of this,” he gestures to the empty space between them, “because I sure as hell shouldn’t be guessing. I’m really bad at it.”
She huffs out a laugh. “I’m not any better.”
“No, I think we’ve cornered the market on not talking about it.”
“Did you eat?” she asks him.
“Not unless you count the half a vending machine tuna fish sandwich Daniel tried to make me eat.”
“Daniel went with you to the hospital?”
“Yeah. Janet made him drive me.”
“Janet?”
“Yeah,” he says with a grin.
“You went all the way to the base but she made you go to the hospital so she could come here?”
“No, I went to her house.” His grin widens as he watches the pieces start to fall into place.
“And Daniel was there?”
“Yep.”
She tilts her head to the side as she furrows her brows. “Wait a minute.”
“Uh-huh,” his grin becomes a smirk.
“Are you trying to tell me—“
“Oh, yeah.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“How long has that been going on?”
He slings his arm around her shoulder and steers her towards the kitchen. “Since I broke my hand the first time.”
“Oh.” As they cross the threshold to the kitchen, “The first time?!?”
He stands at the edge of his yard in bare feet and shouts after her, “Sam!”
He can hear the snap and crackle of twigs and leaves beneath her feet and thanks goodness that while she did flee she wasn’t exactly beating a hasty retreat. “Sam? Can you come out here, please?”
He shakes his head feeling like an idiot. “Sam, c’mon. I’m not wearing any shoes. Don’t make me come in there.” The footsteps stop. “I’m dressed.” After a moment he hears footsteps again. They’re a little slower now, but definitely moving toward him.
When she appears she looks both nervous and embarrassed.
“Well, that wasn’t exactly unexpected, was it?” he says with a crooked smile. And that’s when she starts yelling.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“I yelled at my commanding officer for not wearing a shirt,” Sam moans after burying her face in her hands.
Natalie tries not to laugh but manages only to dial it back to a chuckle. “Sam.”
Sam shakes her head but doesn’t look up.
“Sam, you yelled at Jack.”
“I know,” Sam wails.
“No, Sam,” Natalie says in her best teacher’s voice and Sam looks up, “I mean, you didn’t yell at your commanding officer. You yelled at Jack.”
Sam looks shocked for a moment and then she slumps back into the couch with the revelation. “He’s not my commanding officer right now.”
Natalie waves that off. “That’s not even the important part.”
Sam raises an eyebrow.
“You’ve got to start separating the man from the uniform, Sam. The relationship you’ve had with Jack for the past several months doesn’t have anything to do with the relationship you had with Colonel O’Neill for the past several years. You’ll be doing both of you a favor if you don’t make them interchangeable in your head.”
When Sam doesn’t say anything Natalie moves on. They can make progress on that front another day. “How’re things going at home? How’s the hand?”
“It’s only been four days.”
“Does that make the questions irrelevant?”
“No.”
“So, how’re things going at home? How’s the hand?”
Sam sighs. “My hand’s fine. The stitches will come out in about a week. You know we’re staying at Jack’s now? Because of the mirrors.”
“Yeah. How’re you doing with the mirrors?”
“Mostly, I avoid them.”
“How’re you doing with Jack?”
“I don’t avoid him.”
“That’s good.”
“I’m really angry.”
“At him?”
Sam wrings her hands. “Yes. A little. Maybe. Only about some things.” She says it all so fast Natalie can’t imagine what that must have felt like inside her head.
“Things like sometimes he doesn’t wear a shirt?”
Sam starts to shrug but then stops with a wide-eyed look on her face. “Actually, he’s pretty careful to be dressed,” she says with slow suspicion.
“That sounds okay considering your response to his being shirtless.”
“No, that’s not like him.”
“So he’s not all that modest?”
“Well, no. We’re in the military. It’s pretty hard to maintain a lot of modesty,” but Sam waves off that line of thought. “Wait a minute, I’m angry about something,” but she pauses like she’s not sure about what, exactly. She stews a moment and then, with vigor, “He’s mollycoddling me!”
Natalie swallows back a guffaw at Sam’s choice of words. “Mollycoddling you?”
“He’s walking on eggshells trying not to provoke me.”
“Is that so bad?”
“It’s so not Jack.”
“He cares about you. About how you’re feeling. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that he’d be protective.”
“Well, yeah, but even I didn’t expect those feelings.”
“Which feelings?”
“The ones I got when I saw him in the hall.”
“What did you feel?”
Sam blushes a vivid pink and presses her lips tightly together.
“Sam, it’s okay. Whatever you felt, it’s okay.”
Sam shakes her head.
“It’d really help if you said it out loud.”
“We both know what I felt.”
“It’s okay to feel however you felt.”
Sam shakes her head again. “No. It’s not.”
“Desire is a perfectly acceptable response.”
“Not from me, it’s not.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t deserve it.” And just like that the fear, the anguish, the embarrassment…it’s all replaced with a seething black anger that shadows Sam’s face.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not blameless.”
“What do you mean?”
And then Sam reveals something Natalie already knows because it had brought Colonel Jack O’Neill to tears when he’d repeated it during his own session, but having heard it once before doesn’t really prepare her for the anguish in Sam’s voice when she says, “Because I begged more than one of them for sex.”
“You didn’t,” Natalie objects.
“I did,” Sam counters.
“A choice between two awful things isn’t a choice. Choosing intercourse over near fatal beatings makes that intercourse rape, Sam, not sex. It doesn’t make you undeserving of a sex life later on if that’s what you want. It certainly doesn’t mean you don’t ever deserve to feel desire or arousal ever again.”
“What kind of man could want me?”
“You think Jack doesn’t want you?”
“He wouldn’t if he really thought about what happened to me.”
“Outside you, Sam, I don’t think anyone has thought harder about what happened to you than he has.”
“Then no, I don’t think he could want me.”
“Before all of this, did knowing what happened to him in Iraq make you want him any less?”
“He was my commanding officer, I didn’t want him at all.”
“Lying to me doesn’t help you. And we both know that isn’t true.”
Sam doesn’t say a word; she just storms out of Natalie’s office. She slams the door so hard behind her when she goes that a picture slips off its hook and slides precariously down the wall. The glass breaks when it hits the floor and Natalie starts at the sound.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“She looked at me like I was …ah, a man.” He shifts his eyes downward and grasps the back of his neck as he blushes. “You know, in the good way.” Then he swallows and seems to shore up his resolve, and Natalie has to give him credit for reestablishing eye contact.
“Does it make you uncomfortable that she thinks about you sexually?”
A lazy grin spreads across his face. “Hell no, doc. It makes uncomfortable talking about it.”
“But then she ran.”
The grin falters and a shadow darkens his eyes. “Yeah.”
“Why do you think she did that?”
“Isn’t that sorta your department?”
“Humor me.”
His gaze turns steely in a way that tells her he hates having to answer the question. He does it anyway. “I think a lot of bad things happened to her. I think more than one individual in a position of authority raped her. I think she equates power with pain. And I think she equates me with power.”
Natalie nods. “Several kinds, as a matter of fact.” She pauses and takes a sip of water just to give him a chance to absorb that before moving on. “Neither one of you are doing a very good job separating the individual from the officer.”
“Look, you’ve gotta know, Carter and I haven’t talked about this. We’re just, sorta…doing it. Not it it,” he rushes to supply. “But being together. It just…is.”
“Is that what it is? You’re together?”
“Yeah,” he says with a shrug. “I mean, that’s what it is for me. I’m all in. Whatever she needs. Whatever she wants.”
“You should talk about it, you know,” she says and he shrugs. “What if she doesn’t need you? Doesn’t want you?”
He’s silent for a moment. “Well, then I guess I’d have to convince her she’s wrong.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
When Jack walks into Janet’s office, it’s just in time to see Daniel brace one hand against her desk and lean down to press a heated kiss against her lips. When the two part, Janet is flushed and smiling happily.
“Tonight?” Daniel asks and Janet tosses him a wink.
When he turns comes face to face with Jack. He stops for a half a moment, flicks his eyes towards Janet, and strides forward. “Jack,” he says with a nod. Then he’s gone.
“Be right back,” Jack lobs at Janet then takes off after Daniel.
“Wait a minute,” he calls to his friend’s retreating form. “Daniel!”
He jogs a couple of step until he’s right beside the younger man. “Are you serious?”
“About what?” Daniel detours into the commissary and grabs an apple off a cart of fruit.
“The accusations you’ve been hurtling my way for weeks about hiding a relationship with Sam and you’re, what, screwing the chief medical officer?”
Daniel whirls on him. “Hey! I don’t think I like your tone.”
“I don’t think I like your sanctimonious double standards.”
“Janet wasn’t just rescued from a Goa’uld prison. Besides, I apologized,” Daniel wheedles.
“How long?”
“Since you broke your hand.”
“Wow. That’s…quite a while.”
“Yeah.”
“So.”
“So…” Daniel leads.
“Well. Congratulations.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s it?”
Jack grins. “Yeah, that’s it.” He turns to leave but pauses at the door and looks back over his shoulder. “You see how easy that was?” Jack’s grin turns icy. “Remember that. You might be on the other side of that conversation one day.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“I saw something today that you might find interesting,” Jack says with a smirk as he chops vegetables and she dumps a scoop of protein powder into the blender.
This is the part about living with someone she doesn’t like and, moreover, doesn’t really remember how to do. She’s mad at him. Really, really, mad at him – though probably unrightfully so. And he wants to talk about something trivial like nothing’s wrong? Has he forgotten how she laid into him this morning? Isn’t he mad at her?
He sighs and when she chances a look at his face she realizes he has, indeed, read her silence as lingering anger rather than confusion. Well, that solves that, she supposes. “Are you really so mad at me that you don’t want the juicy gossip?”
Juicy gossip? Well, she could do with a little of that. It’s been a long time since she’s been interested in idle passings and longer still since there’s been any juicy gossip to be had. On one hand, if she gives in and gets the salacious details, how is she supposed to revert back to angry without seeming shrewish? On the other hand, she is sort of mad at Jack for something that’s not his fault. She could let him off the hook and get the gossip.
Then his fingers curl around the back of her neck and he’s maneuvering her so they’re face to face. “Sam.”
She waits but he doesn’t continue. Instead there’s a sad look in his eyes. “Jack?”
He sighs and takes a half step closer to her. He’s in her personal space and he’s got a grip on her and she can feel something akin to panic scratch at the edges of her insides. Instinctively she reaches up and plants her palms against his chest and pushes. Hard. He stumbles back a little. “What are you doing?!?” she hisses.
A shocked look crosses his face. “Jesus, Sam. I’m sorry. I didn’t think—“
“No, you didn’t!” she cuts him off with a shout. “You can’t do that to me.”
“I didn’t know,” he says with hurt in his voice as if she accused him of doing it on purpose.
But now she’s really in touch with her anger from this morning again. “Don’t touch me.”
“I touch you all the time.”
“Don’t touch me like that.”
“Okay.”
But his easy acquiescence just irks her further. “And don’t walk around the house naked!”
“I didn’t,” he points out unnecessarily. “And I thought you were outside when I walked into the hall this morning.”
“Do you know what seeing you like that does to me?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Do you?”
“What?”
“Well, yeah I know what it did to you. Why are you mad at me for that? Not being ready isn’t my fault, Sam. So is it that you’re mad because you’re embarrassed because I know what it did to you, or are you mad because you were turned on in the first place? Because that’s not my fault either.”
“How can you just talk about things like that?”
And then he takes his life in his own hands and she’s got to give him a little credit for that, at least. He reaches back toward her and lays his hand on the place where her shoulder turns into her neck and runs his thumb lightly up and down the tendon that’s straining with her anger. “Because it’s okay, Sam. It’s okay if you’re turned on. It’s okay if I know. It’s okay if we talk about it. There’s no pressure here. No pressure to feel something you’re not feeling or to not feel something you are feeling. And certainly no pressure to act on anything.”
And there it is. He really doesn’t care if she’s turned on by him because he doesn’t want her anymore. She shakes off his hand and flees to guestroom she’d appropriated as her own. A loud thump followed by a curse comes from the direction of the kitchen. His patience with her, it would seem, is wearing thin.
She flops onto the bed ready to commit to a night of staring at the ceiling. Twenty minutes later she hears the engine of his big truck roar to life. She starts putting the planets in the SGC database in order by median observed temperature and hopes to keep her mind mostly quiet.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Daniel swings the door open to find a sheepish Jack O’Neill on the other side holding one hand cautiously against his body.
“I’m guessing you’re not here to see me,” he says with a lopsided smile and steps back so Jack can step into Janet’s living room.
Jack looks amused when Janet steps into the living room in bare feet with a dish towel flung over one shoulder.
“Colonel O’Neill!”
“Hiya, Doc. I need you to patch me up and then go see Sam.”
“Patch you up?” Daniel watches as his girlfriend shifts from the soft woman with whom he’d just been cooking dinner to the in-command CMO he’s used to dealing with on base – all without donning a lab coat (or shoes). And it’s pretty damn sexy.
“Damn it; I think you re-broke it.” She gestures towards the couch then looks over her shoulder at Daniel. “Can you get the white kit out of my bathroom, please?”
Daniel retrieves the first aid kit as requested and when he returns it’s clear he’s missed the ‘what happened?’ portion of the conversation because Janet’s replying, “I don’t know if I’m the best person for the job, Colonel.”
“She needs a friend right now.”
“Like I said…”
“She’s having problems reconnecting with everybody.”
“She’s been outright avoiding me, Colonel,” Janet says quietly.
“Janet,” Jack starts and Daniel looks up abruptly – he can’t ever remember hearing Jack use her given name, “please. I need your help. She won’t talk to me about this. Not right now.”
Janet prods at Jack’s hand gently but he still hisses in pain. “Yeah, it’s definitely broken.”
“If I promise to make Daniel take me to the ER, will you go talk to her?”
“Hey, how did I get dragged into this?”
“Daniel,” Janet says in a voice she hasn’t used on him since before they were sleeping together and he takes it as a warning.
He raises his hands in supplication. “Two stupid men going to the ER.” He pulls her up off the couch and into a hug so he can whisper into her ear, “Don’t let her bully you too much, okay? It’s been long enough.”
Janet kisses him once on the mouth, hard, and then pulls his head down so she can kiss his temple. She turns back to Jack, “Deal.”
“Need anything while I’m out?” he asks just so she knows they’re still spending the night together when they’ve done their respective duties.
“No. And Colonel, let him drive, okay?”
To Daniel’s surprise, Jack hands over the keys without any argument. They’re only minutes down the road when the silence – and curiosity – get the better of him. “What happened?”
“I broke my hand.”
“I know that.”
Jack heaves an aggrieved sigh. “Sam and I had an…argument…and I hit the countertop.”
“Jack! Don’t you think she’s been through enough without you scaring her by getting violent around her?”
“For crying out loud, Daniel, what do you take me for? She wasn’t even in the room when I did it. And it’s not like I meant to hit the countertop hard enough to break my hand.”
The two ride in silence for a few minutes more. “When did we stop being friends?” Daniel finally asks because he knows Jack isn’t going to broach the subject.
“What?”
“We used to talk about things. Now it’s just revelations and arguments. You feel like I don’t trust you and I kind of don’t. I want to know how that happened.”
At a stop light, Daniel turns to face him and is taken aback by the thoughtful look on Jack’s face where he thought he’d see distaste for the subject matter. But then Jack turns to look out the window and Daniel watches how the red traffic light cuts a swath against a more-defined-than-normal cheekbone and Daniel realizes that Jack’s not holding up as well as he’d like people to think and if anyone’s at fault for their changing relationship it’s Daniel himself.
“I made you deal with it alone,” Daniel realizes aloud.
Jack just grunts non-committedly.
“I did,” Daniel insists. The light turns green and Daniel applies a little pressure to the gas pedal. “I felt guilty, you know?”
“We all did.”
“But it was worse for you.” Daniel is sure he’s going to deny it. He watches out of the corner of his eye as the muscles in Jack’s jaw tense then release.
“Yeah. It was.”
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
“You broke your hand?” she asks unnecessarily when he walks through the front door. She’s sitting against the wall there on the floor.
“How long have you been sitting there?”
“And then you sent Janet over here to talk to me because you, what? Thought maybe it’s just that I didn’t want to discuss something incredibly embarrassing with you but that I’d be okay discussing it with someone else?”
“Hey, I didn’t say anything to her about what you were upset about.”
“You broke your hand?” she asks again, only this time it’s with more concern and she pushes herself up off the floor so she can take his bandaged hand gently in hers.
“Just a little bit.”
“Jack,” she admonishes him in a soft voice that makes him tingle in the wake of that look she gave him in the hall.
He threads the fingers of his good hand into her hair and pulls her against his chest into a hug and he relaxes when he feels her arms wind around his rib cage. “I’m glad you weren’t serious about not touching you.”
“I was serious about not touching me the way you did earlier. I don’t know why, but that wasn’t okay.”
“It’s okay,” he soothes as he tucks his face into her neck.
“And I’ve been really careful not to say or do something that might make you uncomfortable. I swear I thought you were still asleep outside or I’d have put on a shirt.”
“I didn’t know I’d feel that way.”
“Sam, I know we’ve done a really good job of not talking about it, but we’ve…felt things… It would be strange if physical attraction wasn’t one of ‘em.”
“No,” she huffs and buries her face in the hollow of his shoulder, “I mean my reaction to the…attraction.”
“I was serious when I said I didn’t care if you never felt like…”
She stiffens against him.
“Hey? What’s wrong?”
She pushes against his chest and he wars with whether or not he should hold her tighter or let her go. He errs on the side of caution and releases her. Her eyes flick between hurt and angry. “What did I say?”
“You don’t have to keep pointing it out, you know?”
“What?”
“That it’s one sided.”
“That what’s one sided?”
“The attraction,” she spits. All the traces of the soft, warm woman he’d held in his arms moments ago are gone.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I get it. You don’t want me anymore. Not like that.”
“Again, what the hell are you talking about?”
“You don’t care if I never feel like being intimate again? There’s ‘no pressure to act on anything’?” She flings his words back at him.
“What are you accusing me of? Because the way I see it, I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t. For crying out loud, Sam! Of course I want you! You. However you come. But what kind of man would I be if I pressured you into something after everything you’ve been through?”
“What kind of man wants a woman he might never have a sexual relationship with?”
“Okay, now I really don’t like what it sounds like you’re accusing me of.”
She just stands there, breathing heavily.
“Doc Jordan said we should talk about what we’re doing here. I think she’s right.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You don’t want to talk about anything, Sam. It’s not okay anymore. You need to keep talking to the doc about what happened to you. And you need to talk to me about how you’re feeling about all of this,” he gestures to the empty space between them, “because I sure as hell shouldn’t be guessing. I’m really bad at it.”
She huffs out a laugh. “I’m not any better.”
“No, I think we’ve cornered the market on not talking about it.”
“Did you eat?” she asks him.
“Not unless you count the half a vending machine tuna fish sandwich Daniel tried to make me eat.”
“Daniel went with you to the hospital?”
“Yeah. Janet made him drive me.”
“Janet?”
“Yeah,” he says with a grin.
“You went all the way to the base but she made you go to the hospital so she could come here?”
“No, I went to her house.” His grin widens as he watches the pieces start to fall into place.
“And Daniel was there?”
“Yep.”
She tilts her head to the side as she furrows her brows. “Wait a minute.”
“Uh-huh,” his grin becomes a smirk.
“Are you trying to tell me—“
“Oh, yeah.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“How long has that been going on?”
He slings his arm around her shoulder and steers her towards the kitchen. “Since I broke my hand the first time.”
“Oh.” As they cross the threshold to the kitchen, “The first time?!?”
