Epilogue:
The debriefing had been long and involved, and he didn't know about her but he was really ready to blow this place and go home. What passed for home when he made it back to the Springs anyway. He'd sat in the tape room and heard enough of her story to know the night he'd anticipated when he'd set off to the extraction ceremony was not going to happen. But then they were used to their plans not happening...the problem he thought frowning at her image on the screen was she'd taken a detour through time sometime that morning while he'd hung around waiting for her to show up.
He might have checked out for a few hundred years worth of atrocities sometime in all that crooning, but she'd spent two and a half years away from his side. She was not going to slip easily and effortlessly back into place. He could read that in her eyes even from the wrong side of the camera.
He eventually exercised his authority, pulled her out of their clutches, and took her home. She was a strange mixture of excited delight and pensive broodiness. She'd waited a long time to be here again and he didn't doubt she was happy to be back. But she'd invested her life (willingly or not) in another world and he wasn't so obtuse that he didn't know it had cost her something to turn her back on it and walk away.
"So...tell me about him."
"Him?"
"Come on, Carter," he said gently. "Two and a half years is a long time. You think I expect you to have grieved over my dead body that whole time? You're young, full of life...I don't blame you a bit. You, however, can't help blaming yourself, and that creates a problem for me.
"See I'm supposed to be back in D.C. bright and early Thursday morning and who knows when we'll have time together after that? I really don't want to waste these next few days with you lurking around feeling guilty or feeling like you have to paste a smile on your face and act like everything is okay while you're missing someone else.
"Let's just put it out on the table and deal with it."
"I'm not sure that's a good idea, Sir."
"I am. And if you're going to let those nasty 'Sir's keep slipping in, consider it an order. I know there's more to what happened than what's going into the official file. I want to hear--well, no, I don't want to hear it, but you need me to. So shoot. Who was he, Carter?'
She refused to look at him when she answered, "Jon. Jon O'Neill."
"Me!" he said in surprise and then nodded his head in evident satisfaction. "I knew it! I knew it, I am irresistible in any timeline!" he gloated to try to lighten the shadowed look behind her eyes. And maybe if he'd had time to think about it, he would have known it. It certainly wasn't unprecedented from other alternate timelines/realities they'd visited. Destiny did seem to have something in mind for them.
She gave him a small, rather feeble smile and said, "You realize that you are the most conceited man I have met in two universes?'
"I take offense at that because I'm sure I heard McKay's name mentioned in your debriefing, and I've got nothing on that man as far as sheer arrogance and conceit are concerned."
"I stand corrected."
"Apology accepted. Now tell me about the other me...and you." And slowly with some trepidation and tears she did.
"Jamie Ahmsted," he mused when she'd finished. "I remember her. I wouldn't say I came close to marrying her, but she was a nice girl."
He wouldn't say it not because it wasn't true but because he'd learned two things from Carter as she talked. For one reason or another it was essential to her for conscience sake that he and this Jon were not the same man. He would have a harder time dealing with her having been married to some other guy...especially considering she'd celebrated a year of marriage with that guy and their first anniversary was only now coming up.
Him, he took it as a good thing she'd fallen for the other him...had to mean even with all of his faults and the difficulties of their long distance relationship she was happy enough as his wife to be willing to take up with him all over again.
She obviously saw it differently--some overthought woman thing he supposed. Probably afraid he'd one day ask her which of the two she'd loved the most. She'd been the Carter to come home, but if he'd understood what she was saying that hadn't been decided because she was the one who loved him more while the other Carter had been the one to love Jon more. Nothing that simple.
But, he would never ask, never even wonder. She'd answered the only thing that mattered to him when she hadn't abandoned him and this world to time. She'd bided her time and endured whatever she'd endured in that other time and world to come back for him and that said it all.
If it helped her sleep at night believing he wasn't the same man in both realities, he wouldn't disillusion her. But for all she wanted to believe otherwise, listening to her talk he'd learned he and the other him weren't all that different. They'd chosen to live their lives differently and they'd been influenced and shaped by the consequences of their choices to some degree, but they were essentially the same man. Loving one of them, she'd been helpless not to love the other.
*****
"Jon! What a surprise," she'd said smiling up at him and resting a hand on her obviously pregnant belly.
"Jamie, you're looking...great," he told her with a grin. He was not as surprised to see her as she was to see him. He'd made the mistake of visiting his granddad on the week of the all school reunion and had consequently been running into old acquaintances left and right.
She socked him playfully and then twirled so he could get a good look at her. "I'm looking wonderful if you're into swollen bellies and feet," she told him with a laugh.
"I'm surprised you're here...I figured you'd be-" he began but then cut himself off because life had a nasty habit of not working out the way you planned and he was the last person with any right to rub her nose in it if her plans had fallen short of her dreams.
"Out in the boat?" she finished for him without any reluctance or regret. "Well," she patted her bulging stomach, "Gary said he wasn't up for an unassisted birth this summer, so he grounded us for the duration."
"Gary? Gary Dolan? You married Gary Dolan...the guy can't--!"
"...even fish!" she finished for him again. "I know. I know. But there are worse things in life. He does make beautiful babies...and buko bucks to keep the boat afloat. We do all right. How about you? Get much fishing in?"
"Not enough to mention."
"That's a shame, Jon. Or colonel now I hear. Next thing we know, it will be general. I warned you you were throwing your life away when you threw me over for the Air Force."
"That you did."
"No regrets though?"
"I miss the kids," he said after a moment of deliberation. "I miss that passel of kids you promised me if I hung around...and the fishing, of course." They'd laughed together easily as they always had and she'd waddled off to find her husband and he'd hurried off to avoid meeting anyone else he used to know.
And he'd wondered then as he sometimes had through the years what his life would have been like if he had made a different decision as a seventeen year old kid. If he had had any hopes of being able to support the two of them and whatever kids came along, he would have stayed, married her, and made a go of trying to make her dreams come true.
Instead, he'd been a kid with no skills, no rich uncle, no nothing but a chance at an ROTC scholarship and a mom who struggled to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads because she'd married a kid who hadn't been able to take the pressures of providing for a family and had left her to handle them alone. At seventeen, he'd been too scared to marry Jamie and discover some time down the road that he had grown up to be his father.
But, if the vagaries of time had left him an uncle with a good job at the mill...well, he and Jon would have been close enough to indistinguishable.
Those contrasts Carter was clinging so tightly to, he doubted they would have existed at all. But if they gave her some measure of comfort, he was happy to leave them to her.
And she need not ever worry that he'd ask her to pick favorites between the two of them. Their life choices had molded them into somewhat different men, but her own choices mirrored his. She'd enjoyed her visit to that other world (and it was going to take her sometime to get over feeling guilty for that for reasons he quite probably would never understand) but she belonged in his.
"I've always favored long-legged blonds myself," he told her, and he was content with the small smile he got in return. She'd left people she loved behind and she'd need some time to deal with that loss. A good deal of time.
Patience wasn't his long suit, but he loved her enough to be willing to give her all the time she needed. Thanks to her and Daniel, they had, after all, all the time in the world. He drew her into a closer embrace and rested his head against hers, breathing in her smell and enjoying the feel of her in his arms.
"You really don't have problems with any of this?" she asked him.
"Well...I have to admit it's a bit on the odd side," he said wondering if this would be a good time to confess the stolen kiss that had been the high point of that whole time loop fiasco. He'd always wondered how she'd react to knowing he'd taken advantage of her and the situation. But, he decided now wasn't the time to find out. That had been child's play compared to this and bringing it up would do nothing but belittle her feelings.
Instead, he said, "Tell me something...did he make you happy?" She grimaced in guilty dismay and he asked again, "Did he?"
"Yes, as much as I could be under the circumstances." Under the circumstances. As happy as she could be believing he was dead and she was guilty of what? Just what exactly was she afraid she'd done in loving his counterpart?
"That's all I could ask," he told her. "I'd hate to think you weren't happy for all that time. In fact, I'd have a lot more problems with all of this if I thought you'd been ready to curl up and die just because you lost me. I may be irresistible but I'm hardly irreplaceable."
She shook her head against him and said in a whisper, "You are to me."
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