Title: Thine Own Self (the Lady, be Good Remix)
Author: beatrice_otter
Fandom: Stargate: SG-1
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Samantha Carter
Word Count: 12,962
Written for: Christi (daisycm83) for gateverse_remix.
Betaed by: the awesome redbyrd_sgfic
Original story: On Your Mind (http://literatiwannabe.the-family-archives.com/onyourmind.htm)
Summary: Sam’s always a good girl. Except when she isn’t.
1969.
Mommy puts ribbons in her hair and dresses her in her prettiest dress. Samantha doesn’t like the dress—it itches, and she isn’t supposed to scratch.
“You look very pretty, Samantha,” Mommy says. “We’re going over to Colonel Foster’s house for a very special event. Do you remember going to Colonel Foster’s house a few weeks ago?”
Samantha nods solemnly. “He’s Daddy’s boss. And you wanted Mrs. Colonel Foster to like us so Colonel Foster would like Daddy.” She hadn’t liked Mrs. Colonel Foster or her house. The house had been big and cold and filled with fascinating things Samantha wasn’t allowed to touch, and Mrs. Colonel Foster had ignored Samantha the whole time they were there, even though Samantha had done everything Mommy told her to.
Mommy nods and smiles. “Of course you remembered. You’re a very smart little girl. You were very good then, and you need to be very good now.”
Samantha fidgets. She’s always a good girl. “Do we have to go?” she asks. It’s much easier to be a good girl in a place where she can run and play.
“We’re going to see something very special on television,” Mommy says. She pats Samantha on the head like she does when she wants to ruffle her hair but doesn’t want to mess it up. “You see, there are men in a spaceship, a rocket, going to the moon. One of them is named Neil Armstrong, and he’s going to get out and be the first man ever to walk on the surface of the moon. It’s going to be very exciting.”
Samantha stares at her, eyes round. “But you said there wasn’t a man in the moon, Mommy.”
Mommy laughs. “There isn’t a man in the moon, sweetie. Neil Armstrong came from Earth, and he’s only going to be there for a few days, and he’s going to walk around on the moon, not in it.”
“There’s my two beautiful girls!”
Samantha turns around with a big smile. She loves her Daddy, loves it when he picks her up and swings her around. She holds her arms up and whoops in delight when he scoops her up.
“Don’t get her riled up, Jake,” Mommy says. But she’s smiling, and leans in to kiss Daddy.
“Daddy, how did the man get to the moon?” she asks.
“Well, do you remember the fireworks we had on the Fourth of July?” Daddy says. “They built a great big one with a tiny room at one end just big enough for three people.”
“Really?” Samantha’s eyes are wide. She loved the fireworks—they were pretty, and they made such loud bangs when they went off. Mark cried even though he was almost seven, but she was a big girl and wasn’t scared. She wonders how much noise a firework big enough to put three men inside would make, and what pretty colors it would have.
“Really,” Daddy says. “They pointed it at the moon and set it off, and they were up, up, and away!” He throws her in the air, and she shrieks.
“Do it again!”
“We don’t want to be late,” Mommy says.
“Mommy’s right, kiddo,” Daddy says. “We want to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, don’t we?”
Samantha nods her head as hard as she can.
“Then let’s go.” Daddy hands her to Mommy and calls to Mark, and off they go.
Later, after Neil Armstrong has said the words about Man and Mankind, the other children of Daddy’s fellow officers go out to play in the backyard. The adults are talking. The television is showing the newsman talking, and he’s repeating himself a lot. Samantha sits by herself at the television, absorbing every word. It was the most exciting thing she’d ever seen, more exciting than the time the stray cat that lived in their backyard had kittens, even.
One of the women comes over to her. “Did you like the moon landing, dear?” she says.
Samantha looks up at her. “I’m going to be an astronaut when I grow up and go to the moon, just like Neil Armstrong!”
The woman is taken aback, but she laughs after a second. “What a funny little girl you are, sweetie.” She turns to one of the others, says something Samantha doesn’t catch.
Samantha bites her lip; she didn’t mean to be funny, and her feelings are hurt, but she doesn’t want to cry about it like a baby. She looks at Mommy, but Mommy is looking at Mrs. Colonel Foster, and Mommy looks worried.
“I see we have a budding feminist in our midst,” Mrs. Colonel Foster says, and some of the women laugh. It doesn’t sound very nice. Samantha doesn’t know what a feminist is, but from the way she said it—from the way Mommy is frowning—it must be bad.
Samantha must have done something wrong, but she doesn’t know what. She was trying to be a good girl.
For Christmas that year, Samantha asks for a Major Matt Mason doll and all the toys that go with it. Mommy lets her help make Christmas dinner, and she even gets to help mix the cookie dough for the cookies. Samantha is so proud when Mommy calls her a big girl. She can’t wait to open presents.
But there isn’t a Matt Mason doll waiting under the tree for her. She gets Barbie and Ken and some books about space from Daddy, and some homemade doll clothes from Mommy. She likes them, she really does, and so she smiles and says thank you, but she can’t help but be disappointed because they’re not what she wanted.
Mark gets a Major Matt Mason Flight Pak, a Moon Suit Pak, and a baseball bat. Mark plays with Major Mason for a while, before shoving them on the dusty shelf that holds his G.I. Joe toys and his few books and taking his new bat outside to play with the neighbor boys.
When he hasn’t so much as touched them again by two days later, Samantha goes into his room and takes them when he’s off at school. He doesn’t notice they’re gone, and Mommy doesn’t make her put them back. So Barbie and Major Matt go to the moon and back at least once a day.
Mommy makes her hide them when Mrs. Colonel Foster or one of the other officers’ wives show up. But for her birthday next May, Daddy gives Samantha Major Matt Mason’s Talking Command Console.
1978.
Samantha is thirteen, and they’ve just moved half-way across the country to Whiteman Air Force Base. Dad’s been given a promotion and assigned to the 351st Strategic Missile Wing. It’s the first time Samantha has lived in a place with that many missile silos. She goes to school in near-by Knob Noster, Missouri, with the rest of the base children and all the kids from the town and its surrounding farms. The school is smaller than her last one, with a greater divide between the local kids and the ones from the base, but they have a program called Educationally Advanced, which teaches higher-level math and science to the smart kids. After a week in the regular classes, Samantha’s math teacher Ms. Blackwell asks the principle to put her in the EA class.
She’s the only girl. At first she doesn’t mind, because it’s the first time she’s had a math class that wasn’t boring. But none of the five boys in the class (three Air Force brats like herself, two local boys) will speak to her once they figure out she’s smarter than they are. When the teacher calls her up to the blackboard to solve a problem, one of them stretches a foot out just in time for her to trip over it. The teacher makes him apologize, but Samantha knows he did it on purpose.
Samantha had been making friends with a girl her age named Rebecca who lives on the base, a few houses down from the Carters. The day after Samantha gets put in EA, Rebecca won’t sit with her at lunch, and two of the local girls laugh at the idea of a girl in the geeky boy science class. Samantha goes home crying, and Mom hugs her as she sobs out her story. They make cookies together, and that night Samantha wakes up to hear her parents arguing about her classes. The next day Mom takes her to school and talks with the principal. Samantha stays in EA, but she has to take Home Ec as well.
Samantha hates it. The other girls have had a semester and a half to learn things, but Samantha wasn’t in Home Ec at her old school and the things Mom has taught her at home aren’t enough to keep up with the others. She’s behind, and knows it. Feeling stupid is a new feeling for her, and she doesn’t like it. Worse, the other girls giggle about her crooked seams and failed foods behind the teacher’s back.
“Why do I have to take Home Ec?” she asks her mother that evening.
Mom looks up from the bills she’s working on at the kitchen table, takes her reading glasses off. “Home Economics teaches things that will be handy to know when you’re all grown up and married and have a family to take care of.”
“But I don’t want to stay home and take care of kids,” Samantha says. “I want to be an astronaut!” That’s one thing that hasn’t changed since the night she watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon, although she has learned to be careful who she says it to.
Mom sighs. “Samantha, you’re a very smart girl, and it’s good to be ambitious and want a career. But the space program is all but dead, and they don’t let women in it, anyway.”
“They’re building new rockets, reusable shuttles that’ll be cheaper than the old Saturn V rockets,” Samantha says. “The first one will be ready for launch in just a few years. They’re looking for new people for the program, now. And they’re accepting female applicants!” It will take Samantha several years to finish growing up and go to college and get her doctorate, but the space program has entered a brave new era, and she thinks that by the time she’s ready to apply herself, they’ll probably be about ready to send the first manned expedition to Mars.
Mom crosses her arms and watches her for a few moments, a look on her face that Samantha doesn’t understand. “I didn’t know that,” she says. “Even so, you’ll want to get married eventually, Samantha. I don’t want to think of you all alone. A career is important, but it’s not enough if it means you come home every night to a cold, empty house. I want you to make some man a good wife some day, and a good mother. I want you to be happy.”
“I’d be happy if I were an astronaut,” Samantha says. She looks over to where Dad and Mark are sitting in the living room, working on the fishing gear they’re going to take with them on the trip they have planned. “Dad?”
Dad looks up. “Your mom knows what girls need better than I do, honey. I hope you get to be an astronaut, but I want you to be happy, too, not just ambitious.”
“But I’m not happy in Home Ec now,” Samantha complains. She’s not that happy in her EA classes, either, but she won’t mention it; she loves the learning, even if the boys are being jerks, and it will look good on her transcripts when she applies to colleges and, later, to NASA. In Home Ec, her classmates don’t like her and she hates the course work.
“Things will get better, I promise, Samantha,” her mother says. “It will be good for you to learn what it’s like to not be the best at something. And it’s important that you have girl friends your age.” She bends over the bills again, and Samantha knows the conversation is closed.
Samantha goes to her room and shuts the door as loud as she dares. She doesn’t know why Mom thinks Home Ec will make her happy as an adult, but she does know that it doesn’t matter how much she wants to be friends with the other girls if they don’t want to be friends with her.
By the time they’ve been there a month, Samantha still hasn’t made any friends, and she’s found out just how little there is to do for a girl by herself. When Dad and Mark both have spare time, they’re rebuilding an old junker Dad bought from a friend; it’ll be Mark’s car when he gets his license. Sometimes, if she’s quiet and doesn’t bother them, they’ll let her watch. She can only spend so much time helping Mom take care of the house and going with Mom to visit Mom’s new friends. It’s going to be a long summer.
By the end of the next year, Samantha will learn to hold her own in Home Ec, though her grades are nothing special. She talks with the other girls at school, but she still doesn’t really have a friend, someone she can trust and tell all her secrets and plans, someone who will invite her over for a slumber party or go to the pool in the summer with her. She’s not sad at all when Dad tells them he’s been transferred again, and they’ll have to move. Maybe she’ll make a friend in their new base. Mark gets mad and starts shouting about leaving his friends and his basketball team. Samantha just goes to her room to start packing.
1980.
Dad’s been assigned to Tactical Air Command out of Langley Air Force Base for a year. He’s very busy; the Tactical Air Command is a Major Command, which means it controls all tactical air missions in the United States, and the training that goes with them. Samantha’s fifteenth birthday was a pretty depressing day; it had been just her and Mom. Dad had to be at work, Mark was off with friends, and Sam hadn’t yet made friends of her own. There didn’t seem much point; there were rumors that Dad would get transferred out to the Red Flag program at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada soon. Samantha spends most of her time reading science books anyway, so she tells herself it doesn’t matter. When she needs to talk with someone, she has Mom.
Mom says that she spends too much time alone, needs to find friends her own age, but all her suggestions run to things like joining the cheerleading squad or choir or a 4-H club that does sewing or cooking or maybe even photography. Sam isn’t very musical, doesn’t like sewing or cooking, and while she likes football and basketball, she’d rather play them than stand on the sidelines jumping up and down for the crowd. She doesn’t know how to be “one of the girls,” anyway, and it’s more painful to be in the group and not a part of it than it is to be completely alone. She does track and field, and she enjoys it, pushing her own limits, not depending on anyone else; besides, it’s the kind of sport the astronaut program would like. (The Air Force Academy would like it, too, and she’ll have a better chance to get into NASA as an officer than a civilian. But that’s a couple years off, and she doesn’t quite have the courage to mention it to Mom, yet.)
This particular afternoon, Mom is out playing bridge with other officers’ wives. Samantha finishes the book she was reading about the time she expected Mom to be home, but she isn’t home yet, so Samantha decides to bake cookies. The summer hasn’t yet gotten hot enough to make baking a chore. Dad will be pleased; he loves chocolate chip cookies. And Mom smiles and calls her “my little woman” when she does household things like that. Assuming Dad comes home on time, tonight, they should still be warm when he gets there.
Mom should be home by now, but Samantha reasons that she might have errands to run and doesn’t think much of it. But then she’s taking the last sheet out of the oven and Dad’s coming through the door with a look on his face like his world just came to an end.
As he explains what happened that day, Sam realizes hers has, too.
1982.
Sam comes in the door, not bothering to be quiet; Dad’s probably not home yet, so it doesn’t matter. Mark hasn’t been living at home since he turned eighteen, and with Dad working such long hours it feels like she’s living alone in a large four-bedroom house. It’s too big for one person, and she doesn’t like the feeling that gives her, so she spends as much time as she can in other places like the library or the bowling alley with the least expensive pool table in town. When she gets guilty over the state the house is in (Mom would have been horrified to see it) she cleans until it shines. Then she bakes cookies. Then she goes out and stays away for as long as she can without Dad freaking out.
“Where have you been, Sam?” Dad comes out of the living room as she heads upstairs to her bedroom.
“Out driving,” she says, trying not to blush. She’s not very successful.
“Who with?” Dad asks, glancing out the screen door. But Jimmy’s already driven away. He’s a good guy; she could introduce him to Dad, and she’s going to. But not tonight.
“A friend,” she says, knowing Dad hasn’t paid enough attention to her in years to know she’s never quite learned the knack of making female friends.
He sighs. “Samantha, it’s late—”
“Sam, Dad,” she says, derailing his lecture with their current standing argument. “Call me Sam.”
“Samantha is a beautiful name,” Dad says. “I don’t understand why you want to make it sound like you’re a boy.”
“I just don’t want to sound like a Sixties television character, Dad,” Sam shoots back. Samantha is a beautiful name, but it’s a name for a girl who sings in choir and is on the cheerleading squad and wants to go to college so she can meet nice college men who are going to be lawyers and doctors and executives some day. The kind of girl her parents wanted her to be, the kind she’s never really been.
By the time they’re done arguing over her name, Sam’s trying so hard to hold back tears that she’s shaking. But it kept Dad from asking what friend she was with and what they were doing, which was the important thing. She goes to her room, lies down on her bed, and cries until she decides it’s stupid to get so worked up over a name and she’s cried enough. Something a lot more important happened to her tonight.
She doesn’t feel any more like a woman, any more adult, than she did three hours earlier. She didn’t feel like the Earth moved. (She wasn’t expecting it to; the Earth’s rotation and orbit have been known for centuries, and even something subjectively important like sex won’t change that objective fact.) She doesn’t feel transformed or enlightened or swept away to a mysterious place of pleasure. But she doesn’t feel ashamed, either. She feels … like herself. Jimmy Washburne is a really nice guy; she wouldn’t have chosen him if he weren’t. He was gentle, and he tried to make her happy, and he brought blankets and pillows to make the bed of his truck comfortable for her. For them. She wouldn’t change anything about it, if given the chance. (Well, she might have chosen Richard Gere instead of Jimmy Washburne if she could have, but she’s never been one to confuse fantasy and reality.)
She’s not ashamed, but she does want someone to talk to about it, someone who will listen as she tells the whole story from beginning to end, someone she can share all this with. The last person she could do that with was Mom, and Mom’s been dead almost two years, now.
As she’s staring up at the ceiling, it occurs to her that she probably couldn’t have told Mom about it, either. Mom grew up in the Fifties and for all that she was only twenty-seven during the Summer of Love, that wasn’t her way of thinking and never would have been. In Mom’s world, good girls waited until marriage, and Sam had always been a good girl.
That makes her feel lonelier than she has in several months—she’d thought she was over her grief, moving on with her life. What makes it even worse is that it’s the first time she’s realized she knows what Mom would think about something … and doesn’t think she agrees with her. Sam’s not a child any more, in an entirely not-theoretical way. She made her own decision based on her own wants and needs, not on what either of her parents would want for her. It feels like a worse betrayal of her mother’s memory than the actual act of sex was, and she has the mad urge to go down and start cleaning or baking cookies, as if that would expiate her sins and appease her mother’s ghost.
What would horrify Mom the most, though, Sam thinks, is the fact that she doesn’t love Jimmy. She likes him a lot, but it’s not the kind of grand passion you see in the movies, and it isn’t even the comfortable warm domesticity her parents shared. Sam didn’t want to be alone any more, and it’s easier to find a boyfriend than a real female friend, especially if you’re willing to put out. And she’d been curious about sex, about the things she’d seen on television and in the movies, and she’d heard girls at school giggling about it but wasn’t good enough friends with any of them to ask the real, serious questions she wanted to ask, and Mom had never sat her down and given her The Talk because Sam was a Good Girl. And Sam couldn’t seem to talk with Dad about what they were having for supper; she certainly wasn’t going to bring up the subject of sex.
So she’d fallen back on the thing she knew how to do best: science. She’d done background research, set her objective, formulated a plan to achieve it, identified relevant variables, and tested her hypothesis. Now she’s analyzing the data and drawing her conclusions. She knows Mom wouldn’t approve of the approaching sex like an experiment, and it occurs to her that her peers wouldn’t, either. And maybe they’re both right in their different ways, because maybe if she’d done it the usual way, fallen in love with some guy, the Earth would have moved for her in ways it doesn’t in her science books and she would have felt transformed.
One in three girls have sex before they turn eighteen. That’s a fact she discovered in her research into human (particularly teenage) sexuality. But she doesn’t have what most of those 33% have, and that’s love, or at least some illusion of it.
The sex itself … was okay. But she feels more alone now than she did before. She realizes that if you don’t have mental or emotional closeness with someone already, sex probably isn’t going to magically provide it. Sam blinks back tears. She doesn’t know how to create that kind of closeness with anyone, and she never has. Mom would have. Much as she likes Jimmy, she has no idea what a relationship like that would look like, doesn’t know if she trusts him enough to let him in. And if she did … what would happen next? She’ll be leaving for college soon.
She thinks about that for a long time. A week later, she breaks up with Jimmy even though she feels guilty about it. He really is a nice guy, and she enjoyed spending time with him. She never meant to hurt him, though she realizes as she sees his face fall, she really did. But no matter how she hurt him, he’s too nice to joke about her behind her back, and she’s grateful for that.
This is one experiment she won’t publish the results of.
1983.
“No. Absolutely not.” Dad’s voice is rough and loud, and she can see his jaw clenching and unclenching.
“I’ll be eighteen. I’ve already been accepted. You can’t stop me.” She’d thought he would be proud of her, and she wanted to surprise him, despite how difficult it was to get through the nomination and application process without him finding out. But she’s not backing down now.
“The hell I can’t!” Dad yells; it’s frightening because he never yells.
She grits her teeth and blinks back tears. “Dad—”
“All I have to do is make some calls.” He’s not yelling anymore, and it should be a relief, but it’s not. Not with that look in his eyes. “I know a lot of people in this man’s Air Force, and I guarantee you I can find a reason to have them revoke your acceptance to the Air Force Academy.”
“Why, Dad?” Sam asks, forcing the words out past a throat that seems to be strangling with tears. “You wanted Mark to go into the Air Force. You kept hounding him so much he moved out to get away from you. Aren’t I good enough?” She breaks off, horrified that she actually said it out loud.
But maybe it was a good thing she did, because it makes him stop in his tracks and really look at her for the first time since she told him what she was going to do with her life. “Oh, Sam, honey,” he says, and his voice is still rough but it’s not hostile anymore, and maybe it would be better if it were because now she can’t quite hold the tears back. “I’m very proud of you,” he says at last. “You’re smart and you’re strong and I love you. That’s why I don’t want you to go.” He reaches up, brushes some hair out of her eyes.
Sam almost flinches; it’s the first time he’s touched her in a long time. “You’re not making any sense.”
He sighs. “I know you think you can do anything. But believe me when I say the military is no place for women. It’s a hard life, and most of the people you would be working with—both above you and below you—would resent the very idea of a woman in uniform. And they’re going to take it out on you. They won’t respect you, and they’ll harass you in any way they can. If name-calling and spreading rumors is the worst they do, you’ll be lucky.”
“Do you resent the idea of women in uniform, Dad?” Sam asks.
“I just don’t want to see you get hurt,” he replies, but he isn’t looking her in the eyes.
The phone rings and it’s someone from work who needs something from Dad, and that’s the end of the discussion for the day. He tries to talk her out of it, but he never calls anyone to try and get her acceptance revoked. Eventually, he even stops trying to talk her out of it.
He never tells her he accepts her decision, never says he’s proud of her for making it in to one of the most selective colleges in the nation, never says he hopes she does well.
But when he takes her out that summer and teaches her to shoot, she knows that’s what he means.
1986.
She’s a second-class cadet (what civilians call a junior) when the Challenger explodes. They’re in the middle of class when the announcement is made over the intercom, and Sam sits in shock rather than praying during the moment of silence that follows.
This is the worst disaster the American space program has ever seen. Only three people died in the Apollo 1 fire, and it might have derailed the space program permanently if they hadn’t been trying to beat the Russians to the moon. There is no such incentive, now, and seven people just died. This is the first American space flight to have casualties during the mission, and the first to launch and not reach space. The space shuttle hasn’t lived up to it’s expectations—even with re-usable parts, it’s not that much less expensive per launch than the Saturn V’s were, and NASA spent a hell of a lot of money designing it in the first place. There have always been people who think space is too expensive a dream to justify; now they’ll be able to say it’s too dangerous a dream, as well. Everything will be shut down while they figure out what happened, and it might not be started up again. All the hard work she’s done to make it this far might not be enough, after all.
That’s what she thinks about for the rest of the class, and later when she looks at her notes she has no idea what they mean. It’s the first time in her life she’s had to copy someone else’s notes.
That night she lies in her bunk and thinks about quitting. Dad was right; the Academy isn’t easy for anyone, but it’s especially difficult for women. She figured out the traps early, and managed to stay out of most of them. She won’t drink until she’s twenty-one and can’t be blackmailed, she never does anything that might even hint at an Honor Code violation, and she is never, ever going to have sex with a fellow member of the Air Force. She’d rather be called frigid than a whore, and she’d rather do a lot of push-ups than risk getting thrown out for fraternization. She only has one or two real friends, and she has a lot of enemies, people who want to see the perfect ice maiden brought low, but if it meant getting to go into space it would all be worth it. Without that dream, she’s not certain it is.
But she was brought up to respect duty, honor, country above everything else, and being an Air Force officer is something to be proud of in its own right. She’s never been prouder of her Dad than she has been since coming to the Academy and learning first-hand just what kinds of things his chosen career entails. She would be proud to wear that uniform, even if she never got to space. Besides, she can’t bear to admit to anyone (Dad) that she couldn’t handle it, that she wasn’t good enough.
But she can’t go on like this indefinitely. Life as a second-class cadet is better than life as a third-class cadet, and infinitely better than life as a doolie, a fourth-class cadet, but that’s not saying much. She needs some way of cutting loose.
She makes it the four months until her twenty-first birthday by the skin of her teeth. Then she goes into Colorado Springs, to a bar not usually frequented by Air Force personnel, and drinks and plays pool until someone catches her eye. She goes home with him, but makes sure she’s back on base by curfew. He’s the first guy she’s slept with since Jimmy, and she doesn’t even know his name.
She doesn’t have any more one-night stands, and she still won’t sleep with anyone in Air Force blue, but she does loosen up in other ways. Sometimes she has to force herself to do so, but it does make a few more friends, and that makes everything so much easier.
1987.
Dad comes to her graduation, and stands proud in his Air Force blue. Sam thinks her heart will burst the first time she gives him a salute as a fellow officer, not just a cadet. Mark doesn’t come, but she doesn’t expect him to. They’re in regular contact, but only because they have an unwritten agreement that she won’t ask him to try to talk to Dad if he won’t tell her she’s wasting herself by going into the Air Force. She has no one else to invite; she lost track of her few friends from high school when she left for the Academy.
It’s been a hell of a four years. Sam has grown, not just as a military officer, but as a person, and she knows she’ll always be grateful to the Air Force, no matter what happens, for making her the very best person she could be. That makes her sound like a recruiting poster, but it’s true. She doesn’t mind being one of the boys; it’s easier than being one of the girls, in a lot of ways. She’s never wanted the picket fence and husband and 2.4 children everyone assumes for her future, no matter how well they know her. Not that anyone really does.
1994.
Sam spends the whole dinner trying to run interference between Dad and Jonas. She hadn’t expected to; she’d thought Dad would love him. He’s an Air Force officer with a good career (even if it’s in “black” operations her father regards as a necessary evil and never really trusts), he’s respectful of his superiors (at least to their faces), he’s charming (except when he’s a pain in the ass), and he goes to church regularly (even if he does prefer churches that are way more fundamentalist than the Catholic churches Mom dropped her off at for Sunday School every week growing up). And he makes her happy. She knew Dad would be upset at first meeting him only after they were engaged, but they’re all three of them on active duty at different bases, and finding a time that all three of them can get off isn’t easy.
The next day Jonas goes out for a run in the morning, to let the two of them catch up, he says. She knows it’s because he doesn’t want to have to deal with Dad again, and she’s grateful both that he went out and that he was tactful enough not to say why. She and Dad sit in his cool living room and make stilted conversation about their relative careers, the only thing they seem to be able to talk about any more. He’s upset that she’s given up flying to focus on science, but accepts that she’d rather fly the Space Shuttle than an F-15 even now that women are allowed to fly in combat. She listens with patience as he derides the idea that the Russians are ever going to stop being the number one threat to the security of the United States. Finally, she can’t hold back any more.
“Why do you dislike Jonas?” she asked.
“Honey, I don’t know him well enough to dislike him,” Dad replies, except that given the way he presses his lips together and the way he needled Jonas all last night, it’s pretty obvious that he’s lying.
“Dad,” Sam says.
“I’m sorry, Sam.” Dad sighs. “I know how much he means to you. I just … I don’t like the vibe I get from him.”
Sam bites her tongue and doesn’t say that Jonas probably doesn’t like the vibe he gets from him, either. Jonas has seen some bad things in his life, even (especially) before he joined the Air Force, and that’s left its mark. He’s gotten over it all amazingly well, or she wouldn’t be marrying him.
“I just think you can do better, Sam,” Dad says. “I want the best for my little girl. And I want the best possible father for my future grandchildren, of course.” He changes the subject to politics.
Sam just sighs internally and lets him. She loves him, but she knows she’ll never change him, and for all he seems to be focusing on her career almost as much as his own these days, he still assumes that someday she’ll have a normal marriage and home life just like he and Mom had in the sixties. That’s what Mom would have expected, too, but much as she might have wanted to be at six and twelve and even eighteen, she’s not the good little girl they tried to make her into.
When she and Jonas are ready to drive back to California and their respective bases, Sam lets him drive without arguing for once, and watches the desert roll by outside her window, glad to be leaving the Matt Mason/Homemaker Barbie Doll Dad seems to think she is further behind with every passing mile.
Except, it turns out, she isn’t leaving them behind at all. Two weeks later she’s given temporary detached duty to Cheyenne Mountain and shown the most incredible thing she’s ever seen in her life. She solves the problem they brought her there for, and they offer her a permanent transfer. There are two science teams at the base; one’s made up of civilians, primarily archaeologists and translators, working on the device from that angle while the other is made up of military physicists and engineers looking for military uses, ones the civilians either might not like or might not be cleared for. The one thing that keeps the assignment from being perfect is the compartmentalization that keeps the two groups from working together directly; Sam can’t imagine any aspect of the project being less than fascinating. She says yes because this is a chance she can’t pass up even if General West is a misogynist pig and it will be hell working for him (for the Door to Heaven she can bite her tongue and suck it up), and then calls Jonas to figure out how they can make this work.
“You can’t transfer to NORAD,” he tells her flatly.
“Excuse me?” she replies incredulously.
“We’re getting married in six months, Sam,” he said. “How can we do that if you’re half a continent away?”
“You could request a transfer to Peterson,” Sam said. “With your record—”
“You expect me to transfer?” His voice has a derisive note she’s rarely heard in it. He knows she doesn’t like that tone; it sounds too much like his father. She only met the elder Hansen once, and that was more than enough.
“Jonas, you can do what you’re doing now at any base in the country,” Sam said. It’s true; ever since his last mission, the one he can’t (won’t) talk about, he’s been assigned to the general staff officer work that makes every base run but is boring as hell. “This is a once in a lifetime job for me. I wish I could tell you about it—it’s the most incredible thing in the world.” Literally. “I can’t pass this up.”
“Why not?” Jonas replies. “You’d have to give it up in a year or two when you retired, anyway.”
“When I what?” Sam can’t imagine what gave him the impression she might be open to that; she’s always been completely up front with her career plans. He’s never commented on them.
“Well, you won’t be able to stay on active duty after we start a family,” Jonas says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. He goes on about the perfect June Cleaver life she’s going to lead, putting on the charm that first attracted her to him, and the picture he paints is so beautiful she could see herself fitting into it perfectly.
If it weren’t for the fact that he’s nuts, because she can’t imagine loving any man so much she’d be willing to give up her career for him. Certainly not now that she’s got the prospect of a bona-fide alien device probably capable of creating wormholes on command, once they get everything figured out.
She listens to Jonas go on for about five minutes, alternating between shock and bemusement and an unwilling respect for his persuasiveness. She still can’t figure out why he thinks she might be willing to go along with this. Maybe he doesn’t know her as well as she thinks he does; maybe he’s more in love with the idea of Sam Carter in his mind than with her, the actual flesh-and-blood woman.
By the time he gets around to explaining how she can go to work for a university science lab part time once their children are in school, she’s had enough. “No, Jonas,” she says gently. “I’m not going to be quitting the Air Force, even if we have kids. I can’t imagine why you would think I would.”
There’s a long silence on the other end of the line.
“But you have to.”
“No, I don’t.” She holds her breath, hoping it won’t send him into one of his moods. He hasn’t had one since months before they got engaged, but the way he’s been talking ….
“You bitch,” he says at last, and she flinches. He’s never called her names before. “You fucking whore. Seduced by your science and your politics away from your duties as a woman, as a wife and mother. Your father should have locked you up rather than letting you join the Air Force.”
Sam blinks back tears; it’s almost exactly what his father said, the one time she met him, but a thousand times worse because she never cared about his father. “Jonas, you can’t believe that, that’s what your father would say,” she says, but he steamrollers right over her.
“But that’s okay, Sam,” he says, voice turning gentle, soothing, like she was some frightened child who didn’t know what she was saying. “You’ll come around, eventually, I know you will. You’re a good woman, Sam, despite it all. You know I’m right, you just need to admit it and let go of these crazy ideas.”
“No,” she says, feeling oddly detached, “you’re the one with the crazy ideas. I’ll mail your ring back to you.” She hangs up, feeling oddly empty. She would have expected to feel hurt, grieved, at the loss of the first serious relationship she’s ever had, but she doesn’t. She’s probably in shock; she knows it won’t last. She still can’t believe the things he said. Maybe he wasn’t the only one in love with a picture in his head.
Four months later, Sam comes in one Monday morning to hear through the grapevine that some civilian has figured out how to dial the Door to Heaven, and that West has brought in some mysterious colonel to take a team through. Nobody she talks to knows much about him; he hadn’t deigned to come down to the science labs. So she watches over closed circuit television as Jack O’Neill leads a team through the Stargate; West is still a misogynist bastard, and refused to even consider letting her on the team. Then he barred her from the control room, as if he expected her to go charging through the newly-rechristened ‘Stargate’ after the exploration team. The survivors come back with the bad news the Abydos has been destroyed, West transfers out (thank God), and after a few months of unsuccessful attempts to make the Stargate do anything else, everything is shut down and she gets the choice of whether to transfer back to the Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base (which could be a good stepping-stone to NASA if she plays her cards right) or go to DC, where she can continue to work on the Stargate data and lobby for the program’s reopening. There really isn’t a choice.
1997.
Sam escapes to her office as soon as she’s released from the infirmary. She doubts she’ll be disturbed; the base is still pretty understaffed, and her teammates all have their own reports to write. They seldom come to her office unless they have a technical problem. They have a debriefing in a couple of hours—General Hammond got the short version of Jonas’ insanity in the Infirmary, but now he needs the details, and she should really be working on her mission report. Instead, she sits and stares blankly at the computer screen.
She’s not sure how long she’s been sitting there when Colonel O’Neill strolls in, hands in his pockets. She starts typing before he can get ask what she’s doing. Reports are familiar; the Air Force really runs on paperwork and not jet fuel, after all. She could write one in her sleep; right now, she can’t tell if that’s a blessing (she doesn’t have to think about it) or a curse (she has time to dwell on just how much of the disaster was her fault). “Sir,” she says, acknowledging her CO’s presence and hoping he’ll just go away because she knows she’s going to get chewed out, but she really couldn’t handle that at this particular second.
“Carter,” he says, voice neutral. He stops about three feet away from her, on the side of her main work table adjacent to the one she’s sitting at. She can see him out of the corner of her eye.
She can’t tell anything from his voice, so she looks up at him, hands stilling over the keyboard.
He’s fiddling with the bunch of paperclips in a magnetic holder that sits with her other office supplies, shoved out of the way into a corner of the table. He’s not even looking at her.
Sam watches him for a few seconds, feeling the words build up pressure behind her tongue, begging to be released. She shouldn’t say anything, just be a good little soldier and not get herself into any more trouble.
On the other hand, Colonel O’Neill has seemed like a good guy since the first meeting, even if he gets annoyed by the science occasionally. (She’s a bit ashamed of assuming he’d be an asshole, in that first briefing, but she’s too embarrassed by the memory to apologize. He doesn’t seem to hold it against her, at least.) Certainly he’s a good officer, and she’s proud to serve under him. But these are not the kind of things you go to your CO with, these are the kinds of things you tell your best friend.
Except she doesn’t have one, certainly no friend close enough to tell who has enough clearance she could tell even an edited version to. And she can’t bear the idea of keeping this inside another minute.
“It’s my fault.”
The Colonel likes to play dumb, but thankfully doesn’t this time. “Did you know he thought he was God?” He waits until she shakes her head. And she has to; she didn’t know Jonas was that out of touch with reality. “Do you have some kind of ray-gun here that gives people … delusions of grandeur?” He glances around, as if seriously expecting to find one. “Because I have to say, I don’t think it’ll be that useful against the goold unless it’s got a reverse setting.”
Sam gives him half a smile. “No, sir,” she says. The smile doesn’t last. She looks down. “When we broke up—he said some things. Not about godhood,” she says hastily, “but … he was normally pretty charming. He could be, when he wanted to, and when he wasn’t he just tended to be a bit … irritable. Nothing too bad.” She sounds like some abused wife trying to excuse her abuser, and she hates that fact; he never laid a hand on her, never tried to seriously cut her down verbally either except for that last phone call.
“There were things in his past he wouldn’t talk about,” she continues, “and when he was like that I usually gave him space to work it out inside his own head. He didn’t like me prying. What he did say was … his dad was a real piece of work. I met him once, and he was verbally abusive. Menacing. Spouted a lot of reactionary religious hate at me, and Jonas too. All kinds of things, and I doubt he stopped at words when Jonas was a kid and too small to fight back. He had a bully’s instinct for hitting the weak spots, you know?”
Colonel O’Neill nods.
“I don’t think going from that into Air Force black ops was good for Jonas. But I thought he was past that.” She shrugs, still not meeting the Colonel’s eyes. “Guess I was wrong. But that last conversation, when he couldn’t convince me … he went from his most charming to verbally abusive and back to charming in a few minutes, and some of the things he said in both states were strange. It was like he was living in a different reality. But not enough to be sure he wasn’t just upset and saying things to be hurtful, you know?”
“Carter,” the Colonel says, pausing to collect his thoughts.
She looks up at him, sees not pity or contempt but understanding, and it gives her the courage to continue. She feels better now, like she’s not going to fall apart any second, and she has to get it all off her chest now before she loses her nerve. “And he was on desk duty, so it wasn’t like there were lives on the line, so I didn’t say anything. I saw his name on the list of people transferring in, and then on the list of Gate-team members, and I thought I should say something. But it’s not like I had any kind of proof he was crazy, just a feel from one conversation three years ago when we broke up. People would have assumed it was sour grapes or a grudge if I’d tried to say anything. And I wasn’t sure myself. And I thought, if something really was wrong with him, surely someone else would have noticed. All those people he killed would still be alive now if I’d spoken up.”
The tight, leaden feeling in her chest has eased while she’s been talking, but it starts to return as she waits for him to speak. She looks up at him, but his face doesn’t tell her anything. There are two possible responses: either he’ll tell her that there was nothing else she could have done and nothing is her fault, or he’ll tell her that she should have said something and failed her duty as an officer by not doing so. Both statements are true; they share the same possible space in the same way as Schrödinger’s Cat is alive and dead. Lots of true statements are like that.
She realizes, after a few minutes, that he’s not going to say anything. No heavy-handed sympathy, no recriminations. Sam doesn’t open up often, and she can count on one hand the number of times she’s done it and not received one or the other. She doesn’t have the words to describe how his silent presence makes her feel. Relieved, pathetically grateful, somehow free in a way she doesn’t understand—all of these kind of fit and none are exactly right. She wishes she were Daniel, for just a second, because surely Daniel would know.
Before the silence can get awkward, the Colonel puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes gently. It’s support that doesn’t come off like condescension. “Can’t change anything now,” he says.
“I guess not,” Sam replies, trying to put on a confident face. She doesn’t think it works.
“We have a debriefing in,” he checks his watch, “fifteen minutes. No need to bring this up unless someone asks.” He shrugs expressively. Sam nods. “I’m gonna go round up Daniel and Teal’c. Remind me to give you a lecture on ‘obeying orders’ and ‘letting personal feelings like guilt get in the way while we’re on other planets.’” Without waiting for a response, he strolls out the door.
Sam watches him go, bemused and confused, feeling better but not sure exactly why—it’s not like he said much, or really did anything. Somehow, though, it was exactly what she needed.
2000.
When Sam finally gets home, after the negotiations are done for the day and both the Tok’ra and the politicians are safely in someone else’s care for the night, she gets only as far as her living room couch before collapsing. She sits there, running the week’s event over and over in her mind, until long past the time she should get up to turn on the lights. It seems like too much effort; getting dinner—even calling for take-out—is even more daunting. What she wants, more than anything else in the world, is someone who can hold her, who can listen to her talk about one of the worst days she’s had in a while. She’ll talk with Janet tomorrow—can’t imagine trying to do her job without Janet’s friendship backing her up—but that doesn’t make any difference to her right this minute.
It’s at times like these she thinks Mom was right, about how much difference it makes having someone to come home to. And wonders what’s wrong with her, that she’s never been able to find someone. Sam’s a good officer and a good woman, she’s smart, she’s got a sense of humor, and she knows she’s pretty. So why hasn’t she ever been able to find someone? She knows what happens with Jonas wasn’t her fault. (She knows that. She does.) And she works too hard, too long, to meet men she doesn’t work with, but other dedicated career women seem to find someone. Maybe it’s just her.
This train of thought is only a distraction of course, and depressing as it is, she’s grateful for it, because thinking about today is even worse.
Martouf is dead. She killed him.
She had no choice; she knows that. It’s what he wanted; she knows that too. If she were in his place, she would hope someone would offer her the same mercy.
That doesn’t make it any easier. He loved her (or someone who looked like her and lived in her head once), and she killed him. He was sweet and never (rarely) pressured her, but that didn’t stop the Goa’uld who turned his mind against itself. It’s not the worst thing that’s happened to someone she cares about since she started going through the Stargate, but it’s close. It’s not her fault, but she’s the one who pulled the trigger.
Sam’s learned not to dwell on the bad things, because if she did it would drag her down. She’s excellent at her job, both the science and the soldiering; it’s not hubris to say that the fate of the world(s) sometimes depends on her. She can’t do that every day if she can’t see the good things they’ve accomplished because of all the horrors.
It’s harder today than it is most days.
Sam’s proud to serve her country, and she’s proud of what she’s accomplished, and she no longer feels like she has to prove anything to anyone about her professional competence. She doesn’t need Dad’s approval, but it’s comforting to know she has it just the same. But much as she believes in serving her country (planet), she joined the Air Force to see the stars. Soldiering isn’t her passion, nor is it her primary contribution to the war effort against the Goa’uld.
Right now, Sam thinks she could be perfectly happy, and as valuable to the defense of the planet (possibly more so) if she stayed at the SGC and worked in a lab full time. (Sometimes, although she’ll never admit it, she feels just the tiniest bit resentful when she gets pulled out of her lab for a mission that doesn’t require the best scientist on base—she never has time to study everything she wants to.) Sam likes the adrenaline rush of going through the gate, but … days like today it’s hard to believe it’s worth it. Fast motorcycles and fast cars give an adrenaline rush too, and when she drives fast she only risks herself. If she’d never gone through the Gate, she’d never have been blended with Jolinar, and she might never have met Martouf.
And Dad would be dead. And she wouldn’t have her teammates to call on when she needed them. And they wouldn’t have an ally against the Goa’uld. And there’s no way to know what else might have happened if she weren’t on an SG team, except that in both of the alternate realities they’ve contacted Sam was a scientist who stayed on base and in both realities Earth was captured by Apophis. Burying herself in science isn’t the answer, at least not while Earth is still in danger. At least, she won’t choose to do so.
Sam prays no one talks about what was said in the second round of za’tarc testing. There’s nothing to worry about, she knows that; Freya has no one to gossip with, Janet knows what this could mean to Sam’s career, and the idea of Teal’c gossiping is ludicrous. She also knows just how destroyed her career would be if it came out that not only does she have a crush (and that’s all it is, a crush with hero worship mixed in, and it will go away eventually on its own) on her CO, it affected a mission. (Who knows if Colonel O’Neill would have stayed if he didn’t think she returned his feelings? Sam knows he would have, but promotion boards and future COs might not.) Never mind that his behavior was no different; never mind that it was no different than their other teammates. Standards in the military are different for women than they are for men. She’s seen it too many times to count.
No one who was there will talk, and the cameras only record visual, not sound. But it’s been a wake-up call she apparently needed. It doesn’t matter how good she is, as an officer or as a scientist, if rumors get out that she’s fraternizing with men in her chain of command, or even that she wants to. If she’s letting her emotions affect her behavior on missions, it may affect her on base as well, and she can’t afford that. She knows he returns her feelings, now, and she only suspected it before, but that doesn’t matter. She won’t let it change anything.
She’ll have to be more careful, that’s all. She can’t afford to indulge her fantasies about what the Colonel would be like in bed, how it would feel to come home after a hard day at work and cuddle with him on the couch, or what would happen if she actually went up with him to that cabin he talks about occasionally. She’ll have to be slightly more formal with him, watch how she talks about him and to him, and avoid being alone with him even in innocent situations.
She doesn’t need to worry about how he’ll react to increased distance between them. He knows how much more precarious her position is as the woman and as the subordinate. And he would never push her.
2004.
The second time she introduces a fiancé to Dad, things are much different. For one thing, she doesn’t delude herself into thinking she has any idea how he’ll react. She doesn’t know him anymore, not really, doesn’t understand his life even though she’s the one who arranged it for him. And Pete’s nice, he wears a uniform (even if it’s not the one she and Dad share) and he’s her choice (which probably counts for more now than it did ten years earlier).
What worries her—about the meeting, anyway, she’s worried about a lot of things starting with Daniel, Anubis and Ba’al, the Jaffa, the Replicators, and continuing down all the way to Pete and Dad and the wedding which are pretty near the bottom of the list—is that Pete’s still a little star-struck about the whole “alien” thing. She doesn’t warn him first because she doesn’t want him to work up a lot of excitement about meeting an alien and be weird about it with Dad. Instead, he’s weird about it because he wasn’t warned. Sam has to wince, but inside she’s comforted by his reaction.
Jonas was able to charm the birds out of the trees when he wanted to; he’d certainly snowed her. It’d taken her years to realize just how much he’d manipulated her in the time they were together, gave and withheld his approval in subtle ways designed to guide her to his way of thinking; she doesn’t think she’d ever have let him remake her in his own image the way he wanted to, wants to think she’d have been too strong for that … but she’s glad their relationship didn’t last any longer than it did.
Eight years of dealing with the myriad different problems and opportunities offered by the Pandora’s Box of the Stargate have taken their toll, building her up and breaking her down until she knows exactly how much she has to give, and what she’s willing to give it for, before she breaks. She may not always like who she is, she may not always know exactly how to go about getting what she wants and needs, but she damn well knows the good and bad both. She’d never fall for a guy like Jonas now, and even if she did she’d know how to spot his manipulations. Pete’s not Jonas, in any way, shape or form. He’d never try to manipulate her, at least not more than the small, ordinary ways everyone does occasionally without realizing it.
But in some corner of her mind, it’s a relief to know that he’s not smooth enough to succeed if he wanted to try.
So Pete meets Dad, and while it’s a bit awkward it’s not as bad as she feared, and she goes back to worrying about galactic current events, while Pete goes back to worrying about planning the wedding. (He’s got his heart set on a big white wedding, and Sam doesn’t really care about the ceremony one way or the other. She told him he could have whatever he wanted if he’d make the decisions, but he doesn’t quite get that the colors and invitation styles and decorations don’t matter to her as long as they’re not horribly tacky. He keeps trying to involve her; it’s sweet, but a little annoying. When she stops to think about it—which isn’t often—she’s amused by the fact that their wedding planning is very stereotypical … except that it’s the bride who’s getting dragged along to all the meetings she doesn’t care about, rather than the groom.)
Then he shows her the house he bought for them without even telling her he was looking. Sam stands in front of the pretty house with a horrible feeling of déjà vu. At first she thinks it’s the way the house is Pete trying to arrange her—their—lives, domesticity fashioned into a cage even though the craving she’s developed for the trappings of domesticity is a large part of the reason she started dating him in the first place. This isn’t “let’s build a life together,” this is “let me take care of you.” And while Sam craves a “life together,” she doesn’t want to be taken care of. If this relationship is going to work, she’s going to have to find a way to make Pete recognize the difference, somehow. She knows all of this is part of the reason for the déjà vu, but at the same time there’s something else she can’t quite put her finger on.
Sam tells herself, as she drives to General O’Neill’s home, that that’s why she wants to see him. He was married for years; surely, he has some experience in dealing with such fundamental differences of mind. It isn’t until she sees the other woman and feels a kick to the gut that she realizes she was lying to herself. That was her excuse; what she wanted was personal time with the one man she’s ever been close to who has never tried to arrange her life for her, guilt her, indulge her because she’s a pretty woman, manipulate her for personal reasons, discount her worth or capabilities because of her gender, or assume he knows what’s best for her. She wanted to have her cake and eat it, too: she wanted him to tell her it was all right to dump Pete because he’d still be there, and maybe there was a way the two of them could build the kind of life together she wanted.
When she sees Kerry, she realizes two other things as well. The first is the irony of wanting to leave one man because he tried to arrange her life by going to another man to do it (and how much she’s always hated the kind of women who want men to solve all their problems for them). The second is how much she has assumed that on a personal level Jack O’Neill is there to serve her needs, staying distant and loving from afar like a saintly 19th-Century impoverished heroine until she wants something from him, expecting him to wait for her convenience (and how she hates the kind of men who assume that women are there for their convenience). She’s known it on some level for a while, now; the hallucination of him on the Prometheus told her as much. She leaves more ashamed of herself than she’s been in a long time, and with a lot more to think about.
She puts the whole thing out of her mind while Dad dies. She hasn’t had much time to talk with him about anything non-mission-related since he blended with Selmak; they still don’t have much time, but now there are no other distractions. They talk a little about Mom, about Sam’s childhood, about Mark and the kids, and it’s enough. Really, it is. Her bedside vigil makes all her other problems seem … trivial by comparison. And yet somehow more insurmountable at the same time. It’s an artifact of grieving, and she’s grieved for enough friends over the years she’s been in the SGC to know intimately how the process works.
After Dad dies, the thought of living with Pete in the house he bought makes her feel almost nauseous. Part of that’s grief; most of that is the whole idea of him arranging her life that way without even telling her. She’s surprised he takes it as well as he does, but once it’s over she doesn’t spare much thought for it. Sam knows she has never been all that good at understanding people, and right now she doesn’t have the mental energy to deal with much of anything besides Dad’s death, nor time for anything but the Replicators and Daniel’s descension and (later) the clean-up, both in the SGC and throughout the rest of the galaxy. (The fall of empires leaves a hell of a fall-out, in people and civilizations.)
Burying herself in work to avoid her personal problems has served her well over the years, but she can’t keep it up indefinitely. Eventually things slow down again and there’s less to distract herself with. It’s not until after they get the ZPM from … well, from themselves … and the team goes to Jack’s cabin that she realizes what the deeper level of déjà vu she felt that day in front of Pete’s house was. The quiet has given Sam time to think that she hasn’t had in years; now that things are beginning to quiet down out in the galaxy she feels like she can take a breath and an actual vacation without feeling guilty. It’s a luxury she hadn’t realized how much she needed, and it’s given her time to think about a lot of things, like what she wants to do now that the primary mission of the SGC—to defeat the Goa’uld—has been accomplished. She doesn’t like dwelling on the mess with Pete; it’s over, now, and she wants to put it behind her, but her mind keeps picking at it like an old scab. At first she just re-treads every significant conversation, looking for ways she could have made everything turn out better. And then she realizes that while she certainly made mistakes and focused more on what she wanted than what she had, she wasn’t alone in that. Like Jonas, he was in love with the idea of her in his head. It’s a far different picture than Jonas’, of course, but no closer to her.
Pete loved movies. Really, really loved them; she’d been shocked by the size of his DVD collection. They were the filter through which he viewed the world. He’d investigated her when they first met because in a cop movie (the kind he dreamed of starring in) the beautiful woman with a mysterious double life she doesn’t talk about is always either a spy or in some kind of trouble (or both) and needs the hero to save her. He’d taken her dancing because it was the closest he could come to recreating her favorite movie. He was willing (eager) to overlook her frequent lateness to dates—or missing them altogether—if she fed him harmless tidbits about what she’d been doing at the SGC because he saw her as the heroine of an action-adventure science fiction movie. And he wanted a big white wedding followed by a house in the suburbs because that’s how romantic comedies end.
It’s not that he can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality, or that he’s as shallow as that makes him sound, but it does color the way he looks at everything around him. And a relationship where one partner is looking for a warm body to come home and play house with and the other is looking for an action-adventure heroine, and both are so caught up in their own ideas about their ideal lives to see and value their partner at their true worth, warts and all, can’t be healthy.
Because as much as Pete was seeing who he wanted to see in her, she was guilty of doing the same thing to him. She loved his humor, loved the spontaneous romantic things he did for her, liked going out and doing things and staying home with him both. She especially liked that he was so undemanding of her time, understanding for the most part what it was like to be on a job where you could be called in in the middle of the night or have to stay late without knowing in advance. But she loved the idea of having a life outside of the SGC almost as much as she loved him. It bothers her that she can’t say for sure she would have given him a second glance if “not connected to the SGC” had been lower on her priority list. And as much as she hurt him (and herself) by learning that, she’s grateful for the lesson. If she ever does find someone else, she hopes she doesn’t make that mistake again.
“Carter.”
Sam looks up to see General O’Neill standing in the door to the cabin, still in his uniform. He’d gotten called to DC for two days, leaving the three current members of SG-1 to amuse themselves. He looks around, but she’s the only one here; Teal’c is hiking in the woods and she’s not sure where Daniel’s gotten himself to.
“Sir,” she says, smiling, admiring how good he looks in the Class A’s he hates. They both know she’s felt something for him for years (crush, infatuation, love in all its forms and kinds, she’s passed through all of them at one point or another). It used to be very important to her to pretend otherwise, but somehow she doesn’t think repression is the right answer anymore (if it ever was), even if he’s still her CO and the fraternization regs are one set she’d never break, nor even bend if she could help it.
“How’s the fishing?” he asks, taking off his cap. His eyes crinkle a bit as he sees her appraise him, and he returns the favor.
“As good as it’s ever been,” Sam says, still amused by a fishing pond with no fish in it, letting her smile turn into a smirk. Though whatever happened in the original timeline, it seems to have fish now even if they haven’t yet caught one. “How was Washington?”
“As … good as it’s ever been,” he says, making a face. He looks like a two-year-old contemplating a serving of peas, or at least she has vague memories of her nephew looking like that on a long-ago visit.
“Why’d they call you in on your leave?” She’s not worried; leave is always contingent on the requirements of the service and if anything were wrong he’d have said so straight away.
“I’m getting promoted. Again.” The look of consternation deepens, and Sam smothers a laugh; he’s the only person she knows who treats promotion like something smelly the cat dragged in.
“Congratulations,” she says, and means it. If anyone’s earned it, it’s him, and while he doesn’t technically have the time-in-grade to qualify for promotion, she understands it on an organizational level. The SGC is the only “Command” in the Air Force commanded by less than a four-star general; having a “mere” major general in command for so many years was necessary for keeping it under as tight of wraps as possible. She was shocked that they gave it to a newly-minted brigadier, however experienced he was.
“And they’re transferring me to DC,” he says. “Homeworld Security is being reorganized and expanded. They think they’ve finally figured out how to get all the alien stuff under one aegis in practice, now, not just on paper. So they need to expand their staff.”
“And they wanted more people with experience,” Sam says, heart sinking. He can’t turn this down for the same reason he couldn’t turn down command of the SGC: he can’t take the chance of someone who doesn’t understand the program being put in charge, or worse, someone who will understand it just well enough to take advantage of it. The SGC is more vulnerable now than it was when it was the only line of defense and anything could be excused in the interest of saving the planet. Someone like Maybourne or Bauer or Simmons could do a hell of a lot of damage, and they’ve all been through too much to save the planet to lose it through carelessness. And turning down a promotion would have to be followed shortly by retirement, the kind they don’t bring people back from; if you don’t think you’re worthy of greater responsibility, the Air Force tends to wonder if you’re worthy of the responsibility you already have.
“Yeah,” the General says. He looks out the window. “The way they’re re-organizing things, there are going to be several different branches. On paper, not just functionally, and they’re finally going to try to clean up the mess of who has responsibility for what. Separate chains of command and all. The SGC’s going to handle exploration and contact with our allies, Area 51 is going to be Research and Development, and they’re setting up a new branch so the 303’s and 302’s won’t be a subset of R and D anymore.”
“That’s great,” Sam says, meaning it, even if not with her whole heart. They’ve needed to clarify those areas of responsibility and chains of command for a couple of years at least, much as the SGC has been able to take advantage of the confusion now and again. She knew she wasn’t going to be starting a relationship with Jack in the near future, and she can deal with not even being able to see him on a regular basis. It’ll probably help her get over him—really get over him, this time, not just tell herself she has because she knows she should.
The General shrugs. “I’m going to head the branch that covers the SGC and Atlantis and alien contact. Mostly it’s just consolidating and running what we already have. Area 51 and the ship programs are both going to be expanded and ramped up to broader mission specs, now that we’re not fighting for survival. But I won’t have to worry about that; they’re going to be Vidrine’s problem. I’ll have my hands full just with Stargate Operations.” He looks at her sideways, not pressuring, not even saying it openly, but offering.
Sam thinks about eight years as a soldier who does science instead of a scientist who wears a uniform. Really, that’s enough, now that the fate of the planet doesn’t hang in the balance. “Y’know, somebody should keep an eye on Area 51,” she says, meeting Jack’s eyes. “Make sure the Trust doesn’t get a foothold in during the reorganization. And I bet they’ll be bringing out all the interesting devices that got brought back and shelved because they weren’t of immediate use fighting the Goa’uld.”
“Probably,” Jack says. There’s a twinkle in his eyes she’s rarely seen, a promise not banked for some indefinite future.
Sam hopes he can see the same in her eyes.
Note on the chronology and Carter’s age: I’ve assumed that Carter was born in 1965, the year Amanda Tapping was born. This does not match up with the chronology Christi gives in her fic, in particular, the assertion that Sam was “under 18” twenty-one years before Season Ten starts, which would have required a birth date no earlier than 1968 (1968 is the year given on the ID that flashes on the screen in “Entity;” although has proved she has to be at least a year older than that. Either birth date would have made Carter too young to have a Major Matt Mason astronaut doll (which she claims to have in the episode Children of the Gods), as Matt Mason was discontinued in 1970; it would also have made her too young to remember watching the Moon landing. The Matt Mason thing could be fudged; the Moon landing couldn’t for the purposes of this story. Therefore, I have adjusted the chronology slightly to make everything fit Amanda Tapping’s real age. This makes Samantha Carter 41 as of the summer the original story takes place, which is old to become a first-time mother but not unreasonable.
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