For Better or For Worse
by TM Potter
Summary: After the revelations made in The Red Triangle, Sam and Jack decide that some changes in their friendship are in order.
Category: Angst, Future Story, Romance
Episode Related: 116 Enigma, 402 The Other Side, 505 Red Sky, 509 Between Two Fires
Season: Season 6
Pairing: Jack/Sam
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: adult themes, language
Disclaimer: Stargate SG-1 and its characters are the property of Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. I have written this story for entertainment purposes only and no money whatsoever has exchanged hands. No copyright infringement is intended. The original characters, situations, and story are the property of the author(s).
Archived on: 08/06/03
For Better or For Worse
5:03 AM.
The blinking red eye of the seconds counting away on the bedside digital clock had been mocking him long enough. His overworked brain refused to shut down, even though his body insisted that it needed sleep. He hated lying there, too keyed up to go to sleep but too exhausted to actually do anything that required any degree of concentration.
Like read. Or watch TV. Or play living room hockey. Or any of the other numerous indoor activities he engaged in on a typical rainy afternoon.
His skin itched, his dry eyes felt like someone had poured a fifty-pound bag of playground sand into them, and the mocking voice in his head chimed in time with the counting seconds on his bedroom alarm clock.
He just couldn't lie there and take it any more.
With an impatient sweep of his arm, he threw back the comforter, not caring that it and two pillows ended up on the floor beside the bed, tripping him up as he tried to catch his balance on sore knees. Cold air washed across his bare body, prickling his skin and prompting him to pick up the sweats he'd dropped beside the bed when he'd collapsed there earlier.
The lightening flashed outside, making him jump and then fall sideways, crashing into the chair beside the bed as he caught a foot in the leg of the sweats and tripped. The rain-streaked windows on one wall filtered gloom from the streetlight into the room, casting the furnishings into shifting shadows playing across the walls. He shifted against the chair, cursed, and picked himself up off of the floor, rubbing at his injured shin. He padded barefoot down the hallway, banging that shin again on the corner of the low cabinet in the upper hallway and catching his shoulder on the oversized books poking out of the bookcase in the short landing that led down to the kitchen.
The 25-watt light bulb inside the refrigerator sliced into his eyes, kicking the pounding in his head up a notch. BAM! Emeril would be so proud.
Okay, he admitted it -- he'd been watching too much late night Food Network again.
He moved a brown-sauce-stained Chinese takeout container out of the way, stacking it and a plastic bag that contained either a very old kiwi or a moldy piece of cheese on top of the sway-backed cardboard. He snagged a now reachable bottle of water, cracking the seal and gulping down half of it before the 'fridge door had even swung shut.
Leaning a hip against the counter, he surveyed the dim dining room across the way, seeing the remains of Friday's takeout Italian congealing on the table, along with the empty bottle of Gentleman Jack that he'd opened last night when the memory of just how bad he'd fucked things up this time had run through his head like a mantra.
He was pathetic.
Ab-so-fuckin-lutely pathetic.
And what was worse, he so needed his head examined.
Yesterday was a notable day in his own personal Great Big Book of Fuck-ups. And it was a very long book.
'Dear Diary,
Yesterday I was handed almost everything I
have ever wanted for the past few years on a
platter. All I had to do was reach out and
take it. And I freaked. I hared-out. Yes,
that's right -- The big, brave, Special
Forces trained Colonel ran, screaming the
whole time like a fucking girl.'
He snorted, slamming the water bottle on the countertop, ignoring the spill when it tipped over as he jerked open cabinets, looking for something better than just water to drink.
Yep, a real red-letter-day.
Of course, it was really just a normal day for him.
He gave up his hunt for another bottle of booze and made a mental note to add it to the grocery list that rested on the desk by his keyboard. It really didn't matter if he found another bottle of alcohol anyway -- one brand new bottle hadn't been able to make him forget his troubles earlier, so he didn't think another would make that much of a difference.
He sighed, rubbing his hands over his face, pausing to dig at his temples for a moment, trying to ease the ache there.
What had the world come to when a man couldn't find a bottle to crawl into in order to forget the troubles of his day?
And what a day...
It had been a turning-point day, one that, for any normal person, would be worthy of remembrance and celebration.
A day that could have, should have, started in motion what could have been the first day of the next chapter of his life.
Except that, like most other good things in his life, he'd fucked up the whole thing.
Could 'a, would 'a, should 'a...Too bad he didn't have a dime for each time that phrase had been appropriate in his life...
He had started things off okay, setting change in motion by picking up the Tollan recorder from her desktop and playing with it until she'd caught him and taken it back. If that had been all that'd happened, it would have been okay. He would have gotten a 'seeing-her' fix and been happy with the status-quo that had been in place between them for two years-heading-to-three.
But no...
Fate had stepped in and decided to 'help out' a rock-headed son-of-an-Irishman.
Fate'd caused him to find the right key combination to switch on the Tollan 'emotion recorder.'
Fate'd led her to play Narim's recording, only to discover that her fumble-fingered CO had somehow left a little bit of an impression behind on the thing himself.
Fate'd stepped in and bolstered the courage he always knew she had inside her. She'd 'listened' to the recording he'd accidentally made and had found the guts to call him on it...
Fate'd let her phone call find him in his office, finishing up the damned report from that stupid babysitting mission.
And Fate'd made him jump at the chance when she'd asked him to grab dinner.
He'd so wanted to ask her who she was and what she'd done with the real Samantha Carter at that moment, but he'd pretended to concentrate on spellchecking the damned report and made some noncommittal
comment.
Once again, he'd probably destroyed his shot at a future by not opening his stupid mouth and saying what he really wanted to say when she finally brought it 'out of the room' to talk about it.
But somehow, someone, somewhere had decided that, for once, it would be he who would stop and consider the 'larger picture' of what the implications of what they were not discussing were to both of them.
Once again in his life, he was at a crossroads.
The choices he would make could possibly lose him more than he could ever imagine. Or gain him more than he knew he deserved. All of it embodied in the one person left who'd been there to help him crawl the last few yards from the muck he'd made of his former life. He stood to lose or gain so much. All because of his inability to think on his feet, to open his mouth and say what he actually meant when it came to matters of his heart's desire...
6:36 PM
He finished the dregs of his second cup of coffee of the night, glancing over the rim of the heavy, white stoneware mess hall cup at her.
She was pushing the cake around on her plate, separating the moist layers of sponge from the creamy frosting, crushing the crumbs into a flat mass that could be pushed around by the fork tines.
As if sensing his scrutiny, she glanced up, a 'deerin -headlights' look on her face. At his raised eyebrows and small smile, her face puckered into a small, worried frown and she looked away.
She dropped the fork with a loud cutlery clang. Seemingly startled by the noise, she switched to pushing the plate a few inches each way...
Shove -- three inches right...
Shove -- three inches up...
Shove -- three inches left...
Shove -- three inches down...
Shove -- three inches right, again...
She was...nervous?...upset?...distracted?...He wasn't sure he was going to like the answer but-
"Okay, Major, out with it."
She jumped at the sound of his voice -- almost as if she'd forgotten that he was sitting two feet from her across the tiny table. Blue eyes flashed up at his face before quickly dropping back down to the hands that lifted the napkin to her lips. He couldn't help it, his eyes followed the path of the napkin and stopped at her mouth, locked there for a moment before they opened and she spoke. His eyes snapped back to her downcast ones, waiting for them to rise.
"I don't know wha-"
A glance back at his face must have shown he wasn't buying it because she stopped dead. She gave ground under his steady gaze, blue eyes flitting away to look everywhere but at his face. Restless fingers now revealed a 'tell' as they shredded the edge of the paper napkin. When those fingers again started to push the plate of decimated cake around the table, he decided that he'd had enough.
Her wrist bones felt fragile under the smooth, warm skin. His fingers wrapped around the strong tendons, overlapping at the thumb and index finger, feeling her resist his efforts to pull the horribly disfigured napkin from her hands.
"Now, now. That poor thing didn't do anything to you. Stop torturing it and tell me what's going on..."
He let her pull her wrist back, watched her glance nervously around the empty-except-for-them mess, and caught her eye on the return trip, his left eyebrow climbing to ask the silent question again.
"Sir, I said...I told you that I needed to show you something..."
"Yeah..."
"Ummm..."
She shifted as her hand dug into the cargo pocket down on the left leg of her BDUs. When she settled back into her seat, she opened her hand, presenting him with the little silver doohickey from her lab. The Tollan thingy he'd been playing with earlier.
"This?"
He reached over and lifted it up to study it closer.
"Look, I told you that I didn't 'listen' to this thing."
"No sir, I know. You didn't...What I mean is, when you-"
Her voice stumbled to a halt, her eyes closed, hiding from him but revealing more than she thought by the fact that she wouldn't meet his gaze as she took a deep breath and hurried on.
"Whenyouwereholdingthedeviceyouturneditoninrecordmode anditrecordedeverything.Ihearditall."
That one took a minute to decipher.
He didn't think he had ever heard her rush words like that. She actually acted as if she-
"What?!"
She jumped at the sharpness and volume of his voice and he winced.
In his defense, that one had been a flat-out ambush.
He looked around, making sure he had not attracted too much attention from the trio of lieutenants and the staff sergeant who had just walked in and were currently gathered around the coffee urn. Nope, they seemed absorbed in dousing their java with sugar and milk, caught up in their own conversations...
When he turned back, relatively secure in the fact that his almost-shout had not called unwanted attention, she was standing, gathering her plates and utensils to leave. She took off before he could rise, running like the proverbial hounds of hell were on her heels.
"Hey, wait up, Carter!"
He grabbed his own dinnerware, stuffing the Tollan device into his shirt pocket, hurrying to catch up with her retreating back after he plunked the plates into the scullery bin at the counter.
She was halfway down the corridor, heading for the elevator when he managed to catch her upper arm and halt her progress. She stopped, but wouldn't turn around and face him. He tried to look around into her face, gave up when she kept avoiding his eyes, and spoke to the back of her head.
"You can't just drop that bomb and walk away."
She wouldn't meet his eyes. She tugged, subtly but insistently, at her arm in his grip, trying to get free of him -- whether to get away or turn and face him, he didn't know but he wasn't taking any chances on the former.
"I know."
She suddenly stopped struggling for a moment.
"I know."
Her head dropped forward onto her chest, revealing the nape of her neck under the ends of her hair. He concentrated on that thin, pale stripe of CarterSkin as she spoke.
"I know...We need to talk. But I didn't want to...I don't think you wanted to..."
She took a deep breath and finally looked back over her shoulder at him, her eyes worried, but blazing with the ferocity of her emotions.
"We need to talk, and I don't think we need an audience for this. Not this time."
He released her arm, realizing that she had maneuvered him out into the hallway on purpose, saving his outburst from becoming a conversation -- a very public one that would have lit up the SGC grapevine faster than the speed of light, at that.
"Right...You're...Right."
He sighed and extended his hand in a gesture for her to precede him down the concrete hall. He followed her, glancing down at the device he stuffed deeper into his pocket and then back up at her too-stiff back moving smartly away from him.
Trying not to look like he was hurrying, he hurried to catch up to her again. Only to stop short before he ran into her as she stopped at the closed door to a small conference room. He glanced around, trying to catch a room number so he'd know where he was --he'd been following her so intently, he hadn't watched where they'd been going.
"Sir..."
She didn't turn immediately, then he saw her shoulders straighten and she turned to face him. Those eyes were still confused, drilling into his own, trying to tell him something...
But what?
"Permission to speak freely, sir?"
"Yeah...Sure...Youbetcha. Knock yourself out."
He wondered at her use of a gambit - speaking freely - she had so very rarely used in the past.
"When we go in there-"
Her head jerked to indicate to room behind the closed door.
"I need...we need...we need to leave the Major and the Colonel out here."
His confusion must have been reflected in his eyes, as she took a step forward into his personal space. Her voice was pitched low, but it was her intensity that screamed at him.
"We need to talk. Sam and Jack need to talk. Not Major Carter and Colonel O'Neill. In this case, the command structure...being who we are...will only further complicate...things."
He just nodded, his mind racing a million miles a minute as he tried to keep up with mapping the possibilities of what she was getting at, here. The one possibility that kept popping up was that whatever happened next was going to change their friendship.
But was it going to be for better or for worse?
If he was George Clooney and she was Michelle Pfeiffer, they would have gone into that governmentissue -decorated conference room and declared their ever-lasting love for each other. The music would have swelled and he would have spent the next few minutes...hours...days...eons...kissing the almost colorless lipstick she favored from her mouth. And, by damn, she would have remembered it this time. He would still have been kissing her as the screen faded to black (or as the SFs showed up to kick them out of the conference room).
But their lives were never that Hollywood easy.
They were in a USAF beyond-top-secret secure facility; they were being observed by security cameras; they were in uniform; they were in the same chain of command; they were not quite able to fool themselves into believing that this was just about them and what they wanted; they were in so far over their heads that they'd have to stand on one of those nifty conference room chairs to see a speck of daylight at this point...
So, instead of an easy path to a future together, one that included a storybook ending and riding off into the sunset, that conference room had given them nothing beyond him slouching in a shocked silence as she explained to him that the device had allowed her to feel everything he had felt from the time he'd touched the buttons on the top until the time he had dropped it into her hand.
She was playing this close to her vest, not revealing whether knowing how he felt about her was a good or a bad thing. He couldn't tell if she was panicked and wanted to take back what she'd said two years ago or if she was happy...
For once, those eyes that always said so much to him gave nothing away. She wasn't giving him enough information to understand what she felt. He couldn't help but think that she was doing this on purpose. Hiding from him...
Fuck-ing-A...
It was one thing to tell someone you loved them. He'd been lucky enough to do that for real once or twice in his life so far. Telling someone you loved them was terrifying but exhilarating. And the rewards were almost always worth the leap of faith it took to say it. But for her to feel everything he felt...
He knew that there was good there. What he felt for her was one of the healthiest parts of his psyche these days. Probably one of the last parts of him that could come anywhere close to 'normal' or 'pure'. She was a bright spot in his life that gave him hope for so many things in the future.
If she'd been able to see that...
It would all be worth it if she could just see that.
He just hoped that she understood that he loved her -- for better or for worse, for now and for later, for the present and the foreseeable future, whether she wanted him to or not. He was in this for the long haul even with the complications that kept them apart. He hadn't even so much as looked at another woman quite that way in years. And even when he had looked, his mind had done an automatic comparison of her charms to Sam - and no matter who she was, she always came up wanting against the reality of Sam.
But he feared that when she'd seen him, felt the good feelings he had for her, that she'd seen the bad, too. He was afraid that the device had recorded his darkness, dragging out the unfeeling hard-ass who lived inside his head. That broken man who was still a very real part of him and had been with him for a very long time.
Created in the crucible of a special forces operation gone wrong, that man had, through the years, pulled Jack and the teams under his command out of the fire on more than one occasion. He was a true bastard: cunning, ruthless, focused, cold -- never letting anything get in the way of his twin goals of prosecuting his mission objectives and bringing his team home alive.
That man had been the one who took over when the beatings and torture in the Iraqi prison had become too much for Jack.
That man had been the one who took over when the crippling pain of his son's death had taken hold and he had pushed his grieving wife away, hating her for forgiving him for their little boy's death.
That man had volunteered to take a nuclear device on a one-way trip into what should have been oblivion beyond the Stargate.
But that man had been tucked away in the back of Jack's head for a very long time. Jack O'Neill had survived the torture at the hands of both man and God, living long enough to retire from black-world ops. He had gotten out of the dark, nasty business of secret operations and never speaking of his work. Then he'd locked up the bastard he could become and buried the key where no one would ever find it.
The hard-ass had actually gone without a whimper, realizing that his time was over when a geeky scientist, who reminded him of his son in an odd way, had broken through the wall he had built around himself. The final nail in the hard-asses's coffin had come when, on that second trip through the gate, he had found himself oddly moved to once again see that geek and the young boy who had held him in such high regard. The hard-ass had slunk away to his cell with a comment of 'nice one' when Jack's curiosity and interest was piqued by the no-nonsense, goldenhaired, egg-head, scientist-soldier that Hammond had insisted he cart along to Abydos.
Through the years, Jack had needed the hard-ass again, but he had used him like a devil sitting on his shoulder, giving advice when situations looked hopeless and he was looking for a win scenario that might save a few of his team's lives, if not all of them.
He was the part of Jack that closed the iris when Alar, the Eurondan leader, had tried to follow them through the gate. The hard-ass had stared, unflinchingly, into Carter's disbelieving eyes on the Gate ramp, only barely allowing Jack to hear what Hammond had said to him about the de-briefing, the echo of the impacting human body ringing low and deafening in his ears. He had heard himself inside his own head, pleading with her to understand, to not turn away in disgust.
He was the man who had grabbed Malchus, the K'tau religious zealot, and came 'this close' to killing him after three SG members had been blown up by the asshole's own men meddling in their attempts to build a rocket to save their planet from its slowly-nova-ing sun.
He was the man who had told Fifth that they'd set the timer for five minutes and then indicated to Carter to set it for two, trapping the humanized Replicator with his 'family' because of the very real threat they'd offered to the Asgard and all of the other beings who populated this and other galaxies. And he'd been the one to take her assessment that he'd used Fifth's humanity against him -- acknowledging the veracity of the charge but knowing that it had needed to be done.
That hard-ass part of Jack had always come in handy.
He was dutiful and held to a simple set of principles that were not clouded by larger issues, mores, or interests. Jack recognized that he needed the hardass to do the ruthless, dirty work his job sometimes called for. But as soon as they were past the crises, Jack'd always taken a moment to put the hard-ass back into the prison he'd built, not taking a chance on letting him roam free for even a moment longer than he had to.
One of Jack's greatest fears in the world was that one day, after the hard-ass had been put back into his cage, after a particularly nasty mission, she would look at him, and see that hard-ass staring back at her -- and finally turn away from him in disgust for who he could be when he had to.
"For better or for worse, it's only...right...that you get to...hear...to feel...the way I feel about...things, too."
He stared at her for a moment as he picked up on what she'd just said, the gerbil in the wheel of his brain going MIA as he attempted to actually process the words into meaning and pull himself back to listening to her.
He watched, fascinated and excited, as she stepped into his personal space. Her hand reached out for him, his body automatically leaning forward in anticipation of her touch. Only to be disappointed as she reached into his shirt pocket and extracted the Tollan device. Her warm, smooth hand closed around his, unfolding the fingers and pressing the body-warmed metal into his palm. She stepped away, moving away so he could no longer feel the heat of her skin, but still touching his hand with hers, looking down at the device.
"I...This has three...recordings on it. Narim's, yours, and now mine."
She stumbled to a stop, absently rubbing her index finger across the rough calluses decorating the place where fingers met palm on his hand. Her mouth opened and closed more than once, stopping before she could utter a sound. Her hand jerked suddenly, drawing away as if realizing for the first time that she was touching him.
"You need to listen to the recording...Jack."
It took a moment for her to add his name and, while it sounded a bit forced, a thrill ran up his spine to hear her voice caress the consonants in the single syllable of his name. He wondered if he could start going by his full name, just so he could hear her say the longer version...
"Umm..."
Her voice brought him back from his thoughts. As did her movements away from him.
"I'll...I'll be in my lab. If...When...If you want to...talk...after..."
Her eyes met his for the first time since they'd entered the conference room. Wide, somewhat frightened, but full of determination and resolve, they held his gaze even when he thought he should look away.
"Just so you know: I don't want to avoid this. And I'm not...We can't just leave it in the room, Jack. I won't continue to live with..."
"No, Sam."
He was proud because his voice only cracked a little on her name.
"We aren't leaving anything in the room this time. For better or for worse, we're going to work this through."
Her mouth lifted on one side in a ghost of what could have been a smile. There was hope in her voice, and a little dry humor.
"If I get a vote, I'll go with 'for better'."
She walked away, not letting him answer and never looking back as she closed the door behind her. Leaving him to decide to listen -- or not...
For better or for worse, trusting him. Leaving the decision for their future in his hands.
He'd sat there for a long time after she left, staring at the device.
He'd made sure that his seat kept his back to the video cameras, opting to not override them and go into secure mode, as explaining that to the General would be difficult when the SFs brought up that nothing above the monitoring class-cert-level had been scheduled in the conference room.
He could have gone back to his office. He was known for regularly installing a sweat sock over the camera eye when it bothered him that he was being watched, so it wouldn't have raised any suspicions. He could have gone to the chapel -- only God got the grace of not having surveillance in this domain. But this place was quiet, out of the way at the moment, and still smelled faintly of her presence. So, he figured it was as good a place as any to listen to the recordings.
He struggled to remember how to make the device work and then it came back to him, her breathy voice sounding in his head...
'It works...it plays...You just touch the red triangle.'
He pressed the red triangle with his fingertip and tried to remember how to breathe...
Jealousy burned hot and low in his belly and made him want to punch something...Narim had really loved her. That damned, superior, alien super-geek-son-of-abitch had really loved her. Even if it made him see red to realize it, Jack couldn't deny that the feelings that had been recorded on the device had been what he would call love.
He quickly learned that releasing his finger from the red button would pause the recording, allowing him to breathe and catch his temper before starting up again...
He had to agree with the man's assessment of her: beautiful, brilliant, moral, courageous, and just plain amazing.
He bristled as he realized he felt the lust the other man had felt when she smiled at him. Narim was lucky he was already dead...
He wanted to tear the room apart when he realized that Narim had kissed her - *and she had kissed him back*! Narim was lucky Jack couldn't figure out a way to clone him so he could kill the geek with his bare hands...
He became slightly uncomfortable when he felt Narim's emotions slip over into a worshipfulness that was just plain creepy to him. Maybe that was only because he was a guy. Did women...okay, did she...like that sort of thing? He wondered at the fact that she could have felt what Narim felt for her and not fallen for the guy.
His own recording was...
Embarrassing.
It made him blush to realize that he was as much goofy-in-love with her as Narim had ever been. There, that part made him happy - it was a pure, unadulterated feeling of love. The really good kind of love that made him proud to be a human being.
But the smile slipped from his face and his visage darkened with shame when he realized that, beyond that first flash of love, he could feel the impatience and guilt that sometimes tempered his love for her. That negativity hid, only a hint of his darkness creeping out. He was amazed at how much the device had captured, and he relived the moments that had been recorded, his own memory providing a loud echo to what was playing on the device.
He was relieved as he came to the end of his own recording and realized that somehow the very worst parts of him had been left hidden deep inside. Somehow Fate had intervened for him, making the recording reflect mostly the positive things - the way he felt for her.
The way his feelings for her put the cold, hard parts of him in the background, filling the foreground with a kind of light, a kind of happiness that, after the mess his life had become, he had figured he would never find again. The recording showed only the smallest part of that extremely cold, dark spot inside him where the hard-ass lived.
His finger fell away from the red button and he took a moment to hyperventilate and get himself back under control.
When he finally got the nerve to press his finger to the button again, the recording of her emotions was a balm to his raw soul. As opposed to his own random fumblings that, he supposed, reflected the dark, jumbled passageways of his mind, her recording was a perfect reflection of her - bright, honest, straightforward, exuberant. While he had stumbled through the gamut of his emotions concerning her, she had deliberately set out to let him see how she felt and what he meant to her.
He reveled in the warmth of her regard, the fact that she could want to be around him as much and in as many ways as she seemed to. She wanted to be near him. Wanted to spend time listening to his voice, laughing at his bad jokes. Wanted to watch him play with Cassie and with the younger children at the schoolyard. Wanted to sit back and watch him as he concentrated on a game of chess with Jonas or cards with them all. Wanted to watch him box with Teal'c or ride the course around the mountain on his bike.
He sucked in a breath as her simple wants became more intimate. She was frighteningly honest in the ways she wanted him. She wanted to feel the roughness of his hands on her skin, his mouth on her body, his heart beating against her own in the dark of the night. She wanted to kiss his mouth so she could taste the coffee he had been drinking with the added flavor of him. She wanted to taste his skin, touch his body, make him feel what she felt when she looked at him. She wanted hot, sweaty, messy sex in her kitchen, on his bed, in the front hallway of his house, in her lab, in his of- Well, in all sorts of adventurous places. She wanted slow, comforting love-making in her living room, in his bedroom, in a new home they called their own.
She wanted long Sunday afternoons spent in bed with him, reading the paper. She wanted late Saturday nights spent walking around the snowy Colorado hills, holding his hand in the cold. She wanted to go fishing with him at his cabin in Minnesota, not caring that they ate Mrs. Paul's for dinner because there were actually no fish in his lake. She wanted holidays spent with their friends and families, arguing over stupid stories from the past and passing bowls of food around the dinner table.
She wanted him there to soothe away the trials of the day when hard work wearied her body and too much death and destruction weighed heavy on her soul. She wanted to clutch him to her and let him take her mind and breath away when she thought too much about too many things they couldn't change. She wanted him to be there always - the last thing she saw when she went to sleep and the first thing she saw when she woke.
She wanted to hold him when the strain of making the hard decisions became too much for him, trying to take some of the hurt away and make him understand that not being perfect didn't mean he was broken -only human. She wanted to listen to him talk about Charlie and even Sara, to comfort him for all he had lost and remind him of all he had regained. She wanted to listen to him regale her with stories of Kowalsky and his other fallen comrades and be there to lend him strength when his voice grew hoarse and quiet and his spirit weary.
He could feel her hurt and confusion because they had to leave what they felt for each other in that isolation room. He could feel her unhappiness with the paranoia that sometimes drove his decisions. He could feel her sorrow that he'd had to live through the pain of losing his son, losing his marriage, losing his life for the months he had been trapped away from the SGC. He could feel her resolve that this time they would work through some of the issues that surrounded them...
He could feel her...And knew she was one of the greatest gifts he would ever be given.
But he could also feel her reserve behind the brighter emotions. Just barely palpable, but there.
Her feelings that right now was wrong for them, that to act on what was between them right now would be wrong. Her fears that they would never end this war so they could be together. Her desperate resolve to help them both to remain true to who they were and not let what they felt for each other make them into someone they weren't, doing something like having an affair with him.
He recognized a reflection of his own feelings there.
It was important that they not poison what was between them with actions they couldn't live with or would later regret. He never wanted her to regret what she felt for him. But when he realized that what he had thought she might feel for him was reality, he knew he was going to have to find a way to make it work between them...
And that was more important than anything in his life right now.
Plan A had been to let it ride.
They'd left what they felt in the isolation room and continued to dance around the topic. A secret smile here, a warm hand touching an arm there...They'd been living with so little for so long. He realized that he'd been going out of his way to make her smile, searching for moments to stand close enough to hear her breathing next to him, feel the warmth of her skin near his own...
But Plan A had been failing miserably. They were neither one happy with the status quo and she had told him she wasn't going to live with things like this anymore. He shuddered to think what those simple words might mean.
Plan B...
He didn't really have a Plan B. It sucked that he didn't have a Plan B.
But, for the conceivable short-term future, he'd be spending his time coming up with said Plan B.
9:16 pm
It had been over two hours.
She'd left him sitting in the conference room, the device clutched in one hand and a speculative look on his face.
She'd told him everything, babbling parts of it, she was sure. He'd said nothing for the longest time. She wasn't even certain he'd heard her until he'd said her name. She'd left after that, leaving him to listen to the device, or not, as he decided how he felt. She knew what she wanted, but he, too, needed to be sure about things before they decided what to do about future.
She wouldn't push him if, after feeling what she felt for him, he decided that them...together...now... wasn't what he wanted.
She'd gone back to her lab to wait for him, finding work that needed to be done to keep her mind off of him.
Stuart Reasons had found her in her lab, asking questions about a waveform theory she had asked him to explore. She'd jumped at the chance to talk with him, knowing that the mental gymnastics would take her mind off of the conference room several levels below.
"See, if you change this portion of the equation by using the inverse, you completely change the outcome, adding no less than sixteen additional possibility variables before you move on here to the permutations."
She marked on Reasons' blue squiggles on the board with her own handwriting in red. Stu was busy scratching things down on the clipboard in his hand, and while she paused in their discussion to let him write, she glanced over his shoulder and caught sight of her CO standing there.
She heard Stu speak, seemingly from far away, as her gaze locked with Jack's across his shoulder.
"This is great, Major! I told Zerishkov that you could-"
Stu stopped short, seeing her eyes glued to something behind him. He craned his head around, wondering who or what could have her so mesmerized...
Oh.
"Well, thanks again, Major. I know you need to run, so..."
She must have said something to him as he backed out of the lab, but she couldn't have said what if her life depended on it. They stood there, eyes locked for a few moments before she closed the distance between them.
"Did..."
"Yeah."
"And?"
He finally broke eye contact and looked down at the device that he was now holding out to her.
"And, we need to talk. We really need to talk. But..."
The silence stretched between them.
"But?"
"But...I need some time...To think...To..."
His voice was flat, cold, emotionless and he wouldn't even look at her.
She felt her blood run cold. The fingers that took the device from his hand were ice-cold where they brushed against him, his heated skin seemingly burning her own.
She had laid her heart out on a plate, showing him what she felt for him, what she wanted from him, and now...
He needed to think.
Not exactly the response she was looking for, was it?
After a moment, she swallowed her heart back down into her chest and heard herself speak in a voice that was as cold as ice.
"Time...You..."
Her head dropped down to her chest, hiding her eyes as she gazed at the device in her hand. She wanted to ask him what was wrong. Did she misinterpret what she felt from him? Was she wrong about what she thought her felt for her? She wanted to scream at him, to make him see-
Her head shook side-to-side in a small, tight motion before she finished her thought.
"Time...Sure..."
She could feel that her movements were jerky as she turned away from him, walking back over to her desk, jerking the second drawer open, tossing in the Tollan device, and slamming it closed again. She walked back over to the bench, grabbing her jacket and briefcase off the surface and slinging the strap over her shoulder. She fidgeted with her keys for a moment before turning back to him with them in hand.
The anger left her body with the sigh that she blew out, leaving behind a resignation that made her heart heavy. She took hold of her emotions and looked him square in the eye.
"I...That recording pretty much summed it all up for me. When you've had enough time to figure out what you need to, you know where I am."
She walked out the door and didn't see him wince at her final parting shot.
"For better or for worse, it's all up to you now."
6:27 am
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to make the pounding there go away. He lifted himself up onto the counter, his legs beginning to ache as he stood there on the cold kitchen floor in the early morning light. A whole day later, and it didn't look any better. Not even in the warm, just pre-dawn morning light.
She was angry.
He knew she was angry.
He even knew why she was angry.
He had said that they would talk and then he'd seemingly welshed on the deal.
She had every right to be angry...
Hell, if it came right down to it, he was angry, too.
He had intended that they would talk...But as his performance yesterday had shown, talking was not his strongest skill. He needed to talk to her about them, but he didn't want to do it before he'd made some plans.
She knew him better than just about anyone alive. She probably thought that he was trying to decide whether or not they should proceed with their friendship - push it past the limits of friends and team mates and onto something more...
For once, she was dead wrong.
After what he'd felt from her on that recording, nothing but Satan himself would keep him from taking what she had offered. Heck, he'd beaten Sokar already, so there was nothing left in this world or any other that was going to keep him from taking up that path to a future together.
Not their pasts, not their work...
But he knew, from what he had felt simmering in the background of her emotions, that Sam Carter was possibly going to throw more roadblocks and land mines in their way than Uncle Sam and his rulebook ever could. He'd spent hours pondering this...
His retirement, as an option, would not solve their problems. If anything, the fact that she wouldn't be around him as much and he wouldn't be a part of her daily work life would make things worse. If he thought it would work, he'd have the papers in and be out the door by the end of the week. But he knew that it would only make things worse.
In one nightmare scenario, he wouldn't be there to cover her back. She and the rest of SG-1 would end up with a beautiful memorial ceremony and a wreath laid onto the Stargate. All of this would happen without him, 'cause he'd no longer have the clearance to even attend the ceremonies. Of course, he'd be busy - trying to find the nerve to blow his own brains out with a gun like the one that had that had killed Charlie (and ended his previous life).
In another of the night terrors that haunted his sleeping hours, she finally met that alien guy who could offer her so much more than a broken-down warhorse with a massive set of aches and pains and a retirement check coming in every month. An alien like Narim or Orlin or Martouf, who could convince her that settling down and raising high-IQ, hybridhuman babies on planet Trees-from-Hell was the way to go. And, again, he got to figure out a way to spread his brains across his house without making such a mess that it completely killed the resale value.
He couldn't ask her to give up her commission. So much of who she was as a person was wrapped up in her military bearing and achievements. He couldn't, no, he wouldn't, ask her to give all of that up for him. She had worked too hard to make her way in the military and he wouldn't ask her to give that up -not even if it meant she could never be his. She had a bright future and career ahead of her in the SGC, and she was the brightest mind they had on 'Stargates 101: How and Why They Work.'
And MacKay didn't count.
There was no way the program could deal with the loss of his blonde 2IC...A warm feeling of pride for her and in her wrapped itself around him, despite the fact that he had no right at all to feel that pride.
He sighed, pulling himself away from thoughts like that and back to the problem at hand. How to orchestrate this whole thing between them so that it ended up with the kiss and the ride into the sunset?
Convincing the DoD that he and Sam should be together would only take a five-line resignation of his commission on a cheap sheet of recycled printer paper. Convincing Sam Carter that they could work out an acceptable way to be together now rather than later was possibly going to take a whole lot more...
So, he just needed time to consider the options. He believed - okay, hoped - that what she felt for him was going to make it easy for her to forgive him for pulling back like he had yesterday.
A very big part of him wanted to march into Hammond's office this morning and resign. Then hot-foot it down to her lab and fulfill each and every one of the desires he'd felt on the Tollan device, before he took her home and spent the next hundred years fulfilling them all over again...
But he didn't want to screw this up...
So, he fell back on the one thing that had saved his sorry ass more than once - his training.
The military had taught him all of his adult life that the only way to win a war was to plan better than the other guy and adapt to his and your own mistakes. You could scrape by in a skirmish on sheer bravado and the luck of the commander, but winning the war always took more.
He'd used his strategic skills before in life, when negotiating for a car, when he had bought this house. He realized that as the years had gone by and the military had become more and more a part of his life, that he approached every conflict as if it were a battle.
All's fair in love and war, didn't they say?
This was one war he didn't intend to lose.
He needed to do this the right way, because this was the only way he knew they could both win.
He reached over into the 'junk' drawer, pulled out a ratty notebook and a chewed-up pen. Flipping on the light over the stove, he plopped the notebook down on the large electric eye and started to scratch down a list.
1. Set up cmd center and establish battlespace awareness. (recce SGC)
2. Map out network of possible key players.
3. Recon and collect vital intel on current and future activities. (Hammond, Janet, Jonas?)
4. Formulate possible courses of action.
5. Map out possible resource allocations for COAs. (Teal'c, Jonas, Jacob?)
He tapped the pen on the list, trying to get this straight in his own head.
For better or for worse, she'd told him, it was up to him now.
Well, of the options she'd given him, he knew which one he wanted.
He stumbled through to his office, looking for a bigger sheet of paper. Suddenly wide awake, he sat down at his desk to start mapping out Operation Convince Carter.
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