The Times That Weren't - Chapter 1
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The Times That Weren't - Chapter 1
With memories of events which never happened intruding on their dreams, SG-1 are faced with the task of rescuing those stranded on Destiny, but when proof of the impossible arrives for Cameron, Sam finds their lives taking a different turn.
The members of SG-1 have been remembering the events which took place aboard Odyssey, in a timeline which no longer exists, but when a package arrives for Mitchell with undeniable proof of another timeline which never took place, it leads Sam and Cameron to chase after what each of them never thought was within their reach. Each other.
Stargate Command, October 1997
Sam stood on the ramp in the embarkation room watching Ernest Littlefield being pestered by the medical staff. She gave a little smile as he immediately quieted when Catherine Langford spoke to him softly. She began walking down the ramp to head to the infirmary for the routine post-mission check-up when she saw Catherine looking at her. The elderly woman stopped her with a hand rested lightly upon her forearm.
"What is it, Catherine?" Sam asked as she was pulled aside from the group heading out of the 'gate room. Colonel O'Neill stuck his head back in from the doorway.
"C'mon, Carter." He waved her forward and she raised a hand to him in acknowledgement with a quick 'yes, sir' which seemed to placate him.
"I have to give you something, Samantha." Catherine stuck a wrinkled hand into one of the pockets of her jacket and produced a small velvet bag held closed with a drawstring. Sam's eyes narrowed in curiosity as Catherine's wizened hands untied the string and upended the bag into her open palm. An elegant, platinum band tumbled against her skin, and the light silver chain it was looped into spilled around it, she could see arcs and filigree etched into the metal, they formed patterns she couldn't make much sense of.
"Catherine, it's beautiful, but I can't accept this." She looked at the older woman in confusion as Catherine forced Sam's fingers closed over the ring with both of her hands, the paper-thin skin stretched taut over knuckles gone white with force. "This must be precious to you, if Ernest gave-" She was stopped by Catherine's vehement shake of her silver locks.
"No, Samantha. This ring is meant for you. It is yours. It has always been yours." Seeing the confusion in the younger woman's eyes she sighed and closed her own, reliving memories from a lifetime ago. "I met a man in Egypt, in 1929." She took Sam's hand in her own and started leading her out of the 'gate room as an impatient medic came looking for them. "That man gave me this ring and told me to give it to you, he also told me to remember the name Daniel Jackson, then he disappeared. Of course I would have thought he was mad if not for one thing." A dawning comprehension made its way across Sam's face.
"He came through the Stargate," Sam supplied in awe and Catherine nodded, "but how would this man know about me and Daniel unless... time travel? Then it could be possible!" Catherine just shrugged and lifted the hand in which Sam was holding the ring and opened her fingers, pointing to an inscription on the inside of the ring which read 'To my beloved Sam, who took me to the stars...' Sam raised her other hand to her mouth as she read the poignant words. "Catherine, this... this is a wedding ring."
"Yes it is, Samantha, and I think whoever originally gave it to you will someday find you again." She led the younger woman into the infirmary before patting her arm fondly and moving off to Ernest's side while a nurse came to check her vitals as well. Sam closed her hand around the ring again as her mind raced.
"Whatcha got there, Carter?" asked O'Neill from where he was being fussed over by another nurse.
"Just something from Dr. Langford, sir." she replied absently and smiled while Daniel looked at her oddly.
"You handing out gifts, Catherine? Where's mine?" Jack asked, feigning a hurt look, Catherine chuckled and waved him away.
"It is only something Samantha dropped long ago which I have carried for a while." She looked at Ernest happily and gave his hand a squeeze. "I felt it was time to give it back to her." Jack just looked confused.
"So no gift for me then?"
"Jack." Daniel said with an exasperated sigh.
"Daniel." Jack deadpanned. Sam smiled and snuck another look at the ring before putting it in a pocket until she could think of something to do with it.
Stargate Command, July 2005
Landry walked into his office from the briefing room and Cameron walked up to the TV where Daniel stood, scratching his chin. They'd just watched the archaeologist give a presentation on the myths of Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table and the possibility of finding a cavern complex under Glastonbury Tor, and Landry had authorised them to have Prometheus scan the tor with it's Asgard sensors. This could be the chance Cam was looking for to get the band back together.
"That was fantastic! You talk to Carter yet?" he asked trying to inject enthusiasm into his voice, he thought there might be a better chance of getting Sam to come if it came from Jackson.
"Uh, yeah. She can't make it." Daniel said trying not to look at him. Cam couldn't hide the disappointment and surprise in his voice.
"What? This is huge! We could be on the brink of another major discovery of Ancient technology here." He tried not to sound petulant at least. Vala watched him from her seat at the table before getting up and moving to stand just behind him with a scrutinising look on her face.
"Look, I'm sure she'll be interested in whatever we find." Daniel said, tapping his shoulder and turning quickly to leave the room when he saw Vala approaching. She didn't follow him though, instead looping her arm through Cameron's and leading him towards the door.
"Hmm. Hey, try playing hard to get." she offered and he turned to her with a scowl.
"Man, look who's talking." he groused and she gave him a brief look. They were quiet until they got back out into the corridor.
"A woman likes to be chased to be sure, but she doesn't want to be brow-beat or dogged into submission." she began as if explaining something to a small child. "If you want my advice-"
"I don't." he interrupted, but she carried right on.
"-you should try to be more subtle, make yourself visible to her, available, but just out of reach. Make her want you and you'll win her heart." He stared at the alien incredulously. She'd been on base for two days! How the Hell had she figured anything out about him in so little time? He'd barely mentioned Sam at all.
"What are you talking about? I'm trying to get her to rejoin the team." he tried, hoping to allay her suspicions, but it didn't seem to be working at all if the look she gave him was any indication. "Vala, not that it's any of your business, but Sam's just a friend, one I've been hoping to work alongside for a long time."
"Sure sure, whatever you say." She turned to him with a teasing smile as they entered the elevator. "Now how about you take me somewhere fun? Are there any gambling establishments nearby? If you lend me some of your Earth currency I'll pay you back." At his glare she pouted dramatically.
USS Odyssey, above P3X-474, May 2007 + 731 days relative
She arrived outside his cabin door and was about to hit the signal button when she heard a loud crash from behind it. Her fingers froze over the panel as her eyes widened in alarm at the sound which was soon followed by another crash and his muffled voice crying out. She looked down at the panel beside the door and moved her hand from the signal to the door open button and stabbed down hard to no effect.
"Cam!" she called out through the door as a series of almost inaudible thumps and thuds sounded through the metal bulkhead. She quickly pried the panel away and was soon entering an override sequence which caused the door to slide open. She darted inside in time to see her friend standing amidst the wreckage of his cabin, facing towards the starscape outside the porthole. She could see a light sheen of sweat on the back of his neck and he was breathing heavily, but when he turned to face her she could tell it wasn't from the exertion of tearing his furniture to pieces. His eyes were like those of a wounded animal, the pain she saw, as recognition of her came into his gaze, was palpable. "Cam! Wha- what's happening?" She took a step forward, but stopped in confusion when he took a step back, the slats from his broken bed shifting slightly under his boots.
"I can't do this, Sam." His shoulders were slumped and his arms were slack at his sides until he raised one hand to rub his forehead as his gaze slipped down to the smashed remains of a shelf surrounded by scattered books. "I can't do this anymore." She could sense the deep, abiding frustration and anger in his voice and couldn't help feeling a wash of guilt deep down in the pit of her stomach.
She knew her friend had been having a really rough time stuck on the ship since she activated the time dilation field two years ago, at first it had manifested itself as him running endlessly through the empty corridors of the ship, but it would build occasionally to him snapping at her when they talked about the progress of her research. He'd always apologise and she could understand how he felt, he was a man of action and he felt useless right now. He'd come up with ideas and plans to try to get out of their predicament, but when it came to actually doing the research to make it happen it just wasn't a part of his skillset, no matter how smart he was, and he was smart, the Air Force didn't give you silver oak leaves unless you had brains.
"I just need some more time, Cam. I'll-" She stopped at the look he gave her, his head tilted to the side, his hand which had been at his forehead brushed back into his hair to clench at his head, and his eyes filled with a deep sadness.
"No, Sam. I can't do this!" he snapped, his hands moving between himself and her, indicating the space between them. "Two years, Sam, of running my ass off every morning and flailing a stick ineffectually at the T every night just to try and keep from..." He stopped, his gaze faltering, flicking from her face down to the floor and back. She stepped forward again in hopes of reaching out a hand to comfort him, but stopped when he once more backed up a step. "I can't do this for two more years and then two more after that. Looking at you every day and telling myself it's not right to tell you." She stepped forward again only for him to back up once more until his back hit the outer bulkhead. The cold metal against his shoulders just seemed to make him deflate, he leaned his head back against the wall and slid down it, one knee up with his elbow resting on top of it, his other arm taking his weight as he leaned to the side.
Her heart was pounding in her chest. She'd never seen him like this, it was so unlike him. He was so quick to smile and laugh and to make those around him do the same that it shocked her to see how utterly broken he looked at that moment. Ever since meeting him at the Air Force Academy nearly two decades before she could always count on him being the boisterous one. The guy with the stories everyone groaned at, but listened to anyway because they were so funny. He was the one who always dragged her away from her self-imposed research binges at the Academy and he picked right up where he left off after he arrived at the SGC and she returned to SG-1. She never could say no to him when he flashed that grin and sparkled those baby blues at her. Now he just seemed lost and she just wanted to wrap him in her arms and tell him they'd get through it like they always did. His words were confusing her though, and he seemed to be trying to keep her at bay.
"Cam, it's going to be alright." She stepped forward again, gingerly making her way over the debris in the middle of the floor, but she froze when he gazed up at her and pierced her with the most intense look.
"I love you, Sam. I've always loved you." His voice was husky, nearly broken and it just froze the blood in her veins to ice. Her spine stiffened and her hands clenched tight even as she was reaching for him and when his eyes flicked away from her and he looked down at his hand with a rueful smile on his lips she knew her face must have been a real sight. She couldn't even think, her backpedaling feet caused the slats of his destroyed bunk to slide under the soles of her boots and she nearly stumbled as she spun around and headed for the door, only her hand slamming against the panel to open it kept her upright on knees now turning to jelly. She slipped between the hissing doors as soon as there was space for her, turned up the corridor and ran.
Atlantis, March 2008
Her eyes flew open to instantly focus on the light fixture above her bed in Atlantis. When she could move, her hands flew to scrub her eyes and run through her sleep-tousled hair as she tried to push her head back into the pillow with a groan. What the Hell was that dream about? Cam confessing to her on Odyssey while inside the time dilation field? Ridiculous. Why was she fantasizing about Cam again after all these years? There was no way he'd feel that way about her.
They'd known each other since her first day at the Academy when he was assigned to show her squad of cadets around the campus. She wasn't going to deny that she, like just about every other female cadet, had fallen for those eyes and that drawl within five minutes of him assembling them together and introducing himself. And he was funny too, but he'd kept the straightest, most serious face imaginable, even shooting them all with glares after making the whole squad laugh. It wasn't until she saw him off duty, laughing and joking and grinning like an idiot that she realised it wasn't unintentional.
The Air Force paid for her Ph.D. in Astrophysics at MIT, while she'd come to Colorado Springs to do her BCT over the summers. This allowed her to take an accelerated course through the Academy which concentrated on the military training and courses. In the end, he had been set to graduate in the year ahead of her despite her being older, but he had always been available to make sure she wasn't taking herself too seriously which she'd had an awful problem with at university. He could talk her ear off for hours about nothing and make it interesting, he'd drag her and other squaddies to the movies, to the bars, to the wilds around Colorado Springs to go hiking. He'd even taken them to a museum once. That was just the way he was. He kept them all sane. And she'd loved him for it, all the while knowing he'd never be more than a friend.
Throwing the sheet covering her aside and kicking her legs out from the bed she padded over to the balcony to stand outside and look out over the ocean. The early dawn breeze cooled the flushing skin on her cheeks and neck, causing her to shiver slightly. It hadn't felt like a dream though. It didn't have the quality of a dream, the unreality, the detachment. It had been too real. That mission on Odyssey was a constant burr under her saddle. An itch she couldn't scratch. The worst of it was that Teal'c knew everything! Well, at least everything he'd experienced personally during the fifty-odd years they'd spent staring at an Ori energy beam outside their starboard viewports. They'd lived a lifetime together on that ship. Was it possible something had happened? She looked up at the sky, orienting herself to the increasingly familiar constellations in the starscape above Atlantis. One of the first things she'd done after taking over command of the Alteran city was to ask Dr. Zelenka where the Milky Way was in the sky. She'd never have asked Rodney to tell her, that was for sure. She found the small group of stars he'd told her to use as her anchor point and followed a line down to where he'd told her their home galaxy was. The worst thing about the dream was she didn't know why she'd run away.
Stargate Command, September 2009
Colonel Samantha Carter smoothed out the skirt of her dress blues as she rode the elevator down the sublevels below NORAD under Cheyenne Mountain. She considered herself lucky to be back in Colorado after extensive debriefings in Washington having grown to dislike D.C. immensely. Her last mission had not gone well to say the least. The doors of the elevator opened on sublevel 25 and she stepped out to the beaming smile of Colonel Cameron Mitchell who wasted no time in wrapping an arm around her and embracing her. She finally felt like she was home now.
"Welcome back, Sam. The rest of the guys are waiting for us in the mess, do you want to go now or get out of the monkey suit first?" He fell into step alongside her as their hug broke up and she started walking away from the elevator. She looked down at her dress blues and then at his own blue BDUs and smiled.
"I think I'll change first, Cam, Vala isn't the most careful of eaters when she's excited." She smiled and he chuckled as they easily wended their way through the corridors to the quarters she kept on base. They talked about the little goings on at the base while she had been seconded to command of the USS George Hammond on a mission to Icarus Base on P4X-351. The vessel was the latest BC-304 built and had still not been assigned a permanent commander. She'd been made official escort for the party of Senator Alan Armstrong, visiting the base on an oversight mission. After changing quickly while Cam waited outside, the two military leaders of SG-1 then made their way to the mess up on sublevel 22 to meet up with the rest of the team.
"How bad was it, Sam?" Dr. Daniel Jackson pushed a tall sundae glass of blue jello towards a very grateful Sam as she sat across from him and next to the Jaffa warrior, Teal'c. Cam slid in next to her and across from Vala Mal Doran, who was licking a spoonful of chocolate ice cream.
"Well, the planet isn't there anymore so you could say it was really bad." Sam smiled ruefully at her friend as she picked up the spoon and began to dig into her jello. Daniel winced and gave her a sympathetic look. "Since I also failed to bring back the Senator, the President himself had to put in a word for me with the oversight committee." Cameron blew out an exasperated breath and rubbed a hand through his hair in frustration.
"I can't believe they even tried to hold you responsible for that, Sam. It's ridiculous." He was clearly upset that the politicos in Washington were trying to hound his best friend who just happened to have saved the entire galaxy on more than one occasion.
"You did everything you could to buy time for the evacuation, and those that didn't get beamed up by you or died in the attack went through the 'gate to Destiny." offered Vala as she brushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear and scooped up some more ice cream for herself.
"Where they're now stranded. The Senator died as well." Sam retorted with a sigh.
"Sacrificing himself to save the others. Senator Armstrong should be honoured as a hero, Colonel Carter." Teal'c inclined his head as he spoke offering his own support to his friend, Sam gave him a small grateful smile.
"I know, Teal'c, but I-" she was cut off by Cameron's hand over hers on the table.
"Don't start second guessing yourself on this one, Sam. It went down the only way it could have gone down. Now we just live with it and try to figure out a way to bring those people home." He gave her hand a squeeze and she leaned against his shoulder for a bit. "Which is what we're going to start doing with tomorrow's mission, we're scouting for new planets with similar conditions to P4X-351 to provide the necessary power to allow us to dial Destiny again. If we can do that much we can send them supplies at least."
"If it's ready access to geothermal power we need then planets with Lucian Alliance outposts are a good bet, they like tapping into them for energy." Vala offered, twirling her spoon in her hand now that she'd finished her ice cream.
"They do favour such arrangements as it is easier to hide their bases from orbital scans. Icarus base was a former Lucian Alliance mining outpost after all." Teal'c elaborated on Vala's point and Cameron nodded.
"So taking another base from them saves us the trouble of having to build one." added Daniel.
"That makes it more likely that they'll attack the base to try to retake it, that's likely the reason Icarus was attacked this time around." came Sam's rebuttal as she ate some of her jello. The rest fell quiet for a moment.
"Which is why our first choice would be an uninhabited planet which we could claim for ourselves." Cam stated the position that General Landry informed him was the considered opinion of the brass and the IOA. "If it proves too tough to find one or too expensive to build our own base then the likelihood of us trying to capture another Lucian Alliance outpost gets higher."
"Will we widen the search to include planets without a Stargate, Colonel Mitchell?" asked Teal'c from the end of the table.
"That would require the main focus of the search to be carried out by our ships, T, and we don't have that many to spare, though I hear that will be the first mission of the Hammond once it's all Bristol fashion. The Tok'ra offered to help out with a list of likely choices as well." replied Cameron. "We're going to be scouting addresses from the Ancient database to try to narrow that list down to a few we might want to do orbital scans of. So first choice would be a planet with a 'gate we can move to the base. Second choice would be a 'gateless planet we can transplant a Stargate to."
"The problem with scouting through the 'gate is that most planets we visit tend to have the 'gate well away from the mountainous regions. All we can look for from the ground are basic indicators of tectonic activity, geological stability and radioactivity levels." Daniel pointed out to a nod from Cameron.
"I know, Jackson," confirmed SG-1's leader, "but the faster we tag planets as potentially uninhabited, the faster we can get ships to them for orbital scans of the core radioactivity rates. The more radioactive reactions there are the more heat the core will be generating for us to tap in to."
"The vast majority of inhabited planets with a Stargate have all of their civilisation tucked in within twenty miles of the 'gate." added Sam. "There are still hundreds of addresses in the Ancient database list that we haven't even sent a MALP to, let alone put boots on the ground."
"Briefing at 0800 tomorrow for our first planet on the list." Cam brought their little discussion to a close and the topics shifted as he got up to grab them all more drinks. Sam watched him walk away and noticed he was stopped by an airman who handed him a parcel.
On to Chapter 2