(no subject)
Title: Down Here Among the Wreckage
Author: Annerb
Summary: Five years ago, SG-1 broke in half. Two years ago, Earth lost. Today, there is one last chance to fix things. But sometimes the pieces just don’t fit back together again.
Warnings: Mature for language, violence, torture, non-con, adult themes, and off-screen character deaths.
Categorization: AU, H/C, darkfic, tragedy, and apocafic for flavor. Team, Sam/Jack.
A/N: Special thanks to holdouttrout for the beta.
Part One-History
Part Two-Prodigal
Part Three-Reckoning
Prologue
Steady Pull
No Net Below
Greater Than
Chapter Four: All We Are
Sam shoves a box against the far wall of the Orfeo’s cargo hold, not bothering to try to make sense of the jumble of objects tucked inside it.
She has a careful litany of stages repeating in her mind, constantly tracking Jack’s slow degradation as the Ancient knowledge unspools in his mind. He’s slipped once or twice already, foreign words seeping into his vocabulary, but only when he’s distracted or exhausted.
Three or four days more, she calculates.
The most telling milestone is the fact that he’s moved into the mad packing phase. He’s filling box after box with objects from the compound, muttering that they will be important. She doesn’t bother to ask why, not wanting to see the frustrated tic of his hands as he tries to latch on to anything concrete. She thinks he doesn’t even really know what or why he’s doing anything anymore.
Something happened to him in the observatory, turning his apathetic listlessness into a whirlwind of movement. She’s not sure which phase is worse because maybe he’s not disappearing anymore, but that just means that he’s burning out faster.
With a sigh, Sam lifts another box to the towering collection and tries to focus her mind on the developing game of tetris that is his cargo hold, and not his crumbling mind. He’s gathered enough stuff to take with them to stretch his ship to the limits, even counting the rather cleverly concealed compartments that she can only assume he uses for smuggling.
She’s moving some cargo around, trying to consolidate to make room, when she pulls the top off a large crate in the corner that seems strangely isolated from all the others. A flash of color catches her eye, and staring down at the contents, she tries to reconcile what she’s seeing but it just doesn’t add up. There are layers of fabric and boxes of foodstuff she recognizes far too well from the supplies her father brought to her like clockwork over the years.
What are they doing on Jack’s ship?
Reaching in, she pulls out a glass jar of preserves, the label carefully handwritten.
Her favorite.
She’d been willing to see the quilt on Jack’s bunk as an aberration, something her father had passed on, but in light of the crate open in front of her she’s finally realizing it is so much more.
She carefully secures the lid back in place.
* * *
“Jack?” Sam asks, wandering into the room furthest back in the compound. “I’ve loaded everything on your list.”
He doesn’t acknowledge her, intent on a bag he’s packing. For a panicked moment she wonders if it’s already begun, if his mind is already slipping away. She takes a step closer to him. “Jack?”
“When did I become Jack?”
Her heart stutters in her chest and she doesn’t know if it’s because she’s relieved he can still speak or terror at his words. “What?”
For a moment she thinks-prays-he’s going to take the question back, to shrug it off, but then he turns, nothing uncertain in his gaze. “When did you start calling me Jack?”
He’s staring back at her and she knows she should turn around and not have this conversation, but he’s got a ticking time bomb in his head and her feet just won’t move. She wants to hate him in that moment because he’s heading for the grave and somehow seems to think that gives him the right to ask these questions, to rip things open on his way out.
He doesn’t have the right.
But then she thinks of a carefully packed crate, years of watching and caring from afar, what that must have cost him.
This is it. No more chances.
“The day…” She breaks off, flinching as her voice cracks over the word.
“Right,” he says, his voice going flat. He turns back to the panel in front of him. “Of course.”
She knows what he’s thinking, but he’s wrong.
She debates letting him keep thinking it was the day Anhur switched tactics, that first time, a first time neither of them can get back, but for her, of all the traumas that is not the one her mind lingers on, the one that she can’t scrape away no matter how hard she tries. She’d already been so far gone by then, after he took away the sarcophagus.
She wonders if the truth is worse.
“No,” she says. “It was before that.”
He became Jack the day she stopped thinking of him as the Colonel. The day she stopped following his orders, spoken or unspoken. The day she broke that bond.
She swallows hard, willing the foreign press of tears to leave her be, for the power of the memory to keep its distance. None of that has worked for weeks now and she almost wishes for silence again if it wouldn’t be such a capitulation.
“The knife,” she forces herself to say and she can almost feel the breaks in her bones, the stickiness of blood on her skin.
She should have killed him. He wanted it. She knew that, despite his inability to speak. She knew it.
He did it for her once, killing her rather than leaving her captive to something, but she just couldn’t do it. She thinks if he’d been just her CO, if it was just about Colonel O’Neill…she thinks she could have done it. But Jack…not Jack. And that’s what is unforgivable.
He has his back to her, his spine stiff and his fingers motionless on the pack in front of him. “Okay,” is his only response.
She doesn’t know what that means.
Opening a small hatch in front of him, he exposes a giant orange-colored cylinder that looks like it’s made of stained glass. He clicks on his flashlight, and Sam follows suit. He pulls the cylinder free with a swift twist and a tug, the compound shuddering into darkness around them.
“We’re going to need this,” he says.
She believes him.
* * *
She’s limp against the chains, shoulder dislocated, jaw angled unnaturally under the blooming bruises, chest completely still.
Jack wants to close his eyes, but has no control. The thing wants him to watch. Always watching.
Even Jack isn’t ready for her sudden resurgence from death and he’s never been more in awe of her. Not even death can stop her. The blade she wields is cool and sharp against his neck and if he could, he would weep in gratitude. She will end this.
But there’s something in her face. Hesitation. And a flicker of something even worse, because the snake sees it too.
“Do it!” he screams wordlessly.
But she can’t hear and he sees the moment her resolve falters, the instant she cracks.
He hears her soft apology and knows she says it both for leaving him captive and for what the snake will force him to do to her in retaliation. Already it is feeding him images, ideas it has for her.
Nausea roils around his phantom stomach. He tries not to look, not to feel her blood flowing over his hands.
Part of him hates her for her weakness.
Jack jerks awake, suffering a moment of disorientation as he absorbs the small alcove around him, the familiar hum of his ship at full speed.
Right, he thinks, his head dropping back to his thin pillow. They are racing towards Earth, chasing an event Jack can’t put in words, outrunning the ticking time bomb in his brain.
There aren’t any Asgard left. Who’s supposed to save him?
He’s going to die. He knows this.
There aren’t a lot of regrets anymore, just the surety that this, finally, is the right path. But there’s one last thing to do before his words disappear all together.
Pushing out of bed, he moves towards the front of the ship.
Carter is at the controls.
Her transformation this last week has been startling. Not that he would have expected any less from the Carter he’d known. Only she’s not the woman she once was. She probably never will be, but she’s solid and focused and stubborn enough not to back down from conversations she would probably rather never have.
She doesn’t need him or anyone looking out for her anymore. It makes leaving a lot easier. He just doesn’t want to leave her clinging to a burden that never existed in the first place.
“He had a sarcophagus,” he says.
Carter jumps at the unexpected voice as much as the words, he thinks. “What?” she asks, not looking back, hands tight on the controls.
There’s no time for pulling punches. “Anhur.”
She winces at the name. “I know,” she snaps, and he imagines she’s thinking about it again, the white light, the hum, the blissful blankness. She knows better than anyone that Anhur had a sarcophagus, but she’s still not getting it, not making the connection that the Carter she used to be would have already seen long before.
He waits patiently for her to look at him. When she finally manages to lift her gaze to his, he stares back at her, willing her to understand.
“He had a sarcophagus,” he repeats, each word carefully enunciated.
It finally seems to slam into her, her face paling and her breath catching. “He had a sarcophagus,” she repeats.
He wouldn’t have stayed dead, even if she’d managed it.
She seems to fold inward, the tension leaving her spine. Her empty hands tremble in her lap as she stares down at them, and Jack sees the tears that struggle free splashing on her open palms.
For five years of built up silence and anger and guilt, she falls apart so quietly. A few tears and a bowed back, her hair falling forward over her face. It makes it all so much more painful to watch.
He hesitates, always hesitating, but finally gets his feet to move, crossing the space. Maybe this was just an inevitable conversation, or maybe it’s the knowledge of time running out on all of this, but he gently turns the chair until she’s facing him and crouches down in front of her. He reaches out to touch her face, slow enough for her to pull away, to object, but all she does is carefully track the movement.
He finally makes contact, his thumb brushing away the tears, and she doesn’t flinch or pull back, her hands open and still on her lap.
She closes her eyes briefly and then she’s looking at him, and he can’t believe what he’s seeing, some tiny, slender thread of that dangerous truth still in her eyes.
“How can you do that?” he asks, his voice hoarse.
“What?”
“Look at me and not see him.”
“Jack,” she says, her face crumpling. “You know why I couldn’t do it. You know.”
They stare at each other and Jack still has the memory fresh in his mind, that tiny moment that betrayed them both to Anhur, doomed them to torture even more insidious. But what he can’t remember anymore are the rationalizations they’d used, the excuses for staying on the same team, despite the truth they could no longer ignore. Had he really thought it wouldn’t matter? Denial and repression hadn’t saved them.
He pulls his hand back. “It was my fault,” he says. “All of it.”
“No,” she denies.
“I was your commander.”
She shakes her head. “It was my choice too. I knew the risks.”
His jaw tightens. None of that changes the most damning fact of all. “I wanted you and he knew it.”
She flinches, the gesture involuntary, but bone deep. “It’s not the same,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper.
“If I hadn’t--.”
“No,” she interrupts, refusing to back down on this one thing. “He was a Goa’uld. He would have hurt us either way.”
Jack pushes to his feet, taking a few agitated steps away from her.
From the first moments of blending, Anhur had been convinced Jack was fighting him, blocking him somehow. That was power Jack never had. It was only ever Anhur’s weakness working against him, his inability to make sense of Jack’s knowledge, to make use of it. That’s what the endless routine of her death had been about-punishment, an attempt to break the host, to make it all make sense. At least until the snake’s twisted mind became obsessed with something else all together.
Anhur hadn’t really seen Carter before the day she dared lift a knife against him. She-a mostly dead female slave, the least important being of all-daring to threaten the life of her god. It shook Anhur, splitting everything open, this bond the humans had that he could never understand. From then on, she was all he saw.
Scared, scared little god, just scrambling to stay alive, getting lost in his own sick games.
Jack swallows hard against the bitterness rising in his throat. “Or maybe he would have just killed you, if he didn’t think there was something worth keeping you alive for.”
Carter’s voice is small when she finally speaks. “Would that have been better? Would you rather I was dead?”
He still has it all fresh in his mind, every heinous detail. He turns to look at her. “Rather than what he made me do to you? Yes.”
She doesn’t flinch back from the vehemence in his voice, rather holding her ground, her back straightening. “Is that why you did it?” she asks. “Why you stuck your head in that thing?”
He stares back at her, feeling like he’s watching a train wreck in progress, but unable to look away. “What?”
She licks her lips, forcing out the one question they’ve been dancing around since this all began. “Because you would rather be dead?”
He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t think she really needs him to. She stares back at him as if willing him to deny it. He can see the terrible realization building in her face as the silence stretches long between them.
She understands now. Finally.
It’s never been about the knife. It’s always been Cimmeria.
Always Cimmeria.
For a moment he thinks she’s going to fall apart under the weight of this realization, but then he watches the stunned horror wipe from her face in the span of a moment, everything shutting off. She’s blank again. So painfully blank.
“Okay,” she says, something like a promise. She pushes to her feet, and when he looks, her hands are steady. “Okay. That’s all I needed to know.”
She walks away.
Finally.
:: next::
Author: Annerb
Summary: Five years ago, SG-1 broke in half. Two years ago, Earth lost. Today, there is one last chance to fix things. But sometimes the pieces just don’t fit back together again.
Warnings: Mature for language, violence, torture, non-con, adult themes, and off-screen character deaths.
Categorization: AU, H/C, darkfic, tragedy, and apocafic for flavor. Team, Sam/Jack.
A/N: Special thanks to holdouttrout for the beta.
Part One-History
Part Two-Prodigal
Part Three-Reckoning
Prologue
Steady Pull
No Net Below
Greater Than
Chapter Four: All We Are
Sam shoves a box against the far wall of the Orfeo’s cargo hold, not bothering to try to make sense of the jumble of objects tucked inside it.
She has a careful litany of stages repeating in her mind, constantly tracking Jack’s slow degradation as the Ancient knowledge unspools in his mind. He’s slipped once or twice already, foreign words seeping into his vocabulary, but only when he’s distracted or exhausted.
Three or four days more, she calculates.
The most telling milestone is the fact that he’s moved into the mad packing phase. He’s filling box after box with objects from the compound, muttering that they will be important. She doesn’t bother to ask why, not wanting to see the frustrated tic of his hands as he tries to latch on to anything concrete. She thinks he doesn’t even really know what or why he’s doing anything anymore.
Something happened to him in the observatory, turning his apathetic listlessness into a whirlwind of movement. She’s not sure which phase is worse because maybe he’s not disappearing anymore, but that just means that he’s burning out faster.
With a sigh, Sam lifts another box to the towering collection and tries to focus her mind on the developing game of tetris that is his cargo hold, and not his crumbling mind. He’s gathered enough stuff to take with them to stretch his ship to the limits, even counting the rather cleverly concealed compartments that she can only assume he uses for smuggling.
She’s moving some cargo around, trying to consolidate to make room, when she pulls the top off a large crate in the corner that seems strangely isolated from all the others. A flash of color catches her eye, and staring down at the contents, she tries to reconcile what she’s seeing but it just doesn’t add up. There are layers of fabric and boxes of foodstuff she recognizes far too well from the supplies her father brought to her like clockwork over the years.
What are they doing on Jack’s ship?
Reaching in, she pulls out a glass jar of preserves, the label carefully handwritten.
Her favorite.
She’d been willing to see the quilt on Jack’s bunk as an aberration, something her father had passed on, but in light of the crate open in front of her she’s finally realizing it is so much more.
She carefully secures the lid back in place.
* * *
“Jack?” Sam asks, wandering into the room furthest back in the compound. “I’ve loaded everything on your list.”
He doesn’t acknowledge her, intent on a bag he’s packing. For a panicked moment she wonders if it’s already begun, if his mind is already slipping away. She takes a step closer to him. “Jack?”
“When did I become Jack?”
Her heart stutters in her chest and she doesn’t know if it’s because she’s relieved he can still speak or terror at his words. “What?”
For a moment she thinks-prays-he’s going to take the question back, to shrug it off, but then he turns, nothing uncertain in his gaze. “When did you start calling me Jack?”
He’s staring back at her and she knows she should turn around and not have this conversation, but he’s got a ticking time bomb in his head and her feet just won’t move. She wants to hate him in that moment because he’s heading for the grave and somehow seems to think that gives him the right to ask these questions, to rip things open on his way out.
He doesn’t have the right.
But then she thinks of a carefully packed crate, years of watching and caring from afar, what that must have cost him.
This is it. No more chances.
“The day…” She breaks off, flinching as her voice cracks over the word.
“Right,” he says, his voice going flat. He turns back to the panel in front of him. “Of course.”
She knows what he’s thinking, but he’s wrong.
She debates letting him keep thinking it was the day Anhur switched tactics, that first time, a first time neither of them can get back, but for her, of all the traumas that is not the one her mind lingers on, the one that she can’t scrape away no matter how hard she tries. She’d already been so far gone by then, after he took away the sarcophagus.
She wonders if the truth is worse.
“No,” she says. “It was before that.”
He became Jack the day she stopped thinking of him as the Colonel. The day she stopped following his orders, spoken or unspoken. The day she broke that bond.
She swallows hard, willing the foreign press of tears to leave her be, for the power of the memory to keep its distance. None of that has worked for weeks now and she almost wishes for silence again if it wouldn’t be such a capitulation.
“The knife,” she forces herself to say and she can almost feel the breaks in her bones, the stickiness of blood on her skin.
She should have killed him. He wanted it. She knew that, despite his inability to speak. She knew it.
He did it for her once, killing her rather than leaving her captive to something, but she just couldn’t do it. She thinks if he’d been just her CO, if it was just about Colonel O’Neill…she thinks she could have done it. But Jack…not Jack. And that’s what is unforgivable.
He has his back to her, his spine stiff and his fingers motionless on the pack in front of him. “Okay,” is his only response.
She doesn’t know what that means.
Opening a small hatch in front of him, he exposes a giant orange-colored cylinder that looks like it’s made of stained glass. He clicks on his flashlight, and Sam follows suit. He pulls the cylinder free with a swift twist and a tug, the compound shuddering into darkness around them.
“We’re going to need this,” he says.
She believes him.
* * *
She’s limp against the chains, shoulder dislocated, jaw angled unnaturally under the blooming bruises, chest completely still.
Jack wants to close his eyes, but has no control. The thing wants him to watch. Always watching.
Even Jack isn’t ready for her sudden resurgence from death and he’s never been more in awe of her. Not even death can stop her. The blade she wields is cool and sharp against his neck and if he could, he would weep in gratitude. She will end this.
But there’s something in her face. Hesitation. And a flicker of something even worse, because the snake sees it too.
“Do it!” he screams wordlessly.
But she can’t hear and he sees the moment her resolve falters, the instant she cracks.
He hears her soft apology and knows she says it both for leaving him captive and for what the snake will force him to do to her in retaliation. Already it is feeding him images, ideas it has for her.
Nausea roils around his phantom stomach. He tries not to look, not to feel her blood flowing over his hands.
Part of him hates her for her weakness.
Jack jerks awake, suffering a moment of disorientation as he absorbs the small alcove around him, the familiar hum of his ship at full speed.
Right, he thinks, his head dropping back to his thin pillow. They are racing towards Earth, chasing an event Jack can’t put in words, outrunning the ticking time bomb in his brain.
There aren’t any Asgard left. Who’s supposed to save him?
He’s going to die. He knows this.
There aren’t a lot of regrets anymore, just the surety that this, finally, is the right path. But there’s one last thing to do before his words disappear all together.
Pushing out of bed, he moves towards the front of the ship.
Carter is at the controls.
Her transformation this last week has been startling. Not that he would have expected any less from the Carter he’d known. Only she’s not the woman she once was. She probably never will be, but she’s solid and focused and stubborn enough not to back down from conversations she would probably rather never have.
She doesn’t need him or anyone looking out for her anymore. It makes leaving a lot easier. He just doesn’t want to leave her clinging to a burden that never existed in the first place.
“He had a sarcophagus,” he says.
Carter jumps at the unexpected voice as much as the words, he thinks. “What?” she asks, not looking back, hands tight on the controls.
There’s no time for pulling punches. “Anhur.”
She winces at the name. “I know,” she snaps, and he imagines she’s thinking about it again, the white light, the hum, the blissful blankness. She knows better than anyone that Anhur had a sarcophagus, but she’s still not getting it, not making the connection that the Carter she used to be would have already seen long before.
He waits patiently for her to look at him. When she finally manages to lift her gaze to his, he stares back at her, willing her to understand.
“He had a sarcophagus,” he repeats, each word carefully enunciated.
It finally seems to slam into her, her face paling and her breath catching. “He had a sarcophagus,” she repeats.
He wouldn’t have stayed dead, even if she’d managed it.
She seems to fold inward, the tension leaving her spine. Her empty hands tremble in her lap as she stares down at them, and Jack sees the tears that struggle free splashing on her open palms.
For five years of built up silence and anger and guilt, she falls apart so quietly. A few tears and a bowed back, her hair falling forward over her face. It makes it all so much more painful to watch.
He hesitates, always hesitating, but finally gets his feet to move, crossing the space. Maybe this was just an inevitable conversation, or maybe it’s the knowledge of time running out on all of this, but he gently turns the chair until she’s facing him and crouches down in front of her. He reaches out to touch her face, slow enough for her to pull away, to object, but all she does is carefully track the movement.
He finally makes contact, his thumb brushing away the tears, and she doesn’t flinch or pull back, her hands open and still on her lap.
She closes her eyes briefly and then she’s looking at him, and he can’t believe what he’s seeing, some tiny, slender thread of that dangerous truth still in her eyes.
“How can you do that?” he asks, his voice hoarse.
“What?”
“Look at me and not see him.”
“Jack,” she says, her face crumpling. “You know why I couldn’t do it. You know.”
They stare at each other and Jack still has the memory fresh in his mind, that tiny moment that betrayed them both to Anhur, doomed them to torture even more insidious. But what he can’t remember anymore are the rationalizations they’d used, the excuses for staying on the same team, despite the truth they could no longer ignore. Had he really thought it wouldn’t matter? Denial and repression hadn’t saved them.
He pulls his hand back. “It was my fault,” he says. “All of it.”
“No,” she denies.
“I was your commander.”
She shakes her head. “It was my choice too. I knew the risks.”
His jaw tightens. None of that changes the most damning fact of all. “I wanted you and he knew it.”
She flinches, the gesture involuntary, but bone deep. “It’s not the same,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper.
“If I hadn’t--.”
“No,” she interrupts, refusing to back down on this one thing. “He was a Goa’uld. He would have hurt us either way.”
Jack pushes to his feet, taking a few agitated steps away from her.
From the first moments of blending, Anhur had been convinced Jack was fighting him, blocking him somehow. That was power Jack never had. It was only ever Anhur’s weakness working against him, his inability to make sense of Jack’s knowledge, to make use of it. That’s what the endless routine of her death had been about-punishment, an attempt to break the host, to make it all make sense. At least until the snake’s twisted mind became obsessed with something else all together.
Anhur hadn’t really seen Carter before the day she dared lift a knife against him. She-a mostly dead female slave, the least important being of all-daring to threaten the life of her god. It shook Anhur, splitting everything open, this bond the humans had that he could never understand. From then on, she was all he saw.
Scared, scared little god, just scrambling to stay alive, getting lost in his own sick games.
Jack swallows hard against the bitterness rising in his throat. “Or maybe he would have just killed you, if he didn’t think there was something worth keeping you alive for.”
Carter’s voice is small when she finally speaks. “Would that have been better? Would you rather I was dead?”
He still has it all fresh in his mind, every heinous detail. He turns to look at her. “Rather than what he made me do to you? Yes.”
She doesn’t flinch back from the vehemence in his voice, rather holding her ground, her back straightening. “Is that why you did it?” she asks. “Why you stuck your head in that thing?”
He stares back at her, feeling like he’s watching a train wreck in progress, but unable to look away. “What?”
She licks her lips, forcing out the one question they’ve been dancing around since this all began. “Because you would rather be dead?”
He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t think she really needs him to. She stares back at him as if willing him to deny it. He can see the terrible realization building in her face as the silence stretches long between them.
She understands now. Finally.
It’s never been about the knife. It’s always been Cimmeria.
Always Cimmeria.
For a moment he thinks she’s going to fall apart under the weight of this realization, but then he watches the stunned horror wipe from her face in the span of a moment, everything shutting off. She’s blank again. So painfully blank.
“Okay,” she says, something like a promise. She pushes to her feet, and when he looks, her hands are steady. “Okay. That’s all I needed to know.”
She walks away.
Finally.
:: next::