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More String Theory: An AU Series:
Dr. Samantha Carter joins the SGC and discovers a life she never expected.
Action/Adventure, Drama, Angst, Romance, S/J
Teen: minor language and violence
And just a note about my web page. I am having a hard time with various technology and access issues that all boil down the simple fact that I can't update my webpage anymore. I hope to resolve this soon, but in the meantime, if you want to catch up with earlier entries in this series, you'll have to read them in lj. Just click the tag string_theory. Sorry!!
Ficlet 18: Calamine
For Sam, the kiss the day they rescued Jack from Edora is easy to explain away. It was a heightened situation after all. He’d been gone seven months and she was still buzzing from the high that she is learning to associate with accomplishing the impossible.
So, yeah. Easy enough to explain away.
Not so easy to explain is her sudden overwhelming need for office supplies at least once a week. Or maybe three times a week. She now has enough paper, writing utensils and glue to build a half scale replica of the SGC. She’s running out of places to put it all.
She briefly considers sending her assistant to return it all, but she’s not sure she can justify that fitting into his job description. But then again, making out with the Second in Command of the base in a storage closet isn’t part of her job description either.
Sam groans softly and drops her head into her hands, ignoring the blinky artifact from P5T-932 sitting in front of her.
This isn’t like her, she knows, and even worse, it’s beginning to interfere with her work. The whole situation is just completely unacceptable. She didn’t come here to get involved in some sordid office romance. She’d left her husband for this opportunity, abandoned her entire life on the off chance that she might be able to build something for herself in these labs. There just isn’t room for anything else.
Especially when half the time she can’t even convince herself that she actually likes Jack.
But no matter how many times she swears she won’t step near another storage closet, she still finds herself wandering down that particular hallway with some flimsy excuse when the unspoken appointed time comes. Jack is always there, as if he can just somehow read her moods, which annoys her on a whole new level altogether.
She has no idea what he thinks of the whole thing (‘thing’ is her way of avoiding categorizing anything), but at the same time, she really doesn’t want to know. He’s a guy after all, it should be pretty obvious what he wants out of this.
But even in her own head that uncharitable thought doesn’t quite sit right.
The idea that maybe this whole thing is just an itch that needs to be scratched lingers in Sam’s mind, though. Just a normal biological reaction. After all, she hasn’t had a man in her life for... No, she really doesn’t want to put a number on it, it’s too damn depressing.
The more she thinks about it, the more she likes this new theory. Particularly because it offers a clear and straight path out of the situation.
Of course, scratching that itch isn’t as easy as it sounds, particularly on a high security military base. But maybe not impossible, Sam thinks with a completely unacceptable illicit thrill. Yes, she thinks, poking agitatedly at the still blinking piece of technology, the sooner she can test her hypothesis and get back to her real life the better.
She spends the rest of the afternoon lost in thoughts having nothing to do with P5T-932.
* * *
Two weeks and two incidents later (which would have undoubtedly been a much higher number if SG-1 hadn’t finally been cleared for off world travel with their new teammate), Sam bites the bullet and goes to visit Daniel in his office.
She’s brainstormed ways around asking Daniel for this particular bit of information, but she’s getting desperate now and the only other option is to follow Jack home and she’s pretty sure he’s too well trained not to notice her. For some reason she’s convinced she really needs to element of surprise on her side, which is silly on more levels that she can count.
But so is essentially asking Daniel to play pimp for her.
Oh, god. Could she take that last thought back, please?
Before Sam can even work herself around to the topic, Daniel hands her a small white piece of paper neatly folded in half. She knows it has Jack’s address on it without asking.
It’s mortifying to discover she’s been this obvious. It doesn’t keep her from eagerly swiping it from his hand.
* * *
It’s just an itch, remember?
The phrase has become like a mantra as she sits behind the wheel of her car on a sunny Saturday morning. She’s repeated the words so often that they have almost stopped sounding completely ridiculous. Almost.
Numerous variables have been carefully inserted into her equations. Early morning to catch him off guard and to avoid any possibility of staying the night and giving this more meaning than she intends. No dinner or traditional build-up that might make it seem date like.
But she’s losing her careful element of surprise the longer she sits in her car parked in front of his house.
The building isn’t exactly what she expected of him, and yet seems to suit him perfectly. The low house somehow manages to be rustic and inviting at the same time and is that smoke coming from around the back? What kind of man barbeques at nine in the morning?
Apparently this one.
Sam gathers whatever courage she has left and forces herself to Remember The Plan as she gets out of the car. She circumvents the front door all together and heads straight for the source of the pillar of smoke rising from what must be his backyard.
It’s larger than she expected, smooth green grass sweeping down to a fence lined with hedges and ancient looking pines. Jack is standing on a wide, darkly stained deck sparsely furnished with comfortable looking lounge chairs and a huge stainless steel barbeque currently belching out more smoke than she suspects is proper.
When Jack notices her, he blinks at her for a moment in the bright sunshine as if he’s not quite sure what he’s seeing.
“Hi,” Sam manages to say.
“Hunh,” is Jack’s reply. “So this is what you look like outside the Mountain.”
Sam quirks her head and refuses to look confused. This is not how it was supposed to go.
But then Jack goes back to his barbeque as if she hadn’t just shown up unannounced in his backyard.
“Want a hot dog?” he asks.
“It’s nine in the morning,” Sam observes needlessly, coming up the steps to stand on his porch.
“So?” he asks with a shrug.
She can’t really come up with an argument to that. “Okay.”
They sit nibbling hot dogs (without buns for some reason) and Sam takes the time to glance around Jack’s yard. It’s a bit like seeing an animal in its natural habitat, but she didn’t really come here to learn more about him. That’s not part of the plan.
“I didn’t really come to talk,” she blurts at some point and automatically resists the urge to slap her palm across her mouth. She did not just say that.
Jack, to his credit, doesn’t look too nonplussed by the completely ludicrous comment.
“Good,” he says instead. “You can help me with the yard.”
It turns out he is in no way kidding and Sam spends the next three hours with her hands in the soil, something completely unfamiliar to her. But Jack has always seemed to take special joy in seeing her off kilter, she remembers.
“I’ve always had gardeners,” Sam comments, forgetting her earlier claim that she wasn’t here to talk.
Jeff hadn’t really had the time to deal with landscaping with his practice doing so well and Sam had been busy enough with the inside of the house to even contemplate plants. Plus, the proper placement and care of various varieties of plant life had always seemed way beyond her.
“I like to do it myself, when I have the time,” Jack says, catching her hand to save a plant she mistakenly assumes is a weed. Dirt grinds between the skin of their entwined hands, but there is still something undeniably electric in the touch that brings Sam’s mind quickly back to The Plan.
But Jack seems to have other ideas because he lets go rather quickly and picks up a pair of shears. He glances speculatively between the tool and Sam and smiles widely. “Maybe it would be better for you to sit this next bit out.”
Sam tries to be offended, but instead retreats to the shade of his porch and watches him cut back the hedge along his fence. She finds herself fleetingly wondering if he might be cooler with his shirt off.
She’s only thinking of his comfort after all.
But then her mind wanders and she thinks about how unexpectedly pleasant Jack’s backyard is. In the distance she can hear the soft buzz of a lawn mower and a few neighborhood dogs half-heartedly sending out tentative greetings. Her own house, despite living there for over a year now, still has a rather stark, unlived in feeling to it and Sam can’t be sure how much of that is because she is never home and how much might have something to do with gleaming hardwood and the smell of rising dough. But even that blurs in her mind these days.
“Sam?”
She opens her eyes slowly, frowning as she tries to place herself. Jack is leaning over her smelling faintly of soap, his hair slightly damp. She’s dumbly trying to decipher why his hair would be wet when she notices the distinct shift of sunlight. Somehow, hours have passed.
“I’m sorry,” Sam says, sitting up a bit too quickly and almost knocking heads with him. “I didn’t mean to doze off.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he says, stepping back and waving away her concern. “Feel like some lunch?”
“Hot dogs?” she asks, arching an eyebrow at him (which isn’t easy to do while she’s still determinedly rubbing the sleep from her eyes).
Jack laughs lowly. “No. I was thinking sandwiches.”
Sam thinks for a moment, willing her fuzzy brain back to The Plan, but he’s smiling at her with the sun painting patterns through the trees on his face and suddenly she’s remembering the Jack who patiently taught her not to be afraid, pulled pranks on Daniel with alien goo, and grinned at her across crowded hallways.
It feels like it’s been a long time since she’ s seen him.
She peers up at him through one eye and says, “I’m really glad you’re back, Jack.”
Jack smiles and holds out his hands. Sam gingerly grasps them and he helps her to her feet, pulling her close enough to almost touch. He catches her off guard, kissing her once, slow and lazy like the afternoon sun before her still sleepy mind has time to react.
“Glad to hear it,” he says, guiding her towards the house and the promise of lunch.
They walk inside, his hand low against her back and just like that something shifts and Sam’s genius plan falls to the wayside.
But even geniuses have to get it wrong sometimes.
next
Dr. Samantha Carter joins the SGC and discovers a life she never expected.
Action/Adventure, Drama, Angst, Romance, S/J
Teen: minor language and violence
And just a note about my web page. I am having a hard time with various technology and access issues that all boil down the simple fact that I can't update my webpage anymore. I hope to resolve this soon, but in the meantime, if you want to catch up with earlier entries in this series, you'll have to read them in lj. Just click the tag string_theory. Sorry!!
Ficlet 18: Calamine
For Sam, the kiss the day they rescued Jack from Edora is easy to explain away. It was a heightened situation after all. He’d been gone seven months and she was still buzzing from the high that she is learning to associate with accomplishing the impossible.
So, yeah. Easy enough to explain away.
Not so easy to explain is her sudden overwhelming need for office supplies at least once a week. Or maybe three times a week. She now has enough paper, writing utensils and glue to build a half scale replica of the SGC. She’s running out of places to put it all.
She briefly considers sending her assistant to return it all, but she’s not sure she can justify that fitting into his job description. But then again, making out with the Second in Command of the base in a storage closet isn’t part of her job description either.
Sam groans softly and drops her head into her hands, ignoring the blinky artifact from P5T-932 sitting in front of her.
This isn’t like her, she knows, and even worse, it’s beginning to interfere with her work. The whole situation is just completely unacceptable. She didn’t come here to get involved in some sordid office romance. She’d left her husband for this opportunity, abandoned her entire life on the off chance that she might be able to build something for herself in these labs. There just isn’t room for anything else.
Especially when half the time she can’t even convince herself that she actually likes Jack.
But no matter how many times she swears she won’t step near another storage closet, she still finds herself wandering down that particular hallway with some flimsy excuse when the unspoken appointed time comes. Jack is always there, as if he can just somehow read her moods, which annoys her on a whole new level altogether.
She has no idea what he thinks of the whole thing (‘thing’ is her way of avoiding categorizing anything), but at the same time, she really doesn’t want to know. He’s a guy after all, it should be pretty obvious what he wants out of this.
But even in her own head that uncharitable thought doesn’t quite sit right.
The idea that maybe this whole thing is just an itch that needs to be scratched lingers in Sam’s mind, though. Just a normal biological reaction. After all, she hasn’t had a man in her life for... No, she really doesn’t want to put a number on it, it’s too damn depressing.
The more she thinks about it, the more she likes this new theory. Particularly because it offers a clear and straight path out of the situation.
Of course, scratching that itch isn’t as easy as it sounds, particularly on a high security military base. But maybe not impossible, Sam thinks with a completely unacceptable illicit thrill. Yes, she thinks, poking agitatedly at the still blinking piece of technology, the sooner she can test her hypothesis and get back to her real life the better.
She spends the rest of the afternoon lost in thoughts having nothing to do with P5T-932.
* * *
Two weeks and two incidents later (which would have undoubtedly been a much higher number if SG-1 hadn’t finally been cleared for off world travel with their new teammate), Sam bites the bullet and goes to visit Daniel in his office.
She’s brainstormed ways around asking Daniel for this particular bit of information, but she’s getting desperate now and the only other option is to follow Jack home and she’s pretty sure he’s too well trained not to notice her. For some reason she’s convinced she really needs to element of surprise on her side, which is silly on more levels that she can count.
But so is essentially asking Daniel to play pimp for her.
Oh, god. Could she take that last thought back, please?
Before Sam can even work herself around to the topic, Daniel hands her a small white piece of paper neatly folded in half. She knows it has Jack’s address on it without asking.
It’s mortifying to discover she’s been this obvious. It doesn’t keep her from eagerly swiping it from his hand.
* * *
It’s just an itch, remember?
The phrase has become like a mantra as she sits behind the wheel of her car on a sunny Saturday morning. She’s repeated the words so often that they have almost stopped sounding completely ridiculous. Almost.
Numerous variables have been carefully inserted into her equations. Early morning to catch him off guard and to avoid any possibility of staying the night and giving this more meaning than she intends. No dinner or traditional build-up that might make it seem date like.
But she’s losing her careful element of surprise the longer she sits in her car parked in front of his house.
The building isn’t exactly what she expected of him, and yet seems to suit him perfectly. The low house somehow manages to be rustic and inviting at the same time and is that smoke coming from around the back? What kind of man barbeques at nine in the morning?
Apparently this one.
Sam gathers whatever courage she has left and forces herself to Remember The Plan as she gets out of the car. She circumvents the front door all together and heads straight for the source of the pillar of smoke rising from what must be his backyard.
It’s larger than she expected, smooth green grass sweeping down to a fence lined with hedges and ancient looking pines. Jack is standing on a wide, darkly stained deck sparsely furnished with comfortable looking lounge chairs and a huge stainless steel barbeque currently belching out more smoke than she suspects is proper.
When Jack notices her, he blinks at her for a moment in the bright sunshine as if he’s not quite sure what he’s seeing.
“Hi,” Sam manages to say.
“Hunh,” is Jack’s reply. “So this is what you look like outside the Mountain.”
Sam quirks her head and refuses to look confused. This is not how it was supposed to go.
But then Jack goes back to his barbeque as if she hadn’t just shown up unannounced in his backyard.
“Want a hot dog?” he asks.
“It’s nine in the morning,” Sam observes needlessly, coming up the steps to stand on his porch.
“So?” he asks with a shrug.
She can’t really come up with an argument to that. “Okay.”
They sit nibbling hot dogs (without buns for some reason) and Sam takes the time to glance around Jack’s yard. It’s a bit like seeing an animal in its natural habitat, but she didn’t really come here to learn more about him. That’s not part of the plan.
“I didn’t really come to talk,” she blurts at some point and automatically resists the urge to slap her palm across her mouth. She did not just say that.
Jack, to his credit, doesn’t look too nonplussed by the completely ludicrous comment.
“Good,” he says instead. “You can help me with the yard.”
It turns out he is in no way kidding and Sam spends the next three hours with her hands in the soil, something completely unfamiliar to her. But Jack has always seemed to take special joy in seeing her off kilter, she remembers.
“I’ve always had gardeners,” Sam comments, forgetting her earlier claim that she wasn’t here to talk.
Jeff hadn’t really had the time to deal with landscaping with his practice doing so well and Sam had been busy enough with the inside of the house to even contemplate plants. Plus, the proper placement and care of various varieties of plant life had always seemed way beyond her.
“I like to do it myself, when I have the time,” Jack says, catching her hand to save a plant she mistakenly assumes is a weed. Dirt grinds between the skin of their entwined hands, but there is still something undeniably electric in the touch that brings Sam’s mind quickly back to The Plan.
But Jack seems to have other ideas because he lets go rather quickly and picks up a pair of shears. He glances speculatively between the tool and Sam and smiles widely. “Maybe it would be better for you to sit this next bit out.”
Sam tries to be offended, but instead retreats to the shade of his porch and watches him cut back the hedge along his fence. She finds herself fleetingly wondering if he might be cooler with his shirt off.
She’s only thinking of his comfort after all.
But then her mind wanders and she thinks about how unexpectedly pleasant Jack’s backyard is. In the distance she can hear the soft buzz of a lawn mower and a few neighborhood dogs half-heartedly sending out tentative greetings. Her own house, despite living there for over a year now, still has a rather stark, unlived in feeling to it and Sam can’t be sure how much of that is because she is never home and how much might have something to do with gleaming hardwood and the smell of rising dough. But even that blurs in her mind these days.
“Sam?”
She opens her eyes slowly, frowning as she tries to place herself. Jack is leaning over her smelling faintly of soap, his hair slightly damp. She’s dumbly trying to decipher why his hair would be wet when she notices the distinct shift of sunlight. Somehow, hours have passed.
“I’m sorry,” Sam says, sitting up a bit too quickly and almost knocking heads with him. “I didn’t mean to doze off.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he says, stepping back and waving away her concern. “Feel like some lunch?”
“Hot dogs?” she asks, arching an eyebrow at him (which isn’t easy to do while she’s still determinedly rubbing the sleep from her eyes).
Jack laughs lowly. “No. I was thinking sandwiches.”
Sam thinks for a moment, willing her fuzzy brain back to The Plan, but he’s smiling at her with the sun painting patterns through the trees on his face and suddenly she’s remembering the Jack who patiently taught her not to be afraid, pulled pranks on Daniel with alien goo, and grinned at her across crowded hallways.
It feels like it’s been a long time since she’ s seen him.
She peers up at him through one eye and says, “I’m really glad you’re back, Jack.”
Jack smiles and holds out his hands. Sam gingerly grasps them and he helps her to her feet, pulling her close enough to almost touch. He catches her off guard, kissing her once, slow and lazy like the afternoon sun before her still sleepy mind has time to react.
“Glad to hear it,” he says, guiding her towards the house and the promise of lunch.
They walk inside, his hand low against her back and just like that something shifts and Sam’s genius plan falls to the wayside.
But even geniuses have to get it wrong sometimes.
next