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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
Ficlet 21: Auspice
There is only one slice of banana cream pie left on the dessert rack by the time Daniel trots into the commissary. Unfortunately Lt. Nelson is currently two feet closer to said slice. And the lieutenant looks like he might seriously be considering reaching for Daniel’s pie.
Hastily grabbing of plate of whatever the lunch special is, Daniel stares hard into the back of Nelson’s neck. Cake, he projects, you desperately feel like eating cake. He has serious doubts as to the reliability of his mind control techniques, but the soldier does turn around to find Daniel staring with one eye squinted with effort. The poor guy looks freaked out enough to step away from the dessert trays all together.
Victory.
Daniel sweeps in and grabs the last piece of pie.
Of course, by the time he settles down between Sam and Evan, Daniel realizes that in his haste he has served himself a heaping platter of meatloaf dejour. Is it really Wednesday again? How could he have been so careless? Out of the corner of his eye, Daniel can see Evan smirking over his completely average looking turkey sandwich.
Daniel sighs audibly and pokes tentatively at the mass on his plate. “Sam, think you could have one of your flunkies take this down to the lab for chemical analysis? You could win a Nobel Prize for proving once and for all that mystery meat is not actually fit for human consumption.”
Daniel glances up from his plate when he gets no response from Sam. Looking at her proves distracting enough to make him forget about his future gastrointestinal woes. There are pencils sticking out from her hair at every conceivable angle and, despite his very witty monologue about mystery meat, has not looked up from the table where she is avidly scribbling and erasing at nearly the same rate. And did those pencils look...chewed?
Daniel reaches out to poke at one of the various pencils, but Jack reaches behind her and slaps his hand away.
“No touching,” Jack says.
Daniel really hopes this strange territoriality doesn’t have anything to do with the whole ‘he’s seen Sam half naked’ thing. Because that was a long time ago and mostly Jack’s fault.
“Apparently there is some pencil mojo at work,” Evan helpfully explains, waving his unmysterious sandwich in Sam’s direction.
“Mojo?” Daniel repeats.
“The arrangement of writing utensils in Dr. Carter’s hair is meant to impart good luck,” Teal’c informs him.
“I never realized Sam was that superstitious,” Daniel says, gazing at the pencils in interest.
“She wasn’t,” Jack says with a sigh. He rather mournfully glances down at Sam’s lowered head where she currently gnaws on a pencil. “This project’s got her a little cracked.”
Daniel returns his attention to poking his mystery meat, looking closely for any signs that the mass might actually be dissolving his fork. “She still working on the naquadah reactor?”
Evan’s eyes grow wide and Jack wildly gestures for Daniel to stop talking, but the damage is already done. Teal’c pushes back slightly from the table as if assessing exit strategies.
“What?” Daniel asks, feeling tension creep up his back in reaction to their strange behavior. But then, just as Jack looks like he is letting himself breathe again, Sam’s head snaps up.
“Did somebody say naquadah reactor?” Her voice is eager but her eyes are just a little bit crazy.
Jack glares across the table at Daniel.
“Do you have an idea to share, Daniel?” she asks, finally noticing he is there. “Because I was thinking that if I could just avoid a feedback loop and somehow polarize the...”
And on and on she goes for nearly fifteen minutes while Jack rubs tiredly at his eyes, Evan contemplates who’s on first, and Teal’c gazes at his plate of fruit as if he has miraculously lost his appetite.
When Sam finally stops, she does so abruptly, snapping her jaw shut with an audible clack. Then she stuffs her current pencil into her hair and reaches across the table to steal Daniel’s pie.
He opens his mouth to protest but he’s almost certain he hears Teal’c growl in warning. Okay, then. Sam gets his pie. When he looks around the table he realizes none of the other men have desserts either.
“Exactly how many desserts have been sacrificed on the altar of accidentally saying Sam’s crazy words?”
Jack drops his head into his hands. “Let’s just say I hope she gets this thing figured out soon or I might waste away to nothing.”
Sam’s mid-bite when Jack sneaks a finger into her pie and swipes a taste. She turns and looks at Jack, and Daniel assumes he’s about to get a fork in the back of the hand for his uncontrollable sweet tooth when her expression shifts. Daniel can almost see the light bulb going off over her head. She absently licks her fork clean while staring at Jack with an eerie gleam in her eye like she’s contemplating some science experiment.
“I was thinking, Jack...,” she says.
“No,” he replies before she can even finish.
“But maybe-.”
“No.”
“Just take a look at-.”
“No.”
“I don’t know why you are being so stubborn,” she huffs, dropping her fork to the table.
“I told you, I don’t remember anything,” Jack says.
“You had the entire Ancient library in your head for a while. I’m sure something must have stuck! Just take a look at my equations.” She shoves the papers towards him, almost sending what is left of Daniel’s pie over the edge of the table to an early death.
“No,” Jack says, pushing the plate back towards her as if to distract her.
Sam slumps back in her chair. It’s obvious to Daniel that this is a scene oft repeated between them. It would almost be sort of cute, if his pie hadn’t ended up as collateral damage.
“If only I had been here for that,” she says wistfully. “It must have been so cool.”
Daniel’s eyes meet Jack’s across the table. Cool? That’s not exactly how Daniel would describe the experience of watching Jack slowly lose his mind. He almost died after all. But then Jack shakes his head slightly and Daniel realizes that Sam must know nothing about that.
Before he can ask why Jack is feeding Sam shiny, edited versions of their colorful past, an airman steps up next to Jack.
“General Hammond on the horn for you, sir,” he says.
Jack almost looks relieved, pushing quickly up from his chair and following the airman into the hall.
Sam goes back to her equations, mumbling under her breath. “This should be working!”
Daniel is just considering stealing back the skeletal remains of his pie when Jack returns to the table. “Gear up, guys. We have ten minutes to be in the gateroom.”
“You’re going off world?” Sam asks, her head whipping up. “I thought you didn’t have a mission scheduled until next week?”
There is a beat of uncomfortable silence as the two regard each other across the table, Sam trying not to look freaked out and Jack determinedly not meeting her eyes.
“One of the teams ran into trouble,” Jack eventually says. “We’re going to go get them back.”
Sam visibly absorbs the information, biting her lower lip and looking like she really wants to say something. But then her face empties and she just nods, the pencils in her hair swaying precariously. “Of course.”
She doesn’t say anything else and neither does Jack. The rest of the team pushes out of their chairs and makes to follow after him. As Daniel passes by, he reaches out and squeezes Sam’s shoulder.
She rewards him with a bright smile, but when he glances back at the door, a new pencil is in her mouth, her equations forgotten and pushed off the to side.
* * *
The locker door slams shut with enough force to cause even the normally steady Evan to flinch.
“Jack,” Daniel says, trying to defuse the situation before the almost palpable rage radiating off of Jack gets out of control.
“I don’t want to hear it, Daniel.”
His tone betrays nothing of anger, just weariness, which alarms Daniel even more.
Bloody BDUs sit in a pile to the right of Jack’s locker. An entire SGC team, gone just like that. Daniel wants to say something, to acknowledge the fact that Jack had carried the one survivor the entire distance to the gate, regardless of the fact that the scientist had surrendered his last breath somewhere in the miles between.
Jack had refused to give up his burden, even as the body grew cold.
Four men dead to the ruthless blasts of Jaffa staff weapons.
“I ran,” Dr. Kellar gasps painfully when they first discover him crouched behind a tree a hundred yards from the fallen bodies of his teammates. “Everything erupted, Rob fell...and, oh god, I ran.”
Jack just stares as Daniel tries to stop the flow of blood from the man’s back. “You did what you had to,” Daniel murmurs reassuringly.
“He was trying to apologize,” Jack says. He has his back to all of them, both hands braced on the smooth metal of the lockers. “He was fatally wounded on a planet thousands of light years from his family and all he could think about was the fact that he’d run.”
Daniel can’t tell if that is censure in Jack’s voice or not. Was he angry at the civilian for running or for dying? Placating words fall off of Daniel’s tongue out of habit. “There was nothing more any of us could have done.”
Daniel knows he’s chosen poorly when Jack’s eyes flash dangerously. “Don’t you get it? He shouldn’t have been there at all! What the hell are we doing, throwing civilians out in these situations? This is war. The sooner we all remember that, the better off we’ll be.”
Now it’s Daniel’s turn to flinch. This is one argument he had thought long over. But it’s typical of Jack that just as Daniel feels his place on SG-1 has been proven and solidified time after time, everything abruptly flips back to square one.
“We all know the risks when we step off world, civilian or not,” Daniel says lowly, refusing to be pushed around by Jack’s uncharacteristic outburst. “It’s our choice.”
Jack runs an agitated hand through his hair and sighs. “Yeah. I guess so. Only Kellar didn’t get a chance to learn from that did he?”
With that, Jack strides across the room and disappears out the door.
Daniel follows a few moments later to find Sam staring wide-eyed after Jack who has apparently barreled down the hallway without even acknowledging her.
“Sam,” Daniel says, one hand on her shoulder.
She smiles as if Jack hasn’t just cut her off.
“It was bad,” he says. He doesn’t know if that is supposed to be an excuse or just an explanation. She doesn’t particularly seem to be looking for either. “By the time we got there, only Dr. Kellar was still alive. He died on the way back to the gate.”
Sam makes a choking sound and it’s only when he sees her face drain of color that Daniel remembers Dr. Kellar had worked in Sam’s lab before he applied for an SG team assignment.
“I’m sorry, Sam.”
She determinedly blinks back tears and schools her features, something at which she’s become far too skilled. Only her trembling fingers give anything away. Mumbling something about checking on her lab, she pushes down the hallway in the opposite direction.
Watching her, he suddenly has to wonder if Jack’s diatribe had really had anything to do with Daniel’s place on SG-1 after all.
* * *
They are usually circumspect on base but Sam can’t ignore the instinct to seek Jack out, self-preservation be damned.
She catches him by the elevators. Still slightly breathless, she only has a moment to look him over, confirming that he is okay, because the doors slide shut as she is standing there and it’s pretty clear he’s not going to bother stopping them. But then a beat of resignation crosses his face and he sticks a hand in the door, gesturing for her to climb inside.
Startled, she steps in, but wishes she hadn’t when the doors close and the car chugs into motion. The small space is filled nearly to bursting with the black cloud radiating off of Jack.
“Are you okay?” she manages to ask, staring straight ahead and watching the numbers tick by.
“Fine,” he says, the word clipped impossibly short.
Sam dares a glance at him. A small scratch stretches just along the hard edge of his jaw, hiding under a day’s growth of scruff and something dark and horrible and not unfamiliar lurks in his eyes. She has some small idea of what’s happened, but she can’t find the words to make any of that okay. This is the Jack O’Neill she’s never gotten a handle on, a far cry from the man of gentle teasing and quick smiles over the breakfast table.
There are days when he just isn’t there, all connections cut off and all she can think to do is get out of his way. Because even as she is certain he would never hurt her, she also knows she has probably never met a more dangerous person, aliens and all, than Jack O’Neill on a black day. Mostly she fights back the urge to ask what’s bothering him and waits for whatever it is to pass.
But today she reaches out to touch his arm, as much a vague attempt to comfort, to be there for him, as to reassure herself. She shouldn’t be as shocked as she is when he automatically pulls away from the touch. The doors open with a chime and Jack steps out, sliding on a pair of sunglasses as he goes.
“See you next week, Sam,” he says and she has to fight back the instinctual urge to flinch at the cold dismissal.
The doors slide shut.
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
Ficlet 21: Auspice
There is only one slice of banana cream pie left on the dessert rack by the time Daniel trots into the commissary. Unfortunately Lt. Nelson is currently two feet closer to said slice. And the lieutenant looks like he might seriously be considering reaching for Daniel’s pie.
Hastily grabbing of plate of whatever the lunch special is, Daniel stares hard into the back of Nelson’s neck. Cake, he projects, you desperately feel like eating cake. He has serious doubts as to the reliability of his mind control techniques, but the soldier does turn around to find Daniel staring with one eye squinted with effort. The poor guy looks freaked out enough to step away from the dessert trays all together.
Victory.
Daniel sweeps in and grabs the last piece of pie.
Of course, by the time he settles down between Sam and Evan, Daniel realizes that in his haste he has served himself a heaping platter of meatloaf dejour. Is it really Wednesday again? How could he have been so careless? Out of the corner of his eye, Daniel can see Evan smirking over his completely average looking turkey sandwich.
Daniel sighs audibly and pokes tentatively at the mass on his plate. “Sam, think you could have one of your flunkies take this down to the lab for chemical analysis? You could win a Nobel Prize for proving once and for all that mystery meat is not actually fit for human consumption.”
Daniel glances up from his plate when he gets no response from Sam. Looking at her proves distracting enough to make him forget about his future gastrointestinal woes. There are pencils sticking out from her hair at every conceivable angle and, despite his very witty monologue about mystery meat, has not looked up from the table where she is avidly scribbling and erasing at nearly the same rate. And did those pencils look...chewed?
Daniel reaches out to poke at one of the various pencils, but Jack reaches behind her and slaps his hand away.
“No touching,” Jack says.
Daniel really hopes this strange territoriality doesn’t have anything to do with the whole ‘he’s seen Sam half naked’ thing. Because that was a long time ago and mostly Jack’s fault.
“Apparently there is some pencil mojo at work,” Evan helpfully explains, waving his unmysterious sandwich in Sam’s direction.
“Mojo?” Daniel repeats.
“The arrangement of writing utensils in Dr. Carter’s hair is meant to impart good luck,” Teal’c informs him.
“I never realized Sam was that superstitious,” Daniel says, gazing at the pencils in interest.
“She wasn’t,” Jack says with a sigh. He rather mournfully glances down at Sam’s lowered head where she currently gnaws on a pencil. “This project’s got her a little cracked.”
Daniel returns his attention to poking his mystery meat, looking closely for any signs that the mass might actually be dissolving his fork. “She still working on the naquadah reactor?”
Evan’s eyes grow wide and Jack wildly gestures for Daniel to stop talking, but the damage is already done. Teal’c pushes back slightly from the table as if assessing exit strategies.
“What?” Daniel asks, feeling tension creep up his back in reaction to their strange behavior. But then, just as Jack looks like he is letting himself breathe again, Sam’s head snaps up.
“Did somebody say naquadah reactor?” Her voice is eager but her eyes are just a little bit crazy.
Jack glares across the table at Daniel.
“Do you have an idea to share, Daniel?” she asks, finally noticing he is there. “Because I was thinking that if I could just avoid a feedback loop and somehow polarize the...”
And on and on she goes for nearly fifteen minutes while Jack rubs tiredly at his eyes, Evan contemplates who’s on first, and Teal’c gazes at his plate of fruit as if he has miraculously lost his appetite.
When Sam finally stops, she does so abruptly, snapping her jaw shut with an audible clack. Then she stuffs her current pencil into her hair and reaches across the table to steal Daniel’s pie.
He opens his mouth to protest but he’s almost certain he hears Teal’c growl in warning. Okay, then. Sam gets his pie. When he looks around the table he realizes none of the other men have desserts either.
“Exactly how many desserts have been sacrificed on the altar of accidentally saying Sam’s crazy words?”
Jack drops his head into his hands. “Let’s just say I hope she gets this thing figured out soon or I might waste away to nothing.”
Sam’s mid-bite when Jack sneaks a finger into her pie and swipes a taste. She turns and looks at Jack, and Daniel assumes he’s about to get a fork in the back of the hand for his uncontrollable sweet tooth when her expression shifts. Daniel can almost see the light bulb going off over her head. She absently licks her fork clean while staring at Jack with an eerie gleam in her eye like she’s contemplating some science experiment.
“I was thinking, Jack...,” she says.
“No,” he replies before she can even finish.
“But maybe-.”
“No.”
“Just take a look at-.”
“No.”
“I don’t know why you are being so stubborn,” she huffs, dropping her fork to the table.
“I told you, I don’t remember anything,” Jack says.
“You had the entire Ancient library in your head for a while. I’m sure something must have stuck! Just take a look at my equations.” She shoves the papers towards him, almost sending what is left of Daniel’s pie over the edge of the table to an early death.
“No,” Jack says, pushing the plate back towards her as if to distract her.
Sam slumps back in her chair. It’s obvious to Daniel that this is a scene oft repeated between them. It would almost be sort of cute, if his pie hadn’t ended up as collateral damage.
“If only I had been here for that,” she says wistfully. “It must have been so cool.”
Daniel’s eyes meet Jack’s across the table. Cool? That’s not exactly how Daniel would describe the experience of watching Jack slowly lose his mind. He almost died after all. But then Jack shakes his head slightly and Daniel realizes that Sam must know nothing about that.
Before he can ask why Jack is feeding Sam shiny, edited versions of their colorful past, an airman steps up next to Jack.
“General Hammond on the horn for you, sir,” he says.
Jack almost looks relieved, pushing quickly up from his chair and following the airman into the hall.
Sam goes back to her equations, mumbling under her breath. “This should be working!”
Daniel is just considering stealing back the skeletal remains of his pie when Jack returns to the table. “Gear up, guys. We have ten minutes to be in the gateroom.”
“You’re going off world?” Sam asks, her head whipping up. “I thought you didn’t have a mission scheduled until next week?”
There is a beat of uncomfortable silence as the two regard each other across the table, Sam trying not to look freaked out and Jack determinedly not meeting her eyes.
“One of the teams ran into trouble,” Jack eventually says. “We’re going to go get them back.”
Sam visibly absorbs the information, biting her lower lip and looking like she really wants to say something. But then her face empties and she just nods, the pencils in her hair swaying precariously. “Of course.”
She doesn’t say anything else and neither does Jack. The rest of the team pushes out of their chairs and makes to follow after him. As Daniel passes by, he reaches out and squeezes Sam’s shoulder.
She rewards him with a bright smile, but when he glances back at the door, a new pencil is in her mouth, her equations forgotten and pushed off the to side.
* * *
The locker door slams shut with enough force to cause even the normally steady Evan to flinch.
“Jack,” Daniel says, trying to defuse the situation before the almost palpable rage radiating off of Jack gets out of control.
“I don’t want to hear it, Daniel.”
His tone betrays nothing of anger, just weariness, which alarms Daniel even more.
Bloody BDUs sit in a pile to the right of Jack’s locker. An entire SGC team, gone just like that. Daniel wants to say something, to acknowledge the fact that Jack had carried the one survivor the entire distance to the gate, regardless of the fact that the scientist had surrendered his last breath somewhere in the miles between.
Jack had refused to give up his burden, even as the body grew cold.
Four men dead to the ruthless blasts of Jaffa staff weapons.
“I ran,” Dr. Kellar gasps painfully when they first discover him crouched behind a tree a hundred yards from the fallen bodies of his teammates. “Everything erupted, Rob fell...and, oh god, I ran.”
Jack just stares as Daniel tries to stop the flow of blood from the man’s back. “You did what you had to,” Daniel murmurs reassuringly.
“He was trying to apologize,” Jack says. He has his back to all of them, both hands braced on the smooth metal of the lockers. “He was fatally wounded on a planet thousands of light years from his family and all he could think about was the fact that he’d run.”
Daniel can’t tell if that is censure in Jack’s voice or not. Was he angry at the civilian for running or for dying? Placating words fall off of Daniel’s tongue out of habit. “There was nothing more any of us could have done.”
Daniel knows he’s chosen poorly when Jack’s eyes flash dangerously. “Don’t you get it? He shouldn’t have been there at all! What the hell are we doing, throwing civilians out in these situations? This is war. The sooner we all remember that, the better off we’ll be.”
Now it’s Daniel’s turn to flinch. This is one argument he had thought long over. But it’s typical of Jack that just as Daniel feels his place on SG-1 has been proven and solidified time after time, everything abruptly flips back to square one.
“We all know the risks when we step off world, civilian or not,” Daniel says lowly, refusing to be pushed around by Jack’s uncharacteristic outburst. “It’s our choice.”
Jack runs an agitated hand through his hair and sighs. “Yeah. I guess so. Only Kellar didn’t get a chance to learn from that did he?”
With that, Jack strides across the room and disappears out the door.
Daniel follows a few moments later to find Sam staring wide-eyed after Jack who has apparently barreled down the hallway without even acknowledging her.
“Sam,” Daniel says, one hand on her shoulder.
She smiles as if Jack hasn’t just cut her off.
“It was bad,” he says. He doesn’t know if that is supposed to be an excuse or just an explanation. She doesn’t particularly seem to be looking for either. “By the time we got there, only Dr. Kellar was still alive. He died on the way back to the gate.”
Sam makes a choking sound and it’s only when he sees her face drain of color that Daniel remembers Dr. Kellar had worked in Sam’s lab before he applied for an SG team assignment.
“I’m sorry, Sam.”
She determinedly blinks back tears and schools her features, something at which she’s become far too skilled. Only her trembling fingers give anything away. Mumbling something about checking on her lab, she pushes down the hallway in the opposite direction.
Watching her, he suddenly has to wonder if Jack’s diatribe had really had anything to do with Daniel’s place on SG-1 after all.
* * *
They are usually circumspect on base but Sam can’t ignore the instinct to seek Jack out, self-preservation be damned.
She catches him by the elevators. Still slightly breathless, she only has a moment to look him over, confirming that he is okay, because the doors slide shut as she is standing there and it’s pretty clear he’s not going to bother stopping them. But then a beat of resignation crosses his face and he sticks a hand in the door, gesturing for her to climb inside.
Startled, she steps in, but wishes she hadn’t when the doors close and the car chugs into motion. The small space is filled nearly to bursting with the black cloud radiating off of Jack.
“Are you okay?” she manages to ask, staring straight ahead and watching the numbers tick by.
“Fine,” he says, the word clipped impossibly short.
Sam dares a glance at him. A small scratch stretches just along the hard edge of his jaw, hiding under a day’s growth of scruff and something dark and horrible and not unfamiliar lurks in his eyes. She has some small idea of what’s happened, but she can’t find the words to make any of that okay. This is the Jack O’Neill she’s never gotten a handle on, a far cry from the man of gentle teasing and quick smiles over the breakfast table.
There are days when he just isn’t there, all connections cut off and all she can think to do is get out of his way. Because even as she is certain he would never hurt her, she also knows she has probably never met a more dangerous person, aliens and all, than Jack O’Neill on a black day. Mostly she fights back the urge to ask what’s bothering him and waits for whatever it is to pass.
But today she reaches out to touch his arm, as much a vague attempt to comfort, to be there for him, as to reassure herself. She shouldn’t be as shocked as she is when he automatically pulls away from the touch. The doors open with a chime and Jack steps out, sliding on a pair of sunglasses as he goes.
“See you next week, Sam,” he says and she has to fight back the instinctual urge to flinch at the cold dismissal.
The doors slide shut.
next