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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: language and violence
Ficlet 37-No One Said It Would Be Easy
Weeks pass before Sam finally does return to Colorado Springs, but for Jack they aren’t weeks of silence. A few times a week there’s a card of yet another view of the quaint little harbor town waiting for him in his mailbox. In them Sam writes about how her injuries are healing, regales him with amusing stories about her parents, and sometimes slips in childhood memories, Jacob teaching her to drive or her first science fair victory over the obnoxious brain bully Derrick Jennings in the third grade.
He’s not really sure if there is some secret message layered in there, but she does sign each card with “I miss you.”
For now, it’s enough.
When she finally does come back, it’s without warning, sticking her head into Jack’s office one day as if she were still a permanent fixture of the base.
“Hi,” she says, one hand clinging to the doorjamb.
“Sam,” Jack says, pushing back from his desk. It’s been six weeks since he’s seen her and he’s caught a bit off balance to have her appear so suddenly. Her skin is a few shades darker and her hair has the gleam of someone who has spent a lot of time out of doors, but most importantly, every last trace of bruising has faded from her face.
She smiles, taking a few hesitant steps into his office. “Are you going off world this week?” she asks.
“Not until Friday,” he says.
“I was wondering if maybe...I could make you dinner.”
She’s watching him closely, looking so terribly hopeful and uncertain and he knows this is the signal he’s been waiting for, the real promise of those letters. I’m coming back.
“That sounds great,” he says.
“How about tomorrow night?”
“Sure.”
“Good,” she says, sounding relieved. Then she glances at her watch and starts backing out the door. “I have a meeting with Dr. MacKenzie. See you tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” Jack says, watching her disappear out the door.
Nothing is over.
* * *
Sam seems genuinely pleased to see Jack when he shows up the next evening, but she’s still radiating nervous energy that inexplicably sets him on edge. He follows her back into the kitchen and soon she’s standing at the stove stirring a pot full of something delicious smelling and Jack swears he can hear her counting under her breath.
He leans against the nearest counter and watches her, his fingers absently playing with some utensil whose purpose completely eludes him. A wisp of Sam’s hair has fallen into her face and she blows at it with absent irritation as she continues her complete concentration on the array of bubbling pots in front of her.
“I thought you hated to cook,” he eventually comments.
She misses a stir, stumbling in her rhythm for just a moment. Then she shrugs, her smile a little brittle around the edges. “I don’t hate it,” she qualifies.
Now he is certain she is counting as her strokes once again become fluid and sure.
Jack steps up behind Sam and settles his hand on top of hers, stilling the motion. He can feel her stiffen at the contact even as she leans almost imperceptibly towards him.
“I need to keep stirring or it will burn,” she protests, her voice slightly breathless.
“You don’t have to do this, Sam,” he replies.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she says tightly.
There is something desperate about her that Jack can’t quite put his finger on, but he knows somehow that this is important. “I don’t care if you can cook,” he clarifies.
“I invited you over for dinner,” she points out.
“I didn’t come for the food.”
She turns slightly to see his face, maybe to assess his sincerity, but before she can form a coherent response a sharp, smoky odor reaches Jack’s nose and he drops his hand from hers.
Sam stirs the sauce, revealing a charred bottom layer. She stares at it for a long time and Jack has the horrified feeling that she is near tears. But then she blinks once and it’s gone.
“Take-out it is,” she sighs, turning off the burners with a snap.
Outwardly she seems annoyed, but Jack doesn’t think he’s imagining the relief that softens the angles of her shoulders.
“Chinese?” Jack offers brightly, his hand lightly squeezing Sam’s arm.
She smiles at him, half annoyed, half amused. There is still something there, hiding under her hard-edged smile, but for now he’s happy to have her smiling at all.
“You’re paying,” she clarifies.
Jack reaches out and tucks the stray strand of hair behind her ear.
“Sounds good to me.”
An hour later, halfway through a carton of mongolian beef, Sam sighs audibly and glances at the pots still sitting on now cold burners.
“I said I’d do the dishes,” Jack says.
Sam shakes her head and sets down her chopsticks. “It’s not that.”
“What then?” Jack asks.
She looks a little embarrassed, but she’s obviously making a concerted effort. “I’m just...not sure I know any other way to do this,” she says.
Ah, is all Jack can think. Now they are actually getting somewhere.
He thinks back to the photo tucked away in the drawer of his desk. Sam on Jeff’s arm, elegant in a floor length black gown. Beautiful, yes, but something about that photo has always nagged at Jack, causing him to keep it like some puzzle he might be able to work out if he just stared at it long enough.
“Did Jeff ask you to stop working?” Jack asks.
“What?” she says, looking completely thrown by the question. “No, of course not.”
“Let’s face it, you’re a genius and there’s no reason to think that you haven’t always been, if I can trust anything Jacob has to say.”
She rolls her eyes, but doesn’t contradict him.
“So why didn’t you ever do anything with all of that before?”
He thinks she won’t answer when all she does is stab her noodles with her chopsticks in careless agitation for a few minutes.
“I missed our one year anniversary,” she says eventually.
That is not what he expects to hear. “Was he upset?”
“No.” She sounds almost sullen about that.
“I don’t understand.”
“I was really close to finishing my first article for publication, just some last tiny details that were driving me completely nuts. I worked straight through our date,” she explains. “I couldn’t believe I’d done that. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t upset; I didn’t want to be that person.”
She looks insanely uncomfortable talking about this, probably just as uncomfortable as he is to hear it, but they are doing things differently this time, no matter how hard it is.
“Jeff wasn’t just a boyfriend,” she continues. “He was...this whole life. He was security and love and family.”
“Everything you had promised yourself,” Jack observes.
“What?”
“In the car with your mother after the crash.”
I made every promise I could think of, sitting in that car waiting. I swore that I would never be like my father. I would never let my family be less important than my career.
“Yeah,” she says with a frown. “I guess so.”
“So what went wrong?”
“He’s a pediatrician, did I ever tell you that?”
Jack feels a bit like he is watching a tennis match, the conversation bouncing back in forth with seemingly no purpose, but he rolls with it. “No, you never did.”
She nods, her fingers now working on a fortune cooking, tearing it apart piece by delicate piece. “We were going to call her Jane. Our daughter.”
She pushes up from the table, dumping her plate in the sink. “I didn’t just lose the baby. Hysterectomy. They said I would have died without it. So you see, I can’t ever have children.”
“That’s why you left,” Jack says, one small piece of the puzzle finally sliding home.
Sam is still standing with her arms braced on either side of the sink, staring out the window, her back impossibly stiff. “What was I, if I couldn’t be a mother?”
“You were his wife,” Jack points out.
“It’s not that simple.”
“No, I guess not.”
He leaves it there because they are both exhausted and she’s beginning to get that panicked look he’s finally learning heralds full on Sam meltdown. Instead, he steps up next to her at the sink and begins to fill the sink with warm water. They stand side by side, Jack washing while Sam dries, all communication stripped down to the incidental contact of fingers, her shoulder brushing against him as she reaches into the sink.
Two people standing so close, but with a vast chasm between them.
He leaves as soon as the last dish is dry and on the drive home he still can’t decide if they’ve taken a step forward or if they were just back down at the bottom of the hill all over again.
* * *
Sam is sitting on his front steps when Jack pulls into his driveway the next evening. She’s leaning back, elbows resting on the top step, her legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankle. She straightens as he climbs out of his truck, stretching her back slightly and pulling her knees in.
He wonders how long she’s been sitting there, carefully perched right on the edge of his space as if not daring to trespass any further. It’s late enough that the setting summer sun paints everything in his yard shades of amber. Jack dawdled hours longer on base today than he normally would. Judging from the sheer relief he feels at seeing her there, he’d been avoiding the possibility of coming home to an empty house.
She watches him as he walks up the path. When she doesn’t rise, he sits down next to her.
“Jeff didn’t ask me not to work,” she says and he can tell she’s done nothing but think about this since he left her place the night before. “I’m the one who did that. I think I got it in my head that I could only be one thing. Scientist or wife, never both. And then suddenly all I had left was my career. When the opportunity to be a scientist again appeared out of the blue…I just grabbed it with both hands. Maybe it was selfish or maybe it was just long overdue, but it was a bit like an amputation, cutting off everything else in my life in one sweeping motion. Including Jeff.”
She’s wringing her hands in her lap, absently rubbing at her unadorned ring finger, and Jack watches the motion with sick fascination until she turns slightly to look at him, her hands pressing flat against her legs.
“Then there you were and it all snuck up on me,” she says. “Suddenly we were in the middle of something and I couldn’t even remember getting there. But I didn’t dare let myself believe that I could have both. Sure enough, everything went to hell and the job kept getting in the way. Then Jeff shows up to tell me he’s going to be a father and I just…snapped. So I did what I do best. I ran. Again.”
He thinks of those last weeks before she left, her strange distance, and tries to understand how he could have missed all of this so completely. She’d never told him why Jeff had shown up that day, but he knows now what that must have done to her, to see what should have been hers taken over by another woman.
“The thing about Jeff…,” Sam says, her voice cracking. She shakes her head, looking down at her feet.
“It’s okay, Sam,” Jack says, even though it feels anything but.
She gazes up at him and he wants to look anywhere but at her. She tentatively touches his arm, her hand settling just above his wrist.
“I don’t love Jeff,” she says. “Maybe I did, once. Or maybe I only loved the idea. All I know for sure is that if I could transport myself back into that life right this instant, I wouldn’t. I think I should feel guilty about that, but I don’t.” Her fingers tighten on his arm until he meets her gaze. “This is where I want to be. I just...I don’t know how to be with you and not be that woman I used to pretend to be.”
It’s a pattern with them, pushing up against walls only to retreat back until one of them finally takes that sluggish, painful, impossible step, letting just enough light in to illuminate another hidden, shriveled secret. Some days it feels like it can never be enough, like there will always be one more wall.
Then there are days like today, where she looks up at him in the mellow, rusty light and makes him really believe he isn’t just a consolation prize.
It’s a little frightening just how much he wants that to be true.
Jack slides an arm around her, pulling her close, and she drops her head to his shoulder, her thigh pressing warmly against his. He lowers his face to her hair, breathing in the familiar scent that still, all these months later, has the power to affect him.
“We’ll figure it out,” he promises.
next
Dr. Samantha Carter joins the SGC and discovers a life she never expected.
Action/Adventure, Drama, Angst, Romance, S/J
Teen: language and violence
Ficlet 37-No One Said It Would Be Easy
Weeks pass before Sam finally does return to Colorado Springs, but for Jack they aren’t weeks of silence. A few times a week there’s a card of yet another view of the quaint little harbor town waiting for him in his mailbox. In them Sam writes about how her injuries are healing, regales him with amusing stories about her parents, and sometimes slips in childhood memories, Jacob teaching her to drive or her first science fair victory over the obnoxious brain bully Derrick Jennings in the third grade.
He’s not really sure if there is some secret message layered in there, but she does sign each card with “I miss you.”
For now, it’s enough.
When she finally does come back, it’s without warning, sticking her head into Jack’s office one day as if she were still a permanent fixture of the base.
“Hi,” she says, one hand clinging to the doorjamb.
“Sam,” Jack says, pushing back from his desk. It’s been six weeks since he’s seen her and he’s caught a bit off balance to have her appear so suddenly. Her skin is a few shades darker and her hair has the gleam of someone who has spent a lot of time out of doors, but most importantly, every last trace of bruising has faded from her face.
She smiles, taking a few hesitant steps into his office. “Are you going off world this week?” she asks.
“Not until Friday,” he says.
“I was wondering if maybe...I could make you dinner.”
She’s watching him closely, looking so terribly hopeful and uncertain and he knows this is the signal he’s been waiting for, the real promise of those letters. I’m coming back.
“That sounds great,” he says.
“How about tomorrow night?”
“Sure.”
“Good,” she says, sounding relieved. Then she glances at her watch and starts backing out the door. “I have a meeting with Dr. MacKenzie. See you tomorrow?”
“Yeah,” Jack says, watching her disappear out the door.
Nothing is over.
* * *
Sam seems genuinely pleased to see Jack when he shows up the next evening, but she’s still radiating nervous energy that inexplicably sets him on edge. He follows her back into the kitchen and soon she’s standing at the stove stirring a pot full of something delicious smelling and Jack swears he can hear her counting under her breath.
He leans against the nearest counter and watches her, his fingers absently playing with some utensil whose purpose completely eludes him. A wisp of Sam’s hair has fallen into her face and she blows at it with absent irritation as she continues her complete concentration on the array of bubbling pots in front of her.
“I thought you hated to cook,” he eventually comments.
She misses a stir, stumbling in her rhythm for just a moment. Then she shrugs, her smile a little brittle around the edges. “I don’t hate it,” she qualifies.
Now he is certain she is counting as her strokes once again become fluid and sure.
Jack steps up behind Sam and settles his hand on top of hers, stilling the motion. He can feel her stiffen at the contact even as she leans almost imperceptibly towards him.
“I need to keep stirring or it will burn,” she protests, her voice slightly breathless.
“You don’t have to do this, Sam,” he replies.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she says tightly.
There is something desperate about her that Jack can’t quite put his finger on, but he knows somehow that this is important. “I don’t care if you can cook,” he clarifies.
“I invited you over for dinner,” she points out.
“I didn’t come for the food.”
She turns slightly to see his face, maybe to assess his sincerity, but before she can form a coherent response a sharp, smoky odor reaches Jack’s nose and he drops his hand from hers.
Sam stirs the sauce, revealing a charred bottom layer. She stares at it for a long time and Jack has the horrified feeling that she is near tears. But then she blinks once and it’s gone.
“Take-out it is,” she sighs, turning off the burners with a snap.
Outwardly she seems annoyed, but Jack doesn’t think he’s imagining the relief that softens the angles of her shoulders.
“Chinese?” Jack offers brightly, his hand lightly squeezing Sam’s arm.
She smiles at him, half annoyed, half amused. There is still something there, hiding under her hard-edged smile, but for now he’s happy to have her smiling at all.
“You’re paying,” she clarifies.
Jack reaches out and tucks the stray strand of hair behind her ear.
“Sounds good to me.”
An hour later, halfway through a carton of mongolian beef, Sam sighs audibly and glances at the pots still sitting on now cold burners.
“I said I’d do the dishes,” Jack says.
Sam shakes her head and sets down her chopsticks. “It’s not that.”
“What then?” Jack asks.
She looks a little embarrassed, but she’s obviously making a concerted effort. “I’m just...not sure I know any other way to do this,” she says.
Ah, is all Jack can think. Now they are actually getting somewhere.
He thinks back to the photo tucked away in the drawer of his desk. Sam on Jeff’s arm, elegant in a floor length black gown. Beautiful, yes, but something about that photo has always nagged at Jack, causing him to keep it like some puzzle he might be able to work out if he just stared at it long enough.
“Did Jeff ask you to stop working?” Jack asks.
“What?” she says, looking completely thrown by the question. “No, of course not.”
“Let’s face it, you’re a genius and there’s no reason to think that you haven’t always been, if I can trust anything Jacob has to say.”
She rolls her eyes, but doesn’t contradict him.
“So why didn’t you ever do anything with all of that before?”
He thinks she won’t answer when all she does is stab her noodles with her chopsticks in careless agitation for a few minutes.
“I missed our one year anniversary,” she says eventually.
That is not what he expects to hear. “Was he upset?”
“No.” She sounds almost sullen about that.
“I don’t understand.”
“I was really close to finishing my first article for publication, just some last tiny details that were driving me completely nuts. I worked straight through our date,” she explains. “I couldn’t believe I’d done that. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t upset; I didn’t want to be that person.”
She looks insanely uncomfortable talking about this, probably just as uncomfortable as he is to hear it, but they are doing things differently this time, no matter how hard it is.
“Jeff wasn’t just a boyfriend,” she continues. “He was...this whole life. He was security and love and family.”
“Everything you had promised yourself,” Jack observes.
“What?”
“In the car with your mother after the crash.”
I made every promise I could think of, sitting in that car waiting. I swore that I would never be like my father. I would never let my family be less important than my career.
“Yeah,” she says with a frown. “I guess so.”
“So what went wrong?”
“He’s a pediatrician, did I ever tell you that?”
Jack feels a bit like he is watching a tennis match, the conversation bouncing back in forth with seemingly no purpose, but he rolls with it. “No, you never did.”
She nods, her fingers now working on a fortune cooking, tearing it apart piece by delicate piece. “We were going to call her Jane. Our daughter.”
She pushes up from the table, dumping her plate in the sink. “I didn’t just lose the baby. Hysterectomy. They said I would have died without it. So you see, I can’t ever have children.”
“That’s why you left,” Jack says, one small piece of the puzzle finally sliding home.
Sam is still standing with her arms braced on either side of the sink, staring out the window, her back impossibly stiff. “What was I, if I couldn’t be a mother?”
“You were his wife,” Jack points out.
“It’s not that simple.”
“No, I guess not.”
He leaves it there because they are both exhausted and she’s beginning to get that panicked look he’s finally learning heralds full on Sam meltdown. Instead, he steps up next to her at the sink and begins to fill the sink with warm water. They stand side by side, Jack washing while Sam dries, all communication stripped down to the incidental contact of fingers, her shoulder brushing against him as she reaches into the sink.
Two people standing so close, but with a vast chasm between them.
He leaves as soon as the last dish is dry and on the drive home he still can’t decide if they’ve taken a step forward or if they were just back down at the bottom of the hill all over again.
* * *
Sam is sitting on his front steps when Jack pulls into his driveway the next evening. She’s leaning back, elbows resting on the top step, her legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankle. She straightens as he climbs out of his truck, stretching her back slightly and pulling her knees in.
He wonders how long she’s been sitting there, carefully perched right on the edge of his space as if not daring to trespass any further. It’s late enough that the setting summer sun paints everything in his yard shades of amber. Jack dawdled hours longer on base today than he normally would. Judging from the sheer relief he feels at seeing her there, he’d been avoiding the possibility of coming home to an empty house.
She watches him as he walks up the path. When she doesn’t rise, he sits down next to her.
“Jeff didn’t ask me not to work,” she says and he can tell she’s done nothing but think about this since he left her place the night before. “I’m the one who did that. I think I got it in my head that I could only be one thing. Scientist or wife, never both. And then suddenly all I had left was my career. When the opportunity to be a scientist again appeared out of the blue…I just grabbed it with both hands. Maybe it was selfish or maybe it was just long overdue, but it was a bit like an amputation, cutting off everything else in my life in one sweeping motion. Including Jeff.”
She’s wringing her hands in her lap, absently rubbing at her unadorned ring finger, and Jack watches the motion with sick fascination until she turns slightly to look at him, her hands pressing flat against her legs.
“Then there you were and it all snuck up on me,” she says. “Suddenly we were in the middle of something and I couldn’t even remember getting there. But I didn’t dare let myself believe that I could have both. Sure enough, everything went to hell and the job kept getting in the way. Then Jeff shows up to tell me he’s going to be a father and I just…snapped. So I did what I do best. I ran. Again.”
He thinks of those last weeks before she left, her strange distance, and tries to understand how he could have missed all of this so completely. She’d never told him why Jeff had shown up that day, but he knows now what that must have done to her, to see what should have been hers taken over by another woman.
“The thing about Jeff…,” Sam says, her voice cracking. She shakes her head, looking down at her feet.
“It’s okay, Sam,” Jack says, even though it feels anything but.
She gazes up at him and he wants to look anywhere but at her. She tentatively touches his arm, her hand settling just above his wrist.
“I don’t love Jeff,” she says. “Maybe I did, once. Or maybe I only loved the idea. All I know for sure is that if I could transport myself back into that life right this instant, I wouldn’t. I think I should feel guilty about that, but I don’t.” Her fingers tighten on his arm until he meets her gaze. “This is where I want to be. I just...I don’t know how to be with you and not be that woman I used to pretend to be.”
It’s a pattern with them, pushing up against walls only to retreat back until one of them finally takes that sluggish, painful, impossible step, letting just enough light in to illuminate another hidden, shriveled secret. Some days it feels like it can never be enough, like there will always be one more wall.
Then there are days like today, where she looks up at him in the mellow, rusty light and makes him really believe he isn’t just a consolation prize.
It’s a little frightening just how much he wants that to be true.
Jack slides an arm around her, pulling her close, and she drops her head to his shoulder, her thigh pressing warmly against his. He lowers his face to her hair, breathing in the familiar scent that still, all these months later, has the power to affect him.
“We’ll figure it out,” he promises.
next