New fic: No Distance Left To Run
Title: No Distance Left To Run
Author: Pepper
Rating: PG
Season: 9/10
Disclaimer: T'ain't mine.
Featured Character(s): Daniel, Jack, Sam
Pairing(s): Sam/Cam
Summary: "But what about Jack?"
A/N: Follow-up to Into The Blue, because people wanted to know just how Jack had screwed it up. Come view my limpet-like attachment to my favourite OTP. Sending me down the Sam/Cam path may require very sharp pointy sticks and some pretty damn impressive carrots, guys. And at least two of those blocks of plastic explosive. ;)
---
Once upon a time, watching Jack watching Sam had been one of Daniel's favorite amusements - like a silent comedy, all big eyes and slapstick, with Jack as the clown so absorbed in his almost willfully oblivious girl that he'd fall over his own feet. Now it was like car crash TV - compelling, but with the guilty sense of being a voyeur at a tragedy.
It was clear that General Jack didn't want to be watching Sam any more than Daniel wanted to be watching Jack watching Sam, but neither of them could stop, it seemed. Jack forced his eyes down to the beer in his hands, and Daniel looked away quickly, not wanting to be caught staring.
Instead, he found his eyes drawn to Sam. She was sitting with Cam, chatting comfortably, looking relaxed and happy and... Yes, not even Jack could be fooling himself about what was going on there. Daniel himself had noticed the change in his team-mates' behavior about two months ago - he might be a bit absent-minded sometimes, but he'd worked as both an anthropologist and a diplomat for the SGC, and he knew Sam like a sister. Cam he didn't know so well, but the guy was writ a bit larger. It didn't take a genius.
They looked good together - good for each other, easy and unguarded. Daniel sincerely hoped that they'd be happy together - once he'd got past his initial emotions of shock, horror, and disbelief. Really, it was lucky that he'd worked it out before he was told (and when they were planning on doing that was anyone's guess), because his initial reaction had basically been, "But what about Jack?"
When he looked back at Jack, he was watching Sam again. Jack, perhaps sensing he was being watched, glanced Daniel's way, flinched, and got up, heading with a determined stride for Landry's barbeque.
Daniel sighed, and followed his old friend.
It took a while to corner Jack, because he'd obviously guessed that Daniel would try to talk to him and therefore spent a good hour being unnaturally sociable - never leaving the safety of the herd. But Daniel had learnt the steps of this routine long ago, and when Jack ducked into the garage, looking for a few minutes' breathing-space, Daniel was already there, waiting. "Hi, Jack."
Jack froze, and then deliberately unfroze. "Hijack?" he responded, casually.
"Pretty much," replied Daniel. The only way he'd found to deal with Jack was direct confrontation. "What happened between you and Sam?"
Jack's eyes, which had been flitting around the garage, over the work tools, now flew to Daniel. That was his only reaction, but it spoke volumes. "What d'you mean?"
"Jack..." said Daniel, warningly.
"I don't want to do this, Daniel," Jack said, tiredly. Daniel just tipped his head to one side and looked steadily at him. "Okay, okay!" growled Jack, throwing up his hands. "But not here. Can we go to yours and get very, very, very drunk first?"
---
"I'm a fuck-up, Daniel," Jack declared, over his... severalth bottle of Bud. Daniel himself had stopped drinking alcohol and had moved on to coffee. It had been a straight choice between getting drunk and forcing Jack to talk.
"You're not a fuck-up, Jack," said Daniel. "A bit of an idiot, yes. Loaded down with emotional baggage, yes. But aren't we all?"
Jack peered at him, and eventually decided that he hadn't been insulted. "Am too," he said, stubbornly. "You don't know."
"So tell me."
Jack sighed, and rolled the bottom edge of the bottle against his knee. "I explained it all to her," he said, softly. "She knows. Sam knows what a fuck-up I am."
Daniel frowned. "You told Sam you're a fuck-up?"
Jack stared at the bottle in his hand. "Yeah. Now she hates me."
Well, that sounded like a tiny fraction of a bigger picture. "Sam wouldn't hate you because you're a fuck-up. And you're not."
"Am too."
"Are not."
"Am too."
"Are - look, can we agree to disagree?"
Jack gave a fleeting smile, but then his whole body seemed to slump. "She's with him now, isn't she?"
Daniel sighed, dropping his eyes to his hands. "Yeah," he said, unwillingly. "I think so. Neither of them has said anything, but... yeah."
There was a long silence between them. When Jack spoke again, his voice was muffled by the arm he'd thrown over his face - a gesture that had always struck Daniel as childlike, as opposed to childish (the adjective he more usually applied to Jack). "I'm gonna get a dog. A collie, maybe - or something bigger." He gave what might have been a laugh, a cough, or a sob. "What's your opinion on Labradors?"
"Jack-"
"It's better this way, Daniel!" The shout stopped Daniel short. The accompanying glare was reddened, but tearless. After a moment of pinning Daniel with his eyes, Jack slumped down again, tipping his head back against the couch.
"Exactly what did you say to Sam?" asked Daniel, when the echoes had died away.
Jack waved his hands impatiently, sloshing beer on Daniel's couch. "That it had been a nice dream. That we're better as friends. That she was deluding herself if she thought it'd really work."
Well, shit. "You told her that?" asked Daniel, in disbelief.
"I told her the truth," said Jack, belligerently.
"What makes you think it wouldn't work out?"
Jack glared at him. "Have you ever looked closely at either of us, Daniel? We're not exactly shining examples of emotional stability. I've got all my stuff. Charlie. Sara. All the other crap. Carter's working on her next dead boyfriend, or maybe her third broken engagement."
"I take it back," said Daniel, acidly. "You are a fuck-up. What did Sam say?"
Jack pulled a cushion over his face. "Not much," he said, through it. "I pulled rank and told her that the conversation was over."
Daniel really couldn't think what to say to that. He dropped his head into his hands. "Jesus, Jack... What were you trying to do - get her to beat you to death with her shoe?"
Jack groaned.
Daniel tried to work through Jack's thought processes - never an easy task. "So... you pushed her away because you were afraid of getting hurt later on?" he asked, tentatively.
"No!" Jack's eyes glittered angrily at him from under the cushion. "Don't you see, Daniel? It wasn't that I was afraid it was going to happen - I knew it would happen! And if it happened after I'd come to depend on her any more than I already do..." There was a pause, and a brief glimpse into a world of terrible possibilities. Jack buried his face again. "The higher you get, the harder you fall. I thought that this way we'd at least have a chance to stay friends. But I did it so badly that I've lost even that, and I don't know what to do!"
Daniel watched as Jack breathed heavily, both hands now holding the cushion to his face. Finally Jack emerged, dropping the cushion to his lap with the most defeated look Daniel had ever seen on him. He glanced at Daniel and away, looking ashamed.
"Daniel," he asked softly, "can you... fix it? Just, I don't know," He waved his expressive hands, "fix it? Please?"
Daniel sighed and closed his eyes, a gesture he'd unconsciously picked up from Sam over the years. "I'll try, Jack."
---
There was a knock on the door of his expensive, new, and somewhat soulless Washington apartment, and when he answered, Sam was standing outside. He blinked at her for a moment. Damn, but Daniel was good. "Carter," he greeted, warily. She didn't look like she was happy to be there.
"Jack," she said, levelly and pointedly.
A sly demon of temptation suggested he correct her use of his name, but he ruthlessly quashed it in the interests of self-preservation. "Not planning to murder me and hide the body, are you?"
She tipped up an eyebrow. "Not at this precise moment."
"Well, that's good." He waved towards the corner of the hallway outside. "Because there's a security camera up there and you'll never get away with it."
Sam narrowed his eyes at his attempts to prevaricate. "Can I come in?" He stepped aside, and she crossed the threshold, looking around with a quick and intelligent eye. He waited, strangely eager to know her opinion on the place he was currently calling home, and finally she turned to look at him. "You should move. This isn't you."
He used the excuse of turning away to close the door to hide his expression of relief. He closed his eyes briefly, gave himself firm orders not to screw this up, and turned back to her. She was somehow managing to look annoyed, hurt, and compassionate, all at once. "Coffee?"
"Yes, please."
He indicated the way, and they went into the kitchen.
The one good thing about this place was the amount of light it received, and he found himself shooting glances at her as he made coffee and she leaned against his sink and gazed out of the window, watching the Saturday morning traffic in the city below. He'd always loved her in the sunlight.
They both stayed silent until her hands were curled gratefully around a large, steaming mug of coffee, and he was rotating his own mug on the counter with a slow scraping sound. "So how's it going?" he asked. She looked at him, assessing his meaning, how much he knew. He gritted his teeth and stepped into the fire. "With you and... Mitchell."
She'd never been good at hiding her emotions. A complicated, vulnerable expression flitted across her face, and she lowered her eyes. "Good," she said, simply.
"Ah." He really couldn't say he was glad. Anyway, she'd know he was lying. "Quick work," he said - the words out before he could stop them.
She gave him a steady, do-you-actually-want-me-to-shoot-you? look. "Jack..."
He threw up his hands. "Sorry. Really, I'm sorry. It's automatic."
"I know." She sounded tired. It was a tone that went straight to his gut and slid in a knife. It was the tone that Sara's voice had taken on for those last few months.
After a breath to recover his equilibrium, he asked: "So Daniel talked to you, I'm guessing?"
She nodded. "He can be very persuasive." She gave him a look from under her lashes. "And I wanted to talk. I just wasn't sure if..."
"If I'd throw you out the door when you tried?" He smiled wryly. "Yeah. I'm sorry 'bout that, too." He rolled his eyes. "See, this is what happens whenever I'm..." He didn't know how to classify their relationship, or lack thereof, so continued, "I do a lot of apologizing."
"I bet you do," she said, dryly. Then sighed, and set her coffee down determinedly. "I'm not mad at you, Jack, and I don't need an apology." He raised his eyebrows. "Okay, I was a bit mad, and I appreciated the apology," she conceded. "But that's not why I'm here."
He waited, but she couldn't seem to decide what to say next. "So you're here because...?" he prompted, knowing he was being cowardly in forcing her to make the first move. She shrugged, helplessly.
"I..." She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. "If it's a choice between friendship and nothing, I choose friendship." She gave him a shaky smile, looking as torn as he felt. "I'll always care about you, Jack," she said, and he had to close his eyes. Her sight was too clear, too piercing, and she knew him too well for comfort. "And I don't want us to avoid each other for the rest of our lives, just because we couldn't - because it wasn't..." She found, as he had, that there weren't really words to describe their nebulous non-relationship. "I don't want to stop being your friend. No matter what."
It was what he'd told Daniel he wanted: a chance to stay friends. And yet he hadn't realized just how much it would hurt. She wanted to be his friend. God. Her unexpected arrival hadn't allowed him to set up his usual barriers, and her presence in his home, out of uniform, away from the familiar locations of their former working lives together... A tiny shoot of hope had grown up, unbidden and unwanted. His stupid heart. No matter how much he told it that things wouldn't work between him and Sam, it didn't seem to listen. I did this on purpose, he reminded it. You think this is bad? Imagine how much worse it could have been.
Sam was waiting for his reply, and he knew this had to be killing her, too. He wondered at the courage it had taken for her to come to him like this. But then she'd always been the one to take command in their relationship. Jack wondered if her heart was aching as much as his. He met her gaze, and felt the connection between them flare as strong as ever. Suddenly, being alone with her, with the sunlight through his kitchen window touching her hair... it was as dangerous as it had ever been. How could he possibly have turned her away? He opened his mouth to tell her he'd changed his mind, that he didn't want to be just friends, that he'd made a stupid, idiotic mistake, that he wanted her - god, how he wanted her... and then hesitated. Stopped. He'd ceded his rights to that choice. He'd done it deliberately, knowingly. And she'd taken him at his word. She'd known he meant it - and he had meant it, at the time.
It was suddenly hard to breathe.
Somehow he found the means to force some words out. "I don't want to lose your friendship either, Sam," he managed, finally. "I don't know what I'd do without it."
She looked monumentally relieved. "I don't think you can lose it," she said, quietly. "Even if we both behave with our usual level of mutual idiocy, Daniel and Teal'c won't stand for it."
Jack gave a brief, humorless smile. "Yeah, they're real pals," he said, softly.
They stood in awkward silence for a moment, as the world turned. If he was going to keep his word - if he really wanted her around - he'd have to be her friend, and pretend that he wanted nothing more. How hard could it be? He'd been doing it for nearly a decade already. He sucked in a breath, forced his shoulders to straighten, and slid back into their habitual patterns. It was surprisingly easy - almost comforting.
"So," he said, in a bright, normal voice, and reached out to gently nudge her shoulder with his fist, "you've never tried my world-famous omelet, have you?"
With no hint of hesitation, nor of distrust in his judgment, she followed him back out onto the high-wire, into their old, familiar balancing act, and gave him a comically dubious look. "The one with the beer?"
He gave her a grin, and wondered whether she could see through his disguise. If so, she kept silent, allowing him his dignity. Her expression smoothed out with the serenity of a performer running through steps so well-known that they were as easy as breathing. "Have a seat, Carter," he said, waving her towards the kitchen table. "And prepare to be dazzled."
---
END.
edit: Incidentally, I keep meaning to say: I tried making an omelette with beer in it. It was frickin' fantastic. (And yes, I am completely influenced by everything I watch. But I really don't regret that one. No siree.)
edit 2:
linnet_101 has just created this awesome guide to the multishipper highway. Run. Run to it.