1994.

Sam spends the whole dinner trying to run interference between Dad and Jonas. She hadn’t expected to; she’d thought Dad would love him. He’s an Air Force officer with a good career (even if it’s in “black” operations her father regards as a necessary evil and never really trusts), he’s respectful of his superiors (at least to their faces), he’s charming (except when he’s a pain in the ass), and he goes to church regularly (even if he does prefer churches that are way more fundamentalist than the Catholic churches Mom dropped her off at for Sunday School every week growing up). And he makes her happy. She knew Dad would be upset at first meeting him only after they were engaged, but they’re all three of them on active duty at different bases, and finding a time that all three of them can get off isn’t easy.

The next day Jonas goes out for a run in the morning, to let the two of them catch up, he says. She knows it’s because he doesn’t want to have to deal with Dad again, and she’s grateful both that he went out and that he was tactful enough not to say why. She and Dad sit in his cool living room and make stilted conversation about their relative careers, the only thing they seem to be able to talk about any more. He’s upset that she’s given up flying to focus on science, but accepts that she’d rather fly the Space Shuttle than an F-15 even now that women are allowed to fly in combat. She listens with patience as he derides the idea that the Russians are ever going to stop being the number one threat to the security of the United States. Finally, she can’t hold back any more.

“Why do you dislike Jonas?” she asked.

“Honey, I don’t know him well enough to dislike him,” Dad replies, except that given the way he presses his lips together and the way he needled Jonas all last night, it’s pretty obvious that he’s lying.

“Dad,” Sam says.

“I’m sorry, Sam.” Dad sighs. “I know how much he means to you. I just … I don’t like the vibe I get from him.”

Sam bites her tongue and doesn’t say that Jonas probably doesn’t like the vibe he gets from him, either. Jonas has seen some bad things in his life, even (especially) before he joined the Air Force, and that’s left its mark. He’s gotten over it all amazingly well, or she wouldn’t be marrying him.

“I just think you can do better, Sam,” Dad says. “I want the best for my little girl. And I want the best possible father for my future grandchildren, of course.” He changes the subject to politics.

Sam just sighs internally and lets him. She loves him, but she knows she’ll never change him, and for all he seems to be focusing on her career almost as much as his own these days, he still assumes that someday she’ll have a normal marriage and home life just like he and Mom had in the sixties. That’s what Mom would have expected, too, but much as she might have wanted to be at six and twelve and even eighteen, she’s not the good little girl they tried to make her into.

When she and Jonas are ready to drive back to California and their respective bases, Sam lets him drive without arguing for once, and watches the desert roll by outside her window, glad to be leaving the Matt Mason/Homemaker Barbie Doll Dad seems to think she is further behind with every passing mile.

Except, it turns out, she isn’t leaving them behind at all. Two weeks later she’s given temporary detached duty to Cheyenne Mountain and shown the most incredible thing she’s ever seen in her life. She solves the problem they brought her there for, and they offer her a permanent transfer. There are two science teams at the base; one’s made up of civilians, primarily archaeologists and translators, working on the device from that angle while the other is made up of military physicists and engineers looking for military uses, ones the civilians either might not like or might not be cleared for. The one thing that keeps the assignment from being perfect is the compartmentalization that keeps the two groups from working together directly; Sam can’t imagine any aspect of the project being less than fascinating. She says yes because this is a chance she can’t pass up even if General West is a misogynist pig and it will be hell working for him (for the Door to Heaven she can bite her tongue and suck it up), and then calls Jonas to figure out how they can make this work.

“You can’t transfer to NORAD,” he tells her flatly.

“Excuse me?” she replies incredulously.

“We’re getting married in six months, Sam,” he said. “How can we do that if you’re half a continent away?”

“You could request a transfer to Peterson,” Sam said. “With your record—”

“You expect me to transfer?” His voice has a derisive note she’s rarely heard in it. He knows she doesn’t like that tone; it sounds too much like his father. She only met the elder Hansen once, and that was more than enough.

“Jonas, you can do what you’re doing now at any base in the country,” Sam said. It’s true; ever since his last mission, the one he can’t (won’t) talk about, he’s been assigned to the general staff officer work that makes every base run but is boring as hell. “This is a once in a lifetime job for me. I wish I could tell you about it—it’s the most incredible thing in the world.” Literally. “I can’t pass this up.”

“Why not?” Jonas replies. “You’d have to give it up in a year or two when you retired, anyway.”

“When I what?” Sam can’t imagine what gave him the impression she might be open to that; she’s always been completely up front with her career plans. He’s never commented on them.

“Well, you won’t be able to stay on active duty after we start a family,” Jonas says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. He goes on about the perfect June Cleaver life she’s going to lead, putting on the charm that first attracted her to him, and the picture he paints is so beautiful she could see herself fitting into it perfectly.

If it weren’t for the fact that he’s nuts, because she can’t imagine loving any man so much she’d be willing to give up her career for him. Certainly not now that she’s got the prospect of a bona-fide alien device probably capable of creating wormholes on command, once they get everything figured out.

She listens to Jonas go on for about five minutes, alternating between shock and bemusement and an unwilling respect for his persuasiveness. She still can’t figure out why he thinks she might be willing to go along with this. Maybe he doesn’t know her as well as she thinks he does; maybe he’s more in love with the idea of Sam Carter in his mind than with her, the actual flesh-and-blood woman.

By the time he gets around to explaining how she can go to work for a university science lab part time once their children are in school, she’s had enough. “No, Jonas,” she says gently. “I’m not going to be quitting the Air Force, even if we have kids. I can’t imagine why you would think I would.”

There’s a long silence on the other end of the line.

“But you have to.”

“No, I don’t.” She holds her breath, hoping it won’t send him into one of his moods. He hasn’t had one since months before they got engaged, but the way he’s been talking ….

“You bitch,” he says at last, and she flinches. He’s never called her names before. “You fucking whore. Seduced by your science and your politics away from your duties as a woman, as a wife and mother. Your father should have locked you up rather than letting you join the Air Force.”

Sam blinks back tears; it’s almost exactly what his father said, the one time she met him, but a thousand times worse because she never cared about his father. “Jonas, you can’t believe that, that’s what your father would say,” she says, but he steamrollers right over her.

“But that’s okay, Sam,” he says, voice turning gentle, soothing, like she was some frightened child who didn’t know what she was saying. “You’ll come around, eventually, I know you will. You’re a good woman, Sam, despite it all. You know I’m right, you just need to admit it and let go of these crazy ideas.”

“No,” she says, feeling oddly detached, “you’re the one with the crazy ideas. I’ll mail your ring back to you.” She hangs up, feeling oddly empty. She would have expected to feel hurt, grieved, at the loss of the first serious relationship she’s ever had, but she doesn’t. She’s probably in shock; she knows it won’t last. She still can’t believe the things he said. Maybe he wasn’t the only one in love with a picture in his head.

Four months later, Sam comes in one Monday morning to hear through the grapevine that some civilian has figured out how to dial the Door to Heaven, and that West has brought in some mysterious colonel to take a team through. Nobody she talks to knows much about him; he hadn’t deigned to come down to the science labs. So she watches over closed circuit television as Jack O’Neill leads a team through the Stargate; West is still a misogynist bastard, and refused to even consider letting her on the team. Then he barred her from the control room, as if he expected her to go charging through the newly-rechristened ‘Stargate’ after the exploration team. The survivors come back with the bad news the Abydos has been destroyed, West transfers out (thank God), and after a few months of unsuccessful attempts to make the Stargate do anything else, everything is shut down and she gets the choice of whether to transfer back to the Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base (which could be a good stepping-stone to NASA if she plays her cards right) or go to DC, where she can continue to work on the Stargate data and lobby for the program’s reopening. There really isn’t a choice.

1997.

Sam escapes to her office as soon as she’s released from the infirmary. She doubts she’ll be disturbed; the base is still pretty understaffed, and her teammates all have their own reports to write. They seldom come to her office unless they have a technical problem. They have a debriefing in a couple of hours—General Hammond got the short version of Jonas’ insanity in the Infirmary, but now he needs the details, and she should really be working on her mission report. Instead, she sits and stares blankly at the computer screen.

She’s not sure how long she’s been sitting there when Colonel O’Neill strolls in, hands in his pockets. She starts typing before he can get ask what she’s doing. Reports are familiar; the Air Force really runs on paperwork and not jet fuel, after all. She could write one in her sleep; right now, she can’t tell if that’s a blessing (she doesn’t have to think about it) or a curse (she has time to dwell on just how much of the disaster was her fault). “Sir,” she says, acknowledging her CO’s presence and hoping he’ll just go away because she knows she’s going to get chewed out, but she really couldn’t handle that at this particular second.

“Carter,” he says, voice neutral. He stops about three feet away from her, on the side of her main work table adjacent to the one she’s sitting at. She can see him out of the corner of her eye.

She can’t tell anything from his voice, so she looks up at him, hands stilling over the keyboard.

He’s fiddling with the bunch of paperclips in a magnetic holder that sits with her other office supplies, shoved out of the way into a corner of the table. He’s not even looking at her.

Sam watches him for a few seconds, feeling the words build up pressure behind her tongue, begging to be released. She shouldn’t say anything, just be a good little soldier and not get herself into any more trouble.

On the other hand, Colonel O’Neill has seemed like a good guy since the first meeting, even if he gets annoyed by the science occasionally. (She’s a bit ashamed of assuming he’d be an asshole, in that first briefing, but she’s too embarrassed by the memory to apologize. He doesn’t seem to hold it against her, at least.) Certainly he’s a good officer, and she’s proud to serve under him. But these are not the kind of things you go to your CO with, these are the kinds of things you tell your best friend.

Except she doesn’t have one, certainly no friend close enough to tell who has enough clearance she could tell even an edited version to. And she can’t bear the idea of keeping this inside another minute.

“It’s my fault.”

The Colonel likes to play dumb, but thankfully doesn’t this time. “Did you know he thought he was God?” He waits until she shakes her head. And she has to; she didn’t know Jonas was that out of touch with reality. “Do you have some kind of ray-gun here that gives people … delusions of grandeur?” He glances around, as if seriously expecting to find one. “Because I have to say, I don’t think it’ll be that useful against the goold unless it’s got a reverse setting.”

Sam gives him half a smile. “No, sir,” she says. The smile doesn’t last. She looks down. “When we broke up—he said some things. Not about godhood,” she says hastily, “but … he was normally pretty charming. He could be, when he wanted to, and when he wasn’t he just tended to be a bit … irritable. Nothing too bad.” She sounds like some abused wife trying to excuse her abuser, and she hates that fact; he never laid a hand on her, never tried to seriously cut her down verbally either except for that last phone call.

“There were things in his past he wouldn’t talk about,” she continues, “and when he was like that I usually gave him space to work it out inside his own head. He didn’t like me prying. What he did say was … his dad was a real piece of work. I met him once, and he was verbally abusive. Menacing. Spouted a lot of reactionary religious hate at me, and Jonas too. All kinds of things, and I doubt he stopped at words when Jonas was a kid and too small to fight back. He had a bully’s instinct for hitting the weak spots, you know?”

Colonel O’Neill nods.

“I don’t think going from that into Air Force black ops was good for Jonas. But I thought he was past that.” She shrugs, still not meeting the Colonel’s eyes. “Guess I was wrong. But that last conversation, when he couldn’t convince me … he went from his most charming to verbally abusive and back to charming in a few minutes, and some of the things he said in both states were strange. It was like he was living in a different reality. But not enough to be sure he wasn’t just upset and saying things to be hurtful, you know?”

“Carter,” the Colonel says, pausing to collect his thoughts.

She looks up at him, sees not pity or contempt but understanding, and it gives her the courage to continue. She feels better now, like she’s not going to fall apart any second, and she has to get it all off her chest now before she loses her nerve. “And he was on desk duty, so it wasn’t like there were lives on the line, so I didn’t say anything. I saw his name on the list of people transferring in, and then on the list of Gate-team members, and I thought I should say something. But it’s not like I had any kind of proof he was crazy, just a feel from one conversation three years ago when we broke up. People would have assumed it was sour grapes or a grudge if I’d tried to say anything. And I wasn’t sure myself. And I thought, if something really was wrong with him, surely someone else would have noticed. All those people he killed would still be alive now if I’d spoken up.”

The tight, leaden feeling in her chest has eased while she’s been talking, but it starts to return as she waits for him to speak. She looks up at him, but his face doesn’t tell her anything. There are two possible responses: either he’ll tell her that there was nothing else she could have done and nothing is her fault, or he’ll tell her that she should have said something and failed her duty as an officer by not doing so. Both statements are true; they share the same possible space in the same way as Schrödinger’s Cat is alive and dead. Lots of true statements are like that.

She realizes, after a few minutes, that he’s not going to say anything. No heavy-handed sympathy, no recriminations. Sam doesn’t open up often, and she can count on one hand the number of times she’s done it and not received one or the other. She doesn’t have the words to describe how his silent presence makes her feel. Relieved, pathetically grateful, somehow free in a way she doesn’t understand—all of these kind of fit and none are exactly right. She wishes she were Daniel, for just a second, because surely Daniel would know.

Before the silence can get awkward, the Colonel puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes gently. It’s support that doesn’t come off like condescension. “Can’t change anything now,” he says.

“I guess not,” Sam replies, trying to put on a confident face. She doesn’t think it works.

“We have a debriefing in,” he checks his watch, “fifteen minutes. No need to bring this up unless someone asks.” He shrugs expressively. Sam nods. “I’m gonna go round up Daniel and Teal’c. Remind me to give you a lecture on ‘obeying orders’ and ‘letting personal feelings like guilt get in the way while we’re on other planets.’” Without waiting for a response, he strolls out the door.

Sam watches him go, bemused and confused, feeling better but not sure exactly why—it’s not like he said much, or really did anything. Somehow, though, it was exactly what she needed.

2000.

When Sam finally gets home, after the negotiations are done for the day and both the Tok’ra and the politicians are safely in someone else’s care for the night, she gets only as far as her living room couch before collapsing. She sits there, running the week’s event over and over in her mind, until long past the time she should get up to turn on the lights. It seems like too much effort; getting dinner—even calling for take-out—is even more daunting. What she wants, more than anything else in the world, is someone who can hold her, who can listen to her talk about one of the worst days she’s had in a while. She’ll talk with Janet tomorrow—can’t imagine trying to do her job without Janet’s friendship backing her up—but that doesn’t make any difference to her right this minute.

It’s at times like these she thinks Mom was right, about how much difference it makes having someone to come home to. And wonders what’s wrong with her, that she’s never been able to find someone. Sam’s a good officer and a good woman, she’s smart, she’s got a sense of humor, and she knows she’s pretty. So why hasn’t she ever been able to find someone? She knows what happens with Jonas wasn’t her fault. (She knows that. She does.) And she works too hard, too long, to meet men she doesn’t work with, but other dedicated career women seem to find someone. Maybe it’s just her.

This train of thought is only a distraction of course, and depressing as it is, she’s grateful for it, because thinking about today is even worse.

Martouf is dead. She killed him.

She had no choice; she knows that. It’s what he wanted; she knows that too. If she were in his place, she would hope someone would offer her the same mercy.

That doesn’t make it any easier. He loved her (or someone who looked like her and lived in her head once), and she killed him. He was sweet and never (rarely) pressured her, but that didn’t stop the Goa’uld who turned his mind against itself. It’s not the worst thing that’s happened to someone she cares about since she started going through the Stargate, but it’s close. It’s not her fault, but she’s the one who pulled the trigger.

Sam’s learned not to dwell on the bad things, because if she did it would drag her down. She’s excellent at her job, both the science and the soldiering; it’s not hubris to say that the fate of the world(s) sometimes depends on her. She can’t do that every day if she can’t see the good things they’ve accomplished because of all the horrors.

It’s harder today than it is most days.

Sam’s proud to serve her country, and she’s proud of what she’s accomplished, and she no longer feels like she has to prove anything to anyone about her professional competence. She doesn’t need Dad’s approval, but it’s comforting to know she has it just the same. But much as she believes in serving her country (planet), she joined the Air Force to see the stars. Soldiering isn’t her passion, nor is it her primary contribution to the war effort against the Goa’uld.

Right now, Sam thinks she could be perfectly happy, and as valuable to the defense of the planet (possibly more so) if she stayed at the SGC and worked in a lab full time. (Sometimes, although she’ll never admit it, she feels just the tiniest bit resentful when she gets pulled out of her lab for a mission that doesn’t require the best scientist on base—she never has time to study everything she wants to.) Sam likes the adrenaline rush of going through the gate, but … days like today it’s hard to believe it’s worth it. Fast motorcycles and fast cars give an adrenaline rush too, and when she drives fast she only risks herself. If she’d never gone through the Gate, she’d never have been blended with Jolinar, and she might never have met Martouf.

And Dad would be dead. And she wouldn’t have her teammates to call on when she needed them. And they wouldn’t have an ally against the Goa’uld. And there’s no way to know what else might have happened if she weren’t on an SG team, except that in both of the alternate realities they’ve contacted Sam was a scientist who stayed on base and in both realities Earth was captured by Apophis. Burying herself in science isn’t the answer, at least not while Earth is still in danger. At least, she won’t choose to do so.

Sam prays no one talks about what was said in the second round of za’tarc testing. There’s nothing to worry about, she knows that; Freya has no one to gossip with, Janet knows what this could mean to Sam’s career, and the idea of Teal’c gossiping is ludicrous. She also knows just how destroyed her career would be if it came out that not only does she have a crush (and that’s all it is, a crush with hero worship mixed in, and it will go away eventually on its own) on her CO, it affected a mission. (Who knows if Colonel O’Neill would have stayed if he didn’t think she returned his feelings? Sam knows he would have, but promotion boards and future COs might not.) Never mind that his behavior was no different; never mind that it was no different than their other teammates. Standards in the military are different for women than they are for men. She’s seen it too many times to count.

No one who was there will talk, and the cameras only record visual, not sound. But it’s been a wake-up call she apparently needed. It doesn’t matter how good she is, as an officer or as a scientist, if rumors get out that she’s fraternizing with men in her chain of command, or even that she wants to. If she’s letting her emotions affect her behavior on missions, it may affect her on base as well, and she can’t afford that. She knows he returns her feelings, now, and she only suspected it before, but that doesn’t matter. She won’t let it change anything.

She’ll have to be more careful, that’s all. She can’t afford to indulge her fantasies about what the Colonel would be like in bed, how it would feel to come home after a hard day at work and cuddle with him on the couch, or what would happen if she actually went up with him to that cabin he talks about occasionally. She’ll have to be slightly more formal with him, watch how she talks about him and to him, and avoid being alone with him even in innocent situations.

She doesn’t need to worry about how he’ll react to increased distance between them. He knows how much more precarious her position is as the woman and as the subordinate. And he would never push her.

2004.

The second time she introduces a fiancé to Dad, things are much different. For one thing, she doesn’t delude herself into thinking she has any idea how he’ll react. She doesn’t know him anymore, not really, doesn’t understand his life even though she’s the one who arranged it for him. And Pete’s nice, he wears a uniform (even if it’s not the one she and Dad share) and he’s her choice (which probably counts for more now than it did ten years earlier).

What worries her—about the meeting, anyway, she’s worried about a lot of things starting with Daniel, Anubis and Ba’al, the Jaffa, the Replicators, and continuing down all the way to Pete and Dad and the wedding which are pretty near the bottom of the list—is that Pete’s still a little star-struck about the whole “alien” thing. She doesn’t warn him first because she doesn’t want him to work up a lot of excitement about meeting an alien and be weird about it with Dad. Instead, he’s weird about it because he wasn’t warned. Sam has to wince, but inside she’s comforted by his reaction.

Jonas was able to charm the birds out of the trees when he wanted to; he’d certainly snowed her. It’d taken her years to realize just how much he’d manipulated her in the time they were together, gave and withheld his approval in subtle ways designed to guide her to his way of thinking; she doesn’t think she’d ever have let him remake her in his own image the way he wanted to, wants to think she’d have been too strong for that … but she’s glad their relationship didn’t last any longer than it did.

Eight years of dealing with the myriad different problems and opportunities offered by the Pandora’s Box of the Stargate have taken their toll, building her up and breaking her down until she knows exactly how much she has to give, and what she’s willing to give it for, before she breaks. She may not always like who she is, she may not always know exactly how to go about getting what she wants and needs, but she damn well knows the good and bad both. She’d never fall for a guy like Jonas now, and even if she did she’d know how to spot his manipulations. Pete’s not Jonas, in any way, shape or form. He’d never try to manipulate her, at least not more than the small, ordinary ways everyone does occasionally without realizing it.

But in some corner of her mind, it’s a relief to know that he’s not smooth enough to succeed if he wanted to try.

So Pete meets Dad, and while it’s a bit awkward it’s not as bad as she feared, and she goes back to worrying about galactic current events, while Pete goes back to worrying about planning the wedding. (He’s got his heart set on a big white wedding, and Sam doesn’t really care about the ceremony one way or the other. She told him he could have whatever he wanted if he’d make the decisions, but he doesn’t quite get that the colors and invitation styles and decorations don’t matter to her as long as they’re not horribly tacky. He keeps trying to involve her; it’s sweet, but a little annoying. When she stops to think about it—which isn’t often—she’s amused by the fact that their wedding planning is very stereotypical … except that it’s the bride who’s getting dragged along to all the meetings she doesn’t care about, rather than the groom.)

Then he shows her the house he bought for them without even telling her he was looking. Sam stands in front of the pretty house with a horrible feeling of déjà vu. At first she thinks it’s the way the house is Pete trying to arrange her—their—lives, domesticity fashioned into a cage even though the craving she’s developed for the trappings of domesticity is a large part of the reason she started dating him in the first place. This isn’t “let’s build a life together,” this is “let me take care of you.” And while Sam craves a “life together,” she doesn’t want to be taken care of. If this relationship is going to work, she’s going to have to find a way to make Pete recognize the difference, somehow. She knows all of this is part of the reason for the déjà vu, but at the same time there’s something else she can’t quite put her finger on.

Sam tells herself, as she drives to General O’Neill’s home, that that’s why she wants to see him. He was married for years; surely, he has some experience in dealing with such fundamental differences of mind. It isn’t until she sees the other woman and feels a kick to the gut that she realizes she was lying to herself. That was her excuse; what she wanted was personal time with the one man she’s ever been close to who has never tried to arrange her life for her, guilt her, indulge her because she’s a pretty woman, manipulate her for personal reasons, discount her worth or capabilities because of her gender, or assume he knows what’s best for her. She wanted to have her cake and eat it, too: she wanted him to tell her it was all right to dump Pete because he’d still be there, and maybe there was a way the two of them could build the kind of life together she wanted.

When she sees Kerry, she realizes two other things as well. The first is the irony of wanting to leave one man because he tried to arrange her life by going to another man to do it (and how much she’s always hated the kind of women who want men to solve all their problems for them). The second is how much she has assumed that on a personal level Jack O’Neill is there to serve her needs, staying distant and loving from afar like a saintly 19^th-Century impoverished heroine until she wants something from him, expecting him to wait for her convenience (and how she hates the kind of men who assume that women are there for their convenience). She’s known it on some level for a while, now; the hallucination of him on the Prometheus told her as much. She leaves more ashamed of herself than she’s been in a long time, and with a lot more to think about.

She puts the whole thing out of her mind while Dad dies. She hasn’t had much time to talk with him about anything non-mission-related since he blended with Selmak; they still don’t have much time, but now there are no other distractions. They talk a little about Mom, about Sam’s childhood, about Mark and the kids, and it’s enough. Really, it is. Her bedside vigil makes all her other problems seem … trivial by comparison. And yet somehow more insurmountable at the same time. It’s an artifact of grieving, and she’s grieved for enough friends over the years she’s been in the SGC to know intimately how the process works.

After Dad dies, the thought of living with Pete in the house he bought makes her feel almost nauseous. Part of that’s grief; most of that is the whole idea of him arranging her life that way without even telling her. She’s surprised he takes it as well as he does, but once it’s over she doesn’t spare much thought for it. Sam knows she has never been all that good at understanding people, and right now she doesn’t have the mental energy to deal with much of anything besides Dad’s death, nor time for anything but the Replicators and Daniel’s descension and (later) the clean-up, both in the SGC and throughout the rest of the galaxy. (The fall of empires leaves a hell of a fall-out, in people and civilizations.)

***

Burying herself in work to avoid her personal problems has served her well over the years, but she can’t keep it up indefinitely. Eventually things slow down again and there’s less to distract herself with. It’s not until after they get the ZPM from … well, from themselves … and the team goes to Jack’s cabin that she realizes what the deeper level of déjà vu she felt that day in front of Pete’s house was. The quiet has given Sam time to think that she hasn’t had in years; now that things are beginning to quiet down out in the galaxy she feels like she can take a breath and an actual vacation without feeling guilty. It’s a luxury she hadn’t realized how much she needed, and it’s given her time to think about a lot of things, like what she wants to do now that the primary mission of the SGC—to defeat the Goa’uld—has been accomplished. She doesn’t like dwelling on the mess with Pete; it’s over, now, and she wants to put it behind her, but her mind keeps picking at it like an old scab. At first she just re-treads every significant conversation, looking for ways she could have made everything turn out better. And then she realizes that while she certainly made mistakes and focused more on what she wanted than what she had, she wasn’t alone in that. Like Jonas, he was in love with the idea of her in his head. It’s a far different picture than Jonas’, of course, but no closer to her.

Pete loved movies. Really, really loved them; she’d been shocked by the size of his DVD collection. They were the filter through which he viewed the world. He’d investigated her when they first met because in a cop movie (the kind he dreamed of starring in) the beautiful woman with a mysterious double life she doesn’t talk about is always either a spy or in some kind of trouble (or both) and needs the hero to save her. He’d taken her dancing because it was the closest he could come to recreating her favorite movie. He was willing (eager) to overlook her frequent lateness to dates—or missing them altogether—if she fed him harmless tidbits about what she’d been doing at the SGC because he saw her as the heroine of an action-adventure science fiction movie. And he wanted a big white wedding followed by a house in the suburbs because that’s how romantic comedies end.

It’s not that he can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality, or that he’s as shallow as that makes him sound, but it does color the way he looks at everything around him. And a relationship where one partner is looking for a warm body to come home and play house with and the other is looking for an action-adventure heroine, and both are so caught up in their own ideas about their ideal lives to see and value their partner at their true worth, warts and all, can’t be healthy.

Because as much as Pete was seeing who he wanted to see in her, she was guilty of doing the same thing to him. She loved his humor, loved the spontaneous romantic things he did for her, liked going out and doing things and staying home with him both. She especially liked that he was so undemanding of her time, understanding for the most part what it was like to be on a job where you could be called in in the middle of the night or have to stay late without knowing in advance. But she loved the idea of having a life outside of the SGC almost as much as she loved him. It bothers her that she can’t say for sure she would have given him a second glance if “not connected to the SGC” had been lower on her priority list. And as much as she hurt him (and herself) by learning that, she’s grateful for the lesson. If she ever does find someone else, she hopes she doesn’t make that mistake again.

“Carter.”

Sam looks up to see General O’Neill standing in the door to the cabin, still in his uniform. He’d gotten called to DC for two days, leaving the three current members of SG-1 to amuse themselves. He looks around, but she’s the only one here; Teal’c is hiking in the woods and she’s not sure where Daniel’s gotten himself to.

“Sir,” she says, smiling, admiring how good he looks in the Class A’s he hates. They both know she’s felt something for him for years (crush, infatuation, love in all its forms and kinds, she’s passed through all of them at one point or another). It used to be very important to her to pretend otherwise, but somehow she doesn’t think repression is the right answer anymore (if it ever was), even if he’s still her CO and the fraternization regs are one set she’d never break, nor even bend if she could help it.

“How’s the fishing?” he asks, taking off his cap. His eyes crinkle a bit as he sees her appraise him, and he returns the favor.

“As good as it’s ever been,” Sam says, still amused by a fishing pond with no fish in it, letting her smile turn into a smirk. Though whatever happened in the original timeline, it seems to have fish now even if they haven’t yet caught one. “How was Washington?”

“As … good as it’s ever been,” he says, making a face. He looks like a two-year-old contemplating a serving of peas, or at least she has vague memories of her nephew looking like that on a long-ago visit.

“Why’d they call you in on your leave?” She’s not worried; leave is always contingent on the requirements of the service and if anything were wrong he’d have said so straight away.

“I’m getting promoted. Again.” The look of consternation deepens, and Sam smothers a laugh; he’s the only person she knows who treats promotion like something smelly the cat dragged in.

“Congratulations,” she says, and means it. If anyone’s earned it, it’s him, and while he doesn’t technically have the time-in-grade to qualify for promotion, she understands it on an organizational level. The SGC is the only “Command” in the Air Force commanded by less than a four-star general; having a “mere” major general in command for so many years was necessary for keeping it under as tight of wraps as possible. She was shocked that they gave it to a newly-minted brigadier, however experienced he was.

“And they’re transferring me to DC,” he says. “Homeworld Security is being reorganized and expanded. They think they’ve finally figured out how to get all the alien stuff under one aegis in practice, now, not just on paper. So they need to expand their staff.”

“And they wanted more people with experience,” Sam says, heart sinking. He can’t turn this down for the same reason he couldn’t turn down command of the SGC: he can’t take the chance of someone who doesn’t understand the program being put in charge, or worse, someone who will understand it just well enough to take advantage of it. The SGC is more vulnerable now than it was when it was the only line of defense and anything could be excused in the interest of saving the planet. Someone like Maybourne or Bauer or Simmons could do a hell of a lot of damage, and they’ve all been through too much to save the planet to lose it through carelessness. And turning down a promotion would have to be followed shortly by retirement, the kind they don’t bring people back from; if you don’t think you’re worthy of greater responsibility, the Air Force tends to wonder if you’re worthy of the responsibility you already have.

“Yeah,” the General says. He looks out the window. “The way they’re re-organizing things, there are going to be several different branches. On paper, not just functionally, and they’re finally going to try to clean up the mess of who has responsibility for what. Separate chains of command and all. The SGC’s going to handle exploration and contact with our allies, Area 51 is going to be Research and Development, and they’re setting up a new branch so the 303’s and 302’s won’t be a subset of R and D anymore.”

“That’s great,” Sam says, meaning it, even if not with her whole heart. They’ve needed to clarify those areas of responsibility and chains of command for a couple of years at least, much as the SGC has been able to take advantage of the confusion now and again. She knew she wasn’t going to be starting a relationship with Jack in the near future, and she can deal with not even being able to see him on a regular basis. It’ll probably help her get over him—really get over him, this time, not just tell herself she has because she knows she should.

The General shrugs. “I’m going to head the branch that covers the SGC and Atlantis and alien contact. Mostly it’s just consolidating and running what we already have. Area 51 and the ship programs are both going to be expanded and ramped up to broader mission specs, now that we’re not fighting for survival. But I won’t have to worry about that; they’re going to be Vidrine’s problem. I’ll have my hands full just with Stargate Operations.” He looks at her sideways, not pressuring, not even saying it openly, but offering.

Sam thinks about eight years as a soldier who does science instead of a scientist who wears a uniform. Really, that’s enough, now that the fate of the planet doesn’t hang in the balance. “Y’know, somebody should keep an eye on Area 51,” she says, meeting Jack’s eyes. “Make sure the Trust doesn’t get a foothold in during the reorganization. And I bet they’ll be bringing out all the interesting devices that got brought back and shelved because they weren’t of immediate use fighting the Goa’uld.”

“Probably,” Jack says. There’s a twinkle in his eyes she’s rarely seen, a promise not banked for some indefinite future.

Sam hopes he can see the same in her eyes.

 

Note on the chronology and Carter’s age: I’ve assumed that Carter was born in 1965, the year Amanda Tapping was born. This does not match up with the chronology Christi gives in her fic, in particular, the assertion that Sam was “under 18” twenty-one years before Season Ten starts, which would have required a birth date no earlier than 1968 (1968 is the year given on the ID that flashes on the screen in “Entity;” although

sg_fignewton has proved she has to be at least a year older than that. Either birth date would have made Carter too young to have a Major Matt Mason astronaut doll (which she claims to have in the episode Children of the Gods), as Matt Mason was discontinued in 1970; it would also have made her too young to remember watching the Moon landing. The Matt Mason thing could be fudged; the Moon landing couldn’t for the purposes of this story. Therefore, I have adjusted the chronology slightly to make everything fit Amanda Tapping’s real age. This makes Samantha Carter 41 as of the summer the original story takes place, which is old to become a first-time mother but not unreasonable.