Title: The Crystal
Author: Pendaren aka Hoshi-Reed
Summary: Sam discovers a secret about her other self. Plenty of Angst.
Rating: PG-13
Season: SGA Season 4Spoilers: Unending
Pairing: Sam/Cam
Written For: meeshy
Prompt: A glimpse into some of the missing time during "Unending". Oh, and baking!!
Disclaimer: They don't belong to me, not even in my wildest dreams; or so the men in the white coats with the cups of colorful pills tell me.
AN: Betaed by Michelle in IRC who is starting in the fanfic world (and scary enough - HALF my age) but at least she is still in school which means she remembers her English classes more than I do.
Sam fingered the crystal as she looked out at the ocean view of her new post. The crystal was the only remnant of a Samantha that no longer existed. In the beginning she had thought its solo purpose was to disconnect the hyper drive from the Asgard Core but her curiosity into the algorithms lead her to discover more within. The layers of encryption had been quite a challenge and her constant busy status had given her very little free time to tackle the problem.
It had taken her months, and she still remembered the first file she had been able to untangle, a simple audio file of a somber cello playing. Whenever she heard the piece she couldn't help but feel hope, love and loss; she had even cried the first time she heard it. Teal'c always smiled when he heard it however; she guessed he was remembering, so before she had left for the Pegasus Galaxy she had given him a copy.
There were several locked archives and one message to herself; her voice echoing from an alternate future that time forgot. Sam walked inside to her new desk and played the sequence for the first time since stepping foot on Atlantis.
I know we aren't suppose to mess with our futures and how one fact can change it drastically and I know myself, so Sam, don't turn this off and put it away for fifty years. Please listen to it all, you will understand why in the end. I've password protected the rest of the files so that only you can uncompress them; you don't have to worry that anyone in Area 51 with a copy of this will get any further. The first archive is simple, your age when you got your first black eye, combined with the first double-digit happy prime and the first name of your first kiss.
Sam smiled at herself. The first time she played the file she nearly did put it away forever. She has since looked at the files countless times but that first leap to trust that she wouldn't mess up the universe had been hard. Every instinct that told her not to mess with temporal facts and tamper with timelines screamed for her to turn it off. It had been a talk with Daniel that finally got her to take that leap. He told her that she was incapable of sending herself a harmful message and to trust herself. She had even asked Daniel to look at it first, but he told her that there must be a reason only she could unlock the files, and he would never intrude on her privacy like that. Somehow he innately knew it was personal.
Sam loved happy numbers even more than prime numbers, as a kid she use to sum the squares of the digits of a number continuously to see if she would get one before she even know what a happy number was. She had received her first black eye when she was eight and her first kiss was on a dare with another military brat named Patrick so the password for the first archive was 21Patrick.
The archive was quite innocent, a video, an audio and a text file in this particular folder. The video was of a normal gathering over a meal with everyone having a good time and discussing the situation. From the angles it appeared to have been gleaned from the ships security footage and it was fairly short. The group was discussing how to reverse time in a localized field and Cam added his two cents with Superman. Sam always laughed or smiled at the exchange, the banter seeming more relaxed than the situation could have allowed for and she was glad that they found levity in such dire circumstances.
A simple scale through three octaves played three times without mistake.
"Wow Sam, that was great. You sound like a pro." Cam's voice could clearly be heard. A hollow thump followed, which Sam could only assume was someone bumping into the instrument. A muffled reply could not be made out probably due to a hug, Sam surmised, and Cam continued. "Well, now if you would only help me mess with the galley then I will be forever grateful."
"Are you trying to do the Ori's work for them?" Vala's voice clearly teased.
"He may burn the place down but at least his food is edible."
"Daniel!" Sam's voice retorted.
"I'm sorry Sam but you still can't cook." Daniel's usual defensive tone had a hint of laughter.
The text file was small, she didn't have to open it to know it read: Unlock JEM2 archive with the following password: Take the first name of the kid whose jaw you broke and their age, reverse it and place your grade level at the end. She had broken Kathy's jaw in fourth grade. Kathy had been fourteen at the time. 41yhtaK4 unlocked the JEM2 archive that was mostly pictures.
Over a hundred stills from a Christmas celebration popped up in a slide show. Everyone was cheerful and appeared to be fooling around and having fun. The tree had been decorated by them all, stills of Vala trying to include what looked like foil wrapped condoms with Daniel trying to take them off just as fast always made Sam smirk. The pictures of the present exchange included a blindfolded Cam being led to a fully functional galley for Cam to practice his cooking. The last still was a mistletoe kiss over a fully loaded banquet table.
The clue for JEM3 was the number between the two prime numbers in an unhappy loop followed by her favorite teacher. 58Campbell had taken her a while to figure out at first because she had hated English in school; she had initially mistaken that the question asked for her favorite teacher in teaching. She had tried her top five, unable to choose between her high school physics teacher, high school calculus teacher, her HSROTC teacher, her first academy weapons instructor, and the professor she once TA-ed for and had held a crush for. It wasn't until a few days later when it hit her the first time. Though she hated Ms. Campbell's class the teacher had helped her in her personal life when it came to dealing with her mother's death and her family. Ms. Campbell was her favorite person who happened to be a teacher. After having done this several dozen times the password came easy as she unlocked JEM3.
The video started off with Cam dragging Sam to the galley. "Cam this is your sanctuary, not mine. I'm telling you I've never been any good at cooking"
"Who said anything about cooking? Today we are baking. Big difference."
"What difference? All I know is food is prepared and I rarely end up with anything edible."
"Sam, how can you work on generators and bombs and not blow yourself up? Hell, you don't even have instructions when you backwards engineer things. At least with cooking and baking you have recipes to follow. Here put this on..." Cam held out an apron with the clichéd Kiss-the-Cook adage.
"I'm no cook."
"Then I don't have to kiss you." Cam smiled. "Just put it on."
Sam mumbled under her breath as she tied the apron on and saw Cam put on his. The 'I'm with Genius' made Sam snort.
The video then devolved from Cam trying to show Sam how to measure properly to stopping her from over kneading the dough to down right frustration and a food fight. In the end they both were covered in flour, raisins nuts, coconut shavings, chocolate chips and various spices. When the oven finally dinged and they tasted the hot product Cam nodded. "See, you can cook."
"Then what are you waiting for?" Sam pointed at the apron and Cam leaned in for a kiss.
Sam remembered how at first she had been shocked. It had taken all her courage to finish off the rest of the pictures in the file the first time. Now she took them in stride and smiled but she had initially grown more and more worried when picture after picture opened up. A blanket spread on a hanger bay floor as the pair sat and feeding each other on top of it, a couple of candle lit dinners, and all forms of dates scrolled by in a slideshow fashion. Several years with Cam unfolded in pictures that left her with no other conclusion but that they had gotten together in that future. Sam remembered that she had thought the fact that her other self did want her to know this made her think that watching these might have been the wrong thing to do after all. Forcing a relationship based on that knowledge could only end in disaster and she had doubted Daniel's words that she couldn't mean any harm with her messages.
She was glad now that she had ignored the doubt and pressed on. She had asked Cam, the person in the previous files, how old he was when he ice skated for the first time and where and added her grade when she first broke her arm. She was glad she had listened to Daniel and used 26SheppardAFB10-11 to unlock the final archive. She played it with a heavy heart as she thought of the life she left behind to come to this new galaxy that she was to call her home.
Sam, I didn't show you my life with Cam because I wanted to show you your future; you may not follow my path. I did it to show you that it wasn't the isolation that caused me to fall in love or that we got together because I was settling for second best. I didn't even show you our life to prove that you can truly fall in love with him. I did it for Jacob. Please remember him for me; no one deserves to be forgotten.
"Ma'am, you are needed in the conference room," the gate technician said at her door. Sam grabbed her earpiece and put it on for the first time.
"Time to get to work," she said as she stood.
An Asgard enhanced image of a fetal boy with the captions Jacob Elliot Mitchell, Always In Our Hearts caused her to get misty-eyed before she hit close and exited the office to face a new future and hoped that maybe someday what was would be.