A/N: Season 5, Episode 3, Ascension. Picks up after Sam has been knocked unconscious and then declared fine by Dr. Fraiser and Hammond gives everyone but Daniel downtime.
"Tense? Me? I'm not tense." Carter tried and failed to convince herself that her words were true. "Am I?" She looked to Jack. "When did you first notice?"
"As we met," Jack replied with a slight swoop of his arms.
Sam frowned. "I've always just thought of myself as very focused."
Jack shook his head. "It's called working too hard. You're gonna crash and burn."
"I really don't have that much else to do, sir."
Jack rolled his eyes. "How many times have I told you to find a hobby? Golf, knitting, kite-flying, fishing..."
Sam smiled. "Is that an invitation, sir?"
"Sadly, no. Ice fishing isn't exactly my thing." Sam nodded. She had to admit she didn't fancy the idea of winter in Minnesota. She followed Jack slowly out of the briefing room as Jack continued, "Teal'c has been insisting I watch Star Wars. He's seen it nine times so I guess it must be good."
Sam raised her eyebrows. "You've never seen Star Wars?"
Jack shrugged. "I can now. We can get pizza, have a few beers, watch various life-forms do battle in space. It'll be fun."
"All right."
"Great! Meet at my place in a couple hours?"
"I'll be there."
As Sam changed into her civvies, she had the uncomfortable feeling that something was watching. She briefly looked around the locker room, but it was deserted aside from her own presence. She shook her head and strolled to the elevator.
She stopped briefly at her house. She wouldn't classify pizza and Star Wars with Teal'c and the colonel as a 'date,' but she wasn't going to show up looking like she'd just gotten back from an alien planet having had a mysterious unconscious spell.
Sam pulled up at Jack's house and as she stepped out of her 1961 Volvo P1800, she again had the feeling that she was being watched. Again, she could spy nothing out of the ordinary. Just as she reached the front door, she saw a man standing on the sidewalk, staring at her intently.
"Hello," the man said.
"Hi," she replied warily.
"How are you?"
"Fine." Sam felt incredibly awkward. The feeling morphed into discomfort as the man spoke again.
"This isn't where you live."
"No, it isn't. I'm visiting, and I'm going to go inside now." She quickly knocked on the door and then let herself in, looking flustered and a little worried.
"Carter? You look like you saw a ghost or something."
"It's probably nothing, but I've got this feeling like someone's been watching me, and just now some strange guy out there told me that this isn't where I live."
Jack was instantly on alert. True, sometimes a person could imagine things when he or she had been pushing too hard, but Jack had more than once staked his life on Sam's instincts. They encountered some pretty strange things on a fairly regular basis, so if Sam felt that something wasn't right, they'd have to get to the bottom of it.
"Tell me about this guy," Jack said.
"He had dark blonde hair, mustache, goatee. He didn't look strange, but the way he looked at me and the way he tried to converse were just...off."
"Well, I'm pretty sure he's not from around here. So how'd he know you don't live here?"
Back on base, Sam repeated her brief story to General Hammond. She didn't really blame him for looking skeptical.
"Major, are you sure your feelings about this encounter weren't influenced by your need of rest?"
Jack jumped to her defense. "Carter's no crazier than the rest of us, General. There's a lot we don't know about the universe yet. I don't think we should just assume that everything is all hunky-dory just because we can't see anything."
General Hammond took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "I suppose you're right about that, colonel. I'll arrange for a surveillance team to keep an eye on the major for the time being."
Sam tried to go about business as usual, but she couldn't help glancing at the cameras that monitored every room of her house. She felt a little foolish as the cameras had been present for several days and nothing unusual had happened. She also had the sneaking suspicion something would happen the moment the cameras were gone.
Sam returned home after spending the day at the SGC doing calculations trying to figure out how to safely operate the weapon they'd found on P4X 636. General Hammond had informed her the surveillance equipment had been removed earlier, so she was finally able to relax a little. She was in the kitchen getting a glass. As she turned to set it on the counter, she froze. The strange man was inside her house.
"Hello."
"Of course you would wait until they took the cameras away," Sam huffed. "What do you want?"
"To talk. To you."
"Ok, talk."
He shook his head. "Perhaps talk is not the correct word. I haven't used words in a such a long time...On Velona, I was attempting to—"
"Velona?"
"The planet you refer to as 636. I was attempting to communicate with you when you passed out."
"Communicate how?"
"My kind is capable of communication that shares our innermost essences. No speech is required. I believe it is possible with humans, but apparently only if they are aware and receptive."
"You want to do this sharing thing with me? Why?"
"I've been alone for so long. As soon as I saw you...I love you."
"You don't even know me!"
"I learned a great deal about you when I touched your mind. You're a good person, intelligent, dedicated to your work. You have strong feelings for your teammates, though you are conflicted about the one called Jack."
Sam shook her head in disbelief. "What are you?"
"I am an ascended being. My name is Orlin. I took this form so I could explain. Actually, this is what I looked like before I ascended."
"Ascended? We've met an ascended being before—Oma Desala."
Orlin shook his head. "I do not know the name."
"She was on the this planet called Kheb where she helped people learn how to ascend."
"That is probably why I don't know her. She must have been banished, like me."
"Banished? Why?"
"For breaking the rules. It is forbidden to accelerate the natural ascension process."
"Is that what you did?"
"No. The people of Velona were in danger from the Goa'uld. I helped them build a weapon. They did defeat the Goa'uld, but then they began to plan the conquest of other worlds using the technology I had given them. The others stopped them."
"The others of your kind destroyed the planet? What if we try to use it?" Orlin just shook his head. "You need to come with me," Sam exclaimed. "We have to tell General Hammond."
Sam, Jack, Daniel, Teal'c, Orlin, General Hammond, Colonel Simmons, and Colonel Reynolds were gathered around the table in the briefing room. Simmons was hung up on Sam's breach of protocol, if not security, by bringing an unknown alien onto the base. Reynolds didn't believe there would be any harm in carrying out the weapons test that the Pentagon had ordered. Jack was arguing with Simmons and Daniel and Teal'c were trying to reason with Reynolds. Orlin merely sat, focusing intently on his clasped hands.
"Enough!" General Hammond exclaimed. "Now, it seems to me that attempting to use this weapon is going to cause more problems than it is going to solve." He looked pointedly at Reynolds and Simmons. "I know you're not inclined to take the word of an alien we've just met, but you can see for yourselves that something happened to those people on 636. I'm not willing to risk any of my people trying to activate that weapon."
"The President gave the go-ahead, General," Simmons replied smugly.
"That was before we knew what we were dealing with. We've encountered an ascended being before, Colonel, and had it chosen to destroy us, we wouldn't have been able to defend ourselves."
Simmons' retort was cut off by a blinding flash of white light. Orlin was no longer sitting at the table.
The light headed directly to the dialing computer and the Stargate began to spin. "Stand down!" General Hammond ordered. "Everyone out of the gate room."
The wormhole opened with its customary whoosh and the light disappeared through it. Moments later, the gate activated again, but this time nothing appeared in the gate room. Soon a voice was heard. "I have destroyed the weapon. You will not endanger yourselves or anyone else now. It was the only way." The voice paused. "Goodbye, Samantha Carter." The event horizon disintegrated.
Sam pulled up to Jack's house. She walked up to door with a sense of déjà vu, but this time, no strange man spoke to her. She walked inside and found Daniel and Teal'c already seated in armchairs, pizza slices and beers in hand. She headed to the sofa and accepted the beer Jack offered. Jack seated himself next to Sam, probably a bit closer than regulations permitted. He picked up the remote and seconds later, the familiar strains of music sounded and yellow text was crawling up the screen.
A/N: Ok. I really did not like this episode. I think it's ridiculous for people who deal with aliens and the unknown on a regular basis to simply assume that 'it's all in your mind.' Not only that, but Orlin and Sam's sudden (although perhaps explicable due to the 'spirit exchange') development of feelings for him were creepy. This episode was also, in my opinion, practically anti-ship for Sam and Jack. If you're going to hint at characters having feelings for each other, don't backpedal.
As one reviewer noted, this was not the first instance of such a situation (someone being thought crazy because there was no evidence of alien involvement). I chose to change this episode because it especially bothered me, but I dislike any episode of any show where this situation crops up. Inevitably, thinking 'no one will believe me' or 'I can't tell anyone' leads to a character digging him- or her- self into a bigger hole than necessary. It's simply a pet peeve of mine in storytelling.