Title: Midnight Visits
Rating: PG
Pairing: Sam:Jack
F.Type: Vignette
Summary: Actions speak louder than words, for words often fail when needed most...
Midnight Visits
Vignette
It's easier, you know. To say things in the dark.
She never could figure out why. Was it because you didn't actually have to look at them- didn't actually have to see the expressions on their face? Was it because their eyes were black in the darkness, and you couldn't watch the pain?
Somehow it turned out to be the opposite of everything she'd ever imagined. She thought she'd have enough strength to tell him in the daylight, out where her thoughts, her feelings were laid naked in the sun.
But she wound up on his porch anyway, at 3 AM, when all was said and done.
And when he opened that door and just looked at her, she couldn't see the weariness in his strained body; the silent, tired question in his eyes.
Because in the shadow of the full moon, the bars of pale light could only play at their feet and attempt to climb up to their faces.
In the night, the moonlight never made it.
And all she was able to see was the faint glitter from the reflecting light in his eyes. All she could hear was their breath seeping in and out of their battered bodies, the quiet chirp of crickets that waited in the grass.
But she could sense it. You didn't work together for as many years as they had and ignore the pain that poured out slowly from him, like water from a half dried well in the desert.
She could pretend that she didn't know it was there in the darkness.
They hadn't spoken yet- didn't speak for the longest time.
"Yes, Sam?"
He never called her Sam.
But that had always been in the day.
"If I told you…" the words failed, trailing silently out of her half open mouth as her own shadowed eyes looked where his should be.
"If I told you that Major Carter was still on base… that while she was there, I just wanted… wanted to say…"
She hadn't needed to worry about her voice reaching him.
After all, he had heard her when no one else could.
So silently, so very, very quietly, he stepped outside onto the wood of the porch.
Just as quietly, heart no longer beating like a caged animal inside of her, she watched him.
She could have sworn that those dark, black eyes hidden from the light of the moon were someone else's.
He could have sworn the same thing about hers.
All it took was a hand, gently, with that rough-edged tenderness of his, placed on her shoulder.
She didn't move.
"I know."
He knew.
When the light of their sun was shed once more on this side of Earth, Major Carter and Colonel O'Neill were once again back in their respective, dictated roles.
She greeted him with a 'sir' in the corridors; he yelled over his shoulder that if she wasn't getting more than 5 hours of sleep he'd pull her off the team. She smiled and answered with an easy comeback.
They never talked of what happened on that dark porch in the night.
After all, both the Major and the Colonel didn't know.
She did.
He did.
And the midnight visits- just their quiet assurance that they were still real- just the touch of his hand on her shoulder, and then she would walk silently back to her house…
…were all they had.
It was always easier in the darkness.
But she never could figure it out.
fini
