Disclaimer: I do not own any recognizable characters. No resemblance to any individuals, alive or dead, intended. I make no money from this work of fiction. Yadda, yadda, yadda…
AN: I know, I know, I should be working on Under the Streetlights, but dude, this one just wouldn't leave me alone.
Fragile Moments is going to be a series of various excerpts of varying lengths and persuasions from the story Basics, one I've been writing on for a while. It stars our beloved Mini Jack -- the Jack O'Neill clone the writers forgot. I'm not positing any of Basics until Streetlights is finished (and that will be finished!).
However, as I write Basics, I keep coming across moments that don't necessarily fit in with the flow of the story but I can't just throw them away. So I'll put them here.
Spoilers specifically for the SG1 episode "Fragile Balance," although honestly, anything is game. Remember, Jon is Jack's teenaged clone.
Here we go…
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Unforgettable
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It started with a whiff of her perfume.
He stopped in the middle of the grocery store isle, shelves full of bread on one side and a refrigerated case full of cheese on the other, and inhaled. Jon remembered reading somewhere about how scent is the sense most tied to the recollection of memories, and right then, right there -- he believed it.
Romance, it was called. Jack had bought bottles of it for Sara for birthdays and for Christmas. It was her scent. She never went a day without it.
That soft lingering scent screamed Sara.
Jack had loved the traces of fragrance left on Sara at the end of a long day. Late in the evening as they crawled into bed together, he would bury himself in her while tucking his face into her neck, pressing his lips against her skin as he moved, reveling in the delicate scent revealed by her body, only detectable by such intimacy.
She'd shudder against Jack and he'd lose himself in her, surrounded by the heady scent of sex and of Romance. His shirt would still smell like her on those nights he was pulled from bed by the sound of a ringing phone. He'd sit on the plane in the early morning hours, knowing Sara was still sleeping peacefully, and he'd nod off himself, comforted by the smell of her perfume on his clothing.
Standing there in the middle of the grocery store, Jon remembered it all, and hated himself for it.
Tossing the loaf of bread into the basket, he disentangled his fingers from the plastic wrapping he'd grabbed so very tightly, and simultaneously forced himself to let go of the sticky-sweet memories.
They didn't belong to him anymore, he reasoned. Jack owned those memories; Jon was the lanky teenager, the high school student. He'd never had a family, he'd never lost a son.
He had certainly never come while screaming Sara's name. So it was of course while she was thusly on his mind that he rounded a corner and nearly bumped into the woman herself.
"Sara."
Her name was barely more than a breath on his tongue, but she looked up into his face at it, eyebrows momentarily knitting together in that way that says, "Don't I know you?"
Her head cocked to the side and her lips parted.
Jon ducked his head, lengthened his stride, and moved to walk past. He heard her call out.
"Wait!"
With her scent in his nose, her spirit in his soul, his steps ground to a halt and he found himself turning to face Sara. When his mind caught up to his body and realized what he'd done, Jon forced his head to tilt to the side and an insolently uttered word to cross his lips. "Yeah?"
He forced his body into the practiced adolescent nonchalant form. Tossed up his hands in front of him as if to say, "What?" while he blinked in feigned impatience.
All the while he was drinking her in.
Sara, the woman with whom Jack had spent a decade … she'd changed little. Her hair was longer. A little darker. But the same eyes stared at Jon out of the same face, and it took everything he had not to murmur a careless, "Hi, how've you been?"
Her eyes searched his, and he could see her questioning the instant recognition, looking for something to tell her why Jon looked so familiar. All the while an tinny speaker in the ceiling with a sense of irony crooned Unforgettable by Nat King Cole.
Jon took a deep breath, preparing himself to talk her out of whatever association to which she came, when he realized she'd already done the job for him. She began to shake her head, at first almost imperceptibly, then stronger, as if she was insisting to herself she didn't know Jon.
"I'm sorry," came the words from her still-parted lips. "I thought…"
Jon swallowed and murmured, "S'okay." He tore his eyes away from Sara, away from this woman he couldn't know.
He turned; he walked away.
As he reached the end of the isle, as he was rounding the corner, he heard her call out a broken apology. "I'm sorry … it's just, he would have been your age."
That's when Jon realized she hadn't been thinking of Jack at all. He dropped the basket and it stayed where it lay, bread rolling out onto the floor in its plastic wrapper while Jon walked out of the store.
The flatness of the black asphalt suited his mood, and Jon scuffed his feet as he walked impassively toward the car.
Unlocking the door, he flopped into the front seat and pulled the rear-view mirror toward himself. He examined the familiar likeness he'd been studiously ignoring for the past year, and there it was. The same brown gaze Jack had happily seen reflected back at him in the eyes of his son -- it was there on his own goddamn face.
Jon's open palm hit the steering wheel once, and then again, but the physical pain wasn't enough to distract him and so the tears began to fall.
Jon hadn't lost a son or a wife.
Instead, he'd lost damn near everything.
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You may want to hit the alert button on this one if you like Mini Jack. There will be more clone "moments," though they won't necessarily be continuations of each other.
Let me know what you think. Reviews are greatly appreciated.
Also, for those of you who know I only write to music, this fic's song list: Tremble for My Beloved by Collective Soul; You, Me and the Bourgeoisie by The Submarines; and (of course) Unforgettable by Nat King Cole.
See you again soon.
