Roses in December
Pairing: Sam/Jack
Warnings/spoilers: None
A/N: A hug and a thank you to mrspollifax for her beta work
"God gave us memories that we might have roses in December." -John M. Barrie
That first Christmas after the accident, Santa brought Samantha Carter a Barbie Deluxe Dream Refrigerator. It was a white side-by-side filled with 30 or 40 pieces of plastic molded into shapes like a milk carton, Pepsi, a dozen eggs, and a bag of frozen peas. A fully stocked fridge and freezer was an absolute necessity for Barbie, because she needed to feed all the people that came to her pool parties.
It was not the toy most often played with, but improbably it made a lasting impression. Even now as an adult, walking through a busy shopping mall a few days before Christmas, the Barbie display in the store window retained the power to catch Sam's attention. She remembered how she had to put the sticker labels on the plastic pieces all by herself and that many of them ended up crooked and wrinkled.
"You OK?"
Sam jumped, startled to realize she'd all but forgotten she wasn't alone. This was the first time that she and Jack were giving gifts together as a couple. Sam was trying not to analyze it too much.
"I'm fine," she replied, pulling her eyes from the display and continuing on their way toward Macy's.
"A sweater for Cassie?" he questioned for the umpteenth time. "But she really wants a new cell phone."
"She doesn't need a new cell phone."
Something like 'party pooper' was mumbled in her direction but she ignored it. Jack's games were not making this easier; all she wanted to do was get finished and get home. The crowds around her were making her feel as if she were stuck in an overloaded elevator that wasn't moving.
Inside the department store, Sam picked out perfume for Vala, and Jack insisted on the blue sweater for Cassandra, if a sweater it must be. The check-out line wound its way around racks of stocking stuffers.
"Who would want a 21-piece socket wrench set in their stocking?" Jack asked as he picked up a box.
Sam was sure her eyebrow said all she needed to say. He glanced at her, then down at the picture on the box, and set it back on the shelf.
"How many?" he asked after a few minutes passed and they'd rounded another turn, still miles from the register.
"57." She was rather impressed with his lack of outward response, but his eyes gave him away, dancing with all the ways he still couldn't believe she was with him. She shrugged. "I felt that owning the 99-piece set was a bit excessive."
"Obviously."
Jack drove and she watched as scenery passed by, trees coated in snow and ice, frozen but managing to live through it. The route took them by strip malls and gas stations and all the things she'd never seen on other planets, all the things that uniquely belonged to Earth. She couldn't even begin to imagine what the Rikarians would make of laundromats, being that they walked around naked day and night.
"Carter?"
She should have done a better job shaking off her mood before Jack caught on. But the memories of childhood and the inevitable reflection on the current state of her life were both too close to the surface tonight for her protective burial system to work. Christmas was never a holiday that affected her before, one way or the other, so it was odd that this year she seemed to be sinking fast.
"Sorry," she said. "I'm a million miles off tonight."
"You sure there's nothing wrong?"
"Just thinking too much." She flashed him a half-smile, knowing that he'd take it as an opening and run with it. To her surprise he didn't. Instead, he reached over and squeezed her hand.
Lights came alive inside and outside the neighbor's houses now that dusk was falling. Through the windows, Sam could see families gathering around dinner tables after parents shouted to kids to get off the phone or computer or Playstation and come to the table.
There wasn't a lot of that in the Carter household by the time she was a teenager. Jacob had given up by then, allowing her far more freedom than was probably wise. Sam was smart enough to take advantage of the opportunity, and there were boys that did the same. Boys who, at the time, Sam thought were appealing because they were 'emotionally open.' As the years passed, she'd come to realize they were just needy.
She wondered if the choice to go into the military was in part due to some vague premonition of where the lack of rules in her life might lead her. Was she that profound on some unconscious level at the age of 17? Because she wasn't smart enough at the time to recognize that she always fell for boys that ultimately would have expected her to maintain a house with a full refrigerator. Possibly have dinner on the table, too.
"We're not getting Nonna's," Jack grouched as he dumped shopping bags on the couch. "Not after the pickle incident last time."
Sam blinked, trying to remember exactly what the 'pickle incident' was. And not only that, but what could Jack have possibly ordered from an Italian place that involved pickles? With him it was the little things, and she'd learned years ago which ones to simply let go of.
He opened the drawer in the kitchen next to the phone. "How about pizza? I'll even give in on the green peppers."
"Pizza sounds good."
"Hey," Jack came up behind her in the bedroom where she'd gone in search of the scissors and tape in her desk and the wrapping paper under the bed.
His hand moved her hair aside; Sam had been growing it out. Until a few days ago, she had forgotten that her mother always wore her hair long, so that it could be pulled up in a ponytail while she baked.
"Hi," Sam breathed out when Jack placed a kiss on her neck.
"Relax." He moved his hands slowly, in soothing gestures she'd begun to know well. It was something he never did before. Before there was this.
"Pizza will be here soon?"
"Mm," his kisses were closer to her earlobe now. "But there's time for me to put some 'Merry' in your Christmas."
Sam snorted a laugh. There was really nothing else to do with this man, this one she never picked and who was unlike anything she ever imagined.
It was expectation that she'd always struggled with, and if he expected sex right now she vaguely wondered if she'd give in. Not if, but why. Why, of all the men she'd known in her life, was he the one that could so easily convince her to go with him on nothing but faith?
She had been on a search for faith ever since the accident happened. In fact, she'd been returning from mass at the Academy chapel on Christmas Day when her father attempted to reach out to her again. He was standing there that December morning of her senior year in his uniform and long trench coat, on the sidewalk outside the building that housed her lab. Her first lab, which was not much bigger than a broom closet, but she'd never forget her first.
Later that same night, Sam sat through an uncomfortable dinner with her father at some fancy restaurant. She'd hardly touched her meal, and the leftovers from it turned green in the back of the refrigerator rather than having to face them again.
"I miss my dad." It slipped out before Sam realized what she'd just said, and Jack's hands paused for a moment.
"I miss him too," he said, even though it wasn't much more than a whisper, but it made her take a deep breath.
And she let go.
The wind picked up outside, but almost as if it were a dance, the furnace clicked on too. Setting the balance of cold and heat, of safe and sound.
His hands found the hem of her shirt but went no further than a patch of skin just above the waistband of her jeans, and despite her earlier musings that he might go further, he did not. He just held her for a moment, even though neither of them were the cuddling type. After a final, brief peck on her cheek he stepped back. "C'mon."
The remains of the pizza and a half-finished bottle of wine sat on the coffee table in front of them. Before Sam realized what she was doing, she was mentally counting up the number of Christmases she'd spent at home in the last two dozen or so years. Between school, the Gulf, and being off-world there hadn't been many where she'd done nothing much. Nothing more important than watch 'It's a Wonderful Life' on the local PBS station.
There was that one in recent years, when her father happened to be on Earth for some talks that went longer than expected, and suddenly, the holidays were upon them. Sam invited him over to her house, and when he discovered that she had no tree, he insisted. So, at 11 o'clock at night on Christmas Eve, she found herself in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart, blowing on her hands to keep them warm while her father scrutinized over the sad handful of picked-over trees that were left. Then he had the nerve to bargain with the guy selling them, which would have been slightly less insane if her father actually had any Earth money on him and didn't have to turn to Sam to pay for it in the end.
Selmak found the entire experience "endearing."
"I've never understood the moon part." Jack's comment seemed to come out of nowhere.
"What?" Oh, right. She'd forgotten about the movie.
He glanced at her. "When George promises Mary the moon. He says he'll pull it down out of the sky with a lasso for her. That's the best thing the guy can come up with to win over a lady?"
"First, there's the impracticality of using a lasso to do it, and unless he wants the Earth's gravitational…" But it died on her lips. He was smirking at her. "I'm agreeing with you, I hope you realize."
"You don't want the moon, Carter?"
"No." After a second she added, "But a moon base might be nice."
Jack's smirk grew a little wider. He reached up and ran fingers through her hair in a lazy attempt to encourage her to lean in against his side.
He'd brought it up two nights ago, in bed of all places, and he'd asked in that "do you think maybe someday you might consider, not that I care one way or the other, I'm just doing the nice thing by asking, and anyway, it doesn't really matter" kind of way that didn't fool her at all. He must have been thinking about it for a while.
She gave him some non-committal grunt that she hoped came across as if she were two deep breaths away from sound sleep. The least he could do was give her time to think about it for a while also. All she had come up with since was what kind of mother has frozen peas in the freezer but nothing else?
"She got us a new Christmas ornament every year to hang on the tree."
"Huh?" Jack asked.
Sam hadn't realized she'd said it out loud. "I… never mind."
Jack rolled on to his back. He asked, "Carter?"
"My mother." Sam shook her head, regretting this conversation already. "She always got Mark and me a new ornament every year, to hang on the tree on Christmas Eve. I still have all 12 of them."
But no more.
She forged ahead, "This baby thing…" and then lost momentum suddenly.
Sam had tried and failed many times, striving to be that Suzie Homemaker that her mother was; she'd learned she couldn't be that. But embracing the complete opposite, as she had all these many years, it had come with a nagging little feeling that something was still missing, that it wasn't quite right either. Could there be a middle ground? Something messy and complicated and a little bit of both extremes meeting, miraculously, somehow in the middle?
"It could be the craziest thing we've ever done."
"Crazier than flying a Stargate on top of a plane?" It was his old trick, used many times to dissuade her from panicking. To remind her in a moment of crisis that they'd performed miracles in the past, so they surely could again. "Crazier than self-destructing The Jack O'Neill to kill some space bugs?"
He particularly liked bringing that one up as much as possible.
"Carter, I think you are seriously overestimating the dirty diaper thing. It's not that smelly."
"Can you be serious for one moment?"
"I am serious. Just breathe through your mouth."
"Jack." She rolled onto her side. The blinds weren't turned all the way closed, and light from the neighbor's front porch slipped in between the slats across his features in a pattern.
"And anyway, I told you it was no big deal. Just a thought, that's all, I didn't—"
She interrupted, "Yes."
"Yes?"
She replied dryly, "I'm not saying it twice."
He kissed her, a serious kind of kiss that wasn't about building heat.
She wondered, vaguely, where the memory of this Christmas would fall in her lifetime of Christmases. It was possibly an insane idea, and they might find that they weren't even able to have children, they ought to give adoption a serious consideration, and somewhere along the line she should have a more in-depth conversation with him about Charlie than they ever had before. It could all be a mistake.
"Hey, Sam."
She drew in breath as his lips left hers, his hands traveled up her sides. "Yeah." She waited for some flippant comment about getting started tonight, or at least doing some serious practice.
"I think we should go out tomorrow and buy an ornament."
Or maybe this was going to be the start of something wonderful. Something that they could build on, cherish. She had an empty fridge and a single bag of peas in the freezer, but it was OK. At least she was healing and they'd get there.