Conscious Distraction
Some people find thoughtful task easier with some sort of conscious distraction, the idea being that while one part of your brain (that finds holding and remembering information a challenge). Your sub-conscious takes over the task at hand and performs it admirably better than you would without.
Samantha Carter was one of these people.
In her high school years, she found that she needed something while she was studying. She needed a distraction. Whether music or some cheesy day time TV show she found it easier to work with these things in the background, with things that took up her conscious allowing her to concentrate.
Women, it has been proved, are extremely able when it comes to doing two things at once.
Sam knew this, but it seemed she was an exceptional case, due to the fact that she found mixing a relatively simple task (listening to music) with quite a challenging one (saving the world) made the big thing seem easier and made her thoughts run faster.
And it was certainly no different now, 25 years later.
Her radio stood out prominently in her lab and on occasion she had actually caught her self humming or singing along.
But it had been a while since the radio had played, the short list of available stations with which it could pick up paled next to the distraction that sat across from her.
The distraction was around 6'2 with brown eyes, and graying hair.
The distraction was one Jack O'Neill.
Despite being scientifically minded Sam wasn't quite sure how the effect of such a distraction allowed her to work and neither did she want to know, placing this great mystery of the universe in her heart rather than her mind. Whenever he was near her, her heart beet faster and yet so did the thoughts in her mind. She had never thought so clearly until she had met this man.
This man split her in two entirely.
The task of watching him, even if it was just the occasional glance, took up her conscious entirely making her almost dizzy with excitement. And yet with his presence came a sense of utter peace and if it was this that allowed her to work so quickly.
Sam was glad she could handle these two things at the same time.
Though it wasn't as noticeable, it was this exact thing that helped her in the field, his presence making split second decisions simple and those crucial moments when it was up to her to save their asses or the world for that matter.
It had became a sort of regular thing between them, whenever there was some dire problem, whenever the world needed saving, whenever those ideas where fresh out; he'd just appear. Like some great magician, bringing her heart and mind alive, making them race simultaneously. Her mind seemed to work because her heart willed it to; in some twisted way she did this to prove herself to him.
She had entered the job with the idea that she had to prove her place as a woman in the air force to a room of 'this man's army' officers. And she did that. She just didn't expect that year on she would be proving herself for a different reason and for one person only (mainly).
She was proving herself for love.
For his love, more specifically.
She'd came running in guns blazing and ideas firing left, right and centre, coming up with crazy ideas that had the slimmest chances of working but she always seemed to pull it through, and after blowing up a sun it seem that every one thought she could do anything.
It was expected of her.
Somehow he knew.
He knew the exact moment she was about to crack, about to give up, about to toss what ever she could get her hands on that perpetually wrong and smug bastard McKay.
He was always there, and right on time.
There would be a slightly tentative moment when he walked into the room; fully aware of the pressure she was under, yet fully aware that he was the only one who could really help.
Of course she'd never told him, but there was something in his eyes, a shine of pride and the slight tug of a smug smile on the corners of his lips, that gives the barest hint that he knows he had something to do with you coming up with the idea in the nick of time.
Once in the room he'd settle himself just outside her personal space but close enough so that she would know that he was there; not that she couldn't tell that those bouncing footsteps down the hall, the slight sigh before he entered her lab and the sweet spicy scent of aftershave was his, all his.
Their eyes would meet for the briefest of moments, and yet an entire silent conversation would seem to pass between them. In that millisecond of glancing into each other's souls, he could tell how much she needed him and she could tell that he was there for her.
In truth this was all she needed.
But a short conversation would follow before an over worked light bulb sprung to life in her mind.
And that is how it is and how it has been in the last years of her life.
Each moment fueled by her feelings for him.
Jack O'Neill, her conscious distraction.