Author's Note: This is a companion piece to Set the Fire. While it's not necessary to read the other piece, I'd love it if you did.
She's shutting off the lights in her lab when he hands her a map. They stand in the darkness, just out of the sliver of light that cuts into the room from the corridor. With shuttered eyes, he asks her to give it back in four days. He doesn't hem or haw and he doesn't explain. Just feeling the way the folds are soft and fuzzy, she knows exactly what the map means without even looking at which part of the world it covers. She doesn't overthink the impulse to slide it between her clothes and skin.
On her last night with the map she spreads it out across her bed with careful hands and kneels next to it, knees pressed into the mattress, feet crossed at the toes. She fights back the bile rising in her throat when she sees how the layers of routes have, over the years, changed from awkward, hasty sketches to deliberate, efficient paths. She can imagine his able hands and serious eyes pouring over the map and wonders what Sara's Jack O'Neill might have looked like drawing those first tentative lines in graphite. She knows exactly how her Jack O'Neill would have looked dipping the end of dirty straw into a cut on the fleshy part of his palm to draw that last, measured trek more than three-hundred kilometers across punishing terrain.
The night before he goes she takes a scalding hot shower, scratches her too-long nails over her scalp, and fights the frustration down past her gag reflex. Later, they find themselves on the phone for too many minutes of not-long-enough. He doesn't talk to her. Not about things that really matter, anyway. He carefully avoids saying the word Iraq but he's not so careful about not mentioning hard-packed desert ground and the feel of sand abrading skin. He talks about everything that means exactly nothing and doesn't mention the map he'd handed her three days before. Because no matter what they are or aren't, this is one he's got to come home from and he might need a reminder why if he ends up in the shit.
He doesn't hold her to things she does during the dark-hour conversations they don't admit to having. He knows what it means when she can't hold up her end of the conversation and her breathing is reduced to sharp exhalations, his voice slicking around her ears like her finger slicks over her clit. There's no use pretending she's not doing it – especially if they're never going to talk about it. When she turns over, tries to catch her breath, it's the crinkle of old paper that reminds her of the map spread out across the bed next to her.
Somewhere along the way he's forgotten she has Top Secret SCI clearance. Between the map, the SAP chatter, Hammond and O'Neill speaking in hushed tones about the NID, and the way he studiously doesn't say certain words, she's parked on the shoulder of the access road that fronts the tarmac from which his off-the-books flight is taking off underneath a brilliant mid-day sun. He catches sight of her when he reaches the top of the small plane's stairs. She flashes her headlights at him when he pushes his sunglasses into place. He doesn't react, just boards the plane.
She pays attention and takes some leave in DC at the right time. She knows enough about post-mission Jack O'Neill and the right few of the people he knows that she ends across the street from his no-tell-motel in a questionable joint of her own that reminds her of a disappointing guy, cheap tequila, and grad school. She takes a chance and waits in the seedy little bar attached to his motel, just in case. While it's not exactly okay that she's in DC, it's a little okay that she's in the bar. She drinks club soda and fiddles with a book of matches. He doesn't show and she's not surprised, so she shoves the matches into her hip pocket and heads back across the street. In the shadows nestled against her building, she can sit and watch him go through the motions of an old habit she hates but understands as headlights cut across his face too seldom for her to catch enough of any one emotion.
He looks okay. Not alive, exactly, but okay. So she sits on the concrete with her back against the white-ish block walls, files her nails down to a length that can't be used as a makeshift screwdriver and tries to feel twenty for reasons beyond the way her ass falls asleep now with the extra years. He's inexplicably on Space-A taking the slow boat back to Colorado the next afternoon and there's a scheduled stop in Kansas where she had, not coincidentally, left her car on the same day he'd hopped from Iraq to Qatar to New York to DC.
A commercial flight puts her on the ground six hours before him so she finds somewhere clean to take a shower and a diner where she can trade a steady diet of saltines and diet coke for a BLT and a decent cup of coffee. She's sitting on the hood of her car when he comes out of the hangar taking a deep and inviting looking draw off a cigarette. She uses her key fob to flash her headlights at him and he spares less than half a glance for the transport plane before his strides are eating up the concrete between them. She hates how she likes the way that feels and realizes she feels like those pictures when soldiers' families welcome them home. She startles herself into remembering she's the one who does the coming home, too. They stare at each other over the top of her car and she thinks he might have forgotten what she looked like. Then he tosses his cigarettes into the center console and they're climbing inside like they do this every day. She's toying around with the idea of smoking at least one when she notices the gold metallic case of the lighter and the particular way Indian is scrawled across it and she smiles as her stomach does a slow flip-flop before landing somewhere around the clutch. She covers by shifting into first as he slides his seat all the way back.
He squints, even behind his sunglasses, so she bypasses the shiny grey interstate with its bustling suburban frontage of Targets and Starbucks and finds herself on the first road heading vaguely into the sun. He doesn't really exhale until the only visible color for miles is the mustard-yellow of wheat and the Kansas High Plains. She flips down the sun-visor and revels in the cool grey fabric when it cuts a line across the horizon.
She passes a couple of bars in a couple of towns before it really sinks in that what they need is a drink. She doesn't want anything flashy or filled with leather and tattoos. She finds a place that looks like it might have been something else once but now advertises Jack Daniels and Coors Light in half-lit neon signs. The man she thinks of as Jack looks reluctant to go in but Colonel O'Neill climbs out of the car. He follows her through the door but she's got to push him towards a questionable looking booth.
She leans against the bar and orders a whiskey neat and his with water and keeps an eye split between the dark look in his eyes and the shortwave radio in the corner he's murdering with sidelong glances. She listens to the liquor splash into chipped lowball glasses and catches a murmur of a numbers station. She schools the nauseated look from her face when she turns to him and can plainly see he's still pretty intent on killing something.
He hums and grunts along to the conversation she tries to make until she gives up and presses the outside of her left foot against the inside of his right foot and they drink in mostly silence. She says the wrong thing at one point and rather than letting it slip by with all the other things they don't say, he looks through her eyes and tells her he knew she came when she was on the phone with him the night before he left. She smirks because now she's not sure if he knows about all the other times or not and having a secret that might not be a secret leaves her feeling oddly titillated.
He shrugs into smugness like it's an old coat but it leaves him looking uncomfortable so she gives him a minute alone and goes to suck some cool Kansas/Colorado air into her overheated lungs. She doesn't have to wait long. It's dusk but he's already pulled his sunglasses down over his eyes when he walks out of the bar. He's stops in front of her, too close, and his toes flirt with hers. She studies his eyes like she can see them through the mirrored lenses before she realizes the uncertainty she's seeing is her own reflection. She brushes the backs of her fingers over his abs, he licks his lips and takes a deliberate step back. He ripples with tension, shifting from one foot to the other so she mentions that the car does one-thirty and tosses him the keys. The anticipation seems to drive the tension from his shoulders. She lets him slide into the driver's seat and start the car before she slips the glasses off his face and onto hers.
He's made it up over a hundred when he reaches for the radio. She likes the quiet, the sound of his breathing, the purr of the car in fifth and the way his chest rumbles sometimes when he forgets himself and starts thinking. So, she bats his hand away from the dial while contemplating tangling her fingers with his longer ones. She doesn't, just brushes her fingertips across his knuckles like it's an accident they both know it isn't. A mile later he's telling her about Iraq. Several Iraqs, really, though he can't seem tell the stories linearly. That's okay with her because some of the things he recollects make her stomach fight her whiskey and others make the soft, wet parts of her clench and tingle. Because she can't give into either feeling, she keeps her eyes on the road and stares into the rare passing headlights through his sunglasses.
Somewhere between the road-trip and Colorado Springs he stops at an all-night gas station and fills up her car while she goes to the bathroom. When she's done, she finds herself a parking lot away from him, bonded to the oil-stained asphalt by the way he leans against the car, deliberately casual while pumping gas like he belongs there. It's a terrifyingly tempting visual of something so impossibly normal that she looks away until the blur of passing traffic makes her eyes sting and the sudden bolt of desire pass through the soles of her feet. Through the haze of engine sounds she hears him clear his throat in that way he does when she floats off into her thoughts out in the field and her feet are moving towards him before her brain decides she's ready to sit next to him in the car again. He offers her the keys but she slides into the passenger's seat and kicks her shoes off to prop her feet up against the dash.
In his driveway he gives her a choice she doesn't need. He leaves the car idling and it would be easy for her to just drive away. But Sam Carter doesn't need to do easy. She turns off the car and follows him inside.
This part is harder than it should be. It always is. He'd kept the car in the jail-if-you're-pulled-over zone for the better part of the drive and the thrum of the engine keyed her up. She thinks he must know that's her typical reaction because he's not really lead-footed of his own accord. He's more apt to cruise with the windows down but, he told her once during one of those conversations they don't have, turning her on on purpose makes him feel alive.
They make small talk over glasses of lukewarm tap water in his kitchen and she notices the difference between the slick, cool tile and rough lines of grout under her bare feet. He stares at her toes while he talks around going back to work in a few days.
When it's time to turn the lights down, she settles down in his easy chair. The couch would make more sense, or the guest room bed, but the recliner smells like him and he tucks a cool quilt around her with more care than the task deserves. She listens to the sounds of water rushing through his pipes as he showers. When she can't sleep right away she scrolls through her phone until she finds and deletes his parents' home number until something else happens and he gives it to her for the third time. Several hours later, once the house has been silent for a while, she falls asleep.
She wakes up ten minutes before the sun comes up because she always does. In her car, the slight scent of cheap tobacco reminds her of his cigarettes. He won't want them, not now that he's home. He'll throw them out or toss them onto a bonfire. Even if he wants to, he won't smoke them. He's not that Jack O'Neill once the mission ends.
She turns the gold lighter over in her hands. It's for her, there's no doubt about that. He wouldn't have a need for a lighter anyway and she's the one with the hard-on for Indians. In the end she slips back into his house and leaves the cigarettes on the coffee table. She slides the lighter into her pocket and feels the pilfered book of matches. It's another thing she refuses to overthink as she tosses them on the table and doesn't worry about what she's telling him.
He already knows.
One last thing...
This was beta'd by a super-cool chick who keeps me on my toes. I was tired and she was hungry so if we missed anything, neither one of us are claiming responsibility.