A/N: When I use "SJSJSJSJS", it's usually meant to indicate a significant jump in time (e.g. Weeks/months) with no real transition.
SJSJSJSJSJS
There's a thick fog settling over her, permeating into her pores and weighing dully on her eyes.
Heavy pennies on a dead man's eyes.
Obscured faces drop shadows in her closed vision, infused in nacreous miasmas and filtering away at the glare of approaching white spots.
She wonders, vaguely, where the rest of her body went. But she can't focus on the question, and instead resigns herself to the slow seep and saturation of fog.
Sometimes she can see the shadows all around her, floating beneath her closed eyelids.
She sees his eyes, sometimes. The Colonels. And the Shadow man's. Some days, most days, they're interchangeable.
They're dark, sometimes black. Sometimes with the unblinking eightfold eyes of a spider. Piercing like thin tunnels of light through smoke.
She shies away from them, instinctively, focusing instead of the dark peripheries around her.
Awareness descends slowly
Voices wash over her. Familiar voices. Familiar territory.
They eventually drown away, and for a long while all she can hear is the sharp beeping of monitors.
Her left hand feels like wildfire.
Her right hand feels heavy... and oddly calloused.
Glaring artificial lights pierce through her closed eyelids.
Figures appear, shift, and she's left in the grey wake of their absences. Her frustration begins to mount as she flood of uncertainty pervades her mind.
A thought forms, and tenaciously she clings to it. But the ensuing headache grips her billion dollar brain and she's forced to release it, letting the lethargy dull her fears as whatever idea had formed, slips away without the linger of regret.
The fog is thick.
The voices come back. Leave again.
A bleary sort of life.
The words are disembodied, but occasionally they break through. The energy that they bear touches every nerve and synapse in her body, encouraging her. Disassembling her. But the heavy weight of sleep is powerful, far more powerful than the Shadow man ever was. The sluggish stupor tosses cables across her limbs, meant to restrain, and she's far too tired to resist. It feels like fibrous filters are placed over her ears, dulling the pitch and lowering the words into near incomprehensibility.
She hears them talking about that one mission on PX7-889, so long ago. That desert planet.
She tries to catch what they say, but a heat erupts from the tip of her toes and blazes into her body. The flames lick at her skin, coiling into her writhing figure. She can't possibly know that sweat has flushed across her skin as a fever rages in her body; all she knows is that the shadow man is burning. The fire glows brighter as the darkness ebbs away.
Erected upon a crucifix of fire.
No one will ever know of his smoldering remains.
"I didn't know." He repeats over and over. "I didn't know."
"It wasn't your fault, Jack." His reply was swiftly met with a low snarl.
"I should have known, Daniel. I wasn't there for her. It's my job to know."
"But you were there, don't you get it? We would have found her dead on that motel floor if you hadn't gotten to her first."
"I had a three goddamn months to get to her."
"We can't contain it, Sir. Before the breakdown I suspected it was psychological, or even a chemical imbalance like Paranoid Schizophrenia. But the MRI reveals a shocking increase of blood flow to the brain, indicating an unusually high amount of neurological activity. Moreover the blood tests show a worrisome drop in white blood cells, it's eating away at her immune system. The bullet wound somehow acted as an instigator, as though the bacteria replicated by the trillions and simultaneously attacked each cell in her body. Simply put, her body is shutting down. Her organs are on the verge of failing altogether. I'm estimating that within a month she'll be put on dialysis."
"I need to hear a solution, Doctor. What can we do?"
"It's a virus unlike any I've ever seen. Obviously Sam's protein marker from Jolinar hasn't been able to deflect it. It's going to take far more than a few drips of antibiotics. We need to send a Hazmat team back to PX7-889 to conduct a full-scale investigation, and to see whether or not they can identify the species at fault and possibly extract its antibodies. But honestly, Sir, the microorganism could have sprung from anywhere."
"I suspected as much. SG-1 and SG-8 are prepping up as we speak. Is there anything else I can do?"
"Sir, I know so little about this disease. I have no idea how it's even transmitted, no clue how she could have contracted it. So far it seems that Sam is the only carrier, but I don't want to take any chances. We should at least notify the CDC that an experimental virus has possibly been exposed to the public. We need to find out about everyone she has come into contact with these past 5 weeks so that we can quarantine them if they display symptoms. It doesn't seem to be an airborne transmission; otherwise all of SG1 would show the same results. I suspect it's contained, but we should still keep tabs on all of her acquaintances, any possible sexual partners, I understand she belongs to a gym..."
"I see. Well keep me posted, Doctor. And for goodness sakes don't let her die on us."
"Sir, with all due respect, it's no longer up to me."
Her mental stupor makes her think of a Pacific tide. Drowning her at most intervals, but occasionally abating, cruelly.
Some unknown force inside gnaws between every cell, vibrating the particles to waken them from their slumber. It's a difficult task, as everything is dulled down by forced infrequency, but once energy begins momentum is formed.
And momentum is something she is very familiar with.
Bits and pieces of the conversation find their way into her closed eyes. Even in her unconscious state she grimly understands that she'll be getting a hell of lot less Christmas cards this year.
So the shadow man was just an off-world virus. Who would've figured?
She suspects it's a positive sign that she's berating herself in her head.
Now to work on getting those pesky eyelids open...
There is a physical body, and a consciousness, but the thread in between has been severed.
Noises rise, and noises abate, and whirlwinds drown you. Or suffocates you.
She resists the urge to gasp for breath.
When she was a child she had a dream that she was Gretel, from that freaky Grimm's story. She was walking through the woods eating candy when she came upon the witch. It was then, with her legs turned to lead and the witch ambling towards her that she realized 'I'm sleeping. This is a dream. I need to wake up.' But she couldn't wake up, no matter how hard she told herself to. The witch gobbled her up despite her rational reasoning that 'this wasn't real.'
Three weeks of knowing she was in a dream state. Three weeks of being trapped inside of her body.
She knows it's a particularly bad year when she is forced to relieve the similar experience of not only Jolinar, but the entity as well.
Daylight is awfully appealing. Even that bright-ass sun on that hot-ass desert planet she hated so much is awfully appealing.
Being in a coma is awfully dull.
Just plain ol' awful.
She can't quite believe that she's mentally fidgeting. She'd do the Colonel proud.
Flash of white, glimmer of fluorescent lights. Tears spring at the sudden brightness.
She feels her coma pulse through her body one last time before completely abating, the shadows rejoining their brethren.
Yes!
The first thing she notices is that the shadow is no longer in the corner of her eye.
No longer taunting her, curbing her vision like a goddamn horse blinder.
The second thing she notices is the tooth fuzz in her mouth. 'Bastards', she thinks affectionately, 'don't even have the courtesy to brush a girls teeth.'
The third thing she notices is the weight pressing down on her right side. The guardrail is carefully positioned away, she sees, and his BDU's desperately need some ironing. She looks at his cowlick pointed upwards, his head smashed beside her thigh, fingers curled like a child. She wonders if she should wake him, before someone walks in, only to realize that she can't do much beyond blinking.
She can hardly hold on to a single thought. The antiseptic coated air around her ebbs and attempts to swallow her whole and sink her back into murky depths. But a delicate thread of images and memories surfaces through the riptide, and she follows it into consciousness.
But the very second after she has formulated and devised an ingenious plan to wake him via her heart monitor he jolts upwards, eyes wide and astonished. She can't take her eyes off the red imprints of rumpled sheets that stand out against his craggy face.
Jonah. She remembers. The Colonel is Jonah, she is Thera. She can't quite believe the shadow man almost stole that from her.
"Hi." He states simply, his face resuming into his carefully composed nonchalance.
It takes her the space of three seconds to understand that she has a tube jammed down her throat.
'You can smile, Sam', she commands herself, 'c'mon zygomaticus, just a little.'
She thinks she makes more of a grimace than a smile, but the responding grin erases her doubt. Message: over and out.
It's only after five minutes of hacking out the plastic taste of the breathing tube that she is finally able to speak to him. Sure there are throngs of visitors standing outside of the curtain (and she has to remember to thank Janet, as she spits week-old phlegm into a cup, for providing them with this particular performance) and she could at least wait until after the morphine wears off so she could remember it. It's painful and her throat is hoarse and raw but she has to say it before she falls back into a hazy sleep.
"Sir, I am so sorry for kicking you in the balls."
With that said, she gratefully passes out, missing out on her CO's nervous laugh and awkward glance around the room full of suddenly rapt faces.
She wakes up gasping for air, eyes frantically flicking across the infirmary in dreaded anticipation. Fixed shadows elongate from fixed objects, and it feels like her heart skips a beat after a long freeze when she realizes the shadow man isn't watching over her.
They'll tell her later that the chamber she had entered on PX7-889 was a Goa'uld laboratory, which Daniel had mistaken for a native temple. Apparently she had breathed in some remnants of a century-old experiment and it took 10 virologists a whole week to find the antidote.
Other than her accidental ingestion of the virus, it wasn't in the slightest bit contagious. She wished that particular bit of information had been discovered before the US Air Force knocked on the doors of everyone she had talked to in the five weeks that she was a carrier.
Yep, the thought crosses her mind yet again, she'd be surprised if she got even one Christmas card this year.
She doesn't quite understand why all of a sudden the Colonel avoids looking at her. He visits her enough, as though double checking her physical status, before slipping back out through the myriads of curtains. She can't quite understand why whenever their eyes meet, he looks as though his stomach has dropped out and suddenly filled with the desire to escape.
He blames her, she figures.
She should have been more alert on that desert planet. She should have put double doses of concealer on those hickeys. She should have let him assume control that awful day in the motel room.
She should have trusted him enough to tell him.
She failed him.
"How you feeling, Sam?" Daniel ventures cautiously.
He puts out a sympathetic hand, which she immediately grabs and yanks him towards her, pulling him in for a tight hug.
He buries his face into her neck, an errant thumb sliding across the bandage around her wrist, and she knows she's forgiven.
She wriggles her outstretched hand. Who needs their pinkie anyway?
At least it was only the tip.
Damn.
She thinks she's just more embarrassed that she fainted from shooting herself in the pinkie than the actual loss. The last time she fainted it was a purposeful diversion technique to escape from that psycho warlord on P4X-298.
But still. Fainted. And in front of the Colonel too.
Damn.
She stares at her reflection in the infirmary bathroom, fingering the tips of her cropped hair. She sighs, knowing she'll have to suffer through another bout of the pixie cut.
She smiles into the mirror.
'But you're alive.'
Teal'c sits with her every second hour. Stealthily slipping past Janet's watchful eyes. It's her favorite part of the day, watching the overgrown alien sneak about like an errant schoolboy, merely to give her the company she so craves. It's a side of him she rarely has the honor to witness, and she sorely regrets not having a video camera to secretly film him with. He slips her blue Jell-O and blue popsicles, stuffing theoretical dissertations behind her pillow at the first opportunity.
He sits with her and laments to her in his expressionless voice about his disappointment with Star Wars: Attack of the Clones. But when he retells the plot, word for word, he squeezes her hand during the exciting bits.
Yea, he was always her favorite.
When she was a child, her father took them to the park so they could play with the children of his old war buddy, Colonel George Hammond. Instead of playing on the swings, she lay in a bed of sand, still wrapped up in her winter-coat and screwed up her eyes, blocking out her sight so she could hear the noises all around them. She filtered out the laughter and the creaks of the swing chains so she could focus on the two-toned whistle of a far off bird.
"It's a chickadee." A deep voice mentioned. "Black-capped."
Her eyes shot open, taking in the figure of the large man, ridiculously sitting cross-legged beside her on the snow-speckled sand.
"That's how you know spring is coming. My father told me that. Even if there's snow all around, if you hear that whistle, you know spring is on its way."
She studiously scrutinized the dead trees, the grey clay sky, the drifting snow dunes, before settling on a bright green weed sticking out of the white dust. She looked up at him, offering him a brilliant smile.
Years later, as she lies on a different kind of bed, delightedly watching the nurses roll away the monitors and crash carts, General George Hammond makes his way to her side. He smiles down on her fondly.
"Guess what I heard this morning."
Like he had to ask.
"Was it by chance a black-capped chickadee?" She replies, softly.
He covers her hand with his large, freckled one.
"And it's not even winter yet. Guess they must be whistling for you."
She knows it's a beautiful day. Daniel told her so.
Besides, it has to be beautiful outside. She feels it in her bones, which, by the way, are all accounted for.
She slips into the rose-colored sweater he had picked up for her, her jeans far too baggy to put on. The green BDU pants will have to do. She's not supposed to be discharged for a few more hours, but there's no harm in preparation. She quickly sits back down on the bed, in case Janet should suddenly appear. She folds one ankle under her thigh as she stares at the grey wall. Almost. She smoothes down the comfortable cotton wrinkles, wincing as her hands slide past sharp ribs. She lost more weight than she's comfortable admitting.
"Sam."
She turns her head, smiling warmly as Janet enters the room, the surety of her grin slipping at the confusion on her friends face.
Janet's eyebrows are crossed together. "Why are you dressed up in civvies?"
Her smile freezes. Falters.
"My name's on the discharge board."
Something in the doctor's face tightens, a clench of muscle beside her left eye that is somehow inextricably linked to the pull and lock of her jawbone. A vague sense of apprehension floats between their visions, and Janet reluctantly puts one foot in front of the other, trying to build basic sentence structures.
"I, I forgot to erase it."
She scrunches her eyebrows together, catching her breath. She clutches tightly at her rose sweater; today was going to be beautiful.
She swivels her whole body forward on the bed. "Oh no, Janet. You told me a week ago I'd be ready to leave. You said so yourself, I'm cured. I'm leaving this place today, you said, come hell or high water."
Janet winces. "You're right. I did tell you that. But that was before the last lab analysis came in. I wanted to triple check it to be sure it wasn't a side effect of the virus."
Cold fear clamps down on her heart. But she had felt him burn away.
"Sam." She places a gentle hand on her knee. "Sam you're pregnant."
Something in her eye twitches, clicks, and for a minute she sits there wondering if she heard right. Janet stares her down, conveying to her the utmost seriousness of her words.
She laughs, nervously, bullshit. "That's impossible, Janet. You know that as well as I do. I had my shot last month and every month previous. You told me..."
The doctor sighs, interrupting her. "And I also told you that the only 100% effective birth control is abstinence." She lifted a hand at her friend's instinctive snort. "Sam, even though I believe without a shadow of a doubt that you're entirely free of the Goa'uld virus, I can't positively confirm or determine every effect it had on your body chemistry. In fact, we knew that the birth control could potentially lose its effectiveness since Jolinar left her protein marker in you. We've been prepared for this possibility."
Prepared.
As her heart stutters to a close, she can't help but think that nothing could have prepared her for this.
The ultrasound is done in silence. At first Janet attempts to assuage Sam's tension while circling the gel on her stomach, but the coiled muscles below refuse to unclench. As the grey-blue glare of the monitor washes across the dark room, the woman lying flat on her back turns her head and faces some indecipherable clipboard.
Finally, Janet whispers, cautious of the strained rigidity of the room.
"It's there, Sam. It's not much, if you want to take a look. It's the dark spot to the left. It looks like a shadow in your uterus."
But she can't look; all she can register is the shadow and her throat as it pulsates with the vinegary bite of bile.
She feels his eyes on her. Shadow man's? A day later. Her rose sweater crumpled and wrinkled from dried gel and from being slept in. She's sitting in the same position as the day previous- deja vue. Her head quickly snaps to the open curtain, her large smile drifting away at the coldness in his eyes. He's leaning against the wall, hands jammed into pockets.
"Sir. Hi."
He stares at her for a moment, considering her, before offering a strained smile. He walks closer towards her, offhandedly jerking the curtain shut.
"Janet give you the all clear?"
She nods, slowly and stiffly. "She wanted to run one more test."
He sucks in a cheek, lips thinning in that awkward facial expression of his.
"So you heard the news, huh?"
She scrunches her fingers in the fabric, feeling something boil deep down in her esophagus.
"Apparently, so have you."
He has the decency to give her face a moment of respite as he stares at the floor.
"Yea, well, one of the nurses spilled it." He chuckles mirthlessly. "Thought she was joking at first."
She doesn't think she can bear the swell and taut strain of the tension between them. Just say it. Just tell me what I am and leave me be.
Her eyes trail down as he fiddles with his thumbnail,
"So did I." She admitted. His head snaps up.
"So you really didn't know?"
Something inside her hardens and congeals.
"Can't say I was too focused at counting down the calendar at the time." She stares hard at him.
His faces stills and cements, for a moment, and she wonders if it's out of anger or embarrassment.
"Sir." She finishes lamely.
He sucks in his other cheek, his Adam's apple bobbing against the minute stubble on his neck, before exhaling a tightly controlled breath. "So you're all packed?"
She shrugs, didn't have much to begin with.
He keeps glancing from her face to the guardrail of the bed anxiously, nervously. She wonders if that was the question he really wanted to ask. How could you do this? What are you going to do? More likely- How do you feel? But that question is too much, even for him.
She can't take it anymore.
"Sir, please." Just spit it out.
He awkwardly runs a hand through his already mussed hair.
"We, uh, I need, Janet. Janet needs to know who the father is. She doesn't think the virus is... sexually transmitted, but she'd like to run some tests just to be safe."
She thinks she should laugh. This is just one giant fucking comedy where she's been pushed from the front row into center stage. She looks up at the Colonel, with his tight, controlled face and hard black eyes. She drops her head as though to indicate she understands.
He straightens, wiping every trace of expression from his face as he gives a cursory nod, the coldness filtering back into his eyes.
"So, you know, when you have the chance... We'll set up an appointment for him."
He clenches his jaw as she turns away from him, staring at the wall. It's only when she hears his forced whistle drown away that she realizes he's gone.
And up and out the window goes shrieking out that beautiful day.
Both Daniel and Teal'c drive her home, the Colonel supplying some unremarkable excuse to be absent. She leans her forehead against the cold sheen of the window, watching as solid forms dissolve into parallel lines that race across her vision.
She begs off when they try to stay and order pizza, feigning tiredness. When she closes the door, she realizes that she hasn't been home in months.
The house feels cold and empty, almost resentful at having been untended for so long.
With a racing heart she stands still, resisting the old urge to go into the kitchen and find a knife.
Somebody was in here, she notes dispassionately, cleaning up the glass shards and replacing all the light bulbs.
But not the shadow man.
Never the shadow man.
The Colonel is the only one with a spare key to her house, and in that moment, as she envisions him stretching upwards and screwing in the bulbs, sweeping up the glass, she is overcome with sheer mortification.
Anybody, anybody but him.
It's so damn dark in here.
There's a swell in the ceiling, a rotund mound of cracked paint and waterlogged plaster. Knowing what she knows of James Mackenzie, the setting doesn't exactly jive with his clinical personality. She remembers him from before, from last time. When he trapped her in her mind to force her to seek out Daniel. It's been a while though, judging by the thinness of his hair. Most of her subsequent psych evaluations have been performed by complacent, unseasoned graduates from the Academy, and she found herself quickly rebuilding old walls at the sight of his intense stare.
His voice is low and gravelly, and the narration reminds her of old anti-drug videos that she was forced to watch in high school. And kids, only street vagrants and promiscuous women smoke marijuana... a 50's style host with a son in a tie and cufflinks, a wife with a bouffant hairdo and a daughter with a shotgun barrel bra.
His squinty eyes narrow, suspicious of her long silence as he contemplates her. He leans back in his green leather chair, and she half suspects he'll lift a pipe to his lips. But instead, sighing, he repeats his question.
"What were some of the things this... shadow man... said to you?"
She stares off at a point past his shoulder. How could she explain to him that it wasn't so much words spoken, sentences and threats clearly constructed and formed and aimed into her ear. How could he possible understand that it wasn't so much a voice, though she had created one, and it wasn't so much a physical form, as she had first seen him, as it was the intimation of his energy crawling in the spaces and matter between her cells. How his laughs drifted on the round tubes of her blood cells and taunted his way down the conical edges of her veins...
As words form in her mouth, he clears his throat pointedly, and a wave of nausea ebbs over her as she clams up. Old threats emerge; it's dangerous to talk. She smiles thinly, shrugging.
"Not much. Just your typical 'the FBI is probably watching you' rants." She laughs a brittle, dutiful noise. "Any more of that and I'd be walking around the SGC in a tinfoil hat."
His face is slack, clearly disbelieving and bored by the usual reticence. He murmurs, scratching something on his notepad as she spares another glance at the sagging ceiling.
She's at the park, strolling down the long laneways with Daniel. She loops her arm through his and tucks her head in his neck. He smiles, murmuring into her hair as the un-mowed grass around them begins to billow and sway. The glint of black steel catches her attention, and she raises her head to stare ahead to her house. The Colonel's black truck is parked in front; the driver's seat open and the man himself watching them as they slowly make their way across the street. He fidgets, awkwardly, guiltily, at their curious stares, before reaching behind him for the papers bags of cold Chinese food. He waggles it temptingly, and they both spare tight smiles.
A peace offering.
So this is what they've been reduced to.
Sometime during the night she wakes up gasping, shooting up out of bed and staring at her bookcase. A giant part of her is so tempted to drag it out of her room, past the kitchen and out the back door.
But that would be giving in.
A wave of nausea sweeps through her, and she stumbles into the bathroom and collapses in front of the porcelain bowl, clutching the sides as she heaves her life away.
She stops briefly to breath, sucking in a shuddering breath as she watches a line of spit bead into the water. She slides an absent hand over her flat stomach, wondering when she'll begin to feel the fluttering of life. She thinks, then, maybe she has already felt it. Mistaking it for the shadow man.
Maybe it's his child.
She pukes and pukes and pukes, and realizes that she'll never be able to escape the lingering doubt of whether or not she's crazy.
Afterwards she wipes her mouth with a short length of thin, rough toilet paper, and stares at the wall.
Any imagined noise, any bump in the night, and she'll rub her calloused finger over her scarred palm, and grip her nails into her growing womb.
Hate replacing the guilt.
She stares at the flicking red light on the answering machine. It's Mark. Mark whom she only recently reconciled with and only recently regained his trust and Mark who's completely oblivious to the psychotic issues of his sister and Mark who's about to be an uncle and Mark who's about to lose all respect and faith in her once again.
For a long minute all she can hear is the tapping of his pencil on his knee, as she pretends to contemplate his question with every intention of completely wasting her fifty minutes.
Her eyes drift from the dim, green-glass shaded lamp back to the expunged sagging of plaster, pursing her lips as though she's genuinely mystified.
Abruptly, he stands up and strides over to the window, yanking the green blinds up from their dusty perch. The sudden onset of bright light is blinding, and her pupils contract plaintively as she shies from the glare. Mackenzie frowns down at her, roughly releasing the plastic handle.
"If you have to be distracted by something," he mutters gruffly, "you might as well stare at something a little more mentally stimulating than a leak in the ceiling."
She stares at him, speechless.
He plops back into his chair, his notepad resuming its original spot on his lap.
"So what's this fixation about cockroaches all about?"
When it finally hits her that she's pregnant, with a different man's child, she throws her coffee mug at the wall on that sunny afternoon and screams into the mirror.
Afterwards she rakes the dead leaves off her yard, wordlessly, before raking the yards of each neighbor she had once mentally accused of treason. Offering each one her brilliant, strategic Samantha Carter smile. The Shadow Man smile.
How fucking convenient. Little ol' Sam finally gets the baby she's always wanted, from a man she desired when she freaking out of high school, and now maybe she'll finally get the break from SG1 that she's always secretly wished for.
And baby makes... for one emotionally unstable "family".
She's nervous, clenching her fingers in her sane, normal floral skirt and passes off a reasonably sane "ha ha ha- totally normal girl talking here" grin. She builds up the courage to tell the professor, and even though he's delighted to see her at first, by the end of their encounter he's getting that panicky "how the hell do I get out of this" expression.
But why would she think otherwise.
'Hey, I'm that girl you fucked on numerous occasions awhile back, who might have infected you with god knows what, and congratulations you're going be a daddy! Wanna come with me to Lamaze?'
She's not the slightest bit surprised, though somewhat offended, when he opts out of accompanying her to the next ultrasound.
It's only the next day as Janet draws blood from his arm when she gets her answer once and for all.
"Hey," he laughs nervously, "it might not even be mine."
He whimpers when Janet jabs him harder with the needle, and looks down at the floor when all three men of SG1 shoot death glares at him.
But she kisses him on the cheek, absently, when he leaves. She understands him, his motives. She played him, and now she pays the consequences.
The Colonel stands behind her as the door closes shut, his body rigid and radiating with tension. But not towards her, she knows.
"I can't believe that sonufa-bitch is going to walk away."
She shrugs. "Doesn't matter, Sir, it wasn't his fault I got him into this mess."
She feels his stare.
"You really believe that, don't you?"
She walks out the door, abruptly. Turning only when he calls out after her.
"We're here for you, Sam." He stands tall and resolute, arms crossed and gaze unwavering.
She tries not to throw him a dirty look. Sam?! What the hell was so wrong with "Carter?"
Why did this baby have to come and fuck everything up?
Dead leaves whip out from passing tires below, the light reflecting off the grey clouds outside and streaming into the wide expanse of windows. An expectant cough draws her attention away from the view.
"Well?"
She sighs. The external brightness draws out the shadows in his face, elongating yellow lines in the blue of his iris, sharpening them. His shape is a dark contrast to the white light.
"What would you like me to say, Dr. Mackenzie? No, I don't feel the urge to slit my wrists. No, I don't have any plans to go postal at work, and no I'm not going to go home and sit in a dark corner and cry all night."
"That's not what I asked you."
"But you're thinking it."
She can almost hear the amusement in his silence.
"You sound awfully confident of the state of my mind, how about the state of yours?"
She stares back out the window. She once thought all doctors' officers to be barren and white-walled, not open and distracting.
"All I know is that I need to get through this. One last time."
"This? I don't understand, Major, get through what?"
She blows out an irritated breath, refusing to look at him.
"This... this pregnancy, obviously."
He stays silent for a long time, considering.
"And after?"
She looks over at him, seemingly for the first time.
It's the last time she opts to talk about her pregnancy with the Doctor.
Cassandra folds the chess board together, apologetically kissing her on the cheek as a friend outside calls for her.
Her adopted mother grimaces as the girl rushes past her, cringing at the loud slam of the screen door. She rolls her eyes and smiles down on her visiting friend, a wary look in her eyes.
It was difficult, getting back into the swing of things. For a while Cassie was unrepentantly unforgiving, unable to fully grasp the extent of the virus' hold on her.
But what could she say? Hey, cool aunt Sam went ape-shit and can only see you under strict supervision until her court-marshaled psychiatrist gives her the all clear?
Things take time, people keep telling her. 'Things change, you adjust, you move on', they think, but complacently tell her something else.
She gives a soft smile as Janet eases into the patio chair, curling her legs underneath the beige skirt.
"Sam..." she begins. She stares at her for an indeterminable amount of time, not quite knowing how to say it. "As your doctor, it's my responsibility to inform you of your options." Janet gives her friend a hard look at her impatient sigh. "Sam... There's always the option to terminate."
She's frozen into immobility, considering.
Quick fix- she thinks. No late night feedings, no diaper emergencies. She's surprised she didn't think of this before.
Life could go back to how it used to be. Before the shadow man.
She never really thought about the A-word too much in her lifetime, despite knowing plenty of female friends in the same predicament. Young women forced to choose between their careers or to begin a family. She knows the statistics; once a woman has a child her career takes a slippery slope. She supposed she was pro-choice, but she saw the posters in subway stations, the pictures of curled fingers. It's a moral dilemma for every woman, she just never really thought about what she'd do if it ever came to this.
She never wanted a baby this way.
But she can't imagine ever recovering her former life.
This isn't her child. This is the child of PX7-889. But she can't tell that to Janet, she can't face those worried, condemning eyes. Cassandra wasn't her child either.
She turns her head away.
But she knows that she'll always feel that flicker of a shadow in her womb, and that she will be haunted by a different sort of shadow for the remainder of her life, baby or no baby.
Part of her misses the motel room. Even the goddamn cockroaches. At least there, with the smell of stale sex, the broken TV, the flicker of far-off strip signs her only source of light, at least there she didn't have to face herself.
She closes her eyes, and remembers what it felt like to be bathed in the vapor of that neon purple glow.
She considers it seriously for a while. Daniel is aghast.
"Because Daniel! Because, I always figured I'd have a child on my own fucking terms."
He shakes his head furiously (like an anxious child, she thinks) and clutches his pencil in his hands, breaking it into two.
"It's my body, it's my life. How dare you judge me! You have no idea..." He cuts her off.
"I know it's your life, Sam! I know what it is you want now, Sam, but I also know you! I recognize that other women do it for their own personal, understandable reasons, but their reasons aren't your reasons. You're just thinking about doing it because you're too caught up in your own goddamn fears, and I know you, Sam, I know you know deep down that that's not enough of a justification for *you*. This decision will follow you for the rest of your life."
She seethes at him, unwilling to give him the satisfaction that he might be right. That she would always be haunted, with or without this baby.
"You don't know anything about me, Daniel. Don't even try."
But she walks away with her mind made up.
"He reminded me of Colonel O'Neill." She mutters in a half-whisper.
"And why is that?"
"I don't really know why. It was just him, and... not him."
He waits her out. She looks up warily, unsure of how much she should reveal, worried of speaking too much.
"It's just... I saw eyes all the time. Everywhere I looked they were watching me. I'd shut my eyes and they were there. And they were the Colonel's eyes. And then sometimes I'd hear muttering, like a far-off voice in a crowd, and I'd look expecting to see him."
He looks unsurprised. "It's not uncommon for delusions to manifest themselves as a physical embodiment of someone with a commanding role in your life, especially one whom you respect."
She tilts her chin, her curiosity outweighing her desire to dwell on the Colonel's 'commanding role in her life'. "Do you think that the Goa'uld actually purposefully created the virus that way? To give me temporary schizophrenia by injecting a hallucination?"
Mackenzie chuckles. "Major Carter, I'd pay to know the answer to that. As far as we know, the virus only attacked your mental status, so I'm inclined to agree with that assessment. We don't even know if it was designed to attack a human physiology. But..." He shakes his head woefully, "well, what a bullshit use of a biological weapon."
She tries, at first, to smother her laugh. But her surprise is stronger than her suspicion of him, and for the first time in five or so years she finds herself warming up to Dr. Mackenzie.
Especially, as he leads her to the door after his strict "50 minutes only" session, he breaks his rule by murmuring to her, "I'd also pay to see the look on Colonel O'Neill's face when you decide to tell him."
She smiles at him, but on the car ride home she seriously contemplates that statement. The Colonel clings to guilt like a moth to a flame, if she tells him who the shadow man really was, he would find a way to resent himself for it.
She's resolute. He'll never know.
She and Daniel sort of make up, despite their differences in opinion, and he designates himself as official "feeder of crazy pregnant lady with even crazier cravings."
She thinks the Colonel is almost jealous of the amount of time Daniel spends with her, and his place in her life. After Daniel confessed to the team that he's spending many nights sleeping on her couch, she can't help but notice afterwards how determinedly her CO avoids sitting on it. In a spot so deep inside of her, so immersed in layers of guilts it's barely recognizable, she feels a cruel satisfaction.
She's at the supermarket, trying to talk herself out of a Ben & Jerry's, when in the reflection of the glass she sees that Mathematics Professor she had once known intimately, flirting with a woman barely out of graduate school. He looks at her, and doesn't recognize her. But why would he? With her stretch marks and grotesquely changing body she doesn't even know herself anymore.
She doesn't even wait until she get's home to snap off the ice cream lid, self-indulging in the parking lot watching the snow fall.
When she feels that first kick, things merely take a turn for the worst.
It has no goddamn right to be in there.
A small part of her wishes that it wasn't her hand she was aiming for that night in the motel.
She's afraid, that she'll always feel like this.
Her body stretches and lungs compress and she spends more and more time in the gym at Cheyenne mountain, pushing herself harder and harder on the treadmill, memories of the shadow man at her heels, until one-day the Colonel's hands wrap under her breasts and yanks her off of it.
"Jesus Carter, there are other ways of getting rid of this baby."
He glares at her, the heat in his eyes flickering briefly into something akin to disgust. She thinks of snow falling in an empty parking lot, and she jerks her arm away from him.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she snarls at him.
She wants him to be mad at her; she wants him to hate her. She cannot stand this new 'Jack', this new man who she knows she hasn't done a thing to deserve. She needs him to be her Commanding Officer. She can't take the soft look in his eyes, the gentleness behind his words. She needs orders and regulations and the occasional snarky attitude.
She hates, hates this goddamn baby.
Teal'c arrives at her front door with a tub of paint and two pairs of ridiculous looking coveralls.
"Major Carter? Is it not customary for one to prepare a nursery before the arrival of an infant?"
Two hours later they sit on the newspaper-swathed floor wearing the stupid looking coveralls splattered in yellow paint, lazily passing the ice cream bowl between each other. She feels almost drunk as she licks the spoon dry, slouching further down the freshly coated wall to find a comfortable place to sprawl.
"The thing is, Teal'c, I'm starting to understand you a bit better."
He raises his signature eyebrow.
"It's like we're both carrying a larvae symbiote, only mine is creating absolute havoc on my body."
He stares at her curiously. "I was under the impression, Major Carter, that Taur'i pregnancy is a wondrous predicament, invoking a strong sense of maternal feelings in an expectant mother."
She snorts. "Maybe on TV, Teal'c, but what I'm feeling for this thing inside of me is far from maternal. Something to put up with, I guess."
He's silent for a long while. Eventually, wordlessly, he unbuckles his coverall, raising his black t-shirt over his head. He gently places her hand on his stomach, so she can feel the slithering motions and slippery slide of the creature below. She feels nausea creep up in her throat. He then places her hand back on her covered belly, circling it until both hands find a flutter of a heartbeat. The sickening feeling slowly dissipates with each beat.
"You are mistaken, we share no similarities in this regard."
She stares at their entwined hands for a long time, feeling her pulse throb in unison to the tiny pulse inside of her.
She knows he's right.
"The worst part was when I couldn't even function off-world anymore." She surprises herself by the blatant honestly, especially when it's directed to a man she mistrusted for her entire term at the SGC. "I mean it was one thing when the shadows bothered me at home. I could deal with that. There was no real off/on switch for it, but whenever I was at work the shadow man seemed to control my movements so nobody would detect any differences." She spreads her hands out, illustrating the points. "So for awhile it was fine, it was just my dirty little secret that would really only incapacitate me when I was at home or at the motel. But it was near the end that, I dunno, things got out of hand. I mean I couldn't even think straight out on a simple field assignment or recon mission, and logically I knew and understood I was putting the team at risk. But somehow the shadow man would rationalize it for me or somehow persuade me to not say a word, even though I knew it was wrong."
Mackenzie sits patiently, completely still as though any movement might cause a break in the longest speech that she's uttered thus far. She stares up at him, suddenly vehement.
"And it makes me so freaking angry too. I fought alongside them for all these years and the entire time they were completely oblivious to what I was going through. I mean yeah the shadow man was good at making me pretend otherwise, pretending everything was okay. But goddamnit there were signs!" As her voice rises, she's ignorant of the satisfied quirk on Mackenzie's upper lip.
"Perhaps they were caught up in their own affairs."
She flicks a finger on a nail, pursing her lips angrily.
"So what? I mean I get they're all feeling guilty now and everything, but I just cannot believe that nobody acknowledged that something was missing from me. I thought they knew me. Sure I can get caught up in my work to the point of forgetting to eat, but my teammates are absolutely everything to me, Dr. Mackenzie. I'm closer to them than I ever was to my own family, and I know that if something like this happened to them I would catch on in a heartbeat."
He nods, thoughtfully. "Well why do you think they were distracted?"
She falls back into her chair, defeated. "I don't know. I mean, I guess I'm not surprised. Granted, Teal'c probably did suspect earlier than the others, he's hinted at it before. He's definitely the observant one of the group. I just can't understand why he didn't come forward with his suspicions."
"Perhaps he was unsure if it was his place to do so."
She snorts. "And risk putting the team at risk? I don't think so."
"Well don't forget Samantha," She's oblivious to the fact that somewhere along the line she's allowed him to call her by her name. "The past two years have been very difficult for you. There was the incident with Jolinar, your father's brush with cancer, his subsequent joining, that... computer virus thing, the death of Martouf, the kidnapping... shall I go on?" She shakes her head, hiding a smile at the dramatization of his listing. He continues. "It would stand to reason that these fairly recent events would catch up with you emotionally."
She nods, thoughtful. "And Teal'c would probably think that it was high time I went on a vacation." She smiles. "I always did appreciate how he'd give you your privacy when you felt on the edge of a mental breakdown. Sometimes you have to work things out yourself. I hate it when Colonel O'Neill tries to, you know, fix things by talking it out, or working it out, when all I need it time and, well, privacy."
He clasps his hands together. "And then there's Dr. Jackson."
She sucks in a cheek. "Well, I guess I can't say I'm too surprised. Obliviousness is just Daniel's forte. It's a personality trait that I knew from the get go. He's like me, most of the time. We just get sucked up in the work that it's hard to look around at the full picture."
"Which leaves..."
"Colonel O'Neill." She finishes for him. She looks out the window, again. "I just can't wrap my head around it. I mean, he's black-ops trained, we've worked side by side all these years, and sometimes I think he knows me better than my own father. And he had absolutely no fucking clue."
"Were you hurt by this?"
"Yes! I thought he knew me. I'm his second in command; he relies on my judgment every moment of every day. The fact that he was able to... miss this..." She sighs, shocked by her own words, "makes me question if I know him." She looks up at the Doctor. "And it makes him less reliable to me."
He nods, interested. "And this is a negative thing?"
She recoils in horror. "Of course it is! One ounce of mistrust could prove fatal out on the field! What if he makes a command decision that I begin to second-guess?"
"Well, do you honestly feel he will be less trustworthy when you're out on a mission?"
She stills, contemplating for a long time before responding. "No, I suppose not."
He leans back in his chair. "Major, you and I both know that Colonel O'Neill is by far not a perfect man." She nods; her eyes pinned on him. "But despite this, anybody with eyes can see that you've put him on some sort of pedestal." He raises a hand at her angry denial. "I wouldn't go so far as to call it hero worship, but I'll be willing to wager a guess that whenever you're in a situation in the field where you have to make a command decision of any sort, it's his voice you hear in your head, guiding your critical thinking processes."
Her swift flush quickly confirms this.
"Samantha, it's unquestionable that you're young and bright and full of potential. And it's obvious that you're being groomed for command. But the only way you'll be able to achieve this is when you begin to think for yourself."
She stares at her clasped hands for a long time, and he'll spend the next week wondering, not for the first time, if he overstepped his bounds.
"You know it's not all bad." He stares down at his hands. "Being a parent."
She looks at him from over her microscope, not fully knowing why he had sat down across from her in the first place. He chuckles, a bitter sound.
"I didn't want Sara to have the baby." Clenches his jaw. "Ironic, huh? I mean I didn't tell her to get rid of it or anything. But I didn't ever want to be father." He looks up at her. "But the idea grew on me, and by the time he was born I couldn't ever imagine going back to who I was before."
She's speechless. He hasn't talked this much about Charlie in years.
"Sir..." she finally starts, quieting at his upraised hand.
"I don't want to hear it Carter, we all know you hate this baby. I'm just here to tell you that you might end up feeling differently."
She's already shaking her head.
"I sincerely doubt that, Sir."
He smiles at her, and she tenses at the amused pity in his face.
Daniel gets food poisoning again. They get downtime, again. She drives her newly repaired motorcycle (and a highly inconveniencing baby bump) north into Wyoming again, spurring the vehicle into unimaginable speeds, again, faintly hoping to that at the end of the icy road is concrete oblivion, and she that she will be gladly swallowed up.
But the end of the road happens to be a roadside diner with bad coffee and overflowing ashtrays, and a Shoshone waitress that sits her down in an empty booth and spends the evening fondly bitching to her about lazy husbands and rotten kids.
She eats reportedly the best damn apple pie in three counties.
She watches the snowfall with a trucker from California, sipping coffee and swapping stories. There's black ice on the road, and he convinces her to hitch a ride with him back to Colorado Springs. He insists on putting the bike into the back of the rig unaided, and she's almost insulted at the delicacy in which he treats her. As though she is some frail thing to be bubble-wrapped. She jokingly calls him on it, as he helps her into the high seat of the cab. But his answer is serious.
"It's not you I'm worried about. It's that baby. What were you thinking driving up here?"
What was she thinking? She's beginning to wonder the same thing.
As they drive back into El Paso County, some soft country song dying away on the radio, she flips through his wallet as he describes the photos of his children. He laughs about the time he had to bail his teenaged son out of jail after the kid had tried to organize a sit-in, and she remembers the waitress back at the diner who did nothing but complain about her family, love simmering behind the carping.
It's not until she's at home, curled up on the couch, that she realizes she wants to one day affectionately bitch to her friends about her own family, and as the tremors overtake her she lets out a hoarse laugh.
She's tired of being afraid.
She looks at herself in the mirror, eyeing the faint lines around her eyes and the white, puckered scar that runs along her hairline.
She doesn't see old, she doesn't see defeat.
She doesn't see weakness and she certainly doesn't see fear.
She sees an incredibly strong woman who once stumbled and picked herself right back up.
For the first time in her life she believes every compliment paid to her in her life.
Beauty. Wit. Intelligence. Determination. Stubbornness. Charm.
She sees courage.
She's proud of herself when she restrains the urge to leap on the Colonel when he knocks on her door, a giant grin on his face and a written letter of consent by Dr. Mackenzie to return to SGC, claiming her official sanity. The excitement in his eyes had nearly catapulted her into his arms.
But that would be weird.
And awkward, she thinks as he glances, mentally slaps himself, and glances again over at her slightly larger breasts.
Definitely awkward.
But it's sort of nice, she has to admit as she reaches over him for some popcorn. After weeks of the Colonel sort of tiptoeing around her, trying to find his place in her changing world, she's glad he's finally figured it out.
And most of all she's glad to reach inside of herself to find that she's forgiven him.
She frames the ultrasound photo, but not before making dozens of copies and mailing them out to everyone she knows. Her brother calls and they talk for hours, and she's surprised at his magnanimous, accepting attitude. He demands the baby be named after him if it's a boy, and she laughingly refuses. Her sister-in-law clamors for the phone, and she can hear them bickering affectionately in the background.
She's never felt closer to her family.
The Colonel sees her across the street, and she yells at him when he jogs out into traffic. He grins boyishly at her, and despite her protests he prudently ignores her and follows her around like a lost puppy for the rest of the day.
After the movie ends she leans against the film poster tacked to the wall, griping about her back. He stares at her intently, the soft smile drifting away. He asks if she's made a decision about work.
"What do you mean?"
He reminds her of that conversation so many years ago, sitting by an off-world campfire. It had been Cassie's birthday, and the topic of conversation eventually drifted to children. Daniel had insisted that if ever he had kids he would be hard pressed to continue working on SG1. When the question came to her, she surprised herself at the answer.
"I think I'd drop out too", she had once said. "I know what it's like to lose a mother at a young age, I couldn't do that to my kids."
She hates him for bringing that up. A flash of fury sparks in her eyes.
"That was a long time ago, Sir, priorities change. I'm not about to give up the fight against the..." his hand clamps down on her warningly, "just so I can stay at home and... and bake cookies..."
He nods, approvingly. A flicker of agreement and something like regret skims briefly across his face.
The crowd from the theatre empty out, jostling them as the Colonel leads her away. He's pushed closer to her, grinning as she distractedly flicks out a popcorn kernel from inside her shirt. He waggles his eyebrows.
He watches as she laughs, embarrassed, her smile fading at the look in his eyes. His hand rests on the bump, his eyes occasionally flickering down. When he leans in, assumedly about to kiss her she pushes him away and turns her back on him.
She never wanted him this way.
And she knows that if they start now, she'll grow to hate him for it.
She hates him now, for his weakness. Five years of knowing each other and all it took was a fertilized egg and a brief fling with insanity for him to come on to her. Apparently Rodney McKay wasn't the only one with a thing for hospital gowns.
She knows he never wanted her this way either.
She hears a resigned sigh as she walks away, and is so eternally grateful that he treats her no differently the next morning.
She wakes up suddenly in the night, her eyes instinctively drawn to the bookcase. She slides a protective arm around her womb, and tries to calm her breathing.
She listens, intently, realizing that the noise wasn't merely some remnant of an old, psychotic memory. She hears it again. She clamors out of bed, very aware of the sheer thinness of her tank top, and not once does she take her arm off her belly.
It turns out to be a raccoon scraping the wall outside of her window.
She plops back down on the bed, relieved. A grin lights up her face, now this was something she could handle.
Something tangible, something defeatable.
Her world finally contorts into reality.
Her neighbor still glares at her from the green-tinted window.
She pitiably bends down to pick up the newspaper, sighing, and for the first time thinks fondly of the virus. At least the shadow man had the courage to stand up for her.
She lifts her head from the printed text of the article, staring ahead at the poplar trees, her eyebrows scrunching together.
Well screw that.
She turns to meet the glowering eyes of the neighbor, grinning broadly and sticking a middle finger up in the air.
She doesn't need a virus to be able to tell somebody off.
She wonders if he goes to a tanning salon.
A ridiculous thought, she knows, but really?
"Dammit, Daniel, all I need is a freaking crescent wrench!"
She turns her head to an imperceptible degree as he changes positions, curling her toes with anticipation. His t-shirt pulls with the movements of his shoulder blades as he bitches at Daniel, riding up to a reveal a darkly tanned back.
It's the dead of winter. She's been walking around looking like a reject from Night of the Living Dead, and he looks like he's been sleeping next to the sun.
"Jack, if IKEA wanted us to be using... wrenches... they would've illustrated it on the instructions! You're just going to mess it up."
It has to be off world. Has to be. They've been to dozens of hot planets; chances are he had to pick up some sun.
But she can't quite recall the last time he whipped off his t-shirt on any one of those planets.
Her mouth goes dry at the visual.
She's unsurprised. The pregnancy book did allude to something relating to... the 'wanting' that usually accompanies loneliness. Otherwise known as horniness.
"For the last time," he slowly spits out, "I am not going to mess this up. I've built one of these things before ya know, I can do it again."
She wonders if it's an all over tan.
"Jack." Daniel states seriously. "There is only one certainty in my life, only one piece of knowledge that I will take to my grave in complete confidence, and that is to never, *never* go against IKEA instructions." He looks disdainfully at the Colonel. "Besides, whose bright idea was it to include you into helping assemble the cradle? The poor kid doesn't have a chance sleeping in there."
She giggles, and they both glance over, happy to lighten her mood. They don't know that she's only laughing at the image of the Colonel being spray-tanned.
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The hum of the air conditioner is loud, seemingly roaring in the box of her room. She lies in bed, watching the ceiling as streams of shadows are chased away by outside cars.
When did she get so lonely?
The sum of all parts.
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TBC.
