Chapter Four: The Darkness Ahead
A/N: Sorry it's been so long! Work is absolutely killing me and my writing bug. Hopefully, the next chapter will be up sometime this week! I promise, I'll try.
Episodes mentioned (in order): 'Chain Reaction,' 'The Other Side,' 'Upgrades,' 'Divide and Conquer,' 'Window of Opportunity,' 'Beneath the Surface,' 'Point of No Return,' 'Tangent,' 'The Curse,' 'The Serpent's Venom,' and '2010.'
Enjoy!
It was a beautiful night; the stars shone like chips of ice in the cloudless winter sky and the snow strewn landscape was blanketed by the silver light of the huge full moon, its reflection casted a bluish tinge over everything. The trees that sparsely spattered the side of the road were silhouetted into gnarled black shapes, standing starkly out from the crisp brightness of everything else.
The black SUV rode smoothly along; the recently plowed road unfurling like a long, dark ribbon ahead of it. Inside, half of its occupants were asleep and the other half sat in comfortable, if not contemplative, silence—the day hadn't been a hard one, but it had been long and filled with tedious meetings and questions. SG-1 had been called to a summit with the Joint Chiefs and the President in regards to the recent screw-up with the chain of command and the subsequent firing of General Bauer and reinstatement of Hammond.
Each member of the team had given their statements, but had then been detained for questioning in regards to a suspected evidence breach concerning certain political affiliates. They had all denied knowledge of the breach, or who it could have been, but that had been a lie. They did know.
But they weren't telling.
After nearly a year, the team was finally back at a place where they could read each other like open-lengthy, and at times dreary— but, open books. The trust within their unit had been a slow and, at times, painful reconstruction, but they'd done it. For each other's sakes and their own.
A year ago, the atmosphere in the car would have been tense and broken, everyone waiting for the other shoe to drop and the lies and mistrust to irrevocably crack through their veneer. But now, it was peaceful, if not a bit sleepy.
Which is why Sam nearly jumped out of her skin when he broke the hours-long silence. "What do you think happened?"
Sam glanced at her commanding officer bemusedly. His mind had obviously been running down a trail that made perfect sense to him, but that she was going to need a little more help with. That question was highly applicable to nearly every single mission they'd embarked on in the last year or so. Was he talking about the Eurondans, or, more specifically, how she hadn't been able to look him in the eye for an entire week after that soft thud against the iris?
Or was he talking about the look in his eyes when that forceshield had flashed blue and impenetrable? The panic, the fear, and the…realization? Or could he be asking about the fate of the tape that had mysteriously disappeared after the incriminating za'tarc incident?
Or the exact physics behind the time loop episode? Or just what exactly that heart-stutteringly soul-scorching stare was about that day in the commissary? Sam still hadn't been able to get the answer out of him, but that didn't mean she would stop trying. Seriously, that look haunted her dreams…
Or maybe he was asking about the weird sort of understanding they had come to after those incongruously blissful weeks under the ice where they didn't have to be colonel and major? It hadn't been easy shoving all of those nearly realized feelings back beneath the surface, but they'd both done pretty damn admirably.
But he could also be asking about that whole thing with Marty…or really just Marty in general. Sam had a feeling they hadn't seen the last of him, though she couldn't put her finger on just why she was so sure about that, especially since the colonel pretty much refused to talk about that entire debacle.
Okay. So he probably wasn't asking about Marty.
Maybe the glider incident? Or Daniel and Sarah? The whole 'Apophis now controls the second largest army of all the Goa'uld' thing and how it's kind of their fault?
No. Sam turned back to watch the damp road disappearing into the darkness ahead of them. She knew what he was talking about…had known what he was talking about the whole time she'd been running through a mental list. The only problem was, she didn't actually know how to answer his question.
He sat silently, his posture relaxed as he waited for her to answer, knowing that she would figure out what he meant. After another long minute Sam turned to fully face him, bending her left leg so that it came up to rest on the seat, and her back pressed against the door. Shivering slightly as the chilled glass came into contact with her thin cardigan, she frowned at the man driving.
He glanced over at her, a small smile tugging at his lips when he recognized her 'deep in thought' face. "And, please, no physics talk."
Sam narrowed her eyes at his crack, but grinned despite herself. She had half a mind to now restrict her answer only to the mechanics behind the time-traveling note and not, instead, to the theoreticals surrounding its need to be sent. But, given that they still had at least a three hour drive ahead of them, she decided to be nice.
"I'm not really sure, sir. Any number of things." Sam shrugged, but continued to regard him. At this moment in time, it was hard to remember how he had ever felt like a stranger to her. She knew every line and plane of him, more so now than ever before. Yes, this past year had been incredibly trying emotionally, but it had also brought them closer together than ever before. At least they both knew where the other stood.
Where there had only been questions before, there were now answers that were just this side of concrete. Which, in Sam's opinion, was better than nothing.
"Infinite possibilities, I know." He threw her a sidelong glance. "But I want to know what you think happened. Really."
"O-kay." Sam blew out a breath and glanced briefly into the backseat, checking to see if her other two friends were awake or still out cold. Daniel had his face pressed against the window, his glasses pushing crookedly into his check. Sam's heart swelled just the tiniest bit; at his core, Daniel was still very much a little boy. Teal'c, who was sitting up straight behind her, had his eyes closed and his chest moved slowly and rhythmically. If Sam was an accurate judge, the man was still in a deep state of kel'no'reem.
So she continued, keeping her voice low so as not to wake the other two. "I think we ran into something really awful, something that had severe planetary consequences, if not galactic ones. The very fact that we did something to affect the timeline…the fact that I allowed it…it must have been something truly terrible." Sam lapsed into a brief silence, thinking hard. "Assuming that we had no great technological revolutions, the note can't have been from anytime in the near future." A roundabout way of saying something she wasn't supposed to.
"Why not?"
"Well, sir, we have no way to predict solar flares. And we certainly have no way of knowing when there would have been a flare big enough to slingshot a note back in time."
"But it's just a tiny piece of paper."
"The size doesn't matter, sir-," Sam broke off, mouth twisting as she glared at her CO. "Funny, colonel."
"I thought so." He flashed her a quick grin and Sam rolled her eyes, desperately trying to ignore the somersaults her stomach had deemed it prudent to start doing.
Crossing her arms over her chest in an exaggerated display of "frustration," Sam continued. "Unless, part of why we weren't supposed to go to that planet has something to do with their advanced technology. If we made an alliance with whoever was on that planet and they had the ability to predict solar flares…well, I guess it could have been sent any time; could have been tomorrow, could have been thirty years." Except that wasn't exactly true. Sam did know when that note was sent and it wasn't either of the timeframes she had just suggested.
"It's kind of creepy, you know?" His body didn't shift, but Sam could feel the discomfort radiating from him.
"That a note you wrote came through the gate covered your blood?" Sam squeezed her eyes shut the second the words left her mouth. Janet had only gotten her test results back a couple of days ago and she hadn't written her official report yet. She'd told Sam her findings in confidence and now she'd just gone and blown it. Even after she'd gone through the trouble of carefully editing her earlier answers.
Maybe he just…hadn't noticed?
"My blood, you say?" Or not.
Sam shrugged sheepishly and ducked her head. It was about as noncommittal of an answer as it got, but he wasn't just going to let it go. "Fess up, Carter. It's just you and me, here."
Resisting the urge to childishly point out that it was not, in fact, just them, but also Daniel and Teal'c, Sam settled for leaning her head back against the cold window and studiously avoid looking at him. "Janet finished the blood analysis. The tests confirmed that the blood was yours, sir." What she left out, however, was that due to a relatively new blood test that measures molecular levels of the protein p16, Janet had determined that the note was sent from approximately ten years in the future.
Ten years of a life that none of them remembered and probably for good reason. A whole decade of things going to hell in a handbasket…a whole decade of things that would no longer come to pass. So, until Janet had drawn up the official report- and General Hammond had decided what to do with it- that information needed to stay in confidence.
"Uh-huh." The colonel's tone made Sam swallow reflexively. Damn the man and his near perfect ability to know exactly what she was thinking. "What aren't you telling me?"
"Nothing, sir." Oh yeah, calm and casual.
"Carter."
Sam felt her resolve waver. But, as she opened her mouth to tell him the exact thing no one was supposed to know, something else entirely came out instead. "You weren't the only one who sent the note." What?
"What?"
Sam almost snickered when he echoed her own thought. Then she remembered that he was expecting an answer. "Well, ah, Janet did a fingerprint analysis on the paper as well."
When it became clear that that was all his major had to say on the subject, Jack lifted one hand from the wheel and made a circular motion with his wrist. "And, so, therefore?"
Settling herself deeper into her seat, Sam returned her gaze to the colonel. A sick part of her desperately wanted to watch and analyze every detail of his reaction to what she was about to tell him. "My fingerprints were on it too."
Jack took the information silently, without so much as a muscle twitch. Eyes skittering from his face to his hands, out the front windshield, down to his jean clad thighs, then back to his face, she waited for him to say something—anything. Finally, he looked over at her, his eyes away from the road for what was probably a dangerous amount of time, and spoke in a very low voice. "At least we know that, whatever happened, we were still…" Here, his voice trailed and he turned back to look out at the dark landscape stretching ahead of them.
Sam felt her head bob up and down in unconscious agreement. She knew what he meant because it was the exact thing she'd said to herself when Janet had told her. At least they were still together…at least they still had each other…whatever had been so bad a decade into the future, at least they were still...
"I know." Sam felt a sad smile curve over her lips and her arm twitched, fingers itching to reach out for him—to reassure herself that they were both living and breathing and here together. She didn't know if he'd seen her flicker of movement, or if he just correctly interpreted the sudden tension coming off of her in waves, but his hand was suddenly lying palm up on top of the middle console.
A small gesture. Maybe even an accident. But Sam didn't stop to think as she reached out and laid her hand on top of his. Their fingers weren't laced and their grip wasn't tight, but Sam felt the intimacy in the gesture shudder her very core. Skin to skin, she felt the sometimes tenuous connection between them strengthen and grow taut. It scared her and exhilarated her to think that if this was what he did to her insides by just holding her hand…what exactly would happen to her if they let themselves go any further?
But Sam knew that question wouldn't be answered anytime soon. Not while SG-1 was still needed. As the darkness deepened outside the car, Sam let her fingers squeeze his just once, before she reluctantly pulled her hand away from his. Except, the strangest thing happened.
He didn't let go.
TBC
A/N: Oh my god, this was the hardest thing in the world to write. I just couldn't make it work. I've been trying for a week and everything that came out was just awful. So, I'm giving up. I'm sorry this chapter isn't up to par and I'd like to promise that the next one will be better, but who knows. I hope you liked at least some of it!
P.S. So I have a question for you guys…what is one thing about SG-1 (doesn't have to be Sam/Jack) that is completely and totally head canon for you? Even if no one else thinks it.
P.P.S. An anonymous reviewer last chapter asked me when Jack admitted that Sam had an effect on him and since I can't PM them, I'll answer it here. In 'Shades of Grey,' Sam says that he isn't acting like himself and Jack responds by saying, "I haven't been acting like myself since I met you. Now I'm acting like myself." In my mind, that's him saying that she inadvertently influenced him to be a better man than he actually was, but now he's over whatever infatuation he had with her, and is back to acting like himself.