Jack put his truck into park then rested his hands on the steering wheel as he stared out the windshield at the house in front of him. He remained that way for a minute as he gathered his courage. Each of his teammates had offered to go with him, but he'd turned them down. A decision that he was now regretting. Jack climbed out of the truck and walked up the drive to the front door of the house where he rang the doorbell.
When the door opened his former father-in-law stood in front of him. "Jack," he greeted the younger man.
"Is Sara here?" Jack asked nervously.
"Yeah," Mike told him. "Come on in."
"Thanks," Jack said as he hesitantly stepped into his father-in-law's home for the first time since the incident with the crystals.
From down the hall he heard a female voice call, "Dad. Who was at the door?"
"It's Jack, Sara" he called back. There was silence for a moment before the sound of footsteps could be heard from upstairs. Sara appeared at the top of the stairs a few moments later. "Hi," Jack greeted her hesitantly. "Can we talk?" Jack saw her pause. "It's important, Sara. Please."
"Okay," Sara agreed.
"I think I'll go take a walk," her father told them. "Good to see you again, Jack."
"I need to talk to you as well, Mike," Jack said. "I still owe you that explanation from that thing a while back."
"It's classified," Sara replied. "That's the only explanation you've ever given for any of it."
"This time, I got you clearance," Jack told her. "But you have to come out to the base. Please, Sara. If what we had ever meant anything, please do this."
"Alright," she agreed with a whisper. A few minutes later the three of them were flying down the highway toward Cheyenne Mountain in Jack's truck. None of them spoke at first but the silence quickly became unbearable to Mike. "How have you been, Jack?"
"I've been getting better, sir" he told his former father-in-law. "I'm not..." Jack tried to find the words for all the changes he'd been through since that first mission to Abydos. "I'm better," he said at last.
"I'm glad," Sara told him.
"What about you?" he asked. It seemed to Sara that he placed a great deal of weight in that one question.
"I'm okay, Jack" she replied. "Dad's been great helping me."
"I'm sorry about that, Sara" Jack interrupted. "I'm sorry I wasn't there for you. I'm sorry I couldn't see past my own pain to help you."
"Its okay, Jack. I understood," she told him. "I didn't know how to help you either. I'm glad someone could though."
"Yeah," he agreed. "I'm going to introduce you to my team while we're here." Jack pulled the truck up to the first of the many security checkpoints they would have to go through to get to their final destination deep inside the mountain. Thirty minutes later they were at the final checkpoint in front of the elevators that lead down into the deeper levels of the mountain where the SGC was housed. Sara and her father were issued visitors passes, and Jack ushered them into the elevators.
"How deep are we?" she asked as the elevator continued to descend.
"Very, very, deep" Jack replied as the doors finally opened and he gestured for them to precede him. Jack led them down several corridors into a conference room where Hammond awaited them. "Sara. Mike. This is my commanding officer, General Hammond. General Hammond, my ex-wife, Sara, and her father, Mike."
"Please, call me George," the general said as he took her hand in his much larger one. "We just have a few papers to sign before Jack can give you that explanation." The two men explained to the civilians very carefully the secrecy agreement they were being asked to sign and just what the penalties were for breaking that agreement. Sara didn't hesitate to sign her name though. For once she would know just what Jack did for the Air Force even if it did come too late to help save their marriage, and Jack seemed to want...no need...this so much.
"Alright," Hammond said as he collected the papers. "Jack, SG-5 is due back in 20 minutes. Bring them down to the control room for the show."
"Yes, sir" Jack agreed as he rose respectfully as Hammond left.
"Spill, Jack" Mike ordered as soon as they were alone.
Jack took a deep breath and seemed to hold it for a moment as he thought about how exactly to explain. He exhaled in a great whoosh of air before beginning at the beginning with the discovery of the Stargate. Twenty minutes later neither Sara nor her father had moved or spoken a word since Jack had begun his explanation. He eyed them both carefully for a minute before saying, "Come on. You won't really believe it until you've seen it." He stood and took her by the elbow to lead her down a flight of stairs into the control room where General Hammond and a few others were already waiting. "Sara, Mike. This is my team," he told her as he gestured to each person in turn. "My second in command, Major Samantha Carter. Dr. Daniel Jackson and Teal'c."
Just then a klaxon sounded causing Sara and Mike to jump and the others to turn back towards the window. She noticed a man in glasses sitting at the console in front of the glass window key the microphone in front of him and announce, "Incoming wormhole! Security to the gate room! Medical to the gate room!"
"Look there, Sara" Jack said as he pointed out the window to the large stone ring in the room below. She gasped as a rush of pale blue light...energy...something burst from the ring before receding into a smooth surface within it.
"Do we have a signal yet, Simmons?" Hammond asked.
"Not yet, sir" he responded but corrected himself a second later. "Wait, yes. It's SG-5."
As Sara watched in horrified fascination first one then other figures emerged from the energy and began walking down the ramp.
Hammond keyed the microphone that Simmons had used earlier. "Welcome home, SG-5. Your debriefing is scheduled for 20:00 hours." The men and women who had just emerged from the Stargate acknowledged their commanding officer before turning to leave the room.
"That...." Mike stuttered before shaking his head to clear it. "Okay, but why is it so important to you that Sara know about this Jack?"
"Well, I have more to tell you," he said as he gently urged them back towards the conference room. Sara was dimly aware of the rest of Jack's team following. They knew the hardest part of Jack's explanation was to come and wanted to help however they could.
"That other time...when Charlie..." she mumbled.
"It was an alien my team accidentally brought through," Jack explained. "When I showed up at your house that day it wasn't really me."
"That was...where the hell were you then?" Mike asked.
Jack sighed. "The alien accidentally injured me. It tried to fix me, but there was one thing that it couldn't fix."
"So it came back here to try to understand how to fix Jack" Daniel picked up the explanation. "We...ahh...we accidentally left Jack behind."
"I don't understand," Sara admitted.
"It couldn't fix Charlie's death, Sara" Jack explained gently. "It was trying to figure out how to make me stop hurting. In the mean time I was flat on my ass unconscious back on it's planet."
"Oh..." she whispered.
"There's just a little bit more, Sara" Jack said. "Are you okay to continue?"
Sara nodded though in truth she wasn't sure she was ready to hear more.
"A few years ago, Daniel found something on one of our missions. It was a mirror, but not an ordinary mirror," Jack said. "It's another kind of gateway. Except it doesn't send you to other worlds. It's a gateway to other realities. Alternate realities."
"Like that TV show 'Sliders' or those 'Star Trek' episodes with the evil universe?" Mike asked. Suddenly Jack was glad that Mike was such a fan of science fiction.
Sam nodded then picked up the explanation. "Exactly, sir. Daniel took a trip through the mirror accidentally when he found it, and then when we brought it back here some people from another reality used it to escape the destruction of their Earth by the Goa'uld."
"The aliens you were talking about, Jack?" Sara questioned.
"That's right. After we got our visitors back to their own reality, we decided to destroy our own mirror because of the danger that others could come through," Jack explained.
"You were afraid the aliens in another reality would use it?" Mike questioned.
"Indeed," Teal'c intoned solemnly.
"Why is it important that I know about this in particular?"
"A few weeks ago we had some new visitors," Hammond said picking up the story from SG-1. "Another reality. Their world was being overrun, but the Goa'uld had blocked their Stargate."
"My alternate self and...another technician figured out how to jury-rig their quantum mirror to their Stargate so that they could escape to other realities," Sam told her. "Their jury-rigging had one complication though. They ended up going to different times as well as different realities."
"The visitors that came through are from about ten years in our future," Daniel said.
Mike glared. "I still don't see..."
"In that reality Charlie didn't die," Jack told them quietly as he took Sara's hand. "He was one of the people that escaped here." Sara just stared at him in shock, so Jack continued. "In his reality, you found him playing with the gun and went to take it from him. It went off, and you died."
"He's not..." Sara began. "My son is dead."
"He's not our Charlie," Jack agreed. "But he is in a way. I couldn't..." Jack began to explain. "You deserve to know Sara. You deserve to know him...to know our grandchildren."
"Grandchildren?" Mike asked in a bewildered voice.
"He's from ten years in the future remember?" Jack said. "His son and daughter came with him. J.J. is just about two and little Sammy, Samantha Sara, was only a few hours old when they came through." Jack pulled his wallet from his pocket and handed several pictures to Sara who could only look at them as a starving man would a feast. She handed them to her father one by one who studied them just as intently. In that moment, Hammond saw a glimmer of a solution to at least one aspect of the dilemma of Charlie O'Neill and his children.
"I want to see him," Sara decided. "I want to see them."
"I'll go get them," Sam volunteered. As she stood she squeezed Jack's shoulder. A gesture that didn't go unnoticed by Hammond or the other members of SG-1. Sara and her father though were too busy processing everything they'd just been told to notice such a fleeting touch.
