Title: "Under the Influence"
Author: Jackie W.
Email: jackiesficaol.com
Rating: PG-13
Once again…. Season 8 spoiler alert!!!!
He was back. He was safe. The Asguard had once again come to his aide, and he was pretty much back to normal. In order to remove the Ancient knowledge they'd had to erase all of his memories from the time he had stuck his head into the repository, but that was only about a week's worth and SG1 could fill him in on the details. It was certainly cause to celebrate. It was too bad Janet wasn't there. If she had been maybe she would have noticed the look on Sam's face when they were told that piece of news. The look that, before it was quickly masked, indicated that she had received a blow that had felt like a punch in the gut.
She needed to think, but she was just too damned tired. Her latest little adventure with the Replicators had left her drained. The doctors didn't seem too concerned, but then they had only had her in their clutches for a few hours when The Asguard had returned the Colonel and they had been busy running a myriad of tests on the recently frozen man. So after being warned not to leave base until all of her lab work was back she had retreated to her quarters for a quick nap. That's where the other reunited members of SG1 finally found her six hours later, so sound asleep she didn't even stir when they entered.
"We should let her sleep. She's had a rough few weeks," Daniel whispered, and the three men quietly withdrew.
"So, is someone going to fill me in?" Jack asked. "I got the basics out of the de-brief. But since I'm not cleared to leave yet, how about we head down for some food and you fill me in on the finer points of my life after I made the incredibly stupid choice to put my head in that thing again," he requested.
They left a note for Sam in case she woke up, and left to update Jack with what they knew. There were gaps. Sam had already been at his house when they arrived that Saturday morning and none of them had been with him on Sunday as he'd said he had things he wanted to take care of. But for the most part he got a pretty clear picture of his gradual decline into the world of Ancient knowledge and the battle with Anubis. In addition they had filled him in on their mission to contact the Asguard and the subsequent request by Thor for them to once again deal with the Replicators. Jack had paled on hearing of Sam's torture. No wonder she had seemed a bit off to him when he'd gotten back. Still after everything was rehashed for him he had a feeling he was missing something. Something important.
Sam woke up several hours after they had stopped by. She panicked at first at seeing the time. Surely Jack couldn't still be in the infirmary. Then she spotted the note and relaxed. She wasn't sorry to be missing out on the session. She was sure they would notice something was wrong if she were there as they summarized events for Jack, and she wasn't quite ready to face telling her part of the story yet. Exactly how did one going about telling a man with no memory of the events that the two of you had gotten married?
Four weeks earlier she'd gone back to Jack's on that fateful Saturday night. They had all left late in the evening, and Sam had made it exactly three blocks away before she had turned around and gone back. She smiled even now remembering the look of surprise on Jack's face when he'd opened the door to find her standing there with a very determined look in her eye. To her credit she hadn't just jumped him then and there. But she hadn't let him turn her away either, and after an hour he was convinced that she wasn't going to regret anything that happened between them, but quite the contrary would always regret it if she left without showing him exactly how she felt about him.
By the morning neither of them had any doubts. Still, Jack surprised himself when he turned Sam in his arms to face him and looked at her seriously before blurting out the words, "Marry me."
She'd smiled and nodded, but he hadn't finished. It had been his fantasy for so long that to have it come true even for a few short days was such an amazing thought that he had to take a chance. He took her face in his hands to force her to look at him and quietly, insistently, stated again, "Marry me, today." He had waited as her eyes had widened and he heard her catch her breath. Then her smile had lit up the room and this time she had clearly answered, "Yes." He had simply swept her into a kiss and reached for the phone to get them on a plane to Las Vegas.
Eight hours later they had returned to Jack's house as husband and wife. This time is was Sam's turn to shock him by taking the condom out of his hand even though she had told him she wasn't currently on birth control because she was still on antibiotics from her run-in with the super soldier at the alpha-site. They had spent the next fifteen hours making love and trying to make a baby.
She still wasn't sure whether she was happy or sad that the pregnancy test she had taken before going off with the Asguard had been negative. She guessed under the circumstances it would have been a bit like a bad episode out of a soap opera if she had been pregnant on top of everything else. Still she was disappointed. She hadn't made the decision lightly and now that she had she couldn't stop imagining what their children would look like. She sighed. First she had to get over the hurdle of telling him they were married and dealing with the fallout. She spent five minutes freshening up and then went to find her teammates.
She finally tracked down Daniel in his lab. He told her that Jack had been called into Dr. Weir's office an hour ago, and Teal'c had gone to workout. She hovered for a minute and was about to head for her own lab when Jack walked in. He looked slightly stunned.
"What's the matter?" Daniel quizzed.
"I've been promoted. They want me to run the SGC. You're looking at General Jack O'Neill," he said, and suddenly started to grin.
"Jack that's fantastic. Congratulations," Daniel enthused.
Sam forced a bright smile, "I'm sure you'll do a fantastic job. You deserve it. Congratulations, Sir," she approved.
"Let's go find Teal'c and head out to celebrate," Jack said clapping his hands together. "This calls for cake!"
She trailed after them with a heavy heart. He had promised he was ready to retire. His knees were shot and he was ready to stop trying to save the world every other day. He would retire and they would have another wedding that their friends could be at. Now what? He was back to being her commanding officer. How could she ask him to pass up a chance at General? She didn't hear Daniel call her name or see Jack rush to catch her as she went down and the blackness surrounded her.
When she woke up in the infirmary a few minutes later there were three sets of worried eyes hovering on the far side of the room and Dr. Lynch was at the foot of the bed going through her labs.
"Well, other than being a bit anemic, everything seems to be normal, but I want you to stay in here overnight for observation," he insisted.
Sam began to protest, but her teammates quickly stepped in and she could see that she wasn't going to win this argument. She had scared them. After all she hadn't feinted in the seven years they had known her other than from radiation that time they had found the crystal skull. They figured something must be seriously wrong, and they wanted her to stay where the doctor's could keep an eye on her. They finally promised to save her some cake, and waited for her to drift off to sleep. Then they headed out themselves.
Daniel was there when she woke up in the morning after sleeping for another ten hours. "About time you joined the land of the living," he gently teased.
Sam smiled. "I don't think I've ever been that tired in my whole life," she admitted.
Daniel was about to ask how she was feeling when Dr. Lynch beat him to it. "Major Carter, how are we this morning," he inquired.
"We are hungry enough to challenge a couple of the marines to an eating contest, and win," she replied.
"Well, assuming everything checks out I'll let Dr. Jackson escort you down to the commissary," Dr. Lynch assured her.
"I'd prefer IHOP," Sam complained.
"Let's try the commissary and if there are no repeats of the dizzy spells and feinting once you are on your feet for a bit, then you can have someone escort you home," the doctor compromised.
Sam sighed and quietly allowed the doctor to check all of vitals while Daniel went off to tell Teal'c and Jack that Sam was going to be up and mobile. By the time she was ready to head down for food the three men were all waiting for her. A part of her was annoyed at the overprotective streak, but she knew deep down that it was just their way of showing their concern, and she couldn't be upset. She did sort of still feel off. Hopefully food would cure that.
She ate more than Teal'c that morning and she knew the three men would be teasing her for weeks.
"Jeez, Carter. When's the last time you had a decent meal?" Jack asked with a grin. "You just ate enough to feed a third world country."
Sam blushed. In truth the last good meal she could remember was breakfast at Jack's that Monday morning before they got the news Anubis was about to attack. In reply she simply shrugged. "Getting tortured takes a lot out of you," she matter-of-factly replied.
With all of them cleared to leave the base they were officially given two weeks of downtime. When they returned, Jack would be stepping into his new role and Sam would be getting command of SG1. It was implied that there would be a promotion for her too. Great she thought, she could be promoted and court marshaled at the same time.
Her game plan had been to wait until everyone left her house and then take a cab over to Jack's to try to explain the situation to him. That was thwarted when it was decided that Teal'c should stay with her for the rest of the day and Daniel would go with Jack to help him clean out the fridge and restock at his house. Plan B had been to drive over herself the next day, so in the morning she called only to get Jack's machine.
She left a message to have him call her, and set about to get some work done. She was surprised when after an hour she was feeling fatigued again. By lunchtime she was in serious need of a nap. She was sound asleep when Jack called back from the road on his way to his cabin. He had decided it would be a while before his new duties would let him get away again and hastily packed up the truck and headed out. He'd picked up her message just as he was leaving.
She didn't have a plan C. She supposed she could head up to his cabin, but she really wasn't feeling up to making the trip on her own. Maybe she would just rest up for a few days and then decide whether to go to Minnesota or wait for him to come back. In the meantime she had some serious thinking to do. She had gotten herself into a real jam and now she needed to figure a way out of it.
Two days later she knew she only had one real option. None of the others made any sense. She could request a transfer, but what chance would their relationship have if she were halfway across the country? She had briefly considered keeping the entire thing a secret and going back to the way things had been before. The thought alone had sent her racing to the bathroom where she had promptly thrown up. Obviously she couldn't cope with that idea. The only other choice was for her to resign. She spent a day crying over that choice, but once she accepted the idea it really wasn't so bad. After all, if she really wanted to have children she couldn't be out running around the universe.
In the mean time Jack O'Neill was up at his cabin trying to find the sense of peace that usually descended upon him there. For once though it wasn't working. He was antsy, and he couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. That there was something he should be doing. He had planned on staying for a full week. On his forth day there he was mulling over heading back to Colorado early when his phone rang.
"Jack, its Daniel. You need to get back here pronto. We don't know what's going on, but Sam just resigned," he reported.
"I'm on my way," Jack replied.
He threw everything into the truck and locked up in an hour flat. A hundred scenarios were playing themselves out in his head. Was she running off with that cop from Denver? Or maybe the Replicators had done more damage then she had let on. That little niggling feeling that he was missing something important was back in full force.
Sam in the meantime had decided she would wait until after she had talked to Jack to hand in her resignation. Then they could go to Teal'c and Daniel and confess before she formalized things. They had a right to not be blind-sided by this. She knew she would get an argument from Jack and he would offer to retire, but she had her case well planned out, and she was sure she could get him to see it her way. In the meantime she needed to take care of herself and get well. She still felt like her entire body was out of whack. She was sleeping more than she ever had in her life, and her appetite seemed to have totally disappeared one minute and the next it would return with a vengeance.
It was on the forth day after he had left that she looked at the calendar and stopped dead. It had been over five weeks since she and Jack had gotten married. She double-checked. Yep, thirty-seven days. She counted backwards. That made her thirteen days late. Holy Hannah. She quickly drove to the store and picked up another at-home pregnancy test. An hour later she was staring at the positive results. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry. In the end she did a little of both.
She didn't even hesitate. She typed up her resignation, drove to base, and headed straight for Dr. Weir's office. Needless to say the woman was surprised. Sam simply explained she was getting married and moving on with her life. There wasn't much that could be said to that, but still she was surprised there wasn't more of an argument. She should have known that it was too easy.
Dr. Weir was smart enough to realize that something else was going on. She immediately put in a call to Washington, and discovered that General Hammond was already on a plane home for a long five-day weekend with his family. She was patched through to him in the air and told him everything that had occurred. He promised that his first stop on landing would be Carter's house. Then she tried to get a hold of Teal'c and Dr. Jackson but ended up having to leave messages for both.
Meanwhile, Sam was at home letting the latest twist in the little melodrama sink in. It was an impossible situation, but she couldn't be upset. She wanted this. She just wondered if now that Jack had his life back he would make the same choices he had that night more than five weeks ago. Her only comfort was the fact that he had told her he'd almost resigned to give them a chance at least three other times. And even though he had paused at first thinking that it wasn't fair to conceive a child when he might not be around to see it grow up he had eventually understood that she wanted his child no matter what happened. Hopefully she could make him understand that again. It had been her decision and she didn't regret it.
She looked at herself in the mirror and tried to figure out how to start the inevitable conversation.
"So, General O'Neill, I quit because we threw the regs out the window, had sex, compounded that by getting married while we were still in the same chain of command. Oh, yeah and to just make sure we couldn't hide it we got pregnant."
Oh crap.
End part 1
Author: Jackie W.
Email: jackiesficaol.com
Rating: PG-13
Once again…. Season 8 spoiler alert!!!!
He was back. He was safe. The Asguard had once again come to his aide, and he was pretty much back to normal. In order to remove the Ancient knowledge they'd had to erase all of his memories from the time he had stuck his head into the repository, but that was only about a week's worth and SG1 could fill him in on the details. It was certainly cause to celebrate. It was too bad Janet wasn't there. If she had been maybe she would have noticed the look on Sam's face when they were told that piece of news. The look that, before it was quickly masked, indicated that she had received a blow that had felt like a punch in the gut.
She needed to think, but she was just too damned tired. Her latest little adventure with the Replicators had left her drained. The doctors didn't seem too concerned, but then they had only had her in their clutches for a few hours when The Asguard had returned the Colonel and they had been busy running a myriad of tests on the recently frozen man. So after being warned not to leave base until all of her lab work was back she had retreated to her quarters for a quick nap. That's where the other reunited members of SG1 finally found her six hours later, so sound asleep she didn't even stir when they entered.
"We should let her sleep. She's had a rough few weeks," Daniel whispered, and the three men quietly withdrew.
"So, is someone going to fill me in?" Jack asked. "I got the basics out of the de-brief. But since I'm not cleared to leave yet, how about we head down for some food and you fill me in on the finer points of my life after I made the incredibly stupid choice to put my head in that thing again," he requested.
They left a note for Sam in case she woke up, and left to update Jack with what they knew. There were gaps. Sam had already been at his house when they arrived that Saturday morning and none of them had been with him on Sunday as he'd said he had things he wanted to take care of. But for the most part he got a pretty clear picture of his gradual decline into the world of Ancient knowledge and the battle with Anubis. In addition they had filled him in on their mission to contact the Asguard and the subsequent request by Thor for them to once again deal with the Replicators. Jack had paled on hearing of Sam's torture. No wonder she had seemed a bit off to him when he'd gotten back. Still after everything was rehashed for him he had a feeling he was missing something. Something important.
Sam woke up several hours after they had stopped by. She panicked at first at seeing the time. Surely Jack couldn't still be in the infirmary. Then she spotted the note and relaxed. She wasn't sorry to be missing out on the session. She was sure they would notice something was wrong if she were there as they summarized events for Jack, and she wasn't quite ready to face telling her part of the story yet. Exactly how did one going about telling a man with no memory of the events that the two of you had gotten married?
Four weeks earlier she'd gone back to Jack's on that fateful Saturday night. They had all left late in the evening, and Sam had made it exactly three blocks away before she had turned around and gone back. She smiled even now remembering the look of surprise on Jack's face when he'd opened the door to find her standing there with a very determined look in her eye. To her credit she hadn't just jumped him then and there. But she hadn't let him turn her away either, and after an hour he was convinced that she wasn't going to regret anything that happened between them, but quite the contrary would always regret it if she left without showing him exactly how she felt about him.
By the morning neither of them had any doubts. Still, Jack surprised himself when he turned Sam in his arms to face him and looked at her seriously before blurting out the words, "Marry me."
She'd smiled and nodded, but he hadn't finished. It had been his fantasy for so long that to have it come true even for a few short days was such an amazing thought that he had to take a chance. He took her face in his hands to force her to look at him and quietly, insistently, stated again, "Marry me, today." He had waited as her eyes had widened and he heard her catch her breath. Then her smile had lit up the room and this time she had clearly answered, "Yes." He had simply swept her into a kiss and reached for the phone to get them on a plane to Las Vegas.
Eight hours later they had returned to Jack's house as husband and wife. This time is was Sam's turn to shock him by taking the condom out of his hand even though she had told him she wasn't currently on birth control because she was still on antibiotics from her run-in with the super soldier at the alpha-site. They had spent the next fifteen hours making love and trying to make a baby.
She still wasn't sure whether she was happy or sad that the pregnancy test she had taken before going off with the Asguard had been negative. She guessed under the circumstances it would have been a bit like a bad episode out of a soap opera if she had been pregnant on top of everything else. Still she was disappointed. She hadn't made the decision lightly and now that she had she couldn't stop imagining what their children would look like. She sighed. First she had to get over the hurdle of telling him they were married and dealing with the fallout. She spent five minutes freshening up and then went to find her teammates.
She finally tracked down Daniel in his lab. He told her that Jack had been called into Dr. Weir's office an hour ago, and Teal'c had gone to workout. She hovered for a minute and was about to head for her own lab when Jack walked in. He looked slightly stunned.
"What's the matter?" Daniel quizzed.
"I've been promoted. They want me to run the SGC. You're looking at General Jack O'Neill," he said, and suddenly started to grin.
"Jack that's fantastic. Congratulations," Daniel enthused.
Sam forced a bright smile, "I'm sure you'll do a fantastic job. You deserve it. Congratulations, Sir," she approved.
"Let's go find Teal'c and head out to celebrate," Jack said clapping his hands together. "This calls for cake!"
She trailed after them with a heavy heart. He had promised he was ready to retire. His knees were shot and he was ready to stop trying to save the world every other day. He would retire and they would have another wedding that their friends could be at. Now what? He was back to being her commanding officer. How could she ask him to pass up a chance at General? She didn't hear Daniel call her name or see Jack rush to catch her as she went down and the blackness surrounded her.
When she woke up in the infirmary a few minutes later there were three sets of worried eyes hovering on the far side of the room and Dr. Lynch was at the foot of the bed going through her labs.
"Well, other than being a bit anemic, everything seems to be normal, but I want you to stay in here overnight for observation," he insisted.
Sam began to protest, but her teammates quickly stepped in and she could see that she wasn't going to win this argument. She had scared them. After all she hadn't feinted in the seven years they had known her other than from radiation that time they had found the crystal skull. They figured something must be seriously wrong, and they wanted her to stay where the doctor's could keep an eye on her. They finally promised to save her some cake, and waited for her to drift off to sleep. Then they headed out themselves.
Daniel was there when she woke up in the morning after sleeping for another ten hours. "About time you joined the land of the living," he gently teased.
Sam smiled. "I don't think I've ever been that tired in my whole life," she admitted.
Daniel was about to ask how she was feeling when Dr. Lynch beat him to it. "Major Carter, how are we this morning," he inquired.
"We are hungry enough to challenge a couple of the marines to an eating contest, and win," she replied.
"Well, assuming everything checks out I'll let Dr. Jackson escort you down to the commissary," Dr. Lynch assured her.
"I'd prefer IHOP," Sam complained.
"Let's try the commissary and if there are no repeats of the dizzy spells and feinting once you are on your feet for a bit, then you can have someone escort you home," the doctor compromised.
Sam sighed and quietly allowed the doctor to check all of vitals while Daniel went off to tell Teal'c and Jack that Sam was going to be up and mobile. By the time she was ready to head down for food the three men were all waiting for her. A part of her was annoyed at the overprotective streak, but she knew deep down that it was just their way of showing their concern, and she couldn't be upset. She did sort of still feel off. Hopefully food would cure that.
She ate more than Teal'c that morning and she knew the three men would be teasing her for weeks.
"Jeez, Carter. When's the last time you had a decent meal?" Jack asked with a grin. "You just ate enough to feed a third world country."
Sam blushed. In truth the last good meal she could remember was breakfast at Jack's that Monday morning before they got the news Anubis was about to attack. In reply she simply shrugged. "Getting tortured takes a lot out of you," she matter-of-factly replied.
With all of them cleared to leave the base they were officially given two weeks of downtime. When they returned, Jack would be stepping into his new role and Sam would be getting command of SG1. It was implied that there would be a promotion for her too. Great she thought, she could be promoted and court marshaled at the same time.
Her game plan had been to wait until everyone left her house and then take a cab over to Jack's to try to explain the situation to him. That was thwarted when it was decided that Teal'c should stay with her for the rest of the day and Daniel would go with Jack to help him clean out the fridge and restock at his house. Plan B had been to drive over herself the next day, so in the morning she called only to get Jack's machine.
She left a message to have him call her, and set about to get some work done. She was surprised when after an hour she was feeling fatigued again. By lunchtime she was in serious need of a nap. She was sound asleep when Jack called back from the road on his way to his cabin. He had decided it would be a while before his new duties would let him get away again and hastily packed up the truck and headed out. He'd picked up her message just as he was leaving.
She didn't have a plan C. She supposed she could head up to his cabin, but she really wasn't feeling up to making the trip on her own. Maybe she would just rest up for a few days and then decide whether to go to Minnesota or wait for him to come back. In the meantime she had some serious thinking to do. She had gotten herself into a real jam and now she needed to figure a way out of it.
Two days later she knew she only had one real option. None of the others made any sense. She could request a transfer, but what chance would their relationship have if she were halfway across the country? She had briefly considered keeping the entire thing a secret and going back to the way things had been before. The thought alone had sent her racing to the bathroom where she had promptly thrown up. Obviously she couldn't cope with that idea. The only other choice was for her to resign. She spent a day crying over that choice, but once she accepted the idea it really wasn't so bad. After all, if she really wanted to have children she couldn't be out running around the universe.
In the mean time Jack O'Neill was up at his cabin trying to find the sense of peace that usually descended upon him there. For once though it wasn't working. He was antsy, and he couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. That there was something he should be doing. He had planned on staying for a full week. On his forth day there he was mulling over heading back to Colorado early when his phone rang.
"Jack, its Daniel. You need to get back here pronto. We don't know what's going on, but Sam just resigned," he reported.
"I'm on my way," Jack replied.
He threw everything into the truck and locked up in an hour flat. A hundred scenarios were playing themselves out in his head. Was she running off with that cop from Denver? Or maybe the Replicators had done more damage then she had let on. That little niggling feeling that he was missing something important was back in full force.
Sam in the meantime had decided she would wait until after she had talked to Jack to hand in her resignation. Then they could go to Teal'c and Daniel and confess before she formalized things. They had a right to not be blind-sided by this. She knew she would get an argument from Jack and he would offer to retire, but she had her case well planned out, and she was sure she could get him to see it her way. In the meantime she needed to take care of herself and get well. She still felt like her entire body was out of whack. She was sleeping more than she ever had in her life, and her appetite seemed to have totally disappeared one minute and the next it would return with a vengeance.
It was on the forth day after he had left that she looked at the calendar and stopped dead. It had been over five weeks since she and Jack had gotten married. She double-checked. Yep, thirty-seven days. She counted backwards. That made her thirteen days late. Holy Hannah. She quickly drove to the store and picked up another at-home pregnancy test. An hour later she was staring at the positive results. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry. In the end she did a little of both.
She didn't even hesitate. She typed up her resignation, drove to base, and headed straight for Dr. Weir's office. Needless to say the woman was surprised. Sam simply explained she was getting married and moving on with her life. There wasn't much that could be said to that, but still she was surprised there wasn't more of an argument. She should have known that it was too easy.
Dr. Weir was smart enough to realize that something else was going on. She immediately put in a call to Washington, and discovered that General Hammond was already on a plane home for a long five-day weekend with his family. She was patched through to him in the air and told him everything that had occurred. He promised that his first stop on landing would be Carter's house. Then she tried to get a hold of Teal'c and Dr. Jackson but ended up having to leave messages for both.
Meanwhile, Sam was at home letting the latest twist in the little melodrama sink in. It was an impossible situation, but she couldn't be upset. She wanted this. She just wondered if now that Jack had his life back he would make the same choices he had that night more than five weeks ago. Her only comfort was the fact that he had told her he'd almost resigned to give them a chance at least three other times. And even though he had paused at first thinking that it wasn't fair to conceive a child when he might not be around to see it grow up he had eventually understood that she wanted his child no matter what happened. Hopefully she could make him understand that again. It had been her decision and she didn't regret it.
She looked at herself in the mirror and tried to figure out how to start the inevitable conversation.
"So, General O'Neill, I quit because we threw the regs out the window, had sex, compounded that by getting married while we were still in the same chain of command. Oh, yeah and to just make sure we couldn't hide it we got pregnant."
Oh crap.
End part 1