Dinner was an exercise in tense silence. By the time the delivery boy arrived with their dinner Jack had slowly but surely become restive and fidgety. He'd abandoned the couch first thing. He'd also shed his jacket somewhere between the living room and the kitchen, no longer chilled but rather flushed and uncomfortably hot. He didn't complain (that would be more communicating that he seemed disposed to engage in), but Sam did what she could to help him. She turned on the air conditioner, dug out a sweater for herself to wear, and tried to encourage him to eat.
Jack stared down at his plate, eyed the pizza slice, then slid his eyes to either side of the room. His hands were in perpetual motion. Fingers tapped and twitched against the table, his knees bobbed jerkily as he tried to settle his rattled nerves.
Sam watched him warily. She hoped his condition wouldn't escalate into something she couldn't handle the way it had with Daniel. Janet said Jack wouldn't be that bad but it was starting to look damn familiar.
"Sir, please, try to eat something."
Jack glared down sourly at the triangle of pizza before him as he stated defiantly, "I'm not hungry, Carter, lay off, will ya?"
"How do you feel?"
"Antsy." He gave a half-hearted shrug, shifted in his seat, and said flatly and knowingly, "The withdrawal."
Sam nodded sagely. "Will you tell me what Ba'al did to you?"
Jack's eyes jerked up to her, narrowing when she didn't waver from his look. His eventual retort was sharp. "Nothing to tell, Carter, you know what you need to know."
Sam sighed in defeat. Colonel O'Neill was snappy. He could be an absolute bear when he got snappy... and Daniel was the only one who could ever get through to Jack in any meaningful way when he got this way.
"Do you have any idea how many times you went in the sarcophagus?"
Jack glowered darkly. For a frightening second, he looked like he was on the cusp of a fight with her. What held him back she wasn't sure, but instead of launching into a verbal thrashing he got up abruptly and picked up his plate, heading toward the kitchen.
Sam started out of her seat when she heard a crash seconds later. She was away from her table and striding toward the kitchen before she realized she was in motion. She found Jack standing before the sink and kitchen counter, staring down at the broken plate and smeared pizza on the tile floor.
Blinking at him, Sam watched him for some clue as to what he was going to do. Jack continued to stand there, almost statuesque, and stare vacantly at the mess on the floor.
Sam cautiously moved forward and began to pick up the broken pieces of the plate. Jack remained rooted in his spot as she worked in silence.
"I lost count after five," Jack said.
Sam looked up at him, taken off-guard by his comment. "Sir?"
Jack finally pulled his eyes away from the mess on the floor to meet her gaze. "The sarcophagus. I lost count after five."
"Oh," Sam returned, not sure what more she should or could say. She continued to gather the pieces of plate. She contemplated the sauce stain but mostly wondered what she should do with the colonel. Preoccupation and a moment of carelessness and one of the glass pieces Sam was collecting sliced into her finger.
"Ouch!" she hissed. She looked down at her finger as a line of blood began to well up from the break in her skin.
Jack was suddenly kneeling beside her, staring intently at her bleeding finger. Sam was reluctant to move. She wasn't sure what Jack was doing or thinking; she realized that until he was more like himself she might have to make a number of bizarre concessions to him.
Jack moved his hand as though to take hers, hesitated, then almost uncertainly cradled her wounded hand in his own as though it were fragile as he watched the blood stain her skin. His eyes were locked and vacant as he said in a muted voice, "Dying gets confusing... makes it hard to remember how many times."
Sam blinked at him, Jack still staring at her cut, and asked tentatively, "You died each time before they put you in the sarcophagus?" Her chest tightened at the thought. Five times in at least, five times dead. They hadn't thought of a way to save him soon enough... more than five times too late.
Jack only nodded blankly and reached up to dab his index finger against the blood on her hand. He pulled away his hand to study the drop of crimson left on his own finger, engrossed.
Sam slowly began to resume her clean-up of the kitchen floor. Jack continued to kneel on the floor next to her.
Jack looked away from the blood on his finger. It seemed he saw the mess on the floor for the first time. "Sorry, Sam."
"It's fine, sir. Why don't you go sit in the living room? I'll get this cleaned up."
Jack didn't respond at first, then slowly did as he was bade. Sam hurried to finish her task; she didn't want to leave him alone longer than necessary.
When Sam finished cleaning up the mess Jack had made and put away the left-over pizza she went looking for her commanding officer. She found him in her living room, sitting solemnly at her desk. Sam moved a few steps closer and understood why he was so still. In his hand was a photograph of Daniel, fished from the collection of loose pictures she kept in her desk drawer.
Carter's life was chiseled down to the military essentials, but she was still sentimental. Apparently to find that sentimentality one only had to go as deep as the top drawer of her desk. Sam had pictures of everyone important to her in that pictorial catch-all drawer. Pictures of her father, her mother, her brother Mark and his family, pictures of Teal'c, Jack, and Daniel. The picture of Daniel that Jack held was of the archaeologist at one of Jack's birthday get-togethers. Daniel was leaning easily against the side of Jack's house as the three of them had waited for Jack to return home so they could surprise him. He was smiling, one of those rare but brilliant grins that he'd worn far too infrequently. Daniel's eyes danced when he smiled like that, damn near shimmered like the wormhole event horizon in the stargate. It was so many little things like that that Sam missed so much.
Jack was staring intently at Daniel's image, seeming lost again. His thumb rubbed over the glossy picture. Now it and odd items like that photo were all that was left to them of their good friend.
Sam wasn't blind nor was she ignorant. She knew that if Daniel was still here it would be him taking care of Jack instead of her. Sam never entirely understood what it was they'd shared, but Jack wasn't as scared of looking weak or human around Daniel; Daniel folded to Jack's care with the kind of trust a child had in a parent. Two grown men who had found kindred souls in the most unlikely of places. They'd been perfect counterpoints and it made them better. Maybe in many ways that Sam could never completely understand. She knew only that, with Daniel gone, the scales were skewed and Jack was a little less for it.
Sam found herself speaking before she could censure her thoughts. "I miss him."
Jack tensed at her words, sat up straighter, shoved the photograph back into the drawer with the others, and slid it closed.
Sam flinched at his behavior, knowing it all too well. "I'm sorry," she apologized, "I know you don't like talking about it."
Jack rose from the chair without uttering a word and moved toward the living room window on the other side of the room.
Sam thought of Daniel. Jack needed Daniel... SHE needed Daniel. All the lives Daniel had touched, all the lives he would have touched had he lived, they ALL needed Daniel.
Sam took the seat Jack recently vacated and slid her top drawer open, looking down at her collection of photos. The one Jack had been looking at was on top. Beneath that picture, Sam could see a photo of Jack, propped against the side of his truck, in jeans and a flannel shirt and smiling. Half of her father's face peeked out a layer beneath that, then a partial view of Teal'c in a cowboy hat sitting between Janet and Cassie at a barbecue. Jonas had yet to make an appearance in Sam's drawer of memories. It was quite possible that Jonas would never find his place in this hodgepodge collection of those most dear to Samantha Carter. Colonel O'Neill was the one who made it clear as the sun in the sky that he wasn't going to accept Jonas as Daniel's replacement, wasn't going to forget Daniel and embrace the man who'd taken his position, but more well hidden Sam suspected she was no better than the colonel. It wasn't fair to Jonas, but that was life.
Sam slowly closed the drawer again and turned to look toward Jack. He was standing by the window, hands in his pockets and body held still as he stared out into the night.
After a long silence, and without turning to face her, Jack began to speak. His voice was rough, low-pitched, and Sam soon learned why. "In Iraq, when I was a prisoner, it always had an end in sight. If we got killed then it would all stop and we wouldn't have to... endure anymore." Jack rolled up once on the balls of his feet, a painfully familiar Jack O'Neill mannerism that gave Sam hope.
"I've never told anyone how reassuring that was... I don't think I really understood how much I clung to that fact until now. Because I didn't have that with Ba'al. If I died it didn't stop there. And dying hurts... hurts like hell."
Sam cringed in sorrow and seethed with fury all at once.
Jack was talking again, softly but candidly in a way that Sam never heard from him before. Maybe this was how Jack had been with Daniel all the time... maybe Jack realized he needed to relent to finding this with someone else because his best friend was gone. After Daniel maybe Sam was the best he was going to be able to do.
"The consolation prize for going through it must be that it's the only time you ever have to do it. Not with Ba'al. No matter how many times I died it was never the end."
Sam was afraid to talk lest she break this moment of Jack actually telling her what was bothering him, what he was thinking. It was a moment built of crystals and silk threads; she would have to do so little to shatter it beyond repair. She didn't have the artisan hands to hold this together like Daniel had.
Afraid of the wrong words, Sam decided to fall back on action. She left her seat and moved toward Jack. She stopped just shy of being alongside him to afford him space, just close enough to let him know she was there. It was all she could think to give him.
Jack listened to her approach; he didn't react immediately to it. He finally cast a direct look at her over his shoulder, saying evenly, "In the end that became the hardest part."
Sam didn't know what to say. Maybe Daniel would have, but she didn't.
Jack half-turned, finally looking more squarely at her.
He'd been brutally honest, so she decided her best tactic would be to return the gesture.
"I'm worried about you, Colonel." 'Understatement of the year,' she thought to herself.
Jack only stared at her for a few seconds, didn't react to her confession, then nodded absently and looked down at the floor. When he looked back up at her Sam felt like she'd been given pardon. There was a faint but sincere smile barely touching Jack's lips. "I'm gonna be fine, Carter. I have it on authority."
Sam frowned at the strange comment, but the only explanation she got was a small, classic and familiar Jack smirk. It was his cryptic look of 'I know something you don't'. She also knew it was all the explanation she could expect out of him.
Sam was fine with that, as long as Jack was right... and she believed he was. Looking at him Sam could see Jack was wounded, but he wasn't devastated and he wasn't broken. They'd get through this, he would be okay, and she wouldn't lose another friend... at least not today.
END
