Secrets and Shadows: The Thin Blue Line
Part Four
There were few things weirder than getting a call from Carter asking him over without specifying why she needed him to come around. However, Jack had to admit that yanking open his stiff front door and finding her standing on the doorstep, unannounced, was definitely one of them.
"May I come in?" The lack of honourific simply added to the weirdness.
And all the protocol in the world didn't inform him exactly how he was supposed to say, "No, you can't."
"Uh, sure," he found himself saying. He waved a hand at the interior of the house. "Come in."
God, please don't let her stay too long...
He followed her into the living room, tucking his hands into his pockets and watching her as she sat down in one of the chairs. She looked about as ill at ease as he felt, her hands clutching each other firmly in her lap.
Even in casual jeans and a plain top, Carter looked...delicious. It was the wrong word to use to describe a subordinate, especially one sitting on Jack's couch, but it was the only one he could think of at that moment.
He remembered Sara's pregnancy, and the way she'd glowed, radiant and incredibly sexy. Part of that had been the fact that she was carrying Jack's child, and his male ego was stroked by the possession of woman and baby; but, given his response to Carter, maybe it was just attraction and the beauty she exuded from every cell of her pregnant body.
Jack clenched his hands into fists, safe in the pockets of his jacket.
Damn regulations. Damn sense of honour. Damn whole fucking situation.
Life was definitely not fair.
"So," he said, aiming to get this order of business out of the way, "What brings you to my humble abode?" She'd come around here once before recently, just before they went in search of Daniel's mythical lost city. And then, as now, he'd been hard pressed not to throw away honour and principle, and just...well, jump her.
There was a joke in the whole situation somewhere. Now, if Jack could only find out who was laughing at him, he'd beat the living daylights out of them.
"I...I've decided what I'm going to tell Pete," she said, slowly.
What makes you think I want to know? His argument with Daniel still stung his emotions and his pride. Daniel's insistance that Shanahan didn't need to know about Sam's pregnancy resonated with Jack's emotions, but his reason demanded that the man be told. "And?" His voice came out more harshly than he'd intended, but she didn't look at him at all.
"You're right," she said, slowly. "He should know." Judging by the way she was tense as a strung wire, Jack guessed that the decision she'd made wasn't the one she wanted to make. And one of the reasons he...admired Carter so much was because she held to her own personal honour just as strongly as he did his own. Maybe more so.
It warmed him, just a little bit, to see the struggle in her and know that she didn't really want Shanahan back in her life. Something in him wanted to say that it was because something in her still...admired him; but his innate cynicism swiftly drowned out that thought. Carter was too strong to want to remain with someone who required her to be something she was not - even for loneliness sake.
His silence drew her eyes to his face and he struggled not to look away. "I don't want to...to go back," she said quietly. "And I won't. He has a right to know about his child, but I can't...not even for our child..."
Our child... Jack's stomach lurched violently and it was all he could do not to retch.
If he'd needed any proof that he was not over this woman, he had it in his body's instinctive rejection of the thought of Shanahan and Carter together. Carter, whom Jack had kissed once - a once she didn't even remember and never would. Carter, whom Jack had admired from the safe distance of a commanding officer for seven years. Carter, who was carrying another man's child, and yet seemed to expect him to put their history behind him to help her out.
She was watching him, now, blue eyes guarded. "Sir? I was wondering if you would mind..."
A knock at the door interrupted her, and they both glanced towards the hall.
Jack cursed silently and took one step towards the door before he heard the key in the lock and swore under his breath. He wasn't going to make it to the door before it was opened, and he paused in the hall, looking back at Carter, sitting pale and bewildered on his couch.
Well, she would have found out sooner or later, he supposed, bitterly. And it wasn't as though he had anything to hide. They were free agents. She'd made that clear enough.
But Jack felt as though he should be ashamed of the woman who pushed open the door in a way that spoke of familiarity with his house. And that did Mel a grave injustice.
"Jack?" Her voice was beautiful, rich and melodious, a pleasure to the ears as it broke through the sudden heavy silence. "Are you ready to go?"
----
She'd intended to ask the Colonel to come with her when she told Pete about the baby. A backup of sorts, to remind her not to be taken in by anything her ex-boyfriend might say or do.
He hadn't been welcoming towards her, although she could understand that. It wasn't as though she usually dropped in to say 'hi' the way Daniel might. And she was well aware of his discomfort regarding her and her pregnancy, her relationship with Pete and a whole lot of other things.
So she'd been leading up to the request, gathering all her courage about her to ask, only to be interrupted by a knock on the door.
A moment later, her world turned about as the door opened smoothly, with an ease that showed the woman entering was familiar with the vagaries of the Colonel's sticky front door.
Something in Sam choked and died as she rose to her feet and looked from the slender woman to the Colonel. Now she understood the smart shirt and pressed slacks, and the hair that looked as though it had been combed into neat submission. The understanding nearly undid her, and only years of self-control enabled her not to crumble beneath the onslaught of emotion that swept through her like an explosion.
"I'm sorry," the woman said as she looked from the Colonel to Sam. "I'm interrupting something." Graceful hands smoothed down the sides of her light summer dress, and Sam suddenly felt frumpy in her jeans and military-issue t-shirt.
"Sorry, Mel," the Colonel said, "Carter came by unexpectedly and..." He glanced at Sam, and she saw his uneasiness, as plain as if he'd broadcast it over a radio communications system. "Melissa, this is...Major Samantha Carter. Carter, this is Melissa Sandringham."
Major Carter, Sam thought bitterly, although she kept her expression neutral and stretched her mouth in a smile that she knew didn't reach her eyes. She moved past the Colonel and held out her hand, "Pleased to meet you."
The words couldn't have been farther from the truth, but she gave them some show of credibility - or so she hoped.
"You're Carter?" Melissa asked, her lovely voice interested. "Jack's spoken of you before. Just a little bit about the work he does in the mountain."
"Just a little bit," the Colonel echoed. Nothing that would compromise security. "Not enough to bore the pants off her." The smile he shot at Melissa was warmly affectionate, and Sam suddenly felt as though winter had come unusually early.
A mean little voice in Sam whispered that the Colonel would hardly have to resort to boring the woman to get the pants off her. The remains of her lunch suddenly churned within her, and she felt as though something had perforated her lungs and there wasn't enough air to give her the oxygen she needed...
One hand reached out to the wall, instinctively seeking something that would steady her. A moment later, the Colonel was at her elbow, his hand supporting her arm. "Carter?"
She moved away from him, enough to make it clear his touch wasn't welcomed. "Sir, I'm fine..."
"You're still in the first trimester of your pregnancy..."
"And it doesn't mean I can't look after myself," Sam said, striving for calm. Calm. Control... "I won't trespass on your time anymore, sir." She didn't want to be anywhere near the Colonel right now. Especially since the feel of his hand on her bare arm was doing terrible things to her equilibrium, fingertips hot against the chill of her skin.
"And I'm not going to let you drive home as long as you're having dizzy spells..."
"With all due respect, sir, you're not responsible for my well-being..."
"When you nearly faint in my hallway, that makes me responsible," he argued. Her hand fisted, fighting the urge to clock him one. If he thought she was going to let him hover over her, or have to stand and watch him and Melissa, he had another think coming.
"We could drive you home if you like..."
She didn't like. She really didn't like. "Excuse me," she managed, before she flung off the Colonel's arm and made for the bathroom. Her arm where his fingers had rested was cold, so cold, and Sam would never be warm again.
The porcelain sterility of the toilet mocked her as her lunch came up and ruined the pristine perfection of the bowl. Daniel might have said it was an apt metaphor for her pregnancy; scarring the perfection of her career and her life with its garish complications. At least, the Daniel-in-her-head would have said it; Daniel might disapprove or dislike, but he had some measure of tact. Sometimes. When he chose to.
I'll ask Daniel, she thought as she rinsed out her mouth and washed her hands at the basin. Daniel can come and get me from here. A glance at her face in the mirror showed the usual. Mouth too thin, brow too wide, eyes too large and prone to shadows beneath them; a sombre, serious face that she presented to the world as Major Sam Carter.
A knock on the open door made her whirl around to face the Colonel. "Uh, you okay, Carter?"
She didn't hold his glance more than a moment, turning back to dry her hands on the handtowel hanging neatly from the rail. 'Carter.' That was all she was to him. One more soldier he'd worked with in his time. One more warm body to throw at the enemy. Not anyone special, just a woman who'd once been a member of his team.
The knowledge wrung her dry, and she answered him with stiff correctness, the perfect soldier. "Fine, sir. Just a momentary nausea."
"I talked with Melissa, we can..."
"I'll call Daniel, sir," she said, interrupting him briskly and avoiding looking at his face. "There's no need for you to interrupt your evening out."
"Carter, it's no trouble..."
She was proud of herself for keeping her voice even, "You had a...a date planned," she said quietly, "You should get to keep it. I'm...I'm okay. I could probably even drive..."
"You're not driving home," he said, and Sam looked up at him as her mind registered the harshness in his voice. His face was a mask of anger, and she couldn't understand why he looked as though she'd betrayed him in some way. Surely, if there was anyone betrayed here it was...
Sam mentally slammed the door on that thought before it could reach its conclusion. She had no right to feel betrayed; none at all.
And yet...
The Colonel was still talking, hard and fast, as though he were barking out commands in the field. "If you won't accept a lift from me, then we'll call Daniel and wait for him to get here so he can drive you home. But I am not letting you drive yourself home!"
Sam could have retorted that it was not his decision. She could have told him that he wasn't allowed to intrude into her private life. She couldn't have told him that he couldn't stop her if she decided otherwise.
She didn't.
Instead, she let him call Daniel, then sat stiffly in his living room and made politely stilted conversation with Melissa, who seemed clueless enough not to notice the icy frigidity of the woman desperately trying not to snub her. And the Colonel paced and watched them, and occasionally added to the conversation. It was maddening.
By the time Daniel arrived, Sam was ready to dig her own grave and bury herself in it. Melissa seemed like a lovely person; a wryly deprecating sense of humour, a serenity that Sam envied in the midst of her own turmoil, claws that she displayed neatly to the Colonel when he snapped unexpectedly at Sam... She was beautiful, elegant, and Sam got no hint of any displeasure that the evening had been interrupted by a woman who was, after all, only a work colleague.
Under other circumstances, Sam might even have liked the woman.
Just not with Colonel O'Neill.
Daniel arched a brow at them all as he walked in. "Sorry to delay your evening, Jack, Melissa," he said. "Sam, you ready to go? Got anything in your car you need to take with you? Laptops, cellphones, stuff?"
Her apologies and farewell to the Colonel and his date were stiff, and Sam walked to Daniel's car, trying to remember if she'd ever felt so flat and stale.
"Sam?" Daniel was regarding her over the roof of his Prius. At the whirr-click of the doors unlocking, Sam pulled open the door and slid in, giving all her attention to adjusting the seat and fastening her seatbelt and ignoring the man and woman who'd come out of the house and were walking over to the Colonel's truck, conversing softly.
Nothing was said until they reached the state highway running towards Sam's house. "I guess you didn't know about Melissa," Daniel said quietly.
"I guess you did," she responded, then shut her mouth, ashamed of her cattiness.
"Are you okay?"
"I had a brief nauseous spell," she explained, "But I'm fine, otherwise."
"Jack said you were dizzy for a moment there."
If he was fishing for information, he was doing a bad job of it, Sam decided. "It was just a moment."
"You do have to look after yourself..."
"So I'm going to have you nagging me all the time?"
He regarded her evenly, "Only when you need to be nagged," he said. "Sam, we're your friends. We're here for you and your child, whatever you decide to do with it or about it."
Sam looked at his profile as he navigated through the Springs' rush hour traffic. "Will you come with me when I tell Pete about the baby?"
She'd intended to ask the Colonel to accompany her. But Daniel would do in a pinch, and it was definitely a pinch.
Behind his glasses, the blue eyes blinked a couple of times in surprise. "Uh... Sure." He frowned a little, "When were you thinking of..."
"Sunday afternoon," Sam said. "In the park." Somewhere public and obvious. Somewhere where she could escape from and not feel as though she were obligated or cornered. And with someone there to back her up.
It was silly to feel as though she needed someone else present when she told Pete about the baby. It wasn't as though she couldn't handle Pete quite capably herself. She just...didn't want to do this alone.
There were a lot of things Sam didn't want to do alone.
Among them was bring up this child without a father. But it wasn't as though she had a choice in that.
Or did she?
Sam stared out the window, submitting herself to Daniel's choice of country and western music and reviewing her options.
She could take Pete back. If he was still interested, of course. He might not be. Yes, they'd had their differences, but surely he could change. If he could learn that he wasn't always going to get his way, if he could understand that she had her own life and her own things that she wanted to do and sometimes she just wanted to be left alone - that he didn't need to occupy her every moment of the time they were together... She was going to change jobs, take on something that wouldn't be as secretive, that wouldn't be hiding stuff from him... It could work.
Maybe.
Sam was only too aware that there were a lot of 'ifs' in her thoughts. Sure, Pete was stubborn, but so was she...
"Sam?" Daniel snapped his fingers in front of her nose. "Earth to Sam!"
"What?"
"I was asking if I got to be an honourary uncle. You know, to your son or daughter." He twinkled at her, smiling slightly. "Teach them to speak Goa'uld and cuss at you in a dozen languages..."
"Of course," she said lightly. "You can be 'Unca Danny' and the babysitter for when we need time off."
"Good," he said, a smile flashing across his face before he frowned slightly. "'We'?" Sam looked away, but not before she saw the incredulity skitter across his face. "You're not thinking of going back to him..."
"And if I am?" She flashed at him, aware that she was taking her anger about the Colonel and Melissa out on him and not really caring. "It wasn't all bad..."
In the early days of their relationship, Pete had been spontaneous, turning up at her house on a whim with anything from a bottle of champagne to a new set of silk sheets to 'try out.' He'd given her gifts, taken her out to shows, slow-danced her through the night - all the usual romantic stuff. He'd made her feel like she was a desirable, feminine woman for once; not a soldier fighting in the middle of a war.
The reality was that she was at once both a woman and a soldier; and while her relationship with Pete had allowed her to be just a woman, he hadn't been able to handle the idea that she was also a soldier, military trained, and well capable of things he couldn't imagine.
"It wasn't all bad when you were first dating," Daniel retorted as he handled the car through traffic. "Do you remember why you told me you broke up?"
In the end her relationship with Pete had crashed on the rocks of her professional work; the same thing they'd always crashed on.
She regretted those few minutes of blunt honesty, now. They'd been cozened from her at 0300 a mere week after she'd broken up with Pete. For all that he could act clueless when it came to military workings, Daniel could set up an intellectual ambush like nobody else Sam had met.
"I remember," she said, tightly. "But that was before the baby..."
His disappointment and disapproval resonated in the air conditioning of the car. "What makes anything different now that you have the baby, Sam? How much more is he going to respect your boundaries and let you be yourself? Is the baby really going to change anything that was wrong between you in the first place?"
Sam knew the answer to that. And he knew she knew the answer.
But it wasn't Daniel's child. It wasn't his decision. And it wasn't his loneliness, eating at him all the time.
At the end of the day, Sam was lonely.
She was all the more so after seeing the lovely woman the Colonel was taking out tonight.
Where had they gone? What were they doing?
Dinner at a nice restaurant with candlelight, soft music, good company? Or out to a bar to sit at a table all night and talk until the evening grew late? Tickets to the opera or maybe to a pre-season hockey game? And afterwards, would the Colonel invite Melissa inside and down the long corridor to his bedroom and kiss her as though there was no other woman in the world but her?
Sam wondered why she was doing this to herself.
Houses flashed past, their reflective eyes showing nothing within, revealing none of the secrets that lay inside. Sam felt as though she were a house with all the furnishings laid out across the front yard, her secrets revealed, her soul as empty as a house with no family inside it.
"You know how I went through several foster homes after my parents died," he said, after a moment. "One of them - one of the first ones - was a couple who fought all the time. They applied to foster because they wanted a child of their own and hadn't had one. And the money was probably good, too," he added, with wry sardonicism.
"Anyway, when I came to them, she'd managed to conceive and was halfway through her pregnancy. And they fought." His mouth twisted, bitter with the memory. "They argued over everything, from what she was and wasn't allowed to eat and drink, to how they spent the money. They fought day and night, and if it wasn't one thing, it was another. He didn't like her involvement in work, she didn't like his friends and how much time he spent down at the bar." Daniel shrugged. "Tammy kept telling me it would be okay when the baby was born. And then the baby was born and they had one more thing to fight over in addition to everything else."
"Pete and I weren't like that." Yet, even as she spoke, Sam knew what Daniel's response would be.
"Maybe you didn't fight all the time," he conceded, "But the problems with your relationship - the ones you said broke you up - are still there. And a child won't change that one bit." They stopped at a traffic light and he turned to her, looking her directly in the eye. "Sam, it's better to be single and wish you were dating someone than be stuck in a relationship and wish you were single."
Sam was tempted to snap at him, demanding just how he knew this. She kept her mouth shut.
It was disconcerting to notice that, in addition to a suddenly-acquired delicate stomach, Sam was finding herself short of temper, irritable, and prone to snapping at people around her. Especially the people with whom she was familiar - namely the guys of SG-1. Better be careful, she told herself, sharply. Nobody likes a bitch. Even a pregnant one.
Daniel had a point. A child wouldn't change the problems that had existed between her and Pete. She conceded that, silently and resentfully. But with a child, they'd at least have a reason to work through those problems.
And the relationship wasn't worth working through those problems before? Her internal monologue inquired acidly.
Sam was given no chance to defend her sudden inclination to repair her relationship with Pete. Daniel was addressing her again. "Sunday in the park?"
Her thoughts were so scattered that it took her a few moments to work out what he was asking. "Yes. I'll need to pick up my car sometime on the weekend..."
"We can do it after the park," he said.
"Daniel, that leaves me without a car for the whole weekend."
"I can drive you around if you need to get somewhere."
He was being stupid about this. Sam rolled her eyes. "And what if I wanted to run around to every baby clothing shop in town?"
"Then it's probably just as well that you don't have a car," Daniel retorted, smiling. Upon catching her expression, he regarded her with slight exasperation. "Oh, come on, Sam," he chided, "Did you really think that you'd become persona non grata now you're pregnant? We're not like that."
"I'm going to be pregnant for another six months," she reminded him. "You'll be more than tired of playing devoted uncle by the end of that time."
He grinned, blue eyes twinkling behind his glasses as they turned into her street. "So enjoy it now while it lasts!"
And even she had to crack a smile at that.
----