Sam hadn't remembered how much she missed a decent shower until she was 'her old self' again and stepped underneath the hot spray of water in the SGC locker room. It was almost euphoric and for a split second she was able to forget everything else. But only a second. Then the echo of her solitary shower head's hiss and the sharp resounding of water hitting the tile floor below was almost a desolate moan in her ears. It made her remember the caves and the cramped, communal showers and how she'd been forced to keep her cleansing rituals short, to conserve her water jealously. She remembered having no choice but to hurriedly and without protracted thought swipe her hands over her belly, the swell of a growing child within her given no opportunity to properly enthrall her.
Sam's eyes dropped down her bare front and aching emptiness swallowed her when she saw the deflated span of her stomach between the rise of her enlarged bosom. Finally in a place where she could savor some time alone, to reflect and learn her body's new curves and shape, and the baby was gone... gone with Thera and with Jonah.
Sam blinked away the droplets of water clinging to her eyelashes and licked her soaked lips. At least she no longer felt the damning trails of tears on her cheeks and that made it a little easier to try and fortify herself. It was far too hard to be strong when she could still feel the evidence of tears where she'd been weak.
The gaping room of white linoleum and chrome taps and shower heads were somehow jarring and sinister, a white nothingness with metal teeth, and she was alone in it all.
Sam reached for the shampoo bottle Janet had said she'd find in a spare locker and poured a small dollop into her palm. She ended up having to go back for more when she realized she'd habitually allotted enough for her 'old' hairstyle and that it was now insufficient for her longer hair. She tried not to think, to be a void, as she lathered her hair and finally got rid of the grease and dirt and soot of so long as a slave. For a while it worked but then she was rinsing out the suds and her fingers were threading foreignly through her long locks and she stopped and her heart constricted and her lungs seized... because she remembered Jonah's hands in her hair. Jack would never play with Sam's hair but Jonah would with Thera's... and had. Thera's memories flared and it was Jonah's fingers against her scalp, trailing through blonde sections, his voice an affectionate lilt in her ear.
Sam dropped her hands at once from her hair and stood there, letting the water finish what she couldn't. She felt the world tilt for one nauseating second and then it stabilized and she was just alone again.
Sam took a deep breath and closed her eyes. How was she supposed to cope with this? How could she ask Thera to forget Jonah? Thera loved him, more than Sam had ever loved in all her life. Sam couldn't get on with her life until Thera let Jonah go, but how could she ask that simple woman to ever give up her reason for smiling like the sun in the middle of an ice age? Thera had so much more to lose than Sam ever had. Thera had had love, she'd had happiness... she'd had more than Sam ever could. Who was Sam to expect Thera to give up all of that just so she, Major Carter, could have back the pathetic little that made up her life, the life everyone seemed to think she had to reclaim?
She had to because there wasn't a choice. Jonah didn't exist, he was gone, as good as dead, and Sam couldn't handle grieving for him as Thera would. Thera's grief would destroy her and Sam had a baby to think of. Thera and Jonah's baby, but it was left to her to care for the child. It was all she had, someone else's baby even though she had all the memories and the body that had birthed it.
Sam would not think of Jonah. She willed herself to purge him from her thoughts.
Sam took up a washcloth and began to wash her body.
At once it betrayed her, because her skin remembered his hands. Her neck remembered his lips, her cheeks remembered his breath, her hands remembered his body.
Sam held her breath, counted to ten, and waited to implode. Surely something had to give, because the distress that tore at her with every reborn memory could not ravage her like this and leave her intact. She would certainly shatter and fall apart, leak into the drain and wash away with the dirty water.
Sam resumed her washing but it was an exercise in agony. Her body wasn't hers any more. It was Thera's, and after that it was Jonah's, and only then did what little that was left over belong to Sam Carter. She'd inherited a broken human being.
Sam finished with the cloth and soap and stood under the downpour a minute and let the water cascade over her. The hot water failed to clean away the sickness in her heart but she gave it time, anyway, just in case.
Sam shut off the water and went to the chest-high wall atop which she'd placed her blue towel. Before she could wrap herself, however, she caught a glimpse of herself in a distant mirror.
Sam stopped and turned to look at her reflection. Warnings resided and blared in her deepest thoughts but she didn't listen and, with towel in hand, stepped toward the mirror. She stood before its full-length and studied the woman staring back at her.
Long, wet blonde hair fell just behind her shoulders. Her blue eyes were almost a different kind of blue against creamy, clean skin. Her face was fleshier than she was used to it being from the 'before' days, before Thera. She looked out of proportion... nothing she saw fit with what she knew of Sam Carter, the fit, lean, athletic military officer. Her hips were wider, they practically screamed maternity, and her thighs had put on mass to match. She looked like gravity had shifted her entire center down a couple of inches. Her stomach, her hollow, childless womb, was flabby skin, not yet used to being freed the burden of containing a child. The skin was marred by brown streaks, like acorn-colored claw marks from some beast trying to rip the baby from her. Her breasts were heavy, the nipples dark and brown stretch marks like tiny stress tears framing the sides.
She looked abused by nature, unwanted and unattended, used and discarded. Sam remembered thinking those thoughts before... or rather, Thera remembered them.
The memory besieged her and Sam was helpless, defenseless and hopeless, to stop it. Jonah's hands on her stomach, his face beside hers, his eyes boring into her own in their shared reflection in a broken mirror. "I look at you, Thera, and I see the best of me."
Sam dropped the towel and slid her own hands over her empty stomach but she remembered Jonah's hands and the tightness of her skin swollen around a child a mere day away from being born. The baby had no doubt been, at that moment, in position, dropped into her pelvis awaiting its time, a time so near, and Jonah didn't know he was so close to true fatherhood when he caressed her.
"Here I see where you and I, together, created a new life."
Sam closed her eyes against the pain but the memory was so vivid, his touch so visceral even in remembering. Her hands drifted up to her breasts, tender and initiated now. They knew the lips of a newborn, the suction of a hungry child.
"I see these and I can't wait to watch you nursing our baby."
Sam allowed a moment to be grateful Jonah had been given that much. Before Jonah and Thera were stolen from them they'd had a little time together as a family, and Jonah got to see his daughter at Thera's breast. She was glad for that.
Sam slowly opened her eyes and saw a stranger in the mirror staring back at her. She wasn't Sam but she wasn't Thera. She was lost somewhere in the middle-ground and she didn't know how to choose between the two women on either side of her.
"I see you and I see everything I could ever want or need."
She missed Jonah. Thera missed him so, so much, but Sam was lost, cast adrift in a bucking sea, when she realized that she missed him, too. She missed that contentment, that joy that he'd brought into her life.
As Thera she had been important to someone, and not just anyone but him. Jonah's world had been Thera. Sam could remember the peace in his arms, the security in his smile, the comfort in his warmth. She remembered the way he looked at her like she was the only reason to get up every morning...that look had so often been her only driving force for getting out of bed to face the cold, grueling world of the caves. She remembered craving his touch and the feeling, like a hit on the sweetest drug, when he at last wrapped his arms around her. She remembered going to him was like coming home. She remembered how they made love and that it had seemed so perfect, like they were meant to fit together. Jonah loved Thera. Even if he'd never said it Thera had always known. Thera was content, a happy woman in a slave labor camp, for his affection. In its purest, truest form Thera was happier than Sam had ever been. Thera, Sam knew, loved Jonah.
And Sam... Sam was left with the broken pieces of a happy life, expected to salvage 'okay' from bliss blasted apart at the seams. It was asking too much, but Sam Carter was a fighter and she'd do her best.
For the baby she had to.
Sam picked up the towel off the floor and covered herself. The mangled remains of her physical self were a last living testament to Thera and for that reason her body, handed back to her in such a battered condition, didn't affect her. It was auxiliary now, apart from everything else she had to do.
Sam started to get dressed in the blue fatigues an airman had given her and the familiar material seemed like a last step in leaving Thera behind. They were the clothes of Samantha Carter, Air Force blue and so very far removed from worker orange.
It made her remember seeing Jack in them an hour before.
She didn't know what she, Sam, was going to do about Jack. She knew part of her would always look at him and see Jonah. She'd set eyes on him when Janet called her out and it had been an instant heartache because he was Jonah. But he wasn't. He'd called her 'Carter'. That was Jack O'Neill through and through.
Sam's stomach turned at the thought of facing Jack. What she didn't see of Jonah she'd see Jack. To Sam Jack was important. Not in the same way Jonah was important to Thera, but he was vital to her just the same. Sam couldn't imagine her life without Jack.
She just didn't know how she could integrate him into her life anymore. Would she always see a little of Jonah when she looked at him, and if so, how could she endure that kind of torment the rest of her life? She was beginning to understand that a little of Thera would always be in her, and that part of her would always search for Jonah in Jack's face.
And the baby...if Sam was going to accept she was the child's mother then it followed that Jack was the father. Jack the father of her daughter. It was almost too much to bear thinking.
But she'd have to figure it out because Thera's memories were part of her and Jack wasn't going away...for Thera's sake Sam didn't want that last vestige of Jonah going away. If that little bit remained of him then Jonah wouldn't completely die and Jonah's death was a prospect Thera could not bear.
Counting Jolinar, Sam's psyche was getting very crowded.
Sam slowly finished dressing and longed privately for the care-free, simple life on P3R-118.
Kaegan's life and been turned on its head for the second time in as many weeks. It seemed a lifetime ago that she was night-shift foreman for the mining crew in the caves, merrily excavating ore for the machines that would help keep her people alive. She was honored to serve and her life had been uncomplicated.
Now she was in another underground facility but that was where the similarities ended. This place was clean where the caves had been dirty, well-lit where the caves were in shadows and the flickers of firelight. The people here were clean and well-fed, friendly and only too eager to give her clothing and food instead of squander their own covetously. There was no pressing sensation of cold just at the edges of the walls. It was all so much the opposite of everything Kaegan had been reared to know.
Even the people she knew from the caves were not the same here.
Kaegan glanced at Carlin at her side. No, not Carlin, 'Daniel' she corrected herself. She had been putting forth a concerted effort but she knew it would take time for her to get used to calling him 'Daniel'... probably as much time as it would take her to assimilate everything that had happened in the last few days. She had never suspected the strange trio of the caves were actually visitors from another planet, this planet, and had been unwillfully conscripted into serving Kaegan's people.
At least Car–Daniel didn't seem bitter about the deceit.
Daniel looked different than Carlin, if that made any sense. He'd showered and shaved and put on clean clothes, a blue outfit with a black undershirt, all of a vastly different thickness and material than the worker clothes they each used to wear. Kaegan had been similarly provided with new clothing but she felt certain it was not nearly as flattering a color on her as it was on Daniel. Blue suited him, even if it was strange seeing him in something other than orange-tan. The blue made his eyes even brighter... although she couldn't say the spectacles did much for their luster. The doctor woman, 'Janet', had given Daniel eyeglasses and Kaegan was still not used to him wearing them. She did note, however, that he wasn't performing a perpetual squint with the glasses.
There was no doubt in Kaegan's mind that the man next to her was not Carlin... not anymore, and that intangible alteration was still giving Kaegan a headache. There were so many little things that were not right for Carlin but were apparently 'bang-on' for Daniel, because so many of the people in this place responded enthusiastically to him when he started acting oddly from Kaegan's point of view.
Daniel had been very kind to her, and she had to count herself lucky because she really felt she couldn't count much on 'Carlin' once the physical body remembered his true identity. Kaegan could almost see a shift in him, a transformation. It was not just the fact he started to answer to a different name. In the span of a few hours he became wiser, gentler, more self-possessed, a little sadder, and it was distinctly not Carlin.
Carlin was still in there, Kaegan knew that much. His memories were still intact, he could recall everything that had happened while he was Carlin. The way he treated her had mostly remained unchanged. He still treated Kaegan like an equal, but there were differences amid those consistencies and Kaegan felt alone in this new world when her one friend vanished right in front of her.
But Daniel was just as nice as, if not nicer than, Carlin and he'd taken it upon himself to help her adjust. He'd taken her out of the under-stimulating infirmary when the tension was starting to wear at them all, he let her get cleaned up (cleaner than she'd ever been) and eat a hearty meal (more delicious, plentiful food than she'd ever had), then he started wandering the corridors with her, showing her around. The corridors all looked the same to her and she was horribly turned around, but Daniel strolled along with confidence and they unerringly ended up where they intended to go. Kaegan had to believe the twists of unchanging halls really did make sense to him, and it made sense that they would if it was true that he had been another person who practically lived in these gray caves for years. Kaegan was amazed at the things she saw but she was more interested in the familiar stranger accompanying her.
Daniel was quiet, a lot quieter than Carlin ever was, and he looked more troubled than Carlin had ever been. Kaegan wondered at that and thought that maybe regaining this 'Daniel's' memories wasn't such a great thing for him after all.
Now that she thought about it, Jonah and Thera hadn't looked so great after hearing the news, either. No, 'Jack' and 'Sam' hadn't looked so good. Perhaps that was the difference... Jack, Sam, and Daniel looked unwell or least troubled while Jonah, Thera, and Carlin had always seemed fine. Kaegan hoped it wasn't telling of the lives to which her companions had returned.
Were it still Carlin at her side she would have asked, but this was Daniel and she didn't know him. For all the same person the two were Daniel and Carlin were not the same as well. Even still, she found herself staying close to Daniel, because what little of Carlin was still alive in him was all she knew and all she trusted in this strange place.
They had been walking side by side in silence for a good while but Kaegan was content without words. Daniel, it seemed, would oblige her. He seemed preoccupied, anyway.
Kaegan looked up and saw yet another strange woman of this strange world coming down the opposite end of the corridor. Kaegan started when she finally recognized the woman as Thera–Sam. She looked so different that Kaegan hadn't even placed her at first glance.
Like Daniel and herself, Sam had been given new clothes, the blue pants, black shirt, and blue jacket that seemed one of two standard outfits in the gray caves of the Earthers (the other being very similar but green instead of blue). Th–Sam had bathed and Kaegan realized just how white Sam's skin was underneath the grime... fairer, even, than Daniel's. Like Daniel, the blue of the clothes accented the blue in her eyes and Kaegan hadn't truly noticed before then just how blue Sam's eyes were. Sam's blonde hair had been pulled back into a ponytail and without the hanging straw-colored locks to frame her face Sam was almost unrecognizable as the woman who had once been Thera.
Besides the new nuances of her physical appearance Kaegan noted a change in demeanor and bearing that made this woman, for all the physical similarities, clearly not Thera. There, too, as with Daniel, was the stride of self-knowledge. Whoever Kaegan's former comrades truly were in this world they were people with far more personal tragedy to strengthen them than they had had as Jonah, Thera, and Carlin. Sam walked with the confidence of knowing just how far she could be taken, how far she could be pushed before she broke because maybe she'd crossed the line a time or two.
Kaegan was almost glad these people weren't the ones she knew, because had they been she might have felt their pain acutely.
Daniel's step faltered and Kaegan looked over and saw that he'd spotted Sam. Daniel slowly came to a stop and Kaegan did likewise and watched, curious, as Sam approached. The blonde woman had seen her companions from the planet and she looked like she meant to stop.
Kaegan didn't know what to expect. Were this Thera and Carlin she'd have a good idea but with Sam and Daniel she couldn't hazard to guess.
Sam reached them, came to a halt a pace away, and Daniel ventured tentatively, "Ah... Sam?"
Sam gave a thin, forced smile. "Hey, Daniel." It was acknowledgement of him and herself, their true selves free of the caves and the people they'd erroneously thought themselves to be.
Daniel smiled faintly in return then his face sobered as he sincerely inquired, "How are you doing?"
Sam stone-walled a moment, reticent and guarded, but she quickly covered with, "Okay." She was far from convincing but no one said so. Sam, in the next moment, looked closely at Daniel and commented, "You found your glasses."
Daniel reached up to the rims and answered, "Yeah... um, Janet had my prescription still on record; she had a pair ordered for me."
Sam nodded and in the lag that followed she looked desperately alone. Kaegan thought it was just that she had been so used to seeing Thera with Jonah at her side that Sam, without accompaniment, seemed incongruous to her.
Or maybe not just to her.
"How's... Jack?" Daniel asked so very gently.
Sam stiffened and her lips thinned but she swallowed and said with as much courage as she could muster, "He's in the infirmary watching the baby."
"Oh... and, um... he's... him? I mean, he's Jack?"
Sam's face pulled toward forlorn as she nodded. "Yeah."
Daniel looked down at the floor and Kaegan looked between them in confusion. She was missing something, that much was obvious.
"It'll be okay, Sam," Daniel said ever so softly, and Sam winced and looked away from him.
Sam gave another wane smile, even less convincing than the first, and she gestured down the hallway. "I should get back."
Daniel nodded and then Sam was gone, walking down the corridor with the same confidence in the maze of gray that Daniel possessed.
Daniel watched after Sam, expression drawn, and Kaegan reached out and touched his arm. Daniel looked over at her and Kaegan, with a quick glance after Sam, asked, "Is she okay?"
Daniel seemed to mull over the prospect of telling her and Kaegan dropped her hand. Carlin would not have assessed her worthiness or right to know, at least not after they had survived the attack together. She used to be one of them, one of the group, and now she was regarded as an outsider again, evident in the way he considered deigning to tell her. This was all Daniel and it stung.
In the end Daniel lowered his gaze and crossed his arms over his chest. "It's... complicated."
Of that Kaegan had no doubt.
"What's wrong?"
Daniel shuffled on his feet anxiously a moment, arms still tightly tucked, then he glanced down both ends of the hallway. Finally he turned his obscenely blue eyes to her and answered in a low voice, "Jack and Sam..." He went quiet after that, lost for adequate words, but Kaegan had a fair guess where he was going.
"I take it they weren't together before the caves?"
Daniel shook his head and the dour expression on his face made Kaegan ask, "Do they have others? Does Jo–Jack have a mate? Or is it Sam who's already bound to someone else?"
"No, it's nothing like that... I mean, neither had a significant other before P3R-118... it's just..." Daniel trailed, heaved a sigh, and Kaegan's brow furrowed. She could not begin to understand these lives her former friends had led.
Daniel looked closely at her, scrutinizing, seemed to come to a decision, and he slid a half-step closer to her. Kaegan held her ground and looked up at him. She could not help but notice that, for the most part, Daniel smelled the same as Carlin did. Soap and the copious amounts of water available at this 'SGC' didn't change the natural, personal scent of him, and she'd spent enough nights inexplicably in his arms to know it, diluted though it now was. His dimensions were the same, too. Daniel was just as tall, just as broad, and just as strong as Carlin, and that familiarity made it hard for Kaegan to keep telling herself it wasn't Carlin anymore.
"It's... a little hard to explain," Daniel said, "but here Jack and Sam are both military officers. Jack is Sam's commanding officer and there are rules that say they can't be romantically involved."
Kaegan's face twisted. "Surely your overseers must realize they didn't know they were breaking the law when they were Jonah and Thera."
"Oh, I'm sure they do... honestly, weird stuff like this happens to us all the time. No, it's not the generals or the Pentagon that are the big problem... it's Jack and Sam."
"I don't understand."
Daniel pursed his lips thoughtfully and then said, "Before the caves, before Jonah and Thera, Jack and Sam... well, I don't know how to describe what they were. They never did anything wrong, nothing against the rules of the Air Force, um, the military branch they serve, but..."
Kaegan was starting to get the picture. "But they wanted to."
"You could put it that way," Daniel said with a faint frown, "I wouldn't, but maybe that's just me. Let's just say they were... attracted to each other."
"But not as much as Jonah and Thera were attracted to each other?"
Daniel frowned deeply. "No, as much as Jonah and Thera, and that's the problem. It's just... hard for them. They've had to pretend they don't care about each other that way for so long, and before they could, but now..."
"The baby."
Daniel nodded.
"So your overseers won't confiscate the baby for what Jonah and Thera did?"
Daniel's eyes widened at the very notion. "No. No, of course not. Not that Jack or Sam would let them if they tried. Here there are laws to protect children from being taken from capable parents without a very good reason. No, it's not that. I just don't know what will happen now... now that they can't ignore their feelings or go back to pretending they don't exist. That's what Jack and Sam have always done, it was their pattern, their way... but now... now I don't think it can be half so easy. That's not to say it was easy before."
Kaegan could see clear concern and sympathy for his friends on Daniel's face. He looked troubled and distraught for their sake, worried about them, and it made Kaegan concerned for Jack and Sam, too. If what she had witnessed in Daniel was correct, then it stood to reason a little bit of Jonah and Thera still existed in Jack and Sam, too, and Kaegan cared about them.
"But they'll... they'll be all right, won't they?" Kaegan finally asked. Were they discussing Jonah and Thera she would not doubt, there would have been nothing that could have kept those two apart. With Jack and Sam, however, Kaegan couldn't know anything for certain.
Daniel looked doubly worried and answered, "I hope so, Kaegan... I really hope so."
