NOTES:

Reflections

Chapter Two

"I was working on the Stargate with Catherine Langford when General West took over the project," Samuel said, moving his chair slightly from side to side.

They'd hauled him out of his cell after his DNA tests had come back: an exact match with Sam's but for the Y-chromosome - he was, in all respects, who he said he was. After a shower and a shave and a new set of fatigues, they'd sat him down in the briefing room so SG-1 could hear his story.

Sam was seated opposite Samuel. It had probably been deliberate. Certainly there was no shortage of people looking from him to her and back to him again. It was like being the main attraction at a circus or a magic show. Nobody could quite believe what they were seeing, including Sam herself.

His story carried some eerie similarities to her own - and quite a few differences.

"I wangled myself a place on the initial insertion team. The Colonel really wasn't happy about that, at least, no happier than he was at Daniel's inclusion. When we came back and they shut the project down, I was transferred back out to the Pentagon and reassigned to other projects."

"Our Carter didn't get on the original team to Abydos at all."

Jack meant well, but Sam wasn't quite in the mood to have old shortcomings - or old wounds - brought up. Especially not before this counterpart of hers who was also Sam Carter - just male.

Samuel glanced over at her with something like sympathy. "I imagine she didn't. General West might have been good for what he did out in Desert Storm, but his prejudices against women were fairly well known. I can't remember how many times Catherine complained of him during the two weeks we worked on getting the Stargate open." He shrugged. "When they reopened the project, I transferred back from the Pentagon, and joined SG-1."

"No arm-wrestling?" Jack arched a brow at Samuel, then looked at Sam. "Just asking."

He would remember that, of course. There were moments in her career that Sam felt embarrassed to remember, and the gauntlet she'd flung down before him, Kawalsky, and Ferretti was one of those she least liked to recall.

The chip on her shoulder had been care of not only General West but a whole plethora of military personnel whose prejudices were bone-deep. In truth, she'd been on the defensive even before the Colonel's skeptical query echoed through the briefing room that first day.

Not exactly her proudest moment in the SGC.

The 'short version' of his SG-1 was similar to hers in a lot of respects. Second-in-command to Colonel O'Neill of SG-1, Jolinar, meeting the Tok'ra, saving the galaxy, Asgard, replicators, the Prometheus, the Daedelus, and a predilection for blowing things up. There were small differences; a planet here, a person there.

And one very large difference. "Near as we can tell, a Goa'uld took the Alpha Site a couple of weeks ago. Grabbed everyone, stuck snakes in their heads, put them back in place. We never even noticed until…" He winced and looked down at his hands. "Captain Brenton dialled Cimmeria, but didn't make it through." The blue eyes rose from his hands to look directly at Sam. "I don't know where the Tok'ra are and the Asgard haven't answered my calls from Cimmeria. So I lived with the Cimmerians for a week until it got too much. I wasn't going to wait around for them to hunt me down - making for the mirror was the best option I could see."

He snorted, amused in spite of himself. "I was looking for a world where they didn't have a Samuel Carter. Never thought I'd find a place where they had a Samantha Carter!" He grinned at Sam. "No offence intended."

"None taken," she replied, although she was feeling just a little overwhelmed by his ebullience. "We've never met a Samuel Carter, if it comes to that."

And that was obviously a surprise to him.

"So how did you know that our world wasn't taken over by the Goa'uld?" Daniel asked, curiously.

"The iris code," he replied with a grimace. "Goa'uld are so arrogant, they don't use an iris for a Stargate."

"And if they did?"

"I'm a naquadah sensitive," Samuel pointed out. "I'd know if they were Goa'uld."

He seemed very assured of it - so much so that Sam was briefly taken aback. She wondered if she came across with the same natural assuredness that this man did - or if it was simply a function of his being male.

"So what do you want from us?" That was the General, of course, looking at it from a professional perspective.

Samuel looked up and down the table. "Somewhere to stay. A place from which to fight the Goa'uld. "There've got to be a few differences between our worlds - tech I've developed that your Colonel Carter hasn't, things that I can do around here."

"Oh, we could always do with another Carter around the place," Jack said off-handedly. He glanced at Sam with a faint smile. She summoned up a return smile for him, even if she was somewhat uncomfortably aware of Samuel watching them when General Hammond spoke again.

"Any decision to offer you sanctuary here will depend on the decision of the Joint Chiefs."

"I understand that, sir," Samuel said, leaning back in his chair with his elbow on the armrest. "At least the entropic cascade failure won't be a problem this time around," he murmured. Then he caught Daniel's slightly astonished expression. "What?"

Daniel explained it later, after they'd seen Samuel to the guest rooms he was occupying until they heard back from the Joint Chiefs. Her counterpart would be allowed his run of most of the main base areas for the moment, although he wasn't allowed entry into the scientific or laboratory levels until they had proper clearance for him.

"It was the exact mirror image of the way you were sitting. He didn't think twice about it, either. It was just…unlike anything I've ever seen before. Uncanny."

'Uncanny' was one way of looking at it. 'Uncomfortable' was the term Sam was thinking of.

They were taking the elevator back up to the lab levels where Sam was planning to collect her stuff and go home. Although not much had happened on the mission, Sam still felt tired - a combination of the long walk to and from the Stargate and the somewhat shocking revelation of her alternate counterpart.

"Well, he is me." Sam thought that statement over and winced. The gender pronouns were going to be hell on her mind. "In a manner of speaking."

"Except for that Y-chromosome…" Daniel grinned. "There, but for the grace of genetics, goes you."

"You've seen another version of me before, Daniel."

"Well, yes," he said, unabashed. "But that was different. Dr. Carter was the same genetically, but her history was the big difference between the two of you. I mean, I'd just been thinking about doing a study of the differences between you and her when she went into cascade failure and we had to send her and Major Kawalsky back…"

Daniel rambled happily on, delighted at the prospect of an anthropological paper. Granted, his specialisation was archaeology, which was things rather than people, but within the SGC, specialisations tended to bleed into other areas due to the vast scope of possibilities in the program - and the requirement that personnel be able to take on tasks at the drop of a hat and perform them to the best of their ability.

"But this is a fantastic anthropological opportunity: two versions of the same person - the male and the female…"

And that was the crux of Sam's discomfort with Samuel.

Her counterpart was not just her, but a male version of her.

It was confusing, disconcerting, and not a little weird. It went even further than her discomfort with the fact that Dr. Carter's husband had been counterpart to Sam's commanding officer. After all, at the time, Sam had already admitted that Colonel O'Neill was an attractive man.

This wasn't a matter of attraction - she wasn't going to touch that one with a ten-foot pole! This was a matter of things that were so deeply ingrained in her that they made up an essential part of who and what she was.

Who and what she was.

Working in the armed forces, Sam had occasionally wished she was male. It went deeper than mere 'penis envy' or gender-based discrimination. Masculinity in the military was so ingrained that there was no way to separate the command from the gender behaviour. And a woman felt it. Try as she might, do what she would, whatever her background, Sam could not escape the fact that the cards were stacked against her from day one - and would always be stacked against her.

She knew the imbalance was not necessarily out of spite, insecurity, or a need to create a glass ceiling by the male-dominated upper eschelons. It was simply that the military had been conceived by men, developed by men, and was run by men - and that bias ran from the most recently-enrolled cadet to the President himself.

Here, at the SGC, Sam was better off than a lot of women. She'd had commanders who trusted her judgement and colleagues who respected her skills. Part of that was the nature of the SGC; the urgency of the matter meant that the gender of the person doing the work was irrelevant as long as they could get the job done.

Of course, that then begged the question of what happened when there were two people trying to fill the one position. Equally matched and skilled, both with the requisite experience and the necessary knowledge, one male and one female.

You have the experience and the background, she reminded herself as they reached the lab levels. You're the one familiar with this command - and the people are familiar with you. It was what she'd said to herself when she faced the prospect of Dr. Carter's presence in the SGC.

Somehow, this was different.

Dr. Carter had only challenged Sam's role in the SGC and her preconceived ideas about her personal life.

Samuel Carter challenged a lot more than that.

"Earth to Carter."

She looked up into the dark eyes of her former commanding officer. "Sir?"

It was a surprise to discover that they'd not only reached the lab levels, but that she'd made appropriate noises to Daniel as he went off down the corridor, and nearly walked into Jack as he came towards her - probably from her lab.

Retired," he reminded her.

"Habit," she reminded him.

She still had trouble getting his name off her lips. She was up to thinking of him as 'Jack' rather than 'the Colonel' or 'the General', but actually persuading her tongue to give up the habit was like trying to persuade a Goa'uld to give up its ribbon device. Still, after a number of appearances in public where she'd forgotten herself and called him 'sir' and gained odd looks from people around them, Sam had managed to get to a stage where she was at least leaving off the form of address.

However, this wasn't public; this was the SGC. And in the SGC, she reverted to instinct.

"Get out of it," he said, smiling.

Her mouth quirked. She never could resist his smile. "Yes, sir." And that time, the appellation was deliberate. "You called me 'Carter'," she pointed out, inexorably.

"I was going to invite you over for dinner," he said, rocking back on his heels and sticking his hands in his pockets. It amazed her, sometimes, just how much like a little boy he could behave - for all that he was nearly fifty. "But you're looking a bit tired after Astara and this…other thing, so I thought maybe I could come around, bring some dinner, hang out…?"

There was no match for the look he could give her; a little hesitant, a little shy, but with a slightly boyish charm about him. "I'm heading home now," she said after a moment. "Takeaway dinner sounds good. Just not pizza."

Jack's expression was faintly abashed. The last four times they'd met up, they'd ended up having pizza, whether going out to do something or staying in.

It wasn't that Sam didn't like pizza – on the contrary, it was one of her most familiar foods. It was just that she wanted something without tomato and cheese on it.

"Any preference?"

"Not really," she confessed, before she felt a bubble of amusement rise up in her. "Surprise me," she suggested, letting her eyelid droop over one eye in something approximating a wink.

He blinked a moment, then grinned as he turned on his heel. "I have just the thing."

She watched him walk down the corridor, half-disappointed that he hadn't kissed her before walking away, half-intrigued by the satisfaction in his voice, and quite definitely watching his ass.

Maybe asking him to surprise her had been a bad idea.

Sam shook her head as she headed off to pick up her things from her lab.

- TBC -

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