NOTES: Thank you so much to the people who've sent feedback. It's very welcome and very much appreciated. I'm so glad you're enjoying the story - and even more pleased that you're sharing your favourite bits with me!

Reflections

Chapter Four

There was never any question that they'd accept Samuel into the SGC.

Another expert on the Stargate systems, that they didn't have to train, who knew all the ropes, was familiar with the command, the code of conduct, and the structure of the SGC? As far as the big brass were concerned Samuel Carter was a godsend. Assuming they believed in God, of course.

The paperwork was fairly awful, though. Creating a new identity for him, bank accounts and drivers' licences, service number and a whole heap of other things took an unspeakable amount of paperwork. She'd forgotten just how much fuss and bother there was to relocate an alien to Earth. Jonas had been nearly three years ago, after all, and Teal'c another five years before that.

Of course, Sam didn't have to be there, but General Hammond had offered her the opportunity to participate, and in the end, she'd accepted. She suspected his request had been partly because he wanted to make sure that Samuel's existence would tread on her toes, and partly because he'd seen her concerns over Samuel's presence in the SGC.

There were times when she thought that General Hammond saw a lot further than Jack did.

This was the first weekend they hadn't spent together when they'd both been on Earth and didn't have other commitments to look after. Not that it was a habit or anything, just that Sam had gotten used to his presence around her during those times, whether they were doing something together, or just generally hanging out at his house or hers.

Jack looked at Samuel, saw someone who could do all the things Sam could, and thought nothing of suggesting that her counterpart take over her role at the SGC so they could spend time together.

Sam looked at Samuel, saw someone who could do all the things she could, and was male into the bargain, and wondered whether she'd have a job when they came back.

And there was something about Samuel that made Jack uncomfortable. Or maybe that was just Sam projecting her discomfort with Samuel onto Jack - she wasn't sure.

In the cool dark of her lab, she turned on the lamp and booted up her laptop, then stared down at the equations she'd been working on the day before. One of the things Samuel had instantly offered was the device with which he'd overridden the iris controls.

And that had opened a whole new can of worms for Sam.

The first, immediate question had been, "Were you aware that the iris systems had a back-door override?" To which the answer had been 'yes'. She'd written the program after all. The next question had been, "Why did you write the back-door into the program in the first place?" Her answer for that had been even less satisfactory than her answer to the first.

Programmers tended to write back-doors into systems, sometimes for malice, sometimes for fun, sometimes just out of habit. Sam had only ever written back-doors as a fail-safe. If something went wrong with the system, or if her systems were overriden by another programmer, she could use the back-doors to regain control of the system.

Yes, it was technically a weakness of the system, but no more than any access point into a system. And in the SGC where they were nearly constantly concerned about the possibility of an invasion into their systems from off-world sources, Sam had reasoned that programming in a back-door was a necessary evil.

Besides, she would never have thought a counterpart of hers would use it to gain access to the SGC.

So, now that the back-door was known, she had to close that one up and create another. Complete with security protocols and everything.

So, on top of everything else on her workload, to say nothing of the state of her not-quite-sure-what-to-call it with her former commanding officer, she was working long hours at the SGC and dealing with Samuel on top of it all.

There was a knock at the door of her lab. "Hey."

Sam looked up from her laptop to see Samuel standing the doorway, one hand half-raised ready to knock. "Hi," she answered.

Samuel was naturally assigned to Sam for the first few days of his 'orientation' at the SGC. Or, more specifically, his orientation at her SGC.

He sauntered into the lab and pulled up a stool on the other side of the lab table by the simple expedient of hooking his foot around it and yanking. "You look beat. Everything okay?"

"Fine," she said instantly.

He gave her a look that indicated quite plainly he didn't believe her, and opened his mouth to say something, then shut it. She'd seen him do that several times lately and figured it was him thinking about pursuing the matter, and then deciding against it.

She wondered if she did the same thing and couldn't remember. Maybe she'd ask Daniel.

"So, what's this morning's exercise?" Samuel asked, planting himself on the stood and leaning down on the bench, arms folded before him. "Now that we've done the paperwork, does that mean we can get onto the interesting stuff?"

The pose was disconcerting. It was a pose that she was more typically used to seeing in Jack as he'd leaned down against her desk. To see it in her counterpart - and given the way of things between her and Jack - was just one more thing that screamed at her.

If she'd wanted proof that Samuel looked up to his former commanding officer in the same way that Sam did, she had it in spades. Language, behaviour, even a couple of quirks belonged to the former General of the SGC, but they were intermingled with her own movements and habits that Daniel had pointed out.

"Interesting, such as...?"

"Well, exchanging a bit more history, for starters," he said. "Then getting a look at the tech around here, checking that all the laws of the universe still hold, and that the speed of light hasn't changed. Whether Dad got the role out at Pagetsville and we spent a year in that absolute hellhole running around with Tommy Coffrey..."

Sam grimaced. "He was the biggest pest I ever met," she said with frank distaste.

Samuel fixed her with a frankly disbelieving look. "Really? We were best buddies, got into trouble together and everything."

She snorted. "I was buddies with Darren Blythe. We usually got into trouble running around the creek area - so much so that Dad threatened to throw me into the water sometime and show me what it would be like if I fell in."

His eyes gleamed, "Oh, yeah, I remember that! Although I'm guessing you didn't get grounded for riding Brett Sanford's motorbike around San Diego?"

Amusement bubbled up inside her - tinged with a little irritation. "He got me into motorbikes in the first place!"

He stared for a moment, then grinned, "You really were a tomboy, weren't you?"

The words were meant teasingly. Sam knew that. But they still elicited a touch of the old defensiveness that she felt about being 'just a woman' in the armed forces. "Nothing wrong with being a tomboy," she pointed out with just a touch of a chill in her voice.

"Never said there was," he returned instantly. "You've done really well here. As good as I did."

There was an odd note to his voice, and Sam glanced up at him. He was looking around her lab with something like envy, but when he realised she was watching him, he just arched a brow. "I'll take that as a compliment," she said lightly.

She wasn't insensible to the praise. From the sound of it, they'd risen through the ranks at about the same pace. Captain before she reached the SGC, Major after three years in it, and Lieutenant Colonel at the same time as the Colonel got his promotion to General.

Which seemed to mean that she was doing pretty well.

Even if she was a girl.

"How are you with the control room statistics?" She asked, directing the conversation back to the original topic of what they were going to do today. Control room statistics were a fairly boring, base-level job, but it would be somewhere to start him while she tried to sort out where and how she could set up the new backdoor into the system.

He made a face, which more or less summed up her opinion of them as well. "There isn't anything else to do?"

She grinned at his distaste and handed him the sheaf of stats sitting in her in-tray. "It's a nasty job--"

"--but someone's gotta do it," he grumbled, finishing off one of their Dad's sayings.

As he settled down on the other side of the table, Sam tried not to think of what her dad would have said if he'd ever come face to face with Samuel. That would have been a true Kodak moment.

She wondered what her father would have had to say about Samuel.

She wondered what her dad would have said about Jack. Then again, she could probably guess that. He'd done enough hinting around it during his last days, never actually saying anything outright, but leaving enough signposts to make his meaning perfectly clear.

I just want you to be happy.

Sam was happy.

Well, sort of, anyway. No, things weren't perfect, but at least she didn't have all the second thoughts that had plagued her during the last months of her engagement to Pete. At any rate, she was closer to 'happy' than she'd ever been before.

At least, she had been until Samuel turned up.

They didn't have a lab for Samuel yet, so he was sharing Sam's. General Hammond had assured her that Samuel would have his own lab, so Sam bore the intrusion with good grace.

Mostly.

It wasn't that she didn't like him. He was her, after all, and you couldn't really dislike yourself, could you? At least, Sam had never disliked herself. She'd sometimes wished she was someone else, but who didn't?

But this really was her as someone else.

And the prospect was not a little uncomfortable.

For a while, the lab was quiet with the sound of paper being thumbed through, and the scribbles of notes being made. She flipped through one of her old notebooks, looking for the diagram she'd drawn the last time she designed the iris systems so she had something with which to compare her current set-up.

There were several other weaknesses that she'd been planning to overhaul for some time. One of the control room techs had gotten as far as designing patches for them, but if she was going to have to rewrite the whole system, then she might as well incorporate the patches now...

She'd just realised where a new set of encryptions could be incorporated when Samuel sat up and stretched. "I'd forgotten just how boring the stats are," he murmured. "I handed them off to the techs as often as I could."

"So do I, most of the time," she said by way of explanation. "But they're in the middle of a reconfiguration of the control room right now, so there's nobody to do it, and none of my projects are urgently required..." Sam shrugged. "Sergeant Gaskill asked if I could do this lot and I agreed."

He frowned. "Surely you've got more important things to do."

"More interesting things to do, perhaps," she said, surprised at his censure. "But the control room stats are important."

Samuel shook his head at her and flipped over another page. "They can be done by anyone, you know. We're better spent doing other things."

"Probably," Sam admitted. Personally, she hated doing the statistics too. "But sometimes it's polite to help them out."

He didn't look convinced, but he went back to work - for a few minutes at least.

She emerged from a reverie where she'd been contemplating some 'trapdoor' techniques to find him watching her with a speculative look in his eyes.

"What?"

One corner of his mouth pulled out in a lopsided grin that put her in mind of her brother Mark. "I was just wondering...are you seeing anyone?"

Sam went pink, her skin choosing the colour without consulting her brain. At one level, the question was innocuous. On another level, it wasn't a question that a man usually asked a woman unless he was interested in asking her out. Or so her mind reasoned.

And on yet another level, she wasn't willing to tell him that she was seeing her former commanding officer.

She answered tersely. "That's a personal question."

He snorted, amused. "Look, Sam, I'm you. You're me. It doesn't get much more personal than that."

"We're not each other," she said, knowing that she was being a little more pedantic about this, but wanting to have it out between them now. "We're each others' counterparts from different universes."

"Sophistry," he dismissed. His eyes - her eyes - fixed steadily upon her. "Look, I'm just curious. You're an attractive woman but you're not married. You've gone the career path before marriage and kids, and I haven't worked out who to see about the base gossip yet - although Daniel is probably a good bet. But he's been pretty close-lipped for all that he's been asking me questions about every possible aspect of my SGC."

It wasn't as though she could hide the truth forever. He'd find out sooner or later - at the very least, someone would gossip about her and Jack within Samuel's hearing and the cat would be out of the bag.

"Yes, I'm seeing someone," she said calmly. She had an instant of déjà vu. Agent Barrett had asked her more or less the same question in the early days of her relationship with Pete. And her reply had been more or less the same answer she'd just given.

He eyed her. "Who?"

She looked down at her notes. "It's not really any of your--"

"Oh, don't give me that, Sam," he said. "I'm just asking. Besides, if you don't tell me, I'll just go and ask someone else. Probably Daniel again."

Fine. He'd asked for it. Sam looked him square in the eyes with her most reasonable expression. "Jack O'Neill."

There was a full few seconds where he didn't get what she'd said. Then realisation hit with all the force of a Goa'uld ribbon device. "You're seeing Colonel O'Neill?"

His disbelief wasn't encouraging, although she was more than a little relieved at his use of Jack's old title. So she wasn't the only one who still occasionally had trouble thinking of him as 'Jack'.

"Yes," she said. The monosyllable was shorter than she'd intended it to be.

"Holy--" He raked a hand through his hair, still staring at her as though he was having trouble processing the thought. "What about the regs?"

Sam kept her voice even and her tone cool. "What about them?"

"Well, I mean, you served under him for--" He raked his hand through his hair again. "God... O'Neill? Really?" Samuel simply couldn't seem to get his brain around the idea. "You're not just pulling my leg?"

She sighed, feeling irritation blossom in her like a small slow-burning flame. "No, I am not just pulling your leg. Ask Daniel if you like." Since you seem to trust his intelligence-gathering abilities so highly.

"Look, I didn't mean to imply that I don't believe you, it's just..." Samuel's mouth hung open a moment. "The idea is just..."

"I'm not you, you're not me," Sam said, hoping that she didn't sound like too much of a bitch at that moment - no matter how satisfying the little dig was. "Q.E.D."

He gave her a very steady, intent look - the kind she'd given Daniel or the Colonel when either one was playing funnyman and she was perfectly serious. "How long, then?"

She shrugged. "Only a couple of months. Since he retired."

"And before that?"

"Nothing before that."

Her ire rose at the look he gave her, slightly disbelieving. "You're not serious! There is no way there was 'nothing before that' and then you suddenly start dating after working together for eight years... Jesus, what kind of frat regs do you have in this place?" Then he caught her look and put his hands up in the air. "Christ, I wasn't meaning to imply-- It's just that--" He paused, then burst out. "I served with O'Neill for eight years, and we were never--" Samuel's expression turned rueful and he raked a hand through his hair. "This is so going to screw me up."

Sam could almost sympathise.

Except for the fact that she was fairly certain that one of the reasons Jack wasn't presently talking with her was because he was weirded out by the presence of Samuel - and the fact that the woman he was dating had, in another world, been a man.

In short, the kind of reaction Samuel was having right now.

"So you were never attracted to your commanding officer, then?" She asked coolly, and took a moment's pleasure in watching him squirm slightly before he regarded her with a look she knew she'd given assorted junior officers, cadets, and Daniel more than once.

"No," Samuel replied, with plain emphasis. "I mean, we were friends, but I never thought, 'Hey, if I was a woman, I'd be attracted to O'Neill.'" He grimaced. "Not that I ever thought of being a woman at all."

Most men didn't, or so Sam figured. Not that she'd really thought about being a man, except when she'd come across the various forms of sexism during her time in the armed forces. It didn't really count.

"But you were friends, weren't you?"

"Well, yeah. About as much as you can be when you're in the same chain of command. It's not always the easiest thing to be best mates with the guy who chews you out at the end of the day."

"Daniel manages it," Sam observed. So it was a little spiteful, but she was stressed.

"Daniel manages a lot of things," Samuel retorted. "And he's not military, so it doesn't make a difference. Hell, didn't you ever resent being told off when you knew you were right?"

She had. But there'd been times when the Colonel had chided her and hindsight had proven him right; just as there were times when he'd reprimanded her and come back with a later apology when she was found to be correct. If there was one thing she'd never been able to accuse him of, it was stubbornly believing he was right simply to be right.

And any reprimands she'd received in the line of duty weren't half the sticking point in her friendship with Jack - at least, not the way Samuel made it sound.

Sam said as much to Samuel, and he stared at her as though she'd lost her mind. "You never minded?"

"It wasn't a case of minding," she pointed out. "Yes, I mind being reprimanded, but sometimes he was right."

"Sometimes he wasn't," said Samuel.

"He was still the senior officer."

"I can't believe I'm hearing this," he exclaimed. "I mean, I never figured myself for a 'yes, man' kind of guy..."

Sam had stiffened at the start of his sentence, knowing where he was leading and not much liking the implications. At least her counterpart showed enough sensitivity to see her getting angry and recognise that he was about to put one foot over a line that he really didn't want to cross.

"If I thought he was wrong, I let him know," Sam said with the crisp precision of enunciation that would have Daniel immediately backing off anything but his most favoured ideas. "I never accepted his decision as right simply because he was the senior, but at the end of the day, the choice and orders were his and I was duty-bound to follow them."

Of course, sometimes she'd stretched his orders to near-breaking point. That was something Daniel had taught her: if you couldn't openly rebel sometimes you could stretch things far enough to make a difference. And the Colonel had eyed her with the slightly suspicious expression of a man who knew that she'd stretched her limits and his, but was satisfied with the result.

"Okay," Samuel said, sounding as though he was halfway willing to accept that idea.

Sam started back on her work, scratching ideas viciously into the paper. A moment later, Samuel spoke. "I'm sorry."

She glanced up at him, still cool. "Considering we're at the same rank, I think we can say that the way you respond to situations is probably the way that I respond to them."

"Either that, or you're more diplomatic than I am," Samuel said with a slight smile.

It was hard not to smile back in response, even if she was vaguely aware that she was being charmed. The grin made her complicit in his amusement, a partner in his pleasure, and it was a handsome smile.

Sam still couldn't help wondering if she'd ever used charm to get her way like this.

A glance down at the diagrams showed them as intractable as ever, and she glared at them a moment, before she glanced up at Samuel again. "So," she said, slightly more conversationally. "How did you deal with your Colonel O'Neill?"

She made it an olive branch of sorts. After all, he'd apologised. And she reasoned that he'd never had to deal with the innuendoes and difficulties of being a woman in the armed forces. So he hadn't known how hurtful his accusation of 'yes, girl' was.

He shrugged, smiling a little. "With patience," he said, apparently willing to accept her olive branch. "Quite a lot of it, actually. I mean, he was a great commander, but when he got the bit in his mouth, there was no hauling back on the reins. It could irk."

That had annoyed her too, although evidently not as much as it had annoyed him. "He could get enthusiastic about some things."

"Maybe just a little," Samuel said with a wry grin. "Seen that cabin of his?"

"Yes." She said, remembering the two week SG-1 had spent up at his cabin, sitting, talking, fishing. Nothing big, nothing dramatic, just taking some down time, relaxing in the company of the people they knew and loved best, knowing that the galaxy had just been saved and that they didn't have to ride out to be galactic superheroes once again.

He was eyeing her narrowly. "I'm guessing you didn't find it boring as all hell, then?"

Sam eyed him back, wondering why there was the odd note in his voice. "No."

"The mosquitos didn't bother you? The insects? The crickets at night and the birds in the morning? The waking up at down to sit on the pier and do nothing?" Samuel grimaced. "Not my idea of fun."

It hadn't entirely been Sam's idea of 'fun' either. But the company of all her team-mates had more than made up for any perceived lack in the hospitality. She had a roof over her head, lotion to keep the insects away, a cold beer in her hand, and no world to save. Okay, so she had retreated back to her computer occasionally, but the Colonel had sat on the other end of the couch and ribbed her about it while he read comic strip collections. At least, he had until Daniel had made a pithy comment about them getting a room and stalked out to read his notes on the porch.

"You know, it's not that I don't think you and he..." Samuel rubbed a hand across the back of his neck, like he was regretting bringing it up. "I mean, I'm sure you're a great couple. I haven't really seen much of him except for that first day when he ordered me shot with a zat. It's just that..." He shook his head. "This'll take getting used to."

You and me both, Sam thought to herself.

As they began discussing the methods and means by which they'd coped with their commanding officers' quirks and idiosyncrasies through the years, Sam carefully didn't think that her counterpart wasn't the only one who'd have to get used to 'this'.

Although whether 'this' was Samuel Carter and the issues he raised for her, or Jack O'Neill and the issues Samuel had raised for him was something that even Samantha Carter didn't know.

- TBC -