Chapter 10 - Impossible
"Well, Carter, you forgot our anniversary again."
Sam removed her glasses as her husband appeared in the doorway of the control room. "Jack?"
"Don't get me wrong, I knew you were a workaholic when we got married, but for you to forget more than once in a lifetime? This seems like a whole new level of absent-mindedness."
She rubbed her eyes. "Sorry. I must have gotten distracted."
He walked up and sat in the chair beside hers. "Why are you still working on this stuff?"
She sighed as she got a clearer view of her husband. Unlike her, he looked like he was no older than his early fifties. The ache in her chest swelled with such pain, she almost couldn't breathe even after all this time. "Why do you care? You're not really here."
He shrugged. "And it's not really our anniversary."
Of course not.
She looked down at the console of the Asgard computer core. "Let me guess, you said it was just so I would tell you what was on my mind."
"Always worked before."
She bit the inside of her cheek before she motioned to the computer. "Look at this."
Jack leaned over her shoulder. "What am I looking at?"
"Something I thought was impossible."
"Like blowing up a sun?"
She turned an appreciative smile to the memory of her husband. "Actually, Jack, this was a little harder than that." Her amusement faded as she looked back at the computer, her heart dropping like a stone into a bucket. "I figured out how to reverse time in a localized field."
"Get outta here."
She looked over her shoulder at him, surprised to see the pride in his grin. "You don't understand. Reversing time in a localized field means that the last fifty-eight years don't happen. We don't get stuck. You and I don't get married. Our kids. . ."
Her voice choked on the idea that her children, old enough to be grandparents themselves if they had been on Earth, would be wiped from existence like a mirage in the desert.
"So, you're not going to say anything?"
She looked down at her hands. "I didn't say that."
"Look, I know that we gave them the best life we could on the ship, but you've got to admit that the kids would probably enjoy life on Earth."
She recoiled. "Jack, reversing time means that none of this happens. Which means that there's no guarantee that any of this will happen in the future. How can we just erase them?"
"Our kids have earned the right to make this decision for themselves, Sam. Just like the rest of the team."
Sam turned off her computer monitor and walked toward her quarters. "Well, it's a moot point anyway since we don't have the power to actually do it. So, it's really just a thought exercise."
"Carter, they deserve to know." Jack's brown eyes held her gaze as she stopped in front of her room and opened the door. "All of them."
She lay on the bed, so consumed with loss today that she couldn't even imagine going to the mess hall for dinner. "Let's pretend this works, Jack. Someone has to stay old so we don't make the same mistake. We can't choose either of the children because it would create a paradox. It only makes sense that it would be me. You're not going to have second thoughts about being with me when I'm forty years older than you?"
Jack lay across from her on the bed, the way he had on countless nights of their thirty years of marriage before his death. "You know better than that. You and me, Carter? We're timeless. You didn't give up on me when I was a hundred years old. I'm not going anywhere if you've got a stooped back and glasses. Maybe I'll even retire and play shuffleboard with you."
The tears came at the same time as the laughter, joy and pain interwoven as so much of their love story had been.
"I don't pretend to understand what you know about astrophysics, but Carter, I know something about things that are meant to be. I don't think you need to worry nearly as much about this as you think you do."
It was just like being on the other side of the goa'uld force shield, feeling so close and yet so far away from him. "I miss you."
He brushed her cheek with his thumb, the action feeling like a tiny puff of air. Then, he leaned in and kissed her forehead. "I love you, Samantha Carter."
She wished she could hold onto him, but instead, she opened her eyes and looked out into the empty void. "I love you, too, Jack O'Neill."
To my darling wife, Samantha, I leave my memories. Check the top drawer of my nightstand. I love you.
For the thousandth time since he'd passed away, Sam opened the leather-bound journal and ran her fingers along Jack's bold, messy script. The shadow of his memory had faded sometime in the early hours of the morning, but she'd managed to comfort herself by holding this token of their years together.
From the moment she walked into the briefing room, she astonished me.
There were easily five hundred stories in these pages. Some only a sentence or two, like when she'd walked into the briefing room. Some were pages long as he revealed the exact thoughts he'd had when he'd shot her body for a second time with a zat to protect the base from the alien entity which had possessed her.
He'd recorded things about her pregnancy which she'd forgotten, like the odd way he'd had to wrap himself in and around her during those last two weeks of pregnancy so she could find some small comfort and get what little restless sleep she could manage between trips to the bathroom. How he had cried with her when she admitted about an hour before their children were born that all she wanted in the world was her mother to be with them as they welcomed their babies into the world, that seeing her mother's smile would give her the strength to finish this agonizing journey to motherhood.
How newborn Jacob had urinated on Daniel during one of his first diaper changes, and how unexpectedly proud Jack had been to be the boy's father in that moment. How Jack had stretched the truth when he'd told Sam he had a favorite aunt named Margaret because he knew it was the only way he'd be able to convince her to name one of their kids after a character from the Simpsons.
Some of his darker thoughts wove into the journal, too, as if he spilled all the reasons he grew quiet and withdrawn around Charlie's birthday each year into the journal instead of burdening his family with any of it. How unfair it was that he'd cheated death so often only to have his oldest son take the trip into the great beyond before him. How he wasn't sure he would have been able to live again without the interference of the Air Force, the Stargate program, and a certain archaeologist.
It was his story, from summers with his grandpa in Minnesota to his fears that, as his life drew to a close, he wasn't sure if he'd given his children the love and affection they deserved. On one of the final pages, Jack had admitted that this journal had been started in the hopes of presenting Sam with a truly personal gift for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. Now, he hoped it would bring her some solace as he left her behind to carry on without him.
It was Sam's lifeline on days like today. The day she told them all she knew how to get them home.
"Mom, are you ready?"
She pressed shaky fingers to her lips and then to the journal before she set it on the nightstand. "I'm ready."
She pulled her glasses off her nose and let them dangle from the chain around her neck as she stood and greeted her son.
He looked down at the journal with a faint smile on his fifty-five-year-old lips. "Dad's journal?"
She nodded. "Can you believe he's been gone over thirty years already?"
"More than half my life," the man murmured as he guided her out the door.
There was another of those pangs in her chest. Some days she hoped it was the beginning of the end, some sign that her heart, like Jack's, was giving out. Some days, she hoped it was just the price for loving Jack the way she had.
The mess hall was uncharacteristically quiet, probably because it was the thirty-first anniversary of Jack's death. They all tended to get a little reflective, though Sam wasn't sure if it was out of respect for her or if it was because they all faced their own mortality in a new way.
Sam pushed her green beans around her tray in the stillness. Funny the things which zipped through her brain these days. Jack, the version of her husband that had been artificially aged after being infected with nanites on Argos, would have been right at home here with the rest of them. Teal'c, Jacob, and Maggie looked the best of them all, but that was because Teal'c was a Jaffa, and the twins were more than forty years younger than the next oldest expedition member. The rest of them, however, looked just as ragged and aged as Jack had before the nanites had stopped artificially accelerating his natural aging.
"I did it."
Daniel didn't even look up. "Did what?"
"Figured out how to reverse time in a localized field."
The scraping sounds of their utensils on their trays all stopped.
Out of the corner of her eye, Sam could almost see Jack smiling at her from where his memory stood by the bank of windows.
The silence stretched on as each of the members of SG-1 looked from Sam to the twins, everyone grappling to process what this meant.
"I'm sorry, are we really suggesting that we go back in time, knowing everything we could lose?"
Sam squeezed Vala's hand, grateful that she had spoken the words screaming in Sam's head right now.
"Unpopular opinion time, but I think we should do it, anyway."
Sam stiffened as Cam gave them all a look that seemed to say that he knew no one would agree with him, but he had to say how he felt. Even Teal'c seemed to look at him strangely.
"He's right."
The voice was younger than the others, and Sam turned to her son. "Jacob, you don't mean that."
Maggie shared a look with her brother before she nodded. "Yeah, Mom. We do."
Emotion welled up in Sam's throat as she looked at her children. Yes, they may have been in their fifties, but they would always be her unexpected miracles. "You realize that if we do this, we erase you from existence. Jack and I weren't married before we got into the time dilation field. There's no guarantee you'll ever come back to us, and even if you do. . ."
"We know."
Jacob twirled his fork in his mashed potatoes. "Even if things unfold the way they did here, just taking us off the ship could completely change who we are because it would change our life experiences. Mom, we were paying attention that day in class."
Sam set aside that issue. She'd deal with it later when she didn't have an audience. "Well, assuming we can figure out how to power this thing, I'm afraid that one of us is going to have to stay old. That way, we don't find ourselves in this same predicament. So, I'll take the crystal—"
"Whoa, who said it's going to be you?"
Sam groaned at Cam's protest. "It makes sense that it be me."
Everyone started clamoring as they tried to sacrifice their youth for everyone else, but a sudden, shrill whistle broke through the chaos, drawing their attention to Maggie, whose two pinkies were in her mouth. "While I might otherwise agree that Teal'c is the best option for this mission, I think Jake and I are actually your best bet."
Sam blinked at her daughter. "As much as I admire your courage, sweetheart, having either you or your brother handle this mission could create a paradox that the time-space continuum was never designed to handle."
Jake bit the inside of his cheek. "I'll risk it."
Maggie caught his eye as she nodded. "Me too."
Sam's heart squeezed. "But you can't."
"Would you rather that one of you has memories of us that you can't talk about? Not with Dad, not with anyone?"
That was Sam's definition of torture.
"And Teal'c, I know you can, but would you really want to face Mom and Dad every day, and not tell them any of what their life was like here? Would you really let them spend the rest of their lives trying to figure out if they're meant to be together after you watched them live out their happily ever after in here?"
Even the Jaffa's eyes dropped to the table.
Maggie tried to lighten the atmosphere with one of her mother's signature smiles. "If we both do this, then nobody has to do it alone."
Doubt clouded in Daniel's eyes. "Look, I know you're probably looking forward to seeing your dad again, but Jack's more likely to throw you both in the brig until he can figure out whether you're a security threat."
Ice crystalized in Sam's veins. "I might actually pull a weapon on you if you try to put something in the control panel, and I don't know who you are."
Daniel looked at Sam as if he suspected she might be missing something. "Well, Jacob is the spitting image of Jack. You don't think that will get your attention?"
Sam shrugged. "Maybe. And there's the fact that even though she's older, Maggie does look like that hallucination I had onboard the Prometheus three years earlier."
Maggie blanched. "Hallucination?"
Sam waved her question away. "Long story."
Jacob shrugged the way Jack would have. "So, write yourself a note."
Sam blinked at her son. "I'm sorry?"
Maggie nodded. "Yeah. Like General Hammond did before you went back in time to 1969. Or like Dad got through the Gate that one time."
Sam's brow furrowed. "What?"
"The one with his blood on it."
A vague memory of a note which said something about never going to a particular gate address surfaced in Sam's mind. "Right."
Maggie caught Sam's hands in hers. "Mom, all our lives, we've heard about the heroics of SG-1 Let us be the ones to save you guys this time, okay?"
Sam looked at the other team members who all seemed to defer to her judgment. She turned back to her kids, hoping that she wasn't going to regret this. "Okay. But we still run into the issue of power. . . "
Mitchell looked at the Ori blast outside and then at Sam. "How much power?"
"You called, Mom?"
Sam managed a thin smile as she looked at her kids. They weren't kids anymore. In fact, when they went back in time, they'd be older than Jack had been when they first started the time dilation field. That would take some getting used to. "Yeah, I was hoping we could chat before we do this."
She pressed her engagement ring into Maggie's palm and Jack's wedding ring into Jacob's hand.
"Mom," Maggie gasped as she looked down. "Your rings."
Sam swallowed down tears. "I'm not going to need them after tomorrow, and if all goes well, these rings and your dad's journal will be your last link to us. Your dad and me, I mean."
She wasn't able to hide the tears for long as she gathered her babies into her arms one last time. "No matter what my younger self does—no matter what your dad's younger self does—know that we're proud of you. We always have been. If it was just your dad and me on this ship, I'm not sure I'd be changing a thing right now."
Jacob and Maggie wrapped their arms around her, squeezing her back as they held her. "We'll miss you."
Her voice wobbled. "Oh, my brave babies, I'm going to miss you too." She studied every wrinkle on their faces, wishing that she could have given them so much more than this terrible birthright. "Take care of yourselves and take care of each other. I can't believe I'm doing this to you."
Jake squeezed her hand, looking so much like Jack in that moment that it scared her. "But you're not doing it, Mom. We are. It's our choice."
The idea of her younger self looking at these faces and not seeing them as her children, not being able to remember how her heart had surged with love at their births or thinking of the myriad tender moments which they had shared as a family on this tiny ship made her almost want to vomit.
"I love you. No matter what Samantha Carter does when you reverse time, you hold on to that, okay? Promise me. You'll always remember how much your parents loved you."
Maggie kissed Sam's forehead, tears slipping down her cheeks. "Promise."