Way up
Episode tag to "Abyss"
When her car stops, his front door opens. Jack freezes by the sight of Sam while inside of her, something gets moving. Sam hadn't thought much about what she was going to say. Hadn't been sure she would even get out of the car. There should have been time to sit and contemplate coming here. That's what Sam had thought. But now there's no time.
Chip, Cassie's brown Shibu, weasels around the Colonel's feet as he walks towards her car. She remembers that Janet and Cassie are in Miami and that the Colonel is taking care of Chip whenever they are gone. It's a cliche, but looking at Chip or Cassie always reminds Sam of how much time has passed in what seems a blink. Sometimes it feels like only yesterday when Sam first challenged the man, that now taps on her window, to arm wrestle. Sam opens the door, gets out, and finds herself getting lost in his questioning glance. It's moments like this when it feels like she has known him forever.
"Whatcha doing in this neck of the woods?" he says.
For a man that has died a dozen times, he looks fantastic. Tall, tan, strong, a healthy glow radiating off him. No trace whatsoever of the torments he has been through—at least ordinary people can be fooled. Sam, on the other hand, is an expert. She can read him like one of her astrophysics books. His eyes and face and little twitches a language in itself, one you needed to train and frequently use to understand—a language she is fluent in by now. However, reading it is one thing, speaking it a very different one.
"I… uh... " Carter stammers. She's here because she fears that he will disappear again when she lets him out of her sight. But she can't tell him that, can she?
He's easy on her. I… uh... as explanatory as a full-length Carter technobabble.
"We were going for a walk, wanna join?"
She nods, smiles thankfully, and bends down to pat the fox-like Chip, who jumps up and down like an excited yo-yo.
"Let's take my car. It's all hair already," Colonel O'Neill says.
A long walk, it seems. A driving somewhere walk. Sam is not sure if this is a good idea, and yet she climbs into O'Neill's truck without hesitation. Chip jumps on her lap, licks her face, and she can't hold back a giggle. O'Neill chuckles next to her, and the strange feeling of normality spreads. This is how it could be. In an alternate universe, in a different time.
They drive for twenty minutes, wrapped in comfortable silence. Sam stares out of the window, watching trees blur by and merge into an abstract green and brown painting. Chip has rolled up on her lap like a cat. Every mile and then the Colonel glances over. He knows exactly why she came, and it tells her everything about how good they could be. It's a thought she quickly stuffs back to where it came from. For now, she is content she has him back.
They come to a stop amid the mountains. Summer is cooler up here. Colonel O'Neill gives Sam a once over and pulls a flannel from the backseat.
"It can get chilly," he says.
Slipping into his shirt feels like arriving. Sam didn't even know she had been on the road, searching, until his smell encases her. It's not the proximity she wants, yet the only one she can have. Content.
Going on a walk with Jack O'Neill has surprisingly little similarity with marching next to Colonel O'Neill over an alien planet. Funny enough, the only thing that is the same is that earth looks like any other alien planet. The way he moves is foreign. At ease, strolling, he seems free, and she wonders if he has dealt with his captivity as well as he pretends.
After a 40 minute hike, the trees open up to a turquoise lake. With a big splash for such a little dog, Chip jumps into the crystal clear water, and Jack and Sam sit down on a dead log.
"So?" he says as he throws Chip a stick.
Only now she realizes that all she said since she found herself in front of his house is I… uh….
"Just came by to walk the dog?" he continues.
She smiles. He can read her as well as she can read him.
"Pretty much," Sam answers.
"Nice."
Sam wants to ask how he is doing only she's not going to. It's another Jack O'Neill formula she has figured out. So they sit silently next to each other, enjoying their company until words fall out of her mouth before they have the chance to chafe her.
"If I hadn't talked you into taking the…"
It's not that her words surprise her. It's the redirect they have chosen, with brutal honesty as new destination.
"Carter," he sighs. It's an 'It's okay, you did the right thing' kind of Carter. Usually, she would stop talking. An outsider would think she'd given up, but to Jack and her, it would have been an entire conversation. However, this time, she surprises herself with what she is saying next.
"If I hadn't talked you into taking the Tok'Ra symbiote," Sam says again. "You would be dead now."
He didn't expect this. The Carter-language he has learned to understand suddenly sounds foreign.
"I am angry and infuriated about what happened to you, but we have you back, and that's all that matters," Sam says and as if to assure herself—and him too—that he is here, back with her, she squeezes his hand.
Colonel O'Neill's eyes drop to their hands. He doesn't move. Doesn't pull his hand out, not even a muscle twitches, and yet his warmth is the reciprocation of her touch. A sigh slips out of her throat, punctuating the sentences that still hangs between them. Each time he gets lost or injured or uploads alien technology in his brain brings her closer to the edge. Right now her toes are dangling over the abyss and gravel plummets into the depth, forecasting the way she will follow if this keeps happening. Sam is not sure how to get off the edge and back to solid ground. Another incident and she's going to fall.
Their eyes are still on their hands when a drop lands on Sam's skin, and above them, a flash cracks the sky open, and hell breaks loose. Sam's and Jack's heads shoot to the gray painted canopy. The sky growls. Chip ducks his tail, starts whining, and searches cover. The world illuminates. Sam can feel the buzzing tingle of energy. Another deafening rumble. "We need to find cover," she yells. A tree explodes. "Follow me," O'Neill barks, all Colonelesque. Thunder. Branches slice their faces and arms. Brightness. They stumble through the understory. Roar. Where is he headed? Flash. A tiny hut. Boom. Wood splatters. Crack. Safe.
The thunderstorm has found a home in the clouds above the hut in which Sam and Jack sit in front of a crackling fire. Their clothes are almost dry, and Chip has calmed down, lifting his head only every other rumble in the sky.
"You brought cards?" O'Neill asks and flicks a chestnut in the air.
"No, Sir."
"We're not on a mission, Carter. Go easy on the Sirs."
"Yes," Sam says, which sounds incomplete without the obligatory Sir that accompanies almost anything she says.
"How long do you think it will last?" He peeks out of the window, looking for something other than rain and trees which only show themselves when a flash splits the sky and the forest appears frozen in time like a snapshot from a different time.
"It will be dark in an hour, so even if it stops, we are trapped here for the night," Sam says and tells her sudden nervous self, it's just like on a mission.
O'Neill lifts his eyebrows and digs in his pockets.
"Dog treats?"
Sam chuckles. "No, thanks."
He flicks the treat to Chip and says, "I would do anything for an MRE now."
"We're on earth, so I'd go with pizza."
"Pepperoni…" O'Neill says in a dreamy voice. "We should grab Pizza for breakfast. Once it's light outside and we get outta here."
"Yes, Sir."
He regards her with another eyebrow lift, and then silence spreads over them like a warm blanket, heavy just the comfortable way. Another thunder rolls, then a flash illuminates the room. Sam leans back and closes her eyes, listening intently to the pounding rain and the upset sky. Warmth spreads in her chest, and her muscles relax. She curls deeper into the smell of his shirt.
"Why do you like storms so much?" he says with a cozy voice. When Sam opens her eyes, she finds him looking at her.
"I don't know. It makes me feel small and protected. Like there's no other place in the world I need to be."
"Yeah, right here is good."
His lips twitch into a quick smile and then, to distract from this confession, he says, "You remember our first year? When Daniel thought we're under attack, but it was just a storm?"
"Yeah. I was the one he ripped out of sleep."
She smiles at the memory of Daniel shaking her vigorously with panic painted on his face while thunders hailed over their heads. Before Sam had been able to calm him down, he shot out of the tent and fell over Colonel O'Neill, who was sitting outside on watch.
"He has come a long way," O'Neill says with a reminiscent tone.
"Uh-huh," is all Sam can say because her heartache of losing Daniel is threatening to overwhelm her, and with it comes the reminder of how close she came to losing Jack too.
"He was there," Colonel O'Neill mumbles. It takes Sam a moment to wrap her head around what he just said. It's the first time they talked about Daniel since he ascended.
"When I was captured… he… appeared," the Colonel continues.
He looks at her like he needs her to believe him. And she wants to. But Daniel appeared?
"Yeah, I'm probably just bananas," he says and is willing to leave it right there, but she has finally caught up to him. If Daniel is ascended, maybe he can come back.
"What did he say?"
The Colonel looks up, surprised that she believes him.
"He knew you guys had figured out a plan."
"How?"
"Will ask him next time he pops by," he answers, but by the flinch on Sam's face knows that was the wrong joke to make.
"Seemed like ascending comes with some perks. Like knowing things," Jack adds to stop the sudden thunder building in Sam's emotions.
"Why didn't he help you?" It's the obvious question, and she doesn't know that's the one still bothering Jack too.
"That's against the rules."
"Ah."
"My words. He offered to beam me up, though."
"He asked you to give up?"
Sam stares at him like a shiny mirror reflecting the fear he had felt every time he woke up in the sarcophagus with a little piece of soul missing. In the next flash of light, his guards come down. It's a quick moment, but of course, she notices. She sees the raw emotions in his face: the pain, the suffering, the fear.
"Well…" he says and pinches the bridge of his nose. He doesn't need to say more for her to understand how he had felt—that he had wanted to give up.
For the second time today and maybe ever since they met, she grabs his hand and holds it tightly.
"But you didn't." What she wants to say is: because you are strong, because you can't be broken. But in front of her sits a man she doesn't know — someone who has shattered into pieces and just got glued back together with superglue. One wrong touch and he is going to fall apart again. Time given he will become whole again, and maybe you won't notice the missing pieces.
"Because Daniel was there and because I knew you wouldn't give up." He turns his hand in her hers and grips her wrist tightly.
"I could never give up on you," she says, and the look in his eyes push her a little further over the abyss.
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