Author's Note: Here's part 2 of the lunch! It's a direct continuation of the previous chapter. Thanks to all of you for reading.
Jack cleared his throat and said, "Well, you deserve the best, Carter."
"So do you, Jack," she replied.
He chuckled, but the sound was joyless.
"At this point I've accepted that I'm never gonna get the best, but that's okay. Not everyone gets what they want."
"Jack, you–"
"How are Daniel and Teal'c doing?" he interrupted, forestalling her attempt at another pep talk and reminding her of his request for some normal conversation that wasn't focused on him.
Sam took a breath to get her mind back on track. She could talk about Teal'c and Daniel. That would be easy.
Sam smiled thinking of their friends. It was difficult not seeing them as often, but she was glad that they were both doing well.
"Daniel's getting ready for a trip to Atlantis," she started. "He's over the moon about it and–"
"Atlantis?" Jack asked. "As in 'the lost city of'?"
She forgot that this version of Jack was created before she almost lost her Jack in the search for the fabled lost city. He was created long before Daniel figured out that the address to Atlantis required an eighth symbol. He had no idea that Atlantis was a real city–a spaceship, really–in the Pegasus galaxy.
For a second, she wondered how much to tell him. He wouldn't have been allowed to go out into the world and live a normal life with all of Jack O'Neill's knowledge in his head if the Air Force thought he was a threat, but it also wasn't like he had the same active security clearance as her Jack.
This probably should have occurred to her back when she mentioned the upgrades to the Prometheus.
Then Sam realized it didn't matter. He wouldn't care about base locations, advanced weaponry, or anything else that had real strategic value. He just wanted to hear about his friends.
"Yes, the Lost City of Atlantis," she replied. "Daniel's been dying to go ever since we found it."
Jack didn't ask for a gate address or how they found it or any other details. He just relaxed back into his chair and said, "To see if it lives up to the legends?"
The truth was, he knew Daniel well enough well enough that he understood the draw without needing the full context. Daniel's entire purpose in life was to discover the history and truth behind mythology.
"Yeah, something like that."
"Well, I hope he finds what he's looking for." Jack said.
Sam thought Daniel was the type to always keep looking, no matter what he found. The trip to Atlantis would probably give him as many questions as answers.
"And Teal'c?" Jack asked when she'd been silent a beat too long.
"Teal'c's great," she replied. "He's got a lot going on with the Free Jaffa Nation, but it's good because he gets to spend more time with Bra'tac, Rya'c, and Kar'yn."
"Kar'yn?"
"Rya'c's wife."
Jack's eyes widened. "Wow. T's kid got hitched?"
Sam nodded.
He let out a low breath and tapped an uneven pattern on the table before resting his hand flat on the surface and turning his melancholy brown eyes back to her.
"I've missed a lot, haven't I?"
He had missed a lot and Sam didn't know how to soften that for him, even as she was already holding back on some of the larger changes.
"It's been a long two years," she replied.
Jack looked down at the table and then she saw his face scrunch in thought. His head lifted, a sudden cautious insight in his eyes. "Wait, you said the Free Jaffa Nation, not the Rebel Jaffa."
Sam hadn't even considered the terminology when speaking, but she might as well let him in on the biggest recent change. It was good news and he deserved to know some good news, especially when he had years of memories of fighting a seemingly unwinnable war.
"Anubis is gone. So are the rest of the system lords. Replicators are gone too."
She had never seen a more stunned look on any Jack O'Neill's face.
"Holy shit, Carter. You defeated the Goa'uld? And the Replicators?"
"Not just me," she teased.
The shocked look on his face slowly morphed into confusion.
"What?" she asked.
"I don't understand the General thing then," he said. "The plan was to retire and…"
His voice trailed off and he lifted his head to meet her eyes. There was a rare look of wistful longing in his expression.
"And?" she prompted before she could stop herself, curious what he would say. Her Jack tried to retire before he was promoted to the Homeworld Security job, but it was a surprise to find out that he'd been considering retirement back when they were both on SG-1.
His face went blank in an instant.
"Nevermind."
Would it be cruel to tell the man in front of her that she was married to the other Jack or would he be happy that they were together? She still had no idea, but she didn't like the feeling that she was lying to him, even if it was only a lie of omission.
"Guess neither of us get a life of fishing at the cabin," Jack remarked, before drinking more of his Guinness. "That's a damn shame."
Once again, she wished that she could hug this younger version of her husband. He was carrying so much sadness in him and all she wanted to do was make him feel better. She just didn't know how.
"It's a nice cabin," Sam said quietly. "You were right. I like it up there. It's relaxing and beautiful."
She loved Jack's cabin. It was the perfect place to get away from it all.
"You went to the cabin?" he asked, the surprise at her statement clear on his face. "Never thought you'd actually go. That's why I stopped asking."
It seemed so obvious now, but at the time she thought Jack stopped asking because he was no longer interested in her.
"I sort of invited myself," Sam admitted.
After everything that happened with her dad and with Pete, she finally got the guts to tell Jack that she wanted to go to his cabin. Of course, at the time, she only had enough confidence in her to suggest it would be a good place for the team to relax after the world almost ended yet again.
"You did?"
She didn't miss the hopeful tone in his voice and considered telling him about her marriage. Would she want to know if the situations were reversed? Or would it hurt her too much to know that some other Sam was out there living the life she wanted and loving the man she loved?
Would she just be adding another item to the list of things he'd lost?
Sam didn't want to make things worse.
"I did," she replied. "It was good for the four of us to be together before we all scattered to different parts of the country…or the galaxy in Teal'c's case."
It was the truth. It just wasn't the whole truth.
Sam watched as that flicker of hope died, but was replaced with a jovial grin that only seemed partially faked.
She hoped she made the right choice.
"Ah, team trip," he said. "Makes sense. Good enough place to celebrate winning a war."
It was a good place to celebrate and also the first time any of them were able to really relax in almost a decade. It was heavenly, in spite of the recent loss of her father.
"Teal'c was in a good enough mood that he didn't mind the mosquitos," Sam shared, "and Daniel decided that we needed to take celebratory shots from an old bottle of whiskey he found at the back of a cabinet."
And after all the toasts were done, she walked out to the water's edge with Jack and kissed him in the moonlight.
"Daniel wanted to do shots?" Jack's clone asked, as if she'd just told him that the sky on Earth was purple. It pulled her out of the memory.
"He did," she replied. "He talked a lot about the celebrations when the people of Abydos defeated Ra, which apparently involved a lot of alcohol. I know he was thinking about Sha're. We finally defeated the Goa'uld, but it was bittersweet because she wasn't there to share the victory with him."
Sam hoped that their friend was finally able to find some measure of peace and healing now that the Goa'uld system lords were gone.
All of them had suffered losses during the war against the Goa'uld, but their time at the cabin was still overwhelmingly happy. That's what she wanted to remember about it.
"At one point after Daniel had a few," Sam continued, "he tried to teach us how to say some things in Ancient, completely forgetting that you and Teal'c…I mean the General and Teal'c…learned a lot of that language in the time loop. It was pretty funny."
The whole translation game that night had her snickering into her drink because Jack would whisper the correct translation in her ear and then completely screw it up in front of Daniel, who grew increasingly exasperated. Then Teal'c leisurely offered up the correct answer and almost caused Daniel to drop his drink in surprise.
The corner of Jack's mouth tipped up and she knew he was thinking about the trouble he would've caused during Daniel's drunken language lesson.
"Hey," he said, "do you remember when he got wasted off that ceremonial liquor on '238 that I told him not to drink?"
"He insisted," Sam remembered, "even in spite of the issues we'd run into in the past with unknown food and beverages."
"Jack, this is what anthropologists do," he said in a horrible imitation of Daniel's voice. "We need to immerse ourselves in their culture to really understand them."
She laughed out loud.
"That kind of talk was what got me into that awful blue dress on Simarka."
Jack grinned at her. "I don't know, Carter. I thought you pulled it off."
The comment was flirty and familiar so she responded to the teasing the same way she would have normally.
"Sure, it was great right up until the kidnapping," Sam bantered with a roll of her eyes.
He winced and she realized that he never got to the point of joking around with her about that mess of a mission. He was created long before the serious conversations that let them joke now about some of those earlier life-threatening incidents.
"Yeah, sorry again about that. You never should have been left alone without someone watching your back. It was a really bad call and it was my fault."
She'd had a longer conversation about that mission with her own Jack once, but the one in front of her only needed to know the most important part. "I never blamed you for that. We were all figuring things out back then."
In spite of her words, his mood seemed to cloud again. Everytime she thought she was gaining ground in this conversation, things went sideways. It was like flying in the middle of a storm.
"Hey, let's not dwell," Sam said. "We all made mistakes, but you were a great commanding officer."
It was true enough, even if the cognitive dissonance of the statement rubbed her the wrong way. He was a clone who she'd really only spent a few days with, but as far as he was concerned, he'd lived years as the leader of SG-1. The man in front of her had those same memories as the real Jack, so did it really matter if he wasn't physically there for them?
Sam didn't often get philosophical–that was more Daniel's territory–but she wondered if it was possible to copy a person's soul. Copying cells, she understood. Even the idea of copying memories wasn't outside of the realm of her experience.
But cells and memories weren't everything that made up the essence of someone. If they were, then Daniel's ascension wouldn't have been possible.
There was some sort of soul, however difficult it might be to quantify.
What did that mean for a clone when a soul was meant to be unique?
What did that mean for her husband when there was someone out in the world who was identical to him in every way except age?
No wonder Jack didn't like to think about his clone–it led to a barrage of awkward questions about identity and self.
Sam was reminded of how uncomfortable she felt when faced with a version of herself from an alternate reality.
Was a clone just like an alternate reality version of yourself who wasn't endangered by entropic cascade failure?
It was all a little too much to think about and it felt like a question without an easy answer.
She looked across the table and saw that Jack was similarly lost in thought. This wasn't the right time for pondering what Daniel always called the 'meaning of life' questions. Her goal for this lunch was to lift this Jack's mood and she was failing miserably.
Sam tapped her glass against his to pull his attention and then said, "Let's talk more about how funny Daniel gets when he's drunk."
Jack leaned back in his chair and grinned at her. "Remember that time when he started to recite parts of the Odyssey in Ancient Greek because Teal'c asked what we meant by 'a Trojan horse'?"
"Was it the Odyssey? I thought it was the Iliad?"
Jack shook his head. "Who the hell knows, Carter. It's all Greek to me."
She burst out laughing and he tried to hide his smile behind his glass of beer before taking another sip.
The conversation got easier from there, as they reminisced about weird missions and funny moments over the years.
They ordered refills of their drinks and Sam kept feeling waves of déjà vu as she saw familiar expressions on the youthful face of the man sitting across from her and heard familiar sentences come from his mouth. This Jack wasn't the same as the Jack she married, but Sam knew that if the two of them were the same age, they'd be almost indistinguishable.
She could see the tension leaving him the longer they talked. He relaxed and smiled more.
It made her happy to see the change in him.
All too soon, it came time for them to leave. Jack had gotten a few texts from his classmates wondering where he was and Sam needed to get ready for her afternoon meeting with the IOA.
"It was really great seeing you, Carter. Too bad this can't be a regular thing."
A small kernel of an idea started to blossom in her mind. What if he could spend time with her on a regular basis?
"I could come see you sometimes," she offered.
He shot her a look of disbelief.
"You've got ships to build, alien doohickies to figure out, and a world to save. Don't tell me the clone of your former CO is going to become a priority."
Maybe not, but the clone of the man she loved, on the other hand…he was already a priority just by the virtue of whose memories he shared.
"I would come see you," Sam insisted. "If you wanted me to."
Jack closed his eyes and ran a shaking hand through his shaggy brown hair. When his lids lifted, she noticed the wet sheen that coated the surface of his eyes.
"Don't lie just to make me feel better or to make yourself feel better," he said, pulling a dented pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. "We both know you never even take time for vacation. Today was a coincidence, not the start of a lifelong commitment. I'm fine alone."
A lifelong commitment.
Sam recently made one of those to a man with the exact same DNA as the one in front of her. She couldn't just walk away. There had to be something she could do. He seemed good when they were talking. He cracked jokes and smiled at her throughout the meal, but as soon as she paid the bill he started shutting down again.
"Jack–"
"Don't waste your time worrying about me." He pulled a cigarette and lit it, taking a long drag. "High school's even more boring the second time around, but it won't kill me."
The statement made her think of all the times her Jack almost died in front of her and of the time before he met her when he was hurting and suicidal.
"Take care of yourself, please," she told him. "And call me if you need anything. Or if you just want to talk."
His jaw was tight and posture stiff when he flicked ashes to the ground.
"I won't call, so don't expect it."
Sam forgot how damn stubborn Jack could be about not needing anyone's help.
"You don't have to do this all alone. We made a mistake before, abandoning you, and I'm sorry. It doesn't have to be this way."
She felt a desperate need to be there for him now and correct the mistakes of the past. He reminded her too much of her husband to just let him walk away when she knew that he was miserable and had been for the past two years.
Jack blew out a long line of smoke and she could tell from the stoic look on his face that he didn't plan to ever speak with her again.
"That's what you don't understand," he said firmly. "It does have to be this way. I don't blame you, Daniel, Teal'c, or the other me. Some problems you can't fix. This is one of them."
Sam felt tears start to well up in her eyes and blinked them away. She couldn't remember the last time Jack–any Jack–told her that there was a problem she couldn't solve. It made her feel powerless.
It made her want to pull some crazy idea out of her butt–as her husband would say–to prove him wrong. It made her want to save him.
In her wedding vows to Jack, she promised that she would always be there for him, but it felt like a promise that had been true long before she said the words aloud.
It felt like a promise that should, in some small way, also connect to the man in front of her who had decades-worth of her husband's memories.
"I should head out," he said. "Don't want to end up with detention for ditching the group."
He said the words as if he was trying to make a joke out of it, but didn't quite succeed. Sam couldn't imagine how difficult it must be to remember saving the world, but still be beholden to high school class trip chaperones.
Sam opened her mouth to reply, but then her phone rang. She apologized and picked up the phone. Immediately, one of her assistants at Area 51 started explaining something that had gone wrong with one of the experiments she'd been overseeing.
The experiment was important, but Jack was fidgeting and looking at his watch while he continued to smoke. She felt the need to say something to him before he left, but she didn't know what and she couldn't focus with her attention split like this.
Her assistant was saying something about injuries, but Jack was about to walk away and if she let him go now, she'd just keep worrying about him.
It was too bad she couldn't be in two places at once.
Sam stopped listening to the voice rambling on the phone and looked back over at Jack, who had dropped his cigarette to the sidewalk and was putting it out with his shoe.
Two places at once.
It was probably a horrible idea.
Once Sam confirmed that none of the injuries from the failed experiment were serious, she absently gave orders to put the project on hold until she returned to Nevada.
It was definitely a crazy idea.
She couldn't believe she was even contemplating the possibility.
Two places at once.
Sam hung up the phone and was surprised to suddenly find herself with an armful of young Jack O'Neill. The clone hugged her tightly, his breath hot on her neck. She reached up and wrapped her arms around him.
They stood there hugging on the sidewalk for longer than Sam remembered ever hugging someone in public.
"Let me help you," she whispered. "Let me do something to make up for what you've had to deal with."
Jack dropped his hands and stepped back.
"You can't," he said. "Not everyone gets a happy ending, but it's okay. You won the war and you're happy. That's good enough for me."
It might've been good enough for him, but it didn't feel good enough to her. He deserved more. He deserved to be happy too.
"Plus, I've got hockey, right?" Jack quipped.
Sam didn't know what to say or what to do and for the first time in a while, she felt completely helpless.
"Jack–"
"Have a nice life, Carter." He slid on a pair of sunglasses. "Thanks for the beer."
With those final words, Jack's clone turned and walked away from her. She didn't even have a chance to say goodbye.
