This time: Samantha Carter
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Samantha Carter had an average military childhood. She moved from place, wherever her father was stationed. It was hard for her to make friends with other kids her age. She was smarter all of them and approached situations from an entirely different perspective. Where kids her age still saw the world is simple terms of things they could feel and basic science… Sam saw the world in terms of the unseen, the intangible, and the everlasting. She read books that college students didn't even touch, watched the discovery channel like it was Saturday morning cartoons, and questioned the world around her at every turn.
During her history phase, a time in which she read nothing but thick tomes on ancient battles, she organized the children of the play ground to replicate the Battle of Cannae. She cast herself as Hannibal and within a few moments had the "Romans" on the run.
It had always been like that for Sam Carter. She would go through phases in what she read… until she picked up a book on Astrophysics. From then on it was all variables, flight speeds, thermodynamics, chemical composition, relativity… so many ideas that her mind was constantly a blur of activity and thought.
She tried to share her passion with her family but they didn't understand. Her father might have… but he was never around long enough to listen to her ramble on about chemical compositions and exoplanets.
It was her mother that kept Sam from feeling like a freak. She was proud of her daughter and made the time to sit and listen as Sam tried to explain the simple concepts to her mother.
It was Sam's mother that found the science camp for her to go to that summer… it was Sam's mother that helped her pack her bags and kissed her forehead as she boarded the plane.
Sam loved Camp… it was full of kids who loved science like she did. She was still smarter than most of them, but at least when she made an offhand remark about some obscure science term, some of them got the joke. Still, she couldn't wait to get home and tell her mom all the things she'd learned.
Until she got to the airport…
Until she learned that her mother had been in an accident…
Learned that her mother had died in route to the hospital…
It was weeks later before Sam would even venture out of her room. She was torn up inside with grief. She hated herself and her father for the pain of loosing her mother.
It was natural for Sam to be angry; maybe if she'd been anyone else she would have rebelled in a different way, but for Sam her escape was found in knowledge. She poured herself into her studies. Graduating early from high school and then from college.
It was in those years of study that she forgave her father and tried to reform her relationship with him. She learned to be confident and bold. She learned how to take on the world and come out on top.
Sam was proud to follow in her father footsteps; she joined the air force and quickly advanced through the ranks. There her education became hands on, instead of theories and ideas. She helped build the Stargate program from the floor up. She became a member of SG-1. The first and she liked to think… best, away team of the SGC.
She saw things that were beyond any dream ever, traveled to places unheard of even in science fiction… lived more in those years than most do in their entire lives.
So, when the chance came to do something new it was easy for Sam to say yes. She'd heard Daniel ramble on and on about Atlantis, the city of the Ancients. She'd read the reports of the first couple years… the death, the battles, the missions.
She wanted that adventure, so she'd taken the job as Expedition Leader, replacing the MIA Elizabeth Weir.
It was there that she met John Sheppard.
Sam considered herself to be a hero; she'd saved the earth from time to time, been given awards by the president of the United States and leaders of alien worlds, but Sheppard was a hero in a way that reminded her of Jack O'Neill.
They both believed in the strength of their team, both defied authority to do what they felt was right, would never leave a man behind, and got hit on by alien priestesses.
Still there were many things that were different about John Sheppard. He was selfless to the point of insanity (Jack was selfless, but John took it to a whole new level), smart enough to have passed the MENSA test (or so Rodney told her), charming and diplomatic (where Jack let her or Daniel do most of the talking), and he made people feel… well… at ease.
As if the whole world rested on his shoulders and he was okay with that. Maybe it was the fact that his boots where never laced correctly or his lazy gait, but the first time that she saw him kill… she felt a chill go down her spine. Gone was the easy-going, fun loving John Sheppard and in his place was a methodical killer with ice water in his veins.
Later, after she'd been removed from command of Atlantis… she'd think about that change, about the man and the beast that lived inside of Sheppard. She'd think until her head hurt and at the end of the night still be glad that for a time she glimpsed the ability of one person to radically change the course of events by sheer force of their will and that while John Sheppard was similar to Jack O'Neill, there was no one truly like John Sheppard in this universe or the next.
Next time: John Sheppard.
Wrap your mind around that one! ;)