Passing Strange
Jack sat in his truck in the parking lot.
The clock on the dash read 12:57.
T minus three and counting.
Crap.
He checked his cell phone, which he'd sat on his knee. It was suspiciously silent. He wondered if the battery was dead. He pushed a button and the screen lit up. Damn. Fully charged. He just obviously had no friends who were going to call and get him out of this.
The clock blipped. 12:58.
T minus two.
Crap.
He turned in his seat to look again at the building behind him. Low, gray, boring, it looked like the rest of the buildings in the medical complex. He didn't know what he'd expected, though a large representation of a nut would have been close. Nut job. Nut house.
Going nuts.
Because that's what he was doing. Going nuts.
He checked the phone again. Still nothing.
It was Daniel's fault that he was here—the little weasel. He'd casually handed Jack the business card before the briefing yesterday. The appointment time and doctor's name were already transcribed on the back.
"She's great." He'd said quietly. "You'll like her."
Jack had looked at the card and scowled. "She's a shrink."
"Yes. So?"
"I'm not nuts."
And there had been that little eyebrow raise and the smirk that always said the same thing. "Jack, don't be an ass."
Except he felt like one, anyway, sitting here in the parking lot two minutes before his appointment time knowing—knowing—that this would be an unmitigated disaster.
The clock blipped again. 12:59.
T minus one minute.
Crap.
He checked his phone—feeling desperate. His last bastion of hope sat, quiet, useless, on his thigh. He wondered briefly if it was wrong to pray for some really powerful snake-headed bad guy to attack the SGC. After all—Siler might get hurt. O'Neill sighed. Sometimes, sacrifices were necessary.
Another glance behind him told him that the building had not yet exploded, nor disappeared. A few seconds later, he looked in the rear view mirror, just to make sure.
The clock blipped again. 1:00
Blast off.
Crap.
Scowling, he picked up his phone and removed his keys from the ignition of the Super Duty. With an absent motion, he opened the door, sliding out of the truck more than climbing. Slamming the door behind him, he clicked the locks and the alarm with the doohickey on his key-ring. He straightened his jacket.
With one, last, hopeful look at his phone—which completely betrayed him by not ringing—he made the short walk across the parking lot and up to the building. He shoved his phone and keys into the pockets of his jeans and, girding his loins, opened the door.
----OOOOOOO----
It didn't look like he'd expected. It looked like a regular doctor's office—only smaller. It was long and skinny—like a hallway with furniture. In front of him, at the end of the hallway, was a little window with a sliding glass door above a tiny counter. To his left, a row of three plastic chairs marched along the wall before stopping at a door. A table occupied the wall to his right—Sara would have called it a couch table—where sat a coffee urn and baskets full of thimble-sized creamer containers, sugar packets, and cups. In the corner sat a very leafy, very fake, ficus tree. On the wall itself, above the coffee, a medium-sized television had been mounted on a pivoting arm. Now showing?
Star Trek.
His scowl deepened.
Walking along that empty row of chairs felt like a perp walk. Especially since the teenaged receptionist watched him the entire time. She was chewing gum while smiling.
Minty and perky. The combination from hell.
She finally spoke once he got to the little counter.
"Can I help you?"
"I'm here for a one o'clock."
"A one o'clock what?" Her name tag called her Brittany.
Jack's eyebrows did a little dance as he tried hard not to reach through the window and smack her.
"Appointment." He finally got out. "I have a one o'clock appointment with Dr.—" Crap. He couldn't remember her name.
He patted his pants pockets, but he knew that only his keys and phone were in there. How long had it been since he'd cleaned out his jacket pockets? Since before his last round at the firing range. He stuck his hand into the pockets and rifled through the contents, but he couldn't feel the card. He pulled out a handful of debris. Bullets, mostly, with a few spent casings. He put them on the counter and reached in again. There was a pocket knife, and a package of fishing lures, and a photograph of—whoa, that was classified—he put that one in the jacket's inside pocket. He pulled out a rock—and wondered for a moment why that was in there, before placing it and a folded up dollar bill next to the bullets on the counter. A few sunflower seeds followed the rock, and a ratty, bent piece of gum, and roughly 83 cents in change. Finally, stuck down in the corner of his right side pocket, he felt the outer edge of the card. He yanked at it with two fingers.
It tore in half.
The only letters still visible of the good doctor's name were the last three—ago. He decided to wing it. "Doctor—uh—Zhivago."
The girl screwed up her face. "Who?"
"Doctor Lunago?"
Brittany looked even more confused.
"Chicago?"
"Doctor Biago?" The girl asked around her gum.
"Yes—" he slapped his hand on the counter, causing all the bullets to jump. "Doctor Biago. Thank you, Brittany."
"Mr. O'Neill?" She referred to a paper on a clipboard behind her window. "Yep—One o'clock. Dr. Biago is almost done with her twelve o'clock. Have a seat and I'll call you when she's ready."
O'Neill flipped back the cover on his watch and tapped the face. "It's 1:07. Shouldn't she already be done with her twelve o'clock?"
Gum-girl chewed a little more and shook her head. Her short dark curls bounced around a little bit. "Mental health is not an exact science Mr. O'Neill. You can't hurry breakthroughs." Kittens would have quailed before her cuteness.
He smiled back at her—the kind of smile reserved for idiots and senators—and turned towards the waiting room. But Brittany was made of sterner stuff. Her voice turned him back around.
"Uh, Mr. O'Neill? Could you please take your weaponry?"
Jack wheeled around and returned to gather up the conglomerate. Brittany watched while he poured it back into his pockets.
"You know what, Mr. O'Neill?"
He didn't answer, merely raised his eyebrow.
"Cosmo says that man-bags are really big this year. You could put all your missiles and stuff in one and then it wouldn't be in your pocket. Physical organization makes for mental organization."
Jack had a fleeting image of himself wearing a man-bag. Then he saw himself shooting the first person to laugh at him wearing said man-bag. There would be a long trial, and many, many people would testify about how mentally disorganized he was, and how it had made him ripe for wigging out.
He decided then and there that man bags were not for him.
"I'll keep that in mind. Thanks." He shot her a two finger salute, and headed back to the waiting area. He sat in the middle seat.
The coffee looked singularly unappetizing. Now, a nice, cold bottle of Guinness maybe—but they probably frowned on that in the mental health profession.
He studied the wall in front of him. The Star Trek episode had just started, and the main guy—Kurt? Jerk?—whatever—was yelling at his engineer to put thrusters to full. It was interesting watching a show about a space ship when he'd actually been on a space ship or two in his time. The engineer was frantically working at his engines, supposedly trying to make them go faster. Jack didn't really think he seemed very intelligent—he seemed to whine a lot about how the ship wasn't made to do what they were asking it to do.
Carter would have designed it better.
He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees. Carter.
Sigh.
She was currently somewhere classified doing something even more classified with an NID operative. Jack had been left behind, officially still recuperating from the staff blast he'd taken on P3X-666. He'd found that there were other things lately that were proving more difficult to bounce back from than staff blasts. His sigh deepened.
Behind him and to his left, the door opened, and a middle aged woman wearing polyester emerged, followed by a younger woman wearing jeans and a nubby wool sweater. Jack hoped that sweater girl was the shrink.
Polyester smiled. "I'll see you next week at the same time. Please bring me your self-affirmation journal."
Denim and Wool nodded and sniffed. "I will, Dr. B, and I'll try to stay positive."
Polyester nodded.
Denim and Wool left in a perfumed cloud, and Polyester turned her attention to O'Neill.
"Mr. O'Neill?"
He stood slowly. Completely without thinking it, he lifted the cover and looked at his watch again. 1:15.
"Is there something wrong?"
"No, it's just that my appointment was for one o'clock."
"Is the time an issue for you?"
"Well, yeah." Jack covered his watch back up. "I mean, no." Honesty being the best policy, he revised again. "Yes."
Polyester's face turned diagnostic. "Well, let's get this moving, then."
She disappeared into her lair, leaving the door open behind her.
Jack stood for a minute, considering. He could still make a run for it. There was no shame in running away. Monty Python did it all the time.
Daniel would find out he'd been a wuss, though. He sucked it up and followed her in.
----OOOOOOO----
He'd been expecting a couch. Weren't all shrinks required to have a couch? There was no couch. Unless a love seat counted as a couch, which every guy knew it didn't. You couldn't spread out on a love seat to watch hockey—way too much estrogen coursing through love seats to be compatible in any way with hockey. Soccer, maybe. Perhaps even tennis. Maybe even baseball, in a stretch.
Not hockey.
Instead, two tall backed chairs sat side by side on one side of a low coffee table, facing a low long chair that looked like one of those things that people sat in by a pool. Except it was upholstered. It looked French. The love seat made a third part of the center square, with the fourth side, the side that faced the open door, empty. Beneath them all was an area rug that looked Turkish, but was most likely a knock-off. Probably made in China.
A desk, covered in paper and books, hovered in one dark corner of the room, while book cases cowered in another. A fake tree—the twin to the one in the waiting room?—drooped in a third corner. The fourth held filing cabinets. He felt as if the furniture were watching him.
Creepy.
Polyester made her way over to her desk and picked up a yellow legal pad and a pen. Turning, she motioned towards the tableau in the center of the room. "You can sit wherever you want."
"Oh, the choices." Jack perused them. "Eenie—meenie—minie?"
"Many people feel comfortable on the chaise."
That must have been the French thing. He pursed his lips and deliberately sat on one of the tall backed chairs.
"Or the other chairs. Whichever."
She perched herself on the edge of the chaise, and waited.
And waited.
O'Neill couldn't help himself. He looked at his watch again.
"You can start at any time." Polyester uncapped the pen and looked expectant.
"What do you want to know?"
"Whatever brought you here, Mr. O'Neill."
"You can call me Jack."
"Daniel says that you have been struggling a bit lately."
"What, you've talked about me to Daniel? Isn't there privilege of some sort protecting against that?"
"Daniel isn't a client of mine. He's a neighbor and a friend."
Jack leaned back in the chair and stretched his long legs out in front of him. He didn't say anything.
"He says that you have suffered some recent losses and are having a tough time getting past them."
Still, Jack remained silent.
"Would you like to talk about that, or something else?"
Jack's mouth opened, and he exhaled rapidly before blurting, "Why don't you have a couch?"
"A couch?"
"Yeah—aren't shrinks supposed to have couches?"
"Mental health professionals can have whatever accoutrements they desire in their offices. Couches or no couches."
"Oh."
"There's a love seat."
"Not a couch." Jack shook his head. "Really not a couch."
More silence passed. Polyester began writing notes on her pad.
"Whatcha writing?"
"Just a few notes. Nothing to be concerned about."
"Are they about me?"
"You are the patient, here."
"Not a patient. I'm not sick."
Polyester smiled. "You've heard the one about the psychiatrist and the light bulb?"
Jack shook his head.
"How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?"
"Tell me."
"Only one, but the light bulb has to really want to change." Obviously this was Polyester's favorite joke. She laughed out loud at herself.
Jack cracked a smile—what his underlings through the years had referred to as his 'courtesy laugh'.
"The point is," she continued, "Is that in order for this to work, you have to want it to work."
Jack considered this for longer than he'd intended. Did he want this to work? If he were going to be honest with himself, he was really tired of pain. Physically—it was tough. His knee had never healed well enough to be completely pain free. He refused to take anything stronger than Tylenol unless a doctor administered it—even after all these years he didn't quite trust himself. He remembered the terror of detox, of withdrawal. Never again.
Emotionally—he supposed if he were truly honest with himself, he would say that he'd been self-medicating for years. Humor, sarcasm, whatever you wanted to call it. Sometimes he'd just been plain mean. It helped that in his job he got to shoot things pretty consistently. Sick, but true. He could admit that about himself. You didn't live to the ripe old age of fifty-whatever without some sort of introspective capability.
He'd tired recently of being in that kind of pain. Maybe it was just that he was tired.
His eyes closed, and he leaned his head back.
"Are you ready to talk, Jack?"
The doctor's face was kind, her expression sincere.
When O'Neill finally opened his eyes and matched her gaze, he felt things opening up inside.
"I'm military."
"I know. Daniel told me."
"A lot of what I do is classified."
"If you tell me the wrong thing you'll have to shoot me."
The line was given in such seriousness that Jack's grin was real, this time. But he had no idea where to start.
"I understand that you have lost some team members lately." Doc Polyester figured out for him.
"Her name was Janet. She was a doctor. She'd saved my life more times than I can count, but in the end I couldn't save hers."
"And how do you feel about that?"
"Like crap."
"Deeper."
"Guilt."
"You can identify that." Her statement lacked surprise.
"I'm not without a few skills."
Polyester made a note on her pad. "Let's take today to list the issues that you'd like to talk about during subsequent sessions. Is there anything else?"
Jack clammed up. He slouched down in his chair and crossed his ankles, folding his hands across his abdomen.
"I'm guessing there's more."
Jack stubbornly stayed silent.
"Daniel said something about a woman."
"Talkative little cuss, isn't he?"
Polyester shrugged dismissively. "He cares about you, I think, and has been concerned for a while."
When Jack didn't reply, she forged ahead. "I believe it's a woman that you work with—a member of your immediate team."
"Sam." When the doctor looked confused, Jack clarified. "Samantha. Sam. Sam Carter. I call her 'Carter'."
"Are you the only one that calls her 'Carter'?"
"Why does that matter?"
"It's just a question, Jack."
"Yes. I'm the only one. She's also a doctor and a major, so she's got about a billion other monikers."
"And you choose her masculine last name rather than her title or first name."
"She's a member of my team. She's my second in command."
"And as such, she's off limits to you—so you keep her at a distance by endowing her with a masculine, impersonal designation."
"She's dating someone else. I guess it's serious. So yeah, distances are good."
"I sense that you have some history with her, other than that allowed by your ranks and jobs."
"I'm in love with her."
Where the hell had that come from? He closed his mouth tightly, his lips thinning into nothingness. He'd never once actually said that out loud. Not once. And thirty minutes with Doc Polyester had him spilling like he was hooked up to one of those Tok'ra mind reader things.
The doctor looked sympathetic. "Does she return your affections?"
"She used to." Jack figured he'd go with it. "At least I thought she did."
"What makes you think that's changed?"
"Did you miss where I said that she's dating someone else?"
"No, but sometimes it's possible just to be ready to move on. She might be ready for more out of her life."
O'Neill nodded. Sam herself had intimated as much on a few occasions. He'd just thought that they would figure out the how when she'd decided on the when.
"You feel that she's betrayed you somehow."
He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs. He couldn't speak.
Doc Polyester cocked her head to one side. "It's not your fault."
He didn't look up.
"It's not your fault." She leaned forward too, her voice lowered until she was almost whispering. "People in incredible positions and situations often find themselves drawn to each other—and sometimes that relationship is healthy, and sometimes it isn't. You don't seem like a man who falls easily in and out of relationships."
He wasn't. He and Sara had dated for eight years and been married longer. She was the only other woman he'd admitted to loving.
"You need to find a way to absolve yourself. It's not a crime to have loved her. It's not wrong. It might be the wrong time or place. But love—real affection—is never wrong."
Jack, just for something to do, peeled back the cover on his watch. 2:01.
His hour was up.
He met the doctor's eyes, but looked away quickly. Standing, he slapped the watch cover back into place.
"I gotta go."
And with that, he walked out of the office without a backward glance.