Two Weeks Later
"Sammy!" Jacob Carter says as he envelops his daughter into a hug.
"Hey, Dad, thanks for letting me stay with you while I find a place to stay," she says, hugging her father back a little awkwardly.
"You know you could stay with me as long as you are stationed in D.C.," he says with a hopeful smile.
"I'm a little old to be living with my dad, I think," Sam says.
Jacob shakes his head.
"Well, a crying baby might keep you up at night," Sam blurts. It wasn't the way she had planned on telling her father about her pregnancy. Well, to be perfectly honest, she'd never had a plan on how to tell her father about her pregnancy. She had spent a lot of time trying to come up with a plan to tell him, but she had never actually succeeded.
"What?" Jack asks, really hoping that he didn't hear what he thought he heard.
"You knew I am on light duty, didn't you?" Sam says.
"I didn't know it was medical," Jacob says.
"Yeah," Sam says biting her lip.
"This is… you got pregnant during the war, then?" her father says with disapproval.
She nods her head.
"Who is the father?
"He is an officer, in another squadron," Sam says looking down.
"Oh, Sam, I'm so sorry," her father says softly.
For a few seconds she's confused. Then she realizes, "Oh no, he's not dead."
"Then…" her father prompts.
"I've tried to call him. I've called him a lot. And he has my number, but… nothing," she says.
"And then I'm sorry again," her father says, "What is his name?"
"Dad, I don't want you to put a whole bunch of effort into searching for someone who doesn't want to be found."
"Sammy, I am going to need the name of my grandbaby's father," he says firmly.
"Jonathan O'Neill," she says.
She can't understand the change in her father's face as the words enter his brain. "Lieutenant Colonel Jack O'Neil?"
"You know him?" she asks.
"Sammy, I've worked with the man for years, he's old enough to be your father! What are you doing with him?" Jacob says in a voice that is a low roar.
"He's not that much older than me," Sam protests.
"Really, what's the age difference?"
Sam looks at her father in horror, for the first time realizing that she doesn't actually know how old the father of her baby is… exactly.
"Sam, what exactly do you know about this man?"
"Not enough, obviously," Sam says.
"Look, Jack comes up to Washington D.C. once a month on business. He'll be here next week, I can invite him over to the house," Jacob says softly.
"He's back?" she asks. Even after all the things that her father has implied about this man, even now that she knows he's back and hasn't called her, somehow she still thinks that he's going to be excited. She was with him for months. She knew him. And she can imagine him walking into her father's house, and seeing her. He'd throw his arms around her, and everything would be ok.
"He's been back awhile, sweetheart," her father says.
"Yeah, you can invite him over," she says with a slow smile.
"Sammy, you know… it's going to be ok. I'm going to be here for you… and the kid," Jacob says. And he's suddenly the father that she knew when she was a small child. He's the father who used to read her bedtime stories and scare away the monsters under her bed. He's the father who used to sit and hold hands with her mother, whispering in her ear when the family watched TV together. It's a side of her father that she missed since her mother died, and he became General.
"I bet you didn't plan on becoming a grandfather quite yet," Sam says softly, picking up her bag.
He takes it from her. She would usually resist such an obvious show of male chauvinism, but she knows that carrying while pregnant is actually really bad for her back.
"No, I didn't quite plan on it. But both of my kids were surprises as well, and that turned out pretty well."
-0-0-0-
"You're leaving the Air Force?" Charlie says softly.
"They won't clear me for activity duty, and it's time to re-sign. Why would I re-sign to fly a desk stateside? That's where they're heading me, Charlie."
"You could get better Jack, and then you could be put back in activity duty."
"Not likely, you need a clean bill of mental health in order to be given any real work," Jack says bitterly.
Charlie's stomach twists with guilt, "I'm sorry, I ruined your career. I didn't mean to."
"It wasn't you that ruined it. It was me. Moaning over a stupid girl, like an idiot," Jack mutters.
"Jack, I have to ask you… are you still…?" Charlie asks, shifting under the awkwardness of the question.
"No, I don't have any intention to harm myself. She's not worth it," Jack says. Charlie detects a deep sadness in Jack's eyes. He may no longer have thoughts of killing himself, but he is also nowhere close to being over Samantha Carter.
One Week Later
"Hey, Sam, come on down stairs!" Jacob calls up the stairs. Sam takes one last look in the mirror before she runs downstairs. She freezes on the stairs. Jack should be here by now. But the man standing there talking to her father is not Jack.
"Ah… hi," she says awkwardly.
Jacob looks between the two people, and can't understand the coldness in their air. It's like they've never met.
"Sam, this is Jack O'Neill," he says.
Sam pauses on the step, "No, it isn't." Is this some sort of joke? Is her dad planning a joke with her concerning the father of her baby? Really?
"I assure you ma'am, I do know my own name," the man replies.
Now Sam can see why her father was so surprised to find out Jack was the father. This man, with no sense of humor and thirty years on her, was definitely not her type. "Ok, well, this was not the Jack O'Neill I'm having a baby with," she says.
"I certainly am not!" the man says taking a step back in horror.
"I'm sorry about my daughter," Jacob says glaring at her on the staircase.
"There must be another Jack O'Neill. It's not like it is the most uncommon name in the world," she says.
"Excuse me," Jacob says to O'Neill, before he leads his daughter in the kitchen. "I was really hoping that I was wrong," he mutters.
"Wrong about what?" Sam asks.
"Sam, he gave you a phone number that didn't work. What makes you think that he didn't give you a fake name?" Jacob asks softly.
"No, dad, it's not like that. You just don't know him. If you knew him, really knew him, you'd never say that. I just need to find him. You can do a search for Jack O'Neills, right?"
"It's a really common name," her father says softly.
"Right, but there can't be that many in the Air Force," she begins.
"I'll look into it, Sammy," he says, trying to calm her down.
-0-0-0-
Jack's cabin had always been his refuge. A safe place that he could go to escape any problems in the world. It was a perfect place to go post-Angel.
That's right, his life is divided into pre- and post-, with a different man on each side of the Gulf.
He fidgets with a ring.
That's right, he was stupid enough to buy the woman a ring. He'd described exactly what he wanted to a friend stateside, and he'd bought it for him. Jack was about to have it shipped to him with a crazy amount of insurance on it, and then he'd found out that she was going back to the states. So he'd told his friend to hold onto it. He figured he could give it to her the first time that they saw each other stateside.
His answering machine had been blank when he came up here. Not that he really expected her to call. How would she have time when she was living with… him? But it still would have been nice. It would have been nice if she'd try to lie to him, and convince him she had really been in love with him. Maybe he even would have pretended to believe her. After all, a little of Angel was better than a whole lot of another girl.
He takes one last look at the shimmering engagement ring before he chucks it into the lake. It's stupid, that ring was worth a lot of money, and that's going to be pretty tight now that he doesn't exactly have a job.
He'll survive. He'd decided that he was going to survive, although he wasn't quite sure why.
A Few Days Later
"Sammy," Jacob says, sitting down next to his daughter on the porch. Her new boss is a very 'by the books' guy. The regulations say that pregnant women aren't allowed to work overtime, and since she moved to Washington she hasn't.
"Hey," she says, taking a sip of the herbal tea she's begun drinking in order to kick her caffeine habit.
"So I looked up Jack O'Neill today," her father says softly.
"And?" she asks hopefully, but she knows the answer as soon as she looks at her father's eyes. "Did you try 'Jonathan'? Jack is a nickname for Jonathan."
"I know that, Sam," her father says softly.
"Of course you do. But maybe there is a different spelling or…" she begins.
He puts a hand on her arm, "Sam, I tried everything, there is no one by the name of Jack O'Neill in the Air Force except for that man that you met the other night."
Sam nods her head slowly. "I tried his number three times today… nothing. It's never going to work."
"No, it isn't, sweetie. I'm so sorry. Have you thought about… what are you going to do now?"
"I'm going to raise my baby," she says, putting a protective hand over her stomach, "And someday, when it's old enough, I'll tell it that its father was an asshole."
Jacob chuckles pulling his daughter into a hug.
Sam wonders how she could have been so off. So wrong. She was so sure that she knew the man she'd spend three months with in war zone. She was so sure that she loved him. If she could be wrong about that, then she could be wrong about anything.