AU: A freak accident aboard The Odyssey flings Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter back in time further than she expected or thought possible. Will she choose to preserve the original timeline, or will all hell break loose? How will her decisions affect the rest of the team both now and then?
Summary: When Jack boards the Tel'tak, Sam is surprised and less than impressed.
Part 6 of my Lost and Found Universe. A short story explaining the 89 year old Sam Carter from previous stories.
Takes place during 10.22 Unending and 7.13 Grace using Air Dates for the timeline.
Chapter 6: Why this time?
Training base (inside Tel'tak) – Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter
The sound of his voice made me jump almost out of my skin. Launching to my feet was fraught with difficulty when my still weakened legs almost gave way causing me to lunge for Bra'tac in an effort to prevent myself from hitting the ground in a tangle of pasty white limbs.
"Jack? You're… here and…" I wanted to say young. He wasn't frozen, still wearing his Colonel's BDU and carrying a P-90.
"Well, I would say what happened to you. But ah… kinda already said that once." He said, taking a step forward, looking me over as if he were searching for injuries. "So, ah…" He coughed as if to clear his throat, flicking his eyes to Teal'c then back to me, "…definitely from the future."
I merely nodded. There were no words I could use to describe where I was from better than my age. I could get into the technicality of it all, but frankly I wanted to be gone.
"So, Doc… where's your DeLorean?" He asked in jest. Pity I wasn't in the mood for his type of humour. Standing tall, just the way I'd been trained to do when facing a superior officer, I stepped forward.
"Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter, Sir. Second in Command of The Odyssey." I introduced myself.
He looked at me through squinted untrusting eyes, the same way he looked at her – the other Samantha – all those years ago when we were around the briefing table. Before their interlude. A spike of jealously ran through me at the thought of her having what I could not. Of her having him in a way I could never have him. Of her raising his daughter on the other side – a daughter he would never know. Serves him right for not… damn. Was I really so jaded, so angry, so petty that I rejoiced that he would never meet her? Yes. Yes, I was. Angry at him, angry at myself, angry at everything that stood between us. Angry at Teal'c and Bra'tac for bringing me here. I was angry. Seething.
"Are you sure you're not from an alternate reality?" He asked with a twirl of his hand. Oh, I wished. I wished so much that this was an alternate reality because then he wouldn't really be him. He'd be another version of the man I loved and lost, instead of the actual man. At least, I was fairly certain this was the same reality since I had yet to experience any form of entropic cascade failure in the three days it took to fix the ship and get here.
When I didn't answer his question, he took another step forwards. "The oddity, hey?" He queried, his pronunciation coming out completely wrong. Did he think this was a joke? That me being here was funny? What a complete and utter… utterly normal thing for Jack O'Neill to do.
"The Odyssey, Sir." I repeated trying not to grit my teeth. A spark of anger ricocheted through my mind at his persistent playing dumb act. He should know that I figured him out years ago. I wasn't in the mood for his crap right now. I didn't even want to be in his presence, let alone in his presence dealing with his eccentricities.
"The Odyssey." He rolled the name around his mouth and gave me a circumspect look. "And what is that exactly?"
Of course. He didn't know about our newest ship in the fleet. He was still a Colonel, not a General. If I had just rewound the 50 years, he would know, since he approved its construction. He wouldn't be here. I wouldn't be here. Swallowing heavily, I gave him an uneasy smile. I still had not identified the exact point in time, other than sometime in early to mid-2004, but seeing him unfrozen and looking so damn good was screaming very early 2004 in my head, early as in that Christmas party had only been a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, my scientific rules-based brain argued that it simply wasn't possible. That travelling beyond the point of the activation of the field was not possible.
Dammit! How could this happen?
I should ask for more information, or ask about memories or events, then again, I could just try and work it out myself. Plans B and C weren't viable because my memory about events from so long ago wasn't stellar. Recalling a mission with Cam from our SG-1 days around the table just before we took the leap had been hard enough. Remembering the configuration of crystals and what conduits went where in the Tel'tak had taken me three days whereas it used to be a 30-minute job.
"Cat gotcha tongue, Colonel?" He prompted, pulling me out of my musings. I had to stop thinking of things in terms of 50 years ago because for them, it wasn't. For them, I was an anomaly. A mistake. They just didn't know it.
"When exactly am I, Sir?" I asked, going with Plan A. He raised his eyebrows and tipped his head to the side then smiled making me have to fight to keep control. It was a signature look of his that I loved, one of the many memories that had petered out into nothing. Focusing on that day in his backyard, finding him with another woman, helped me focus my anger and keep it together.
"When do you think it is, Colonel?" He replied, turning my question around.
"I asked first, Sir." I rounded it back to him. He smiled and I nearly melted, so I looked away.
"Well, I have no idea what the Odyssey is, but going by the name, it's probably one of our ships. That means that SG-1 aren't gate hopping anymore, we are finally flying. Though I would have thought it would be sooner than…" He gestured to my appearance and paused giving me the opportunity to jump in.
"Not all of us, Sir." I replied, working hard to keep the nervous upset out of my tone. Sounding like an old lady was fine. Sounding like an old lady on the verge of tears was not.
"No? Oh, please don't tell me Daniel is dead again." He equipped. "He really should stop doing that." Hearing him talk about death was just too much, but I couldn't look away fast enough before the unbidden tears fell. "Oh, he is, isn't he?"
"No! He's…" I wanted to say, but the truth was, I didn't know. I could just see him out of my peripheral vision. His face fell slightly before he caught it.
"It's me, isn't it? You're what 80-something making me…well old, but probably more likely d…"
"NO! Dammit! Will you just stop!" I interrupted harshly, my barely contained anger leaping out in an uncontrolled lash. I could not hear about him being gone, no matter how angry I was with him. With her. With myself! It was bad enough I'd lived my life without knowing him as more than my CO.
"Excuse me? I think you missed something on the end of that, Lieutenant Colonel." He scolded, the commander in him coming out full force. I couldn't take it anymore.
"Seriously! I'm almost twice your age and I'm damn sure that the Air Force doesn't have me on their books." I yelled in a broken voice, pointing to some space off to my left as if Washington DC were in that direction.
"Be that as it may, Carter, there are rules…" He growled, his own finger pointing the in same direction as mine.
"Rules! I hate the rules! I hate them, Jack." I screamed at him, feeling my emotions bubble. "Even when you…" I paused to pace a little, cursing at my near slip over him becoming The Man.
"Even when I what? Colonel." He prompted, the harsh commanding tone dulled down into something, well less commanding and more like concerned interest. "Even when I what?" He repeated a little calmer.
"Nothing, Sir."
"C'mon Carter, you can't start something like that and leave me hanging. What happened… happens to me that makes you so…" He waved his hand at my current temperament. I hated that I had no control in front of him. I knew this would happen. After being in love with this man for what equated to sixty years for me, thinking that I would unravel localised time and go back to my old life, remembering nothing of those years, only to be trapped three years earlier in his presence being reminded how much I had given up for my career. Well, it just plain sucked.
"I can't tell you; you should know that." I growled. "If I do, it'll…"
"Change the timeline, I know. Trust me. I've heard it from you enough, but don't you think that just you being here has already changed things? T said you pulled his ship out of hyper whatzit. He wasn't coming here before then. Things are already different." He explained. He was right. Here I was worried about changing things if I went to Earth, if I saw him or myself. My aged brain didn't even consider that things were already different. Oh God. My breathing hitched and heart rate rose.
"Not again. Please." I begged my body on a harsh laboured breath. It didn't work. My heart rate pitched heating up my skin and creating a sheen of sweat to prickle across my forehead.
"Carter… hey, Carter!" A familiar voice said as its owner wrapped an arm around my waist, coaxing me to sit. "C'mon, let's get someone to check you out." He was beside me, sitting with me. His unique scent filling my mind with memories of his smile, his jokes, his eyes. Things I thought I had forgotten. I laughed almost hysterically before coming back to myself.
"I'm fine. It'll pass, it always does." I murmured, my brain urging me to pull away but my heart steadfastly refusing to allow it to take control.
"Be that as it may, I really think you need medical atte…"
"Sure, why not! See if they can find out what's wrong with me!" I bit off, standing up unsteadily and pushing away from him. "Be my guest. Stick some needles in, take a little blood. Test for Naquadah and God knows what else. Maybe they can work out what I did wrong while they are at it. It has to be something, right? I mean, I don't see Teal'c or Vala or Cam or Daniel, or General Landry. There must be something wrong with me!" I lashed out, the names of those who had been with me for half a century spewing forth without even thinking about my audience.
"Sam?" I flung my head around at his use of my name. I hadn't even realised he had stood up and moved closer. "Why don't we let them check you out?" He tried to sound concerned. Helpful. Placating. I almost believed it until I saw his eyes. Dark and untrusting, cautious.
"You don't believe me. You… you think I am making this up, that I'm not really me."
"Look Carter, all I know is that you're here, looking… a lot older than when you left."
"Stop calling me that! I'm not her. I'm not your Major!"
"Could have fooled me. You sound like my Carter, and technobabble like my Carter." He paused and looked contrite for a moment. "You smell like her." I looked up suddenly. I smelled like her. "Same shampoo." He muttered. Of course, I'd fabricated some home comforts and necessities to make our incarceration a little more comfortable.
I shook my head, "I'm not. Even when I was a Major, I was never yours." I watched as his face turned tense, hard and unemotional. Just like it did after Freya's little game of 20 questions.
Moving slowly over to some crates pushed against the bulkhead, I gingerly sat down. God I was tired. He watched me move but didn't follow. At length he spoke.
"Is this a cake thing? Did you eat some cake and wake up old?" He asked, giving me his funny little smile that never failed to make my skin prickle with arousal, a feeling I had forgotten about and honestly thought I would never experience again. I couldn't help the laugh that erupted.
"No. I wish I had. I'm afraid that there is no undoing this." I confessed.
"This. Care to explain?" I looked up at his question to find that he looked genuinely interested in how I came to be here. While I knew telling him too much was a bad idea, but he was right. Things had already changed. Maybe this time things would turn out better. For them. I swallowed. Not me. I was destined to live out my days a broken old woman. Maybe my memories would change if I did tell him the things I had held close. Maybe they wouldn't. Taking a breath, I decided to surge forwards. In for penny, in for a pound as they say.
"Are you sure you want to hear it, Sir?"
He raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms over his broad chest. "Wouldn't have asked if I didn't want to hear it, Carter." He never failed to amaze me. I had known for years that he absorbed everything that I said and only interrupted me because most of the time he already knew the science behind things. There was no way he could be as knowledgeable about a variety of things including astronomy, blast radius', projectile trajectories or how to compensate for changes in gravity that we experienced on other planets without a solid understanding of physics.
"OK." I swallowed and ran my hands down the length of my thighs thinking of where to start. "Three years from now, we were under attack by the… a hostile alien race. They had us dead to rights, Sir. They fired a blast at less than one hundred and sixty thousand miles from us…"
"What! You don't remember the exact number of miles?" He interrupted, a sly grin on his face.
I did remember. It was a central part of my maths for decades, along with the 0.86 seconds it would take for the blast to hit us once we deactivated the bubble. "159,960 miles – give or take a few feet – Sir." I told him. He smiled slowly and motioned for me to continue.
"I initiated a localised time dilation field encompassing the ship and the immediate area of space around the ship buying us enough time to think of a solution." I explained.
"By enough time, you mean…" He started but didn't finish since it was clear how much time it had given us by my physical age. I merely nodded at his unfinished realisation. He looked away briefly and blew out a breath before continuing.
"Let me guess, you slowed time to one-five-billionth of a second like we did with the Replicators on Halla." He continued, without so much as a skerrick of conjecture in his voice, his dark eyes communicating his understanding. "Then you spent fifty years, trying to work out how to avoid the blast." He added much to my amazement and complete speechlessness. I could not stop the smile from branching out across my face.
"Actually, it was more like one-four-and-half-billionth of a second, Sir." I corrected him.
He narrowed his eyes, "That include leap years, Carter?"
"Well, when we are talking about that amount of time, adding eight extra days doesn't make much of a difference. In the long run, Sir." I responded with my own smile at his stab at my maths. He looked at me a little longer before smiling again, all traces of mistrust gone from his countenance.
"Are you sure you're not my Carter, the one on the Prometheus? It's a fact that Colonel Ronson's tiresome jokes cause people to age prematurely." He said gesturing at my appearance.
"That was the nanites, Sir. Not Major Ronson's bad jokes." I replied to his dig about Ronson when he had overseen the scientific research team responsible for monitoring the Colonel's return to his normal age after Argos. "Technically, his jokes made you youn… Wait! Did you say Prometheus?" I stopped my own thought with a question.
"Yes." He replied. I'd been on board that ship many times in my career, several during the six-month period where I knew I had landed. Why did it have to be this point in time? Looking at Jack, I could see that he was waiting for more.
I sighed, cradling my head, "Just my luck that I land here, now."
"Why is that?" He asked, his face completely devoid of anything. He was testing me. Great. My memory was pretty terrible, but I tried, nevertheless. Leaning back, I closed my eyes. A song popped into my head. One I had not heard in decades.
"Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." I replied, keeping my eyes closed. "What day is it?" I asked.
"7th January 2004." He responded without missing a beat. "Around 8pm Earth side." He added the time. Here comes that train wreck. Tomorrow afternoon, our mission time would pass. We would be declared overdue. Hammond would wait another 24-hours before starting the search. Jack would be on this planet training recruits for another 48-hours, before being recalled to head up the search.
This was the mission that made me seek out Pete. The mission that was the beginning of the end. By the time I realised Pete wasn't the one, Jack had moved on with Kerry and a new job in Washington. I barely saw him and when I did, it was always stunted. I'd had the opportunity to tell him when Dad had died but I didn't. Another opportunity to go to the cabin, but I ran away leaving him an 'I'm sorry' note. I let him leave only to find out later that he hadn't been with Kerry since the day I lost Dad.
"Oh God." I choked out, my breathing becoming erratic to the point of panic once more. I could feel my heart rate climb again until it started thumping in my head creating a play of colours speckled with multicoloured stars behind my eyelids. That wasn't good. I needed to calm down, I needed… but I couldn't. My chest hurt as I tried to suck in oxygen increasing my panic.
"Carter. Carter." He was saying as he stepped closer, but I couldn't see properly through the haze clouding my eyes. I had to watch myself. I wasn't 39 anymore. Suddenly, a warm hand touched my shoulder. "Sam." He said my forename again, looking right at me. "Sam, you need to breathe. We'll work this out. We'll get it fixed. Janet will know what to do." He still didn't get it. I couldn't be fixed. Wait Janet? My panic intensified. Of course. I was living in a temporal paradox where my best friend would die in a matter of weeks, and my 36-year-old self was on the mission where everything had gone to hell. She was already in the cloud. Unconscious. Seeing things, misinterpreting things.
"Lost. Lost." I cried out through the speckled daze and asphyxiation engulfing me as I felt my body go weak. Cold. So cold, shivering while sweating. Lifting my frozen fingers to his face, the tips burning against his warm skin. "Jack. Find her. Me. T-tell h-her. Please. Please." I begged, my eyes fluttering closed.