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TITLE: I Don't Think Jack Expected To Come Home… The Hundred and First Day Sam sits on the floor of her house with a beer in her hand. The TV is off and so are the lights. It's just her, her beer, and her thoughts. I don't think Jack expected to come home. Daniel should have been a diplomat, not an archaeologist. And she, Major Sam Carter, should have been a 2IC striving to rescue her CO, not a woman seeking the man she cared about. She drove out of the SGC this evening, heading for home. Heading for somewhere a long way away from the man who had walked through the Stargate earlier that day to the sound of much cheering. Tanned, toughened, and half-shaven after three months on an agricultural planet, Colonel Jack O'Neill returned to earth with all the pomp and ceremony due a hero. The gossip had spread through the base like lightning: the Colonel was back! He had been lost on Edora, but through the patient efforts of his 2IC, they'd gotten him back through the Stargate! If only the gossip had finished there. If only. "I heard he was living with one of the locals when they got through!" muttered one of the young officers of the SGC in the mess hall. "No way!" "Way!" "And the woman wanted him to father her child!" "Did he?" "Who knows?" "How like a man!" exclaimed another, indignantly, "After all Major Carter did to get him back…" "Shh…Lisa - that's her over there…" Sam sat down opposite Corporal Simmons and smiled wearily. "Maybe now he's back, I can get some sleep," she remarked wryly, and the young man smiled, although she saw how much effort it cost him. He knew. How many others? "You did a great job, Major," he said warmly. Blue eyes earnest. "You would never have given up on the Colonel." And that's just the problem, she thought to herself now in the darkness. I didn't and now I'm the laughing stock of the base for expending so much energy for a man who doesn't care as much for me as I thought he did. How many sleepless nights and frustrating dead-ends had she seen in the last three months? Daniel and Teal'c had dragged her out into the sunlight, but once there, all she had wanted was to go back down into the artificial light of the base and keep working. She had staved off the tiredness by thinking of him. Thinking of the drawling voice, and the sarcastic inflections; of the terrible jokes, and the little-boy looks; of the smiles he could give that would warm her to her toes, and the feel of his arm around her shoulder as he hauled her through the Stargate. She was an idiot. The man who had filled her thoughts in his absence and haunted her dreams when she slept had given up on seeing his home planet again and flung himself into the arms of another woman. He had even asked the woman to come back to earth with him. At that moment, standing with Daniel and Teal'c, Sam had wanted nothing more than to run to the nearest bushes and spew her guts out until she could bring up nothing more. This woman with her work-roughened hands and her hungry eyes, her agricultural homeworld and her simple ways…come back to earth? To be wife and lover to Colonel Jack O'Neill of the United States Air Force, a man living in the most technologically advanced society on earth, with knowledge of a hundred races and a thousand planets? The thought was worse than nauseating; it was revolting. Thank God the woman had refused. If she had returned with Jack, Sam's resignation would have been on the General's desk within the week. She would have blamed it on stress, on weariness, on the desire to lose no more friends through the Stargate because it hurt too much. She would have been lying through her teeth. She acknowledges that now. But even more than the personal pain she feels about the Edoran woman, she feels the pain of Daniel's words. I don't think Jack expected to come home. Why? Why didn't he expect to come home? He thought the Stargate destroyed. No, he wasn't to know it was buried - the Edorans had no advanced technology with which to detect the Stargate naquadah. But even if there was no hope of return through the Stargate, Jack had seen enough of space travel to know that light years could be travelled across by more than just wormholes. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week or next month, maybe not even next year…but they would have found him and brought him back. Do we mean so little to you, Colonel? She asks the dark. Do you think so little of us that we'd abandon you on a planet without trying everything in our means to get you back? They've all been back for each other, time and time again. They've risked their reputations, their commissions, their lives to be there for one another. Tears streak down her face and into her mouth, and she drinks another draught of beer, the malt flavors washing away the bitter salt. Do you think that I'd ever let go of the hope that we'd get you back, somehow? After three years, she thought the question should be rhetorical - a self-evident answer. Perhaps not. Someone knocks on the door, but Sam just sits on the floor and waits for them to go away. But they don't, and it looks like they won't either. The knocking turns into banging, and banging into thumping. Whoever is out there, they're not going to give up that easily. Finally, she stumbles to her feet and opens the door, glaring blue daggers at whatever soul has chosen to beard the lioness in her den. Daniel looks back at her from the open doorway. He glances over her flushed face and red eyes, and his eyes flicker to the living room where he sees the empty bottles. "I think you need company, Sam." "I think you need a lobotomy, Daniel," she snaps, and promptly hates herself for doing so. Don't become a bitter hag from this, Sam! Women have died and the worms have eaten them, but not for love. He sighs, but something in his eyes set, and he pushes past her into the house. For a moment, she's stunned, staring at him as he stands in the middle of her lounge. Jack, she would have expected to barge in, but Daniel…? "What are you doing here, Daniel?" She shuts the door behind him and leans against it. "They said you'd gone off-base for the night. Janet wanted to be sure you were okay, I volunteered to be the sacrifice." He turns from his contemplation of the room to face her. There's a smile on his lips, but none in his eyes. "Got any more beer?" She stares at him. "You don't drink beer, Daniel." "I do tonight," he seats himself down and looks up at her. "Sam, please." Eyes that particular shade of blue should be illegal - especially when the person is pleading for something. Grumbling, she gets him the beer and sits it down in front of him. Then she resumes her place on the floor facing him. "Why'd you come here?" "Because I need company, Sam." He takes a long drink of beer, "You're not the only one Jack hurt by not expecting to come home." For a moment, she's bewildered by his statement. Holy Hannah, is Daniel saying what she thinks he's saying? "Daniel…" He catches her expression and half-laughs, "No, Sam, I'm not confessing to long-hidden feelings for Jack." Another long drink. "I'm just angry at him for giving up so fast." Major Carter, get your mind out of the gutter! For a moment she's furious with herself - in that one instant, she hated Daniel as passionately as she hated the Edoran woman. You're a sick girl, Sam. Unaware of his companion's thoughts, her friend and team-mate continues with a bitter laugh, "Colonel Jack O'Neill, Mr. Never-say-die, who would never give up or lose hope or leave a friend behind… He gave up." Another drink, before the archaeologist spits, "He gave up on going home in three months! Three months!" A pause before Daniel vents the core of his anger: "He gave up on us!" Oh yes, Sam knows how Daniel feels. "Daniel…" "Don't defend him, Sam. Not right now. I can't take it…" Daniel hunches over and he's shaking. She gets up and sits beside him, pulls his head onto her shoulder and lets him draw on her strength, while the tears run quietly down her own cheeks. "He thought that we'd give up on him!" "Yes." she holds him tight, feeling the same emotions course through both of them. This is what it means to be part of a team. Comfort and support, emotional and physical. Someone to catch your arm before you trip, and to pick you up and brush you off and check that no harm is done when you fall face-first in the dust. The promise that when the milk is spilled, they'll help you clean the mess it made, and then they'll share their milk with you. Trust in your team-mates, and put your faith in their abilities - or if not in their abilities, at least in their determination. But you didn't, did you, sir? Daniel's not shaking anymore, but he's still holding her so tightly she's afraid to let go. Daniel's lived his life in a state of emotional limbo. No family, few close relationships. Most of them academics who laughed his extreme theories out of the digs, museums, and research libraries. Only when he went to Abydos did he find the family he'd been seeking all his life. We all need somewhere to call home, and Daniel never had it. Not until Abydos. And then when Abydos was denied him, he found it here, with us. SG-1. Oh, sir, can't you see what you've done to Daniel? He knows that you'd never give up looking for him if he was lost. Not until you knew without a doubt that he was gone. You'd do that for any of us and we know it. Now he knows that you don't trust him - that you don't trust us as much as we trust you. Now she's the one shaking, but not with grief - with anger. Anger at Jack on Daniel's behalf. Daniel's so fragile inside, Jack. He trusts you above anyone else he knows - his friend and champion. How do you think it makes him feel to find that you don't know him at all? It's easier to sustain this anger than the other. She can live with her own bitterness, she can't live with Daniel's. Not when he's come to her for comfort - for someone to take refuge in. He should have known better. "Yes, he should have known better." She starts, unaware that she'd said the words out loud. Daniel raises his head from her shoulder and lets her go with an apologetic smile. The moment of fury and bitterness is gone, washed from his soul. It may resurface, but he has conquered it - for now. He's reassured himself that he still has her support. His family is still there for him - some of them, anyway. He just needed that confirmation. But now the inquisition is shifting, and the blue gaze fixes her firmly. "How are you doing, Sam?" She half-smiles, half-winces and shifts away from him a little, settling her elbows on her knees and clasping her hands together. "Drained," she admits at last. She's not sure how much she can bear to explain to him - although he probably has seen enough to draw the correct conclusions. "It's almost an anticlimax, having him back." Although she doesn't have him back…not really. "You nearly killed yourself getting him back, Sam," Daniel murmurs and he leans forward beside her. "You did an incredible task." Yeah, I did an incredible task - I put all my effort into getting the man I…I cared about back and ended up with my CO instead. "You brought him back." There's no mistaking the emphasis, and she knows that push has come to shove, and Daniel is going to push. Damn him. There's a bitter note in her laugh, "Did he want to come back?" A measured silence follows before Daniel sighs, "Yes, I think he did." No other refuge but sarcasm, so she takes it. "You think he did?" "Okay, so I know he did." "You didn't want to come back from Abydos." The words are no sooner out than she curses her tongue. He snaps right back, "There's no comparison between Jack on Edora and myself on Abydos." "What do you mean, there's no comparison?" When Daniel's got archaeology on the brain, he'll become absent-minded about everything else, but when he steps into an argument his mind blitzes along. It's one of his more endearing qualities - the lightning thought that arcs between the terminals of the mind. "I stayed of my own free will, Sam. I could have come home, but I had nothing here on earth for me - no family, no friends. The woman I loved was on Abydos, so I stayed." He speaks passionately, and abruptly she realises he's reliving his past in his mind, memories carefully preserved and pored over when he feels lost or alone. "I was happy on Abydos - you saw that when you and Jack and Kowalski and Ferretti came through the gate. I was more than happy, Sam, I was content." Sam remembers the fleeting envy she'd felt, watching Dr. Daniel Jackson and his adopted Abydonian family laugh and touch and tease each other. In her life, she'd had friends and family, but in the last few years they had drifted away, tenuous threads of relating that could so easily snap. She'd watched Daniel Jackson and his wife and felt the eye-prickling longing for a relationship that intense. The emotion makes her sharp, "So?" "Jack didn't get a choice on Edora. He stayed to help the locals and got stranded. Then, too, he had people waiting for him on the other side of the gate - he had us." There's a touch of bitterness in his voice as he is reminded of how little the Colonel had thought of his friends. "The ties we have as a team and as individuals…he had them…has them…" The grimace across his face is pained, but he forces it away. She can see the effort it takes him, like she could see Corporal Simmons' effort to make small talk earlier that day. A half-smile, brief but genuine, flits across his lips, "Did you know there are jokes about SG-1 - about our closeness as a team - on-base?" She shakes her head mutely, surprised. The on-base gossip lines don't interest her - so little of it's true, anyway. The smile lingers, just a moment. "Remind me to tell you some of them sometime." The humor helps, just a little. "I'll hold you to that, Dr. Jackson." "I'll expect you to, Major Carter." The blue eyes shift, the expression in them changes and suddenly she realises what he's about to say. "Don't, Daniel. Don't say it." She doesn't want to hear about the Edoran woman. Not when she's feeling so raw right now. "He found a woman to love on Edora, Sam. Maybe he was displacing feelings for someone else." Sam shakes her head, vehemently. She'd like to believe that, she would! But the evidence says otherwise, and the truth could be too painful to face. Presently, they're emotions that she can keep under control, and hide beneath a military demeanor. Bad enough that she has...feelings...for her CO. Worse if he returned them. Which he doesn't and he won't. Or he would have trusted her to find him a way back home. "Don't do this to me, Daniel." Her voice is low, struggling for equanimity. She doesn't care that Daniel knows - Daniel is as safe and close as the graves he used to study. "He asked her to come back with him, remember?" "And she refused, Sam. Jack might have managed to be happy on Edora, but he would never have been content. Not Jack O'Neill. The Edoran woman knew that, too. Why else do you think she let him go?" She knows he's right, even if she rebels at the thought of the pain and effort she went through to bring him back, and the pain it cost her to understand that he had forgotten her. Daniel turns her head to look at him, his finger lightly touching her jawline. "You can keep an eagle in a sparrow's cage, Sam, but it will always be an eagle." The innocence of those eyes stabs through to the core of her being and she drops her gaze from his. Yes, she knows it would have been a crime to leave Jack on Edora - whether he wanted it or not. And Daniel knows she knows, and so the inquisition is put away for another time when hard truths need to be faced and only the innocent can declare that the emperor has no clothes. She did the right thing in bringing him back. To have her stubborn, sarcastic Colonel back she would have done a lot more. Still, she curls up around her pain, embraces it for one fierce, furious moment and cries, "God, I wish he'd never come back!" But she knows it for a lie even as the words leave her lips. She's glad he's home. She's so glad he's home. "Sam…" Daniel reaches for her and now it's her turn to draw strength from him. They've both been hurt by someone they care about, and that man is one and the same. They'll keep loving him, but it will be a slow journey back to the way things were. But they'll get there. Someday. * FINIS |
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