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Colonel O’Neill’s stride would be difficult to classify as he walked down the hall towards Carter’s lab. It was as if his feet were eager to reach their target, taking purposeful strides, though the rest of his posture seemed to belie that urgency. The man himself was no less conflicted. He was eager to see Carter and talk to her, make sure they were okay after the events of his undercover operation. But every step he took, he found himself replaying the cruel words he had thrown at her only a week before. His team as a whole seemed to take in stride the revelation that his behavior had been an act, but it was important to him to make sure they each knew how much he trusted them. Which is why he was making his way to Carter’s lab.
He stopped at the doorway to try and get a sense of her availability and her mood and was surprised by the mess that he found. There were papers and materials scattered across all surfaces. Samantha Carter wasn’t precisely a neat freak, and when she was in the midst of her experiments or tinkering, her work area would get a bit cluttered. But this level of disorganization was a first in Jack’s experience.
The woman herself seemed at first glance to be engrossed in something on her computer, but her stance was a bit off and her eyes didn’t seem to be moving to track words on the screen. Jack came to the conclusion that she was lost in thought. He briefly considered leaving her alone, but the state of her lab and her apparent distraction were concerning.
He cleared his throat.
Sam’s head snapped to find him and she started to scramble to her feet. “Sir! I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there.”
“At ease, Carter. We’ve been through this.”
“Right, sir. Sorry sir,” she stammered as she sat awkwardly back down. “It’s just that Colonel Makepeace was a little less relaxed about these things. The old habits came back pretty quickly.”
Jack grimaced and Sam averted her gaze, having inadvertently poked the elephant in the room. Jack stood in the awkward silence for a bit before leaning back against the counter behind him, not accounting for just how cluttered it was. Multiple objects went skittering across the counter and Jack shot his arm out to prevent them from falling as Sam jumped up to come by him.
“Sorry sir, I’ve been meaning to get this mess under control,” she said as she started picking up papers.
Jack turned around and joined her in her task, gathering a few papers in one hand before finding an unfamiliar object that fit too perfectly in his hand to not be fiddled with.
“Yeah, what happened?” he asked, pleased for a safe change of topic. “Looks a bit like a tornado blew through here. You catch an interesting project while I was out?”
She looked at him sharply and he caught a hint of panic in her eyes before she looked down. “No, umm, this is still left over from…before, umm, well, when…”
“Oh, for cryin’ out…” his exclamation trailed off as he thought past the last two weeks to what was happening before his undercover excursion. “Oh,” he breathed. Edora.
He began looking around the room more closely, seeing now that it wasn’t just haphazard clutter. The pages in his hands were covered in calculations and drawings, and even scribbled admonitions, “it HAS to be possible”, “a YEAR for the Tok’ra, it’s too long”. He saw that many of the discarded parts had similar shapes as if they were failed attempts at the same thing. He squeezed the object in his hand, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. He didn’t notice the small flash of green as he continued to look around the lab.
“I, uh, may have gotten a bit of tunnel vision, sir,” Sam explained sheepishly. “The particle beam generator was a fascinating problem.” She attempted to adopt her excited scientist tone, but was utterly unconvincing. When Jack kept examining her space with knowing eyes, she started inefficiently gathering things and shoving them in drawers.
“Well, and then, I did it, and you came back, but Janet insisted…well you know Janet. She got a bit overprotective, thought I’d been in here too much. Banned me from my own lab! And well, General Hammond agreed with her, so I didn’t really get a chance to get in here and clean up, and well, then, umm, things were happen…”
“Carter.” His soft voice stopped her in her tracks, but he didn’t immediately continue. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. It was too dangerous. She was on the edge of something too raw.
“Carter.” There was a hint of pleading in his voice this time and she couldn’t prevent her eyes from responding as they slowly made their way to his face. He gave her a sincere smile. “Thank you.”
She took in a sharp breath and held it. Not trusting herself to speak, she nodded in acknowledgement.
Jack looked at the papers again before putting them down and, desperate for something to do with his hands that wouldn’t get him in trouble, he started rolling the device he held between his two hands. “So, just how impossible was the miracle you created this time?”
Sam blushed and furrowed her brow. “I mean, well, it wasn’t just me, sir. And I really only got the idea from Apophis,” she sidestepped, wary of the uneven ground they were traversing with this conversation.
“So, very impossible, that’s the vibe I’m getting. How many hours were you working?”
She looked around the lab, “Oh, it really wasn’t that much more than I usually do.”
“I can ask Janet, Carter. She must have kicked you out of here for a reason.”
Sam huffed before blurting out her response at top speed, “OK fine I didn’t leave base for weeks at a time but you were gone sir and I wasn’t even sure you were alive but I knew you shouldn’t have to wait a year, and I needed…” she took a breath. “I needed to know,” she finished on a whisper and went back to gathering her materials, although she was more orderly about it this time.
Jack felt, not for the first time, a sense of awe for his second in command. Followed by a deep feeling of regret as he watched her avoid his gaze. She had worked herself to exhaustion to do the impossible, for him, and when she’d tried to tell him about it on the planet, he’d brushed her aside. Then he’d been so quickly swept up in the NID plot that he never even got a chance to check in with her about his 100 days abroad before he’d been shoving her unceremoniously away. He shook his head thinking of how it must have hurt her for him to say those things after everything she’d done for him. The circumstances may not have all been strictly his fault, and it hadn’t exactly been a picnic for him, but she rewrote the laws of physics for him. And she had been ready to go back to life as usual without so much as a word of recognition.
Jack was overwhelmed with respect and affection for the woman currently bustling about awkwardly in her own lab. He made a feeble attempt to avoid thinking about the implications of her actions and her obvious discomfort with him knowing about it, but he wasn’t a clueless man like he preferred to pretend to be. He could read people fairly well, and if there was one thing he knew, it was that he, they, were in trouble. He also knew that he should probably cut and run right now, before he made things even more complicated.
But he looked at his Major. Major Doctor Samantha Carter. The woman who bent physics to her will at his say so, and she looked so unsure and lost.
He took a step towards her and placed a hand on her forearm, stilling her movements and calling her attention to him. And then his words failed him. He didn’t trust himself to speak. How could he make her understand his deep gratitude and remorse without giving away too much?
She looked at him and gave him a half-hearted smile. “It’s really alright, sir,” she assured him, and he thought she meant it.
He pulled his hand back and she followed the movement as he joined his hands back together on the device he’d been manhandling.
She looked quickly between his face and the device a few times.
“Have you been holding that this whole time?”
“What? Yeah. Why?” He quickly dropped it on the counter. “Am I gonna explode or something? What does it do?”
“Oh, no, nothing, it’s not dangerous. It’s just…” she looked at him again and back at the device.
“You’re not making me feel less worried here, Carter.”
“No sir, it’s nothing at all. Just a communication device that one of the Tollan left behind when we first met.”
“You mean we had a piece of Tollan tech this whole time?”
She actually managed a small laugh. “I guess we did, sir. I got it out when we were trying to contact them. I forgot I’d left it there.”
“Aww, well, I’m glad I’m not going to explode or brain swap or anything.”
“Not this time, sir.”
“Right, well, I guess I’ll get out of your hair. You’ve got your hands full, and I don’t even want to think about the paperwork to get un-retired again.”
“Good luck, sir.”
The tone of their conversation had shifted back to more familiar and safe territory, but Jack took a moment to meet his second’s eyes. “Thank you, Carter.”
Sam smiled at him as he left, then turned slowly to the counter he’d just vacated. She stared almost aggressively at the device. She wasn’t sure exactly how it worked. She’d even tried to record her own emotions on it, only to feel Narim’s feelings for her when she tried to play it back. Chances were that Jack hadn’t succeeded in activating it at all.
She took the device over by her computer and sat down, turning it over in her hands. On the one hand, if Jack had activated it, she needed to know that, when it came to deciphering how it worked. On the other hand, he hadn’t agreed to participate in a study on the device that would involve sharing his emotions with her. And yet, she knew he’d been holding back something during the conversation, and she wanted to know. Which, of course, was a terrible rationalization. If he held back, he likely had his reasons.
She stood to put the device with the other items that were tagged for Area 51 when Daniel popped his head in.
“Want to grab some lunch, Sam?”
She was facing away from him and she startled, dropping the device, only to catch it in her other hand, squeezing the red button in the process. She froze as she felt the onslaught of emotions from the recorder.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to…”
She just shook her head at him. Bracing her free hand on the counter as tears sprung into her eyes.
“Sam, are you OK? Jack said he talked to you. Did he botch his apology?”
Sam closed her eyes as she gave herself a moment to process what she was feeling. What Jack had been feeling. She set the device down and took a deep breath before turning to look at her friend. “No, I’m fine, we’re fine.”
He looked at her a bit sideways as she walked over to join him. “You’re sure?”
She looked back at the device as she steered Daniel into the hall. “More sure than I’ve ever been.”