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Al knows the truth before Sam does.
He’s never coming home.
“Oh my god,” the person in Sam’s body says breathlessly, hands coming up to touch their face and pat their way down their body. Their eyes fill with tears as they look around at the imaging chamber, taking everything in as their jaw drops.
Al braces himself to give out yet another reassurance that they aren’t in heaven and didn’t secretly die within the past thirty seconds as their eyes finally land on him. The words themselves die, though, when they speak again.
“...Al?”
Of course he’s never coming home. He’s… Sam’s a genius. Al’s never met anyone smarter than hir. He created a thousand things of a thousand importances. So if he can’t figure out a plan to get home that’s better than what the rest of them forced Ziggy to come up with when they realized they couldn’t bring Sam back by recalibrating and rewiring and reworking then they’re all well and truly screwed.
Sam’s never coming home and Al wishes he had the comfort of blaming himself but he doesn’t. It was Sam’s decision to test the accelerator on hirself. Sam had the keys to the lab, the knowledge of how everything worked, and the sheer stubborn willpower to actually go through with it when he thought the whole project was about to get yanked out of reach. There was nothing any of them could have done to stop hir.
It was all hir choice, and now he’s never coming home, and the rest of them just have to live with that. He just has to live with that. With his best friend being lost in the timestream. Being there for hir is the next-best thing. It’s the only thing.
He can lie and tell Sam that maybe all he has to do is close hir eyes and then he’ll find hirself back in hir real body—in hir real life—in hir real time, because it makes hir feel better. And sometimes he can even convince himself that he’s going to get to feel hir again, too.
One or two of the people Sam has switched with have hugged Al by accident or simply while being careless and not paying any attention to what they were doing. A crying kid who needed comfort, for example. But it never really felt like Sam was the one touching him, even if it was clearly hir body. They just weren’t Sam. They weren’t.
Now, though, the arms around him feel just like they’re supposed to. The missing link welded back together. They’re getting tears all over his jacket, too, so much it’s soaking a wet spot clear through it.
Honestly, Al’s head feels a little fuzzy. Like this might all be a dream. He limbs feel leaden and he can’t make himself hug back like he knows he wants to. Like he knows he should. Because that’s decent and proper. Because he doesn’t know how to say the words out loud. Because this is Sam. This is Sam. Sam’s back. Sam’s home. The least Al can do after all this time is welcome hir back.
“Sam?” He manages to say. It comes out squeaky and cracked in a humiliating way like he’s fourteen and asking Tommy Cleaver if he wants to go make out behind the dumpster again and not a grown man.
“It’s me,” Sam says, half-crying. “It’s really me. And it’s really you, right? This isn’t—I mean, we’re—we’re not—”
“If it’s really you, it’s really me,” he says, voice thick, and Sam starts laughing.
Maybe Sam doesn’t want to come home.
He gets to help people. He gets to save lives and make a difference the way Al knows he always wanted to. Sam’s got a bleeding heart the size of a supergiant and takes to new people like a Spot-billed Duck to water. In between all the terror and the mud and the fear that some leaps bring, Al knows he’s having a good time. That he loves what he does. The act of helping.
(What’s the saying, again? Ruth would mutter it wryly over and over to herself like a mantra when the two of them were having a spat for whatever reason. Said it probably wasn’t really a Jewish thing, since nobody could remember where it came from anymore, but that they used it so much and people said it came from them so often it might as well have been theirs all along.)
God, if there’s one thing anyone could say about Sam, it was that he loved that act of helping.
(“I ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders.”)
Sam literally collapses to hir knees before long, after Al has shouted for some help and everybody who cares has come rushing in. Sam’s babbling about a bar or something and Al can only catch the third or fifth word because everything is muted seeing Sam in hir body again. Sam moving like he’s supposed to and not with the stumbling of a man who usually needs crutches or a child who’s afraid of the dark or with the gleam of some bloodthirsty killer in his eyes—hir eyes, they’re hir eyes again.
His head feels like static.
Sam’s home. Sam’s home, and he’s not sure how he should be feeling, because he’s happy, he’s so selfishly happy, because Sam—well. Sam loves helping people. Sam loves making sure everybody goes home okay. Saving the boy and making sure the girl makes it home and catching that cat right out of a tree like he’s a dime-store Superman. He loves it. He loves it like it’s all he was ever meant to do in life, like it wasn’t something going wrong but everything going right. He loves it. And Al loves—
He loves Sam. Jesus Christ. He loves Sam like a lodestone loves the magnetic field. And now Sam is back, and he has absolutely zero idea what to do with that.
Sam once told him that he wasn’t sure he knew who he was when he first started Project Quantum Leap. He told him he’d gotten a lot of things wrong about hirself at the time. He’d thought all he wanted to do was change the world, and then he’d said that was the point in changing things if it wasn’t for the better? He’d said he’d thought he was smarter and better than other people (Al had wanted to tell hir he was right), and then he’d said that he knew better now, because wasn’t everybody just trying? Just doing their best to keep moving forward even if they didn’t know what they were doing?
And then he’d said that he’d known, somewhere inside, that he wasn’t ever a farm boy. He wasn’t ever hir father’s son. And he’d been terrified of that. Of everything that brought with it. No wonder he’d needed to run across the world and through a thousand lifetimes before admitting it to hirself.
That’d been when he asked Al to keep it a secret from everyone else.
Al had been a little surprised he thought he had to repeat the request—didn’t he know by then that Al would do anything he asked him to?
“Sam,” Al says, “it’s, uh, it’s been two hours. Are you gonna let go?”
Sam’s been clinging to whatever he can reach ever since he hugged him. Right now hir hand is clamped onto his wrist, while earlier it was gripping the hem of his shirt, or clasped onto his shoulder, or (when he first took those steps and nearly faceplanted) hooked onto his forearm. Even while hugging other people—Tina’s always been a little clingy—who were there to welcome hir back, he’s been keeping ahold of Al.
“Do you want me to let go?” Sam asks, eyeing the hallway to the imaging chamber with all the natural mistrust of someone who’s already been burned before.
“No,” Al says, because he hasn’t touched Sam in what must feel like a thousand years to hir. (It feels like a thousand to him, too.)
Sam doesn’t bother to hide hir smile.
“Do you regret it?” Al asks before he can stop himself.
“Regret what?” Sam cocks hir head, half listening, as he fastens the buckles around the traveling crate for the sedated pet dog belonging to the older cousin of the person he leapt into.
“Testing Project Quantum Leap on yourself.” Al directs the question more toward the ground than anywhere else.
“It was the only way,” Sam says simply. “We were going to lose funding.”
Al doesn’t know how to make himself say that he’d rather lose funding for some stupid experiment than lose Sam.
“Doctor Beckett, we’d like to talk to you privately,” the man says. Al knows he would know his name if he could think straight. He also knows he’d like to kick his knees in.
“No, you don’t,” he counters. Hey, he’s pissed off tougher military personnel and lived. He puffs himself up, like a rooster preparing for a cockfight. “Anything you’ve got to say to Sam, you can say in front of all of us, right here and now, got it?”
“Al…” Donna says quietly from behind him, and Sam winces a little. Yeah, yeah, working with your ex is tough, Al can sympathize, so what? Right now they’re dealing with this!
“It’s okay,” Sam says. Hir voice is stiff. He’s still holding on to Al’s hand. (Oh, Al’s hindbrain supplies.) “I’ll go with you. It’ll just take a few minutes. Trust me, I remember everything about each leap. I’m sure I can give you as much detail as you want for each report, right?”
It still takes several seconds for Sam to convince hirself to pry hir fingers away. He tries to smile again.
Al scoffs and jabs his finger into this asshole’s chest. “I want him straight back here after you boys are done with him,” he says. “You hear me?”
“I wish you knew how it felt,” Sam says, pressing hir palm flat against hir chest. The valley spreads out below them, eerily quiet and blanketed in snow. Hir job is to keep a guy named Jamey’s kids safe. Bring them on this camping trip out into the middle of nowhere so they’re all safe. Nowhere near any home burglaries gone wrong. He’ll make sure they are. For the time being, though…
He was—is—a doctor. He knows how fast hypothermia can get to someone. Every time he looks around nowadays it feels like he’s only a few inches away from watching somebody die. There are a thousand ways this frozen valley could kill the people he was sent here to protect. A thousand ways it could kill hir. Hypothermia is only one possibility. There are avalanches. Drownings. Starvation. But it’s safer than home. It’s so much safer than home.
“To leap?” Al looks away from Sam and at the houses glittering in the distance. The air is so clear and the stars are so bright above them it’s a bit like watching a settled snow globe. The wind whistles and kicks up little flurries that chase each other over and over again as they tumble downhill. “Because, no offense, Sam, but I do, and that was more than enough.”
Sam shakes hir head and cups hir gloved hands around hir mouth and shouts wordlessly. It echoes in the nothingness. “Not to leap. Come on. The kids have probably put the fire out by now.”
Al doesn’t want to know what he was going to say. He doesn’t, alright? He was telling the truth when he said he’d had enough of approaching the whole business from Sam’s perspective. He doesn’t want to know. But he hopes Sam knows that he’d listen, if he wanted to tell him. He really would. He just can’t say that out loud, that’s all. Don’t ask him why.
Sam looked awfully pretty with the last straggling snowflakes caught in hir hair.
“They’ve had him in there for an hour and a half,” Al says, on his two-hundreth round of pacing. “What do you think they’re doing to him?”
“If you don’t stop that I will tie to you that chair myself, so help me god,” Tina says. “This is a part of the contract you also signed. Look, I know you’re friends, but just let him be, yeah? They’re not exactly torturing him in there. It’ll probably be a few more hours at least. You said he’d been on a hundred of those things. That’s a lot of talking.”
One of the interns—crap, what’s his name? Andy? Randy? Something like that for sure—pokes his arm after a solid thirty seconds of Al sitting there silently fuming following her very reasonable statement. “Uh. Are you feeling okay? You didn’t make any jokes about Dr. Martinez tying you to a chair.”
“I’m going to go get him,” Al decides, trying to cow all six feet of unnamed intern away from him. He probably only steps away to make him feel better, the dick. “Goddamn army men.”
“Pot, kettle,” Tina mutters. “Sit down, Albert.”
Al huffs. “Fine. I’ll just—”
He freezes. Tina crosses her arms. Oh. Right. He can’t.
He was going to… the handlink is still on his person, tucked into the inside pocket of his jacket. But right now it’s as of much use to Sam as a calculator with some LEDs taped to it. He can’t get to hir with it. For the first time in what feels like well over a thousand lifetimes, he can’t get to hir with as much ease as pressing a button and telling Ziggy to track hir down.
As much as they may be currently surrounded by people, they’re both completely and utterly alone.
“What’d be the first thing you did?” Sam asks, laying flat on hir back on the beach. The waves crash and swell and he filters sand grains between hir fingers. “If you were like me, and you made it home, what would be the first thing you did? And don’t you dare say you’d get laid,” he adds, sitting up when he sees Al open his mouth. “I know who I’m talking to.”
Al looks at the ocean. He knows, logically, that the air is heavy with salt and the smell of low tide is carried on the wind. He just can’t taste it. He can see and hear Sam, and the other people Sam is with. He can see and hear the landscape. But he can’t actually interact with it. He’s an observer. It’s not the same. He’s not like Sam.
If he could interfere, he’d probably screw it up nine times out of ten, anyhow.
“I’d get some nice Prairie Bluehearts and put them in a bouquet and give ‘em to the prettiest girl I know,” he says, finally.
“Ooh, Tina would like that,” Sam says. “You know, those used to grow all around Elk Ridge like weeds. Tom used to say that they got there because they climbed up the roots of other plants, and when I was a kid I really believed him. They were always one of my favorites.”
Al successfully resists the urge to say “Yeah, I know.”
“You know,” Tina says, not looking up from the paperwork she’s filling out, “none of us will say anything.”
“About what?” Al taps his foot. They’ve got Sam. Sure, they’re probably not hurting hir or anything. But they have Sam. What if they decide to never let hir go, as irrational as he knows that is? He knows Sam couldn’t take that. Being trapped like a butterfly under glass. Poked and prodded by people who want to know everything about what he experienced firsthand.
“Nobody’s going to ask,” Tina says with delicate emphasis. She adds her signature to the bottom of the page with a little flourish. “And we won’t give them a reason to.”
“And get a little better at saying ‘him,’” Donna adds. “You sound like you’re doing a bad accent when you say heem by mistake.”
Al’s thoughts screech to a halt. “...Ah. Right.”
(They don’t realize all of it, Al will reflect later, after Tina tells him on their own time that it’s hilarious that he keeps accidentally almost calling Sam honey. They don’t know about hir. And he’ll keep it that way. So Sam stays safe.)
“Al, look,” Sam says, balancing on the tightrope and accidentally biting hir tongue to try to stand against the gentle breeze. At least it’s not trapezes this time. “I think I’m getting the hang of it.”
“Great job,” Al laughs. “Maybe now you can raise it up by more than a foot off the ground.”
“Nope.” Sam very carefully inches forward, half holding hir breath so he doesn’t overbalance. Every few seconds he winds up listing sideways and grabbing in Al’s general direction on instinct to stop hirself from falling, arms pinwheeling through empty air while Al automatically tries to grab back. “Not doing that.”
“You’re gonna have to, or this family circus act isn’t gonna make it,” Al reminds hir.
Sam loses hir balance and falls off the wire, the little skirt attached to the leotard those people gave hir swishing around hir legs. “They’re all nuts to try making a family circus act, anyway!”
“Worked for the Panzinis.” Al shrugs.
“And they were nuts, too!” Sam sits on the grass and idly pulls up some small daisies. He grins up at Al. “But I guess you also have to a little crazy to test your time-traveling experiment on yourself, huh?”
“You’re in a good mood today,” Al notes. He sits (well, not really) on the grass beside hir.
“Just enjoying the sunshine.” Sam sighs and tilts hir head back so he can look up at the stray wisps of clouds lazily crossing the clear blue sky. “Do you ever wonder what would’ve happened if everything with Project Quantum Leap went right?”
Al pretends to pick some daisies, too. “What do you mean?”
“If… you know. If I didn’t have to test it on myself because we lost funding. If we went forward as scheduled and handed everything over to the military when we were done so they could use it for god knows what. What do you think that would’ve been like?” Sam flops backward like he did onto the sand at the beach.
He could answer honestly. He could say that he doesn’t care about what the cost might’ve been because then Sam never would’ve left. He’d have stayed with them in the present—well, here in the good old 60s, it’s technically the future—and everything would have been good. Al wouldn’t have to worry that every new day could wind up with hir dead. With hir and whoever he was using the body of at the time dead. It’d be the truth if he said he hated the idea of Sam having to do this. Of him not being able to touch hir anymore.
But at the same time, everything else he’s thought about Sam is warring with that. Because this is what Sam loves. He loves helping. He acts like he was put on Earth just to do it. Not in the pretentious way, like those assholes who thought they were god’s gift to humanity. More like he couldn’t believe he was lucky enough to get to be the kind of person who helped others.
How could he want to take that away from hir? Al knows he’s a selfish person, but c’mon. You’d have to be a monster to do that.
“I don’t know,” he says, finally. “But I think a lot of people would be suffering without anybody to help them.”
“Yeah,” Sam says quietly. “That’s what I was thinking, too.”
“I’m fine,” Sam says. “Seriously, Al, I’m fine.”
He’s kind of lying, Al can tell, but he also doesn’t look hurt—just tired. More tired than he’s looked in awhile. Since that corn field in Indiana, if Al had to really think about it. He’s also holding on to Al again, keeping a hand on his shoulder like he’ll fall if he lets go.
“They, uh, they want me for overnight observation,” Sam says. “In case I, y’know, leap again by mistake. Even now that I’m out of the imaging room, they’re worried it’ll happen.”
Al knows Sam. And he knows Sam’s not just as worried about that as everyone else is. Hell, he almost sounds wistful. Like he misses being tossed through the timeline like a stone that someone only just learned how to skip. Like he’d be happier there instead of here with the people who really know hir and care about hir.
(“Why isn’t this enough?” Al wants to demand. He knows it’ll never be enough, but why isn’t it? He knows it’s a bit like the old adage. “If you love something, you’ll set it free.” Anything else is just selfish, something you do only to make yourself feel better and not because you really care about the wants and needs of whatever it is you love.
Al’s fine being called selfish. He’s been selfish his whole life. What feels wrong about it this time around?)
Sam’s drunk, because Bess is a lightweight and Sam didn’t realize it before knocking back some strong vodka. Sam’s drunk and Al knows that’s the only reason he’s saying this, and that he probably won’t remember it by tomorrow morning even if this was a timeline where hir brain wasn’t all full of holes.
“I don’t think I’m ever gonna get home,” Sam slurs, resting hir head on hir hands. “I know the chances should be—should be good,” he hiccups, “but I don’t think they are. It’s a one in a million every time. I don’t think I’m ever gonna get home.”
“Sure you will, Sam,” Al says, and wishes he could get as drunk for this conversation as Sam already is.
“No, I won’t, and I—” Sam shakes hir head. “I won’t. I’m not going home. Ever. I’m never gonna get the chance to. It’ll just—it’ll just be—I’m going to be doing this forever, aren’t I? You think so too. I know you do. I know you do.”
“That’s not true,” Al lies.
“Yes it is! You’re making your lying face!” Sam sighs. “I’m never gonna go home. I’m gonna be here forever, and they’re never going to tell my family what happened to me, are they? It’s all classified and secret and—and stuff. And I should be really sad, right? Because I’m not going home. I’m gonna—I’m gonna be doing this forever. It’s all just gonna be like this. So I should be sad. But I’m not. I want to… I never… I think I…”
Hir words get fainter and fainter as he drops hir head more and it thunks against the desk. Al waits for hir to finish hir sentence, heart stumbling over itself in his chest.
He doesn’t finish, though, and Al realizes he’s asleep. He sighs.
“Good talk, buddy.” He mimes patting hir on the shoulder and pretends he can properly feel it. “Lucky for you, your son’s coming over to drive you home.”
Al nearly slips and cracks his head open fumbling for the phone when it rings, terrified that it’ll be Donna calling to tell him that something happened and Sam’s gone again and this time not even Ziggy knows where he is and that none of them even got to say goodbye.
Hearing Sam’s voice on the other end makes him dizzy with relief, but not so much so that he can’t hear what he’s saying.
“Can you come pick me up from the base?” Sam asks. “I need to get out of here.”
Twenty-five minutes later, Sam’s sitting in the passenger seat of his car, seemingly unaware that it’s just a little weird to have hir hand on Al’s knee. Especially since he apparently can’t stop looking at his face.
“They didn’t hurt you or anything, right?” Al asks when they’re a good distance away from the low building. A coyote darts across the road ahead of them, eyeshine momentarily gleaming in the darkness.
“Oh, no,” Sam says, shaking hir head. “They didn’t. Don’t worry about me. I just had to… it was too claustrophobic to stay in there. I just needed some fresh air, and Tina said she’d distract them so I could make a break for it if I called and asked you to get me first.”
They drive in silence for a minute or two. Sam’s leg is bouncing. He’s cracked the window, and the air outside is chilly—contrary to popular belief, night time during the winter in New Mexico commonly gets below freezing, especially as high up as they are. It’s almost too cold, but Al doesn’t have the heart to tell hir to close the window.
“They told me what they’re going to use the project for,” Sam says quietly after a long moment. “When everything is fixed and the kinks are straightened out. They’re going to use it to assassinate people. Anybody they want for any reason they want.”
Al looks at Sam. He wants to say—people die in wars. They die in wars all the damn time. Sometimes they even get assassinated. It’s a fact of politics. But he shouldn’t say that, because Sam’s not a soldier, he’s never been a soldier, even when he’s had to playact as one. Because the Sam Beckett he knows helps people, he doesn’t hurt them, not unless it’s to save somebody else. And that could be what he means, the government targeting bad people, but Sam would’ve said so if it was.
(And is that really so much better? There’s enough blood on his hands already, is it better if it spatters all of them who worked on Project Quantum Leap?)
“I thought they’d told you before,” he says instead, and Sam stiffens. Al knows what he’s going to say before he says it. “They didn’t tell me. But she was your brainchild. I thought you knew what you were signing us all up for.” He doesn’t mean for it to come out as mean-sounding as it does. “That came out wrong.”
“They didn’t. They said it’d be—” He shakes hir head. “It doesn’t matter now, I guess. I just thought… I was stupid.”
“You weren’t stupid,” Al says sharply. “You were just a kid. Being naïve’s not being stupid. I already told you, you’re the smartest girl I know.”
“...Don’t let Tina hear you say that,” Sam says quietly after a second, squeezing his knee tightly. Al knows what he means.
They both get out of the car when Al parks.
(Sam has to bend a lot more to kiss people when they aren’t holograms anymore, it turns out.)
“I don’t think I want to go home,” Sam says quietly. He’s laying down again, this time on a teenage boy’s messy bed. Scattered pages of algebra homework that Sam could solve with one eye closed and one hand behind hir back litter the floor.
Al doesn’t respond immediately. He just looks at hir. At the way hir eyes are squeezed shut like he’s afraid to even look at Al and see his reaction to what he just said. The subtle clenching and unclenching of hir fingers. The symbol painting a circled star on hir shirt. The patches of skin through hir ripped jeans. At the crumpled, bloody napkin in hir hand from where he just stopped a kid’s nosebleed because he happened to be passing by while picking up the younger brother of the person he’s currently hijacked the body of from school.
“I know,” Al says, just as quiet.
There’s adrenaline making Al feel almost seasick, which means anything can happen because he hasn’t felt like that since the very first time he set foot on an actual boat. The halls aren’t dark, they never are, there’s always harsh fluorescent lighting unless there’s been some kind of power outage and they haven’t gotten everything else back up and running. Luckily they’re just as active as they usually are, too, and there’s nobody who stops them as they slip along the walls, Sam’s hand in his.
It’s almost worse that the imaging room is still bright. They should’ve smashed those bulbs the second Sam came home. They should’ve made themselves more time. (They should’ve done a lot of things, but there’s no time for that right now. Not anymore.)
Sam grins at him and there’s a light in hir eyes that—Jesus Christ, it’s something he hasn’t had since he’s been back, how did Al not notice that? How did he not notice when he’s seen it damn near every time since Sam stepped into the accelerator, the way he lights up right before he leaps almost every single time? “What’re you gonna tell them?”
“I dunno, I was thinking of saying that you exploded suddenly. Horrible tragedy. Big flashing light, sizzling shoes left behind, you get the picture,” Al jokes. It comes out much weaker than he was intending, meaning his emotions must be showing on his face, which is horrible. Sam’s laugh is suspiciously wet.
“Better than anything I’ve come up with,” he says, and then he’s hugging onto Al so tightly it crushes all the breath out of him.
“What’re you doing?” He asks, trying to hug back.
“I’m memorizing what you feel like,” Sam says simply, somehow managing to make hir voice much more even than Al’s, and his heart cracks clean in two down the middle.
It’s a good idea, though, so he tries to do the same, every slightly shaky breath and point of pressure engraving themselves into his amygdala and pressing into his neocortex. He does his best to pretend that the rest of their life is going to be right here. And it is, technically, for one of them.
“You’re not going to die,” he says, partially to convince himself. “I’m going to find you again. We will—Ziggy can find anything. You know that.”
“Of course I know that,” Sam says, and it just comes out tired instead of falsely affronted. Al embeds the feeling of hir ribcage expanding and contracting as he talks into his brain. “That’s why it’s okay to go. I know you’ll be there.”
“...Oh.” Al swallows.
It’s not enough time for everything, when Sam steps away and smiles. It helps that it’s so genuine.
“See you soon,” he says, softly, still holding Al’s hand, and he puts it together.
It feels different because it is different. It’s—that’s what’s wrong with the selfishness. Because there’s not a world where Sam doesn’t help people. Because he can’t imagine a world where Sam isn’t… where he doesn’t…
Because if Sam was the kind of person who wouldn’t go back to helping people in the way only he can, Al wouldn’t love hir so much.
Sam’s fingers squeeze his hand one more time, and then they both let go.