Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There’s a break in the guard rotation. Now or never.

Run, her fight or flight instinct screams with every muscle and nerve in her body.  

She scrambles to her feet, blinking against the wave of vertigo. Run, you idiot. Muscle memory kicks into gear and she’s out of the small, humid cell and into the maze of dimly-lit dirt hallways before her brain catches up with her legs.

Keep going. The echo of marching boots grows louder as they head in her direction. She dashes into a side corridor out of sight. Her foot slams into a rock; she catches herself against the cold stone wall and pain shoots up her left arm – too much time spent with her arms twisted up behind her. She misses her shoes.

The marching boots pass and she holds still for another few breaths. She peeks out and then yanks herself back in. The guards have passed, but they’re still within sight. She waits until the sounds fade further before checking again – this time, they’ve turned a corner. Slowly, she exhales, but the relief is short-lived as she steps out of the corridor: left, right or straight? 

Think. What do you remember? 

She closes her eyes, trying to remember three months ago. Mostly she remembers being pushed or dragged. But there were stairs, first. Several turns. Another set of stairs; she’d tripped down the last flight.

Now go! 

She sprints, turning left where her memory says right, up where she remembers down. She passes a gust of cold air and shivers. Most of her clothing is in tatters, held on by dirt and sweat.

An alarm whines through the air – they must have found her open cell. She knew she wouldn’t have long. She has a head start, but it’s not much for someone who doesn’t know where she’s going. Panic starts to rise: she doesn’t know enough about these aliens to intuit a door location. No one does.

Focus. Find a ship. Get off the planet.

She gets lucky: while hiding in a large crack in the wall from another guard contingent, she hears the familiar whine of engines. The alarm increases in pitch and frequency – they must really want her back despite that she’s told them nothing in three months – but there’s light at the end of the crack. Crack goes through. You can fit. She shimmies through the wall and spares a glance down at her body. Mostly bones. You’ve been here for three months. Maybe think about food later, yeah?

A cadre of aliens marches through the hangar bay. She waits for the squadron to depart and then rushes forward to the closest raider. Her fingers fly over the external controls, hoping it reads her input as just a fighter late to the party. When the hatch starts to lift, she jumps inside before it’s fully open. She slaps the inside panel and the door drops down. The hull blissfully dampens the alarm. Hurry or they’ll lock down the bay. She straps herself in. The HUD doesn’t care that she’s an alien and it brings up a series of holographic overlays onto the front window. Flight controls she can guess a little better than architecture. The raider rumbles to life and lifts off the ground.

The bay doors begin to close. She’ll figure out the finer details of navigation later. For now, up and out are good enough. She accelerates to maximum and flies into the murky dawn sky.

Now up. Space. She dares a look over her shoulder and her eyes widen. The bay doors hadn’t even shut behind her and they’re opening again, raiders swarming out into the atmosphere.

“Couldn’t give me five seconds, could you,” she says, voice hoarse from disuse.

Something beeps, accompanied by a red flashing light; she presses the blinking panel to shut it up and discovers automated evasive maneuvers. The same panel triggers the HUD’s combat mode and paints the swarm as unfriendlies. A radar scanner lights up like a fireworks show.

Hyperdrive, please. She silences a garbled radio transmission – no doubt ordering her to land, albeit in an alien language she’s not been able to translate much of in the last three months. She thanks all the gods she’s ever heard of for this GUI being largely picture-based. Weapons probably shouldn’t be behind hyperdrive in her priority list right now, but if she does this right she won’t need them. A well-placed barrel roll avoids a barrage of incoming fire. As soon as she clears the gravity well, she kicks in the hyperdrive and suddenly everything is silent.

No alarms, no radio, no flashing lights. It’s almost overwhelming.

Find a planet with a Stargate. Get home. 

Her empty stomach twists and she vomits pure bile into the copilot seat.

Safe in hyperspace for the moment, she takes a few minutes to breathe in the cool, dry recycled air and re-regulate her system as the adrenaline and cortisol storm begins to pass. With body and mind calmed for now, she opens her eyes and figures out weapon controls, just in case, before accessing the ship’s navigational computer. She’d picked a planet at random when plotting her hyperdrive jump; though it’s certainly far enough away that the raiders shouldn’t be able to follow her through hyperspace, she isn’t sure it has a Stargate.

The Stargate is how she got into this mess, and she isn’t entirely sure it’s going to be how she gets out of it, but a raider designed for short-range fighting definitely doesn’t have enough fuel to get back to Earth. It’s a miracle it even had a hyperdrive. She finds a nearby uninhabited planet she knows has a Stargate – and a Stargate that has a clean wormhole, or at least it did three months ago – and programs in a course.

She passes the eight hours by searching the ship for water (successful) and food (not). Though it hasn’t failed her yet, she doesn’t entirely trust the raider to keep her safe if she dozes off, so she stays awake by trying to remember Marvel plotlines.

*** 

She remembers leaning on the DHD for support. Barely able to stand and even less able to focus her eyes, it took her three tries to slap the symbols for Earth. And she remembers, just before stepping into the event horizon, sending up a prayer to a handful of gods and her grandfather that it would be a clean dial and she’d end up on her Earth.

But then, nothing.

So when she opens her eyes to cloying semi-darkness and shadows, adrenaline surges again like she’s back in her cell and just found the gap in the guard rotation. No no no no, get out get out get out. She’s already sitting up, grabbing at the wires and cords around her, before her ears register the rhythmic beeping of medical monitors. Voices that might be familiar crowd around her, but her brain is so focused on get out, run that she doesn’t process they’re speaking English. She rips out a handful of wires and feels a spike of pain in her arm, followed by a monitor beeping wildly. She tries to take a deep breath in preparation for pushing off the table and running, but there’s a tube down her throat.

While something clicks in the back of her mind – home – the rest of her fight or flight response is targeted irrevocably on flight. She has to get off this table. Now.

A lightning bolt of panic strikes down her spine as she flails at the tube. Her breaths overlap with the machine’s automated rhythm and she tries to breathe in at the same time the machine breathes out. She feels like she’s drowning. Hot tears flood her cheeks and she tries to scream.

She gags against the tube, but then it’s gone, pulled away, and she’s coughing so hard her entire body feels like it’s on fire. And through the searing in her chest and throat, the burning pain in her arm, the inferno she’s just now noticing in her back, and the storm surging through her veins, she decides that right now, she’d really like to die.

“You’re safe, Alle,” a male voice whispers in her ear. A warm, strong hand grasps hers.

She knows that voice. Remembers it. 

Trusts it.

She hasn’t trusted in a while, almost so long she’s forgotten that trust is good. She focuses less on the words he says and more on his tone: quiet and calm, like sunset ocean waves at low tide.

As he speaks, she settles enough that shapes start to solidify out of the shadows. People, machines, a couple of chairs. IV wires dangling from the bags beside her, no longer connected.

Hospital. Help. Home.

“Zach,” she whispers hoarsely. She grabs at his hand, reassuring herself that he’s real.

She’s suddenly aware of how quiet the room is. Someone must have turned the alarms off.

The mattress shifts and she senses a body sitting down next to her. An arm carefully slides across the tops of her shoulders, avoiding the raging fire spreading across her back. “Yeah,” he says. “You’re okay.”

Now that the adrenaline is beginning to subside, a whole catalog of hurt starts to crop up. That, and the way she can’t quite grasp why she woke up in a hospital bed with the overwhelming urge to run, tell her that she’s about as far away from okay as she can get and still be alive. But she nods, barely. She trusts him.

Someone puts a glass of water in her hand. It’s lukewarm and feels like heaven itself on her throat. 

“Alle,” another voice, female this time, says from her other side. “Can you lie back down? You need to rest.”

“What happened?” she croaks out. She doesn’t want to sleep until she knows why everything hurts so badly. His arm around her shoulders tightens just slightly, reminding her that she’s safe.

“You’ve been missing for three months.”

It’s an unsettling non-answer. There are too many blanks to fill in. The more she tries, the more blanks appear. But she’s home. She’s safe. She can figure out the rest later. “Okay.”

The bed shifts as he slides off; two pairs of hands gently guide her back down. Someone fusses by her arm and there’s a pinprick as they insert the IV again. Soon, she feels a slow, languid wave of fuzziness slip over her.

Before the cool and painless wave surrounds her completely, she catches a hushed conversation.

“How is she, really?”

“It’s bad, but she’s been stable for a few days. She’ll make it. Any news on Sam and Jack? It might help, next time she wakes up.”

“No. Harper’s team searched the planet she gated from. Nothing but a dead raider; not even enough juice to power the lights.”

“She wouldn’t leave without them.”

“I know.”

Chapter Text

“Well,” Colonel O’Neill announces cheerfully as he waits by the DHD while Daniel dials home. “That was uneventful.”

The seventh chevron locks and the wormhole engages. Sam sends through their IDC and thinks about uneventful. She’s almost forgotten the word over the past years, having had little occasion to use it except in the presence of not. But P3X-673 was the pure definition of uneventful. Pretty, with its trees and mountains and gorgeous sunsets that light up the planet’s twin moons. And useful, with its untouched naquadah deposits. And absolutely, completely, uneventful. The native squirrel-like creatures didn’t even try to steal their food.

Daniel goes through first, Teal’c behind him. Sam follows third and Colonel O’Neill covers their rear. But when Sam takes two steps out into something distinctly not the gate room, she wonders if uneventful should get filed away with other harbingers of doom like calm and quiet.

***

Neither Teal’c nor Daniel have an explanation for General Hammond when he demands to know where Major Carter and Colonel O’Neill are.

***

Jack blinks as he steps out, not into the familiar concrete walls deep inside Cheyenne Mountain but instead into a sandblasted landscape. “Okay,” he says, drawing out the word. “Did you dial the wrong number?” Getting no response, he looks around for Daniel. He’s nowhere to be found. Neither is Teal’c. Strange. “Uh, Carter?” he asks as the wormhole closes without revealing the other half of their team. He tries to keep it casual as usual, but concern laces through his voice: Daniel and Teal’c went through first. They should be here.

“Not sure, sir,” Carter says, crouching by the DHD. She pulls out the crystal controls. “Well, the pattern buffer’s empty,” she closes the control panel. “I don’t know where they are, but I think it’s safe to try dialing out again.”

Jack hops off the steps to join her on the dusty ground and gestures for her to go ahead.

The wormhole doesn’t engage. Carter frowns, then tries again. And a third time.

“The wormhole won’t lock,” she states the obvious. Her frown deepens and Jack peers over her shoulder to see what she’s frowning at.

He develops a frown of his own. The symbols on the DHD exactly match those on the Russian DHD, which should not be in the middle of a desert.

“Sir, I think we’re on Earth.”

Jack kicks a pebble and looks over the lack of scenery again. Squinting up at the sun, he says, “Unless Hammond did a little redecorating while we were gone, no we’re not.”

Mental alarm bells trigger at the all-too-familiar sound of safeties flicking off. With his own weapon instantly ready in his hands, Jack whips around to find the source. Right beside him, Carter’s had the same idea.

“Yes, you are.” A man in desert camouflage steps out of his hiding place behind a large boulder. Three other people pop up from behind rocks. All four guns are trained on Jack and Carter. There’s a slow swagger to the speaker’s walk. “Who the hell are you?” He pauses a few feet in front of them.

Despite the guns pointed at his head, Jack keeps a firm hold on his weapon. Carter doesn’t budge, either. “Air Force.”

“Noticed that,” the man says. “You two got names?”

“We know who they are, Major,” one of the others says.

“Still need their names, LT.”

Jack shrugs. They look human and military. And know about the Stargate. And seem to know who they are. Might as well go with the truth on this one. “Colonel Jack O’Neill. Major Samantha Carter.”

“Shit,” Major says.

“Not usually the reaction we get, Major.” Jack uses the man’s rank intentionally. Major stiffens to half-attention, but doesn’t lower his gun. It was worth a try.

“Alle said this was possible, sir,” LT pipes up again.

Major scoffs. “I don’t care what she said. Doesn’t mean I like seeing dead people.”

“What?” Carter says under her breath.

Jack doesn’t know a lot about how the gate works, but he does know they’d assumed gate malfunctions would either redirect them to another planet or not connect the wormhole at all. And he knows enough about the nonsense he’s encountered before to know something has gone deeply sideways with that assumption. They’re either staring down an alternate reality or time travel. If they’re really unlucky, both.

“Come with us,” Major gestures for them to jump in the back of a truck hidden behind a cluster of rocks. He orders two of his men to stay behind.

They could fight, but they’re outnumbered and would probably piss some people off in a way that’s hard to come back from. Reluctantly, Jack lowers his weapon and gestures for Carter to climb into the truck; he follows her up, sitting beside her by the cab. She’s not looking any more thrilled than he is. LT joins them and doesn’t let go of his weapon. Major gets into the driver’s seat and speeds them across the desert to a building off in the distance.

***

They’re hurried to the infirmary. Given that they were recognized at the gate, Jack feels like he shouldn’t have to donate his blood to prove his identity and says so. No one seems to care much about his opinion, but he’s used to that from doctors, so he eventually gives in and holds out his hand for a fingerstick. They’re clearly in some sort of SGC situation; apart from their greeting party’s initial reaction, nobody’s given any indication that they’re unwelcome. Just unexpected. They’re given little round band-aids for their fingers, the kind Jack knows will fall off in twenty minutes.

Carter’s quietly sitting on the bed across from him but, with Carter, silence means thinking. “What year is it?” she asks.

“2038,” the nurse offers easily. At Carter’s shocked expression, the nurse gives her a soft smile. “Someone will be by shortly to explain,” she says, then leaves with tiny labeled vials of their blood in a small test tube tray.

Jack catches Carter’s eye. They’ve been working together long enough that he doesn’t have to say anything to convey his question: what the hell happened? She shrugs and makes perhaps the most confused face he’s ever seen from her. Comforting. He’s about to elaborate out loud, but a short, wiry man steps into the infirmary and heads directly for them.

“Hi,” the man says, and introduces himself as Doctor Simon Boyd, theoretical reality physicist. His job title alone makes Jack’s head hurt. “Major Wentworth tells me you’re not where you should be.”

“No. Can you get us home?”

Dr. Boyd doesn’t appear confused about who they are – no one does, and Jack can’t decide if that’s becoming more strange by the moment or less – but he does visibly hesitate at Jack’s question.

Carter jumps in. “Dr. Boyd…Simon,” she uses his first name after a smile and a please, call me Simon even if Jack doubts she has much intention to do so ever again. “Let’s just start with ‘what happened?’”

“The Stargate system in our reality is corrupted. Sometimes it puts people where they want to go. Other times they end up in the wrong reality and, sometimes, the wrong time.” He ends the statement with a smile, as if it’s supposed to make them feel better.

It really, really doesn’t.

And then Carter asks a question that Jack damn well knows is dangerous to ask of scientists. “How?”

It’s barely five seconds into the explanation before Jack knows that Doctor-Simon-Boyd-theoretical-reality-physicist is going to give him a migraine. Because even though he isn’t paying much attention to Boyd’s explanation of events – he catches snippets, something about a species called the Rak’har and reality nets – he’s certain it all adds up to one big I don’t know. He hates I don’t knows.

“Just hang on,” Jack crossly interrupts the very patient scientist. “You’re saying that when we dialed Earth from 673, we switched realities and timelines. Fine.” It’s not fine, but it can be fine for now. “Where are Daniel and Teal’c?”

“Earth,” Boyd says tightly.

“The one they belong on? Or another one?”

“I don’t know. And there’s really no way to tell, unfortunately. If we could do that…” he trails off.

Carter clears her throat. “Clearly you’re more used to reality and time shifting than we are. Do you have a way to get us back?” She repeats Jack’s earlier question.

Boyd swallows. “Maybe? We’re planning to reboot our own timeline so we can avoid this mess. Alle’s leading the research team. She’ll be able help you more.”

“Who’s Alle?” Jack asks, recalling LT mentioning her at the gate.

“Oh,” Boyd says flatly. “That’s gonna be awkward. Maybe you should start with Zach.”

Jack sighs. He’d give his left arm for a solid answer. “Who’s Zach?”

“I am,” a tall man dressed in military fatigues steps in from the hallway. He looks only a few years younger than Carter.

Jack tilts his head. It’s half an answer. He’ll take it. “Hi.”

The man smiles softly, a hint of sadness behind his eyes. “I’m Major Zachary Hawthorne. To answer your other question, Alle is Dr. Alexandra Carter-O’Neill.”

“Ah,” Jack says, pointedly not looking at Carter. He doesn’t have to look at her to feel her stiffen on the other bed. He doesn’t think he’s capable of not feeling her presence. Not after seven years. Not after spending so much time boxing up their feelings. He wants to look at her, wants badly to know her reaction to all this, but he can’t. Not and stay focused. He notices that Boyd has made himself scarce. Wise man.

Hawthorne nods. “Yes. As to why you’re starting with me: I’m stuck on orientations this week. Also, full disclosure, Alle’s my fiancée.” He pulls a chair over, turns it around, and sits in it backward.

Jack bypasses that little detail for the moment. 2038 was abstract. Having a daughter old enough to be engaged suddenly makes the thirty-five year time jump a little more real in a way he’s not quite ready to deal with. He’s also not at all ready to confront that this Jack O’Neill and Samantha Carter were together (although, that’s now happened in 100% of the alternate realities he’s heard of), let alone had a child.

An image of Charlie, happy and playing in the backyard, forms in his mind’s eye. He bats it away. There is no reality where he joins the Stargate program and Charlie is alive.

Jack swallows, pushing thoughts of his son to the background. “What happened here?” he asks in a quiet, commanding tone, hoping the major will understand that he wants Big Picture, not Boyd’s details.

Hawthorne gestures for them to get comfortable on the beds. “About seven years ago, a species called the Rak’har showed up on the galactic scene. The Goa’uld were well scattered by then, the Ori and Replicators were gone, the Lucien Alliance had fallen again – ”

“The who?” Jack asks, recognizing only half that list.

“Whoops,” Hawthorne mutters and brushes past his question. “The important bit is that the galaxy was largely at peace, but there was a pretty big power vacuum. Made it easy for the Rak’har to take over small planets and systems without anyone noticing for a while. They clung to the fringes and we didn’t know much at first; just that nobody was having much luck fighting them. Then something went wrong with the gate system. A few SG teams disappeared and a couple times teams stepped through that weren’t ours. We figured out pretty quick it was a reality problem and suspended the program, then we figured out the time travel piece, but it took a few months to realize it wasn’t isolated to our gate. By then it was too late: they’d dropped nets across the galaxy, disrupting the phase of anyone who traveled through them. Most nets were placed in direct lines of gate wormholes.”

“So it wasn’t the gate at all,” Carter says.

Hawthorne shakes his head. “No. The gate’s fine; it’s the wormhole that’s the problem. The Rak’har can shift through reality and time. Near as we can figure out, they’re simply trying to cause chaos in order to exert power. It’s working. We don’t have enough of an idea how their technology works to combat it.”

“Still not hearing a reason why we ended up here,” Jack says.

Hawthorne gives Jack a look. Jack finds it a little too casual and familiar for someone he just met. Then Jack realizes that he must look a lot like Hawthorne’s dead father-in-law. All of this is disconcerting. He doesn’t even know how he died yet. He’s long decided that, as Teal’c once said, his is the only reality of consequence, just to make it all easier to grasp. But, still, as much as he and Carter have always been together in alternate realities, he’s also been dead in all of them. He has a slight problem with that.  

“Alle can explain it better, but the simple version is that the nets are anchored here, but drift through other realities and times. A net must have drifted through your reality’s wormhole, redirecting you here.” He twists the cap off his water bottle and takes a swig. “The Rak’har started escalating, dominating larger systems. No one ever got eyes on their tech; we had nothing that could beat them. Four years ago, they came here. Evidently they found us enough of a threat to skip the chaos and go straight to bombing the surface. It was pretty brutal. We think there are maybe a couple million people left on the planet, total.”

“Oh my God,” Carter whispers.

Last Jack checked, the population back home was six billion. His brain doesn’t want to do the math on how many people had to die to drop that down to two million.

Hawthorne nods and taps his water bottle against the back of the chair. “Yeah. Cheyenne Mountain was destroyed. So was Mount Weather. Most major cities are rubble. Area 51’s in the middle of nowhere, so,” he gestures around them. “What’s left of the SGC made it here. We hooked up the second Stargate to try mapping the nets. Everyone in our reality knows to avoid gate travel, but we’ve acquired a few unlucky visitors,” he motions at the two of them. “We can reset the clock pretty easily, but that doesn’t do us any good if we can’t defend against them. Alle and the others are working on that.” 

“So,” Jack says, “what happened to us?” he gestures to himself and Carter. “Your us.”

Hawthorne takes a deep breath and looks away for a moment. “Two years ago, Sam and Alle risked a trip to the Alpha Site to pick up some equipment. Jack sure as hell wasn’t letting them go alone. They never made it. We still don’t know what happened: the wormhole to the Alpha Site was clean before then and we made a clean redial immediately afterward, but they didn’t make it. Three months later, Alle came back. Turns out they’d been caught and were on a Rak’har prison planet. Alle made it out, but not before Sam and Jack died there.”

Jack knows Air Force debriefs and knows that was the much abbreviated version. Whether it’s because Hawthorne doesn’t want to share or because that’s all he knows, Jack isn’t sure. But he’s very sure he’s glad it’s all he heard. He would give Carter every doohickey she’s ever wanted in exchange for knowing what she’s thinking right now, but he won’t ask until they’re alone.

“She’s not here right now,” Hawthorne says suddenly. “She went on the Florida trip and they’re not due back for a couple days. When she gets back, she’ll be able to tell you the timeline on getting everyone back where they should be.”

“Florida?” Carter asks.

“Annual pilgrimage to another enclave of survivors,” he says. “They’re picking up oranges and other supplies.”

“I’m hoping they come back with fish, too.” A petite woman with long auburn hair and a lab coat walks over, holding a tablet displaying lab results. “We could do with some extra protein around here. Hi, I’m Doctor Kate Shackleton.” She takes off her glasses before she offers her hand to greet them. “Your labs are clear. Jack O’Neill and Samantha Carter.”

“Told you,” Jack says.

Carter bites back a smile.

“I’ll tell McLaggen,” she directs this to Hawthorne, who gives her a nod, and then she leaves.

Hawthorne checks his watch. “I’m on perimeter duty in a couple of minutes,” he says. “But you’re probably gonna be here for a bit. We’ll get you set up with quarters, though you’ll have to share. Dinner’s at eighteen hundred, but the mess is always open.”

Jack opens his mouth to say that they have food for a while and don’t need to impose. They’d accidentally overpacked on MREs for this trip. But before he can get a word out, Hawthorne sharply shakes his head.

“Don’t argue,” he says. “Food is one thing we have plenty of.”

The unsaid because there aren’t many of us left to eat it hangs above all their heads as he directs them to what will become their home for months.

***

“It’s amazing,” Carter says after dinner and a base tour given by Shackleton. “The world ended and they’ve still managed electricity, water, supplies, food, and some sort of infrastructure.” She bends over to untie her laces.

Jack clears his throat. “Carter. We’re a very long way from home.”

“I know,” she says, toeing off her boots. “But you have to admit, it’s remarkable.” She sets her boots neatly by the door, next to his.

“Consider it admitted. How do we get home?”

Carter digs around in her pack for her toiletry kit. “I don’t know, sir,” she admits. She stands up and sighs. Jack remembers that she’d borrowed Daniel’s toothpaste on the trip. “I know when we are, but as to what reality we’re in? We don’t really have a reliable way of determining which reality is ours under normal circumstances. And that’s without the time travel.”

“Carter,” Jack says sharply. There’s a distinct set of her jaw that means she’s going to give him a lesson on advanced theoretical something if he doesn’t make an abrupt left turn. “Can we get home?”

“Well…”

“Ah.” He holds up a hand, stopping her right there. “Yes or no. Can we get home?”

“It’s possible, sir. I just don’t know how long it’s going to take or how we’re going to do it.”

That’s probably as close to a straight answer as he’s going to get from her right now. “Alright. You doing okay with all of this?”

“You mean that we’re thirty-five years in the future in an alternate reality where you and I were together, had a daughter, the world ended, and then we died in an alien prison? Oh, and no one knows how to get us home?”

He winces. “Yeah.”

“‘Okay’ is not the word I’d use.”

“Yeah,” he says again. “Me neither. Heads up,” he tosses her his toothpaste. “I’ll take the couch.”

She catches it and then hesitates by the door. “The bed’s plenty big enough…”

“I’ll take the couch,” he repeats. Even if they didn’t have an entire mess of feelings locked inside a hypothetical room thirty-five years ago and several realities to the left, he doubts he’ll sleep much tonight and doesn’t want to keep her awake.

***

Sam and Jack look up from their breakfast three days later and stare at the commotion stirring in the hallway. By the sounds of it, the Florida trip has returned, and they’ve brought oranges, seafood, and a tan.

They’ve had three days to speculate on what their (not) daughter might look like. Jack’s betting on blonde and scientific. Sam’s betting on brunette and joking.

Sam knows Alexandra Carter-O’Neill the minute she sees her, even without an introduction. A glimpse of her profile, the way she purses her lips and sighs at Boyd, even how she can’t quite stand still: it’s all so familiar and the woman standing at the mess hall entrance can’t be anyone but the daughter of Jack O’Neill and Samantha Carter.

They were not betting on a five foot two inch blonde ball of energy wearing a floral sundress and a leather motorcycle jacket. But that is what they get.

“No, Boyd,” she’s saying patiently, as if explaining to a small child why it’s a bad idea to stick a fork in an electrical outlet. “I don’t need a particle physics graduate student. What I need is someone who can calculate divergent quantum reality integrals without getting a migraine. And until you can find me one of those, you can take Jeremy the Graduate Student.” 

“I don’t need a particle physics grad student either, Alle.”

“None of us do, but we’ve acquired one and you didn’t just spend the last three thousand miles listening to him recite your doctorate back at you like a raging fanboy.”

A too-skinny man with shaggy brown hair walks between them carrying a box and Alle and Boyd both go suspiciously quiet. Sam assumes he’s the grad student in question.

“You did develop the slingshot dialing method and rewrite all conventional wisdom on the Stargate,” Boyd says once the man is out of earshot. He puts his hands up in defense when Alle shoots him a meaningful glare. “I’m just saying. Take credit where it’s due.”

“Oh, I take full credit for my genius. But McLaggen put me in charge. So you get to take the grad student.” She smiles widely in victory, then turns and practically skips across the room to Hawthorne. “Hello.” She stands on her toes and kisses him softly.

Hawthorne wraps his arms around her. “How was Florida?”

She hugs him back. “Sunny. Sandy. Warm. There was a lot of grouper. And rum.”

“Was there now?” he lifts an eyebrow.

“Yeah, Hawthorne? Your fiancée is not allowed on my boat ever again,” a man, maybe fifteen years older than both of them, shouts across the room.

“Hey!” Alle steps away from Hawthorne. “I at least stayed in the boat, Troy, unlike some people.”

Troy sets the crate of oranges down. “Yes, but you are the only one who fell out of a palm tree.” He smirks and heads outside to continue unloading.

Hawthorne tilts his head and looks at Alle. “You fell out of a palm tree?”

“There may have been a dare.”

“Oh, well. Far be it for you to turn down a dare,” he shakes his head with a smile.

Alle turns and her gaze lands on Sam and Jack. Her eyes widen and her face loses all color. “What the hell is that?” She turns back to Hawthorne.

He grimaces. “They came through the gate a few days ago. Their wormhole got caught in a Rak’har net shift.”

Sam would like to be anywhere else right now. The situation is bizarre and disconcerting for her, and a little bit upsetting, but for Alle it must be agonizing. Alle’s posture, previously relaxed and happy, has gone tight, like sheer force of will is keeping her standing.

Jack gives Alle a little awkward wave.

Alle blinks. A flash of clear, gut-wrenching grief washes over her face and then, as quickly as it came, it’s gone. She doesn’t wave back, doesn’t smile, doesn’t show any reaction, just focuses on helping the others unload, as if Sam and Jack aren’t there at all.

***

“Hey,” Sam says, sliding into a seat across from Alle, two nights later at dinner. She needed ten minutes to psych herself up for this conversation; she doesn’t think she’s ever been more nervous talking to someone in her life. She tries to think of Alle as just a person, not her alternate self’s daughter. It had been a successful strategy, right up until the point she sat down.

Alle pauses the game on her tablet. She takes a drink of water. “You lost the Rock, Paper, Scissors match?” Her voice is soft and a little distant.

Sam winces. “Coin toss, actually.”

“Ah.”

Taking a deep breath, Sam jumps right in. “I know this has to be hard for you, and I don’t want to sound selfish, but do you know if we’re getting home soon?”

Alle sets her tablet aside. “We’re working on it. There’s a lot of people here who shouldn’t be here, not just you two. It’s probably not soon, but we’ll get you there.”

Sam nods. “Hey, if there’s anything…”

“Look,” Alle starts, silencing what Sam was going to offer. “I, uhm,” she pokes at her salad for a moment before she looks up again. “I know you’re not her. But you look and sound a hell of a lot like my mother.” Her voice is tight and strained as she runs a hand through her blonde hair. The unspoken and I miss her every day sits in the air between them. “So, I need you to just…leave me alone.”

Alle looks like she badly needs a hug from someone who is definitely not her, so Sam just nods. “Okay.” She offers Alle a small smile before she stands up and walks away. The brush off hurts, but she understands. She spares a glance over her shoulder, relieved to see the table now filled with Alle’s friends. It’s only a few seconds before Alle’s smiling with them, but her posture remains tight and controlled even as she starts laughing.

***

“What’s so funny?” Sam rubs her eyes, still half asleep as she walks out of the bedroom the next morning. Colonel O’Neill is sitting on the couch, laughing quietly about whatever’s on the paper he’s holding.

He holds up the piece of paper, printed on both sides. “And you thought only Twinkies and cockroaches would survive the end of the world.”

She opens her mouth to state that even Twinkies have a shelf life, but recognizes the text formatting as a standard Air Force memo. She forces her train of thought to change track. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Funny.” He finishes skimming and then hands it to Sam.

She looks at him askance and reads:

AREA 51 PUBLIC RECORD MEMOS 4/15/38

TO:  Everyone who should not be here.
FROM:  An astrophysicist, a quantum mathematician and a social geographer
SUBJECT:  This is not the beginning of a walked into a bar joke.

It’s been a while since we’ve last updated the Who Needs to Go Where and When diagram. If you are in the wrong reality, make your way down to Carter-O’Neill’s lab (206) sometime this week and double check that a) you exist on the diagram, b) you exist in the correct spot on the diagram, and c) all the details of where/when you should be are correct. There are charts for reference. And do not change anything that does not apply to you.

Thanks!

Alle, Jeff and Stephani

 

TO:  All Area 51 residents
FROM:  Team Awesome
SUBJECT:  Dart Wars v4.0

Back by popular demand. Sign-up sheets are in the mess, due to Troy Harper or Kate Shackleton by Friday.

Season 4 starts 12:01am 5/1/38.  

Bring it. - T&K 

 

TO: All Area 51 residents
FROM:  Kitchen Staff
SUBJECT:  Waffles

First off, we are not rationing food. That rumor is false.

Second, we’ve had some requests for waffles. We’d love to, but someone borrowed two waffle irons a few months ago and neglected to return them. So if you have one or both, just drop it off. No questions asked, no fingers pointed.

Thanks,

Kitchen Staff

 

TO:  Everyone who didn’t go on the Florida trip.
FROM:  Everyone who did go on the Florida trip.
SUBJECT:  We get it.

We get it. We really do. What you wanted was a nice, organic, free-range medium-rare steak, a baked potato and some applesauce. And what we brought back was a lot of seafood, more oranges than we’d really like to admit, and a couple of coconuts. So we got the order wrong, and we’re very sorry about that.

We’re especially sorry that the entire base smells like a day-old fish market right now (really, we are: we smell it, too). But fish only lasts on ice for so long. Your friendly kitchen staff has been working overtime to deal with the metric boatload of seafood that you folks won’t be able to consume in two days. Canning, salting, smoking and otherwise preserving can be a stinky process but it’s better than the alternatives: option one – no fish; option two – rotten fish.

It’ll be over soon. In the meantime, have an orange.

- Area 51’s resident fishmongers

 

TO:  Project Dorothy leads
FROM:  General Dean McLaggen
SUBJECT: Meeting

1330. My office.

 

TO:  Biochemistry
FROM:  Astrophysics
SUBJECT:  Light bulbs

We are not amused.

Sam folds the paper again and hands it back. “At least they kept their sense of humor.”

“You know,” he says, “I’d make sure I read my memos if they were like this.”

She looks at him sideways mid-yawn. “Sure. You bring up the idea of gutting a fish in the gate room to General Hammond, sir.”

***

After setting a note on the coffee table in case Carter wakes up before he gets back, Jack slips out of their shared quarters in hope that a walk will cure his insomnia. He gets lost after five minutes and finds himself near the entrance instead of the hydroponics garden like he’d intended. Spying a map tacked on the wall, he heads toward it to at least get his bearings.

“Little lost?” Alle’s voice distracts him from his target. She’s smirking.

The smirk is uncomfortably familiar. He’s seen it in the mirror. “Shouldn’t you be asleep?” Jack ignores her question and falls in step with her, walking toward the main doors.

She lifts an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you?”

Idly, Jack wonders if Teal’c is around in this reality and taught Alle that expression, but he takes her point. “Couldn’t sleep.” He follows her outside into the clear, crisp Nevada night. Despite the heat during the day as they creep toward summer, the desert cools off once the sun sets; he’s thankful for the sweatshirt he tossed on. “I thought they had rules about going outside in the dark.”

“You’re out here,” she points out.

“Not intentionally,” he says, gently kicking a stray tumbleweed. “But you are.”

“Honestly, the rules are a technicality. If anything more threatening than a coyote shows up, these guys,” she waves at someone perched invisible on the rooftop, “will shoot it down before we even notice it.”

“Ah.” They step beyond the pale glow of the base’s spotlights and into the dark. “Why aren’t you asleep?”

“Couldn’t sleep either.”

He notices that she’s still wearing the khaki shorts and black hoodie he’d seen her in at dinner: she hasn’t even tried. He’s reminded of Carter, even after he ordered her to get a life. “Want to talk about it?”

“Not really. Do you?”

“Nope.”

They fall into companionable silence as the brilliant full moon lights their way. The Stargate is still a few miles off, but Jack thinks he can make out its circular form standing tall against the bright stars. Alle stops and shoves her hands in the pocket of her sweatshirt. She turns around, staring up at the sky.

Jack suddenly feels like he’s intruding.

“When I was a kid,” she says softly, gazing up at Orion, “and Dad was offworld, Mom would take me up on our roof and point our telescope at wherever he was. Most of the time we couldn’t see the actual star, but she hit the general direction. She never told me why we looked at the stars when he was gone, but it became our little ritual.”

Jack can’t imagine leaving a kid at home to go risk his life offworld. Then again, knowing everything that’s out there, he can’t imagine not. And then something hits him. “She wasn’t Air Force, was she?”

Alle shakes her head. “No. Science team.”

Things make a little more sense now. Though, if he takes alternate realities as evidence, literally the only thing standing between them is the Air Force. That’s not as comforting as maybe he’d hoped – it’s a pretty big obstacle.

“They read me in when I was nine,” Alle continues. “The stargazing made a lot more sense after that, but we never stopped, not until he took over from Hammond. I think she started again when I was on SG-1.” She pauses and turns, facing Cassiopeia now. “I may have been a little mean to Sam the other night.”

Jack blinks. He heard about it, of course, but Carter made it sound like a desperate request, not mean. Rather than say so, he decides to push a little. “Yeah?”

She looks at him askance. “Like you haven’t heard.”

“Not too subtle, huh?”

“For a guy trained in black ops, you can be pretty obvious.”

“Yet you didn’t give me the brush off.”

She crouches and picks up a small rock. She tosses it in her palm a few times before throwing it as hard as she can into the black desert night. “I always knew it was possible for Dad not to come home after a mission. But Mom was always going to be there.”

Jack can’t, and doesn’t want to, imagine how it must feel for her; he can imagine the alien prison with no hope of rescue and tries not to think too much about Alle experiencing that. “I’m sorry,” he offers, knowing the condolence isn’t much.

Alle smiles sadly. “I just…” she sighs and looks away again, starting over. “When I was seven, some mission went pear-shaped. Dad didn’t get home for a month and a half. And I learned that I could…survive without him. I didn’t want to and it was awful, but I would live. Because Mom was there. She was a wreck, but she was there.” She kicks a pebble. “I guess you’re never really prepared for it, but I told myself years ago that I could make it if some day he didn’t walk back through the gate. Never occurred to me that Mom wouldn’t.”

He studies her in the moonlight; the silver glow reflects off her features – Carter’s nose, his jawline – and casts shadows that make her look years older than she is. A tear escapes her eye and sparkles in the night for the brief moment before she wipes it away. Her sweatshirt has thumbholes in the sleeves and it makes him smile.

She turns back to face him. She looks at him hard, as if she’s trying to make out her father in him. Whether she can or can’t, and whether that’s a good thing or bad, Jack can’t tell, but the sadness has left her eyes, replaced by something he can’t quite read in the dark. “There’s nothing between you two,” she says after a while.

The statement knocks him a little off-balance as he recalls a similar question by a not-his-Sam several years ago. He recovers quickly and shakes his head. “Nope.”

Alle opens her mouth to add to that, but closes it again. She laughs to herself and takes a step back toward the base. “Thanks for the company,” she says over her shoulder, waiting for him.

He gives her a smile before catching up. “You’re welcome.”

Chapter Text

TO:  All residents of Area 51
DATE:  6/24/38
FROM:  Farmer Jake & Farmer Annie
SUBJECT:  Harvest help

Hi, folks. As we move into July, we’re beginning to hit harvest season. Any and all help we could get picking and storing this year’s crop would be greatly appreciated. :)

If you’re new to this, we’ll teach you everything you need to know. If you’re not new, we’ll give you a refresher anyway.

Thank you!

Jack plucks a tomato from its vine and gently places it in the bucket on the ground. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, smudging sweat and dirt across his skin.

He’s a pretty simple guy. Give him not much more than The Simpsons, a lake with no fish, and a bottle of Guinness, and he’s happy. But after nearly three months, he really just wants to shoot something. He’s asked to be added to the duty roster, even if it means standing around staring into the desert, but his requests have been denied; they’re not currently letting anyone from a different reality on duty. And since his skill set isn’t otherwise particularly useful at the end of the world, he wakes up every morning, slathers on sunscreen, and heads outside to pick vegetables. Yesterday it was peppers. Today it’s tomatoes. A month and a half ago, he planted these damn things.

He thinks this must be what going insane feels like.

Fortunately, he’s not alone. He grins through the leafy plants at Carter. If he feels like he’s going insane, she must be holding onto the shreds of her sanity by her fingernails. She’s volunteered to help every scientist she can find but had the same luck he did, although their reasons were that she didn’t know enough; he knows that stung way more than she let on. So Carter’s out in the garden, too. Technically it’s a farm, based on size, an irrigation network, and the presence of chickens, but they find it easier to say that they’ve been gardening instead of farming.

The implication at the end of the day is flowers, not cow manure.

They’ve settled into repetition while they adjust to the idea that someone else is supposed to fix this. Awake at five, Carter nudges Jack’s shoulder before she leaves for a morning run. She wakes him up again when she gets back and then hops in the shower. Wakes him for a third time when she’s wrapped in a towel (he’s not sure, but the towel, more than it being the third wakeup call, might be what actually wakes him up), then goes to the bedroom to change. He sleepily brushes his teeth and wonders out loud how anyone could be awake enough to run five miles before coffee. Carter reminds him of 0600 departure times and how this really isn’t that bad in comparison (she isn’t wrong). They walk to the mess for breakfast, then outside. When the Nevada sun gets too much, they retreat inside for lunch.

Afternoons are spent playing chess or sorting produce, sometimes reading. Dinner, followed often by watching a Dart Wars final battle or one of the many D&D campaigns the base has going, and then they return to their quarters. Jack whines about being bored; Carter grumbles about a knot in her right shoulder. She washes up in the bathroom while Jack puts the pillows and blankets back on the couch and waits for his turn.

She always offers to share the bed, but he always politely declines. After he switches off the bathroom light and steps into the living room in his boxers, he sticks his head into the bedroom to wish Sam sweet dreams. She tells him the same and turns out her light as he shuts the door.

Sleep for eight hours, repeat.

He sleeps on the couch because this isn’t a question of if they’ll get back, it’s a question of when they’ll get back. And they’ve let the thing in the room out enough in the last month. She’s dropped the sir (mostly) and he calls her Sam (occasionally). And when Sam reaches up to rub in a streak of sunscreen he missed on his cheek, Jack’s breath catches in a way that spells certain trouble. So he stays on the couch, even if he winks at her through the tomatoes whenever he can.

***

“O’Neill.”

Jack looks up from his green beans. He a distinct dislike for Colonel Richards, even if turning him down for duty was base policy. “Yeah?”

“You and Carter are going into town tomorrow. Briefing’s in the mess in ten.” Richards walks off.

“Town?” Jack lifts an eyebrow at Sam.

She shrugs.

Town, it turns out, is Las Vegas.

They run into Hawthorne on the way inside and he gives them the short version. A few big box stores survived the direct hit Vegas took. The military spent the first week transferring all perishable items to a Costco so they’d only need to keep the energy running in one building. Perishables have long run out, but the Costco remained as the supply hub; they gradually moved everything else over. Most survivors voluntarily relocated to the base, but a few groups remain in the city. About every other month, Area 51 sends a caravan into the city to pick up supplies.

Colonel Troy Harper – who Jack remembers as the guy yelling about his boat and who, they’ll find out on the drive into Vegas, was the current leader of SG-1 when this mess happened and has since been reassigned to Supply Guy – steps onto a table.

“Alright. Grocery 1 has reported increased activity around the Bellagio, so eyes open. Grocery 2 spotted a new group on 15 north of Nellis last week. No word yet on friendly status, so proceed with caution and do not engage; leave contact to the town teams. Now. Some shit went down last trip that did not need to go down. It’s been smoothed over, but this is your reminder and order,” he pauses, locking eyes with several choice people in the audience, “that we shoot to discourage, not to kill or injure.”

His attention returns to the group. “Hawthorne’s handing out supply assignments. You are responsible for what is on that list and nothing else. Use the buddy system inside the building. Each truck has four people and no truck travels alone. Got it?” A chorus of yes sir rumbles through the crowd. “Good. We leave at 0630 tomorrow.”

***

Back in his fatigues and boots, Jack palms the butt of his P-90. He leans against the Escalade he was pointed toward and checks his watch. 0730. He finds it comforting that the Air Force can’t tell time in any reality.

Next to him, Carter re-ties her boot.

“How many times are you gonna fix that thing?”

“It’s a new lace.” She stands up. “Is this much firepower really necessary for a trip to Vegas?” Each person milling around the parking lot is equipped with at least a semi-automatic and a zat.

Jack shrugs. “Got me.”

Alle walks past them, tablet in hand as she discusses with Harper whether they need ten packs of paper towels or fifteen. Her feet clad in combat boots, she’s chopped a pair of desert BDU pants into shorts and skipped the jacket in favor of a black tank top. Her hair’s pulled up into some sort of braid Jack doesn’t understand; designer sunglasses sit on her face. There’s an assault rifle slung around her back.

“Now that’s just wrong.”

“It’s hot out,” Sam says.

“I mean the gun.” Images of Charlie slide unbidden into his mind and Jack clenches his teeth. “She’s a civilian.”

“We give Daniel a gun.”

“That’s different.”

She cocks an eyebrow. “How?”

“It just is.”

“Right.” She pushes her sunglasses back up the bridge of her nose and leans on the car.

After a few seconds, Jack throws up his hands. “I’m just saying…”

“She could probably take you,” Sam says with a playful grin. “Sir,” she tacks on as an afterthought.

“You mock me?” They walked past a hand-to-hand training class the other day. Alle may be short, but she’s formidable in close quarters. It’d be a fair fight, at least.

“Oh, look,” Sam says, still grinning, “we’re getting ready to go.”

Alle pulls a ball cap onto her head (Jack’s secretly pleased that it’s a Cubs hat) and then grasps the exposed frame of a Jeep and swings herself into the reversed back seat, settling the gun in her lap. She nods to Harper.

“Alright, people. Let’s move out!” Harper shouts. He jogs to the Escalade where Sam, Jack and a young captain named Andrews are waiting. “Who’s riding shotgun?”

Two rounds of Rock, Paper, Scissors land Carter in the shotgun seat. Jack picks the seat behind her.

At times the drive is pretty, but mostly it’s boring. Harper’s music preferences lean toward heavy metal and they sail down 93 to Judas Priest and Mötley Crüe.

Nearly ninety minutes into the two hour drive, Jack notices the first physical evidence that anything bad happened here. A pickup truck lies on its side in the right-hand lane ahead of them. As they pass, he glimpses one skeleton inside and another halfway out. He grimaces.

“It gets worse,” Harper says from the driver’s seat without taking his eyes off the road. “Wouldn’t recommend looking.” He cranks up the volume on Guns N’ Roses, maybe as a distraction. It doesn’t work.

Cars smashed into each other in multi-car pileups bear the scorch marks of fire; bones of their occupants lay mangled and blackened inside. Some vehicles remain neatly parked where drivers and passengers got out to walk; scattered skeletons along the shoulder tell of their inevitable death. Occasionally a skull or a rib or a foot lays on its own, hinting of coyotes and other scavengers. There’s been some attempt at cleaning it up, moving broken and burned metal frames to the left lane to allow for easier passage, but it doesn’t lessen the impact.

Discretely, Jack reaches forward between the seat and the door and gives Sam’s hand a squeeze. Right now, this is their home. She squeezes back and holds on for a little bit before letting go. 

The city itself is a disaster of broken bodies and buildings. Like the highway, there are hints of attempts to clean up: stacks of bodies now turned to bones, organized piles of crumbled stone and street signs, stretches of roads eerily clear of rubble.

They pass remnants of once-shiny hotels and casinos, palaces to glitz and glamor now covered in dust and stone and shattered glass. The Stratosphere cuts buildings in half where it smashed to the ground.

“Eyes open,” Harper says, turning off the music. “Bellagio’s up ahead on the left. Shoot to discourage,” he repeats his order from the briefing.

The majestic fountains are still and empty, the water long evaporated into the dry desert air. A shotgun blast shatters the silence, echoing throughout the streets. Jack returns a volley of gunfire, aiming high in warning. Then there’s silence again until they pull up at the Costco with the rest of the caravan.

They split up. Sam and Jack head one way; Andrews and Harper go opposite.

Alle’s leaning on the Jeep next to their Escalade when Sam and Jack exit the Costco. She’s squinting at the tablet in her hand, trying to make out the screen despite the bright glare. A taller woman with her brown hair in a braid and a sniper rifle in her lap sits in the driver’s seat, hat pulled down over her face against the sun.

“You our team back?” Jack asks. Harper and Andrews aren’t back yet.

Alle glances up. “Looks like. Torrini and Rabinowitz have zero sense of urgency, so we might be here for a minute.”

“One day those boys will learn how to tell time,” the brunette says, still pretending to sleep.

“Not in our lifetime.” Alle kicks a pebble across the parking lot.

“Who’s your friend?” Jack asks.

The brunette sits up and pops her sunglasses on. “Nora Vincent.” She offers her hand.

Jack shakes it. “Air Force?” He assumes not – she would’ve introduced herself with a rank if she were and she’s wearing a t-shirt advertising a band called Kara And The Destinies – but there’s a military attitude to her posture.

“Former. Lieutenant Colonel. I ran the SGC’s first contact team before UNSOP tapped me as Trade and Commerce Director.”

He lifts an eyebrow. “UNSOP?”

“UN Space Ops. Successor to the IOA.” At his blank look, she continues. “Created when disclosure went global. Allowed us to negotiate on behalf of all humanity, not just the countries who knew about the program.”

Largely, Jack isn’t too aware of the time jump. People are people and, other than some technology improvements, there isn’t much to remind him that it’s 2038 here. And then people say things like that.

“That sounds like a nightmare,” he says, because it does. He’s always been glad there’s a separate group of people responsible for the political ramifications of gate travel.

“You have no idea.” She clicks into her comms. “Chimera Leader to Chimera 2. Did you get lost in the lawn furniture again? Over.”

“Patience is a virtue, young padawan. Over.”

“Not when it’s this fucking hot out it’s not. Hurry it up. Chimera Leader out.” She shifts in her seat, leaning back, and settles her cap on her face again.

“Can I ask a question?” Carter pipes up from her spot in the Escalade’s back seat out of the sun.

Jack’s never known her to ask if she can ask questions, but Carter’s been very good at giving Alle all the space she wants to take. He leans half a step backward to subtly brush his hand against hers.

“Sure,” Alle says.

“Why don’t you take all the supplies? The base has room.”

“Because people still live in Vegas.” She sets her tablet down in the passenger seat and rotates her left shoulder a few times.

“But you don’t even guard it and they’re shooting at you.”

Alle shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. They’re still human. They deserve clean water, toilet paper, and giant bags of barbecue chips just like we do.”

“They’re shooting at you,” Jack repeats Carter’s words.

“Yeah. But they don’t clear the shelves, either,” she points out. “Maybe they want the supplies to themselves too, but, like us – they’re not going to take everything until they’re sure no one else needs it.”

“That really doesn’t sound like the humanity I know,” Jack says. Carter nods in agreement.

“We’re thirty-five years ahead of you and this isn’t your reality.” At his skeptical glance, Alle shrugs. “It’s not all sunshine and ethics, trust me.”

From the front seat, Vincent snorts and adds no kidding under her breath.

“But if we lose sight of those basic human dignities, then we’re…no longer worthy of survival.”

Alle’s words catch him off guard. Jack trusts himself to raise a kid with a solid moral center. He doesn’t trust the Air Force, or humanity at large, to hold to those same ideals. He wonders what happened here. Besides the obvious.

They fall back into silence for a few minutes before Harper and Andrews, followed by two men who must be Torrini and Rabinowitz, exit the building with their own carts of supplies.

The ride back is quiet, despite the music.

“You okay?” Jack asks Sam later that night once they’ve eaten dinner and showered. He’s not okay after the destruction that was Las Vegas. For three months, they’d lived at the untouched Area 51/Groom Lake complex, with only pictures and stories about what happened around the world. Seeing all the destruction firsthand – and, by all measures, Vegas is a minor city – has him badly on edge. The Air Force trained him well in compartmentalization, so he’d pushed those feelings aside earlier today, but now that he’s back and doesn’t have to be on guard, he’s angry. And sad. And confused about why he’s both, since this isn’t their reality at all.

She hesitates, as if gearing up to lie, but shakes her head. Silently, she sits on the couch. 

Jack sits beside her. This isn’t their reality, which somehow makes it feel worse instead of comforting. In thirty-five years, it could be. And they may not be able to do a damn thing about it except see it coming. They’ve lived out plenty of disaster movies at the SGC and none of them live up to the real end. “C’mere,” he says, scooting closer. He tucks his arm around her. She immediately leans into him, resting her head on his shoulder. He tugs her a little closer, tighter; he needs to hug her just as much as she needs to be hugged.

They sit in silence, her eyes closed and his staring at the wall, until he takes a leap and brushes a kiss against the top of her head. Friends do that, he tells himself. It’s comforting. “We’re gonna get home,” he says quietly.

“How do you know?” Sam asks in a small, uncertain voice he doesn’t want to hear from her again.

“Because you’re the smartest person I know. And a version of you gave birth to someone who inherited more of your genes than mine.” 

“That’s not really how genetics works.”

 “We’ll get home.”

***

Sam starts August with sunburn bad enough to stay inside. She’s been on produce duty, sorting food for Eat Now or Preserve To Eat Later, but they’ve finally caught up and she has the afternoon off to read. A knock interrupts her focus. She sets the astrophysics journal aside and opens the door, shocked to see Alle standing on the other side. Except for their brief conversation in Vegas, and that was circumstantial, Alle’s largely avoided her. The fact that she hasn’t gone quite so out of her way to avoid Jack hasn’t gone entirely unnoticed by Sam. It’s certainly made it easy to give Alle her space.

“Hi,” Sam says, unsuccessfully masking her surprise.

“Hi. Uh, do you and Jack want to come over for dinner tonight?” Alle says quickly, like she’d practiced on the way over and needs to get all the words out at once. “I mean, the mess does a good job, but sometimes you want to feel like you don’t live on a military base, you know?” She plays with her hands as she explains that she and Zach snagged a set of quarters with a kitchen.

Sam smiles. She understands the feeling even if she doesn’t understand the sudden change in heart. “Sure. What time?”

“Seven. See you then.” Alle disappears after an awkward wave.

Dinner passes in a whirl of wonderful food: vegetarian fajitas with tortillas that are hell bent on ripping. Laughter comes easy as they go through an absurd amount of napkins. The conversation’s surprisingly easy, too, with the four of them swapping SGC stories. Their realities are different enough that Alle and Zach hadn’t heard most of the good ones Sam and Jack have. But Sam’s favorite story of the night is the one where Alle got a fresh pizza delivered to the moon in under an hour.

A little after they’ve finished eating, Alle starts to retreat, as if without the protection and pretense of food she’s suddenly back in avoidance mode. Sam nudges Jack’s leg under the table and offers to clean up.

A few minutes later, Alle meets her in the kitchen. She’s clutching a notebook in her hands. She nervously shifts her weight while Sam scrubs at a pan. Sam doesn’t say anything, just finishes the dishes and waits for the other woman to speak.

“I feel like I’m eight,” Alle says to herself, giving a short little laugh as she stares at her feet for a moment. She looks up at Sam and takes a deep breath. “My math is wrong somewhere. And I’ve been staring at this for days and can’t find it. And I don’t really trust anyone else to just error check the thing without going off on three tangents. Can you take a look at it?”

Sam nods and dries her hands before accepting the well-worn notebook. She may be decades behind on the science, but she knows how to follow formulas. “Of course.” As Alle nods her thanks and silently turns to go, Sam speaks up. “Thanks for dinner. It was nice.”

Alle looks over her shoulder and smiles. It’s not really a smile, more the hope of a smile, but Sam’s seen it a thousand times on Jack. She doesn’t know Alle at all, doesn’t know if this is the first step to friendship or if she’s just a convenient brain, but Sam’s an optimist about most things, this included.

“Sure,” Alle says. She pauses. “Cooking dinner makes it feel a little less like the world ended.”

***

Jack wakes up, thirsty. His eyes naturally drift to the closed bedroom door. His brow furrows: light glows around the doorframe. He checks his watch and his eyebrows skyrocket. It’s well past bedtime, even for Sam In The Middle Of A Project. He pours himself a glass of water and drains it before padding barefoot over the mismatching rugs. He knocks softly before opening the door.

Sam rubs at her eyes and smiles sleepily at Jack. Jack feels his entire heart melt at how honest that smile is, at how much it’s Sam and not Major Carter. She turns back to the carefully-printed equations and diagrams in front of her.

“Uh uh,” Jack shakes his head. He sits on the bed next to her, wishing he could forget the sudden knowledge that the bed is way more comfortable than the couch. He also wishes he could forget the sight of sleepy Sam; he’s seen her tired and semi-awake before, but never in bed. Never comfortable, cozy. He doesn’t want to forget it, but he should.

“‘m awake,” she murmurs, all evidence to the contrary.

“Sure you are,” he says, plucking the pencil from her fingers. He slides the notebook with all of its theories and math and hope for the future away from her pillow. “It’ll be there tomorrow.” He sets the notebook and pencil on her nightstand.

“Okay,” she mumble through a yawn without argument. Her eyes flutter closed as her head drifts back down to the pillow.

Jack smiles and brushes a stray lock of hair out of her face. “Night, Carter,” he whispers, turning off the light.

***

Sam’s been down to Alle’s lab before, to put herself and Jack on the map with everyone else who shouldn’t be here. Charts and references line the hallway walls, almost a Choose Your Own Adventure to help people determine their reality number. Theirs is 4372.

Over lunch a few weeks ago, Sam had asked one of the other scientists on the project – Stephani Vazquez, a social geographer who headed up the SGC’s refugee relocation program before gate travel was shut down – how they could’ve indexed such detailed information from other realities. The times Sam’s encountered alternate realities, it’s been mostly a lucky guess, followed by a hope and a prayer. Turns out the other main scientist – Jeff Donovan, a quantum mathematician who probably needs a little more human contact every so often – had cracked the technology behind the Ancients’ quantum mirror; the codex he downloaded combined with the ongoing net mapping project through the Stargate has given them an extensive database of labeled realities.

She knows she should be focusing on getting home. But all the work this SGC has done in the last thirty-five years is fascinating. Sam wants to study all of it, right now. Reality mapping, interplanetary refugee assistance, Luna Base, Alle’s slingshot method for intergalactic gates, and she’d heard something about AI and mech units. They’ll probably get there in her own reality in time, but the scientist inside of her can’t resist devouring the journals and papers she finds in the base library.

Alle sits bent over her desk with her back to the door, headphones on with the volume loud enough Sam can hear lyrics clear on the other side of the room. Sam knocks, surprised when Alle looks up over her shoulder; how Alle could hear anything less than a nearby grenade explosion with music that loud is beyond her. She’s a little concerned for Alle’s hearing.

Alle sets her headset around her neck. “Did you find it?” She silences her music and takes off her glasses.

Sam nods. It took her a few days and several times through the equations, but she found it. She hands Alle her notebook back, open to the page with the ħ outside the parentheses instead of inside. Alle curses under her breath at the small mistake. Sam waits patiently while Alle skims the updated equation results.

“Thank you,” Alle says with a sigh of relief. She looks up. “This makes a lot more sense now.”

Sam smiles at her. “You’re welcome. Is there any way I can help?” The offer rushes from her mouth before she has a chance to pull it back and honor Alle’s space.

Alle rubs at her eyes, smudging her eyeliner a little. “I haven’t a good night’s sleep in four years, so please don’t take this the wrong way.” She waits for Sam’s nod of understanding before she continues. “I wrote my dissertation based on breaking several laws of physics you haven’t written yet. You’re thirty-five years behind on this stuff. I mean, in theory we have all the time in the world here, but that just means more time for people to show up from the wrong time and place, and more people to figure out how to get home. I can’t take two weeks off to get you up to speed without making one of our fundamental problems worse.” Her voice is kind, but honest.

Whether she’s being blown off because she looks like Alle’s mother or because she doesn’t know the science – or both – Sam decides that she’s had it up to here with produce. While she may not be the smartest person in the room right now, she’s still really smart and can contribute somehow, she’s sure. And she’s actually going to go insane if she doesn’t get to calculate something soon.

“I’m a quick study,” Sam says. “Can you take a day off to teach me the basics? I’ll pick up the rest as I go.”

Alle squints and tilts her head. Sam doesn’t know what Alle’s looking for: hints of her mother, maybe hints of not her mother. This is the longest she and Alle have been alone together and Sam’s surprised about how not awkward the elephant in the middle of the room is. She still expects to be brushed off, but at least it wasn’t so brusque this time. Progress.

Suddenly, Alle nods. “Okay.”

Shocked, Sam feels like she passed a test.

“Meet me for breakfast at 7:30 tomorrow. We’ll start then.”

***

At the sound of the door closing and a body slumping against it, Jack looks up from his collapsed house of cards. “You okay, Carter?” He hasn’t seen her since early that morning except for dinner, where she unsuccessfully tried to eat pasta and take notes at the same time.

She opens one eye. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

She opens the other eye and reaches down to touch the floor, stretching out muscles stiff from hours of an uncomfortable chair and frantic note-taking. “For every time I tried to explain something over your head. I am really sorry.”

She’s a perfectionist. Jack’s seen her beat herself up countless times when she doesn’t have the answer. If she’s apologizing to him, he can’t imagine how much she wants to just curl up in a ball right now. She’d been so excited last night at finally getting to learn something and help: now she just looks defeated.

Jack stands and walks over to her. He places one hand on her shoulder, mindful of the sunburn still hidden beneath the t-shirt, and gently guides her into a hug. “It’s okay.”

Sam rests her head on his shoulder and slowly brings her arms around his waist. She shakes her head. “No, it’s not. They’ve had seven years to figure out how to get people like you and me home and they have no idea.” Emotion rises in her voice. “I miss Daniel and Teal’c and my dad. I want to go home and they’ve had years to work on it and I don’t even know what math they’re using. I don’t even know where to start.”

Jack feels her shudder against him and he holds her tighter as she starts to cry; he’s not entirely sure what to do with a crying Carter (…Sam), but he rubs slow circles on her back. They’re four months in now and, truthfully, he’s been expecting something like this; Sam’s one of the strongest people he knows, but while he’s at least mentioned that he misses annoying Daniel and hopes Teal’c has found something other than Star Wars to watch, she’s been mostly silent on the matter of the lives they left behind, until now. He presses his lips to the top of her head. She melts into him, clutching at his shoulders. He sticks with the circles, occasionally murmuring what he hopes are calming, confidence-restoring words, until her breathing steadies.

She sniffles a few times before working up the courage to pull away from his chest. “Sorry,” she says, wiping her cheeks dry with the back of her hand.

Jack looks at his shoulder and the noticeable wet spot on the green fabric. He shrugs. “It’ll dry.” He knows that’s not what she’s apologizing for.

Sam looks up at him and manages a watery smile. “I’m going to bed.”

“I’ll be on the couch.”

Teeth brushed and face washed and pajamas on, Sam hesitates by the bedroom door. She plays with the hem of her shirt. “Jack,” she says when he comes out of the bathroom.

His first name sounds strange on her lips, but in a good sort of way. It does funny things to him, like seeing her sleepy smile the other night. He could get used to it.

He turns off the bathroom light. “Want company?”

She swallows and nods. “Do you mind?”

“Wouldn’t have offered if I did,” he says. He collects the extra pillow he’s stolen from the bed and follows her into the bedroom. He waits patiently for her to get settled, curling into the blankets just the way she likes, before sliding in next to her. She turns out the light and instantly rolls over, tucking her head underneath his chin.

Comfort, then, not just companionship. If he’s honest with himself – and he is so rarely, but in the dark with the desert night sky shining in through the small window, he might be – he needs the comfort, too. She’s not the only one who misses home. He settles his arms around her, letting her cuddle close. She smells good. Faintly like strawberries.

Jack closes his eyes. He can almost pretend that this is any number of ice cold planets and they’re hiding out in a cave, cuddling for warmth trying not to freeze to death.

They aren’t in a cave and hypothermia isn’t imminent.

But maybe, Jack thinks as he presses a soft kiss to her forehead, it’s another form of survival.

Chapter Text

TO: Astrophysics
FROM: Biochemistry
DATE: 10/13/38
SUBJECT: chairs.

give them all back or we’re proclaiming the bathrooms on your floor as sovereign territory of canada. we have flags. we’re bored. we’ll do it.

Sitting in Alle’s lab, Sam takes a break from mapping new Rak’har net data and stretches her neck. Her eyes settle on Alle on the other side of the room, squinting despite her glasses, bent over a table and intently building a model out of Legos. Dressed in black leggings, black boots, and a sapphire blue tunic, with her blonde hair pulled up in a loose crown braid around her head, Alle would look out of place in any lab Sam ever called her own. Alle’s too bright, too loudly her own person for a military lab. But her brightness fits in perfectly here.

It isn’t that she and Jack aren’t upbeat or have their own brightness, it’s that Alle shines so brightly, and continues to shine despite everything. Sam hopes that any kid she and Jack would have would find that same brightness in life, despite its hardships. And then she kicks that thought to the curb – they might be sleeping together, and it might not quite be platonic anymore, but Jack’s still her CO.

Alle’s lab is still an Area 51 science lab at the bones of it, but she’s disguised that fact pretty well; whether it was intentional or just a byproduct of Alle being Alle, Sam isn’t sure. Sam’s jeans and t-shirt stand out blandly in the lab, even if her borrowed t-shirt today is advertising Ed’s Feed and Seed in McCool Junction, Nebraska.

There’s a couch in the corner, stolen from what’s now a school classroom and used to be a lounge for the aeronautical engineering staff in the lower levels. Two entire shelves of the bookcase are occupied by Alle’s notebooks from grad school onward: rows of labeled identical black hardbound books. Next to the couch is a basket of 3D combat maps and a handful of minis for the D&D campaign Zach runs, stored safely out of his players’ view. Taped to one of her monitors is a Beacon of Hope spell card. A row of clear glass jars holding highlighters in every conceivable color lines one counter in rainbow order, capped by a jar of identical black pens. Near the tea station (no coffee pot in sight, but a deluxe cabinet filled with more kinds of tea than Sam ever knew existed) stands a fake monstera plant taller than Sam.

What isn’t anywhere are pictures. There are photos of Alle and Zach – a couple posed engagement shots amidst the candids – and a few of Alle and her friends, but nowhere is there a picture of Alle and her parents. A few spots on the shelves are conspicuously empty, like something used to be there but isn’t anymore, and she couldn’t find anything to fill the void.

Speakers are mounted to the ceiling and are currently playing something called lo-fi. Sam’s learned that Alle likes loud heavy rock when she’s doing math. Pop when she’s running theories. Mahler and Bach when she’s processing out loud and talking a mile a minute, jumping from topic to topic before landing on something Sam never even saw the connections for. And lo-fi when she’s building.

But amidst the organized chaos and good music, and more important than the off-the-mark aesthetic she brings, Sam feels like she’s back in her first semester at the Academy: all eagerness and energy, trying to solve problems way beyond her knowledge level.

She knows she’s smart – really smart – but her confidence in her own intelligence wavers more than she’d like lately. Less than when she and Alle started, now that she’s accepted she can’t learn four decades of science in four days, but she hates not knowing the answer.

Knowing the answer is her job.

Jack reminded her that she can’t possibly know all the answers here immediately; it’s almost like he gave her permission not to know. She breathed a little easier after that conversation. She breathed even easier when, instead of kicking her out after two days like Sam had expected, Alle handed her a stack of textbooks and mouthed “homework” with a smile. Sam still has to tell herself that it’s okay not to know the answer, to slow down and really understand it, but Jack’s I’ll make it an order if I have to and Alle’s unexpected patience have done wonders for her crashing self-esteem. She’s pretty sure that Alle has finally upgraded her from a lab assistant to full-bird scientist, now that she’s a couple months in and can mostly stand on her own two feet. She wonders if Alle always knew it would take more than a single day – or even two weeks – to catch her up.

A round piece rolls off Alle’s table and onto the floor, bouncing a few times before disappearing underneath the door to a storage closet. Sighing, Alle slides off her chair. She opens the door. The motion sensor lights in the closet come on and Alle steps inside and then stops, standing dead still in the middle of the small room. She goes pale. Her breath catches in her chest, coming shallow and rapid, and she takes a step back out. And then another. And then another until she bumps into her table. The fear on her face is plain as day.

“You okay?” Sam asks.

Alle exhales slowly and shakes her head. “Can you,” she hesitates. “Can you get that? Please?” The please is desperate.

Sam’s brow furrows in concern. She’s not seen Alle switch from okay to terrified this quickly since the first time she saw her. “Sure.” She easily finds the missing piece in the tiny closet. She picks it up and shuts the door. “Here you go.”

“Thanks,” Alle says, breathing carefully. “I, uh. I don’t really do well with small spaces anymore,” she admits.

Then it clicks. Sam doubts Alle’s cell was much bigger than that closet. Triumph at being confided in is quickly tamped down by concern and understanding. Though Sam’s fine with small spaces, there are other things she doesn’t do well with anymore. “I was once trapped on a glacier,” she says. “I keep my lab at about 75, now.”

Alle exhales slowly and her shoulders relax. “Are you busy tomorrow night?”

“No.” She can’t remember the last time she had plans; she definitely can’t remember the last time someone asked about them.

Alle smiles. “It’s our monthly End Of The World party. You in?”

***

A little bit after nine, Sam makes her way down to the lounge on the third level. She’s not sure what an End Of The World party entails, but she suspects alcohol (and a lot of it). Jack teased her on her way out, saying that she’d better be home by two or else there would be trouble, but she’d laughed and told him not to wait up.

She walks into the middle of a heated MarioKart race.

“Hey Sam!” Alle says, not taking her eyes off the TV as she drifts Toadette around a curve. “Drinks are over there,” she jerks her head toward the counter, absolutely chock full of alcohol. “If you guys haven’t met her yet, this is Sam from 4372. Uh, Nora – incoming.”

“Goddammit,” Nora swears from the couch beside Alle. She drives Rosalina off the track just as the blue shell hits, avoiding the explosion.

“That’s cheating,” Stephani says, though it allows her to slide Yoshi into first place.

“No, it’s utilizing a well-known exploit Nintendo intentionally did not fix.”

Sam investigates the alcohol selection. Mixers are pretty limited, and she only recognizes about half the alcohol bottles, so she settles on a screwdriver. She perches on the edge of the couch next to Alle while the game continues, tuning out the remaining races as she looks around. The party has a pretty exclusive guest list and she recognizes everyone as someone Alle’s friendly with. Something light and happy settles inside of her, even more so than when she figured out she’d been promoted out of lab assistant.

As much as Sam isn’t Alle’s mother, Alle isn’t her daughter either. But she’d like to be her friend and maybe they’re making it there.

Slowly, she’s introduced to the people she doesn’t already know. Rachel – the third point on the Alle/Nora childhood best friend triangle, who was a comic book artist before and now teaches at the base’s small school. Edward – an older man who runs the kitchen and, after three beers, admits to owning the pizza place Alle used during her (apparently legendary) adventure in lunar pizza delivery. Deck – CO of SG-2, absolutely terrifying as Bowser, and who refuses to tell anyone her real first name. Mira – an aerospace engineer from 9024 who spends most of her time in the Area 51 archives cataloguing alien artifacts with Hakim, a lawyer (“he’s a public defender, so it’s fine”) with a keen eye for tech.

She’s met Leo, a CIA handler in her 50s that Alle and Zach picked up in Honduras on their way to Area 51, while out in the gardens; what Sam didn’t know is that Leo thrashes everyone she meets at pool. Carlos and Micah, the other half of the Alle/Nora town Jeep, are there too, and tonight Sam learns they were part of Nora’s first contact team for a while; all four of them onboarded to the SGC together. Stephani and Jeff she knows already from the team, and finds out that Stephani speaks four alien languages in addition to three Earth languages and will happily teach everyone how to swear in them all; Jeff has an unending knowledge of science walked into a bar jokes and will patiently explain them for anyone who doesn’t understand. Kate’s the undefeated garbage can basketball champion. Troy makes an appearance for one round of MarioKart before having to leave for gate duty; he loses so triumphantly that Sam wonders if it’s on purpose.

And Zach, well. What Sam learns about Zach is that he is utterly, thoroughly, irrevocably in love with Alle. He looks at Alle like she’s the sun and it’s dead winter all around him.

She also learns that Alle is utterly, thoroughly, irrevocably in love with Zach. Something about Alle often feels like a missing puzzle piece. But when Alle’s with Zach, Sam doesn’t notice it so much; like he reminds Alle that life is still worth living despite the pallor of grief all around her.

Sam gets roped into a final MarioKart challenge and chooses Peach. Alle helps her through the new kart designs; Sam chooses a bike and changes Peach’s outfit to a leather jacket and black helmet. Very drunken – but impressively on-key – karaoke starts in the corner of the room during the second race.

The world ended and nearly everyone died, and it is terrible, but these people have found a way to make it work. Thrive, almost. It gives Sam more hope than she’s felt in a long time, and not just because she finally understands the basic math. Hope for what, she isn’t sure. Humanity, maybe. Life in general. Just…hope.

It’s nearly two in the morning – Sam giggles, thinking of Jack’s fake curfew – and everyone is gone except her and Alle. Her screwdriver became mostly vodka an hour and a half ago. Alle’s been drinking something called K’Taaran Fire Whiskey all night and the bottle that started out mostly full is now entirely empty.

Alle’s lying on the floor with her feet up on the couch. The TV behind her plays the MarioKart animated intro on loop, muted. Sam’s sitting on the couch, feet propped up precariously on the table around abandoned half-empty drinks and bowls of snacks. She really should get up and go back – at the very least drink several glasses of water and take some ibuprofen – but she’s so comfortable.

“When did you and Jack get together?” Alle takes a few tries to get the words in the right order.

“What?” The question catches Sam off guard. “We haven’t.” She manages to bite back the yet. “We aren’t.”

Even drunk, Sam knows she’s lying to herself – that she and Jack are both lying to themselves. The hugs and forehead kisses and names were one thing, but Jack hasn’t moved back to the couch since that night. More often than not, they wake up tangled around each other. Absolutely nothing else has happened, yet she can feel gravity pulling them together. Gravity’s always pulled them together, but right here? Right now? Without any idea when they might get home to a place where rank and rules matter? There’s not much reason to try to stop it.

“We’re not,” Sam says again, as if she can deny it enough times and the door to that room will just stay locked and they won’t have to deal with the consequences.

Alle sits up, impressively folding herself nearly in half, and braces her arms on the floor behind her. She looks straight at Sam. “Bullshit,” she says, a moment of sobriety coming through. “I watched my mother look at my father for thirty-two years the exact way you look at him.” Her eyes shine with a sudden wave of tears she holds back. She grabs a nearby water bottle and takes a swig. “Don’t tell me nothing’s going on.”

“Nothing is going on,” Sam says emphatically, though she’d very much like for something to go on.

Alle snorts, rolls her eyes, and lies back down.

Sam wakes up the next morning in bed with a pounding headache and a strong desire to stay horizontal. Years of Air Force training convince her to get out of bed anyway, albeit slowly. There’s a glass of water on the nightstand and a bottle of ibuprofen. She takes four and drinks the entire glass before changing out of last night’s clothes.

“Morning, sunshine,” Jack says all-too-cheerfully (and a little too loudly) when Sam shuffles bleary-eyed into the main room of their quarters.

She stops and runs a hand through her hair. “How did I get here?” The last thing she remembers is sitting on the couch, lying about how this thing between her and Jack is most definitely not a thing.

“I went looking for you when you weren’t back around three.”

She falls into the chair across from him. “Did you wait up?” She gratefully accepts another glass of water.

He shrugs. “I dozed.”

It might be the hangover, but Sam swears she sees a slight blush to Jack’s cheeks.

***

Jack’s on his way to the mess to grab a snack for himself and Sam when the unmistakable smell of baked goods distracts him. He grabs a couple of apples and opens the door to the kitchen. It’s easy to follow the sound of clattering baking sheets until he finds Alle, swapping out trays of cookies from the oven.

“Hey.” She closes the oven door. She turns, facing away from him as she transfers the fresh cookies to a cooling rack. Her tank top reveals a tattoo down her spine – he recognizes it as Ancient – and a ribboned mess of scars across her back and shoulders. Some of them cut through the ink, distorting the words. Not like he can read them anyway.

“Ouch,” he says.

She looks over her shoulder. “What?”

He gestures toward her back.

She stiffens and a flash of something crosses her face, too quick for Jack to read. “Oh, yeah. Usually forget about those.” She grasps the hot baking sheet with a potholder and waves the metal tray through the air to cool it down.

It’s the tone in her voice that clues him in to her expression. She’s lying.

“What happened?” he asks casually.

She places her palm on the center of the tray to test the temperature. Satisfied, she reaches into the mixing bowl and begins rolling the dough into balls. “Misadventure fermenting alcohol when I was fifteen. Wash your hands and help me out with this.”

Jack’s brow furrows. Some scars are pinker than others, fresher. Thicker, too, probably not from shards of glass. And those are the scars that slice through the tattoo. She obviously doesn’t want to talk about it, so he doesn’t press further as he turns to the sink. “That must’ve gone over well.”

“Oh yeah. It blew up and threw me out of the attic window. Broke my leg. I think Dad was impressed with the idea, if not the execution. Mom lectured me all the way to the hospital. Only part of it was about the chemistry.”

He washes his hands under hot water and tries to think about what he would’ve done if Charlie had done the same. He decides he’d probably be impressed too, though he’d also emphasize the safety lecture once they were out of the hospital. “What’s with the baking?” He picks out some dough and mimics Alle’s work.

She sighs softly. “Sam’s birthday is tomorrow.” She gestures with her elbow at a cake cooling on the counter. “And I bake when I get stuck. Usually it only takes one to get unstuck, but I’m still lost after the cake. So, cookies.”

Alle’s defrosted a lot in the last months from that first conversation with Sam. Jack would even go so far as to call them friends. But there’s no mistaking that sometimes all Alle sees when she looks at Sam is her dead mother. Sam works in their quarters or the mess on those days. Today was one of those days.  

“You’re making Sam a cake?” There was cake for his birthday too, rolled into the other October birthdays. But this one seems specific.

“Yeah,” Alle says. She braces her arms on the counter behind her. “Life goes on, you know? I mean, life has to go on because if we can’t undo this,” she gestures around her, “then we’re stuck with it. And no one should have to forgo birthdays because we couldn’t fix it.”

“So Sam gets cake.”

“Sam gets cake.”

They work in silence for a while.

“What are you stuck on?” Jack asks.

“Hm?”

“The problem that led to cookies. What is it?”

She looks at him sideways and suddenly looks so much like Carter that Jack almost does a double-take.

“Do you really want to know?”

He shrugs and waits for the last twelve seconds on the timer before swapping out the baking trays. “Sure.”

Alle hops up onto a clean space on the counter as Jack slides in the last tray. “The problem has always been that it’s reality and time,” she starts. “We could send you all home pretty easily if it was one or the other, but combining both into one trip is…I don’t want to say it’s impossible, hardly anything’s impossible if you try hard enough, but it’s two very different concepts. Ancient tech is rarely even compatible with itself and –”

Jack holds up a hand, stopping her. “No, what’s the problem. The problem you have tonight.”

“It’s not going to make any sense without the context.”

“I’m not going to understand it either way,” he points out. He’s tried this with Sam before; sometimes she just needs someone to talk to, not someone to talk with.

Alle sighs heavily. “I thought I’d finally figured out how to connect Ancient control crystals with element omega, but the extra power just creates a localized black hole in every simulation. Like it always does.”

Jack understands that well enough. “That’s worth avoiding.”

“Yep.”

“So, cookies.”

“Cookies.”

***

AREA 51 PUBLIC RECORD MEMOS 12/30/38

TO: All residents of Area 51
FROM: Team Awesome
SUBJECT: Winter Assassins League

With Team Manticore’s decisive win over Team Chimera last weekend, this season of Dart Wars has officially come to a close.

Don’t fret, though. The annual winter Assassins tournament will begin at 12:01am January 15th. Sign-ups are available in the mess, due to Troy Harper or Kate Shackleton by January 4th.

We have a few new rules this year, so attendance at the intro meeting on 1/14 is mandatory. 

-T&K

TO: All flight squadrons
FROM: General Dean McLaggen
SUBJECT: Squadron leaders

As is tradition, your squadron leaders are changing before the new year. I’d like to thank Athena, Python, and Brawler for their service this past year.

Effective today, your new leaders are:

Blue: Deck
Red: Big Bird
Green: Titan

Thank you to all who applied. It’s an honor to serve with you all. -McLaggen

TO: All residents of Area 51
FROM: Kitchen Staff
SUBJECT: Waffles. Again.

This is the third time this year the waffle makers have disappeared.

Waffles freeze quite well. If you’re the local waffle fiend, return the makers to us and we’ll make waffles in bulk and freeze them for you. We have plenty of toasters and mini-freezers you can steal appropriate for your quarters. We do not have plenty of waffle makers.

This has gotten ridiculous.

-Head chef Edward Brassard

Sam first notices the vibration when her pen falls off the table. She frowns and puts down her fork, leftover piece of birthday cake forgotten as she reaches down to the floor. The vibration is faint enough that she’s almost ready to write it off but, as she sits up again, she catches Alle’s worried look. The intensity grows and the jar of blue highlighters crashes to the floor.

An alarm starts to thrum through the base.

“Not good,” Alle says, her eyes locking with Sam’s. She jumps up, knocking her stool over, and rushes out of the lab. Sam’s close on her heels.

Sam picks up fragments of conversation as she and Alle head to the surface. They push against a sea of people trying to get as far underground as possible. She pieces together that the Rak’har are back and there was no warning. Alle’s not good seems like an understatement.

They finally break free of the crowd and step outside into the cool desert winter. Sam squints up to the sky, shading her eyes from the sun. She stands still, staring at the ship as people shout commands and scramble planes. Sharp, chill wind blows around her, whipping her hair in her face.

The ship hovers in the atmosphere, hulking and awkward. It’s unmistakably a warship. It jitters, like looking through a slowly-turning kaleidoscope. Nothing’s quite where it should be.

Sam tilts her head, studying. She’s aware that she should be doing something more useful than standing around and looking at it, but she can’t tear her eyes away or force her feet to move. After a few seconds, she realizes the shifting and changing must be the ship phasing in and out of their reality and time coordinates. She shudders, thinking that there are countless others out there – perhaps even countless versions of herself – seeing this exact same image.

The warship looms heavily above her and she feels targeted, like someone up there is looking for her. Unbidden, her mind duplicates the ship, mentally creating a fleet of warships darkening the sky, the sight seen by everyone on this Earth on that fateful day four years ago. She shivers.

“Carter!”

Jack’s voice breaks her gaze and she whips her head around to find him. She instantly feels some of the tension leave her body: there’s a huge and terrifying warship above them, but Jack is familiar. So is working side-by-side with him in combat. Comforting even amidst chaos.

“Feel like helping?”

“Yes, sir!” she says; they may have dropped formalities in the last months, but she knows an order when she hears it. Breaking from Alle – who’s running in the opposite direction now – she runs to his side to assist with a missile launcher. He hands her a communication earpiece. She turns it on to catch the middle of an order for all pilots to get their asses in the air right fucking now. A swarm of fighter jets and gliders fly out of their hangars and into the air.

A wide red beam shoots out from the underside of the ship and slowly begins sweeping across the ground toward them.

“Raptors, Hawks, this is Blue Leader. Weapons free. Take out that scanner. And stay out of Asterion’s firing solution.”

A larger Air Force ship – much smaller than Prometheus but larger than an al’kesh, and clearly of alien design despite the USAF call letters on the side – flies up from its ground hangar to meet the warship. It hovers in the air, still and solid compared to the warship’s shifting silhouette. Panels slide open from its hull plating to reveal several sets of rail guns. Sam watches in dismay as the scanning beam moves closer and no one’s weapons – not even the rail guns – cause near enough damage. 

“Peace out, kids. If you don’t take this down, I’m gonna come back and haunt all of you.”

“Guardian, what the hell are you doing?”

“Taking out that scanner, ma’am. Following your orders.”

Sam holds her breath and tracks the glider across the sky as the pilot breaks formation. It flies far enough away that Sam’s eyebrows raise: she has a thought about Guardian’s plan and she doesn’t like it.

“Get your ass back into formation, I swear to God.”

“Sorry, ma’am. Someone needs to take this thing out and weapons aren’t cutting it.”

“Get. Your ass. Back here. Now. That’s an order, Guardian.”

“Guardian, McLaggen. I’m backing Deck on this one: stand down.”

“You want to find out what that scanner’s looking for? Because I don’t. Good hunting.”

Deck and McLaggen try to get Guardian back on the line, but his comms have gone silent.

The collision isn’t much. The glider is no match for the behemoth warship, but Guardian’s aim was true: a small explosion bursts from the warship’s underbelly and the beam stutters out.

Sam and Jack catch each other’s gaze. A long, heavy look passes between them.

The ship slowly descends closer to the ground.

“All birds, back to base,” McLaggen orders. His voice is strong and steady, despite grief running through it. “Ground team, weapons hot. You all heard Guardian. I know I’m not the only one who doesn’t want to find out his idea of haunting.”

The ship begins to fire at the surface. Whether it was looking for something specific or not seems irrelevant now as it covers the ground with bursts of explosive fire. The earth shakes beneath Sam’s feet as the cold wind turns hot with flame.

“Ground team, weapons free. I say again, weapons free. Bring that thing the hell down.”

Sam clears the Stinger BCU and gives Jack a thumbs up. He lifts the launcher to his shoulder, checks the IFF signal, and fires. Sam visually tracks their missile and it’s a direct hit; between their missile and the rest of the ground team, and the barrage from the air squad earlier, there are small flickers of flame and smoke coming out of the warship now. But it’s not nearly enough for how much they’ve all shot at it. Jack sets the launcher down so they can prep another attack.

“Maestro, how’s that solution coming along?”

“Working on it, General,” Alle’s voice, tight with stress, comes over comms. “I need two minutes.”

“Now, Maestro.”

“You can demand all you want. It’s still gonna be two minutes.”

Sam stifles a laugh. She’s desperately wanted to respond like that so many times before, but held her tongue to avoid insubordination.

Almost two minutes exactly and Alle comes back on the line. “Got it, General. Everyone hold your fire!”

Launcher mounted on his shoulder and ready to go, Jack frowns and looks at Sam. She shrugs: without knowing Alle’s thought process, she has about as much an idea what’s going on as Jack does. She does know that they have about thirty seconds before the BCU overheats and they need to reload the launcher again. Whatever Alle’s planning, she’d better do it fast.

“On my mark.”

An eternity passes in twelve seconds.

“Fire!”

The air itself seems to shatter as all weapons fire simultaneously. The warship breaks apart and crashes to the ground.

***

It’s not technically a garbage can. Jack thinks it might be a sterile storage container from the infirmary. But it’s about the right size and it’s filled with a mix of alcohol that smells like it’d be better suited as paint thinner. If he ever survives the end of his own world twice, Jack’s pretty sure he’d want to get ragingly drunk, too, but he has standards: drinking mixes of unlabeled alcohol is way below them, no matter the situation. He opts for a beer instead – Carter does the same – and then stands in line for food.

If he hadn’t spent the past seven months here, Jack would question the presence of DJ equipment in the corner. But he’s learned that not only is Area 51 incredibly resourceful, they’re also really into forgetting that all hell broke loose on their planet. From Alle’s End Of The World parties (he’s on the invite list, now that Sam’s a regular) to Dart Wars and D&D, there’s as much escapism as there is work.

The music is innocuous and appropriate for dinner, but he bets that in an hour or two it’ll be loud and thumping.

“Apparently there’s cake,” Sam says. She steals a cherry tomato – grown in the hydroponics garden indoors now that it’s winter – from Jack’s plate.

“How is there cake?” It’s only been a few hours since the warship was shot down. Cake can take a while; Jack’s baking skills may be limited to eating, but he at least knows that much. While the kitchen staff wasn’t involved in debriefings, he saw Edward and a few others at the memorial service for Guardian (Captain Isaac Haidara, living his callsign to the end) and the rest who fell this afternoon.

Sam shrugs and pops the tomato in her mouth. “There’s cake.”

They don’t stay long. They each finish a couple more beers and a piece of cake (Sam pretends not to notice when Jack goes back for seconds) and leave before the music gets too loud and someone gets the bright idea to start dancing.

By unspoken agreement, they head back to their quarters. They’ll never understand what it means to survive again, so they leave the music and suspiciously strong alcohol behind. Instead, they walk close to each other, unwilling to bend to ideas of personal space.

Near the flagpole, its faded American flag still fluttering proudly in the wind, their hands brush against each other. They glance at each other in the starlight, smiling softly. They allow their fingers to tangle together, holding on tightly. They keep walking.

Some of the party has moved outside. They walk by groups of people passing around bottles and cups. Someone’s started a bonfire. Jack’s thumb rubs against Sam’s palm and they turn a corner into the shadows of their building.

His lips brushing against hers catches both of them off guard.

Jack pulls away, an I’m sorry forming on his lips as he searches her eyes for some sign that wasn’t the stupidest move he’s ever made.

Sam tilts her head, studying his face as she licks her lips.

He opens his mouth to fumble through an apology, but his words are stopped by her finger on his lips, gently shushing him. The quiet smile on her face tells him he doesn’t need to apologize at all. He presses a soft kiss to her fingertips. She drops her hand to his shoulder and leans in, tentatively kissing him in return. Her hesitation dissolves when he urges her body closer to his; she loops her arms around his neck, eyes fluttering shut as he slips his tongue past her parted lips.

His hands settle on her hips, fitting perfectly, like his hands and her hips were made to be together; even through her jeans, the heat of her skin is almost electric. Sam’s fingers tease at the nape of his neck, gently threading through his short hair. She presses her body against his and Jack groans.

He chases her lips in a series of small kisses and dips his thumbs below the waist of her jeans. Her skin is scorching and smooth and she shudders under his touch. Without breaking the kiss, he walks her toward the wall.

“We should go inside,” Sam murmurs against his lips. Using the brick wall as leverage, she hooks her leg around his calves, pulling him closer.

They break away, breathless. Jack rests his forehead on hers, his hands curling around her hips. The look in her eyes tells him that her suggestion has nothing to do with the fact that it’s cold out here and everything to do with her hands trying to get to skin underneath his sweatshirt. “You sure?”

She slides her hands down his chest to hook into his belt loops. A slight tug threatens to throw him off balance, but Sam’s there and steady and kissing him again. “Never been more sure of anything.”

He loves kissing her. “Not even physics?”

Sam grins and slips out of his embrace. She catches his hand, lacing their fingers together again. Lifting slightly on her toes, she presses a soft, simple kiss against his lips. “Not even physics.”

Chapter Text

Sam wants to bang her head on the table. They’ve had three weeks to devour the technology from the fallen warship and are no closer to understanding how any of it works. Well, they’ve learned a few buttons not to press. But largely, they’re in the same place as they were three weeks ago.

Sam’s learned that while Alle doesn’t yell, she certainly has a tone. Luckily, Sam hasn’t been on the receiving end of it. Yet. Boyd gets the brunt of it and gives as good as he gets.

General McLaggen called a meeting this morning. It started as a lecture about the importance of working together, which might have been effective had he not then asked everyone for a progress update. The meeting nearly immediately devolved into shouting. McLaggen seems to be the kind of general who tolerates scientists well and he seems inclined to just let them shout themselves out.

While Boyd and Donovan go head-to-head about whether they should bring the main computer back online (Boyd: no, Donovan: yes), Alle slumps in her chair like she’s just come to a conclusion she really doesn’t like.

“Do we have the Tok’ra memory devices here?” her whisper is a casual aside to Mira sitting next to her, but the entire room goes silent. “Well, do we?”

“Yes,” Mira says. “They’re in the archives. But you remember how those work, right? Even with direction, you don’t have much control over what else you might remember.”

“I flew a raider off that planet,” Alle says. “And these controls,” she points at the monitors showing pictures of what they’ve determined is the phasing component, “look so familiar, but I can’t remember how to work them. We never got anywhere with the raider because of it, but didn’t care once we learned it was phase-locked. Now that we have their phase-shifting tech, we need to get at those memories.”

“Alle, you know…” Sam starts softly, remembering her own unpleasant experience with the memory device. And, not that it’s a contest, her unwanted memories have to be easier to handle than Alle’s.

Alle holds up her hand and focuses on McLaggen, refusing to make eye contact with anyone else. “I know. But I saw all kinds of tech in that base, used their OS, and we need that knowledge if we’re going to get anywhere. You and Shackleton, General. That’s it.”

McLaggen nods. “Alright. We try this. But,” he firmly holds Alle’s gaze, “you get two hours. If we can’t find what we need by then, I’m pulling the plug.”

***

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Sam asks as they step into the elevator to go back to their lab. She’s not sure when she started considering it their lab instead of just Alle’s lab.

“Nope.” The word pops on her lips as the elevator doors close. “It’s a terrible idea. But it’s the only one we have.” Her voice wavers a little.

Sam nods. Alle’s not wrong, though Sam looks at her in concern. Alle pointedly does not make eye contact. “Do you want anyone in there who knows engineering? Those things are pretty disorienting.”

Alle sharply shakes her head. “No. I’ll brief McLaggen so he knows what we need and can direct it.” She pauses. “And if you’re thinking about just showing up anyway, don’t.” She crosses her arms and looks sternly up at Sam.

The sharp edge in Alle’s voice makes Sam feel like she’s being protected from something. She takes a breath to argue the point, but notices Alle’s set jaw and quirked eyebrow. It’s the same expression she’s seen on Jack countless times, an expression that screams go ahead and try, I dare you. “You must have been a pain in the ass growing up,” she says instead.

That breaks the tension in the small elevator.

“Dad used to say the same thing,” Alle snorts. “Oh. Did I read the situation at breakfast right? You and Jack?” A little smirk tugs at her lips.

Sam feels heat rise to her cheeks. There’s no reason to keep it private here, but they’ve tried anyway; she supposes Alle would have a leg up on everyone else when it comes to noticing a relationship. “Yes,” she confirms with a smile.

“It’s about damn time,” Alle grins.

***

Two days later, the night Alle uses the Tok’ra memory device, Jack finds himself unable to sleep. He slides out of bed, careful not to wake Sam. He brushes a kiss to her forehead, places a note on the pillow, and changes out of his pajamas in the other room so the light doesn’t wake her.

The walk doesn’t much help his insomnia, so when he sees the base commander sitting alone in the mess at oh-dark-thirty, Jack detours from the path back to his and Sam’s quarters. He clears his throat.

McLaggen looks up from his hands folded on the table. The dim lights cast deep shadows on his dark skin. “Jack.” He gestures for the other man to have a seat. “What brings you here?”

Jack slides into the chair opposite him and shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep; went for a walk. Everything okay, sir?”

McLaggen waves off the formality. “You’re retired in this reality and even if you weren’t, you’d outrank me.”

“Alright,” Jack agrees, filing the bit about him outranking a three-star general away for later. “Question stands, though.”

McLaggen sighs. “You want a drink?”

“Sure.”

He gets up and procures a bottle of scotch and two glasses and pours them drinks. Swirling the amber liquid, he raises his glass before taking a sip.

“I’ve known Alle her entire life,” he starts, sitting back down. “I was a captain on SG-1 when she was born,” he explains. “She’s tough as nails and doesn’t take shit from anyone, but she’s the sweetest girl I’ve ever met. Brilliant, too. She came onto the SGC after college, hit the tail end of General Hill’s command.”

Jack nods. He senses that the general isn’t really talking to him, but rather talking with another human being around. If there’s a point McLaggen wants to make, he’ll get around to it eventually. Jack takes another sip of scotch. It’s good: smooth and smoky.

“I took over later that year. Alle was mostly doing research for her doctoral thesis, but she helped out with all kinds of crazy shit. When a scientist spot opened up on SG-1, I asked her if she wanted in. We needed her there for more than the science. Some political bullshit after Hill was forced into retirement unraveled a number of treaties; even UNSOP couldn’t hold onto them. We were at the brink of war with what felt like half our allies. Alle grew up in the SGC and knew as much about alien politics as alien gadgets. She, Harper, and Hawthorne helped save most of those relationships.”

The way McLaggen spits out political bullshit, Jack knows it was far worse than that. He idly wonders if Kinsey is still kicking around somewhere in this reality. He hopes not.

“I had to split up SG-1 when it came out that she and Hawthorne were dating. Moved him to his own command on SG-7. Then we ran into element omega.”

Jack raises an eyebrow. Alle mentioned element omega that night with the cookies.

“Nasty stuff. It’s the basis for targeted time travel, but creates a temporary black hole if you use too much of it. Galaxy went nuts over it. SG-1 got into a whole heap of trouble more than once. One day in the middle of all this, Al hops into my office on crutches and tells me she’s quitting SG-1. She’d signed up to do science, I had her doing politics, and now she was ending up on the wrong end of a rifle more often than not. I put her back in the lab.”

Jack doesn’t know why anyone would voluntarily quit SG-1 or gate travel. The pros always outweigh the cons, even when the cons are “stuck in Ba’al’s prison because a stray Tok’ra wanted to save his girlfriend.” But he supposes for someone like Alle, who has all the scientific curiosity of Sam without any of the military inclination, there might be a breaking point.

“Then the Pentagon shut down her ello research. Guess she wasn’t focusing enough on military applications. And, God. Jack, I’d seen that woman shot, captured, all of it. But I’d never seen her so defeated as when she walked into my office that afternoon and gave me her resignation.” McLaggen shakes his head and takes a long drink of scotch.

“She landed with UNSOP down in Chile at one of their Atacama facilities. Once we suspended the program, I pulled some strings to get Hawthorne transferred down there with her. Then…this.”

Swirling the scotch around in his glass, Jack takes a deep breath and briefly closes his eyes. He’s helped prevent planetary destruction a few times; they’ve come close enough to failing that the imagery has made it to the front of his mind more than once. But in the end, they’ve always succeeded – often by the skin of their teeth, but still succeeded. He’s confronted with the end of the world daily here, but this isn’t his planet, not really.

“Communication was a mess those first months. Pretty much everyone except Sam and Jack assumed she was dead. Either that or she’d high-tailed it weeks ago in a cargo ship. But one day, we made contact. And a week later, she and Hawthorne showed up here. Had a crate of chickens and a couple goats in the back of her truck, a few other cars with her, and asked if maybe she could help out. Went right to work. Then she, Sam, and Jack disappeared. Everyone tried to move on, kept trying to work, but Sam and Alle were our best bet at fixing this before we all died of old age and everyone knew it. After a month, we held a memorial service.”

The scotch burns as it slides down Jack’s throat and he thinks of home. He wonders if they’ve held a memorial service for him and Sam yet. Without bodies or tags, they’ll be listed MIA. But they’re on the backside of six months, slowly closing in on a year. At the very least, Jack hopes that Hammond hasn’t kept anyone assigned to work around the clock on getting them back. Carter’s the only one who could possibly figure that out and she’s here, with maybe a third of a clue.

“Then one day, she made it back. Alone, two days away from dead, but back. When she was ready, Al told me what she could remember. It wasn’t much, but enough to get the idea. God,” he drops his head. “Seeing what they did to her. I don’t know how she gets out of bed every day.” He throws back the rest of his scotch and swallows thoughtfully. “She never told them a damn thing, though.”

Jack sits in silence for several minutes, allowing the other man to pull himself together. He hadn’t pressed it at the time, but now he knows what he saw on Alle’s back that night in the kitchen and why she lied. She may very well have been thrown out of a window by a teenage misadventure, but the lines that slice through the old scars and her tattoo are from a whip. And a whip wielded by someone who knew how to use it.

“She okay?” Jack asks, finishing his drink. He wills his jaw to unclench, suddenly fiercely protective of a daughter that isn’t his.

McLaggen gives a noncommittal shrug. “Shackleton sedated her a few hours ago.”

Jack nods. “Why are you telling me all this?” He tamps down a sir. Habit.

He sighs a bone-deep weary sigh. “She’s our best shot at fixing this. And I don’t know if she’ll ever be okay again after reliving that.”

It’s not an answer, but maybe it’s a suggestion. “She still in the infirmary?”

McLaggen nods. “The good stuff’s long gone. She’s probably awake by now.”

“Thanks for the drink,” Jack says. After a while of silence, he nods and stands, leaving McLaggen alone to the moonlight and his thoughts.

Instead of walking back to his and Sam’s quarters, Jack makes his way to the infirmary. He pokes his head in. It looks like every other base infirmary he’s ever had the displeasure of visiting at night. Quiet, hushed, dim. There’s a single occupied bed in the far corner; the patient is doing a poor job of pretending to be asleep while a nurse checks her vitals.

He’s not Alle’s dad, so he’s either about to make this night better for her, or much, much worse.

“She’s asleep, Colonel.” Shackleton stands in his way.

“Doc,” he says. “Just wanted to see how she was.”

Shackleton forces a smile. “She’s asleep,” she repeats.

“Not really an answer.”

“You didn’t ask a question,” she points out. She sighs. “Look, Colonel. She went through hell two years ago and she went through it again tonight. I’m not sure seeing you is the best thing.”

Jack nods, decision made for him, and turns to leave.

“It’s okay, Kate,” Alle’s soft voice causes Jack to turn around. She’s sitting up weakly. She sounds tired. No, she sounds exhausted. She looks around. “You send Zach to bed?”

“Yeah. About an hour ago. Nora and Rachel, too. How are you feeling?”

Alle shrugs and makes a face that only emphasizes the shrug.

Shackleton prepares a syringe. “This should help. You’re pretty out of it, but I want you to sleep.” She injects it into the IV’s injection port.

“Thanks. Can you…” Alle gestures at the curtain surrounding the bed. When Jack makes a move to leave, she shakes her head.

“Sure. Night, Al.”

“Night, Kate.”

Jack pulls up a chair once the curtain is closed and most of the infirmary lights are out. “What’s up?”

“I, uhm.” She pauses and starts again. “I know you’re not him. But,” she looks away and bites her lip, swallowing hard, and starts a third time. “All I’ve wanted since this started was to forget. Zach and I drove here from Chile and it was…” she trails off and stares at the ceiling. “We helped survivors burn bodies the entire way. There were too many to dig graves for,” she looks down at her blanket-covered feet. “We helped people burn as many of their friends and family as we could find. Said prayers, listened to stories and confessions. I had nightmares for weeks.” She sniffs.

Jack reaches out and covers her hand with his. He supposes he’s everyone’s confidante tonight. He certainly doesn’t have any advice to give or know what comforting words to say, but he looks and sounds like their Jack O’Neill and maybe their version was better at this than he is. He’s been here long enough to notice that sometimes the lines between which reality one calls home are a little blurry. Alle turns her hand over and gives his a gentle squeeze.

Hell has a way of making people forget details.

“I hardly remembered anything that happened to me in that prison. I woke up back here and was so confused. Everything hurt – I felt what had happened, but I didn’t know the how. And my parents were dead and – ” she cuts herself off, like she’s going to say something she doesn’t want to speak aloud. “My parents were dead; I didn’t give a damn about anything.”

Jack notices her eyes glaze over; the drugs, however expired and ineffective, have started to kick in. If he were anyone else listening to anyone else, he’d write off her words as drug-induced ramblings. But the good drugs have a way of bringing truth to the surface.

She goes silent for a while and Jack thinks she’s forgotten about him.

Alle pulls her hand out of his and rubs at her eyes. “I just…I never wanted to remember what happened to me. And now I remember everything. I don’t regret it, but.” She sniffles and reaches for the cup of water on the table. It’s too far away so Jack hands it to her. When she’s done, he puts it back within reach. “Since I made it back two years ago, I’ve wanted so much to just reset everything. Without a plan, without a weapon, reset it all.” She swallows. “Screw it and hope it turns out differently.” Her voice, thick with unshed grief, catches on hope.

In that moment, Jack realizes why he’s here. Underneath the slightly-stoned gaze, and underneath Sam’s nose and his jawline, and underneath all the brilliance is a woman who wants nothing more than to wake up soon. Though they both know this nightmare is very real, the antidote is the same.

He did the same thing for Charlie.

“Scoot over.” Jack waits for her to make room before sitting beside her on the tiny hospital bed. He wraps his arm around her shoulders and she instantly curls into him, almost climbing into his lap. He hugs her tightly, hoping it provides at least some amount of comfort.

Her usual smile and energy, the smirk on her lips and ripple of her muscles as she puts a bored airman through his paces, her determination as she butts heads with a Lieutenant General, it’s all gone as she settles against him. Tonight, she isn’t the savior of the world. She’s just sad and scared.

Jack gently strokes her blonde hair and he’s reminded of another woman who all too often has to shoulder the world’s hope.

***

Alle is livid when she finds out McLaggen recorded it. Two hours of her worst memories, captured on video.

She stands still in the lab and seethes, shoulders and chest heaving in fury. After a few moments, she clenches her fists and storms toward his office.

Sam’s hot on her heels. She’s angry too and they aren’t even her memories. And, as much as Sam privately thinks he might deserve it, she also thinks it might be a good idea to make sure Alle doesn’t take a swing at the general.

Alle screams at him. Actually screams at a general. She’s a civilian, but still. McLaggen sits behind his desk, silent, and takes it all. After five minutes, even though Alle shows no signs of stopping, he stands and opens his arms. Alle holds still for a split second, glaring, but then rushes into his hug, sobbing.

Sam leaves, shutting the door behind her. McLaggen might deserve a solid right hook to his jaw, but Alle needs the hug more.

Alle’s still upset about the recording for a few days, even though McLaggen had a point and it is helpful being able to rewatch sections of it. She copies the file to a flash drive and forbids anyone from watching it without her: Sam suspects less because Alle wants to see it so many times and more so Alle can control what other people see. After a week, they’ve put together an index with clickable time stamps.

Every so often, Alle will miss the end on time and Sam will catch brief images of something horrible before Alle turns it off. Sam averts her eyes and pretends she didn’t notice the stress positions. Or the whip.

They work in silence in their lab; Alle’s back to loud music in her headphones.

There’s a separate time stamp index, written in Alle’s precise and tiny writing on a pastel pink Post-It. There are far fewer entries on this one, but there’s a smiley face drawn in the corner. Sam comes in one morning to see Alle close out of the video, but not before Sam glimpses the time at the bottom of the screen: it’s in one of the smiley face ranges.

“You want to talk about it?” Sam asks after two weeks, tired of ignoring the fact that between ten seconds of navigation system and eighteen seconds of hyperdrive controls is three and a half minutes of someone using Alle as a personal punching bag. She’s been trying very hard not to ask that question, but Alle hasn’t made eye contact with her in three days.

Alle stiffens. “No.”

Sam sighs, looks at the ceiling, and counts to ten. “Look. I’m not your mom. I don’t pretend to be. I don’t know anything about her and I don’t really know anything about you or what you went through. But I do know that the way to deal with all of that,” she points at the monitor, frozen on a closeup of a control panel, “is by telling someone something. Anything. Not by staying awake for days and being so tired you can’t think straight.”

It’s been weird pointing out errors in Alle’s math. She’s had to do that a lot, lately. Checking for a stray variable is one thing; finding pages of theory based on an equation with its parentheses missing is a whole different story.  

Alle drops her pencil on her desk. “Really.” She spins around in her stool. “I suppose you’ve been captured by aliens before,” she says, almost mocking, “been through the post-mission therapy a couple times and gotten a clean bill of health, so you know your way around it. Let me ask you this, Major: how many of your parents were killed in front of you while you were there?”

Sam clenches her jaw but stays silent.

“Everyone’s on me to talk about it,” she snaps. “Surprise, I’ve always remembered in crystal fucking technicolor watching them kill my parents. It’s the only thing I’ve remembered for two years.” Her voice catches in her throat, hard, but she pushes past it. “It’s not new.” Tears fall freely and Alle frantically wipes at her cheeks. “I didn’t want to talk about it then and I sure as hell don’t want to talk about it now that I remember everything else.”

She rips the drive out of the computer and throws it at Sam, who barely catches it before it skitters to the floor. “You can watch it yourself if you care so much.” Alle slides off her stool and makes it to the door before taking off in a full sprint out of sight.

Sam turns the tiny green drive over in her hands. She gets up and shuts the door, sliding the deadbolt into place so she isn’t disturbed. Alle’s certainly not coming back today and Sam would bet good money she won’t see her for a few days.

With a deep breath, she pushes the drive back into place and clicks on the file. She watches the entire two hours and ten minutes without stopping. She only throws up twice, but she cries so much in parts that her head hurts.

It takes her six hours to edit the video into three parts: useful, bad, and happy. She emails the bad to General McLaggen before permanently deleting it, figuring someone should still have access to it in case there’s valuable intel amidst the torture. She saves the useful to the password-protected science network drive and attaches a readme file with a new time stamp index. And she saves the happy to a fresh portable drive.

Before leaving, she tidies up Alle’s station for her: Alle’s usually meticulous, but the last few weeks have been distracted and cluttered. This way, she can come back to calm and organized.

With the drive in her pocket, Sam turns out the lights. She wants so badly to find Alle right now and give her a tight hug. But, friendship be damned, the important title she holds tonight is Not Alle’s Mother. So instead, she goes in search of Zach.

***

Jack wakes instantly when Sam lifts the covers and crawls in next to him. He raises his arm, letting her cuddle in close.

“You missed dinner,” he whispers.

Sam nods, digging her way underneath the warm blankets. She’s cold, and not just because it’s mid-February and the desert is freezing at night. “I know.” After she found Zach and handed him the drive for Alle, she made herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She doesn’t remember eating it, but her stomach isn’t growling.

“Everything okay?” he kisses her temple.

She closes her eyes and listens to him breathe. She’d thought the images of pain and torture would stick with her. They have, and they’re horrible, but the moments that really haunt her are those of a blonde woman and a grey-haired man, laughing and happy and so clearly in love with each other. Their care and love for Alle was so clear during every childhood memory – Sam sitting on the bathroom floor with a way-too-skinny teenage Alle, playing gin late into the night; Jack cheering loudly at a rainy tee-ball game when Alle tripped and slid her way into home plate, grinning up at him with a face full of mud. Pride filled their faces at every milestone.

Tears stung at her eyes when she watched Sam and Jack dance at his official retirement party. Her head rested against the four stars on his shoulder as they effortlessly glided around the room and their lips met as the music came to a close. They didn’t deserve the ending they got.

Watching herself and Jack die had been unpleasant, but she’d been prepared for that.

She had not been prepared for a younger Jack, bloody and dirty, refusing to let go of his small daughter who’d snuck through security to meet him at the gate. There wasn’t enough detail in that memory to figure out what mission had gone so pear-shaped, but Alle, probably around seven, was a beacon of hope in the aftermath. Jack clung to her like a lifeboat.

Jack nudges her shoulder when her silence lingers.

“I love you,” Sam whispers, eyes still closed. It’s probably not the night for that particular declaration; she feels she should save it for a moment when she isn’t so raw and can really enjoy it. But she needs him to know. Now. She loves him, desperately. She thinks she always has; being here has just allowed her to love him out loud.

He brushes his lips against her forehead. “I love you, too.”

At some point, they should talk about it. There are rules and regulations and questions about what happens when they get home, but that’s not a conversation for tonight. She loves Jack, and Jack loves her in return. That’s enough. They don’t need a plan for it all tonight.

“I watched the recording of Alle’s memories,” she says softly. “All of it.” Tears well up in her eyes. There was so much bad in those memories, but also memories so good they ached to watch. Her emotions are a mess of contradictions and she isn’t sure what exactly is making her cry. Probably everything.

“That bad?” he asks.

Nodding, Sam wipes away tears. “Yeah.”

“C’mere,” he says, rolling onto his back. He takes her with him, wrapping both strong arms around her as she quietly cries into his chest.

***

Alle misses breakfast. It’s common enough that it doesn’t strike anyone as weird.

But when the overnight gate watch comes in, they have other news.

“She took out three guys and then pointed a gun at me, General. What did you want me to do?” Major Wentworth says.

“Where did she go?”

“Hebridan, sir.”

“At least the wormhole’s clean,” McLaggen says. “What the hell is she doing there?”

“I don’t think Hebridan was her final stop, sir. The Serrakin were wiped out years ago; the planet’s a wasteland.”

“Then where the hell did she go?”

Nobody has an answer.

Chapter Text

AREA 51 PUBLIC RECORD MEMOS 2/15/39

TO: Supply teams
FROM: Col. Troy Harper
SUBJECT: Next town trip

11 volunteers needed. 2/20/39. Let me know if you’re interested. -T

TO: Area 51 military personnel
FROM: Lt. Col. Joanie Murdock
SUBJECT: Hand-to-Hand Combat Recertification 

Annual hand-to-hand recertification is, well, at hand. Anyone needing recert must join one of the following sessions:

2/17 @ 0800 led by Maj. Micah Rabinowitz
2/18 @ 1400 led by Col. Jack O’Neill
2/19 @ 1630 led by Maj. Andrew Wentworth
2/20 @ 1100 led by Lt. Col. Joanie Murdock
2/21 @ 1330 led by Capt. Caroline Kennedy

-JM

“Are you worried?” Jack liberates the Costco’s shelf of several 36-packs of toilet paper.

“About Alle? No. Heads up.” From three shelves up, Hawthorne drops two absurdly-large packs of paper towels into the cart.  “How many of these did we need?”

Jack checks the list. “Five. She’s been gone for over a week.” And, hell, he’s worried.

Three more packs fall into the cart and then Hawthorne climbs down. “She’s on Dakara,” he says, “with Teal’c.”

“How do you know?”

Hawthorne looks at him like he’s an idiot. “She told me. And then sent a message when she got there.”

They go down the next aisle for cleaning supplies. “Good you know where she is,” Jack says. He feels a little bit of relief himself, knowing. If Teal’c’s there, it’s a safe bet it’s friendly. He wonders where Daniel is in this reality.

“Yeah,” Hawthorne nods absently. “We really need to move this stuff down,” he mutters upon seeing all the easy-access shelves empty. He starts to climb again. “She’s not in the best headspace after the whole memory thing,” he admits. “Catch. I don’t just want to drop these on you,” he says after reaching the dish soap. “Teal’c’s always been able to straighten her out.”

Jack nods and catches every bottle Hawthorne drops; he’s proud of that. There’s an underlying note of concern in Hawthorne’s voice: worry about Alle that she needed to leave in first place and maybe that her offworld information is two days too old for the trip back. Trauma’s a bitch to live with even when it isn’t yours. “You should probably just stay up there,” he says, looking at the rest of the aisle. It’s painfully lacking in stock within arm’s reach.

Chuckling, Hawthorne agrees. “Not the weirdest thing I’ve done for this job.”

They silently add boxes of garbage bags and several packs of reusable containers to the cart.

“Not like my opinion matters,” Jack says once Hawthorne’s back on solid ground, “but you and Alle are good together.” He’s been thinking about that for a while. And the fact that Hawthorne let her go to Dakara alone, given the state of the galaxy and what happened last time she used the gate system, speaks to an enormous amount of trust and understanding.

“Our Jack said the same thing,” Hawthorne says. He shakes his head, smiling wide. “Love that woman with all my heart.”

Jack thought he understood that feeling with Sara, and maybe he did, but god. Sam is like breathing when he didn’t even know he was drowning. “Good,” he clasps the other man on the shoulder. “That’s how it should be.”

***

A month after the warship, someone finally comes to the conclusion that more bodies on duty is better than less and opens the duty roster to those from an alternate reality. Jack’s one of the first to sign up for gate duty. He spends all day in the sand and scrubby plants guarding the gate. And then he comes home – weird to think of things here as home, but it’s home enough for now – to Sam.

And Sam, well. Sam’s the real home, he thinks.

***

“Look at this,” Sam says excitedly, pushing the huge R&D book across the lab table at Jack. She’s been in the base library again and, in her defense, had actually been looking for something specific to reality phasing. She’d just gotten distracted. And then Jack came by to see if she wanted a snack and now she’s distracting him with it, too.

“What am I looking at?” Jack squints at the page, full of schematics for something humanoid and robotic.

“They have mechs,” Sam grins. “Most of them are AI-controlled. Actual artificial intelligence ground units.”

Jack’s eyebrows rise. “I knew they’d eventually replace us all with robots.”

Sam smiles wryly. “They use these for missions humans can’t go on. Toxic atmosphere, extreme temperatures, that one Stargate that was inside a volcano – ”

“Still don’t understand why the Ancients put one there.”

Sam doesn’t either. “Think about it. One in twenty planets is too dangerous for human exploration, yet there has to be a reason for a Stargate to be there. We could actually explore those beyond MALP range.”

“Reading ahead, are we?” he teases.

Sam shrugs. “Can’t hurt, can it?”  

It’s not like copying someone else’s homework, Sam’s told herself. Their own R&D is years behind designing something like a viable Viper mech. Their manufacturing units are decades away from producing a Condor mobile starbase or Harrier heavy warship. She hasn’t heard of half the materials composing a Raptor hull, has even less an idea where to find them. And the final R&D manual for Boomslang mechs – a project that was scuttled after repeatedly failing QA testing – is over 3,000 pages long.

It’s not copying someone else’s homework. And it’s not reading ahead, because this isn’t her reality she’s ahead in.

She’ll run the time travel logic past Alle first, but Sam’s planning on asking for a few things if she’s in the clear. Her blueprint wishlist is two pages long. She’s not leaving a treasure trove of technology behind if she can avoid it.

She realizes Jack is staring at her. “What?”

“Nothing,” he says with a soft smirk.

“Mmhm,” she agrees playfully. “You were thinking of robot armies, weren’t you?”

“Maybe.”

***

TO: Biochemistry
FROM: Astrophysics
DATE: 2/25/39
SUBJECT: Final warning.

Once we figure out how you made all the stuff fall off our walls, it’s all over for you.

Sam’s on her way to lunch when she hears shouting coming from the base’s front entrance. She detours toward the voices.

“My apologies for not asking for permission beforehand.” Alle crosses her arms and stares defiantly up at General McLaggen. She doesn’t sound, or look, apologetic at all, but the dark circles under her eyes aren’t quite so cavernous.

Sam’s relieved to see her back, safe and sound.

“You shouldn’t have gone at all, Alle,” he says. “You didn’t know if new nets had appeared, if the Rak’har had taken Dakara, any number of nightmare scenarios.”

“I’m not an idiot, General,” Alle interrupts. “And I know you know I’m not an idiot so I don’t appreciate you treating me like one.”

Sam’s eyebrows shoot up. Yelling at him in private was one thing: he’d just recorded two hours of her worst memories. But no general Sam knows would put up with that from anyone in public, no matter how much war they’d been through together. General McLaggen does not disappoint.

“Doctor Carter-O’Neill.” The weight of all three stars stands behind his tone.

There’s a slight straightening to Alle’s spine at the use of her title and last name. Whether it’s respect or a dare, Sam isn’t sure. She’s glad Alle’s found her strength again, but if she’s about to challenge General McLaggen, she should probably not do it in the entryway. There’s anger and then there’s stupid.

“We would all be dead in the water if something happened to you. Go to Utah next time you need time off. Hell, go back to Chile.”

Sam jumps, startled, when Jack places his hand on her shoulder.

“How long has this been going on?” he whispers in her ear.

She shakes her head. “I just got here.”

Alle’s posture softens slightly. Still ramrod straight and furious, but a little less ready to get into a fistfight. “I told you where I was going; it’s not my fault you didn’t see the note immediately. I checked in once I got there and coordinated with the base the entire trip home. Can we finish this conversation somewhere else?” She gestures to the people around.

“My office,” McLaggen orders.

Alle nods once and turns, walking away to his office.

McLaggen looks at the crowd that’s gathered. “You all have other things to do, I’m sure.” He follows Alle.

***

The next morning, when Alle doesn’t arrive in the lab after a few hours, Sam resigns herself to working alone again. She’s put on an indie folk playlist of Alle’s to fill the silence. It’s nice. Sam thinks she’s going to need to install speakers in her lab when she gets home, or invest in a really good set of headphones.

She’s in the middle of setting up a diagnostic on the warship’s engine – another team is sweeping the phasing component today, now that they know how to turn it on – when Alle’s chair squeaks. Sam looks up.

“Hi,” Alle says. She’s uncharacteristically in jeans, sneakers, and a hoodie. Though her hair is piled into a messy topknot, her eyeliner is still immaculate.

Sam smiles. “Hi.”

Alle plays with the sleeves of her golden yellow hoodie. “I owe you an apology,” she says suddenly.

“You don’t.”

“Yeah,” Alle nods, “I do.” She rotates her left shoulder and sighs. “I’m sorry I told you to watch the video.”

Sam would like to say that she’s seen worse but, truth is, she hasn’t. “I’m sorry you went through that.”

Alle nods again and bites her lip. “Thanks for the file. It helps.”

Splicing together the happy memories had done wonders to lift Sam’s mood after watching the entire recording. She’s glad it did at least a little of the same for Alle. “You’re welcome.”

With a deep sigh, Alle shrinks into her hoodie and looks up at the ceiling for a moment. “And I’m sorry I snapped at you like that.” She looks back at Sam. “You were trying to help and I was kind of a jerk.”

Sam softly shakes her head. “Alle, you’ve been through something terrible. You don’t need to apologize for anything.”

Alle sniffles and her eyes shine, but no tears fall this time. “Turns out I did need to talk about it.” She lets out a little self-deprecating laugh.

“Did Teal’c help?” Talking to Teal’c has always helped Sam. She misses him.

“Yeah. A lot.” Alle slides off her stool and pauses. “Can I, uhm. Can I give you a hug?”

Smiling, Sam nods. “Yeah.” She’s wanted to give Alle a hug for months; it never occurred to her that the feeling might be mutual.

Alle hugs fiercely. She lifts up on her toes to wrap her arms around Sam’s shoulders, enveloping her in one of the warmest, kindest hugs Sam’s ever received. Sam hugs back just the same.

***

Sam’s reading in bed while waiting for Jack to finish up in the bathroom. “Alle hugged me today,” she says as Jack climbs into the bed beside her.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She puts her tablet – borrowed from the base – away.

Jack settles his arm around her shoulder and kisses her cheek. “And how do we feel about that?”

“Good,” she says after a moment. “I don’t know, it’s weird, right? She’s our kid, but due to the time travel she’s only a couple years younger than I am. And I’m glad we’re friends. It’s just…”

“Weird,” Jack finishes for her.

“Yeah.” They’ve never really talked about Alle as Not Their Daughter. It’s easy to see her as someone who avoided her, then someone who was nice, and finally someone who’s her friend. But sometimes, especially after watching Alle’s recorded memories and seeing a Samantha Carter and Jack O’Neill as Alle’s parents, she now trips over who Alle really is and her brain shorts out for a moment.

“How’s she doing?”

“Better,” Sam says. Even from their brief interaction today in their lab, Sam could tell that Alle had, at the very least, finally slept.

“Good,” Jack says.

As they turn out lights and settle in for bed, Sam muses on Jack’s tone. There’s so much care in his voice, held back just a step from becoming truly paternal. Sam smiles as she tucks herself in his arms. If this thing between them survives their trip home, maybe in a few years she’d like to see what that care sounds like unshackled.

***

“It’s ello,” Alle says the next morning when Sam comes in. There are two empty tea mugs by the cabinet and she’s working on a third. By the scent of the steam, this one’s at least herbal.

“Ello?”

“Element omega. Nguyen’s team found residue in the phase core. In small amounts, combustion creates a temporal distortion that allows for time travel. Larger amounts cause singularities that violate basic conservation laws.”

Sam raises an eyebrow. “How?” She’d read about element omega in the base library, but never found an explanation for that piece.

“We don’t know,” Alle admits. She takes a sip of her tea. “Once the reaction stops, the singularity no longer has a power source. Without additional element omega, it’s too weak to sustain itself so it destabilizes and collapses. It should eject everything it consumed, but it doesn’t. But,” Alle holds up a finger. “That’s not the interesting thing.”

As Alle grins and calls up pictures and video on her computer, Sam feels a very familiar shiver of excitement.

“This is what ello singularities look like.”

Sam studies the anomaly. The space it occupies shifts with slight variations, like viewing something through a rotating kaleidoscope. “That looks familiar.”

“Yep.” Alle brings up video of the Rak’har warship. The shifting pattern is identical. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. And I don’t know how they’re doing it. Or how they’ve incorporated the reality piece. But they’re using element omega to intentionally create a singularity inside their ship.”

“Hang on,” Sam says, recalling an article she read months ago, before she started working with Alle. She opens her notebook and flips back through her notes from early summer. “Wasn’t there a theory that ello singularities had different properties to regular black holes? And despite not being particularly strong, they could open up other dimensions besides time?”

Alle stares at her. “Did you read the entire base library?”

“Only the interesting parts.” It was all interesting, but she could actually understand the physics journals. Xenobotany is beyond her. “Boyd wrote the article,” Sam says, finally finding her notes. The theory’s highlighted: if ello singularities can cause shifts in time, might they also cause shifts in other dimensions such as reality?

“I remember that,” Alle muses. “He was working on it right after the Pentagon shut me down so I was kind of mad at anything ello-related, but Boyd kept calling me about it anyway. Usually at three in the morning.”

“You’re referenced in it,” Sam says. Alle’s not credited as anything hefty like co-author, but some of her research is quoted and she’s listed in the thank you section.

“That was nice of him,” Alle admits. “Okay, so we’ve got element omega for sure, which is always a bit of a nightmare, and Boyd’s bonkers alternate reality theory?”

Sam blinks. No matter how excited she is for how the day turns out, some things require food. “I think I need breakfast, first.”

“Me too.”

***

“I hate that this makes sense.”

“Right?”

“I really hate that this makes sense.”

“Okay, you can’t just keep repeating that. It was your theory; how do we test it?”

Boyd stares at Alle. “You’re the experimental scientist.”

“It’s your theory! You’re telling me you came up with this batshit idea and never anticipated testing it?”

“I didn’t think anyone was dumb enough to want to! We’re talking ello singularities here; those aren’t exactly the safest things to generate.”

Sam wonders if this is what she and Rodney McKay sound like.

“Okay.” Alle shakes her head. “We could send a MALP through. Worst that happens is we lose a MALP, and at this point who cares.”

Boyd frowns. “How are you going to generate an ello singularity in the middle of the desert?”

“Same way I did it in the lab.”

Sam snorts. When the other two look at her, she covers it into a halfway-believable cough.

He huffs and rolls his eyes. “I mean, you need enough ello to create a large enough reaction.”

“We’re at Area 51,” Alle points out. “There’s gotta be some in a box in the basement. Sam, can you…?”

“On it.” Sam calls up the base inventory. “Five crates. And seven MALPs, though they’re all either decommissioned or were still in development.”

“I’ll take a decommissioned one. At least we know those work.”

“I’ve been working on the modular reality identifier for the past few months. It’s largely done,” Boyd says, pointing to a device on the counter. “Just need to download Donovan’s latest index.”

It’s Alle’s turn to roll her eyes. “Oh, now he’s an experimentalist.”

Boyd ignores that. “So when do we do this very stupid thing?”

The speed of SGC science, regardless of reality and timeline, never ceases to amaze Sam. They’ve gone from “untested wild theory” to “let’s try ripping a hole in reality” and it isn’t even lunchtime. She’s missed this kind of discovery, the rush of adrenaline from getting one step closer to the solution. And if this works, she’s one step closer to getting home. Finally.

“It’ll take me a few hours to do the reaction calculations and get it set up,” Alle says. “And we should…not do this inside: we don’t have the right containment. And someone should probably tell McLaggen.”

Boyd and Alle stare at each other. After a brief moment, they silently hold out their hands and play Rock, Paper, Scissors. Boyd throws Paper and Alle throws Scissors.

Boyd sighs, heavily. “Fine. 5:30 in the southwest parking lot.”

***

They’re cuddling on the couch later that night – Sam reviewing MALP data and Jack doing a crossword incorrectly – when Jack breaks the silence. “Did I hear correctly? You and Alle created a black hole in a parking lot?”

Sam bursts out laughing. Phrased that way, it certainly sounds absurd. Hell, it was absurd. And really, really cool. God, she loves science. “Technically, yes.”

“…why?”

She shifts so she can look at him straight on. “You know that’s the second most dangerous question to ask me after how,” she teases.

He gently pokes her in the side. “Seriously. Why?”

“To test what sounded like an absolutely insane theory, but what ended up being right.”

Jack gestures for her to continue.

“See, normally, when black holes collapse, they eject all the matter they consumed, usually in the form of boiling hot liquid plasma. It’s a fundamental law of the universe that matter cannot be created or destroyed, so when the black hole collapses, everything that got sucked into it has to go somewhere. Singularities created by large element omega reactions don’t eject anything, they just destabilize and collapse in on themselves. And…” she trails off. Jack’s staring at her with a slightly starry look in his eyes. “Do you even want to know any of this?”

He tugs her back to him, resting her against his chest. He puts the crossword away. “I like hearing you talk about things you’re excited about.”

Sam blushes. Sometimes he cuts her off, usually when there’s something urgent and there isn’t time for a full explanation. But she’s always liked when he wandered into her lab and just listened her ramble or watched her work. She’d thought it was because he was bored and avoiding paperwork. She smiles at the idea that it may have been something else all along.

“Okay,” she says, “but you asked for it.”

Jack nods. “I am asking you to talk about things I have no hope of grasping.” He kisses her cheek and holds her a little tighter.

Sam’s smile grows and she threads her fingers through his. “So the question is, where did all that matter go? If it can’t be destroyed, it has to go somewhere. Alle was researching that before the Pentagon cut off her funding. Then Boyd had this theory that ello singularities actually connected different realities. And when it collapsed, everything it took in got ejected into a random reality.”

“Wouldn’t someone have noticed a giant explosion of energy?”

“On a planet? Probably. Just out in the universe? Probably not. Space is pretty big. But our test with the MALP indicated that all matter leaves the singularity in the same state that it entered. It’s similar to a Stargate wormhole, just between realities and time.”

“Hang on. You created a black hole in a parking lot and then drove a MALP through it?”

“Yep!” Sam grins.

“Carter, you’re incredible.”

She blushes harder. “Don’t worry, it’s not still there. Maybe avoid that parking lot, though.”

“That’s…concerning. Still incredible, though.”

***

A few days later, Sam’s on their couch trying to focus. But Jack’s fingers dancing up her leg make it awfully hard. She suspects that’s the point, but she really does want to finish this analysis tonight. She closes her laptop and stands.

Jack pouts. 

“Later,” she promises with a smile, kissing him before tucking her laptop and notebook under her arm and leaving for the mess.

She hears laughter before she reaches the open doors and hesitates for a moment. She’d wanted silence, but company might help. She heads over to the table occupied by Alle, Zach, Kate, Troy, and Edward. They’re all several beers deep, and three laptops sit on the table. Alle’s legs rest in Zach’s lap and she’s playing a game on her tablet.

“Can I join you?” Sam asks.

“Sure,” Kate says, scooting over to make room.

“I hate inventory,” Troy says in a slight sing-song voice. He consults a notepad next to him, covered in scribbled pen, and changes a few numbers on his screen.

“McLaggen wants monthly inventory reports; misery loves company,” Kate explains, gesturing to Troy and Edward. “But I don’t know why these two are here,” she points to Alle and Zach.

“Booze, mostly,” Alle says, taking a drink. She frowns at Sam setting up to work. “Are you still working?”

“I want to finish the containment reading analysis so Mira and Liz can start reconstruction tomorrow.”

Zach looks at Alle. “She’s worse than you. How is she worse than you? No one is worse than you.”

“Because I lost the coin toss and numbers started looking fake after ten hours. So, booze and no homework for me.”

Sam smiles. There really was a coin toss the other day once they’d made a list of everything. After she finishes this analysis, next up on Sam’s list is how to stop an ongoing ello reaction remotely without actually ripping a permanent hole in reality. She’s both looking forward to and dreading that one. But at least she doesn’t have Alle’s headache: reverse-engineering how to sustain a singularity without it growing so big it eats the ship.

“You gave up on numbers?” Troy says with mock horror. He gets up for another beer.

Alle reaches forward to her ankle resting on Zach’s thighs. She pulls out a small dart gun from a holster hidden underneath her jeans. Calmly, she points it at Troy. She primes it, closes her right eye, aims, and shoots him square in the back of the head from ten yards away. The foam dart bounces to the ground.

Sam raises her eyebrows, impressed.

Troy rubs the back of his head. He turns around.

Alle grins. She spins the small blaster around her finger and pretends to blow smoke off the barrel.

“I hate you,” he says without any malice as he picks up the dart. He returns to the table with a round of beer for everyone, Sam included. Before sitting down, he pulls an index card out from his back pocket and slaps it into Alle’s waiting palm.

“Thank you.” Alle hands Kate the card with Troy’s name on it before looking at her new target.

“Who’s winning?” Zach asks as Kate pulls up the Assassins spreadsheet.

Sam’s curious, too. She got knocked out last week by Torrini.

Kate makes a few changes to the sheet. “Deck, followed by a three-way tie between Carter-O’Neill, Vincent, and Montgomery.”

Troy looks over at Alle. “Every year.”

She gives him an innocent look and shrugs.

“How long have you two been running this?” Sam asks.

“Four years,” Kate says. “Team Dart Wars in summer and fall. Solo Assassins in winter and spring. Turns out it’s pretty boring past the end of the world.” She looks at her own inventory sheet. “We’re about to be out of Band-Aids. Whoever’s making the shopping list, can you put those on there?”

Troy writes it down.

“Alright,” Edward says, laying down his pen after silently reviewing his own inventory. “We’re out of couscous. And we’re a couple months away from being out of flour.”

“Do we care?” Zach asks.

“About couscous? No. Flour? Very much so. We could do with any kind of pasta, too. We’re running a little low and no way can we make enough fresh to feed this many people, especially running out of flour.”

Troy presses his lips together, holding back a smile.

“Don’t,” Zach and Kate say at the same time.

“Have you considered trying harder?” He barely keeps a straight face for half a second.

Edward sighs heavily. “Can you shoot him again?” he asks Alle.

“Happily.” She does, hitting him in the chest.

Troy fakes his death with much melodrama, eventually sliding to the floor.

“Were you this annoying when we were on SG-1 together?” Alle wonders out loud as Troy sits back in his chair. “Or have you finally lost it?”

“He absolutely was that annoying,” Zach confirms. “Still probably gone a little off the rails, but he was pretty annoying.”

“That’s insubordination, Major,” Troy says jokingly.

Zach takes the blaster from Alle and shoots Troy again.

Sam lets the banter fade into the background and focuses on her laptop. They’re rounding in on a year here and still every day she’s amazed by the friendships and jokes that continue well past the end of the world. The lives that continue on past the end of the world. Area 51 is just a little enclave in the desert, but it’s the beating heart ensuring none of this hell ever happens. And, in spite of all the pain and grief and loss they’ve endured, they’ve made a life here.

A life that goes on.

Zach and Alle even finally got married back in January. It wasn’t planned. The desert night was crisp and clear, the full moon gleaming bright silver on a tapestry of glittering stars. Zach woke up General McLaggen at one in the morning to officiate.

Life has to go on. Sam thinks maybe that’s what she’ll take with her when they leave. Life has to go on, even when it seems like it should stop.

***

USAF ENCRYPTED MEETING INVITATION
TO: Adabi, Mira; Boyd, Simon; Carter, Samantha (Maj. USAF); Carter-O’Neill, Alexandra; Donovan, Jeff; Harper, Troy (Col. USAF); Nguyen, Elizabeth; Vazquez, Stephani
DATE: 3/18/39 @ 1030
FROM: McLaggen, Dean (Lt. Gen. USAF)
SUBJECT: Update

1030, second floor lounge. Let’s talk about your plan.

“Thanks to Dr. Adabi, Dr. Nguyen, and Major Carter, we have a way to interrupt the element omega reaction. What we don’t have right now is a delivery system.” Alle gestures to the whiteboard panel with PROBLEM #1 and pizza delivery written on it. “We have plenty of ideas,” she points to the list below pizza delivery, hastily re-written to be legible right before the meeting started. “We’ve decided to use surface-to-air launchers. Major Carter and I will begin work on that next week. ETA maybe a month or two depending on the final method we choose. Boyd,” she gestures for him to take over.

“Right. Problem Number Two,” he points at the second whiteboard panel, with no place like home written underneath PROBLEM #2, “is getting everyone home. Dr. Donovan and I have done enough testing that we’re now confident that opening an ello singularity and walking through will send people to a different reality and time. Incidentally, we think that’s how the nets work, too: they’re collapsed singularities.”

General McLaggen holds up a hand to stop him. “Are you telling me we had the solution all along? We’ve known about element omega for fifteen years, why are we just now learning this?”

Alle leans forward in her seat. “Who do you know who’s willing to walk into a black hole?”

McLaggen makes a motion for Boyd to carry on.

“We can accurately pinpoint the time using standard element omega time travel equations. What we’re still working on is a way to dial the right reality. Our going theory is that we can use control crystals from the Ancients’ quantum mirror as sort of a dialing device…once we find a way to connect it that doesn’t end in either actual black holes or explosions, that is. ETA…hopefully three months. And rounding us out is Colonel Harper.”

Harper stands up by the third panel – PROBLEM #3 and please leave. “And finally, and arguably the most important because why bother with any of the rest of it if we can’t do this, is how the hell do we prevent the Rak’har from ever getting a foothold in the galaxy in the first place. Hawthorne, Murdock and I have spent the past couple weeks tracing Rak’har incident records from the last seven years. We’re pretty sure we need to get the Asgard involved.”

“Why?”

“The Jacob Carter,” Sam says instinctively, though the question was directed at Harper. Both men look at her. “Sorry, sirs.”

Harper gestures for her to continue.

The only reason the incident report sticks out in her memory is because she was touched the Asgard named a ship after her father. “The Jacob Carter was the most advanced ship in the galaxy. The Rak’har attacked it and the Asgard jumped into hyperspace. If a ship that advanced left instead of fighting them, they’d feel emboldened to continue.”

“Bingo,” he says. “Our reset plan is to send a note back to 2031 to Carter-O’Neill with instructions. And if we can convince the Asgard now to keep the Jacob Carter in the galaxy back in 2031, I think we’ll all have a fighting chance. They’ll only accept a message or exclusion from their own people, so we need to have them on board beforehand. Provided we get a weapon working, we can give them all the details to build their own.”

“ETA?” McLaggen asks.

“We have a message off to the Asgard High Council now, sir. Alle’s on deck whenever they respond.”

The meeting continues for another hour and Sam catches Alle afterward. “Why’d they tap you to talk to the High Council?”

“Thor’s kind of my godfather,” she says, like that’s a totally normal statement. “And the High Council’s pretty picky about who they talk to. In lieu of my dad, I’m the one Thor’s most likely to listen to. You want to get lunch and talk about missile launchers?”

“Absolutely.”

***

They find Alle and Sam purely by luck. The note in their lab said In the workshop, but neglected to mention which one. The note was also still on the notepad and halfway hidden underneath a laptop. Jack makes a mental note to remind Sam about putting notes in obvious places.

“Do you,” Hawthorne side-steps a mess of cords. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

A wrench clanks as it bounces on the concrete. “Totally,” Alle says, hidden underneath the machine.

Something pops in a shower of cascading sparks. Alle swears, and then there’s the sound of someone shaking out an electrocuted finger. Or fingers. Possibly an entire hand.

Both men immediately swivel to look at Sam. She leans against the workshop’s counter, mug of tea in hand, and nods. The situation maybe doesn’t seem like it’s in control, but it is.

Alle’s hand appears, slapping around the concrete until she makes contact with the wrench, and then slides out of view again.

Jack squints. “Is that an Avenger launcher?” He hasn’t seen one of those off a truck in…ever, really.

“Yes,” Sam says, taking a sip of her tea. “We need a delivery system for the singularity neutralizer,” she explains, gesturing to a smaller, sleeker piece of equipment on the counter opposite her.

“We’re gonna weld it to a Starstreak,” Alle’s muffled voice says. “But we have to modify the launcher for the additional payload first.”

“Where did you even find Starstreaks?” Hawthorne asks. “And the launcher, for that matter.”

“We took a field trip to Creech this morning,” Sam says.

That explains why Jack didn’t see her at lunch.

Alle slides out from underneath the launcher. She has grease smudged across her forehead.

It’s been nearly a year and still Jack’s amazed at how much Alle looks like Sam sometimes.

Hawthorne offers Alle his hand and helps her up. “You have,” he gestures to his forehead. Alle brushes the back of her hand over her forehead and succeeds in smearing the grease even further.

Jack claps his hands together. “Well, we’re here to make sure you two eat something,” he says. “You’ve missed dinner four nights in a row working on…this. And we’re staging an intervention.”

Alle and Sam look at each other.

“Food is not the worst idea I’ve heard in the last two hours,” Sam says.

“Nope,” Alle agrees.

Jack smiles at Sam. She smiles back in a way that warms his whole body. He offers her his arm. “Shall we?”

Sam sets her tea down and slides her arm playfully through his. By the time they reach the door they’re just holding hands, but it’s no less of a thrill. Jack laces his fingers through hers and gives a squeeze. He’s not willing to give this up when they get home. Not at all.

Chapter Text

Gate duty is boring. Really boring.

Jack expected it to be boring, but not this boring. They’ve had a few people come through – and boy is Jack glad he doesn’t have to explain to them what just happened – and sometimes his shift lines up with a science team that spends a few hours dialing random addresses and writing down data, but largely it’s the same every damn day.

Sand, sun, small lizards, and nothing.

***

Jack’s on a night shift, sitting on the big rock next to the DHD with his weapon in his lap, when things stop being boring.

Captain Andrews squints into his night vision goggles. “What the hell?” He hands the goggles to Lieutenant Sloane beside him.

Harper intercepts the goggles and focuses on the bit of rock Andrews had been idly examining for coyotes. He clicks a button on the side a few times before handing the goggles up to Jack.

Jack stands and peers through the lenses. Several not-rocks sit a few klicks away amidst a collection of boulders and cacti. They’re trying hard to be rocks, but somehow miss the mark. “Odd.”

While booting up a laptop, Harper taps on his earpiece. “Alle, this is Gate. Come in please.”

“It’s the middle of the night,” Sloane says.

It isn’t. It’s barely 2330. But Jack understands why Sloane might feel that way. They’ve been out here since 1800 and the most exciting thing was needing to clear a scorpion off the DHD at 1815.

“She’s there, LT.” Harper taps on the keyboard and images from the goggles appear on screen. “Alle…”

“Sorry! I’m here. Needed tea. What’s up?”

“I’m sending you some pictures. Take a look.”

“Taking up photography?”

“No.” Harper glares into the distance.

“No need to get defensive, Troy. I think it’s good. You need a hobby. But you might want to wait until sunrise.” 

His glare hardens. “Sent.”

“Alright, give me a few.”

“Roger that.”

Not thirty seconds go by before “Oh, shit,” crackles over.

“I know my lighting needs some work, but…”

“Shut up. I’m coming out there.”

Jack blinks because suddenly Alle is standing right in front of him and he could’ve sworn it was a thirty-minute hike from the base. “Hi.” He tilts his head in confusion.

“K’Taaran personal transporter,” she explains, showing him a black and gold cybernetic wrist band.

He helps her up onto the rock and hands her the goggles. She plays with the focus and zoom. Color drains from her face, turning her cheeks bright white in the starlight. Jack places a steadying hand on her elbow. She leans into him and he feels her sway. “Come on,” he suggests, gently guiding her to sit down on the boulder.

She’s barely down before she has the goggles at her eyes again. “Four foot soldiers guarding three raiders. Raiders fit four; they wouldn’t send that many unless there are more soldiers around somewhere.” Her voice grows steadier as she talks. The canteen Harper shoves into her hand helps too when she takes a sip.

“I guess they missed their ship,” Jack says.

Alle looks sideways at him and squints back through the binocular lenses. “Wait. Two scouts on the ridges at three and eleven o’clock.” She twists around and scans the landscape behind them. Finding nothing threatening there, she turns back to the raiders in the distance. She eventually hands the goggles down to Harper. “I don’t know where the rest are, but it’s gotta be a scouting party.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Harper says. “All our satellites are down though – no way to check.”

“What’s that mean?” Andrews asks.

Harper thumps Andrews on the back of his head. “It means we have a problem.”

Alle rubs her hands over her face. “I’d bet someone all the quarters stuck in the laundry machines that there’s a bomber or two on its way. Andrews, you and Sloane stick around. Radio in if anything changes.” She punches a combination into the wristband and gestures for Jack and Harper to gather around her.

Jack feels a static charge against his skin the moment he steps close to her. The charge builds, but before it can spark – he’s back in the base, standing at the front entrance. Cool. He wonders if Sam can add one of the transport things to her wish list.

“I’m gonna wake some people up,” Alle says. “You should too,” she tells Harper. “You,” she pauses at Jack, “wake up your girlfriend. Tell her to meet me in the lab in ten minutes.”

And with that, she’s running down the hallway.

Jack watches her until she turns a corner out of sight. Most of the time she’s just Alle, a person with a unique personality all her own. Sometimes, Jack sees her mother’s influence come to the surface, both Sam and Dr. Carter. Sometimes, he sees her father’s influence – Jack’s.

Until now, he hadn’t seen General O’Neill’s.

***

Two hours and a whole lot of planning later, and Jack slides into the chair next to Sam in the briefing room. He bumps her shoulder with his. She smiles around a yawn. She smells faintly of engine grease and welding sparks.

General McLaggen rushes into the room. Jack thinks the man looks pretty good for being roused out of bed not thirty minutes earlier and briefed – according to a conversation overheard in the hallway – actually in his pajamas. If Jack were in his position, he’d probably wander in having missed a button on his shirt and with his shoes on the wrong feet. McLaggen looks at Sam and Alle before he even sits down.

“What do you have for us?”

Jack watches as Alle looks up from her laptop and pushes her hair out of her face. She doesn’t bother to mask the exhaustion in her eyes. He thinks there might be fear lurking there, too. But she takes a breath, pulls her blonde hair up into a messy bun, settles her glasses on her face, and every emotion except determination disappears.

“Best case scenario – our weapon works and locks them into phase with us. We start shooting and blow them off the face of the planet. Worst case scenario – our weapon doesn’t work. They shift, go home, and come back in a week with a lot of friends and destroy us. Which is…next week’s problem.”

“You don’t know if this thing works yet?” McLaggen raises his eyebrows.

“We’ve confirmed in a lab setting that it will destroy a singularity, sir,” Sam says. “We haven’t tested it on a Rak’har phasing chamber yet. We’re still fabricating one of our own.”

“We didn’t want to use the warship’s in case it sent a signal back to the hive,” Alle adds. “We’ve been burned by SOS and recall signals before.”

McLaggen nods. “Lab testing will have to do,” he says. “Harper, O’Neill, what’s our strategy?”

***

They’re in their quarters for a few minutes while they gear up, Jack for the second time that night.

“What do they look like?” Sam asks, pulling a black tank top over her head, covering the expanse of pale skin Jack had been admiring. She tucks the shirt into her pants before pulling her hair up into a ponytail.

Jack checks the sight on his P-90. They’ll hit the armory in ten minutes for ammunition and other consumables, and it’s boots on the ground fifteen minutes later by cover of darkness. He’s still mostly geared up from duty earlier, and easily got back into everything he’d taken off; he’ll happily take the few minutes of downtime to watch Sam gear up. It’s not quite as sexy as watching her take her clothes off, but as Sam secures her tac vest and starts on her thigh holster, Jack thinks there’s definitely something to a woman in uniform.

He overtly watches her strap her thigh holster in place – partly because it’s hot, but mostly to stall for time while he searches for the right words to describe what he saw in the starlight. Monsters, really. And not just because he knows what they’ve done. Real nightmare kind of stuff. Too many teeth.

What he actually says – because Sam knows even better than him that they’re monsters no matter what they look like – is, “Kind of like Predator and Alien mated.”

Sam’s face scrunches up. “Ew.” She slides her zat into place.

Jack makes a quiet noise of agreement. Both guns checked and clear, he cracks his neck. He taps his earpiece. “Hydra Leader to Hydra 2, sitrep. Over.”

“Hydra Leader, Hydra 2. Situation still FUBAR, but in a stable kind of way. Over,” Vincent’s voice comes through. Her team had been sent out to support Andrews and Sloane at the gate. He’ll join them shortly.

“Roger. Radio silence unless that changes. Over and out.”

Sam’s moved on to her own weapons, leaving jacket and boots for last. “It’s weird going into this without you as my CO, you know.”

Jack does. It’s strange for him, too. “We should probably get used to it, though,” he says, thinking about when they get back. No matter what path they choose when they get home, there is no way Sam stays in his chain of command if they’re together. And there is no way they’re going home not together.

Sam pauses, halfway to loading her sidearm, and looks at him a little funny. He smiles softly. Recognition dawns on her face and she smiles back. “Yeah,” she says. “I suppose we should.”

She finishes gearing up in companionable silence while Jack idly plays with a loose button on his jacket.

“Can you check my vest?” Sam asks. “Something’s not right.” She has her boots on, but her jacket’s still draped over the chair.

They have two minutes before the armory run.

Jack stands and she turns, presenting her back to him. He checks all the velcro connections, making sure to drag his fingers across any bit of bare skin he can find. Her neck, her shoulders, her arms. He’s never felt skin so soft as when he touched Sam for the first time. He re-fastens the velcro at her right hip and if his fingers linger, well, he’s just making sure her shirt’s smooth underneath the vest. “Better?” Jack asks, half a whisper.

“Yeah,” Sam says softly, leaning into his hands.

Her vest’s in the way, but he curls his hands around her hips. He leans forward, brushing his lips against the back of her neck. Sam’s breath catches in her throat.

His watch alarm goes off. Time’s up.

“We should…armory,” Jack says, reluctantly.

“Yeah,” Sam says, taking a step away from him. She turns to face him as she shrugs her jacket on. “Later, though,” she smiles.

“Definitely,” Jack agrees and steals a kiss.

***

Jack runs low toward the cliff line, hiding in the deep dark of the new moon. He lies flat on his stomach next to Lieutenant Colonel Vincent. She’s in full military battle gear, no concert tee to be found, looking through her rifle’s scope at the original scouting party. It’s grown.

“Six raiders, one bomber,” she reports in a hushed voice, though she gave him an updated sitrep while he was on his way out here. “Ten bogies on foot standing guard.”

“Can you take any of them out?”

“I can take them all out,” she says confidently. “But there are some still in the ships and I think they’re gonna notice ten bodies down, sir.”

He nods. “Who else we got out here?”

“Reunited SG-4, plus 6819’s SG-3 and 7241’s SG-7. Snipers on that ridge,” she points opposite her. “Shock troopers along the rock line. And commandos waiting at the entrance,” she gestures to a small cluster of rocks. “Ready on your order.”

Jack nods. Some of the terminology is a little different than he’s used to, but he gets the drift. “Hold position until we have confirmation.”

“Roger that.” She relays his order into Hydra’s comms, then settles comfortably on the hard ground.

He cycles through comm channels until he finds the private one Sam set up for them. “How we doing, Carter?”

“Almost ready, sir.”

“We’ve got plus one bomber over here.”

“I overheard Harper talking to McLaggen about that. Is yours shifting?”

He squints through his binoculars at the bomber. It has the same kaleidoscope effect as the warship did. “Yes. The ones on the ground aren’t, though.”

“Say again?”

“Ground troops look stable.”

“Interesting,” she says in that tone of voice.

“Define interesting.”

“Phase shifting might be isolated to the ships. We have two disruptor missiles; we’ll take out your bomber when this one’s down.”

“Got it.”

“Gotta go, sir.”

“See you on the other side, Sam.”

“You too, Jack.”

***

“Remind me again why there’s no Wagner?”

“General Hill banned it after the second Lucian Alliance fell.”

“Well, she’s not here, so I’m bringing it back. Anyone hacked a music app into their HUD?”

“I think everyone has hacked a music app into their HUD, Salsa. We just don’t want to listen to your shit.”

“Rude, Weaver.”

“And yet, true.”

“Sorry, man, looks like I left ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in my other cockpit.”

“Thanks, Titan. Way to contribute.”

“Anytime.”

“Hold tight, everyone; I’m working on it.”

“Maestro to the rescue.”

“As always.”

“What would you people do without me?”

“Fly with my own damn music.”

“Actually, I think we’d all be dead.”

“Protecting your girl’s honor, Slayer?”

“Oh, I can protect my own honor, Kermit. Shut up or you get no Wagner.”

“Well if you’re going to hold German opera over my head…”

“You know, when I was seven, I wanted to be a professional ballerina.”

“Regretting not following that career path, Maestro?”

“Little bit.”

“I think that’s enough chatter, folks.”

Sam stifles a chuckle when General McLaggen’s stern command elicits a chorus of yes sirs. She adjusts her communicator earpiece and checks the disruptor attachment one last time.

“It’s gonna hold,” Alle says, tightening her boot lace. She’s as geared up as Sam is.

“I know.” The welding was rushed, but Sam’s confident in her own skills. She rubs at her eye, forcing a grain of sand back out where it belongs. She tunes out last minute flight instructions to Raptor and Hawk pilots and climbs into the launcher’s gunner seat, snorting as the opening notes to “Ride of the Valkyries” starts playing over comms.

Beside her, Alle just rolls her eyes and minimizes the music app.

“Maestro, Meteor,” General McLaggen says. “You have a go. Launch Basilisk 1.”

Sam aims the turret controls for the middle of the bomber’s underbelly, where the singularity core should be. With her target locked, she takes deep breath and fires. She’s always nervous modifying someone else’s missile design.

First-stage burnout happens as it should, clearing the launch tube. The stage two rockets fire as planned and the missile accelerates to burnout velocity.

So far so good.

The missile splits into three as planned, and its invisible lasers paint the bomber for better targeting. It’s hard to see at this distance, but Sam knows it can’t have impacted yet. The singularity disruptor is welded to the middle unit and is designed to engage on impact. Even if it didn’t work, her sensors would indicate something.

It feels like the entire desert is holding its breath. 

Finally, after a few seconds that feel like hours, the missile impacts in a plume of blue smoke. Sam breathes. She calls up her diagnostic array and Alle does the same. “Come on,” Sam urges her laptop, tapping her finger impatiently against the casing.

All the diagnostics come back at once. Sam’s eyes widen. She glances up at the bomber, just to be sure. It’s solid and still, though beginning a controlled descent. She looks over at Alle. “You want to do the honors?”

Alle grins. She clicks into global comms. 

“Ladies and gentlemen and folks who don’t fit the gender binary, this is Maestro and Meteor. We have confirmation. Bogies are stuck here. Good hunting.” 

“Ground and air teams, weapons free,” McLaggen officially orders. “Send these fuckers to hell.”

Within seconds, an absolutely epic playlist replaces Richard Wagner.

“Do you have a combat playlist?” Sam asks as she picks up her gun. Not that she’s surprised.

Alle grins and grips her own gun. “I have three.”

***

Despite the onslaught of ordnance from air and ground, both bombers manage to land. Doors slide open on either side and waves of Rak’har pour out. With soldiers on the ground, the bombers lift off into the air again, guns primed for a fight.

***

“You heard the man!” Jack orders his team. Instead of ten bogies and a handful of raiders like he started out the night, he now has ten bogies and a handful of raiders and whatever troops the bomber dropped off. Plus the bomber itself.

Though clouds of dust swirl up underneath the Rak’har soldiers, obscuring Jack’s vision even more in the dark, it’s clear within seconds that Hydra is outnumbered in a way that’s very, very deadly.

“Thunderbird, this is Hydra Leader. We have major unfriendlies. No bad timing if you want to bring Basilisk our way, over.”

“Hydra Leader, Thunderbird.” Hawthorne’s voice comes over the comm. “We’ve got them too. Path is blocked; Basilisk cannot get to you. I say again: Basilisk cannot get to you. Over.”

“Got an ETA? Over.” He shoots one in the head. Vincent’s doing the same beside him, except she’s counting. She’s up to twelve. He knows she’s taken out more than that.

And then he hears Rabinowitz, a little tinny in his earpiece sharing global and Hydra comms at the same time, say “Eleven,” just as another one’s head explodes.

Headshots. God save him from snipers, really. Not that he hasn’t been counting himself. Eight.

“Negative on Basilisk. We’re sending Raptors your way to help. ETA two minutes. Over.”

“Shit,” Jack mutters. “Roger. Hydra out.” He clicks into Hydra comms. “Alright, here’s the deal. There’s a boatload of bad guys between us and Thunderbird. Our job is to hold the line until they can clear through. Air support incoming in two minutes. Understood?”

“Yes, sir!” comes back in fourteen different voices.

Jack swaps for his P-90 and unloads a spray into an oncoming wave of growling, snarling aliens. At least his guys are easy to identify amidst the large and heavily-armored aliens.

Of course, that also means he sees in near crystal clarity when the two commandos from SG-3 drop underneath Rak’har bullets.

Swearing, Jack reloads. “Plan A never works,” he says, not to anyone in particular.

“One day it will,” Vincent says without much belief. Three shots ring out from her gun and three Rak’har drop.

It doesn’t go unnoticed by Jack that those are the three who shot the commandos. And that she nailed them in the eyes. Maybe snipers are growing on him.

Four Raptors swoop overhead, engines roaring, and drop charges into the fray. The ground rumbles on impact and fire flashes in the dark. More dust kicks up, making visibility even worse, but then the Raptors flick on their spotlights.

“Banshee to Hydra Leader.”

“Hydra Leader, go.” Jack rolls out of the way of incoming bomber fire. Heat flares against his skin from the torpedoes, burning away any last shred of early spring chill he might have felt.

“Thunderbird’s got a plan, but we need to hold this for five more minutes, over.”

Two Raptors break off to flank the bomber. Phase-locked or not, they can still do some damage.

Jack slams the butt of his rifle into a Rak’har’s face and then shoots it in the chest, point blank with armor-piercing rounds; dark blue blood pours out of the wound. “Roger. Hydra out.” He grabs his combat knife and throws it, hitting another Rak’har in the throat just before it can shoot who he thinks is Torrini. It howls in pain before dropping. Above him, missiles slam into the bomber, sparking up the night sky like fireworks.

The five minutes feel like five hours. Jack’s eyes are gritty with sand; a headache’s building behind his eyes from squinting in the dark and spotlights. One of the snipers catches the edge of a Rak’har grenade and falls off the cliff before he can regroup with the rest. Another commando is down, but a medic hovers over her while Rabinowitz provides cover fire from his perch. A Raptor takes a full assault from the bomber’s torpedoes and spins out, crashing in a ball of fire as far away as the pilot can take it.

“Hydra Leader, McLaggen. Lead them back here. We’ve got a plan, Colonel. Over.”

“Are you kidding?” Jack grabs the grenade launcher from beside Vincent, tracks the four shock troopers from SG-7, and launches two grenades into a pile of aliens as far away from them as he can get and still do worthwhile damage. “And stick my guys between two Rak’har armies? Over.” Sweat drips down his brow as acrid smoke from the fallen Raptor burns his eyes and nostrils.

“We need bait,” Harper’s voice this time. “It’s Plan D for Dumbass for a reason.” A barrage of turret fire follows in the background.

At least it’s not Plan F for –

“Move it, Colonel,” McLaggen orders.

“Whatever happened to outranking him?” Jack mutters. “Roger, wilco,” he says before switching back to Hydra’s channel. “Fall back!” he shouts. “Regroup with Thunderbird!”

Thunderbird has the lights on too and Jack doesn’t like what he sees in front of them. He likes even less what he knows is following behind them. If he makes it to sunup without a fistful of tags, he might consider going to church once or twice when he gets home.

Vincent’s yelling at stragglers to find their sense of urgency, every bit as strong a second as Sam, and signals to him that she’ll bring up the rear. No one left behind, even in Plan D for Dumbass.

As another missile connects with the bomber, Jack and the SG-7 shock troopers slam into Thunderbird’s fray. 

***

They’re crouched behind rocks and makeshift barricades, holding back the horde of Rak’har on this side of the field while Hawthorne’s team sets up a trap. Floodlights illuminate the center of the combat field, keeping the edges in darkness. So far it’s been a good strategy, but then Sam sees it a split second before Harper does: a Rak’har sneaking up behind Alle, sneer curled around its many teeth, nasty serrated knives in its hands.

“Alle!” they both shout. They’re each about ten yards away on either side of her. Too far away to do anything but shoot, and the alien moves preternaturally fast as it lunges at Alle with its knives.

Alle turns. Her eyes widen as she sees the alien. Primal fear flashes across her face and she rolls out of the way just as knives scrape against the rock she’d been using as cover. The alien roars in frustration, baring its sharp teeth. Alle throws a fistful of sand toward it, sending a cloud of dust and tiny rocks into its face.

It hisses, but the dust doesn’t deter it. With a swift kick, its boot makes a solid sickening thud against Alle’s ribs. Alle groans and curls protectively in on herself. Sam aims, but between the dust, darkness, and the alien’s speed, she can’t get a shot without endangering Alle, too. From the look on Harper’s face, he can’t either. When the alien lunges at Alle with the knives again and she scrambles backward on the scrubby earth, Sam realizes Alle’s lost her gun. She spies it just out of reach, by the rock.

The knife misses but the fist doesn’t. An armored gauntlet slams into Alle’s face and she loses what little upward movement she’d managed. Sam fires. The alien moves at the last moment and she nails it in its chest armor instead of its head. She’ll take it. Anything to slow it down. Another shot rings out and the alien stumbles – Harper hit it square in the back.

The shots distract the alien enough, giving Alle the moment she needs to stand up. The alien towers over her; she’s tiny and doesn’t have near enough the same weapons and armor. Blood trickles from her eyebrow and she winces as she touches her side. Sam’s seen her fight before, but with ribs that are at least bruised, probably a concussion, and no weapon, Sam doesn’t like Alle’s chances.

But Alle shakes out her shoulders and then, all at once, it’s like she comes back to herself. Her lips curl upward in a bloody snarl as she settles into a fighting stance, fire-forged steel in her spine. “Come at me, you piece of shit.” She spits blood onto the ground.

“Attagirl!” Harper shouts from behind his barricade. “Carter, she’s got this. We’ve got incoming!”

Sam may not like Alle’s chances, but she believes in Alle. She believes even more in Harper’s belief in Alle – the two of them fought side by side for a long time. Sam fires into the charging mob in front of them, taking down three armored Rak’har. Next she looks over, Alle’s going toe-to-toe with the alien. She’s smaller and faster, despite her injuries, and the alien isn’t getting the easy prey it thought it was. It swings, she blocks. It lunges, she sidesteps. It reaches, she ducks. It turns, she catches it in the midsection with a roundhouse kick so fierce Sam hears the impact over the sounds of fighting.

From there, Alle’s inside the alien’s reach and is all swift punches and elbow strikes. For one heart-stopping moment, the alien catches her in a chokehold. Her face turns red in the sickly white-green floodlights, but she jams her elbow into its chest at the same time as she stomps on its foot. There’s minimal impact given its armor, but its grip loosens enough that she slides out and underneath its grasp. In the same move, she grabs its wrists and twists, forcing it to drop the knives. Sweat gleams on her forehead and fury burns bright in her eyes. She kicks the knives away, seething as her chest heaves with exertion.

Sam’s never seen Alle like this. Upset, yes. Angry, absolutely. But this…this is rage. And the fight isn’t just for survival. Sam’s seen that look in soldiers’ eyes before, thinks maybe it’s been in her own once or twice. Alle might genuinely not care if she survives tonight or not. The point isn’t survival for her. The point is to hurt them back.

And right now, all the hurt the Rak’har have inflicted upon Alle – destroying her galaxy, annihilating her species, torturing her within an inch of her life, murdering her parents – is laser-focused back on the single alien standing in front of her.

Above them, the bomber finally breaks apart under relentless onslaught from the Raptor and Hawk pilots.

Alle hip checks the alien – now all snarling teeth and wide open sloppy punches – and yanks on its arm, flipping it hard onto its back. Little puffs of dust kick up around its prone body. It makes to get up, but Alle suddenly drops, slamming her knees hard into its shoulders, keeping it down. Fading starlight glints off a knife she pulls from her thigh holster. She presses its razor sharp edge against the alien’s throat.

It doesn’t matter where the heart is if you slit something’s throat well enough. With a cry that sounds equal parts triumph and grief, Alle does just that. A spray of dark blood arcs across the slowly-lightening sky. Alle rolls off the alien and collapses against the rock. Fiery debris from the bomber rains down around her.

She’s either sobbing or gasping for breath, Sam can’t tell at this distance. She’s about to go to her when she spies Harper slipping out of cover.

Sam stays where she is and focuses on the oncoming horde; Alle’s CO is better equipped to get her up and moving again, Hydra’s brought friends, and there are orders coming over comms Sam needs to follow.

While setting up her end of the C-4 line, Sam overhears Harper checking on Alle.

“You okay?”

“No.”

Harper yanks the pin from a flashbang grenade and throws it over his shoulder at a group of Rak’har trying to sneak up behind them. He blocks Alle’s body with his and Sam covers her own eyes from the explosion. “Rephrase: you hurt?”

“No.” Clearly a lie, but Harper doesn’t call her on it.

“Good. Grab your gun and get your ass in gear, Maestro.”

Alle looks up at him, bruised and dusty, and grins. “Roger that, Kermit.”

He lets out another round of fire, dropping four more Rak’har. He shoves Alle’s gun back into her hands. “Let’s move.” He helps Alle up and then looks over at Sam. “You too, Carter. Book it.”

“Almost finished, sir!”

“You’ve got fifteen seconds and then I’m hauling your ass out of here.” Harper and Alle take up positions on either side of Sam, laying down cover fire for her to finish wiring the explosives.

Thirteen seconds and Sam’s done, off sprinting with Harper and Alle and a few other stragglers. Rak’har bullets whiz through the dusty air. Sam cries out, stumbling as one strikes her arm. But Alle’s there, catching her before she falls, and drags her forward.

Sam runs into Jack, quite literally, as they clear the line. She’s breathing hard and bleeding and he holds her tight. McLaggen gives the order.

The entire field explodes in a blinding flash of fire in the dim early dawn, followed by the pounding of indiscriminate automated turret fire.

***

Jack pushes his way through the crowded infirmary to find Sam. She’d been whisked away out of his arms by Harper and marched toward the infirmary along with Alle. Jack had then been sidetracked by McLaggen wanting at least a preliminary report. It took long enough that the medical staff is done with triage. Critical patients have been cordoned off into separate rooms for care, and green-tagged patients remain waiting with a handful of yellow. He scans the main area and finally spies Sam’s blonde hair near the back.

Space is limited, so Sam’s sitting on a cot with Alle, picking at the green band on her wrist. The bullet wound in her arm has been patched up enough to stop bleeding all over everything, and Jack bets it’ll be awhile before anyone gets to her for stitches. But Alle has a yellow tag on her wrist and Shackleton’s running a portable scanner over her midsection. 

“…but I don’t see any internal bleeding,” Shackleton’s saying as Jack joins them.

“I’ll take it,” Alle groans, pressing a hand to her side. She has a cut over her eye and a nasty dark bruise forming behind it.

“Dr. Shackleton, he’s coding!” someone shouts from an open door.

Shackleton looks at Jack. “Do not let them leave,” she orders and then sprints off to her patient. 

Jack sits on the stool next to their cot. “What happened to you?” he asks Alle. He saw the bullet hit Sam. He wishes he hadn’t.

“Fistfight with a Rak’har,” she says. She grimaces as she shifts to lean against the wall. “You should see the other guy.” Her voice is strained with pain, but she manages a smile.

He grins proudly. “Good.” He looks over at Sam and catches her hand. “You okay?”

Sam smiles and gives his hand a squeeze. She’s covered in dirt and blood and still her smile is brilliant and dazzling. “Absolutely.”

***

Jack makes a mental note to have sex with post-successful-mission Sam more frequently.

He’d watched as she’d palmed the pain meds she’d been discharged with, slipping them into her pants pocket. Bullet wounds hurt like a bitch, so when lunch passed and she still hadn’t taken them, he asked why. She smiled, didn’t answer his question, and Jack quickly found himself pushed up against the door the second they were inside their quarters.

She’s always confident in bed, and he finds her sexy as hell anywhere, but Sam riding a combat high is unparalleled.

“They make me tired,” she explained afterward. “And I didn’t want to be tired,” she smirked, sliding out of bed to find her pants where they’d been cast off in the living room. Returning with a glass of water and no pants, she’d dutifully swallowed the meds before crawling back into bed and curling into his chest.

Jack knows that the image of her walking towards him, gloriously naked and backlit by the setting sun, will stay with him for a very long time.

She sighs and he loosens his arms to allow her to shift in her sleep. He drops a kiss on her shoulder and closes his eyes. The revelry outside has been going on for hours – and who can blame them: a successful fight and confirmation that they can really fix this. Jack drifts off to the sounds of celebration and Sam’s even breaths and, for the first time in over a year, doesn’t think of home as any place different.

Chapter Text

AREA 51 PUBLIC RECORD MEMOS 4/30/39

 

TO: Area 51’s Waffle Fiend

FROM: Kitchen Staff

SUBJECT: Surrender. 

Alright. We give up.

We found half a pallet of waffle makers in the back of the Costco. Keep the three you have; we now have twenty. And they’re all RFID chipped.

 

TO:  Project Dorothy

FROM:  Alle

SUBJECT:  Field trip

Wednesday. North Building. Wear sunscreen.

 

TO: D&D nerds

FROM: Also D&D nerds

SUBJECT: Ironsworn finale 

We’re level 20 and overconfident so we’re gonna go fight a couple gods who annoyed us one time. It’ll be fine. Friday, 8pm in the mess.

Starring:

- Hakim Farhat as Nasir, a tiefling twilight domain cleric who is the team dad with the jokes to prove it

- Annie Marino as Malia, a halfling circle of dreams druid who holds the party record for most deaths (9)

- Troy Harper as Art, an eladrin archfey warlock who slept with his patron last session, so he’s clearly great at decisions

- Carlos Torrini as Grazza, a kobold draconic soul sorcerer who is small and mighty and must be protected at all costs

- Nora Vincent as Aurora, a wild hunt battlemaster fighter whose entire personality is just Beefcake

- and Zach Hawthorne as the Forever DM

“What’s up?” Sam spies the messenger bag slung over Alle’s shoulder. There’s a tote bag – the 75th Annual Celery Festival in Mt. Absalom, Ohio – on the table, filled with plastic containers of food. Sam has sunscreen, as instructed. And her laptop in a backpack.

“Change of scenery.”

“What Alle really means is that Wentworth’s running drills today and she doesn’t want to get dragged into it,” Jeff says, leaning on the door.

Alle shoves the tote bag into his hands. “No: I’m still sidelined thanks to broken ribs. I want some fresh air.” She grabs her sunglasses and a set of keys and leads them out into the hall.

“Andrews is still mad at you for last time, isn’t he?”

“Your ass I can kick without violating medical orders,” she grins without a hint of true threat. “Go find Steph and meet us there.”

Jeff offers her a comically sloppy salute and goes in search of Stephani.

Sam follows Alle up out of the lab levels. “Do I ask?”

Alle rolls her eyes. “Andrews and his male bravado do not play well with my fighting style.” She puts her sunglasses on as they head outside.

“Where’d you learn, anyway?” All civilian gate team members are required to take hand-to-hand training in addition to weapons, but something about Alle’s hand-to-hand isn’t standard military.

“Teal’c,” she says. “Also I was in color guard in high school; made staff weapons easy to figure out.”

Sam stares blankly, trying to imagine Alle with a flag. It doesn’t work.

“I was rifle line junior and senior year,” she says, unlocking her red truck.

That, she can imagine a little better. Mindful of her arm, mostly healed but still a little tender, Sam swings herself into the passenger seat; it’s much more comfortable than the transport truck they took to Creech to pick up the Starstreaks. Alle takes her own time, careful of her ribs. The bruises on her face have mostly faded, at least.

There’s a collection of faded parking decals in the front window. Sam squints at the SGC parking permit and makes out Carter-O’Neill, Alexandra S. “What’s the S stand for?”

Alle starts the truck, throwing it into reverse to back out of her parking spot. “Selmak.” She smiles at Sam and shifts into gear. She checks the rearview mirror to make sure Jeff and Stephani are behind them and then drives out of the parking lot.

Sam has to swallow down a lump in her throat at the thought of her father. She misses him deeply, more than she realized. She wonders how long he spent working with the SGC to find a way to get her back and if he’s still at it. While she wants to believe he’d still be working on it, she’s also a realist. They’ve been missing for a year and there’s nothing to be done from the other side. At least when they do make it home, it’ll be at the exact moment they left. Nobody but her and Jack will have any memory of this.

“What was it like?” Sam asks after a while; she’s still so curious about this reality. “Growing up in the SGC.” Noting dusty footprints on the console, Sam braces her feet against the glove compartment and leans back in her seat.

Alle flips down the sun visor. “I didn’t really notice it much, you know? I mean, it was just my life. It was a shock in kindergarten to learn that not everyone’s parents did cool secret stuff,” she smiles. “Nora and Rachel got it, though. Nora’s mom was SG-2 leader when we were kids. Rachel’s parents were base doctors.”

Sam nods. Friends are hard when you work on something as top secret as the Stargate. She doesn’t have any outside of the program. She’s glad Alle had friends growing up who understood the experience of living adjacent to it all.

“They read me in pretty early,” Alle continues. “They had to. When I was nine, a Ba’al clone decided that taking me hostage was a good idea.”

Sam’s eyebrows lift high into her bangs.

Alle glances over at Sam and lets out a small laugh at her horrified expression. “It was fine,” she assures her. “I made the Jaffa take me out for ice cream. I was home in time for dinner.”

Sam laughs. A contingent of Jaffa standing in line at a Dairy Queen seems like the beginning of a joke.

“Yeah,” Alle smirks. “I think that one went down in SGC legend.”

It can’t all have been fun. Sam’s read mission reports and knows that the Goa’uld were, somehow, worse in this reality than her own. She couldn’t finish some reports for how awful they were. Global disclosure happened in 2009, the result of an Apophis attack that they couldn’t explain away. Though it was rough going for a while, in the end it seems to have helped the program’s international cooperation more than whatever loosely-held treaty they have with Russia any given week back home.

Halfway there, Sam digs around in the back of the truck for the pack of gum Alle promises her is back there somewhere. She does not find gum. She does, however, find a travel mug that seems to be growing something inside, an entire unopened box of granola bars, and a handful of picture frames sitting carefully in a box. Sam leaves the travel mug where it is, sets the granola bars in Alle’s bag, and lifts the picture frames into her lap.

“Do you mind?” Sam asks, not wanting to invade Alle’s privacy.

“Go ahead.” Alle’s brow furrows. “What the heck am I storing in my truck?” she mutters to herself.

The metal frames clink against each other as Sam turns them over.

Alle’s breath catches in her throat and she abruptly looks back at the road.

Though the picture in her hands is fascinating, Sam’s much more focused on Alle. “Everything alright?”

She swallows and stares intently ahead. “I wondered where Zach put those,” she says softly.

Sam looks down at the picture. It’s of her – or, rather, Alle’s mom. She’s sitting on a wooden cabin deck, Jack beside her with his arm around her waist; her head rests on his shoulder and the setting sun casts golden light onto their content faces. Though the woman in the picture is older, she’s clearly Samantha Carter and looks happier than Sam could ever imagine.

Sam knows exactly where this picture is supposed to go: on the shelf with the notebooks from 2024-2026, next to the photo of Alle’s SG-1 around an offworld campfire.

And another, of a toddler Alle – all wild gold curls and wide blue eyes – grinning happily as her mother places a birthday cake in front of her, belongs one shelf down with the highlighters, in the conspicuous space between a photo of Zach giving Alle a piggyback ride up a mountain and one of Alle, Rachel, and Nora with giant margaritas at a beach.

There are others – Alle and her parents at graduation, Jack helping a young Alle focus a telescope, Sam and Jack passed out on the couch together with a Happy New Year banner behind them – and Sam sees where each of them fit in the spaces in the lab. They fill out a life lived well and tell a story of a daughter and a family loved more than anything.

Sam wonders if some version of her alternate self’s life is in her future. Before coming here, she didn’t let herself imagine it. The Stargate was everything: trying to find a life outside of the program wasn’t worth it. But now, after experiencing the possibilities, she isn’t so certain. She is certain she wants her life to include Jack, and not just as her CO anymore.

Sam puts the photos back where she found them, for Alle to bring out and put back on the shelves when she’s ready.

The rest of the drive passes in companionable silence and quiet music. Sam hops out of the truck once Alle’s parked in front of the unassuming building. Jeff parks his car in the spot next to Alle – Sam realizes with a wry smile that all their vehicles are parked within the lines. When Sam sees the picnic tables, she understands that maybe the building itself was not the field trip’s destination.

***

Hours later, with the sun high in the sky, Sam stretches out on the picnic table bench. She throws her arm over her eyes. With the singularity neutralizer complete and Problem #1 successfully wiped off the board, and with a second message sent off to the Asgard High Council and Problem #3 temporarily on hold, all they’re left with is Problem #2 and getting everyone home. Project Dorothy.

They’ve been throwing ideas out into the spring air: no such thing as a dumb idea, Alle and Boyd told them.

While they may not have found any truly dumb ideas, they’ve found plenty that won’t work.

“When all the alternate SG-1s showed up, how did that get solved?”

“I don’t remember, Boyd, I was four.” Alle sighs from her spot on the long-dead grass.

“They reversed the polarity of the subspace rip,” Mira says. “But it doesn’t matter – the only reason that worked is because the rip is what sent all of the alternate teams to that reality in the first place.”

“Too bad the nets don’t have a polarity to reverse,” Boyd muses.

“It wouldn’t work anyway,” Sam says. That report was in an early stack of homework Alle gave her. “Six teams gated in from the Alpha Site and all ended up here. Even if there was a polarity to reverse, it would only connect back with one alternate reality, not six.”

“And,” Alle adds, “it still doesn’t solve the time problem. I think we need to go back to Boyd and Donovan’s original idea: trigger an ello reaction to the right time, and then dial the reality. Somehow.”

“Ello only creates a navigable singularity when you use too much of it,” Boyd reminds her. “Everyone here came from a timeline that would need well below critical mass.”

Alle sits up and grabs another cookie from the box on the table. She thoughtfully chews a chocolate chip cookie. “What if we hooked it up directly to the quantum mirror?”

“Are you insane?”

“If we don’t solve this, I’m about to be.”

“Every time we feed more power into an ello reaction, it gets worse.”

She finishes her cookie and stretches her arms out behind her. “It might create a proper ello singularity. I think the control crystals give it the extra power it’d normally have from more element omega.”

“Every – and I mean literally every simulation we’ve ever run on this creates a black hole.”

No, Sam thinks. This is definitely what she and Rodney McKay sound like.

“Walk it off,” Mira says before Alle can retort and the conversation escalates. “Both of you.”

Sam feels herself exhale deeply when Alle and Boyd walk away in different directions.

Stephani looks at Mira. “Thank you.”

“Unstoppable force meets immovable object,” Mira observes. As for who is who, she doesn’t elaborate.

After a few minutes with no sign of Alle or Boyd coming back, Sam sits up. “So. If we generate an ello time travel reaction connected to the quantum mirror, in theory we’ll have the extra power needed to push it into a singularity, and can then dial a reality and hit the time coordinates too.”

Jeff nods and snags a cookie. “Yep. We know an ello singularity connects to a random reality and time. This just lets us control both components of it. No one’s ever actually connected control crystals to an ello time reaction before because we didn’t want to create a singularity. Boyd and I haven’t tried it because all of his simulations create an actual black hole instead.”

“Which still might not be stable enough to last very long, but would eject all its consumed matter like it’s supposed to,” Sam says.

He taps his nose and points at her. Right on the money.

“At some point, though,” Mira says, “we’re just going to have to try and see what happens. This is the only plan we have.”

Sam crosses one arm over her chest to stretch it, then the other. “Did Boyd’s simulations assume the extra artificial power would break it into its base elements?”

“Think so, yeah.”

“There’s your problem. Ello’s structure is pretty stable,” she says, calling up a molecular diagram on her laptop. “As long as it stays in its original structure, which it should, we’ll be fine.”

“I think his concern was if ello behaves differently in a reaction full of itself versus when boosted by an outside source –”

“Which isn’t an invalid theory,” Sam admits.

“– but I like your plan better because it means we can get out of this mess.” Jeff looks at her across the table. “You want to try it?”

She nods. “I do.”

They have a working theory and a test plan by the time Alle and Boyd come back.

When they test it a few days later, fifty miles away at Creech and safely away from the population at Area 51, they set the ello reaction for a few seconds after Sam remembers heading home. Alle connects the quantum mirror to the reaction generator. The shimmer expands into a familiar singularity.

Sam holds her breath and dials 4372.

The MALP sends back a video of her and Jack walking through the gate.

***

Alle pitches their plan to Thor and he agrees to take it back to the High Council.

All they’re waiting on is Problem #3.

***

“We, uh, we should talk,” Sam says while they’re sitting and cuddling on the couch after dinner.

“About?” He draws idle spirals on her arms and peppers her neck with tiny kisses.

She drops her head as Jack starts to massage her shoulders. “You know we have a way home.” Technically they can go home now. But without the Asgard on board with the reset in this reality, there’s no guarantee they won’t just step out back into the Nevada desert when they gate to the SGC. So they’re all waiting.

Jack’s hands still. “Yeah,” he whispers.

Sam reluctantly pulls away and puts space between them. “I don’t know how to do this back home,” she starts. “But I want to figure it out.”

They’ve done a lot of not talking about it over the past months. And now they need to.

“So do I,” Jack says.

Sam’s heart does a funny little flip-flop and she smiles. She gets to take this home with her. However messy it will be when frat regs finally slap them in the face, they’re going home together.

“I’m thinking about retiring,” Jack says quietly.

“I can take a position in R&D or on another team.” Sam suggests. She doesn’t really want to do either – she loves going through the gate, and she loves being on SG-1. But neither does she want Jack to feel like he has to be the one sacrificing.

He shakes his head. “One of us has to step back and it’s not gonna be your career we end here.”

“Hammond will want to know why.”

“Maybe not.” Jack reaches out and takes her hand, twining their fingers together. “Maybe a year in another reality is reason enough. I’ll tell him if I have to, but let’s avoid that if we can.”

Sam thinks the reason will be very obvious very quickly, even if Jack doesn’t say anything. But if it really comes down to a court martial – JAG will have a hell of a time proving they were in a relationship before he retired out of her chain of command. Any evidence and witnesses are here. She doesn’t like thinking like that; it feels too much like they’re doing something wrong, but it’s what lets her have both Jack and her career. She brushes her thumb across his knuckles. “I’m going to miss you on missions,” she says after a moment.

“And I’ll miss you when you go.” He lightly tugs on her hand, encouraging her to cuddle against him once more. She comes willingly, sighing happily when he settles both arms around her. “But then you’ll get to come home to me.”

Smiling, she squeezes his hands. “I like the sound of that.”

He nuzzles her cheek, pressing tiny kisses to her jaw before finally capturing her lips with his. “So do I,” he murmurs.

***

TO: Astrophysics & Biochemistry

FROM: SG-2 & SG-4

DATE: 5/15/39

SUBJECT: (no subject)    

This is an intervention. Best of luck finding your doors.

“Okay, so, mechs,” Alle says, pulling up files on her laptop as she tucks her legs underneath her on the couch in their lab. There’s an organized mess of cables and adapters coming out of the laptop, connecting to a dusty USB hub they found deep in the basement. Connecting a 2038 computer with a 2003 computer for a file transfer had been an adventure, and then they found out the files were too big. Luckily, they found a handful of 2003-compatible portable USB drives in the basement too. “We’ve got Viper, Python, and Cobra. Blueprints are all yours.”

“What about Boomslangs?” Sam asks, checking her list. She already has a personal transporter – and, importantly, instructions and a charging interface – in her backpack.

“Failed QA testing. Repeatedly. To the tune of ‘targeting program could not find a target 50% of the time.’”

“Can I have the specs anyway? We might find something useful.”

“Sure. We’ve certainly cannibalized that project for other things.” Alle copies the file over and pops the drive out. She writes a little label on it – MECHS – and hands it to Sam sitting beside her. “Next up: UAVs. You want all three?”

“Please.” Sam hands her a fresh drive.

“Widow, Huntsman, and Goliath specs coming right up. Widows use the same neural interface OS as Cobras, by the way.”

“Got it. And we’re sure this isn’t going to do anything to my timeline?”

Alle shrugs. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Sam looks at her askance. Alle has a tendency to be cavalier about a lot of things, but she’d like something a little more concrete than I wouldn’t worry about it.

“Sorry. There have been…a lot of arguments lately about the ethics of trying to reset our timeline.”

“That sounds like a discussion that should’ve happened a while ago.”

“Mmhm,” Alle says tightly. “Like before my parents were killed and I nearly died?” She sighs heavily and closes her eyes. Sam watches as she takes a few breaths and her shoulders loosen. “Luckily it all came down on the side of do the thing, but not before Harper reminded me that we’re erasing eight years of relationships, personal development, children, and whatever else, not just for ourselves but the galaxy.”

Sam winces. The galaxy rests heavily on Alle’s shoulders, but god does she try to stand anyway. Sam places her hand over Alle’s and gives her a little squeeze.

“He’s our ethics guy, his job is to bring stuff like that up, but it was easier when it was just a math problem.” Alle takes a deep breath and literally shakes it off. Before she pulls away, she squeezes Sam’s hand in return. She reaches over for her tea, cups both hands around the mug, and takes a slow sip. “Anyway, no. It shouldn’t affect anything for you. There’s no such thing as a correct timeline in a universe where time travel exists. There are too many variables.”

That sentence hits Sam like a truck. There’s no such thing as a correct timeline in a universe where time travel exists. “But if a universe doesn’t have time travel and therefore has a correct timeline,” her brows furrow as she follows that thought through, “and then time travel is introduced, then it never had a correct timeline.”

“Nope,” Alle confirms. “It just had a timeline. And the original point is invalid anyway: you can’t have something be correct without a corresponding incorrect version being at least possible. Otherwise it’s just a thing. So bring back all the tech and specs you want: you’ll be fine. You want all the ships?” Alle hands her a drive labeled UAVs.

Sam nods and gives Alle a fresh drive. And here she thought she was done having her entire understanding of a topic turned upside down.

She looks at her list and thinks for a minute while Alle copies files. “Any chance we can take a vial of ello home, too?”

Alle shakes her head. “I can tell you where to find it and give you a control relay. But it’s, uhm, volatile during gate travel and we don’t have the right containment here.”

“Sounds like there’s a story there.” The way Alle said volatile hints at an entire novel of things gone wrong.

“That area of the galaxy is still under travel advisory.”

Sam’s eyes widen.

Alle blinks. “I should probably give you the containment device specs, shouldn’t I.”

Sam quietly adds that to her list.

***

Jack finds Alle later sitting outside, well-earned bottle of beer next to her, staring up at the stars. The Asgard required a little extra convincing and she spent most of the afternoon negotiating with the High Council. “What’re they gonna say?”

Alle looks over her shoulder and smiles at him. She pats the ground next to her. “They’ll say yes.”

“What makes you so sure?” He sits down beside her and stretches out his legs. In his experience, getting the Asgard to change their minds is a little like banging your head against a mountain.

“The High Council stalled me for a bit, but they owe us a pretty big favor from a while ago. I officially called in the marker. They’re just,” she sighs and gestures aimlessly, “debating if the scope is equal or something.”

“Ready for this to be over?”

Alle exhales slowly. “Very.” She looks at him. “You ready to go home?”

Jack can make home just about anywhere, if the last year is any indication. But he misses his friends. And though things are great with Sam and they have a plan for when they make it home, the last year has also felt a little bit like a holding pattern. Like nothing can really happen until it’s all solved. “Yeah.”

The sounds of the desert at night fill the silence between them.

“You know,” Alle starts. “When I saw you a year ago, I was just…really angry.”

“And now you’re not?”

“Oh, I’m still angry,” she laughs. “Just not at you two. It’s stupid, but I was mad at you and Sam for existing when my parents didn’t.”

Jack bumps her shoulder with his. “It’s not stupid.” He doesn’t understand it, but that doesn’t make it stupid.

“Alle,” a muffled voice comes from the comm earpiece she’s shoved in her pocket.

She pulls it out and puts it on. “Yeah, Troy.”

“Heard back from Thor. We’re good to go.”

***

Jack absently runs his hands over Sam’s bare shoulders. She’d been frantic, almost desperate earlier as she’d moved above him. He’d rolled them over, settling on top of her, and didn’t move until she admitted what was bothering her.

Sam hadn’t needed to say anything beyond we’re going home. Jack understood completely: their time in this reality will be up shortly after lunch tomorrow. He then kissed her softly and kept kissing her until he felt her relax back into the moment. He made love to her slowly, deliberately, showing her just how much he loves her – how much he’s in this, no matter what awaits them at the bottom of the gate ramp at home tomorrow.

Lying in a tangle of each other’s arms afterward, Jack knows better than to assume she’s asleep. He trails his fingers across her bare shoulders; he loves touching her, loves her soft skin under his fingertips. “I’m retiring,” he reminds her. “It’s gonna be okay.”

She stirs, lifting her head from its place on his chest to lock her eyes with his. She doesn’t say anything, just leans forward and kisses him gently.

Jack kisses her in return. Sam slides her leg over him. The sheet falls to her waist and her hands coast over his chest. He buries his hands in her hair, kissing her deeply as she presses her hips into his.

He’ll miss SG-1 and going offworld, and he will happily give up all of it to be with her. Going home doesn’t have to change anything.

It will change everything. But it doesn’t have to change this.

***

Dressed in his BDUs again with his P-90 strapped to his chest and sunglasses hanging around his neck, Jack takes a deep breath. He walks to the ramp in front of the already-active gate. He shakes General McLaggen’s hand, then Hawthorne’s and Harper’s. Alle, escorted by this reality’s SG-6, will be coming with them to set up the reality and time switch. They’re the last group to go. With a final look at the desert and Area 51 in the distance, Jack steps through the gate behind Sam.

Once they’re on P3X-673, it’s suddenly real. Real that they’re going home. Real that they were ever gone at all.

Alle goes to set up the singularity generator, leaving Sam and Jack with their thoughts.

“I’m not sure I want to leave,” Sam says quietly.

Jack knows the feeling. But they have to leave. They have lives at home and if the letter back to Alle in 2031 works the way it should…well. No one could give him a straight answer on what happens to them if the precipitating event to their presence here suddenly never happened. So they have to go home. He cradles her face between his hands and kisses her. “We’ll always have Area 51,” he quips.

Sam dissolves into laughter. Jack grins – that was the point.

“We’re good to go,” Alle says, standing by the open singularity. “You ready?”

Jack steps up and hugs her first. “Thanks for everything.”

Alle stands on her toes and wraps her arms around his shoulders as best she can. “Thank you,” she whispers.

Sam fights back tears as she hugs Alle. She tries to hug back with the same fierceness Alle hugs with. “Good luck.” Now the hard work lies with Alle eight years ago.

Alle sniffles as she hugs Sam a little tighter. “You too.”

Sam steps up to the singularity with Jack. She looks over her shoulder and waves at Alle. When they send back the letter as soon as Alle gates back to Area 51, Alle won’t remember any Sam other than her mother. But Sam will never forget her.

“Ready?” Jack asks and tilts his head.

“Ready.”

They step through.

***

February 3^rd, 2031

“Oh, bless my mother,” Alle says as she opens the box on her kitchen table. It’s full of snacks she can’t find down here.

On the video call, Zach tosses a few pieces of obvious junk mail in the garbage. “I’ve moved three times in the last four years. How do these people find me?”

“You work for the Air Force, babe,” she points out. “There’s no hiding.” Underneath the food, she finds a soft blanket, a box of her favorite tea, and a new sudoku book; it claims to be impossible and there’s a post-it inside in her mom’s handwriting – maybe not impossible, but should take you more than five minutes :)

Offscreen, there’s the thud of too much junk mail landing in the trash.

“Speaking of, how’s that issue with the gate going?”

“How do you know about that? That’s classified.”

She shrugs and files her own junk mail into the garbage. “Tell that to Jonas.” She picks up the next letter in the pile and frowns.

“What?”

Alle holds up the letter to the camera.

“To Alexandra Carter-O’Neill,” he reads. “With a return address of…you at the Mountain. Odd.”

“I didn’t send myself anything.” She holds it up to the light. Just a few pieces of paper and a small computer drive. She opens the envelope. “May 26th, 2039.” She blinks and looks at Zach. “That’s fun.”

He groans. “I hate time travel.”

Mumble-reading it mostly to herself, Alle scans the letter. “Under no circumstances should the Jacob Carter be allowed to leave the galaxy…element omega…singularity core. Oh, for crying out loud.” She scrunches her eyes closed for a moment to clear her vision. “So, you can cancel that trip to come visit in two weeks,” she says. “Looks like I’m headed back to the SGC.”

“Not gonna complain that I get to see you early, but why?”

Silently, she shows him one page of the note. The page with all the diagrams.

Zach squints. And then tilts his head, as if looking at it sideways will help. “Uh. What is that?”

“No idea. But there’s a bunch of weird math around it and apparently element omega’s involved. I bet this and the gate problem are related.”

“No such thing as coincidences.”

“Exactly.” Alle stifles a yawn. “Alright. Hate to cut this short, but I need to call Mom. This,” she waves the paper, “screams of her help.”

Zach nods. “Let me know when you have flights arranged. I’ll pick you up.”

Smiling, Alle kisses her fingers and taps them to the webcam. “Love you.”

He repeats the gesture. “Love you too.”

She ends the call and immediately texts her mom. You still up? I have time travel and weird math.

A few seconds later the typing bubble pops up. And then, Yep. Give me ten minutes to make coffee though.

Alle smiles. Tea’s probably a good idea.

***

“Oh,” Jack says, finding himself still on P3X-673 in all its uneventful glory. Alle, the generator, and SG-6 are gone. The gate shimmers as Daniel and Teal’c disappear into it. “Well then.” He’s not sure what he expected, but he thought there’d be something more than what felt like a few normal steps.

Sam looks around. There’s no hint of the singularity they stepped through. Her gaze settles on Jack. “That was…easy.”

“Wanna go home?”

“Not really,” Sam says. She grimaces; it’s an odd feeling after spending over a year trying to do exactly that.

“Hey,” Jack says, cupping her cheek with his palm. “Remember what I said.”

Sam nods and casts her eyes downward, wondering whether it really will be that simple. “Yeah.”

“Hey Jack, Sam? You guys okay back there?”

“Yeah, Daniel. We’ll be right there,” Jack says.

Jack kisses her softly, a quick reminder that they aren’t leaving behind what’s between them. “Let’s go home. I, for one, can’t wait for my bed.” He puts his hand on the small of her back and walks them to the gate.

Sam laughs. “That mattress was a little too standard Air Force, wasn’t it?” It was plenty comfortable for being an Air Force mattress, but nothing beats home. 

“And that shower.” He shudders. It was small and favored cold water.

“Oh.” Sam almost moans at the thought. “Bathtub. I missed that.”

“You know, I have one of those.” He stops them right at the event horizon.

Sam lifts an eyebrow. “You take baths?”

“I could be convinced.” Jack smiles and gestures for her to go first.

Sam laughs and takes a deep breath before walking through.

Jack turns around and stares at the empty planet. “If I walk out into Nevada again, I’m gonna be really pissed, Alle.” He crosses his fingers and follows Sam.

General Hammond’s voice greets him. “Welcome back, SG-1.”

Chapter Text

It’s still early summer. They keep the cabin’s air conditioning on through the high heat of the day, but turn it off at night. A soft, warm breeze flows through the open windows, fluttering the sheet covering them both. Sam sighs contently and rests her cheek on Jack’s bare chest. Cicadas drone in the trees outside while fireflies flit around, sparkling in the dark. If he listens carefully, Jack can hear the soft waves of the lake.

Disclosure had been awkward. Even after the lengthy debrief for P3X-673, Hammond hadn’t taken his retirement request without a good reason. Jack was honest. I’m in love with her, and that’s not gonna stop. And the program needs Carter right where she is.

In the end, Hammond agreed. He decided that what happened in one reality didn’t matter to another and put an end to any worry of court martial. Jack was allowed to retire and is heading back to a civilian advisory role – the program needs him too, Hammond argued – after some well-deserved vacation.

After temporary reassignment to Area 51 R&D for three months, where she kickstarted projects for all the tech and schematics she brought home, Sam’s now Lieutenant Colonel. She’ll be SG-1’s commanding officer when she gets back. Jack smiled so hard at her promotion ceremony that his face hurt.

All in all, not a bad way to end fourteen months away from home.

Jack drags a finger down her spine. “Happy?” It’s a silly question, considering that she’s naked and he’s naked and they’re in bed at his cabin in their own reality, but it seems like the right one.

Sam kisses his chest. She folds her hands and rests her chin on top. “Yeah,” she says with a smile. “You?”

“Absolutely.” He tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear. It’s shorter now, back to chin-length, but as long as he gets to touch her like this, he doesn’t care. He presses his lips against her forehead when she lays her head down again.

“Do you think they made it?” Sam asks after a few minutes.

“Yeah,” Jack says. “I think they did.”

“Me too.” She closes her eyes and gradually drifts off to sleep.

***

Behind the white curtain hiding the staging area from the guests, Jack smiles at his daughter. The salt air blows a gentle breeze through her hair. Her strapless white dress is fitted to her waist then flows freely in a simple gown. Her face, and she hasn’t stopped smiling since this morning, is framed by her long, blonde hair falling in a cascade of loose waves across her shoulders. Delicate flowers are tucked behind her ear. She’s a far cry from the eight year-old he once had to rescue from the tree in their backyard.

And then he realizes she isn’t wearing shoes. “Barefoot, Al?”

“It’s a beach.” She digs her toes into the sand. She looks out across the calm blue ocean waves. The sun’s just beginning to turn the sky pink and orange. She takes a deep breath.

“There’s still time to back out,” Jack jokes, though he knows she’ll never take it. She doesn’t need to.

“Not a damn chance,” Alle says with a grin.

Jack pulls her into a hug. “I love you, Alle.”

“Love you too, Dad,” she whispers, hugging him tight.

Daniel sticks his head around the curtain. “We were told there would be a wedding.”

Alle laughs and kicks a little puff of sand in his direction. 

Later that night, vows exchanged and toasts made (both Zach and Alle get thoroughly embarrassed by their friends) and cake eaten, the tables are cleared away to make room for a dance floor. Torches line the beach, lighting up the party long after the sun sets. Stars glitter and twinkle overhead. There’s a bonfire crackling by the shore, sending sparks up into the night.

After first dances, Jack offers his hand to his wife. Sam takes it with a smile.

“By the way,” he says. “Good job saving the world. Again.” Between wedding planning and the note Alle received from herself, it’s been an eventful few months.

Sam laughs and kisses his cheek. “Well, your daughter helped.”

“Yeah. Time travel,” he shakes his head. “Always makes my head hurt.”

“It worked,” Sam says. “So I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” She rests her head on his shoulder as they sway to the slow music.