Close Calls
Jun. 24th, 2023 12:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stringertheoryTitle: Close Calls
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Characters: Jack O’Neill, Samantha Carter
Word Count: 7227
Categories: angst, post-episode, friendship, URT
Spoilers: set after “Desperate Measures” (S5E11)
Warnings: N/A
Summary: Jack believed Carter when she said she was fine. But he still kept an eye on her, waiting for the tide to come in.
Jack believed Carter when she said she was fine.
He knew that it could be true, even after the worst trauma. Had experienced it himself, knew how there were lulls between the waves where everything was okay, where everything felt like it had before and that semblance of normalcy held you together.
But waves crash eventually. So while he believed her, he still kept an eye on her, waiting for the tide to come in.
It had been four days since he’d freed her from her restraints in Conrad’s horror show of an abandoned hospital, his voice steady and his heart in his throat.
Conrad and his Goa’uld had vanished, Maybourne was in the wind, Carter had been traumatized (again), and Jack had a new bullet wound to add to his collection. He also had a very long list of tortures planned for good ol’ Harry once they met again, a list he added to every time his arm twinged. And it twinged a lot.
Fraiser, possibly feeling generous due to the circumstances surrounding his injury, had not been skimpy with her distribution of painkillers when she’d discharged him from her care. But Jack hated the fuzziness they left in their wake, so he’d purposefully dialed back on the prescribed dosage, knowing from far too much experience exactly where his tolerance threshold lay. Sustaining a lower dose meant that his arm ached almost constantly, but the pain was a welcome trade-off for being fully aware of everything that was going on.
Like the fact that Carter had disappeared from his living room in the time it had taken him to hit the head and retrieve a beer.
It was usually a coin toss as to whether they met at her place or Jack’s for the obligatory post-near-death-experience team night. But with Jack banned from driving for the time being—and to allow Carter her place to retreat to, once she had enough of the rest of them—everyone had come to him this time.
Jack took a step back into the entryway and peeked outside. Through the narrow window beside the front door, he could see that Carter’s car was still in the drive, so she hadn’t beat a retreat yet.
He’d known without asking that Daniel had offered to pick Carter up, to bring her along with him and Teal’c. Just like he knew that Carter had insisted on driving herself. He would’ve done the same, in her situation. Had, a time or two. You needed to control everything you could for a while after that control had been taken from you. It was understandable. Plus, speed was a form of therapy for Carter, right up there with working for days on end, and Daniel’s sedate driving would not have done the job.
So she hadn’t left yet, but she also wasn’t where Jack had left her, safely ensconced on the sofa beside Daniel.
A flutter of unease rippled through him, the ghostly remnants of so many desperate days with her missing without the slightest clue as to her whereabouts.
Annoyed with himself, he forced his fingers to relax around the bottle they held, the straight-from-the-fridge cold a grounding sensation against the licking flames of panic. There wasn’t anything dangerous within at least a mile of his house, unless you counted the platoon of stray cats that patrolled the neighborhood. And he had absolutely no doubt that Carter could take them—or tame them—without so much as breaking a sweat.
So she was fine. He needed to relax.
Once he knew where she was.
Stepping down into the living room, he took a minute to stare blindly in the direction of the television Daniel and Teal’c were watching. He didn’t really focus in on what it was showing—looked like a nature documentary, which could just as easily have been Teal’c’s choice as Daniel’s—but felt he had to make the gesture toward nonchalance.
For his own sake alone, apparently, because when Daniel turned and met his eyes, Jack could see the understanding—equal parts amusement and solemnity—in their depths. He could also see Daniel holding his tongue, biting down on the words there, waiting for Jack’s prompting to let them out. To maintain the facade that he hadn’t learned to read Jack’s face so well that it was just another language in his arsenal? Or to make Jack say the words, just so they both could hear how they came out?
Feeling contrary and ornery, Jack shifted slightly, settling his arm more comfortably in its sling before taking a slow draw of his beer. There was another point in favor of taking it easy on the pain meds: he could drink.
Kind of.
Let’s just say he definitely would not be telling everyone’s favorite diminutive doc that he’d imbibed, but doing so was less dangerous on the lower dose of meds he’d chosen to take. And he was only going to have one. Or at least that had been the plan. If Carter had disappeared before they’d even ordered dinner, it might wind up being a long night.
Swallowing a sigh, Jack let his gaze drift back toward the flickering screen. But he could still feel Daniel’s eyes on him when he finally asked, as casually as possible, “Where’s Carter?”
“She went outside some time ago,” Teal’c intoned, not turning away from the program, where some small, furry creature was scurrying through dense jungle vegetation.
Daniel, tilting his head toward the deck, added, “Said she needed some air.”
Jack took another drink before nodding, as if in agreement. Yeah, some air sounds good. I could use that, too.
He and Daniel turned away from each other at the same time, Daniel back to the television, Jack toward the door that led onto the deck. After a moment’s deliberation over the options of how to free up his working hand, Jack secured the beer bottle in the crook of his sling and reached for the door.
The faint swish of it sliding open masked the hiss he let loose as the frigid burn of the bottle against his skin caused the aching in his arm to crest sharply. Entire arm now throbbing, he quickly fished the bottle back out of the sling and stepped out onto the deck, pushing his side against the handle to get the door closed again. Once it clicked shut, he stayed leaning against the jamb, eyes closed as he waited for the pain to recede back to an acceptable level.
It only took a moment or two, during which he may or may not have rethought his decision to not follow the doc’s dosage orders. But even as he considered trading the bottle in his hand for a different one, the pain returned to its ‘I got shot a few days ago’ standard, and he returned to his search for his second in command.
When a quick glance around the yard didn’t immediately reveal Carter’s location, the whispers of worry started up again. But Jack knew that Teal’c and Daniel wouldn’t have just let her wander off—not right now, not after what she’d just been through—so she had to be somewhere nearby.
The thought struck him that she might have gone to the roof, and he eyed his beer warily. He knew he could make it up the ladder with only one hand, but he didn’t relish the thought of having to tuck the bottle back in his sling for the journey. Which meant he’d have to leave it behind. A sacrifice, but a worthy one.
It was as he moved to the far end of the deck, planning to check the rooftop, that he finally spotted Carter. She hadn’t gone to the roof after all, but was standing at the back side of the house, concealed behind the stony bulk of his fireplace. That part of the deck wasn’t generally used as much more than a passageway to the backyard, and the fact that she was standing in the one spot where she would be concealed from view from the living room was telling.
There was no way she’d found herself back there by accident; she was hiding.
From what? Or whom?
Jack almost left her alone. He understood the need for solitude, especially after captivity. It was the control thing again, being master of your surroundings and all that.
But she hadn’t left, hadn’t just gone home where she could literally be master of all that she surveyed, and that was telling, too. Because even when you needed to be by yourself, you didn’t always want to do it alone. Having the team there, out of sight but just a pane of glass away, was like having a kind of security blanket. She was alone with her thoughts, but she wasn’t actually alone, and that could make the being alone part a lot more palatable.
So he started to retreat, thinking he’d just go back inside. He could surreptitiously keep an eye on her, now that he knew where to keep that eye, while also giving her her space. He could return indoors and join Daniel on the sofa and purposefully annoy him—and amuse Teal’c—by throwing out wildly inaccurate factoids about whatever they were watching now. Carter would come in when she was ready; they could wait for her.
But just as he was about to turn away, he was struck by how unnaturally still Carter was. She looked for all the world as if she were completely oblivious to his presence, even though he probably wouldn’t have been able to sneak up on her had he tried. The sound of the glass door being opened and closed alone would have alerted her to someone joining her outside. And while his deck was sturdy, it wasn’t exactly creak-free, but she hadn’t so much as twitched as he approached her position.
There was always the chance that she was purposefully ignoring him, hoping he’d get the message and leave her alone. But there was something about her posture that made him think that wasn’t the case. There was a lack of awareness in it, somehow, like she wasn’t fully in the here and now.
Debating what he should do, Jack stepped closer, figuring that if Carter still didn’t react, he’d take it as a sign to leave her to her thoughts. He couldn’t quite make out her expression from his angle, but he could at least tell she wasn’t crying, which he took as a good sign.
Then his eyes drifted down to her hands, which he hadn’t been able to see before. One was wrapped around her own bottle of beer, which was half empty, while the other was gripping the deck railing as she stared blindly out across his yard. And the knuckles of both were white.
Jack cursed under his breath and inched nearer. He was all for the joys of solitude, but sometimes being left alone with your thoughts was a bad idea. And given what his team’s thoughts could include, doubly so.
“Carter?”
She gave no indication of having heard him. Jack set his beer on the railing and closed the remaining distance between them to lay a gentle hand on her shoulder, calling her name again as he did so.
Her reaction to both was instantaneous. She whipped around to face him with a barely audible gasp, the beer slipping from her fingers to shatter on the deck between their feet.
Jack’s heart stuttered as he took her in: eyes wide with fear, jaw set with determination, hands clenched into fists. It was the same look she’d had when he’d burst through the door to find her strapped to that damn gurney, and for a second he was back there with her, terror and relief mingling in disorienting fashion.
Then her hands started to shake as the initial shock dissipated and she settled back to reality. Jack watched as the fear turned into confused surprise, followed rapidly by what looked dishearteningly like shame. Her eyes fell from his to the mess on the deck, and she grimaced faintly before dropping into a squat and beginning to gather up the bottle’s shattered remains.
Her hands still weren’t steady, though, and Jack was worried she’d cut herself, so he squatted as well to stop her.
“Carter—”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she cut across him. “I didn’t hear you coming. I was lost in thought, a million miles away—you know how I do that sometimes—and it startled me when you came up behind me and I just lost my grip. I’ll get it cleaned up.”
She was babbling, whether to distract herself or him, it wasn’t clear.
“Carter—”
“At least I’d already drank most of it,” she added in a joking tone that sounded forced. “It’s good beer; wouldn’t want to have wasted it.”
Jack really could have used both hands at the moment—he needed two to match Carter’s—but he took hold of the wrist nearest him and pulled it away from the broken glass, relieved when she actually obeyed the unspoken command in the action and stopped.
“Carter, I don’t give a damn about the bottle, leave it.”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes, and he could feel her wrist trembling lightly where he held it. There were amber spots staining the pristine white of her sneakers, beer droplets soaking into the canvas surface in a way that felt darkly, mockingly symbolic, and in that moment Jack could have killed Adrian Conrad with his bare hands. With just the hand on his injured arm. He was half convinced his rage alone would be enough to put the man on a slab if Jack could just find him and look him straight in the eyes.
But Carter didn’t need anger. Jack wasn’t sure what exactly she needed, to be honest, but he knew it wasn’t anger, so he gave her wrist what he hoped came across as a supportive squeeze. But before he could open his mouth to offer words of some sort to supplement the gesture, she interrupted him again.
“I’m okay, sir.”
She said it so calmly, so evenly, that if they’d been talking on the phone he would have believed her. But he wasn’t blind, or stupid. She wasn’t okay, wouldn’t be okay for some time, and she didn’t need to lie to him or herself or anybody else about it.
His voice was gentle but direct when he replied.
“You don’t have to be.”
She looked up at him then, eyes dry and expression haunted. Jack’s stomach felt like a bottomless chasm, the lingering taste of his beer turning bitter and sour at the back of his throat.
He ignored the screams of his knees and the louder screaming of his arm and he stayed in his crouch and he waited. Eventually he saw her swallow.
“They were going to experiment on me.”
Her voice was soft but clear, words unmistakable in the quiet of the late afternoon. A passing breeze ruffled her hair, and Jack tried to reconcile how young he knew she was with how old her eyes suddenly seemed and he felt a little sick. In that moment, she had the thousand yard stare of a prisoner of war, and he would have sold everything he owned without question or hesitation to ensure he never saw that look in her eyes again.
But the universe didn’t work that way, unfortunately. So he hovered with her over broken glass and he held her wrist and he let her get it out.
“I was unconscious most of the time,” she continued, “in and out of it, but they did do some tests, took—took samples.”
Her voice faltered then, her free hand drifting to the crook of her elbow, and Jack wondered what she hadn’t put in her report, what she’d kept for herself. There was always something too personal or too precious to put on paper.
He would never ask.
“In the end, they got desperate. Before you arrived, just then, they were going to put me under. To kill me.”
Her eyes had gone distant, her voice flat. A cold chill passed over Jack’s body, goosebumps prickling across his skin only to be immediately replaced by the feverish burn of rage. He took a breath, the only concession to his sudden inner turmoil the knee he let drop to the deck, shifting him from his wobbling squat to a steadier kneel.
Carter didn’t seem to notice.
“Euthanasia. Clean and efficient and cold,” she continued. “I’d just go to sleep and never wake up. Meanwhile, they were going to cut my head open and dig into my brain and experiment on me for the future of medical science.”
She nearly spat the last bit, tone twisting with an unfamiliar accent, like she was repeating someone else’s words. Jack suddenly bitterly regretted not shooting the scientists they’d found, and made an idle mental note to visit them in prison.
“But they didn’t,” he said, managing matter-of-fact instead of furious.
Carter’s eyes snapped to his, gaze direct and harrowing.
“Only by seconds.”
Every close call was built on fractions. Ones of millimeters, ones of grams. But escape by seconds was the most common scenario, and one that had become so frequent during Jack’s time at the SGC that he considered it more an everyday occurrence than a special occasion. An SGC-specific brand of gallows humor had even developed around it, and no one was immune to indulging in its dark amusements from time to time. Soldiers knew you had to laugh death in the face while you could.
So Jack had understood, intellectually, how close they’d come to losing Carter this time. He’d seen the syringe in the hand of the scientist who’d been looming at Carter’s bedside. He’d heard Carter’s comments about his timely arrival during her report to Hammond.
And he’d certainly known it physically; the stuttering quick-march of his heartbeat every time she’d been out of his sight since then was clue enough to the lingering aftereffects.
But the pained look in Carter’s eyes was telling him how much she had felt it. How much she still did.
His team had been so close to death so many times it was almost routine at this point. Jump into danger, almost die, save the galaxy, come home and get pizza. Just another Tuesday.
(He had suspicions that there might even be a clandestine betting pool circulating through the SGC about it, but even those who laughed death in the face knew better than to bet on SG-1’s lives out in the open. Still, he’d heard rumors.
And he couldn’t really begrudge anyone their speculations—SG-1 did kind of have a reputation. Hell, they’d actually died and been brought back to life and somehow kept going as if it hadn’t happened. For his part, he’d tucked that particular event away in the darkest part of his mind and simply refused to think about it. For his own sanity.)
They bounced back each time because they had to, because what else were they going to do? But bouncing bruised, and a death diverted still left its marks.
And a death where you couldn’t fight it, couldn’t get away, could only watch in helpless horror as it came toward you?
Jack unconsciously ran his thumb over the inside of Carter’s wrist, just above her pulse point. It had been so close this time. Too close.
Just by seconds.
“I know,” he said.
Carter’s eyes slipped shut for a moment, a look of something like relief passing over her face, as if she’d needed to have her feelings confirmed by his own.
And that was the problem with getting used to brushing shoulders with death: when the time came around where you weren’t able to move on quickly, it suddenly felt wrong. You started questioning yourself, wondering if you were making a big deal out of nothing, wondering why you couldn’t just dust yourself off and keep going like you had before. Or you forced yourself to when you weren’t actually ready. It was a cruelty you created out of your own strength, which made it extra unfair.
He’d been there more times than he cared to admit, but he still didn’t have a damn clue how to help someone else find their way out of it. At least not in any manner that would be considered healthy.
Carter had reopened her eyes, and was staring just over his shoulder, gaze slightly unfocused. He could sense that there was more she needed to say, and he patiently waited while she got herself there. When she spoke this time, there was a kind of resignation in her tone.
“They shouldn’t have even known about me. About the Goa’uld or Jolinar or any of it.”
“No,” he agreed, pushing down his own bitterness.
Conrad and his goons shouldn’t have known about any of it, but the secret of the Stargate was a cat that would never go back in its bag. Mitigation through denial and destruction were their only options now, though they had a pretty shit track record on that so far. Jack tried not to let it eat at him that intel falling into the wrong hands was another danger he couldn’t protect his team from.
But Carter was slowly shaking her head.
“It wasn’t just the program,” she added, and Jack was put on alert by the hint of something—disgust? despair? desolation?—in the words. “They had my medical file.”
Jack relocated the bottom of his stomach as it suddenly dropped out before twisting in on itself.
It was one thing for his service record to be rifled through by grubby little hands, as he knew it had been; the worst of his sins had been redacted beyond recounting by all but those who’d lived through them. But his medical file told its own lurid story, and the right mind could piece together a clear picture of his troubled existence following its narrative.
Because everything was there. Not just mission injuries or base mishaps, but every exam, inoculation, mandatory (and not so mandatory) psych eval—everything. An entire life laid bare beyond the confines of military action.
And it was extremely rare for anything in a medical file to be redacted; it didn’t need to be. It was private, it was secure, it was protected information. For one to be out there in the wild was a violation in a way that the exposure of a service record couldn’t be, and he felt sickness and sympathy rise in him knowing Carter had been so keenly observed without her consent.
He felt the urge to say something pithy, because that’s what he did. That’s how he got through things, and how he got others through things. But there wasn’t a single damn thing about this that he could make amusing, and it wasn’t the right time.
Carter’s eyes were no longer dry. Tears were welling up just above her lower lashes, not yet spilling over, but pooling deeply enough that he could almost see his own reflection in them. She seemed tired and empty and done, and he wanted to hold her but didn’t know if he should let himself.
He hesitated, the knee-jerk reflex of protocol holding him in place. And for a moment, he hated the Air Force. He hated the fact that he stopped to think about how Daniel and Teal’c were right there, just on the other side of the wall. And how he mentally calculated—literally calculated—the sight lines from where they were sitting to where he and Carter were huddled together behind the fireplace’s bulk.
As if it mattered. Because it shouldn’t matter. It didn’t matter. Daniel and Teal’c weren’t the malicious, prying eyes that were always searching for any excuse to split up SG-1, and who would relish the opportunity to use Jack’s concern for Carter as a crowbar. They were his friends—their friends—and every single one of them had been here before. Maybe too many times.
Carter needed comfort and they’d do the same for her if they were out here instead of Jack and that was normal and it didn’t matter except that it did. Because Carter mattered too much to Jack and too many people knew it.
But they were alone in his backyard and he’d be damned all over again if he was going to just sit there and watch her cry when they’d both come so close to her being dead.
Rising to his feet—and ignoring what sounded like every bone in his body popping in protest—he stepped to one side of the broken bottle, gently tugging Carter with him. She went without resistance, though she did stiffen for the space of a heartbeat when he wrapped his good hand around her bicep and pulled her to him. She always reacted that way on the rare occasions when he initiated physical contact, and he knew it was her own protocol reflex kicking in.
But within the next breath she had relaxed, her arms slipping around his waist—careful of his sling—while her forehead came to rest on his uninjured shoulder. Her breathing had picked up a rhythmic unsteadiness, and the patch of warmth he could feel growing on his shirt confirmed that she was crying.
While she dampened his shoulder, he pondered whether it hurt worse when she cried this way—silently, almost calmly, as if she was too broken to manage an outburst—or when she wept uncontrollably, her emotions beyond restraint. He was pretty sure he’d seen her in every variation between the two extremes, and not a single one of them had been bearable.
She made a little hiccuping sound in the back of her throat, and he settled on her crying at all as being the worst. The absolute worst. Nothing worser.
Then he remembered how close they’d come to her not being here to cry at all, and thought there was at least one thing worse.
After just a few minutes, Carter pulled away. She never cried for long, tending to purge herself quickly. Jack also suspected she didn’t like leaning on anyone for too long. Family issues, military mindset, a natural inclination toward self-reliance: whatever the reason, she always pulled herself back together in short order after she fell apart. Which could be good, or bad, depending on how broken she actually was. She was an expert hider.
So he studied her while she wiped her face on her sleeve and put herself in some semblance of order. They were still standing close, probably closer than they should have been, and Jack’s shoulder brushed hers as he turned away to pluck his beer from where he’d left it on the railing. He wan’t going to finish it; the aching he’d been able to live with had turned into a fire he couldn’t, so the pills were going to make a return shortly.
Carter let out a huff of laughter when he held the bottle out to her, but she took it anyway.
“I won’t drop this one, sir. Promise.”
Jack leaned against the railing beside her and looked back at the house. He could just see the edge of Teal’c’s shoulder from where they were standing, and knew that Daniel was hidden somewhere behind the fireplace.
“Hell, Carter, you can chuck the thing across the yard if you need to,” he casually replied. He raised his chin toward the house. “I’ll send Daniel out to pick it up later.”
“Is Daniel your yard boy?” she asked, tone lightly teasing.
“Well, I don’t have a cabana.”
She snorted around the sip of beer she was taking, and Jack felt his heart float in his chest. She would mend, was mending, and this wasn’t going to be the thing that broke her. That broke any of them. It had been bad, and it had been close, but it hadn’t been the end and that was the only kind of happy ending they got.
He glanced at Carter from the corner of his eye, noticing how she looked lighter than she had when she’d first arrived. He wondered how tightly she’d been holding herself together. He wondered whether this had been enough falling apart.
He looked away and, despite there not being anyone else in hearing range, lowered his voice slightly.
“You can not be okay for as long as you need, Carter. And you only have to tell me.”
She paused with the beer half raised to her mouth and looked at him questioningly, a wary uncertainty in her eyes. He carefully shrugged his uninjured shoulder.
“I’ll milk the arm, keep us off active duty.”
Her eyes were still red-rimmed, but the half-smirk she threw him had genuine amusement in it. “You, sir? Milk an injury?”
He attempted an affronted look, but didn’t think he quite pulled it off, if the spread of her smile was anything to go by. He frowned down at his sling instead.
“Hammond might suspect—Fraiser definitely would—but neither of them would begrudge me. I was wounded during a rescue mission; that comes with special privileges.”
“Like milking the injury.”
The humor in her tone had faded a bit, and he wished he hadn’t mentioned the ‘rescue mission’ part. But he just shrugged again, as if he hadn’t noticed.
“Or not. As needed.”
Carter’s voice was quiet when she asked, “Which will be how long?”
“As long as you need.”
She visibly swallowed, and he swore he saw tears well up again before she blew out a long breath and took a sip of his beer. She looked away from him, out toward the shrubs blocking the view of his neighbor’s yard, eyes searching and yet not settling.
“It won’t be that long, sir.”
“As needed, Carter,” he softly repeated.
They stood there in silence for a few minutes, the shadows lengthening around them and the insects striking up their evening band. The air was heavy with the scent of freshly cut grass—Jack was relatively sure it was a Saturday, if he hadn’t lost any days in there somewhere. Under that heady green scent, he could just make out Carter’s shampoo, something warm and lightly spicy, and the yeasty scent of the beer in her hand.
If they weren’t on his back deck because one of them had almost been killed, again, it would’ve been the perfect weekend afternoon. But he guessed that, circumstances taken into account, it actually was what passed for a perfect weekend afternoon for them.
He was considering whether he could trust any of them with his grill when Carter spoke again.
“Thank you, sir.”
Jack sighed, only somewhat dramatically. “I did get shot, Carter. I mean—who knows how long it’ll take this thing to heal?”
“Last time was three weeks, sir.”
“Ah, but that was just a graze, Carter. And I’m older now. These things take longer as you get older.”
She gave him a dry look. “It was last year, sir.”
“Yup, a whole year older. Practically ancient.”
He kind of was ancient, at least in terms of still being out in the field. And there were times he definitely felt it. Mostly in his knees. And his back.
Hammond had talked to him about it more than once, never pushing but making it clear that as far as the Air Force was concerned, Jack’s clock was ticking. But he’d done the desk thing and didn’t relish the idea of returning to pushing papers. At least not yet, and certainly not while his team might be out there getting into danger without him. So he was going to keep throwing himself—bad knees and bullet scars and all—through the Gate until they stopped letting him.
Or I die, he thought with a faint grimace.
He was pulled from that morbid thought by Carter’s sigh as she turned around to lean against the railing beside him. Their shoulders were brushing again, so he felt it when she went tense. He looked around, wondering what had set her off, only to find her staring back into the house. He almost went full DEFCON in that moment, wondering—somewhat irrationally—whether someone had managed to evade the SGC’s sweep of Conrad’s abandoned hospital only to somehow find their way into his living room. But following Carter’s gaze, he could tell that she was looking at Teal’c, or at least however much of him she could see.
“Carter—?”
“We experimented on Teal’c when he first came here.”
Her voice was quiet and pained, the words unexpected but not surprising. Jack had seen enough of her mental roadmap to understand where they were headed.
“Yes,” he sighed, “we did.”
“I can’t believe we did that.”
Jack could believe it, and much worse, but he preferred not to think about it. He cleared his throat.
“He was a willing participant, Carter.” Under duress, perhaps. But fully willing.
“People shouldn’t be treated like things.”
“No, they shouldn’t.”
“I’ve been the experiment before.”
Despite the nature of what she’d just said, Carter’s tone suddenly seemed a bit less hollow, and Jack looked over at her. She was still staring in Teal’c’s direction, but her gaze was slightly unfocused, like she was seeing somewhere else.
“It was different,” she continued. “After Jolinar. When I was ordered to work with R&D then, it didn’t feel like this. It wasn’t about what they could take from me, it was about what I could do.”
The sick feeling in Jack’s stomach threatened to rise again at the implications of what Carter was saying, but he breathed through it. Carter was fine, or at least she would be. And they’d find Conrad eventually. Jack took pleasure in knowing that he would make the man wish he’d let himself die once they did.
“The difference is that you couldn’t give Conrad what he was looking for anyway,” he quietly pointed out. “The answer wasn’t in you. You said so yourself.” It was all the more reason for Jack to hate the man: his abduction of Carter had been pointless.
Carter slowly shook her head. “No, I couldn’t have. We’ve already done every experiment we could think of in an effort to develop a viable method of symbiote removal. We’re nowhere near a solution of any kind, much less one that would be safe for the host.” She paused, then added in a softer, almost hesitant tone. “But the Tok’ra could do it.”
Jack gave her a sharp look. While it was true that the Tok’ra could forcibly remove symbiotes from hosts, he doubted they would condone the purposeful implantation of a Goa’uld symbiote for any reason, even with their patented removal process waiting in the wings.
But there was always the other option. Given their dwindling numbers, Jack had no doubt that the Tok’ra would likely be willing to consider any potential host the SGC vetted for them—that was how they’d gotten Jacob, after all. But despite being part of a hunted and endangered species, they were still picky about the humans they chose to partner with, and Jack doubted Conrad would have passed muster, with either the Tok’ra or the SGC.
“Maybe,” he conceded with a frown. “Can’t say I’d vouch for Conrad to them, though.”
Carter didn’t answer, just made a little non-committal hum before taking another sip of beer. Jack studied her face, spotting the emotions warring in her eyes even as she kept her expression neutral. His arm ached enough that he was starting to feel it all the way up in his jaw, but he ignored his desire to shift positions. Carter’s response had him feeling uneasy and he wasn’t ready to let it go.
“Carter?”
Hey eyes flicked his way for a second before she returned to staring at the wall.
“Carter.”
She licked her lips, looking torn. “Conrad thought he was doing what he had to do. The only thing he could do,” she finally said, almost apologetically.
Jack scoffed. “Yeah, well, Conrad also decided to put a snake in his head, so I don’t consider him the height of intelligence.” Nor any of the people working for him. Idiots, every single one, as far as Jack was concerned. You didn’t put Goa’uld in people, not for any reason; you killed them. End of story.
“He was dying and it was his last resort.”
Even though Carter’s tone spoke to her own discomfort with the thought, Jack was surprised she’d had it at all. She’d been abducted, drugged, experimented on, and almost killed—was she really trying to understand the man responsible for it all? As far as Jack was concerned, Conrad was an arrogant, narcissistic megalomaniac. (The human version of a Goa’uld, now that Jack thought about it; he and his snake were probably getting along splendidly.) He wasn’t someone worthy of empathy. Maybe Carter had spent too much time around Daniel and his idealism.
Jack gave Carter an incredulous look, using the motion of his slight turn toward her to adjust his sling. “Carter, are you siding with the man who kidnapped you?”
She flushed, a faint scowl forming between her eyebrows. “No!” she protested. “But I can hate him for what he did and still understand why. Desperation is a powerful motivator. So is death.” She paused, the hollow, haunted look seeping back into her eyes for a moment. “I can understand doing whatever you can not to die,” she said, a hint of pleading in her tone. “Can’t you?”
Unsettled by the direction of the conversation, and the reasons why Carter would be thinking about the desperate desire to live, Jack answered without thinking.
“Carter, I would never want to live so badly that I’d let someone put a snake in me,” he snapped, jabbing a finger toward his head.
She didn’t flinch. In fact, her expression barely changed at all, nothing more than a flicker, like a ripple across the surface of a pond. But Jack immediately wanted to take the words back. Or at least soften the way he’d said them.
He didn’t think Carter would ever have chosen to play host to Jolinar, had she been given the choice. But she’d gone through it just the same and had managed to come out the other side intact. Eventually, anyway—that had been another ‘too close’ moment, but one well in the past. And while Jack didn’t think she begrudged him his continued repulsion around the entire concept of symbiotes, he never wanted her to think those feelings extended to her or what she’d been through. She was Carter, and if the memory of someone else looking at him through her eyes still showed up in his nightmares sometimes, he would never, ever tell her that.
And then there was the still slightly uncomfortable fact that her own father was currently carrying a snake of his own. The friendly version—or friendlier, at least. The Tok’ra weren’t exactly a warm bunch, and Jack had never been shy about his feelings toward them, but he was growing to like Selmak. Even if he’d deny it.
Jacob had been in the same position as Conrad, in a way. He’d been facing a slow, painful decline in health followed by a premature death. Conrad had taken what Jacob had been offered, and wasn’t that the damndest metaphor? Conrad had been selfish and refused to face his death, and had got taken over by a Goa’uld for his troubles. He might have been healed, if he truly was still alive out there somewhere, but he wasn’t in control.
In contrast, Jacob had been, if not selfless, at least self-sacrificing. He hadn’t wanted to die—who would?—but he could have chosen to rather than become a host. Instead he’d chosen to share his body and his mind and saved two lives in the process.
And he’d done it, at least in part, for Carter. Jack was sure of that, was positive that Jacob had taken the chance to stick around a little bit longer so that he could be alive for her. Because she’d asked.
The thought flashed through Jack’s mind that he would probably do the same. Even if it did involve a snake.
Unnerved, he defaulted to jokes, looking for a way out of the topic.
“Anyway, I’ll never be in that position,” he said with exaggerated bravado. “I’m very difficult to kill.”
He held back a cringe. Definitely not the smoothest transition he could try to make away from what they’d been discussing, but it seemed Carter was more than happy to go along with him. She nodded gravely, a small smile playing at the corner of her mouth.
“Nine lives, sir?”
“At least, Carter. At least.”
He wasn’t going to think about how many of those lives he’d already used, and how few he might have left. He was alive for now. As his body was making abundantly clear to him, loudly and insistently. Letting the pain show on his face a bit, he straightened up from the railing and gingerly fingered his shoulder.
“Not yet bulletproof, though,” he sadly sighed, trying for a comedic effect.
Whether Carter actually found the attempt humorous or not, she did give him a genuine, if muted, grin. “Working on adding those sleeves for you, sir,” she quipped.
Jack gave her a small smile in return. Their eyes met and he held her gaze, an understanding passing between them in the moment. They were okay, and they would be okay.
He turned and looked back into the house, what he could see of it through the window.
“We should order some food,” he sighed. “I’m going to need to eat something before I take a handful of pills.”
Carter’s smile faded slightly, her brow furrowing in concern. “Is it that bad?”
“Just bad enough, Carter,” Jack replied, careful to keep his tone light. It was pretty bad and getting worse, but he wasn’t going to worry anyone about it, especially Carter. He jerked his head toward the door. “C’mon, let’s get inside before Daniel and Teal’c order something without us.”
Carter fell into step beside him as they headed back around the house. Jack deliberately avoided looking through the windows to see if Daniel or Teal’c were watching them.
“Could we order Thai?” Carter asked.
“We’ll order whatever you want.”
Carter looked over at him in surprise. “Really?”
Jack gestured to his sling. “Pretty sure I can get whatever I want for, oh, at least the next three days or so. So if you want Thai, we’ll get Thai.”
“Milking it, sir?”
Jack paused at the sliding glass door and narrowed his eyes at her conspiratorially. “Do you want Thai food or not, Carter?”
Her lips twitched like she wanted to smile, but the look she gave him was more fond and grateful than amused. Before he had time to grow uncomfortable under her gaze, she stepped past him and pulled the door open. She waved him in ahead of her with an, “After you, sir.”
With one last shared look, Jack stepped inside and loudly announced, “We’re ordering Thai.”
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Characters: Jack O’Neill, Samantha Carter
Word Count: 7227
Categories: angst, post-episode, friendship, URT
Spoilers: set after “Desperate Measures” (S5E11)
Warnings: N/A
Summary: Jack believed Carter when she said she was fine. But he still kept an eye on her, waiting for the tide to come in.
Jack believed Carter when she said she was fine.
He knew that it could be true, even after the worst trauma. Had experienced it himself, knew how there were lulls between the waves where everything was okay, where everything felt like it had before and that semblance of normalcy held you together.
But waves crash eventually. So while he believed her, he still kept an eye on her, waiting for the tide to come in.
It had been four days since he’d freed her from her restraints in Conrad’s horror show of an abandoned hospital, his voice steady and his heart in his throat.
Conrad and his Goa’uld had vanished, Maybourne was in the wind, Carter had been traumatized (again), and Jack had a new bullet wound to add to his collection. He also had a very long list of tortures planned for good ol’ Harry once they met again, a list he added to every time his arm twinged. And it twinged a lot.
Fraiser, possibly feeling generous due to the circumstances surrounding his injury, had not been skimpy with her distribution of painkillers when she’d discharged him from her care. But Jack hated the fuzziness they left in their wake, so he’d purposefully dialed back on the prescribed dosage, knowing from far too much experience exactly where his tolerance threshold lay. Sustaining a lower dose meant that his arm ached almost constantly, but the pain was a welcome trade-off for being fully aware of everything that was going on.
Like the fact that Carter had disappeared from his living room in the time it had taken him to hit the head and retrieve a beer.
It was usually a coin toss as to whether they met at her place or Jack’s for the obligatory post-near-death-experience team night. But with Jack banned from driving for the time being—and to allow Carter her place to retreat to, once she had enough of the rest of them—everyone had come to him this time.
Jack took a step back into the entryway and peeked outside. Through the narrow window beside the front door, he could see that Carter’s car was still in the drive, so she hadn’t beat a retreat yet.
He’d known without asking that Daniel had offered to pick Carter up, to bring her along with him and Teal’c. Just like he knew that Carter had insisted on driving herself. He would’ve done the same, in her situation. Had, a time or two. You needed to control everything you could for a while after that control had been taken from you. It was understandable. Plus, speed was a form of therapy for Carter, right up there with working for days on end, and Daniel’s sedate driving would not have done the job.
So she hadn’t left yet, but she also wasn’t where Jack had left her, safely ensconced on the sofa beside Daniel.
A flutter of unease rippled through him, the ghostly remnants of so many desperate days with her missing without the slightest clue as to her whereabouts.
Annoyed with himself, he forced his fingers to relax around the bottle they held, the straight-from-the-fridge cold a grounding sensation against the licking flames of panic. There wasn’t anything dangerous within at least a mile of his house, unless you counted the platoon of stray cats that patrolled the neighborhood. And he had absolutely no doubt that Carter could take them—or tame them—without so much as breaking a sweat.
So she was fine. He needed to relax.
Once he knew where she was.
Stepping down into the living room, he took a minute to stare blindly in the direction of the television Daniel and Teal’c were watching. He didn’t really focus in on what it was showing—looked like a nature documentary, which could just as easily have been Teal’c’s choice as Daniel’s—but felt he had to make the gesture toward nonchalance.
For his own sake alone, apparently, because when Daniel turned and met his eyes, Jack could see the understanding—equal parts amusement and solemnity—in their depths. He could also see Daniel holding his tongue, biting down on the words there, waiting for Jack’s prompting to let them out. To maintain the facade that he hadn’t learned to read Jack’s face so well that it was just another language in his arsenal? Or to make Jack say the words, just so they both could hear how they came out?
Feeling contrary and ornery, Jack shifted slightly, settling his arm more comfortably in its sling before taking a slow draw of his beer. There was another point in favor of taking it easy on the pain meds: he could drink.
Kind of.
Let’s just say he definitely would not be telling everyone’s favorite diminutive doc that he’d imbibed, but doing so was less dangerous on the lower dose of meds he’d chosen to take. And he was only going to have one. Or at least that had been the plan. If Carter had disappeared before they’d even ordered dinner, it might wind up being a long night.
Swallowing a sigh, Jack let his gaze drift back toward the flickering screen. But he could still feel Daniel’s eyes on him when he finally asked, as casually as possible, “Where’s Carter?”
“She went outside some time ago,” Teal’c intoned, not turning away from the program, where some small, furry creature was scurrying through dense jungle vegetation.
Daniel, tilting his head toward the deck, added, “Said she needed some air.”
Jack took another drink before nodding, as if in agreement. Yeah, some air sounds good. I could use that, too.
He and Daniel turned away from each other at the same time, Daniel back to the television, Jack toward the door that led onto the deck. After a moment’s deliberation over the options of how to free up his working hand, Jack secured the beer bottle in the crook of his sling and reached for the door.
The faint swish of it sliding open masked the hiss he let loose as the frigid burn of the bottle against his skin caused the aching in his arm to crest sharply. Entire arm now throbbing, he quickly fished the bottle back out of the sling and stepped out onto the deck, pushing his side against the handle to get the door closed again. Once it clicked shut, he stayed leaning against the jamb, eyes closed as he waited for the pain to recede back to an acceptable level.
It only took a moment or two, during which he may or may not have rethought his decision to not follow the doc’s dosage orders. But even as he considered trading the bottle in his hand for a different one, the pain returned to its ‘I got shot a few days ago’ standard, and he returned to his search for his second in command.
When a quick glance around the yard didn’t immediately reveal Carter’s location, the whispers of worry started up again. But Jack knew that Teal’c and Daniel wouldn’t have just let her wander off—not right now, not after what she’d just been through—so she had to be somewhere nearby.
The thought struck him that she might have gone to the roof, and he eyed his beer warily. He knew he could make it up the ladder with only one hand, but he didn’t relish the thought of having to tuck the bottle back in his sling for the journey. Which meant he’d have to leave it behind. A sacrifice, but a worthy one.
It was as he moved to the far end of the deck, planning to check the rooftop, that he finally spotted Carter. She hadn’t gone to the roof after all, but was standing at the back side of the house, concealed behind the stony bulk of his fireplace. That part of the deck wasn’t generally used as much more than a passageway to the backyard, and the fact that she was standing in the one spot where she would be concealed from view from the living room was telling.
There was no way she’d found herself back there by accident; she was hiding.
From what? Or whom?
Jack almost left her alone. He understood the need for solitude, especially after captivity. It was the control thing again, being master of your surroundings and all that.
But she hadn’t left, hadn’t just gone home where she could literally be master of all that she surveyed, and that was telling, too. Because even when you needed to be by yourself, you didn’t always want to do it alone. Having the team there, out of sight but just a pane of glass away, was like having a kind of security blanket. She was alone with her thoughts, but she wasn’t actually alone, and that could make the being alone part a lot more palatable.
So he started to retreat, thinking he’d just go back inside. He could surreptitiously keep an eye on her, now that he knew where to keep that eye, while also giving her her space. He could return indoors and join Daniel on the sofa and purposefully annoy him—and amuse Teal’c—by throwing out wildly inaccurate factoids about whatever they were watching now. Carter would come in when she was ready; they could wait for her.
But just as he was about to turn away, he was struck by how unnaturally still Carter was. She looked for all the world as if she were completely oblivious to his presence, even though he probably wouldn’t have been able to sneak up on her had he tried. The sound of the glass door being opened and closed alone would have alerted her to someone joining her outside. And while his deck was sturdy, it wasn’t exactly creak-free, but she hadn’t so much as twitched as he approached her position.
There was always the chance that she was purposefully ignoring him, hoping he’d get the message and leave her alone. But there was something about her posture that made him think that wasn’t the case. There was a lack of awareness in it, somehow, like she wasn’t fully in the here and now.
Debating what he should do, Jack stepped closer, figuring that if Carter still didn’t react, he’d take it as a sign to leave her to her thoughts. He couldn’t quite make out her expression from his angle, but he could at least tell she wasn’t crying, which he took as a good sign.
Then his eyes drifted down to her hands, which he hadn’t been able to see before. One was wrapped around her own bottle of beer, which was half empty, while the other was gripping the deck railing as she stared blindly out across his yard. And the knuckles of both were white.
Jack cursed under his breath and inched nearer. He was all for the joys of solitude, but sometimes being left alone with your thoughts was a bad idea. And given what his team’s thoughts could include, doubly so.
“Carter?”
She gave no indication of having heard him. Jack set his beer on the railing and closed the remaining distance between them to lay a gentle hand on her shoulder, calling her name again as he did so.
Her reaction to both was instantaneous. She whipped around to face him with a barely audible gasp, the beer slipping from her fingers to shatter on the deck between their feet.
Jack’s heart stuttered as he took her in: eyes wide with fear, jaw set with determination, hands clenched into fists. It was the same look she’d had when he’d burst through the door to find her strapped to that damn gurney, and for a second he was back there with her, terror and relief mingling in disorienting fashion.
Then her hands started to shake as the initial shock dissipated and she settled back to reality. Jack watched as the fear turned into confused surprise, followed rapidly by what looked dishearteningly like shame. Her eyes fell from his to the mess on the deck, and she grimaced faintly before dropping into a squat and beginning to gather up the bottle’s shattered remains.
Her hands still weren’t steady, though, and Jack was worried she’d cut herself, so he squatted as well to stop her.
“Carter—”
“I’m sorry, sir,” she cut across him. “I didn’t hear you coming. I was lost in thought, a million miles away—you know how I do that sometimes—and it startled me when you came up behind me and I just lost my grip. I’ll get it cleaned up.”
She was babbling, whether to distract herself or him, it wasn’t clear.
“Carter—”
“At least I’d already drank most of it,” she added in a joking tone that sounded forced. “It’s good beer; wouldn’t want to have wasted it.”
Jack really could have used both hands at the moment—he needed two to match Carter’s—but he took hold of the wrist nearest him and pulled it away from the broken glass, relieved when she actually obeyed the unspoken command in the action and stopped.
“Carter, I don’t give a damn about the bottle, leave it.”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes, and he could feel her wrist trembling lightly where he held it. There were amber spots staining the pristine white of her sneakers, beer droplets soaking into the canvas surface in a way that felt darkly, mockingly symbolic, and in that moment Jack could have killed Adrian Conrad with his bare hands. With just the hand on his injured arm. He was half convinced his rage alone would be enough to put the man on a slab if Jack could just find him and look him straight in the eyes.
But Carter didn’t need anger. Jack wasn’t sure what exactly she needed, to be honest, but he knew it wasn’t anger, so he gave her wrist what he hoped came across as a supportive squeeze. But before he could open his mouth to offer words of some sort to supplement the gesture, she interrupted him again.
“I’m okay, sir.”
She said it so calmly, so evenly, that if they’d been talking on the phone he would have believed her. But he wasn’t blind, or stupid. She wasn’t okay, wouldn’t be okay for some time, and she didn’t need to lie to him or herself or anybody else about it.
His voice was gentle but direct when he replied.
“You don’t have to be.”
She looked up at him then, eyes dry and expression haunted. Jack’s stomach felt like a bottomless chasm, the lingering taste of his beer turning bitter and sour at the back of his throat.
He ignored the screams of his knees and the louder screaming of his arm and he stayed in his crouch and he waited. Eventually he saw her swallow.
“They were going to experiment on me.”
Her voice was soft but clear, words unmistakable in the quiet of the late afternoon. A passing breeze ruffled her hair, and Jack tried to reconcile how young he knew she was with how old her eyes suddenly seemed and he felt a little sick. In that moment, she had the thousand yard stare of a prisoner of war, and he would have sold everything he owned without question or hesitation to ensure he never saw that look in her eyes again.
But the universe didn’t work that way, unfortunately. So he hovered with her over broken glass and he held her wrist and he let her get it out.
“I was unconscious most of the time,” she continued, “in and out of it, but they did do some tests, took—took samples.”
Her voice faltered then, her free hand drifting to the crook of her elbow, and Jack wondered what she hadn’t put in her report, what she’d kept for herself. There was always something too personal or too precious to put on paper.
He would never ask.
“In the end, they got desperate. Before you arrived, just then, they were going to put me under. To kill me.”
Her eyes had gone distant, her voice flat. A cold chill passed over Jack’s body, goosebumps prickling across his skin only to be immediately replaced by the feverish burn of rage. He took a breath, the only concession to his sudden inner turmoil the knee he let drop to the deck, shifting him from his wobbling squat to a steadier kneel.
Carter didn’t seem to notice.
“Euthanasia. Clean and efficient and cold,” she continued. “I’d just go to sleep and never wake up. Meanwhile, they were going to cut my head open and dig into my brain and experiment on me for the future of medical science.”
She nearly spat the last bit, tone twisting with an unfamiliar accent, like she was repeating someone else’s words. Jack suddenly bitterly regretted not shooting the scientists they’d found, and made an idle mental note to visit them in prison.
“But they didn’t,” he said, managing matter-of-fact instead of furious.
Carter’s eyes snapped to his, gaze direct and harrowing.
“Only by seconds.”
Every close call was built on fractions. Ones of millimeters, ones of grams. But escape by seconds was the most common scenario, and one that had become so frequent during Jack’s time at the SGC that he considered it more an everyday occurrence than a special occasion. An SGC-specific brand of gallows humor had even developed around it, and no one was immune to indulging in its dark amusements from time to time. Soldiers knew you had to laugh death in the face while you could.
So Jack had understood, intellectually, how close they’d come to losing Carter this time. He’d seen the syringe in the hand of the scientist who’d been looming at Carter’s bedside. He’d heard Carter’s comments about his timely arrival during her report to Hammond.
And he’d certainly known it physically; the stuttering quick-march of his heartbeat every time she’d been out of his sight since then was clue enough to the lingering aftereffects.
But the pained look in Carter’s eyes was telling him how much she had felt it. How much she still did.
His team had been so close to death so many times it was almost routine at this point. Jump into danger, almost die, save the galaxy, come home and get pizza. Just another Tuesday.
(He had suspicions that there might even be a clandestine betting pool circulating through the SGC about it, but even those who laughed death in the face knew better than to bet on SG-1’s lives out in the open. Still, he’d heard rumors.
And he couldn’t really begrudge anyone their speculations—SG-1 did kind of have a reputation. Hell, they’d actually died and been brought back to life and somehow kept going as if it hadn’t happened. For his part, he’d tucked that particular event away in the darkest part of his mind and simply refused to think about it. For his own sanity.)
They bounced back each time because they had to, because what else were they going to do? But bouncing bruised, and a death diverted still left its marks.
And a death where you couldn’t fight it, couldn’t get away, could only watch in helpless horror as it came toward you?
Jack unconsciously ran his thumb over the inside of Carter’s wrist, just above her pulse point. It had been so close this time. Too close.
Just by seconds.
“I know,” he said.
Carter’s eyes slipped shut for a moment, a look of something like relief passing over her face, as if she’d needed to have her feelings confirmed by his own.
And that was the problem with getting used to brushing shoulders with death: when the time came around where you weren’t able to move on quickly, it suddenly felt wrong. You started questioning yourself, wondering if you were making a big deal out of nothing, wondering why you couldn’t just dust yourself off and keep going like you had before. Or you forced yourself to when you weren’t actually ready. It was a cruelty you created out of your own strength, which made it extra unfair.
He’d been there more times than he cared to admit, but he still didn’t have a damn clue how to help someone else find their way out of it. At least not in any manner that would be considered healthy.
Carter had reopened her eyes, and was staring just over his shoulder, gaze slightly unfocused. He could sense that there was more she needed to say, and he patiently waited while she got herself there. When she spoke this time, there was a kind of resignation in her tone.
“They shouldn’t have even known about me. About the Goa’uld or Jolinar or any of it.”
“No,” he agreed, pushing down his own bitterness.
Conrad and his goons shouldn’t have known about any of it, but the secret of the Stargate was a cat that would never go back in its bag. Mitigation through denial and destruction were their only options now, though they had a pretty shit track record on that so far. Jack tried not to let it eat at him that intel falling into the wrong hands was another danger he couldn’t protect his team from.
But Carter was slowly shaking her head.
“It wasn’t just the program,” she added, and Jack was put on alert by the hint of something—disgust? despair? desolation?—in the words. “They had my medical file.”
Jack relocated the bottom of his stomach as it suddenly dropped out before twisting in on itself.
It was one thing for his service record to be rifled through by grubby little hands, as he knew it had been; the worst of his sins had been redacted beyond recounting by all but those who’d lived through them. But his medical file told its own lurid story, and the right mind could piece together a clear picture of his troubled existence following its narrative.
Because everything was there. Not just mission injuries or base mishaps, but every exam, inoculation, mandatory (and not so mandatory) psych eval—everything. An entire life laid bare beyond the confines of military action.
And it was extremely rare for anything in a medical file to be redacted; it didn’t need to be. It was private, it was secure, it was protected information. For one to be out there in the wild was a violation in a way that the exposure of a service record couldn’t be, and he felt sickness and sympathy rise in him knowing Carter had been so keenly observed without her consent.
He felt the urge to say something pithy, because that’s what he did. That’s how he got through things, and how he got others through things. But there wasn’t a single damn thing about this that he could make amusing, and it wasn’t the right time.
Carter’s eyes were no longer dry. Tears were welling up just above her lower lashes, not yet spilling over, but pooling deeply enough that he could almost see his own reflection in them. She seemed tired and empty and done, and he wanted to hold her but didn’t know if he should let himself.
He hesitated, the knee-jerk reflex of protocol holding him in place. And for a moment, he hated the Air Force. He hated the fact that he stopped to think about how Daniel and Teal’c were right there, just on the other side of the wall. And how he mentally calculated—literally calculated—the sight lines from where they were sitting to where he and Carter were huddled together behind the fireplace’s bulk.
As if it mattered. Because it shouldn’t matter. It didn’t matter. Daniel and Teal’c weren’t the malicious, prying eyes that were always searching for any excuse to split up SG-1, and who would relish the opportunity to use Jack’s concern for Carter as a crowbar. They were his friends—their friends—and every single one of them had been here before. Maybe too many times.
Carter needed comfort and they’d do the same for her if they were out here instead of Jack and that was normal and it didn’t matter except that it did. Because Carter mattered too much to Jack and too many people knew it.
But they were alone in his backyard and he’d be damned all over again if he was going to just sit there and watch her cry when they’d both come so close to her being dead.
Rising to his feet—and ignoring what sounded like every bone in his body popping in protest—he stepped to one side of the broken bottle, gently tugging Carter with him. She went without resistance, though she did stiffen for the space of a heartbeat when he wrapped his good hand around her bicep and pulled her to him. She always reacted that way on the rare occasions when he initiated physical contact, and he knew it was her own protocol reflex kicking in.
But within the next breath she had relaxed, her arms slipping around his waist—careful of his sling—while her forehead came to rest on his uninjured shoulder. Her breathing had picked up a rhythmic unsteadiness, and the patch of warmth he could feel growing on his shirt confirmed that she was crying.
While she dampened his shoulder, he pondered whether it hurt worse when she cried this way—silently, almost calmly, as if she was too broken to manage an outburst—or when she wept uncontrollably, her emotions beyond restraint. He was pretty sure he’d seen her in every variation between the two extremes, and not a single one of them had been bearable.
She made a little hiccuping sound in the back of her throat, and he settled on her crying at all as being the worst. The absolute worst. Nothing worser.
Then he remembered how close they’d come to her not being here to cry at all, and thought there was at least one thing worse.
After just a few minutes, Carter pulled away. She never cried for long, tending to purge herself quickly. Jack also suspected she didn’t like leaning on anyone for too long. Family issues, military mindset, a natural inclination toward self-reliance: whatever the reason, she always pulled herself back together in short order after she fell apart. Which could be good, or bad, depending on how broken she actually was. She was an expert hider.
So he studied her while she wiped her face on her sleeve and put herself in some semblance of order. They were still standing close, probably closer than they should have been, and Jack’s shoulder brushed hers as he turned away to pluck his beer from where he’d left it on the railing. He wan’t going to finish it; the aching he’d been able to live with had turned into a fire he couldn’t, so the pills were going to make a return shortly.
Carter let out a huff of laughter when he held the bottle out to her, but she took it anyway.
“I won’t drop this one, sir. Promise.”
Jack leaned against the railing beside her and looked back at the house. He could just see the edge of Teal’c’s shoulder from where they were standing, and knew that Daniel was hidden somewhere behind the fireplace.
“Hell, Carter, you can chuck the thing across the yard if you need to,” he casually replied. He raised his chin toward the house. “I’ll send Daniel out to pick it up later.”
“Is Daniel your yard boy?” she asked, tone lightly teasing.
“Well, I don’t have a cabana.”
She snorted around the sip of beer she was taking, and Jack felt his heart float in his chest. She would mend, was mending, and this wasn’t going to be the thing that broke her. That broke any of them. It had been bad, and it had been close, but it hadn’t been the end and that was the only kind of happy ending they got.
He glanced at Carter from the corner of his eye, noticing how she looked lighter than she had when she’d first arrived. He wondered how tightly she’d been holding herself together. He wondered whether this had been enough falling apart.
He looked away and, despite there not being anyone else in hearing range, lowered his voice slightly.
“You can not be okay for as long as you need, Carter. And you only have to tell me.”
She paused with the beer half raised to her mouth and looked at him questioningly, a wary uncertainty in her eyes. He carefully shrugged his uninjured shoulder.
“I’ll milk the arm, keep us off active duty.”
Her eyes were still red-rimmed, but the half-smirk she threw him had genuine amusement in it. “You, sir? Milk an injury?”
He attempted an affronted look, but didn’t think he quite pulled it off, if the spread of her smile was anything to go by. He frowned down at his sling instead.
“Hammond might suspect—Fraiser definitely would—but neither of them would begrudge me. I was wounded during a rescue mission; that comes with special privileges.”
“Like milking the injury.”
The humor in her tone had faded a bit, and he wished he hadn’t mentioned the ‘rescue mission’ part. But he just shrugged again, as if he hadn’t noticed.
“Or not. As needed.”
Carter’s voice was quiet when she asked, “Which will be how long?”
“As long as you need.”
She visibly swallowed, and he swore he saw tears well up again before she blew out a long breath and took a sip of his beer. She looked away from him, out toward the shrubs blocking the view of his neighbor’s yard, eyes searching and yet not settling.
“It won’t be that long, sir.”
“As needed, Carter,” he softly repeated.
They stood there in silence for a few minutes, the shadows lengthening around them and the insects striking up their evening band. The air was heavy with the scent of freshly cut grass—Jack was relatively sure it was a Saturday, if he hadn’t lost any days in there somewhere. Under that heady green scent, he could just make out Carter’s shampoo, something warm and lightly spicy, and the yeasty scent of the beer in her hand.
If they weren’t on his back deck because one of them had almost been killed, again, it would’ve been the perfect weekend afternoon. But he guessed that, circumstances taken into account, it actually was what passed for a perfect weekend afternoon for them.
He was considering whether he could trust any of them with his grill when Carter spoke again.
“Thank you, sir.”
Jack sighed, only somewhat dramatically. “I did get shot, Carter. I mean—who knows how long it’ll take this thing to heal?”
“Last time was three weeks, sir.”
“Ah, but that was just a graze, Carter. And I’m older now. These things take longer as you get older.”
She gave him a dry look. “It was last year, sir.”
“Yup, a whole year older. Practically ancient.”
He kind of was ancient, at least in terms of still being out in the field. And there were times he definitely felt it. Mostly in his knees. And his back.
Hammond had talked to him about it more than once, never pushing but making it clear that as far as the Air Force was concerned, Jack’s clock was ticking. But he’d done the desk thing and didn’t relish the idea of returning to pushing papers. At least not yet, and certainly not while his team might be out there getting into danger without him. So he was going to keep throwing himself—bad knees and bullet scars and all—through the Gate until they stopped letting him.
Or I die, he thought with a faint grimace.
He was pulled from that morbid thought by Carter’s sigh as she turned around to lean against the railing beside him. Their shoulders were brushing again, so he felt it when she went tense. He looked around, wondering what had set her off, only to find her staring back into the house. He almost went full DEFCON in that moment, wondering—somewhat irrationally—whether someone had managed to evade the SGC’s sweep of Conrad’s abandoned hospital only to somehow find their way into his living room. But following Carter’s gaze, he could tell that she was looking at Teal’c, or at least however much of him she could see.
“Carter—?”
“We experimented on Teal’c when he first came here.”
Her voice was quiet and pained, the words unexpected but not surprising. Jack had seen enough of her mental roadmap to understand where they were headed.
“Yes,” he sighed, “we did.”
“I can’t believe we did that.”
Jack could believe it, and much worse, but he preferred not to think about it. He cleared his throat.
“He was a willing participant, Carter.” Under duress, perhaps. But fully willing.
“People shouldn’t be treated like things.”
“No, they shouldn’t.”
“I’ve been the experiment before.”
Despite the nature of what she’d just said, Carter’s tone suddenly seemed a bit less hollow, and Jack looked over at her. She was still staring in Teal’c’s direction, but her gaze was slightly unfocused, like she was seeing somewhere else.
“It was different,” she continued. “After Jolinar. When I was ordered to work with R&D then, it didn’t feel like this. It wasn’t about what they could take from me, it was about what I could do.”
The sick feeling in Jack’s stomach threatened to rise again at the implications of what Carter was saying, but he breathed through it. Carter was fine, or at least she would be. And they’d find Conrad eventually. Jack took pleasure in knowing that he would make the man wish he’d let himself die once they did.
“The difference is that you couldn’t give Conrad what he was looking for anyway,” he quietly pointed out. “The answer wasn’t in you. You said so yourself.” It was all the more reason for Jack to hate the man: his abduction of Carter had been pointless.
Carter slowly shook her head. “No, I couldn’t have. We’ve already done every experiment we could think of in an effort to develop a viable method of symbiote removal. We’re nowhere near a solution of any kind, much less one that would be safe for the host.” She paused, then added in a softer, almost hesitant tone. “But the Tok’ra could do it.”
Jack gave her a sharp look. While it was true that the Tok’ra could forcibly remove symbiotes from hosts, he doubted they would condone the purposeful implantation of a Goa’uld symbiote for any reason, even with their patented removal process waiting in the wings.
But there was always the other option. Given their dwindling numbers, Jack had no doubt that the Tok’ra would likely be willing to consider any potential host the SGC vetted for them—that was how they’d gotten Jacob, after all. But despite being part of a hunted and endangered species, they were still picky about the humans they chose to partner with, and Jack doubted Conrad would have passed muster, with either the Tok’ra or the SGC.
“Maybe,” he conceded with a frown. “Can’t say I’d vouch for Conrad to them, though.”
Carter didn’t answer, just made a little non-committal hum before taking another sip of beer. Jack studied her face, spotting the emotions warring in her eyes even as she kept her expression neutral. His arm ached enough that he was starting to feel it all the way up in his jaw, but he ignored his desire to shift positions. Carter’s response had him feeling uneasy and he wasn’t ready to let it go.
“Carter?”
Hey eyes flicked his way for a second before she returned to staring at the wall.
“Carter.”
She licked her lips, looking torn. “Conrad thought he was doing what he had to do. The only thing he could do,” she finally said, almost apologetically.
Jack scoffed. “Yeah, well, Conrad also decided to put a snake in his head, so I don’t consider him the height of intelligence.” Nor any of the people working for him. Idiots, every single one, as far as Jack was concerned. You didn’t put Goa’uld in people, not for any reason; you killed them. End of story.
“He was dying and it was his last resort.”
Even though Carter’s tone spoke to her own discomfort with the thought, Jack was surprised she’d had it at all. She’d been abducted, drugged, experimented on, and almost killed—was she really trying to understand the man responsible for it all? As far as Jack was concerned, Conrad was an arrogant, narcissistic megalomaniac. (The human version of a Goa’uld, now that Jack thought about it; he and his snake were probably getting along splendidly.) He wasn’t someone worthy of empathy. Maybe Carter had spent too much time around Daniel and his idealism.
Jack gave Carter an incredulous look, using the motion of his slight turn toward her to adjust his sling. “Carter, are you siding with the man who kidnapped you?”
She flushed, a faint scowl forming between her eyebrows. “No!” she protested. “But I can hate him for what he did and still understand why. Desperation is a powerful motivator. So is death.” She paused, the hollow, haunted look seeping back into her eyes for a moment. “I can understand doing whatever you can not to die,” she said, a hint of pleading in her tone. “Can’t you?”
Unsettled by the direction of the conversation, and the reasons why Carter would be thinking about the desperate desire to live, Jack answered without thinking.
“Carter, I would never want to live so badly that I’d let someone put a snake in me,” he snapped, jabbing a finger toward his head.
She didn’t flinch. In fact, her expression barely changed at all, nothing more than a flicker, like a ripple across the surface of a pond. But Jack immediately wanted to take the words back. Or at least soften the way he’d said them.
He didn’t think Carter would ever have chosen to play host to Jolinar, had she been given the choice. But she’d gone through it just the same and had managed to come out the other side intact. Eventually, anyway—that had been another ‘too close’ moment, but one well in the past. And while Jack didn’t think she begrudged him his continued repulsion around the entire concept of symbiotes, he never wanted her to think those feelings extended to her or what she’d been through. She was Carter, and if the memory of someone else looking at him through her eyes still showed up in his nightmares sometimes, he would never, ever tell her that.
And then there was the still slightly uncomfortable fact that her own father was currently carrying a snake of his own. The friendly version—or friendlier, at least. The Tok’ra weren’t exactly a warm bunch, and Jack had never been shy about his feelings toward them, but he was growing to like Selmak. Even if he’d deny it.
Jacob had been in the same position as Conrad, in a way. He’d been facing a slow, painful decline in health followed by a premature death. Conrad had taken what Jacob had been offered, and wasn’t that the damndest metaphor? Conrad had been selfish and refused to face his death, and had got taken over by a Goa’uld for his troubles. He might have been healed, if he truly was still alive out there somewhere, but he wasn’t in control.
In contrast, Jacob had been, if not selfless, at least self-sacrificing. He hadn’t wanted to die—who would?—but he could have chosen to rather than become a host. Instead he’d chosen to share his body and his mind and saved two lives in the process.
And he’d done it, at least in part, for Carter. Jack was sure of that, was positive that Jacob had taken the chance to stick around a little bit longer so that he could be alive for her. Because she’d asked.
The thought flashed through Jack’s mind that he would probably do the same. Even if it did involve a snake.
Unnerved, he defaulted to jokes, looking for a way out of the topic.
“Anyway, I’ll never be in that position,” he said with exaggerated bravado. “I’m very difficult to kill.”
He held back a cringe. Definitely not the smoothest transition he could try to make away from what they’d been discussing, but it seemed Carter was more than happy to go along with him. She nodded gravely, a small smile playing at the corner of her mouth.
“Nine lives, sir?”
“At least, Carter. At least.”
He wasn’t going to think about how many of those lives he’d already used, and how few he might have left. He was alive for now. As his body was making abundantly clear to him, loudly and insistently. Letting the pain show on his face a bit, he straightened up from the railing and gingerly fingered his shoulder.
“Not yet bulletproof, though,” he sadly sighed, trying for a comedic effect.
Whether Carter actually found the attempt humorous or not, she did give him a genuine, if muted, grin. “Working on adding those sleeves for you, sir,” she quipped.
Jack gave her a small smile in return. Their eyes met and he held her gaze, an understanding passing between them in the moment. They were okay, and they would be okay.
He turned and looked back into the house, what he could see of it through the window.
“We should order some food,” he sighed. “I’m going to need to eat something before I take a handful of pills.”
Carter’s smile faded slightly, her brow furrowing in concern. “Is it that bad?”
“Just bad enough, Carter,” Jack replied, careful to keep his tone light. It was pretty bad and getting worse, but he wasn’t going to worry anyone about it, especially Carter. He jerked his head toward the door. “C’mon, let’s get inside before Daniel and Teal’c order something without us.”
Carter fell into step beside him as they headed back around the house. Jack deliberately avoided looking through the windows to see if Daniel or Teal’c were watching them.
“Could we order Thai?” Carter asked.
“We’ll order whatever you want.”
Carter looked over at him in surprise. “Really?”
Jack gestured to his sling. “Pretty sure I can get whatever I want for, oh, at least the next three days or so. So if you want Thai, we’ll get Thai.”
“Milking it, sir?”
Jack paused at the sliding glass door and narrowed his eyes at her conspiratorially. “Do you want Thai food or not, Carter?”
Her lips twitched like she wanted to smile, but the look she gave him was more fond and grateful than amused. Before he had time to grow uncomfortable under her gaze, she stepped past him and pulled the door open. She waved him in ahead of her with an, “After you, sir.”
With one last shared look, Jack stepped inside and loudly announced, “We’re ordering Thai.”