has_2ls | TR debut

Entry tags:

sam,
tabula rasa

TR debut

Of all the fool damn things he’s done over the years, Jack is pretty sure that diving into icy cold water is way, way up on the list. McKay needs him to drain the jumper bay and apparently the only way to do that is to dive down there, look around for some switch, and flip it. McKay seems to think it’s pretty obvious but apparently Jack’s having an obtuse day - none of these controls seem obvious in any sense of the word.

The cold seeps in almost down to his bones and his lungs are burning from lack of air. He can hold his breath for a decent amount of time but he’s got no idea which of these switches he’s supposed to be pushing or pulling. Nothing to do but go back up and bark at McKay until he can give him a better description of what is and isn’t obvious on Atlantis. Damn Ancients. Why couldn’t it have been one of those ATA activated things where he could just think “open” from up on the ground, dry, and skirt around this whole mess?

When he breaks the surface again, Woolsey is there looking all expectant-like and Jack wishes like hell he had something to tell him. Thing is, he doesn’t and Woolsey isn’t the one he needs to talk to anyway.

“Did you do it?” Jack shakes his head and holds out his palm. “Radio.” Woolsey hands it over with a minimum of fuss but he’s still hovering and Jack knows that he’ll have to feed him something just to keep him from panicking and revealing their position. First things first, he’s got to talk to McKay.

“McKay. You and I have very different definitions of the word obvious.” McKay squawks a little, out of his element, and Jack interrupts him. “There are dozens of controls down there and I wouldn’t even know how to describe.” Still, he and McKay come to some kind of consensus that the emergency switch should be toward the middle of the console and extremely prominent. Jack hopes, for everyone’s sake, that he’s right.

He’s not really fond of going back in the water but a little cold water’s hardly the worst thing he’s faced in twenty plus years of a decorated military career. If Sheppard and his team can pull off this rescue, it will have been more than worth it for Jack to get hypothermia and frostbite. More than worth it. He takes in a deep breath and goes back under, swimming to the center of the room and pushing at a likely switch.

It seems to be draining the room, so Jack releases it, only to see the water rush back in. Great. One more trip topside to inform McKay that he’s a complete idiot and he’s back in the water again, hopefully for the last time. He pushes at the switch and ignores the burn in his lungs, ignores the way his vision goes black around the edges. When everything starts feeling fuzzy and he feels light-headed, he keeps holding on, knowing that everyone’s fate pretty much depends on Sheppard and the rest of them getting into Atlantis to take it back from these damn replicators.

He focuses on that, the rescue, and it feels like time slows down and he’s suspended for a little while. The big difference is that he feels like he’s sprawled out on a flat surface and while he’s wet and cold, it doesn’t feel like he’s underwater anymore. He gasps in a deep breath, chokes on it, and spends the next few seconds coughing and sputtering and wondering where in the galaxy he’s wound up. Replicators. Of course. Like as not, he’s in a room somewhere with some alien’s hand in his head and none of this is even real. When he hears footsteps, he decides to go on the offensive.

“Look. You’re not getting anything from me. Hell, I don’t even know anything. You captured the wrong guy if you wanna know how to get from Pegasus to Milky Way because I don’t even know how the damn gate works, much less that bridge Carter and McKay dreamed up. Completely out of luck.”

There. That should satisfy them, right?

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This island change is one of the more pleasant ones, Sam thinks. She never spent much time in NYC and even though she knows this isn't really New York, just the island in disguise, she's enjoying it. Janet is too little to notice or care, but William likes it, and it's helped distract him from the tantrums he's been having since Daniel disappeared.

She's just gotten out of class and is going to pick Janet and William up from the Children's Office. It's just a short walk around the corner but Sam's forgotten her coat so she's hurrying--she's thinking of taking the kids ice-skating later, if William's not too cranky--and she almost trips over someone on the sidewalk. "I'm sorry," she says, "I didn't see you--oh." She stops when she gets a good look at who it is, and she freezes.

"Oh, my God. Jack?"

"Yup. Go on, take your hand out of my head. This one is probably gonna get way too personal for your liking."

Jack is still convinced the Replicators have him and while he's happy they haven't stumbled upon anything that will compromise earth security (yet, anyway) he's not really fond of them seeing any fantasies he's got about Carter.

He sounds just like the Jack she remembers--the same flippant, slightly self-deprecating sarcasm--and her heart skips a beat. But he's soaking wet and it's cold out and he's sitting here talking like he's talking to a Replicator, and she knows the first priority is to get him inside and into dry clothes. "No Replicators," she says, "and nobody has a hand in your head. You're fine. It's me, Sam."

"I would ask you to prove it but the point's probably moot since whoever has his hand in my head has all my memories of you. Guess I'm just gonna have to trust you and hope it works out," Jack says, closing his eyes and letting out a few curses at how freaking cold it is. He shifts to stand up.

"Next time we share a fantasy, I want somewhere warm, Carter. You got that? Warm."

"Give it about a month, and it'll be warm again," she says. "Which... okay, i can explain all of this, but not out here while it's freezing and you're soaked." She mentally re-evaluates her plans; Janet and William may have to stay at the Children's Office for a little bit while she explains everything. "Come on," she says, and nods in the direction of her apartment, a block away in the opposite direction of the compound. "There's a lot to explain."

"Yeah, I want...a hot shower," Jack says, shivering a little in the cold. He can see his breath and there's ice on the streets and all of it points to a situation that's going to be really bad if he doesn't actually get inside soon. Nothing to do but trust Carter and hope it works out.

"Shit, Carter, could the weather have at least cooperated a little?"

"This is cooperating. It's not actively snowing or raining." She can't believe she's making inane small talk with Jack, who disappeared almost a year ago, when he's standing right there, flesh and blood, walking beside her and acting like showing up somewhere he isn't supposed to be isn't a big deal because it's the kind of thing that happens on a regular basis when you do what they do (did) for a living. The surprise of seeing him is such a shock that she doesn't know what to do or say, so she doesn't say much during the short walk to her building or the short trip in the elevator to the 12th floor.

"Fair enough. Next time, it'll be snowing when I freeze my...you know off. Maybe I should be grateful for small blessings."

He's still too cold and miserable to really care about where he is but he has to wonder how he's ended up in the middle of a city when he was just on Atlantis. If Carter's not a Replicator doohickey and she's actually Carter (which Jack thinks she is - she called him 'Jack' and not 'Sir,' and he's pretty sure no Replicator would have done that based on the information in his brain) maybe she can explain it.

"So...what planet are we on? Maybe I should start with the galaxy but I'm gonna assume Milky Way and not Pegasus this time."

He would start off by asking her a question she doesn't know the answer to. "I'm actually not sure," Sam says. "It's a pocket universe. It's some kind of temporal and spatial anomaly that pulls people from different places and times and other than that, we don't know a lot about it."

Her apartment is kind of a mess, with William's and Janet's toys everywhere and some dirty dishes in the sink, but she ignores the mess for the moment to peer in some boxes where she had carefully packed away Jack's things. She couldn't bear to get rid of them, but it was too painful to leave them out, so boxing them up was a compromise with herself. "Bathroom's down the hall," she says, passing him a small pile of meticulously folded clothes but no shoes because she doesn't remember where they are. "There's a lot to explain and I don't think you want to sit through it cold and wet."

"Not particularly. Hopefully I can get my ass in these and we're not gonna have a problem," Jack says, eyeing the pants critically. Right length, but his middle's gotten a little...spready over the last few years.

He shrugs and heads down the hall, taking an obscenely long shower just because it's warm and the water smells good and not like Atlantis. When he's done, he slides into the clothes (which fit, thank god) and pads back out to Carter with towel-dried hair.

"I believe I may have resurrected. You sure that shower's not a sarcophagus?"

While Jack was in the shower, Sam made coffee--it's decaf, because she's still nursing Janet, but she figures it's better than nothing. "Positive." She decides not to tell him that the super-awesome bathroom of this apartment will be replaced with barely-adequate island plumbing in about a month, if things go acccording to the usual island pattern. Instead, she puts two mugs of coffee on the table. "You should probably sit down for this," she says.

"So I guess it's safe to assume you've got kids," Jack says, looking around at all the myriad toys littering the floor as he makes his way to the table. "Not too shabby. I'm a fan of kids. Used to have one, even."

He's babbling because he's a little nervous and unsure of where he is and once he realizes it, he promptly shuts his mouth and takes a sip of his coffee instead.

"I do." Sam nudges at her coffee cup but doesn't drink it. "It's... complicated. Before I explain--tell me what you were doing before you showed up on the sidewalk? It'll help me explain some things."

Jack arches a brow but figures, again, if he's trusting this is the real Carter (or one of them - there's a lot of realities out there and he doesn't know which one he's in) he needs to be honest with her.

"I went to Atlantis for a joint Homeworld Security and IOA evaluation of the Lantean transition...thing. Anyway, turns out they were Replicators and I ended up stuck with Woolsey's ass and half-drowned. And then here."

Sam nods, slowly; she wasn't around for that particular mission, as SG-1 was offworld at the time dealing with the Ori, but she knows about it. "Okay, that helps. Well, like I said, this place is some kind of spatio-temporal anomaly in which people are pulled at random from other universes and timelines. It's a little like the ways we've had other versions of us from alternate timelines cross over into our timeline with the quantum mirror and other things except that we can't figure out what causes it. I am actually from a point about two and a half years further along in the timeline than you are, and I've been here almost three years."

She waits a beat to let that sink in, and then adds, "There was another you here when I got here, from a lot further back in the timeline."

"Wait, what?"

Jack has gotten better at following Carter's science babble over the years but this is just flying over his head. "So, you're saying I was here before, you're from two years after me, but since you've been here three years, you're really five years after me? Forgive me, but that makes no damn sense, Carter."

"I know, it doesn't make sense," Sam says. She imagines his head is about to explode from the math. "The thing is, people can disappear from here just as randomly as they arrive, and the other Jack O'Neill disappeared about a year ago. Not quite a year. A little less than a year. There have been a lot of Stargate personnel here over the years--you, me, Jonas, Daniel, Vala, John Sheppard, Ronon, Dr. Keller, Rodney, Cam...I think Teal'c was here too, before I came along. And some people from the Destiny, which you don't know about yet, do you? No, of course you don't. I didn't learn about that till later. They're all gone now, except for Jonas. Never any two of the same person at once, which is good, because of the whole entropic cascade failure thing. But... just trust me. It happens."

"Ooookaay."

Jack's seen enough weird shit in his life that he's able to accept this easily enough. He's been in a room with two Carters before, it's possible that he's been here before now. He scrubs a hand back over his hair and looks down at his coffee before his glance slides to Carter's hands. She's wearing a ring. It's kinda simple, but it's clear what it is.

"And you got married and had kids? So, who's the lucky guy. You didn't mention Shanahan."

She sees Jack looking at her wedding ring--she's never taken it off--and laughs, softly. As many other thems as they've encountered, she thinks he might have put two and two together by now... except how do you even assume something like this? "Not Pete," she says. He's never been there and she hopes he doesn't show up, not so much for her sake but because he'd hate it. "I married Jack O'Neill."

Oh, well, there it is. Jack's been avoiding that possibility for obvious reasons but now Carter's put it out in the open and it explains a lot - especially how she's been calling him Jack and not sir.

"Look...I...okay. So we were married and had kids, multiple, and then I disappeared and now I'm back. It's a little screwed up, isn't it?"

"A little bit," Sam admits. "Two kids. William is three, and we adopted him when his mom disappeared. Vala is his mom--I think you would have met her at least once--and he's a nice kid. Normal, I mean. Not like Adria. He's not Ori, or anything. He's a normal human boy. And Janet, she's about seven months. They're at the day care right now, they're usually with me but I teach some classes at school and I was just going to pick them up when I saw you." She suddenly feels a weird sense of guilt about that, which is crazy, because it's not like she needs to defend her parenting choices to him (nor has he hinted that she should) but this whole situation is crazy and that's maybe the least of it.

"Sorry to dump all this on you," she adds, before he even has time to get a word in, because she's not sure what his reaction is going to be and she needs time to prepare herself for it. "I wasn't really prepared for...for this, and I don't know what I should say or anything..." She's meandering now and she reaches for her coffee to drink it; her hands are shaking and she spills a little, but it's an excuse to get up and find a towel to clean up with and she jumps up to do it.

"Carter, it's all right," Jack tries. It's not, because it's completely ridiculous and screwed up but he can see she's upset and he doesn't like it. He does love her, however stupid it is for him to love someone he can't have, and he doesn't want to hurt her.

"It's what we do. It's our thing, the thing in the room and I don't blame him for uh, for doing right by you."

When he mentions the thing in the room it's both a comfort and a painful reminder that he's not the same Jack as the Jack she married and built a life with here. He's still Jack, and he knows her--in some ways more than her husband, because of all the things he's lived with her that her Jack didn't, and in some ways less, because of the things here he doesn't know. It's confusing and she's not sure how to respond to it. "It wasn't about 'doing right,'" she says, because this is Jack and she knows he doesn't mean that, but it still stings a little. "It was about finally having what I wanted and could never have. Janet came later."

She wipes up the spill and tosses the towel on the counter. "I have to pick up the kids," she says, and she finds it difficult to meet his eyes. "I understand if you don't want to--if you're not ready to see them, but if you want to, you can. It's just around the corner, I won't be gone long."

Jack isn't really sure what to say because while he knows he wants to see his kids, especially the one that's his, he doesn't want to confuse them. The baby's probably too little but the older one might remember him. He's about to say he'll just leave and come back some other time when he's interrupted by a lapful of fur and paws and teeth.

Holy shit. It's a wolf. Not just a wolf, but a giant, overgrown, the-size-of-a-pony wolf.

"Carter? Why the hell is there a wolf in the house?"

His voice is a little high and nervous but the wolf seems to be all right with him being there, maybe a little too all right. "Uh, calm down, buddy. And yeah, go get the kids, I'll uh, be here. With the wolf."

"Thor!" Sam scolds, but the direwolf seems perfectly happy to half-climb all over Jack and shove his nose in Jack's face. It's kind of cute, actually, and Sam can't help but smile a little. "There's a wolf in the house because a girl named Susan gave us a wolf. Named for everyone's favorite Asgard. Um, and this is Cash," she says, as the dog follows the wolf and sniffs at Jack's pant leg. "He used to belong to John, and then Rodney, and now me, and we have a cat and turtles... we sort of inherit all the pets," she adds sheepishly.

She pulls her coat from the rack by the door and then hesitates. "I don't know how William will react," she warns Jack. "He was close to you before, and to Daniel--and Daniel was here twice and William really took it hard the second time, when he left. He's a sweet boy, Jack, so if he doesn't seem like it now, he's just having a hard time."

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