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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"I wanted to name her after someone important to both of us." Janet's still sleeping, so Sam carefully eases off her little pink hat with earflaps so Jack will actually be able to see her. Her face is pink from the cold outside and the warmth inside and her mouth is all scrunched up the way she does sometimes when she's sleeping.

Sam doesn't know whether she ought to offer to let Jack hold her or if maybe he doesn't want to; she's lost the ability to read him like she used to, and she feels like she ought to protect them somehow, but that's completely irrational--she knows Jack, any Jack, would do anything for her and her kids whether they were his or not and they don't need protecting from him of all people. Maybe it's the potential for loss that she wants to shield them from, not wanting William to be more miserable than he already is, not wanting Janet to experience it at all.

Even pressed up against Carter's shoulder, Jack can tell she looks like Charlie. The mouth is a little Carterish, fuller than Charlie's ever was, but the rest of her has O'Neill written all over it. It's like seeing a ghost.

It takes him a minute before he can say anything and when he does, his voice is low and soft. "She's beautiful, Carter. Completely perfect."

Sam feels absurdly proud of that--again, weird, because it's not like she planned out exactly how Janet looks or did anything, really, except manage to give birth to her--and she touches the little wisps of blonde hair that are sticking up from Janet's head, a little staticky from her hat. It's hard to know what to say, because Jack looks stunned, like someone's hit him in the head and he's trying to get his bearings. She tries to image what it would be like if their situations were reversed and she can't. She doesn't know what she'd say if she showed up in an alternate universe where Jack was alone with a child of theirs. She can't get her head around it.

She shifts Janet in her arms so Jack can get a better look at her, and it's enough to wake her, even though Sam didn't meant to do that just yet. Janet opens her eyes gradually, like it's an effort to wake up while bundled in warm blankets.

When Janet blinks her eyes open, Jack hopes for half a second that she has blue eyes and hates himself for it when he's disappointed they're brown. She looks even more like Charlie now and while she's perfect and beautiful and undeniably his, it wounds him in a place he's pushed down and forgotten for so long that he doesn't remember how to deal with the pain.

"Hey there, pretty girl. You sleepy over there on Mama? Don't blame you. I bet that's a real nice place to sleep."

He feels kind of like an idiot baby-talking but she's his daughter he and figures nobody will judge him for it.

Sam never got to hear Jack talk to their daughter, never got to see the look on his face when he saw her for the first time, and now he's standing there looking like he's seeing the most precious thing in the world when an hour ago he didn't even know she existed. "Do you want to...?" she asks hesitantly, and trails off, because even though he's looking at Janet adoringly, he's still got the stunned-shocked look behind the adoration and she's not sure if offering to let him hold her is putting him on the spot.

"If that's okay? I don't want to like...overstep, or anything," Jack says, awkward even though his fingers are curling in anticipation. He's always loved the way babies smell, all soft and clean, and Janet brings back every good memory he ever had of Charlie as an infant.

"If you think it'll be all right, I'd like to."

"Sure, it's all right." And it is all right, no matter what her protective urges are blaring at her about. She shifts Janet into his arms and it's made easier by the fact that Janet, at seven months, doesn't have the floppy, heavy head and weak neck of a newborn. Now that Janet's waking up and curious about this new person, she's pushing herself to sit up and look around.

It's hard for Sam to look at them, and she looks away; her chest feels tight and she's hot all over and she slips out of her coat, using putting it away as an excuse not to stare.

"Hey, Princess," Jack murmurs, dipping his head a little so he can look at Janet while he's holding her. She's perfect, from her creamy skin right down to her little button nose and that mouth that is more and more Carter by the second.

"I'm your daddy. Yup. I'm kinda late getting here but I love you, kid, and I always will."

It's too much for Sam. She can't listen to him talk to her baby in that voice. It hurts and it's too much and she can't look at them together. She'd finally healed from losing Jack, she managed to keep it together when Daniel disappeared, but this is too much because it makes her ache badly for everything she's lost. "Sorry," she says, and her voice is thick. "I have to--got to check on William. Sorry."

Sam makes a hasty retreat to William's room, where he's curled up on his bed with his favorite blanket. He's only recently moved into a 'big boy bed' and this one, with this apartment seems bigger, making William seem even smaller and more vulnerable--and that forces her to pull it together, because he needs her to. "You okay, kiddo?" she asks, and sits beside him on the bed.

"Uh-huh," he says, and curls up close to her. He looks tired and a little sad and Sam worries about him.

She pets his hair and sighs. "I know, it's hard, honey," she says. "It'll be okay." She feels like a hypocrite telling him this when she's not sure of it herself, but what else is she going to say? She can't even promise him that she won't disappear and reappear. "I need to talk to Uncle Jack for a while. Help him figure stuff out. I haven't forgotten about your story, though. Before bed. I promise."

Jack spends the next few minutes with Janet, playing with her and looking at her and trying to figure out all the ways she'd different from his Charlie. There's a few and they're significant enough to make her seem like her own person even if there's still a spooky resemblance.

Carter's been out of the room for a little while when Janet starts to fuss and squirm and a quick check of her diaper proves that's not it. Jack doesn't know where the bottles are, or if she's breast feeding, so he tries to comfort Janet as best he can before going to find Carter in William's room.

"Carter? She's fussing. I checked to see if she was wet but she's not so I guess she needs to eat, maybe?"

"Probably." It's a relief to have some normal, perfectly predictable business to take care of. She gives William another soft touch to his hair and gets up, reaching for Janet. "Come here, baby. There you go, nothing to fuss about." Janet's used to the routine and knows what's coming, and she begins to settle, but it won't last long until she's fed. And while Sam doesn't care who sees her, really--she's fed Janet whenever and wherever she needs to--she feels weirdly self-conscious right now.

"I'm just going to go in my room," she says, and it's a little awkward because she doesn't want Janet to start crying again. "But there are other things you should know about this place--I mean, don't go anywhere, okay?" And the other thing is that yes, it hurts to see him, it hurts like hell, it's good to see him, too, and she doesn't want him to disappear so soon.

"Not going anywhere. Kind of at loose ends anyway since I don't know where the heck I am."

It's true, though he wouldn't go anywhere anyway. He's not that kind of person to abandon someone he cares about even if it's pretty clear Carter's got this handled.

"I'm just gonna go...sit in the living room? That good?"

"Yeah," she says, almost adding make yourself at home, but it feels awkward, given the context, so she just says, "I won't be long," and goes into her room with Janet.

She thinks that when she's in her room, alone with the baby, she might have a chance to process what's happened in the last hour, but she finds it's hard to think about much of anything. She feels numb and a little lost. And stupid, too, to have never considered the idea that Jack might come back--Daniel did, after all, but she supposes she didn't think about the idea in relation to Jack because it's a very Daniel thing to die or disappear and show right back up again.

Jack, not so much.

So she doesn't think about anything other than the logisitcs of getting this new Jack acquainted with this stupid island. Janet is too little to notice anything, and once her tummy is full she ends up mostly asleep against Sam's chest, a relaxed and half-drunk expression on her face. Sam decides to let her sleep, putting her down in her crib and lightly covering her with a blanket, then Sam straightens her clothes and goes back out to the living room.

"Janet's asleep," she says, with a little shrug towards her bedroom. "I just put her down for a while."

Edited 2012-12-04 22:14 (UTC)

"I'm just...here, I guess."

It occurs to Jack that for the first time in over twenty years, he doesn't have anything to do. He doesn't have a team to command or CO to check in with or reports to file or anything and he's a little at loose ends. He doesn't know what to do or say to Carter, who seems upset he's shown up, and all he wants is to go get the baby and hold her until he gets his fill even though she's tired and wants to sleep.

"But I guess I can go, if you need me to? I shouldn't be coming in here and turning your life upside down."

"No, don't," Sam says immediately, "you're not. I just didn't expect this. You. But it's not your fault." It's hard to look at him, so she takes the excuse of picking up some of the kids' things and general straightening to keep her eyes and hands busy. "None of this is your fault."

In the movies, when someone gets back someone they thought they'd lost, it's a happy reunion and it's all fireworks and swelling music, but Sam doesn't feel any of that. She just feels numb.

"Okay," Jack says quietly. If it was his own Carter, back home, he thinks he'd know what to do to fix this situation but it's not, so he's quiet instead. He doesn't want to make an awkward thing more awkward.

"Thanks for letting me hold her. She's beautiful, Carter. Really beautiful."

The tone in his voice when he talks about Janet tugs at her heart, and she feels herself soften a little. "Yeah, of course," Sam says. "Anytime. You can see her anytime, if you want. I mean... this, by itself, is a lot to dump on you on top of 'oh, by the way, you're stuck in a pocket universe and you can't get out and all kinds of weird crap happens here I haven't even told you about yet'... I'm not really sure how to... you know. Do this. I didn't think I'd get to see you again."

"Surprise!" Jack jokes, but it falls a little flat to his ears. When do you ever expect someone to come back from the dead aside from Daniel? He's a special case in every sense of the word.

"Well, I'm here, as much as I can control that and I want to help with the kids. You don't have to let me, I get it, but I want to be around for them if I can."

"Of course you can." For the kids, not for her; she thinks that's what he means, anyway, and she can't really blame him. Being dropped in the middle of this just to find out that she was with another version of him, that they were married and had a child...it's got to be weirding him out. She gets it. She remembers how she felt when she learned about Dr. Carter and how she and the Jack in her timeline were married.

"For you, too," Jack adds. "You don't look good, Carter. I mean, you're holding it in pretty good but I know you and I know you've probably got to be stressed. It'll be good to be a little less...you know. Frazzled and stuff. If me being here can help that, I'm all for it."

It's not quite what he wants to say but it's part of it. He hopes Carter can read him as well as his version back home always could.

"Not stressed," she says quietly. "I was doing okay. I missed you, but I was okay, finally. It took a while. And now here you are, and you're not..." No, that's not what she means to say. "You're you and I'm... I'm really glad you're here." And she is, despite the numbness she feels.

Jack doesn't touch on what she doesn't say. He assumes it's that he's not the same Jack, which, yeah, isn't fair but it isn't fair to her either. He reaches out and touches her shoulder lightly, a gesture of comfort he's offered more than once over the years.

"Yup, I'm here. I'm sure you'll get sick of me sooner rather than later but for now, I'm here."

For now. There's no guarantee this Jack won't also disappear, too. It hurts. It hurts a lot. "Yeah," she says. "You are." When he touches her shoulder, she hesitates for a moment, and then does what she's wanted to do since she found him on the sidewalk, which is slide her arms around him, pressing her face against his shoulder.

She doesn't want to let go.

It takes him a moment to get over the shock of Carter hugging him but once he does, he slides his arms around her and rubs his hand over her back. He doesn't say anything, just holds her, and wishes that there was something he could do to keep her from looking so sad.

He doesn't want to let go either.

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