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Entry tags:
- item,
- jennifer keller,
- sam,
- tr
Man on a Mission [For Keller]
Jack didn't like being on the outs with Carter, not even when they had a purely working relationship. He'd always loved her company and thought she was funny and sincere before he started having thoughts about how to make her laugh and what would drive her crazy. That said, he'd landed himself in the dog house pretty good after the sex fiasco and Jack couldn't for the life of him understand why he'd let himself get so carried away with her. It wasn't like either of them.
Still, an apology would probably do them some good and Jack intended to snag fruit and coffee from the Compound just after dawn and sneak it into Carter's hut by way of making peace. She'd wake up to her favorite thing and a note from him and maybe it'd start smoothing things over. Or making them civil. Hell, he didn't know what to do. He just had to try.
Coffee in hand with a folded note, he started making his way back down to New Atlantis, hoping nobody ran into him.
Still, an apology would probably do them some good and Jack intended to snag fruit and coffee from the Compound just after dawn and sneak it into Carter's hut by way of making peace. She'd wake up to her favorite thing and a note from him and maybe it'd start smoothing things over. Or making them civil. Hell, he didn't know what to do. He just had to try.
Coffee in hand with a folded note, he started making his way back down to New Atlantis, hoping nobody ran into him.
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Why were they saying the same things over and over every time?
"Jack." She sat down at the table across from him, hands folded in her lap. God, she was not awake enough for this and she was terrified she'd go all mushy-mouthed and say something inane. She thought about spending most of the day with him in bed, the picnicking, the flower-picking, the lazy whiling away the day, and she couldn't find it in herself not to want that on a more regular basis.
She just couldn't let herself have it. Not yet. Not even when he was bringing her coffee and looking all sheepish in her doorway.
"All that stuff I said about loving you, that you were the best thing that ever happened to me... all that was true," she said carefully. "I just wasn't ready to say it yet. It's like..." She struggled for the right metaphor, but she was so tired her brain felt like it was full of fog.
"It's like you're in this brand new X-302," she said, forgetting for the moment he hadn't even heard of that yet, much less seen it, "and you think you know exactly how to land it, because even though you've never actually done it before you've studied it for years, but you realize it's something totally new and way better than what you thought you had, and it's the only one there is and the only one there's ever going to be, so you don't want to wreck it. You don't want to crash it and burn it up, so you pull up... and God, this metaphor sucks," she finished lamely. "I can't think straight. Just... do you have any idea at all what I mean?"
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"You don't want to wreck it because it's so damn beautiful, but because you're afraid you can't really let her fly, right? Is that about it?"
Because that was exactly how he felt about her just about every day and he kept crashing the plane on the runway before he could really get going good.
"You don't have to be afraid to fly, Sam. You're allowed to be happy, I swear. If it's me that makes you happy, I'm a damn lucky man, but you deserve it regardless of who or what it is."
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Just one word, soft, but certain. Every romantic relationship in her adult life had ended in loneliness of some kind, whether by death or spectacular breakup, and Sam was so afraid to set herself up for that again. It was why she was burying herself in her work even here on this island. Not duty, or at least not entirely; it was fear. Fear that it wouldn't work, fear that it wasn't real, fear that it wouldn't last. And it was petrifying in a way that all the crazy things she did on the job never had been--because that was the job, and this was her life.
"I am." And she needed him to be patient with her until she wasn't anymore, but she didn't know how to ask him.
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"Unless you want me to stay, I think I'll go. Let you have your coffee in peace, all right?"
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She took a breath, and when his hand fell away from her hair she caught it, squeezing gently. They had had too many painful conversations recently, and she felt drained and a little nuts and she really didn't want to screw up.
"I don't want to wreck this," she said quietly. "It's too important. I just need..." You to be patient with me? To not misunderstand? She couldn't put it in the right words--too much feeling and not enough sleep in the last few day were catching up with her. "A really careful pre-flight?"
Yeah, she had really pushed the limit on that partucular metaphor, but it was what she had to work with right now.
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"At the risk of sounding like a teenager, did you want to just date and see what happens? Nothing...physical," Jack said, drawing that line for her, "But maybe just being around me in a capacity that's not friend or CO?"
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But she wanted to.
"I'd like that a lot," she amended, glancing up at him. There was a possibility that this might be a conversation that didn't end with her wanting to pull her heart out, and there was that hope thing again.
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She might have just woken up, but she didn't want to look like she'd just woken up.
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He walked over to investigate, lightly touching the top. His handwriting was there "Crap from my SGC office" and neatly scratched out with an inventory beneath in someone else's handwriting.
Jack's dress uniform, with shoes
Photographs--Charlie; the team; Jack's father.
Miscellaneous--Jack's tags, string bracelet from Cassie?
Jack opened the box, pawing through for the one photo that meant the most. Dammit, Charlie. He missed him.
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"Okay, let's--" She stopped when she saw what he was doing. She recognized both the box and the handwriting on the lid, and knelt down beside him. He'd seen the list; she knew what he'd be looking for.
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"Never thought I'd get to see this again, you know?"
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And then wanted to label the whole box as SGC crap until she scratched it out and did a proper inventory.
He'd never really talked about Charlie, other than the obvious, and she had never pried. There were some things that were just outside that boundary, whether in the boundaries of rank or out of it.
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"I'm so sorry," she said, her voice low. Sam knew what it was like to lose her parents and her dearest friends; she could not even begin to imagine what it would feel like to lose a child, especially not in the way that Jack had lost Charlie.
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Jack laughed, but it was a little more subdued than usual. "Looks like I did make general though," he said, nudging at the uniform in the box. "Stars."
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The uniform, though... "I told you," she said, smiling a little.
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They'd sort of been planning to go together anyway, in that 'we live right next door to each other and are going in the same direction' kind of way, or at least they had been before everything blew up. But this was different; a subtle difference, but different regardless.
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"Then we'll go. Pick you up on time and everything. I can be a good date when I want to be, promise."
As opposed to the day before yesterday, when he'd pushed things way too far.
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So they were going to Jennifer and Ronon's wedding together. That made it something like a date, didn't it?
Oooh boy. A date with Jack O'Neill.
She wasn't entirely sure how she felt about this still, but really, she didn't need to be entirely sure. It was just a date.
With Jack.
And she was as nervous as a sixteen year old over it.
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