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Let your hook always be cast. In the pool where you least expect
it, will be a fish. Ovid.
PART 3: ALL THINGS MERGE INTO ONE
Jack is holding me like this is where I'm meant to be. He's set. He's good.
He's got me.
He's where I want to be.
All it took for me to realise this was the clarity of a blade in my chest.
"It didn't flash before my eyes," I murmur disjointedly.
"Life?" Jack gets what I'm trying to tell him.
"There was nothing."
Just the ice of the blade and her eyes, and then heat, tremendous heat, searing
through the heart of me. Blood filling my mouth, spilling out.
Nothing. No life half-lived, no paths not taken. No illusions, dreams or
fantasies. No Jack, waiting.
No Jack.
I was falling away from him with blood in my mouth.
"Nothing."
He's warm with me. He feels good and right and I soak him in, his chest against
mine, our heartbeats blended.
"I could stay like this."
I could let go.
I'm more shaken than I care to admit; Jack hears me whisper.
"If it wasn't such a cliché, I'd kiss you," he promises gruffly.
"And we all know how you feel about clichés." I've been inching towards him for
so long that I'm not capable of jumping now. It isn't in me. This is all I can
find to say to him in the hope he'll hear me, he'll know what I'm holding
inside.
He smells of beer and sunshine. Peace. There's even patience. He's all I want to
know. I find I can inch a little closer...
"Could you? Jack? Could you kiss me?"
"You try and stop me."
As much as I like being with him like this, guarded and protected, as much as I
want to feel this safe, I need to look at him. He's worth everything to me,
worth the risk. I can't die without Jack again and I know that means I must live
with him.
"You need to know what's changed." Jack smiles soft recognition, pulling me
gently back to him. "I've changed."
"If only it were that simple."
"I'm simple."
He's making promises to me and this feels so good. If only I weren't crippled by
confusion and the memory of pain. Jack might as well kiss me; it makes no more
sense to me than anything else does.
I hold onto him.
Jack knows I want this and he makes it easy for me. He makes me feel this is
right, his arms tight and his face against mine.
"Maybe I haven't changed at all," he muses. "Maybe I finally just saw the
light."
"I don’t understand." I'm pleading quite nakedly, wanting only to know where I
stand. To find sense and some semblance of certainty.
"I love you. That's the way it is."
The way I want it to be.
"You loved me before, Jack. It wasn't enough. So what's changed?" I don't even
know if I wanted it to be enough. Not then, not when it was first acknowledged
between us.
"Me," Jack admits wryly, wanting me to know he's past this. "I don't seem to
have had the blinding revelations that dog you into the afterlife and back
again. I wish I could tell you different. Truth is, the only thing I woke up to
was – I was an ass. Yeah, I loved you all this time but I loved myself more. I
was telling myself having respect and honour, having my command - those were
worth more to me than having you."
"I knew it." As little as I was ready to commit to the idea of 'us,' I was hurt
by it.
"I doubt I'll ever be able to say 'screw my command' and completely mean it,"
Jack says frankly. "But I did manage to grasp two simple facts of life as I know
it."
His lips ghost over my cheek and my heart freezes.
"It's your respect I need most and there's no honour in me if I can love
you and cut you off because it's easier on me." He sits back with a smile that
melts his eyes then takes my face between both eloquent hands. Studies me
unflinchingly with a – a heat I barely understand, not from him. "There's
never going to be a right time to do this," he decides. "Not the first time."
If he means to kiss me, to give me what I want, he doesn't quite make it. I
can’t trust myself not to ask for it, can't be this close and not touch him, and
so we find each other. Our mouths meet and I shudder hard. One time. Explode out
of my skin.
Fear and pain and falling. God, I know this. Falling away from Jack or into him,
I can hardly tell. I can't breathe for what I'm losing, the one thing I would
have given anything to keep safe. I would have given my love to keep his
friendship.
No time to think.
Jack is hot and hard and hungry, wanting to take us deep, wanting it all,
pulling me down with him when his back hits the dock.
There's only feeling.
Jack's iron body, his throttling hold on me with arms and legs, his tongue
slipping over mine, his hands on me.
Fear and regret and clenching tension.
Not holding back.
Heat tears at the ice inside, in my gut; the cold, clear memory of pain. The
blade. Piercing me like her eyes. Sam's eyes.
Letting go.
Falling into Jack, into his mouth and his eyes and his arms. I'm wide open -
wrenched open - and my heart is shaking me; I'm holding onto him in a way that
feels completely wrong.
I love him.
Only Jack could want more.
"Don't let go," he whispers.
I shiver abjectly despite the warmth of the fire and the blanket, pressing my
cheek into Jack's thighs. The couch is too small for us, too obvious if Sam or
Teal'c were to come out of their rooms, but for so long as I'm curled up beside
him, Jack has no place he'd rather be. He's stroking my hair with one hand,
soothing the tension from my back with the other.
"There's no scar," I remark inconsequentially, reaching out from under the
blanket to touch Jack's wrist, his arm. Feeling able to touch him in small ways.
"There should be." I don't have to close my eyes to feel the wound. The blade.
"This is different, isn't it?" Jack is so gentle with me, my eyes sting. "Dying
this time – it was different for you."
"It was personal."
Jack looks away from my face to stare enigmatically at the door Sam is sleeping
behind. There's a darkness, a blame in his eyes that relieves me. I took a real
risk in trusting him with the truth. The others will go on thinking Replicator
Carter and I died together in the lash of the terrible Ancient weapon on Dakara,
that it was instantaneous, painless for me. Only Jack will ever know I was
murdered. I could only share with him the violence and desperate pain of dying
alone, wrenched with fear and regret.
It's only because he has me safe I can face this. It's not a burden lifted, only
shared, but I find I can be glad Jack is in this with me.
I've felt so alone.
"I saw into her mind, Jack," I confide. "Into Sam's mind."
"The Replicator?"
"I'm not sure any longer." I find I'm holding on to his arm and Jack's grip
naturally shifts to hold mine. Easier to look into the fire than to have Jack
look into me, but I turn my head at this and let him see. "I don't know what I
expected of a human form machine but I found what I recognised to be Sam. Her
memories, the way her mind works. Not so very different than our own Sam because
only a few months of experience separated them. I even know how the Replicator
Carter saw Sam – those memories were there too."
"How?" Jack interrupts. He's feeling something here and he needs to know. He and
Teal'c both assured Sam that she wasn't responsible for the Replicator Samantha
Carter. Sam knew better, she knew she was the root of it all. Fifth learned
betrayal from her and it came full circle to haunt her in the form of her copy.
It’s only now that I've seen into the Replicator Carter I fully understand Sam's
insistence on her guilt.
There but for the grace of God.
"The Replicator believed if Sam could only see past her insecure need for
acceptance and compliance, if she could set aside her compassion and pursue
power the way she was meant to, they would be the same," I confess in a stifled
voice. The machine was filled with dark, arrogant egocentrism, sublime
conviction of its superiority and a consuming need for absolute power. I don't
believe it had the emotional maturity to comprehend our Sam's essential
humanity. It couldn’t understand the profound impact of human feelings, how they
drive us.
I love Sam. I wish I was bigger than this, but I'm struggling to separate my
friend from the cold, self-serving thing that killed me. I'm influenced not only
by my unwanted insight into the workings of Sam's mind but the glacial
perceptions of the machine, untrammelled by bonds of affection. I had no choice
about going into the Replicator's mind, but I never expected it to leave these
kinds of wounds.
"I hate what this has done to me, Jack," I confess slowly in a low, reluctant
voice. "I hate that I'm seeing the Replicator every time I look at Sam. I know
in reality they're not the same, but I feel her – she's cutting into me
and I can't get past it."
I was in her way. She took me out. That's Sam's logic at work. Nothing could
stop the Replicator Samantha Carter; not guilt or remorse, certainly not those
shared feelings for me she laid claim to. The machine knew me at least as well
as Sam did and now I know what that means. I've seen myself through Sam's eyes.
I've seen myself with a clarity that Sam's emotions and insecurities won't allow
her. I wish I didn't know the person Sam sees. In some of her memories, I see
only a caricature of myself. An aggravation. What I can no longer see is Sam
loving me.
"I can't get past it."
"A year ago I made a promise to someone," Jack says stonily. "I think it's time
I made good on it."
"A promise?" I'm confused. A promise is not something Jack O'Neill makes lightly
and this is coming out of nowhere. "Jack? Who did you make a promise to?"
"To the guy who saved our asses in the battle over the Antarctic, the guy who
bought me time to get to the Ancients' weapon. Cameron Mitchell. He led the
squadron of F-302's that kept back Anubis' forces and he paid for it. He paid
dearly."
Mitchell? I know the name but not the man. Jack's the only pilot I hang with,
the only one of them I know who doesn't think if you don't fly you don't live.
"Mitchell's fighter went down in a dogfight and he's spent the past year in
Rehab learning to walk again." Jack respects this.
"You've been keeping tabs on him?"
"I keep tabs on every member of SG-1." Seeing my shocked reaction, Jack is cocky
and grinning.
"SG-1? That's your promise? A place for him on the team?"
"In my book, Mitchell earned it."
Then it's done. This is why we haven't had our fourth since Jack stepped up to
lead the SGC. This man Cameron Mitchell. It's important to Jack so it's
important to me. SG-1 – we're still Jack's team. We'll always be. If he needs
for Mitchell to be on his team, then I'll do what I can to make it work. To make
room for the man in a place I only ever want to have Jack.
"Isn't Mitchell the same rank as Sam?" I ask cautiously, unsure of where this is
taking us.
"We'll work it out." Jack's grin widens, his eyes dwelling darkly on Sam's door.
I think I see the sense of this, of having a second military presence on the
team and an objective one. A fresh perspective – even, if you wanted to look at
it that way, a second-guesser. Someone to ask the right questions and challenge
the answers in a way Jack himself might.
I wish I could say Jack is reading more into my distress than he should but I'm
mired in my unwanted inability to trust. My faith in Sam has taken a cut – a
literal cut I still feel as ice inside of me – I'm not sure I can recover from.
I can't see my way clear of this. Not yet.
I wish I could say Jack was wrong.
I can only say I'm grateful.
On this crisp, uncertain morning, Jack's exuberance is purely offensive.
Breakfast barbecue? Dear God.
Faced with greasy sausage and fossilised eggs even Teal'c is daunted, while
Sam's brittle smile deserts her completely when Jack blithely announces – as if
this is a good thing - SG-1 is getting its fourth.
Sam knows the name too. She knows a threat when she hears it. Sam is – what do
they call it? As a pilot, she's second chair. Mitchell is like Jack, though. A
leader.
Sam knows it.
"I have news too," she announces almost defiantly, pushing her barely touched
plate away from her. "I've been offered a command at Area 51. Again. They want
me to head up the team of military and civilian scientists there." She went
looking for the reaction she's now getting but I can't say she's enjoying it.
Teal'c's glass of OJ, suspended mid-way to his lips, resumes its journey. He
takes a measured sip and sets down his glass again. "Given the mistrust that has
been fostered between the scientists of Area 51 and those of Stargate Command,
there would be many tactical advantages to your acceptance of such a position,"
he judges.
"There he goes again," Jack complains exaggeratedly to the rest of us. "Letting
that wayward heart of his rule his head. Haven't we talked about you getting all
weepy and emotional like this?" he demands.
"Colonel Carter does not require my verbal assurance in order to be certain that
I do not wish her to leave SG-1," Teal'c replies, unmoved by Jack's sarcasm.
Colonel Carter looks as if she requires something, but it's not from Teal'c, and
as for me - I might as well not be here. It's Jack she's looking at as if he
might open up and swallow her whole.
"I think it goes without saying I don't want you to go either, Carter," Jack
says steadily. "But if this is what you want, and I guess General Hammond signed
off on the offer for it to have even been made, then I can't stand in your way."
"You can't or you won't?" Sam quietly challenges, torn between anger and – I
think – tears.
Jack raises a decidedly supercilious eyebrow.
"Sir," Sam snaps grudgingly. I think she knows this is all the answer she's
going to get but she can't quite bring herself to accept it.
"More coffee, Carter?" Jack offers blandly.
Sam's face flames at this brutal snub.
She's not cold, she's far from cold, and I feel a queer pain. I see my friend in
her and I see more, much more than I was ever meant to know.
The Replicator Samantha shared Sam's needs and drives even if she had moved past
so many of them. What Sam wants is Jack, or at least her idea of Jack. She's
wanted him for as long as I have, and been clear about how she wanted him. As a
woman, it was simpler for her to comprehend wanting.
She's never going to have what she wants. She's never going to touch Jack, not
the way she craves. I think...I think she'd have to see him first. See him for
who he is and not who she needs him to be.
Placidly, Jack smiles at me as he cuts her off. "Feel like taking a walk?" he
invites. "I could do with some air."
Somehow failing to notice Sam picking up her breakfast things with slow, angry
precision and walking frigidly into the cabin, Teal'c generously offers his
mosquito repellent for the expedition and tells us emphatically he and Colonel
Carter will not be here when we return.
"Good man." Jack's smile not only holds, it widens to mostly teeth. Pearly white
teeth and a certain suspicious smugness.
"You should go after her," I object as my arm is taken and I'm hauled gently but
firmly out of my chair under Teal'c's benignly approving gaze.
I don't know whether to be grateful or insulted Teal'c thinks I'm so easy he
doesn't bother to question Jack's blatant extraction of me from a difficult
scene. My traitorously paternalistic Jaffa friend wants me in safe hands
and he's having no difficulty at all with those hands belonging to Jack. Those
hands have his blessing.
Feeling like a baton that's been passed or something, I'm inclined to stand my
ground and kick both their asses.
Teal'c smiles at me.
I gulp as it finally sinks in.
He knows about us. About Jack. Jack and me.
He knows!
"Sam!" I bleat in Jack's direction, unable to deal with all of this. "You should
talk to her."
"I should," Jack agrees equably. He's not going to. Instead, he pockets
buttermilk biscuits to stave off possible starvation and drags me off to picnic
in the dewy – read damp - woods.
"Don't worry about Carter," he advises me as we walk away from the cabin. "The
guy she should be sorry over is that poor dumb cop Pete. That was real. That
mattered. The rest, the stuff that was only in her head, she'll get over."
"You'll talk to her?" I urge. His only reply is a non-committal grunt. He's not
about to accept his culpability where Sam's fantasies are concerned and I don't
have the energy or the will to make an issue of it. "Jack," I sigh, wishing I
could be a more forceful advocate than I feel. I don't want Sam to go, I don’t
want to lose her, I just don't feel up to fighting for her.
"We're not going far," Jack warns me as I tramp along the narrow, overhung trail
behind him, ticked off, a little depressed, and soaked to the ankles. "We'll go
back as soon as they've gone." He glances around to check on me and I see all of
his teeth bared at me again. "Back to bed."
Bed? Oh.
"Jack...I'm not sure."
"About?"
"About almost everything."
"You love me. I love you. That's sure."
That's sure. But nothing else is. For me, not even death and taxes.
"Stop your whining," Jack snorts, thwarting my efforts to falter to a halt and
get nervous on him. "Or at least walk and whine at the same time."
"It's not about the sex per se. It's not issues of masculinity or anything like
that." I'm not scared of getting physical with him. Only of what it means. To go
from inching towards him to tumbling headlong over a precipice? Can I even
try?
"I tried sleeping with a woman," Jack casually stuns me. "It was about the sex
per se. And I guess you could say I did have issues of masculinity, only not the
ones I expected. Sex?" He shrugs indifferently. "Its okay, y'know? It's sex.
It's supposed to be fun. Only there's no point to it if I'm not with you." Jack
is fearless as he tells me this. He not only knows the truth of it, he's
accepted. I'm a part of him now. "No one gets to me the way you do."
"Like living under glass?" This is what Jack said to me at Bitter Creek. That I
couldn't touch, couldn't be touched. Not where it counted. Not...intimately.
Jack turns around and eyes me. "You're not mad?" he enquires doubtfully. "About
the woman? Only, I decided if you were trying so damned hard to leave me that
maybe I should try leaving you. I don't tell you this to hurt you, Daniel, only
to be honest with you. Okay? I want you to know where I'm coming from, that's
all. I know it's important to you."
"Was she nice?" What else can I say? Like his fishing and my books, like
Atlantis, this woman is a metaphor for what's been going on with Jack and me.
She's about wanting and not having. Illusion, and even obsession, in place of
commitment.
"She was great. It's not her fault I figured out that sex – it takes you."
Jack looks inward, reflective, while I hardly know how to respond. This is the
man who wouldn't sleep with me because he was afraid to get that personal.
"She figured out on her own that for me there's no real point to anything unless
you're a part of it and she made sure to let me in on it."
"She dumped you?"
"Aaah, she had cause," Jack allows indulgently. "I couldn't even figure out you
were dead."
I could, I think involuntarily.
Possibly reading my mind, Jack comes much closer, his hands sliding around to
clasp the back of my neck. "Bed," he says decisively. "That's what you need."
"There are more clichés for love and death than for anything," I say quietly.
"It's impossible to communicate honestly your experience of either of those
extremes."
Jack pulls on his supportive look like he would a coat.
I put my hands on Jack. Swallow hard.
"You're what I need," I tell him timidly.
This is love. Reaching out.
I'm in a room with a bed in it. A bed and Jack. He's waiting and I'm going to
have to reach out again. Give in to him a little. Only this time he's the one
who can't wait, who has to ask before I can give him what he wants and we meet
up at the foot of the bed. There's an awkwardness for us in daylight, in being
eye to eye. We sit. Then we lie back, each of us keeping our bare feet firmly on
the floor.
"I'm not leaving you," I tell Jack as I give my hands a place to be, folding
them tightly over my stomach. I look up at the ceiling. "Not anymore."
"Good." Now Jack has to swallow. "That's good to know."
"It doesn't mean I don't belong in Atlantis," I hasten to add. "Because I do."
"You're obsessed."
"Yes. I am an archaeologist and this is Atlantis. In point of
fact, obsessed is possibly an understatement. We should be talking selling my
soul." I find I'm smiling. "I'm staying here."
"Yes?"
"You're here."
"Yes."
"I wish I could give you a better answer. An easier..."
"That's okay," Jack quickly interrupts. I hear a grin in his voice again. "You
and me – it's been real. Let's not get all hearts and flowers on each other
now."
I steal a sidelong glance and find Jack's looking at the ceiling too. And he's
trembling. Laughing. On the inside.
"How about we settle for getting comfortable?" He sits up, pushes back, plumps
down on the pillows.
With little hesitation I plump down next to him.
"Have we resolved anything?" I want to know, tracing a crease of fabric down his
shirt. "Are we any further forward than that time at Bitter Creek?"
Jack considers this. Then he pulls open a few buttons and pushes my hand under
his shirt. Against his skin. "If we were any further forward, we'd be naked," he
observes with warm satisfaction.
"I didn't make a decision." I feel a distant, quivering sadness. "It was – if
anything, it was made for me. I died. That's all it took. I only had to die to
know..."
Jack's hands are busy helping my hands feel him up so he puts his face against
mine. "That only means you're human," he promises. "Come on, Daniel, listen to
yourself. You died to know you could be with me? Who could ask for more?"
"You could ask for certainty."
"I don't feel it myself." The heat is there in his eyes again, killing me with
tenderness. "I just heard it said to me once too often, what I wouldn't tell
myself."
"The woman?" I roll onto my side, hitch closer to Jack, then hitch closer again,
until we touch.
"And the barber." Jack's face lightens, he lightens, his whole body growing
loose. "Even the goddamned Ancients." He's trembling again. Light and laughing.
"Stuck you back butt naked right in my office."
"I wasn't in danger of Ascension. I'm sure of it." I'm making him the promise
now. "Whatever Oma and the Others wanted of me, you were here."
I can't see enough of Jack smiling.
"Could you, Daniel?" he asks me softly. "Could you kiss me?"
Live with fear for him or don't live at all?
That's a choice I've already made, if it was ever a true choice for me at all.
I kiss him.
It takes all of me, takes the whole of my body to kiss Jack the way I need to
and the way he wants me to. His smiling mouth is smooth and hot, each stroke of
his tongue directly connecting to my cock, excitement skittering across tingling
nerve endings, spiking low in my belly. His hold on me is tight, as solid as
anything I've known. He must feel my heart banging against my ribs, the breath I
can't catch.
Attacking buttons and zippers, his fingers are no steadier than mine. Rolling
and pushing ineffectually at strangling clothes, we strain for skin. Jack is
trembling again, clenching up on me, looking as if something is really, really
wrong with him. He groans out something thunderous and low.
I think – I hear my name. I hear him.
Jack's found what was missing from sex, that's all. He's found me. Touching and
being touched. And it's really, really right for him. Then he's tearing
at my jeans, baring my hips and my thighs, he's on me and doing wonderful things
to me with lips and tongue and greedy fingers, he's shaking and groaning and wet
and hard and hot, and it's right, it's exactly right for me.
There's a rhythm to mouths and tongues and touch and hips, a slow-fast pulse of
body on body, cock on cock that squeezes my heart like a fist. This makes sense
to me. This is certainty. The rest, I don't know. If there's a world outside of
making love with Jack, I don't know it. I don't care. I can only be with him.
This is simple.
My Jack is a simple man. All the issues we have outside of loving and being
loved? His solution is simple.
"You and me," he whispers pleasurably in the ear he's nibbling. "After this..."
He's assuming we'll survive.
"We should go fish."
FINIS
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