DISCLAIMER: Yeah, the SG-1 guys are all property of MGM, World 
Gekko Corp and Double Secret productions. This is all in fun, no 
infringement on copyrights or trademarks was intended. All other 
characters, ideas, etc., herein are copyrighted to the author.
TITLE: A DECADE OF PLANETS AND THREE CUPS OF TEA
AUTHOR: Rowan Darkstar
EMAIL: rowan_d1@yahoo.com
WEBSITE: http://rowan_d.tripod.com
RATING: Teen
CATEGORIES: Angst, Future, Sam/Jack
ARCHIVE: Yes, just let me know.
SUMMARY: "She smells like home."


Thanks to my fabulous betas: Teddy E, annaK, and Foxcat


"A Decade of Planets and Three Cups of Tea"
by 
Rowan Darkstar (rowan_d1@yahoo.com)
Copyright (c) 2005



"When you come to me, little girl
Saying 'Baby, he's all the rage
He gives me pretty roses and diamond rings
And a bluebird in its cage'
And I say 'Hey if that's what you want, little girl
Well it all sounds sweet, you know.'
And you say 'How could you leave me here?
You were supposed to take me home'"
				--"Stay" by Elizabeth Rowandale





Everything ends.

Everything changes.

No more SGC.  Not for the four musketeers, anyway.

No more SG-1.

A phase of their lives has passed.

They're meant to pretend they're Earthlings from now on.  No 
longer Taur'i.  They fear they have forgotten how this is done.

They try to stay in touch for a while.  But Teal'c is no longer 
on the planet.  And Daniel is in Mexico or South America or the 
Middle East most of the time.

Jack is simply...Jack.  As he has always been.  He learned to 
simply *exist* in the echo of a single gun shot.  He learned to 
expect or desire nothing more and nothing less.

He tries to remember this knowledge.  Tells himself this life is 
enough.

Carter gets transferred to a research lab in Georgia.  She hates 
hot weather.  That is all she says.

He drives her to the airport.  And for the first time in his 
life, he feels weak.  Because he doesn't know how to make her 
stay.  And he can't even admit that he wants to.

The phone calls fall away.  Carter marries someone who looks too 
much like Pete not to make Jack's skin crawl.

The marriage doesn't pass the two year mark.  Daniel tells Jack 
Sam and her ex are still friends.  Jack thinks this is because 
one of the lovers is still in love, and the other never was.

Another year passes before Jack steps out his door at 10am on a 
Saturday and almost kicks Carter in the hip.  She's sitting on 
his doorstep.  He realizes he doesn't even know where she lives, 
or how far she has come.

She jumps hard at the movement of the door.  She looks up at him 
in the brilliant Colorado sun and her eyes are even bluer than he 
remembers them.  She is beautiful.  She is...older.  She looks 
worn.  Tired and something like defeated.  For too long, the 
eternal innocence in Sam Carter's eyes was the only thing keeping 
him going.  He has no right to place his survival on her 
resiliency.  But he gave up on the guilt of needing people long 
ago.

Three breaths pass, and he doesn't have a clue what to say.  The 
notion echoes in his brain, catching some memory long past, when 
he thought he heard her voice say these words and long hair 
tangled beneath his fingers.

All his soldier's instincts miss what's coming when she stands up 
and wraps her arms around him.  She buries her face in his neck 
and whispers over and over, "Don't turn me away, don't turn me 
away, don't turn me away..."

He doesn't have to think, and if he did it wouldn't change a 
thing.  His arms lock around her and he says simply, "I never 
did."

When he realizes how hard she's crying, he doesn't let go.  He 
hopes no one has died.  But he doesn't think so.  She cries 
differently when she mourns.

It hurts to find he holds this knowledge, and he holds on a 
little tighter.  Pretends there aren't tears in his eyes.  She 
smells like home.


*****


He can't get much out of her for a while.  She's scared and a 
little desperate, but there's thought behind her actions, because 
she's Carter and her mind never stops.  He does what he can to 
see that she's okay.

Kissing her proves too easy.  On the steps of the foyer, against 
the wall, in the kitchen on the pretense of hot chocolate to ward 
off the cold.  He's a good fifteen minutes into the lust this 
time when she says, "No.  I mean...yes, but...no.  Not this, 
yet."

He watches her; he stays close enough to feel her breath and 
smell her skin.  She smells like always.  Only now he can mingle 
the scent with the taste.

"I want this," she says, voice hoarse from crying.  "But 
first....I *need*....*this*," she whispers. And she presses his 
hand over her heart and strokes her fingers down his cheek with a 
tenderness he has almost forgotten exists.

He understands.  "Okay."  She doesn't re-button her blouse.

He pulls her against him and she hugs back hard.  "I missed you 
so much, sir," she whispers through tears.

And he buries his face in the heat of her neck, hopes he's not 
holding so tight she hurts.  "Oh, Christ, Carter.  Oh, Christ..."


*****


They sit on the couch.  They sit on the deck.  They sit on the 
floor, with their backs against the kitchen wall and he notices 
she's still as limber as she used to be.

He knows there should be anger.  Resentment.  Some kind of 
misunderstanding to resolve.

But there is none of that.  Not now.

She tells him what Turghan did to her when she offered herself 
for punishment.  She says her clothes hurt against her back for 
weeks.

He rubs gentle circles over long faded scars.

He tells her being trapped in Antarctica awoke his nightmares of 
Iraq, and he didn't sleep right for months.  He tells her in one 
dream he saw her die on the ice, and he drove by her house at 3am 
to see if she was okay.

She holds his hand and stares at the floor.

She tells him in the wake of Jolinar she lost all sense of who 
she was.  Night after sleepless night, she cradled the phone 
against her chest, wanting to call him.  She never dialed.

He tells her Ba'al nearly broke him.  That it took him months to 
regain his faith in his own strength.  Tells her it mattered that 
she watched him out of the corners of her vision.

She tells him she fell apart when he was on a moon with 
Maybourne.  Tells him she's never been able to say goodbye.


*****


A decade of planets, three cups of tea, and somehow all the walls 
drop and everything is spilling out as the sun sinks and the moon 
rises and he finds out she's soft and sexy and vulnerable and 
still tough as all hell.

He finds out he still knows what it is to be comforted.

Finds he still wants what it is to be loved.

She tells him she has a tattoo now.  But she won't tell him what 
it is and this makes him smile.  And her smile.  And the moment 
lingers like glitter in the air.

She tells him since her mother died she hasn't been able to let 
herself need someone so much.  He crept under her skin anyway and 
for a decade she's been terrified.

He tells her he had a son named Charlie.  And he killed himself 
with Jack's own gun.

She climbs into his lap and kisses him.
 

*****


The sun comes up and they're on their backs on his living room 
floor, looking out the window at the pink line of the horizon.  
She's resting her head on his shoulder, and an old, dog-eared 
blanket is spread across their legs.

She asks him where he was going when she interrupted his day.  He 
says the grocery.  And then he laughs at the words 'interrupted 
his day'.  Because his life has been on hold since she left.  
That was the interruption.  And from the moment he nearly tripped 
over her, his life has been back in motion; on fast forward to 
make up for the frozen time.

But he says she'll have to wait this morning, because he has a 
firm date with the All-You-Can-Eat breakfast buffet at Bob and 
Norma's Diner.  And dinner plans with Homer and Marge Simpson.

She starts to cry.  And all she says to explain is that she feels 
like Carter again.

He feels like the man he's never been when he's allowed to 
comfort her.


*****


Days pass before they make love.  She's taken four weeks of 
leave, saved it up like the good workaholic.  They have time to 
walk and laugh and cry and be nervous and withdraw and separate 
and come back and shake a little but hold it together.

He finally asks her why she came.

She says she tried everything to move on, and in the end, she 
couldn't do anything real until she faced him, one way or the 
other.

He asks why she tried to move on.  And he has to accept that he 
was equally at fault in his silence.

Silence can be the hardest habit to break.


*****


Making love to Sam Carter is not what he imagined.

He couldn't have imagined.

Because his fantasies were about the Carter he worked with and 
knew everyday, just that, adding in sex and nothing more.  But 
this...this Carter is raw and open and gazes right into him like 
no one since Sara, and she is making love to so much more than 
his body.  She is touching parts he thought no one could reach.

And she is scared and trembling and he has to coax her to open 
herself to him, and he worries about her in a way that hurts his 
stomach, and he wonders if the others who came in the years 
between ever really had her at all.  He thinks this is different 
for her, and he almost believes this is more than a wish.

She is confident and warm and sheltering and beautiful.

She is Carter.

That is all he has wanted.  For too long to remember.


*****


The fights come.

The resentments.

The clashes between might-have-been and really-is and the ground 
shaking contrasts between lovers-in-wartime and connected-souls-
trading-dish-duty-for-garbage-runs.

He gets to know Sam.  He likes her.  But he finds *she* doesn't 
like Sam very much.  She wants to be Carter.  So he lets her.  
But he loves them both.  And he tells her to let her hair grow 
out because she's not in the field anymore.  She resists.  She 
needs to learn to be that vulnerable again.

He falls back into patterns of locking his past in a box.  She 
gets hurt.  She turns cold.  Eventually, he figures out why, and 
he lets her in again.  It cycles, but they keep scrambling back 
to the surface and meeting Sunday night for "The Simpsons".


*****


He takes her into town for steaks and pool.  She's wearing a 
leather jacket and sleek black slacks and heeled boots and 
burgundy lipstick, and as she leans over the pool table, he could 
swear ten years have fallen away.

She's the hottest woman in the room, and she's catching his eye 
in the blue-red light.  She tosses him that rare sideways Carter 
smile that's always set her apart, and he finds he's infinitely 
grateful to know it still exists in the world.  He feels 25 when 
she climbs into his truck, tired and beer-buzzed, and she dozes 
in the late night quiet as he drives them home.


*****


She has nightmares he never knew about.  After all their campouts 
on other planets, he thinks he should have known.

But they're bad, and she has a really hard time letting him in, 
and once again he feels like he's the first one to try.  And 
this, more than anything, makes him angry at the men she's been 
with.  He knows she's hell on wheels if she's determined to shut 
someone out, but he knows he would never stop trying.  She was 
married, for Christ's sake.  Her husband should have known.

He finds her once, curled in the corner of his couch.  He 
staggers out, sleep-drunk, and wakes up in a heartbeat when he 
sees her tears.  She's sweat-drenched and trembling and she can't 
even tell him what she dreamt.  He holds her until they both fall 
asleep.  He wakes up with Samantha Carter sleeping quietly in his 
arms, his t-shirt still bunched in her fist, and he thinks maybe 
the world is shifting into rhythm.  Things feel...right.

He has always thought she deserved someone better.

In this one moment, he thinks she just might love him enough.

He remembers what it is to believe in himself.


*****


He drives her to the airport at the end of the month.

She looks at him and says the weather is hot back home.  Much 
hotter than in Colorado.

He holds her hand and she stares at him in the vast busyness of 
the ticketing area.  This is when they ought to kiss, ought to 
say goodbye, or 'see you soon' or something that would mean so 
much more than it seems.

The past month is rushing through his mind like a film gone wild 
and it's all mixing up with the airport before.

She hefts her bag onto her shoulder and her eyes flicker to the 
departure boards.

He steps closer, leans in close to her face and she turns just 
slightly, but not enough to meet a kiss.  He's on some planet 
with suspicious natives and trying to give Carter an order on the 
sly, except there are earrings, and laugh lines, and the vague 
scent of a new perfume.

He breathes on her temple for a moment, until there's no one left 
but the two of them.

He says...."Stay."

She closes her eyes.  She doesn't move.  She stares at the floor.  
Her fingers are wound through his and she's standing so close, 
and he sees her breath shake and the first tear spill down her 
cheek.  She's hardly making a sound, hardly breathing.  But she's 
crying in the silence.  And his gut tells him she's been waiting 
for this word too long to hear it without pain.

But he doesn't feel weak anymore.  And when she gets on the 
plane--because she's Carter, and she has to report back and put 
in for a transfer and do everything by the book--he has no doubt 
she will return.

He lets himself have something to believe in.

After all, he's seen the Homer Simpson tattoo.
 

*****

rowan_d1@yahoo.com