Speed of Light

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: Speed of Light
AUTHOR: Rowan Darkstar
EMAIL: rowandarkstar@gmail.com
WEBSITE: http://www.beautyinshadows.net
RATING: Teen
CATEGORIES: Carter Angst, Jack/Sam
ARCHIVE: Yes, just let me know.
SUMMARY: A life by the numbers.

Heaps of thanks to Ness, Jill, and Teddy E for the wonderful betas.

And special thanks to Geonn for clever research
on my behalf.:)


"Speed of Light"
by
Rowan Darkstar (rowandarkstar@gmail.com)
Copyright (c) 2006



"20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26...still alive"
--'So Well', Feeder



When she was 4 years old, she saw her first rainbow and her
mother explained about the fractured white light. She stared for
hours. She begged until her mother bought her a prism for her
bedroom window.

When she was 8 years old, she and her mother painted a rainbow on
her wall, and her friends thought she was an ordinary little girl
who loved rainbows and My Little Pony. They didn't know she was
seeing the tiny particles of light sprinkling across her wall and
imagining her own molecules dividing and raining through the
atmosphere, racing through the universe at the speed of light.

She painted stars on her ceiling. She wanted to dance with the
universe. Her mother understood who she needed to be, and her
father thought she was beautiful and told her she had talent and
should take art classes. His little girl wanted to fly.

When she was 10, the bully in the neighborhood insulted the deaf
boy who lived in the corner house and stole away his favorite
G.I. Joe figure. Sam tried to get the toy back and ended up in a
fight. She got in some impressive punches and a good groin kick
before she took a solid hit to the jaw and another to the gut
that knocked the wind out of her. Her brother made fun of her
for being a sap and fighting like a girl. Then he carried her
home, because the bully had kicked her ankle when she was down
and it was swelling like mad. Away from the other kids, Mark
told her what she had done was pretty cool. She kissed his cheek
on impulse, and he shouted in disgust and wiped off her cooties,
stomping to his room to blast his stereo. They had only been the
neighborhood three weeks.

When Samantha was 11, her best friend moved away and Sam didn't
talk to anyone in her class for weeks. She hadn't realized one
friend had been enough and she had lost touch with everyone else.

When she was 13 years old, she discovered the theory of infinite
universes. She couldn't stop reading and hardly slept for a
week. Her father was away on TDY. She was comforted by the
notion that in some other reality, he was home safe and they were
all playing Monopoly.

When she was 14, she got in the car with a 16-year-old friend who
had been drinking and the roads were glistening with reflected
streetlights in the pools of raindrops. The car hydroplaned and
spun out. Samantha understood every step of the physical
process, watched the phenomenon in internal slow motion as they
crushed the front of their car into a phone pole. She spent the
night in the hospital and promised her mother it would never
happen again. She cried and curled across her mother's lap until
she didn't see a hint of disappointment lingering in her mother's
blue eyes. Her head hurt the worst it had in her whole life.

When she was 14-and-a-half, her father came home to the smell of
chocolate chip cookies and informed her her world had shattered
like the glass of the windshield. She ripped apart her bedroom
and threw her prism against the wall and smashed it and she
stared in hypnotic fascination at the incandescent light catching
the shards. She couldn't find the white light in the rainbow.
She couldn't find anything, anymore.

When she was 15, she held hands with the deaf boy at the end of
the block. Because he was the only person she knew who
understood what it was like not to belong in your own world. On
a shadowy field on the Fourth of July, he kissed her. And she
kissed back. And for a little while she felt like maybe she was
someone worth loving, again.

When she got home, her father grounded her for missing curfew and
making him worry. She shut herself in her bedroom, turned off
all the lights, curled on her bed and closed her eyes. She fell
asleep in the clothes that smelled like the boy down the street
and imagined the stars above her.

When she was 16, she won a Future Scientists award for a self-
constructed optical pump probe. Her father made it to the
ceremony. He had tears in his eyes when he told her her mother
would have been proud. Sam didn't know what to say, but she
slipped her hand in his as they stood talking to one of her old
math teachers.

When she was 16-and-a-half, she climbed out the window of her
room and sat on the roof of their house for an entire afternoon,
watching a rainbow and wondering who the hell she was in the
universe and where it all had blurred and fallen apart. She
curled on the warm shingles of the roof and cried until she was
out of breath. Then she climbed back in the window and opened
the drawer with the Air Force Academy catalogue and tour letter
inside. She wanted to dance with the stars. She wanted her
father to look at her and see her. Maybe she'd find something
she lost if she could reach the sky.

When she was 17, she learned how to hug her father again and feel
like they both meant it. She hadn't learned how to talk to him.

Mark wouldn't let either of them touch him.

When she was 19, she thought maybe she had fallen in love. In
the end it was only affection. But it was warm and gentle and
they parted as friends.

When she was 20, she realized other people truly didn't see what
she saw in a blackboard full of physics calculations. At least
not many people. She'd always thought maybe girls just weren't
interested in math. But the boys were falling behind her as
well.

Samantha Carter needed to be the best, and this was something she
could cling to, something she could put her back up against.
Numbers were beautiful. And when she made them sing, people
looked at her. And loved her.

When she was 21, she realized she wasn't the best at firing a
gun. So she worked her ass off with all the focus and
determination she was gifted with. She spent endless hours at
the firing range, pushing herself to forever surpass her own
accomplishments. By the time she turned 22, she was the top
marksman in her class. She swore to keep her form for the rest
of her career.

When she was 27, she was deployed into a war zone. She
calculated the benefits of combat pay and tax free income and
thought about maybe buying a townhouse when she got home and
putting in for the job she was hoping for in D.C..

When she was 28, she took her first life in combat. She called
her father from overseas, standing at a pay phone at 3 o'clock in
the morning, crying her eyes out in the desert heat, and for
twenty minutes, he was just her Dad. He told her she was
beautiful, and she was kind, and it would all be okay, it would
never be the same, but it would be okay, and her mom would
understand and God would understand. And she had never loved her
father so much in her life.

She came back from the Gulf and Mark never even called. He never
even fucking called. He'd had his first baby. She'd heard about
it from their Aunt Emily.

She didn't think she wanted children, or at least not anytime
soon.

But when she was 29, and working the job she'd so desperately
wanted in D.C., she dreamt one night of whisper-soft baby's
breath on her breasts and a tiny warm body pressed against her
stomach, precious and trusting and full of all the potential and
beauty in the word. She woke up flushed and trembling.

When she was 30, she thought she was finally, truly in love. She
took the ring and thought she might keep it. But reality came
into focus, Prince Charming slipped, and she was left with darker
eyes and invisible scars. She moved from his upscale apartment
back to the townhouse she'd never let go of. She hoped he was
okay and felt guilty for still putting him ahead of herself.

She started to think she hadn't grown up quite as much as she
thought.

When she was 32, she got called on a mission. The mission. The
one she'd dreamt about since she saw that first rainbow and
opened her eyes to the wonders of the universe.

She was going through the gate.

When she was 33, she forgot about family and love and the little
house with the yellow kitchen she'd wished for in the quiet
summer nights, holding the hand of the boy from the house at the
corner of her street. She thought about defending the planet,
saving the human race, interstellar flight capabilities and the
anatomy of a Zat. She thought about too much coffee and how
maybe she should unpack those boxes in her apartment one of these
days. She wished her Dad would call more than a couple of times
a year, but she wasn't home to take the calls, anyway.

When she was 34, an alien symbiote burrowed into her head and
scrambled her meticulous sense of identity. She cried and shook
and woke in cold sweats more in a month than she had in ten
years. She didn't tell anyone. But somewhere along the way, she
realized she had a best friend named Daniel. And she would have
trouble continuing to gush like a child over all the wonders they
had discovered together if he suddenly weren't by her side. She
realized Teal'c made her feel safe and protected in a way she had
left behind when her childhood bubble had exploded and dropped
her, unprotected, to the cold hard ground.

She had wandered her way to some kind of home.

Just before her 35th birthday, Sam's father nearly died, and she
took him to his salvation. He told her he loved her. He told
her he was proud of her. Then he left her again.

When Sam Carter was 35, it crossed her mind she might have fallen
in love. But it was unplanned and unscheduled and most
definitely unwanted, so she shoved it away and scorned it as a
crush; clung to the woman she had so determinedly created. A
woman who didn't need anyone. A woman who had proven she could
stand alone. A woman who never mixed business and pleasure. She
spent more time at the firing range, perfecting her technique.

Her father walked back into Mark's life. And on his coattails,
she slipped in the door. She had some kind of brother again.
She was ashamed at how good it felt, and how willing she was to
let past hurts go unspoken in exchange for a kind smile.

When she was 36 years old, she accepted that she had found a new
family with the unlikely moniker of SG-1. When she woke in the
hospital, these were the soft and worried voices that soothed her
ears and spoke of home. She let herself acknowledge this a
little bit, because she knew the three of them well enough now to
realize -- they didn't have families to go home to either. In
this job, they likely never would, not ones with whom they could
truly share their lives. So maybe they wouldn't let her fall.
Maybe they needed her as badly as she needed them. Maybe they
always would. Maybe.

When she was 37, she disappeared for 48 hours before anyone
noticed, and she started to think she might have carried the
independence a bit too far. She stayed awake a few nights
contemplating her life and the definitions of strength and love
and family. The next time the Colonel, with Daniel and Teal'c in
tow, brought by pizza and a movie, she was tired and behind on
her reports, but she let them in anyway. And she let them fall
asleep in warm lumps around her living room. Because she didn't
want to disappear for days and not be missed.

Colonel O'Neill smelled of dark summer nights.

When she was 38, her best friend died of radiation poisoning and
chose to leave her behind. A few months later, she fucked up big
time and her CO nearly vanished forever. She hadn't felt the
ground slip beneath her this wildly since she was 15 years old.
There was no boy down the street to hold her hand. Instead, she
found comfort in the arms of a powerfully gentle alien who showed
her a depth of respect she had not even earned from her own
father.

She needed them all so badly the thought of another loss made her
sick to her stomach.

The thought of losing the Colonel...fuck fuck fuck, where the
hell was the soldier, the scientist, the brilliant woman to be
reckoned with she had built with such painstaking care?

God, please bring him home, please bring him home, please bring
him home...

When she was 39, her best friend came back and didn't need her as
much as he used to. But maybe he still loved her. And maybe
that was enough. When she was 39, she met a man who adored her,
cherished her, gave everything for her. He made her laugh, made
her cry, made her feel loved and wanted and brilliant and
powerful. He kept her connected to her brother. She tried to
capture something she had once wanted and never found. She tried
so damned hard.

The Colonel dropped in front of her eyes and another true friend
went down for the count, and she felt herself sliding and
clinging to all that mattered.

When she was 40, her father died with his hand cradled in hers
and all the walls fell away.

The Jaffa knew freedom. The Replicators were silenced. The
Goa'uld lost their hold on the galaxy and the SGC resurrected the
Lost City.

She knew what mattered to her and what could be silenced and what
needed to be said.

When she was 41, she still hadn't gotten any of it right. But
she wasn't exactly single, anymore, and she hadn't lost her
determination.

When she was 42, Cameron Mitchell made Sam laugh and made her
remember the fun of gate travel, and, in a bar she hadn't been in
since she was a lot a lot younger, he poured her too many beers
and asked if she and General O'Neill were something...more than
friends.

She stared into Cameron's eyes, too beer buzzed and drowsy to
summon any more lies, and she told him yes, they were. He stared
right back until there were tears in her eyes and he asked her
why. She told him some things could be fucked up so bad for so
long they couldn't be fixed in a night. Or even a month, or a
year.

Cameron told her he thought they could. And for a moment she
couldn't figure out why that couldn't be true.

When Sam Carter was 42 years old, she took a red-eye flight to
Washington D.C. on a Friday night. She used her own key card to
make her way up to Jack O'Neill's top floor apartment. She crept
through the silent shadows and caught the faintest hint of his
distant snores in the bedroom down the hall. Her feet carried
her out on the balcony and up the spiral staircase onto the
building's roof. Where he kept his telescope and still dreamt of
dancing with the stars. She lay back on the cold surface and
watched the constellations with her naked eyes, imagining the sky
from the rooftop outside her childhood window.

Ten minutes later he found her there. He never truly slept
through anything but her science documentaries.

He stretched out on the cold concrete beside her, barn jacket
slung on over his sleep tee and sweats. He watched the stars
with her for a while. Then he said, "You know I've loved you all
along, right?"

She felt like she'd had the wind knocked out of her and she was
flat on her back in the grass of that little boy's front yard,
but there was no brother this time to carry her home.

Just a warm body beside her -- that felt more like home than
anywhere in this world or another.

His words crushed the last of her defenses, and the stars were
blurring and flaring through the welling in her eyes. She could
feel him watching her from the shadows. She finally nodded,
lifted a hand to cover her mouth, and the sky swam into an
indistinguishable wash above her. "Okay," she whispered.
"Okay." Then she melted into the circle of his arms, and cried
like she'd cried on the roof of her childhood home.

But it was different this time. There was a solidity of contact.
A firmness of sensation. This time...she was in love.

On the eve of her 43rd birthday, Sam Carter was learning to fly.