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.


*****