Posted September 2004
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: Warm Place
AUTHOR: Rowan Darkstar
EMAIL: rowan_d1@yahoo.com
RATING: (PG)
ARCHIVE: SJD yes. All others fine, just let me know, please.
CATEGORIES: Angst, Sam/Jack
SPOILERS: Through Season 5's "Last Stand"
STATUS: Complete
SUMMARY: A routine mission turned violent leaves Carter more
than a little angry with O'Neill's choices. But maybe that's not
the whole picture.
TIMELINE: Take places a few days after the events of "Last
Stand".

AUTHOR'S NOTE: To avoid confusion, let me state now that this is
NOT an established Sam/Jack romance fic, it is meant to be
canonesque Season 5 Sam/Jack, so when you read that wisecrack
from Daniel, it is just a joke, not meant to imply anything
literal.:D


Endless thanks to my betas: Fulinn, Teddy
E, and AnnaK



WARM PLACE
by
Rowan Darkstar (rowan_d1@yahoo.com)
Copyright (c) 2004





Teal'c had volunteered to remain Offworld, continuing to gather
information about the local way of life, the native customs;
anything that could help repair the damage before the upcoming
negotiations. Jack had returned with Carter and Daniel to report
in to Hammond, to explain what exactly had gone down and try to
give him the scope of the present state of affairs. First there
had been shooting, then there had been semi-coherant
communication, and after several hours of treating the wounded,
beating down feathers and calming panics, SG-1 and the native
residents of P2C-957 had begun cautious discussions. Now they
were tentatively approaching the idea of future trade talks. So
much for the standard clockwork meet'n'greet.

Jack O'Neill was grateful for the rush of warmth that greeted him
on the familiar side of the event horizon. The gate room
normally felt cold, but everywhere on P2C-957 had run about ten
degrees colder than native Earthlings find comfortable and the
chill had started to grate on his nerves.

In all fairness, everything had been grating on his nerves from
the moment Carter had turned the first icy and disapproving gaze
his way following his order to fire. By now she had stopped
making eye contact.

"Greetings, General!" O'Neill called up to Hammond, offering a
full arm wave. The General nodded, subdued, from the control
room and headed toward the stairs. "It's good to be back on this
side of the sun, don't you think?" Jack quipped, turning to the
rest of his team.

Daniel offered a tolerant smile and brushed some of the loose
bramble from his boots. O'Neill turned his gaze toward Carter
who was moving purposefully down the ramp. She lowered one
eyelid, a subtle brush-off, and kept her gaze straight ahead.
"You should know, sir," she said. And she was past him, handing
her weapons off to the armory airman.

O'Neill slowed to a halt at the foot of the ramp, heavy boots
clanging on the metal grating. Carter disappeared around the
hallway corner without a glance his direction.

Daniel's soft chuckle torqued O'Neill's ear as his friend moved
to stand at his side. "Looks like someone will be sleeping on
the couch tonight."

On another occasion, Jack might have tossed his friend a
sarcastic look, telling him to shove off, but not really minding
the tease. Today, his attempt at sarcasm refused to rise above a
glare. Because Carter's brush-offs had taken on an edge that
shouldn't have been there. And the coldness she was throwing off
was frosting his skin worse than the Eskimo planet.

Jack caught the surprise and concern in Daniel's eyes when the
coolness drifted in his direction, but O'Neill couldn't deal with
the fallout right now. He walked after Carter, just as Frasier
accosted Daniel with a barrage of questions about the medical
advances they had hinted at in radio contact. Daniel wouldn't be
following for a while.

Carter was in the gear-up room, locker open before her. She
barely spared her CO a glance as he stopped in the doorway.

O'Neill moved into the room, circling toward his locker.

"Something you want to talk about, Carter?" he asked,
deliberately cool, noncommittal.

Carter shook her head, focused on the clasp of her wristwatch.
"Nothing much to say, sir."

O'Neill reached for his own watch, slid it over the back of his
hand, wincing as the links of the band pulled the hairs on the
back of his wrist. "Oh, somehow, I doubt that, Carter." He
forced the lightness into his tone. "If there's one thing I have
never pegged you as, it's a woman of few words."

Carter tossed her watch into her locker; it landed with a sharp
clang. She set to work on her GDO strap. "Which would prove you
don’t know everything, sir." She spoke the words too quickly.
As though if she bounced the reply back at him fast enough she
couldn't be held responsible for the insubordination.

O'Neill let it slide. He unzipped his jacket and released a
heavy sigh, scrubbed a hand down his face. "Come on, Carter."
He flicked a goading hand. "Out with it."

He was surprised by the vehemence when she whirled on him. "What
do you want me to say, sir? That I'm happy with our actions?
That I agree with you? I don't. And I'm not. And I will not
justify the means based purely on the end result."

He shrugged out of his jacket and propped his hands on his hips.
"I'm not asking you to. You disagree with my assessment of the
situation; I get that. But you followed my orders anyway, and I
will note that for Hammond. What I don't get is what you want
from me?"

She looked away again, unbuttoned the sleeve of her blouse with a
sharp snap of her arm. "I don't want anything from you, sir."

That hit. He felt like he was 8 years old, back in Mr.
Spaulding's classroom the day he had been caught giving test
answers to Jimmy Harlin. Jack's once favorite teacher had never
again held his bright and feisty student in high esteem.

"Well, that's becoming pretty obvious," he said quietly.

He watched Carter's back, the silvery-blonde of her hair beneath
the artificial lights. That flash of color amidst all the green
and brown usually meant friendship and warmth and welcome.

For a long time, Carter didn't speak. She shrugged out of her
vest, loosed the buttons of her blouse. He should have returned
to these menial tasks himself, readied for the debriefing, but
somehow he couldn't bring himself to move.

Carter turned to half-face him, moving on the tide of an
unexpected flood of words. "I just...after as long as we have
been doing this, after all that we have seen and learned, I
guess, I expected more of you. I expected you to at
least...look at other options before you landed on 'blow it
up'."

"You're assuming I didn't do so."

Her jaw hardened and she met his eyes for the first time since
they'd entered the gate, and he almost wished she hadn't. "In
the fifteen seconds prior to you giving the order, yes, I'm
assuming that."

"Believe it or not, Carter, even my brain can work pretty fast
when it has to. And in my job, sometimes, it has to."

She shook her head, she'd already run through it all in her mind.
Worth your life to think a step ahead of Carter. "We didn't know
for certain they were hostile. We didn't even know the severity
of the damage their weapons might inflict, particularly judging
from the less than technologically advanced appearance of the
architecture we had so far observed. We knew it appeared they
were of hostile intent, as have many alien cultures we have
encountered in the past who then turned out to be powerful and
worthy allies. If we never take the risks, we never find out the
truth. That is part of our mission, is it not?"

"Obtaining means of defense of our planet and our people is our
standing order, Major. Running around making all the right
friends in the galaxy can work toward that end as well, I'm not
denying that. But not everything can be solved with a little
chat. You can't take weapons out of the picture and expect us to
last more than a week out there. Most of the universe is just
not that evolved, Carter. We're military. We defend our own."

Carter let out a sharp breath, nose wrinkling in an expression of
suppressed disgust he had seen a dozen times, but had never been
on the receiving end of. He didn't like the new view. "Don't
tell me that," she snapped. "Don't talk to me as if I have no
respect for the value of armored defense. I am not Daniel and
don't argue with me as if I am."

He watched her through narrowed eyes, taking the hit of her harsh
tone and tamping down on his own reflexive anger. The Colonel in
him was pushing to the forefront, ready to temper the situation.
He lifted an eyebrow, angled his head expectantly. "...'sir?'"
he prompted.

Carter scoffed and turned back to her locker. "Fine. You don't
want to have a real discussion, that's fine with me. Sir. I
have a debriefing to prepare for."

Anger won. "Hey. You want a real conversation, you don't duck
out the minute I push you."

"Well, maybe I don't want to be pushed right now."

"I didn't start this."

"Well, I'm asking you to stop it." She wasn't looking at him
anymore. Something was off. But she had pissed him off too much
already, she had crossed the line.

"They had us surrounded," he said, weary repetition in his voice.
"We said we were peaceful. Daniel did his 'we're just explorers'
bit, 'we want to trade'. They trained more weapons on us. What
the hell was I supposed to do?"

She shook her head, gaze lowered, face hidden. "I don't know.
Sir, can we not do this now?"

But he refused to let the moment go, refused to get jerked
around, then let everything melt away. "No, Carter, now I get
to decide. We're gonna do this. If you're gonna be pissed at
me, and in front of the rest of my team, then we're damn well
gonna have this out. You don't agree with my orders, that's your
right, but that does NOT give you the right to undermine my
authority in front of my team."

She almost looked his way, jaw hard again, back muscles tensing
as she worked the buckle of her belt, whipped it free. "Yeah,
it's all about the image, isn't it? Colonel O'Neill has to stay
cool, be everybody's friend, so they'll follow him off a cliff
when push comes to shove. You and your gun."

Jack O'Neill stepped back like he'd been struck, hands lifted
wide in surrender and deflection. "Okay, what the hell was
that? What are we talking about, Major?"

"Nothing. We shouldn't even--can we just stop this, please?"

"Stop--," he waved his hands in a gesture of desperate
bewilderment, "--what!?"

"Stop...yelling. I don't want to be...yelled at right now." Her
voice was quavering.

"You yelled first!"

"Yeah, well, now, I want to stop."

Silence settled over the room. Echoes of harsh words bounced off
his eardrums. Carter stood, one hand on her open locker door,
face turned away. A single, careful breath, and he heard her
silent tears, felt her struggle not to cry. He'd known her too
long not to see it all in the set of her shoulders.

And all the anger and resentment that had charged through his
veins ran off of him like water. He stood, defeated and
deflated. Lost. "Carter?" he said softly.

She tried to speak, but failed. She kept her face turned away
and fought to breathe. Her tears were thick. He felt it in her
breath.

Jack tried to speak, faltered, then finally said simply, "Okay.
Well. Obviously, I've missed something."

Carter sniffed hard, brushed her nose with the back of her hand.
"It's just...just to lose him again..."

He scrambled, racing to catch up. "Him...Lantesh? We're talkin'
about Lantesh, here?"

His words broke the dam and suddenly Sam Carter was really
crying, mourning a friend, no more than two feet away from where
he stood and he felt like his heart had been sucked somewhere
around his stomach. "Well, hey, I...well, why are we yellin'
about..." He reached out and rubbed her back, and she didn't
move away. He placed a simple, guiding hand on her shoulder.
"Sit down," he said, kindly.

Carter sank to the bench, forearms propped on her knees. He sat
beside her, hand continuing steady circles on her back.

After a moment, she lifted her head and said softly, "It's
just...I managed to deal with it the first time. But then to
almost have him back only to... Everyone who starts to care
about me..." but she lost her voice into quiet sobs. And there
was this whole other layer of pain he hadn't had the chance to
comprehend.

"What? Hey..." Gut response took over. He pulled her into
his arms and she came.

Her fingers dug into his shoulder as she buried her face in his
neck. He locked his arms across her back, cradling his hand to
the back of her neck.

"Hey..." he breathed. "It's all right." Her body shook against
his, and he tried to remember the last time he had held her like
this, the last time he'd seen her cry so deeply. He came up
empty. "What are you talkin' about?" he prompted, never
expecting a real reply. His mind was already working through it
all as fast as he could with Sam Carter breathing against his
neck and her tears soaking into his shirt. It was all there.
Martouf, Orlin, Narim, even that Faxon geek with the muddy shoes.
And maybe this one, maybe this really was one too many to ask of
anyone in such a short span of time.

So easy to believe Sam Carter could handle anything. A quick
flash of raw pain, a hand on her shoulder, and then she was back
on the track and good to go. She was tough, that much was real.
But the pain had to be there somewhere, no matter how well she
dealt with it, and he felt like a consummate jackass for letting
himself take the easy way out so often, accepting her facade.

She was quieting in his arms. Sobs fading to tight sniffs. Too
soon, probably, but that was Carter around her CO. She edged
gingerly back. He held onto the last seconds of intimacy and
warmth he could grasp. Smoothed fingers down her cheek as she
withdrew, brushed the dampness from her skin.

"You all right?" he asked softly.

She nodded, gaze down, pale cheeks blotched with pink. "Yes,
sir," she whispered. "Thank you."

No apology. He loved that about her. Officially, he probably
should have been reprimanding her for those jabs she'd failed to
retract, but hell if that was going to happen.

"We should be at the debriefing," she said, sounding like she had
a head cold. And he wanted to hold her again. Sam's
body...fit...so damn well. Always hard to let go. Always.

"Give yourself a minute."

She nodded.

He didn't move from his place on the bench as she gathered the
last of her necessities from her locker.

"I'm headed to the women's showers," she said, testing a weak
smile. She closed her locker door, pushed it again to make sure
it latched.

Jack nodded. "Yeah."

Carter held his gaze a moment, make-up smudged at the corner of
her eye, then she turned and started toward the door.

As her hand touched the exit, he said simply. "Not everyone."

She turned, guileless and painfully open. "What, sir?"

He shifted his weight, gripping the edge of the bench.
"Not...everyone...who cares about you."

She let that soak through the layers, gaze on his and she never
looked away. Then she gave a slight nod and turned to go.

He sat alone in the empty room. Until her scent had faded from
his skin. Until his armor was firmly back in place.

***

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