Author: Regency

Title: For More Than Country

Genre: Action/Adventure, AU, Drama

Rating: R

Word count: ~63,671+

Pairings: Jack/Sara, Sam/Jonas, Sam/Jack (friendship/UST), Janet/Kawalsky (friendship/UST) with other lesser relationships

Contains/Labels/Warnings: non-graphic dub-con/non-con (see warning note), language, mature themes, graphic reference to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, violence, non-graphic sexual situations, references to torture, depictions of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,  flouting of various military regulations and social mores.

Spoilers: Includes but is not limited to A Matter of Time, Secrets, Children of the Gods, Gamekeeper, The First Commandment, and Shades of Grey.

Summary:  There were very few things Captain Samantha Carter wouldn’t do for her country as a member of Jack O'Neill's Special Ops team. It just so happened that the very thing her superiors were asking of her was one of the few.  ‘Neutralize Jack O’Neill by any means necessary,’ they’d told her. It wasn’t the first order she’d defied but it was the biggest. (Also known as, the increasingly complicated life and times of Samantha Jean Carter, PhD.)

Author’s Notes: When reality and canon contradicted one another, I decided to go with canon for the sake of familiarity. I’ve futzed with canon due to some obvious time discrepancies. You’ll note them as you read. Also features cameo appearances by various Stargate Atlantis characters.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any characters recognizable as being from Stargate SG-1 or Stargate: Atlantis. They are the property of their respective producers, writers, and studios, not me.  No copyright infringement was intended and no money was made in the writing or distribution of this story. It was good, clean fun.

Warning Note (contains spoilers):  The non-con occurs between O’Neill and Carter due to a forced contact situation during a mission. It is portrayed as rape and dealt with as such between the two characters.

~!~

  

            Sam woke up on the wrong side of the bed on the best morning of her life.  She rolled clear off the high mattress, generally perfect to accommodate her considerable height, but today agonizing on the horizontal trip down.  She limped into the shower at 0435 hours with a bruised hip and a swelling cheek from where her face had impacted the nightstand.

            She had worked up a headache by the time she stepped out at 0445 hours to find that she didn’t have nearly enough makeup to conceal the bruising and no magic wand to reduce the swelling.  Captain Samantha Carter was about to report to Peterson Air Force Base, her new duty station, looking like a victim of domestic violence.

            Today of all days, she was not in the mood for this shit.

            She tore through two pairs of nude pantyhose before one managed to stand up to her wrath long enough to safely envelop her well-worked thighs.  It didn’t matter that she’d worked her ass off through basic to earn these legs or that she ran seven miles every evening to keep them, or even that she seemed to have to shave every ten minutes just to say smooth.  All that mattered was that the damned regulations called for these damned stockings with this damned uniform.

            It’s tradition, Sammie, her father would have said. This morning, she would have been hard-pressed not to punch him for it, two-star general or not.  She was not in the mood to pour herself into her dress blues, but tradition dictated that that was exactly what an officer should do when first reporting for duty on a new base.

            Sam was seriously considering taking further courses in military history just so that she could find out who’d founded these inane rituals and punch them in what remained of their solar plexus. She wasn’t generally the bloodthirsty type, but she wasn’t above desecrating some hallowed ground right about now.  She was that teed off.

            Today was supposed to have been perfect.  All the plans had been made; papers signed and ink dry, I’s dotted, T’s crossed.  Murphy was supposed to have taken a freakin’ holiday. So, Sam was completely clueless as to why nothing was going right.

            By 0515 hours—still early but fifteen minutes later than she’d planned—Sam walked out of her new apartment only to remember that her car wouldn’t arrive in Colorado Springs for at least another week.  Until then, Sam was going to be a loyal patron of the bright yellow taxi.  With a resigned sigh, she turned around and went back inside to make the phone call.  If this morning were a bigger disaster, it’d be Chernobyl.

            Sam spent another twenty minutes waiting for her ride to arrive, during which she managed to inhale three cups of coffee and pace like a caged lion.  Between her nerves and the liquid overload, it stood perfectly to reason that as soon as the cab driver honked outside, she’d suddenly have to pee.  Sam made one last mad dash to the bathroom; all the while chanting, “Please, don’t leave. Please, don’t leave,” knowing that with the sort of luck she was having he probably would.

            He almost did.

            It was only thanks to some incredibly undignified arm-waving that Sam managed to salvage her morning.  The driver gave her a curt nod and she hopped into the back of the cab.  It seemed that she’d gotten the only driver in the Springs who had no idea how to get to Peterson AFB.  The fresh captain was beginning to believe she was being auditioned for sainthood and that she was seriously about to bomb, because if she was late, she could not be held responsible for the morality of her actions.

            Luckily, she wasn’t late.  She was unbelievably early. Sort of embarrassingly early if the SFs at the security checkpoint were anything to go by.  She’d presented them with her credentials and her orders and gotten a raised eyebrow for her trouble.  After months of training for a job that women just didn’t do, Sam was pretty used to it by now, but she could have done without the doubt at face value.

            Sam cleared the doubt from her mind with a head shake and paid her cabbie in correct change.  She had the pleasure of discovering, then, that her fare was exactly all the money she had on her today.  The rest of her cash must have still been in the jeans she’d worn the night before.  It was all she could do to keep from throwing up her arms and going back home to bed. Clearly, nothing positive could come from this day.

            If this is any indication of the way my tour will go, I should probably resign now before I kill myself in the line of getting a cup of coffee.

            At 0610 hours on Monday morning, all Sam wanted to do was find a quiet place to wallow in her misery.  At 0610 hour on a Monday morning, all the places that were usually good for that were closed.  She knew for a fact that the Officer’s Club wouldn’t open for a couple of hours yet and she wasn’t particularly interested in learning the social dynamics of the base via the commissary just yet.  She simply wanted to sit and stare at a wall until she could recapture the part of her personality that had made her so formidable in Special Ops training, the part of her that had probably gotten her this billet to begin with.  She had gone from irate at her run of bad luck to despondent.  She didn’t have time to feel that way today.

            Samantha Jean Carter didn’t freak out when the going got tough.  She got inspired.  Now, she was just waiting for that inspiration to strike.

            Her appointments with the base commander and her department head were coming fast and Sam knew if inspiration didn’t strike soon, disaster would.  She needed time to decompress and space to think. At home, she’d been too busy unpacking, planning, and re-planning to really prepare herself for the fact that all her work was about to pay off.

            The doctorates and the extra training, and the inexplicable year she’d spent languishing at Nellis in technological research had come to gold.  She’d enjoyed her work, but she hadn’t enjoyed sending her prototypes to be tested by people who didn’t know better on people who didn’t know better.  Some of the devices she’d designed had been utilized in that moral grey area that had always given Sam pause.  She’d finally concluded, long after the decision had already been made for other reasons, that if anyone had to use a weapon she’d invented for good or ill, she’d sleep better at night if she was the one to do it.

            Sam had no illusions that this would make her a better person. In fact, she was sure it wouldn’t, but she felt like it was a small thing she could do for her brothers-in-arms, to save them from the nightmares that plagued her father decades after he’d transferred out of Covert Ops.

            As he would have said, Sam was her father’s daughter, but she had her mother’s heart.  She’d never hated him for saying that, even if she knew it wasn’t true.  She hadn’t been selected for this team, or for any team, because she was a loving and nurturing soul.  She’d been picked because she could wield a sniper’s rifle with deadly accuracy in the dark of night.  She’d been picked because she was light on her feet and as graceful with a hunting knife as Craig Biggio with a Louisville Slugger.  When she struck, no one got up.  She’d spent several quiet months worrying what that said about her.

            She wasn’t worrying so much about that anymore.  She’d been handpicked for one of the best Ops units in active service.  Someone thinks I’m doing something right.  Any doubts she had she’d left in Nevada.  That’s where those doubts had to stay or she’d get herself and, likely, her entire team killed or captured.  It wasn’t an option.  Time to wake up and smell the war paint.

            Sam looked up and realized that she’d been wandering around the training grounds for the better part of a half-hour.  She didn’t actually know for sure—her watch, wherever it was, was not on her wrist—but her aching feet told a story of some longevity and suffering. She took their word for it and went to find her unit commander’s office.  She doubted anything good could come from arriving at the base CO’s office this much before her appointment.  She didn’t want to be obnoxiously early, simply right on time.

            The newly-minted captain found her new unit commander’s office without much fanfare since it was a location with the least amount of fanfare possible. Within the indoor training facility (already populated by sweating, grunting cadets, officers, and enlistees alike), she found the path to the Special Ops inner sanctum.

            It was essentially a lounge with sundry mismatched chairs and tables, all crowded around a TV both larger and, seemingly, older than Sam herself.  All of the chairs were empty, but Sam still got the sense that people had been here recently.  There were magazines left open and snack wrappers that hadn’t been discarded littering the table tops.  She got up close and personal with a half-full can of coke that’d been abandoned on the floor.  With a roll of her eyes, she shook her head. She hated to generalize, but all she could think was, Men!

            For want of anything else to do, Sam began picking up the trash and tossing it out in the nearest bin.  Before long, the place still looked like an all-man’s land, but it also looked like it had seen a woman in the last decade.

            She nodded with some satisfaction and continued on her way. It was 0647 hours, if she could trust the clock on the wall.  This whole impromptu cleaning jag had taken longer than she’d expected.  If she waited around to meet her new team CO, chances were she’d be late for her meeting with the base commander.  Looks like I’ll have to catch up with him later.  Sam turned tail and headed out of what she hoped would be her new den.  It wasn’t perfection or state-of-the-art, but she thought she could get used to it.  Hell, she thought she could love it—if she didn’t already.

            Sam didn’t have much time to get from point A to point B, so she was forced to use logic instead of solicit directions to the base commander’s office.  She reasoned that the best place for it was the center of the base in the administrative building.  She was right and right on time.

            She’d been standing beside the desk of the general’s aide a light two minutes when the call came down for her to step inside.  She gave her epaulettes a perfunctory brush, smoothed her skirt, and did just that.

            The man inside the office was not who she was expecting and yet not totally out of the realm of possibility. He stood tall decked in black and green BDUs.  He was lean and leaning against the edge of the general’s desk. Upon seeing her, he lifted his chin in greeting but made no move to return her salute given that he wasn’t in Class A’s.  She didn’t have to see his name embroidered on his chest to recognize the minor legend known as Colonel Jack O’Neill.  He looks nothing like his pictures. That’s talent.

            “Captain Samantha Carter reporting for duty, sir,” she announced as she came to attention.

            The colonel raised his eyebrows with what Sam really hoped wasn’t amusement. “Relax, Captain, before you hurt yourself.”

            “Sorry, sir,” Sam murmured and dropped into parade rest stance.  She kept her eyes trained directly to the right of the colonel’s face. It was easier not to do a point-by-point facial comparison if she wasn’t looking directly at him.  She couldn’t help herself, this was the way her brain operated.

            “Captain, you’re allowed to make eye contact. I’m your CO, not your drill instructor.”

            “Sir, yes, sir,” she bellowed.  If her peripheral vision was right, her unit commander had started smirking roughly point-two seconds before she’d started speaking.

            “Y’know, I saw that coming and I still thought it was funny. Nice one, Carter.”

            Sam nodded, feeling the tense knot in her gut start to unravel a bit. “I aim to please, sir.”

            “That’s all I ask, Captain. All I ask.”

            Once Sam finally allowed herself to set eyes on her new unit CO for more than a passing glance, she found him bouncing on the balls of his feet with his hands in his pockets and a sparkle in his eye.  He really seemed nothing like the man he was rumored to be.

            “So…how do you feel about hockey?”

            Sam grinned. She guessed that was all right.

“Don’t know much about it, sir, but I’m dying to learn.”

            “Sweet.” He tipped his head toward the door. “Let’s go meet the team, then.”  As the colonel sauntered past, Sam wasn’t exactly sure what to do.  She did have another appointment to keep, after all.

            “Uh, sir, I’m supposed to be meeting with General McClear—right now, actually.  Shouldn’t I wait to see him?”  Sam tangled her fingers together nervously out of sight.  She hated to start questioning orders this early, but it paid to clarify…Right?

            “That won’t be necessary, Captain.  The general was called into an emergency briefing with the Air Force Chief of Staff and he asked me to be the welcome party in his place. So, welcome,” he declared with enough sarcasm to kill a field of daisies. “Now, come on, the team’s gone crazy wondering about you. Might as well put ‘em out of my misery.”

            Sam smiled wider, relieved.  “Lead the way, sir.”

            “Thought you’d never ask.” With a grandiose—and comically overblown—gesture, the colonel invited her to pass through the door first. She did. After all, she was nothing if not a stickler for tradition.

~!~

            Sam felt like the new kid in school as the colonel led her back over the path she’d just taken. Before, she’d managed to pass through and garner little attention, but with him at her side, heads turned.  It made her nervous and a bit uptight.  She stiffened her spine and forced herself to focus solely on the sound of the colonel’s voice as he pointed out the various facilities around them.

            She filed the info away for later use, even if it was all standard and most bases were essentially laid out the same way.  It never hurt to familiarize oneself with the particulars.

            “…And blah, blah, blah, you’ve been on military bases before. I don’t think there’s anything I can tell you that you don’t already know.  But, if you have questions, feel free to ask me or pretty much anyone you meet.”

            Sam nodded, glad that he didn’t beat around the bush much and also glad that he didn’t think she was an idiot on sight.  Of course, he doesn’t think I’m an idiot. Everybody knows that Jack O’Neill doesn’t suffer fools. If he didn’t think I was worth it, I wouldn’t be on his team.

            “Will do, sir.”  Sam kept her hands clasped behind her for want of something to do with them.  She had the most ridiculous urge to just salute constantly.  It was as if all her knowledge of military protocol had died a startling and untimely death this morning.  It was nerves for the most part; she was trying particularly hard not to think about it.

            “So, Captain…”  Sam picked up on the undercurrent of speculation in his tone pretty easily.

            “Sir?”

            Her new superior stuck his hands into his pockets as he ambled along, favoring her with a couple of surreptitious glances that made her stomach plummet.  Shit, I’ve managed to mess up already. How?

            “Met any street gangs lately?”  He seemed to ask in all seriousness, yet Sam couldn’t miss the spark of humor dancing at the corner of his eyes.

            “Street gangs, sir?”  Though Sam’d be damned before she’d admit it, she was totally lost.  Is this code?  She was feeling that overwhelming urge to call it a day again. 

            He made a vague gesture towards his face; specifically, his eye and cheek.  Suddenly, Sam really did want to call it a day.  She’d all but forgotten about the victimization she’d faced at the hands of her furniture not three hours earlier.  Industrial- strength concealer, it goes on the shopping list now.  In hindsight, some of the weird looks she’d gotten already made a bit more sense.  Keep being this observant, Sam, and you’ll shoot up the ranks. Really.  She’d just arrived and Sam was convinced that Jack O’Neill’s sarcasm was quicksand and she was sinking.

            “Ah.  About that, sir…”

He gave a relaxed shrug and waved off her explanation before she’d even had a chance to give it.  “I only have two questions about it, Captain.  Are you okay? And, how bad does the other guy look right now?”

Sam ducked her head, feeling silly about triggering concern on her first day, but also touched that she’d managed it at all.  Special Ops wasn’t a profession for the gentle sort—Hurlburt Field had given her a rough education in that—but the colonel had a reputation for caring about his people.   “It’s nothing a little ice, aspirin, and time can’t sort out, sir. As for the other guy, he still looks like my nightstand.”

She gave him her own surreptitious glance, but was startled to find herself the subject of her CO’s scrutiny.  She stopped short and held her breath. She never would have noticed the minute movement of his eyes if she hadn’t been looking for it.  From her hairline to the collar of her dress uniform, not a single area of exposed skin went uninspected. She stayed loose and let the tension drain from her body.  If she was holding anything back, he’d see it and she had no desire for him to brand her a liar on her first day.

“Sir,” she inquired, quietly, finally.

He raised a dubious eyebrow, but tipped his head to her unspoken question. “Just checking the damage, Captain.  Can’t have a member of my team at less than 100 percent.”

Sam nodded as though she understood, which she did, she just didn’t…also.  Well, as long as I’m making perfect sense on this fine Monday morning, what else can I hope for?  She rolled her eyes towards the heavens and seriously wanted a do-over.

“Something eye roll-worthy you wanna share, Carter?”

            At the sound of his voice, Sam came very close to dropping her face into her hands.  She was making the impression from Hell today and she had no idea why.  She was a good officer; determined, meticulous, and impressive, the way she’d been trained to be.  She did not air her internal monologue for anyone, much less her new CO, to hear.  That included facial expressions.

            “Honestly, sir, I don’t know what’s the matter with me this morning.  I’m usually a lot more put-together than this,” she apologized by way of explanation.  Come on Sam, you’ve pulled out of a simulated bombing run in an F-16 at 8-plus G’s.  This is nothing compared to what you know you can do.

            The colonel had paused to lean against the side of the building they were passing now, the commissary.  Lifting his chin a few degrees to acknowledge a couple of saluting trainees, he crossed his arms and gave her his full attention.  Sam managed not to fidget successfully this time, dropping back into parade rest as a matter of protocol and a measure of comfort.

            “You know everyone has bad days, right?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            “Do you know what the odds were that your first day on a new base, in a new town was going to be a bad one?”

            Sam momentarily tried to do the math, but the colonel’s growing impatience with her silence prompted her to think the question was rhetorical.  “No, sir,” she answered finally.

            “Well, they’re high, Captain. Pretty much astronomical.  In fact, I’d hazard a guess that the odds that it would be crap were better than the odds it wouldn’t be.”

            “So…what?”  The look the colonel gave her this time told her in no uncertain terms that he was beginning to doubt her common sense, or at least her sense of humor. 

“So,” he murmured lengthily, “lighten up, Captain.  Some days are gonna suck.  Some won’t.  If you’re lucky, at the end you’ll be able to say that you had more good than bad ones. That’ll be enough.”

She guessed she’d have to take his word for it. “Sir, yes, sir.”

He flickered both brows at her and shook his head as he started to lead the way again.  “That joke only works once, Captain.”

“Cut me some slack, sir. I’m new.”  She affected a vaguely naive affect and was rewarded when he double-took to look back at her suspiciously.

“Oh, no, you don’t.  You can’t pull that one with me.  I’ve seen your file, Captain.  You’re not to be messed with.” He sounded impressed. “Over 100 hours in enemy airspace during Desert Storm? Give me a break on the harmless as a butterfly routine, Carter. Born at night, not last night.”  It had been a flash in the pan of Sam’s career, that didn’t mean she failed to take pride in it.

Sam beamed brightly, glad that something was finally working in her favor. Her record was one thing that had always preceded her and, today, she was unbelievably grateful.  “I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean, sir.”

“Sure you don’t.  Save it for the combatants.”

“Yes, sir.”  She followed behind him, a bit more certain now and without hesitating to hold her head high.  She could love this.  She just had to get past the first few days.

            They were quiet the rest of the walk back to the training center, save for the times when the colonel whistled aimless tunes. He never finished a whole song, but started and stopped like he’d gotten distracted halfway through.

            Sam, for her part, was content to observe the personnel as they started their days.  The running trainees, the officers and the enlisted alike rushing from one place to another like their lives depended on it.  Maybe they do, who knows?  Sam wasn’t naïve enough to think that she was the only person with an important job to do.  She knew that undelivered orders and reinforcements that never came could turn the tide of a conflict as surely as a team of commandos in the desert.  Any effort to defend her country was a team effort even if she didn’t know every member of her team.

            The colonel drew her in with a wave.  Sam realized she’d passed through the heart of the facility on autopilot. They were back at the lounge.  This time it wasn’t empty, though the trash was back.

            “Oh, look,” the colonel said, shifting his weight to rest against the door jam, “the gang’s all here—and company!”

            Sam stepped to his right to take a look.  It’s a mid-sized group of men and one woman.  Sam felt herself tensing up again when they all swung their eyes from the colonel to her.  The large TV in the background was blaring a hockey game that Sam figured had to be taped considering the time of day. She nearly lost her footing when the colonel pushed her forward with a sharp nudge at the center of her back.

            “Go on. They don’t bite.”  Sam was not encouraged by the unspoken, ‘much.’

            Deciding to skip the formalities and go straight for familiarity, Sam smiled.  “Hi.” She waved, feeling incredibly lame as they all traded smiling glances.  Wow, way worse than high school.

            Finally, the only woman in attendance stood up and came over to introduce herself.  “You must be Captain Carter. Sam, right,” she asked and shook Sam’s hand in welcome.

            “Yes, ma’am.”  Whenever she met someone new, she assumed they outranked her until she was told otherwise.

            “No need for that,” explained the petite woman. “Captain Janet Fraiser. I patch these delinquents up when they get themselves into trouble.”  She couldn’t have reached higher than Sam’s chin, but she was damn near as formidable as the colonel himself.  Note to self: stay off her bad side.

            “Yes, it’s Captain Doctor Frasier,” Colonel O’Neill interjected semi-helpfully.  “Keeper of the big honkin’ needles. Beware.”

            Sam cracked a smirk; it came easier this time.  “Sounds like someone’s been on the wrong side of a hypodermic recently.”

            “All the time, Captain,” said one of the men still seated in the mismatched chairs.  He pushed himself up and out, casting a broad and tall shadow that belied his open smile.  “The colonel lives to wind the doc up.”  He stuck out his hand and took Sam’s as soon as Janet let go.  “Major Charles Kawalsky.  I’m team2IC.”

            “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”  He dismissed her formality with a wave.

            “When it’s just us guys, you can call me Charlie. It’s no big.”  He pointed to another man who stood up in response to his signal. “That guy’s Ferretti, he’s our fourth.” He gestured, next, toward a very young officer, a lieutenant based on his insignia.  “That’s Simmons.  He handles the doodads, makes sure everything’s in good working order before it even gets in our hands for a mission.”  He leaned toward Sam conspiratorially and said, “He may seem shy but he is not someone you wanna piss off.   The difference between a faulty chute and one that gets you safely to the ground is that guy.”

            Nodding, Sam agreed. “I read you loud and clear, sir.”  She smiled kindly at their obviously nervous subordinate.  He blushed.

            Louder, Kawalsky said, “Hey, Jack, this one ever gonna stop calling me sir? It makes me feel old.”

            “You are old, Kawalsky,” the colonel shot back, no longer content to leave Sam to the wolves.  He ambled fully into the lounge to stand opposite the good Doctor Frasier, bookending his new team member and, probably unknowingly, consoling Sam’s still lightly fluttering nerves.

            Kawalsky snorted and looked back at the one known as Ferretti for back up.  The wirier, and probably younger, Sam thought, of the two grinned wide and welcoming.  Kawalsky was in for a disappointment. “You’re both old.  I’m the spring chicken of this trio.”

            “Ah, not anymore, Major,” Frasier said, coming around to slap Ferretti affectionately on the shoulder.  “Your trio’s a quartet now and you’ve got yourselves a new spring chicken,” she teased, nodding toward Sam.  Sam doubted that anyone without the captain’s southern charm would have gotten away with treating a superior officer so cavalierly.  She envied the backbone that took.

            “So, everyone’s old but Carter,” the colonel questioned, a decidedly rhetorical note in his voice.  “Sweet.”  His faint half-smile would have let Sam know that he didn’t mind if the tiny shoulder bump didn’t give him away.  “Anyway, this is the crew pretty much, Ops Team One in full.  Most of the time, it’ll just be the four of us on missions unless it calls for additional personnel.  If that happens, Frasier and Simmons are up first if their expertise is called for.  Occasionally, we do combined ops with other units and noncoms, but that hasn’t happened in a while.”

            Kawalsky dropped back into his comfy looking armchair and picked up on O’Neill’s trailing thread, saying, “In the meantime, we specialize in training cadets and enlistees for the field.  All four branches.  I think we’ve even done an exercise with the Coast Guard. Didn’t we?”

            “Sure did,” Ferretti answered for him, his inflection cutting.  “Did not enjoy the hypothermia that came with that exercise in futility.”

            “Be nice, Lou,” the colonel warned, a blend of fondness and firmness softening the reprimand.

            “Yes, sir,” he retorted, said with all due respect and touch of rebellion. They were equals on one level, if not all levels, Sam was sure of that.  They must have bought their senses of humor from the same bait and tackle shop.

            As though sensing Sam’s confusion, Frasier gave her the details. “The general tries to keep dissension between branches to a minimum on base. He’s turned that into the colonel’s problem, which makes it…,” the woman trailed off and shrugged.  It was everything and nothing at once.  Sam had a little experience with that.

            Sam muttered, “Guess as long as we’re in the business of making miracles.”

            “That’s what I said,” Ferretti exclaimed, giving Sam the third approving look she’d gotten today.  Yes, she was keeping count.  “She has the sense that God gave a macadamia nut. Somebody put some stars on her shoulders.”  Sam was only half-certain that had been a compliment, but that was how she decided to take it.

            “Ferretti,” the colonel scolded, eyes flashing, “cut it out before you scare the nice captain off and get reported by some passing grunt with their eye on your job.”  Ferretti shut up quick, even if he looked damned pissed he had.  Sam sensed some underlying tension.  She was thankful that it wasn’t all because of her.

            “Sir, yes, sir,” he snarled.  Kawalsky gave him a sharp look and Sam was left to wonder whether Janet’s services were going to be needed to patch somebody up for a court martial.  She wasn’t sure just whose ass was about to be on the line though.  Never let it be said that tempers don’t run high among friends.

            “Hey, Lou, why don’t you take a walk,” the team’s 2IC advised.  If that had at any point been suggestion, Sam must have blinked through that part.

            Ferretti visibly gritted his teeth, then, complied.  Watching him go in silence, Sam thought it must have burned to be dressed down by an officer of identical rank.  Seniority had its place, but it never seemed fair at the time. You either love it or loathe it. Though she hadn’t had the pleasure, she expected it was on the horizon.  Law of averages dictated that at some point something unpleasant had to happen to her.  It also dictated that eventually this would be the unpleasant thing.  Now that she’d seen it up close, she could tell it was not going to be a barrel of laughs.

            About like the room was after Ferretti had stalked out in a controlled storm.  The colonel looked annoyed.  Kawalsky looked exasperated.  Frasier seemed to be developing a mother of a headache. Simmons just looked incredibly uncomfortable.  Sam could relate to that feeling. She felt like the only one present with no idea what exactly had gone down in the last five minutes, or why.

            “How about those Canucks,” she blurted all of a sudden.

            Frasier giggled nervously. The colonel snorted before patting her on the shoulder and turning away. Kawalsky raised an eyebrow, smirk still lighting his face, and nodded almost proudly.

            “The mantle has been passed, grasshopper. You are now the icebreaker.”

            Yeah, she was being mocked mightily, but there were worse things.  “I will use my power well, master,” she vowed and bowed.

            “See that you do.”

            Her CO started off the slow clap and the rest picked it up.

            “Now, that is how you make a debut,” said the colonel, breezily.  “Carter, you get set up with the doc at the infirmary. She’ll set you straight with whatever shots”—he shuddered—“you’ll need.  When you’re done, either drop me a line or come on back and we’ll go over the schedule for the week.”  He paused for a loaded second, and then continued, “Think there’s something coming down the pike, but for the moment, it’s above my pay grade.  Because of that, I want you to get a head start on team training.  If we get orders to head out in two days, I don’t want you totally unprepared.”

            “Yes, sir.”  She had no idea what training he meant but she could fake it with the best until she did.

            The colonel gave her a long inscrutable look.  Far different from the dancing glimmer in his eyes in the general’s office, different even from the worried inspection he’d proffered near the commissary; this look said he saw everything she didn’t want him to see.  Her nerves, her need to prove herself, her abject fear of failure—and the fact that she wouldn’t be leaving this place until she’d conquered every one of those. There were more embarrassing truths he could have seen in her eyes.

He departed without another word, giving neither affirmation nor reproof.  She supposed he hadn’t made up his mind yet.  She decided that she’d have to do it for him.  This is the beginning of the rest of my life. There’s no way I’m screwing this up.

Stiffening her spine and returning her attention to the other captain in the room, Sam decided it was time to put her money where her pride was.  “Doctor Frasier, shall we?”

The petite physician, not much older than Sam but with eyes that had clearly seen much more, gave a nod toward the door.  “Of course.”

From behind them, Kawalsky pitched, “Fifty bucks says she takes the vacs like a man.”  Were she younger, Sam might have bristled at the remark.

“You mean better than you then, Major,” quipped her female colleague lightly.

Sam swung her eyes to the offending party in disbelief. “Wow,” she mouthed.  Janet, because she was officially Janet in Sam’s mind, grinned. The silence was almost painful and only became less so at with the low-pitched chuckling that sounded from Lieutenant Simmons’ corner of the room.

“Ha ha, Doc. Ha ha,” Kawalsky grumbled and Sam could see him sulking in her mind’s eye, possibly while sending Simmons the evil eye.

“You’re welcome, sir.”  Smugness apparently ran in the family, Sam thought, because Janet wore it like a Meritorious Service Medal.

“Don’t you have shots to administer to unsuspecting airmen?” He tried for snide and landed at petulant.

“It’s funny you should say that, sir, since I’m pretty sure you’re behind on yours.  See me in the infirmary this afternoon.”

“But, Doc!”

“No buts, Kawalsky, or it’ll be your butt at the front of the line.”

He sighed in irritation. Janet looked even smugger.  Sam understood who was really in charge here.  This is not my father’s chain of command.

She decided that she did love the place already, and maybe that was why.

“Now, Captain, let’s see about that shiner you’re working on, there.”

She sighed. Knew it was too good to be true.

~!~

            At 0500 hours on the morning after the best day of her life, there was a knock at Sam’s door.  Not her door at home, but the door of her temporarily commandeered base quarters. It was the colonel’s doing; she had nothing to do with it.  Okay, nothing other than the mother of all yawns in the middle of an impromptu cram briefing in spite of the gallon of coffee she’d ingested in the hours before. That was her responsibility, grammatically faulty explanation and all.

            The colonel had seen her exhaustion, done some basic travel math and—aided by her embarrassed admission of having absolutely no cash on-hand and the collective realization that Peterson really needed to have an ATM machine put in—decided that she’d be staying on base for the night.  She had and now a new day had begun, and Sam didn’t have a thing to wear, but she opened the door anyway.

            She staggered back in response to a stack of nondescript clothes and other things being lobbed at her chest.  She grabbed them before they could fall only to glare at the figures smirking from the other side of the threshold.  It wasn’t insubordination but God would she have loved for it to have been.

            “It’s what the trainees usually wear but it should do in a pinch until Supply comes through with your BDUs,” the colonel explained from the front of his twilight riding trio. Sam narrowed her eyes at him in confusion.  She could pick up her own uniform and would have later in the day.  She hadn’t been asleep at this relatively late hour, but she hadn’t been prepared to get dressed either.  It must have shown on her face, because her CO got a look of comprehension on his face.  “Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that we usually take laps around the base a few mornings a week.”

            “Most mornings,” Kawalsky corrected.  There was a touch of teasing arm-twisting in his tone and Sam’s estimation of the man only rose.  No one can say they lack balls around here.

            The colonel groused. “Most mornings. Yeah, what he said.”  He bounced on the balls of his feet and stuck his hands into the pockets of his jogging pants.  Sam thought he looked like a kid eager to show the new girl around. Though they hid it better, his cohorts—her new cohorts—were no better.  “So, you in?”

            She decided that she liked that look on them. “Yes, sir. I can be ready in five.”

            “Make it...five, then.” He seemed liked he’d been ready to challenge her when good sense had prevailed.  He shrugged. She grinned.  “Yeah, we can do five. We’ll just go warm up.”  He threw an encouraging wave over his shoulder and led Ferretti and Kawalsky off into the early dusk. 

It would be another hour or more before the sun even contemplated a cup of coffee much less rising.  They clearly loved to slink about in the dark.  Early riser or not, Sam would have to get accustomed to their way of doing things.  If she could get dressed in five minutes, she could certainly get used to whiling away her mornings racing a group of overgrown kids from point A to point Z and back again. That could only be so hard.

Exactly three days later, Sam wished she could go back in time and smack her three days younger self with an MP-5.  Kawalsky and the colonel were bickering about who was manlier while adeptly dodging muddy puddles from the most recent, unexpected, rain storm.  The major had already knocked their superior into what was effectively a pond of rain water once.  Now the colonel wanted payback which the major was only too glad to outrun.

The colonel doesn’t take being outstripped well.  Sam shook her head and manned her pace, keeping step with Major Ferretti, who appeared content to keep step with her in return.  He was the old fresh-faced kid and she the new.  They had a lot to talk about but Sam was content to listen to the beating of booted feet on the packed earth.  It was about all that was keeping her awake right now.  Without the adrenalin of first day jitters or a good cup of caffeine to her name, Sam was asleep upright.  As amusing as her superiors were, they were not equal to the task of a big cup of java, no sugar, no milk, no cream.  God, I need to stop tormenting myself.

She roared a great yawn and nearly fell on her face in the process. Ferretti’s quick reflexes saved her from a broken ankle and three weeks of wasted downtime.  Sighing dramatically was out of the question though blushing wasn’t. Sam couldn’t have been more grateful for the lingering shade.  Damn it, those three early days have caught up with me. Gotta get the hang of this.

With a gracious, if shamefaced, smile to Ferretti and a totally manufactured burst of speed, Sam rushed forward on the trail they’d circled a half a dozen times already to slam between Kawalsky and O’Neill and start the lap again.  They’d begun to slow down, to meander.  Sam didn’t meander anywhere. If she went, she went full speed ahead and with all due intent.  The morning run wasn’t going to be any different.

As for the rest of the team, they’d just have to learn to keep up.  There was a new spring chicken in town.

Her daily exercise regimen paid off in endurance.  She knew she couldn’t outrun her team indefinitely, but she liked to make an impression when she could.   She breezed ‘round the outside of the shooting range, mentally cataloguing the safety features that made that a safe, if unadvisable, thing to do.  She passed the parade grounds, already feeling the dust the men were kicking up at her heels.  She slogged through the heart of the base, past the semi-unconscious airmen chugging enticing mugs of government-issue sludge.  She doubled back at the unaccompanied officers housing, re-covering the distance from her front door and circled the training center on a lark.

Looking behind her and realizing she’d actually lost them, she grinned and jogged in place near the back door.  She was dead-tired but pumped.  She liked winning and she liked getting people not to underestimate her.  She was a challenge and she needed her team to understand that.  It was the only way this could ever work.

Sam started stretching again to shake the fatigue out of her limbs and joints.  Duty waited for no woman’s nap.  Regardless of the fact she’d stayed up most of the previous nights studying whatever missions reports she had clearance to access in order to better understand the team’s dynamic, she knew she still had to prove she fit in here. And she absolutely did.  She knew it down to her bones.  Just hope the colonel knows.

Feeling sufficiently cooled down, Sam stopped her stationary exercise to lean against the brick wall.  I think it might be time to invest in a multivitamin. She’d thought she was in shape; how old she felt right now belied that.

A quick check of her watch informed Sam that she hadn’t seen her team for a full fifteen minutes.  She frowned.  While she may have been in arguably better physical condition than them, there was no way they’d be fifteen minutes behind her.  Something’s up, she thought and dashed inside the training center.

She didn’t even stand out among the multitude of sweaty bodies already at work and play. Just one more head and heaving chest and one more pair of charging feet.  This was a place where she could disappear.  Inhaling a great breath of sticky, drying Coca-Cola, coffee grounds, and sweat, Sam slid with a fair amount of grace through the door of the lounge.

The guys were definitely sweating like pigs, but they weren’t panting anymore.  All eyes were trained on the TV screen and Sam wasn’t comforted by the fact that it wasn’t hockey.  CNN blared and bloviated with its talking heads and their perfect hair and pressed clothes.  They were blandly beautiful and unimposing. They were absolutely wrong for this story where nothing was bland or beautiful about it, rather garishly horrifying. It was a crash course in what evil man could perpetrate against man.

Sam had taken history courses all throughout her academic career.  She had seen pictures and heard firsthand accounts of one-sided battles, massacres, and holocausts.  She had just never seen it up close, living and breathing in real time.

“This begs the question,” one of the talking heads said.  “What separates genocide from ‘acts of genocide’?”  Sam could only stare, because this was purely academic to them.  It was words on paper and an international forum and not a life, not lives.  This was why she’d gotten into this business and out of her last ones. There were simply some enemies who couldn’t be defeated from a distance, from the air.

“Sir,” she found herself saying.  She didn’t know what was going to come out next, she just knew that this was a defining moment for their team and she needed to make that connection now, to show that she knew and to prove that he knew it, too.

Without looking at her, the colonel nodded. “I know, Carter.”  In three words, he managed to acknowledge everything she wanted to say and everything none of them could.  Can’t it be someone else this time?

Kawalsky did look at her to say, “Gear up, Captain.  We’ve got orders.”  Sam acknowledged his command with a slanted nod.  She didn’t know the full story and she was afraid to leave before she did.  This was shorthand and she was still learning.

Ferretti let out a long, slow whistle.  It was as garish as the news, but knew it.  The young major spun on his heel to turn away from the screen.  Instead of broken in a smile, his face was creased with uneasy knowledge.  He looked at her with something akin to pity and as much as she hated it, she stood easier in the understanding that she wouldn’t be entering this hell alone.  Whatever this hell was.

“Hey, Cap’n?”

Automatically, Sam’s spine stiffened and she met Ferretti’s eyes fearlessly. She could take what he could dish out. “Yes, sir.”

He offered her the mug of steaming brew in his hand. “Coffee?”

Sam felt her lips twist with some small relief.  “Yeah, sure.”  She took the cup and took a sip.

Finally, the young captain got the rush she’d been waiting for.  Too bad it didn’t do anything for the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

Then again, she imagined that nothing would.

“So, where’re we going?” she asked as Ferretti began to lead her from the lounge.  She had an idea, a feeling, a gut instinct that she wanted to ignore.

He clapped her on the shoulder companionably and told her, “You really don’t wanna know.”  He’d known her for three days and he could already read her. She wasn’t convinced that Kawalsky and O’Neill were far behind.

That would definitely take some getting used to.

~!~

            When they stepped off the plane in Rwanda, it was the heart of daylight and hot as hell.  Sam didn’t pretend she couldn’t smell the variations on dying and dead flesh that pervaded the air.  The smell alone would put her off the colonel’s offer of barbecue for a while.

            The airport was deserted save for the growing queue of U.N. peacekeepers being flown in.  There weren’t enough by any number and the need was too big and too vast.  They were far from armed with their single sidearm each and, constrained by their mission statements, they could only fire them for purposes of self-defense.  Sam didn’t know why they’d been sent at all if they could only open fire to protect themselves.  Wasn’t their purpose to protect the ones who were being led to the slaughter?

            Then again, she supposed that was why her team was here, disguised and far better armed among this cadre of guardians and mediators.  They would protect the protectors and, if they were lucky in an unlucky time, transport as many of embattled citizens as they could out of the country. They weren’t taking sides and no blood was supposed to be shed, but they were not to allow any of their protectees to be harmed—at any cost. 

Sam thought she could live with ‘at any cost.’ From the looks on their faces, O’Neill, Ferretti, and Kawalsky definitely could.  The difference between her and them was that although she’d excelled at ‘eliminating the enemy threat’ in training exercises, and she’d more than excelled at it in the air, she’d never actually had to do it under face-to-face field conditions.  She had yet to go on an op and take a life.  But now that she was here, she couldn’t discern any exit strategy that precluded it.  Somewhere in this warring nation was the first combatant Sam would ever shoot, or otherwise, to kill.

And she would kill them. Because to do otherwise meant to expose her team to danger and that was something she could never do.  I’m sorry, she said to that person, even if they’d never hear her and never understand.  That was just the person she was.  Guess dad would be proud of that.

Sam pointedly brushed dirt from the light blue beret she wore that identified her as a peacekeeper, or a Blue Beret.  If Kawalsky makes one more crack about how it brings out my eyes, I’m going to stop being peaceful.  She glared at her superior with impunity because he couldn’t exactly get to her from the other side of the colonel and Ferretti, both of whom seemed amused at the continuing hostilities of distraction taking place over their heads.

“Captain, Major, let’s be big boys and girls.  We fight with our fists, not with our words,” the colonel sagely counseled them.

Sam snorted. “Nice lesson, sir.”

“I try, Captain.”

Sam raised an eyebrow in remembrance.  “All I ask, Colonel. All I ask.”

He gave her a quick, impressed look.  Yes, sir, I remember.  His knowing smirk was comment enough for her.  She liked to do the little things to impress him.

Kawalsky coughed, “Kiss-ass.” He coughed again and waved off their attempts to either aid and/or smack him.  “Sorry, gotta be the dust.”

“Sure,” the colonel went on with a touch of exasperated fondness. Sam had a feeling he’d given up on controlling them for the afternoon.  Sam shrugged to herself. That’s probably for the best. It’s one against three; he’s so outclassed here. She was rewarded for her mutinous thoughts with a shoulder bump that would have knocked her over if she wasn’t used to that sort of thing at this point.

She glared up at the colonel while he looked smug as a duck in water. “Yes, sir?”

“Do I detect snippiness, Captain,” he asked with affected seriousness.  He had a small smirk hovering around the corner of his mouth and she imagined if it weren’t for the shades she’d be able to see his eyes overflowing with his usual brand of humor.  Funny was his default position. I see how you work, sir.

“No snippiness for miles, sir.”

“Didn’t think so.”  He gave his head a little tilt, silently encouraging her to move forward and take flank while he fell back to six.  There’d be few if any hand signals here. They didn’t want to give away that they were different from the others.

Sam frowned but did as ordered, sliding around him to take her new seat.  Looks like the mission’s begun.

While Ferretti and Kawalsky continued to joke and kid, it could only be called that due to the feigned lightness of their voices.  They were in field mode.  No one was free from their scrutiny.  Not their fellow peacekeepers—as if they could be ignored in their startling vests of blue—nor any of the insurgents who stood watching from the sides of the roads as they rode the hollowed-out supply trucks through the overrun towns.

Sam’s fingers began to ache from clinching them so hard and she realized why.  Somehow they’d found their way to the sole firearm peacekeepers were allowed and were clutching the grip like a lifeline.  She didn’t know what she was expecting to happen, or when, she just feared being caught unawares.  She didn’t want anybody to die because she hadn’t acted quickly enough. She didn’t want to die for the same reason.

Her fatigues stuck to her skin from the heated friction of her disassembled M40A1 sniper rifle strapped across the middle of her back.  It was the best way to conceal things, strapping them under her uniform.  Anything carried in luggage was subject to search and seizure and this was the last thing they wanted found.

 Not in the old U.S. of A. anymore, she mused with something bordering on black humor.  None of the peacekeepers, including the members of her own team, could be caught carrying more than the minimum allowed weaponry on this mission.  It was in the Rules of Engagement and God knew the nations’ governments and the U.N. Security Council were damned serious about those.  Any actual troops on the ground meant interference in a foreign internal conflict.  Regardless of the gross human rights violations taking place in plain sight, interference wasn’t an official option for the U.S. government.  However, there were always the unofficial alternatives to consider.

            They were the unofficial alternative.  Sam hoped they’d be enough.

            Mid-afternoon saw them putting themselves between children and men, coerced and coercing, to take swipes at people who seemed exactly the same save for their lighter skin.  They waved machetes and AK-47s at which Sam flinched, once, though she did not retreat.  It was one time too many.  She immediately became the weak link, the one they would continue to test. 

Sam gritted her teeth.  This was her job, her post, and she would not flinch again.  It didn’t matter that the best in Ops had her back.  She’d been trained to stare hopeless evil in the face. Hell, she’d been trained to be hopeless evil.  There was no way she was ever looking away again.

The militants wanted an excuse. If she showed aggression, they had it and it’d be all out war; at least here on these grounds.  It was already wartime everywhere else.  Perhaps naively, Sam hoped they could safeguard the Butare Province just a while longer.  One of the few places that no one was rushing to spill blood, where there was so little enthusiasm for the taking of Tutsi lives that Rwandan Armed Forces were being flown in to get it under way had to be protected.  In a country tearing itself apart at the seams, it was the best she could do to stave off any bloodshed at all.

While Lieutenant-General Dallaire headed up the effort to evacuate potential noncoms from Kigali where there was, in minimum, a chance in hell of success, Sam and company had the inglorious task of a hopeless cause.  They may not die in this hour, but we’re a dozen bodies against a force five times our strength.  We’re kidding ourselves and these poor people. She believed it so strongly that she ached with the intensity of it.  Yet, she didn’t back down.  All she had to their sight was a sidearm and set of baby blue accessories that would never see a Parisian catwalk, but she knew she could be more damaging in an instant than they could be.

The secret she kept and that their orders demanded would be all told in the dark where she excelled.  The premeditated taking of lives to save others would have made her skin crawl if she saw at least some sympathy in the eyes of those before her.  They seemed content to wait her out, to wait out her entire team.  She didn’t know the names of the other eight people who’d been assigned to their force and she didn’t particularly care as long as they had the fortitude not to say die first and regret later.

As long as they didn’t get in her way when she carried out her mission to evacuate the embattled people huddled in the church behind her, Sam had absolutely no problems with these perfect strangers.  They had all come with a single mission anyway: to keep peace.  They had simply come with different limitations on how they were enabled to do so.  A little duplicity here, a little cloak and dagger there, does it matter who lies as long as more live?

The President didn’t think so and neither did his Joint Chiefs.  The United Nation Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) had turned into a bust so fast there were heads spinning and not just in the war zone.  Non-intervention was in the process of failing spectacularly and there were already dead personnel to answer for on their side.  There’d be no one left if all anyone could do was stand aloof and look imposing.  Sam now knew from experience that a machete was a hell of a lot more imposing than a long-distance sniper rifle nobody could get a look at.

Worried as she’d been about taking lives before, she was anxious for it now.  It wasn’t a matter of her goodness or her evil.  She was a foot soldier carrying out other men’s plans.  It was a matter of what she could live with and she could live with ending them sooner and moving her charges sooner and going home sooner.  It had been the notion of slaying the lonely soldier that had given her nightmares.  Just a man, more likely a boy, doing his job that would have to die so that she could do hers.  Now it was dozens and they weren’t lonely, and their ‘job’ was anathema to all she believed to be good and right.

It didn’t lessen the nightmare in her head, but maybe, just maybe, she could live with what came after nightfall after all.

            It was 2236 hours Local Time on the fifteenth night of April the first time someone fell at the behest of one of Sam’s precisely aimed bullets.  From the distant tree line behind and to the left of the church, Sam had watched her charges’ would-be executioners prowl about the clearing like so many restless hyena.  By then, some had already wandered away, content in the knowledge that the peacekeepers would have to leave sometime and when they did, they wouldn’t be taking anyone with them. As grating as she found that smug expectation, Sam was painfully aware of its truth.

            Scenes like it had played out across the national stage with all the gore of Titus Andronicus.  This would just be another instance if someone, anyone didn’t start eliminating the threat posed by the watchers.  This was Sam’s first mission, but it was also her job.  It’s as humanitarian as it gets in Ops, she observed idly.  They didn’t make the calls, they just ran the plays.  An hour before, the colonel had broken the line and punted her the ball.

            Time to move the chains.  With Ferretti covering her back in the shadows offered by the narrow moon and the whistling trees, Sam took her shot. Whoever she hit, and she wasn’t sure who it was, went down like a sandbag on a flooded plain.  She’d been ready for shouting and fear. She hadn’t been prepared for the nearly tangible sensation of dam-breaking rage as the combatants that had faded into night rose up again.

            With a shared look and an oath, Sam and Ferretti turned tail and ran. He was nearly humming as he leapt into a trench that ran alongside their pre-decided path; she followed suit.  He kept his head down and moved quickly without making a sound.  She thought that had to be a something one just learned because she felt like a rhinoceros tramping over bubble wrap.  They can hear us. They have to be able to hear us.  The screaming directly above their heads was answer enough for Sam.

            She nearly broke formation and changed paths. If not for suddenly being yanked forward and taking a hard right, she would have.  Had they not been in the middle of a country that was on the verge of murdering itself—and likely them next, Sam might have protested Ferretti’s near paternal grip on her arm.  She wasn’t a child, her feet weren’t defective.  Then again, neither was her brain.  Talking now? Bad idea, very bad.

            The good captain kept her own counsel and followed the good major’s lead.  He knows how this works. He won’t lead me wrong.  It was time she learned to truly trust her teammates.  This was the proving ground and what ground it was.

            All of a sudden, there was a fist in front of her face, directly in front of it.  She could make out its outline even in the faint illumination left behind by the sky’s spontaneous cloud cover, along with the shape of an arm extended firmly across her waist.  Do not proceed, sitrep, they told her.

            Her training triggered, she dropped down, and Ferretti came down with her.  His typically jovial face was pinched in concentration.  If he’d been a cat, his ears would have perked up as he gave their immediate surroundings his complete attention.  In spite of having adjusted to the night, Sam’s eyes felt useless, so she decided to follow his go again.

            She tipped her head toward the direction they’d come.  That could be wind or footsteps. She couldn’t be sure. If it was steps she was hearing, the person must have been picking their way through a minefield for all the irregularity of their gait.  A limp maybe?

            Just as she was sure that they needed to check, Sam felt another squeeze on her arm. She knew it for what it was and kept to Ferretti’s six as he led her forward again.  She kept her ear to the ground above the trench they were traveling.  Sam was praying, something she didn’t do, that it was one of theirs.  Her gun was still hot, thus, she hadn’t been able to put it away yet.  She couldn’t afford a second-degree burn any more than she could afford to be caught over-armed.  Please, be one of ours.

            Ferretti froze out of the blue and Sam was left biting her lip in frustration.  She wasn’t as afraid as she was pissed.  She was not dying or, worse, getting captured, then, killed on her first mission.  That would not count as proving myself, damn it.

            An obtrusive flashing light blinked at the floor of the shallow gorge.  Instants of daylight mixing and disrupting the night.  Sam recognized the seemingly disembodied fingers manning the switch.  With a grim smile, Ferretti appeared to do the same.  He gave a sloppy salute that would have shamed a general or twelve.  It warmed Sam, however, forcing her think that there was maybe more than one way to honor tradition than repeating it like clockwork.

            They stayed low in spite of the fact that their pursuers were a left turn and a few hundred meters behind them.  Keeping the colonel’s now-signature stride in hearing range, they followed him until the gorge broke open to low ground.  He dropped lightly before them, rebounding on the balls of his feet.  The twilight had resumed and he was tinted in shade underneath the worn green ball cap he’d produced from places unknown.

            He’d abandoned his light blue duds at the church along with theirs.  Inside a hole in the graveyard was a neat cache of vests and berets that would certainly piss off somebody somewhere.  Thankfully, those someones were in the opposite direction of themselves and their merry band of runaways.  That had been the plan anyway.

            With a vague point behind him, he advised them of their new direction.  By process of elimination, Sam figured that Kawalsky was holding down the fort with the peacekeepers and their protectees.  I don’t envy him right now.

            Her superiors stepped lively but Sam didn’t struggle to keep up so much as she struggled to be a discreet presence.  She didn’t have experience sidestepping leaves. Nature didn’t bend to her will, so she bent for nature.  In doing so, she found herself more exhausted of the subterfuge than the physical exertion.

            One last time they dropped into crouches to see around the bend.  It was a sparse tree line that was only as useful as the late hour.  There was no light signal this time, just their CO’s intuition.  He glanced back to Ferretti momentarily before making a quick, low dash across the open ground and vanishing into the brush.

            Sam waited beside Ferretti with her back to the bank of higher ground.  She daren’t look up to see if there was anyone there.  Call it stupid, call it refusing to tempt fate; either way, Sam refused to look.  Regardless, she listened.  Beyond the steady, strong thrum of her pulse, she heard the militiamen in the distance.  Her gun hand twitched as, somewhere in the distance, an AK-47 gave a hasty, angry report.

            She didn’t think about it because she didn’t want to.  Despite being trained to know, she couldn’t tell it the shot was coming or going.  Should I be on offense or defense?  Is my team okay? Am I okay?  She was wordlessly asking more questions than she could expect to have answered, than she could even comprehend.

            Her M40A1 was cooling across her shoulders but her Beretta was snug on her hip.  She laid a palm across it and breathed.  There’d never been a worse time to panic than tonight.  The mission wasn’t over yet.

            Ferretti grabbed hold of her camo and yanked her along the colonel’s trail.  Sam felt like a beacon with her pale blonde hair reflecting all manner of starlight.  That didn’t mean she stopped.  If she was going to be a target, she was going to be one that moved.  In this killing field with more machetes than guns, Sam was going to take her chances outrunning death rather than waiting for mercy to slap her in the face.

            The pair of hands that caught her was unfamiliar, swinging her sympathetic nervous system into high gear. The bearer of those hands was face down on the dirt before they could think of giving name, rank, and serial number, and before Sam bothered to ask.  In the field, some people identify themselves and some people kill you first. No guesses which one I am, she reflected, the web of her hand still firmly drilling the face of her unknown assailant into the ground.  Surprisingly, she’d done it with the least amount of ruckus possible.  Didn’t even rustle the grass.

            Yeah, she was beginning to understand where the smugness came from.

            Just as quickly, she got a crash course in where it went when it left, too.

            “Easy, Captain,” the colonel hissed against her ear, lethally close.  “He’s one of the good guys.”  She hadn’t heard him or felt him or smelled him, or all around sensed him in the least until he had her dead to rights. But she absolutely heard him loud and clear now that he did.  She let go.

            Her…victim rolled up onto his feet, a dim figure among the whistling trees.  He brushed himself off with minimal grumbling. She had no idea who he was or how he’d gotten here.  Though unable to see it on his face, she sensed a smirk on her CO’s mouth.  When all else fails, guesstimate.

            “Peacekeeper,” she asked in an ineffectual whisper. God, everything carries out here.

            “You betcha,” he pitched effortlessly under the radar of listening ears.  Sam frowned and not because she’d attacked one of their own.  This learning by experience thing was starting to get to her. She was just out of her league with these three; they had years’ advantages over her and there hadn’t been a moment while here that she hadn’t felt it. Yet, like so much else, she put the thought off till a safer occasion.

            Of course, he’s one of us. The colonel had everyone dress down, so we wouldn’t become even bigger targets out here.  She doubted they’d taken kindly to being inexplicably ordered around by a supposed comrade.  They’d followed anyway; they were here anyway.   From what she’d seen, that was the way things tended to work where Jack O’Neill was concerned.

            “Now, sir?”  May as well get back to business.

            “Now, Captain, we get everybody the hell out of here.”  Rather than wonder how he made it sound so easy, Sam just went with it.  Crazy like a tactically-brilliant fox.

            “Where to, sir?”  She stuck close to his side as he strode surely through the brush.  The single unadorned peacekeeper took up the rear with Ferretti falling in beside him.  The air doesn’t even move when they do.  She was determined to learn how they did that.

            “We’re set to rendezvous with the major three kliks from the recce site.”  He pushed at her with his shoulder, a wordless personal sitrep request.  Thoughtlessly, she pushed back to say, Situation normal with me, sir. He made a vague gesture of acknowledgement and they went on.   “We’ll then proceed to Kigali, where we’ll touch base with Dallaire’s peacekeeping forces. The Blue Berets’ll take it from there and we’ll head on home.”

            “Sounds like a plan, sir.”

            He regarded her oddly before nodding slowly.  “Yes…it does. Let’s get to it, then.”  She wondered what he was thinking when he gave her that look.

            “Yes, sir,” she answered sharply.  There wasn’t much more that could go wrong, she figured, might as well as act like it all made sense whether it did or not.  I still don’t compose the plays.  Hell, I don’t even get to see ‘em. Doesn’t mean I can’t execute ‘em with the best.  Sam really hated the idea of how Ops worked sometimes. If her CO had been anyone else, she’d have no confidence in the work at all.

            Luckily for her—for them, she reminded herself—he was as good as his legend.

            Luckily for him, she had all the confidence in the world.

            They proceeded on the colonel’s signal toward the rendezvous point in complete silence, intermittently halting and continuing at his unspoken command.  There were informal patrols assigned to the area but they had the hilliness of the region on their side, if not the home court advantage.  They knew how to fight on these kinds of battlefields, even if the city attached was an outlier.

The cultural and academic capital of the country; killing the people here absolutely makes sense.  Sam’s internal monologue had begun to incorporate her teammate’s free-floating sarcasm.  When nothing adhered to reason, it was merely simpler to minimize it with humor.  And I’ve found my coping mechanism.  Neat.  Nonetheless, Sam was a scientist at heart, she’d have to test it to see if it was effective under mission conditions; then, replicate the results for verification.  Samantha Carter might have been the USAF’s newest hired gun, but she loved the Scientific Method.  She attempted to prove her devotion to the cause over the next couple of days.  It was harder than she’d expected.

Once they’d met up with Kawalsky and the newly displaced refugees, the colonel had broken them up into the Alpha and Bravo section.  He’d assigned her to be his flank with Alpha and tapped his 2IC and Ferretti for Bravo.  This way, there was double the chance that someone would complete the trip to Kigali.  Two officers per team ensured that there’d always be a fresh set of eyes keeping watch.  Amid what was shaping up to be the most heinous act of violence in modern history, Sam slept fine with the colonel on watch.  She was also fine being awake, though her trigger finger itched and the hairs on the back of her neck seemed locked in the upright and fixed position.

She was not fine having her hands tied. She was not fine creeping away from the scene of the crime while whole blocks of people were summarily slaughtered.  The colonel had to physically stop her from intervening once.  She’d gnashed her teeth, grabbed his collar in her fists, and stared him down until he deigned to give her an explanation.  Of course, he hadn’t. Of course, she hadn’t needed him to.   As a soldier, she followed the orders she was given.  As a scientist, she explored theories based on facts.  And her theory that her sole effort would have saved more lives than it cost?  Wasn’t based on anything of the kind.  There wasn’t enough cynicism in all of Peterson AFB to get out a joke out of her, then.

The colonel didn’t reprimand her because she hadn’t compromised the mission. Didn’t matter, she reprimanded herself, because she could have.  This wasn’t a field for emotional people or for people who couldn’t leave heart at home when the time came.  Sam had failed at that and that might have exposed her CO and their group to almost certain death.  She wouldn’t do that again.  When she’d been allowed into the fold, Sam had made certain unspoken promises. Not the least of them was to be as good as her reputation, to never give up, and to risk life and limb for country and countrymen.  That last one, she’d made long ago but it meant more than ever now.

            Next time she heard the tell-tale howling of the suffering, Sam calmly, if stiffly, nudged her charges deeper into the brush behind the houses they were using as cover and carried on.  She wanted to go in there with her superior guns and her superior officer and just STOP this.  Thing was…the numbers never lied and, as a woman of science, Sam was a stickler for the numbers.  She held on tighter to her gun anyway.

            She didn’t rest so well during either watch this time, which turned out to be for the best.  On the second to last night before they were scheduled to return to the States, Sam had the late evening watch.  They’d taken refuge in a conspicuously empty house on the outskirts of Rwanda’s capital city.  The streets had been empty on their entrance but neither she nor the colonel had been fooled.  For weeks now, it had been a veritable ghost town, the presence of UNAMIR personnel mostly relegating the fighting and killing to its outlying areas.

            This place wasn’t safe for them or their refugees; it was just where they’d be spending the night.  Every person wasn’t a soldier.  Some were teachers, ministers, or doctors. Some were children and Sam had all the sympathy she could muster for that, so she walked a little slower and pushed a little less.  Her CO at her back was the polar opposite. Because these people were important, to the future of this country and to its people and to its children; he pushed harder.  Something else they’d argued—argued? Yes, argued—over in low tones when they deemed it safe enough to blink.

            “You command with your sympathy and you’ll be sympathizing with a corpse,” he’d said in his matter-of-fact manner.  Humor hadn’t touched his tongue in days. They had been out of contact with Bravo section for an innumerable number of hours and he was feeling the strain.  She was feeling everything he was because that was the way she followed the leader.

            “Is it so wrong that I don’t want to run them into the ground while saving their lives,” she’d asked without expecting a true answer.  She knew the risks of letting her compassion rule and she knew how to shut that down when the time came.  She just felt that the disengagement of humanity was a problem this country already had and wasn’t something she wanted to contribute to. That, she hadn’t said, thus, it was the first thing he heard.

            “You’re capable of a lot, Captain,” he’d remarked with an expression that was part reproof and part, well, sympathy.  “This, you’re not capable of.”  He gave her a firm pat on the shoulder and turned into the center of their haven.  Their half of the refugees, sans unadorned peacekeepers, were quietly traumatized, arguably content to huddle together and disappear into the mob.  The colonel was someone they feared and revered. He’d shown more often than Sam that he would permanently deal with those that threatened them. He showed, too, that he would never hurt them.  He was the kind of distraction anyone could use.  So, Sam used him.

            When it was her turn to keep watch, she’d edged into the open doorway to get a sitrep of the most easily observed surrounding areas. The colonel had just performed a circuit of the building from the outside, with an eye toward any covert company rolling up from either the hind entrance or the front. It had been all clear and Sam had been relieved. They were a day’s travel—if it was easy, more if not—from their rendezvous point.  She was ready to see these people off into better hands.  She may have been her mother’s daughter, but she still didn’t know what to say.  To those who spoke English, there were no words. To those who did not, there were no gestures. An embrace could never be enough.

            Upon seeing that things were pretty much situation normal (i.e., deserted) outdoors, Sam settled down to keep her ears out and her eyes up.  The colonel had settled down near the rear door to rest.  Ever the guard dog, she mused, noting that he slept like a well-downed log but roused at the slightest sound.  She envied that.  She envied most of the attributes that made him such an effective commander, she wasn’t sure she’d ever learn any of them.

            She was steeped in fervently calculating the odds that any of her natural abilities would include any of his when she heard shouting out of eye view. Clutching her rifle close, Sam attempted to rubber neck her way into the Covert Hall of Fame to catch a look without revealing her position.

            A handful of doors down, there was a standoff occurring by moonlight.  The opponents were so unevenly matched that Sam’s already upset stomach turned.  Something lethal gleamed and Sam didn’t think, nor did she hesitate.

            But when she was finished, she did round up her troupe, and her colonel, and hauled ass.  It was the second best decision she had made so far after coming here at all.  She didn’t spend any time regretting that first mortal decision. None, really.  Necessary evils were necessary, after all.

            Three days later found Sam curled up in a corner of the Ops lounge, staring at a month-old hockey game and wondering who could possibly find it entertaining.  She didn’t, but it shut down the echoes of her first mission.  Logically, she hadn’t expected it to be sunshine and roses.  Special and, particularly Covert, Operations generally meant just the opposite.   It was silly that she couldn’t sleep, silly that the idea of meat made her ill, and that she had a sudden terrible aversion to knives.

Maybe she’d just anticipated that the universe would take a rain check on troubling her conscience on what was ostensibly her first day at the fair.  Maybe she’d thought she was a harder being than she was and she was deluding herself into thinking otherwise.  She wasn’t really her father’s daughter and she wasn’t worthy of being on this team.  God, she missed Nellis.

Her ears pricked at the sound of vulcanized boot soles sticking to the floor. A faint, disbelieving, “The hell?” made her smile and shake her head.  She didn’t turn around, only shifted imperceptibly to free up the arm rest on the chair beside her.  Lou fell onto the cushion, grunting with exhaustion and growling when the old seat cushion deflated, loudly.

Sam kept her eyes trained away so he wouldn’t see her laughing. He saw it anyway.

“Just for that, you can wake us up for laps in the morning.”

The captain swept her gaze back to him in puzzlement.  One, she was pretty sure there was no rule against laughing at Ferretti, because he was Ferretti and that was his reason for existing. Two, she hadn’t actually been to any of her teammates’ quarters so far and that came with whole other connotations she’d rather avoid.  On the other hand, he had to know that.  He’s challenging me.  She narrowed her eyes at him and decided to make him work for his status from here on out.  Two chickens can play that game.

“You got it, sir.”

“Thought you’d go for that.”  He settled, forearm brushing hers and to her surprise dropping a sweating can of cola into her hand.  Raising her eyebrow, she wordlessly asked him the deal.  He shrugged and popped the top on a can of his own.  “Yo, Charlie, turn it up!”

With a shaking of his head, Kawalsky cranked up the volume on the game just in time for the Avalanche to score.  Collectively, all three men came to their feet with manly shouts and fist pumps.  Sam stayed off of hers and waited to be inspired.

It didn’t happen at first. She saw men in bulky jerseys and unflattering headgear essentially figure skating with glorified wooden golf clubs.  The problem wasn’t that Sam didn’t get the rules, it was that she didn’t get the game. Why would anyone want to-

She leaned forward in her chair and blinked in awe of the instant replay of a hockey puck smacking into the side of a goalie’s head.  It was horrible. It was wince-worthy.  It was fascinating.  Sam was taken back to her high school physics course and Newton’s Laws.  She wondered what the mass of a regulation hockey puck was and gave it a fair guess to calculate force.  The result: Ouch. Also: Now, this is entertainment.  Sam also liked boxing; she didn’t wonder if there was a correlation there.

Apparently, this had been a pretty contentious game and there were plenty of ‘accidental’ collisions of body, puck, and hockey stick to keep Sam amused.  It was about all that did and she was fine with that.  She hadn’t gotten to exercise these mental muscles in a while. Maybe it was time.

The game sucked. The Avalanche lost. Her team groused but Sam grinned anyway. When all else failed, there was science to entertain her and that she could cheer on.  The boys wouldn’t know any better.

Sam was just—pointedly—chucking her can in the trash while the guys were gathering to leave.  She imagined they’d either be heading back to quarters or home.  They’d been debriefing pretty much since they had stepped off the plane and were finally finished.  If there had been anything waiting for Sam at home, she’d have been rushing to get there.  There wasn’t, just the echoes and she’d had quite enough of them.

“Hey, Carter, what are you doing tonight?”  The colonel rocked coolly on the balls of his booted feet, his trademark ‘bored’ tic.  Sam shoved her hands in her pockets and wondered what he was offering.  She didn’t want to be alone, definitely not, but…she didn’t want to give her CO the wrong idea about her.  This was an area where she had a little experience and none of it good.  Okay, Sam, tread carefully here.

“Uh, no idea, sir.”  She rubbed her hands down the front of her pants to wipe away the excess condensation from her soda and the sweat that was slicking her palms.  She stuffed them, fisted, back into her pockets.  “What’s up?”

He was giving her that look again.  She pursed her lips and tried to hold his gaze.  He sought something out in her face and she hoped he found it.  Like the first time, he gave no indication either way, pivoting toward the rest of the team and the doorway and beckoning her to follow.

“Officers’ Club. Let’s play pool.”

There was still a tight knot at her core but Sam ignored it in favor of following Ferretti and Kawalsky in the colonel’s wake.  Now pool was a game she knew.  Ferretti chattered, her CO and his 2IC bantered, and Sam finally managed not to think.  It was a temporary reprieve and Sam couldn’t have been happier.

It was the first time in days.    

~!~

            Sam was twenty-six years old the first time she killed someone on an op.  It wouldn’t be the first time that haunted her, however.  That had been at a distance with a barren field and a church between her and her objective.  He had been an unavoidable casualty and, in passing, she would always regret that and how many like him there would be after. But, it was her second victim was that rode her hard weeks later.

It had been a kid and she had known him on sight. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen but he was wielding a long blade at a four-year-old with the know-how of a skilled butcher. 

Sam didn’t blink, nor did she hesitate.

She had already run into him once in those dark days.  He had been patrolling with another boy not much older than he, making a circuit of the church’s forward grounds. She’d let him go unpunished in spite of coming too close to her section of the perimeter. She’d let him go because he’d laughed. He’d laughed at something, anything the other boy had said, and reminded her that he was just a little boy. He was a little boy playing an adult game and he could still learn better.  That was one of the many mistakes she’d made on mission one, thinking she had the right to decide ‘better.’

Nevertheless, he hadn’t learned, if he even could have.

And in the last moments of his life, he hadn’t seemed much like a boy, but rather like a monster with its quarry.  He’d sought to play with the mortality of someone more vulnerable than him and that wasn’t something she could allow. She’d had her orders and her conscience to think of.  Not that she’d thought, not that there’d been time.

‘At any cost…’

So, she’d ended him and saved the little girl instead.  He was a prisoner of propaganda, he was a zealot with a cause. Whatever he truly was, he’d had a weapon and beautiful smile once and that was the contradiction she doubted she’d ever understand.

The things that man does to man.  Boy, I don’t know, she thought, nightmared, and dreamed with a shudder.  She had seen more going in and coming out than the news channels that sold themselves as hard-hitting would ever dare broadcast.  The world they catered to wasn’t ready to watch travesty of that magnitude.  Sam hadn’t been ready to watch it and she had chosen to go. Afterward, she wasn’t ready to acknowledge she’d even been there.  It was better to pretend to have done nothing than to have, in fact, done little.

Or so she thought, amid bouts of self-doubt and rigorous team training.  If she cared her heart out about being a better teammate, a better Ops officer, she didn’t have to think about being an ersatz peacekeeper with the unachievable task.  She didn’t have to remember all the ways they hadn’t actually maintained peace anywhere—or how many times in the future they wouldn’t either.  That wasn’t in their job description.  Didn’t mean the truth didn’t sting, in all tenses.  She dreamed about that, too.

But she learned to run it off and that was what let her sleep at night.  When running it off failed, she learned to joke about it. Once that began to hurt too much, she joked about something else.  Before she knew it, she sounded just like the boys.  It wasn’t being cliché or conforming; it was survival.  All she needed was a phantom of her CO’s hand on her shoulder to let her know she was doing all right.

Six weeks after Rwanda, she paid the colonel back for his kindness and shoved him into a puddle. She, then, ran for her life.  Two weeks after that, and she imagined much scheming and conniving in the interim, he shoved right back.  He was damned fast for an old bird much less a full-bird and she learned firsthand not to underestimate Jack O’Neill even at play. His reputation was well-earned and rock solid.

She still gave the chase all she had and tried her hardest to stop being afraid of blades and men.

~!~

            She was two laps into her solo run the first time she met Jonas Hanson.

The guys were out like a light in base quarters and Sam had energy to burn.  The vitamins had helped, as had the habit.  It was a point of personal pride that Sam ran even on mornings when they didn’t.  They’d grouse and moan and poke fun, but she knew they looked at her with a little more respect because of it.  The colonel had said a long time ago that she’d already proven herself; and Sam would feel like she had eventually.  For now, she was still trying to feel comfortable in her own skin and her own shoes.  She felt a lot closer to it when she ran.

She was in the midst of taking her usual illogical path across the parade grounds when her object in motion was bodily acted upon by an unbalanced force.  Acceleration calculations and force equations spun through her head along with an arbitrary pain estimation right before she hit the ground.  And hit the ground she did with an audible oof!

Blinking away silver floaters and—hey!—visible, if imaginary, stars in her eyes, she blinked up at the blurry figure wavering above her head.  She couldn’t really see him so much as his silhouette and the absence of detail that must have been his face.  The growing light behind him painted him in stark relief and it wasn’t comforting.

Sam was a detail woman.  She worked from detail, lived from detail, and interacted from it.  He was just a quandary in the dead of dawn and she was vulnerable without backup.  The detail woman mentally calculated how much effort and force would be required to bring him down without going down with him.  I can take him, she assured herself. She was mostly sure.

            “Hey,” he said all of the sudden and struck Sam dumb.  She vaguely noted a hand reaching down for her and that she didn’t flip him on his ass immediately was a testament to how much the fall must have winded her.  Instead, she took his hand and let him pull her back to her feet.

            She was starting to be able to see him more clearly.  Dust brown hair and blue eyes were dull in the morning light.  He seemed to have a permanent faint smirk on his lips.  She didn’t know the face and, so, clearly didn’t know the name either, but she could find out.

            “You must be new on base,” he said by way of introduction.

            She nodded in confirmation.  No harm in being friendly.  “And you?”

            “Nah, been here a while.  Just got back in town.”

            Sam gave an ‘ah’ of comprehension.  Must be one of our guys.  “Well, welcome back, sir.”

            “It’s just Jonas,” he corrected.  “I don’t do that whole rank thing.”

Sam’s eyebrow gave a twitch.  She was pretty sure that whole ‘rank thing’ came with the territory.  If Kawalsky can get away with it, I suppose anybody can.

“If you say so…Jonas.”

“That’s more like it.”  His smirk unfurled into a more becoming smile and Sam definitely saw the appeal in it.  “So, you didn’t tell me your name.”

“Captain Samantha Carter,” she said, because Sam did do the rank thing.  All she did was the rank thing. That is, unless she was doing the surname thing, which was all the colonel’s fault, like most things.

“Then, I should tell you I’m Captain Jonas Hanson.  Looks like we don’t have to do the rank thing after all. How about that?”  He lifted his chin with a quasi-smug grin.  Boyish and ruggedly handsome at once, Sam could only shake her head.  He’d fit right in with her guys.

“How about it,” she replied rhetorically.  He was too interested by half and Sam wasn’t ready to get mixed up in a base romance just yet, if ever.  That way lies danger, said her gut and she was definitely in the business of listening to that nowadays.  She smiled politely and started moving again.  In the general direction of away from the handsome stranger.

“So,” he said as he began to follow, “you’re running.”  He kept up easily in spite of the fact he didn’t seem to be dressed for it.

Sam snorted less than politely, “So I am.”

The wind rushed and bent around her thighs and calves which were bare beyond the baggy black shorts she wore.  She’d gotten her BDU allotment a short eternity ago, but she had a soft spot for the first clothes she’d ever gotten on base.  At her age with her face, she looked like a trainee anyway, so she never minded the second looks she got as she ran with the team.  If she was going to sweat and strain and pant, she might as well do it in comfort.

For the first time, however, she wished she was wearing pants.  There’s something about men and legs. I’ll never understand it.  She didn’t usually care since it was only the guys, occasionally including Lieutenant Simmons and Janet, looking at her, but she was not a fan of being ogled by random men who’d knocked her on her ass during her laps.  It didn’t put her in a good mood and they would not appreciate her taking it out on them later.  She wouldn’t appreciate the eventual ass-chewing she’d get because of it either.

Unfortunately, certain things were unavoidable.

Like captains named Hanson and the dawn and the questioning, tickled glances between CO and 2IC as she approached the training center with her newest acquisition in tow.

“Morning, sir,” she said with what passed for a salute on this team. It was sloppy but meaningful.  He returned it with gusto and handed her the steaming cup of coffee he’d been drinking from a second ago.

“Drink and be merry. But preferably shower soon after.”  His dancing eyes lit on Jonas before looking back at her with an eyebrow waggle.  A tip of the head was enough to let him know what she thought of whatever he was imagining.  He absolutely did not care.  So began a day filled with endless ribbing. With an eye roll, she thought, Might as well play along.

She winked puckishly. “You got it, sir.”

He nodded toward the showers. “In ya go, Carter.” She raced inside and was only too glad to hear Kawalsky put a stop to Jonas’ attempt to pursue.

“Whoa there, big guy.  I’m pretty sure the captain can scrub her own back just fine.  She’ll give you a call if she wants some help.”

Not likely, Sam decided, and didn’t think about it again.

At least, not for quite a while.

~!~

            That evening, Sam showed up to the colonel’s monthly barbecue early.   It was supposed to be monthly, but whenever one had been scheduled, they’d been called out of town on an op.  This was the first one they’d managed to make it to.  She supposed 1994 was a banner year for the Ops trade, despite it being a crappy year for the world at large.

It was also the first time Sam was going to get to see the guys outside of work.  Sure, they spent an inordinate amount of time together due to training and checking each others’ reports for accuracy and consistency, but they never went out for drinks or out to dinner just as friends.  They did all that on base in the guise of teambuilding. The Officer’s Club, the mess, the training grounds.  Sam had scored in more touch football games out there than even Ferretti.

            If the rumor mill was to be believed—and it could be more accurate than even intel from the Brass—several of the teams were considering stealing her from Ops Team One for the spring base games.  She knew that any such attempt would fail, but it was nice to be appreciated for taking down guys twice her size without breaking a copious sweat.  O’Neill had been right, the extra training had come in handy.

            Shifting impatiently on her sandaled feet, Sam knocked on the front door of the nice, average house on the end of a quiet street.  The colonel’s monster of a pickup truck was the only thing that gave any indication that he lived here.  The garden was lush but well-kempt.  The grass was cut if a little trampled, she guessed from the busy feet of the colonel’s son.  Sam hadn’t had the pleasure of even seeing a picture of him, as he didn’t like to keep those sorts of things visible as a matter of security, but he talked about him as often as he breathed.  Charlie was a lucky kid.

            When the door finally opened, Sam concluded that Sara was damned lucky, too.  It was the colonel in a pair of worn blue jeans and a faded Air Force Academy tee.  It fit like old, comfy skin that he had just slipped into.  The bare feet didn’t hurt either. Well beyond her tendency to blush over such observations, Sam grinned mysteriously.  Her CO narrowed his eyes at her suspiciously.

            “I don’t like that look on you, Carter. What are you thinking?”

            Sam adjusted her lips to smile prettily, innocently, and overall unconvincingly.  This was their game. “Me, sir?”

            “Yes, you of the Level Three hand to hand combat training. What are you thinking?”

            “Just that what Janet’s nurses say is true, sir.” She wandered past him as soon as he stepped aside.

            “And what’s that, Captain?”  He had aimed for authoritative and landed at assertively flummoxed.  Can’t wait to tell Janet about this. She grinned proudly as she shrugged off her denim jacket.

            “That you’re as dashing in jeans as you are in a hospital gown, sir. Even if you are grumpy.”

            “I’m not grumpy,” he scowled, sending Sam an especially dark look.  Its effect was dampened by the growing redness of his ears, which only served to be even more disarming.  Sam was having entirely too much fun at her CO’s expense.

            Sam snapped her head toward the amused chuckling that came from the direction of the staircase ahead.  Gotta be Sara. That’s the laugh he talks about.  She was trying to stifle it behind her hand and failing.  Like a contagion, the laughter spread and Sam’s face nearly hurt with it.  The colonel grumbled about respect and humiliation and stormed away in a mockery of insult, leaving the two women alone.

            They finally calmed down long enough to share a conspiratorial grin.  Sara O’Neill descended the last few steps to shake Sam’s hand.  “You must be Captain Carter.  I hear you’re keeping my husband and his band of lost boys in line.”

            Sam mimicked a patent O’Neill grin and nodded jauntily.  “I do my best, ma’am.”

            “It’s Sara, please.  I get enough ‘ma’am’ from the rest of Jack’s subordinates. You’re in my home as a guest and a friend. It’s Sara.”

            Sam had always been told not to piss off the hostess. She didn’t see any sense in starting now.  “Then, I’m glad to be here, Sara.”  The woman squeezed her hand again gently before letting go.

            “And I’m glad to have you,” said the elder blonde to the younger.  “Now, let’s get out to the grill before Jack douses everything that isn’t Charlie’s in beer.”

            The captain shuddered. “Beer?”  She liked alcohol as much as any of her teammates but as seasoning? Not so much.

            “He says it gives the meat flavor.”  That she thought that claim was dubious at best came across loud and clear.  Sam decided that she and Sara O’Neill might yet be the best of friends.  Between my sarcasm and hers, his won’t stand a chance.  Sam was totally planning how best to get one over on her CO next.

            “Is the flavor ‘gross,’ by chance?”

            “I ask him this all the time. He never answers.”

            Sam patted her shoulder in empathy.  “He’s that way about way more than beer.”

            “Oh, believe me, I know.”

            Sam all but cackled with glee when they came upon the colonel on the backyard deck, applying Guinness as liberally as pepper to the ribs on the pit.  The colonel was so out of his league, he wouldn’t be able to find the ball field much less daylight when they were through.  Sam was pretty sure she was just short of hunched over like a proverbial Snidely Whiplash, her plotting was so apparent.

            What could she say; they hadn’t taught subtlety at the Academy.

            “Sir, put down the beer and back away slowly.”

            He spun around quickly, managing to look both incredibly defiant and unspeakably guilty with the iconic stout bottle in his hand.  Oh, they’ve definitely had this fight before.

“Hey, Carter, what’s up?”

            “I’m hoping your taste in food,” she retorted. She only dared go this far with Sara beside her. Sara who was smirking and on the verge of giggling again.

            Her CO shifted his gaze from her to his wife and back again.  “You’re colluding, I can tell.”

            “Don’t know what you mean, sir.”  For a man with so vast a sense of humor, he had eyes made for plumbing the depths of the soul.   I am not about to start shuffling my feet. This is not high school. One foot twitched and scuffed against the floorboards.  The other followed suit.  She absolutely didn’t swear out loud.  It was under her breath. Mostly.

            “There’s no way you’re pulling the wool over my eyes here, Captain. I’m the king of plotting and scheming. It is my domain and you are not horning in on it. Come on, what gives?”

            Saving them both from themselves, Sara stepped in.  She walked over to her husband and relieved him of the Guinness.  Sam heaved a sigh of relief.  The colonel murmured in disappointment.  She stifled the urge to pat him affectionately on the head.  He might have given every indication of being a chastised puppy, but his bite and his bark went hand in hand.  She knew that for a fact.

            Better to keep my distance and my silver bars, thank you very much.  She smiled wanly when the colonel stormed by yet again after being banished from the barbecue grill.  Sara was taking over and Sam thought that had to be for the best.

            Things kept looking up when she heard a medley of the doorbell ringing and sundry unique knocks at the front door.  Didn’t even notice there was a doorbell.  Seeing that there was nothing left for her to do while she waited for Sara to salvage their meal, she headed back inside to see who else had arrived.

            Colonel O’Neill was still grumbling as he let everyone in.  The team’s dedicated medical officer was the first in, pausing momentarily to pop a kiss onto the colonel’s cheek as she came.  He drew her into a brief hug and they shared a quick laugh. 

            It gave Sam a moment of pause because she never saw them do that on base.  Scuttlebutt, if the Air Force gods would forgive her borrowing the term, was that they had known each other for years.  She’d never seen a need or had a chance to ask.  Score another one for the grapevine.

            Once Janet set eyes on her, Sam finally had something to do.  They headed out to the deck as the boys and their girlfriends filtered in.  Sam was halfheartedly aware of Lieutenant Simmons’ voice as he introduced the colonel to the pretty NCO from Supply he had brought along with him.  Sam was looking forward to someone else getting the romantic grief tonight.  Speaking of which…

            “So, Sam, I heard you spent a little quality time with a certain rival team captain this morning,” Janet prompted with a wicked smirk.  Sara leaned against the railing beside her as she let the meat rest, all ears and all interested, eyes saying, Do tell.

            Sam scoffed.  How the hell did I get cornered this fast?  “I wouldn’t call it spending time so much as running for my life.”

            “Oh?” Sara interjected.  “Which captain are we talking about here?”

            Before Janet could get another word in, Sam answered for her. “Captain Jonas Hanson.  We had a run-in near the bleachers.  He knocked me down. I got back up.  He apparently thought I was playing hard-to-get and followed me back to Ops.  I have no idea why.”

            “You can’t possibly have no idea why,” Sara offered. Still not so far from some hard days in Flight School, Sam took that personally.

            “I did not lead him on. I don’t do that.”  She fought not to cross her arms across her chest and mostly succeeded. This was feeling like one of those days again.

            Her CO’s wife immediately laid a hand on top of her arm and held on with a contrite expression.  “I didn’t mean it that way, Captain.”  She gave the stiff limb a squeeze and released her.  “I meant that you’re an attractive woman.  If he’s the first person on base to blatantly pursue you, they’re training ‘em up a lot better than they used to.”

            Sam blew out a breath and shrugged, letting the moment pass without another thought. “Sorry. Had a few bad experiences so I’ve learned to nip that sort of thing in the bud before it spreads.”  The Gulf War had been some of the best and worst days of her career.

            “Trust me,” Sara said, “I can imagine.”  She said it with enough gravity that Sam wondered just what Sara O’Neill had seen as the wife of a man like the colonel.  I’ll have to ask sometime. But not today.

            “So, about Jonas Hanson?” Janet prompted, as outwardly eager as each of them to move on to lighter topics.

            “Presumptuous,” Sam summed up the man in a single word.  He’d knocked the wind out of her, but she wasn’t sure he’d actually apologized for it.  Now, she really disliked him.

            “Sounds like someone you could love to hate,” Janet reasoned with a suggestive elbow nudge to Sara who concurred.

            “Or hate to love.”

            “Or neither of the above,” Sam concluded out of the trifecta.  “Trust me, he’s not on my ‘nice’ Christmas list this year.”

            “I can vouch for the fact that ‘naughty’ is much, much better,” Sara volunteered with an all too revealing leer.  Sam groaned. That, she did not need to know.  Janet covered her face, which was red and reddening down to her neck.

            “It’s official. I’ll never be able to look my CO in the eye again,” Sam whined.

            “Oh, Sam, the eyes are nice, but there are definitely other things you could focus on instead.”

            Sam covered her ears. She was not listening to this.  “We are not talking about how nice the colonel’s assets are,” she chanted in a sing-song voice.  It was pretty effective actually.

            Until the man in question showed up.

            He came around to stand between her and her captive audience of Janet and Sara.  He’s doing that twinkling thing again.  She pretended not to be to faintly horrified.  Why? Because he only did that when her worst nightmare had come true.  She didn’t have to ask if he’d been listening. It was written all over his dimpling, smirking, eyebrow waggling face.

            He offered her a beer—a Guinness, the bastard!—and swaggered away.  Yep, definitely listening.  If she’d had doubt before, she had none now. He was going to mock her for the rest of the night.  She muttered, “Sweet,” dryly before taking a gulp of beer.  It was cold and it would keep her from anymore embarrassing intrigue where her CO was concerned, and she was all about avoiding the intrigue.

            “So,” Kawalsky said as he ambled on over to them.  “You and Hanson are a thing now, Sam?”

            Sam shook her head vigorously. Nothing like a juvenile response to a valid question to make her case. “No. I don’t even know him.”

            Kawalsky sipped his own beer with an uncharacteristically neutral expression.  Humor-wise, he tended to occupy the center ground between Ferretti and O’Neill. It wasn’t like him not to smile.  Because it wasn’t like him, it set off klaxons in Sam’s head.  She had never exactly had subtle instincts.

            “Something the matter?”  Kawalsky’s expression shifted to an uneasy wince.  He sort of rolled his shoulders and shifted on his feet.  He wasn’t as cool as he’d been in Saudi Arabia last week; he wasn’t even as cool as he’d been on their ten-lapper this morning.  He was sweating full metal jackets and looking for an exit strategy.

            He wasn’t about to get one.  “Whatever it is, sir, spit it out.”  She fell into formality when making demands of her superiors. It was the only way to keep either side from taking things personally.  She couldn’t let him offend her, they had to work together.

            “Truth is, Cap’n, that I can’t tell you what to do. You’re a grown woman and a good enough officer that you don’t need to be told to keep yourself free and clear of ‘questionable’ associations.”  He hesitated to go further, trying to impress the importance of what he was saying upon her with a mere look.  She thought he’d regret how successful he was.

            “I suppose that makes Hanson a ‘questionable association,’ then, sir?”

            He pursed his lips and nodded brusquely. His posture screamed his discomfort as hers likely did.  One of the bravest men I’ve ever known looks like he wants to run for his life.  She smiled grimly, and watched as he began to stage a tactical retreat to the grass, where everyone else had gathered to either argue about hockey or toss the football around.  Charlie was holding court on his own with the other ladies of the group. He seemed to be balancing ego with embarrassment if his burning ears were any indication.  That kid will break more hearts than Lou, she predicted.

            Kawalsky’d kept his head down, leaping from the deck to the yard and jogging over to their assembled team members.  She had trained her ears to pick their voices out of a crowd of more than this; consequently, his, “Mission accomplished--kinda,” came through immediately. 

            The colonel saluted with his beer bottle, shoving a deck chair in the major’s direction with his foot.  Kawalsky sat down and sat back with a visible sigh. Sam crossed her arms with the realization that someone had given their 2IC orders to talk to her, and that there was only one person who it could have been.

            Leaving without saying goodbye, Sam took the deck steps one at a time.  Ignoring Sara’s whispered, “Oh, hell, what has he done now,” she strolled across the yard, past Charlie and his harem, past Lieutenant Simmons and his tinkering with the FM radio, toward her team and their lazy game of hot potato.  Just as she arrived, the football sailed in an arc over her head from Ferretti’s hands to their CO’s hold. He didn’t launch it again; she was blocking his light.

            “Carter.”

            “Sir.”  She waited and observed.

            He leaned sideways to look up at her.  She thought he must have some impressive peripheral vision if he preferred it over facing her head-on.  He was welcomed to evade her, but she’d still be standing here.

            “Something I can help you with, Captain?”  He sat his empty beer bottle and the ball in the grass and regarded her hands-free. To anyone else, that might have been nothing, to Sam it was preparation.  He’s expecting a fight. I’d hate to disappoint.

            “Just wondering if I should get used to hearing my CO’s concerns coming out of someone else’s mouth.”

            He squinted at her quizzically and she was almost convinced.  Jack O’Neill wore cluelessness like he wore his wings, with enviable effortlessness.  If she hadn’t seen parts of his personnel file, she wouldn’t know he was a man who’d managed to survive three months in an Iraqi prison and come out relatively intact.  She wouldn’t know that just a handful of years ago a parachute malfunction had landed him in the middle of Iran with no prospect of rescue and a low probability of survival.  He’d dragged himself out of there, broken legs and all, and he’d come home.  She couldn’t have told it from the way he was staring at her now, but he was far from a fool.

            She wasn’t any closer to one.

            “Colonel, I don’t understand why I’m still on the team if you think I can’t watch my own back.”  Her commanding officer sucked in a gusty breath and pulled himself up straighter in his chair.  He wasn’t pulling clueless anymore, merely resigned with a casual slant.  They were having this conversation and on a day that had begun so well.

            “There are two things I hate about command, Carter.” He counted off on his fingers, “The first is sending good men—good people off to do die, and the second is politics.”  He rested his head on his hand.  “Can’t get away from either one of ‘em. I think about quitting, I think about throwing in the towel and spending the next decade teaching my kid to play hockey.”

            “Could be good,” she remarked. She didn’t mean it, she didn’t want him gone. He was good where he was, doing what he did. He was better than good.

            His mouth tipped up wanly like he heard what she didn’t say and felt the same.  “That’s what I think.  But then I get to thinking about the next guy or I think about the guys upstairs and I wonder who’s going to push their buttons if I don’t.  Who’s going to have to get burned if it isn’t me?”

            Kawalsky, who hadn’t vacated his seat despite Sam’s glare passing over him, objected.  “Come on, Jack, you know I can be just as big a pain in the ass as you.  Lou’ll help me.”

            His head canted in tacit acceptance but his expression didn’t waver.  “This is my gig till it kills me, Carter.  I accepted that the day I realized that my son was nine months old and that I’d spent roughly seven of those months on a different continent. This is the life I chose, for good or bad.”

            Sam blew a renegade tendril of hair out of her face, baffled.  “Sir, I don’t understand what that has to do with you advising me through Kawalsky.  If you have a directive for me, you have every right to tell me directly. Sir, I have every right to hear it directly from you.”

            He quirked his brows up at her with interest and it wasn’t the polite sort.  “And I bet you’d like an explanation to go with that ‘directive,’ wouldn’t you, Captain?”  Sensing that she was treading on unsteady ground, Sam held off on answering. 

Evidently mollified by her reticence, the colonel waved her toward a seat they’d left empty, maybe even for her.   She sat down gingerly, unsure if she was about to be dressed down or terminated outright. He hung his hands clasped together between his knees and she realized that while she’d been focused on him, Ferretti and Kawalsky had effectively closed ranks with them and completed the circle.  What a sight we must be, she reflected with anxiety-laced fondness.

“Carter, I have no doubt that you’re well-acquainted with all manner of military man.” She didn’t need to nod, he didn’t seem to notice. “You’ve flown in conditions some of the macho sons-of-bitches in Washington haven’t even dreamed of. You’re good and I’m glad you’re with us.”  She did nod this time, because she was glad to be here and she was glad he was glad. It was a complicated feeling.  “Not everyone is.”

“Sir,” she asked without asking, a Gordian knot of dread winding its way around her throat.

“What I’m saying…Sam, is that you need to choose your friends carefully.  Because there will always be someone waiting to pull the rug right from under you to see if you can cope.” Sam curled her fingers over the edge of the deckchair and sank her short nails into the weather-treated wood.  He didn’t use her given name—never had. When he did, it was nothing good.

“What does that mean, sir?”  After this many months, Sam had thought she’d learned everything she needed to be in here.  Her team members accepted her with little fanfare, save for all the quiet talk of a birthday excursion they thought she hadn’t heard about.  They didn’t agonize over her lack of field experience and lauded her for her strengths; with a rifle, with a knife, in hand-to-hand. What she didn’t know, they could teach her.  She was their secret weapon and she’d gotten so used to the treatment she’d forgotten it wasn’t an opinion shared by everyone.

“That means you keep being good,” he shrugged and lowered his eyes to stare toward the ground.  She noted the way the four of them blocked out the glare from his newly installed yard lights.  Together they could cast a shadow so big, sometimes, Sam could hardly comprehend it.

“And you, sir?”  She hadn’t forgotten about his confession, she couldn’t have.  It felt wrong for a man who had so doggedly survived so much to surrender to any idea of defeat, much less one as lackluster as this one.

“And I’ll keep having your back, Captain.”  He reached out and laid a firm hand on her shoulder.  She leaned into it without thinking and he only pulled away once she was upright again.  Another one of their rituals. “But it’s hard to do that if I’m worrying about who your friends are.  Like Kawalsky said, you’re a big girl and you’re free to tell us both to shove it, but it matters. With the Brass, it does.”

Feeling like the fool she’d sworn she wasn’t, she flexed the tense fingers of her tense hands, “Why?”

“Because, now that you’re one of mine, my problems are your problems. So are my enemies.”  He choked on the word ‘enemies’ and it was easy to see that it was spite, not fear that did it.

“And vice versa,” she replied, concluding truths wholly different than she’d predicted before.  She’d gotten the sense that there were people who didn’t much like the colonel before; she hadn’t understood just how many they were talking.

            Fully confessed, the colonel slouched down opposite her and closed his eyes. Their team mates drew back, leaving them in a weak huddle.  “So few words and, yet, so right. Knew there was a reason we kept you around.”

            She smiled, her questions hardly answered but multiplying.  “I knew you just liked me for my entertainment value.”

            “D’oh!” he snapped his fingers.  “Lou, you were supposed to distract her before she noticed.”

            The youngest man held up his hands in deference.  “Tried and failed. Sorry, Jack.”

            “Great,” he dragged out.  “Now, who’ll run around the base like a hopped-up Chihuahua while we drink coffee and eat the doc’s donuts?”

            Sam crossed her arms.  “Janet brings donuts in the morning?”  That explained the mess Kawalsky always made of his mission reports, given that he liked to work on them first thing in the morning. The boys have been holding out on me.  She’d known she wasn’t that fast.

“From now on, you guys are going first for post-mission physicals.”  It was the only way to get them back that didn’t involve reneging on her fitness regimen and she had no plans on doing that.

They shared dismayed looks, and implored her better nature to reconsider.  Didn’t they know? She didn’t have a better nature. She stood up, dimpling impishly at her team. “Sorry.  Deception begets retribution, boys.”  A few encouraging claps on the back and she was on her way.

She’d gotten all the answers she was going to get out of her guys. Although they hadn’t told her everything, in 189 days, she’d learned to trust them. They wouldn’t leave her in the wilderness forever.  In the meantime, though, there was always the grapevine and it had never let her down before.

She wondered just what Janet knew…

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