For the first time in thirteen months, Sam didn’t get up for morning laps.  She languished in the sheets of a bed that wasn’t hers.  She stretched out from fingertips to toes and curled them around the ends of the mattress.  It wasn’t bare; the sheets were clean and smelt of detergent and soap and some faintly recognizable man.

            Not one of her men, not one of her team, she knew, because she knew their smells.  She even knew the smells of their lovers.  It was somewhat disturbing though not particularly odd given that they would be pulled from their respective lives without a moment’s notice and those lives included a healthy appreciation for sex.  She’d never intimated to them that she knew what they’d been up to and, conversely, she’d never seen that they particularly cared.  They were all adults, all virile, all accountable for themselves.  If it were any other man, they’d look menacingly—threateningly—in his direction before proceeding to lose interest.  As the colonel liked to say, she was a big girl.

            But this man, in his eyes and all of theirs, was a mistake.  Bright blue eyes that put her own to shame and light brown hair that gave him the appearance of always being fresh from the beach made him irresistible on a night like last night when she hadn’t wanted to resist anything or anyone.

            She’d just walked back into to Nevada after being gone for over a year. She’d been seconded to Nellis for a three-month stint at the colonel’s advice. He’d opined—in his earnest, concerned, and not at all rattled way—that she could ‘maybe use a little distance.’  After their confrontation in Rio, she hadn’t had a leg to stand on in refusing him.  Thusly, she hadn’t refused and had packed her bags to jump the first military transport out of town.

            Unbeknownst to her, Captain Jonas ‘I don’t do the rank thing’ Hanson had been permanently transferred a couple of months before to a Special Ops unit stationed there.  There hadn’t been a hell of a lot of room for advancement at Peterson as long as the colonel was kicking, so it had been the best option.  For Sam, it was a step back.  It took her off the fast track, where she’d been most of her career.  Making captain by twenty-six was nothing compared to how fast she might have gone if she could have held it together a while longer.

            She hadn’t melted down completely, but she’d shaken her CO’s confidence in her.  Her first kill had been a kid and she’d survived.  She’d slit the throat of young woman in Iraq because she’d jeopardized the mission, and the team, by screaming in fear. After that, she’d truly forgotten how to blink at her own propensity for violence.  Just weeks ago, she’d put a gun to a man’s head and fired, and would have done so again if the shit hadn’t royally hit the fan before she could. This was who she was now, this was the kind of woman.

            But tolerate mistrust or risk betrayal? No, that wasn’t something she could stand. More than anything, she couldn’t stand it from a man she’d come to trust more than herself. He wasn’t Lou or Kawalsky, although he was that kind of friend. He wasn’t Janet or Sara, though she similarly considered him her ideal, if in a different way.  He’d led her to horrible places to do damned distasteful things; he’d led her to horrible places to do miraculous things.  He had been a legend to her before they’d ever met and she knew why now.  Yet, it was the utterly human part of him she couldn’t rationalize—or, maybe a better word was forgive.

            For that reason, she’d taken his thinly veiled suggestion and gotten the hell out of dodge. She could get her bearings on her old stomping grounds. She could focus on anything other than the phantom sensation of thin, scratchy bark at her back and warm, apologetic hands on her face.  Jack O’Neill was a better man at a distance than he was up close.  She was having a hard time living with the contradiction.

            Sam rolled out of bed long after Jonas had gone.  He had a briefing and had given her permission to stay as long as she liked.  She’d pulled late hours in the R&D lab the night before and her supervisor had okayed her morning leave.  As long as she was in around noon, she was in the clear.  It was 1000 hours, the day was a’ wastin’ and Sam only sort of cared.

            This was heaven after all.

            She pulled a pair of Jonas’ workout sweats from his dresser and put them on. Carefully, because there wasn’t a part of her that wasn’t in the process of healing.  She turned his TV to CNN and waited to see what the latest crisis was that had assailed the world.  During the next three months, it was someone else’s job to care.  Sam wouldn’t be pulled out of bed to a vague as hell briefing to do a bloody as hell job in a god forsaken country that once upon a time she’d wanted to visit on vacation.  There weren’t many places the captain wanted to visit anymore, much less show her face.

            If there wasn’t a warrant for her arrest in Brazil, the local LEOs were about as useless as she’d always thought.  She didn’t see her name spanning the news ticker at the bottom of the screen, so she breathed easy and put the thing on mute.

            The next eighty-seven days belonged to Groom Lake, but Sam’s heart, which remained perpetually in her throat, would continue to be at Peterson AFB.  That’s where her team was and that’s where she intended to return when she’d gotten her head on straight.

            She thought that Colonel O’Neill had been dead-on in getting her the hell out of there.  Questioning orders at the tail-end of an op gone to hell? It wasn’t done.  She could be forgiven for being rebellious on their first op; there’d still been ropes to learn and compulsions to master. At this late date, she had no excuse for pretending not to know the way things had to be.  She always felt that her job was dirty; she often forgot that CO had the dirtiest of the four.  He did the hard jobs, made the hard calls, and had the worst dreams so that they could have better ones.

            Considering how little sleep Sam typically got anyway, it was a wonder that the colonel functioned.  He seemed more tired some days, but he mostly did all right.

            Sam realized about now that getting her out of Peterson hadn’t done anything to take her mind off things.  She was still fixating, still kicking around the details of Paraguay and Brazil when it no longer mattered.  Ferretti had survived the first and Kawalsky the second. The means didn’t have much significance compared to the ends: they’d all made it home safe.

            Charlie still has his father and Sara still has her husband. It’s perfect, she told herself in a tone that was almost totally convinced.  Almost.

            No matter how she contorted her thinking, she kept going back to him.  Not to the majors and not to Janet and not to her father who’d thought it was it high-time he visited his little girl’s unit.  That occasion had been so strained she’d nearly puked on his immaculately shined shoes. 

And, oh, look, there go my thoughts derailed. She’d waited for the colonel to say something, to say anything about her abhorrent behavior.  He hadn’t and the rest knew too little about the entire business to dare, though she knew they wondered and worried.  General Jacob Carter, her father and the first man she’d ever called, “sir,” had been no different.

            “Honey, have you considered that Ops may not be for you,” he’d asked more gently than he’d spoken to her in all the years since her mother’s death.  He’d seen the strain on her face and thought she was cracking up. The taste of bitter disappointment that had welled up in her throat had been hard to swallow back.

            Dad doesn’t think I can hack it.  That was the absolute zenith of failure for Sam.  She’d joined Special Ops for a number of reasons, one of which was to understand her father more completely.  She’d wanted to know who he was and why.  She knew now and understood so much more about the two of them, about how much they shared and how alike they were.  Certainly, she had her mother’s compassion, but she had her father’s drive.  She couldn’t have been prouder of that combination.

            She just wished that two weeks later she hadn’t had to tell him that she was going TAD to her old job.  He’d sounded relieved and she’d tried not to see that as an affirmation of her weakness.  She was a damned fine soldier most of the time; she only wished she could have made a better daughter.

            With an anguished sigh, she got up from in front of the TV and headed for the shower. Although she was still an hour and a half from her appointed check-in time, she doubted her state of mind was going to get much better than this.  Damn if Nevada wasn’t failing to live up to her expectations.

~!~

            Following hours of pointing a soldering gun threateningly at a half-dozen circuit boards, Sam needed to get out of her mole hole.  If she saw another red or black wire, she’d snap and that was not the way she wanted to end her military career.  She tossed her protective goggles and gloves aside and left the laboratory for the base commissary.  What she needed was a drink in the Officers’ Club but she didn’t dare go down that route now.  The day wasn’t over yet, she had to show Colonel Mailer some result before clocking out to justify his faith in her.  The new submachine gun, known as the FN P-90, wasn’t going to test fire itself.  She felt like she’d let down enough of her superiors lately; one more was too many.

            Definitely wanting that drink now, she groused upon entering the mess and finding it just about full.  There was little chance of her getting a corner to herself, much less a table, and she was not in the mood to wade into base politics again.  She wasn’t really R&D anymore, but she wasn’t quite Ops either at this point.  She was in limbo and she hated it.  There was a place where she belonged and that was just where she couldn’t be.  She’d have sworn out loud if it wouldn’t have made things that much worse.

            Just as she was about to take her lukewarm coffee and find a janitor’s closet in which to brood, a pair of sparkling blues caught her attention along with a familiarly throaty voice.  Jonas had been watching her scowl for the last five minutes with the smirk to end all smirks on his face.  With a tip of the head, he invited her over the Ops table with his team.  Feeling sanity, or something like it, wash over her, Sam came over and took a seat.  He smiled, she smiled back.  It was the little things that felt like home.

            She spent her fourth day back at Area 51 meeting new people and catching up with old friends.  She didn’t think of where she should have been again.  Not until she fell once more into bed with the man of iridescent eyes and a rebellious grin did she think of the lessons she should have been learning. Then, she threw them out and wrote her own lesson plan.  She liked the way things were going here.

            Upon waking the next morning, she wasn’t alone and she still felt fine.  His fingers tangled sleepily in her hair, his stubble rubbing affectionately, if a little itchily, against her skin was soothing.  It had been such a long time since anyone had shown a worthwhile interest that she’d forgotten how cherished it could make her feel.

            Jonas Hanson was the master of making Samantha Carter feel wanted.  She normally didn’t care, but nowadays she just wanted to be wanted somewhere, anywhere.  This felt like the only area of her life where she was doing anything right.  And, on that note, she firmly put her team out of her head.  No need to go there, she warned herself. It’s been a good few days.

            He wasn’t them, he didn’t know any more about her than what got her off and her favorite style of underwear to wear (boy shorts).  What he did know, nevertheless, was when to stop talking and start touching; when to leave her to her introspection and when to turn on the news.  He knew stuff that mattered and she was content with that.  Besides, this isn’t forever. What more do I need?

            She needed a lot more it turned out.  Even in another state, she longed for the touch of familiarity.  This led to a multitude of phone calls to Colorado Springs, mostly to Janet, occasionally to Kawalsky or Lou.  Out of a warped sense of propriety and some anxiety, she had avoided phoning Sara.  There was no telling how Sam would respond if he picked up instead and wanted to talk to her.  She couldn’t talk to him with all of the things that were going on between them.  His frustration and disappointment would make her feel worse than she had when she’d left him.  She was feeling better; she wouldn’t allow herself to travel backwards.

            Still, a letter from Charlie O’Neill around her third week in Nevada had forced her hand.  The body of the letter had been unfailingly polite as he’d been taught to be, but his post-script had been a kid-sized kick to the gut.  P.S. Mom misses you. Can you please call her back?  The ‘please’ had been in all caps and underlined thrice, a touch of his father’s exasperation shining through his manners.  Sam had been helpless not to comply with his request and had rewarded it with a call to both of them.

            Charlie was his usual exuberant self, but it was his mother who seemed different, showing reserve where outlandishness typically reigned.  Sam got the feeling that there was something going on that was holding her back and nearly asked what when she heard the distinct tones of a familiar voice and hung up instead.  Knowing she’d have a hell of a lot of apologizing to do when she eventually called back, Sam set out to concoct a good excuse for her behavior.

            She never ended up needing one.

            The next time they spoke, Sara was situation normal and they spent far too long discussing Jonas in Sam’s view.  She could hear the woman’s sing-song ‘I told you so’ for days after that call concluded.  Can’t a girl change her mind once in a while?  Naturally, she could, but there was no chance of her doing it without magnificent amounts of good-natured teasing.  Janet had been an audibly grinning testament to that fact, as had the friends Sam was reconnecting with on base.  The sheer amount of ‘aw’-ing she had to endure when talking about the man made her a little crazy.  They were seeing each other, not picking out china for their new house.

Sam had no plans for anything so permanent with the man who’d knocked her down back home.  But try telling them that and they call it denial. Right.  She rolled her eyes at the thought several times a day.  It wasn’t like Sam’s schedule was exactly brimming with free time in the first place.  She’d been given some leeway to reacclimate herself to local base life, but that didn’t last.  She was known for her hard work, not for resting on her reputation.  Sam was still as good as her name.  Regardless of her increasingly satisfying personal life, Sam’s days still ended late and, more often than not, with a headache.  It was painful, though effective, normalcy.

Every second morning began next to Jonas.  Whether it’d be a good morning would be up to their respective subconscious minds, their moods reflective of the night they’d had.  A night free of nightmares for Sam would find her curled up in a ball around her pillow; he liked to tell her, smiling, that she’d wake up with a sigh.  A restless sleep would end with her tangled, limb for limb, with him.  There was security in numbers and Jonas was nothing if not her number two, her safety.  If he was anything short of pleased to help, he’d never shown it to her.  For a man who rarely seemed to close his eyes for longer than it took to blink, he was always well-rested and ready to start the day.  She only knew how hard-won that impression was because they shared their nights.

Jonas’ darkness was well-earned, were his reputation to be believed and she had no reason to question it.  At thirty-nine, Jonas had stopped rising and had stagnated at the rank of Captain.  Sam had heard it blatantly implied that he’d go no farther despite the many medals and commendations that weighed on his personnel jacket.  ‘He’s a hothead with a lack of affinity for following orders the first time,’ she’d read on a less than legal foray into the Air Force’s electronic databanks.  Variations on that complaint were rife throughout the paperwork, also peppered with reluctantly penned reports on all manner of heroism perpetrated by him.  What wasn’t heavily redacted made for interesting reading.

He was an Instructor-level marksman, a certified sharpshooter who had been ordered to use his skills to some deadly effect often.  For that reason, he avoided training cadets and fellow airmen at the range when offered the chance, saying he’d rather teach hand-to-hand—another skill he employed with lethal efficiency.  For her part, Sam had learned more about what not to do in a close combat situation when rousing him from a nightmare than she’d learned in all her time in Basic.  Those bruises wouldn’t be fast in fading, nor the memories of his expression when he’d kicked her to the floor as though she weighed nothing.  Sam was good, but he was extraordinary.  One could safely say that Sam was experiencing a little hero worship when it came to Jonas Hanson; it would hardly be the first time for her.

Her occasional colleague Doctor Rodney McKay rarely missed an opportunity to comment on the improbability of their match.  God, she wished he wouldn’t, but wishing had rarely gotten her anywhere faster than leaving the room while he rambled.  Grinning and bearing it when it came to the subjects of Jonas, Rodney, and the colonel as he ran amok at the back of her thoughts, was about all she did outside the bedroom and the lab.  To her best friend, this was apparently the funniest thing she’d heard in months.

“It’s not funny, Janet,” Sam murmured, annoyed, into the phone beside her bed.  The long-distance calling card she’d found in the pocket of her service uniform upon arriving in Nevada was coming in handy, even if the donut filling that had made it sticky refused to go away.

The doctor stifled her chuckles with obvious effort before clearing her throat and continuing on semi-stoically, “Sorry, Sam.  It’s just—come on, you left home and proceeded to fall for someone exactly like the men you usually surround yourself with. You don’t think that’s a little Freudian?”

“One,” Sam unconsciously counted off on her fingers, “I don’t think that’s how Freud works. Two, no, I don’t.”  She was going to sulk about this and she didn’t care if that made her childish.

“Oh, honey, it’s okay to be attracted to that type of guy. As long as you know what you’re in for, all’s well that ends well.”

Sam kicked off her shoes and pulled her stocking feet onto the bed so that she could curl up against the headboard.  “You think so?”

“Yeah, but like I said, you need to know who you’re getting and what baggage he’s bringing with him.  Ops men can be hard to live with.”  Sometimes, it seemed to Sam that Janet forgot that Sam was an ‘Ops woman,’ but she was used to that.

Recalling vaguely that Janet was married to one and should know, Sam thought it best to take her at her word. “Tell me about it.  I thought I was bringing heady stuff to the table, but Jonas…I don’t know.”

“He’s got you worried, doesn’t he?” asked a voice rife with experience.

“Something like that.”  She stretched her legs out in front her, wincing at a twinging in her knee.  It still gave her grief after all these weeks.  Must be rain.  Her body had become a damned weather vane.

“Let me just say, for the record, that there’s nothing that Jonas can dish out that you have to put up with.  You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course I know that,” she answered on a sigh. “If I needed to, I could take him, Janet.”

The doctor’s pregnant pause was the opposite of encouraging.  “Okay.”

“I could,” she insisted.

“Okay,” her friend repeated a second time in the exact same tone.

“You don’t believe me.”

“I don’t think you believe you. If you do, get thee to the nearest shrink and don’t leave until you’ve gotten your head on straight.”

“Janet! A little female solidarity would go a long way here.”

“Hey, you know me.  You know I love you, honey, and you know there’s very little I think you’re incapable of doing, but we’re not talking the laws of physics here. This is physiology, biology, and basic anatomy.  These are my strengths and my expertise tells me that he’s got you beat.”

Sam bristled, “So, what are you saying?”

“I’m saying…you could have chosen worse, but it would have been hard.”  Her voice lacked even a glimmer of the humor that had colored her words before.

“He’s a good man, Janet.”  She meant it more than she thought she would have.

 “There are certainly worse men than him out there, yes, but they aren’t the ones I’m worried about.”

Scowling, she replied, “I can take care of myself.”

Her friend sighed, breath rattling ghostlike down the line.  “I believe in you, Sam. I just don’t want to see you hurt, that’s all.”

“Better by a stranger than by a friend,” Sam observed.

“And we’re back to that.” Janet could be heard settling back in her desk chair, the dull clamor of the infirmary even duller in the background.  “Sam, tell me what’s going on.  You’ve been gone nearly a month and a half and I still don’t know why you left.  The colonel isn’t talking and all Kawalsky does is grumble while Ferretti grunts.  And, I swear the three of them seem to stay in trouble without you.  What happened?”

“I messed up and sending me here was the absolute least Colonel O’Neill could do to address the matter.”

Janet clicked her tongue skeptically, “Maybe.”

Sam felt her dander rise.  No, a reprimand in my personnel file wasn’t an option.  What of it? “Maybe?”

“Look, don’t get upset.”

Too late for that.  “That sounds reassuring,” Sam snorted disbelievingly.

“The rumor mill is vicious around here, which you already know.”

“Yes,” she drawled impatiently.

“They think you were having an affair with one of your teammates.”

Sam couldn’t even say she was surprised; she was actually sort of disappointed the gossips hadn’t been more creative.  “Huh. Well, that’s something.”

“Yeah, it’s something all right.”  Sam could hear her tapping her pen on a case file.  It was an old habit, classic Janet Frasier with Ops Team One’s influence all over it.

“I’m guessing there’s more to it than that?”

“Sam, Special Investigations has been all over this base recently and they’ve been asking a lot of questions about Ops Team One.”

She knew that was a bad sign.  “Just us?”

“And a few others, but I’d hazard a guess that you and your guys are the subjects of their investigation.”

“Any idea why?”  Sam had a couple.

“Oh, I’ve got at least one.”  They were on the same wavelength again, something that inevitably came with the territory.

Sam exhaled tiredly and checked her watch for the time.  She needed to be heading back to R&D to finish up for the night; it was going to be another late one.  “Janet, you know I can’t tell you anything.”

“I’m not asking you to. I just don’t want to see you get blindsided when you come back.”  That introduced a concept Sam was far from ready to face.

“Come back.” She shuddered. “Right.”

“You are coming back, aren’t you?”  A dizzying combo of anxiety and fear laced Janet’s voice,  though, for the life of her, Sam didn’t know why.

“Sure,” she replied quickly.  Maybe too quickly.

“Right.”  Had Sam not been so unsure herself, she might have been offended at Janet’s incredulity.

Just like that, the best of friends had run out of things to say.

“Well, I need to get back to the lab. God knows what McKay’s gotten up to while I’ve been gone.”

“Same here, I need to update the team’s medical files.  Really, Sam, you’ve got to talk to those three. They’re not getting any younger, they can’t keep this up.”

Sam hummed grimly.  “Just try telling them that. They won’t believe you.”  Why should the notoriously short-lived care?

“Remind you of anyone?”

With a roll of the eyes and a smile, Sam said, “Good night, Janet.”

The other captain laughed at all she didn’t say.  “Night, Sam.”

They’d probably talk about it all again tomorrow.

~!~

            As good as things were for a while, that was how bad they got before Sam had her fill of Nevada. 

Doctor Rodney McKay was a lot of things, most of them extremely irritating, but he was not a bad man.  If she torched a very important experiment directly before a crucial deadline, he might sneer condescendingly and remark snidely on the color of her hair affecting her ability to add 2+2, but he wouldn’t leave her to her failure.  He called it ‘networking,’ because one never knew when they might need a favor in the future; she called it decency.  He’d been born with his own healthy share of it despite all of his attempts to drown it in antacids and cheap coffee on a daily basis.  He was a good man and by the time Sam stepped out of the Groom Lake facility for the last time, she considered him a friend.

Some sunny morning beautifully begun had found Sam lingering near the weapons-testing range to watch the sunrise.  Dawn had already come, but she couldn’t stave off her fascination with watching the sun’s position in the sky change with the hour.  She knew it only appeared to be rising to meet them, that it was the position of the earth in orbit around the sun that was changing and not the sun itself, and yet she’d never learned to love the sight any less. 

The scientist and romantic in her agreed that there was nothing like the sun, or the light of the stars, or space. When she was a girl, she’d dreamed of cruising among the astral bodies like so much cosmic dust and space junk, the universe and its infinity unfurled before her. That dream had pulled her through adolescence and her mother’s death, and the Academy and the obstacles she faced as a young, markedly ingenious, woman on the rise.  That dream was everything and more to a young Samantha Carter.  To this day, she wasn’t exactly sure what had changed.

So preoccupied was she with the saga of her life, where she’d been and where she was going, she nearly noticed too late that someone was about to rush her position via her blind side.  She tossed her cooling coffee to the cracked ground and dodged while bringing up her guard.  Her retreat had already erected a meter of open ground between them before she realized just who her would-be assailant was.

Rodney McKay looked sick.  He’d never been robust picture of health to begin with, but this state was a new development.  Despite herself, Sam risked pressing her hand to his forehead to see if he was running some kind of temperature to explain the alarming pallor of his face.  She frowned when he momentarily basked in the contact before whirling away, kicking up dust with his abrupt pacing and causing a sandstorm with the motion of his arms.

Now, he looked sick and pissed.  Sam was admittedly more than slightly alarmed at this point.  “Rodney?” He grunted and kept up the pace.  If he scowled any harder, she feared something important might crack.  “What’s the matter? Did something happen?”

This close from toe-to-toe with her, he stopped.  He held his hands aloft for a second, then looked at them, and dropped them to his sides.  He did a thing that Rodney McKay never did: he shrugged.

Sam was not amused.

“Doctor McKay, a civilian does not bum rush an experienced Special Ops officer for no reason.  Unless you want to see just how experienced this officer is, I suggest you come up with a damned good explanation for making me drop my coffee.”  She hadn’t intended to make it a threat, she’d just been very attached to her coffee this morning. It had been a bad night for both her and Jonas. The morning light hadn’t improved anything.

It apparently hadn’t improved Rodney’s impression of her either; his expression vacillated between the previous scowl and a brand new flinch.  That wasn’t what she’d wanted.  She decided to try a different tac.

“Rodney, what’s going on?”

He opened his mouth to speak; she could even hear the sole syllable of the first word he planned to say when he aborted the sentence and went quiet.  She’d never noticed how blue his eyes were, too, until he had his back against the sky.  It was another way in which they weren’t so different.

She touched his forearm, feeling it tense at the unanticipated gesture. “If it’s important, I need to know.”

He opened his smug mouth and uncertain words fell out, “Define important.”

Sam’s smile built on her worry, though it was based on some cousin to joy.  “My team, my family.” One and the same, she thought. “This base. Oh, I don’t know, the world as we know it.  Pick one.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t mention Hanson or this might have been awkward.”  His acerbic ‘wit’ was out in force and Sam’s tolerance for his conditional fragility was at an end.

She gave him a Look, inherited from her mother, refined by her father, and distilled into an art form by many greater men than he.  Instead of quelling, he rolled his eyes.

“Spare me the ‘tough broad’ act.”  He jumped back as soon as she lifted a provisional fist.  “Hey!  I’m not the guy chasing around every above-average pair of ti-”  He made his point, but he never got farther than that.

“Jonas,” she questioned to the man whose mouth was firmly shuttered by her hand. He rocked his head in a deliberate nod once she failed to release his lips on their own recognizance.  She wouldn’t be making that mistake any time soon.  “You have reason to believe he’s being…” She didn’t know what to call it. Unfaithful was too much for what they were, for what little she’d admit they had.  “He’s seeing someone other than me?”  The best she could do on a good day was all right, she supposed.

He slanted his eyes away from hers and however he was predicting she’d respond.  It was nearly chivalrous how he tried not to watch it hit her.  Whatever she might have said, Jonas Hanson was the first person she’d trusted herself with in a very long time.  He was also the first person she’d chosen to trust after her re-assignment.  She hadn’t confided in her closest friends or her nearest colleagues.  She hadn’t gone through the proper channels or even sought counseling; she’d turned to a near-perfect stranger first of all. 

She could have laughed.

It’s the ‘near’ that’ll get you every time.

She didn’t sleep as well after that, but, then again, she didn’t sleep with Jonas either. (She avoided him actually, another of her many talents.) They may never have been exclusive, but she liked to think they’d at least been honest.  ‘Assume’ makes an ass out of yadda, yadda, yadda.  If it could act as reproof, she’d already said it to herself. Or Rodney had said it, from a far, far distance and possibly with a door between them, over an intercom.

 She certainly called him a friend, but she did it very quietly and not without some dread for what a future with him in it would bring.  Probably scathing insults and awkward come-ons.  He’d made no secret of his attraction to her, nor of the fact that he was aware the feeling wasn’t mutual. Unlike Sam, the numbers woman, Rodney believed numbers did lie and that facts could change.  He was a little delusional, a little grating, and a lot determined.  But when he wasn’t trying take Jonas’ place in her pants, he could be pretty entertaining to have around, too.

Sam liked to think of it as ‘networking,’ because one never knew when they would need a loyalist.  She called it ‘friendship,’ though, because with a simple surprising act of compassion and discretion, he’d saved her from herself when there were many who wouldn’t have bothered. But she’d gladly chew on barbed wire before ever saying that out loud.  The sheer amount of hot air he’d release would transform the biosphere.  And Sam was all about preserving the world for the next generation; she was as much a stickler for that as she was for tradition.  Right.

Sam was as bad at lying to herself about herself as ever; she was far worse at lying to those she loved.  Thus, it would naturally follow that Sara O’Neill would catch her after an especially trying day and ask an especially trying question without trying. 

She thumped her head on the wall behind her. Her husband’s personality is an infectious disease. Somebody, have mercy and call the CDC.  She thought about just hanging up, but knew she couldn’t do that to her friend.  She’d behaved oddly enough over the last few months, hardly taking the time to catch up with Sara’s life before ending their calls.  She simply hadn’t been able to tolerate hearing about Charlie’s latest escapade with his friends or the colonel’s latest fishing tale, things that had happened while she wasn’t there.

“Did Janet tell you Jack and the boys went up to Minnesota?  He called it ‘team building,’ but, if you ask me, it just sounded like typical male bonding.  You know how men are; they probably just wanted to grunt, belch, and scratch without being told not to do it in front of company.”

Sam grunted without irony in response.  No, Janet hadn’t told her the team was going out of town and certainly not why.  Janet had been incommunicado for a time which Sam had just put down to a busy schedule. Things were busy for the U.S. Special Forces these days and probably busier still for their doctors.  Those that made it home didn’t always make it unharmed.  A dozen times Janet had saved her life, Sam couldn’t fault the woman for having more important things to do than ease her troubled mind; she just missed her boys—and they’d gone ‘bonding’ without her.  Guess they don’t miss me at all.

“Hey,” she heard finally, amid the thumping of her agitated heart in her ears.  She wasn’t fighting off any tears she’d be acknowledging.

“Yeah,” she choked, instantly thirsty and, damn it, hurt.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Sara started, voice dipped in sympathy; a mother’s voice.  “Don’t you know they’re just killing time waiting for you?”

“Doesn’t sound like they’re waiting.”  She hated the bitterness she hadn’t quite learned to hide from this woman.  It was damned hard to see how a man with secrets could live with her and stay the same.  Doesn’t that explain everything?

She had to quit asking herself things like that.

“Sam?”

She scooted down on her rumpled bed and curled around her pillow on her side. “Yeah.”

“Come home.”  She could practically see Sara fiddling with the phone cord for want of something mundane to do with her hands.  Sara liked to tinker, too.

“I don’t know that I can.”

“If you left Nevada tomorrow, would you be leaving something behind?”

Sam thought of Jonas and his arms around her. Then, she thought of Rodney McKay and his predilection for the blandest food he could get his hands on.  She thought the laughter, hell, the exasperation she’d suffered with McKay made a far better medicine than every oddly restful night.

“You never really leave anything behind if it’s worth keeping.”

Sara chuckled.  “You’re getting wise in your old age.”

Sam ducked her head in the empty room, ears aflame.  “Very funny.”

“I mean it, Sam.  For someone so young, you’ve seen a lot and you’ve learned.  You learn as you go, but that doesn’t happen overnight and it doesn’t happen by running away from the things that hurt you.” Her friend paused briefly.  “I know something happened, Sam, and I know it probably had something to do with my husband.”

Sam’s stomach churned and acid stung the back of her throat.  She would have moved to sit up if her body had been in the mood to comply.  “Sara, I ca-” 

“I know,” she assured Sam.  “I know what classified means. I’m not asking and I’m certainly not expecting you to actually tell me anything. Remember, I live with a human lockbox; I’m used to not getting answers to my burning questions. I just…I don’t want to lose you if I don’t have to.  Whatever happened, it’s clear you miss those boys as much as they miss you. If you can see clear to putting this thing behind you, we can all put it behind us.”

Sam worried the thread of her pillowcase till it tore free of the fabric. Then, she did it twice.    She didn’t know if she could, but that wasn’t something she could say.  “Are they really that different without me?”

“You’re the elephant in the room, Sam. I pity the officer that was assigned to replace you, because he can’t begin to measure up.  You spoiled them rotten and they’re sick about losing you.” She sighed wearily.  “And my husband is being his usual taciturn self.  He’s pretending none of it bothers him and then going into a depression anytime someone mentions your name.  He says, ‘Things got out of hand,’ and that he waited too long to do anything about it, if that means anything to you.”

Sam wanted to quip, “Understatement of the century,” but the thought never went farther than her coiled gut.  Even if she’d said the words, she couldn’t have begun to explain; too many ‘classifieds’ and ‘top secrets’ and ‘I’m so, so sorry’s’ from start to finish.  She missed being able to really look her best friend in the eye; one day, she might yet learn to look back at herself.  This wasn’t that day.

“I miss him.” It was the first thing she’d said without thinking in months and maybe the truest, regardless of whether she could explain how far the loneliness ran.

“Then, come home and stop missing him.  Whatever he did, whatever he’s done, make him apologize—I’ll make him apologize—and take your life back.  There’s so much you miss when you leave. It’s hard to make up for that time.”

Her sixth sense twigged. After a few logical, chronological leaps, Sam let out groan. “Don’t tell me, Charlie’s discovered girls.”

“Not girls, just testosterone, though I have no doubt that girls are next up to bat.  He’s discvored his inner rebel and he and Jack are butting heads over just about everything.  I try to mediate, but he’s getting to that age where it isn’t ‘cool’ to listen to his mother, so that’s been an exercise in futility.”

“I take it this is where I come in?”

“God knows you’re welcomed to try,” Sara belly-laughed. “Charlie and Lou talked to him without much success. Maybe you’ll have better luck. You’re old enough to listen to but you haven’t been around long enough to seem completely unapproachable. I’ll take it, though I’ll hold you personally responsible if you’re the first girl he discovers.”

Sam giggled softly, shaking her head and imagining the blushing ten-year-old she knew pulling a McKay on her.  It stopped being adorable after five seconds and started being vaguely mortifying.

“On second thought…”

“I thought you’d reconsider.” Sara apparently came to some decision because she continued, “Look, it doesn’t matter if you can get through to Charlie. It just matters that you come home.  Things might not be normal, but they can be better.”

Sam unfurled herself from around her squished goose feather pillow.  She stretched out as far as she could without losing hold of the phone, joints popping into comfort.  Sara’s reassurance was her touchstone for the moment; it would probably help her sleep tonight.

“They can be better,” she echoed with unvoiced agreement.

“You’ll come back?” the elder woman asked and Sam could all but see her fingers crossed.

“I’ll come back.”

But, first, she had to see a blue-eyed man about some pajamas she’d left behind.  Realizing how many that could apply to, Sam found herself grinning at the ceiling of her darkened quarters with Sara chattering in her ear.  Rodney wishes.  And, knowing the man, he probably did.

~!~

            When Sam laid eyes on Jonas for the first time after weeks of Groom Lake Tag, she saw everything she’d missed upon seeing him every day and every night.  He was a man of subtle shifts in mood and temper and alertness.  He faded in and out, and she didn’t wonder where his mind went, though she doubted anyone besides him would know.  He didn’t sleep much because he couldn’t, and he always managed to function because he had to.

Handsome he may have been, but that was something he held together by a string called time.  He’d be a walking corpse years before he stopped breathing. Inside, he was already there.

Nevertheless, he had a ready smile for her when he let her into his quarters.  The place was the same as the morning she’d left it, almost eerily so.  She’d go so far as to say that the mug on the TV was the very one she’d been meaning to return and wash all those evenings ago. If the dust that had settled over the surface was anything to go by, it hadn’t even been moved.

Sam decided to ignore it.  She hadn’t come to critique his less than satisfactory housekeeping habits, she’d come to take back the pieces of her life she’d left with him—figuratively and literally.  Everyone on base knew they were over; it was just time for one of them to say the words.

He’d clearly decided he wouldn’t be the one.

She walked around him and picked up a few non-apparel things she’d left here.  Her walkman was one.  She’d dropped and broken it during a late evening run a month ago and had intended on repairing it when she had some free time.  It just so happened that in her life there was no such thing as this mythical ‘free time’ and it hadn’t gotten fixed.  Shrugging, she decided to cart it home and make another go of it. 

Honestly, my odds of having a working tape player anytime soon are better if I just bite the bullet and buy a new one.  Although she was a dreamer, Sam was a practical girl at heart.

Next, she found her ‘best woman on Peterson AFB’s Ops Team One’ mug on the bathroom sink. Her teammates had gotten it for her as sort of half-assed prank—Clearly, the colonel’s plan—and she’d ended up loving it.  She dumped out the water that had sat in it for who knew how long and rinsed and dried it before tucking it away in the duffle she’d carted along for the unenviable ‘post-breakup stuff exchange.’

Turned out that, a few shirts excepted, Sam didn’t have much of Jonas’ in her quarters. She’d mostly visited his place and kept her own as a sanctuary for when they each needed space.  She’d been infatuated, not mindless.  She’d take whatever consolation she could in that.

She had to take some kind of consolation to justify having ever dated the man watching her so intently now. Not a word in all the time she’d been here.  He kept his distance, he strayed closer; and, still, not one word.  It made her ridiculously nervous.

Maybe not ridiculously.  He had over ten years of extra service time on her and longer in the field.  She had bruises still healing to illustrate what he could do to her if he so chose. Not that she expected he would.  Jonas was prone to violent outbursts while unconscious or asleep; as far as Sam knew, he’d never exhibited such tendencies while awake, aside from sparring matches and field scenarios.  Sam would have been a hypocrite to fault the man for his training when hers had prevented her from being mugged twice, once in Nevada and once in Colorado.  Sam understood the threat of a skilled soldier; she knew better than to take the training for granted, no matter how innocent the face that wielded it.

She wasn’t afraid of the Jonas Hanson she’d known, but of the one she’d never known at all.  Problem was that he seemed to be the one hanging around.

“We don’t have to do this, you know.  We can just forget this ever happened and go from there.”

Sam didn’t turn her head from the book on the expanding universe theory she’d been reading recently.  She’d been positive that Rodney had stolen her copy when it had gone missing suddenly. Apparently, it had just fallen underneath a pile of outdated newspapers in quarters where she only kind of lived. No wonder she’d gone so long without finding it.  Since she’d already replaced it, she decided to leave Jonas to it.  Maybe he’ll learn something.  She valued her money too much to bet on a loss that sure.

Moving back to the bedroom from the sitting area, Sam went straight to his closet to find her spare uniform.  She laid it across the bed and proceeded to raid his dresser for the rest of her stuff.

“Sam, honey, talk to me.”

She was momentarily jarred by the difference between the way her friends called her honey and the way he did.  This might have been Jonas at his utmost urgent and sincere; she would never know it from the way he talked to her now.  She would have liked to think she could inspire more emotion than this.

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I want you to tell me what’s going on with you, why you haven’t spoken to me in three weeks, and why—out of the blue—you’ve decided we need to go our separate ways.”

She raised an eyebrow at him via the mirror over his dresser.  He continued to look completely unenlightened.  “You really have no idea?”

“Nothing but what the base gossips have to say, but I want to hear it from you.”

Sam put down a pair of underwear from his sock drawer that she was only half convinced belonged to her.  Instead of reacting, she merely moved on to the next article of clothing she touched, which fortunately was hers.  She couldn’t have handled much more of the mystery intimates portion of this farce.

“You sleep around. That’s a problem.  You don’t tell me about it and let me find out from a civilian.  That’s a problem.  Consequently, I’m forced to conclude that we’ve got problems, more of them than we can reasonably fix.”

He reached out and grabbed her wrist as she reached for a second drawer.  “You’re not even trying.”

She circled her arm in a medium arc to dislodge his hold.  He didn’t fight her.  He knew the value of her training as well.  Whether or not she came out the loser, he’d suffer humiliating bruises for all the world to see.  Sam believed in nothing if not sending a message.

“I don’t want to try anymore, Jonas.” All she’d done was try since she’d arrived.  “I’ve tried hard enough.  I just want to go home.”  And that was as far from Nellis and Nevada as her orders would carry her.

“You know none of them meant anything right. It was just…”  And, suddenly, it was as if he didn’t know what to say.  If she’d had her way, he never would have looked at her the way he was looking now, as if she was the only thing that was keeping him on his feet.  Of all the things she’d desperately sought, she’d never been looking for that.  She didn’t want to be that for this man, he wasn’t one of hers.

 “If you hadn’t kept this from me, I can honestly say that I never would have gotten upset,” she remarked while rolling up a pair of sweats to place in her bag.  She’d have moderated her interest in him and probably ended the romance sooner, but she wouldn’t have gotten angry, or been hurt.

He tried to slide his fingers up her shoulder, to stroke the side of her neck in the way that she liked to calm her down. She rebuffed both gestures.  Affection was the last thing she wanted from him anymore and she wasn’t all that interested in being calmed.

“Don’t touch me. We’re not together anymore and it’s probably going to be a while before we can even consider being friends. So, just don’t.”

“Come on, Sam, you and I never talked about being exclusive, so there’s no use in being upset about that.”

“I’ve met brick wall with better listening skills,” she mumbled to herself while rifling through his last drawers in search of her old training duds.  “I just said I didn’t care about the cheating or whatever you want to call it. It’s the lying I can’t stand.”

“I never said-”

She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “You never said a lot, Jonas.  That’s what bothers me.  You have this incredibly narrow view of what it means to be in a relationship with someone.  You can’t sleep next to them every other night and share your nightmares and think there isn’t something significant there.”  She stopped to consider what she was about to say.  “We may not have been in love, but we were in a relationship.  All I wanted from you was the truth. I never wanted to marry you, I don’t want to marry you.  I just wanted…” She shrugged.  “I wanted to feel better. For a little while, I guess I did.  So, thank you for that.”

He nodded and stuffed his hands into his pockets and gave her a sly sideways glance.  If it was supposed to make her curious, it did.  She wondered what he was up to.  If it was supposed to tempt her, it failed.  She’d had more than enough of men who knocked her down.  It was time for her to get back up again, on her own.

Of course, Jonas had never surrendered gracefully in his life.  She was sure there had been a whole five minutes in which she’d found that charming.  It must have been the shortest five minutes since time began—relatively speaking.

As it was, Sam ended up grinding her teeth for every moment she spent in Jonas’ presence packing up the rest of her things.  At first, he’d tried cajoling her in his gently flattering way.  Then, he’d given her puppy eyes as though that face could be the solution to her distaste.  She was convinced now that betrayal followed her everywhere out of some manifestation of supremely negative karma.  That last life must have been a bitch.

She supposed the only answer to such a betrayal would be to face it.  But she wasn’t in the mood to face this betrayal with this man, not right now and maybe never; not when it reverberated more deeply than she’d expected.  He didn’t get that satisfaction.  There were other people to whom she owed second chances before him and they’d have them if they were willing to earn them. All there was left to do was see.

This captain had made reparation enough for one mistake; she was done apologizing.  It was time to go home.

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