The first thing Sam did when she touched down in Colorado Springs was to kiss the proverbial asphalt. She’d missed the thin air and the sight of the mountains in the near distance.  She’d missed ambience, she’d missed her home.  The only way she was ever leaving again for any length of time was in a box bound for Arlington.  She knew that was something Colonel O’Neill would never deny her. Probably the only thing by now, but she didn’t care so much about that.

            After arriving at her poor, abandoned apartment, Sam decided to spend a little time showing her old Volvo some much-needed TLC.  She’d left it behind as an affirmation that her trip wasn’t permanent and that she would return.  She had returned and the first thing she did was check the transmission fluid, test the brake line, and change the oil. 

Saying a silent prayer of thanks that she’d chosen a fairly safe neighborhood and made friendly with her neighbors, she gave her fenders and hubcaps a loving a polish and slapped a coat of wax over the car’s paint job.  This had been her ride since high school but it ran like new.  That was one of the perks that came with being damned good with her hands; she rarely wasted a dime on a repairman when she could fix something herself.  And, trust, there was a lot of stuff that Samantha Carter could fix.

She could jumpstart an F-16 faster than she could eject from one.  That was a quarter of what had made her so commendable in the air, as good a second seat as a first.  In time, her fellow pilots had learned that she was a gift to have as a wingman.  What she couldn’t be present to repair, she could talk the others through. It was a skill that had made her a golden goose during the Gulf War and she’d pretty much had her pick of assignments directly after.  She’d swung into Research and Development because it had the distinction of being an easy billet for her.  She’d known, even fresh out of conflict, that getting into Ops wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.  Her father could have pulled many a string to make it happen, but she hadn’t wanted her place there tainted with the stink of favoritism.  If she was chosen, she’d wanted to be chosen on her own, admittedly extraordinary, merits. So, she’d submitted her transfer request and forgotten about it.

Or, she’d tried to, anyhow.

In reality, Sam had been hooked from the moment she’d begun to research the teams at Peterson.  The Air Force liked to keep a close eye on their living, breathing killing machines, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that they were well-detailed within in the system. Nevertheless, she was a little shocked at how many firewalls and security measures she’d had to bypass to find out even the most basic information about Ops Team One.  They weren’t an easy bunch of men to research and their files were covered in so much electronic black ink that Sam had momentarily paused to see if her desktop was malfunctioning.

It wasn’t and strangely enough that fact begot the mystery she couldn’t ignore.  Other subtle, non-electronic inquiries had only piqued her curiosity even further.  These were men—and they were only men since this was apparently too mean a business for ladies—who put near as much fear in the hearts of their peers as they put grey hairs on the heads of their superiors.  But underneath both of their somewhat polar reactions, Sam discovered a strong vein of pride.  They did things they could never talk about and they did them well.  A couple of high-clearance medical reports she managed to finagle from friends at military hospitals in Kuwait and Germany just confirmed what she’d already begun to feel.  These men were the damned best this country had to offer and, since Sam was damned good at being the best herself, she’d wanted in.

She got her wish and there’d been no looking back.  All right, there’d been some looking back and some completely leaping back but no regrets.  Sam was Special Ops, specifically Ops Team One; serving and damn proud to under the command of Colonel Jack O’Neill, CO, and Major Charlie Kawalsky, XO.  She’d been gone for a hell of a long time in military terms and she’d had enough. It was time for their fourth to come home and for her to rejoin her boys.  She just hoped they were ready to see her.

More than anything, she just hoped the colonel was ready to deal with her, because things had to change.

~!~

            This was the first time they’d been alone together since she’d set foot on Peterson AFB two weeks ago.  She’d been avoiding him at first, unprepared to deal with any number of objections he might have about her return.  She’d come back too soon, she’d dallied—so to speak—against orders, and she hadn’t yet attended the counseling sessions she’d sworn to attend.  She’d done all this, not to spite him, but to take back control of herself, to take back control of her career.

            Counseling wasn’t going to fix what was broken without breaking a hell of a lot else.  The colonel had to understand and, yet, he’d insisted.  By launching her at a shrink, he’d risked the destruction of both their livelihoods.  He needed such a wakeup call and she had just the bucket of ice water for the job.

            She leaned against the door of his base quarters with affected ease.  She’d already done the sweating, nauseous, vomiting thing.  All that remained was anxiety and an empty feeling in her stomach.

            He stood opposite her at the inadequate dining table the base had provided for his use.  It waited like a convenient barrier he might put between them if things started to burn.  She couldn’t think of it as a bad call, really.

            “So, Captain, what’s so important that we couldn’t discuss it somewhere…other than my quarters?”  He stuck his hands in his pockets and spoke with his shoulders.  Body tense, brows furrowed, eyes cloudy.  He doesn’t like the direction this is going in.

            “It’s about….” She paused, reconsidering whether this conversation should ever happen, much less here.  Has to happen someday, her conscience reasoned.  Sam thought it was funny that it had finally decided to have an opinion on things.  “It’s Paraguay, sir.”

            After momentarily freezing, the colonel inclined his chin in understanding. “Ah, that.”

            Sam nodded, feeling her shoulders draw up protectively and firmly putting a stop to it before she morphed into a shelled turtle.  “Yes, sir, ‘that.’” 

She took a step away from the door to prove that some things remained constant.  There was probably nowhere in the world she was safer than with him, the other members of her team, or with her very own father.  That wasn’t where her doubts lay, or her apprehension.  It was simply—or complexly—this:

            “Because I’m Samantha Carter instead of just Sam Carter, sir, you made a decision that wasn’t necessarily the best one you could have made.”

The colonel was nonplussed. He shook his head and looked away, rejecting the very idea outright.  “Come on, Captain, you know me. You know I don’t subscribe to that crap.”  To the sexist notion that she was weaker due to her sex? Absolutely not, but that wasn’t what she cared about at the moment.

            “Maybe you think you don’t, sir, but just think about it.”  Already closer than she’d realized, she touched his hand. They both recoiled at once—for disparate causes.  She didn’t bother to ask why he pulled away; she could only be in one head at a time.  “If they’d had Kawalsky and you knew—you knew, sir, what they were planning to do to him.  Would you have stepped up and done it yourself or would you have shot your way out of there, consequences be damned?”  I can’t even say the words, how can I expect him to know what the hell I mean?

            The colonel puckered his lips, a response clearly already on his tongue, but he stopped and bit his bottom lip.  He was uneasy and that was his least favorite way to be.  It was her least favorite way to see him.

            “You’d have spent every bullet you had rather than…”  She blinked because this wasn’t Paraguay anymore and it wasn’t as if she was afraid of him.  Not really.  “You would have killed and risked both of your lives to spare his dignity.”  She took a shaky breath.  “You didn’t do that for me.”

            “I didn’t think…”

            She lifted an eyebrow wryly, challenging him to go farther with that idea.  “You didn’t think it would matter?”

            “Of course, I thought it would matter!” He clinched his tense shaking fingers into tense fists.
“Anything I do in the course of an operation matters. Especially when said operation has gone haywire. I’m the commanding officer. It matters.”

            She nodded. “Right.  It matters.”  Like I have to be told, sir.

            He couldn’t sit down and he wouldn’t pace. She knew him well enough to know he was fighting the impulse to run.  She was fighting the same one.  His pulse was racing in a syncopated rhythm with the vein at his temple.  It sucks to find out you aren’t who you thought you were, she reflected with some sympathy.

            “I never meant…”  He fumbled for his lucky hat only to find it wasn’t there.  He raked his fingers through his hair and Sam just wanted him to be still.  As angry as she should have been, she just wanted him to understand why she couldn’t move on.  “You are the best possible addition to this team.  After we lost Hank Boyd, I thought we’d never be operational again. Then, your file came up and I knew we’d found our fourth. I thought treating you like one of the boys was the answer to helping you fit in.”  He couldn’t keep his fingers out of his hair.  He looked like a little boy caught in a windstorm by now.  Probably feels like one, she thought.

            Sam lifted a shoulder in understanding.  “You weren’t wrong.  You—all of you—treated me like family from the first day.  You didn’t handle me with kid gloves. You didn’t go too easy. You covered me like anybody else, checked me like anyone else.  I appreciated it then, sir. I still do.”  She pursed her lips, wary of what she was about to say and knowing it had to be said.  “I never even realized you saw me any differently until that day. I don’t think I even realized that it had gone wrong until we were home.”

            She remembered hugging herself on one of the gurneys of Janet’s infirmary, feeling strangely different from when she’d been there only days before.  There was no particular pain; it certainly wasn’t the dirt.  She just knew that something had changed and could never go back to that way it was.  Janet had asked her about her run-in with the natives, something she’d learned about from the rest of the team, and Sam had requested a pregnancy test.

            Perhaps that was the day that Janet had first seen her differently, too.

            The test had come back negative then and weeks later, which had come as no surprise. The Air Force enforced strict birth control policies for its female active service members in combat units. Given that Sam was all but frontline, she never missed a contraceptive shot; couldn’t afford to miss one.  But it was the knowledge that she had been put in the position of having to ask that had knocked her for a loop.  She hadn’t really recovered yet.

            “I thought they would go away…if they thought I had everything under control.”  He puffed out his cheeks, staring bewildered at the floor.  If she hadn’t been standing between him and the door, she was certain he would have bolted already.

            Sam gestured for him to go on. She knew the story, knew his part in it. He’d infiltrated the guerillas drenched in mud, foliage, and war paint.  He spoke better Spanish than a number of the combatants and enough Paraguayan Guaraní, the national indigenous language, to pass muster in order to get close to the prisoners.  Ferretti had been hurt trying to have her back and Kawalsky was hot-footing him back to the recce site while the colonel retrieved her.

            She’d had the misfortune of being captured while female and he hadn’t thought anymore of it.  At this late date, they both probably wished he had.  She really wished he had.

            “You did have everything under control—me included.”  She couldn’t be gentle, that wasn’t a needle the Academy had taught her to thread.

            “Yeah,” he agreed, eyebrows rising in slow recognition.  “It didn’t—I didn’t… I thought they’d leave and I could stop.”  The bones of his hands popped and he unfurled his fingers, staring vacantly at them as though they belonged to someone else.  He turned his palms up to stare at each in turn.  “I didn’t stop,” he confessed, though she’d been there and she remembered maybe better than him.

            She swallowed back the sick thickness at her throat. It felt new. “They didn’t leave,” she reminded him.  It didn’t matter any more to him than it had to her.

            He tilted his head, eyes anywhere but on hers, anywhere but on her.  “They didn’t leave.”

            “You treated me differently than you would have treated a male member of this team, Colonel.” She was so petrified she was nearly at attention and it meant nothing to him.  She needed it to have meaning for him.

            “I did,” he conceded, still refusing to look at her, still enthralled with his hands.

            “That’s not going to happen again,” she declared unflinchingly.  Unlike the rest of what she had to say, this had gone without saying.  He’d never put her in a position like that again, or himself. He’d die first.  She already knew that, she was just struggling to be sure of it.

            The colonel expressed his acquiescence without saying a word.  He was pale, stiff.  If he’d fallen on his face, she’d have been neither surprised to find him unconscious nor shocked to see him shattered in pieces on the rug.  When the colonel did shaken, he went full throttle.

            “We’re a team, sir.  That’s how it’s going to be.  No more re-assing, no more dancing around it. This is what happened.”  She had worked her ass off for her career and for his respect. She wouldn’t have those things gone this easily.

            He inhaled slowly, appearing for all the world like a man on the verge.  Just slowly shaking his head, he started to put more distance between them.  He was rubbing his hands on his pants frantically and she didn’t wonder what he thought his skin was covered in.

“I, uh,…I raped you, forced you.”  The hesitation wasn’t his and the expression on his face she’d rather belonged to someone else, too.  She didn’t like the idea that she could make him break him, that anything involving her could hit him that hard.  More so, she didn’t like how badly she still hurt, too. “I didn’t even think.”

Sam began to move away herself.  The words had made reality Technicolor bright.  “I think it’s a bit more complicated than that, sir.”  She wanted to exhaust the issue, to talk it within an inch of death; it was the only way she could move on.

He scoffed, “How?”

She wrapped her arms protectively around herself.  “I could have fought you off.”

            “Don’t do that to yourself, Carter,” he told her warningly.  “You know I had the upper hand.  I had the power.”

“You did, but I still could have stopped you.”  Which was true, in any other situation, she was trained to take down someone attempting assault with a well-placed knee to groin or a quick, sharp grab and twist.

Her CO was having none of that self-delusion, which she thought funny, all things considered. 

“Not and lived, Sam,” he remarked, uncharacteristically addressing by her given name.  So, this is as bad as it feels. Quelle surprise.  “Those guys were waiting for you to resist.” He grunted, slamming his fists on the table in frustration. He cursed them roundly, in a few languages.

“They would have killed us both had they realized you weren’t one of them.”  The fact that he’d been wrong didn’t exempt the circumstances themselves from blame.  They’d been more than bad, they’d been the worst.

He rolled his shoulders, popped the vertebrae in his neck.  “I should have shot them.”

“Maybe.”  Yes, she wanted to say. Yes, yes, yes! But that wouldn’t have given either of them any peace and they needed peace more than complete truth.

“If you were just Sam Carter, I would have shot them,” he admitted.

“Probably,” she conceded.  That was a fact she’d already come to terms with.  Someday, she liked to think he would as well.

 “You should tell someone.”

She scoffed.  “You really must be out of it, sir, if you think that has any hope of making things better.”

He rubbed his fingers together absently.  “It may be the only thing that can.”

            “Sir-” She moved toward him.

            He moved as far from her as his limited living space allowed, i.e., not far.  “No! You need to amend your mission report and I’ll do the same.”  His vehemence was only matched by his intention to get as far away from her as humanly possible.

            She pretended that didn’t hurt.

            “Why would I do that, sir, if I left those events out in the first place? You knew I hadn’t included them and I know you didn’t. Why change our story all these months later?”

            He shifted uneasily. “Because I get it now, because I get what I did to you—and why—and somebody else should know.”  She found it hard to believe that he’d ever really been unaware.

            “What for? Why?”  She didn’t mean to yell, but she just wanted to shake him.  He couldn’t see past his own sudden, overwhelming self-loathing to protect either of them; so, it fell to her.

            “Because it was wrong!”  He rounded the table to get away from her and to the nearest exist.  Thankfully, she was smaller and accustomed to being fast.  The door wasn’t opened far enough to produce much of a bang when it slammed under her combined weight and force. She was grateful.  The last things they needed were worried SFs knocking at the door.  He rested his forehead against the door’s surface and squeezed his eyes tightly shut.  “It was wrong and I knew it was wrong.”

            She sighed, stopping alongside him to rest her head, too.  “I know you know that, sir.” She touched his shoulder. He stiffened and made to flee. She wouldn’t let go and he, following an edgy moment, surrendered.  “I’m not nearly as angry about what you did as why.”

            “You should be angry about both. You ought to be furious.”  He jerked out of her grasp and strode to the tiny kitchenette that he never used.  She hoped his stock of alcohol was approaching empty.

            “That’s the price you pay to do the job, sir,” she responded almost calmly.   She hated the idea that she should spend even more time being angry.  She couldn’t waste any more time feeling like this. “That’s the price I paid and I’m fine with that.” And it was true.  She was a soldier with a dangerous job. No one had promised her safety; the only promises of dignity she’d ever garnered were from her team. If those were promises she couldn’t trust…

            “Well, I’m not,” he shouted. “I’m not okay with it.”  He turned away, every muscle positively quivering with that truth.  “I knew I hurt you, Sam. I knew, but I’d hoped you’d understand. I’d hoped you’d know that I would never…not under normal circumstances. You’re a member of my team.  I’d take a bullet for you and I wouldn’t flinch.”  He scrubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, setting himself against the waist-height counter wearily.

            “I know that.”

            “How can you trust me? How have you kept from hauling off and slugging me for so long?”

            She raised her eyebrows sardonically.  “Restraint, sir. Great restraint.”  He went on as if she hadn’t spoken.

             “I knew and I just wanted to pretend it wasn’t…that.  I didn’t want it to be that.” He grasped his head in his hands, desperate unease drawn in every crease of his face.  “You’re a friend, Carter.  A good man doesn’t do this to his friends.”

            With that, Sam had finally had it up to here.  “Okay, that’s enough.”  She raked twitchy fingers through her short blonde hair, a habit she’d taken up since returning to base two days ago.

            “What?” He stared at her askance, his gaze dancing away from her each time she attempted to meet it, leaving her to wonder if he’d ever actually look at her again.

            “Stop this. I didn’t bring you here or tell you this to watch you tear yourself apart.  I wanted you to understand what happened so that it never happens again.”  A long way to go to make my point stick, she noted.

            He bit his lower lip and kicked at the floor as though it was the guilty party.  Sam smirked a bit; he really was one of her boys.  “It won’t.”

            She picked up on his tone and firmly placed herself in his personal space. She braced his head between her hands in order to look him directly in the eye.  “Whatever you’re thinking, let it go. I’m not leaving the team, and I’m not going back to Nellis.  I’m not pressing charges, I’m not holding this against you.  We go together: you, me, Lou, and Charlie.  We learn as we go.”  She brushed away some encroaching hair, spying clandestine strands of grey near his ears. “This doesn’t go beyond these walls because we’re the only ones who know—or need to know.  This is over now. Do you understand?”  She’d started this and she was finishing it.

            He skimmed her face with his ocean-deep look, leaving neither blemish nor beauty mark unabsorbed.  Sam knew she was flushing under his scrutiny and she didn’t care.  They lived this intimacy now, whether they wanted it or not.  Boundaries they had in spades, what they needed was understanding.  That was evidently what he found in her expression since he consented without exception.

            She clapped a hand on his shoulder.  He reciprocated hesitantly.  She laid her free hand right on top of his.  With him in his slouch, they were about eye to eye; it was about the first time they’d ever been. In this battlefield, like any other, she could read what he couldn’t say.

            Her taking one step closer to him made him want to take the same step back.  But since he couldn’t, he pulled her to him and she let him.  He dug his fingers into the fabric of her shirt; she clung to him just as tenaciously, relaxing some as he tucked his face into the crook of her neck in unerring imitation of the way he’d always done.

            “I’m sorry, Carter,” the colonel whispered against her skin, the one crucial thing he hadn’t already said before.  He drew her even closer if that were possible.

            Her shrug was hampered by arms, though she knew he felt it regardless.  “It was a necessary evil, sir.”  No sense in seeing it any other way now.  She didn’t think it important to mention that this little exercise hadn’t exactly corrected her warped sense of propriety.  He still felt so much more like her partner in an illicit affair than just her commanding officer.  Not that she could tell him that, or ever would. The slim positive difference, nonetheless, was that he was starting to feel like a friend again and that hadn’t been true in a while. Maybe, in time, that was all she’d feel.

            “Well, necessary evils have necessary consequences, Captain.  I made a bad call-” They weren’t going down this road again, she decided.

            “You made the only call you could have, sir.”

            “Doesn’t make it any easier.”

            “No, sir,” she commiserated.  She had mixed-up dreams enough to prove it.  That didn’t stop her from holding on tighter.

            This had hurt them, it had definitely hurt her, but she hoped they’d be stronger now. Their team was better intact than it had ever been in pieces and she hoped that would ever be true.    For now, though, the glue that bonded them felt stronger than ever.

            One more nightmare put to rest, she thought. Maybe now she could sleep.

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