It starts with little things: looks, touches (his knee against hers when they're sitting next to each other, pretending not to notice when his hand brushes hers accidentally) and sometimes words but it's nothing concrete enough to be evidence, nothing tangible. But in time it shifts and then suddenly there's this man in her personal space, holding her against him, holding on longer than he needs to. There's no playing games now, no toying with the possibilities. This is real. This is them.
It happens in a series of events, and reads like notes in their mission reports. Monday: Bumped into the Colonel again. Noticed he rested his hand against my shoulder longer than he needed to. Tuesday: Threw the colonel on the floor of the locker room in a fit of virus induced passion. Wednesday: Saw the Colonel kiss an alternate version of myself in another reality.
It's not an ordinary story, and it ends before it begins and then it ends again. In their line of work they play with time and jump across galaxies, so it was it was never going to be a fairytale despite the existence of heroes and villains (and one or two fair maidens which she chooses to forget).
Like all good stories, it starts at the beginning, and it's by no fault of her own because she's trying hard not to be the kind of woman that begins stories like that. She tries hard but she can't help noticing he's sexy as hell, so she hopes, for their own good, that she's the kind of woman he doesn't want to start stories with. She's a good officer, does everything she's supposed to, but she never could carry a pretence for too long so the facade of indifference has to go and she ends up pinning her hopes on her lack of success with rugged, cavalier military types who spend more time around men than women.
She's sensible, dedicated and smart and she can shoot the right molar out of a smiling Goa'uld at fifty yards. She's the original 'all this and brains too' girl but she doesn't expect the hero with the dry wit to appreciate that, not even when he's dying on the floor of an ice cavern, light years (it was light years to them) from home and hope. She knew then, as she knows now, that he was looking for an anchor and she believed at the time that she couldn't be that for anyone. So she let him close his eyes and make believe, thinking it was the last memory either of them was going to have, and everyone deserves to have that last memory the way they want it.
Only they didn't die. They lived and they fought another proverbial day, and then there they are, at this moment where he's trying too hard to pretend that a reality out there where they're engaged is the craziest thing he's ever heard. It's probably true but she can't help thinking he's been caught in the middle of doing something he shouldn't. This might have been when she knew but it wasn't the start.
It starts at the beginning, and she'll always date it from there, but there's a point where it gets distracted, or more properly, misled. It's not her fault, not anything she did intentionally, but with Jolinar she's two people at once and there isn't an Officer's manual for that sort of thing. Jolinar confuses her, makes her think she's no longer able to put things in perspective. There's that second voice in her head that remembers things that never happened, remembers words she never said. She thinks she can't be trusted to feel.
But she does, and that's a little unfair.
Jolinar, and everything that comes with her is a diversion but eventually she become part of a larger story, part of a rhythm. The ritual of them becomes common practice, a backwards and forwards of half gestures and long looks, and instances that stand apart like the time he kissed her and it wasn't her but it was. She thinks she should have said something then, done something during the whole double-Carter incident, that would have let him know it wasn't so bad.
However, the ritual demands constancy, an ebb and flow to events. She avoids him, tells him it's okay when he tries to explain, tells herself he was just humouring 'her' (not her) and it's nothing more than O'Neill's good nature that lets him kiss her image in front of her (was he really surprised to know that she'd seen?). She's not good at lying, especially to herself, so they both know and try to forget - bury it under work and the rigid formality of the Air Force.
This is how it goes. This is how it unfolds, how it might have unfolded for years if not for the inevitability of finding themselves in circumstances that force the issue. Eventually it comes down to this: him, her and a wall between them. She's going to die and he's going to die saving her.
In that moment everything gets turned on its head. No lying, no avoiding, no pretending and no way of taking back those wasted years when she wasn't with him and she could have been.
Now she'll never know.
In that moment she has perspective. It forces her to make rash promises: I'll give it all up. I'll retire, I'll transfer, just give me one more chance.
Someone hears her and it's one more goodbye made prematurely. They live, return home and fall into routine: lie about how you feel, avoid one another, pretend it never happened.
Lie. Avoid. Pretend. It's second nature to them, so easy that they forget it's a lie until Anise puts them under the Zatarc detector's scrutiny, and even then the clock counts down to zero before she remembers.
All these things, should have made a difference, should have changed things irrevocably, and in some interpretations of events, they did.
But she always knew it was over when it was out. She buried it, swore that this time she would move on. Finally.
It ends there. It should have ended there.
*
She spends most Saturday nights at home, and she hasn't had sex since she stepped through the gate (possibly longer but who is counting?) but no one can ever accuse her of leading a dull life. Which is why it isn't really a surprise when she arrives at the morning's briefing and the Colonel telling her they're caught in a time loop that only he and Teal'c can remember. She is, however, amazed to hear them speak an ancient language not even Daniel can understand and to see that the Colonel is now an expert in geomagnetic storms.
What also amazes her is that he's smiling. He's got a goofy smile plastered across his face and he's looking right at her. It goes away before she gets to question him about it, but the next morning, in the commissary, it's back.
It causes her to think. By this stage, she knows enough about P4X639 to know he's had ample opportunity to do something worth smiling about, and she's pretty sure she wants to know what that something was.
She looks for signs first, clues to something more. He gives little away: whistles more than usual, walks with a spring in his step, musses Daniel hair when he gets the opportunity. He's in a good mood. It sends her imagination into overdrive.
And then it hits her. What if she and he.
It's ridiculous, and for a while she clings to an inane belief that if something happened she'd know because it was her and her body and surely, somewhere deep in her psyche there's a part of her that would remember.
And maybe there is. She searches her mind for images, tries to picture events as they might have occurred, but she only succeeds in conjuring fantasy. What was it like? Was it wild and abandoned, full of pent up passion and long withheld desire? Was it slow and sensual, taking place somewhere quiet and dark? Was it playful? Did he laugh? Did she cry?
Was it incredible? Was it unforgettable?
Where was it? The locker room? No, they couldn't risk that kind of exposure. There was always one of the supply rooms - she could short circuit command codes or something so that no one could interrupt them. Just like her to do something incredibly geeky in the throes of passion.
Did he tell her he loved her?
The imagination is relentless in its pursuit of the fantastic, and she becomes certain that it is the fantastic she is pursuing. Her need to know replaces her casual curiosity and she begins to look for a space, somewhere to raise the question she has to ask.
She finds it or it finds her. She chances to encounter him alone in the locker room. She was about to leave.
She enters, interrupts him while his hand is mid air, stretching. He lowers it when he sees her.
"Carter, " he says.
She nods. "Sir."
She probably gave everything away when she walked in, or at least looked suspicious enough to put him on alert. He's already got his eyebrows up, expecting something. Wary.
"Something I can do for you, Carter?"
She takes a breath. Takes another. "There's no easy way to say this so I'll just come right out and say it," She waits anyway. Waits for an emergency, an unscheduled offworld activation, an act of god, something to prevent her from making an inevitable fool of herself. "Sir, with all due respect, while you were stuck in the time loop, did you - did we do anything?"
He reacts in a way that is familiar. He looks at her in that way he does when she's explaining wormhole physics or quantum theory, like she's spoken another language and he hasn't a clue what she's just said.
"Anything?"
"Well." She presses her hands together, wishes she never started on this, wishes she'd just kept walking past the locker room and left him in there alone with his curious look and raised eyebrows and that goddamn smile on his face. "Something - in particular."
"Something like.?" There's something in his voice. Something she can't place. Her heart races. Maybe she was right? Maybe, maybe, maybe.
"Sex?" Her voice is barely audible. For a moment she thinks he may not have heard. But then she sees his face and he's genuinely surprised and she's wrong, oh god, she was wrong!
"Sex," he says.
"It's just that." "Carter!" He's bewildered. "What in the world made you think we might have had sex?!"
"In the commissary this morning, you were smiling."
"It was good oatmeal!"
There's something in his voice, something in the way he throws his hands out to the side as if he's trying a little too hard to be outraged. Maybe she's wrong but she's still suspicious.
And no oatmeal is that good. "Sir, you looked right at me." There's something. She knows there is.
He lies. "I didn't mean to."
She sits down next to him, places her elbows on her knees and clasps her hands together, peering at him through hair that sits too often in her eyes.
"Sir - there's something you should tell me isn't there?"
He looks at her, his face unreadable. The corners of his mouth go up slightly and then turn down again. He goes to speak, stops himself.
Eventually he shakes his head. "You know, I was so busy trying to figure it out - trying to work out how I could kiss you and not have to deal with the fall out. It never occurred to me we could."
"You kissed me?" A slight inclination of his head and she knows it's true. A kiss. That's all. Her mind leap frogs. A kiss. Just a kiss. "How?"
He shrugs. "You were in the control room, I gave my resignation to Hammond, waited for the right moment, and then."
"And what did I do?"
He grins that grin she saw on his face in the commissary.
"I didn't give you a lot of options," he says.
Not that he'd need to. She wonders if she knew, knew from everything he was saying that they'd just jump back in the loop and she'd forget, or whether she took a chance, let herself go with the feeling.
"In the control room? In front of everyone?"
"Yeah."
Not that anyone would remember. "What about Teal'c?"
"I like him a lot but we're just friends." He can't help himself sometimes.
"I mean, was he there?"
"No, but - well I had to tell someone and who else was going to understand?"
"I see." Teal'c knew. She tries to remember whether he looked at her differently, fired a knowing glance in her direction. Unlikely. The secret is probably well kept with Teal'c.
"Carter, it was a strange, strange situation. I mean, you gotta understand." He waves his hand for emphasis. "I was going a little crazy. And then Daniel said something about this great opportunity and I thought, well when am I going to get another chance?"
"And it was just once?"
He nods. "The last loop."
She considers this, considers that he took the equivalent of three months to reach a point where he could kiss her and not worry that this loop would be the last and he'd be left with his retirement and his bewildered 2IC.
He was careful. He was downright calculating.
She thinks she should be angry, but she finds herself wondering about this - this kiss. What was it like? Where did he put his hands? Where did she put hers? Was her pressed against her?
God, what if he was hard? What if she could feel it?
She flushes, blood running for her cheeks. She feels suddenly warm.
"Carter?" He has that look on his face again: eyebrows raised, blank expression.
"What was it like?"
He looks away momentarily, down at the floor, to the other side of the room. He shifts in his position slightly. "Nice," he says, finally.
"Nice." Non-committal. Frustrating. What did she expect? A re-enactment of the event in lurid detail? Not his style.
She follows his gaze to the floor and then they are both sitting there, staring at the ground, lost in what was and what might have been.
She feels empty, suddenly bereft as though something that was hers, something that was her right, has been ripped from her leaving her wanting. The memory is gone, never to be recovered.
"It's strange - I was there, it was me, and I can't remember it, I won't ever remember it." She shakes her head. It's not fair.
"For what it's worth, Carter, I'm sorry. I didn't - I should have thought it through."
"No Sir - that's not it." She couldn't really say it, say that the only reason it was wrong was because she couldn't smile about it afterwards like he did. And she wanted that - wanted that goofy smile on her face and the memory of him against her. She wanted that too. "I just wish I could have been there." She doesn't know why she says it, but she does, and it's out there now where she can't take it back.
"Carter."
She laughs. It sounds hollow. "I'm sorry, it's silly."
He touches her arm. "It's not silly."
His hand doesn't move, just rests against her forearm. And then he moves the back of his fingers against her arm, back and forth, back and forth, slowly. His touch is light and her skin goosefleshes.
She finds herself watching the movement of his hand, finds it oddly fascinating, as if these are parts of them disconnected from their bodies, acting on their own volition.
She wonders how to react, whether to move, and then he's leaning forward, hands reaching up to cup her face, thumb brushing her neck below her ear lobe, kissing her.
He kisses her, his mouth on hers, the pressure of lips against her own. She feels his tongue brush her teeth, his breath against hers.
She shifts in her seat so that he can press himself against her, heartbeat against heartbeat and both beating fast. She touches his ribs, feels his chest rise and fall under his t-shirt.
And then all too quickly he backs away, his hands releasing her slowly, unwilling.
"It was like that," he says. His voice is softer than usual, apologetic. "But it wasn't really you, because you were never there. So maybe it never happened."
And she knows he doesn't want to say it but she hears in those words their unspoken agreement: Everything back to normal. Lie. Avoid. Pretend.
She gets up and leaves him there, leaves him in the place where she encountered him, half way between thinking and acting.
And once again she leaves everything within the confines of the walls.
*
Endings are convenient and there are times when she feels the need to reach for a conclusion in the same way she strives for meaning and reason in the events that surround them. If she chooses she can bookend the story with a kiss and turn it into the all-singing, all-dancing finale that comes before the curtain. If nothing else, she can say that was that and the story ends on a high rather than the continuing torment of never really knowing where she stands.
But this is her life and she wakes up in the morning after the curtain closes and she comes to work to see his face on every tomorrow. And if proof is needed for the inevitability of things then surely it's in this, this constant return to the beginning and everything after.
He looks at her today, looks at her tomorrow and all the days after, looks at her, calls her Carter and says, "yes sir, you betcha" with that smile on his face.
This is the way it is. This is real. This is them.
End
*
Author's notes: "And I cynically, cynically say, well it's that way, surprise, surprise, surprise." - The Sundays, "Here's Where the Story Ends"
Thanks for reading.
DISCLAIMER: All publicly recognisable characters, settings, etc, are the property of their respective owners. Any original characters and plots are the property of the author. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended. ... [ read more ]