Occasionally she sees apparitions. Little pictures that appear from nowhere, transposed where they ought to be but where they aren't. Luminescent text and brilliant images flicker against dark and shattered computer screens. Light comes from empty fixtures. In the halls, men and women sometimes meet her eyes, smile or raise a hand in greeting. Some of them are complete strangers. Others are dead and buried.
These phantasms never last long. Seconds at most. But when one is struggling to hold on to reason, mere seconds of madness can seem like hours.
She tries to shame herself into sanity. Others have lost as she has. Husbands, wives, friends, teammates - sometimes even children - and they all share in the loss of human civilization as they know it, perhaps the most terrible burden of all. Yes, they all have their cross to bear. She isn't special in that regard.
But she is, because she sees things. And for other reasons as well.
She feels terribly out of the loop. She knows that things are happening and happening with great speed and urgency, but she's fuzzy on the details and puzzled as how to contribute. This is a military base, after all, and she's only a civilian.
Charlie, being Charlie, does what he can to keep her informed. With the rest of his team gone - with... with his commanding officer gone - he's working directly under the General now. He's very busy; he doesn't have much time but he makes it anyway. "The Stargate will be up and running any time now," he informs, standing across from her in a dim hallway, airmen sometimes passing between them on their various ways. "The, um, those aliens are sending a ship out to the Beta site, to let everyone know that they can unbury the Stargate and come home."
Home. It's a funny concept. One week ago this base, this city and this planet were all unquestionably part of home. Now she feels like a stranger in a strange land. This isn't home. Home was a thriving, functional place. Home was a world constantly struggling, fighting with itself, but doing okay. Home was a place where she had a husband, a house, the hope of family and future and love. Now the future seems more like an awful, inevitable thing than a bright, beckoning light. Her house holds no appeal, her family is in tatters, and any love will carry a bitter aftertaste simply because it is not his.
"Asgard," she tells Charlie, her voice faint and lethargic in her own ears. "They're called the Asgard."
He nods but she can tell from his unfocused eyes and absent expression that he doesn't care about their names; he cares about what they can do for Earth.
And they can do some amazing things. They brought her home in mere minutes, after all, and so many things were accomplished during that trip. The captain had told her a great deal about the state of the universe and a few of the wonders that could not be reached through the Stargate system.
And then, of course, they had resurrected General Hammond.
If only...
She realizes that Charlie is no longer speaking, that in fact he's watching her quizzically, arms resting against the butt of his MP5. Ever since their return, Charlie and his weapon have been inseparable. "Sam," he begins solemnly, "It's okay. CJ's going to be okay."
CJ. Jesus, she's forgotten about CJ. She closes her eyes, cold with guilt and a new surge of grief. Grief crushes hope, demolishes logic, and for one dark moment she loses all semblance of optimism. CJ won't be okay. None of them will be okay ever again. "I don't know what I'm going to tell him," she confides, panic pressing in on her lungs and squeezing her heart.
But Charlie, being Charlie, misses both her meaning and what she imagines is a feral expression upon her face. "The General told him," he reminds her. "He's had a week to process it..."
His tone is gentle and so are his eyes. There've been times he's looked at her like that and she's wanted to hug him. And sometimes she did. Jack never minded. After all, Charlie knew her husband years before they even met; if it hadn't been for Charlie they never would have made it to the first date, and as such she's grateful...
But right now grateful isn't enough. The gentle tone and eyes seem almost pitying, almost inappropriate for the moment. Anger springs up into her chest and dislodges that all-consuming grief for one painful, beautiful instant. Words tumble from her lips. "Dammit, I've had a week to process it, and I can't! I keep... he's fifteen years old, Charlie, and now both of his parents are gone, and when he comes home, I have to tell him that we buried his father this morning... or at least..." - her voice cracks and she hates it " - we buried what was left."
Charlie stares at his boots for a few long seconds, his mouth a tight line and his eyes hard. Embarrassed by her outburst, she stares at them too. They're shiny... unnaturally shiny. Nicely polished boots, tidily laced boots seem incongruous with the damaged corridors and sporadic lighting. Maybe that's part of being military, she thinks: remembering to buff your boots even when the world has fallen apart around you.
At length he clears his throat softly, meeting her eyes once more. "What the, uh, the Asgard did for General Hammond..." He trails off, expression uncertain but at least cleared of pity.
She nods minutely, interpreting the continued conversation as a sort of truce. "Thor said... well, it came up during the trip back to Earth. After this long and... after that much damage to the body... they couldn't bring him back."
He tilts his head, scratches his temple and gives a rueful, resigned smile. "I figured as much. I just thought, you know, maybe."
An anxious shiver trembles through her but she presses on, driven. "Thor said all they'd be able to do is clone him, using DNA... clone a new body and age it. Apparently, that's how they exist themselves. But that's because they're able to transfer their consciousness from the old body to the new."
For the first time, he lets his hands fall away from his gun. "Jack's consciousness isn't readily available."
Jack's consciousness, she thinks, is gone. His heart, his soul, his memories, everything he knew - which amounted to a lot, no matter what he liked to say - and every feeling he ever had... they're all gone. Every bit as fragile and seemingly insubstantial as flesh and bone. "Without that transference," she continues with admirable self-control, "any new body is a blank slate. Like a... like a baby. He wouldn't know how to do things, who we are... who he is. He'd have to relearn everything all over again."
For Charlie this is a matter of absolutes. His demeanor changes in an instant once posed with such a vile wrong. "Jack wouldn't want that," he says with conviction and more than a little disgust.
"No," she answers. "No, he wouldn't."
* * *
Her lab, like most places on the base, has been reduced to rubble, tens of thousands of dollars of technology and equipment charred and blasted and in some cases hideously mangled. She can't imagine that anyone would have sought refuge or mounted some kind of defense here, so she figures it was simply senseless vandalism on the part of the Jaffa. Destroying all those shiny surfaces and blinking lights must have been a great stress reliever.
She stands next to the table in the center of the room. A large chunk has been taken out of one corner, the edges rough and dangerously sharp, but the table itself is still there. She thinks of all the hours she spent bent over its surface, mesmerized by something under her microscope or a new calculation on her laptop. There had been weeks where she'd spent more time within these four walls than anywhere else... certainly more time than she'd spent at home. She'd been a bona fide recluse, and she hadn't minded. She hadn't been looking for friendship. She certainly hadn't been looking for love.
But somehow, even with his team's schedule as busy as it was, even with the responsibilities of being Hammond's right hand man and the even more tremendous duty of raising a teenaged son, he'd noticed her. And somehow, despite her best efforts to not get entangled with another military man, love had found her.
He'd proposed in this very room. Standing next to this very table.
She touches the dusty surface, running her hand across it. The motion of her palm leaves a clean black path in its wake, and for a second, mere seconds, she sees things. Apparitions. Papers litter the unmarred desk. Papers filled with numbers, crowded with diagrams. Warm light shines from a small, long-necked lamp, and next to the lamp sits a small pot of purple flowers.
"Sam?"
She jerks away from and out of the mirage, whirling towards the voice in the doorway.
For an instant the ghosts stay with her - she sees blinking lights, functional machinery - but then they're gone. The room is dark and cold, and CJ stands in the doorway.
She heard the klaxons sounding, knew the Gate had been reopened and that those who had escaped to the off world base had returned. She should have sought him out, but instead she had come here to remember. Ashamed all over again, she offers him a watery smile. "Hi CJ. How... how was the Beta site?"
Still standing in the shadowed doorway, he pushes his hands into the pockets of his unadorned BDU's and shrugs. "Too sunny," is his odd reply. She can't see his face or decipher anything from his tone of voice. He could be devastated, depressed, furious or on the verge of tears... she can't tell.
Absently rubbing her fingers together, feeling the particles of dust rolling under her skin, she tries again. "I heard you gave Doctor Fraiser some trouble during the evacuation." She actually only knows this second-hand; Charlie had mentioned it as they'd fled to the mirror what felt like an eon ago. Fraiser, CJ and the others had gotten out with only seconds to spare.
"Yeah, well, I didn't like leaving you behind," is the muted response, said softly and quickly, for any expression of caring and concern is an automatic liability for a teenager. Then, before she can answer, he rushes on: "So that mirror thing worked, huh?"
The mirror. Good boy. He knows where her comfort level lies. "Yeah. Yeah, it did. The people there helped us contact the Asgard, and they scared off the Goa'uld." She forces a smile. "It must have been a big surprise when the Asgard showed up."
CJ says nothing for a long time, such a long time that her strained smile eventually fades. She opens her mouth to say something - something, she's not sure what - but he preempts her. His voice is much more telling now.
"Was Dad there?" he asks.
She wants to close her eyes, to turn away from him, to indulge in her private pain for a moment or more. God, yes honey, your Dad was there, he was there, only it wasn't really him at all, and what would he have done if I had told him about you? She wants to be weak because weak is easy, but CJ's never seen her like that before and she won't let this be the first time. Again the fake smile is plastered to her face. "He was. Me too. Pretty funny, isn't it?"
Hands still pushed deep into his pockets, CJ slowly steps out of the shadows and into the sphere of light created by the lantern on the counter. He doesn’t look at her, doesn’t give any indication that he finds anything funny, and doesn’t ask if there was another him on the other side of the mirror. She knows he must be thinking of the incident with his father’s gun, the fact that if the bullet had struck two inches to the left he would have likely died. He knows that, and so he doesn’t ask.
She wonders if there’s a universe out there where father and son are alive, together, happy. Whether or not she’s in the picture, whether Jack was with her or still with Sara, wouldn’t make any difference. She’d give a lot for CJ to be able to seek his father’s advice, for Jack to be able to watch his son become a man. She’d give a lot.
For a moment she studies his downcast expression and is stunned by how he resembles Jack – both her husband and the other Jack O’Neill, of course – in the slope of his blow, the curve of his jaw. His eyes are blue and his hair blonde – Sara’s legacy – but in every other way he is his father’s son. She loves him because of that, and also because of who he is. Holding onto that love, holding it tight, she tells him, “Charles… I’m so sorry.”
He looks at her at last, startled by the use of his given name. To nearly everyone he is CJ. Charlie, after all, is Charlie Kawalsky and has been since before he was born. Charles is his grandfather’s name, and John – technically – his father’s. By the time he passes through adolescence he will no doubt be calling himself something else, but being his stepmother she has the authority to pick and choose between monikers according to the situation. And right now, she needs him to be an adult. She needs him to be Charles Jonathon O’Neill for just a little while.
“Don’t be sorry,” he says promptly, looking older than his fifteen years – and understandably so. Death ages those who spend too much time in his company. She sees it in the eyes of all the survivors: that ancient, haunted look. The fact that she sees it in CJ as well leaves her incredibly sad, but the boy’s words are sure and even, a familiar note of command in his voice. “I’m not mad at you or anything, Sam. I mean, that’d be stupid. We’re kind of… the whole family now.” Almost as an afterthought, he shrugs.
She nods, feeling tears prickling at the back of her eyes. In a world that was even slightly fair, Sara would still be alive, but fate – in the form of a tired driver, half-asleep at the wheel – is not fair and not kind. CJ lost his mother almost two years ago, and now his father has been taken from him as well. “We kind of are,” she agrees.
Either embarrassed by the emotion in her voice or recognizing it as an echo of his own, CJ coughs and starts edging towards the door again. “I’m going to go find Cassie,” he tells her, and for a second she doesn’t see that terrible ghostliness in his eyes. She nods, as thought he was asking her permission, and maybe he was, because he doesn’t turn and leave the room until she’s given her silent assent.
She watches his receding back and thinks about motherhood.
* * *
She had never told the other Jack about his son being alive in her dimension. At first, preoccupied as she had been, she simply hadn’t thought of it. The mere fact that he was alive had thrown her. Sure, she’d known in her mind that the world they escaped to would be different from the world they’d left behind, but she hadn’t accepted it in her heart. It just didn’t seem possible that she could have lost him… but that he could still be living somewhere else, living another life, completely oblivious to everything he was missing. She had known there was a chance that he would be missing his son, as well – statistically speaking – but she hadn’t wanted to consider it. She loves that kid, and even a perfect world isn’t truly perfect without CJ in it.
Afterwards, after the other Hammond had approved their stay, she had finally thought about it… but discarded the notion as being far too cruel. From all reports CJ had gone – however unwillingly – to the Beta Site with Janet, Jonas and Cassie. He was safe, and to tell Jack would serve to either tempt him through the mirror in search of his lost son or fill him with resentment. And she hadn’t wanted that.
She had simply wanted… him. Jack O’Neill. Her husband… or the man who would have been if this perfect world hadn’t been so screwed up. Maybe she was kidding herself, maybe it would have been even harder if the two of them had been involved in this universe, but she convinced herself otherwise. She’d reasoned: if her other self had known this Jack just as long as she had known hers… if that woman truly felt nothing… well, regulations were no excuse. She’d had her chance. She didn’t deserve another. She didn’t deserve him.
Getting him into bed with her had actually been ridiculously easy, even though it hadn’t been her express goal at the time. It had simply happened, initiated by the giving and receiving of comfort, as it had been when she’d gone to be with him after his ex-wife’s death. This time, however, she had been the one to cry, and it was his arms that had gone awkwardly around her. An uncomfortable embrace that had relaxed, then tightened, and she’d been all but draped against him when she’d raised her head and felt his lips against hers. She’d realized that, if she and Charlie were being allowed to stay… she didn’t have to lose her husband after all.
She’d whispered in his hear, running her hands over the familiar texture of his BDU's, told him how much she wanted him, how much she needed him.
Her Jack had loved being needed. This one had been no different.
Later, aware of the guard on the other side of the unlocked door, she’d gently pressed him to call her Samantha, not Carter, and they had compromised at Sam. It had been… different. Not better or worse - just different - and not like being with a completely new partner either; if anything, it had felt like being with a familiar lover after a long period of separation. But she'd told herself that in time it would be familiar again. Familiar and wonderful.
Even later, her palms against his lower back, feeling the patterns of scar tissue as she pulled him closer, she found it easy to believe that the last few days had been as insubstantial as a nightmare. His face, his voice, his hands on her body – they would make the nightmare go away.
Yet she can not so easily forget the look on his face afterwards, the naked guilt, the pain in his eyes as he blindly reached for his clothes. Although she does not and cannot regret that time, that special, borrowed time, she now feels sympathy for the world she left behind. She came away from this entire experience with two precious gifts, and what did that other reality get in return? How long will that Jack and the other her be walking on eggshells around each other? How long will that Hammond be suspicious, wondering if perhaps some things are consistent across dimensions? How long before Jack will be able to call his second in command ‘Sam’ without reliving that sting of betrayal, that lash of pain?
Perhaps it will do them good. Or perhaps it will destroy any chance they had, and she’s merely trying to mollify her conscience.
She vows to be a good mother.
* * *
She’s brushing her hair one night when there’s a knock on her door.
The brush was found in rubble; it belonged to another woman, one with long dark hair, and the handle is charred. Yet brushing her hair is such a habit for her, and sometimes it’s calming. She can still remember her mother brushing and coifing her daughter’s hair on her wedding day. The cancer had allowed Patricia Carter only eight more months, not nearly enough time, but the simple act of hair brushing makes her memory seem clearer.
All the same, using the dead woman’s brush brings back more guilt and nausea than memories. Maybe she’ll try a shorter style. Maybe much shorter.
“It’s open,” she calls.
It’s Charlie, this time without his gun. For the first time since their return his shirt is slightly askew, his wild hair comical. He looks weary, anxious, and the reason is all too obvious. Clearing debris means finding more corpses. The former is hard on the body, the latter hard on the soul. She smiles tentatively at him, but his somber expression and questing eyes don’t change. He stares at her as though searching for something… some difference.
“Charlie?” she asks, suddenly nervous. “What’s going on?”
He comes further into the room, closing the door behind him. Increasingly concerned, she sets down the brush and begins to rise. When he speaks, she finds herself frozen in a half-standing, half-sitting position. His voice is cool. “I just wanted to offer my congratulations, Sam.”
She sits heavily, indignant heat flushing her face. “Fraiser told you?” she accuses.
Charlie sighs, finally looking away. “Don’t be mad at her,” he says firmly. “She wasn’t gossiping, she just figured that you had already told us.” He pauses, shifting his weight. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
She sighs as well, looking down at her lap briefly. It’s hard to stay mad at him, especially when he looks so damned hurt. “I don’t know,” she softly lies. “I guess I’ve been trying to understand it myself. I wanted to tell CJ, and you and Hammond… but everyone’s been so busy and I just didn’t know what to say…”
Letting her voice fade away, she looks up through a thin veil of hair as Charlie leans back against the closed door. His eyes are fixed on some distant point and his thoughts, if she had to wager, are fixed on his best friend. She predicts his question seconds before it comes. “Whose is it?”
Brushing her hair out of her face, she answers quickly but – she hopes – calmly. “Jack’s.” Maybe she should be offended that he’s questioning her fidelity, and maybe she should find his prying upsetting, but she feels neither of these things. She’s too busy feeling guilt and relief, horror and hope.
Charlie nods mutely, eyes still unfocused, and he asks another question. “Which one?”
Which one.
She looks away, stung, not by outrage but by the fact that she just doesn’t know. “It doesn’t matter,” she decides aloud. She could have denied the implied accusation – that she has been unfaithful to her husband with another version of himself – but it’s not worth it. Charlie’s right, but so is she. It doesn’t matter. DNA is DNA, and theirs was identical.
She waits patiently, watching her friend’s conflicted expression, aware of how well he understands her. He knows that this wasn’t sex for the sake of sex, that there were enough mitigating circumstances to send any lawyer into paroxysms of delight. And she’s sure he knows that there’s no easy way to tell, one way or the other, which reality the father was from. In the end, it doesn’t really matter.
“No,” he says at length. “I guess it doesn’t.”
Standing, she brushes her hair back and tries to look content. “I know it’s not going to be easy,” she tells him. “This isn’t the kind of world anyone wants to bring a child into. But… I want this so much, Charlie. Jack wanted it too. To make a family… for CJ to have a brother…”
Charlie’s eyes flicker with amusement. “A brother, huh? You think it’s a boy?”
Quaking inside but forcing her contentedness into outright happiness, she nods. “Yeah. I guess I do.”
* * *
As soon as he had eliminated any possible resistance and taken out most of the major cities from orbit, Apophis had naturally turned his deadly attention to the SGA, blasting it from space. His intention hadn’t been to destroy the base; he wanted the Stargate intact and functional. But he also had wanted to shake, scare, and immobilize them before sending in his troops.
Trees and other foliage, concrete and metal gates, cars and any unfortunate pedestrians remaining outside had all been torn apart, vaporized by the onslaught.
What remains are scorched splinters, smoking ruins that have been neatly piled to one side… and dirt. A great deal of dirt.
What was once a parking lot is now a graveyard.
All of the graves are marked one way or another, but not all of those markers have names. Sometimes identification was simply impossible. Sometimes there just wasn’t much left. There are bodies without placards… and also placards without bodies, owing to the terrible arsenal the Goa’uld had at their disposal.
It’s bright, cold and breezy. Rubbing her arms against the chill, squinting against a cold sun, she makes her way to the southwest corner of the makeshift cemetery. Her steps are slow, careful, because this is sacred ground. As she nears the newly-sculpted tree line she can faintly hear a man softly crying within the black-green shadows, but she leaves him to his grief.
In this corner is a particular mound of earth shaded by the fronds of a few plucky trees. The diffused sunlight reflects off a small rectangle pressed flush to the ground; she had taken the sign from his office door to use as a temporary marker. Besides the crying man in the woods, there are a few others out paying their respects this afternoon, but none in her area of the graveyard. She lowers herself to the ground next to that particular mound of earth, places her hands in her lap, and stares down at them.
“Hi, Jack,” she says finally. She wonders if she should apologize for not having any words to say at the brief ceremony days before, or for not having visited sooner. But she knows that if Jack were here, sitting across from her in the dirt, he would wave those platitudes away and tell her – nicely – to get to the point. It was his way. So she gets to the point.
“I’m pregnant,” she says, and the power of language makes it more real than it’s been at any point previously. The words literally take her breath away, and she’s forced to pause and catch it before continuing. “Doctor Fraiser ran the tests a couple days ago. Once main power was restored they gave everyone checkups, she said I was looking sick, I… mentioned the possibility… Well, she let it slip to Charlie, which I really didn’t mind – I’m mean, it’s Charlie – but I thought I should tell you before anyone else.” A wind gusts, the trees whisper, and she shivers. “Maybe it’s stupid coming out here, talking to you like this. I never did it when my dad or mom died… never have. I mean, it’s not like you’re a patient in a coma… you’re gone.”
She tentatively lays her right hand over her stomach.
“But you’re not.”
This corner of the cemetery is shadowed, but the majority of the expanse is barren, sunlit. She understands what CJ meant when he described the Beta Site as ‘too sunny’. The weather ought to have the good grace to be appropriate to the situation. Eye-watering blue skies were meant for triumph, not for pain and loss.
Not for confessions.
Her left hand combs absently through the dirt as she speaks. “I went through the Gate. I met the Asgard and asked them to help us. Most of them… less than enthusiastic about the idea, but there was one...”
His name had been Thor, and he had said a lot of things to the other aliens that she hadn’t exactly understood. Things about keeping closer tabs on Tau’ri development. About protecting the defenseless. About something called ‘the fifth race’.
“We were taken immediately to his ship… transported, I suppose. The trip didn’t take long, but… Well, I asked him if they knew the Nox, if they could do what you said the Nox can do… bring people back from the dead. I told him about all the people who had been killed… about you. Thor said it was… difficult. Human physiology, I mean. He said they could revive people who had just recently been killed, provided there wasn’t much damage, and he actually did save Hammond.” She smiles dimly at the memory. “Anything more traumatic and the Asgard usually turn to cloning.”
She licks her lips to wet them, to stall and think of the right words to tell the dead man. “I wish I could say it was Thor’s idea, Jack. He did bring up cloning and everything associated with it… but I was the one who asked if it could be done. I told him there could be… samples of your DNA still in my body.” She bows her head as though breaking eye contact with an invisible man, as thought ashamed, and continues, “I didn’t want them to build you a new body if it wouldn’t be… complete. And it wouldn’t – it wouldn’t have your thoughts or your memories or your knowledge or anything. But all I could think was that it wasn’t fair, that you deserved more time, another chance…”
And the only way he could have another chance – another real chance – would be if he could have another life. The child she carries, then, isn’t this Jack’s child or that Jack’s child…
“It’s you,” she whispers, the hand on her belly tightening. “He’s you.”
She closes her eyes and imagines how hard it will be, and knows that nothing she can imagine can even be close to reality. It will never be the same and never can be. She’ll have to trade in one kind of love for another. She’ll have to live with the burden of what she’s done, constantly questioning whether it was right, forever second-guessing herself as she watches him struggle through the new world they – through the reopening of the Stargate – helped to create. And then there will be questions even more impossible to answer: questions about the spirit, about the soul, about what it means to make a copy of someone. The Asgard see no moral problems with what they do, but they clone in order to survive. This is different.
And the difference will haunt her.
But she’ll have a child. CJ will have a brother. Charlie Kawalsky can never be a husband to her, but he can be a father to this boy. And Jack, while never knowing who he is or how he was created, will have another chance.
Maybe some day it will come out. As this boy grows someone might find physical – even emotional or mental – similarities between him and his ‘father’ too remarkable to be coincidence. Perhaps one day everyone will learn of what she’s done. But one day is a long way away, and there are still plenty of things to worry about now. Namely her sanity, and how much she misses Jack O’Neill.
The breeze has died. The trees no longer whisper and the man hidden in their shadows has either calmed himself or left the area. Her head suddenly feels very heavy and she rests it in her dirty left hand. Tears threaten, but she fights them away and thinks of motherhood. Presently, she wipes her forehead clean and climbs to her feet, walking across sacred ground as she returns to the base. She needs to tell CJ.
As she passes what used to be the main checkpoint, something tells her to stop, to face the sun. Puzzled, she turns… and sees things.
A sea of cars parked in neat rows, glittering in the afternoon sun. Uniformed men and women walking jauntily to and fro. Smiles. Hands raised in greeting. Life.
Someone touches her shoulder, and she looks up into Jack’s face.
“It’s okay,” he says, and then he’s gone.
* * *
Walking past the main checkpoint, she stumbles over her own feet. It’s another one of those damned dizzy spells, the ones she’s been having for days now, the reason Janet kept her on base for five whole days – “just in case”. Even now, she’s only being allowed out of the SGC, because the spells have been subsiding, leading her to believe that they were some kind of aftereffect of Entropic Cascade Failure. It could even be that the other Sam Carter is experiencing something similar in her reality, either at random intervals or whenever their paths cross.
She faces the parking lot and thinks, uneasily, what that other Sam could be looking at right now… in her reality.
Someone touches her shoulder, and she looks up into Colonel O’Neill’s face. “It’s okay,” he says.
She frowns, wondering if her lack of equilibrium is affecting her hearing. “What?”
He raises his eyebrows quizzically. “I said, ‘you okay?’. First I thought you were going to do a faceplant, and just now you were a million miles away.” As he speaks his eyes focus on his hand, and now he removes it, looking… odd. “Are you sure Fraiser should be letting you out?”
She rolls her eyes. “More than sure, sir. It’s…” She tries to think of a way to put this tactfully. “It’s been a long week.”
“It sure has, Carter,” he says. His smile is unconvincing and his voice strained, but she can’t think of how to comment on either condition without getting into a decidedly messy conversation.
Some things can’t be put into words, she thinks, and some things just shouldn’t be. It's better for everyone that way.
Together they walk towards the parking lot in companionable silence; he doesn’t offer to drive her home, for which she’s thankful. They part ways with a nod and perfunctory farewell: “See you Monday, sir.” “You bet.”
As she unlocks and opens her car door, something tells her to stop, to turn around. Puzzled, she turns… and from across the lot she finds the Colonel standing next to his own vehicle. Staring in her direction. Staring after her… until he realizes she’s seen him, and then he leaps behind the wheel with uncommon swiftness. And then he’s gone.
The End