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These go along with "Year Two." Read Year One and Year Two first.
Title: Canning
Fandom: SG-1 Burn!Verse
Setting: Just after Autumn in “Year Two,” only I seriously mangled the timeline. *cough*Just ignore it*cough.*
Rating: PG
Notes: Let’s call this…Year 2.1. This is a scene originally meant for “Year Two” that didn’t quite make the cut.
Disclaimer: Stargate SG-1 belongs to other people. This makes me sad, but they let me play around with their universe, so overall I’m pretty content.
“That’s the last of the garden,” Jack said, dropping the basket on the counter and crowding Sam out of the way so he could wash his hands at the sink.
“Hey!” Sam exclaimed. “I need to drain this or we won’t have dinner tonight.” She held a pot of pasta—their last store-bought—over the sink, the steam rising from it and dissipating under the working kitchen light.
“Two seconds,” Jack said, and finished, drying his hands on Sam’s shirt. She sighed in mock exasperation, but drained the pasta and poured a little olive oil in the pot.
Jack lifted the lid on the other pot on the stove to check it. The smell of tomatoes, peppers, onions, and even some meat wafted out.
“Looks good.”
“I didn’t touch it, so it should,” Sam said pointedly.
“Good girl,” Jack said, and lightly kissed her.
“Hmm.”
They set up the table, their dinners having become a tradition over the last few months—partly just for something to do, and partly because it was a challenge to make something normal out of their dwindling supplies.
Jack turned off the kitchen light and the generator. It was much easier to cook with electric light, but they couldn’t afford to keep the generator on for too long. Sam lit a candle, shaking the match out. They sat down and dished up.
“This is pretty good,” Jack said, reveling in the spicy sweet taste of the peppers. Sam nodded her agreement, closing her eyes in bliss.
“All we need is some wine and some French bread,” she added after a moment.
Jack raised a finger and wagged it at her. “Don’t start. You know we haven’t had any wine for three months.”
“I know.” She sighed and picked up her fork again, dropping her eyes to her plate.
Jack gave her a speculative look.
“Tomorrow we’ll finish preserving the vegetables.”
“God, I never thought I’d be canning,” Sam said.
Jack smirked. “Have to admit, it’s wouldn’t have been one of the talents I picked you for.”
“Well, it’s not something they teach at the academy, sir.”
Jack started at the use of ‘sir’ from Sam. “Been a while.”
Sam dropped her fork onto her empty plate.
“It has.”
She stood up and Jack got the impression she wasn’t talking about titles or wine anymore. He swallowed the last bite of his dinner compulsively; it still shocked him that this was okay, that that look in Sam’s eyes, the one that said, “You’re mine, sir”—only without the sir—was allowed.
He set his own fork down. “You know, day after tomorrow, after we finish the canning, what do you say we take some of the extra into whatever serves as the nearest town these days and see if we can’t scrounge up a bottle of wine?”
She tugged at his hand and he let her pull him up.
“Whatever you say, sir.”
They were heading for the stairs. Jack grabbed the candle before they left it burning on the kitchen table. “I was deluding myself to think you always thought my orders were worth following, wasn’t I?”
“I’d never imply such a thing to my commanding officer.”
Jack shut the door at the base of the stairs behind them. “Uh huh.”
Title: The Notebooks
Fandom: SG-1, Burn!Verse
Time: Set during Year Two
Category: Romance
Rating: PG
Notes: I really, really wanted to include this in “Year Two,” but it didn’t fit, for oh so many reasons. I guess you’d say this is “Year 2.3,” or something like that.
Disclaimer: Money? What money? I’m just having fun.
It was December when he found her stash of notebooks, page after page filled with sketches (of a sort—she’d never been talented in that respect), equations, columns of names, Stargate addresses.
There were seven notebooks, college ruled, all meticulously dated.
He was surprised he hadn’t seen her using them—he’d thought she spent her time…hell, what had he thought she’d been doing? Besides the obvious survival stuff. And reading. They both had a lot of time for reading.
She must have waited until he was outside—or asleep.
He flipped idly through the top notebook. In between equations and diagrams were large sections of text. Multi-syllabic words that made his brain ache just trying to sound them out. He thought he recognized some of the objects that used to be in her lab from the pictures.
Damn. Why had she hidden this from him?
He looked at the dates. The first notebook was the one on the bottom, and it had a black cover. It began a few months after the Burn started.
It was, more importantly, just a few days after the second group of bandits. The ones they didn’t manage to run off.
He flipped through the pages of the first notebook, noticing that the first few were taken up by names on the left-hand side of the page. The right-hand side was almost entirely blank. He got chills as he scanned the list, recognizing names from Sam’s conversations and the SGC. By a few names she’d written in “Deceased,” and by others she’d written “Off-world, status unknown.” Everyone else had either nothing—presumably the ones she didn’t know about—or a date written by their name—when she’d last heard from them. He was on the list, with several crossed out words by his name. The first one said, simply, “Alive,” and the last, “Minnesota.”
The very last name on the list was Sam’s own. There was no word written next to it.
After the last page of names, there was a jumbled few pages that seemed to have something to do with the Burn. Jack suspected not even Sam could make anything of the mess of equations and drawings that littered these pages. The last page like this had a giant slash mark through it, and after that there was one completely blank page, and then a page filled with small, neat writing.
“Dear Jack,” it began, and Jack snapped the book closed, knowing he’d already invaded Sam’s privacy enough for one day. His fingers itched to reopen the notebook, but he ignored the desire, having finally learned his lesson of sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. Notebooks didn’t seem as formidable as alien repositories of knowledge, but in his opinion, one could never be too careful.
He debated putting the books back where he’d found them, but instead sighed and gathered them up. She’d know something was up as soon as she saw his face, anyway.
He went downstairs, Sam almost but not quite lifting her head at the sound of the door closing behind him, her face buried in a book—one of the thick technical ones she’d picked up on their last supply trip.
“Hey,” he said heavily, setting the notebooks down on the table in front of her and taking a seat on the chair next to her couch. “We need to talk.”
She looked up, foggy still from her involvement with the information in the heavy volume. She took in his face, and the notebooks in front of her, and he saw her brain finally settle in the here and now.
“Shit,” she said. Jack could almost see her go through her list of possible explanations. He loved watching her think, the process clear and visible on her face.
He expected her to be angry with him, but instead of glaring at him or going silent, she sighed, shut her eyes, and looked very guilty.
“Did you…look at any of it?”
“The first twenty pages or so.”
She made a noise in the back of her throat, somewhere between amusement and panic. “Did you read the letter?”
He didn’t even try to feign ignorance. “Nope. Saw my name, but thought I better make sure you weren’t going to kill me first.”
A smile flickered across her face. “I always knew you were smarter than you let on.” She picked up the first notebook, flipped to the page. “You should read it, I think.” She handed it to him, settled back into the couch cushions, closed her eyes.
He read.
“Dear Jack,
By the time you see this letter, I’ll probably be halfway to the SGC. You’re going to kill me, I know, and you’re going to wonder why I didn’t tell you or take you with me. Or at least leave the damn note on the table.
I’m sorry.
It’s funny, because I always thought you were the one with the largest hero complex. But you seem to be…content here in a way I just can’t. Like the screwed-up world no longer has any bearing on your life. I dream at night about every name on my list, how I failed them, and I need to go do something about it. Maybe just find them, I don’t know.
I can hear you telling me it’s not my fault. Bullshit. I can trace the lines of cause and effect all the way back to my own misguided and egotistical desire to open the ‘gate at all costs. I’m a scientist, not a historian, but even I should have known there are some doors better left closed. I’ve proved it over and over; with the ‘gate, with the Replicators and the Red Sun, and I hope I’ve finally learned my lesson.
Oh, shit, Jack. I don’t know how to write this goodbye. I can’t tell you what you’ve meant to me these many years. Thank you for saving me, time and time again.
Love,
Sam”
He kept the notebook open and looked at Sam, who still had her eyes closed, her head resting against the top of the couch. He fingered the paper.
“What changed your mind?”
At that, she smiled. “I kept putting it off—for one reason or another—until the car.”
“I knew that was a good move.” He realized something. “You were planning on leaving before I got back.”
She nodded.
“Really good move.” He tried to keep his voice light, but failed.
Sam opened her eyes. “When you drove up in that damn car, I knew I should laugh, but I couldn’t. I realized it wasn’t me who’d broken the world, but the world that had broken me.”
“Philosophical.”
They grinned wryly at each other.
Jack sobered. “God, Sam, it would’ve killed me.”
She swallowed, said quietly, “Yeah, well, I know that now…”
“Because of the car,” he said, feigning stubborn pride.
She sighed. “Yes, Jack. Because of the damn car.”
He grinned and leaned over, giving her a small kiss, just barely catching the corner of her mouth.
He settled back in his seat, paying no attention to the amused expression she wore.
He said, “You wanna do something? We have chess, Monopoly, and…oh look! Chess!”
An expression of distaste turned her mouth down. Neutrally, she said, “Actually, I was just in the middle of this chapter. If you don’t mind, I’d like to finish it.”
“If you must. Anything else interesting in these?” he said, grabbing the black notebook again.
“Well, there are some of my ideas about the spatial mechanics of—“
“Ah!” Jack held up a hand. “I don’t know why I ask. Suffice to say—besides the potentially Nobel-winning stuff--is there anything else I should know about?”
He almost caught the flicker of annoyance he knew had to be there when he interrupted her scientific babble. One day she’d break, and he was looking forward to that argument, if only because he didn’t think he’d ever seen Sam really angry with him.
“You might stumble across something. I wrote a few things down here and there.”
He flipped through a few pages while Sam picked up her book again. After the third non-committal noise from Jack, Sam snapped her book shut.
“Okay! We can play a game. But not Monopoly. And no gloating when you beat me.”
He loved that he could beat her at chess.
“I make no promises.”
“If you don’t gloat, I might consider having sex with you tonight.”
Now there was an idea that needed some serious consideration.
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Date: 2007-01-05 11:45 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-01-08 03:56 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-01-06 04:20 am (UTC)From:Got more? Because I hate for it to end here.
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Date: 2007-01-08 03:58 pm (UTC)From:Thanks!
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Date: 2007-01-08 03:59 pm (UTC)From:As for cuddly apocafic...I don't really know how it works. It shouldn't, I know. But then, the fluffy love tribbles of doom ate my angst a long time ago.