The Strangest Thing: Sam/Hammond fic
May. 1st, 2004 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wisdomeagleRating: R
Pairing: Sam/Hammond
Spoilers: Better if you've seen Secrets and Tok'ra
Season: 5
Warnings: Ooh, boy. Feelings of the Jack/Sam variety. Angst and then some. Cross-gen. More than you probably wanted to know about George Hammond.
Summary: A conglomeration of moments and memories with a side of weirded-out teammates and some unsettled Electra issues.
Notes: For the Behind Every Good Woman Rare-Het Challenge. Feedback, including critical response and "What the fuck were you smoking to write this pairing??" would be adored.
Disclaimer: Created by others, taken out to play. Sam Carter and George Hammond belong to each other. Really.
Between us
twenty years of age
between your lips and my lips
when they meet and stay
the years collapse
the glass of a whole life shatters.
-Nizar Qabbani
"Well, this is... awkward," says Colonel O'Neill.
"That's, um, interesting," says Daniel.
"I too find it strange, MajorCarter," says Teal'c.
But it isn't so strange that Sam ended up with her commanding officer. Daddy issues, says that voice in the back of her head that insists she's made a mistake. And it isn't so strange that she's violating all the rules. A rule-follower like Sam, who taught herself a proper salute when she was three, was bound to get whiplash eventually. And it isn't so strange that she decided to freefall now and that he was there to catch her. It isn't strange that she finds herself at General Hammond's house during most of her downtime. Not strange at all.
And she supposes it isn't really strange that the rest of her team just doesn't understand. They've never understood her, didn't know her father before he became Selmak, didn't seen her growing up. God, they are all so blind. Living their lives, their tragedies, and here is Sam Carter, with her weekend Heather Has Two Mommies play dates with Janet and Cassie and her late-night motorcycle rides and her trips up to Canada to go fly-fishing by herself.
She doesn't understand her teammates either. She doesn't understand their star-crossed tragedy makeshift lives built out of splintered dreams. She knows that this is the second-best alternative for all of them, but her first choice. Sam excels while the rest of them muddle through. Colonel O'Neill can't negotiate, Daniel doesn't understand the military, and Teal'c doesn't understand earth customs, but Sam is good at everything.
Some things about her teammates are obvious though. Daniel is an archeologist. Teal'c doesn't drink beer. The colonel loves kids.
So yes, she does understand that Colonel O'Neill spends time with Tessa and Kayla the way she spends time with Mark's kids, the way they all spend time with Cassie. So she wasn't really surprised when he showed up at George's door last Saturday with his arms full of art supplies for the girls. He was very surprised to see her. They hadn't been doing anything, just helping the girls make cookies, but the colonel had made a lucky guess or two and deduced the truth. Sam had a big apron on that said, "Kiss Me, I'm Cooking," and George had one that said, "CHEF," and Tessa's was blue with handprints on it and Kayla's said "Grandpa's Littlest Helper." They were all covered in cookie dough and there was a speck of flour on Kayla's nose.
"Jack," said George, and he wasn't at all startled. "Come in." He said it with such smooth precision that Sam couldn't have added her own greeting. She did stand at attention for the colonel though, until he gave her a Look and muttered, "At ease, Major." She couldn't still the butterfly effect in her stomach though. A butterfly flaps its wings in Sam Carter's stomach when her CO finds out about her indiscretions and thirty years later Kayla is in therapy because when she was eight, her granddaddy's lover dropped the cookie sheet, saluted everyone in sight, and left the house, leaving her coat behind, still wearing her apron.
The colonel wants to talk about it. He summoned them all up to the lake, had Sam and Daniel search the whole place for NID bugs twice while Teal'c and he started the barbecue, and now flips burgers relentlessly while the rest of them stand around and eat the carrot sticks that Sam brought. They are very busy feeling awkward.
"Sam's sleeping with Hammond," says the colonel--Jack, now, because this is personal.
Teal'c raises an eyebrow. Daniel looks like he's been stung by a hornet.
"It's true," she says simply.
And this summons their litany. Awkward, interesting, strange.
It is strange. Sam has been doing something so strange that even her teammates, her teammates who watch The Simpsons and Ricki Lake and The History Channel on their downtime, her friends who understand Jello wrestling and drink too much coffee and beer and once pooled their money to buy her a pedicure kit but could not, between the three of them, ever remember her birthday--her friends don't understand. No one says anything for the longest time.
Sam thinks about the feel of George's fringe of gray hair when she embraces him, about his jowls and his deep, low laughter and his matter-of-fact dismissal of her when she's in his office on official business.
She drove to his house the first time ostensibly to see the girls, and then, somehow, she can't even remember how, the girls weren't there one Wednesday night when they were both off-duty, and she'd driven over anyhow. He called her by her name that night, and they started talking about life before, about her father, but they stopped, because suddenly the knowledge that he was her father's contemporary seemed very, very strange. In the silence, she rested her head against his shoulder and pretended it was someone else's. The next week, she didn't bother pretending.
"Why?" asks Daniel, not judging yet, gathering all the facts before he pronounces his verdict.
Because he trusts me to make the right decisions in the lab, Sam thinks. Because he never tells me to get out of bed and go home until I'm ready. Because at the Mountain, he's still my commanding officer (Colonel O'Neill would never do that. Colonel O'Neill would become Jack so quickly that she would never respect him again. Jack would wink at her outrageously in the middle of battle and would make emotional decisions that left the rest of the team in peril. Jack would care too much.) Because he kisses all the science away. Because he's got a big dick, dammit. She sniggers to herself.
"What?" asks Jack, with suspicious jealousy.
"Nothing," says Sam. "I just am, Daniel. It's one of those things."
"I'll understand when I'm older?" asks Daniel, and Jack bites back a chortle.
And Sam sees sand pouring over Sha're's grave. She sees the flowers that they bought in Cairo and took to Daniel's parents' grave, seven miles out. She sees Shifu vanishing through the Stargate, but she can't see behind Daniel's eyes, and he keeps secrets. Daniel is old enough to understand, but too old.
She is, after all, just a little girl, removing the pink streamers from the handlebars of her bicycle, balancing a washer in her hand and testing the weight before she uses it to attach a headboard to her bed, running to meet Daddy and Uncle George, who are home on leave. Even when they are making love, she cannot help thinking of him in those days, when he had more hair and a wife, before he grew old and serious and daring.
She wishes everyone could wake up with George Hammond just once. When he wakes up, he grunts and sighs and rolls over and when he finds Sam naked next to him, he smiles at her, and she shatters. He touches her like she's all there is, then crawls out of bed and brings her orange juice in a blue glass that his wife bought. Sam wonders what it would be like if Lydia were still alive, if they would rent motel rooms and always carry condoms instead of lounging in George's huge king size bed and kissing lazily all day.
"Sam?" says Daniel, gently, and Sam knows she's zoning badly. Teal'c's hand on her shoulder hardly feels real.
"Is it really so strange?"
"You're having highly illegal sex with someone your father's age. Strange," says Jack, "does not even begin to cover it."
When Sam finally figured out how to save the world the last time, she wanted to collapse with exhaustion, not crunch equations for five hours. Jack said, "You deserve a breather, Major. You did well. I'm proud of you," and Sam blushed and stammered. Then George said, "Finish the job, then take three days' leave, Major." And her face reverted to white and she smiled confidently and the world was saved, after all.
Her teammates are still looking at her anxiously, waiting for her to come up with the answers the way she always does, with cunning visual aids and nasty-looking equations to back her up. She wants to take the magic markers Colonel O'Neill brought to George's house and draw stick figure images of a blonde woman with a blue body and a man with no hair sitting together and thinking about the past (Christmases with the Hammond and Carter clans and piano lessons paid for and a beaming smile at Academy graduation and Lydia and Martouf) and the present (candlelit dinners and striped comforters and slow kisses and granddaughters playing tag and mission reports, regular like the rainfall on P7X-386) but never the future. She doesn't have the words to tell them.
"I can't really explain it," she says.
"You are in love with General Hammond?" asks Teal'c. He's probably thinking that the Tau'ri are very weird.
She isn't in love with General Hammond, though. She's in love with George, and the difference is a smile's width and tastes like Christmas morning.
"Not really." They look at her expectantly, all of them, waiting for the punch line, maybe. And it's the strangest thing, but Sam doesn't really care what happens next, what they think of her now that they know, or even what will happen when they get back to Colorado. She doesn't care whether she sleeps with George again, whether they both get dishonorable discharge, whether she ever again discovers that George loves backrubs and has a foot fetish.
"I'm going home," she says, walking away from angry Jack, bewildered Daniel, puzzled Teal'c. "I think you can figure me out better without me here."
squicky, but yay!
Date: 2004-05-01 06:34 pm (UTC)The team's attempt to understand Sam parallels nicely with Sam's inability (or unwillingness) to understand herself. The way she denies the strangeness of her situation, the way she has reasons for her behavior but doesn't seem to have thought it through is such a departure from what might normally be expected of her that it does make sense that she's sleeping with Hammond.
My immediate thought was, "Oh, okay, Sam's just rebelling against something or other, acting abnormally because she feels pressured, etc.," but there is more than that in this story. There's a certain simplistic sweetness in her relationship with George that (for me) puts the squickiness in perspective. Yes, it is odd, it is vaguely disturbing, it runs around snogging Freud -- and yet there is a level of stability in George that it is easy to imagine Sam needing. The idea of Sam as a child is good, an interesting dissociation between her private self and her professional self that lends credibility to the relationship.
Damn you for making me read Sam/Hammond and like it. (:
Re: squicky, but yay!
Date: 2004-05-01 06:48 pm (UTC)I win!
There's a certain simplistic sweetness in her relationship with George that (for me) puts the squickiness in perspective.
Good. I was hoping for that... I'm glad I managed to make it seem reasonable yet still not okay.
Thanks for the feedback. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-01 07:14 pm (UTC)I can't say that I had really considered Sam/George before, but this works.
I have thought about George/Walter, though. ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-01 07:17 pm (UTC)Glad you liked, and welcome to the f-list!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-03 08:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-02 12:18 am (UTC)I'm having a hard time saying this, because Sam/Hammond? What were you thinking??? And the worst thing is, now that I've read it, it isn't so strange anymore. You ruin me. IN a good way, of course. :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-02 07:27 am (UTC)Glad you liked it.
My evil plot has succeeded. *laughs evilly*
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-02 10:51 am (UTC)What the fuck were you smoking?!
Ok, now that that's out of the way...
*headdeks*
I'm trying to get to something approaching rational comments, but the pairing just seems to get in the way.
:p
All right, well written, characters make sense (except for Hammond, a bit. Why's he doing this? Doesn't belong in this fic, but...anyway) but the pairing...first Jack/Kinsey, now this. The mental immages...may I have a lobotomy now?
:p
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-02 12:39 pm (UTC)Meh. Phone call tonight maybe? Shouldn't, but God help me I need one. Bad day. Meh.
Anyhow... scribbled a little Hammond POV in Islam the other day. Don't know if I can make it work or not. *shrug*
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-02 02:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-03 10:04 am (UTC)Can you still see the comments?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-03 07:26 pm (UTC):p
Erm...not really. Can see mine, can't see yours.
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Date: 2004-05-03 01:05 am (UTC)Okay.
This was *gah* for me. This was fucking oh my god *GUH*. This was more than I can express.
God, nobody does it like you do it. Crack-pairing aside, you make me *believe*. You make me *GET* it.
And this:
and thirty years later Kayla is in therapy because when she was eight, her granddaddy's lover dropped the cookie sheet, saluted everyone in sight, and left the house, leaving her coat behind, still wearing her apron.
The hysterical laughing coming from somewhere a little southwest of you, say *Kentucky* - that's *me*. Bawling because this was just too good, too funny, and too true.
The thing that's so great about this fic is that you *get* Sam. You grok her and you grok Hammond and you understand how sometimes she's the odd person out on SG-1.
That sometimes, she's this well-put together woman straddled with three broken men who lack a fundamental understanding of her life, who she is, and what she does.
She is, after all, just a little girl, removing the pink streamers from the handlebars of her bicycle, balancing a washer in her hand and testing the weight before she uses it to attach a headboard to her bed, running to meet Daddy and Uncle George, who are home on leave.
*shudder*.
Why do you do THIS to me? Just have this perfect little image of child!Sam, of how it made her who she is.
*shiver*
I'm telling you, this is a nearly perfect fic. *gah*
I don't know what to feel, because sometimes it's so beautiful and perfect and then sometimes it makes me angry, because I want Jack, Daniel, and Teal'c to be okay with it, to accept it, to learn to accept Sam, but I know they can't.
Because it's all too right.
Because it makes that scene in "Revelations" just that much more painfully, terribly real and wonderful and meaningful. Because it's Hammond that went to her and when she follows behind him, I can see for a moment that Sam is *his* girl, that that while she cares about everyone on SG-1, there's something between them that isn't there with anyone else.
Your mind isn't supposed to be able to think impossible thoughts, but damn, you make it so real that I'm never gonna look at the entire Stargate universe the same.
Goes without saying that this fic is getting recced like five minutes ago.
Geezus Ari, WHY DO YOU DO THIS TO ME.
*SCREAMS*
And during finals, too!
- Meg
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-03 09:39 am (UTC)& I am ridiculously glad to have made you believe this pairing. It will be my goal to make you believe in all my crack pairings. *gets out list*
I have a lot of writing to do.
<3
RE
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-04 10:22 am (UTC)It's been said, but this line? Bangarang.
I love the Sam Carter who's the normal one among SG-1, but has issues all her own. The only thing I had my doubts about--and this may be me misreading your story--was that I thought Jack wouldn't have been the one to actually tell Teal'c and Daniel; he'd let Carter do it. Although now I'm thinking that maybe his whole control-freak tendency might have been driving there. And maybe I'm wrong.
Anyway--thoroughly enjoyable story. Well done. I hope you don't mind me friending you.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-05-04 03:10 pm (UTC)That's a good point about Jack not telling... in retrospect, he would certainly call Carter on it, but not bring it before the team... Teal'c's son is the example that's springing to mind.
I friended you back: welcome. :D
Different, but good
Date: 2004-05-16 12:04 pm (UTC)I'm delighted that you gave Sam a whole laundry basket of issues - something that isn't often seen. Well, at least not by me, since I don't real Jack/Sam fic.
I like her introspection and the reactions of rest of the team. You've done a really nice job with this - very well written with an excellent job at getting into her head.
Courser
Re: Different, but good
Date: 2004-05-17 08:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-23 09:37 pm (UTC)She isn't in love with General Hammond, though. She's in love with George, and the difference is a smile's width and tastes like Christmas morning.
I love how Sam can separate out the two, but the others can't because they all pull too much of their personal problems into their work. I love how the others are so baffled, but they still check for bugs because they protect each other no matter how much they disagree with someone's actions. I love that Sam knows that Jack's real issue is jealousy, but she can recognize why a relationship with him would never work while it COULD work with George. What I really love, however, is how you've shown that Sam is a bit of an outsider--which she absolutely is--but the others have never really picked up on that before and still don't really get it even now.
I'd LOVE to see a companion piece to this, to see Hammond's take on how he and Sam fit together. Hell, I'd actually just like to see more of them in any case.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-06-24 12:29 am (UTC)It's been a long time since I wrote this but I am still fond of it...
but they still check for bugs because they protect each other no matter how much they disagree with someone's actions.
That's something I hadn't really noticed, or at least, I hadn't put it into words, but that's so true.
is how you've shown that Sam is a bit of an outsider--which she absolutely is--but the others have never really picked up on that before and still don't really get it even now.
Yes. Yes EXACTLY.
I love this pairing a lot... and should write more of it! I should!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-04 08:54 pm (UTC)This is a really good story, and I wish people would write more Sam fic. (Good Sam-fic, I mean. Not the millions of fics in which she suddenly turns into a ditzy blond). I especially like the way you made the relationship plausible, in a way that I could understand. I do, however, think some things are still unresolved...
In other words, I want more. Lots More.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-06 02:08 am (UTC)No indeed. :p
Thanks for reading, and I'm glad you liked it. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-19 05:11 pm (UTC)Right, obligations out of the way I can get down to actually reveiwing.
Love this paragraph, becuase for the rest of them it was their second-best, and they've all given something up, but she hasn't and this is what she's wanted to do all her life.
Other people have said they liked this line and I agree because it is really good but, for some reason, I want to read a follow up fic to this, from Kayla's POV, while she's in therapy thirty years later. I know, I know, I should listen when my friends tell me I need therapy...
SWEET!!!
So, to sum it up, I LOVE this story, want to read more in this universe, and will be putting it in the Recs portion of my memories.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-19 05:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-10-19 05:21 pm (UTC)Am so glad you loved it! :)
(no subject)
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