Aftermath

By Bren Ren

-o-o-o

Sam awoke with a start.

It had been a long time since she’d had one of those dreams.

“Resigning? Why?”

“So I can do this.”

She shook her head to clear the voices from her dream. Then she sighed. Her memory, she realized. She rolled over to her side to face her sleeping husband.

She decided to take a moment to savor the sight of him, as it was all too rare these days. He looked so peaceful in his sleep that she almost didn’t have the heart to wake him. She closed her eyes.

His face flashed before her as it came crashing down into hers, with lips that were as warm as they were strong and sure. Her own mouth, after a moment of frozen surprise, suddenly responded with a mind of its own, opening beneath his… beneath him as he bent her backward in a low dip—

Then a white flash and nothing. She opened her eyes and looked at Jack.

He was on his side facing her, one arm curled beneath his head, the other draped lazily over her torso. Sam raised her hand up to gently stroke his cheek. When he didn’t stir, she decided to try another angle of attack. She kissed him.

Sure enough, he was kissing her back momentarily, albeit sleepily.

“Mmm, what’s that for?”

“I had that dream again,” she told him.

“What dream?” he muttered.

“That dream you promised you’d tell me all about,” Sam prodded.

Jack blinked a couple times while he wracked his sleepy brain. He had no idea what she was talking about.

“The time loop dream,” she said after a few beats.

Jack’s eyes slowly widened, then snapped shut as the full memories assailed him. “That dream.”

“It starts with you kissing me in the control room, then it gets a little fuzzy after that. I think it’s time you told me what really happened,” she said firmly.

Jack rolled onto his back with a sigh. He brought his hands up to rub his eyes, giving himself a moment to put the pieces of memory together in the right order so that he could tell her the story properly.

“I tried several times to kiss you before the control room. That moment was the culmination of much effort, and no small amount of pain on my part.” He paused when Sam frowned. “I couldn’t get it right, you’d get defensive, shall we say, and you usually wound up hitting me. Well, slapping mostly. You got in a good right hook, once though,” he mused, rubbing his jaw at the memory.”

“I don’t have any memory of that,” she said gently. “You must have fumbled it pretty badly to get me to actually hit you.”

“You have no idea,” Jack said dryly. “It finally, after I don’t know how many loops, dawned on me that perhaps I could get rid of the one thing that was standing between us. So I resigned right before I kissed you.”

“That I remember,” Sam said, recalling her shock as well. “You didn’t give me any time to think, just to react.”

“And you did, finally, react in my favor.” Jack had that smug, slightly proud grin on his face; the one that Sam was sure had prompted her memories in the first place.

Her curiosity as to what Jack had gotten up to while stuck in a time loop for over three months consumed her, until she found herself dreaming about Jack for several weeks. It took her that long to work up the courage to talk to him about it.

She shook her head with a smile. She didn’t have to worry about that much any more. He was her husband, had been for nearly two years. One of the first things they agreed to work on together was their communication. And since they were so rarely together in a physical sense these days, it made the time they did have together so much more precious; they found themselves sharing everything.

At Sam’s smile, Jack continued, in full story-teller mode now. “I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that you’d finally responded, that you kissed me back, so I decided to risk a little more. That’s when I dragged you into a storage closet, told you about the time loop, and kissed you for all I was worth. And once again, to my surprise, it actually worked. You kissed me back.”

“Well, of course I did,” Sam interposed. “I knew I’d forget all about it. Except that I didn’t. But I didn’t know that I would remember.” Sam finished with a slightly confused expression.

“No, but we both knew that I’d remember,” Jack said. “I asked you to join me off base, and you agreed. So I took you to a little cabin in the woods.”

“I knew it wasn’t your cabin!” Sam exclaimed quietly.

Jack laughed. “No, it would have taken us more than the entire loop to get there. We didn’t have access to the Asgard transporters in those days.” This time, Sam laughed. Jack continued, “Anyway, I took you out to a cabin in the woods, with complete and total privacy, and we talked.”

“We talked?” Sam asked incredulously. “You and I, we talked? Then poster children of miscommunications on a personal level, we managed to have an honest to goodness conversation about the… the state of the union?”

“Yes, we did. You don’t have to act so surprised. We were each pretty damn good at communications on the professional level, and look how well we’re doing now!”

Sam sighed. “I’ll concede your points, this time.”

“So we talked. About the state of the union, as you put it. We each made a couple of things clear. Being unwilling to compromise SG1 for the sake of a personal relationship neither of us was ready for, for one thing, and for another, your full awareness and consent to taking advantage of a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity’—your words, my dear.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam laughed, “I can’t believe I used such a corny cliché.”

“That’s quite all right,” Jack replied. “Anyway, the point is, you agreed, and then I made that promise to tell you all about it when the time was right. And then, we made love.”

“Oh, I remember the love making part pretty clearly,” Sam informed him. “That’s what I kept dreaming about when the time loops stopped.”

“Good dreams, then?” Jack asked with a wolfish grin.

“Very disturbing dreams. But in a good way.” Sam looked at Jack for a long quiet moment. “So, is that all?”

“Pretty much. The loops stopped shortly after that round, and the rest I’m sure you also remember pretty clearly.”

“Thanks for telling me, Jack.”

“Of course.” Jack rolled over to his side once more, his hand coming up to clasp the back of Sam’s neck. He pulled her close and kissed her soundly. “So, now that you’ve thoroughly disturbed my sleep, perhaps you’d like to carry this to its natural conclusion.” Jack kissed her again before she could reply.

Sam savored his kisses, relishing this time that they could spend together. She in turn explored every detail of his mouth with her own, imprinting in her memory every sensation, every feeling evoked. Soon hands were exploring, too, and legs were entangling together, until you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. They loved one another into the morning hours, and then watched the earliest rays of sun start peeking through the bedroom windows. It would never be enough, but it would always get them through the lonely nights ahead. They had each other, and so life was good.