DISCLAIMER: The story, and characters and anything and everything else concerning SG: SG1 belong to MGM, Gekko, Secret Productions etc, they are so not mine and no money is being made from this and no copyright infringement is intended.
SPOILERS: Set immediately after "Beneath the Surface"
SONG: Lyrics are from "I want you" by Elvis Costello
ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author

I Want You
By Celievamp

++I want you
You've had your fun you don't get well no more
I want you
Your fingernails go dragging down the wall
Be careful darling you might fall++

You slept with him. Okay, I know that you weren't exactly yourself at the time, but you slept with him! You slept with Jack O'Neill!

I don't know why I'm so angry. Okay I do know. River in Egypt and all that. You are beginning to remember stuff again I can tell. You and O'Neill can't look each other in the eye. And when you look at me there is such confusion in your expression. You don't know what to think.

You don't want to be alone yet you won't ask if you can come and stay with me. General Hammond of all people asks me if I can look after you for a couple of days. He says he thinks it would be good for you to spend some time with me and Cassie.

You're so quiet that it's beginning to scare me. You don't know what to say for the best so you opt for saying nothing at all. Even through my anger at you I worry that you're slipping into a depression again, as you did after Jolinar died.

You were crying in your sleep last night but you could not tell me why. You started off in the guest bedroom but when I woke at about three you were snuggled in beside me, your head resting against my back, your arm across my abdomen. I should have kicked you out but I was hurting too much. I still love you, dammit. But you slept with him, Sam. You betrayed me.

++I want you
I woke up and one of us was crying++

You weren't yourself. I keep telling myself that. I've always known about the attraction between you and the Colonel. Hell, there's been a book on the two of you getting it together since you joined SG1. He likes you. A lot. He may even love you but I tend to think a lot of it is just because he can't have you. Forbidden fruit.

The pregnancy test you insisted on taking was negative. That's one relief, I suppose. There's nothing to link you to him now beyond the obvious. You can both move on, put it down yet again to alien influence on your minds and actions. Hammond's already written it up as such in his mission report. No further disciplinary procedures will be taken against either of you.

++I want you
If you need a second opinion as you seem to do these days
I want you
You can look in my eyes and you can count the ways
I want you
Did you mean to tell me but seem to forget++

O'Neill came to see me today. He wanted to apologise. He said that the two of you had talked. And that nothing would ever happen between you, he knew that you did not really love him. It had been wrong person, wrong time. He wanted me to know that he would never intentionally do anything to hurt either of us. But he slept with you. He knows now exactly how you feel, how you look, how you sound, how you smell. He has something concrete on which to base his fantasies about you. And I hate him for it.

I have asked one of the other doctors to do his pre and post mission medicals from now on. I don't trust myself not to do something stupid. Not to hurt him.

We have ended up sleeping in the same bed every night, but we have not made love. I'm too angry and you're too… afraid, ashamed. I don't know. We haven't talked either. We try to put a normal face on in front of Cassie. But I don't think we're fooling her for a moment.

I woke as you clutched me tightly, lost in another nightmare, your hot tears scalding my back. I freed myself from your grasp, turned to face you. Once I would have held you in my arms, soothed you back into a restless sleep. My hand hovers an inch from your face. I cannot bring myself to touch you. I want to hurt you, to shake some sense into you, to shout at you so badly. How could you have been so stupid, so needy. How could you have turned to him of all people.

Your eyes are open. You choke back your tears. You are afraid of me. I just cannot deal with you now. I get out of bed and go to the bathroom, locking the door behind me.

++I want you
Just since when were you so generous and inarticulate
I want you
It's the stupid details that my heart is breaking for
It's the way your shoulders shake and what they're shaking for++

I can't hide in here forever. I stand, flush the loo then look at myself in the mirror over the sink. The light in here is not particularly flattering in the best of circumstances. At the moment I look like seven kinds of shit. Too pale, too stressed, too tired, too angry, too hurt, too horny... fuck it! Faced with the stark honesty of my reflection I decide once and for all what the hell it is I want to do. Break up with you now, forever. Or forgive and forget. I know how badly you are hurting over this. Part of me is vicious, says good you deserve it. You slept with him. You betrayed me. You slept with Jack O'Neill of all the people on all the worlds in this goddam universe you slept with Jack O'friggin'Neill!

I know you remember everything that happened between you whilst you were in Administrator Calder's camp. I know you remember being Thera and you remember him as Jonah. I know that at the time the names Sam and Jack meant nothing to you. I don't know all the details of what else you did to survive – I haven't let you tell me yet. All I know is that even though you had no memory of Major Sam Carter, Colonel Jack O'Neill, the ties that bound you together, the regulations that kept you apart – you still ended up with him. In each other's arms. In the same bed. I know that you had no memory of me.

I have to ask if it would have made any difference if you did remember me. He was there. I was not. The part of me that is vicious, cold, angry. The part that is staring out at me from the bleak eyes of my reflection. The darkness that I could fall into scares me. As angry as I am with you you are still here with me. And how ever much it hurts me to look at you I know it would hurt a damn sight more if you were not there. I'm no one's fool. I know I will never find anyone like you again, that what we have between us comes only once a lifetime and only then if you are very lucky. Do I want to lose that, lose you, spend the rest of my life alone, bitter and hateful and regretting?

No. I put my hands over my reflection, blot it out of my sight. I am a better person than that. The part of me that loves you, yearns for you can see a future beyond this. We can get past this. I have to know that this was what it was. You were lost and alone and you reached out. And he was there for you. Thank god, he was there for you when I couldn't be, when you didn't even remember my existence.

I have to make this right. I cannot lose you. I would rather die.

++I want you
It's knowing that he knows you now after only guessing
It's the thought of him undressing you. Are you undressing?
I want you
He tossed some tatty complement your way I want you
And you were fool enough to love it when he said
I want you ++

My bedroom is empty and quiet. I open my door to see the door to the spare room where you 'officially' sleep when you stay over is slightly ajar and that a light is on in the room. I slip inside. You are more or less dressed, cramming the rest of your belongings back into your duffel bag. I doubt very much that you can see what you are doing you are crying so hard. But I see too clearly. You are planning on leaving.

"Sam?"

"I'm sorry, Janet. I can't stay. I can't stand to see the way you look at me anymore. I ruined everything, I know. I have to go. Please just let me go."

"Sam. Stay. Please." I rest my hand on your bare arm, feel your skin instantly goosepimple at my touch. You turn to stare at me, your cheeks wet with tears, your eyes red rimmed with crying so much. I was so angry that I forgot that you are hurting over this every bit as much as I am. I hate it when you cry.

"Don't torture me like this, please," you whisper, pulling away from me. "You hate me now, for what I did. I know it."

"I don't hate you, Sam. I can't hate you. I'm so sorry for the way I reacted. I should have known that you would never deliberately hurt me. You could not help what happened. If I need to blame someone it should be that bastard Calder for doing this to you in the first place. I love you, Sam. Don't go. Please." I reach up to kiss the tears from your cheeks. You are determined not to touch me, your hands held away from my body clenched into white knuckled fists and then as I move to press my lips against your mouth your hands gradually relax, moving to touch my body, one hand on my lower back the other on the back of my head, your long fingers entwined in my hair.

What with the mission and the time you were missing and the time I was mad at you it has been three weeks since we kissed like this. I realised how much I missed it how touching you like this is as integral to my well being as food and drink and oxygen. I need Sam Carter in my life to be alive. I cannot live without you.

We are both crying now, curled up on the bed together so tightly that I can't tell where I end and you begin.

++I want you
The truth can't hurt you its just like the dark
It scares you witless
But in time you see things clear and stark
I want you
Go an and hurt me then we'll let it drop
I want you
I'm afraid I won't know where to stop++

You tell me everything that happened to you on the last mission, what it felt like to be Thera, the freedom that you felt even though your existence was even more circumscribed than it was here. How the sense of comradeship with Jonah grew into something more intense. How the four of you found each other again and by some miracle figured out what had happened to you all and set yourselves and the other prisoners free.

To come back to me.

++I want you
I'm not ashamed to say I cried for you
I want you
I want to know the things you did that we do to
I want you
I want to hear he pleases you more than I do
I want you
I might as well be useless for all it means to you++

That was it. The thing I missed in my anger and hurt. You came home to me. You did not go to O'Neill, or run and hide out with your brother. For all the anger I had shown you, the bitterness and fear I was still the one you wanted to be with.

As night gives way to day our tears turn to kisses. We get to know each other again. Three weeks without your sure yet gentle touch and my body opens to you like a flower opening to rain after a long dry spell. I trace your cheekbones with my thumbs, my fingers tight in your thick hair. I kiss away the last traces of your tears. Your eyes are dark with desire. And it's all for me.

I kiss the corners of your mouth and then I kiss you properly, our tongues entwining. Your hand is drawing circles on the bare skin of my back. I pull away only when I begin to get dizzy. You smile and with a rush I realise how much I have missed seeing it. Seeing you. Your long fingers trace my spine, span my ribs, brush across the soft skin of my abdomen. I cling to you, lack of sleep and the come-down from all the adrenalin and rank emotions suddenly make me feel jittery, strangely certain that if I lose hold of you will simply cease to exist.

"I'm here," you murmur, kissing my brow. "I'm not going anywhere. I promise."

"I just want to touch you," I breathe. "I want you to touch me." I realise that your smell is back to normal again – clean, faintly sweet, an old fashioned kind of floral. When you came back you smelt of grease and smoke and engine oil. And of him. I banish the thought. I reach for you blindly and your mouth is on mine again and then you are moving down my body. Any rational thoughts I might possess flee gibbering as you mouth at my breasts, the sensation going straight to my centre short circuiting my brain. You roll me so I am lying on my back and after giving my breasts your loving attention you butterfly kiss your way down my abdomen. I close my eyes and give myself up to sensation. I try not to giggle as your tongue swabs out my navel. I feel your smile against my skin as your fingers tickle me for a moment before they slide down around my hips. Your breath is hot against my skin as you raise my hips, my legs parting at your unspoken command. Your movements slow as you reach your goal, your touch careful and deliberate as you part my tender flesh, lap delicately at the abundant honey that has already collected there. Just for you. Only for you.

++I want you
Did you call his name out as he held you down
I want you
Oh no my darling not with that clown
I want you++

I come so hard that I almost scare myself and I realise that I am crying. You crawl up my body until we are face to face again and kiss away my tears murmuring soft endearments and I clean your face of my juices tasting myself on you. And happy as I am that we are together again suddenly I have to know.

"What was it like with the Colonel?" I ask softly and my hand reaches down to cup your sex. In the dim early morning light I can see the blush that flows across your skin, the unease in your eyes. This is not a conversation you want to have with me, not now, not ever. But the demon has me now and I persist.

"Did you cum?" I ask softly, letting my fingers push gently through your slick folds. "Did you cum for him, Sam?"

"Yes," you say softly but there is a hint of something awfully like anger in your voice. Good. You have been on the defensive about this for too long. "Yes he made me cum. He was a good lover, Janet, whatever you think of him. He took care of me; he made me feel safe and loved. I knew that whatever happened he would watch my back and he would protect me and trust me to do my job." She pulls gently but firmly at my hair until I look into her eyes. "He made me feel then and there like you make me feel now and here. But it wasn't real. And this is real. So finish what you started, Janet. Make me cum. Make me scream your name."

And I do.

I hold your quaking body to me, running my fingers gently over your heated skin. You nuzzle at me happily. "Are we okay?" I ask.

"Think so," you open heavy lidded eyes and smile that slow sweet smile that melts me to my core again without you even touching me. Open mouthed kissing slow and sweet and suddenly your weight is on top of me again, the length of your body rubbing against mine. Your smile is electrifying, more than a little feral. "More than okay. I love you so much, Janet."

And then the wildness is gone and you look at me tenderly, your slender, clever hands caressing my face, my body, laying claim to me but there is no need. I am yours. Yours forever. I am breathless. I don't know how much more of this I can bear yet I don't want this to ever end.

And without a word being spoken we move as one into a favourite game to play: looking glass world. We kneel on the bed facing each other and slowly slowly mirror each other's movements. We touch, staring into each other's eyes, sapphire and chocolate. I am you and you are me. Palm to palm, breast to breast. We kiss. Fire and ice. We curl around each other, mould into each other, skin to skin. Slow sweet. We have all night, we have the rest of our lives. Our hands clasp, fingers entwine. We breathe in the same rhythm try to keep it going as long as we can.

As long as forever.

Sleep takes us eventually and in each other's arms, where we know we belong, we go willingly. There will be no more nightmares.

++I want you
No one who wants you could want you more
I want you
Every night when I go off to bed and when I wake up
I want you
I'm going to say it once again 'til I instill it
I'm goin' goin' to feel this way until you kill it
I want you++

The End

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