Lovefool
by ALC Punk!

After Janet died, certainly. Before Colonel O'Neill got himself frozen.

Maybe it was after she found the three rolls of film laying around. And she sometimes wonders if he left them for her to find or if it really was an accident. She never told him she found them, never mentioned looking at them.

Pictures of her, her friends, the mountain. Obviously surveillance photos (Barrett had had quite a collection to look through, last year. And that had been to save the Colonel, of course). And they had dates, times. That first week they had been dating.

There are times she wonders why she didn't stop this then. Why she didn't take her courage in hand, face him down. Explain in no uncertain terms that her life was classified, and if he couldn't deal with it--

She wonders how Jack did this with Sara for 15-odd years. How he put a happy face on after coming home a broken bloody wreck.

Lying like this is not something she's ever been good at, but it's worth it. It has to be.

He never seems to realize, as she lays there panting under him. Sometimes he even seems to be obscurely pleased. As if his efforts are what drove her to scream (and maybe it's a good thing she's faking it, otherwise the wrong name could spill off her lips in that unguarded moment of pleasure) so lustily. He thinks he's just gotten better at pleasing her.

She's not going to tell him differently.

And it isn't REALLY Pete's fault, is it? Because he was good, in the beginning. He did make them real.

Once, she might have told Janet. Might have talked this whole thing out with the other woman, figured out what was wrong. Fixed it. It would have been another connection in a life which has so few.

But Janet is dead, and there's no one else to take her place.

The Colonel might have tried, but she pushed him away again (and she really can't imagine discussing sex and orgasms with him. Would it be over tea and crumpets, and would she remember to always hold her finger up?). And now, of course, it doesn't matter. He's locked in a frozen prison with only his own mind for company. She sometimes hopes he has no sense of time passing.

Knowing Jack, he'd be going mad without a thing to do.

It's easier to call him Jack, now. Easier to think of him as Jack, because it's what Daniel calls him, when they talk--which isn't often, anymore. And she's beginning to regret that.

But it had been easier to push him away, too. Teal'c hadn't needed the push, some part of him understanding her need to distance herself.

Except now all she has is Pete.

And he was never able to read her--even Jonas Hansen read her better (and that's so not a comparison she ever wants to make again). He tries, sometimes, to understand. Maybe to control. But she's so far past letting it affect her.

Sometimes, she wonders if it's too late for her. No kids, no picket fence, no dog happy to see her at the end of the day.

This is what she wants, isn't it?

This normal life that she boxed herself away for?

The life which has her faking orgasm so that the man who shares her bed never realizes that a different man will always be between them?

She's reaching for that happiness she told herself she didn't have.

Practicing her kegels like a good little post-modern feminist who's in tune with her sexuality.

And all the while, she's destroying anything that could mean something. Watching feeling and happiness and contentment slither away from her grasp, crumble into dust.

It's not something she thinks about, a lot.

Hell, it's been six months since Jack got himself entombed in ice.

And she misses him, desperately.

But she's never going to let on. Because she can fake it with the best of them. And no one will ever know that the life she leads is a sham, put there to cover up a hundred bad decisions.

Maybe they're only wrong because she can't ever let go.

-finis-

Final Notes: This was almost completely written in the shower last night, and I had to yell out loud, "Samantha Carter! You bitch!" And things along that line. I *really* didn't know she could do things like this. Bad Sam. *eyes* No cookie.

The title belongs to The Cardigans song of the same name. I thought it was... appropriate.

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© 2005 ALC Punk!