you take the blue paian

Jack/Sara, 680 words


Five Ways Jack and Sara Reconciled

They never actually were divorced. They just needed an extremely extended separation to work out how much their marriage meant to them and find a way to save it. Nine and a half years after he'd moved out of their Winter Park house, she was living in Georgetown, and he took a job in D.C. to move back in with her.

In all the years they'd been divorced, they'd never visited Charlie's grave together, but on his birthday ten years after the breakup they ended up there at the same time. A long talk on a bench in the peaceful cemetery on that warm afternoon led to a quiet dinner, and then a night in the nearest motel (neither of them lived in town anymore), and then several months of phone calls and weekend trysts, and finally a new life together. Charlie can't believe it took so long, but he's over the moon about it anyway.

She muscled and sweet-talked her way past every bureaucratic barrier and walked into his office in the Pentagon one day to demand to know why the Air Force was siphoning all her best people off into some extremely expensive and secretive program that he seemed to be involved with or possibly the head of. "Your best people?" he said, after a second or two of blank surprise. It turned out that after they'd broken up and lost touch, she'd joined the Peace Corps, and worked her way close to the top rung of the recruitment ladder. They'd been competing with each other for human resources for years without ever realizing who the competition was. It didn't take Jack long to recognize that she'd make a formidable ally, especially as he worked behind the scenes to take the program public. It took only a little longer for their new professional affiliation to become a personal one, as they fell in love all over again, and fell in love for the first time with the changed people they'd become over the intervening years. They were remarried just after the Ori situation came to an end and just before the big final push to reveal the Stargate to the population of Earth.

The Jack who talked about sports and fish on a video recording left in ancient Egypt for the SGC to get hold of millennia afterwards never mentioned an ex-wife or a dead son, and pro football was still played on Sundays, so the Jack who was sitting on the dock behind his Minnesota cabin with his teammates around him when a fish splashed in the pond never gave a thought to anything else being any different. After his team-bonding weekend he went home to Sara and Charlie in Colorado Springs the same way he always did -- and counted his blessings on general principles, the same way he always had.

The Jack who talked about sports and fish on a video recording left in ancient Egypt for the SGC to get hold of millennia afterwards never mentioned his wife or the son they'd recently sent off to college, so the Jack who was sitting on the dock beside his Minnesota cabin with his teammates around him when a fish splashed in the pond never gave a thought to anything else being any different. But he got home from the team-bonding weekend early enough to catch the Bears game that Sunday in his lonely house, and something made him pick up the phone to call Sara. Glutton for punishment, he thought, because the Bears were losing to her Packers and she'd always been insufferable when her team won and you'd think that after nine years he wouldn't miss that anymore. They ended up not talking about sports at all, and she said she was awfully glad he'd called, because she'd had the weirdest feeling all day, and hearing his voice seemed, weirdly, to help. They talked a lot more after that, and started seeing each other again, and by the time he was considering the move East, she asked if he'd like some company. He said yes.


Originally posted 3/1/08 at sg1_five_things.