The In-Laws
Jessa4865
Spoilers: Up through Threads because I'm still trying to pretend that RDA's still on the show
Disclaimer: I don't own them; I'm just taking them out for some fun. I'll put them back when I'm done. Promise.
AN: Excuse any inaccuracies. I don't know the names of Mark's wife or kids. Nor do I know if there's a chapel at the Air Force Academy. Oh, and I'm purposely making Mark's kids much younger than they could possibly since they already existed in Cold Lazarus. If these things are in fact wrong, please ignore them as I don't think they necessarily affect the point of the story. J

Chapter One

When I made peace with my father a few years ago, I thought things would be better. In allowing him back into my life, I also got my sister back. Or so I thought. Sam and I had always been close - as her big brother, it was my responsibility to protect her when dad wasn't around. And dad wasn't around a lot. Even though Sam was only a few years my junior, I felt like she was my trial run at being a dad myself. She fooled me into thinking it would be easy. Sam was every parent's, and older brother's, dream. She was smart and well behaved and outgoing and popular and she even helped me with my homework, not that I ever admitted that to anyone.

So when I opened my door to dad and Sam five years ago, I made the ridiculous mistake of believing that they were back in my life. Sam and dad had always been close as well, making it no surprise to me that they'd been in contact for years without involving me. It was a surprise, however, that Sam had changed so much in those years. I went nearly a decade, embarrassed as I am to admit it, without talking to my father or saying much of anything beyond standard holiday greetings to my sister. Through cards on Christmas and the kids' birthdays, we communicated anything of particular interest. I actually called Sam when my son was born, due mainly to the fact that I'd received a note a week earlier that she was relocating to Colorado Springs from Washington where she'd been since she finished school.

Those occasional notes revealed very little, apparently. Much to my chagrin, my brilliant sister was progressing happily through the ranks of government service where I'd told her a million times she would never succeed. And, of course, those few contacts were brief and specific, preventing the topic of dad from ever coming up. When Sam called me out of the blue one day, damn near hysterical in her quiet, controlled way, about dad being terminal with lymphoma, it was only out of a sense of decorum that I didn't hang up on her.

She must have known because she never called to say he died. Of course, that made sense when he knocked on my door. But I was a little burned that she hadn't called to say he'd lived either. I never did get much of an explanation on that. It just went away, apparently. I certainly hope if I ever get something like that it will mysteriously clear up on its own.

I forgave my dad. Because he was there. Because he was my dad. Because I'd looked at my little girl's face and knew, without a doubt, that it would absolutely kill me if she ever stopped speaking to me. I had nothing to forgive Sam for, since she'd never done anything wrong. But the woman I spoke to that day was not the same woman I'd known.

Now, granted, when I'd last seen her, she'd barely been a woman. She'd been in her early twenties, progressing through her doctorate at breakneck speed without even consciously realizing that she was much younger than any of her fellow students. She'd never paid any attention to the fact that she was brilliant. She never really seemed to notice that there was anything special about her. She was just this exceptionally gifted girl with a sunny outlook on life that probably annoyed all the people who were jealous of her anyway. She was every bit as exuberant then as she'd been as a cheerleader for her junior high squad. She was happy and quick and gregarious and so talkative it made me nuts - because she was usually talkative about stuff that was so far over my head that I could have cried. Even when she was serving in the Air Force, she was the same way - going off on tangents about the stuff she was working on excitedly before she remembered it was classified and then begging me not to tell anyone anything she'd said, as though I'd understood enough of it to know what to repeat if I'd wanted to. That was just Sam Carter.

Somewhere along the line, Sam Carter had been replaced with a clone - physically, she looked like Sam, but her personality was dad's. She was quiet and reserved and tightlipped and said as little about herself and her life than was necessary to actually have a conversation with her. I guess all that Air Force stuff sunk in; I felt guilty for not talking to her as if that was responsible for her personality shift.

Every once in a while, the real Sam will peek out - like when she bought Nicky a telescope for her eight birthday and rattled on about the stars and planets so long that Nicky fell asleep.

But mostly, I got polite answers, curt nods, and strange phone calls that never quite explain why Sam wouldn't be around for Christmas or a birthday or whatever trip she'd claimed to have penciled in on her calendar. So I started seeing her like I had always seen dad - I knew somewhere deep down, she cared about my family and I, but I knew we weren't on her mind a lot. And the awkward silence when I tried to push past the Deep Space Radar Telemetry bull that even I recognized as a cover story told me that whatever she was doing took up pretty much every available thought.

Needless to say, when I got the call that day - without Sam even having missed any important event - and my sister was on the other end of the phone, not the Air Force Colonel, I mean, but my sister, I knew something was very wrong. She danced around the reason she was calling, ignoring my queries into her sniffling and asking how Nicky and Matt were doing and how my wife was and if there was anything new going on at work. Confused, I repeated the appropriate questions, how she was, what was new. She chattered on about a sale at the grocery store for at least ten minutes before she dropped two unbelievable pieces of news on me.

"Pete and I broke up," she said. Then she paused, and I wondered if she was terribly hurt by it. A moment later, the rest of the news came. "Dad's gone."

I knew she didn't mean like on vacation kind of gone. Gone gone. I squeezed my eyes closed, feeling a hurt inside that I truly hadn't really expected to feel. There was utter silence in my house, as Stephanie and the kids were at the store, and I felt so alone that I was glad to have chatty Sam on the phone. It took a few moments for me to force out words as some kind of automatic response kicked in to cover up the fact that my head wasn't quite working. "What happened?"

And in true Carter fashion, Sam didn't answer.

"There's going to be a memorial service. It's going to be at the Air Force Academy chapel." She rattled off some more information, the date and time and directions from the hotel where she'd gotten us a room in case we didn't want to stay with her. I wrote it down without asking anything else.

I knew the military way - my father was dead and all I was going to find out was when to pay my respects. I didn't even get angry. I recalled that I'd brought it on myself by leaving her alone with only dad as family for too many years and then promised her, my scared, hurt, yet still unflappable baby sister, that we'd be there as soon as we could.