Wheel

Fanfiction
Title:	Wheel
Author(s):	Destina Fortunato
Date(s):
Length:
Genre(s):	slash
Fandom(s):	Stargate: SG-1
Relationship(s):
External Links:
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Wheel is a Jack/Daniel story by Destina Fortunato.

Reactions and Reviews

Best FF That Always Makes Me Wonder How the Hell You'd Carve a Turnip. But Then, I've Never Carved a Pumpkin, Either, So Maybe I'm Just Not Picturing This Right. Wheel, by Brighid, aka [livejournal.com profile] brighidestone. Stargate: SG-1, Jack O'Neill/Sam Carter/Daniel Jackson. Warning: I can't warn you, but I can say it's all on the upswing after the first part. If you make it through that, you're good. But thost first few sections hurt, people. My basic summary of this story is: wow. I've been wanting to rec this for a long time, partly because it makes me happy, but mostly because it's brave. It is just such a fucking courageous story; in it, Brighid does two specific things (no, I am not going to tell you what they are, because you'll know if you read it, and also they're spoilers of a large and looming nature) that are unusual (especially when paired like this) in SG1 stories of this genre. (The genre is The World Ended or Maybe We Just Lost It. In this case, for the record, they just lost it; earth is doing fine, but it and SG1 are maintaining separate residences.) And she does them (Brighid does the things, I mean; I refuse to apologize for my dependence on parentheses. They are pretty and fun. So there.) so well, and neither one is a particularly popular choice.

Okay. Look, we can't go on this way. If I'm going to talk about this story, I have to talk about those two things. So, please, just go read it, and I'll stay here and spoil in privacy.

[SPOILER]

The first thing she does that's weird is killing Teal'c the way she does. There are rules to this sort of thing. If you kill someone loved and important at the beginning of a story, either you bring him back or it's a sad story. You don't say, hey, it starts here, and this is hard and bad and awful, but now let's move on. Brighid does that, which is, I suspect, one of the many reasons this story has the title it does. And then she gets Sam pregnant. Which continues the cycle, of course, and that's why it works in this story, but - it's rare for Sam to have a baby in an SG1 story. (It was even rarer, oddly enough, before the actress did.) Especially in these kinds of SG1-without-the-SGC stories, people work hard to keep Sam who she was on earth: a woman in a very male profession, a woman who works hard to be one of the guys. Usually it's Jack and Daniel who do the changing, the relaxing, who feel the boundaries created by the SGC and their importance and earth weakening and slipping away. In this story, that happens to all of them. And they all have to adjust to it, too, and that's hardest on Sam; she doesn't just automatically become a domestic goddess. (Really, this is a Jack/Sam/Daniel story, but for me the heart and the joy of the story is Sam.) This makes me happy. Which is good, because I tend to re-read this only when my life is bad. To me, it expresses something I believe very strongly: life can be bad, but then it gets better. Just usually not in the way you expect.