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The room was different. Sam couldn’t immediately place it, but suspicion took hold and she prowled around, searching for exactly what it was that was wrong. Almost immediately she found that the couch had been fastened to the floor and it wouldn’t budge, no matter how much Sam shoved at it.
Moving away from the couch, she turned in a slow circle, and a floor decoration caught her eye. A lever. It was a dull bronze and next to the wall about midway down the room and didn’t seem to be there for any apparent reason. Who put random ornaments on the floor anyway? It was Ba’al, though, so it was hardly going to be random.
Sam chewed on her lip, eyeing it distrustfully. She could wait for Ba’al to get back and demand an explanation, or…
The level shifted easily, without much pressure at all.
The room shifted with it.
For one completely bizarre moment, Sam would have sworn she was actually sitting on the wall, then she was falling, much further than she should have. She hit the floor on her back, thoroughly winded, and struggled to breathe while the unmistakable sound of shattering glass filled her ears.
Sam stared up at the ceiling and blinked to clear her vision. Her first thought was that she must have knocked herself silly, because last time she’d checked the couch had not been on the ceiling. But it had been fastened down.
She sat up abruptly and irrationally reached out to grab something to prevent herself falling. The couch, of course, was not on the ceiling. She was on the ceiling and she was going to kill Ba’al.
This technology… this she had only heard of, but it wasn’t something she’d ever hoped to experience. Academically fascinating or not, she associated it was something she’d been trying very hard to not to think about.
It was also a direct breach of their agreement.
‘Goddamn it, Ba’al!’ Sam hissed, standing up on the ceiling.
Of course he’d failed to stick to their agreement. Honestly, she’d been holding her breath, waiting for the shoe to drop and now it had. The question she now had to ask herself was what the hell was she going to do about it?
She glared up at the furniture as she made her way back over to the lever, all of which seemed to have been fastened in a similar manner to the couch. The room had been set up carefully and meticulously to make it work.
Glass crunched beneath her feet and Sam recognised the remnants of the glass she had been drinking from. She sincerely hoped Ba’al’s little gravity experiment only affected the one room; otherwise her laptop was going to be in a similar state.
She couldn’t reach the lever, seeing as it was now above her head.
‘Ba’al,’ Sam muttered, ‘I’m going to show you the true meaning of ex-System Lord.’
Right on cue, she heard the front door open. But then… speak of the devil and he shall appear.
‘Ba’al, I swear to God,’ Sam yelled and instantly regretted her wording. Vengefully, Sam hoped he walked in without realising. She started towards the exit, because it was easily big enough that she could still climb through it.
Ba’al appeared in the doorway just before she reached it. ‘Ah.’
Sam was struck with the disconcerting situation of looking up at him, whilst he was also looking up at her.
So not affecting the whole apartment then.
A pen dislodged itself from somewhere and landed on the floor – ceiling – beside her. Ba’al sighed.
‘I leave for less than an hour, Samantha, and look what happens.’
Sam glared at him. ‘I should hand you in for this.’
‘I have used no alien technology.’ Ba’al spread his hands wide, the very picture of innocence. This was built entirely from supplies from your planet, therefore well within our agreement.’
‘No, no, and seriously no.’ Sam’s neck was getting sore from looking up at him. ‘Get me back on the floor and then undo this. I mean it.’
Ba’al studied her. ‘Can you do a handstand?’
‘Ba’al,’ Sam growled through gritted teeth and he shrugged.
‘Stand still, and make sure you are clear of the glass.’
Sam was having second thoughts about turning down the handstand idea; she really didn’t want to risk breaking her neck. She started towards him.
‘Maybe I should just climb ou-‘
He reached for something beside the door and she was falling again, not straight down, but sideways and she found herself sitting on the wall again. The tinkle of falling glass once again accompanied the transition. Ba’al now looked truly odd, standing at right angles to what was now her floor and he raised an amused eyebrow at her.
‘I was hardly going to let you fall on your pretty head.’
Then the world tilted again until he was the right way up and she was dumped unceremoniously beside the couch.
Reorientating herself as quickly as possible, Sam marched across the room and got in Ba’al’s personal space. It had been a while since she’d felt the urge to threaten him with extraction, but his little experiment had done it.
‘You really can’t do this; you can’t just modify your apartment with alien technology!’
Ba’al raised both eyebrows. ‘Why not?’
Sam drew a breath to shout at him, and was struck by an epiphany. Why put the controls for the technology on the floor? It was totally impractical, since if you knew what was going to happen, you wouldn’t activate it when the controls would end up above your head. Obviously Ba’al had another lever just outside the door, but why have one inside the room at all?
The answer was simple; he was baiting her.
Testing the boundaries, crossing lines to see what would happen. Because he was curious. Because he was bored. Because he was Ba’al.
He smirked. ‘No-one but you and I have been in here, Samantha. Granted it would alarm anyone else, but they won’t see it now, will they?’
That set Sam off on a new rant, because baiting her or not, she had to maintain the rules. She was halfway through shouting when she realised that she was just going through the motions, and he’d stop bothering to engage in the argument and was standing there watching her with a curious expression, head tilted to one side.
Sam paused. ‘What?’
‘I was expected more passion in your fury, Samantha. It would suit you better to drop the pretence of anger altogether.’
‘I am angry at you,’ Sam said, trying to make her tone stand up to her words. It didn’t work and Ba’al raised an eyebrow at her. She sighed; she should be angry at him, livid that he’d pull such a stunt. Particularly with this type of technology and the inevitable connections that came with it. Not that she was touching that subject with him, not even with a ten foot pole. Yet what slipped out of her mouth was; ‘Why put that base on a planet anyway? Surely it would be easier on a ship, seeing as the ship already has-‘
‘Artificial gravity,’ finished Ba’al, not even pretending he didn’t know what she was talking about. He shot her an odd look. ‘Exactly why it would not have been a challenge.’
‘Oh.’ Sam leaned on the back of the couch and wished she was angry at him. She wished she was furious; she wished that the reference to what he’d done to Jack was enough to make her stop playing games with him, or at least to rekindle her doubt about him. ‘I hate you.’
Ba’al frowned at her. ‘Yes, obviously.’
His tone was hard to decipher and Sam found she had no idea if he was being sarcastic.
She brushed past him out of the room and sat at his kitchen table with her laptop, staring blankly at the screen. After a moment Sam saw Ba’al out of the corner of her eye as he moved to join her at the table, she didn’t look up.
‘It was hardly personal, you know,’ Ba’al started in a conversational tone, and Sam wished he would just drop it. She didn’t want to face this, although clearly he was curious about her feelings on the issue. Ba’al continued; ‘He arrived at my base, or more accurately, the Tok’ra did, but seeing as the Tok’ra had left him to the consequences…’ Ba’al shrugged, then looked at her sideways, a slight smirk playing over his lips. ‘Although, I have to say now that I have met your General, I-‘
‘Stop. Talking.’ Sam said through gritted teeth, holding the side of her laptop in a death grip.
Ba’al paused and shrugged a second time. ‘As you wish.’
He’d probably drawn the obvious conclusion, Sam knew, and thought that anything else he said could impact on… on whatever it was they were doing together, if not the entire arrangement. She let him believe it, that her anger on Jack’s behalf would come between them.
She couldn’t let him see how much he’d gotten under her skin, apparently enough to take the sting out of the memory of his crimes. Somethings should never be forgiven.
She couldn’t let him see that, in that moment, it wasn’t him she hated; but herself.