Author: Desiree Armfeldt
Title: Beginning(s), Middle(s), End(s)
Fandoms: Quantum Leap
Characters: Sammy Jo Fuller, Al Calavicci
Rating: Gen
Length: 645 words
Angst-to-hope ratio: Low? Medium?
Disclaimer: I didn't create these characters, I don't own them, I derive no profit from their use.
Bookkeeping notes: New-to-me fandom!
Summary: "Al didn’t see you born, but he saw you conceived.  That’s what he tells you sometimes."

Al didn’t see you born, but he saw you conceived.  That’s what he tells you sometimes, when he’s just the right kind of drunk.

(Not loud and laughing at his own dirty jokes drunk; not maudlin, despairing drunk; but the phase that happens in between, where he whispers the slurred secrets of the universe.

I’m not supposed to tell you this, Sammy Jo. . .You can’t tell a soul. . .Ziggy would kill me if she knew. . .I’m breaking the rules by telling you. . .

You know a lot of things you’re not supposed to know.  Breaking rules is pretty much a way of life on project Quantum Leap.  It’s the only way it can possibly work at all.).

Sometimes he claims he literally saw you conceived, a holographic voyeur in your mother’s bedroom.  Other times his story is that he only heard about the lovemaking after the fact, from Ziggy or from Sam.

(Al’s the kind of guy who tells the same stories over and over, but never quite the same way twice.  You’re never sure how much it’s because that’s just his nature, and how much is due to the fact that he has trouble keeping track of which of the pasts he remembers are true in the context of whatever version of the present he’s speaking to you in.)

As far as Al’s concerned, he also saw you born.  You winked into existence when he stepped out of the past, into the imaging chamber.  His colleague; his big secret.

(One of his big secrets.  Al has pretty much nothing but secrets.  He’s not naturally very good at dealing with secrets, but unlike you, Al never had a choice about signing up for his current job. It’s not a choice when only one of the options is even marginally acceptable.)

He tells you his secrets because who else can he tell?  Or because you’re the closest thing he’ll ever have to a daughter.

(In this present.  Apparently there have been timelines in which Al did have children of his own.  He only mentions them by accident, when he’s drunk enough to say things he’d regret in the morning if he remembered saying them.)

Or maybe he tells you the secret of yourself as a warning: you appeared out of nowhere, and the work you’re doing could easily send you back to nowhere again.

(Technically, you appeared out of a dead-end job in Mobile.  Or so Al told you once.  But you could just as easily end up unborn.  You all could.)

And Al would wipe you out of existence without hesitation, if it would end the Leaping and bring Sam home.  He’d feel guilty about it, of course.  He feels guilty now.  Hence the (maybe) warning.

What he doesn’t understand is how unnecessary the warning is.  And not simply because you’re fully aware of the risks, and have been since you signed your non-disclosure forms. Because what makes you different from Al, and from everyone else on the project, all the people who were there before Sam stepped into the machine, is that you’re here because it’s where you always wanted to be.  You’re not here out of gratitude that Sam gave you life, or love for the father you’ve never met.

(Al says you did meet Sam once, but you don’t remember that.  You’d like to meet Sam, he sounds like a great guy, and maybe the only person in the world capable of truly geeking out with you in your own field.)

You came here to do a cool, impossible job, and you’re going to do it right or die trying.

(Or possibly both.  Sequentially, concurrently, or in separate timelines.  In fact, if your theory is correct, you already have.

Al doesn’t understand that part either, but that’s not his fault.  You’re better at keeping secrets than he is.)