Title: Compares With You
Author: Christi (christim@comcast.net)
Rating: A sort of vague and non-substantial R
Category: Fluffity fluff fluff
Disclaimer: If you sue and I lose, does that mean, as I am deep in debt,
that you actually have to pay my debt? Because I could go with that.
Author’s Note: So, this fic had many different inspirations. It started
with me reading a rash of “Sam is unhappy in her science life and returns to
SG-1” fic and I had an idea percolating, and then karma_aster requested Thor and
I remembered a little piece of fluff I had never finished that I wrote for
lyssie that loosely involved Thor. Even after tweaking, Thor is really only
sort of involved and for that, I am deeply apologetic. I tried, I really did.
Also, there’s a tiny section here indirectly inspired by b_cavis’s “Treaty of
Guinness”, which is completely worth a read if you haven’t yet. Endless thanks
go to kate98 for her amazing beta job, encouragement and aid in a title, which
is a line from The Beatles “In My Life”.
---
The fish was (disturbingly) fresh, the beer was (pleasantly) cold, and
Daniel was (outrageously) cheating. Not that Jack could prove it, of course,
but it was the only rational explanation for Danny’s sudden talent at five card
draw.
“How are you doing it?” Jack demanded, eyes narrowed. “Stacking the
deck? Have cards up your sleeves? Counting them?”
Daniel smirked, shuffling the deck. “I have no idea what you’re talking
about, Jack.”
“I think Teal’c is a co-conspirator,” Sam finally chimed in, eyeing
Teal’c’s own substantial pile of chips.
Teal’c, of course, said nothing. But there was that expression on his
face, the recently patented Jaffa-smirk. Typical.
The wood of the porch underneath them creaked as Jack shifted towards
Sam, feeling younger than he had in years. “
She nodded back solemnly, playing along. “Damn shame.”
He still couldn’t quite believe that she was here, sitting under the sun
and smiling at him like that. The
past week had been one of those experiences that he hadn’t really believed happened
to people like him—the sort of hazy, innocent, out-of-time joy that Norman
Rockwell had captured for a living and Jack had always scoffed at. But here he
was with a pond full of fish and a cabin in the woods, a beautiful woman he loved,
and two friends trying to cheat him out of quarters.
As he watched, Sam’s hand rose and brushed against his cheek, the warmth
of skin against skin making him smile and feel ridiculously giddy considering
his age. When she pulled away, there was a tiny silver fleck resting on the tip
of her finger; a scale from the fish he had caught and cleaned earlier.
Finger even with his mouth, she held his gaze, still smiling that smile.
“Make a wish,” she said.
---
“Did you find it?” Jack asked as he climbed back up the last few rungs
of the ladder to his deck carrying two cold beer. Once reaching the top, he
grabbed at the blanket hanging over his shoulder before it had a chance to slip
to the ground.
“Yeah, just adjusting the resolution,” Sam replied as she peered through
his telescope. “You know, you really do get a pretty good view from up here.
Not too much light pollution.”
He shrugged, handing her a beer that she took with a grin before
settling the blanket over her shoulders. “Eh, it’s all right. We’ll take it up
to the cabin next time we go. You’ll be amazed at the difference.”
She nodded, blue eyes wide with ever-present enthusiasm. “I’ll bet.”
There was a ridiculous satisfaction spreading through his chest fueled
by the fact that she hadn’t bothered to contradict or even protest his
assumption that they’d be returning to
Sam pulled the blanket a little tighter around her body, huddled up in
her chair and rested her chin on her knees. “Still cold?” he asked.
“No, no, this is perfect,” she replied easily. “So…another game of chess
or do you have yet another wonderfully fascinating celestial body to show me?”
He briefly considered making a remark about her celestial body, but curbed the impulse. Until he realized that
she had purposely worded it that way. His eyes narrowed at her all-too-innocent
expression. “Carter…” he said warningly. “Evil.”
A shrug was her first flippant response. “I know.”
---
Daniel was pacing again, back and forth across the briefing room while
Jack watched silently. Not that he’d want to interrupt, not when Daniel was on
a roll like this one.
“And after all, I am the most
knowledgeable person left on Earth when it comes to the Ancients, and I’ve
effectively been one at least once now, so I don’t think it’s that unreasonable
for me to ask you to let me go when it’s very possible that Atlantis could be
destroyed within a few days or weeks by these Wraith. Besides, it’s not like
you really need me here anymore, not with…Jack? Are you…laughing at me?”
Surprisingly enough, he really was. A bone deep chuckle that he couldn’t
stop from escaping shook his shoulders. “Pretty much.”
Daniel’s face scrunched up in that slightly offended expression he had
perfected years ago. He looked like he was one step away from putting his hands
on his hips and stomping his feet in a demonstration of defiant petulance.
To save himself from being exposed to that particular image, Jack held up his hands in surrender.
“Daniel…you can go.”
Blue eyes blinked at him owlishly. “I can?”
Jack shrugged. “Sure. Look, things here are finally…good. And T’s
already gone off to be a founding father or whatever. Sam’s put in for that
promotion to Area 51…and it sounds like they could really use you out there.”
“Oh. That’s…a good point. I, uh…thank you.”
Jack just leaned back in his chair, his laughter still echoing in the
mostly empty room.
---
One Wednesday evening, Jack arrived home to find a manila envelope from
the Pentagon waiting for him. He read its contents once, then twice just to
make sure he wasn’t hallucinating (an oft-reported symptom of extreme sexual
frustration). When he was quite sure it was all real, he grabbed his keys and
headed out—only to swing his front door open to find Carter standing there,
clutching her own manila envelope.
He just stared at her silently for what seemed like an absurdly long
time, but then in flurry, they were wrapped around one another. One hand was
tangled in her hair, the other grasping, sliding, doing anything to get her
closer.
Kissing her was ridiculously like he had imagined it would be, which was
both reassuring and terrifying. When he finally managed to break away for a
breath of desperately needed air, tripping over his own feet to pull her back
into the house, he started working his way down her neck. “Got the promotion?”
he mumbled against her skin.
A tiny little gasping noise preceded her reply. “Mmm-hmm.”
He nodded a little, mouth now on her collarbone as he backed her against
the door. “Good. For you, I mean. I got one too.”
“Really?” she asked, somehow managing to wrap one leg impossibly high on
his hips. “Congratulations.”
“Tha-aanksss.” She thrust her hips firmly against his and the end of the
word got lost in a sort of hissing noise through his gritted teeth. “Jee-sus,
Carter…” They needed a bed. Or a couch. Was he too old for couch sex? Probably.
Really, the carpet in his living room would do right now—any kind of flat,
horizontal surface. Now was not the
time to be picky. “How do you feel about area rugs?” he managed while tugging
her shirt off.
“Ask me later,” she responded before dragging him to the floor (and its
conveniently placed rug).
---
“Beer really is a food group for you, isn’t it?” Daniel goaded him while
watching him marinade the steaks on the grill.
“Your point?” Jack retorted.
Daniel shrugged, sipping the second of his allotted three beers for the
evening. “Just an observation.”
Jack pointed the barbeque tongs at him. “If you bitch any more, I’ll
make you cook.”
Daniel shrugged. “At least I know the difference between medium-rare and
burnt-to-a-crisp.”
“Gah! That’s it! I quit!” Jack threw his tongs at Daniel’s head before
sitting down in a huff. Next to him, Sam stroked his hair.
“Poor misunderstood General,” she said, voice ringing with (what he
suspected was false) sympathy.
Daniel scoffed. “Please Sam, you’re only humoring him because you two
are finally…” the archeologist trailed off a bit awkwardly, realizing that
maybe some subjects were off-limits,
even among friends.
That is, until Sam just smiled serenely. “True enough. Although the
omelets are really quite tasty.”
This made Jack feel slightly vindicated, or at least justified in giving
Daniel an increasingly hard time. “Danny, give the tongs to Teal’c. Barbequing
is man’s work.”
Surprisingly, Daniel did give up the tongs, but not without sending a
glare in Jack’s general direction. T just took them and went to check on the
progress of the meat. Jack grinned happily. “Proper delegation really is key,
you know,” he confided to Sam.
“I’ll keep that in mind, sir,”
she said with a roll of her eyes.
Strangely, through the smoke wafting across the porch, Daniel looked a
bit misty eyed. “Something wrong Daniel?” Jack finally asked, knowing he’d
probably regret it.
The younger man shrugged a bit sheepishly. “It’s just strange to think
that in two days, we’ll all be…I mean, you and Sam are going to D.C. before she
heads out to Nevada, and Teal’c will go back to Dakara and I’ll have to hurry
to finish packing for Atlantis…it’s the end of SG-1.”
Leave it to Danny to bring the mood down in twenty seconds or less.
“Daniel…” Jack warned.
“Jack…I’m just saying…” Daniel started before Teal’c interrupted.
“I believe you are incorrect, Daniel Jackson.”
They were all silent for a moment before Jack smirked a little. “What he
said.”
---
There was a crack in the ceiling shaped vaguely like
Thor's head, Jack noted as he lay prone on his bed in his brand new
government-provided housing. It was hard to make out at first, but the more he
looked at it, the more and more he expected it to blink in that owlish way and
address him as "O'Neill."
Underneath him, the bed shifted as Carter collapsed next to him, letting out a
loud groan. "Ow. Whose idea was this whole moving thing again?"
"The U.S. Airforce?"
"Right. Don't like them."
He smirked a bit, summoning the energy to roll a bit closer to her, nuzzling
against her neck and finding it damp with salty sweat. "Carter...you're
all wet," he observed.
A blue eye cracked open and glared at him as well as one eye can. "Jack,
it's ninety-some degrees outside and we've spent the day hauling boxes
around," she griped, making a little noise of protest as he snuggled
closer. "You're not exactly Mr. Fresh and Dry yourself."
He only hmmed in reply, distracted by lapping a bit of the sweat off of her
shoulder. Mmm. Crabby Carter. He used to be forced to cheer up Crabby Carter
with cake and bad jokes. In the past few weeks, he had discovered there were
alternate ways to deal with the appearance of Crabby Carter—namely, making
Crabby Carter orgasm.
Better than cake, no question. And he really liked cake.
He traced his mouth up her shoulder, her neck, her ear, while his hands busied
themselves with grasping slick skin. "Ja-aaaack," Sam whined a little
as his tongue played in her ear.
"Hmm?"
"Wha..." she lost her train of thought temporarily as he nibbled a
spot behind her ear and that made him feel all kinds of superior. "Whatcha
doin'?"
He pulled away just enough to meet her eyes with a pseudo-serious expression.
"Helping?"
His thumb brushed over her left nipple and her breath hitched a bit as a shiver
actually ran through her body—seriously, he could feel her wiggling her toes.
"Ah. Carry on, then," she said a bit breathlessly.
"Yes, ma'am," Jack said, setting to work. In his new (and vastly
improved) sex life, he took Carter-issued orders very seriously.
---
The phone next to his bed rang at 11 pm exactly, which
surprised Jack, but not enough to prevent him from answering on the first ring.
“You’re…on time,” he remarked.
“Well, we had a date,” Sam’s voice said through the line,
sounding slightly affronted. “You thought I’d forget?”
“Not forget. Get distracted, maybe. You’ve got a lot of
fun new doohickeys to play with out there.”
“Mmm, there is that. And today someone down on level
three accidentally turned on an anti-gravity generator. It took us three hours
to figure out how to turn it off and another two to clean up the mess.”
He chuckled. “Got your very own Felger, huh?”
Exasperation filled her voice. “More than one. But I can
handle it.”
“Never doubted it. So you’re not regretting the job
switch?” He said it with as much carelessness as he could manage, but he had to
admit that the fear was still there, nagging at him.
She missed the subtle difference over a telephone wire
and two thousand miles, though. “No, not even a little. This place is amazing.
We’ve been so busy fighting these past few years that I had to put in insane
hours if I wanted to get any work done in the lab at all. Now…now I can just
concentrate on science. It’s a nice change.”
Relief washed over him, and with it came contentment. It
didn’t matter so much that she was halfway across the country and he was stuck
knee-deep in bureaucratic crap. This, they, were…working. “So we’re still on
for this weekend?”
“Absolutely. Should I see if there’s a transport to D.C.
or…?”
“No, no, I got it covered,” he assured her airily. As it
turned out, there really were some pluses to being ‘the man’. “Our little buddy
Thor is going to be in town, he said he’d be more than happy to beam you here.”
Actually, there had been more to that reply, including a
rather disturbing but not entirely
unappealing line about ‘being pleased to aid in the propagating of the O’Neill
genetic code.’ But he wasn’t about to tell Sam that. Yet.
“Really? That’s sweet of him. And certainly more
convenient.”
“I thought so,” he replied neutrally. “Now, Carter…tell
me all about the gizmo you worked on today. In great detail.”
He could actually hear
her frowning. “…Why?”
Jack shrugged. “It’s hot.”
---
He didn’t think he had ever seen a bar quite this crowded before. But, Jack reflected from his vantage point in
an out-of-the-way booth, people had good reason to be packed in here. Namely, a
very hot blonde and an almost-equally-hot brunette who were playing pool. In
leather.
Daniel’s eyes were glued to the activities across the room with an equal
measure of awe and outright fear. Really, Jack thought that he should have
foreseen this when Daniel suggested getting together for a casual drink with the
two of them while he was in town. But apparently the idea had come to Daniel
right after the Appropriations meeting fiasco, so his brain was too preoccupied
with coming up with ways to attempt to apologize to the Senator. Jack could
understand that—somehow, reassuring
another man that you believed him to be satisfactorily endowed, no matter what your alien companion had implied to
the contrary, seemed a fairly insurmountable task.
So of course, Daniel had forgotten the fact that wherever he went, Vala
had to follow. Jack just didn’t particularly care one way or the other, and Sam had actually expressed interest
in meeting the alien woman who had Daniel twisted in knots (thus fully
confirming Carter’s hidden evil nature). Now
Sam and Vala were both here. At the bar. Together.
“This isn’t funny, Jack,” Daniel warned. “She’s a terror. With Sam…with
Sam, well, the two of them could destroy
the galaxy. We’re talking just…spontaneous implosion.”
Jack raised an eyebrow. “It’s just pool, Daniel.” Besides, he had always
believed that if Sam really put her mind to it, she was fully capable of
galaxy-wide destruction all on her own. There was a reason he had always been
happy to be on her side and not the other way around.
“B…b…but…look at all the…” At this point, Daniel seemed to run out of
words and just gestured wildly at the crowd. “Doesn’t it bother you that
your…girlfriend…is surrounded by men who are all imagining her in various
states of debauchery?”
Jack actually scoffed at that. “No. Carter’s hot.”
This was his entire argument, and he thought it made perfect sense until
Daniel shot him a look that indicated his dissatisfaction with it. Searching
for another reason to give him so he’d quit obsessing over it, Jack finally
came up with, “Besides, I’m the only one who actually gets to experience a debauched Carter.”
Daniel’s face took on the quality of one who had smelled something
particularly unpleasant. “Gah. Too much information, Jack.”
Like he cared. Daniel’d have to leave in another fifteen minutes with
his Bondage Barbie girlfriend and then Jack could go home. With Carter.
---
Jack had seen Sam angry before. Actually, he was closely familiar with
that particular Carter-emotion. This, whatever it was, was something entirely
new. As he watched her gather a few things she had insisted she needed before
heading back to
“It might not be permanent, you know,” he finally offered. “Maybe you’ll
fix whatever it is that needs fixing and then they’ll let you go back.”
She sighed, grabbing a pair of shoes. “No…the SGC is like quicksand in
some ways. I left once with little difficulty, but I get the feeling that won’t
happen again for a long time.”
“Would that really be so horrible?” The SGC held some of the best
memories of his life, and while leaving it had been necessary personally and
professionally, he still missed it everyday.
“No, it’s not…” She honestly seemed at a loss for words, something that
didn’t happen with Sam very often. Or, you know, ever. “It’s like we’re the
Beatles.”
Jack blinked. “Wha…at?”
She nodded, looking more certain of her analogy while Jack was just
floundering (as usual). “The Beatles were a great band, I’ll give you that. But
even decades after they broke up and had success in their own separate careers,
the question they were asked most often was when The Beatles would be getting
back together.”
He thought he understood. Sort of. Metaphors weren’t really his thing.
“So you’re…upset because you feel like SG-1 and the SGC is…inescapable?”
“Sort of. I guess I just feel like I want to do other things, explore
other areas of my life. And just when I’m getting good at that, someone’s
telling me to go backwards.”
He stopped her frenetic activity by looping his arms around her, the
tactile feeling of skin on skin helping to soothe her. He had figured out early
on that touching Carter had a remarkably calming effect on her. “But, at the
risk of repeating myself, is that so bad? SG-1 is a pretty spectacular thing to
get called back to, Sam. It’s a once in a generation kind of overwhelming
coolness thing.”
She smiled up at him, shuffling a little closer. “Easy for you to say.
You’re John Lennon.”
That actually drew a sound of disbelief from his throat. “Don’t be
ridiculous, Carter. My sunglasses are much
cooler than Lennon’s ever were.”
---
“What’s the verdict?” he asked without so much as a greeting when he
scooped up the receiver.
“It’s bad. Cameron wants me to stay. Daniel and Teal’c seem to be
leaning that way too,” she informed him, sounding not-exactly-pleased with the
news.
“And…what do you want?”
She sighed. “I want…to not feel like I’m stagnant. I want to change, to
be different than I was, to not fall back on the old habits of working all the
time and letting that mean everything.”
He drummed his fingers against his desk. “Speaking as the person who
most-often benefits from your new work habits, I heartily agree with that
desire. But no one’s saying you can’t do that from the SGC.”
“I’m just afraid that…that it’ll be so easy to fall back into that
pattern that I won’t even realize I’m doing it,” she admitted. “I really like
my life right now. I like my job. I like…us.”
That drew a smile; the idea of a tangible us always did. “I do too,” he admitted. “But I think we can handle
it. I think we’ll make time. I think…we have to.” That’s what it really came
down to and they both knew it—the world needed SG-1 and Sam was a central part
of that.
She sighed heavily. “I know.”
He reflected. “Although now I really wish I hadn’t sold my house.”
Her laughter was dry, but less bitter than it had been. “Me too. I liked
your house. But maybe next weekend you can come and we can…pick out a
house…together?”
Jack couldn’t stop himself from grinning again, despite his recent
observation that it was habit-forming. “Sounds like a plan.”