Author: Christi (christim@comcast.net)

Disclaimer: Not mine. Don’t sue. Please. You’ll end up owing me money, I’m that broke.

Spoilers: WoO (so small if you blink you’ll miss it), New Order Part 2, tiny spoiler for general Season Eight

Author’s Note: Okay, I really can’t believe I wrote this. Seriously. Am in complete and total shock. I don’t write fluff. And I’ve *never* written PWP. So this...bowled me over completely. And it’s probably out of character and may not make much sense and be a bit juvenile at parts (I barely curbed the horrible impulse to include the line, ‘Is that your stapler or are you just happy to see me?’. Luckily, I managed to resist temptation.) Still, it’s finished and so I figured…what the hell. Hope you enjoy. Or at least, don’t feel the incessant need to mock.

---

“Well…that’s…uh…big.”

“Distinguished, Daniel. I think that’s what they’re trying to go for.”

There was a snort. “For Jack to reach distinguished, they’ll have to do better than that.”

“I believe O’Neill to be worthy of respect regardless of this item.”

“Of course, Teal’c, but typically speaking, the higher up you are, the bigger these things get. Our society tends to equate size with power.”

Outside the room where Jack had been able to hear the trail end of the conversation, his eyebrow rose. Had Carter just said…?

“…I can’t believe you just said that, Sam.”

Curbing the impulse to grin maniacally, Jack peered around the door, watching as his second in command flushed a bright red that indicated that she couldn’t either. “That’s not what I meant, Dan-“

The rest of her explanation was interrupted as Jack’s gaze slid past her to the atrocity occupying space in the room.

“For cryin’ out loud!” Jack’s voice rang out with exasperation. “It’s huge!”

They turned towards him, but his gaze was stuck on the damn thing, unable to look away from the terror. “It’s not that bad, Jack,” Daniel said comfortingly.

“Are you kidding me? It’s a boat.” He eyed the desk venomously. “Seriously, I feel like I should smash a bottle of champagne on the damn thing to christen it.”

“That might be a bit overdramatic, sir,” Sam pointed out, a smile playing around the edges of her mouth.

He just kept fuming. “I don’t know. Look at the size of that thing, then think of all the paperwork that could get stacked on it.” He couldn’t stop the shudder that ran through him at the prospect. “I’m seriously rethinking this whole thing.” He really wasn’t joking. At all.

“It’s a bit late for that, don’t you think, Jack?” Daniel asked, raising an eyebrow. “Besides, it’s just a desk.”

“It’s symbolic, Daniel,” Jack ground out, because that should have been obvious.

“Right…” The archeologist’s tone clearly indicated that he was barely humoring his friend’s odd behavior. “Well, all the big pieces of furniture are in here now, right?”

Jack glowered. Of course, Daniel just had to point out that the desk wasn’t the only source of his torment. Damn, he actually had filing cabinets.

“Indeed,” agreed Teal’c.

He was getting the distinct impression that he was being smirked at. You know, if former First Prime Jaffa types could smirk. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it at all.

Daniel nodded. “So we’ll just leave you to figure out how you want everything.”

The three of them began to file out of the door, even after Jack made a completely undignified squeaking sound in protest. “You’re leaving?” he exclaimed with dismay.

Sam smiled a little, patting his shoulder as she brushed by him. “Hey, we have work to do. Otherwise we’ll hear it from the boss,” she joked lightly, leaning forward a little. “He’s a real-“

Jack met her gaze with a quirk of his eyebrow, silently daring her to finish the sentence. She just let it hang and flashed him one of those perfect grins before slipping out of the room, leaving him alone with the last of a smile on his face, an ache in his heart, and, as his eyes landed on the unnecessarily large desk again, a tiny bit of nagging doubt.

He pushed it away firmly because doubt was weakness and Jack O’Neill didn’t do weakness well. So instead, he set about trying to figure out what exactly all these damn blue reports were and where they were supposed to go.

Four hours, one pesky new assistant named “Gilmore” of all things, and several hundred reports later, newly appointed General Jack was in a very bad mood. What the hell had possessed him to say yes to this job in the first place? Oh, right, Daniel’s brilliant ‘you’ll be able to do whatever you want’ theory.

Looking at the days of work scattered around him on the floor, Jack couldn’t hold back a snort.

From this vantage point, absolute power was looking really overrated.

A knock sounded on the door and Jack groaned. “For Christ’s sake, Gilmore, it’s nearly 2300! Go away! I don’t want to sign, approve, or glance over any other forms today!”

Regardless of what he had always considered a fairly threatening tone, the door cracked open. His head spun around, his entire body tensing as he prepared to holler at the diminutive little paper pusher, only to deflate completely at the surprise he got. Jack struggled to keep a grin off of his face as his brown eyes met vaguely startled, wide blue ones. “Carter,” he managed. “Whatcha doin’?”

The door opened a little more and she stepped inside, his eyes recognizing the almost sheepish expression on her face before they skimmed down to rest on what she was carrying. “I thought…what you said earlier…I don’t know, I figured maybe…” she fumbled, uncertain of herself and of him, even after all this time. And here he thought he had always been so painfully obvious that he’d take whatever she was willing to give him.

“Carter…you brought me champagne?” he asked as the bottle she was holding registered in his mind. The action was so unexpected that he found himself wincing and smiling at the same time as that part of him that he kept so carefully under lock and key burst out of its cage and began to invade the rest of him, even if it was only temporarily. It made his fingers tingle, and he wiggled them, trying to get the feeling to go away.

She blushed again, doing that smile and gaze down at the floor thing that he found so adorable. “I thought it might make having the desk less traumatizing for you,” she explained softly as she walked over and handed the bottle to him. “Even if you did have one before.”

“Still not sure I believe you on that one,” he muttered, unable to look at her because she was there and so close and being so…Sam. So he gazed down at the label instead. “Awful good stuff. Shame to waste breaking it on that monstrosity,” he said, gesturing to the abhorred piece of office furniture. Before he knew he was going to say them, the words were already spoken. “Share a glass with me?”

He couldn’t be sure, but she might have made a tiny little sound in the back of her throat. A kind of squeak or sigh or gasp—he couldn’t be sure as he’d never heard anything like that from her before. But when, after a moment’s hesitation, the corner of her mouth tilted up just a touch, he found it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she had muttered a soft, “All right.”

Grinning, Jack stood from his position curled on the floor among stacks of brilliant blue mission reports, his knee groaning a little and his mind forgetting to care as he tried to search around for some kind of— “Ah, here we go,” he muttered. Dragging two coffee mugs out of a box and placing them on top of an as of yet empty filing cabinet, he began to open the bottle with the corkscrew on the tiny Swiss Army knife that hung from his keychain, swearing never to mentally mock it for its uselessness again.

He filled the mugs silently, handing her one. She took it and smiled yet another Carter smile, still nervous but amused. He loved that. As he watched, her fingers ran around the rim of the cup, absently down the side, and slowly her eyes slid to his, warm and friendly. “To your new desk,” she said to his surprise. “And to Brigadier General Jack O’Neill, who can now do whatever he wants. God help us all.”

It took Jack awhile to place the emotion he heard behind her words, and he was startled when he recognized pride resting underneath the teasing and affection. Pride. For him.

It hit him in the gut like a staff blast, and all he could manage to do was clink his mug together with hers, offer a wan smile, and collapse onto the now much talked about desk as he sipped the fizzy liquid. It tickled his nose and it was warm instead of chilled like it should be and drinking it from a mug made him feel a little silly, but as Carter sat beside him on the smooth wooden surface close enough for her hips to brush his own, he realized it was the most ridiculously romantic moment of his life thus far.

When had he become such a sap?

“I can’t, really, you know,” he said abruptly, breaking the comfortable silence in an attempt to keep some of his sanity.

“Can’t what?” she asked over the rim of her mug.

“Do whatever I want. That was an unfortunate exaggeration produced by Daniel’s overactive imagination.”

She chuckled a little. “I figured as much.”

“Could’ve clued me in,” he groused, glaring at her when she laughed again. “Hey, don’t laugh; I’m actually a little pissed about it.”

A single eyebrow tipped up slightly at him, and rather abruptly he realized how much more they all did that after seven years of being subjected to the all-interpretive Jaffa eyebrow raise. “What would you have done?” she asked lightly, sounding honestly curious.

His mind reeled with possibilities, but all he could manage was a nonchalant shrug. “Oh, I don’t know…ordered no missions before eight AM…made sure that all reports were submitted in only five bullet points…had a three day staff party on that one tropical planet with all the beaches and the purple strawberry things…”

“…P3X-277?”

“Yeah, that one. Made sure they served cake every day in the commissary…” he trailed off, then added, “And blue Jell-o,” as an afterthought.

A smile spread across her face and her eyes did that shiny thing they did so well that made it a little hard to breathe. “Blue Jell-o?” she repeated. “For me?”

He shrugged, trying not to do something horribly embarrassing like blush as he avoided her gaze at all costs. “Who else eats that stuff?”

“That’s so…” she let the sentence hang and he was thankful for it because if she really did use the word ‘adorable’ or ‘sweet’, he might die. “That’s all?” she asked instead.

“Well, I didn’t get much time to think about it before the illusion was shattered,” he said defensively, gesturing towards the administrative chaos that had taken over his life. But somehow, it wasn’t bothering him so much right now. It was hard to worry about paperwork when Carter’s shoulder was nudging his own like that, so easy and familiar and yet so damn hot. With an almost surreal detachment, he noticed that her booted foot had somehow slipped behind his own, nudging it gently every few seconds. When had that happened? “I would’ve thought of more eventually,” he finished.

“Like…banning Kinsey from the base,” she suggested with a laugh.

He smiled a bit. “Nice. Or…instituting funny hat day.”

“Blaring opera over the base speakers.”

“Banning all needles from the infirmary.”

“Playing golf through the ‘gate.”

His head snapped over to hers. “How’d you…” At her startled look of confusion, he shook his head. “Never mind.”

She let it go, just gazing at him, dimples flashing in her cheeks and lips damp from the champagne. And he really should turn away now, break the eye contact and ignore the ‘moment’ that was quickly developing.

He didn’t. And for once, neither did she.

In fact, unless he was still suffering from some kind of post-being-frozen-disorder and therefore delusional, she was actually…encouraging it. Just...sitting there, hip to hip, foot on foot, shoulder to shoulder, and now face to face. “Sir…?” she asked softly, so softly he almost hadn’t heard it past the echo of blood in his ears.

“Hmm?”

She hesitated one minute more before leaning forward, breath mingling with his own. Jack was frozen, completely incapable of thought or movement as he felt it wisp over his face, warm and wet and making him wonder when he was going to wake up from this disturbingly vivid daydream. “Did you ever consider…” she started quietly before closing the last bit of space between them, her lips tentatively brushing against his own.

Time stopped. Jack didn’t breathe, afraid he would shatter the delicate feeling of her against him, her mouth testing his lightly, the brief tastes of her making his lips tingle. It was simple and soft and so sweet that a lump actually formed in his throat.

And then he realized that this was real and this was Sam, and something inside of him snapped.

With a moan, his hand flew to the back of her neck, pulling her against him as his mouth stopped being docile and took control, seizing her lips with all the possessiveness and ferocity and pure lust that he had built up over the years. He very seriously doubted he had the right to even feel such things, but he let them loose anyway, helpless to keep them from taking over the mating of their mouths. Surprisingly, she didn’t seem to mind, her hand flying to his hair, fingers tangling in the silver gray strands in a way that spoke of her own long-suppressed wants. It tugged a little, but damn if it wasn’t the sexiest thing he could remember feeling. Ever.

His tongue slipped past her lips easily and tangled with her own and the first full taste of her made him groan because she tasted like she smelled and her smell had always been enough to make his eyes roll back in his head. They were devouring each other, not out of anger or frustration or anything so base, but simply because after so many years of waiting, they needed. He needed the keen moan that rose out of the back of her throat. She needed the weight of his hand as it gripped the small of her back. And when, with very little encouragement, she somehow managed to shift her weight and turn to face him, straddling his lap and wrapping her arms around his neck, yeah, he definitely needed that.

He couldn’t think and he couldn’t breath and that was starting to become a problem, or so the little red spots behind his eyelids told him. But he couldn’t seem to care, because when it came down to breathing or sucking on Samantha Carter’s tongue, there really wasn’t much of a contest. Especially when she was wiggling around on top of him and making those noises and….oh, God.

Tearing his mouth away at the feeling of her fingers trailing up the bare skin of his back, he leaned away from her a little and gasped for air and the last bits of his quickly eroding self-control. “Christ, Carter,” he panted, the sound of his voice low and foreign even to his own ears.

After a moment, he managed to open his eyes, and the vision of her perched on top of him, hair tousled, lips swollen, and eyes a deeper blue than he’d ever seen nearly undid him again. But no, he couldn’t, because he was a self-flagellation kind of guy and he couldn’t seem to just go with a very good thing. No, for once in his life, he was actually driven to talk instead of act.

Damnit.

Jack searched her eyes, needy and confused and so turned on he could barely see straight. But one question was begging to be asked before he could do anything else, before he threw caution to the wind yet again and just did what he damn well wanted to. “Sam…” he grated out, clenching his teeth to try and ignore the sensation of her weight right there on his lap. “…what’s going on here? What’s changed?”

She bit her bottom lip uncertainly, not quite meeting his gaze. “Everything. Nothing. I don’t…” she sighed, sounding more fragile than he could ever remember. “…I’ll just go…”

She started to leave, to pull away, and Jack panicked. Blind, sheer, and complete panic because suddenly he saw all too clearly the next years of his life going without this, and all of the sudden, that wasn’t an acceptable loss anymore. Luckily, years of training and carefully honed instincts took over, and while she tried to retreat, he grabbed her, somehow managing to flip their positions so that she was caught on the edge of desk, his body pinning her there. “No,” he said fiercely.

“No?” she repeated, and instead of sounding angry like he had feared she might, there was a definite ring of relief in her voice and her hands somehow worked their way into his hair again, fingernails scraping lightly at the base of his neck.

“Hell no,” he reiterated before reclaiming her mouth with his own savagely. Talking could wait—they were both more action-oriented people anyway.

She wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms were around his neck and that was good, but he wanted more. So, with great reluctance, he separated their mouths, beginning a line of open-mouthed kisses down her neck, nibbling here and sucking there and that was better because she was moaning now and oh, God, she tasted like peaches. His attack moved up and to her ear, but was interrupted when he felt her hands under his shirt again, warm fingers trailing up his back and then around to his chest, making the muscles there contract involuntarily and drawing out a hiss of breath from between his teeth.

He backed away long enough to tear his shirt over his head, throwing it across the room before following suit with hers, and suddenly there were acres of pale Carter skin to be explored. But it wasn’t quite enough because Jack was greedy now, so her shoes and socks came off so that the pants could, too, and that satisfied him—for the moment. He went back to kiss her because kissing her was proving to be addictive, and the sensation of skin against skin drew gasps from both of them.

Slowly he lowered her to the long, shining surface of his new desk, gazing at her. This wasn’t how he had imagined this would happen when he had ever allowed himself to imagine it at all. But with her sprawled there, blonde hair shining against the reddish tint of the cherry wood, chest heaving for breath already, he found that fantasies didn’t matter so much anymore. She held his gaze for a moment and then opened her arms and Jack fell into them eagerly, drowning in her. He wanted her desperately, to the point of physical pain, but there were some fantasies he insisted on fulfilling, just in case this turned out to be a worst case scenario—a crazy moment of lust on top of a desk that she’d soon want to forget. So he mentally batted away his own aching desire, not even allowing himself to remove his trousers to relieve the horrible pressure of his erection straining against them. Instead, he set about touching and tasting as much of Samantha Carter as he possibly could.

He pressed a line of kisses across her collarbone, down the center of her chest, fingers splaying over the white cotton of her bra before working themselves around to the back. His fingers unfastened it quickly and pulled it off so he could latch his mouth onto an already tight nipple, licking and nipping gently. She arched up against him, and the increased contact of her heated flesh sent electric shocks running across his skin.

Jack couldn’t breathe again, but that was okay because he was working his way down her stomach now, calloused hands running down her sides, across her abdomen, cupping her breasts as his tongue darted into her navel. All he wanted was to slide south, to smell and taste and consume her, but the hands tugging in his hair had other ideas. He slid back up her body at her insistence, lips meeting again as she darted her tongue into his mouth, invading even more of him. He was distracted by the raw lust of it, heat and eagerness and yearning all wrapped together, so when one palm cupped him through his pants, unsnapping and tugging at the zipper deftly, it came as a complete shock. He couldn’t stop his hips from lunging into her hand and then pressing against her, rubbing in a way that had them both crying out. Once they came together, then twice, and suddenly the time for exploration was over.

The last of his clothes and then hers came flying off without regard, tossed away blindly in wake of desperate need. There was no moment of hesitation or soul-searching beforehand, just him thrusting into her fully once all barriers were gone, sliding as deep as he could go and just praying that he didn’t die from the overwhelming rightness of it all. Some sound escaped him, a cross between a growl and a whimper, and he had to freeze then, had to breathe then because it was too much to handle.

His head fell onto her shoulder, as he panted and tried to find some semblance of the self-control that had held him in check for so many years. But it refused to come, because at some point he realized that their hands were clasped together, fingers entwined. It could have seemed like a small thing when he was buried inside of her, but as he felt her hand squeeze his own, he suddenly realized that though this looked like a quick fuck on a desk to ease years of lust, it wasn’t really about that at all. It was about the way she was trembling underneath him and the way he couldn’t help but nuzzle her neck gently and about how he couldn’t open his eyes because then he might do something mortifying like cry and about how he was pretty sure that she already was.

So with one more squeeze of her hand and a quick kiss against her parted lips, he began to move, long and deep and steady, trying to draw out the inevitable as much as possible. Her hips rose up to meet him and she had begun to mutter under her breath, whispers of words he couldn’t make sense of but that he felt somehow. It escalated quickly—it had to, of course, after all this time, but it was okay because she was just as desperate as he was, just as needy. His rhythm began to falter and he couldn’t stop the small grunts that escaped him with each thrust now, hungry sounds.

At some point, he opened his eyes, and that was when it was over because they instantly met Sam’s, dark and earnest. She looked at him in a way he couldn’t quite describe and that was all it took, her hips and back arching up off the wood, every muscle tightening and his name, his real name, escaping her lips as she surrendered. It was too much and suddenly he was there with her, following her so far over the edge that his ears rang and it almost hurt a minute before white obscured his vision and he was choking out her name over and over and over again as he poured into her helplessly.

Everything was numb for awhile after that—he couldn’t move from being collapsed against her and he couldn’t think too hard. It was work just to draw long-needed air into his lungs and to try to stop the tremors still coursing through his body. When he finally did manage to move, it was just to the side, so he’d stop crushing her into the unforgiving, hard surface of polished wood.

He was afraid then, because thought was returning and with thought came insecurities, old and deeply ingrained into the heart of Jack O’Neill. He was convinced that she’d leave right then, that she hadn’t felt what he had, that she hadn’t understood that it was more than casual sex on the nearest available surface.

Damn, they should’ve talked before.

But before he could even process the extent of his fear, she was there, clammy skin against his own, a head on his shoulder and their fingers still entwined. Sam sighed, but it was a happy sound, and there was wetness on his shoulder now that he was pretty sure was more tears than sweat. And if all that didn’t quell his personal demons for the moment, the sight of her bare toes actually doing the most adorable wiggling, curling thing did.

She relaxed against him completely and they were actually cuddling on top of his gigantic desk. Somehow, he realized that they didn’t have to talk, that all those years of nonverbal communication had paid off and they were finally in the same place. The rest…they’d figure out, one way or another.

It was about then that he decided never to part with that desk. Ever.

And then another delicious thought occurred to him. Unable to stop a truly cheesy-assed grin from taking over his face, he squeezed her hand lightly. “Hey, Carter?”

“Hmm?” she responded lightly, feet tangling with his own.

“It occurs to me…that now I have all this other office furniture, too.” He traced his free hand down her back, up and down. “Filing cabinets. A trophy case thing. A big sturdy chair.” He bent over a little, nuzzling into her hair and placing a kiss at her temple. “And Carter?”

“Hmm?” An amused sound, and yeah, things were gonna be okay.

“The chair?” he said softly, then moved to whisper in her ear. “It spins.”