Chapter Text
The wind socks were getting a proper workout at Peterson the day Sam Carter emerged from her Volvo and paced across the cold concrete parking lot near the parade ground. She feared for her service cap’s stability as a January gust threatened to knock it off her troubled head.
Little dandelions peeked through the cracked serviceway, recovering from the latest wash of winter weather they’d endured. “Hang in there,” she muttered, side-stepping a patch of golden crowns and turning her heels onto the yawning road that would eventually lead her to the main administrative buildings.
There was no VIP parking at Peterson for Carter. This wasn’t the hallowed bubble of the SGC where her halo never tarnished, her science was gospel, and getting her from A to B as quickly as possible was the priority. No, here, she was just another major and she’d have to walk to her fate like any other misbehaving, mid-ranking officer.
The white envelope and single-page summons, folded neatly in her inside jacket pocket, felt like lead. She'd found it in her lab the previous day upon SG-1’s return to Earth and part of her now wished she’d had the chance to toss it through the next forming event horizon and deny receipt. The summons was vague but the implication was clear; she was in trouble. She’d been an idiot for like, two seconds two weeks ago, someone had noticed, and now, it was coming back to bite her in the ass.
She’d committed one tiny, stupid, silly infraction and it was about to ruin a careersworth of good will. It had been an exhilarating indulgence that she really, really, really shouldn't be thinking about in this humourless, flat place. Her tender memories didn’t belong to a land of straight lines, sharp corners and strict rules, and the very notion of them being uncovered and laid bare to the glare of military judgement was almost too much to take.
But, they’d summoned her, so here she was.
She took note of a series of hangars on the right as she walked. Then, on her left, she passed the striped arm of a parking barrier that restricted access to the lot assigned to higher ranking officers and officials.
Above the buffeting of the wind, she heard her name being called.
“Carter! Wait up!”
There he was. Dress blues, silver hair, lined face shaded from the winter glare by his own service cap’s peak. He was clutching a white envelope with a jagged rip across the short edge. It flapped in the rude wind. " Colonel ?!"
He lifted the envelope in greeting. “You got one, too, I take it.” He looked her over in a way that she shouldn’t like as much as she did, and she did the same to him because she wasn’t strong enough not to give Jack O’Neill a once over when he was in his Class A’s.
She managed a brief nod when she realised he was waiting for an answer. “Yessir.”
She slowed her pace as he approached, and as one, they straightened their shoulders and fell into step. “I didn’t expect to see you here, sir. Why didn’t you say anything yesterday?”
“Why didn’t you ?”
Touché.
They walked in silence for a little while, then her eyes flicked to her side briefly. “You don’t think…”
“Naaaah.”
She slowed, delaying the inevitable. “I mean, they couldn’t know, right?”
“Course not.” He gestured for her to keep walking. “How could they?”
How, indeed? “But the summons said-”
“ I know .”
Sam knew from his tone that he didn't believe it either. She caught his eye as the wind picked up and saw that he was struggling with this just as much as she was.
"You were drunk, Carter, and I was stupid. But no-one saw anything."
She canted her head. He was already working to find an out. “I really wasn’t that drunk, sir.”
He sighed. “Well, then I was stupid enough for both of us.”
—
The clump of close-knit lieutenants in Jack’s hallway were drinking his Guinness and trying to stay out of the way. The party was in full swing, with team members from SG’s 1 through to whatever crammed into his house, wearing party hats and novelty “2000” spectacles.
“Make a hole!” Jack parted the junior officers like Moses and found his favourite nerds holed up in his den as far from his ill-advised mid-winter barbecue as they could possibly get.
Daniel peeked up at him from behind a Trivial Pursuit quiz card.
Of course. “You went rummaging?”
Jackson nodded. “We went rummaging. This is something Sam played at the Academy.” The Pursuit board was nowhere in sight. Instead, Jack’s coffee table was peppered with shot glasses and a half-full bottle of Jameson.
“‘Trivia Per-shoot’?” He was proud of his pun.
“Hot Quiz, Pop Shot!” Carter grinned up at him as she set an empty glass down among an impressive collection of its fallen comrades. “When you get a question right, you drink.”
Jack tried not to notice all the good things her wide-necked sweater did to her collar bones from this angle. He leant against a wall and surveyed the carnage in front of his Major. “Isn’t it meant to be the other way ‘round?”
Daniel nodded. “We changed the rules to… even out the playing field.” His smile slipped a little sideways. Daniel was no quiz slouch and he had the blood alcohol level to prove it.
Teal’c bobbed his head. “MajorCarter is nonetheless proving victorious.” And she glowed with the pride of it. O’Neill hadn’t seen his second look this relaxed and radiant since… ever, actually. She was legitimately having fun. It suited her.
Daniel squinted at the card in his hand and read out the next question. “How many bits in-”
“Eight!” Sam picked up a full shot and downed it before Daniel could sigh “...in one byte.”
She carefully rested the empty container beside her growing collection. “Join us, sir.” Her bright eyes and soft sweater drew him in. “I could do with a challenge.”
Daniel scoffed, Teal’c stood to get another soda, and Jack lost himself for a moment somewhere below her chin and above her belt. Party Carter was brave and flirty and he liked it, and he knew he really, really shouldn’t. “Get a coke, Carter. If this Y2K thing really happens, I’m gonna need you sober enough to fix my VCR.”
Her laugh tinkled as she straightened to a stand inches from him. Her cute little high heel boots clicked on his tiles and she took a moment to scooch and settle her hip-hugging skirt. “Yessir.”
—
O’Neill held his hat steady as they paced by the Air and Space Museum’s gated entrance. Windy days seemed a little more blustery around the antique aircraft which dotted the display aprons. It was as if the sky was demanding their return, huffing and blowing, aiming its gusts at those outstretched wings willing them to flip or tumble or lift into the air one last time. “Are we OK, Carter?”
“Yes, sir.” She sounded strained. In the distance, the choral whirr of jet engines warming up reached them on the wind and the ever-present smell of fuel and fresh paint intensified.
O'Neill sighed and stuffed his envelope in his pocket before he lost it for good. “We haven’t really talked about… everything. Do we need to?” He’d meant to sound like a grown up, but the questioning lilt at the end made him feel more like a kid asking permission.
“Here, sir?”
He recognised that it was hardly the time or the place, but when would they next get the opportunity, or have the motivation to address this head on? "Well, ideally before we reach those doors." He gestured to the collection of low-lying buildings ahead. Despite their squat construction, they all sported single, red rooftop lights, flashing a code few people understood anymore. He couldn’t help seeing each little winky light as a warning.
Carter slowed and came to a gentle halt. The wind followed suit and not for the first time, he wondered if she had as much instinctive control over her environment as she did over the men in her orbit. Her attention settled on him and her blue eyes read his soul.
He watched as the major before him shifted subtly and transformed with a twitch of her lip and a slight relaxing of her posture into a real human being. Her voice softened. “ We’re OK.” She held his gaze with a tenderness that instantly transported him back to that night, two weeks earlier. “I’m just not used to being called to the principal’s office for,” she broke eye contact and he returned to reality in a blink, “something like this."
—
“Three! Two! ONE!”
Jack smiled like a good host should as his guests clinked glasses and blew noise-makers.
He smiled as Siler dipped his good lady wife and kissed her. And he smiled as the flock of lieutenants clumped together again and squeezed the life out of each other in one big penguin huddle. In fact, his smile only faltered when he turned and caught sight of Sam's lips pressed hard against Daniel’s cheek. The younger man was laughing, hanging on to Teal’c’s sleeve and drunkenly trying to explain the New Year tradition to their alien companion.
Jack made his way over as Sam scooted past Jackson in the crush of revellers, pulled their massive warrior friend down to her height and planted a kiss on his indulgent cheek too.
“What of ONeill?” Teal’c asked as Jack joined them.
Sam’s eyes shot his way, widening. She offered him a smile, her eyes all warmth and her lips wine-sweet.
Teal’c turned to Daniel. “Is it not tradition?”
“Oh, it is.”
Jack’s stomach twisted into knots. Could he handle the memory of Sam Carter’s lips against his skin without wanting more? Could he keep it together as she touched him, leant in, breathed close and wished him a Happy New Year? “The host is exempt.”
Sam bit her lip and considered his inscrutable expression. “Maybe next year, sir.”
Relief and disappointment are a tough combination at the best of times, but when you catch sight of your best friend squinting at you behind his glasses, too, well, it meant it was time for another beer.
—
“I’m taking the fall, understood?”
“You want me to lie ?”
God, she was so earnest. He hated how much he liked that about her. “No… I just want you to not tell the whole truth.” He held up a hand at her brewing protest. “I am this close to retirement, and you have a long ass runway ahead of you, and if either of us has to go down for this, it makes way more sense that it’s me.”
“But, I don’t think-” The gasping whoosh of jets taking off and growling skyward drowned out her argument. As the rumble receded she tried again. “Sir, it’s just that-”
“Ack!”
She rolled her eyes but held her tongue.
“I'm not putting your advancement in danger because of a momentary lapse in judgement. Decision made."
—
Jack tossed another crushed can into a plastic bag. “Did you really play that ridiculous game at the Academy?”
Sam hummed a yes as she swiped chips off her CO’s coffee table into an upturned party hat. “When you’re a colonel’s daughter, you have to prove you’ve earned your spot. It was my ‘Ginger Rogers’ move.”
Jack considered that as he watched her straighten and swipe chip dust off her hands. “Backwards, and in high heels?”
She nodded and shot him a challenging glance. He saw so much of the captain he’d first met over a briefing table in that look. All fire and fight.
Her eyes flicked the length of him.“If I can run rings around you at a party, imagine what I could do to you in the air...”
Hot damn.
—
“It wasn’t a lapse,” Carter said.
“I know.”
“I’m as complicit as you, sir.”
“ I know . But you’re far more useful, so shut up and let me do this, OK?”
They passed a small cluster of non-coms, offered the required nods and acknowledged the necessary salutes. Once they were out of earshot, Carter finished her thought. “I could still do my job as a civilian.”
“Carter. I’m trying to be noble, here.”
“Yes, sir, I can see that. But what I’m saying is the SGC needs you in uniform a lot more than it needs me in uniform, and…” She didn’t have to finish the thought. There could be other advantages. Other, more personal advantages.
He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t tempted. The image of Sam Carter in that soft sweater, that skirt, and those heels had been a contributing factor to their current predicament.
But.
“I can’t be the one who loses you your commission, Sam.”
—
“Night, guys!” Sam waved her rubber-gloved hand at Teal’c as he passed by, supporting a wobbly-footed Jackson.
“Drink some water, Daniel!” The front door latched and Jack reappeared at the kitchen entrance. For a moment, he watched his 2IC at his sink, busying herself with the last of the washing. The domesticity on display was unbelievably hot. It was proving almost impossible not to walk up behind her, slip his hands around her waist and hum to her to come to bed. It was the first time all night that he'd actually felt at liberty to admire her figure in her heeled ankle boots, her tight skirt, and her soft-knit sweater. The wide neck had slipped to the side revealing a hint of shoulder. “First through the gate, last to leave a party.” He turned his gaze to the drainer before she could catch him staring.
“I’ll just finish up here, sir and be out of your hair.” She balanced the last shot glass at the top of a small pyramid she’d constructed as she’d washed.
Jack surveyed them. “I didn’t know I even had that many of those.”
“I think one of the junior officers brought a bunch. And that, too . ” She nodded to an almost empty bottle of something expensive, foreign and high proof bundled together a few unopened bottles of wine. “I guess he was trying to impress you.”
“By drinking at me?”
She laughed. “You can’t bring Coors Light to a colonel’s home, sir.”
“I’m not too good for crappy beer, Carter.”
She pulled off her gloves with a bubbly snap, turned and smiled at him. “It was a fun night.” She clutched the counter at her hips.
“Yes, well. When General Hammond asks you to throw a party, you throw a party.”
“Still, it was nice. Everyone had a good time.”
“Mrs. Siler certainly seemed to.”
Carter nodded with enthusiasm. “I know! Did you see that kiss ? Wow!”
“Way to go, Siler. Didn’t know he had it in him!”
The room filled with the sounds of mirth, but then, their eyes met, and their joint laughter died as fast as it had erupted. Open displays of affection were all right for other people, but not for them - he’d reminded her of that once tonight already.
Sam cleared her throat. “It’s late… I should…” She brushed past him towards the designated ‘coat zone’ on his dining room table.
Her lonely jacket had slipped behind a chair as those leaving before her dug about for their own winter protection. He watched her bend and reach for it, her legs appearing longer than usual as her skirt hitched a little.
Dear God.
Then, jacket in hand, she straightened and did her skirt settling scooch again. Her keys jingled as she pulled them from her pocket.
“You’re driving ? After all that hooch?”
"I'm fine, sir." She approached the door to his hall, but he stepped to block her exit. "Honestly," she spoke, offering him a hint of her earlier challenge.
He didn’t move.