Negotiating Hell

Title: Negotiating Hell
Author: Ky (venom69)
Fandom: Stargate EssGeeWun.
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Jack closed his eyes, crossed his toes, took a deep breath and wondered if his own Special hell would send a taxi for him or if he'd be expected to start walking.
Character/Pairing: Sam/Jack
Spoilers: None
Warnings: Sex, language.
Author’s Notes: Written for

phdelicious, in the

sjficathon. Many thanks and love to

amandal557 for the beta. I went over it when she was done, so the mistakes are mine. I've screwed with the timeline of the show a little bit. Because I can. Song belongs to Underworld.
Disclaimer: Usual guff. Not mine, promise to put them back where I found them.
Date: 14/08/07

***

We dance underneath the radar
We live underneath the bomb
When you live underneath the radar
There’s no way that you’re ever gonna get far

***

Jack frowned as the boy - perhaps eight or nine - looked up at him, his young dark eyes serious. "Will you help us?"

His frown deepened.

The little boy looked too much like Charlie for Jack's taste, despite the different heritages. The dark hair, fair skin... it was all far too familiar for him. "We're not supposed to get involved."

The eyes that met Jack’s gaze spoke of a wisdom that surpassed the years of the young body. "Please."

***

There had been very few times in his life when Jack had been seriously inclined to take the moral high ground. He had always trusted his superiors to tell him what he should and should not do - since they were paid the big bucks for a reason - and he never saw reason to argue with them. Their decisions never really interfered with his not-so-strict code of right and wrong, which he generally attempted to live by.

He'd spent a great deal of his childhood getting himself - and his friends, by default - into trouble and his parents had insisted on the Air Force as a way of straightening his, well, 'slightly less than legal' habits out.

From the onset of his adulthood, Jack had spent his entire life being given orders and rules to follow. Though he had often fought tooth and nail with his COs, and he had often told them to all but fuck off and die, at the end of the day, he would follow his orders - mostly - and get the job done.

It wasn't really a perfect solution - most of the men he'd worked for had thought his attitude and quick 'wit', as he liked to call it, to be somewhat counterproductive - but it was all he had known and it worked for him.

Of course, despite the attempt at following orders and doing the right thing, there had been times when those two goals had been mutually exclusive. Once or twice, Jack had followed an order over doing what he considered to be the right thing, and it was always those missions that ate away at him until he thought he might go crazy. He had no plans to end up a trigger happy soldier with a chip on his shoulder and sometimes, only sometimes, he had found himself going against the order of a Commanding Officer.

Having a reprimand on file sucked a hell of a lot less than not being able to look at oneself in the mirror, he'd quickly found.

It was with that thought in mind that he walked back to the camp that Carter and Teal'c were assembling, while Daniel was off somewhere else, up to his eyeballs in Historical glee.

Carter was the first to spot his return as she struggled in a battle against a particularly hostile tent pole, a battle that she appeared to be loosing rather spectacularly. "What did Hammond say?"

"He said not to get involved."

She frowned, her forehead creasing. "But why?"

Jack pulled the strap of his MP5 higher on his shoulder and shrugged. "The Pentagon doesn't want us to negotiate the treaty because they don't want to be responsible for the ultimate outcome. They aren't prepared to get involved in the religious politics of this planet."

Though the Delenga representatives had asked for their help to peacefully end the civil war that they were currently living through, Jack knew that the President didn't want to be at the heart of any sort of diplomatic incident that their involvement could cause.

In other words, they didn't trust Jack not to open his mouth, insert his foot up to his ankle, and be the root cause of the entire planet exploding or something equally catalytic.

Heh. They sure did have a lot of faith in his ability to screw things up. He was almost proud.

Amusement at his lack of diplomatic skills aside, Jack could almost understand the decision of the Higher Ups not to get involved. To begin with, the SGC was still relatively new and most of the SG teams were still trying to find their footing in the galaxy while trying to resist the urge to scream "Holy crap I'm on another planet, yo!!" every time they stepped through the Stargate. Not to mention the fact that their last attempt in getting involved with the affairs of another planet - Namely, Chulak - hadn't exactly gone all that well for them. Beyond that, they didn't know enough about the history of the people on this planet to get involved.

But that little boy with the dark eyes...

Waving away Carter's concerned look, Jack headed west of their campsite to the ruins that Daniel was so engrossed in.

When he had the younger man's attention - which took enough time for him to have watched the Super bowl with a double feature performance at halftime - he relayed the same orders that Hammond had given him.

"That's crazy," Daniel, unlike Jack, was extremely likely to voice his opinions when an order didn't coincide with his own beliefs. The young man had, effectively, only been working for the AF for a few months - not that one could really count his time on Abydos as 'working' - and he hadn't quite reached the stage of knowing when to keep his mouth shut.

"I didn't say I agreed, Daniel. I just said that he ordered us to stay out of it."

Daniel raised an eyebrow - Jack wondered if he needed a crane for that action alone - and shrugged expectantly. "So...?"

"If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun."

And that was all he had to say about that.

***

"Did Jack tell you what the plan is?"

Sigh. "No."

"So you don't know?"

"No."

"Can you ask-"

"No."

"But-"

"No."

"I-"

"Daniel. No. He will tell us when he is ready."

"General Hammond said we shouldn't get involved."

"And do you agree with that?"

Pause. "Well, no."

"Then stop asking questions."

Jack could hear the exasperation in Carter's voice as she and Daniel sat watch together. In fact, he felt a large amount of exasperation himself, mainly out of sympathy for her.

Daniel, though usually in favor of helping those less fortunate, didn't like not knowing things. Hell, the kid had spent his entire career excelling from the discovery of information that had slipped through the cracks of history. It had worked for him his entire life; Jack just wasn't in the mood to explain his actions right now and he had - selfishly - put Daniel on watch with Carter so he wouldn't have to listen to the incessant pestering for knowledge.

Carter might want to kick him for it by the time he relieved them in another - quick glance at watch - three hours, but at least she'd been trained to squash that particular desire and Jack's shins would remain bruise-free.

He sighed.

The truth wasn't that he was annoyed with Daniel, so much as he had no idea what the hell he was planning.

Hammond had specifically told him that they were only allowed to be on the planet for the initial three days that they had been granted at the start of the mission.

They had three days for Daniel to drool over the ruins until his heart was content, three days for Teal'c to confirm that there was no super secret Goa'uld base hidden thirty feet underground, three days for Carter to swear on her head that there was no Naquadah in the soil and three days for him to work on his tan, catch up on some missed sleep, contemplate the recent airing of the Simpson’s and generally keep the kids out of trouble.

Though they had sent a UAV before being given the go-ahead on the mission, they hadn't actually expected any native interaction, much less the welcoming party of representatives that had greeted them when they had stepped through the 'Gate. They'd made the introductions, explained that they were on opposite sides of their civil war and then the little boy had pulled Jack aside and asked if he'd come to be their savior.

Jack didn't really think himself capable of saving his own soul from Hell, let alone stopping a war on a planet he knew little about.

What they did know was that there was a conflict happening and, though the people of Delenga weren't living in high-rise apartments, they weren't a rudimentary society by any stretch of the imagination and they had the weaponry to prove it.

The UAV had shown them pictures of both populations, but they'd been ordered to stay within the immediate vicinity of the uninhabited ruins. The two settlements on Delenga were on opposite sides of the main land mass, with the Stargate and the subject of Daniel's current fascination being virtually in the middle. It would make life easy for the team, up until either side of the war decided to start shooting, though there’d been no evidence to suggest recent violence of any significant magnitude.

Of course, if they - Daniel - managed to do their jobs correctly, that would all be a moot point.

Jack could still hear Daniel and Carter talking quietly - discussing some new scientific publication, if he was correct - but he tuned them out and tried to force some kind of plan into the forefront of his mind so he wouldn't feel like an ass under Daniel's questioning gaze come morning.

He got nothing.

Rolling his jacket up into a tight ball to serve as a pillow for the remainder of the evening, Jack sighed and closed his eyes. He had to stand watch in a few hours and it would be logical if he'd had at least a little sleep first.

***

He did not function well pre-coffee.

It was a biological certainty and the fact that Daniel - a confirmed caffeine addict - could hold a coherent conversation before his first jolt was nothing short of a sign of the apocalypse.

Trying desperately to ignore the young man - while quickly doing a scan of the perimeter for four guys on horses - Jack poured himself a cup of lukewarm coffee and swallowed it all in two long gulps before he left the words being spoken to him penetrate the morning fog of his mind.

"So what are we going to do?"

"We're going to negotiate their treaty in less than forty-eight hours." Jack forced confidence into his voice. The kind of confidence that only came with having a detailed and well thought-out plan. One that he most certainly did not have.

"We?"

Daniel was perceptive sometimes. "You."

"I'm not a negotiator."

He could see Carter biting her tongue to keep from commenting, laughing, or an odd mixture of both. "And?"

"I'm also not a diplomat."

"You lived on Abydos." Maybe they could have Daniel shag one of the leaders daughters to sort everything out?

"They weren't asking me to negotiate anything for them."

There went that stroke of genius. "What's your point, Daniel?"

"I'm not a negotiator," he repeated firmly.

Jack nodded in understanding and then patted him on the shoulder with a smug smile. "Then congratulations; you are today."

***

"Did I mention that I'm not a negotiator? Or a diplomat?"

"You did."

Jack continued walking, forcing the others to keep step with him in order to voice their disapproval of his decision.

Well, Daniel verbally protested. Carter snorted - in a very ladylike sort of way - every so often and Teal'c silently followed behind them, no doubt shaking his head - metaphorically - at the antics of the humans that he had so recently allied himself with.

Jack wondered if the big guy was starting to regret that decision yet.

"Jack, I can't just go in there and start mediating for them. We don't even know why they're fighting!"

"Ask them, then."

"Ask them?" Daniel turned to look at Carter and roll his eyes. Jack couldn't see the action, but he could well imagine. "‘Ask them’ he says!"

She, at least, was what Jack was beginning to think of as their voice of reason, and she was fairly likely not to call her CO a dickhead until the team had been together at least a year. He hoped. "It's not that ludicrous, Daniel."

"You don't really expect me to start their peace talks with 'Can anyone tell me why we're here?', do you?"

"Why not?"

"We'd look ridiculous," he protested.

"We'd look honest," she countered.

Jack silently smirked.

***

Though it probably - definitely - didn't serve him well as a faux-negotiator, Jack knew that his tendency to spit out one-liners without thought was entertaining as well as troublesome. On that basis, he considered it nothing short of a miraculous attest to his restraint that he managed to bite his tongue when he saw what the natives defined as 'peace talks.'

The Delenga representatives from the southern sector had come to the 'table' with more weapons than the entire SGC armory. And that was pretty damn impressive.

The northern sector Delenga's, however, had done much the same, though they'd put a slightly more subtle spin on their approach and only admitted to having several sniper-esque men in the trees when Jack pressed the issue.

Once he'd established where all of the men with guns were, Jack turned the meeting over to Daniel and watched the younger man take a few deep breaths - perhaps mentally plotting Jack's slow and painful death that would, no doubt, involve several blunt objects and some rusty cutlery - before he sat up a little straighter and attempted to look like he knew what was going on.

"Can anyone tell me why we're here?"

***

Jack thought it quite likely that he might be dying.

And, if not dying, then he was terminally ill with a life expectancy of a day.

"Do you have any idea what they're talking about, Carter?"

If possible, she looked just as confused as he did. And that scared the hell out of him. "Not really, Sir."

"Teal'c?"

"They are arguing about the origins of the ruins Daniel Jackson has been studying."

That was it? "Really?"

"Indeed."

From their position, several dozen feet from the table, Jack eyed the natives that he could see and frowned. "But they're armed to the teeth!"

"So they're arguing passionately." Carter offered with a shrug.

"Are they arguing about how old the ruins are?" As far as Jack was concerned, if it interested Daniel, it was really old and not much more needed to be said.

"The people of the south believe that the ruins were established by their God."

Oh crap... "A Goa'uld?"

"Possibly."

"Great." That was just what they needed. "So if the Southerners are arguing for one God, the Northerners arguing that it was a different God?"

"Correct."

Carter almost looked impressed. "Jews, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists arguing over the origin of God, on a slightly smaller scale."

"I am unfamiliar with those Goa'uld's."

Jack shook his head. "They're not Goa'uld's, Teal'c, they're religions on Earth. Each religion has followers that emphatically believe in their God and what he or she stands for."

"And there are some," Carter continued, "That would argue that there is no such thing as a God. They're called atheists."

"There are also some that would argue that God, Buddha, Allah, the Dalai Lama and the rest are all the same being with a different name and a different set of rules to live by. They're called realists," Jack added.

"Have wars been fought over these beliefs?"

Carter grimaced as she nodded. "Too many."

Jack didn't really think that now was an appropriate time to be discussing the unrest between religious groups on Earth. He wasn't sure if the Delenga's would take kindly to their 'diplomats' being of a world that couldn't even sort out their own belief system. "So why are they fighting now?"

"It seems that they were happy to coexist with their own beliefs but, a few generations ago, something happened that caused them to question how there could be two Gods."

"They couldn't just have a friendly debate?"

"Daniel says that they were, but when we showed up and started looking around the ruins, they were concerned and the fighting escalated from peaceful discussions to threats and eventually shots would be fired."

Jack found it hard to believe that their presence alone on this particular planet had thrown the entire civilization’s religious beliefs into question. Then again, they had managed to piss off Ra and Apophis without too much effort on their part, so he supposed anything was possible. "So what do we do now?"

Carter shrugged. "Wait for Daniel."

***

Some hours later, when the negotiations were finished for the day and Daniel was slumped beside their fire, Jack shook his head in amazement. "I can't believe you actually asked."

"Well... Sam told me to."

"If Carter told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?"

"No!" Daniel frowned, growing quiet for a moment. "I might consider it, though."

There were at least ten responses that sprung to mind, none of which Jack thought Carter would let him get away with saying. He shut his mouth.

"And in any case," Daniel continued, oblivious. "It worked, didn't it?"

"I don't think that's the point."

Carter jumped in at that point, if only to save them from any potential bloodshed. "How does your first successful negotiation feel, Daniel?"

"I don't know if I'd call it successful."

Jack raised his cup slightly. "They didn't start shooting, there's not bodies around and no gunshots being heard, I'd call that successful."

"Yeah, but you're a pessimist," Daniel rolled his eyes. "All I did was re-instate the status quo that they had going."

"Is that bad?" Carter raised an eyebrow. "As long as they're content to accept each other's beliefs and not fight over it, isn't that a good thing?"

Daniel looked almost uncomfortable. "Actually, I think they're worshipping the same Goa'uld anyway."

"What?"

He nodded. "The ruins suggest that the first settlement on this planet was by the Stargate. They settled there after they were taken from Earth. After a few decades they followed the will of their 'God' and migrated North. Fast forward a few more decades and that same 'God' came back and separated the people in the North. I don't know why, but he had his Jaffa transport half of them to the south."

"Right," Jack nodded. "But how does that equate to them worshipping different Gods?"

Teal'c cocked his head to the side. "The Goa'uld changed hosts."

Daniel clicked his fingers and grinned. "Exactly."

***

When a small group of Northern Delenga's - including the very same little boy that had convinced Jack to help in the negotiations with just one word - made their way to the campsite and offered celebration and friendship, Jack didn't think it would be very polite of them to refuse.

When a small group of Southern Delenga's joined them not more than half an hour later, bringing with them an offering of a sweet berry drink that they swore was devoid of any hallucinogenic properties - he asked; once bitten, twice shy - Jack was pretty damn sure that they'd been set up.

Not set up in the bad way, though, for a change. The natives were happy that the conflict had ended and all they wanted to do was thank SG-1 for helping.

Of course, native gratitude came with food, which helped.

Jack eyes the cup of dark liquid in his hand. The little boy had given it to him and told him that it was full of wild berries from the west fields. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. "Should we really be drinking this?"

Daniel shrugged. "Sam's on her third cup."

Though it didn't actually sound all that bad, Jack knew that three cups of this stuff didn't bode well when he looked up to find his second standing in the middle of a group of natives - a decidedly male group of natives - with just her black T-Shirt and pants on, something dangling from her index finger.

No, not something, her bra was dangling from her finger.

He watched with an odd mixture of horror, desire, mortification and shame - but mainly desire, he admitted - as she twirled the bra around her finger, emulating the sounds of a helicopter.

Very childish and way, way, way too hot to be natural.

Crap...

***

It was official; He was going to Hell.

But not just any generic Hell. Oh no. He was going to the special kind of Hell reserved for people who talk in movie theaters, fart in elevators and kick small puppies.

In fact, Jack decided, they may not even let him in to that Hell. Maybe he was going to get a new Hell all to himself. He had surpassed the level of movie talkers and elevator farters and puppy kickers and he'd surpassed the corruption of innocence, so they were going to have to set up a whole new department just for him. He'd rule the new level of Hell.

Heh. Cool.

No, he told himself firmly, focus.

Focus.

It seemed like a pretty damn good plan in theory, but focusing only brought his attention to the naked blonde in his arms. Having his attention brought to her made key areas of his body do a little happy dance and it made his mind bring up a couple of images that really didn't help the signs of life coming from the general direction of his groin.

All of that just reinforced his Hell theory.

The worst part about the whole situation was not so much that he'd woken with a naked woman in his arms. No, there had been a few youthful indiscretions in his past that involved waking with an unclothed and unnamed person next to him. There'd even been a few unknown locations in there too. But at least then he'd known what general area he was in.

Now? He didn't even know what damn planet he was on.

Yup. Hell.

Sigh.

Carter had drooled a little on his chest at some point during the night. And she was snoring softly - if a sound equivalent to a Mack Truck could be defined as anything resembling ‘soft’ - and muttering in her sleep.

Jack poked her shoulder as gently as he possibly could

She made some kind of indistinguishable sound and tried to bury her head further into her pillow - namely his chest.

"Carter!"

Training had to count for something and her head snapped up, her eyes instantly alert. "I'm awake."

"Good." How did one politely tell their subordinate to get the hell away from them?

"I'm also naked."

She said it like he couldn't feel every damn part of her pressed against him. And just why were her nipples hard anyway; it wasn't cold! "Yes, you are."

"And why am I naked?"

Uh... good question. "I have a confession to make."

She looked appropriately concerned even as she attempted to look neutral. "Mmm?"

Jack closed his eyes, crossed his toes, took a deep breath and wondered if his own Special hell would send a taxi for him or if he'd be expected to start walking. "I have no idea how we got here."

Carter made a face. "Me either."

Well, at least he wasn't alone there. "Oh good."

"Did we...?" She looked down at herself. Well, as much of herself as she could see without lifting the blanket that covered them. "I don't remember..."

"No." Jack didn't specifically remember doing anything questionable with her and he figured that was good enough.

At least, he hoped to Hell - no pun intended - that it was.

Carter appeared to struggle for an appropriate response before she settled on "Good", accompanied with a nod.

“So…” Jack clucked his tongue.

“So?”

Yeah, he still hadn’t figured out how to tell her to get the hell away from him without hurting her feelings. “We should probably…”

“Oh… Oh. Oh! Right. Yes.”

She was talking in monosyllables and, even thought he’d only known her for a few months, that was long enough for Jack to have established that any sentence from Carter that didn’t make him want to find the nearest dictionary was generally cause for concern.

He waited until she’d moved - slid, was the correct term. slid, oh god - off his body before he spoke. “We’ve all done it, you know.”

Carter kept the blanket clutched to her chest and kept her eyes averted as she looked through her pack - had Daniel put that there? - for her spare uniform. “Done what? Woken up naked with our COs?”

Jack tried to imagine waking up naked, cuddled close to Hammond, but all he got for that fleeting thought was the word ‘ew’ flashing through his mind.

Filing that little gem away for the next inappropriate erection that arouse, Jack started to pull his own clothing on. “Uh… I meant eaten or drunk something off world that didn’t agree with us. Remember what Ferretti said about Captain Deall and that smoked meat?”

Despite the situation, she managed a slight snort of amusement. “I remember.”

“That was way worse than this.”

“Deall and Ferretti didn’t wake up naked together.”

“No, but Deall did have to deliver a verbal report to Hammond while stoned. He spent half the briefing trying to convince everyone that they really did need to order a pizza with a Big Mac and vanilla malt milkshake on it.”

She wasn’t looking at him as she re-folded the blanket they’d slept under, but he managed to get another small laugh in response. “True, I suppose.”

“My point, anyway,” He shrugged into his jacket, “Is that it’s no biggie. And neither of us remember much about last night, so…” So they could stop being weird about it, was the unspoken.

Carter was Carter; she got what he didn’t say. “Understood, Sir.”

***

With every intention of pretending that nothing had gone quite as wrong as it had on this mission - though, despite the naked 2IC and the impromptu strip show, it had been a pretty successful three days - Jack wandered lazily behind the team as they headed back to the ‘Gate.

He turned to order Carter to dial the DHD, but the words caught in his throat and he was assaulted with the image of her from the previous night.

No, more than the image; the taste of her in the air, the sight, smell, feel, everything...

She giggled even as he tried to convince her to get inside the tent.

"I'm not sleepy!"

Her protests didn't register as Jack fought the wave of jealousy down.

They'd all been watching her, watching her pale skin dance with firelight as she'd slowly and methodically peeled away the form hiding layers of her BDU's.

Jack had felt an odd desire to cover her from their eyes. He'd wanted to cover her and hide her from the eyes of men that wanted her only as a body. Men that didn't know about the brain that came with those breasts.

He wouldn't let himself stop to think about why that was important. She was a grown woman, smarter than any he'd met before, and perfectly capable of making her own decisions about what she did and did not do with strange, leering men.

More than that, he was her Boss, not her father, and he shouldn't be entertaining the thoughts of beating those men to a pulp - and ruining the effect of Daniel's previously unknown negotiation skills - simply because they had been witness to her erotic dance.

She pressed their hips together, rocking back and forth against the erection that he hadn't been willing to think about or consciously acknowledge, and all thoughts of those men flew from his mind quicker than he could think, Shit.

"I want you."

Crap.

He'd already said no to her once in the last six months. Wasn't it bad enough that he had to work with someone that hot and have the regulations hanging over his head? She had to throw herself at him too? Jesus. How much restraint did whatever deity watching expect him to have? "No."

"Please, Sir."

Oh that just wasn't playing fair.

He couldn't believe that he was really going to say no to a naked - and, apparently, extremely willing - blonde.

Jack knew, without doubt, that is was the drink - whatever it had been - that was making her do this. He knew that, while the natives had all been perfectly lucid by the time Carter had started stripping, the dark liquid had had a strange effect on her. Thankfully - for him - none of the male SG-1 members had accepted more than one glass. He didn't think that Teal'c had even had a sip at all. But that wasn't the point.

No, the point was that Jack was very well aware that Carter was only acting like this because she was under the influence of... something.

Well, his brain knew it; his balls were just interested in what she was offering.

He was almost afraid of which ‘brain’ would win.

"Carter. No."

She pouted.

It would have been cute if it weren't sexy as hell.

Forcefully, Jack ignored the pout and maneuvered her into the waiting sleeping bag. When she was settled, he stripped his shirt and pants off, crawled into his bag and sighed as he flicked the torch off. "Ask me again when you're sober."

Her voice floated through the dark, tinged with the sadness of rejection, but still tantalizingly full of the promise of pleasure. "I will.

And, later…

Something was rubbing him back to full hardness.

He wasn’t completely awake or coherent - not that he was normally the latter, anyway - and he couldn’t do much more than push his hips up toward the talented hand that gripped his flesh, sure of the pleasure it could give him.

One of the digits - a thumb, he suspected - teased across the tip of his erection, smearing the moisture that gathered there. It felt way, way, too good.

Jack wasn’t completely certain that he wasn’t dreaming.

What he was certain of, was that he had gone to bed with boxers on. He’d also gone to bed alone, after putting Carter in the sleeping bag next to him, though she’d fought him every step of the way while she tried to seduce him. Carter seducing him. Mmmm.

Carter.

Carter…

His eyes snapped open. “Oh shit.”

“Now that’s not very nice.”

The voice was muffled and, before he could look down to figure out why, the head of his cock was encased in something warm, wet and tight.

“Carter!”

She answered him - but he had NO idea what she said, specifically - and the vibrations from her ‘words’ made his stomach flop in a way that was as bad as it was really, really good.

He had to stop her. “Carter!”

She sucked harder, moving her head down to encase more of him, and Jack thought it quite possible that his brains had melted out of his ear.

“Shit.”

Startled back to reality with the opening of the Stargate, he turned and noticed Carter watching him with a slight frown.

He wondered if she remembered what she had said and done. He wondered if she remembered crawling into his sleeping bag at some ridiculously early hour of the morning, doing… that and, once he’d stopped her from finishing him off - damn his conscience - demanding that they share body heat.

He wondered if she knew that he had been able to feel the damp heat from between her thighs when she draped her leg across his.

Probably not.

Damnit.

She continued frowning at him even as she moved to stand next to him, her eyes averted. "I will ask again, you know."

Jack whistled to himself as he watched her jog to catch up to Daniel and step through the 'Gate. So she does remember… "Sweet."

***

"You disobeyed a direct order!"

"You've read my file, Sir,” He returned blankly. “You can't possibly be surprised about that."

Hammond didn't look impressed by the comment, but Jack thought he saw the corner of the older man's mouth twitch just a little. "The order came from above me, Colonel, do you realize what the Pentagon will say when they found out that you interfered with the natives?"

Jack didn't actually care about that specifically, but... "I'm sorry I made your life difficult, Sir."

"Did your involvement change anything?"

"No Sir. Daniel discovered that they were worshipping the same God, but we didn't tell them."

"Why not?"

"That wasn't really a can of worms I wanted to open. Daniel found evidence that the Goa'uld that ruled there hadn't been back for well over four generations. Teal'c confirmed that he died in battle with Ra. The natives were relatively happy as they were, I didn't see any reason to disillusion them."

Hammond sighed. "Have you written your report on this mission?"

Jack raised an eyebrow. They'd only been back for a few hours and he was still trying to think of how to explain Carter's striptease. Aside from that, he wasn't exactly well-known for keeping up to date with his paperwork. "Not yet."

"What are you planning to say?"

He met the blue eyes of his Superior and held his gaze for a long moment. Jack wasn't certain, but he almost believed that Hammond wanted him to lie.

One way to find out... "I'm planning to say that we went to P3X-595, had limited contact with the locals, Daniel investigated the ruins, he learnt what he needed to and then we came home."

Hammond nodded once. "I look forward to reading that, Colonel."

"Understood, Sir."

***

"Sir!"

Jack stopped walking and turned around slowly, watching Carter jog down the corridor to catch up with him. Parts of her were bouncing with the movement and his brain had already packed a suitcase and moved into his Special Hell by the time she reached him. "Captain."

"Sir."

"Captain?"

"Sir."

"Carter, what do you want?"

"Ah... I was wondering if you'd had a chance to write your mission report yet?"

"Not yet." Jack raised an eyebrow. People sure were interested in his report today. "Why?"

"I was wondering what you were going to say..."

"About the mission?"

"About last night."

"Ah."

She looked as uncomfortable as he felt. "Yeah."

If he were just a fraction more of an asshole than he really was, Jack knew that he could have a lot of fun teasing her about last night.

Of course, there was little doubt in his mind - now - that she remembered everything that had happened. So she’d also remember that he’d been a little slow in stopping her mouth from its hoover impersonation.

“I think there’ll be some careful… editing, before Hammond sees my report.”

The relief was evident on her face. “Thank you, Sir.”

“Don’t mention it.” Nodding, Jack turned to continued towards his office - his Nintendo was calling - and he noted absently that walking was slightly more uncomfortable than it had been forty-five seconds ago.

He took three steps before she called out.

“Sir?”

“Yeah?”

“Would you like to get some… cake?”

The pause before her final word spoke volumes and Jack blinked in surprise. It would be against regulations for him to have… cake with her. Or think about having… cake with her, for that matter. Hell, it was against regulations that they’d had… icing together last night. His answer didn’t really take that much thought.

You have a moral code, Jack, he reminded himself.

Turning, Jack met the smile on her face. “I would love some… cake.”

***

End