Disclaimer: If you know it, it's not mine.
Summary: Sam's idea of relaxation doesn't match up with most peoples. One shot, some Sam/Jack towards the end of fic.
Rating: PG for one word.
Downtime
Sam pouted all the way home. Jack had offered to drive her to make sure that she actually did leave the base. Of course Sam would never disobey General Hammond's orders of two weeks downtime but Jack knew that if anyone could find a way around them, it was her.
She flipped the light switch as she walked into her house and plonked herself down on the couch. What on earth was she supposed to do for the next few weeks with no work to occupy her brain? Two weeks of relaxation, she could do that, right? Jack has told her to kick back and watch television, or catch up on reading but Sam knew she was more likely to slowly go out of her mind.
Sam glanced up at the clock, it was late. So late it could actually be considered early. She began to make herself a cup of hot chocolate as a bedtime drink. As she stood beside the kettle Sam realised that boiling it took about twice the amount of time it took for anyone else's kettle. She could fix that with just a few minor adjustments. However since she had been mostly awake for the last week straight she decided that the kettle's speed augmentation could wait until the following morning. Or later on in this morning, whatever.
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Sam slept until late the next afternoon and after that she found that her bed was so comfy that she couldn't get out of it. Annoyingly that was when her phone decided to ring.
"Good afternoon Carter," sing-songed Jack down the phone. He sounded far too jolly for her sleep addled brain to handle so she just grunted in reply.
"I thought you'd already be up and at 'em, what with your work ethic," Jack sounded ridiculously cheery considering that he could have only had marginally more sleep than her in the last week.
"Oh, shut up." She mumbled, rolling over into the warm mounds of bed clothes that had been cradling her.
"You know what I've always wanted?" He didn't wait for her answer. "One of those conveyor belt gadgets that made you breakfast so you didn't have to. Y'know like from Wallace and Gromit" And on that note he hung up. Sam blinked in confusion. Did he really call her up just to tell her that?
Sam eventually hauled herself out of bed and put the kettle on to make a cup of coffee. She found herself thinking once again about how slow her kettle was.
Sam stood in the kitchen, perfectly still, dressed in her pyjamas with all sorts of equations and properties flying through her mind. Her thoughts were derailed by the loud click that signalled that the kettle was finally done.
She sat down on her couch, nursing her coffee, picked up the newspaper that had been sat on her floor for the past few weeks and started to read some old news. After a while it occurred to her that she could easily supe up the kettle and no doubt all of her kitchen appliances with ease. She had a basement just full of wires and screws, all sorts of useful objects had been horded down there. All she needed to do was find the right bits and pieces and soon she could create a super kitchen.
Sam made her way down into her cold and cluttered basement and hunted around for the bits and pieces she was looking for. There was junk everywhere. One day she was going to organise it all, Sam promised herself with the knowledge that even if she did have the time she wouldn't want to do it.
It took a good half hour but she found the appliance's original manuals that had been relegated to the basement when she moved in. She also dug out old games consoles and board games as well as some books she'd put aside for when she had more time. After selecting the most useful looking items Sam moved her haul up into the living room and dumped everything on her coffee table so she'd know just where they were.
Sam decided that the kettle was the first thing that needed to be rewired since she'd need a constant flow of cups of tea and coffee to keep her energy levels up. Even after doing the kettle (23.5 seconds to boil water, brilliant) her need to tinker was not even close to satiated. So she started on the microwave, who was not even close to efficient enough.
Sam continued improving her kitchen appliances for the afternoon, throughout the night and into the early hours of the morning, amassing a huge pile of spare bits and pieces from the dismantled appliances. The pieces were broken, useless or entirely unidentifiable.
In order to finish the improvements Sam needed some new parts and since none of the old parts would fit, she picked up her cell phone and made a few calls to some good suppliers she knew from the SGC. Needless to say they did wonder why she needed fibre optic cables and high quality computer parts at home and in the middle of the night but they knew she was a good customer so brushed their suspicions aside and agreed to deliver them the next day.
With nothing else to do she read through the parts of the newspaper that hadn't been used to protect her hard wood floors and nice rugs from any oil spills. Not that many of her kitchen appliances had oil in them but Sam could find oil in anything. Just as she finished off a slightly ripped crossword Sam remembered her bizarre conversation with Jack earlier. A breakfast conveyor belt, it wouldn't be too hard to make, in fact she had a motor she could use and plenty of strong material to make the belt itself. She pulled out a large piece of paper and set about planning her monster machine.
The sun had started to rise before Sam noticed how tired she was. After one last look over her plan she'd retire to bed. Sitting back and stretching she looked over her plan, it was complicated but doable. In any case, she'd put together more complex things than this for work just last week, how bad could it be?
The answer to that question was pretty bad. Sam had, rather than sleep, lay in bed dreaming up variables that would make the design more troublesome. The main issue with making the breakfast machine work was getting the timing just right. Each breakfast item would be cooked to perfection on its own but combining them led to a patchwork of a breakfast varying from overdone to freezing cold.
Sam sighed and picked at the edible parts of her current meal. A redesign was definitely in order. She pulled out another giant sheet of paper and wrote down all the jobs and the average time required for each. Armed with this new information she set about reorganising her kitchen. The tasks that took the most time would now happen first to try and minimize heat loss and over cooking.
While she was waiting for the next round of breakfast to finish cooking Sam doodled plans for a plate warmer that would allow for more flexibility with the timings and estimating the power in the springs of her toaster so that the toast would propel itself onto the plate, now if only it would butter itself. As she was contemplating buttering robots her second breakfast arrived looking much less worse for wear than the first.
As Sam munched on her rather nice second piece of toast, she pulled the casing off the toaster. The spring wasn't nearly strong enough for what she had in mind. In her mass of spare parts she couldn't find a spring with enough force to fire the toast from the toaster to the plate so Sam ventured into her garage and found one that would do for now but would make her toaster look very ugly.
After reminding herself that a toaster didn't need to be beautiful, she fitted it and tested the mechanism. Once it was toasted to perfection the toast leapt a good metre into the air. With a whoop Sam caught the airborne bread, buttered it and started to eat it all whilst trying to estimate the right angle to get the toast to the conveyor belt. Sam could work it out with calculus, but where would the fun be in that? Instead she took to setting it at a random angle and testing it.
Following ten minutes of tinkering with the toaster elevation the back door opened revealing her CO with his usual grin in place. The grin stuck to his face for a few seconds before he tripped over the power cable for the conveyor motor and stumbled into her newly suped up kettle which steamed at him loudly. Jack's head whipped around to gape at Carter but the toaster she was holding went off at that moment flinging flawlessly toasted toast at his head.
"Uh, afternoon sir," Carter said with a sheepish grin. Jack picked himself up off the floor and the toast that had bounced off his skull with it.
Jack looked around the room before asking, "Late breakfast Carter?"
"My fourth," Sam replied guiltily. Her kitchen wasn't exactly a mess, it just looked bizarre. Sam had mounted the conveyer belt on the wall, to the left of the door was an on switch and from that starting point everything else was attached. Most of the appliances had been voided of their casing since Sam had wired in some chunky looking springs to most of the machines.
"You're supposed to be on downtime Carter, you know, do nothing time," Jack, who was secretly impressed with the kitchen machine, pulled up a stool at the breakfast bar and sat down.
Sam sat down next to him, "I don't know how to gear down my brain."
"Ah yes, a constant state of geared up-ness, how awful."
Sam ignored him and continued, "I'm happy when I'm fixing things, building, inventing or whatever. Downtime's meant to be relaxing and doing things make you happy so that's what I'm doing."
Jack looked thoughtful and opened his mouth to speak only to find himself needing to close it again as Sam spoke up.
"Why are you here anyway Sir? Not that I'm not glad to see you."
"Downtime's about doing things that make you happy," it was a cheesy line, but that man was a walking cliché.
"So you're here to do me?" Sam teased, knowing that Jack would panic. She was correct as Jack stood up sharply, knocking over his stool and began stammering something.
"Th...that's err…not…not what I meant. I'm here to see you," Jack finally met Sam's eyes. She smirked. 'Bugger', thought Jack.
The End