Chapter 21: Let It Riiiiiiiip!
Don't turn around Jack. Pretend like she's not changing behind you. Just don't turn around, whatever you do!
Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw Sam drop her shirt to the ground and he groaned quietly to himself.
She's not there. She's not there.
He felt her handcuffed hand move up her back and, naturally, his own hand had to follow. He almost died when his fingertips touched her bare skin.
"You almost done yet, Carter?" he asked, swallowing and breathing deeply.
"Uh… yeah, almost…" Jack knew this didn't really mean almost.
Wow. Look at that bare wall! You don't get walls like that anymore.
"Sir." Sam's voice was laced with anxiety and… was it fear?
"Carter? What's wrong?"
"It's the shirt."
Whatever happens, you never put it in her suitcase! Just to stick to that story!
"What about the shirt, Carter?"
"It's the sleeve." There was a pause.
"Yes…?" Jack asked slowly. What was going on? There was another pause as Sam did something unknown to Jack, before she spoke again.
"I can't put my arm through it without pulling yours through as well." There was a silence.
"P-pardon?" Jack questioned, swallowing again. Just when he thought things couldn't get any tenser…
"I'll demonstrate." She pushed her hand through the left sleeve of her shirt, and Jack felt his follow automatically. If she was going to put it on, he was going to go right with her.
"Crap. Crap!"
"Exactly! Now what the hell do I do?"
"How did you get your… your other clothes off? Wouldn't you have had the same problem?"
"The other shirt has zips coming down from the sleeves and to the sides. All I had to do was unzip it and it just came straight off."
"And your…?" She knew what he meant.
"It can unclip. Both of them can."
"Oh. Right. Well, just… er…" Jack knelt down and picked up the shirt off of the ground, handing it to her with his eyes tightly shut.
"I guess the only thing you can do is put it back on, unless you have another zip up one."
"This will have to…" A line of expletives suddenly shouted out from her mouth and Jack's eyes snapped open, before he glanced round at her.
"Carter? What the hell…?" She handed him the shirt, and suddenly he felt like swearing too. Both zippers had fallen off.
"If I even attempt at putting that thing on, it's just going to fall right off again."
"We… we can fix it," Jack said, and he attempted to push the zipper back up the zip line. However, instead of achieving anything with the shirt, he ended up accidentally elbowing Sam in the small of her back, and as another round of swearing ensued he somehow managed to rip her shirt. There was a silence.
"What was that noise?" she asked slowly.
"I… passed wind?" he ended helplessly.
"You ripped it, didn't you?" Another silence followed.
"Sorry, Carter." She sighed deeply and shut her eyes tightly, rubbing her temples.
"It's not your fault, Sir," she said, her voice oddly strained. Jack glanced round at her slightly to see that her shoulders had gone rigid and had probably, like him, realized that this might mean that they would have to spend the remaining twenty four hours handcuffed together with her being topless.
Yeah, and he thought that the toilet thing had been bad! This was just… great… as in great catastrophe.
Jack let his military side kick in and straightened up.
"Alright, Carter, this calls for drastic action. Before we do anything else…" He grabbed a nearby towel, quickly spun Sam around and covered her in it.
"What…?" she questioned as he smoothed the side of the material over. He glanced up into her eyes.
"Like we're going anywhere or doing anything while your wearing nothing but your bra as a top!" The color seemed to drain from her face.
"What do you mean going anywhere?"
"What do you think I mean, Carter?" he asked, his eyebrows furrowing together. "How else are we going to find Simon?"
"What? Find Simon…"
"So he can uncuff us so we can both get changed, and then hopefully he'll realize that handcuffing us together for the day was the wrong decision and he'll give us freedom."
"I'm not going out there!" Jack's blissful look was suddenly wiped away and he looked back down into her face.
"What?"
"Sir, Simon is out on this ship somewhere. He is out there somewhere on this large, luxury cruise ship. We will have to find him on this large, luxury cruise ship where, as you know, there is an undetermined yet considerable amount of people roaming around in various places. I am wearing a towel as a top. I am not going to go wandering around this large, luxury cruise ship looking for Simon when he could be anywhere, and where anybody and everybody will see me wearing the aforementioned towel!" She pointed feverishly at the cloth wrapped around her shoulders. Jack sighed. But she had a point… and frankly, he found the idea of other people ogling at his Major very uncomfortable.
"Yeah. Yeah, I can see the logic in that. But I don't know what else to do! How are we going to get to him? He's the only person who can save us from all this mess. Here's an idea," he added. "You're the smart one. Why don't you think of something?" Her answer was almost instantaneous.
"Is there a phone in this cabin?"
~~~
I knew that. Phone. Pffft. That's nothing.
"Hello? Could I possibly speak to Simon please?" There was a pause, before Sam glanced round at Jack and gave him a thumbs-up signal, which Jack took as a good sign.
"Simon? Simon! Hi… it's Major Samantha Carter… yeah, Colonel O'Neill's partner… yes, the one that you handcuffed." Jack was amused to see that she spat the last bit out through gritted teeth, her eyes betraying her cool exterior.
She was pissed. He could relate.
"Could you come down here? We… have a problem." There was a pause and Jack watched intently, waiting on bated breath for any kind of response. He had to get down there… he had to uncuff them… Jack couldn't spend the rest of the twenty-four hours handcuffed to Sam when she was so nearly topless; his system was already over-loaded enough…
"What do you mean?" she suddenly asked, and Jack blinked, swallowing. Uh-oh. That wasn't good.
"You have to come down here… what do you mean?" she asked, her voice rising. Jack shook his head. Oh no.
"You have to, I… no… what the hell are you talking about? This is an emergency! We can't leave this damned room, that's the emergency… no, wait…!" There was a long silence, before Sam slowly hung up the phone.
"Well?" Jack asked hopefully, although judging by the look Sam was making, he could already guess the answer.
"He said that the whole point of being handcuffed together is so we can work better in extreme situations. We should just work through anything that happens, that's the whole point."
"Why didn't you tell him what happened…?" Jack asked.
"I tried, but when I told him that we couldn't leave the room all he said was that we could order food using the phone."
"That's all he said…?"
"That's all he said!"
F!@$! I hope your laughing up there, asshole! Whoever is doing this, I hope you're enjoying this, you bastard!
"Alright," Jack said calmly, taking a deep breath. "That's fine. As long as we don't die, right? Right?" Sam looked up at him, shaking her head.
"I thought we were already dead."
~~~
A/N: More is on its way! Had to end it quickly because a lot of people want Chapter 21 already… here it is! But now you're going to have to wait longer for 22-haaaa!