He spent the day wrestling all sorts of bureaucratic nightmares and racking up yet more reasons for his long list of why being too old for field duty sucks. It was fishing season in Minnesota, he couldn't help thinking as he spent five hours staring at the annoying accountant whose name he could never quite remember. That had been the plan. Fishing, and fresh air, and maybe a dog.

And then came Carter, and the promise of regular sex with Carter if he stayed in town. Not to mention the very complex and rational arguments she had given him while wearing nothing but a bathing suit in his backyard jacuzzi. (Janet Fraiser, bless her, had made up for any and all unnecessary medical procedures she had spitefully performed on him over the years by insisting he purchase a hot tub to help the stiffness in his knee.)

While basically covering the same territory as the generic You Can Still Contribute speech, Carter-in-a-bathing-suit had an additional, very valid point:

He would never be okay with someone else sending his team into dangerous situations.

And so here he was, one most-embarrassing-request-ever to the President of the United States later, circulating memos and fielding requisitions and attending more briefings than God. (Actually, even more humiliating than having to ask permission from possibly the most powerful man on the planet to date an officer under your command was the response that, by the less-than-official intelligence President Hayes had received upon ascending to office, Jack and now-Lieutenant-Colonel Carter had been "most likely" involved in an illicit affair for coming up on four years.) Whoever said that flying a desk was cushier than getting shot at, and by "whoever" he meant "Jack O'Neill circa any year prior to 2004", had clearly never heard the words fiscal summary.

He finally lucked out when his scheduled phone conference with the Pentagon ended early, and was more than ready to burn rubber out of the Cheyenne Mountain parking garage. He wasn't entirely sure that Major Davis hadn't invented another appointment just to get away from the cloud of budgetary annoyance Jack was projecting through the telephone lines, but he wasn't going to worry himself too much about the reason so long as he got to go home and collect on the promise of that kiss that morning. After all, he figured, as he checked the sign-out sheet before leaving to make sure Sam hadn't forgotten about going home early, it was at least partly her fault that he was still employed.

Teal'c had played a rather underhanded card of his own to lure Jack back into the SGC, reporting that he was "unsure" whether he could come to respect any other leader who might replace General Hammond sufficiently to remain in service of the Tau'ri, but Jack was less enthusiastic about the possibility of seeing Teal'c in a white satin negligee.

So Jack returned home, expecting to find Carter busy on her laptop in his living room ("home early" meant nothing with regards to actually stopping working, he'd learned; you could take the girl out of the lab, but you couldn't take the freakily-naquadah-obsessed-workaholic out of the girl), fully prepared to sweep her away from her work, ravish her wildly on the nearest flat surface, and then receive a large outpouring of sympathy for his miserable day. Sam, at least, acknowledged her complicity in his bureaucratic misery and was fairly good about making sympathetic cooing noises whenever called upon to do so.

Instead, he found his toaster in pieces on the dining room table and Sam hovering over the mess wearing her very important piece of alien technology please don't touch it, sir face.

"... Carter?" He had a bad feeling that there wasn't going to be a rational explanation for this, at least not one that he was going to understand and appreciate, but he held out hope.

Sam looked up at him, surprised, then at the clock, then down at the disassembled appliance in front of her, and then back up at him. And pretended nothing was out of the ordinary. "You're back early."

"Thing ended early. What are you doing?"

She glanced down at the array of pieces on the table and the screwdriver in her hand as though surprised to see them there, like the toaster had taken itself apart without her assistance. Ever the innocent. "I'm fixing it."

"Fixing. Did you break it?"

"I'm making it toast faster."

"Oh." He paused a moment, ran a hand through his hair, and watched as she bent her head over one of the pieces, stuck it with a pair of pliers and did... something. He figured the dining room table was off-limits for sex if it was covered with toaster parts, but he was okay with amending his plan so that the nearest flat surface became the nearest flat surface with nothing sharp on it. "Wanna take a break?"

She didn't even look up. Sam finished whatever she was doing with the pliers before she spoke. "Sorry about the mess. I was hoping to be done before you came home. I hope you don't mind that I..." she waved over the table to encompass the damage she had wrought in the name of increased breakfast speed.

Three months ago she had been worried that leaving a hairbrush at his place was overstepping her bounds as maybe-possibly-his-girlfriend, encroaching too much on his personal space, and now the woman was overclocking his toaster. He reminded himself that this was a good thing. "No, it's fine. Uh... how long do you think this is gonna take?"

"I've already taken it apart and put it back together twice," she reported, blowing a chunk of blonde bangs out of her eyes as she stabbed a piece of metal with her screwdriver. "I haven't got it yet, but it shouldn't be too long."

He shifted from foot to foot. Last-ditch attempt. "I could buy another toaster."

That got her attention, and she shot him a look. A what do you take me for? look. A weren't you paying attention while I wrestled all those alien computers to the ground with my bare hands under time constraint? look. He was sunk.

He hung around for a few minutes anyway. The inside of his toaster wasn't nearly as exciting as he would have hoped. He picked up what looked like part of the element and she snatched it away absently before he could bend it in a way that would render it unusable.

While at one time watching Carter work had been as close to sex with her as he could possibly get, and as such was a remarkably pleasurable activity, he had since actually had sex with her. It wasn't that she wasn't still adorable as she played with her gadgets, making faces and muttering to herself and occasionally grinning excessively for no reason that he could determine, and he still enjoyed taking his breaks on-base in her lab... but this time they were at home. Less than fifteen yards away from the soft, comfortable bed he sometimes now caught himself thinking of as theirs. They really could be having sex, and observing her in her natural science-y habitat was a poor, and frustrating, substitute.

"I'm going to watch TV," he announced.

"Okay, sir," she replied. Except on-base, where decorum often required her to, she only called him sir when she wasn't paying attention. She probably didn't even realize that she wasn't in her lab. So much for an early evening at home.

His day just kept getting better.

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