Author's Note: Now that we're past the dark, ansty chapters, it's time to see about getting the "ship to sail" as janissima so aptly described it. However, I think Sam and Jack have to build the boat before they start sailing! :) So... it's going to be slow... but here it is, the beginning of my ship...

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She already loved him in so many ways. It probably wouldn't take much for her to love him as a romantic partner too. And... if he reciprocated those feelings...

Shaking her head, she broke her train of thought. This was not getting her anywhere productive right now. If they were stranded on this planet long enough, the two of them were going to have to talk about some of it. She didn't know what the resolutions or answers would be, but she wasn't going to solve them today.

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Ch 11: PROGRESS

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As they passed the end of their first week on the planet, Sam wondered what she should do next. The General rarely spoke unless it was necessary. He mostly brooded. And during meals, he always kept the fire between the two of them. As if he was afraid that he'd suddenly lose it and jump her.

She'd tried talking to him, of course. She'd tried to open conversations. But he wouldn't reciprocate. So she had a choice of handling the conversation by herself, or to just fall silent. Silence won more often than not.

She'd repeatedly stated that she didn't hold him responsible for their current situation. And when that didn't work, she tried saying that she forgave him – even though she didn't think that there was anything to forgive, because he couldn't be held responsible for his actions while under the influence of an alien drug.

But so far she had failed to pull him out of his self-flagellation.

A week. It had been a week. Normally, she would have let him keep brooding, figuring that he could take his own time to heal and come to terms with the latest traumatic episode in their lives. But these weren't normal times. Here, the two of them were alone with no others to turn to.

She'd known a week ago, when she was sitting on the steps to the Gate. She'd known that he would own the guilt. She'd seen the problem. Identified it accurately. But she still had no idea how to solve that problem. She could jury-rig a naquadah reactor to an alien ship, but she couldn't rewire a psyche, or a heart.

Well, dinner was over and the dishes were cleaned up and put away.

And here they sat.

On opposite sides of the fire.

In silence.

Again.

She could pull out one of the laptops that he'd packed. That had been a surprise. There were three laptops and four backup harddrives in amongst the supplies he'd taken from the SGC and the Safe Site. And extra rechargeable batteries, with a solar recharger. Unfortunately, he hadn't snagged a laptop from her lab at the SGC, because then she might have gotten a copy of the dialing program. They'd still need a power source for the 'Gate... but she thought she could hotwire what was left of the DHD to bypass the damaged portions in order to be able to control the 'Gate's power source. That was her next project right after they were finished constructing their shelter and the rest of the campsite.

Manually dialing would be arduous with only two of them and that dialing program would have been sweet. She could try resurrecting portions of the code from memory, but she didn't want to fry a jury-rigged, hot-wired gate... they'd probably only get one chance at that.

So... she brought her gaze up from the flames of the fire and her thoughts back from her potential Gate project. Glancing over at the man across the flames, she caught him looking at her, but he quickly shifted his gaze back to the flickering light between them.

She decided to go for it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

"Sir, I need your help," she tried for a start and he met her eyes with a questioning look, so she ventured forth, "I'm going to go nuts if we are going to spend the next who-knows-how-many weeks, months or years not talking to each other."

"We talk, Carter," he objected, but he knew it was feeble.

She raised an eyebrow ala Teal'c, "Yes, sir, we say, 'Pass that log,' and "I'll get water from the river,"... but that's not talking, sir."

"Carter, I can't-," he started and she cut him off, not liking where he was headed.

"Yes, you can sir. And if you don't, I'm going to lose it. Go right around the bend. You'll come back from the river with water one day, and I'll be over there desperately having a full-blown discussion with a tree!" Small victories, she thought to herself as she saw a small smile flit across his face as he conjured up an image of her talking animatedly with a tree.

"Carter, I don't think that you are in any danger of losing your grip on reality to the point of talking to trees," and to her delight, the small grin wasn't being chased away.

"Sir, I know that I'm not a social gadfly-," and he couldn't help but interject, "Nah!" with an exaggerated look of surprise.

"Har, har, sir," she replied.

"Hey, you were the one who wanted me to talk," he pointed out, but the grin was still on his face, so she gathered her courage to continue.

"I know that I can lose myself in a project or on my laptop for days on end-," and he chimed in with, "To the point of forgetting to eat or sleep...," and then he gave her a look that challenged her to deny his statement.

She wasn't that foolish, so she attempted to continue, "At any rate, what I'm trying to say is that I am not someone who normally needs a lot of social interaction on a daily basis-," and she held up her hand warningly to stop his next comment. He acquiesced, but a familiar smirk settled on his face. Sighing, she continued, "But, I do need some social interaction, sir. Some dialogue about... oh, I don't know. We could just start with the weather or some equally innocuous."

"Are you going to use lots of multi-syllabic words like innocuous? Because we don't have a dictionary and even if we did, I don't like to have to think hard when I socialize," he teased with feigned distaste.

Well... they did have a thesaurus of sorts... the word processing program on the laptops sufficed in a pinch, but she didn't think that now was the time to mention that. "I'll try to keep it down, sir, although you may have to remind me when it gets too annoying," she easily replied and then swallowed her delight at his surprise. He had no clue how far she was willing to go to get him to start talking. If agreeing to shorter words was one of the conditions, then she had no problem with that!

A few moments of silence passed while they tried to decide who would speak next... and about what. To her surprise, he spoke up first.

"I have one condition," he opened with, while watching her closely.

She widened her eyes and shrugged, "What?" She had no clue what he was going to say, but she felt like she'd agree to almost anything.

"You have to call me 'Jack', and stop calling me 'Sir' and 'General'," he stated and lifted his chin a notch while waiting for her reply.

They both knew why he was asking for this. He'd ordered her to call him Jack on the second day and for every day after that. His reasoning was that he wasn't her superior officer anymore. Not after carting her off and stranding her on an alien planet. But she had steadfastly continued with the military decorum, because she felt that he deserved it. She still saw him as her CO, and she didn't blame him for their current situation.

She sighed. She had thought that she was ready to agree to anything. But she didn't want to agree to this with the ultimate result being confirmation in his mind that she blamed him. On the other hand, she also desperately needed to break him out of his self-imposed prison of brooding.

Looking him straight in the eyes for a moment, through the smoke wafting up from the burning wood of the campfire, "Allright, but you have to call me Sam," and she waited for his reply.

He looked uneasy. She'd called his bluff...ok, maybe it was just a semi-bluff. She'd refused to capitulate on this point all week and he was unprepared for her to give-in. And he wasn't sure that he could call her Sam. The whole reason that he wanted her to stop calling him 'Sir' or 'General' was because he didn't think he deserved that respect from her anymore. But he also didn't think that he deserved the intimacy of calling her by her given name.

As he tried to collect his next statements for their negotiation, he looked over at her... and she was smiling. Just a small, hopeful smile. No recrimination, no anger. Just... Sam Carter with an honest invitation.

He nodded, "Allright," he relented and her smile widened to show her teeth.

"Thank God!" she sent her gratitude into the evening air.

"Which God would that be Car-... Sam," he fumbled and then ended almost tentatively.

"It's allright, sir-," and then she grinned ruefully at her own blunder, "It will take us both awhile to lose the habits entrained over more than 8 years..., Jack," and she said his name deliberately, to show that she too was going to make it work.

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They spent the rest of the evening chatting about relatively 'safe' topics. And, he jokingly did start off asking her about the weather... whereupon she responded by deliberately starting to spiel off technobabble regarding what she knew and had observed about this planet's weather. He'd interrupted her cheeky monologue and changed the topic to Cassie.

The conversation that first night was not easy and there were many silences where they struggled for the next sentence or the next topic. But it was a start.

At the end of the evening, as Sam headed to bed and Jack settled in for the first watch, he asked with his customary smirk, "So, do you think that will save you from talking to trees?"

"I'm not sure," she responded to his surprise, "I'll let you know after a few days," and she gave him a grin before crawling into her sleeping bag.

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TBC

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