Notes: I've said it before, but I really appreciate the reviews. They really do help remind me that people are actually waiting for the next part of this story. This chapter has actually been sitting on my computer for a few days, completely neglected, because it originally didn't end where it does now. But so many people have shown an interest in this story, I decided to cut it in half so you could have this bit now. My husband's got a flu, which, as anybody who is married knows, means I now have another big child to take care of. Honestly, my six year old daughter 'takes it like a man' better than he does. Anyway, in light of the fact that I haven't had time to finish the back half of this chapter, I'm separating it into two. It was long anyway, so that's probably good. Enjoy, and thanks for reading as always.

Ch 11: Little Questions

Jack and Sam were finally comfortable around each other again, but Jack wasn't sure how long they could make it last this time. In such tight quarters, it seemed inevitable that the tension would keep building up until they finally either had a fight they'd never be able to recover from or, as Sam had said just after they'd been dumped at his cabin, 'gave the Asgard what they wanted and jumped each other.'

He considered it a minor miracle that they'd managed to work out their last misunderstanding without bringing up anything really, truly personal. Feelings had been alluded to, of course, but that was it. As always. Jack had decided at the start of all of this that if at all possible he wasn't going to let this forced isolation be the thing that finally brought them together.

Of course, he also wasn't going to let it be something that forced them farther apart. And after a few days of easy friendship, Sam was starting to get bored again, and now that she was calling him Jack, he had little reason to continue making bets with her, so he needed something new to entertain them.

"Happy with your empty lake?" Sam asked, joining him on the dock just as he started trying to think of a new way to keep her from being bored.

"Yup," he said, glancing over at her so he could see that look she got when she was teasing him. He looked back to the lake quickly. She was in her swimsuit, with a pair of shorts over it. It wasn't a revealing suit or anything, a plain black one-piece, but compared to layers and layers of fatigues…

"Do you mind if I swim, whenever you're done… fishing? I don't want to have to spend months in the gym when we finally get back trying to get back in shape."

"Course not, go ahead," he said casually, reeling in his line. He wondered if she'd expect him to leave. Probably. More than likely she wouldn't want him sitting on the dock staring at her while she swam around.

"Thanks. I'm going to run back inside for my towel and put on some sunscreen. It's really getting hot up here."

"Yeah," he agreed, adjusting his sunglasses.

"Want me to bring you a beer or something when I come back?" she offered.

Did that mean he was allowed to stay? Sweet. "Sure. That would be great," he said, hoping he didn't sound too eager.

As soon as she was inside, he reached into his tackle box for the book he had stashed in there. Some of Carter's books had been among the things Thor had dropped off when he'd dumped them there, and she had some pretty entertaining novels. When she'd caught him watching her read the other day, he'd covered it up by asking her for a book.

She'd rummaged around in her little pile and handed him 'Jaws;' and made a comment about cautionary tales against fishing."Very funny," he had smirked. But he had never read it, although he had seen the movie several times, so he decided he might as well give it a try.

He had just started to read when Sam joined him on the dock again, pressing an opened bottle of beer into his hand. "Thanks."

"You're welcome."

Between the baseball cap pulled low on his head, his sunglasses, and the book, he was perfectly capable of watching her without her being able to tell what he was doing. So while his eyes were on her half the time since the second she dove off the dock, his face was pointed at the book.

He probably should have felt guilty, but he didn't. Because she was the smartest person he knew, so she had to know he was checking her out occasionally. She probably didn't realize exactly how frequently his eyes went from the book in his lap to her, but still. Since she didn't call him on it or ask him to go inside while he swam, he figured she didn't mind. Which was just beyond cool, in his opinion.

He couldn't help but tease her a little. While she swam, he hummed the familiar, ominous Jaws theme song until she got close enough to splash him.

After that day, they settled into a new routine of sorts. After breakfast, Jack went out to fish. Sam usually left him alone until lunch, occasionally fishing for a little while. After they ate, he'd go back out there and about half an hour later, she would come out to swim, carrying her towel and a beer. She would swim for about an hour, then go inside, shower off, and when she finished with her shower he would be back inside, finished fishing for the day, and they would go on with the rest of their day.

After about a week, Jack was settled into this new pattern nicely. He wasn't sure what exactly the difference was; it was probably a combination of a lot of things actually, but he felt like things between them were more relaxed than they'd been in a really long time. So he wasn't prepared when Sam handed him his beer one day and leaned over him, peering closely at his book.

"Um, Jack," she commented, looking at the book pointedly.

"What?" he asked, glancing at her sideways. Her hair was getting so long, it was becoming impossible to look at her without being instantly reminded of dangerous things like zay'tarc detectors and time-loop kisses.

"Um, well, you've been… reading that book for a week, and you're only on page 30?" she asked innocently.

He narrowed his eyes at her. "I'm just being thorough," he grumbled, turning a page of the book with extra force.

She went about setting her towel down, stepping out of her sandals, and wriggling out of her shorts, and felt his eyes on her again. He'd been doing it all week long and she couldn't take it anymore. She couldn't very well order him off of his own dock, but really, enough was enough. She turned to him quickly, catching him checking her out. No way could he pretend to be reading this time.

Jack shot her an apologetic look automatically but then decided he wasn't going to do it that way today. Hey, if she was going to force this, he wasn't going to be the only uncomfortable one… "What?" he demanded indignantly. "You know you're hot, I'm not a… a monk!"

She stopped her laugh and blush by ignoring him and quickly diving into the water. After swimming until she had completely cleared her head of anything remotely connected to their bizarre and complicated relationship, Sam got out and started to dry off. "You know, swimming is really good exercise for people with bad knees," she commented casually.

He folded his book closed and looked up at her. "Are you saying I'm getting fat?" he asked patting his stomach self-consciously.

She laughed and scooped up her clothes. Feeling extra brave as she headed up to the cabin for her shower, she called back, "Come on, Jack, you know you're hot!"

He whipped around so fast to look at her as she retreated that he upset the thin folding chair, crashing in a clumsy heap, entangled with his chair. "Ohfercryingoutloud," he muttered as he picked himself up off the dock.

It took every ounce of willpower Sam had not to turn around and look when she heard the crash, but she knew if she did he would have some sort of comeback, and for once she was determined to come out on top of one of these little matches.

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When Sam got out of the shower, she towel-dried her hair and frowned into the mirror. Her hair really was getting a bit out of control. Like the person under it, she thought. Sometime during her shower it had hit her that she had just told her CO he was hot. Yeah, this whole situation was bound to get completely out of hand soon.

She sighed as she combed out her hair. Every day it seemed to require longer to get it all in place. Although, on the plus side, if they were there much longer she would probably be able to put it in a ponytail for the first time since college.

She suspected Jack was harboring some scissors somewhere, because his hair was maybe a quarter inch longer, but no more than that. But over trying to give herself a haircut, or worse letting Jack do it, she preferred letting it grow, despite how messy it was looking these days.

Hair taken care of, she threw on some jeans and a white tee-shirt and went out into the den, which was empty. Strange. She went to the kitchen to get herself a bottle of water, looking out the window. No Colonel O'Neill out there, and his fishing things were inside. She jumped as she heard a scream and a loud crash from his bedroom.

Having no idea what she might possibly find, she hurried into his room. "Are you o…" She froze, covering her mouth with her hand to try not to laugh.

Colonel Jack O'Neill was lying in his open closet on a pile of very squashed boxes, covered with clothes, the wooden rod that the clothes normally hung on sitting across his chest.

He had his eyes squinched shut and was repeating something quietly to himself. It sounded an awful lot like, "Overwhelming coolness. Overwhelming coolness."

"Yes, overwhelming coolness. That's exactly what this situation screams, Jack," she commented lightly, gathering several shirts off of him and setting them aside.

"Yeah, yeah. You gonna help an old man up or just be a smartass?" Jack groaned.

"Are you… hurt?" Sam asked as she took his hands and hauled him to his feet, grateful that she had years and years of practice at keeping a straight face.

"No. Just a little bruised," he said, dusting himself off and wondering if he could get by without explaining himself. Yeah, right. And Teal'c was going to quit the SGC and take up ballet.

"So… you got in a fight with your fishing shirts and lost?" Sam guessed.

Apparently he wasn't going to be able to get out of it.

"Uh, not exactly. I was… well, you've been swimming to keep in shape. I've been… doing sit-ups and push-ups and stuff in here and… I thought I might try pull-ups and the closet bar looked sturdy enough…"

"To support you?" Carter asked sceptically.

"Yeah, I was ah… mistaken," he admitted sheepishly.

They turned their attention to the wreck that was his closet. Sam stepped inside to examine the brackets. "Yeah, one of these was ripped right out of the wall… the other one's just really… bent."

He peered in around her, overwhelmed with the fresh-out-of-the-shower smell that somehow stayed with her a lot longer than it did with him. "Sheetrock repair. Excellent," he said. He stepped completely into the closet to further inspect the damage he had done to his house and suddenly it was just a bit too crowded.

"Um, I'm just going to go… make some tea," Sam said quietly, squeezing past him to get out of the closet.

Way to go, Jack, he congratulated himself as he gathered up all his clothes off the floor and dumped them on his bed. Talk about losing your cool factor. Better go implement his new plan for keeping Sam entertained. Hopefully it would get her mind of his idiotic crash earlier.

He winced as he headed to the kitchen. His shoulder was already getting sore, and his neck wasn't very happy with him either. "Hey," Jack said, leaning back against the counter.

Sam was making a big pitcher of iced tea. "Hi. Do we need to ask Thor to go to Home Depot for us?" she asked with an amused smile.

"Nah, I'll just fix it whenever, and put my clothes in the dresser. Hey, I have a question."

"What is it?"

"How do the gate coordinates work?"

"What?" She knew the answer, of course, but she couldn't believe he was asking. She was expecting a question more along the lines of 'do we have any Oreos left.'

"I get the part where it's like a phone number. Well, kind of, but how… how is it an address?"

"Well, it's sort of like a map. Think of each coordinate as a stop along the way, a reference point for where you need to go next. Now, of course, just as a map in your truck is only a two dimensional representation of three dimensional space, the 'stops' aren't linear because we're talking about more than three dimensions, so…"

He lost her there, but it didn't matter, because she spent the next fifteen minutes explaining it to him and was clearly enjoying it. A lot. Mission accomplished. Now, maybe he could also get some answers to some questions he'd had over the years.

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The next day, while they ate dinner, Jack asked, "When we went back to 1969, ourselves from 1969 were there too, right?"

"Of course," Sam said with a nod.

"So how come we didn't have that tropical failing thing your twin got when she was here?"

"Entropic cascade failure," Sam corrected automatically, furrowing her brow for a few seconds, thinking about it.

"Yeah, that. So how come we didn't get that? We were stuck there a lot longer than your twin."

"Well, Teal'c wasn't on our planet in 1969 and neither was I so…"

"Huh?"

"Um… well, I guess technically I was. We were there in July? So, yeah, I wasn't born yet but my mom was pregnant."

He groaned. "God, I am so old."

"You're not old," she replied automatically, as if it were one of those conditioned responses men usually had to questions like 'does this make me look fat?'.

"Very convincing," he mumbled, grumpy.

She rolled her eyes and decided to divert his attention back to his initial question. "So, as far as you and Daniel are concerned… well, it's actually a really interesting question, sir. And it's all theoretical of course, but the differences between time travel within one reality with limited causality and crossovers between alternate realities would be a fascinating subject to research…"

He looked like he wanted to stick his fork in the back of his hand just to have something else to do, so she cleared her throat and said, "Sorry. Um, basically, while there were two of you in one reality at the same time, you were both from the same timeline. You were both in your own reality, whereas the other… me… had jumped from one to the other. Although it would be fascinating to try and determine if entropic cascade failure would still occur eventually, at a slower rate, oh and try and determine if physical distance between the two versions of yourself had any affect… but it would probably be impossible to determine because the longer you stayed in the past the harder it would be not to change your own future, which would create multiple new alternate…"

Yeah, he was so beyond lost again. But that was just fine, because when she started talking that fast, he could look at her all he wanted to and just pretend he was paying close attention to what she was saying. Which he was, in a way. Just because he didn't understand what she was saying didn't mean he wasn't listening.

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Sam was starting to be able to tell when Jack was about to ask her another question. She knew he was doing this for her benefit, but she doubted he realized how much of his own carefully guarded intelligence he was revealing. While he had no patience for the technicalities of theoretical astrophysics, he was a very smart man with what she was beginning to think of as an intuitive knowledge of how things were supposed to work. He couldn't pin down why a situation wasn't right, but he always picked up on it when something didn't fit.

If she had said any of that to him, he would have brushed it off and that would have been the end of the questions, she knew. So she kept that thought to herself, along with all those other thoughts about him she was keeping to herself.

Back to the present, though. Since Jack had sat down next to her on the couch and hadn't reached for the remote, she knew another question was coming. She put down her book and turned to him expectantly.

"Hey, I have…"

"What is it?"

"Do the Asgard use the toilet?"

She stared at him for several moments, trying to decide if he was serious or just teasing her. He was serious. Geez.

"Well… I guess you'd have to ask Thor about that to be sure," she commented mildly.

"General Hammond ordered me not to," Jack admitted, fiddling with the sleeves of his shirt.

Sam couldn't help it. She burst into laughter, picturing that. Knowing that Hammond had figured it was necessary, that the Colonel's behavior, curiosity, and lack of diplomacy would probably lead to him asking their little grey buddy about his toilet habits.

"Are you done now?" Jack finally asked.

Sam got control of her laughter, hugging her ribs as she curled her legs up onto the couch to get more comfortable, and said, "Well, I can't be certain, of course, but we think…"

"We?" Jack interrupted.

Now it was Sam's turn to be embarrassed. "Um… Daniel and… I."

"Ah ha! You've thought about it too!" he said triumphantly.

"Well, it's kind of hard not to. For purely scientific reasons, of course, we were… curious."

"Right. Purely scientific reasons."

"So what did my little brainiacs come up with?" he asked, genuinely curious for once.

"Well… um… the Asgard are all about efficiency, right? Nothing unnecessary. They don't have reproductive organs and live in controlled environments so they don't need clothes…"

"Yeah, I noticed that."

"Well, we weren't really sure, but after I went to help Thor, when you, Daniel, and Teal'c went to deal with the Replicators on the submarine…"

"Ah, memories…"

Sam nodded and continued. "Well, he offered me 'nourishment' and beamed in these little… well they looked like blocks. Each one was a different colour and shape, and they were really hard. He told me he liked the yellow one so…"

"Carter!" Jack exclaimed, reverting to the old habit due to the context of their conversation. "What's the rule about accepting food from aliens?"

"Well, I didn't think Thor was trying to drug me and get me into bed!" she objected, referring to the incident early on that had caused him to issue that order in the first place.

"Hey, that's number three on the list of 'Things we aren't ever going to mention again,'" he reminded her. About halfway through their first year as a team, Jack had proposed they make a pact wherein certain off-world occurrences were never to be mentioned to anybody. Ever.

They each contributed something they'd rather forget, and had sealed the pact with a round of ginger ales, since Teal'c didn't drink and Daniel could barely handle a beer. As the years had gone on, the list had been added to many, many times.

"Sorry,"Sam said, her tone indicating she wasn't sorry at all. "Anyway, ah, I figured Thor wouldn't offer me something unless he knew it was safe for me to eat, so I took the yellow one, which he said was his favorite. It was so disgusting. The taste was just so… strong. But vaguely familiar. Anyway, we had more or less decided they must only consume what was absolutely necessary to keep them alive… that pretty much confirmed it. They eat exactly what they need, the exact vitamins and minerals in their most basic states, so there aren't any… leftovers to be um… excreted. Well, that's our theory anyway."

"You and Daniel spent a lot of time on this, didn't you?" he asked smugly, glad to know he wasn't the only one who had been pondering the Asgard's lack of… certain anatomical… parts.

"And… Janet too," Sam admitted.

Jack smiled slowly, grinning like she had just given him a Christmas present or something. "I should have known."

"You could have asked," she pointed out. "Want to watch a movie?"

"Yeah, sure. I'll go make some popcorn."

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Thor narrowed his eyes as he observed the conversation about Asgard toilet needs. Deciding that was one of the things he definitely wouldn't be sharing with General Hammond, he made a few adjustments on his console and went back to work.

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More Notes: To hopefully prevent a surge of questions about Sam's age, I used her DOB from 'Entity,' which I got from my sister, who had to look up everybody's birthdays for one of her stories. If you're really bothered by it, click on my name, look at my favorite stories, and go to "Birthday Traditions." Her explanation is in one of the author's notes; I think it's in the last chapter. I defer to her judgment for all Stargate-related questions.