A/N: Wow! I'm thinking some of you really don't like Pete. :-) I won't subject you to him again for a while. Thanks for the reviews!


Chapter 12 - Critters and Loops

Jack was finding the critters on this planet difficult to hunt. He'd seen a lot of tracks, had even seen a flash of movement in the brush as he walked by once, but he had yet to see anything to aim a zat at. It was like they knew he was looking for them. He had managed to catch some fish in the lake that morning – their packs contained small, standard issue tackle kits which contained some fishing line, a few sinker weights, a bobber and a package of assorted size hooks. It didn't take long for him to catch a couple of decent sized fish that looked similar to bass for their breakfast. He was now using the inedible parts of those fish as bait to try to lure something out of the brush, hoping to get something that would have enough meat to smoke and last a few meals. He didn't like leaving Sam digging for the gate while he hunted and fished, but she said she preferred digging to hunting.

He was hiding behind a tree, overlooking what looked like an animal path, which is where he had left the smelly bait and was watching with his zat ready. He was only about 500 meters from where Sam was, on the other side of a small hill. He wasn't sure if he would have much luck luring anything out so close to where they were working for the gate, but he didn't want to travel too far away from Sam, in case there was a problem. After an hour, he saw some movement in the brush ahead of him. Barely breathing, he waited for the animal to make its appearance. When it finally came out of its hiding spot to investigate the offering, Jack aimed his weapon and... Swoosh! Some huge gray thing swooped out of the air, snatched his dinner and flew off.

"Jack?" Sam was yelling over the radio, "Are you OK?"

"Carter? Did you see what the hell that thing was?"

Sam came running over the hill, radio in hand, looking around for Jack. When she spotted him she ran right over. "Are you OK? Did it attack you?"

"Damn thing stole our dinner! Did you get a look at it?"

"Yeah, but..."

"But, what? Did I see what I thought I saw?"

"It looked like a dragon to me."

"Sam, there's no such thing as dragons. Right?"

"Well, that sure looked like one."

"You're talking about the fire-breathing creatures from medieval legends?"

"Yes, Jack."

"But they don't exist."

"Think about it. 10 years ago, you would have told anyone who asked that the sun god Ra never actually existed, until you met him. Just look at all the other so called myths that we've found alive on other planets. This creature could be the basis for our legends."

"Oh for crying out loud, we're talking about a creature that breaths fire, Sam."

"Jack, the bombadier beetle on Earth has the ability to defend itself by shooting out a stream of liquid at a temperature of over 200 degrees. I don't see how it would be that difficult to imagine a creature that evolved a mechanism to 'breath fire'." At his continued incredulous look at what she was saying, she continued. "Depending on the digestive system and diet, digestive gases can be combustible, it would just need a mechanism for igniting the flame, either with a natural catalyst in its system or some sort of sparking mechanism, maybe a sparking mineral it builds up on its teeth. Besides, we haven't actually seen it breath fire, so that part may be a myth."

"Bombadier beetle? Sam, is there any subject you DON'T know anything about?"

She flashed him one of her megawatt smiles. "No comment on that one."


Another night, another dinner conversation...

"... So I'm riding my bike through the halls and up the ramp. Just before I hit the event horizon, I hear General Hammond in the control room yelling 'Colonel O'Neill, what the hell do you think you're doing?'" O'Neill is laughing hard as he's recounting the incident from one of his time loops. "Then I hit the wormhole and I tell you, what a wild ride! I felt like Miss Gulch riding her bicycle through the tornado. What a blast, until, of course, I got to the other side and hit the stairs pretty hard. Not one of my brightest ideas after all."

Sam was bent over laughing so hard her sides ached. "I can't believe you did that."

"Yeah, well, reliving the same day over and over again got to be a little monotonous."

"So... Um... What did you do to me while you were looping?" Her intense blue eyes almost looking right through him.

"You? Uh... Nothing." He couldn't believe his voice just cracked when he said the word 'nothing'.

"Jack?"

"Nothing, really." He tried smiling and looking innocent at her.

"You did stuff to Daniel, Hammond, Siler, Harriman, McKenzie and Janet. Multiple times. You even made a prank call to the President using Hammond's red phone. Are you really expecting me to believe that I was immune to your pranks? I mean, I know what kinds of things I might be tempted to do, if I were in that situation. The way you were smiling at me for two days afterward tells me it must have been something interesting... You didn't ride your bicycle through the women's locker room, did you?"

"No, Sam, that's something you might think of doing, not me." Jack was smirking at what kinds of things she might have thought of doing.

"What, me?"

"Yes, you. I saw you watching me the other day by the lake."

"What? Oh... Um... I didn't mean to... I was just... I left... I left my radio by the water and didn't realize you would have gotten undressed so quickly. It wasn't my intention to..." Her face instantly turned crimson remembering what she had done, not believing her luck that he'd actually known about it.

"Don't worry about it, Sam. Just remember what they say about paybacks." He gave her a wink.

After she regained her composure, she got the nerve up to ask again. "So what DID you do to me?"

"Sam, the whole point of what Teal'c and I were doing was that there would be no consequences. If I told you, there'd be consequences." As he was talking, he involuntarily looked at her mouth, twice.

"You kissed me, didn't you?"

"Wha... Uh... No... I wouldn't..." He couldn't look at her. How had she figured it out? Yeah, she was one of the smartest people in the world, but still.

"So, what? Did you pull me into a storage closet or something, or just come into my lab and kiss me? Come on, Jack, I know you did it, I won't hold it against you, I'm just curious about the details."

"Oh for crying out loud. If you MUST know. I went into the control room, dressed in my civvies, handed Hammond my resignation and kissed you right there in front of him."

"In front of Hammond? In the control room?"

"Yeah. Well, I figured, if I was gonna do it, I may as well do it right." By now he was smiling at her again. One more thing that had been bothering him for years – after the initial thrill had worn off, he had always felt guilty about kissing her without her knowledge.

She shook her head to clear the surprise she was feeling that he would have done something like that in front of Hammond. "Well, what happened? Did I, uh, you know... kiss you back?"

"Actually, yes, you did."

She stared at the ground for a few minutes, a flush of embarrassment rising on her cheeks as she thought about what had happened. Realization of what that kiss meant started to sink in. "You have GOT to be kidding me!"

"What? You're the one who kissed me back, you didn't have to." Jack didn't understand what she was so upset about.

"You mean, you knew, all this time?"

"Knew what?" He really had no idea what she was getting upset about. Nor what she thought he apparently 'knew'. She normally kept him pretty confused, but that was with technobabble, this was completely different.

"Knew how I felt! I kissed you back, in front of Hammond and everyone. How could you pretend to not know what my feelings for you were? All this time, you knew my feelings." By now she was mainly muttering to herself, pacing back and forth in the cave, Jack only heard a couple of words of what she was saying here and there. "... and you just let me go on with my life, with Pete, with the wedding... Here I kept trying to get the nerve up to talk to you... to tell you... and you knew... I guess you really don't have any feelings for me, do you. All that time I wasted, waiting for you. Even now, constantly thinking about you while stranded here, instead of Pete. What an idiot I've been." She turned and walked out of the cave.

Jack just stood there and watched her leave. He really didn't understand what she was upset about. Yeah, he knew how she had felt about him at one time, but she told him to leave it in the room, so he did. And obviously, her feelings had changed, or she wouldn't have gotten engaged to Pete, right? Wait, did she just say she had been waiting for him? And didn't she look really uncomfortable when he had asked her if she was in love with Pete? She never really gave him a satisfactory answer on that one.


He found her at the edge of the clearing looking over the crater that defined their current existence. A freakishly pink half-moon was high in the sky, casting an odd hue to everything, including Sam. He could see the tears trailing down her face. She had her arms around herself almost as if she were hugging herself. She didn't know he was there, he could quietly turn around and go back to the cave, or not. 'To hell with it', he thought, and walked up to her. He gently put his hands on her shoulders and slowly turned her to look at him. As her tear-filled eyes turned to look at him, he leaned in and kissed her.