Author's Note – Okay, well I've written this chapter and it's turned out to be a lot more angsty than the others so I hope I'm not going to disappoint too many of you. What I am considering doing is adding a further chapter containing some cards that Jack considered including. If anyone has anything they think should be included, feel free to let me know and I'll give you a credit!

Thanks to everyone who has reviewed and messaged. I've had a brilliant time writing this piece and have a couple more ideas I'm going to try out so hope to be posting more stuff soon.

Standard disclaimer applies – none of the characters are mine, I gain nothing from their use, etc, etc.

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It wasn't every Friday night you got home from work to a USAF Colonel asleep on your front doorstep.

Sam sighed. She'd really been hoping he'd be gone by the time she got around to coming home. Her elderly neighbour, Mrs Hennessey, had called her at work a little after four in the afternoon to say that a young man had pulled up outside Sam's house half an hour earlier in a bug-eyed truck and was now camped on her doorstep. A little further questioning had been enough for Sam to be fairly confident she knew the identity of the 'young' man in question and make her revise her plans to wrap up and head home for an early night.

That had been a little over seven hours ago and he'd gone from sitting on the steps to sleeping flat on his back on her front porch, arms straight out either side and his feet still resting on the first step down. A long flat rectangular package, wrapped in pale blue paper and finished with a white bow lay on the porch beneath his right hand. He was also snoring loudly enough that Sam sincerely hoped Mrs Hennessey had turned her hearing aids off for the night.

Sam nudged him, not particularly gently, in the ribs with her foot, thinking that she'd known the flat shoes were a bad choice when she'd put them on this morning, the black stilettos with the pointy toes would have been much better for the job.

Jack flinched and sat bolt upright before groaning and clutching his knee. 'Hey, Carter, give a guy a break will ya? Enough I'm in pain already without you needing to make it any worse!' He shot her a glance, continuing to rub his knee with one hand and investigate his ribs, where she'd kicked him, with the other. Sam kept her expression blank. This was a man who didn't warrant any encouragement as far as she was concerned.

'What are you doing here, Sir?'

It had been two days since The Gate Room Incident and Jack had managed to convince, as far as was possible, a fairly sceptical General Hammond that he must have been sleep-walking. Jack had then borne the speculation on his usual choice of sleeping attire with as much fortitude as possible and done his best to ignore the grins and innuendo. He'd been military his entire adult life and he knew they'd find something else to gossip about soon enough and he just hoped next time it wouldn't be him.

He'd been under no illusions regarding the identity of those actually responsible but so long as they'd gone to the effort of making sure the Gate Room security tape was doctored (rolling his eyes at the unintended pun when he thought it in his head) and the toxicology screen the General had ordered came back negative, he wasn't going to say anything. He also accepted that he undoubtedly deserved to have Carter want to make him squirm and he was hoping she'd now got it out of her system and they'd be able to return to some semblance of normality.

'Needed to talk to you.' He shifted uncomfortably, straightening his leg and then levering himself upright by grabbing onto the porch rail. 'Do you mind if we take this inside, Carter? I need to sit down.'

She was tempted to tell him he had a perfectly good truck parked roughly 20 feet away but she knew she was going to have to talk to him at some point so doing it on her turf was probably as good as it was going to get.

She opened the door in silence and headed into the house without waiting to see if he followed. She knew he would but she wasn't giving an inch until she had to.

Jack continued to grumble complaints as he stepped into her tiny lounge and slumped into one of her squishy sofas. Sam decided that despite the lateness of the hour, she really needed a drink for this. Opening her refrigerator she pulled out a bottle and then rummaged through her kitchen drawers for the corkscrew. Eventually finding it, she carried the bottle, along with two glasses, back into the lounge and sat down opposite Jack, carefully placing the bottle on the low table between them.

Finally silent, Jack leaned forward and picked up the corkscrew, using it to open the bottle with an ease she'd never suspected he possessed.

He didn't look up from the task. 'Get a grip, Carter, it's not rocket science.'

For the first time since she'd seen him on her porch she almost smiled.

'So. What are you doing here, Sir?' She tried to keep the tone curious rather than interrogative. 'And how long have you been waiting for me to get home?'

Jack didn't even bother responding to the second question and in answer to the first he tossed the wrapped package into her lap. 'Like I said, I needed to talk to you, Carter.' He poured them each a generous glass and leaned back into the sofa, bringing his ankle up to rest on the other knee and stretching the arm holding his glass along the back of the sofa.

Sam unwrapped the parcel, not all that surprised when it turned out to be the Monopoly set they'd played with all those weeks ago in the Infirmary. She looked at Jack, not particularly wanting to phrase the question.

Jack reached a long arm forward and moved the bottle sideways on the table 'Get the board out, Carter, and lay it on the table.'

'Sir, I'm not playing this game with you. If you remember, I didn't like it much the first time around.'

Exasperated, Jack growled at her 'I know that, Carter, and I'm not asking you to play the damn thing. Just get the board out and lay it on the table.'

Curiosity getting the better of her, she unfolded the board and placed it on the table before reaching for her glass and moving back into the corner of the sofa. She watched him expectantly over the rim of the glass, not really sure what he was going to do next.

Jack was still, preternaturally still for him. His fingers were relaxed around the stem of the glass as he balanced it on the back of the sofa but his face was shadowed. The only movement she could see was the slow rise and fall of his chest and a gentle pulse just above the open neck of the blue shirt he was wearing.

Realising she couldn't see his face, and she wanted to, Sam reached over the arm of the sofa and turned on a table lamp to her left.

Jack flinched but it seemed to rouse him from whatever contemplation of his demons he'd been indulging in.

'Sam, I am really sorry if you were offended in any way by the stuff I put on those stupid cards. You have to know that I would never intentionally hurt you.'

It had been important for her to hear the words and she was glad he'd said them but she'd known he was sorry from the moment he'd tried to hide the first card. She waited to see what else he had to say.

'Okay. I guess I never really thought it was going to be that simple.' He lifted his glass and she watched as he tipped his head back and downed half of it. When he'd settled his arm back along the sofa, his eyes moved to the board between them. 'Sam, do you know why Daniel was laughing so hard at the places I put on the board?'

She looked at the board, the locations were a mixture of names and gate references; none of them meant anything immediate to her but she remembered querying Jack on whether one of them had been a rural planet they'd visited in their first year as SG1. She'd been pretty convinced he was feigning a degree of disinterest that hid something more important but she hadn't been able to prove it so she'd let it go. She wished now she'd pushed it.

Jack moved to sit forward, hunching over the game and scrutinising the board himself. Finding the one he was looking for, he pointed. 'Linyos. That's the one you asked me about and, yes, I had to say you were my wife to stop the locals trying to buy you but that's not what I remember it for.' He risked looking at her face. 'I remember it as the first place you and I shared a tent.'

He put his finger on another place on the board 'Varsoosh. It had fish but as far as I was concerned, the most enticing thing in the water was always going to be you. You swam for an hour while I was on lookout on that ridge and for all the attention I was giving it, half a dozen Goa'uld could have landed their ships right on top of me and I wouldn't have noticed.'

Sam gasped, shocked to hear him admit he'd spied on her.

His finger moved again, this time to a gate reference, PL3 4RY. 'Three day mineral survey mission. You know how much I adore mineral survey missions so you smuggled four packets of M&M's and half a dozen Hershey bars through the gate just to keep me happy. You and I shared watch the first night and we ate the whole lot.' Sam found herself smiling back when grinned at her. 'That was one hell of a sugar high, Carter!'

Suddenly serious he looked back at the board, searching for another reference. Finding it, his eyes returned to her face. 'Prenath. Abandoned Goa'uld stronghold. Daniel found some tablet talks about the overthrow of a God about 5000 years ago. He's jumping up and down, saying it might give a clue how to defeat the Goa'uld and I suddenly realise you're not there. Two of the worst hours of my life to find you; you'd fallen down a damn staircase.'

She cut him off. 'I didn't fall, Sir, it collapsed underneath me!'

'Whatever, Sam. I saw you lying there and I thought you were dead.'

Sam remembered. Remembered Jack calling her name and telling her to hang on, he'd get her out of there. Then he was beside her, checking her for injuries and getting as close to panic as he ever got in the field, which wasn't actually that close. She'd had slight concussion but nothing more serious. They'd been making their way slowly back to Daniel and Teal'c when he'd suddenly grabbed her for a quick sideways hug and told her 'Thought I'd lost ya there, Major.'. She'd been surprisingly touched by his rare display of affection and done her best to brush it off by telling him she wasn't that easy to get rid of. They'd never discussed it again.

'Sam, that's where I first realised exactly how important you were to me.'

He finished the contents of his glass and set it down on the table, leaning towards her and clasping his hands together loosely between his knees. 'I have to tell you this and I've rehearsed it in my head a hundred times so just let me say it and be done.' He looked her directly in the eye 'And Sam, if you interrupt me, So Help Me God, I will get up and walk out of here and I will never discuss this with you again as long as I live.'

She knew he was serious and she'd never felt less like interrupting anybody in her entire life.

'The Frat Regs are there for a reason, and it's a very good reason, but I don't ever want you to think that I don't care for you very, very deeply just because there's a rule that says I'm not supposed to.' He sighed. 'The rules just stop me from actually doing, they don't prevent me from feeling.' He pulled back from her as though in pain and ran both hands through his hair. 'And, Sam, it was you who wanted to leave it in the room, all that stuff that came out with the Zatarc testing. Not me. If you'd given me any indication then that you wanted more, I would have moved heaven and earth to do that.'

He stood.

'So I'm sorry if sometimes I get a little bent out of shape and do stupid things that make you think I don't take you seriously or I don't care but you've got to believe me when I say I do that because it's the only way I can deal with what's going on in my head.'

Without getting out of her seat, she caught his hand as he passed her on his way to her front door.

'Jack.'

He stopped but didn't turn back to her.

'Jack?' She made it a question but she wasn't quite sure what she was asking. He looked down at their joined hands before raising hers to his lips and brushing a soft kiss across her knuckles. It was a swift gesture of tenderness and regret and once he was done he settled her hand back on the sofa and again moved to leave.

He was about to pull the door shut when he turned to her with a sudden smile. 'Oh by the way, Carter, you might want to stop Walter selling too many more copies of the original tapes from the other night in the Gate Room.' He paused to let the implication of that sink in. 'Or at least check he's got the subtitling right. He claims he's cross-referenced each of the cameras and had them checked by a lip-reading expert but …'

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Okay, it's done. Not as much humour in the final chapter but it's where the story was going so I hope it's not too much angst for the humour fans?

As ever, reviews are welcome, positively encouraged, not to saypleaded for...