A/N: This chapter took... a lot more thought and work than I expected. It seems my muse got ideas of its own, and decided to take the story in a different direction. I know I'm going out on a limb a little, and I have no beta to run this by, so I'm depending on you all to be honest with me about this chapter. Please do tell me what you think. Do I need to cut/add/scrap it altogether? I'm hoping that it's in character; I've given it a great deal of thought. I know it gets darker and more angsty; perhaps that will be the general vein of the story. But it is my intent to veer in a more light hearted direction after this point. This chapter was necessary I feel, as I didn't want to ignore what I had begun to deal with...

Happy New Year to you all, and I do apologise for taking so long with this one. I started it a great many times and it never felt quite right until now... I hope that I have replied to every review I've received, thank you all so very much. To those who reviewed anonymously; thank you for leaving your opinion, I'm only sorry that I can't find you to follow it up!

Retrieving the book from the floor, Sam figured that her attempt at reading covertly could be pretty much pronounced a disaster. Although it was probably a good thing, since she could almost feel her eyes crossing as she tried to make out the small print in the flickering firelight.

Replacing it quietly on the table closest to her, Sam huddled down under her rugs and stared into the flames. She was starting to feel a chill creep into the air, and withdrew her feet from the pinching tendrils of cold that were crawling up her skin. She was way too tall for this sofa, and was curled in something resembling a fetal position just to stay warm. Her eyes unfocused slightly as she became lost in the depths of the fire now burning low in the hearth. It conjured so many memories of her past, each with a painful pang associated with some family member now gone from her life for whatever reason. Various Christmases, cookouts, campfires and nights spent under the stars at her uncle Irving's ranch for no other reason than it was summertime and her aunt and uncle gave Sam and Mark free reign of the place. Come to think of it, it had been her uncle Irv who encouraged her love of mechanics, and it was while helping to fix his beat up old truck for the hundredth time that she decided she wanted a bike of her own.

They had lost touch with her mom's side of the family after her death, due to disagreements of various kinds between her father and her mother's siblings. Sam didn't like that, now that she thought about it, and when she next had time she decided she'd like to drive up and see uncle Irv and aunt Kate. They lived in Colorado... somewhere...

Jack's thoughts didn't flow as freely... to him it felt hideously stereotypical to be so depressed at Christmas, but he couldn't help it. Every day of the year hurt, but this one managed to do so just that little bit more. But he wouldn't allow himself to go there, to mourn Charlie anew each time. Whenever Charlie's face, or a thousand times worse, the sight of Charlie's body as they had found it that day, rose in his mind, he pushed it back down quickly. Sara's screams only rang in his ears for a second or two, before they were plunged back into the dark recesses of his heart. He had relived those moments every day of his life for over a year; he could do so every day until he died. That's what he was afraid of... he didn't know how to let it go, he couldn't deal with it, so he pushed it aside as much as possible.

Almost as bad, and equally as intense, was his awareness of her proximity to him. SG-1 had been the first thing to make him feel alive since Charlie's death. The work, he could lose himself in that. But Carter... she had unwittingly started to wear away at the only part of him which still remained numb and closely guarded. Ever since all bridges had been burned between himself and Sara, he had denied to himself that that part of his heart even existed. She had taken it with her, he preferred to believe. Just how Carter had worked her way in there, he didn't even know. It had been far too late by the time he realised... and now she was laying less than a metre away from him. For starters, it scared him. She was everything soft and warm and, dare he say it, young. She was life and he was misery and decay. Or so he felt, at any rate. He couldn't deserve her, couldn't drag her down with him since it seemed she was already on the way to a broken heart anyway. He knew he could never make that better, and was only likely to make it worse. All this without even thinking of the frat regs... so it was best not to think of how she looked at him sometimes...

A log shifted in the fire, sending a fine shower of sparks onto the hearth and causing Sam to drift back to reality. A second later, Jack swore and swatted at his arm. Sam tried to suppress a smile.

"I hope you're not smirking at my suffering, Major."

Sam's surprised blue eyes crashed into Jack's browns, which were slightly crinkled at the edges in a way that told her he was teasing. Although she could have sworn he had been sleeping with his back to her. If he had been sleeping at all...

"This seasonal insomnia's a killer... wanna game of... something?"

Jack almost surprised himself at the normality in his voice. Then again, he specialised in being a closed book, and Carter was certainly not the one to voice his current problems too. Sam hesitated; if it was going to be anything as awkward as their earlier conversation, she'd settle for silence and fire-staring thank you very much...

"Unless you were sleeping that is?"

Ok, he was on to her.

"Sure. You have a chessboard?"

Sam was smiling one of those enthusiastic smiles that made Jack wish he'd learned chess at some point in his damned life. How the hell could you get to... well, his age... and not know how to play chess? It was bad enough that he couldn't sleep when she was in the same room... What did this woman do to him for goodness sake?

Realising that his stare looked rather accusatory, and Sam was looking curiously at him, Jack got to his feet, swore at the cold, and lunged for the shelf in the corner where his dusty stack of... anything that involved two people... lived.

At least he didn't injure himself on anything this time.

Sam slipped gently to the floor, wrapping herself in several rugs and shifting as close to the fire as she could manage. Jack pretended not to notice the chessboard and pieces so prominently displayed on his shelf, originally intended to motivate him to learn by staring him in the face each time he walked by, and returned with a checker board instead.

"Close enough?" he smiled as he sat down, throwing a log on the fire.

Two games later and it was an even draw of one each. Sam was miles in the lead this time around however, having taken several of Jack's pieces in an early move. Jack noticed that she never bit her lip, or fidgeted with her hair when she was concentrating. No, Samantha Carter stared at her goal so intently that he was surprised it didn't wither under her gaze. She must have been mean in staring competitions as a kid. Those baby blues could radiate some intensity when they wanted to. They had shot angry sparks in Jack's direction more than once in the past 3 years, that was for sure. Although the change in her demeanour didn't go unnoticed, and Jack wondered at how she could go from being clearly upset to intently focused. Women were good at that, he decided. But that was unfair; Carter wasn't 'women'. She was... Carter. She deserved her own world-saving, Goa'uld-ass-kicking, doohickey-decoding category. He figured that she had a habit of losing herself in work/planet saving/board games when stuff bothered her. But he still wasn't going to ask. Jack was aware of his capabilities and lack thereof... and anything involving...well, let's face it; words... was definitely filed under 'lack thereof'.

"King me!" she smiled at him triumphantly, with a childlike gleam in her eye.

Suddenly, a worried frown creased Jack's face and his hand paused over the game as he focused on a spot in the corner of the room where the flickering of the firelight failed to chase the shadows away.

"Carter, what's that?"

Snapping into military mode, Sam jumped up to look. Staring for a moment, and seeing nothing, she looked at him inquisitively.

"What sir?"

"Oh, I guess these old eyes are playing tricks."

She looked at him suspiciously as she sat back down, but it took her several seconds to notice that her newly acquired king and two other pieces were missing from the board.

"Sir!"

Jack knew instantly that he had been over ambitious... perhaps if he had just taken one, she wouldn't have noticed. Nah, he was kidding himself.

"What?"

"I can't believe I fell for that..."

Jack continued to feign innocence.

"C'mon sir, I can't finish the game without my pieces..."

"Aha, so you forfeit?" Jack grinned triumphantly.

"No!"

Sam's indignant cry coincided with the first chime of midnight on the clock in the hall.

"Call it a draw then?"

"I had no idea you were so afraid of losing, Colonel."

She was definitely baiting him. Jack had never known Carter to be so competitive.

"That's not gonna work Major. Now if you refuse to finish the game, I have no choice but to accept victory."

He made his next move and sat awaiting her decision. There they were; the sparks. But not angry this time, just determined. She was gonna beat him with just four pieces and he knew it. The clock finished chiming. Sam made her next move.

She had him beat before it chimed a quarter past, the game culminating in a chase around the board with the only two remaining pieces. Jack discovered a new facet of her personality; Smug!Carter. She never got cocky about blowing up a sun, but boy did she get a kick out of beating a cheater at checkers. Her hair was tousled from sleeping, or at least attempting to, on the sofa, that billion watt smile lit up her face and her eyes sparkled with delight. It was bizarre, but contrary to all the thoughts that had been previously running through his head about her, in that moment she reminded him of Charlie beaming with pride when he wrestled his dad to the ground with his new Power Ranger one Christmas morning.

"Is this how you imagined it?"

The words left his mouth before he even thought them through fully. Not that that wasn't an everyday occurrence for him; but it didn't usually provoke the response he was now getting from his 2IC. The tenderness in his voice and the faraway look in his eyes quieted Sam's momentary jubilance.

"Imagined what?" she asked gently, sensing that, as usual, her CO had managed to voice a thought that related nothing to any current situation, but evidently one that gave him sadness.

"Christmas." Hell, he might as well finish it now.

The silence returned as Sam looked thoughtfully at the tassel of the rug that she was slowly turning over and over in her hand, and Jack decided that the situation really had gone to hell in a handbasket once and for all. The frankness with which she responded took him completely aback.

"I'd be lying if I said yes. I guess I'd always imagined, or maybe hoped, that by now I wouldn't be spending my Christmases alone... present company excepted. Not that I expected to be here... but was that what you were asking?"

Sam trailed off uncertainly, realising that she had perhaps said too much. Heart to hearts were generally a thing reserved for Janet or Daniel, and whether or not she had intended to say quite so much, she couldn't really decide.

Jack didn't know what he had initially meant either. This Christmas? Any Christmas?

"I guess... Christmas just feels different, after... y'know..."

Jack looked around helplessly for anything in the room that might possibly offer a different topic of conversation. He never talked about this, why was he talking about this? He could feel that ache that permanently inhabited the pit of his stomach stretching into a yawning gap of loneliness as memories of the precious few Christmases he'd had with Charlie came crashing back.

Sam could only look at him helplessly, as she guessed what was going on in his mind. How stupid of her not to realise how hard Christmas must be for him; he'd lost so much more than she had.

The pain washed over Jack in a way that he rarely allowed it to; and when he did he was usually alone and very drunk. He felt like punching a wall, making the pain go away. Of course it never did go away. It ached inside of him constantly, taunting him with everything he'd lost, and everything he couldn't have. He could drink it into submission, but he didn't like to do that. In part, he was still punishing himself, but in part he knew that SG-1; its work and its members, were the closest to salvation he was ever going to get. He could exercise a measure of self control, and a descent into alcoholism would leave him with nothing but his own self pity. Jack wouldn't allow himself that indulgence. As long as he was left on this earth; he was going to be useful in some way or other. He wanted to scream at her to get out, to leave him alone with his misery and guilt, and stop parading in front of him something that he could never have again; love, a life, happiness... her. But when his eyes finally met Sam's and all he saw were twin pools of pain, a completely different part of him reacted.

In an instant, he had taken her face in his hands and he was kissing her.

And she was kissing him back.

And he could taste tears.

For a moment, their pain mingled and became something else; something equally consuming, equally powerful. But it couldn't make the pain go away. Only briefly did it burn brighter, then subsided, leaving them staring hungrily into each others eyes; breathlessly searching for a cure that neither could provide. Both knew how far they could carry this moment, how far they wanted to, but also that it wouldn't give them what they were looking for. It would merely be a band aid on a gaping wound. Two broken people wouldn't make a whole one.

Never looking away from her, Jack gathered Sam into his arms, wrapped the blankets protectively around them and lay down to the deepest sleep he had experienced in years.

Sleep was longer in seeking Sam out, as she lay with her hands clenched around the material of Jack's sweater, stretching it taut over his back, her eyes wide and unfocused as they stared into the darkness.