AU: John and Lieutenant Colonel Sam are at the end of their stay at the Cabin in Minnesota. Shenanigans ensue while Grace is meditating. The Lieutenant Colonel receives her orders.

TRIGGERS: Non-explicit Sexual Content (Oral) denoted by the chapter break line. Skip the section between these flags if you choose. Please note the while this is an underage relationship, John is technically a 52 year old man in the body of a 19 year old (artificial aged via the Ancient gene). Please remember that this is FanFiction and not real life. I DO NOT CONDONE this behaviour in real life.

Chapter 2: All is Fair in Love and... Not Love

Thursday, 17th June 2004 – Jack's Cabin, Minnesota – John O'Neill

Coming out of the shower, I walked past Grace's room on my way to our bedroom with the intention of getting into something more practical than a towel when I heard the scuff of feet on the carpet with a healthy dose of muttering. Pushing the door open slightly revealed Sam in an entirely too enticing position over Grace's bed tucking new sheets around the mattress. Now as Sam's former commander, I knew I was taking my life into my own hands by sneaking up on her, but resistance was futile.

Pushing the door open silently, I put my reacquired stealth skills to practice. Three silent steps later, I reached my hands out to her hips intending to engage in a little tactile innuendo when she stood up and took a step back… right onto my bare foot.

"Yeap!" She screamed alongside my 'Whoa!' as she spun around to face me, her hands grappled in thin air snagging on the edge of my towel before she sought to steady herself by grabbing my shoulders, while my hands landed on her hips and our feet tangled together. We were just about to get ourselves out of the potential incident when my dislodged towel hit the floor and entrapped our already flailing feet. Somehow, we managed to do a 180-degree spin with those tangled feet while falling, me first and Sam second, onto Grace's bed, messing up the crisply laid out sheets.

"Oh my God! John… what the… where…" She admonished before choosing to sit up but remaining straddled across my hips rather than get up completely. The summer sun and warmth had seen Sam go into town to purchase some soft cotton shorts in a variety of colours. So far, I loved every single pair I had seen her wear. Today's were pink because Grace liked the colour.

"Oh my God, John. Been a long time since I heard that." I jested with a smirk. Oh, I was still John during the day, though at night – until recently – our golden hued friend would visit, and I'd very quickly became Jack, or occasionally even Sir. While the first time since that explosive night back in March had been a shock for both of us, his visits had become an expectation. He would come, then she would come, and I would… well, you get the picture. For some reason he had disappeared the last few nights, not that that had stopped her from calling me Jack, but still, it had left a void after so many months of escalated bliss.

Escalated bliss that had been responsible for regressing her age some three decades while ageing me not more than three years, making me physically 19 and technically an adult. Yeah, we couldn't explain it either, nor did we care too since she was in much better shape and health than three months ago.

"You should know not to sneak up on me." She berated from her seated upright position above me.

"Sorry." I replied as my hands ran up her bare thighs. She raised a single eyebrow when my fingers ventured under the hemline and playfully slapped my hand away.

"No, you're not." She countered.

"No, I'm so very not. And you… you are so very hot." I replied, my hands wandering yet again while I showed her what her extreme hotness was doing to me.

Sam looked up and through the window to where I knew Grace was sitting cross-legged on the dock facing the lake. "John, it's day time. Grace is awake." She warned, though still ground her hips in response to my suggestive movements.

"She's been meditating since just after breakfast Sam. That hardly qualifies as awake." I replied. "She will never know." I replied while she attempted to hold my hands back from their intended target. More futility.

"But I would know." She replied breathlessly when my questing fingers reached their intended destination. "Damn, control yourself woman." She muttered to herself on a heavy sigh.

"Oh, I would make sure you knew about it." I promised.

"John." She moaned, "I'm not having sex with you on our daughters freshly made bed in the middle of…" Her voice tapered off into a small sigh. "Jack." She ground out, adding the punctuating name at the end while leaning forward and grinding harder.

"Oh, you minx. That is so not fair. Calling me both names." I growled, my hands gripping her hips in an attempt to shift her centre of weight enough so that I could flip us over. She countered, by putting weight on her opposite side and grinding down again. If hadn't already been at full staff, that would have done it.

"Ah, ah, ah… Sir." She said waggling her finger side to side. "All's fair in love and… not love." She replied as my eyes rolled into the back of my head from both her physical and mental stimulation. The Sir thing was so damn hot, but then again even as Jack, I had struggled with her variety of Sir's throughout the years.

"It's 'all's fair in love and war', Carter." I corrected finishing with the name I spent years using in a variety of ways as payback for her 'siring' me while trying to leverage her to the other side. She countered again before meting out more punishment. She smiled, flicked her eyes up again to check that Grace had not moved then looked down with a determined expression that spelled trouble… for me. I was in trouble.

"Semantics." She replied.

"No, it's not. Not in your context anyway, 'love' meaning what I want to experience with you right now and 'not love' being the opposite of that desire. 'War' on the other hand has an entirely different connotation to not having sex." I explained in a rare exhibition of intelligence that I hadn't quite remastered how to stifle yet. "What you said makes no sense."

"Hmm, using logical semantics perhaps, but under lexical semantics, what I said makes perfect sense. Love can mean sex, just as 'not love' can mean no sex." She countered making me curse Daniel and his lectures on the different branches of semantics over the years. Sometimes his 24 languages came in handy, other times, I wanted to drown him in his own cone of silence.

"Yeah, OK… but considering what you are doing, the latter part is certainly not fair." I reasoned because goddamn I needed her to end this. No amount of cold showers were going to work at this stage of the game. I should have known that starting something like this in the day time would see me wallowing in this state. Sam had instigated a firm no day time sex rule from the get-go because our responsibility was to Grace first and foremost.

"You started it, Colonel." She baited alternating her eyes between me and Grace outside.

"You can finish it, General." I replied while lifting my hips.

"Not a General." She corrected rubbing herself forwards and backwards.

"Lexical semantics." I responded with a smile knowing she didn't have a comeback because of the relationship between the two ranks where she was concerned. She was a Colonel but would be a General very soon; in fact I was surprised she didn't already have her orders. She smiled back and climbed off.

"Sit up." She ordered. With cautious movements, I did as she asked. "Watch her."

"She's fine, Sam."

"Watch her." She repeated sternly as she kneeled in front of me.

"OK." I agreed and turned my head toward the lake. The next I don't know how many minutes passed in a blink of an eye when my mind went completely blank. I think I said something about this being over too quickly, but to be honest I was in no state to remember as I flopped to my side on the bed.

"There, that was fast." She said smugly once she released me, then rose to her feet. "Did you watch Grace." Her eyes flicked from me to the window where Grace was probably still in the same place that she had been all morning.

"No, ma'am." I huffed.

"Good, thought I might have lost my touch." She replied with a little more smugness in her tone. She was enjoying this, but right now there was not a darn thing I could do about it. I was completely boneless – pun totally intended!

"No, ma'am." I replied again as I flopped to my side and continued to breath hard. I did not have the energy to form a sentence with any more than two words. She snorted a giggle as she turned to leave, throwing over her shoulder at the last second that I was remaking Grace's bed.

~ ~ J 💞 S ~ ~

Same day – Lieutenant Colonel Sam Carter

It had been nearly thirty minutes since I had left John, and I wondered how much of that was him just laying on the bed recovering. It made me smile to think that in the seven years of serving together before Loki created John, not once had Captain Major Doctor Carter ever done that for her CO. If she had, then perhaps my timeline would never have existed. Then again, perhaps me coming back had caused reality to split and somewhere in the multiverse were a version of me and a version of him still living separate lives, both of us miserable, both of us pining for the other waiting for our one day. Maybe with Jack's promotion, we did finally take that step. I hoped so. I truly hoped that somewhere out there we remained strong, waited out the war and found each other when rank and chain of command were no longer an issue.

"Hey. How is she?" John asked as he finally emerged, fully clothed as if nothing had happened. As I looked at him, the sun reflecting off his features revealed a touch of red in the few whiskers he was attempting to grow out while he still could. It made me sad to think that he would be forced to shave it all off in another year's time.

"Still the same." I replied, "Well, the glow is a bit brighter." I commented. John took a seat beside me and reached for my hand. As our fingers linked together, a small smooth river stone painted with a happy sun levitated, then another and another.

"Is she… making rocks float?" John asked. Moments later, Grace herself lifted several inches off the ground and remained suspended in thin air.

"Umm…" I half giggled half spoke, "Try herself." I muttered, then leaned over the side of the chair to snag the camera Samantha insisted we take.

"Teal'c is going to love this." John said with a snicker. I had to agree, the big man's obsession with Star Wars was second to none. Seeing Grace levitate things like Luke Skywalker did in The Empire Strikes Back would send him into a Jaffa equivalent of a tizzy.

"Have you managed to pick up anything?" I asked him as we alternated between looking at each other, then Grace who was still floating, though not moving any higher.

"Like what?" He asked, a little of the old Colonel coming out in his tone. Rather than retort, I gave him a long-suffering look followed by a shake of my head and a roll of my eyes. He sighed and withdrew the small red fire truck. "No. Maybe I'm not enough like him… or maybe Ch…"

"Don't! Don't do that Jack!" I berated using his original name. "You are just like him, right down to self-deprecating bullshit. Charlie was your son just as much as he was his." Long gone were the days where I would walk on eggshells around him with regards to Charlie. Especially when he acted like this.

"Then why?" He asked with a little catch in his voice while turning the metal truck over and over in his hands. "If I am so much like him, why can't I make it work?"

"Have you done what she told you to do?" I asked. He scoffed and focused on the toy, extending and closing the little plastic white ladder over and over. That meant that he hadn't forgiven himself. His self-blame for Charlie's death was the burden that stopped him from making that step, though he refused to believe it. "If Jack could do it, so can you." I offered remembering the brief conversion I had had with Samantha about their visits to Charlie's grave every Friday.

"Yeah, maybe." He murmured; his thumb had moved onto the wheels of the truck to spin them freely other than the one that was stuck – jammed into the underside of the chassis. "I have tried, you know. Tried to see it as just an accident." He said while digging his thumbnail to try and release the wheel. "But then I start the 'what if' game and before I know it, I am back at square one where I forgot to put it away properly. Back to it being my fault."

"I blamed my father for years. In my mind it was his fault that Mum got into that taxi." I confessed while looking out over the pond. I was about to share another part of my future, something that had not happened yet, but probably would because Sel'mak was over 2000 years old. "All it did was block the chance for reconciliation longer than it should have. If I hadn't been so mad at him, he would have told me about his cancer sooner. Those years after Mum died made him harder, despite Sel'mak's calming influence. He tried to tell me so many times, but I ignored him even right at the end when he said to screw the rules. I have to live with that." I ended the cryptic explanation and looked at him to find a set of worried brown eyes focused on mine.

"What do you mean in the end?" He asked, scrutinising my words. I could see him running them through his mind over and over, analysing them from all angles just like Jack always did. Finally, he managed to pick up what I was putting down and looked back out to the scenery. "I see. That's why you don't want to see him." He alluded to a conversation we had a few months ago before all this. He looked back at the little truck and closed his hand around it, then closed his eyes but again nothing happened.

"I'm sure there are things in this life you struggle with." He looked at me and nodded as he placed the truck back into his pocket.

"Yeah. Ronny, from school. She asked me to…" He gestured with his head and coughed, "…be her first. I declined."

"Why?"

"Because… she's 16, and I'm…"

"Also 16." I finished for him.

"No." He disagreed immediately.

"Ah, yes. In fact, John, you are probably the best person to give her that. You know what to expect and how to make it less traumatic." I gave him my reasoning. "It's not wrong, it's natural, and I would never begrudge you for doing so." I told him flatly because it was true. Nevertheless, he still winced. "John, if she asks again, I want you to think about it."

"Sam." He warned, giving me a hard look.

"No. You're a good man John O'Neill. Your hesitation proves that. Don't ever think otherwise. All girls deserve their first time to be special. If had known Jack when it was my turn, I'd have asked him despite the age gap." I confessed with a smile knowing I had just given him permission to sleep with another woman.

The rolling crunch of car tyres on the gravel and two slamming doors caught our attention. John sought to move in front of Grace to block the sight of what she was doing while I stood to waylay whoever it was. When two unknown men in uniform walked around the corner, I knew the time had come.

"Ma'am." The unknown airman said. "We're from General Hammond's office. You've been reactivated." The man – a Major – informed me while the other – a Captain – passed me a familiar manila folder scrawled with the USAF insignia. He leaned out to look around me.

"Captain." I interrupted his snooping. He tucked himself back quickly.

"Apologies Ma'am. You are to report tomorrow for briefing. Your flight leaves Duluth at 0900 hours." The Captain explained.

"Thank you. Dismissed." I said, then watched as the two men left waiting until I had heard two doors close and the sound of wheels crunching on the driveway as the vehicle reversed. "Did he see anything?" I asked John.

"Nope. Unless you are referring to my ugly mug." He replied as he walked up and looked down at the file I held in my hands.

"Don't say that, John. I like your mug." I said with a smile, then traced a single finger down through his encroaching facial hair. "Red. I never expected you to have a red beard. I like it."

"Yeah, well not for long. It went mostly brown by the time I was twenty-five." He said, then looked back at the file. Slowly he took it from me and flipped the cover open. He was smiling while running his finger over my new rank. "Wow. You made it. A General." He said with wonder in his voice.

"Yeah. Of course, this means that now I have no idea what is coming." I said to him, firmly hoping that the fate he experienced my timeline was a thing of the past. I had not been able to do anything back then, but now – as a General – I had the rank and the leverage to stop them taking him, if indeed they tried.

He had a family now and no one would leave him behind like last time.