Cheyenne Moutain, 1997

"You know," Daniel began, walking into Sam's lab as if he owned the place, oblivious to the fact that he had just distracted the scientist. "You're different." He sat on a stool next to her to take a look at the artifact she was examining.

Sam turned to the archaeologist. "Different?" she asked, pushing the tablet towards him so he could read the preliminary test results.

"Compared to Abydos," he replied, taking the tablet.

SG-1 had been in operation for a few months now. Daniel had returned, Teal'c had been accepted into the team, and Sam had reverted to the perfect soldier everyone expected her to be. The encounter with Jack in his office had been a way for her to end their story on her terms, to be the one who decided when and how things ended, not the other way around. Or at least that's what she kept telling herself.

Since then, Carter had worked perfectly with O'Neill, and SG-1 had become the flagship team, the one that others aspired to emulate. What she hadn't anticipated, however, was the constant desire she felt for her Commanding Officer. She briefly wondered if it was just the notion of the forbidden that drove her to feel such intense desire, or if he had simply managed to enchant her body to the point where, for the first time in her life, her mind agreed with her panties.

"Less young?" she ventured, thinking about her rapidly approaching thirties and trying to distract herself from the thought of Jack O'Neill between her thighs. "Divorced?" she suggested, with a wry smile.

Sam briefly thought of her father's disapproving look when she told him she had married after only six months of dating. But he couldn't understand, could he? Jonas was everything Jack wasn't. Everything she had needed at that moment in her life.

Unfortunately, he was also everything she had always avoided in men.

But that was ancient history now. Sam sometimes wondered if the divorce had been the cause of his behavior on P3X-513 or if he had been completely deranged from the start and she had been unable to see it. She sighed quietly. She was divorced when she could have been labeled as the widow of a deserter; she wasn't doing so badly. Especially for a general's daughter.

"More alive," Daniel responded, putting the tablet down to examine a part of the artifact covered in inscriptions.

Sam rolled her eyes. The reunion with Daniel, though tinged with the disappearance of Sha're, had been a breath of fresh air. Their sibling-like relationship had only intensified, and they shared a lot. A lot, but not everything.

"That's funny," she said, re-examining her notes. "Because I was just dead a few weeks ago," she said with a wry smile, referring to their encounter with the Nox.

"Don't do that," the archaeologist replied.

"Be alive?" she asked, looking up.

"Get away with sarcasm and humor," he said, grabbing a paper and pencil to note the first words he recognized. "That's Jack's technique."

Sam opened her mouth to contest, to tell him that Jack's way was more about disappearing and shutting down, pushing everyone away and hurting others before they had a chance to hurt him, but she stopped herself. She stopped because, in reality, she didn't know. She didn't know because she didn't know him as well as Daniel did.

In six months with SG-1, she had learned more about Jack O'Neill than in two years of sex. Because, in fact, they had never really talked. Things had only been primal between them.

And animals don't talk after all.

Daniel had confirmed his divorce even she had suspected it at the time, had told her about Charlie. Hell, she had even met Sara. All of this had been far from what she had imagined when she realized three years earlier that trips from the Pentagon would no longer be necessary. When she realized that he was probably the only man capable of making her climax in a world where she prided herself daily on being strong and independent.

"Ah," she simply replied. "So much sarcasm and humor that he disappeared to the other side of the planet," she pointed out, getting up from her stool to go to the computer where she entered new data.

"Only to the other side of the Atlantic," the archaeologist corrected, adjusting his glasses. "And it's different."

"Because of Kynthia?" Sam asked, turning to him, briefly wondering if what she felt was jealousy. How could she be jealous of a woman who had drugged him? Did she even have the right to be jealous, to begin with?

Daniel looked up, his clear eyes seeming to get lost in contemplating the young woman. Sometimes he wondered if he was missing something obvious between the two soldiers, but what could it be? "His father died while he was stuck on Argos, Sam," he finally said after a moment.

"Oh."

Sam suddenly felt stupid, realizing she had never thought that Jack might have parents. Or a family. As if being over forty was incompatible with being someone's child.

She refocused on the screen in front of her, pretending to be absorbed in her notes rather than responding. Daniel was about to point out that this technique was also used by Jack when they were interrupted by the base's loudspeakers.

"Captain Carter, report to General Hammond's office immediately. ยป