Today, the galley's walk-in freezer had broken down, leaving her with 103 pounds of defrosted vegetables, 46 pounds of ruined meat, and 37 gallons of melting ice cream. The crew's dinner had been a strange one.
Sam sighed as she walked to her cabin. As much as she loved command, and as much as she'd learned on Atlantis about trusting her people to do their jobs, it still vexed her sometimes that she never had four or 14 or 48 hours to devote to a problem. A primal part of her was convinced that she could fix everything if she could kick everybody off the ship and work nonstop until she couldn't work anymore. So she planned to spend most of the night shift with her laptop, a stack of reports and schematics, and some melted ice cream.
Which was why, when the door slid open to reveal something other than the blissfully empty quarters she'd anticipated, she didn't react as well as she could have.
"What are you doing here?"
Jack's eyebrows did a little, teasing dance as he stood up from her narrow bunk. "Nice to see you, too, Carter."
He was dressed in civvies, so either the world was ending, or this was a social call. Sam didn't have time for either, and judging from the expression on his face, the earth was not going to blow up today. She put her laptop and the ice cream on her desk.
"Dinner?" he asked, jerking his chin at the butter pecan.
"Malfunction."
"Ah.
But the cabin itself smelled like dinner -- Italian, to be precise. She noticed a white bag on the tiny coffee table in what passed for her living area. "You didn't."
"I did. Emilia's. I got you the gnocchi carbonara."
Sam loved the gnocchi carbonara. Potatoes, cheese and bacon: all her comfort foods in one place. Her stomach rumbled, and Jack grinned at her. She tried to ignore the scent of garlic bread.
"I gave you the stone for emergencies, General."
Jack cocked an eyebrow. "'General?'"
"I'm trying to maintain professional distance. You can't just beam up here whenever you want. What if the sensors were working?"
"They're not. I do read your reports, you know." He turned away, irritating her further, and started pulling clear, plastic boxes from the bag.
Sam rubbed her forehead. "I can't have anyone from the Pentagon dropping by for the hell of it. It's too early. It suggests you don't trust me. It's just like Atlantis."
"Which is exactly why I never visited you on Atlantis."
Which had sucked, but that wasn't the point. "Will you at least look at me?"
Jack sat on one of the low chairs and looked up at her. "Nobody knows I'm here, Sam," he said calmly, as he laid out the plastic cutlery. "And they won't unless the sensors get fixed. By my reckoning that's 99.9% less likely to happen when you're off duty. Come on, it's getting cold."
It was too much. Sam's brain was still in fixit mode and hadn't caught up yet. She sat opposite Jack and accepted a paper napkin. Her stomach rumbled again. "Jack, what's going on?"
"Nothing. Dinner." He handed her a slice of garlic bread. "Eat."
Sam gave in and took a bite. "Oh my god," she sighed. "This is so much better than soggy cauliflower."
"Little refrigeration problem, is it?"
"Freezer. I don't want to talk about it."
"We don't have to talk about anything."
That got Sam's attention. He was still opening containers, placing the gnocchi and some steamed broccoli rabe (Broccoli rabe. In space.) on her side of the table. She finished chewing a mouthful of bread and studied Jack instead. His shoulders were hunched, and he was moving slowly, as if his skin hurt. And despite what she'd said earlier, she knew he'd never make a surprise visit to her command just for the hell of it.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"I'm fine, Carter," he said into his linguine.
"Is everybody else okay? Cassie?"
"They're all fine. Will you relax already?"
"Jack."
"Carter." He pointed at her food with his plastic fork. "I happen to know that's your favorite meal in the universe."
Still thinking, Sam took a few bites. She resisted the urge to moan. "It's wonderful," she said.
Jack smiled, a shadow of his usual "I told you so" smile. Sam smiled back and tried to recall the last few times they'd eaten at Emilia's. It was less than a mile from his place in DC.
"Did I miss an anniversary or something?" she asked.
He flinched, almost too quickly for her to see. Sam had a horrible thought and looked at her watch: June 6. "Oh, god, Jack, I'm so sorry."
"I figured it was a sign you were working too hard and could use a break," Jack said. In English, that meant I wanted to see you. Sam was never not working too hard.
"I'm sorry," she said again.
"It's okay." He speared a floret of broccoli rabe with excessive force, and finally met her eyes. "Honest, Carter, it's okay."
The tradition had started after Daniel's ascension. Sam and then-Colonel O'Neill had been at odds, two different styles of grief colliding, and then one night he'd shown up at her door with a pizza, a movie, and a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke, explaining that it was his son's birthday.
The next year, Daniel was still gone and Abydos had just been destroyed, and it was Sam who went to the Colonel's house with burritos and beer. They'd marked the day together ever since -- sometimes off-world, mostly on -- except for the one year she spent in Pegasus. Then Sam's father had died in late May, so they started toasting him, too.
Now here it was, June 6 again. Charlie O'Neill would have been 22 and it was four years since she'd lost her dad, and Sam had been too busy playing with her new toy to notice.
Jack handed her a bottle of soda and brushed her fingers with his own. "You were working too hard, though."
"Jack."
"Oh, please tell me you're not going to beat yourself up over this," he said lightly. "Even a brain as big as yours can't keep track of everything. Anyway, I'm way ahead of you on the forgetfulness tally."
True. He'd forgotten his own birthday last year.
"And if you won't eat that," he said, "I will." He made a grab for her gnocchi.
"Hey!" Sam fought him off, lightly twisting his hand until he cried uncle. He gave her his crooked grin, one of her favorites.
And that was when the food started to float.
"Oh, for crying out loud," Sam said as she captured as many containers as she could. She stuffed her feet under the chair so she wouldn't go anywhere herself.
Jack clutched the garlic bread to his chest and watched with amusement as the takeout bag did a slow flip in the air. Then the ship lurched, and the bag, and everything else, crashed back down.
"Hey, do you ever wake up above your bed, Carter?"
Sam ignored him. She clicked her earpiece and called her top engineer.
"Chung here, Colonel." Crystals clanked in the background.
"Major, I'd like you and your crew to stop work on the internal sensors for the time being and focus on the artificial gravity instead. I have a theory I'd like to test in the morning."
"Sure thing, ma'am. It would be nice if our tools stopped flying away."
Sam signed off and stretched her ankles.
Jack had set the food back on the table and was giving her the eyebrow as he rescued his fork from the floor. "Just what theory would that be, Colonel?" he asked.
She grinned at him. "I'll think of something."
Thanks for reading!