Mother Warned Me There'd Be Days Like This by splash_the

Mother Warned Me There'd Be Days Like This

The smell from the basket made Jack's mouth water: warm and sweet and spicy, like melted chocolate mixed with ginger and peppermint. He pulled at a corner of the oiled paper crumpled around the basket's contents and groaned as the scent hit him full on.

"Sir." Carter had paused a few feet ahead, in the middle of the rutted dirt road that led back to the Gate. Ignoring the mild reproach in her voice, Jack inhaled again before making a deliberate show of folding the paper back while Carter rolled her eyes.

"What?"

"We should share those with Jonas and Teal'c."

"Really? I don't remember Jonas and Teal'c standing ass-deep in a freezing stream. For that matter, I don't remember *you* standing ass-deep in a freezing stream."

PCX-1746 hadn't appeared to offer much at first glance: a pristine pastoral quaintness that left Jack expecting thatch-roofed hamlets and apple-cheeked farmers, and some overgrown ruins that looked "sort of Goa'uld-ish, from a certain angle," according to Jonas. It was at those ruins, about six klicks out from the Gate, that they'd run across a group of locals in the midst of what looked like a pretty extensive archaeological excavation. Leaving Jonas to play in the dirt with them, and Teal'c to supervise, Jack followed Carter and a very disgruntled teenager who'd been ordered to show them the way to town.

Fifteen minutes down a well-maintained gravel path, Carter stopped mid-step. "Wow."

Jack caught himself before plowing into her. "What?" He followed the line of her arm as she pointed above the tree line. Tall metal spires marched above top of the tree line ahead. Thin blades spun at their peaks, scattering the afternoon sunlight.

"Huh. What're those?"

The kid glanced back over his shoulder at Jack and rolled his eyes. "Windmills, duh."

Jack exchanged a look with Carter, who was biting her bottom lip, eyes dancing. "Shut up," he said.

"Yes, sir."

Town was as much a surprise as the windmills - a hodgepodge of the rustic thatch-roofs Jack had been expecting intermixed with gleaming machinery and gadgets that had Carter all but bouncing in her boots.

They were on a terraformed moon, they found out when the kid introduced them to his mother, and the community was an experiment in alternative clean energy production sponsored by a university on the planet below. Ailwen, who described herself as something between mayor and principle research investigator, was standing chest deep in a small, fast-moving river that ran through the middle of the town, struggling with the blades of a current-spun turbine that powered the mill she used to grind flour for her bakery.

So Jack grabbed the kid and dragged him into the water over his sullen protests. They wrestled the blade apparatus back onto the mount while Carter did the first contact thing and then grilled Ailwen about their energy studies.

Hours later they said their goodbyes, Carter armed with pages of notes and a promise to return with a follow-up team in a few weeks. As Carter packed her notebooks away, Ailwen disappeared into her bakery, returning moments later and pressing a basket into Jack's hands. "A small thank you for your help."

"A thank you for my help." Jack reminded Carter, basket clutched to his chest. "*Mine*. For spending the day with cold, wet underwear."

Carter's mouth curved up. "Sir, that wouldn't be fair. You should share for the good of the team. To keep up morale."

Dismissing that notion with an expansive wave, Jack said, "Fair shmair. You know how Jonas is about food." He reached out and grabbed her sleeve, tugging her off the road. "Come on," he said, and clambered up the embankment that ran along the road, where a low stone and mortar wall bordered a field of something bright green and spindly.

Parking himself against the wall with an exaggerated sigh, Jack unclipped his weapon and set it within easy reach before scooping up one of the cookie-like things. Holding up his empty hand, he said, "Now, Carter, this should be an easy one for your big brain. Which is more important: a stupid abstract like 'fairness', or," and he dropped that hand, now holding up the cookie. "*Cookies*."

With a snort Carter followed his example. When she was settled, long legs stretched out and her P-90 resting across her thighs, he deposited the warm, sticky cookie in her outstretched palm. "They really do smell good," she said.

Jack chuckled as she picked it apart, breaking off little chunks to pop in her mouth. He dug another out of the basket and crammed half of it into his mouth, grinning around the crumbs. The warm sun and a cookie-filled stomach were doing more to ease the knots that had taken up permanent residence between his shoulders than any of Frasier's prescriptions had managed.

A soft sound pulled his attention back to Carter. Tension in the long lines of her fingers broke apart the pattern she drummed against the stock of her weapon. She'd been wound so tight since he got back from vacationing with Maybourne, and since Niirti's machine they'd all been spread thin, a veneer of composure wrapped around the jerky wobble of a top spinning down.

He grabbed Carter's fingers in a gentle grip. "Hey. No bad guys today."

Resisting the temptation to tip up her chin when her mouth dropped open in a small "O" of astonishment, Jack squeezed her fingers until she relaxed back against the wall, her shoulder bumping his. She sucked a smear of chocolate off her thumb, and Jack didn't say anything as she reached across him and helped herself to another cookie.

END