A/N: Yay, my first ship day fic! Whoop! Bizarrely, this was written before the whole name discussion on GW. For obvious reasons, this is merely banter and bit of fluff. :)
I Distinctly Remember...
-0-
"Why do you call Aunt Sam, 'Carter'?"
Jack peered at the young teenage girl as he sat down at the table opposite her, his eyebrows reaching high into his hairline. He spared a quick glance at her father sitting beside her, receiving an equally quizzical look.
"Well," Jack began, "It's a military thing..."
The girl frowned, her nose scrunching up and reminding him of Sam. Jack wondered, not for the first time since he'd met her niece, what Sam must have looked like at that age. "What do you mean?" Abby asked.
Jack swallowed a mouthful of his burger. "Well when I first met Sam, it was through work and people in the military often call each other by their surname so..." he shrugged, "I got into the habit of calling her 'Carter'..."
"Ah... That's not strictly true..." Daniel placed a plate on the table and slid onto the end of the bench, closely followed by Teal'c.
"Daniel..."
The other man simply shrugged, ignoring Jack's verbal warning. "Well it's not," he replied, his mouth half full of food. "You used to call her 'Sam' for a good year or so before..." and he waved his fork in the air in some sort of gesture.
There was a long pause, where everyone at the table suddenly fell silent. Jack simply studied his half eaten burger.
"Before...?" All eyes suddenly fell on Mark, Sam's brother, who was weaving his own fork in a similar gesture to Daniel.
Daniel pushed his glasses up his nose and swallowed. "Well... whatever happened, happened..."
Mark glanced from one man to the other and Jack suddenly realised that the frown must be some genetic family trait.
"I concur," Teal'c tilted his head to one side in agreement. "When we first began serving together, O'Neill did indeed refer to Colonel Carter simply as 'Sam' when not in battle. Sometime later this did in fact alter, although I too cannot identify exactly what date this change occurred."
"See..." Daniel responded, his head nodding up and down. "Teal'c agrees with me."
Jack merely shook his head. "You see, Daniel, that's where you're both wrong." He eyed both his former team members. "Because I distinctly remember Sam insisting I call her 'Captain' when we first met..."
Both Daniel and Teal'c paused, heads tilted in thought for the briefest of moments.
"Didn't Sam chew you out, when you first met?" Daniel asked innocently. Then realising the severity of what he'd said, threw Jack a teasing smile.
"You weren't even there!" Jack cried. "What would you know?"
"I too heard something of this nature," Teal'c agreed. "Is it not true that Colonel Carter challenged you to an arm wrestle, O'Neill?"
Jack's mouth opened and closed momentarily, the man unable to form a word before a rumble of laughter hit his ears. Sam's brother was sitting there grinning, his daughter sporting an equally delighted expression.
"Did she win?" Abby asked innocently.
Jack would have glared at the girl, if she hadn't have been bouncing up and down in her seat so excitedly. Fortunately he was saved by the woman in question, who suddenly appeared with her own plate full of barbecued food. She slid into the seat between Daniel and Jack and eyed the table's occupants warily.
"What?" Sam asked.
"Jack was just telling us of the day you and he first met," Daniel replied cheerily. He threw a smug grin at Jack, delighting in the scowl on the other man's face. But the loud groan that suddenly hit his ears came from Sam instead of the General.
"Jack..." she whined.
"Hey!" Jack shrugged, "It was Daniel, not me!"
"What's so bad about the day you first met?" Mark asked. Sam and Jack both looked at him at the same time.
"You mean apart from the arm wrestling?" Daniel asked.
"Well, there was the whole feminist chip on her shoulder thingy..." Jack replied, waving a sausage in the air with his fork. His expression appeared all innocent while Sam simply covered her face with her hands.
"I can't believe you are telling people this..." She muttered.
"Something about her reproductive organs being on the inside instead of the outside..." Jack grinned. Sam nudged his shoulder with hers as she cringed. "Well..." he said, glancing down at her. "I thought it was..."
"Cringe worthy?" Sam offered.
"I was going to say profound..." She shook her head at his continual play of innocence, unable to suppress the grin that he was trying to provoke.
"Well..." Sam replied, carefully watching Jack as he took a sip from his bottle of beer. "It's not as bad as thinking I was a man, I suppose..."
Jack nearly spat out the drink in his mouth. "For the record, I did not think you were a man!"
"Oh I distinctly remember you saying-"
"That was Hammond's fault - he implied you were a guy! What else was I supposed to think?" Jack glanced at the woman beside him, pausing when he saw the playful smirk on her lips. "Carter!"
"See!" Abby cried, delighted when Jack uttered the name again.
Sam glanced at her niece after her sudden outburst. "Abby thinks it's weird that Jack sometimes calls you 'Carter'," Mark offered, seeing the confusion lining her brow.
"Oh... really?"
Abby simply nodded.
Sam glanced up at Jack, his eyes softening as he smiled down at her and making her insides flip. She leaned into his side, her arm snaking its way around his back as his automatically found her shoulder, pulling her towards him.
"Well," Sam said, her focus solely on her niece. "Can I tell you secret?" Abby nodded. "Sometimes I like it when Jack calls me that..."
Daniel suddenly groaned loudly, and the hand that rested on Sam's right shoulder suddenly let go and whacked Daniel on the back of the head.
"Ow!"
Abby simply giggled and Jack threw her a wink.
"That hurt!" Daniel protested.
"Serves you right." Jack bit back.
"It was Sam who started it!"
"Oh please!" Sam cried, turning in her seat to face Daniel. "When I first met you, Sha're was practically sucking your face off!"
"Exactly what does sucking ones face off entail?"
The table went silent. Sam, Jack and Daniel struggled not to burst out laughing, while the others couldn't work out if Teal'c was actually being serious or not.
"Did someone say 'suck'...?"
Jack groaned inwardly as Vala appeared, Cassie tagging along by her side. "Oh for crying out loud! There is a kid at the table!" He cried.
"I don't mind!" Abby perked up.
"I do!" Mark added.
"Seriously," Cassie said, stopping beside Abby, "If I was you, I would cover your ears and close your eyes... these guys can get awfully 'icky' after a while..."
"Cassie!" Sam had that mothering tone almost down to a tee.
"What? It's true. You didn't come home one morning to find Jack sitting in his boxing shorts at the kitchen table..."
A flush of pink hit Sam's cheeks, while Jack merely raised an eyebrow at the young woman. "And what were you doing coming home in the morning...?" He asked.
"Seriously," Sam cried, as Cassie's face turned pink to match hers. "Can we all just stop talking about my love life?"
"Its okay, Samantha," Vala stated. "These guys are just jealous 'cause they don't have one."
"Really?" Daniel replied. "Out of everyone on this table, at least three quarters of us are in a relationship. I hardly think that you can say that anyone here is jealous."
"Well..." Vala dragged out the word, glancing around the table. "Teal'c can hardly be satisfied if he doesn't know what sucking someone's face off is like!"
Daniel just stared at her open mouthed, while a series of groans and cries were uttered from the other end of the table. A fork was clattered on a plate somewhere and Vala studiously ignored the rising eyebrow on Teal'c's face.
"I can demonstrate on you, if you like?"
Daniel merely sighed and rolled his eyes in response.
"Oh for crying out loud!" Jack muttered under his breath. "Daniel, why does this always happen to you?"
Sam swiftly turned her head to stare at the man by her side. He stabbed at a sausage with his fork before glancing up to look into her eyes. He couldn't help but notice the mischievous twinkle in her eye, or the slight smile that curled upon her lips. "What?" Jack asked.
Placing her hand around the back of his neck, Sam simply pulled his face to hers, kissing him ferociously. Making sure that it was as loud and sensuous as possible, Sam dragged it out as long as she could manage before she had to pull back for air. Leaning her forehead against his for a moment, she had to bite her lip to stop the grin from spreading across her face. "Complaining?" She asked, pulling back slightly.
Jack's mouth opened and closed silently, as his brain struggled to regain control. "Uh-uh..." He managed to squeak out, shaking his head and clearing his throat, his lungs still heaving.
Sam merely grinned, pulling back and picking up her burger as though nothing had ever happened.
Daniel and Mark simply stared with their mouths hanging open; Vala had a stupid grin on her face; Teal'c's eyebrows had disappeared under his hat; while Cassie had simply covered Abby's eyes with her hands.
"Well," Daniel coughed. He glanced around the table, looking anywhere but at the couple beside him, before turning to Teal'c at his side. "If you need anything else demonstrating, I'm going home."