Author's Note: So I was watching Forever In A Day tonight and this popped into my head and wouldn't go. I figured I'd share it since I bothered to write it down. :D

This doesn't have anything to do with anything I'm writing that you're currently (maybe) reading. But I've got grand ideas I'm not spilling about right now.

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Oh, this is kinda pre-ship, if that's really a thing.

She shows up with a six-pack of beer, a bottle of cheap wine and a package of raw chicken breasts. Confused, he lets her in and she pushes past him to the kitchen like she's been in there since Daniel's wake. She hasn't. He still hasn't said anything other than her name, but she's pulling open the fridge and liberating questionable vegetables like a woman on a mission. And considering the raw chicken, maybe she is. He shrugs, bends around her to put the beer in the fridge and starts opening drawers to find the corkscrew.

He figures she'll talk when she's ready. And he's not one to turn down the promise of food – especially considering he was previously trying to decide between Hungry Man Barbeque and Hungry Man Meatloaf. But when she throws onion, yellow squash, mushrooms, and broccoli all in a pan together with no oil or seasonings, the chicken still wrapped in cellophane and apparently forgotten, he figures the two of them are going to need him to step in at some point. Clearly, Carter doesn't cook. He finds that amusing. And endearing. But damned if he's going to actually say that.

He bumps her aside with his hip and turns the heat off under the pan. He sort-of-carefully separates the vegetables on the counter then puts the pan back on the stove. Within minutes, he's cut the chicken into thin strips and has oil heating for a quick stir-fry. He silently hands her a box of minute rice and she blushes.

She puts almost the right amount of water into a bowl she finds in the third cupboard she tries with a little too much rice, shoves the whole thing into the microwave and sets it for twice as long as she needs to. Finally, he realizes something's wrong. He presses a glass of her wine into her hand and points her by the shoulders towards a stool in the corner. Armed with a wooden spoon and no clue he prompts her, "Not that I don't love a good dinner ambush, but what's going on?"

"What do you do when you don't know if you can do it anymore?" she asks and then drains half her glass.

"Do what?" he asks carefully and dumps the onions into the hot oil.

"It," she gestures widely, "anything. All the…shit we do."

"Three and a half years, Carter, and I've never heard you so carefully not say something."

"One of our teammates killed the wife of another teammate. How the hell do we come back from that?"

"Teal'c did what he had to do." He adds the broccoli.

"I know that."

He knocks the veggies around in the pan with his wooden spoon and idly notices she hasn't called him sir even one time. He's gotta admit it… He's impressed.

"Then what's the problem?"

"The problem is, I've never felt like this before."

"Like what?" He pokes at a spear of broccoli, determines it's done enough, and dumps the chicken, the squash and the mushroom all in together along with a splash of sesame oil he finds hiding in his cupboard. While she thinks, he unearths some soy sauce and garlic powder and figures it won't be great, but it'll be more edible than whatever she'd had in mind when she showed up with raw chicken.

"I don't know," she finally says. "But I don't like it.

"Get used to it."

"That's your advice?" she asks and gets up to refill her glass.

She grabs a can of beer out of the fridge and waves it at him but he rejects it and pours himself a glass of the really shitty, he thinks after a sip, wine she's drinking. "Carter, this wine sucks."

She grimaces as if she's just noticed. "Yeah, it's pretty bad." But she takes another sip anyway.

"Sometimes you just do the best you can," he says and pulls her over-done and slightly crunchy rice out of the microwave.

"Do you think Daniel's okay?"

"He will be."

"What do you think he's going to do?"

"How the hell should I know? I've never lost the woman I love."

"You're divorced," she points out unnecessarily.

"It's not the same. When Sara and I split, it's because it was the right thing to do."

"So you didn't love her anymore?"

"Not the same way," he says and scoops crunchy rice and half-assed stir-fry into a couple of bowls before gesturing towards the dining room.

He puts a bowl down in front of the chair she chooses and she pokes listlessly at the veggies with one tine of her fork. "I don't think I've ever loved anyone the way Daniel loved Sha're."

"Not Hanson?"

She shrugs. "I don't know. How do you know if you love somebody enough?"

"Enough's relative."

"I just keep trying to picture what it would have felt like if I'd lost my dad the way Daniel lost Sha're."

"It's not the same."

"Have you lost a parent?"

"Yeah."

"Well, me too."

"I know," he says.

"And it was awful."

"It's not the same," he insists. "We love people in different ways. Losing a parent is different than losing a child is different than losing your soul mate."

"Was it harder losing Ch—"

"Yes," he interjects in a way he hopes she'll understand that now she's supposed to drop it. He likes her. He enjoys her company and watching her six more closely than he needs to. He might even enjoy making her smile a little too much. But he's not gonna talk to her about his son.

She finally takes a bite of the food he's been plowing through mindlessly. "I completely screwed up the rice."

"It's a good thing you've got a day job," he agrees.

"Why are you even eating this?"

He shrugs. "Because we made it."

She looks at him like maybe what he's saying is profound so he rushes to continue. "And because it's still better than a TV dinner. Besides, I bet I don't end up overeating." He winks at her.

She ducks her head and smiles a little, but she picks out the veggies and the meat and leaves the rice in her bowl.

"I'm sorry for ambushing you tonight."

"Did you get what you came for?"

"I don't know what I came for," she says.

"Well, you gonna show up for work tomorrow?"

"Yes, sir," she says.

"Then the rest doesn't really matter, does it?"

When she leaves it's like she's sucked the air out of the place. Her beer's still in the fridge – six pack broken but untouched. The wine bottle has half a glass left that he dumps down the sink. Their bowls are identifiable by the quantity of rice left behind – all of hers, none of his.

In her absence he starts to understand what she was asking, maybe gets what she was feeling, feels a little bad for not peeling back some of his protective layers. She's young and brilliant and, whether he never noticed it before or not, a little fragile in strange ways. Big blue eyes ways. Get him into a whole heap of trouble if he isn't careful ways.

Anyway, the next time he's at the grocery store he finds himself picking up bottle of decent wine. Just in case.