"Hey, look, it's Dr. Rugmuncher," Branson hollers, horse laughed descending into snorts and chauvinistic back-patting. Michaels and Ramirez are laughing right along with it, hooting and hollering like this is some second-rate strip club and not an educational institution.

Sam ignores them, keeping her head down and her jaw clenched like she's trained herself to over the seven months she's been here. Sometimes she feels like the first women to ever walk these halls, even though she knows she's far from it. Still, she got into this knowing it wouldn't be easy, and the fast track they've got her on for a prominent place in R&D keeps anything physically serious from happening. She thinks about Amy Peterson and her sparkplug reflexes and her bright blue eyes and grits her teeth.

Tonight they've been granted their first rare jaunt off the reservation. Branson, Michaels and Ramirez were stumbling gamely off in their uniforms, hoping it'll get them laid no-doubt. Sam hopes that the local girls are by now immune to their charms, even though she knows that Colorado Springs is a big city and a lot of girls can be stupid under the right attention.

Sam's not that kind of girl, and she's going to take this asshole-free grace period to head to the library and get some work done. With training, there's no way to get out of here a year early, but it'd do her well to have her master's by the time she's an officer and doesn't have to take this shit, at least from the enlistedmen, any longer.

The library is quiet, of course, but more so than usual. Besides the resentful-looking guy perched behind the main desk, there seems to be only one other person here. He's at the end of a long table near the back, towards the windows, slumped forward into a textbook in a way that make it seem impossible that he could ever make it to standing, let alone attention.

Still, there's something quietly enticing about him and the seriousness of his features as he stares into the third year aeronautical engineering textbook. How he manages to keep his hair this long in the face of military barbers seems almost a miracle.

She notices that she's staring when he does, looking up from his textbook and winking. "I thought I'd be the only one in here tonight," he says, pushing back from the table to slouch instead against the back of his chair.

"Oh, I'm sorry if I'm disturbing you. I could . . ."

He ducks his head, flushing ruefully. "No, don't worry about it. I make a point not to complain when a beautiful girl decides to share her space with me."

Sam can't help herself from blushing. She's used to attention – in a testosterone zone like this one, she'd have to be deformed not to be – but, there's something gentlemanly, almost archaic, about the way he drawls it. "Well, if I'm going to be distracting you . . ."

He chuckles, clearing a space on the table beside him for her to sit down, "Hey, trust me, it's a welcome distraction."

Sam tells herself to stop grinning, but she can't, sliding in next to him. Maybe it's her imagination, but it seems like he's giving off heat, her whole body flushing when he turns playful hazel eyes on her. "I . . . I haven't seen you around. What's your name?"

"John Sheppard." His handshake is firm, and oddly formal. "You're a frosh, right? Samantha Carter?"

She's amazed that he knows her name, even though this isn't that big of a school. "So my reputation as Dr. Rugmuncher precedes me," she grinds out. For some reason, despite all of the teasing, this is the first time it really hurts.

"That," Sheppard says, hazel eyes flashing far too serious, "is an awful name."

Sam immediately feels bad for thinking the worst of him. "I'm sorry, it's just . . ."

"You don't have to apologize. I hate it when guys do that. You probably turned some asshole with a small dick down, and instead of thinking of you as just a nice girl who's not interested, he's decided that the only reason you could possibly reject him is because you bat for the other team."

She knows that, but it's good to hear him say it, nonetheless. "Tell that to Jeff Branson."

"You know what? I think I will," he grins conspiratorially. "He actually does have a really small dick."

They laugh together at that and Sam finds that it's the first time she's truly relaxed on this campus. After the laughter subsides, Sheppard points to his book and asks her, "Actually, I know you because you were in my Math class before I got bumped a year up."

"You're an upperclassman?" She winces, thinking about how he could have her on the ground doing push-ups at any time he'd like.

"Nope. Just a lowly sophomore. And I had mono for a while last semester – probably why you didn't see me around."

"So you were in third year math, and you got skipped up to senior?" Sam is impressed. John Sheppard is charming, intelligent, and if she's being honest with herself, ridiculously handsome.

"Yeah, not that I'm ready for it," he shakes his head. "But my father, the Colonel, wouldn't let me reject a single ‘recommendation' from higher up."

Sam is feeling bored in her current class at the moment, so she doesn't think she's too presumptuous in offering him help if he needs it. "My Dad's in the service too," she adds.

He gamely accepts her help on a few problems, in between commiserating about Air Force Brat life, controlling but absentee fathers, and some of the more bizarre customs of the Academy in general.

It's getting late into the night by the time John looks as her with a dangerous twinkle in his eye and pronounces. "Hey, if you're fourth-class, this is your first chance to get out of here. It'd be a shame to waste it."

She knows that she should say no, but instead she takes his hand and follows him out into the cool Colorado night air, out the gates and down the road until it starts to be residential. She's surprised when he stops in front of an old Chevy convertible parked in front of a battered-looking blue house. He pulls the tarp off and slides into the seat, grinning at her bewildered look. "I'm not stealing it. It's mine. I help the old lady with her groceries once a week so she can let me keep it here." John Sheppard must spend a lot of time AWOL, then. Sam finds that the rebelliousness of that, idiotic on other people, just makes John Sheppard that much more interesting.

He drives them fast around mountain curves and Sam finds herself tilting her head up to the sky to feel the wind in her hair and the starlight on her pale features. John looks at her inscrutably – she can't tell if he's amused or amazed.

They finally pull up to a mountain lake, the stars glittering in the still black surface. He pulls her up onto the hood of the car, the engine warm at their backs and a few shooting stars cascading above them and Sam says what she hasn't told anyone since coming here. "I'm going to make it up there, someday." It's a desperate dream – the kind you keep hidden to protect from the vicious doubts of skeptics and naysayers.

But John Sheppard just smiles beside her. "Yeah, you will."

They stare at each other for a second then. John looks like some sort of dark angel in the moonlight, with his skin a pale white in contrast to the unruly hair and the seriousness of his eyes. He reaches out to cup her cheek, and even though she knows she shouldn't, Sam can't resist.

John's lips are soft and his body is warm as an engine, humming all around her as he levers himself up to settle between her legs. She has no idea how long the kiss, only coming back to herself when she feels something hard and insistent pushing up against her inner thigh. He pulls away then, smiling down at her almost shyly. She thinks about Max, then – her boyfriend throughout high school with the thick glasses and the crocked smile, and even after they agreed to see what happened in college, she feels a little twinge of guilt, here with this beautiful man who she just met tonight who's all charm where Max was sharp rough edges spiked with intelligence.

John doesn't speak, but the question in his eyes is clear. Sam nods, missing his weight as she yanks off her clothes, waiting for him to retrieve a condom. She's naked, laid out in supplication like this empty mountain lake, but he keeps a soft fleece jacket on, warming them both as he settles back down onto her. And, god, it's good. Not the sex so much as the kisses. And John is so unexpectedly gentle, after the mornings trainings, the push ups, the shouts of ‘Dr. Rugmuncher' that are the backbone of her experiences here. It's only when he's close, thrusting wildly, with an almost childlike look on his features that she feels the weight of him pressing into her, and the forced friction of it all.

He runs a finger through her sweat-soaked hair. "You're amazing," he says, before rolling off her and over the edge of the car and down a small hill.

"John!" she shouts, not caring that she's naked or that small stones are digging into the soles of her feet as she rushes after him. He doesn't respond, and when she sees the blood dripping down his temple, she knows why. He's breathing, but there's blood all over the green brush he's landed in, black in the moonlight.

Sam's panicking now, trying to rouse him. She pulls on her clothes, not bothering with underwear, before yanking him into his boxers and dragging him to the car. She's new to Colorado Springs, and she doesn't know where a hospital is, so she drives them back to the Academy, through the front gate and to the infirmary.

Before John wakes up, a few things become clear: Nobody's surprised that John Sheppard managed to knock himself out having sex, because he's as notorious for being a klutz on the ground as he is for womanizing; that he wasn't in the library studying because he's a good boy, but because he was being pushed for all those times AWOL; the green bush John rolled into turned out to be poison ivy, and it's very obvious to everyone exactly who was with him that night.

Sam can barely stand the shame – the catcalls, the increased propositioning, Branson's insistence that if she can reform her rugmuncher ways for the notorious John Sheppard, she can accommodate him too. She thinks of quitting the Air Force more than once, but then she thinks of the starscape reflected in that mountain lake, and knows that as tough as it might be, she can't.

She's angry a John, of course, even though she knows that she has no right to be. He never promised her anything, and though he didn't go out of his way to tell her the whole truth, he didn't lie either. It's all her own fault for succumbing to his easy charm.

When he recovers, John is busy with all sorts of punishments for going AWOL yet again. He looks sheepish when he smiles at her in the hallways, but they avoid each other after that. Neither knows what to say.

Then, one day, Branson ends up in the infirmary with a broken wrist, two black eyes, and a bloody nose, supposedly from sparring practice, but nobody calls Sam "Dr. Rugmuncher" ever again.