Against everything that Jack wanted, the big leaving do at the SGC had happened. Red and white bunting, lots of cake and party hats. He blamed Walter, he really did.
Hammond had come back, made a speech full of things that made Jack focus determinedly on the tablecloth, which matched the bunting. Then, to cap his evening off, they'd made him make a speech as well. Thor, it appeared, either hadn't developed telepathic powers or was just plain ignoring him.
Perhaps they just wanted to make sure that he went and stayed away. The formality of the thing, the fact that the focus of all the attention was on him, even if the focus was from men and women he'd served with, in some cases, for far longer than he cared to remember.
He tried to skulk away several times, he really did, before being dragged back to reminisce about ol' PX-567 with SG-5, because that was a funny one, guys, that really was…
He heartily wished that SG-5 had stayed on PX whatever at that moment, despite the fact that normally he quite liked the lot of them. The rest of SG-1 were noticeably absent, as well.
Jack really hoped that they were raiding the buffet table for him. What had happened to never leave a man behind? All very well to act on that when there were snakes around, but what did snakes have to Sergeant Siler trying to engage him in a thrilling conversation about wrenches?
He pretended that the Joint Chiefs had waved him over, graciously apologising for his abrupt departure (and who said he couldn't do diplomacy? Daniel?). He just hoped he was out of sight before any of the little group realised that none of the Joint Chiefs were there.
So he found himself skulking in the corridors of the SGC, unnaturally quiet as everyone except for the absolutely essential was crowded into the commissary, hiding form his own party. He just couldn't stand those things, those sorry excuses for a good time. And he realised that everything had been set up in a manner to try and make sure that he'd had a good time. Civvies and everything to ensure that it was a relaxed, casual affair, with lots of beer. Again, he blamed Walter, Master of Organisation. He just hoped that the poor guy didn't realise that he'd disappeared.
This led him to the question of why the hell he was taking this job. The thing he was currently hiding from was a pleasant foreshadowing of the hell that awaited him in the bureaucratic pit that was DC. He sighed, scrubbing his hand through hair that refused to be anything but unruly. Because there were only two people that knew what it was like, what needed doing and what could wait, and Hammond was retiring.
His thoughts were abruptly interrupted by an arm yanking him into a storage room.
"Daniel!?" he exclaimed, spinning round to face the man responsible. Glancing round the room without really seeing anything, he raised his eyebrows. "You do realise what classically goes on in storage closets…" he asked, letting the question trail off.
"Jack, don't be an ass," replied the younger man.
"Daniel?"
"Jack…"
"Daniel!"
"We're here to save your butt, sir," interrupted in the blonde woman that he'd missed. He could practically hear the 'children, behave'. She was eyeing a package very strangely. "Do we even use blu-tack?" she asked him, holding it more gingerly than she'd hold a naquadah reactor.
"Eggheads on level 22 like to brainstorm with it," Jack replied automatically. Damn, but a year ago he'd have been the one staring at it like it'd come from PX-thingy, the one with the fluorescent pink flowers that had followed them around and not set off Daniel's hay fever. "Carter, what the hell is going on?" Her, he expected a straight answer from. Unless it was geeky.
She looked behind him as light flooded in from the corridor.
"We are celebrating you leaving, O'Neill," the Jaffa said easily, closing the door behind him as he entered.
Jack frowned suspiciously at him. "Was that a joke?" he asked, turning to include Daniel and Carter in his question. All three of his former team, he was disconcerted to learn, were wearing identical smirks. It couldn't have been that long since he'd had their respect, surely.
"It is not, O'Neill. We were anticipating your dissatisfaction, so we took measures to prevent it from escalating."
"Teal'c, you're making my boredom sound worse than a nuclear explosion," Jack said warningly, managing to not look at either of his two other team-mates.
"Indeed."
"There's beer and a barbeque at your place, if you want," said Sam, eager to stop the General and Teal'c's from starting a Jack-and-Daniel-esque exchange.
The gaze that settled on the former First Prime of Apophis was nothing less than accusatory. The only one of the three of them with a key to his place was Teal'c. Superficially because he was the only one of them without a place of his own, in reality to stop either of the two with cars gaining retribution for the general pain in the ass moments that he had.
But his mind was working, too. "Teal'c, take point, Carter, watch our sixes," he said, watching the unabashed grin shared by his two scientists as his acceptance washed over them.
An hour later, he'd burnt the meat, chipped his counter with a bottle of beer and was having the time of his life. Carter was playing a fairly impressive game of keepy-up with a soccer ball and trying to teach Teal'c the finer points of the game – apparently she'd picked up something other than a love of math whilst Dad had been posted in Germany during her teenage years.
He reached out and snagged a beer out of Daniel's hand.
"Hey! That was mine!" Daniel said, trying half heartedly to grab it back.
"Haven't you had your two beer limit, Danny?" asked Jack, smirking. It was a joke that'd run for nearly eight years, and he saw no good reason to drop it now.
"Funny, Jack," Daniel said dryly, attempting to once more swipe the beer back into his rightful possession. "Its good to know you can let things drop."
Jack waved the bottle around for a tiny bit longer before relenting, yielding possession with a teasing grin. "Not letting a desk jockey get the better of you, are you?" he asked. "Grab me another beer if you won't let me have that one."
Two hours later, the four of them had abandoned his backyard for the warmer, well lit inside. Somewhere along the way, Jack had persuaded Teal'c to model his sunglasses.
"You see, those are pilot glasses, so they look right on you," Daniel was earnestly telling him. The two beer limit was a joke, but his low tolerance for alcohol wasn't. Jack'd always figured that Daniel hadn't got out much as a student, but then again he'd always figured that Carter hadn't either, and she was curled up in a chair looking distinctly amused by the whole thing, and disturbingly sober. He had a sneaking suspicion that she could probably drink him under the table, or at least make it a close thing.
He tuned back into Daniel, his own beer glass nestled comfortably in his grip. "…And so you see, because Sam is in the Air Force, she's a pilot, so the glasses would look great on her – look…" At which he leaned over unnecessarily far, having misjudged his distance. Teal'c, who up to this point had been smirking, quickly handed Daniel Jackson the sunglasses to avoid the possibility of having a drunken archaeologist sprawled in his lap. There were some things that service to the Goa'uld did not prepare you for.
Crawling across the sofa, Daniel then leaned over the arm to try and put the sunglasses on Sam's head. She took them, giggling – maybe the beer was hitting her harder than she was showing – and put them on, asking all three, "So, I look like an idiot, right?" as she modelled, for want of a better word, the sunglasses.
Daniel fell back heavily on the sofa, thankfully not on Teal'c as he considered her question with the effort he normally put into the Third Dynasty.
Also with a rather loud crack.
He looked at Jack sheepishly after he'd retrieved the case for the sunglasses that were at this second adorning Lt-Col Carter's head as she froze, realising that she'd been caught with a hand mirror by not only her CO, but also Teal'c.
"Err…" she stumbled, turning a shade that Jack normally associated with people being strangled. Daniel, predictably, was struggling to open the glasses case and had managed to miss the whole exchange.
Jack and Teal'c smirked at each other, then both yelped (Teal'c would later deny this fact) as various contents of Carter's purse pelted them both in the face.
"Carter!" he managed to splutter out, retaining enough poise to throw the mirror back at her, before they both turned, sensing rather than seeing their stoic companion's smirk.
Their stoic companion was calming placing Colonel Carter's hairbrush where he thought Daniel Jackson was going to sit.
He was right, as it turned out. Daniel gave an anguished yelp as Sam begged Teal'c to not return the hairbrush. "Really," she gasped out through the laughter, "keep it, honestly."
Still snorting with laughter, Jack shook his bottle, finding it sadly lacking in the liquid department. So was his fridge, when he got there. Gathering the last two, he made his way back to the lounge, having opened them both.
"Okay, kids, who wants the last one?" she called out above the noise of Carter and Daniel squabbling over his sunglasses. Abandoning their fight, they both looked up like little kids, raising their hand and calling "Me!"
Deciding that discretion was the better part of valour, he placed the beer bottle on the coffee table and waited for all hell to break loose.
Surprisingly, it was Daniel that registered his actions first, swooping down on the table with an exultant grin on his face, but Sam wasn't far behind, playfully trying to wrestle her friend away from the beer.
Jack raised an eyebrow at Teal'c. Teal'c raised an eyebrow at Jack. It seemed that Carter had discovered a playful side in the past few weeks, amongst her family, anyways. Whether it was the breaking of her engagement, the loss of her father, the imminent break up of SG-1, or even whether it was a good or bad thing, he was far too cynical and far too full of beer to decide.
"Hey, Spacemonkey, you going to do that with McKay?" he called over the whispered claims of "Mine!"
"I've given him a lemon, sir," Carter replied as she stole Daniel's actual glasses, waving them just out of his reach thanks to the fact that she was kneeling and he was sitting, facing away from Jack as she raised three fingers behind her back.
Jack smirked. "Less," he said clearly, causing Daniel to look at him in confusion. Now that he knew Carter was hamming it up, he was beginning to suspect that Daniel was, too – he was a smart kid, he'd figure out why he couldn't reach the glasses in less than three minutes.
Two minutes, fifty seconds later, Sam swore like the soldier she was as Daniel triumphantly placed his glasses in their rightful place and settled back down on the couch.
"How much do I owe you, Sir," she asked sweetly, putting as much venom as she could into that last word.
"Oh, I think I'll just make you forfeit the beer," he replied, smirking as he indicated the bottle which had miraculously survived.
"Danny? Down it," he ordered, leaning over to pass the beer to his slightly befuddled archaeologist.
Reaching over Sam to accept the bottle, wariness in every line, Daniel dropped back onto the couch a little heavy. With a crunch.
"Please…." Begged Jack, covering his eyes with his hands. Please, no.
Daniel was wearing the most apologetic look that any of them had ever seen, and holding the shattered remains of a pair of sunglasses. Jack's favourite sunglasses.
"Danny, those glasses survived hell and all it takes is your backside to break 'em!" he practically barked. He was sulking, yes, but they were his favourites.
"Sorry," the man in question replied, wincing a little. A look at Carter and Teal'c's faces suggested that his strop was kinda ruining the party atmosphere that had been present up until then.
"S'okay," he muttered unconvincingly, burying the king sized tantrum that was possible.
Three hours later, Jack was awoken by the sound of vomiting. If Daniel had made a mess anywhere, he swore, he would be the one to clean it up. Every last bit, every last…
Hey, when had Daniel gone blonde? He was sure he would have remembered – he noticed when Teal'c got hair, after all.
"Carter, you were off your face," he informed her, filling a glass of water and placing it in front of her before crouching besides her. It wasn't like she had any hair that needed pulling out of the way. "You 'kay?"
"I know, I'm fine," she practically growled at him, glaring at him from her position by his toilet.
Holding up his hands in a defensive position, he couldn't help but laugh. "I'm going to go check on Daniel," he told her to avoid any retribution she might care for after that ill-timed humour.
Four hours later, he was awoken by the sunlight filtering through his still open curtains. He growled and went back to sleep.
Five hours later, he realised that he was sharing his bed with the entire of SG-1, though a further, slightly panicked inspection (How much had they drunk, last night, anyway?) revealed that they all had their clothes on. Apart from Daniel who, for reasons possibly unknown to even himself, had wrapped his t shirt round his head. Sometimes he had to wonder whether he was fair to the Pegasus Galaxy…
Sam stirred, unwinding herself from Jack's foot. "Sir…? What…?" she asked as she surveyed the slumbering Daniel and Teal'c.
"Carter, did you barf on my foot?" he whispered down the length of his body. She slapped his foot gently in rebuke, before grimacing at him.
"I may have used your toothbrush, sir," she admitted.
"Me too," croaked Daniel, apparently having just woken up.
A pair of brown eyes regarded him levelly. "I also, O'Neill."
Jack mentally slotted in toothbrush shopping into his day.
Six hours later, he was trying to explain to General Hammond and Walter exactly where he'd disappeared to, having missed the secret surprise visit from the President in honour of the fine work he'd done for his country. He wasn't sure which was worse; Hammond's sternly rebuking gaze or Walter's kicked-puppy one.
"Well, it started when Daniel dragged me into a closet…