This chapter will end the Lost City/New Order story arc. It was inspired by the Sanctuary episode in which Amanda Tapping sings and all the Saturdays my (grown up) kids have dragged me to karaoke night. It also includes more of my original characters - the members of SG8, Col Gerald Mallory, Captain Scotty Lawrence and Major Rusty Davidson. It also features Scotty's girlfriend Annie. This chapter is a part of Sunshine and Shadow and was not edited for Moonlight and Steel, but I felt it was need to wrap up the last few chapters. Moonlight and Steel will now return to its regularly scheduled Sam-whump. ;-)
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Daniel appeared in the doorway of the science lab and entered with all the subtlety of a dust devil. He walked straight to the table across from Sam, leaned over, resting on his elbows, clasped his hands in front of him and said,
"So how you doing with all this?"
"All what?" Sam asked, but she wasn't doing a good job at all of hiding the fact that she knew exactly what he was talking about.
Daniel gave her a penetrating look that said clearly he wasn't going to let her get away with it.
"Jack taking command, you getting SG1…."
"Why wouldn't I be doing just fine with it?" Sam asked, "It's what I said was going to happen. It's what I've been working for all my adult life." She leaned towards him. "I pretty much have everything I want right now, don't I?"
"Do you?" he shot back.
"Daniel." It was short, flat, filled with impatience.
"What about Jack?" he asked.
Sam flashed him a look that should have burned him to ash on the spot.
"Here? Really?"
"The cameras don't have sound. We're just chatting. What about being with Jack?"
"I am with Jack, in a way."
"As sophomores at Mountain Springs High School in Denver!" Daniel protested.
"SHHHH!" Sam hissed. "You're going to give me a heart attack."
"Sam," Daniel said, "I know that you're more of a hard scientist than I am. I know you deal more in what's real and factual and can be proven and all this might seem logical to you, but is this really something you can quantify? It's not like you can run a simulation of how this might work out."
"Daniel…."
"I just want to make sure you're okay, Sam," he said quickly, "We've been in 'no way out' situations that we got out of hundreds of times. I just want to make sure that's not how you're treating this."
"This?" She said, "And I swear to god Daniel if you say Pete, I'll throttle you."
Daniel clamped his mouth shut abruptly and she glared at him. It took her a moment to assess the situation. Daniel was starting to sound a little too much like her brother, who had never supported anything she wanted to do and he had never been that kind of brother-figure to her before.
But temper never helped and Daniel wasn't coming from wanting control over her. Daniel did everything from a basis of love. They were part of a team and Daniel had always been the one who helped them get their feelings and thoughts and ideas into the open – picking at Jack until he defused with sarcasm, challenging Teal'c into smiles and soft looks that had been foreign to him seven years ago and giving her the courage to voice her opinions and ideas in spite of her military training.
And Daniel was right in a way. She was working from a checklist, the way she always did. She was assessing risks and probabilities, extrapolating about what would come next from what had come before. Simple calculations, projections of vectors, the beauty of math and science that had been her life since her mother's death had sent her in a frantic search for carefully ordered rules.
Her career had recently taught her how wrong the laws of physics could actually be and how much time she'd spent on them. Maybe she just wanted to free fall for a while.
"I thought we agreed you were going to let me make my own choices and do things the way I want?" she asked, finally.
"I don't remember signing anything," he said, with an innocent smile that only made her want to throttle him more.
"I'll get you a pen," she kept from snapping it by the skin of her teeth. An old reflex made her take a long, deep, cleansing breathe.
She leveled an expression at him that she hoped said I really love you Daniel but knock it off. Now.
He got the message. The man was not an idiot afterall.
"So, you coming tonight?" he asked.
"To O'Malley's?"
"Yes."
Sam shrugged. "It's first Thursday, so yeah, why wouldn't I? The place is going to be packed though. It sounds like everyone is going to be there."
Daniel nodded. "Everyone wants to get out from under the mountain and celebrate the victory over Anubis."
"You going to be there?"
"For a little while, yes. Jill wants to go."
"You used to hate these things, Daniel," Sam pointed out, "Too much noise, too much military."
It was his turn to shrug and even to grin in a kind of silly way. "People change."
"Yes," Sam said, pointedly, "We do."
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O'Malley's on Friday and Saturday night was always packed. Sunday through Wednesday it was mostly a family crowd. Thursdays had always notably been the quietest day of the week.
Until the SGC personnel had discovered the emptiness of Thursday night and begun the tradition of 'First Thursday'. Now on the first Thursday of every month O'Malley's was packed, so full of people they had to open the banquet rooms. Karoake started early and last until the place closed. The pool tables were never emptied and the kitchen often ran out of food.
In the beginning, in the waning days of that first year when this tradition had started, Daniel had been very uncomfortable. Teal'c had managed to avoid even going for years and Daniel had always had an excuse ready so that he could duck out after an hour and half a bottle of beer.
At first it had just been odd to see them all outside of the gray walls and military protocol, to see them in jeans and regular shoes and laughing and ripping each other in ways that were sometimes ribald and sometimes rode the edge of downright dirty.
Daniel had never been part of a group, not even on dig sites. He'd had no idea how to process the experience except from the outlook of the anthropologist, which had made him feel even more separate. It was more than seeing them out of uniform and trying to remember their names without the convenient labels. It was seeing them with their normal lives and regular personalities, without military constraint.
As if military hadn't been enough of a barrier in the beginning, as if 'civilian' wasn't often uttered as a something contemptible, Daniel had been forced to witness the body language of camaraderie and a bond of closeness, even of a kind of intimacy that he had never had. There had always been a sense of wrongness that left him feeling even more like a transplant from another world.
It had taken him years to get over it and finally begin to feel welcome and a part of the group as a whole. It had taken more than a year for someone to greet him by name and offer him a drink or challenge him to pool. Now he didn't mind arriving a little early, even if Jack wasn't there ahead of him, standing at the bar telling war stories surrounded by a group of guys well into their second pitcher of beer. He'd envied Jack his swagger, his easy sense of belonging.
The change in his attitude might have started with having Jillian arriving early with him. They'd grab the large horseshoe booth in the middle of the wall facing the bar, where they could see the game on the big screen to the right and the karaoke stage to the left and all the members of SG1 and Sg8 could share as long as they didn't all try to do it at the same time, or Annie didn't mind sitting on Scotty's lap in the chair pulled up to the open end of the table. Jack, when he sat with them, always took the end place facing the door and whoever might already be there had better move.
Now it felt kind of right to Daniel to be there with people whose faces he did recognize and with Jillian leaned up against him while she nursed whatever drink it was she wanted to try that month and now he knew he liked the taste of beer out of a pitcher more than out of a bottle.
There was a slightly different feeling on this particular First Thursday. The defeat of Anubis and the word of what had happened with the Replicators had created a party atmosphere unlike the simple stress-relieving raucousness usually associated with the get-togethers. But no one was quite sure that Jack would come. It wouldn't just be Colonel O'Neill. It would be General O'Neill and there might now be a line of demarcation that he could no longer cross.
The evening was already later than it usually got without Jack putting in an appearance and Daniel had already exchanged a few short conversational glances with Teal'c and resisted sending inquiring texts to Jack's cell that he would probably just ignore anyway.
Then Jack sauntered in as if he did it all the time, scanned the room automatically even though he knew all the exits. When his gaze finally landed on their regular table Daniel held up the empty pitcher of beer and gestured towards the bar. O'Neill nodded and worked his way through the crowd of grinning, welcoming SGC personnel until he was at the bar and standing next to Gerald Mallory. He leaned over as Mal said something to him, laughed and the Mal blew a long whistle over the noise of the crowd until everyone shut up for a moment.
Daniel expected some weird military protocol, something like "Officer on Deck" but that's not what Mal yelled next.
"What do you call the last man standing at the bar?" he hollered in a voice that would have been audible over a barrage of weapons fire.
With one voice the occupants of the bar shouted back, "O'NEILL!" followed by a host of raised glasses and hearty cheers.
It was clear from Jack's expression that he was laughing. Daniel laughed a little too and exchanged another look with Teal'c. There was something about Jack.
Holding a pitcher of beer in each hand, Jack made his way back through the crowd until he got to the table. Scotty stood up in true military fashion but Jack waved him back into his chair. One of their servers arrived at about the same time to clear away the empty baskets of fries and bring them all clean glasses. Daniel indicated the tall brown bottle the girls had been drinking all night and got a smile and a nod of understanding.
The noise had reached the loud party level again but they'd all gotten used to it after all these years of First Thursdays. A group made up largely of SG13 and 17 took the Karaoke stage and started singing New York New York.
"Where are the girls?" Jack yelled.
Daniel wondered if you could really call a decorated Air Force Colonel and two women with doctorates 'the girls' but since they never seemed to mind he let it go. They got to have the big booth and spend time with a blond, a brunette and a redhead. It wasn't a bad way to pass the time.
"They went en masse to the ladies room about 10 minutes ago," he answered.
"They have a tendency to travel as a unit for such purposes," Teal'c observed.
"You might want them to stay in there for a while," Daniel said.
Jack had poured three glasses of beer and slid one each across the table to Daniel and Scotty.
"Why's that?" he asked, diving in to his glass with enthusiasm.
"They each ordered a drink when they first got here and since then they've been doing straight shots of that," Daniel answered, with a nod at the big brown bottle, "and singing karaoke."
Jack snagged it in one big hand and read out loud, "Tequila Rose?"
"It tastes like a strawberry milk shake and that's the second bottle of it they've finished tonight," Daniel said.
Both Jack's eyebrows went up. "What were they drinking before that?"
"Jillian had a…." Daniel got that look on his face that meant he was searching his memory bank. Teal'c helped, "Strawberry Rose Margarita."
Daniel repeated it a half a syllable late and then said, "Annie had a …." He and Scotty spoke at the same time, "Checkered Flag and Sam ordered something that I won't repeat but I dared her to order in front of you."
"What have they been singing after all that?"
Daniel glanced at Teal'c again and they began listing songs all at the same time.
"Girls just wanna have fun –"
"Dancing Queen –"
"Danger Zone-" and even Jack groaned.
"Jillian and Annie did Take My Breath Away though Sam refused to participate – "
At that point the girls joined them in a kind of overwhelming onslaught of tight jeans and clingy sweaters, soft tousled hair and bright smiles. Jillian collapsed into the booth next to Daniel. Annie nudged her way onto Scotty's lap. Jack got up to let Sam slip in between him and Teal'c. Sam reached for the Tequila Rose and poured three shots.
"What wouldn't I participate in?" she asked.
"That song from Top Gun!" Daniel answered.
Sam groaned, tipped her head back and drained the shot. "Do we have to do that every First Thursday? I keep hoping we'll get through one of these without someone yelling 'take me to bed or lose me forever'."
Jillian and Annie grinned, shoved their shot glasses back at Sam and Jillian said, "You know we only do it to bug you, right?"
"You succeed!" Sam said, raising her shot glass in a salute.
Jack had his head turned completely around so that he could see Sam.
"Where's Pete?" he asked.
"Stakeout," she answered.
"Oh. Too bad," Jack said, though he didn't sound anything but utterly neutral.
The group on the stage abandoned it after torturing Total Eclipse of the Heart. Annie jumped to her feet, pulling on Scotty's hands.
"Come on," she said, "Sam, Jillian, come on. We've got to get this place dancing."
Jack barely got out of Sam's way and Daniel let go of Jillian's gentle weight against him very reluctantly.
"Jillian!" he said, sharply. She turned and looked at him. "You promised."
She leaned over and kissed him sweetly. "I promised," she said and then took of through the crowd after Annie and Sam.
"What'd you make her promise?" Jack asked, refilling his beer.
Daniel glared at him and Teal'c answered. "She is forbidden from singing anything with his name in it."
"You're no fun," Jack said.
"So I've been told," Daniel agreed, putting his hand on the top of his glass so Jack wouldn't top it off.
Then Scotty was belting out Joy to the World with the girls backing him up and a crowd moved out onto the dance floor and started singing along.
Two more songs and they surrendered the stage to another group and came back to the table. The guys had ordered chili fries and Daniel had gotten Jillian and Sam diet cokes. Jack had started doing the rounds of the various groups and was currently watching a competitive game of pool.
"You should come sing with us, Dr. Jackson," Annie said.
"Daniel," he corrected, "and umm, no."
"Dr. Jackson has perfect pitch and a gorgeous voice but he doesn't sing in public," Jillian teased.
They talked and laughed and Sam got up after a while and went to play pool. Mallory and Rusty came to join them and started swapping stories that even Teal'c found funny.
The new group on the stage started singing My Girl.
"Dr. Jackson might not sing but he dances," Jillian said, dragging Daniel out of the booth and onto the floor with Scotty and Annie close behind them.
They danced through two more songs, getting lost in the music and letting the noise fade away for a little bit and then they became aware of Sam singing again.
It was Patsy Cline's Crazy and she was swaying while she sang and had her eyes closed.
Crazy, I'm crazy for feeling so lonely
I'm crazy, crazy for feeling so blue
I knew you'd love me as long as you wanted
And then someday you'd leave me for somebody new
"She really does have a dozen talents we don't ever get to enjoy doesn't she?" Daniel noted.
"She does," Jillian answered.
Daniel stopped doing more than rocking back and forth with Jillian so that he could watch Sam. He was still more than a little anxious about the way she was behaving and he didn't mean just this evening.
He listened to her lovely voice rise into a lilting, emotion filled crescendo.
Worry, why do I let myself worry?
Wond'ring what in the world did I do?
Crazy for thinking that my love could hold you
I'm crazy for trying and crazy for crying
And I'm crazy for loving you
Daniel hoped that he was the only one in the noisy, overcrowded bar who noticed that she was looking straight at Jack O'Neill when she finished.
They all went back to the table after that, ordered more food and more beer and the girls finally finished the Tequila Rose. At that point Jillian stood up and pulled on Daniel.
"Let's go home," she said.
"I thought we were going to wait and let Teal'c drive us?" Daniel asked.
"That's the same glass of beer you started with hours ago," she said, outing him, "You're fine. Come on." She paused and shot a mischievous look at Sam, "Come on, Jackson, you big stud. Take me home or lose me forever."
The entire table groaned and Sam flung a paper napkin at Jillian that missed and went in Scotty's beer, which everyone seemed to think was hilarious.
Daniel dragged himself out of the booth, where he had actually gotten quite comfortable.
"Show me the way home, honey," he said.
Sam tossed her head back and pleaded with the ceiling in mock anguish, "Oh god, someone make them stop."
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