Author's Note: A character study of Major Davis, Siler and the Chevron guy….I hope you like it J
Elsewhere in Colorado Springs on New Year's Day:
As consciousness overtook him, despite his attempts to keep it out via squeezed shut eyes, Paul Davis realized he was not alone. Slowly, his alcohol ravaged mind tried desperately to piece together the events of the previous night before he actually looked at his bedmate du jour.
Unable to contain his curiosity until he could remember it all, he peeked over at the other person; only allowing himself one eye lest he had not chosen wisely the night before.
He sighed, a sense of relief coming over him at the sight of the lovely, curved figured of the naked young woman. Well, that looks good so far, he thought to himself, and she's a redhead, he noticed. Must have been a good evening, he decided.
His attention turned to the state of the rest of his body, which was desperately in need of a big greasy fast food burger to absorb the queasiness he felt. His head, he decided, was screaming for a little of the hair of the dog, and he got up slowly to procure himself a remedy of that nature.
"Hey," the girl called groggily from the bed. He looked over at her, wincing as he realized that this incident would negatively impact his career if her true age were ever to be revealed. Worth it, though, he thought as he looked at her, mentally marking another notch and giving himself a reminder to collect his bet from Siler and Norman regarding the wisdom of wearing dress blues to O'Malley's on New Year's Eve. It was always a crap-shoot, but it had played in his favor this time.
"Hey," he replied. He realized he was only in his boxers, and looked around the room for something to put on over them; spotting a pair of sweats discarded by his dresser he began to pull them on. He wasn't sure what he was going to find in the next room, best to be clothed to some degree; the redhead might have had a friend or four.
"Is there another way out of your place? I really don't want to waltz by your pals in the other room," she said as she sat up, hair attractively askew.
The sight of her naked in his bed with her voluminous red hair down around her pretty young face prompted his memory; she was an Air Force groupie, as they called them and she'd come over and sat in his lap the night before at O'Malley's. Siler and Norman had given him grief over it, but they had gone quiet when she gave him the deep-throated kiss at the stroke of midnight.
The memory of Siler and Norman prompted yet another thought; as per the usual New Year's plan, the low sounds of the early bowl game on his big screen television broke into his thoughts. Norman would already be up watching, he knew, and Siler was probably sacked out in the La Z Boy, alternately trying to sleep and watch the game; Norman's enthusiasm for football would make it difficult not to watch.
"Yeah, I've got a back door; I'll call you a cab," he said. He had a couple of regulars he knew would be happy to get the fare and he paid them pretty well to make sure the girl got wherever she needed to go.
In his sweats now, he wandered out to the living room. Sure enough, Siler appeared to be out cold while Norman perched on the edge of the couch. He picked up the half empty Molson's that was on the end of the table and took a swig. Warm, yes, but he didn't think the screaming in his head would wait until he could get a cold one from the refrigerator.
"C'mon, stick 'em!" Norman cursed quietly at the offense, trying to respect his friend's attempt-at-sleeping status.
"Hey, did you guys order food yet? I'm jonesing for a nasty greasy old cheeseburger."
"Nah, it's a good game and I haven't had a chance," Norman said, not looking up from his perch. They were all good games to him; he'd always wanted to play but never quite had the stature required for it.
Paul went over to the portable phone on top of the table near the kitchen. Fishing a couple of business cards out of the drawer, he dialed a number.
"Yeah, hey Bill, it's Paul. Yeah, I've got a fare for you. Yeah, Bill, same deal as last time. Oh, you're in the neighborhood? Figured I'd need it, eh? Well thanks for the vote of confidence, buddy," Paul said with a laugh into the telephone. "Yeah, the uniform always does it," he said with a grin, looking over at Norman, who gave him a disgusted look at the reminder of the bet. "Five minutes? Great, thanks Bill. Yeah, back door like before. Thanks."
Paul scanned the living room for a moment; spying the jacket, purse and boots that could only belong to her, he retrieved them, careful not to move too quickly, nursing his hung over body.
He walked back to the bedroom with her stuff and his half empty warm beer; the girl was up and dressed. Oh yeah, she had been worth the risk to his career, he decided. He was beginning to regret the fact that he could hardly remember any of it. What was her name, anyway?
"Cab's on the way," Paul said, handing her the remainder of her things.
She smiled at him. "Thanks," she said, taking the beer out of his hand. She took a swig and made a face. "Eewww, it's warm," she said, handing the bottle back to him.
The cab pulled up and beeped; she followed Paul out of the bedroom and to the back door, away from the living room. Paul held the door for her, getting one more brush against her supple young body as she passed him on her way out. Well, at least that much he'd remember.
Walking her over to the car, he smiled and nodded a greeting at the cabbie Bill. He opened the door for the girl, smiling at her; she reached up and gave him a passionate kiss, simultaneously giving his privates a quick squeeze. He was caught off guard by this; she smiled wickedly.
'Thanks for the memories, flyboy," she said, getting into the car.
He handed Bill his usual $50 and wished him a Happy New Year. He waved at her as the cab pulled away, then went back in to attend to his screaming head.
As he walked back into the house, grabbing a comfy sweatshirt out of the bedroom as he passed it, he saw that Norman's antics had finally eradicated any hope of sleep for Siler. Siler slid him a look from half closed eyes.
"So, who was she?" Siler asked off handedly, in what he and Norman called his Mock Mother accent.
Paul wandered wordlessly into the kitchen, knowing he wouldn't be able to fend this off too long. "Either of you two want a beer?" he called as he rummaged in the refrigerator.
"Yes!" came the two voices in unison from the living room.
He opened the three bottles and went back into the living room. Norman didn't even look up as Paul swung the bottle in front of his face, just grabbed it and took a swig, all without his eyes ever leaving the action on the screen. Paul smiled a bit; he got a kick out of Norman's obsession with the games. He handed the other one to Siler.
"Y'know Paul, you should at least remember 'em if you're going to get 'em that good," Siler said with a matter of fact tone to his voice. He wasn't one to pass judgment on his friend's actions; he simply felt that Major Paul Davis deserved better treatment than he currently allotted himself.
"Yeah, I know," Paul responded with a tone of contrition in his voice. "But, it's still worth $50 from you two," he said with a half-hearted grin. He knew this was a shallow victory, but a victory nonetheless.
He picked up the portable telephone and a restaurant delivery menu and slumped on the couch, his body telling him that he had managed all of the movement that he would be allowed today, as retribution for the punishment he'd given his body in the last 18 hours. He grabbed the bottle of Advil from the coffee table, no doubt placed there by Norman as soon as he woke up, and washed back a couple of the tablets with a swig of the cool amber liquid.
"Hey, what all do you guys want, anyway?" he asked as he scanned the menu, unable to really focus.
There was a commercial on now; Norman turned his attention to his friends and the task at hand. "Just get a couple of loaded pizzas, that'll hold everything down," he said knowingly, his red, watery eyes an indicator of the amount he himself had consumed the night before.
Siler looked at them both through his half open eyes, his own body rebelliously not willing to allow more movement than that today. "Yeah, what he said," he muttered in agreement.
Paul perused the menu, then dialed the number, silently thankful for take out restaurants. He placed the order with the tired sounding voice on the other end, and clicked the phone off, relaxing back against the comfortable leather sofa he had purchased for the living room. Now he could assuage his poor brain with the mindless numbing of the bowl games.
To an outsider, this might have seemed a strange scene, he, an officer, and a fairly senior one at that, with Washington connections that went deep, hanging out with two enlisted men from Cheyenne Mountain.
But, this discrepancy had never really occurred to Paul Davis when it came to Siler and Norman; at the end of the day, they were all serving their country, weren't they? Putting their lives on the line for the rest of the country – hell, in this program, wasn't it really for the rest of the world?
Paul had seen these two men calmly obeying orders in situations that would have literally scared the shit out of some of the Washingtonites he knew; these two had simply chalked it up to another day's work.
This created a mental conundrum for Paul; as long as he'd known the two of them, he continually found himself surprised that they had not progressed in their respective military careers, but then, he knew them well enough to know that they were content with simply being background people, letting the SG teams take all the glory.
Compared with his own ambition and that of the majority of people he interacted with on a daily basis in Washington, he found this quite honorable, in fact, it seemed almost more patriotic, to be content to simply do one's job, as dangerous as it could be, to ensure that others could do theirs.
He'd experienced plenty of high-level military society goings on back in Washington, too, along with his fair share of beautiful Washington ladies; they couldn't compare with the sincerity of the more casual, straightforward folks from this assignment, he had decided.
An image of a certain blond operative threatened to invade his consciousness then; he shoved it away with another swig on his beer. They were both better off now, he reminded himself, but the fact that this would have been their tenth wedding anniversary refused to be completely banished from his brain, followed inevitably by the fading memory of the pain that he'd felt when she'd fallen for her partner on her last assignment, forsaking him and their New Year's Day wedding plans.
The distance from Washington had helped, time at the SGC had not – women like Samantha Carter and Jennifer Hailey were everything she had been and more; they were unfortunate reminders of what could have been between them. But these were simply difficult facts of his current assignment that needed to be reconciled – sometimes on a daily basis he realized with an inward grimace. Lieutenant Grogan's declaration by way of his girlfriend that there was something going on between Hailey and the archeologist, and Sam's obvious allegiance to Colonel O'Neill, military and otherwise, made it much easier to push the ponderings away.
As this whole thought pattern wandered aimlessly across the few active cells available in his brain this day, it resurrected memories from the previous night.
"Hey, whaddya suppose Carter and O'Neill were doing in there last night? They left in a big fat hurry, before midnight – ya think they were headed for the horizontal bop?"
"Well, by the looks of Colonel O'Neill, there wasn't much in the way of that happening last night," Norman said with a chuckle. "He was three sheets to the wind; it was all Carter could do to carry him out of there," he added.
Siler sat up, gingerly. "Hey, it's not like that with them – at least in public. He's a stand up guy; I think he was really sick. She looked worried about him; I overheard her on the cell phone talking to the doc about it."
"Yeah, that's true," Norman conceded in a distant voice, not looking at his roommates. The action on the screen was heating up again.
"DOH!! What were you thinking!" he yelled, as he anguishedly watched his favorite team of the day fumble the ball on the 10 yard line on fourth down, resulting in a turnover for the other team.
Paul again found himself amused at his antics. He glanced over at Siler, who was half smiling, too. Times like this made him grateful for the arrangement with these two guys.
As his time with the SGC had increased, Paul had known he needed a local place, and when Siler's wife had left him, taking their teenage son with her, leaving him with the excruciating task of selling the house, Paul deemed it only logical to buy it from him.
Even though the house was full of memories – or perhaps for that reason, Siler had still wanted to live there, an arrangement that worked out well for Paul; Siler rented it back from him and took good care of it and everything in it. Paul had furnished it with expensive toys and gadgets appropriate to his age and rank – a big screen television, a leather couch and matching leather La Z Boy chair, a soothing 40 gallon fish tank.
He'd always thought it a bit tragic that Siler's wife had decided that she didn't want to grow old with him because he never talked about his work, if she were to ever understand what he had been keeping from her, no doubt she would have been a lot more grateful for his silence.
The loss of their infant daughter years earlier hadn't helped, either; if she had lived, she would have been about Cassie's age, Paul realized. That certainly explained Siler's obvious fondness for the girl. He quietly doted on her whenever she visited the base; he was always making outrageous balloon animals to make her laugh. It was a hobby he had taught several of the officers at the SGC, including SG-17's Lieutenant Powers, who had needed a way to keep his hands busy when he'd stopped drinking.
"Aw, come on, you've gotta be kidding me! Are you blind???!!!" Norman argued vehemently with the official who'd just thrown a flag on the last play.
Their circle had been completed when this particularly avid football fan, Sergeant Norman Davis – the chevron guy, as his friends sometimes teased him – had needed a place to stay, his own apartment having gone condo, at about the same time as Siler's son had decided to go to an expensive, private college out of state.
Paul had been able to split the mortgage payments between himself and the two now roommates, and he himself had a place to stay when he came to town; that he enjoyed their company was just a bonus – when he was in town, the three of them often went skiing in the Colorado mountains; he and Norman always laughed at how much Siler resembled Roger Moore in his ski gear; his dashing figure was not lost on the ladies on the slopes, either – Sly, they called him on those days.
Norman usually courted the taller ones, succeeding more often than not given his level of smarts and penchant for trivia – the King of Obscure Information was another nickname Paul and Siler had given him. These interludes usually ended when the novelty for one of them wore off, but Norman never seemed to pine for long when that happened.
Norman also had an ironclad rule, a good one, Paul thought, about not dating anyone in the workplace. Way too much complication, he'd always said, not to mention it was against the regs. Paul admired his ability to just "shut it off," as he put it, when he went to work.
"Oh yeah, go baby, go!!" Norman yelled, jumping up and down and doing a small victory dance as the secondary for his team du jour ran 92 yards for a touchdown. Siler and Paul chuckled. Norman was an excellent dancer and on the rare occasions when they ventured down to Denver to go to the nightclubs, Paul and Siler were always left holding down the table.
The doorbell rang, probably the delivery guy, Paul surmised.
"Hey, it's your turn to ante up, anyway, Normie," Paul teased him, "and you both still owe me fifty each from last night," he said with a superior grin.
"Yeah, yeah," Norman said offhandedly as he paid the ragged looking teenager at the door, tipping him well and taking the food.
Siler carefully brought the La Z Boy up to full attention as the food appeared on the coffee table, Paul slowly got up and brought a fresh round of beers and some paper towels from the kitchen.
As they prepared to dig in, Paul raised his bottle. "Well, here's to another year, gentlemen; may it be as prosperous and sex-filled as our last."
"Here, here," Siler said. "And maybe next time you'll even remember her name," he grinned.
"Amen to that," Norman clinked his bottle with the other two, "and don't forget your best SGC pals when you meet her friends," he laughed.
Paul munched his pizza contentedly, his hangover easing with every swallow. Here with these two, listening to the buzz of the bowl game with Norman's commentary, life was as good as it gets, he thought.