Sam slammed the trunk door harder than really necessary and lugged her computer bag and carry on up through the door between the garage and the kitchen. She tripped over something right inside the door and swore, making no effort to be quiet or ladylike about it. She flipped on the light and viciously kicked the wastebasket, revealed directly in her path. Sam was mad at Daniel but when the wastebasket flew across the room and trash fell out, she was mad at herself too. She was really acting like an idiot. She had pulled a lot of late nights herself at Cheyenne Mountain. She certainly should be able to understand how it could happen.
She picked up the trash and restored the wastebasket to its appointed spot. Then it occurred to her to wonder how it had found its way in front of the door to the garage. When she talked to Daniel the night before, he told her that when he came home he had found most of the plants in one of the landscaped beds in front of the house dug up and lying on their sides. It could have been a dog but he doubted it. Had someone been in the house? Daniel's car wasn't in the garage and, now that she thought about it, there had been a strange car parked at the curb. It occurred to her that if she suddenly got quiet and started creeping about stealthily, and someone was indeed in the house, they would know she knew they were there. She forced herself to move around normally, opening the refrigerator to get a soft drink while she thought about a game plan.
The refrigerator not only had the normal supply of Guinness and diet coke but there were two magnums of champagne. Was Daniel planning some sort of a celebration? Even knowing she might have an intruder, she couldn't keep but smiling. She left the champagne in place, took out a diet coke and twisted off the top. Humming to herself and the unseen intruder, she retrieved her pistol from on top of the cupboards. Carrying the coke slightly in front of her and the gun straight armed down at her side, she began going through the downstairs. She found absolutely nothing. She went to the cellar door and locked it. Now, at least if someone was down there, she'd hear them when they tried to come up.
Okay, upstairs then. Sam turned on the light at the bottom of the stairs and climbed the stairs at a normal pace but with every sense on alert. She didn't hear anything but she did smell something she couldn't identify. At the top of the stairs, she saw a trail of petals leading down the hall to Daniel's study. There was a soft light seeping out under the door. Surely she would have seen it from outside when she came home. Someone was definitely here because whatever the light source was, it had been turned on AFTER she came in the house.
Sam set the coke down. She took her cell phone off her belt and armed the "panic button" new phones came with now. She held the phone with her finger over the panic button. If it was more than she could handle, she would be able to alert someone. With her cell phone in one hand and her gun in the other, she backed up and kicked open the study door. There was a sort of yelp and a man staggered out from behind the door clutching his forehead. His hand was over his face and it took a moment for Sam to realize that it was Daniel. He was wearing a beautiful, soft blue sweater that she had never seen before, contributing to the slow identification. Daniel dropped his hand and took in the gun that was still pointing at him right between the eyes.
Daniel collected himself and said in a stagy, affected voice, "Please ma'am, don't hurt me. I'll cooperate. Whatever you want." His expression slide into an exaggerated leer, "WHATEVER you want."
"Daniel, what is all this?" She gestured with the weapon.
"Honey, how about you put the gun down and use your hand for any sweeping gestures you might have in mind," Daniel suggested, speaking normally. Sam looked at her hand and hastily, but carefully, complied. She set the cell phone next to the gun. "So maybe surprises are not really a good idea for you?" Daniel asked looked over at the hole kicked part way through the door.
Then Sam began to take in the rest of the room. There were candles flickering on every available surface, the source of the soft light she had seen. There were 4, no 5, bouquets of white roses and the trail of rose petals led to the big overstuffed armchair.
"I'm still evaluating," she replied and went to him. She looked at his forehead where there was definitely going to be a major bruise. "I am so, so sorry," she said contritely. "I thought you were a burglar."
"With a trail of rose petals?" he asked dubiously.
"I didn't see your car. And aren't you allergic to roses?"
"The roses are silk and I'll explain about the car but later." Sam had put her arms around his neck and started kissing everything she could reach and whispering, "Sorry, sorry," over and over again.
Daniel said with an attempt at sternness that failed miserably, "You're going to have to stop that for a moment, Sam. It makes it hard for me to speak coherently."
"We make way too much of verbal communication," Sam said and tried to begin to demonstrate her thesis but he trapped her hand.
"I have a very important question to ask you," he said. He backed away from her and indicated the chair. "Please sit down."
She sat and he knelt before her, took her hand, and said, very seriously, "Will you marry me?"
"Of course but didn't we already have this conversation?" Sam answered.
"I announced it without asking you properly first but I want you to have a proper proposal."
"Yes, yes, yes," she happily accepted. "Now come here."
Instead he reached in his pocket and pulled out a ring and slipped it on her finger. In the buttery light from the candles, she saw a beautiful sapphire in an old fashioned setting. "Oh Daniel, it's beautiful," she breathed.
Sam had seen the near end of the world. Multiple times. It was unexpected that anything on a smaller scale could still surprise her but the phone call she received the next evening was the second major surprise in 24 hours. As she hung up the phone, she said to herself, "Never say never."
She went back to the bed where her suitcase was open. Clothes were spread out around it, roughly four times as many things as she could take or needed to for their wedding trip to Lake Tahoe the next day. She kept changing her mind. She didn't want to look like an older woman dressing below her years for her young groom. She didn't want to look frumpy either. She wanted to look sexy for Daniel but she wanted the right dignity for the occasion. With her hands on hips, she surveyed her choices so far. It just wasn't going well.
She heard the door downstairs open, offering a reprieve. She rushed part way down the stairs to meet Daniel coming up. His face lit up when he saw her but his body language was not that of a happy man. Her face fell and she asked concerned, "Did something go wrong?"
"I hope not but I just got some rather distasteful information about what might have happened to me when I was missing." He put his arm around her and they walked the rest of the way up the stairs together. He steered her into his office, sat down in the big overstuffed armchair, and pulled her down into his lap.
He sighed and gave her the full dump. "They've found out that the planet where I went missing is a sort of harvesting point for a nasty little operation in that sector. The people running it have relatively high technology. Space travel for sure and they've learned to exploit some Ancient technology, probably the suspended animation technique used on me. The people on the planet with the gate are a low tech, superstitious lot and our information mostly comes from them so there was a lot of reading between the lines for the analysts. The local people don't know why people are taken. There may be a clue in the local legend of a man who appeared again and again over a hundred years. He always looked the same. He'd show up, do some dirty work for the bad guys, something that was out of character completely for him, and vanish."
"Sort of like zombies, right?" Sam said. She looked at Daniel tenderly. She knew what would be bothering him. "You're really worried that you may have been used to do something awful that you can't remember, aren't you?"
He returned her gaze, grateful for her quick understanding. Sam said, "Hey, I have some news that may make you feel a little better."
She waited expectantly. "You don't seriously want me to guess do you? Sam, honey, I'm just not up for that now. How about if I ask nicely?" He pulled her head down and kissed her. "Is that nice enough?"
"I think I need a little more persuasion," Sam said tracing his lips with her index finger.
Daniel had always been an overachiever and the persuasion was quite thorough. At long last, when she could get her breath again, Sam said, "Jack just called."
"Jack as in your ex-husband who just told us a few days ago that we were the scum of the earth?" Daniel asked, not welcoming the news.
"Actually he used much worse words," Sam said, "but you have to give him credit. He apologized, well as close to an apology as Jack gets. He asked to stop by and talk to us this evening."
Daniel said warily, "You don't think he's just lulling us into a false sense of security so he can come over here and finish the job from last weekend?"
Sam shook her head and smiled crookedly. "I know you don't mean that. We both know Jack would never really hurt us. If you want my opinion, he still loves both of us and that's why he was so mad the last time we saw him. In the old days, it was all of us and Teal'c together. Now he feels frozen out."
Daniel snorted, "He's mad because the sexiest woman in the universe walked out on him. When I think of anyone else touching you, I want to tear them apart with my bare hands. A couple of times a stray image has crossed my mind of you and Jack together and I CANNOT handle it."
Sam said, sadly, "I wish that was it. Actually, our main point of contact for the last few years was our shared parenting of Danny. He decided unilaterally that I couldn't possibly be interested in him physically and shut down that part of our life awhile ago. I think what had him so over the top last weekend was that he saw the critical mass in the competition for Danny shifting to us as a team, Danny's mother and his biological father."
A few minutes later, they heard the doorbell ring. Sam got the door as fast as she could, thinking it was Jack. Instead she opened the door to find a flaming mass of something in a brown paper sack that smelled like an outhouse. A moment later, Daniel joined her to stare at the hostile gesture smoking and stinking on their front sidewalk. Sam asked, "How do you even put something like that out?"
Daniel said, "Let's start with water," and ran to the hose at the corner of the house. He put the fire out and then kept dosing it for another minute or two.
They noticed a car pulling into the driveway but continued to concentrate on the task at hand. Jack strolled down the sidewalk and stood next to Daniel. "Holy shit," he said.
"We know," Daniel responded.
Jack pitched in to help Daniel shovel the mess up and put it in a metal pail and clean up the sidewalk. It was a good fifteen minutes later before they all filed into the house and each of the men went to a different bathroom to clean up. When they reconvened in the living room, Sam had drinks ready for them and some chips. "I got to ask," Jack said, "you kids refuse to buy cookies from the local Brownie Troop or something? Or maybe looking at your forehead, Daniel, you got in trouble with full grown Girl Scouts."
Daniel looked over at Sam. Both of them were amazed that Jack seemed, well almost friendly, and both reached the same decision which was to act like there was nothing surprising about it. Daniel said wryly, "We took care of the anti-Gay factor so we know that's not it."
Jack wanted an explanation. He cracked up when he heard the whole story. "I love it," he said. "Daniel is gay because he's in shape and has a nice wardrobe. Well I'm sure glad I never had any clothes sense. And I noticed you didn't explain the bruise. I bet THAT's an interesting story." He sobered and asked, "So you have no idea really?"
Sam said, "None and this is about the fourth incident in the last week, right Daniel?"
Daniel nodded. "Just last night, I had to park the loaner the garage gave me out at the curb because someone had strewn our garbage all over the driveway. You know one reason we were so glad to get out of the old neighborhood was there had been repeated incidents of stuff like this the last couple of weeks we lived there."
Sam said regretfully. "It was great here at first. This just started this week."
Daniel suddenly looked struck by a thought. "That's it! That's it!" He got up, cocked his hand at an imaginary embodiment of an idea and turned to face them both. Sam thought to herself, "My lord, is he ever sexy when he's in the throes of an idea," and suppressed the thought as this being neither the time nor the place.
"I've been watching the paper for the listing of real estate transfers." He looked at Jack and grimaced. "I was really worried that this house being jointly purchased by the two of us was going to show up before we ever talked to you about, well about, how things were. I guess after we talked to you, I was just in the habit of looking. It was in last Sunday's paper."
Jack said, "And?" He gestured for Daniel to continue, "Don't make me wait for the 'in this week's episode.'"
Daniel in the grip of an idea sometimes had no idea who he was talking to or what was going on around him. He had totally forgotten that this was not precisely his old friend Jack in front of him. He sat down next to Jack on the sofa, reached over and touched his arm, and said, "Don't you see? If someone was harassing us at the other house but didn't actually have us under surveillance, they might not have had any idea where we went when we moved." He spread his hands, "but the paper told them where to find us."
Jack looked at Daniel and an improbable smile appeared on his face. "You didn't think for one minute I did this?"
Sam and Daniel were completely shocked. Daniel answered for both of them, "Jack, you're a grown up. People who do stuff like this are immature adolescents inside, no matter what their age."
"Well, it looks like we have something to work with then if you still think I'm a grown up," Jack said leaning back, suddenly looking very tired.
They all sat in silence for awhile. Jack's eyes were closed and Sam found herself wondering if he had fallen asleep. As a result, he startled her when he said suddenly, "This is all so bad for Danny. He's being put in the middle and forced to feel like he has to choose. I think he feels like he's playing by at least two, if not three, sets of rules."
He sat up then and made eye contact with both of them. "I haven't slept much lately worrying about it. We need to show Danny a united front. And," he smiled ruefully, "he's one smart kid. It can't be just on the surface. We have to, at least, start to resolve our issues."
"I'm all for that," Daniel said slowly. "What are you suggesting? Counseling?"
"I'm a do it yourself guy, Daniel." Jack replied. "How about we give it a shot ourselves? I'll start." He took a long swallow of his beer and then said, "I was a real ass, okay, about you getting to know Danny, Daniel. He will always need Sam and me, we're his parents, but he needs to know the kind of man you are, Daniel, too. And, if you look at it right, you're sort of system redundancy. Anything happens to me, he's still got a father."
"Jack, for crying out loud," Daniel tried to interrupt.
"Just let me run because I'm not used to driving this train," Jack warned him. "Also, my reaction to the news you're getting married wasn't my finest hour. You're not a slut Sam. You showed incredible restraint, Daniel, for not trying to take me out for even using that word around her."
He picked up a decorative cushion on the couch next to him, threw it at Sam, and said, "Okay, your turn."
She immediately said, "Danny said that when we fought I used Daniel as a weapon against you."
Jack made a face, "He didn't. Please tell me he didn't."
"He did. He was sort of right, Jack. I did have a bad habit of using Daniel as an example of how I wanted you to act in certain areas."
Daniel looked appalled. Sam quickly added, "Oh it wasn't really you, Daniel. I've been living with you now for a few weeks and, although I love you profoundly, you are just as capable of being a pain in the ass as anyone. It was this idealized Daniel that I created from your memory and used to flog Jack with the last couple of years of our marriage. It wasn't fair, Jack, and I think it showed something fine in you that you didn't go for his throat the minute you saw him."
She fell silent. Daniel knew it was his turn and searched for the right words. "I shouldn't have just shown up like that. I should have contacted you first and worked out how you thought this should be handled with YOUR son. I feel like I should also apologize for how fast it has gone with Sam and me but I know that I would do exactly the same thing again. I couldn't handle being in the same room with either of you if you had taken her away from me and don't blame you for being so angry."
Jack blew air out and said, slowly, "But that's just it, Daniel. I can handle being in the same room with both of you." He hesitated for a moment and then said, very briskly, "Is everyone a happy camper now because I don't want to talk about this any more. Can we move on to the next item on the agenda?"
Daniel said, "Which is?"
"I think Danny ought to be there when you guys have them play "The Wind Beneath My Wings."
Sam was both touched and indignant. "If you mean when we get married, Jack, I'd love to have him there but we are NOT going to have anybody play "The Wind Beneath My Wings."
Daniel looked puzzled, "What's wrong with that song? I kind of like it."
Jack chuckled and said, "Believe me, you don't want to get her started on how much she dislikes it. For awhile there, it seemed to be played at every wedding and I had to listen to a little speech at some point, usually in the car on the way home from every wedding we went to about it."
Daniel said, "Sure. I don't feel strongly about it." What he did feel rather strongly at the moment was the realization that Jack and Sam had shared 16 years of marriage and he would be playing catch up for a long time to that fund of shared memories and understanding. "But as to Danny, he really didn't want to come."
"Daniel, my approach to parenting doesn't include letting your kids make really stupid decisions as long as they are still kids. He's coming but he's coming kicking and screaming so I'm going to have to bring him."
"Jack, I can't do that to you," Sam said, even more moved.
"What you really don't want to come right out and say is that it is really creepy and strange for me to want to be there and you are totally weirded out." Jack held up his hand to forestall any further comment. "I'm coming and I'm bringing Danny. We're done talking about it." He stood up. "I think traveling up there together would definitely be too much. Tell me the name of the place where it's happening and when and we'll be there."
They were indeed. In fact, Jack and Danny were waiting at the wedding chapel when Sam and Daniel drove up. Danny, nicely dressed in a sport coat and dress slacks and a tie, was no longer kicking and screaming. He was very quiet and subdued and kept shooting Jack, in a full dress uniform, sidelong looks as if he thought he was inhabited by an alien. He actually seemed more upset with Jack than with his mother or Daniel.
Sam was too happy to let anything or anyone dim her mood. She handed her bouquet of lilies and blue hydrangeas to Daniel, who held it arm's length, as far away from his nose as possible, and enfolded her son in a big hug. She looked up into his face and said, "Thank you so much for being here Danny. It makes this perfect." She started to give Jack a quick hug, but hesitated, not sure of herself.
Jack laughed. "This is already sooo unusual. Let's have a hug." When he released her and she reclaimed her bouquet, he added, "There is one thing I WILL not do. You'll have to get down the aisle by yourself."
They went inside the chapel and got organized for the ceremony. While Sam and Daniel were talking to the minister, and Jack was wandering around looking things over, the organist pulled Danny aside and whispered to him, "I know this is really none of my business but I can't stand it. How is it that you look exactly like the groom but you're calling the soldier Dad?"
For the first time, Danny saw some humor in the bizarre soap opera that was his life. "The groom is my biological father. No one, including my biological father, knows who my biological mother is for sure. The soldier and the bride were married and they adopted me. My adopted parents' divorce was final about two months ago. Now my adopted mother is marrying my biological father."
"Do you all live together in a commune or something," the organist asked, too far gone down the path of completely inappropriate prying to stop now.
"No," Danny said, "not yet but I have a feeling that may be next." He went to sit down and thought to himself, "I'm going to spend the rest of my life giving other people a life story that they will feel compelled to repeat to the next four or five people they talk to." Maybe he was just numb but it actually struck him funny.
Daniel and Sam had decided to defer their honeymoon until later when there was time to properly plan it. They were so happy that it didn't seem like it should matter where they were anyway. They were quite wrong. They came home to find the front door had an obscenity painted on it as did the garage doors. The windows had been soaped and there was tp in the trees. The lovely private setting of the house was decidedly showing its ugly underbelly. Sam looked at Daniel and said, "In the words of Scarlet O'Hara, 'tomorrow is another day.' I'm not ruining today by cleaning it up now."
Daniel snuck back outside later when she was in the shower and got most of the tp out of the trees but clean up was delayed because they needed daylight. Daniel was at Cheyenne Mountain during daylight hours and even though Sam was around the house more, he made her promise she wouldn't work on it without him. The first weekend was one nonstop torrent of rain and it had to wait another week.
The police came and went without offering anything at all helpful. Merilee visited them to try to pry out information and to drop broad hints that they were failing in their responsibilities as homeowners in not immediately cleaning up. She did not, however, offer to help with the effort.
When Jack drove up to drop Danny off for the weekend on Friday, Danny said, "Look at that Dad," and pointed at the front door. I just learned that word a couple of weeks ago and, you are alllllllways telling me about my potty mouth."
Jack got out of the car with Danny and walked up to survey the damage more closely. He noticed the soap on the windows then. Sam came out to greet Danny and found Jack in the bushes looking more closely at a window. "The time has come to put a stop to this crap, Sam," he said.
Daniel came out of the house then and said, a shade defensively, "Just how do you think you can do that?"
Jack knew immediately where Daniel was coming from. He came back to the sidewalk and said, "Let's just say I have some additional resources as an ex-black ops guy most people don't have. I'll explain my idea to you later and you can decide if you want to go with it." He dusted off his jeans and said, "First of all, let Danny and I help you with the clean up."
Sam protested, "Really, Jack, that would be presuming way too much on you."
Jack cocked his head and just looked at her for a moment. "Come on, Sam, I showed up at your wedding. We've already crossed the ex-husband weirdness barrier."
Daniel took the olive branch Jack was offering, his admiration for the bigness of spirit the man was capable of growing even larger. "Thanks, Jack." He shook his head slightly at Sam who looked about to demur further. "This is going to be a big and unpleasant job."
Jack responded. "No problem. So how about we go to Home Depot and get what we need tonight and then tomorrow I'll come back and we can get started."
A half an hour later, Kathy Jaworski and her family were pulling into the Home Depot parking lot. As they passed in front of the store, Kathy spotted Sam, Jack, Daniel, and Danny entering the store. She said, with unexplained urgency to her husband, Mike, "Let's go to Lowe's instead."
"Mom, we're already here," her son, Kyle whined from the back seat.
Kathy turned and looked at Kyle with steel in her eyes. "I said we're going to Lowe's, right, Mike?"
Inside Home Depot, a bored young clerk just happened to look over at the front of the store as he was stocking a display with roach motels. It was them, the interesting people from several weeks before. He left the roach motels in a heap and moved purposefully in the direction of the paint section where he had seen them disappear. His faith in interesting things to come was justified very quickly.
"So are you thinking repaint the whole door rather than try to touch up?" Jack was asking Daniel when a woman's voice said, "Jack O'Neill, I'll be damned."
They all turned to see two attractive women, somewhere in their late fifties or early sixties. One woman continued to talk while the other was clinging to her cart as if she thought she was going to faint. "I told Sara wouldn't it be a riot if we ran into you and she just quoted probabilities to me."
Sara smiled weakly at everyone while the monologue continued. "Jackie, you remember your former niece, Jack, lives here now. She's moving and I dragged Sara along to help. We've got her all settled in and were just picking up a few more things for her." She looked at them all with avid curiosity and wound down with, "So how the hell are you?"
"Just fine, Louise, just fine."
Louise was looking at Jack expectantly. Danny just knew this was going to be more soap opera. His dad's "former" niece named Jackie yet. How do you manage that?
Jack cleared his throat. "Louise, Sara, this is my son, Danny, my ex-wife Samantha, and Sam's husband, Daniel Jackson." Sara and Louise both looked quite confused. "Everybody, this is Louise Conway, my former sister-in-law, and Sara, my ex-wife."
Danny had that deer in the headlights look. Sara saw his distress and thought she was helping to clarify things by saying, "I'm Charlie's mother." But Danny looked more lost than ever.
Daniel jumped in. "Sam and I met you years ago. That incident with the… the boy… that looked a lot like Charlie. We were in the, uh, program with Jack."
"Oh, of course. I remember. You were also on that expedition with Jack right after Charlie died, right?" Jack was looking stony faced now.
Sara was thinking aloud and too rattled to be as careful as she should have been. "Your wife was missing, wasn't she?" She realized suddenly that probably this was not a good choice of topics but it was too late.
Daniel said flatly, "She died, a couple years later."
Danny suddenly came to life. "Just a minute here. Dad, you were married before Mom and had a kid named Charlie? And Daniel, you were married before? Why didn't I know any of this?"
Louise suddenly said, "Well, this has been lovely but maybe this would be a good time for us to leave."
Sara surprised everyone, including her take-charge sister by saying, "Actually Louise, we haven't eaten and if Jack and his, his group, haven't either, maybe we could go somewhere, catch up on what's happened in the last couple of decades." The invitation was advanced very tentatively and Sara looked afraid of her own words.
The smile that spread over Jack's face was a sight to behold. Daniel looked at Jack and then at Sara and said, "You know what, Jack, we have all this stuff to haul. Why don't we take Danny and get it back to the house and you can go ahead and join Sara for dinner?"
Louise, bless her heart, was quick on the uptake. She chimed in immediately, "You know, that's a great idea. I could run our stuff home to Jackie and Carlos and you can go ahead and go with Jack, Sara. You wouldn't mind bringing her home, would you Jack?"
There were various protestations and discussions but in the end, Daniel and Sam left, almost bodily dragging Danny who started asking heated questions as soon as they were out of the aisle. Louise got two aisles away and whipped her cell phone out to share the amazing developments with Jackie. The young clerk said, "Yes," and decided he really was going to be able to get a novel out of his experiences at Home Depot. And Sara and Jack strolled quietly out of the store and into the evening.