Ch 5: Sticking Together
By lunchtime, Jack was going insane with boredom. Carter was working like crazy in her lab, trying to figure out a solution to their problem. Which meant he had little to do but perch uncomfortably on a stool behind her and 'stay out of her way.' Yes, those had been Hammond's exact orders at the end of their little group breakfast of awkwardness.
He couldn't help but notice that the crowded lab had emptied gradually throughout the day, as the novelty of sneaking amused looks at the two of them wore off and Jack's grumpy attitude started to scare people away. He didn't have a problem with that - actually, he had been making wagers with himself in his head all morning about which geek would be the next to leave.
Once they'd been left alone, he really had nothing to do. After a few bad attempts to use a yo-yo with just his left hand, Carter offered to 'help' and took it from him. He'd thought she was going to untangle the string for him but instead she'd just thrown it across the room into the rubbish bin and gone back to work without saying anything.
"Carter, come on, it's lunchtime," he said at precisely 12.00, poking her repeatedly in the shoulder until he had her attention.
She lifted her head from the microscope and glanced at the clock. "I don't really think you want to go to the commissary right now, sir, do you?"
"Well..." It might be worth it, just to get out of this damn lab, he thought, but he finally said,"No, I guess not. Come on, I've been pretty quiet all morning."
He didn't bother to mention that his patience had officially run out, and she probably wouldn't be getting as much relatively uninterrupted work done in the afternoon. Somehow, he doubted that would help his 'let's go to lunch' argument.
"That's true," she agreed reluctantly. "But..."
Her phone rang, and Jack jumped to his (their) feet at the welcome interruption, answering with a quick, "O'Neill."
"Hey, Jack, it's me," Daniel said. "Janet's having lunch brought to the VIP room for us again, are you about ready to..."
"We'll be there in one minute!" Jack interrupted.
Daniel laughed on the other end of the phone and said, "Yeah... that's kind of what I figured. See you."
Jack hung up the phone quickly and said, "Did you hear all that?"
"Yeah. I need to shut this down first."
"Hurry up. I think it's sloppy joe day!" He clapped her on the shoulder as he said it.
She turned her head at a really awkward angle and gave him an 'oh, please be joking' look. "Sir... We're going to be stuck in these tee-shirts for who knows how long, maybe sloppy joes aren't the best way to go..."
"Relax, Carter, I was joking. Come on, let's go."
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Daniel and Teal'c were waiting on Jack and Sam to begin lunch. "How do you think they're managing it? He's probably going to start driving her up a wall pretty soon if he isn't already," Daniel asked, trying to imagine Jack being forced to sit still in Sam's lab all morning long.
"Perhaps I should give O'Neill a few strategies on meditation," Teal'c suggested.
The door opened and they both looked at their teammates in surprise - they looked a little tired but didn't appear to be harboring any murderous thoughts towards each other.
"Hey, guys," Daniel finally said as they sat down in what had already more or less become 'their' chair and started surveying their lunches. "How's it going?"
"Good," Jack said, reaching for one of the sandwiches. It was easy to eat one-handed, and probably wouldn't be very messy.
Teal'c jerked Daniel's hand and nudged his plate towards him, giving him a look that Daniel interpreted as 'leave them alone.' So he did, focusing on eating. But he couldn't help glancing at them curiously every once in a while. The way they were stuck together, you had to wonder... it couldn't be that comfortable for either of them, but especially Jack, and what if he...
"Daniel, for cryin out loud!" Jack finally barked.
"What?"
"Stop looking at us like that!"
"Sorry, I just... how do you go to the bathroom?" He'd been dying to ask.
Jack and Sam both renewed their interest in the tray in front of them, and Daniel didn't think they were going to answer. Jack mumbled, "Carter's real bendy," and stuck half a sandwich in his mouth while Sam reddened.
Daniel blinked at them slowly for a few moments and finally realized that was all either of them was going to say about it. He was trying to think of something else to say to change the subject, but Teal'c thought of it first. "Dr. Fraiser wishes to see us again after lunch."
"Oh goody," Jack and Sam both muttered.
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They let Janet do her tests on them until she was satisfied that they weren't about to die or anything, and Jack was just trying to decide which one was worse: an afternoon in the infirmary or an afternoon in Carter's lab, when Dr. Lee came and took Daniel and Teal'c away to test some more potential solvents he'd been working on.
After the two men had left, Jack asked conversationally, "Does anyone else keep imagining them skipping through the halls like that?"
Judging by the looks Carter and Fraiser gave him – no.
"Now I am," Carter muttered. "Janet are we done here? I've got a lot of work to do."
"And I've got a lot of sitting around to do, I guess," Jack said with a dramatic sigh as they headed back to the lab.
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Sam had known it wouldn't be easy working under these conditions. It was hard enough to focus when her CO barged into her lab and started fiddling with anything not nailed down, trying to get her to take a break, asking ridiculous questions... and usually there was a whole work bench between them when he did that.
She knew he'd been as patient as was physically possible for him that morning, but she was still surprised when she tried to get back to work after lunch. She idly wondered whether Janet give him a nice hefty dose of Ritalin or something as she grabbed the pen he'd been tapping against the edge of the table for the past five minutes and forty-one seconds. She sent the pen the way of the yo-yo and could practically feel him sulking.
"You're binning a lot of stuff that still works, you know," he said casually.
"You'll run out of things to play with eventually," she said distractedly, moving back to her microscope.
"Would you stop jumping up like that? Give a guy a little warning!"
"Sorry, sir." She truly was sorry about that. She did tend to get a little bit absorbed in the work and kept forgetting that any sudden movements on her part yanked him along with her.
"Are you thirsty?" he tried hopefully.
"No."
"Hungry?"
"We just ate," she reminded him.
"Oh."
He tried to sneak one of the cultures off the table and examine it but she saw him out of the corner of her eye. She grabbed it back and said, "If we waste the samples someone else will have to go back for more."
"I just wanted to see it," he said defensively.
Hmm... maybe that would actually interest him for a few seconds. "Okay, here, look." She adjusted a few knobs on the microscope and ducked her head to the side so he could look through the lenses.
He hunched over her and squinted into the microscope. "Neat," he finally said, standing up straight again.
"Yes, sir. It's actually a rather remarkable substance, and since the planet was devoid of humans, it could turn out to be a great resource... I mean, who knows what something that bonds this strongly could be used for - aircraft repair, maybe, or..."
"Assuming we figure out how to get it off first."
"We will. It's just a matter of time, sir."
"Hey it would be pretty ironic if this stuff ended up being used to make the UAVs a bit more durable, wouldn't it?"
She laughed, suddenly feeling a lot better, and said, "Yes, sir, it would."
Feeling a new wave of pity for him, she grabbed a spare notebook and handed it to him.
"What's this for?" he asked.
"I've seen you entertain yourself for hours during Daniel's meetings with a blank piece of paper, Colonel..."
"Yeah but I'm right handed... hey maybe I can teach myself to be ambidextrous!"
She leaned over the table for a pencil she'd rolled out of his reach earlier and passed it to him, suddenly realizing how her mother must have felt trying to keep her quiet during church when she was little.
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"Teal'c, do people hold hands on Chulak? I mean, like they do on Earth?"
"They do not, Daniel Jackson."
"That's interesting."
"I suppose."
Dr. Lee said, "Okay, I think this one might do the trick..." He spread a white goopy thing on their hands with a tongue-depressor. "Let's just leave that on for a few min..."
"It's burning!" Daniel suddenly exclaimed.
"What?" Dr. Lee asked nervously.
"It's burning, it's burning!" Daniel hopped on his feet in place, hissing at the pain – his hand felt like it was on fire.
"Okay, Dr. Jackson, we'll get it off..." Dr. Lee said quickly, hurrying over to a cupboard for some distilled water. "Teal'c, it's not burning you as well?"
"It is not," Teal'c replied, looking at his friend in concern. Daniel's face was bright red and it looked like steam was about to come out his ears. "Daniel Jackson, try not to think about the pain. Dr. Lee will remove the substance immediately."
"You don't have your symbiote anymore, but I suppose maybe the Tretonin..." Dr. Lee was speculating, clearly fascinated.
"DR. LEE! You will remove it NOW!" Teal'c ordered.
"Right, sorry," Dr. Lee apologized to Daniel, quickly getting the substance off of them. Their hands remained linked, although Daniel's was now a violent shade of pink.
"Daniel Jackson, is the pain gone?"
"Yeah... it's... getting better," Daniel said, glaring at Lee.
"Guess that one doesn't work either," Dr. Lee said. "Umm, maybe you should go let Dr. Fraiser look at that."
"This sucks," Daniel muttered as he and Teal'c headed back to the infirmary.
"I concur."
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The notebook and pencil bought Sam thirty blissful minutes of uninterrupted work, until her CO suddenly hurled the pencil across the room, where it bounced off a file cabinet and rolled off into a corner somewhere. "That's just frustrating."
Join the club, she felt like saying.
He crumpled up the paper he'd been scribbling on and lobbed it at the rubbish bin, cheering for himself when he made it. He eagerly ripped off another page and started crumpling it. The throwing action was jostling her around a lot, making it very hard to concentrate on what she was supposed to be doing. "Hey, I can't write with my left hand but I still rule at basketball!"
She sighed and waited for him to get bored with that game, or run out of paper, whichever came first.
He ran out of paper first. He took to tapping out a beat of some sort against the table, then against his own leg, then against hers. When it became apparent that ignoring him would not make him stop, she finally said, "Why don't you read a book, sir?"
"Can't," he said simply.
She set down her pen and said, "All right, I know you like to pretend you're not as smart as you are, but I think we all know you can read."
"And we all know I'm an old man, Carter. I gotta hold a book out kind of far and, well, you're in the way. Unless you want to hold it in your lap for me," he couldn't help but add. Hey, she was the one who brought it up.
"Somehow I don't think General Hammond would be very pleased with that arrangement, sir," she said, ducking her head on the pretense of checking the row of numbers she'd just jotted down.
"Yeah, but what Hammond doesn't know won't hurt him..."
Oh dear, Sam thought. She'd done it now. The flirting tone in his voice told her he'd found the quickest way to distract her.
"I wouldn't be too sure about that, Jack," a third voice said out of nowhere.
"Daniel!" Sam exclaimed. She hadn't been so glad to hear his voice in a long time. He and Teal'c came in, their joint hands wrapped in an ice pack. "What happened to you?"
"Daniel Jackson had a negative reaction to one of the substances Dr. Lee applied to our hands," Teal'c told them.
"Janet said the ice should make the burning stop soon," Daniel added, looking rather forlorn. Sam felt sorry for him.
"Poor guys."
"Hey, guess what else she said though? Cassie sent us a bunch of movies and stuff to keep us entertained tonight, since we'll probably want to stay in our room and all."
"Sweet," Jack said. "Hey, for once you actually do have good timing, Danny boy. I was about two minutes away from dragging Carter out of here, but since you're here... want to go fetch my cards?"
"I don't know, Jack..."
"Daniel, please – he's driving me crazy."
Daniel's eyes widened. For Sam to say something that close to insubordination, it had to be true. He nodded. Teal'c agreed apparently – he was already dragging them towards the door.
"And my tennis ball too!" Jack called after them.
"You are not bouncing a tennis ball in my lab," Sam said firmly, then remembered belatedly to add, "Sir," so that it sounded slightly less like a reprimand.
"So, driving you crazy, huh, Carter?" he asked as soon as they were alone. "In a good way or a bad way?"
"Take a wild guess. Sir."
She hoped he didn't notice that she was suddenly examining data she'd already compiled with unnecessary attention.
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"Why do we have to go to the briefing?" Daniel asked.
"So I don't have to repeat everything we cover to you later," Janet said firmly.
"But..." Sam started.
"Look... everyone that's going to be there is working on finding a way to get you guys out of those ridiculous positions. So they know what happened already. You're going to have to stop skulking about the halls eventually, you know. And Hammond wants you there anyway. Now come on."
Janet grabbed Daniel's only free arm and marched off. The rest of SG-1 followed reluctantly, although once they were underway, Jack said quietly, "At least those chairs are comfortable."
As soon as he said it, Sam felt like the biggest jerk on the planet. She was so used to the stools in her lab she never gave it a second thought, but... perching against one of those all day, with her weight on top of his own... no wonder the Colonel had been so cranky all day!
Now that it occurred to her, she was actually surprised he hadn't said anything about it. Or done anything about it. The tables in her lab were too high for normal chairs, but surely they could think of something for tomorrow...
"Carter? Where the hell are you trying to go?" he interrupted her musings by asking. She looked around and realized she was steering them towards the wrong corridor.
"Sorry," she replied hastily. They hurried to catch up to Teal'c, Daniel, and Janet, which probably looked rather funny – like penguins scurrying about on a glacier.
"I bet we look like a penguin," her CO commented idly.
She laughed and exclaimed, "I was just thinking the exact same thing!"
"Maybe this alien glue is going to our brains," he suggested as they reached the briefing room.
It was even more crowded than she had guessed it would be, since all the scientists working on their problem were there. Felger waved at them nervously, a goofy smile on his face. She waved back tentatively. Jack grabbed her hand quickly and lowered it. "Don't encourage him, Carter," he growled in her ear, scowling around the room.
Luckily, most of the people there were scientists – there were very few enlisted men and women present, just the guards and a couple of Lieutenants from one of the off-world long-term research teams. Therefore, they were all sufficiently scared/in awe of SG-1 that they kept their gawking and laughing to an almost-respectable minimum. At least in front of them.
Hammond entered and ordered everyone to sit. Daniel and Teal'c sat down unceremoniously, but Jack let out such a happy sigh as he sank into his chair that Hammond and several other people looked at him in surprise.
"You sound like you just plopped down in your Lazy-boy with a beer to watch 'The Simpsons,'" Sam whispered out of the corner of her mouth when he shifted around to get perfectly comfortable and asked, "What?"
"Ooh, good idea, Carter," he whispered back.
Hammond was still looking at them.
"Sorry, sir, we're um... all here and ready, I think," Jack said.
As people started updating each other on what they'd learned, Sam opened the SGC notebook that was waiting for her on the table and started taking notes, pulling it down into her lap to write because her CO (aka human-chair) was so relaxed in the chair that she couldn't reach the table comfortably.
The meeting was long. Some of it was boring even to her. She felt a new rush of pity for Jack, especially considering the boring and (she know realized) uncomfortable day he'd spent in her lab. So, she didn't say anything when he kept shifting around, alternately stretching out his legs to make his knees feel a little better.
Janet, who was next to them, apparently wasn't as concerned. She leaned over and hissed, "Would you two be still?"
"Sorry," they chorused.
Felger got up and started babbling about something really boring that, to Sam, seemed completely useless. She put down the pen and looked down in surprise when Jack quickly snatched it up. He slid the notebook in her lap a little bit to the side so he could reach it better, and she started to move her hand off of it so he could write on it, but he stopped her, pressing her palm flat against it and nudging her fingers apart.
She watched in amusement as he traced her hand on the paper, glancing around to see if anybody else was paying them any attention. It didn't seem like they were being watched. Even Janet appeared to be actually listening to Felger.
When he finished tracing her hand, he nudged it aside and started making it into a turkey. She had to bite her lip to keep from laughing when he added a crooked bow-tie to the drawing, and gave it hair like Felger's. When he added legs with really knobby knees and the saddle shoes Felger always wore, she nearly burst out laughing. A funny sound, sort of an, "Ip!" escaped, despite her best efforts.
She clamped a hand over her mouth as Hammond and several other people glared at them. She was certain that behind her, her CO had what she privately referred to as 'Smug-bastard Smirk #1' firmly in place.
"Sorry, sir," she apologized quietly to Hammond, who swivelled back to face Felger after giving them a 'this is your last warning' look.
The turkey-drawing trouble-maker tapped 'sorry' in Morse code on her leg and she sighed, glanced around, and casually picked up the pen again.
Since he only had his left-hand free, his doodling abilities were pretty much limited to hand-turkeys. If he got really creative he might figure out how to flip it over and make a cow. But in the meantime, she decided to take over the doodling.
Her artistic abilities were only marginally better than her cooking abilities, but she doodled two stick figures holding hands, gave one of them Daniel's boonie and glasses, made the other one really tall and frowning with an Apophis symbol on his forehead and a staff-weapon in his free-hand, and showed it to him.
She could feel him shaking with silent laughter and he tugged the pen from her hand and added some scenery, until their Daniel and Teal'c were standing on top of a big rainbow with something she assumed was supposed to be the Emerald City in the background.
She added a bunny and a unicorn near the base of the rainbow and he wrote, "Why'd you draw a donkey?"
"It's a unicorn!" she wrote back indignantly. He snickered and must have been looking in Daniel's direction because both he and Teal'c looked at them suspiciously. Sam clutched the notebook to her chest so they couldn't see the picture, and wondered what the hell had gotten into her. Maybe the Colonel had a point about the sap going to their brains... she realized he was tapping something on her leg again and wrote, 'Start over.'
'Do the Doc.' What the hell... She wrote a big question mark on the paper and underlined it three times. He must have realized the weirdness of the request because he pointed at the pictures of Daniel and Teal'c, hard, until she got that he wanted her to draw Janet too.
She tried to think of how to make Janet into a caricature and ignored the fact that his next coded transmission was 'Dirty mind, Carter.' She remembered him calling Janet 'Napoleonic,' so she made her cartoon-Janet extra-short and standing like Napoleon, one hand in her lab coat. Instead of a sword, she made sure to give her a 'big honkin' needle,' even going so far as to give it little sound words like the old Batman show, so that it looked like the needle was actually saying, 'honk! honk!'
She could feel Jack snickering into the back of her neck, trying to be quiet, and was a lot more happy about the fact that she'd just made him laugh during a meeting than she should have been.
Janet jerked the pen from her hand suddenly and they both sobered up. She'd obviously seen the picture. She scribbled something on her own pad and angled it towards them – Big honkin' needles await you BOTH, quit flirting and pay attention! – was written in big block letters.
She felt Jack shift uncomfortably again, no doubt imagining those big honkin' needles... the really big ones could only go in one place... Sam swallowed and mouthed, 'Sorry' to Janet, who scowled once more and got up to make her part of the report, taking their only pen with her.
"Evil little woman," Jack muttered so that only Sam could hear.
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Jack wasn't particularly surprised when he and Sam were asked to stay behind after the briefing was (finally) over. He honestly didn't really feel bad about it either – he knew Hammond well enough to know that George was willing to cut them all kinds of slack while they were stuck like this. And he turned out to be right.
Despite the efforts of several people (mainly Daniel, who started the chorus of 'Ummmmm's as everyone else filed out of the room) to make them feel like naughty children in trouble with the principal, as soon as they were alone, Hammond looked at them both carefully for several moments and shook his head with a 'what am I gonna do with you two' kind of expression on his face.
Jack could tell Carter was about to start apologizing and squeezed her shoulder to get her not to.
"Just... be careful," Hammond finally said, waving them away.
"Yes, sir," they both said.
They penguin-walked (that was Jack's new term for when they tried to walk quickly) out of the room and as soon as they were out of earshot, Carter said, "I thought he was going to be mad."
"Nah. He's really just a big ole teddy bear. Ready to eat?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Good, I'm thinking long, messy strings of spaghetti with extra sauce..." he teased as they got on the elevator.
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After they ate their dinner, Janet had a TV cart wheeled in with a DVD player and flat-out ordered Sam to stay out of her lab for the rest of the night. She promised to come check on them once more before she went home for the evening, and left them arguing over which movie to watch.
Teal'c and Sam both wanted to watch 'Star Trek,' so Daniel agreed to it as well. Jack was trying to get them to watch 'The Simpsons' instead, but nobody else wanted to. He finally lost, and Daniel put the original 'Star Trek' movie in.
"Have you ever even seen this, Jack?" Daniel asked as he and Teal'c sat down on the smaller of the two already-small sofas in the room.
"Yeah... well, the first twenty minutes or so," Jack answered.
Daniel had seen the movie a few times already, twice with Teal'c actually, so he wasn't too bothered with keeping up with the plot. It was much more fun to watch Jack and Sam. Since shortly after they'd all joined SG-1, he had noticed that they did a lot of mostly-silent communicating. But that usually required eye-contact. Now, since they couldn't really look each other fully in the face, they were having a lot of private, almost-whispered conversations that Daniel got a kick out of watching just because they looked so... coupley while they did it. Yup, coupley. He was going to send it in to the OED people with a picture of Jack and Sam as a definition. Okay, maybe not. But he could.
Anyway, it was after one of these conversations that they stretched out on their sides on the other couch. Daniel caught Jack's grimace as they tried to get comfortable, and wondered how his knees and back were holding up during all of this. Sam wasn't heavy or anything, but she was really tall... and Daniel knew Jack hated the stools in Sam's lab more than he himself did.
Janet came back halfway through the movie and surveyed all of them, smiling discreetly. Daniel caught her eye and she nodded slightly at the couch where Jack and Sam were. "If I didn't know better I'd think I was interrupting a double date," she commented.
Daniel and Teal'c looked at each other, Teal'c looking unperturbed as usual even though Daniel was giving him his best yuck-face.
"Anybody need anything before I go home?" Janet asked, and Daniel would have bet she was trying to find a subtle way to see if Jack wanted to be knocked out for the night again.
They all told her they were fine, and she said goodnight. After the first movie was over, it still wasn't very late, and Daniel wasn't surprised when Teal'c got up and wordlessly put in the next movie in the series, stretching their arms out far so that Daniel didn't have to get up too.
He was surprised, however, when Jack and Sam whispered for a few moments and rolled rather ungracefully off the couch as they got to their feet. "We're going to watch 'The Simpsons' in my quarters," Jack said as Sam rummaged through the DVDs Cassie had sent them and found one of the boxed sets. "Have fun with your Vulcans and whatever," he added as they left.
Daniel looked at Teal'c, who looked surprised too. Well, surprised if you knew the guy. "Are they allowed to do that?" Daniel asked rhetorically.
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"Are you sure we're allowed to do this?" Carter asked after they had borrowed ('not stolen, borrowed') a second TV cart and managed to get it into his tiny quarters.
"Hammond didn't order us all to stay together or anything. Besides, I deserve a medal for being quiet during the first movie. I can't watch two 'Star Treks' in one night if Hammond wants Daniel and Teal'c to remain unharmed." Jack answered reasonably, adding, "Besides, you didn't want to watch it either."
"True," she admitted, yawning as he selected a DVD and handed it to her.
"You're not going to fall asleep, are you?" he asked. They probably should go back to Daniel and Teal'c to sleep...
"No, I'm not that tired, sir," Carter said as they stretched out on his narrow bed, like they had been on the couch. It was exactly the same, but he couldn't help but think it was even weirder now that they were alone. And it was his bed.
Maybe this was a bad idea, he thought belatedly. Carter had already started the DVD though, he couldn't exactly back out now.
"Carter?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't fall asleep, okay?"
"I won't," she said.
She had sounded fairly confident at the time, but it occurred to Jack during the second episode they were watching that he was the only one laughing. He craned his neck awkwardly and sighed when he realized Carter was sound asleep.
Well, okay, she could just doze until 'Star Trek' would be over and then he'd wake her up and they could go back to the VIP room with the Bobbsey Twins. He didn't want to be creepy or anything, but he always got a kick out of seeing her asleep – maybe because it was such a rarity. He'd seen her go nearly three days on nothing but coffee, and heard rumors she'd gone even longer a time or two, but he'd quickly noticed off-world that when she did sleep, she certainly seemed to make the most of it.
She always crashed and remained so dead to the world until someone woke her up for her watch that she was the only one of them who could sleep six inches away from Daniel while he snored loud enough to scare everything on the planet away. As long as she was asleep before his racket actually started, she could sleep right through it without budging. Jack had always found it kind of funny: she even slept with single-minded focus. She drooled too, but he and Daniel had never been brave enough to bring that up while she was awake yet.
She shivered and tried to scrunch closer to him for warmth, but there wasn't a whole lot of 'closer' available. He nudged the blanket down by their feet up until he could reach it and tried to cover her with it, but there wasn't a way to cover her well without covering himself. He hoped cuddling under a blanket with a warm, sleeping Carter in his arms, in his bed while watching 'The Simpsons' wouldn't lull him to sleep too, then barely had time to laugh at his own naivety before he nodded off as well.
The next thing he knew, the theme music was playing, infiltrating his oh-so-nice dream. All the episodes on that DVD were over, and he vaguely remembered he was supposed to do something when that happened... but he couldn't remember what. He nuzzled into Carter's neck, knowing in his mostly-asleep state that they weren't really supposed to be sleeping together but for some reason it was okay right now... and maybe since she was hugging one of his arms she wouldn't mind if he kissed her just a little bit, since his lips were already right there on her neck anyway, but not too much or she might wake up, or he might wake up and realize this wasn't even really happening...
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In the morning, Janet let herself into the VIP quarters after receiving no answer to her knocking. It was early, but surely they hadn't all gone to the commissary... not after Daniel and Teal'c's experience there yesterday. And people were still talking about the Colonel and Sam's little performance during the briefing...
She looked around the room in surprise. One of the beds was full, and she suddenly wished for a camera. Teal'c and Daniel were both still asleep, backs pressed together, Daniel curled up in a semi-fetal position. Janet was surprised Teal'c was still asleep – he usually only slept about four or five hours a night. She wondered how late they stayed up watching movies... then her eyes strayed to the very un-slept-in bed next to theirs and she realized she'd lost two of her charges.
She sighed and said, "Daniel, Teal'c, wake up."
Teal'c woke up instantly. Must be a Jaffa thing. He sat up and looked at her calmly. "Good morning, Dr. Fraiser. I apologize for oversleeping."
"It's fine, Teal'c, don't worry about it. Where are Colonel O'Neill and Sam?"
Teal'c looked over to the empty bed and said, "I do not know. They did not rejoin us last night."
"Where'd they go?"
"To O'Neill's room."
"Oh brother," Janet said. "Daniel! Get up!"
Daniel mumbled something in another language and started reaching blindly for his glasses. He sat up, put them on, and looked around, clearly surprised that Teal'c and Janet were looking at him expectantly.
"Wassgoin'on guys?" he asked. He looked around and answered his own question. "Where are Jack and Sam?"
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