"I don't think we need to do any more experiments along that line except to establish the limits," Sam agreed, adding that conclusion to the day's notes. Daniel would translate them to a code of his invention in Ancient and they would burn the originals in the fireplace.
"I'd say that Liz MacDuff was at least 10 feet away from us when we picked up on her," Daniel said, "so the limit has to be at least that far."
"She was looking in your direction and definitely thinking warm thoughts and you weren't exactly unaware of her," Sam snarled.
"In the first place, you haven't a leg to stand on when it comes to noticing good looking members of the opposite sex. Do you think I don't catch what you try to suppress when you look at Mitchell sometimes? In the second place, Liz could have been noticing someone behind me, Sam. Just because you're obsessed with me doesn't mean everyone else is."
Sam stuck her tongue out and tossed a pillow at him. "Daniel, if you have no idea by now of how most women react to you, it's willful and deliberate ignorance on your part. Practically every woman we walk by projects something."
"Do you have any idea how many guys I've been tempted to punch out in the past few days?" Daniel asked her. "You have quite an effect on the male population. Of course, if someone's looking at us together, we don't really know which one of us they're reacting to."
Sam made a face. "I really don't want to intrude into people's personal sexual preferences. This empath thing is a case of toooo much information most of the time!"
Daniel picked her feet up and put them on his lap and began to massage them. He watched her face relax and felt the tension leave her physical body and her emotions. She dropped the notepad on the floor and said, "The rest of my body wants equal time. Come here."
The next day was a Saturday and it found Sam and Daniel parked on a quiet suburban street. "I thought you were saying we were getting too much information and we're about to tail Jack's ex-wife? That seems like rather aggressive pursuit of information to me," Daniel said, sipping coffee from a large traveling mug and looking at his wife over his glasses.
"Daniel," she said apropos of nothing, "when did you have lasic surgery?"
"Huh?"
She pounced. "Okay, not lasic but something. I can tell you're hiding something." She grabbed his glasses from his face before he could stop her and put them on. "These don't have any correction in them!" She removed them and brandished them at him. "Explain yourself."
Daniel looked at her sheepishly. "Okay. When I came back after I was ascended, my vision was probably 20/20. People were weirded out enough and I didn't want it to seem like I wasn't the same person when everyone expected me to need my glasses. The glasses always seemed to help make people listen to me more seriously as a scientist too."
"You fraud," she said. "I bet you deliberately fail your eye exams. Also, Daniel, when I first met you and you were this very young, hunky guy, you might have needed some help with credibility but… "
"So I'm not young or I'm not hunky?"
"What do you think?" she asked and leaned over and kissed him.
"What made you ask in the first place?" he laughed.
"Daniel, you don't wear them half the time. It's absolutely erratic when you seem to need them and when you don't. I bet Cameron figures it out one of these days. Why not just tell everyone you got lasic and quit fooling with them."
He expelled a breath and glanced down the street. "Sam, Sam, she's getting in her car."
Sam took the car out of park and hung back until Sara had pulled out and was almost to the corner before leaving their parking place. "You are really into this whole cop, surveillance thing, aren't you?" he asked her.
"Daniel, we need to know if she still cares about Jack the way Jack so clearly still cares about her. You felt it just like I did when he was remembering their wedding. You don't need our empathic abilities to draw the conclusion that she's really on his mind with this business of thinking he sees her everywhere."
They followed Sara to a Wal-Mart. She parked and they parked two rows away. Inside they were immediately greeted by a friendly woman who welcomed them to the store. They smiled at her, but the slight delay was enough for them to lose sight of Sara. At least, it was very refreshing that Daniel could sense that the greeter quite honestly did seem to be glad to be there and glad they were too. They had learned to prize sincere, happy people.
"Let's split up. You go work your way in from the right half and I'll start at the left half," Daniel suggested.
Daniel felt faintly idiotic, cruising the aisles looking for a woman he had only met once and would have to count on recognizing mainly from the clothes she had been wearing when she left her house. In the plastic containers aisle, he spotted her picking up a stack of individual serving type of containers. With any luck, you're not going to be needing those any more, he thought, steeling himself for the encounter. "Hi," he said brightly. "Haven't we met?"
Sara stood and looked at him, her expression pleasant but confused. Daniel was grateful that so far she wasn't nervous. He was grateful that he had shaved off that God awful beard. Sam had told him after the fact that it had made him look like a serial killer. "I don't think so," Sara said.
"Be patient with me a moment," Daniel said. He continued to work on looking as inoffensive and nonthreatening as possible. "I know," he said triumphantly. "It was years ago, about 7 or 8 years maybe. I was working with Jack, Jack O'Neill, when there was that incident with the child who looked a lot like your son, Charlie. I'm Daniel Jackson."
She went from being calm and mildly interested to generating some waves of powerful emotion. "You work with my ex-husband?" she asked. It came out almost as a squeak.
"He's been promoted so we stay in touch, but we don't actually work together any more. I don't know if you heard, but he's a general now and he's got a high powered assignment in DC. I'm still at Cheyenne Mountain. Actually, that's not exactly true. I mean about Jack being in DC. He's decided to take a few months leave of absence here in town and regroup. There's been a lot of pressure in the last couple of years."
"So is he all right?" she asked. She was struggling to show only moderate and polite interest but oh my, the yearning under the surface.
"He's okay. Coming off of a lot of stress as I said and maybe a little lonely."
"He's not involved with anyone then I guess?" Her façade was still casually polite but underneath it was another story.
Daniel could feel Sam approaching before she came around the corner and interrupted the conversation. "Sam, honey, look who I ran into."
Sam came toward him, maintaining a polite but puzzled expression. "Remember when we worked that incident with Jack years ago, you know with the child? This is Sara. Sara, this is my wife, Sam Carter Jackson."
Sam's face cleared. "How delightful to see you again."
"It's really nice to see you too," Sara said politely.
"This is going to sound really crazy," Daniel said. "I mean you don't really know us, but we'd love to talk with you a little and get some insight into Jack. We've been his best friends for years, but some things are still a bit of a mystery to us and lately he's not really been himself."
Sara was clearly torn. "I don't want to offend you, but I really don't know you. I mean I do remember meeting you both sort of, but I don't really know anything about your relationship with Jack. Jack wouldn't welcome me talking about him with people I didn't know anything about." She laughed. "Hell, Jack wouldn't welcome me talking about him with his closest friends."
"Of course. You're absolutely right. That was really a stupid suggestion. In fact, we owe you an apology. How about you let us take you out to lunch and we won't talk about Jack at all." Daniel could sense a lot of loneliness. He knew she was tired of eating alone and keeping her own company. He worked at projecting as much friendliness and warmth her way as he could. Sam and he had come to the conclusion that they did have some limited ability to project feelings.
Sam took up the banner, "There's a Cracker Barrel right next door. We can meet you there." Sara was hesitating. "Look Jack's saved both of our lives, multiple times. We've been on a lot of very secret missions together." Sam faked chagrin at having been indiscrete and Daniel tried to look disapproving. "I shouldn't have told you that." She sighed. "The thing is we owe him a lot and, well, he's let some things slip about how important you still are to him. Let's just say that doing something nice for you would definitely make us feel that we were paying him back a little." It worked. Now Sara probably felt like she would be prying information out of them and not the other way around. At least that was Daniel's guess at the excitement and curiosity she was now feeling.
"I haven't done anything impulsive for ages," Sara said. "Why not? It's not like my calendar is all filled up."
"You're definitely playing this thing by ear, aren't you?" Sam asked Daniel as they went out to their car. "This is beginning to remind me of one of Jack's plan C's."
"Works for him." He stopped and put his hands on her shoulders. "Do I dare call Jack and try to get him to meet us for lunch?"
"NOW?"
"Pushing it too fast?" Daniel asked, searching her blue eyes.
"Well, yes, but I don't know if we'll have another shot any time soon so I guess I have to go along with you. Look, how about we call him. He had the chemo on Monday so he's probably feeling up to it by now. If he can't or won't come at the drop of a hat like this, then it wasn't meant to be."
They got in the car and Daniel called Jack on his cell. It rang repeatedly until the answering machine picked up. "Jack, it's Daniel. It's about 12:15. Look we're out running errands and decided to stop at the Cracker Barrel next to Wal-Mart on Carson Blvd for lunch. If you get this anytime in the next half hour, why don't you come on over. You know Cracker Barrel. We won't get a table for a good half hour anyway. We just found out something you will never believe about Davis and Woolsey."
"Davis and Woolsey?"
"Hey, I was improvising. Help me think of something exciting about those two guys."
As Daniel predicted, it was a half hour wait before they were able to be seated at Cracker Barrel. They used the time exactly as the marketing geniuses who had created the chain intended, browsing through the extensive gift shop that constituted the waiting area. Daniel suggested, tongue in cheek, that maybe Sam and he should register at Cracker Barrel for wedding gifts. The service wasn't offered, of course, but going through the collection of mostly tacky mixed with some good and coming up with anything they would want and then thinking of how they would use it got them all laughing.
To be sure there was a place for Jack, they got a table for five. Daniel told Sara that their friends and coworkers, Cameron Mitchell and Carolyn Lam, ate there frequently and, on the off chance they wandered in, they wanted to be able to invite them to join their party. Of course this resulted in the announcement out in the gift shop, "Jackson, party of five, Jackson, five," when their name came up on the waiting list. This cracked Sam up and got a smile from a couple of the other waiting dinners. Daniel confessed he had always wanted to do it.
"I guess you can't name any of your children Tito, Germaine, or Michael," Sara said, displaying more knowledge of the group than either Daniel or Sam possessed.
"I, uh, need to go to the ladies room," Sam suddenly announced and bolted out of her chair.
"I hope she's okay," Sara said. "You're not already working on a little LaToya or Janet are you?" Daniel realized that she thought Sam had morning sickness but Daniel could see that Sam had spotted Jack and was leading him over to ensure that he didn't get away. As they had schemed, Sara's back was to the door and she was blissfully unaware of what was about to happen.
"The crazy thing is, Jack, remember how you kept saying that you thought you had seen Sara? We actually ran into her just now," Sam said, just as they reached the table.
Jack went rigid and froze in place. Sara turned in her chair at the name Jack and was white as a sheet. Sam literally dragged Jack to a chair and pushed him into it. "Look who we found," Sam said.
Sara gave her a betrayed, wounded look, but then she looked at her ex-husband's frozen expression and the stiff lines of his body and her face transformed into a soft, tentative smile. "Hello, Jack," she said. "It's really good to see you."
Jack cleared his throat. "Sara, this is amazing. You look exactly the way you did the last time I saw you."
"I hope that's a good thing," she said and laughed a little.
The waitress, Antoinette according to her name tag, arrived and they ordered. Daniel couldn't help but notice, that with her Day-Glo hair, she wasn't the run of the mill Cracker Barrel waitress. Jack and Sara simply seconded Sam's order. They clearly didn't care what they ordered and they didn't eat much of it. When Antoinette came back to refill the coffee, she stage whispered to Jack, "I could have told you that you wouldn't like that girly salad. Are you sure I can't get you a mess of bacon or ham and some eggs?" Jack looked at her with real appreciation, grateful that she noticed his preferences, Daniel thought, in contrast to Sam and Daniel riding roughshod over him. Still Jack shook his head. Daniel worried that even when he wasn't nauseated from the chemo, Jack just didn't eat.
Jack said relatively little, but he didn't take his eyes away from Sara except to occasionally glare at Daniel or Sam. Daniel knew there would be hell to pay later for this transparent set up. Sara was delightful. It was clear to Sam and Daniel why Jack had fallen in love with her in the first place. Toward the end of the meal, Sam decided it was time for another risky move.
"Daniel and I are really in a bad place. It's my fault really since I'm the one insisting on a band at our reception. Neither of us can dance, but I've always had this dream of dancing at my wedding. Jack offered to teach us, but he realized we really needed a woman to work with us too. He was telling us that you guys were quite the dancers. You don't suppose you could help Jack teach us to dance?"
Sara bit her lip. She was putting out both desire and fear. Daniel supposed she was afraid Jack would feel crowded. When Jack didn't say anything, Sara said, "What do you think Jack? I haven't danced in years, but maybe it's like riding a bicycle."
Then Daniel's lie early in the afternoon suddenly became fact. "Well, hello, hello," Cam said. They looked up to see the officer and a moderately unhappy looking Carolyn. There was a flurry of introductions. Daniel got up and pulled a sixth chair from an adjoining table and insisted that Cam and Carolyn join them.
"I thought you were making them up," Sara whispered to Daniel.
He whispered back, "Actually I kind of was."
"Do you guys swing dance?" Sam asked.
Carolyn groaned. "One of us does."
Cam said, "I keep telling her she'd really enjoy it if she gave it a chance."
"I've got an idea," Sam said. "Jack and Sara just agreed to give Daniel and me dancing lessons, for the reception, you know. You guys are in the wedding party and you're going to have to dance. Why don't we all get together at our place next weekend and we can have a group lesson." Daniel quickly reviewed Jack's chemo schedule, as he was sure Sam had before she made the suggestion. It should be almost time for another treatment. Hopefully, he'd be physically up to it since the real sickness so far was confined to the first three or four days at most.
She turned to Jack and Carolyn who looked totally stunned by how fast the situation had gotten away from them. "Would that be okay with you guys?"
Cam seemed to take their agreement as a given and before they could get themselves together enough to respond, suggested, "If you're going to get the wedding party up to speed, you'd better bring Teal'c into it to."
"I bet Bay would be glad to come and act as his partner," Carolyn offered. They segued into logistical planning with the two instructors still looking completely poleaxed and unable to get a word in edgewise.
That evening, as they cuddled in front of the TV watching the Battlestar Galactica episode they had recorded earlier, Daniel told Sam. "We're doing the right thing for everyone else, Sam, with the dancing lessons, but I wish to God there was some way out of it."
"Something really bad happened to you with dancing," she stated. There was no question about the feelings of humiliation and unhappiness rolling off Daniel.
"I was years ahead of myself in school. I didn't fit in and I certainly didn't know how to behave in social situations. I got drafted to take my foster parents' daughter to some dance and it was a nightmare. They were sniggering at me and my awkward attempts to dance with the poor girl and she was dying of embarrassment."
"Oh Daniel," Sam sighed, "but think of all the people who were big deals in high school who are loosing their hair, overweight, and in dead end jobs today. Then look at you Dr. Dr. Daniel Jackson, interstellar hero, and all around hunk. He who laughs last, laughs loudest."
"The people we were as teenagers don't ever really go away Sam," Daniel said. "They're hiding in there somewhere."
"Really," she said, pulling back and looking at him thoughtfully. "What sort of sexual fantasies did teenaged Danny have anyway?"
Daniel couldn't believe how embarrassed the question made him. "For God's sake, Sam, I may not have been able to get a date, but that doesn't mean I wasn't as horny as the next guy. I have NO intention of discussing this."
"I'll tell you mine if you'll tell me yours," she offered.
He was still too embarrassed to be affected by the desire she was beginning to project. He had a sinking feeling she wasn't going to leave this alone. "It was just typical stuff. Some beautiful, very special, girl is crazy for me and can't get enough of me."
"What exactly does she do?"
"Sam, give it up."
"What exactly does she do? You won't be sorry. Tell me."
"To begin with she rips off my clothes," he offered, warily. Sam began ripping his clothes off.
"And…"
Daniel was finally beginning to get into this. "She starts kissing me all over and I do mean all over." Daniel moaned with pleasure as Sam began to act out that part of the fantasy. Daniel thought to himself before he lost the capability to think rationally, who says dreams don't come true?