"Sha'uri!" Daniel says as they enter his house. He pronounces her name with a different accent than anyone else. He walks over and gives his wife a huge kiss. She can tell that the other two wives, tending small children on the floor, are jealous. But Daniel doesn't appear to notice.
"Did you have a good day, Meye?" he asks, calling her something in her native tongue as he touches the mound on her stomach with no small amount of affection.
"Yes, Samantha and I went shopping," she says.
Then Daniel focuses his eyes on Samantha for the first time, "You're Jack's new wife, then?"
She nods.
"He did well, you're beautiful," Daniel acknowledges with more honesty than flattery.
"She's also brilliant. A scientist," Sha'uri defends her friend.
"What's your field?" he asks with a smile. Sam isn't used to this. Usually the fact that she had illusions of a career was treated with derision.
"Well, mostly I've been working with improving Goa'uld technology. I'd like to do some work on pure physics now that I have the time."
"I'm an archeologist myself. Egypt is a great place for that. We're lucky to live in the land of excile," he says.
Sam nods. A few generations back, there had been a practice of uprooting "troublemakers" and moving them near the gate. It was a foolish practice (if indeed gods could be foolish) and was discontinued long before she was ever born. However, the decedents of those exiled were still concentrated in Egypt, causing the people there to be both brighter and more rebellious than other places.
"So you study first contact?" she asks.
The Goa'uld make a big deal about how "primitive", "young" and "unworthy" humans had been before the Goa'uld came. They paid a lot of people a lot of money to perpetuate this story. She sort of lost respect for Daniel when she found out that he's one of them.
He laughs, "Ah… no. I do original work. I don't work on commission. If I don't make enough from my ideas, I find other ways to feed my family. It's bad science that starts with a conclusion before it gets any evidence. Actually, I work mostly with the pre-contact era. There was civilization back then. To be sure, it wasn't much of one, but who knows what it would have been like if we had been left alone?"
"That's a dangerous thing to do," she says, her disappointment turning to admiration.
Daniel grins, "Jack calls me Space Money now and again. You know, after the game where people get high from nearly strangling themselves. He says I like near-death. But I don't, you know, death just seems to find me and stare me down," he says seriously. Then Daniel's face breaks into a bashful grin, "Sorry, that was a bit serious for a first meeting."
"Daniel is always serious," Farida explains with a laugh.
"Sam, you don't be a stranger," Daniel says. "If you need anything, you just come over here and let us know."
"Thank you," Sam says, taking the baby and the packages and heading back to her own house.
-0-0-0-
"What time does Daddy normally get back?" Sam asks the sleeping child as she checks on him once again. She wishes that she'd asked that question of Jack before he left that morning.
It's late. She's bored. The house doesn't feel like hers, and she doesn't feel like she can go to bed while her husband isn't in the house.
"Maybe I'll just sit down for a little bit," she says, stopping her pacing in order to sit in a chair.
-0-0-0-
The sound of something hitting the wall very close to her startles Sam awake.
"Quiet, you're going to wake her up!" Jack whispers, shockingly close to her head.
"I'm awake," Sam tells him, standing up from the chair. She sees two strong men carrying Jack between them on a stretcher. The stretcher hitting the wall of the house is the very thing that woke her up.
"You didn't have to wait up for me," Jack says.
"Eager young wife," one of them men says with a wry grin.
"Shut up, Kowalski," Jack mutters.
"Hey, she's bound to be disappointed for a bit. I can't believe you managed to get yourself injured so soon after your marriage. You won't get to enjoy your marriage bed for a while," Kowalski teases.
"What happened?" she asks, concerned, as she moves things out of the way so that they can carry the stretcher toward the bedroom.
A small woman with dark hair walks in behind the men, "He's going to be all right."
"But what happened?" she demands.
"The usual, he got shot with a staff weapon," the other man says.
"Do you or don't you understand the meaning of the word 'classified', Mitchell?" Jack bellows at him from the stretcher. The woman flinches at the large sound, but hides it well behind the stoic face which takes its place a second later.
"Come on, dude, she's your wife, it's not like you seriously believed that you were going to be able to keep all of this a secret from her, did you?" Mitchell offers.
"You can't survive a staff weapon blast," Sam says firmly, having forgotten Jack had already confessed having done that miracle himself.
"Well, thank goodness that particular piece of Goa'uld propaganda is a lie, or the resistance would be out of business in a bad weekend," the woman says.
"Janet is being modest, she's the main reason we survive staff weapon blasts," Kowalski says, with a smile for the young woman.
"I would say that the special staff blast weapons vest probably had something to do with that," Janet says.
"And who was one of the people who invented that jacket?" Jack asks with a smirk.
It comforts Sam to know that her husband hasn't lost his sense of humor. Sam follows them down the hallway. Then they roll her husband onto his bed.
"Geez Jack, you didn't let her personalize this place at all. It doesn't even look like a woman lives here," Mitchell says, looking around the bedroom.
"I keep my stuff in another room. It's nice to be able to spread my stuff out," Sam defends her husband quickly.
"Ah, but the fun part of marriage is making two lives one. Converging," Mitchell says with a smile.
"Your marriage is new, and you've only got one wife," Kowalski reminds him, "You just wait until you've got more than one wife. Then it pays to have a wife's room separate from a husband's. In a few years, he might have a second wife, and Sam will be spending some nights in her room."
"Don't talk about second wife when he's been married for less than 48 hours," Janet scolds the men.
"I'm not going to be marrying again," Jack says.
"Does it hurt?" Sam asks, lying down next to him gingerly on the bed.
"Nope," he says cheerfully.
"Did you figure out yet that your husband is a compulsive liar?" Mitchell asks.
"Listen, Sam, I will warn you that Jack is a very bad patient."
"I resemble that comment," Jack says.
"Wait, you're just going to leave him alone?" Sam says in terror.
"No, we're leaving him with his wife," Kowalski says.
"But I don't know what to do! I've never taken care of someone before," Sam protests.
"If you run into trouble, get Sha'uri to help. When Jack is hurt badly, she stays with him. But he's been worse than this and stayed alone. I'll be by to check on him in the morning," Janet comforts her.
"Thank you, thank you all for bringing him back," she says as they file out.
"The charade is up, you can go back to your bed now," Jack says.
"You heard Janet, I need to take care of you," she says not moving an inch.
"No, you heard Janet, I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself. Besides, I promised your father that we would have separate bedrooms."
"Well, it turns out, I can make choices independent of my father, and it's not like anything is going to happen with you wounded like that. Now, are you going to tell me what happened?" Sam protests.
"I can't tell you that, Sam."
"I'm a big girl," she says.
"I know, but I really can't tell you. Most members of the resistance don't even know what went on there. I'm not going to be able to share a lot of that part of my life with you, I'm sorry."
"Did you win?" she asks.
He grins, "It isn't really that easy to talk about winning and losing in cases like this. But yeah, we accomplished the mission objective."
"Can I do anything to make it hurt less?" she asks.
"Well, in a few hours I might have you make me some painkilling tea that Janet gave me to keep in my cupboard. But right now, I'm going to sleep."
"Ok," she says.
"You are seriously going to stay?"
"Yep."
"I'm too tired to make you leave."
"Good."
-0-0-0-
A beautiful smell greets Jack's nose. What is that smell? Something delightfully fresh and feminine. He feels a hair tickling the inside of his nose. Huh, what hair is in his face?
He pulls his head back a little and opens his eyes to take a peek. Ah, blonde hairs. Blonde hairs of his brand new wife.
Her whole body is snuggled tight against him. That's dangerous. But it also hurts like hell, considering the fact that she's lodged herself right into his wound.
He pulls himself a way a few inches. She makes a whine of protest, even though she is still fast asleep, and she tries pulls him closer.
"Sam, you're going to have to let me go," he says.
She opens her eyes and look at him in surprise. "I'm pretty sure that you've got me," she says with a giggle.
"I don't think so," he says grumpily.
She lifts up a hand which is, certainly, trapped over her body, and, much to his embarrassment, is also touching her butt.
"You started it, you must have rolled over by me. I'm too sore to move," he pouts, hating to be proven wrong. Hating even more the fact that he's moving in on her after having promised everyone, most of all himself, that he was not going to do that to her.
"Jack, what side of the bed are we on?" she asks with a giggle in her voice.
"Well, you were the one that had the bright idea of sharing a bed in the first place," he says with a bit of bite.
"I'll get you that tea," she says, deciding not to tease him anymore.
-0-0-0-
"You seem to be healing up well, how do you feel?" Janet asks Jack as she enters his bedroom later that day.
"Good," Jack mutters, not even looking at Janet.
Sam looks at her Janet's though, "You go on missions?"
"Not often, she's too valuable as a medic," Jack answers for her.
"But she went on a mission with you yesterday," Sam says with a nod.
"She wasn't there," Jack says, looking at his wife in confusion.
"What happened?" Sam asks Janet, lightly touching a cut on Janet's face.
"It's nothing, it's just a touch of barb wire that caught me when I was sneaking into work. It's an occupational hazard."
"You know, we have gates," Jack teases her lightly. He obviously believes the story.
Sam is more skeptical. "You didn't notice the barbed wire until it hit you in the face?"
"Sometimes, things sneak up on you," Janet says with a chill in her voice that doesn't escape Jack's notice, even though he has no idea what it means.