Ch 8. Telling Tales

They had gated to another planet and were on a tel-tak on their way to Yu's homeworld. "So, how did you meet Jack?" Daniel asked Joe.

Cat leveled him with a steady stare. "How do you know that we've met?"

"Look, Sam and I have both seen him at both his best and worst. You won't shock us. I just picked up that he had good reason to trust you. Just looking for some history about one of my best friends. I also know that it was no accident that you are accompanying us on this mission and not Team 16." He looked over to Stan and Mike. "No offence meant."

"Okay, Alpha Squad picked him up after he had escaped from Club Med. We were on our way out of country from one of our incursions and he came up to us, looking more like he had escaped from a concentration camp than anybody in the nineties had business looking like."

Blue picked up the narrative. "We shared our supplies and he walked out of Iraq with us. There were a few fire fights along the way and he never broke down like you might expect prisoners of war to. He fought to get home to his family."

Daniel's face darkened at the thought of how Jack was after he lost that family. "Yeah. He was more than a little . . . well, he wasn't Jack after Charlie died. At least not the Jack we know now. I met him not long after Charlie."

"What happened to Charlie?" Cowboy looked more than a little apprehensive.

"He accidentally shot himself with Jack's personal weapon. Jack was in some sort of quasi-retirement and then called up for this suicide mission through the stargate. I guess that was about two months after Charlie died. He once said that Sara could forgive Jack, but never forget what happened. Jack said that he was the opposite. He could never forgive himself, but he could forget - sometimes."

Both Joe and Cowboy looked horrified at the prospect of facing life without their own children.

Lucky broke in, "Well enough of this downer shit. Tell us of your more colorful escapades." His eyes twinkled just a bit.

Cowboy nodded in agreement. "You mean they weren't all colorful? Com'on Lucky, you know The O'Neill better than that."

"S squared, children." Harvard scolded. "I want to hear this."

Jacob smirked. "That man can get into trouble anywhere he goes. I actually think that he likes pissing people off."

"You don't know the half of it, Dad. About the only alien that likes the colonel completely is Thor. Even Freyr doesn't like him much. Well, Lya likes him, too, but Lya likes everybody."

"Okay, I'll start. I've known him longest. Although I think that his funniest escapades are ones that only Teal'c can tell." Sam raised an eyebrow a la Teal'c. "Groundhog's Day." The confusion cleared from Sam's face while Jacob's confusion grew. "Oh come on, Jacob. You've seen the movie. Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell? Bill Murray had to relive the same day over and over and over? Jack and Teal'c had such an experience. They are the only ones who know what all happened and they aren't telling everything."

"Let's see, the System Lords have a price on our heads. It mostly started when the colonel threw a knife through Heru'ur's hand. Well, it started before that with Teal'c turning on Apophis and becoming The Shol'va. Then, it was me becoming host to Jolinar. Seemingly meek Daniel over there has done his share to piss off the System Lords, too."

"When I first met Jack, he was a complete hard ass. It was almost like he was an automaton."

Joe could practically hear the warning. 'I don't care if you are a hard ass or not. I've dealt with them before.'

"I had just figured out what the gate was and I was going to go through it come Hell or high water. So I lied. I said that I could get the team back on Earth. He was sent to blow up anything that moved on the other side of the gate with a nuclear bomb. No one else knew about it." There were lots of jaws that dropped at that notion.

"Unfortunately, before I could figure out how to get them back, we were captured by Ra. Of course, by this time I was married and didn't even know it!" His smile was melancholy. "I was killed for the first time, but stuck in a sarcophagus because I spoke their language and was wearing the amulet of Ra. I think that he wanted to know who the pretender was. I busted Jack, Kowalski, and Ferretti out. The people of Nagada rebelled against Ra. Jack set the bomb and we ringed it up on Ra's mothership."

"Just a tick, did you say that you 'died' for the first time? Doesn't that suggest that you 'died' more than once?" Stan frowned.

"Ah yeah, I've died four times to date. I flatlined one other occasion so that doesn't count." Daniel's gave a slightly cynical bark of laughter. "It has simply become a habit for the four of us to survive."

Daniel then became melancholy. "I stayed on Abydos and lived there for one golden year. It was the happiest time of my life."

Sam saw her friend's mood and tried to lighten it. "Not fair! Everybody else I know got to meet the colonel in the middle of a great adventure! Escape! Saving the people of a world from slavery! Throwing off the yoke of oppression! What was my first impression for him? I told him off! I informed him that just because my reproductive organs were inside instead of outside I could still handle any danger thrown my way! And then, I challenge him to arm wrestle!"

Harvard was trying his best not to laugh. Sam leveled a look at him. "My wife, PJ, said very similar things to me when we first met. She's a FInComm agent. We had issues. I wanted to protect her from the dangers of the world and she wanted to be in the thick of things. It was a long road."

"Well the colonel has never had problems with wanting to protect me because I'm a woman, he just isn't too crazy about scientists. It's pretty much me, Daniel, Janet, and Jonas that he gets along with. Thus why I needed to prove I was tough enough. Otherwise, how often does a theoretical astrophysicist get out in the field and be a soldier? Long about our third mission he finally saw that I could take care of myself. However, since then, I did fly an asteroid through the Earth once. And then there was the time I blew up a star."

"Ok, there's a couple of stories I've GOT to hear. How did you manage these great feats?"

There was an alert sounding in the control room at the same time the al-kesh lurched to a halt in open space. Jacob and Teal'c excused themselves and ran from the room. "Sam, we're going to need your help down in the engine room. There is something wrong with the hyperdrive.""Come on, Joe. I understand that you have a mind for engines. You should be able to help figure this out. Harvard, Cowboy, Dad might need your help up in the control room. This isn't exactly a friendly part of space." Daniel, too, was heading out the door to see if he could help somewhere.

A/N As always, please review. There is one more chapter written so far. I don't know when I'll get caught up and write more. Muse seems to make her demands in fits and starts. Still, progress is being made. I hope you are enjoying the story. Everlovin'