A/N: Sorry this one took a while to get out. My grandfather has been sick for a long time and passed away yesterday. I will be out of the country for the funeral for several days so I wanted to get what I had done posted since it will probably be a while before I have the next part done. It may also be a while after that before I am in the right mindset to write a funny story. Thank you all for reading and I hope you continue to enjoy the story.

Ch 9

The rest of dinner passed uneventfully and pleasantly. The kids loved the spaghetti and wolfed down large portions, getting sauce all over their faces and shirts in the process, and they each earned their first dollar when someone spilled coffee at a nearby table and let out a loud expletive. Under Hammond's stern glare, the offending Captain had handed a crumpled bill to each delighted kid, and everyone else saw that the General had not been joking and determined to watch their mouths.

The spaghetti mess on top of the fact that the kids were pretty ripe to begin with from their afternoon of playing meant that they definitely needed to get cleaned up when they were done. Jack thought that fell under Fraiser's purview. She WAS their doctor, after all. "So, Doc, why don't you take the kids for their baths and I'll come get them for bed in, what, an hour?" he suggested hopefully.

She eyed him suspiciously, but then took pity on all of them. "All right, come on guys, let's go get you two cleaned up," she said, smiling at them both. "I'll bring them to you in the VIP suite, sir."

They grumbled a bit but obeyed, following her out the door.

Jack took advantage of his free time to grab a quick shower for himself. He had just settled in on the couch in the VIP suite, enjoying the few moments of peace and quiet, and was going to relax until the kids showed up when the phone rang.

He picked it up with a frown, knowing something must have happened with the kids. "O'Neill."

"Colonel, you'd better come to the infirmary," he heard Janet say over someone's wailing. She said something else he didn't quite catch, but he assumed it didn't matter much what she was trying to say - the screaming definitely told him he needed to be there, whatever the problem was.

He high-tailed it to the infirmary and heard the screaming as soon as he got off the elevator. One of the kids sounded like they were being murdered. He hurried into the infirmary and quickly took in the scene in front of him. Daniel was standing there wrapped in a towel, dripping water everywhere and looking very worried.

Janet was just finishing wrestling a screaming, yowling, flailing, and kicking Sam Carter into her new nightgown - the one he hadn't been a bit surprised she'd gravitated towards instantly. The short-sleeved thing was navy and covered in yellow stars and moons.

"What the hell is going on?" Jack demanded.

The wailing stopped long enough for Sam to notice him and scramble away from Janet and head straight for him, screaming once more as she practically scrambled up him like she was climbing a tree. He caught her under the armpits and she latched onto him, muffling her sobs in his tee-shirt. Having no idea what could have set her off so much, he doubted he'd be able to hear an explanation until he got her quiet, because seriously, that volume was just not human! He was surprised the emergency klaxons weren't going off.

"Sam, calm down, breathe," he tried, rubbing her back.

"She got scareded in the shower," Daniel tried to explain, shouting with his hands over his ears, as Janet approached him with his new dinosaur pajamas.

Scared in the shower? Okay, Jack definitely didn't see that one coming.

He sat down on the edge of the nearest bed and murmured to the still-howling girl quietly while she sobbed, brushing her hair away from her face, frowning when his hand got all soapy - she still had shampoo in her hair, apparently. . He rubbed her back instead and gradually her sobbing died down until she was just clinging to his shirt tiredly and sniffling and whimpering occasionally.

"Sam, what happened? The shower scared you?"

"I don't like the water on my head!" she cried. "I always take baths at home I don't like showers!"

"I can see that," he said mildly, wondering how long that phase of her life had lasted. "But we don't really have bath tubs here, honey, it's a military base."

"That's what Dr. Janet said," she whined.

He gave her a few more minutes to calm down further, then said, "What are we gonna do about your hair? It's all soapy. I guess the doc gave up on rinsing you out amidst all the screeching?"

"I dunno, I guess. I wasn't payin much attention to her," Sam admitted.

"I can imagine," Jack said. "Okay, come on, we'll let her rinse you out in the sink. It'll be just like in the tub."

"Noooo," Sam whined, clinging to his shirt more tightly.

"Sam you can't walk around with shampoo in your hair forever," he tried to explain gently.

She sniffled and rubbed her nose. "You do it. I don't want her to do it."

"Okay, come on."

He picked her up and took her over to the sink, trying to remember exactly how Sara had done this with Charlie. He set her down on the counter next to the sink and looked around, grabbing an empty beaker and a towel, completely oblivious to the fact that Janet and Daniel were both watching with amusement and interest, respectively. He folded the towel to be a neck rest on the side of the sink and switched the water on, waiting for it to get warm. Sam was eyeing it warily. "It's okay, your head's not going under the water," he promised.

Janet, seeing what he was planning, brought the shampoo over. "I didn't get any further than globbing it on top of her head," she explained apologetically. "I'm so sorry, sweetie, I had no idea you would be so scared," she added to Sam.

"I don't like showers," Sam said firmly.

"Clearly. Hey, why don't Daniel and I go find you guys some hot chocolate," she offered with a warm smile.

"With cookies too?" Sam asked, rubbing her eye.

"Sure," Janet said.

"You hypocrite," Jack muttered to her as she led the worried looking little boy out of the infirmary. He turned back to Sam. "Okay, Miss Carter, step into my Salon."

She laughed but he could tell she was still a little nervous. Still, she let him scoot her into position so she was lying on the counter with her head hanging into the sink. He used the beaker to pour the water so it didn't get in her face or startle her by pelting her, and she was fine. He washed her hair carefully, rinsing out all the suds, which took forever with the beaker, and finally helped her sit up. "There, all done. That wasn't so bad, was it?"

She shook her head, sending water droplets flying everywhere. He set her back down on the bed he'd used before and grabbed one of the dry towels Fraiser had brought in. "Not scared of towels, are ya?" he asked lightly.

Giggling, she shook her head, laughing underneath the towel as he made a show out of roughly towel-drying her hair. When he finally stopped, and tossed the towel aside, he laughed. Her damp hair was sticking up in a hundred directions. She reminded him of the little Nox boy who had been so taken with her all those years ago.

He handed her the brush Fraiser had used on Daniel already, and started mopping up some of the water he'd splashed everywhere, not wanting anyone to slip.

"Uh, Colonel?" she called after a minute. "I need some more help I think."

He turned back to her in alarm and groaned. The hairbrush was stuck in her hair, sticking out comically at a forty-five degree angle.

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"And then we saw all these things called video games, and Colonel Jack said he has some at his house and if we get to go there we can play them…" Daniel was chattering animatedly to Janet, having hardly stopped to breathe in telling her all about their day as she had taken him to the commissary to fetch the snack they were after, once she had promised him Sam would be okay.

Janet, who of course knew Daniel to be one of the most talkative adult men she'd ever met, was still taken aback at the non-stop barrage of information she was being presented with from the child version.

"And Sam was saying it was weird how none of the toys are the same and everything is different here, like way more com… com… complicated, and Jack just said it was a really special toy store. Can I have a cookie now, before Sam?" he asked hopefully, surprising her by the abrupt change in topic. Realizing he probably couldn't eat and talk at the same time, she handed him a cookie wordlessly as they got back on the elevator.

The cookie kept him occupied and they entered the infirmary silently. Janet was glad they were able to enter without being noticed, and really, really wished she had a camera all of a sudden, at the sight that greeted them.

She doubted she had ever seen Jack O'Neill concentrating so hard on something in all the years she'd known him. He was standing behind one of the infirmary beds, bent awkwardly over the blonde head in front of him, carefully combing out the mass of wet tangles as gingerly as if he were diffusing a bomb. The little girl in front of him couldn't have presented a more different picture from when Janet had left. Looking completely calm and supremely unconcerned with the current state of her hair - which had to be a tribute to the Colonel's gentleness, Janet was sure - she was in turn brushing the mane and tail of a stuffed unicorn with a similar look of concentration to the one Jack was wearing.

"Sam, I bringed you a cookie!" Daniel called, breaking the silence before Janet had a chance to figure out how to get a picture of this. Maybe the security cameras…

Sam looked over at them and grinned, all traced of her earlier trauma completely forgotten. "Good, cuz all that crying made me hungry!"

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After the cookies and hot chocolate, Janet only let them leave the infirmary after O'Neill promised her he had bought them toothbrushes today and they were in the bathroom in the VIP suite, just waiting to be used. She was glad to see that between O'Neill calming Sam down, and Janet bribing the girl with the bedtime snack, Sam didn't seem to be harboring any resentment towards Janet for the horror scene that had been the attempted shower, as long as Janet kept a respectable distance, that is. After Daniel hugged Janet goodnight cheerfully and gave her a somewhat chocolatey kiss on the cheek as well, Sam had even bravely followed suit with a hug of her own.

Jack led them back to the VIP suite. As soon as they were inside, Sam asked, "Where's Uncle Teal'c?"

"He… went to his own room, to go to bed," Jack said, deciding kel-no-reem loosely fell under the category of 'going to bed.'

"But we didn't say night-night to him," Daniel said, looking worried.

"It's okay, you'll see him in the morning. He's a big boy he's used to going to bed all on his own," Jack smirked.

"He IS big," Sam agreed, as though that settled the matter. "But we don't have to go to bed right now, do we Colonel? I'm not tired at all!"

He looked down at her hopeful smile and sighed. The snack had clearly boosted both their energy stores. "What do you guys want to do?"

They looked at each other and grinned.

Twenty minutes later, Jack felt like he was about to fall asleep himself, despite the fact that he was trying desperately to stay awake to keep an eye on them. Daniel was happily building away with Legos. Sam had played with him for a while but quickly grew bored with the complex city he was attempting to construct. She'd wandered off to the new toys and stopped dead upon seeing the lumpy blanket hidden poorly behind the sofa and potted plant. "What is that?" she demanded, pointing.

Scrambling over to her quickly, Jack steered her away. "That is a surprise that you aren't going to see until tomorrow morning."

"Aww… please?" she asked hopefully, eyes pleading with him.

"Nope. For once that face isn't going to work on me. Now come on, you've got lots of new stuff over here, what do you want to play with?"

Her eyes lit up. "Want to have a tea party?"

He stared at her as though certain she must be joking. Fraiser had put her up to this just to get embarrassing footage of him on the security cameras, or something. Had to be. No way Sam Carter, at any age, wanted to play tea party.

Apparently he was wrong.

Five minutes later he was sitting on the floor around the coffee table, drinking imaginary tea from a tiny purple plastic cup, seated across from a well-brushed unicorn and a stuffed dog, Daniel's stuffed dinosaur to his right and Sam to his left, pouring imaginary tea and offering seconds on imaginary cookies to all the stuffed animals.

He was so giving her crap about this when she was big again.

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Jack finally found a way out of the tea party, pointing out that if he "drank" any more tea so late at night he would never get to sleep. Pleased with his reasoning, it seemed, Sam agreed that the party could end, and Jack noticed that it actually was getting rather late when he glanced at his watch while she cleaned up.

It took ten minutes to get Daniel away from the Legos, which was actually an improvement in many respects on how long it usually took to tear Daniel away from something. They left his construction intact, of course, so he could work on it more the next day.

Jack sent them to the bathroom to brush their teeth, then belatedly remembered the mummy incident and hurried after them to supervise. Once they'd brushed their teeth, he tucked them each into bed in the two twin beds closest to each other - his own being a bit farther away, up against the opposite wall.

"Can you read us a story please?" Daniel asked hopefully.

"Please?" Sam called from her own bed.

"Sure." He went over to the small pile of books they'd got that day and selected one. He sat down on the foot of Daniel's bed and started to read. "The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another…"

"I want to see the pictures too!" Sam insisted.

He stood up between the beds and tried to hold the book in front of himself and read it upside down. "The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another…"

"Now I can't see them!" Daniel complained.

Jack looked at him, then at Sam. They were the same distance away, just at different angles. "Sam, can you see the pictures now?" he asked.

"Uh-huh."

"Uh-oh. Daniel, did Dr. Janet check your eyes?" Jack asked, getting concerned.

"She looked in em with a flashlight thingy. Why?"

Jack sighed. "We're going to have a talk with her tomorrow. You might be getting some glasses, buddy."

"Glasses? Like my Mom wears?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"Cool!"

"Do I get them too?" Sam asked.

"You don't need them, Sam. They'll help Daniel see better."

"I don't see right?" he asked, looking a little concerned.

"You see just fine. They'll just help you see better, if you need them. In the meantime…" Wanting to distract them from endless questions about glasses, he scooped Sam up out of her bed and dumped her next to Daniel on his. "There, now you can both see the pictures."

He sat down on the edge of the bed and waited until they had both snuggled down comfortably, then held the book up so they could clearly both see the pictures, and started the book for the third time.

By the time he was finished, they were both blinking drowsily. "Can we have another one? Please?" Sam asked.

"Not tonight, or we'll run all out of books," he said lightly. "Come on, let's get you back in your own bed."

Before he could move her, she hugged Daniel rather tightly and awkwardly around the neck, smacking him loudly on the cheek. "G'night, Daniel, I love you!"

"I love you too Sam, night night," Daniel replied around a big yawn, hugging her back.

Jack moved Sam back to her own bed and tried to tuck her in, but she was clinging to his neck as well, hugging tight. "G'night Colonel O'Neill! I love you."

Really, really hoping his face didn't show just how weird he was finding it to hear that, from her, in her current condition, he returned the hug gently and tucked her in. "Goodnight, Sam, sleep well." He slid back over to Daniel, who was holding his arms out for a hug as well, and hugged him too. "Goodnight, Daniel."

"Night-night, Colonel Jack, I love you," Daniel yawned, eyes already closing.

Shaking his head ruefully, Jack tried to decide if it was more or less weird to hear that from Daniel than from Sam. Two minutes later he decided he'd better not think about any of that or his head might explode. He quickly and quietly got himself ready for bed in the dim light provided by the tiny night light between the beds, popping his pain and anti-inflammatory medicine for his knee with a groan before he climbed onto his own narrow bed. These kids were a lot harder on his recovering knee than Fraiser's PT, that was for sure! He probably needed to ice it, but didn't want to leave the kids alone or bother an Airman to come sit with them for ten minutes while he ran for some ice.

Besides, even though it was early, he was just as exhausted as they were. He hadn't had a nap, after all!

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