Emma doesn't believe in Santa Claus anymore. Actually, there are a lot of things she doesn't believe in. Her father's death didn't seem to have a huge effect on her when she was tiny, but now, at nine, it had made her a whole lot more jaded than her peers.
She saunters out of her bedroom after Ty and Hannah are in bed, and offers to eat the cookies that they left for Santa. Jacob, the O'Neill's resident Santa pretender, sees no reason to object. Olivia gives advice on how to answer the letters that her siblings left behind in ways just quirky enough to believe. She laughed for five minutes when the idea to answer the question "How old are you?" with an infinity sign occurred to her.
Then she got the idea to sprinkle bits of ash around the fireplace where Santa would have been.
And then came the Santa butt print, and Jacob was a little bit worried her laughter was going to wake up the younger children.
Then she stops laughing and stares at the soot.
"What's wrong?"
"He's never going to die," Emma whispers.
"Santa? No, ideas live forever," Jacob says joyfully.
"People have graves. They return to the ground. Ashes to ashes, like the old saying goes. They become nutrients for trees, and flowers. They cycle around in the universe, again and again. He's never going to get that."
Jacob realizes with horror that she's talking about her father.
"It's only been a couple of seconds for him, Em," he says softly.
"That's all he'll ever get. A couple of seconds."
Jacob shifts on his feet, suddenly wishing he took the optional psychology class at the academy. He'd done something involving weapons instead. "You want us to give him a memorial?"
Emma shakes her head, "I just don't like the idea of never-ending limbo. He's not dead. Yet, he is beyond hope."
Jacob remembers how hard it was for him to move on after his wife died. He tries to imagine how much harder it would have been for him if his wife had never actually died. If she was still alive. Still in a life-threatening position. Still screaming for help.
But there was nothing they could do.
"I'm sorry, Em," he says sincerely.
"I think I'll go to bed now," Emma mutters.
Jacob gives her a hug that is a bit tighter and a bit longer than was strictly necessary.
As soon as Emma climbs into bed, Hannah's eyes pop open. "Did you see him?"
Emma nods into the darkness.
"What does Santa look like?" Hannah asks.
"Terrible," Emma says, rolling away.
Hannah doesn't know quite what to do with that odd comment. After a few minutes of reflection, she retorts, "Maybe next year you won't be so naughty then!"
Emma rolls over and curls her legs up around herself, because the thought that what her father is going through is her fault is too much for her to bear. Even though she doesn't really believe it.
A Week Later
Most of the time for date night, Daniel and Janet just wait until the kids fall asleep and drink some pregnancy-friendly orange juice fortified with extra calcium on the couch.
Lately, though, that hasn't been much of an option. Cassie's seventeen, and goes to bed later than they do. They'd like to scold her, but she keeps up good grades, and seems totally functional going to bed a bit after midnight and waking up at six in the morning.
Daniel and Janet are old enough that ten is late.
Often, at ten, Dominic is still over, and nothing says romance killer quite like watching your teenage daughter hold hands with a kid you know she's intimate with.
So, when Jack offers to watch their kids for a night out, they do not object. He brings his hoard over, and the three O'Neill kids all invade Olivia's room.
"Wow, you have Samantha?" Ty asks in awe.
"Mom?" Hannah asks, confused.
"No, this doll, it's Samantha. You know, one of the American dolls," Ty says, looking at his sister like she's a dimwit.
"Let's go outside and play ball or something," Hannah says, making a face.
"When did you get her?" Ty asks.
"Dad gave it to me for Christmas. It's supposed to be a fountain of youth," she says.
The other kids stare at her, "He thinks that owning a doll will keep me young forever or something."
"Have you even played with her?" Ty asks.
"It," Emma corrects, worried about his grasp on reality.
"Can we play with her?" he asks excitedly. Then he frowns, "Or maybe you want to keep her perfect."
"Knock yourself out," she says, sitting down on the bed. She was more than a little curious what he would do with it.
Emma looks around the room for another doll, and failing that, she grabs a hairbrush from the dresser. She fashions a couple of pony tails to it, and moves near Ty saying, "I say, top of the day to you, good sir."
"Samantha isn't British," Ty says with a roll of her eyes.
Emma looks a bit taken aback by this. The clothing seems to scream another place, as well as another time, but then she says, "Of course not, but the hairbrush is."
Ty nods his head as if that was obvious.
"I'm going downtown to see if I can see one of those new horseless carriages," Ty informs the hairbrush.
"I say, old man, what do you mean?" the hairbrush asks.
"Cars," Ty asks in a way that is clearly breaking character. He then returns to Samantha's voice, and says, "It is the newest technology. It's positively delightful."
Olivia looks around her bedroom for something hairbrush-like enough to allow her entrance into the game. That level of improvisation is a bit much for her so she timidly asks, "Can I play, too?"
"Of course," Ty says, grabbing up a pillow and tosses it to her. "You can be Nelly. She's an orphan, just like Samantha, only she's Irish, and really poor. She has to work in a factory."
Olivia looks at her pillow, and scrunches up her face with concentration, "Top of the morning to ye, off to da horseless carriage we go."
"You guys are nuts," Hannah dismisses them with a wave of her hands as she leaves the room.
-0-0-0-
Daniel silently pokes his head in the room. He is shocked to find her giggling on the floor while doing a simply horrid Irish accent and shaking a pillow.
And Ty? Ty is talking through her doll.
He blinks in shock. His daughter is playing dolls?
"You're home," Olivia says with a smile.
"I don't want to go home," Ty whines.
"Well, it's late bud. Hannah is already asleep, and your dad is trying to get her into the car without waking her. You guys better get going," Daniel says.
"Next time, you should bring Samantha over to our house. We've got lots of other dolls that she could play with," Ty informs Olivia.
To Daniel's shock and delight his daughter nods her head, almost like that was already something she was planning.
"So, you were playing dolls," he says, trying to hide the 'I told you so' look from his face.
Olivia rolls her eyes. "Ty thought Samantha was cool," she explains.
"Well of course he did, because she is cool. Were you having fun?" he asks.
"I don't know," she says with a shrug. "I guess it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I mean, playing dolls is really just making up a story. It's kind of like reading a book, except in reverse."
"More like writing one?" Daniel suggests.
"Right, but there is also some acting to it. It was fun," she confesses.
Daniels grin starts to grow again.
"You not take success well," she says.
"Probably because I've had so little of it."
"Not true," she says, standing up on her tip-toes to give her father a kiss on his cheek. Daniel is glad that she gets to be a little girl, at least for a little bit longer.
4 Months Later
By the time the pain is bad enough for Shelby to open her eyes, she's pretty sure that she's been in labor for a while.
It wasn't supposed to happen like this. Teal'c wasn't supposed to be on a mission when the twins made their debut in the world.
Twins tend to come early, that's a well-known fact. So well-known that Teal'c had refused any missions for the past couple of weeks. Then, there had been some sort of minor Jaffa emergency, and Bray'tac had come through himself to beg help from his protégée. It wasn't like Shelby begrudged him whatever he wanted; he'd practically raised her husband, and then her step-son, for several years. It was only one night, and they'd decided they could risk it. After all, what were the chances that she'd go into labor on the one day her husband was off world?
Apparently, pretty good.
She grabs her phone and makes a call to the O'Neill's. Jack, of course, is gone, along with the rest of SG-1. But Sam is there, and so is her dad. So Sam can come to take care of Shelby's kids without having to take her own along.
She considers waiting for Sam to arrive before leaving, but a contraction causes her to do this as soon as she can. She's still ok to drive now, and later she might have to wait for taxi. If she is as far along as she feels like she is, she might even have to give birth in a taxi. That's not exactly something that she's hoping for, so she walks into Rya'c's room.
He's done with his mediation for the night, its past two in the morning. Even his most fitful Kel-no-reem only takes him from 10 pm to 1 am. He has an algebra book spread before him, and earphones in his ear.
Amy introduced him to heavy metal.
Shortly after, Teal'c gave his son earphones.
Shelby taps his shoulder. He takes off the earphones, looking at little concerned as to why his step-mother might be contacting him in the middle of the night.
"The babies are coming," she tells him.
A look of panic cross the teenager's face as he wonders just exactly how involved teenagers of Earth are with the birthing process.
"I need you to watch the girls until Sam comes."
"Jaffa males do not do childcare," he informs her.
"Sam should be here in, like, ten minutes or something, and they're asleep. I just want you to be in charge."
Rya'c is about to launch one of his more disrespectful objections when Shelby's face doubles over in pain.
"You can rely on me," he tells her.
"Thank-you," she whispers when the contraction is complete.
-0-0-0-
Shelby went to Cheyenne Mountain to have the babies. No-one could be completely sure exactly how much of a security breach the children were going to represent, so it was really the only option.
She had requested that the guard at the front gate contact General Hammond, and have him recall her husband.
She was still expecting to bring his children into the world without him. So she was pleasantly surprised when he ran into the infirmary only twenty minutes after her own arrival.
"Have I missed the birth?" he asks eagerly, coming to his wife's side.
"No," she says, rubbing her hand over her still large and very taut stomach. One of the babies kicks inside of her, and she realizes with a bit of sadness that this is probably going to be one of the last times that she will feel them move within her.
"I am sorry that you had to endure the early parts of your labor without my presence," he says.
"That's ok, it hasn't been so bad yet," she tells him.
He smiles at her, thinking, not for the first time, that his wife is a lot more of a warrior than she would like to admit. This is the kind of pain that most women found in unendurable. Shelby, though, she had felt worse. This was nothing compared the pain caused by some of the beatings in her childhood.
"I am required to hold your hand," he says, taking her small hand from the bedside in his huge one.
"You're not required to do anything," Shelby tells him. She finds herself more than a little relieved when he keeps holding her hand anyway.
-0-0-0-
The boy is born first. Teal'c takes him into his hands the second he has entered the world, and says, "Welcome, Luke," with a huge grin on his face.
Shelby is shocked, because she's only caught wisps and hints of smiles before, and this is so much more than that.
The sight of her husband so indescribably happy makes the birth of her daughter much more endurable.
"Welcome, Leia," he says as his daughter enters the world.
"No, I vetoed that name," she says, with no small amount of panic.
"I thought you said that in jest. It is clearly the most appropriate name for our daughter."
"Jest? You think I was kidding when I said that I did not want our twins named after characters from Star Wars?"
"Luke and Leia are also twins," Teal'c deadpans.
"We agreed on Alexis. You love that it means 'defender'."
"It is not so wonderful a name as Leia; however, it will suffice," he concedes.