triumvirate - chapter one - ray guns are not just the future
part one - genetic world
It’s bright.
Jack squeezes his eyes shut behind his sunglasses as Daniel asks what the hell just happened. He shakes his head, getting sand in his hair, and only makes the pounding headache worse. “I have no idea.” He rubs at his temples and carefully opens one eye, vaguely aware that there’s a rock in the middle of his back.
Daniel blinks. He looks at Jack lying on the ground, obviously suffering from the same pain Daniel is, and wonders whether the Advil in his pack is easily accessible or has floated to the bottom. “What?” He unzips his pack and starts digging for the painkillers.
Jack takes a deep breath to brace himself against vertigo, and sits up. He blinks away spots and glances up, making sure that they aren’t surrounded by angry natives wielding spears or Jaffa aiming staff weapons at their heads. Satisfied that they’re secure enough to wallow in the overwhelming headache, he rests his elbows on his knees. “You asked what just happened.”
“No I didn’t.” Daniel rubs the back of his head, his other hand still deep in his pack, feeling for the bottle that’s just out of reach.
“Yes, you did.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
“Sir…”
Carter’s groan ends the argument. Jack follows her voice and finds her on the ground behind him; he closes his eyes for a moment while his head yells at him for turning too fast. “You okay there, Carter?”
Bracing a hand behind her on the sandy ground, she slowly sits up and immediately drops her head between her legs. “My head,” she says, palming the back of her skull.
“Yeah, it’s going around.”
Sam unscrews the lid of her water bottle and accepts a handful of painkillers from Daniel, finally successful in his search. “Where’s Teal’c?” She tosses the Advil in her mouth and chases them with a swallow of water, dropping her head back down again in an effort to keep the world around her still.
“No kidding,” Daniel says, taking his own pills before reaching out to give Sam’s shoulder a supportive squeeze.
“I am here, Major Carter,” Teal’c says from his position by the DHD.
Daniel blinks rapidly at Teal’c. “Why aren’t you…?” he gestures to himself and the other members of SG-1 sitting on the ground, feeling hungover without the fun night.
“I was unaffected by the light.”
“Wait,” Sam says, catching up with the discussion. “Daniel - no kidding what?”
Daniel offers the painkillers to Jack and then tosses the bottle back into his pack to be lost again. “You asked if someone could turn off the sun.”
Sam frowns, confused again. “No, I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yeah, Carter,” Jack says, “you did.”
“No, sir, I didn’t.”
“Major Carter is correct,” Teal’c says firmly, “she did not request that one of us ‘turn off the sun.’”
“Yes she did, Teal’c.”
“Whatever!” Jack says, unwilling to dive headfirst into this argument at least until his head has stopped pounding. “Teal’c, what the hell happened?”
“We left the SGC intending to explore this planet for its potential as a Beta Site. Colonel O’Neill commented upon the brightness of the sun, Major Carter attempted to explain that this star’s magnitude is different than ours but I believe Colonel O’Neill ignored her.”
“I heard that, Carter!” Jack snaps.
“I didn’t say anything!” Sam protests. “Sir,” she adds as an afterthought.
Teal’c ignores them both. “Colonel O’Neill suggested that we ‘get a move on.’ We walked perhaps five meters before a flash of light hit us. I recovered first, several seconds after being rendered unconscious. I determined there was no threat, but when I could not also wake you, I began to dial the SGC. Daniel Jackson awoke while I was dialing and I thought it prudent to not alarm the SGC if Colonel O’Neill and Major Carter were to awake soon as well.”
“Carter?” Jack looks at her for explanation of how a flash of light could be as effective as a bottle of tequila in causing a legendary headache.
Aware that the other three are looking to her to answer the question, Sam sighs. “I thought it,” she says hesitantly after a moment, hoping that this isn’t going where she thinks it’s going.
“What?”
“Turning off the sun, sir. I thought it, but I didn’t say it out loud.” She’d also thought a smart remark about Colonel O’Neill never paying attention to her when she’s excited about science, but chooses not to mention that. He can make that logical jump on his own.
“Then how did Jack and I hear you?”
As an experiment, Sam runs through the periodic table very loudly in her head. She stops at platinum. By the expression on Colonel O’Neill’s face, she knows that this is going exactly where she thinks it’s going.
“Gold?” Daniel says hesitantly, after counting forward from hydrogen.
“Yep,” Sam says.
Jack feels a throbbing begin behind his eyes that he thinks has very little to do with whatever hit them coming out of the gate. “Teal’c, dial up the gate. We’re going home.”
Jack kicks the air underneath the infirmary cot. He’s been poked, prodded and stuck; he’s had blood drawn, lights shined in his eyes, he’s been two different scanning machines, and someone has asked him to stick out his tongue and say aah. Fraiser usually gives some sign that she’s found something useful, but all she’s offered up is a stay here, please when he hopped off the cot two hours ago to get lunch. He watches while she puts the result of an MRI up on the light board. He can’t read it, but he can tell by her facial expression that something’s interesting. He rubs his temple. “Can you not think so loudly?”
“Sorry, sir,” Sam says. She grimaces, unable to hold back a thought about this being her normal thinking volume and that it’s probably impossible for someone to think loudly.
We won’t call it insubordination if you think it. For the moment.
Sam looks up, startled. He’s smirking at her. Thank you, sir.
“Doctor Fraiser?” General Hammond walks into the infirmary, looking more concerned than usual. He’s used to his teams coming through the gate injured in ways he can see and catalog, not in the middle of a three-way argument that’s only half spoken out loud.
Janet takes a deep breath and turns to the four scans on the board. “Well, sir, Teal’c appears unaffected, like we originally thought. But as for Colonel O’Neill, Sam and Daniel…there’s a lot about the brain that we don’t understand, but this area,” she points at a highlighted section, “is usually dormant.” She slides another scan up on the board. “This is a scan of Sam’s brain three months ago. The area is dormant in this scan, but active in the one I took today.” She looks at General Hammond. “This is consistent for all three of them.”
“Which means what, Doctor?”
“I don’t know, sir. Something happened on that planet that activated a portion of their brains. It appears to have telepathic effects -”
“Uhm,” Jack raises his hand, “not ‘appears,’” he makes air quotes around the word. “Does. Definitely does.” He looks to Daniel and Carter for confirmation and they both nod.
Janet ignores him. “- and being next to the communication and emotion centers, I suppose that makes sense. But I don’t know how it happened or, at the moment, how to turn it off.”
Jack tunes out the rest of the conversation and turns his concentration inward. He hears Daniel trying to get Carter’s attention, and Carter patently ignoring him in favor of actually listening to Janet talk about neuroscience and brain activation. He knows that he would hate it if anyone intentionally listened to his thoughts, so he tries very hard not to hear Daniel’s train of thought that starts with why would anyone ever do this to someone else and I hope this is reversible turn to we planned to be offworld for three days, is there any food in my kitchen and I wonder if Sam would be up for dinner tonight and finally derails with a mental image of Carter in a black lace bra and a shit shit think of something else Jack can hear you before the words switch to a language Jack doesn’t recognize.
Jack coughs politely. He waves off Janet and General Hammond who look at him in concern before returning to their discussion of his brain. He spares a look at Daniel, who is beet red, and then Carter, who’s doing her best to think of very complicated physics while staring intently at the floor.
He coughs again, mentally. How long has that been going on?
Couple of months, sir.
Ever planning on telling me?
Nope.
Daniel.
We were concerned that it might get one or both of us moved from the team, sir.
The regs only apply to military personnel, Carter.
We get in our share of firefights, sir.
Jack nods; the rules are there to prevent anyone doing something stupid in combat because someone they care about is in trouble. I wouldn’t have said anything unless it started to interfere. He’s not sure what he would have done with that information, but it would’ve been nice to know.
Sam squirms on the bed, torn between feeling guilty that she hadn’t told him and feeling annoyed that he now knows: it’s private, as are the daydreams she has when listening to Lee or Felger ramble on about things that can’t possibly work. Now, nothing’s private and she can’t seem to stop her mind from thinking about Daniel, no matter how hard she tries to nudge things in the direction of physics, astronomy or motorcycle maintenance. I know, sir, and I’m sorry - we should’ve said something to you. Sam blushes, catching a stray thought of Jack’s that involves her in the very bra Daniel was imagining. And we won’t call it inappropriate if you think it, sir. For the moment.
Thanks, Carter.
“How are you doing?” General Hammond finishes his conversation with Doctor Fraiser and turns his attentions on the three afflicted members of SG-1. Having been given a clean bill of health, Teal’c stands stoically beside him.
“Apart from having to listen to Carter’s physics lessons and Daniel prattle on in Ancient Sumerian -”
Egyptian.
“- just fine, sir.”
“I can’t send you through the gate if you’re distracted by every stray thought someone else has. Until further notice, SG-1 is to stand down. Let’s see if we can figure out what happened, and how to fix it.”
“Sir,” Sam says, “I know we don’t want to send anyone else to P9A-378 in case this,” she gestures to the three of them, “happens again. But if we could trigger the beam -”
More of a flash.
“- again and get some scans, it could go a long way to providing some explanations.” Anticipating General Hammond’s question, and hearing Jack’s, she continues. “The beam -”
Flash.
Due respect - shut up, sir.
“- seemed to have no effect on Teal’c.” Sensing that neither man is interested in this line of inquiry, she changes tactics. “Sir, is there any problem leaving the MALP there, set to run continuous scans? We could dial in periodically to pick up data; it could help us figure out if this is a natural phenomenon or artificial, what kind of light it is and how it affected us…”
General Hammond raises his hand, silencing her. “We will leave the MALP there, Major. Doctor?” He turns back to Fraiser.
Janet exhales and slides her hands into her lab coat pocket. “Other than the telepathy, there’s nothing wrong with them, sir. They’re free to go.”
“Wonder if it works when we’re asleep, too,” Daniel muses around the toothbrush.
Sam presses a fluffy towel to her face. “I hope not,” she says. “You have really weird dreams.” She uncaps her toothpaste and starts on her own teeth.
Daniel spits into the sink Sam isn’t using and swishes water around in his mouth. He leans against the bathroom counter and crosses his arms. “I’m not the one who dreamt about being a pregnant Miss Scarlet in an Irish castle that turned into a greenhouse halfway through the game.” Blinking, he looks innocently at Sam from behind his glasses.
She scoffs and takes the toothbrush out of her mouth so she can properly defend herself. “That was one time and there was Vicodin involved. It doesn’t count. Hey!” She makes a face at him in protest after being swatted with a towel.
Daniel lets her finish brushing her teeth in peace while he turns down the covers. Sam’s arms slip around his waist and, leaning back, he smiles. He tangles his fingers with hers as she lays her cheek against his shoulder. He likes what they have, whatever it is: it’s quiet and easy and it’s nice to be able to talk about the nightmares and be honest and uncensored with someone who understands the bruises and scrapes and occasional broken bones. They gravitated toward each other after he descended, realizing their jobs to be too difficult to do alone and too impossible to explain to anyone else. Her thumb gently rubs against his palm and he squeezes her hand. Daniel can’t help overhearing her mind become less organized, turning instead to fuzzy logic and thoughts of bed.
“Did you take drugs?” he asks softly. Sam had quietly spoken to Janet before they all left for the day and in the nightstand drawer is a bottle of something to help them sleep if one or both of them keeps the other awake thinking too much.
She nods and her nose rubs against his neck. “You think a lot,” she says. She smiles at his thought and kisses the nape of his neck. “My nose is always cold.”
Daniel smiles and turns in her arms so he can kiss the nose in question. She yawns after a few minutes. “Okay. Bedtime.” He slides his hands down to her hips and turns them so she’s closest to the bed and walks her the step and a half toward it.
Sam smiles up at him once she’s climbed into bed and slid her feet underneath the covers. She points at the drawer and watches as Daniel debates whether or not to take anything. The debate shakes out on the side of taking something and she pretends not to have overheard the I’ll keep her awake that settled the decision for him; she’s ten minutes from falling asleep regardless of how loud he thinks.
Daniel swallows the pill with a mouthful of the glass of water by the bed. He lies down next to Sam and doesn’t set the alarm: they don’t need to be anywhere until ten tomorrow morning when Janet wants them to meet with a neurologist and, drugs or not, they’re both conditioned to wake up with the sun. Once she’s reached over and turned off the light, he drags the covers up and curls around her, his arm automatically sliding across her waist. “Night, Sam.”
Sam turns slightly and kisses him softly. “Goodnight. Sweet dreams,” she smirks.
Jack hangs up the phone after placing his standard order for Chinese takeout. He scrubs a hand over his face and idly wonders what Carter and Daniel are up to. He can still hear them, almost a whisper in the back of his mind, but if he doesn’t think about it too much it’s almost like they’re gone and things are back to normal.
He scoffs at that - normal. He’s run into his fair share (and then some) of less-than-normal situations since being pulled out of retirement and thrown onto SG-1. He likes them, mostly: it’s amusing and keeps the boredom away and while he could do with less time spent in a Goa’uld prison or facing the business end of a staff weapon, on the whole he’s come to accept not normal as his default mode for experiencing life.
Except not normal usually disappears the moment he leaves the base and switches back to normal somewhere on the drive home. On the long list of things he imagined could possibly happen to him offworld, becoming telepathically linked to two of his teammates had not made the cut. He pops the cap off of a beer and thinks that he’ll have to make another addition to the list of things he hadn’t imagined could happen to him offworld but did anyway.
As the beer tingles against his tongue, he drops down onto his couch and turns on the television to catch whatever game is on. He’s soon distracted, not by someone else’s thoughts but by his own. He groans and closes his eyes, leaning his head on the back of the couch.
If they can’t fix this, he’s pretty sure Hammond won’t have much of a choice. He’ll have to break up SG-1.
Sam wakes up first, stretching her long legs underneath the warm covers. Sometime in the night her legs became tangled with Daniel’s and she tries not to jostle him too much as she moves. She frowns, overhearing the tail end of his dream. “What the hell, Daniel?” She turns her head to check the clock; the sun’s barely up, so she turns and settles back into his embrace. There’s no way she’s falling back asleep, especially not with twisting and turning thoughts of elephants chasing him through Manhattan making their way into her mind, but she can close her eyes and ignore the outside world for a while.
Her phone rings. She slaps blindly at the nightstand until her hand makes contact with her vibrating phone. “Carter,” she says, trying to inject as much propriety and as little sleep into her name as possible. She fails. Daniel shifts against her back, awake.
“Tell him to stop dreaming so loudly.”
Without another word, Sam hands the phone backward to Daniel and sits up, sliding her feet out to rest on the floor. She yawns and runs a hand through her hair, causing the short blond locks to stand up more than normal. She looks over her shoulder at Daniel telling Jack that he has control over neither what he dreams nor how energetically he does so, and decides that a shower is probably the best course of action.
Jack taps Sam on the shoulder when she doesn’t answer him for the third time. She jumps and turns in her chair; she takes out her earbuds when she sees him. “Save your hearing, Carter,” he says, wincing at the music blaring out of the headphones.
“Sorry, sir.” She turns off her computer speakers and the music silences. “Daniel thinks really loudly,” she says, “this drowns him out.” After an hour of listening to him translate, she changed her earlier opinion about thoughts only having one volume level and dug her headphones out of the top drawer.
Jack listens for a moment and is accosted by a landslide of disorganized and loud translation of a tablet brought back by SG-4 a few weeks ago. He grimaces. “No kidding.”
“Is there something you wanted, sir?”
“Ah, yes. Has that brain of yours figured anything out yet?”
She shakes her head. “There’s a lot of data here. It’ll take me a couple of days to figure out what I’m even looking at.” When he looks at her as if he’s expecting her to at least throw him a bone, she shrugs. “It seems to be based on proximity.”
“What is?”
“Whether or not I can…hear you or Daniel. I think the closer we are to each other, the better the signal, for lack of a better term.”
“So, what? We just stay far away from each other and we’re fine?”
“You asked what I’d figured out so far, sir.” She twirls her pencil between her fingers and tries, unsuccessfully, to ignore Daniel’s Jack’s in there don’t think of Sam don’t think of Sam, right - translations, Goa’uld, tablet, don’t think of Sam. She rolls her eyes.
Daniel. Get over here.
Sam looks up at Jack, confused. He holds up a finger, indicating for her to wait.
Daniel sheepishly stands in the doorway of Sam’s lab.
“Shut the door,” Jack says. He waits until Daniel has done so before he speaks; he doesn’t want anyone to overhear this, but the other option is to think it and he doesn’t want anyone to walk by and see the three of them standing still, staring at each other in silence. “Look. You two are together, that’s fine. But the harder you think about not thinking about Carter, the more I end up seeing her in some very non-regulation underwear. Which is nice,” he ignores the choice words Carter thinks about him and the way Daniel’s eyes narrow, “but distracting. So if your mind goes there, it goes there.”
“Why isn’t he giving you this lecture?” Daniel turns to Sam.
She shrugs. “Military training.” Telepathy wasn’t exactly covered at basic training, but she’s learned how not to think about things. Mostly.
“Oh!” Jack covers his eyes. “Did not need that image, Carter.” He’s spent some time over the past thirty-six hours wondering what’s under the black lacy bra, but hadn’t put any thought at all toward the exact knowledge of what’s underneath Daniel’s boxers. Thanks to Carter, he doesn’t have to. Realizing that Carter’s now glaring and Daniel looks like he might just hit him, he switches gears and thinks about trout.
“Sorry, sir.”
Daniel looks across the table at Sam. “Military training, huh?”
She throws her pencil at him. “It usually works.”
A week later, Jack finds himself at Carter’s front door, holding a six-pack of beer and unsure whether he should knock, ring the doorbell or just think really hard. Carter opens the door, solving his dilemma for him.
“The steps creak,” she says by way of explanation for her spontaneous appearance at the door, though she had heard him loitering. “Thanks for coming.” She steps aside and lets him in, shutting the door behind them. Daniel was technically the one to invite him to her house for dinner and Daniel isn’t here yet, so she awkwardly takes the beer Jack offers her and leads him to the kitchen.
Jack shrugs and tries to play it nonchalantly, until he remembers that she can hear him thinking. “It was either this or a hockey game I know the outcome of and lousy pizza.”
Sam smiles and removes one bottle from the package and slides the rest of the beer into the fridge. “Siler spoil you for the Rangers/Wild game?” She deftly opens the bottle with an opener bolted to the wall and offers it to him. She’s already halfway through a glass of wine sitting on the counter next to the cutting board.
“Remind me to make him scrub toilets,” Jack says with a grin, taking a swig of the beer. “Whatcha making?” he asks when she returns her attentions to the onion.
Sam stops mid-slice, catching a stray thought about her handling the knife very well. She covers, playing it off as needing to adjust the onion so she doesn’t slice off her finger in the process. “This is going in the chili,” she gestures to a pot simmering on the stove; she and Daniel ate the last of the batch that was in her freezer the other day. “Dinner’s grilled shrimp,” she says, waving her elbow in the direction of a bowl of shrimp marinating in the corner.
“You grill?” He raises an eyebrow and hopes that it’s her that’s doing the grilling and not Daniel, because while he trusts Daniel to talk their way out of a corner he does not trust the man with a flame.
Sam looks up at him, onion perfectly diced in front of her. She lays the knife down and picks up her wine glass. “I have skills.” She swallows her wine and looks at him meaningfully over the rim of the glass.
Jack’s saved from having to think very hard about the weather by Daniel coming in the front door. Carter did say that they’d been together for a couple of months, but Jack knows that Daniel at least ostensibly lives elsewhere and that doorbells are still considered polite.
Carter glares at him briefly before relaxing into an honest smile when Daniel comes into view.
“Sorry I’m late,” Daniel says. “Hi, Jack.” He halts oddly in the kitchen, as if he was about to go directly to Sam, but doesn’t quite know how to act around Jack. “I saw his car, figured I’d let myself in,” he says to Sam. “Uhm,” he starts, sensing a bit of tension in the room, “what’d I miss?” He’d suggested that the three of them have dinner not out of any need to share a meal with Jack but because they all need to figure out how to deal with each other when they can hear and feel every thought and emotion.
Sam clears her throat and answers, because he’s just going to push her for it later if she doesn’t accidentally think about it first and it’s best to get everything out in the open when they’re all here. “Colonel O’Neill was thinking that it’s awfully rude of you to let yourself in despite that I knew you were coming over, you have a key not just for emergencies, and that, as you said, you saw his car in the driveway.” Jackass, she adds mentally before she remembers that he can hear her thoughts, too.
“Carter…” Jack says. He may not have any authority to reprimand her for thinking inappropriate remarks, nor does he want to, but that doesn’t mean he has to like the things she doesn’t say out loud.
“My brain, sir,” she says acerbically, holding his gaze long enough to ensure that he knows she’s not as okay with this as she’s been pretending on base. She opens a drawer, takes out a butane lighter, and heads toward the back to light the grill.
Daniel pours himself a glass of wine and tops off Sam’s. “I don’t think any of us are thrilled, Jack,” he says in attempt to diffuse the tension in the air.
Jack nods and takes another sip of his beer. “How are you two…?” He gestures aimlessly with the bottle, directing conversation into a realm he hopes is a little less volatile, or at least less filled with Carter cursing at him in her head. He lives on the other side of town from her and it’s been blissfully quiet at his house; he only occasionally picks up a stray thought and as far as he can tell, it has to be pretty strong for him to notice. But the two of them seem to have had no change in their relationship; though since he hadn’t known they were together they could be faking.
“Just fine,” Daniel says, unable to hold back a little smirk.
Jack blinks at that for a moment until, “Oh.” He supposes telepathy would help with that. Not that, based on the thoughts Daniel is unsuccessfully trying to reel in, they apparently needed any help. “Gonna pretend I don’t know that.”
“Pretend you don’t know what?” Sam puts the lighter back in the drawer and starts sliding the marinated shrimp onto skewers. “Oh!” She squeezes her eyes shut and blushes furiously, thankful that she isn’t facing either of them. “Daniel…” The fact that they haven’t had sex since this happened hasn’t stopped them from inadvertently sharing intentions. And now her commanding officer knows the extent of her imagination.
“Sorry,” Daniel says, and to his credit it sounds genuine. “Jack asked how we were getting along and…”
She holds up one hand, understanding. “Dinner is in ten minutes,” she says, turning around with a plate full of skewered shrimp. “Do you two think you can set the table and pour water without me naked showing up in the conversation?” Without waiting for a response, she turns and goes back outside.
“She’s twenty feet away. Why isn’t she hearing us thinking?” Jack follows Daniel’s cue and takes three glasses out of the cabinet Daniel points to and starts filling them with water from the filter in the fridge.
Daniel pulls out one more place setting than he’s used to. “She’s been spending a lot of time with Teal’c, learning how to make things quiet. Something about if she’s ever going to make sense of that beam then she needs a way to shut me up during the day.”
“That was really good, Sam,” Daniel swipes a piece of bread in the leftover sauce on his plate and pops it into his mouth.
She smiles and leans back in her chair, swirling the remainder of her wine in her glass before finishing it in one swallow. “Thank you.”
“You do have skills,” Jack acknowledges, setting his water glass down on the table. He smiles at her.
She returns the smile, though not as brilliant a one as she gave Daniel, and nods. “Teal’c has been helpful in giving me some techniques for ignoring you,” she starts the conversation that was the whole point of dinner. “They don’t always work, but I can filter out most things so it’s not constant. It’s a little exhausting, though,” she admits. “He said he was willing to work with you two.”
Jack nods solemnly. The concept of meditation has always struck him as new-agey and useless, but he hasn’t seen Carter hauling around a bag full of candles or sitting cross-legged in the middle of her lab, so he assumes Teal’c’s teachings are a little less obvious and perhaps more useful on an hourly basis.
Daniel nods as well, though he’s already had this conversation with Sam. He’s proving to be less adept at quieting his mind than she is, but Teal’c has promised him that there is hope. Sam kicks him under the table and he gets the hint. “About what Sam said in the kitchen, earlier. It’s her brain. And it’s my brain and yours, Jack. None of us should be held accountable for thinking anything someone else happens to overhear.” He catches her eye and she nods, offering him a smile of thanks. She’d asked him to bring that up since she didn’t know how; Jack is her commanding officer and this is an awkward enough situation without her asking for a free pass to call him whatever she wants inside her mind. “Within reason,” he says, catching wind of Jack’s thought process. “If a Goa’uld takes over the base and makes it into one of us, it’s probably a good idea to tell someone about that.”
Sam snorts and it turns into laughter. When she finally reins it in, she swallows and looks at the two men around her table. “Because what this,” she gestures at the three of them, “needs is a Goa’uld weighing in.”
“Colonel O’Neill,” Teal’c says solemnly, “you are not trying.” Candlelight flickers off the tapestries hanging on the walls of his base quarters, but it is not nearly as relaxing as it usually is for him.
Jack wishes there was a wall next to him he could bang his head into. As it is, he’s sitting in the middle of the room, cross-legged on a lumpy pillow that barely conceals that it’s resting on top of reinforced concrete and the scented candles are beginning to give him a headache. “I am trying, Teal’c. Carter and Daniel think a lot and it’s hard to get them to shut up. I don’t think that much. How does anyone think that much?”
Teal’c merely raises an eyebrow. “Major Carter and Daniel Jackson have other activities they can use to distract them from others’ thoughts. It does not require meditation.”
“Yes,” Jack says, feeling like he’s just been insulted for knowing how to take a day off, “Carter has physics and quarks and Daniel has languages and statues. I fish, Teal’c. And watch hockey and The Simpsons.”
Teal’c tilts his head and contemplates what his friend could possibly occupy his time with on base that would prove a sufficient distraction. “Do you not have a significant amount of paperwork General Hammond has requested you complete while we resolve this situation?”
Jack glares. “Paperwork’s not gonna distract me nearly enough, T.”
“Then you must concentrate.”
They discover the physical side of their condition purely by accident.
Sam leans back on her heels and looks up at Daniel, still gripping the counter as he regains control over his breathing. Janet’s insistence on running exhausting tests almost daily, and Sam’s cycle have gotten in the way of any activity beyond dinner and simply sleeping together for the past three weeks. Their plans for an evening of Lord of the Rings and takeout had started with Sam kissing Daniel and pushing him up against her front door the moment he stepped in with the Chinese takeout bag. They’ll get to the movies eventually, but for the moment Sam’s concerned with the throbbing between her legs. Blow jobs turn her on, but not usually that much.
“What?” Daniel manages to ask a few moments later. He blinks at her and, aware that he’s standing in her kitchen with his pants down around his ankles and his cock hanging out, bends down to fix his clothing. He places a kiss on Sam’s forehead, determined to return the favor some time in the evening.
“I think I felt that,” she says, accepting his hand and stands up. At Daniel’s raised eyebrow, she explains. “Your orgasm. I think I felt it.” She gestures in the general direction of the zipper of her jeans. She’s torn between wanting to understand the science behind it and just being really horny.
“Did you…”
“No. I just felt something really intense.”
Daniel looks at her askance. “This isn’t Sam Code for ‘get me off right now,’ is it?”
Sam makes a face and opts for the simple answer instead of sarcasm. “No.”
His eyebrows shoot up at her thoughts and he hooks his fingers into her belt loops and tugs her toward him. He tilts his head and kisses her, softly at first before picking up her sense of urgency. He swiftly slides down the zipper and slips his fingers into her jeans, cupping her through her underwear. “Wow,” he breathes into her mouth.
“Told you,” she says huskily, letting her head fall back so he can pay attention to her neck. She widens her stance to give his fingers easier access. “Okay, I lied. That might have been code.” She grinds against the palm of his hand until he gets the point and pushes the fabric of her panties aside.
Daniel scrapes his teeth against her neck before taking her earlobe into his mouth. “Jesus,” he whispers, easily slipping two fingers into her. He has her on the edge within seconds and with a swipe of his thumb, she clenches around his fingers and moans her release into his neck. He slowly removes his fingers and keeps one arm around her waist to hold her up until she can find her footing. His cock is beginning to twitch again and he knows exactly what she was talking about. “You want to play with this or you want to eat dinner and watch Frodo?”
Sam laughs and rests her head on his shoulder. She’s keyed up and ready to go, but lunch was a very long time ago. Her stomach growls. “Dinner,” she says. And then we can make out on the couch in front of the movie.
Jack frowns. He stares down at his pants. He likes hockey, but not that much. It’s been decades since he’s had a spontaneous and uncontrollable hard-on, so he knows that this isn’t his fault. He reaches over for the phone, intending to call Carter and Daniel and at least find out whether they’re having the same issue, but stops with his fingers clasped around the plastic casing.
“Son of a bitch,” he curses and sets the phone back in its cradle.
He’s clear on the other side of town and if thoughts only sporadically drift over here, he thinks that feelings and horniness should certainly stay where they belong.
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