Mostly Harmless (The Rewrite)
SUMMARY: Daniel asks Sam why she dyes her hair, which leads to some insights about appearances and cultural norms, and then degenerates into a fight over which one of them’s prettier (neither wants the title).
CATEGORY: Short character study, some humor
TIME: End of Third Season
SPOILERS: Not really.
RATING: PG
COMPLETED/Rewritten: October/November 2005
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Originally written as a brief series of ideas in story form, rewritten as more of an actual ficlet. No waffles were harmed in the making of this story. Daniel is a trained expert in stunt eating. Don’t try this at home.
“So why do you keep it blond, anyway?” he asked, stabbing a third chunk of syrupy waffle onto his fork and shoveling the whole load into his mouth. It looked like he was building miniature pyramids on his fork, then descending on them like a Goa’uld mothership.
Sam tried not to stare, but she must have, because after he swallowed he spoke again.
“Sorry, is that a personal question?” he asked.
“Not from you,” she smiled. “It started turning brown when I was about nineteen or twenty.”
“So you just didn’t like the change in color?” While he spoke, he layered another three slices of waffle onto his fork and rolled them around in syrup.
Here’s the ha’tak and here’s the pyramid, open up wide… Where in the hell does he put it, anyway? She pulled her plate a little closer to her, just in case. “Actually, I didn’t like the change in how people treated me.”
Daniel paused in his chewing long enough to say. “It changed how they treated you?”
She smiled wearily. “Appearances matter, Daniel. You know that.”
Daniel swallowed and put his fork down. Her answer must have captured his attention, because he couldn’t be full yet: he hadn’t even touched her plate. “Yes, that’s true. I’ve just never heard anyone illustrate a direct contrast like that. How did it change?”
She sat back, crossing her arms. “They started taking me more seriously.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“Given that I was already a bit of an overachiever and never exactly known as the life of the party,” she said, “yeah.”
He leaned forward slightly. “And by taking you more seriously, you mean…”
“Assuming I was too busy to socialize, instead of just asking,” she said by way of example. “Being more reserved around me. Calling me ‘ma’am’.”
“Interesting,” he muttered, staring off to the side for a moment while he thought. “So do you still think… I mean, do you think if you came in here tomorrow with medium brown hair, we’d all start treating you differently?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“But people who don’t know you?”
“Maybe,” she nodded. “I don’t know. At this point, maybe I’m just more used to it than anything else.”
“Well,” he drawled, eyeing a passing Marine’s breakfast tray with palpable interest, “we, uh, all get used to, ah… certain crutches.”
“Crutches?” she echoed ominously.
His eyes snapped back toward her and he looked chagrined. “Poor choice of words. Sorry. I just meant, we all settle into grooves and-”
“No, you said ‘crutches’,” she interrupted. “You think my hair color is a crutch?”
“No,” he said. Almost convincingly, until he added, “Is it?”
She shook her head. “A crutch for what?” When he looked back toward his waffles, and his hand started toward his fork, she added, “Come on, Daniel, you must have a theory.”
He dropped his hand. “It could be a lot of things. Maybe you just think it looks better than any other color. Maybe it’s the old ‘blonds have more fun’ thing. Maybe-”
“I asked for your theory,” she said.
He looked at her thoughtfully. Then he gave a very short sigh. Finally, he said, “Fine. Your mother kept her hair blond, didn’t she? You showed me a picture once.”
She skipped a breath. “Yeah,” she finally said. And couldn’t believe it had never occurred to her.
“When I said ‘crutch’,” he explained, “I was just thinking maybe it’s a way of keeping her… with you. You do look like her.”
“But not so much if I had brown hair,” she said slowly.
He shook his head. “Not as much, no.”
She tried to remember the first time she’d colored it, that last long look at the rapidly darkening hair that made her look like someone else, a stranger. Was she that simple? That transparent? She knew he meant well, but sometimes Daniel had this way of making you feel like you were nothing but an equation to be solved while he was bored waiting for a computer to boot or something.
“Or maybe it’s just fashionable,” he added, cutting off another stack of waffle bites. “Or maybe it’s your way of reminding yourself you can be feminine and an officer in the Air Force. Maybe you’re secretly dating Thor, and the light hair makes it easier for his beaming technology to lock onto you.”
She smirked. “Yes, Daniel, that’s it. Thor’s incredibly sophisticated beaming technology needs help from L’Oreal.”
He smiled while chewing, and gestured like he wanted to say something else as soon as he swallowed. Tough; something had just occurred to Sam.
“You know,” she mused, “I had a friend at the Academy. Kind of weird. You’d have liked her.”
He glared, and started chewing faster, evidently gearing up to issue a response to that comment.
“Anyway,” she continued at a leisurely pace, “she had this theory that the real point of cosmetics and hair dye and all that stuff wasn’t to look better. It was to show that you spend time worrying about your looks. That you’re harmless. Superfluous. Content to sit around looking pretty, instead of taking the world by storm.”
Daniel swallowed, then frowned. “I’m sorry. You’re saying, or rather she was saying, cosmetics are a way for women to show they accept submissive status? And in this scenario, I guess men are so bad at being dominant that they can’t approach a woman who doesn’t make that clear up front?”
Sam shrugged.
His eyes flitted around thoughtfully for a moment. “That comes too close to blaming women for inequality for my tastes.”
“Well, we do share responsbility for the way things are,” she pointed out.
“Yes, of course. But we’re all fighting generations of conditioning, men and women. Any change has to come from all of us.”
She nodded slowly, thinking it over. “Do men find superfluousness attractive?”
He tilted his head to one side. “I don’t. Gotta wonder about some people, though.”
“There’s the whole trophy wife syndrome,” Sam mused. “So maybe her theory wasn’t totally out there.”
“I never said it was totally out there.”
“No, but she was,” Sam replied. “I mean, she also thought Reagan was being controlled by… aliens.”
They stared at each other for a slightly uncomfortable moment, mentally cataloging the likely suspects.
Daniel finally broke the silence. “I don’t know about superfluous. But I have known some incredibly beautiful women who couldn’t get dates, because men just assumed they were out of their league.”
“You know for sure that’s what it was?” she asked, intrigued. She’d seen that phenomenon herself - experienced it once or twice, if she wasn’t mistaken (one didn’t actually have to be all that beautiful to run into the problem) - and always suspected insecurity was the root of the problem.
“I’ve heard men say it,” he confirmed. Then he looked uncomfortable. “Okay, in one case I was the man.”
“You?” she asked, startled.
He nodded, his expression changing to confusion.
Unbelievable. But she couldn’t think of a way to pursue the topic without embarrassing him. Yet. She took a different tack. “Well, of course the most unfair thing about that is, it assumes that because a woman is beautiful, she can’t be deep enough to love someone for who he is inside.”
“Or,” Daniel put up a finger, “it assumes that because our culture puts such an unfounded value on beauty, she’s had everything handed to her as a reward for embodying the epitome of the cultural norm, and can’t have had the experiences that make the rest of us ‘deviants’ look outside the box.”
Okay, that did it. “Wait a second: how exactly do you figure you’re a ‘deviant’?”
Daniel frowned back. “Well, I don’t mean I think of anyone as deviant, I just meant cultures form norms which they define as right, no matter how insane they are, and anyone who doesn’t at least try to conform is viewed as wrong. And I definitely have experience with that.”
“True,” she remarked, recalling some of Colonel O’Neill’s horror stories about just what Daniel had endured for his theories on the pyramids. “But as for the looks thing…”
He raised his eyebrows. “What looks thing?”
“Well, you…” Was he putting her on? Just wanting to hear her say it? Could he really be that blind? “Your looks embody the cultural norm very nicely.”
He stared at her for a second, evidently taken aback. Then he glanced away. “How? I’m not exactly the square-jawed, rugged, all-American-”
“That’s a male standard of male beauty,” she cut him off. “Actually, more of a Hollywood standard. The female standards for male beauty are a lot more varied and - just trust me - you measure up.”
He crinkled up his face. “Oh, please. Okay, I mean, yeah. I know I’m not hideous-looking, but you’ve got to admit I fade into the background with ease. I was talking about women who are, like, heart-stoppingly beautiful. They walk into a restaurant, and conversations stop. It’s like a wave of silence rippling through the room.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “Daniel, some women think you’re pretty heart-stopping.”
“They do not.”
“Yes, they-”
“No, they don’t!”
“Have you added the qualification woman to your title recently?” she asked. “Didn’t think so. Now, I’m not naming names, but I am aware of some women who think you’re drop-dead gorgeous.”
He glared at her. “And what do you think?”
“I think you’re very cute,” she admitted easily. “And every once in a while, when the light’s just right or something, I can see how someone might have a minor heart-palpitation over you.”
“Ugh,” he shuddered, viciously slicing into his waffle with a knife and fork. “You know, everybody thinks you’re gorgeous.” He rolled an enormous bite of waffles in syrup, stuffed it in his mouth, and glared at her triumphantly while he chewed.
Honestly, he was just so bizarre sometimes.
“No, they don’t,” she responded without thinking.
“A-ha!” he said with his mouth full, and swallowed quickly. “Have you recently added the qualification of man to your title, Sam?”
“You said ‘everybody’,” she dead-panned. “That includes women.”
“Janet says she’s just looking for an excuse to amputate your legs and reattach them to herself.” He sliced, he diced, he rolled another bite.
“Yeah, well, she’s got… a couple of parts I wouldn’t mind having. Everybody wishes-”
“I’ve heard entire teams drooling over you in the locker room.” He crammed his latest pyramid into his mouth.
She leaned forward. “Ditto. Or the equivalent number to a team, considering we don’t actually have any all-female teams.”
His eyes narrowed even further and swallowed before saying. “Jack and Teal’c both think you’re beautiful.” Quickly, he amended, “I do, too - I’m just not really into blonds.”
“Yeah, well,” she shrugged, “Colonel O’Neill thinks you’re hot, too.”
The knife slipped, and a chunk of waffle launched onto the table. “Excuse me?”
She smiled slyly. “Says he’ll never get a date again if he keeps hanging around you.”
He rolled his eyes and started slicing and dicing again. “You know, I never understood how you ended up with somebody like Jonas Hanson. And I don’t mean the beauty discrepancy.”
She shrugged. “Well, the same way you ended up with Linnea, I guess,” she answered.
He looked up, pausing for a moment in his waffle surgery. “I wasn’t planning on marrying her.”
She sighed. “It’s the same mechanism, though. Sometimes you see something in a person that no one else sees, and it’s kind of exciting, like a new discovery. You think you can bring it out, bring it to the surface, but you never do. Maybe sometimes it was never even there, and you were just imagining it.”
He’d stopped slicing to stare at her. “That’s insightful, Sam.”
Really? “Happens sometimes,” she said, feeling like Colonel O’Neill admitting to good thinking. She knew insights into human nature weren’t her specialty.
In a very serious tone, eyes on the tabletop, he said, “I knew it was her.”
“What?” Sam asked, rewinding the conversation to figure out who-
“Linnea,” he said quietly. “On some level, I knew it was her as soon as we realized she’d had a hand in what happened on Vias.”
Moments like these, she was so glad she wasn’t Daniel. She probably had some pretty scary patterns and baggage in her own head, but it stayed beneath the surface for her. Daniel’s intuitive insights applied to himself as much as anyone. “Then why…”
“I didn’t consciously know,” he explained. “Kera was so good. I needed to understand how someone like that could be someone like Linnea.”
Sam stared at him thoughtfully, remembering. “You were always fascinated by Linnea.”
“She helped us escape,” he shrugged. “She was true to her word. I’m still positive she saved my life somehow, because there’s just no way I got the upper hand with the Incredible Hulk.”
“And yet she can’t help but experiment lethally on massive populations for kicks,” Sam added.
“Exactly!” He looked miserable.
She didn’t think she could carry off cheerful, so she went for a slightly goofy voice. “We sure can pick ‘em. Still. Guess ya gotta cast a big net and catch a whole lot of guppies to get a sea bass.”
He looked amused as he returned to his breakfast. “You turning into a fishing boat captain or something?”
“Argh, matey.”
He flashed one of his blink-and-you-miss-it grins. “There’s got to be a better way. Like, going where there actually are sea bass, and casting a line.”
She frowned. “Did Colonel O’Neill ask you to go fishing again?”
“Yeah, we’re going in two weeks,” he said, then winced and pressed a hand against his abdomen, somewhere below table level. “Ow. Must’ve eaten too fast.”
Ya think? “So, if you’ve got all the answers, what’s your big secret to finding a woman who really appreciates you for who you are?”
He cracked a little bit of a smile, but still looked pained. “Something to do with a mastadge and the Eye of Ra, as I recall.”
She smiled back. She was pretty sure that was the first time since Sha’re’s death she’d seen him refer to her without having to leave the room immediately afterwards. “So you don’t have a solution that works on Earth people, either.”
“Well, no,” he acknowledged, finally moving his hand away from his stomach and looking more relaxed. “I came to terms a long time ago with the fact that I’m not exactly prize material when it comes to dating. Probably the best thing I can do for women everywhere is leave them alone.”
She frowned. “Didn’t we just establish you’re-”
“-an inconsiderate, self-centered workaholic who accidentally stands girlfriends up because he doesn’t realize today is Tuesday?”
“Ouch,” she grimaced. “You actually did that?”
“More than once. And not just on Tuesdays.”
“But you were so thoughtful when you took me out that time,” she said sweetly.
Daniel glanced around in a panic to make sure no one had heard. Like she’d have said something like that if anyone could. “That’s because it wasn’t a real date. I was on a mission to help a friend,” he explained irritably. “You hadn’t left the base in two months, working on that particle beam generator, and I just thought you needed a proper evening off.”
“Yes, and everything was perfect,” she said earnestly.
“And it exhausted all my reserves of boyfriendly behavior for two whole years.”
“Daniel!” she laughed.
“It’ll be early 2002 before I can impress a woman again,” he continued, now that he’d found a riff to work. He was as incorrigible as Colonel O’Neill, in his own way. “And I’ll blow it all on the first date, and she’ll break up with me on the third.”
Suddenly, it hit her. Two people-related insights in one day - she was going to blow a head gasket. But this one was coming through loud and clear. “Is that why you wear the glasses?”
He blinked at her. “What?”
She’d have to lead him to this logically. “What’s your very best physical feature, Daniel? The one the whole team and Janet agreed on at your birthday party last year.”
He frowned. “My eyes?”
“Your eyes,” she confirmed. “And you hide them behind glasses.”
“I don’t wear glasses to hide my eyes,” he said, sounding confused.
“Don’t you?”
“Hello? Near-sighted, here.”
She shrugged. “Hello? Contact lenses. Didn’t Colonel O’Neill tell you he’d feel a lot better taking you into combat if you didn’t have something that could break into shards right next to your eyeballs?”
“Yes, and I explained to him at length about the impracticalities of having clean, lint-free hands with which to change the lenses on missions, not to mention the additional burden of saline, rewetting drops-”
“Laser surgery?”
“Gives me the willies.”
“Still,” she continued undeterred. “You could wear contacts around here. Off-base. But you don’t.”
“I’m used to glasses,” he shrugged.
She tilted her head to the side. “I think you’re afraid of attracting women and then disappointing them.”
His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “That’s a little convoluted, isn’t it?”
“Not for you,” she said, feeling more and more sure of her theory. “You’re more concerned about protecting other people’s feelings than your own. If you’re really convinced you can’t do justice to a relationship with a woman, I can see you taking steps to prevent them from developing.”
He scrunched up his face. “Now who’s making women out to be shallow? You’re saying a pair of glasses can cause women to overlook a man as a potential mate?”
She shook her head and dead-panned again. “No, but it might weed out some of the shallow ones who only want you for your looks.”
He rolled his best features again, and this time she had to chuckle.
“But really,” she said, following her logic a little further, “it’s this whole… way that you present yourself. Bulky clothes, glasses. You look like someone who got hassled by the jocks in school.”
“I was.”
“Yeah, but you aren’t now,” she said, leaning forward. “Now you could probably beat up most of the jocks who ever gave you a hard time.”
He stared at her. Ha! She’d just beat him to an insight on human nature!
“Trust me, Daniel,” she said, going for the pounce, “if I put you in contact lenses and some nice clothes and took you out to a bar for four hours, you’d get a dozen phone numbers. Maybe worse. And then you’d never call any of them.”
“Right, so what’s the point of trying to attract that kind of attention?”
“Exactly! And that’s why you wear glasses and dumpy clothes!” Oops.
He looked offended. “I admit I don’t shop out of the Armani catalog, but ‘dumpy’?”
“Bad choice of words.”
“Yes,” he returned dryly. “So, let’s see. You dye your hair to hide the fact that you’re very serious and smart and busy. I wear glasses to hide…”
“…your smoldering good looks?”
He winced. “I was going to stick with my ability to defend myself physically nowadays. Anyway, you seem to think everybody’s trying to hide something.”
She thought about it for a second. “Yeah, sort of. I mean, that’s defense mechanism 101, isn’t it?”
He muttered something unflattering about pop psychology under his breath. “Okay, so let’s pick a random third party. What’s Jack trying to hide? No glasses, no hair dye.”
“I haven’t thought about him,” she admitted.
“Let’s think together,” he suggested. “He doesn’t try to hide his age.”
“No,” she agreed.
“Except…” Daniel trailed off, frowning into space. “That whole Simpsons thing.”
She gave him a long moment, but he didn’t follow up. “What whole Simpsons thing?”
“Well, he… he does try to make himself appear harmless, doesn’t he?” he finally continued. “He acts like Homer Simpson and plays dumb. And the grey hair might make people who don’t know him underestimate his physical skills, assume he’s past his prime.”
She nodded slowly. “Yeah, when he still has the reflexes of a cat.”
“And that whole yelling his head off when he’s injured thing?” Daniel scoffed. “That’s a Special Ops trick for making the enemy think you’re more hurt than you really are. And he’s really much more sensitive than he lets on.”
“Sensitive?” she echoed, not buying that one. Colonel O’Neill and the word sensitive didn’t belong in the same sentence.
“Trust me,” Daniel said. “He’s very aware of emotional nuances. Remember Thor’s Hammer, and him asking me to shoot it? He knew it had to be me who blew the thing up, or else I might have gone on resenting the decision. And even if I hadn’t, Teal’c would have wondered if I did.”
She thought that one over for a moment. “Huh. That does make sense.”
Daniel nodded, but then he winced again, his hand going back to his abdomen. Right side. “Maybe you’d better head to the infirmary,” she suggested. “You look kind of pale.”
“I’m fine. I gotta run. Jack asked me to meet him at 0800 and explain Buddhism to him.”
She frowned. “Buddhism?”
“Yeah, after our little visit to Camp Mother Nature,” he clarified, rubbing his abdomen again. “Oma Desala and all that. Apparently stirred up some latent philosophical - mmmphh - curiosity.”
“Daniel, where’s the pain, exactly?”
“I’m fine,” he said, standing up. “If it doesn’t get better by the time I’m done with Jack - which should take about five minutes - I’ll see about it.”
She was too focused on where his hand had been when he stood up to answer: lower right side. “Daniel, that’s your appendix. I’m going to call Janet right now.”
“No, you’re not,” he said. “I’ve had it before. It always goes away.”
Maybe. But he looked green. “If you say so,” she said doubtfully.
He tried to look reassuring, and did a fair job. “It’s perfectly harmless.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, like us?”
“No, really harmless. It’s not dying its hair or wearing glasses or pretending to be stupider than it really it. It’s just… flaring up a little. I’ll be fine.”
She gave up trying to convince him and decided on another course of action. “Okay. Hey, let me know how much intelligence and sensitivity Colonel O’Neill displays during your Buddhism lecture.”
He glared at her as he left, and she grinned back. As soon as he was gone, she jumped up and ran to the commissary phone to send Janet up to Daniel’s lab with a medical team.
CATEGORY: Short character study, some humor
TIME: End of Third Season
SPOILERS: Not really.
RATING: PG
COMPLETED/Rewritten: October/November 2005
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Originally written as a brief series of ideas in story form, rewritten as more of an actual ficlet. No waffles were harmed in the making of this story. Daniel is a trained expert in stunt eating. Don’t try this at home.
“So why do you keep it blond, anyway?” he asked, stabbing a third chunk of syrupy waffle onto his fork and shoveling the whole load into his mouth. It looked like he was building miniature pyramids on his fork, then descending on them like a Goa’uld mothership.
Sam tried not to stare, but she must have, because after he swallowed he spoke again.
“Sorry, is that a personal question?” he asked.
“Not from you,” she smiled. “It started turning brown when I was about nineteen or twenty.”
“So you just didn’t like the change in color?” While he spoke, he layered another three slices of waffle onto his fork and rolled them around in syrup.
Here’s the ha’tak and here’s the pyramid, open up wide… Where in the hell does he put it, anyway? She pulled her plate a little closer to her, just in case. “Actually, I didn’t like the change in how people treated me.”
Daniel paused in his chewing long enough to say. “It changed how they treated you?”
She smiled wearily. “Appearances matter, Daniel. You know that.”
Daniel swallowed and put his fork down. Her answer must have captured his attention, because he couldn’t be full yet: he hadn’t even touched her plate. “Yes, that’s true. I’ve just never heard anyone illustrate a direct contrast like that. How did it change?”
She sat back, crossing her arms. “They started taking me more seriously.”
“And that’s a bad thing?”
“Given that I was already a bit of an overachiever and never exactly known as the life of the party,” she said, “yeah.”
He leaned forward slightly. “And by taking you more seriously, you mean…”
“Assuming I was too busy to socialize, instead of just asking,” she said by way of example. “Being more reserved around me. Calling me ‘ma’am’.”
“Interesting,” he muttered, staring off to the side for a moment while he thought. “So do you still think… I mean, do you think if you came in here tomorrow with medium brown hair, we’d all start treating you differently?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“But people who don’t know you?”
“Maybe,” she nodded. “I don’t know. At this point, maybe I’m just more used to it than anything else.”
“Well,” he drawled, eyeing a passing Marine’s breakfast tray with palpable interest, “we, uh, all get used to, ah… certain crutches.”
“Crutches?” she echoed ominously.
His eyes snapped back toward her and he looked chagrined. “Poor choice of words. Sorry. I just meant, we all settle into grooves and-”
“No, you said ‘crutches’,” she interrupted. “You think my hair color is a crutch?”
“No,” he said. Almost convincingly, until he added, “Is it?”
She shook her head. “A crutch for what?” When he looked back toward his waffles, and his hand started toward his fork, she added, “Come on, Daniel, you must have a theory.”
He dropped his hand. “It could be a lot of things. Maybe you just think it looks better than any other color. Maybe it’s the old ‘blonds have more fun’ thing. Maybe-”
“I asked for your theory,” she said.
He looked at her thoughtfully. Then he gave a very short sigh. Finally, he said, “Fine. Your mother kept her hair blond, didn’t she? You showed me a picture once.”
She skipped a breath. “Yeah,” she finally said. And couldn’t believe it had never occurred to her.
“When I said ‘crutch’,” he explained, “I was just thinking maybe it’s a way of keeping her… with you. You do look like her.”
“But not so much if I had brown hair,” she said slowly.
He shook his head. “Not as much, no.”
She tried to remember the first time she’d colored it, that last long look at the rapidly darkening hair that made her look like someone else, a stranger. Was she that simple? That transparent? She knew he meant well, but sometimes Daniel had this way of making you feel like you were nothing but an equation to be solved while he was bored waiting for a computer to boot or something.
“Or maybe it’s just fashionable,” he added, cutting off another stack of waffle bites. “Or maybe it’s your way of reminding yourself you can be feminine and an officer in the Air Force. Maybe you’re secretly dating Thor, and the light hair makes it easier for his beaming technology to lock onto you.”
She smirked. “Yes, Daniel, that’s it. Thor’s incredibly sophisticated beaming technology needs help from L’Oreal.”
He smiled while chewing, and gestured like he wanted to say something else as soon as he swallowed. Tough; something had just occurred to Sam.
“You know,” she mused, “I had a friend at the Academy. Kind of weird. You’d have liked her.”
He glared, and started chewing faster, evidently gearing up to issue a response to that comment.
“Anyway,” she continued at a leisurely pace, “she had this theory that the real point of cosmetics and hair dye and all that stuff wasn’t to look better. It was to show that you spend time worrying about your looks. That you’re harmless. Superfluous. Content to sit around looking pretty, instead of taking the world by storm.”
Daniel swallowed, then frowned. “I’m sorry. You’re saying, or rather she was saying, cosmetics are a way for women to show they accept submissive status? And in this scenario, I guess men are so bad at being dominant that they can’t approach a woman who doesn’t make that clear up front?”
Sam shrugged.
His eyes flitted around thoughtfully for a moment. “That comes too close to blaming women for inequality for my tastes.”
“Well, we do share responsbility for the way things are,” she pointed out.
“Yes, of course. But we’re all fighting generations of conditioning, men and women. Any change has to come from all of us.”
She nodded slowly, thinking it over. “Do men find superfluousness attractive?”
He tilted his head to one side. “I don’t. Gotta wonder about some people, though.”
“There’s the whole trophy wife syndrome,” Sam mused. “So maybe her theory wasn’t totally out there.”
“I never said it was totally out there.”
“No, but she was,” Sam replied. “I mean, she also thought Reagan was being controlled by… aliens.”
They stared at each other for a slightly uncomfortable moment, mentally cataloging the likely suspects.
Daniel finally broke the silence. “I don’t know about superfluous. But I have known some incredibly beautiful women who couldn’t get dates, because men just assumed they were out of their league.”
“You know for sure that’s what it was?” she asked, intrigued. She’d seen that phenomenon herself - experienced it once or twice, if she wasn’t mistaken (one didn’t actually have to be all that beautiful to run into the problem) - and always suspected insecurity was the root of the problem.
“I’ve heard men say it,” he confirmed. Then he looked uncomfortable. “Okay, in one case I was the man.”
“You?” she asked, startled.
He nodded, his expression changing to confusion.
Unbelievable. But she couldn’t think of a way to pursue the topic without embarrassing him. Yet. She took a different tack. “Well, of course the most unfair thing about that is, it assumes that because a woman is beautiful, she can’t be deep enough to love someone for who he is inside.”
“Or,” Daniel put up a finger, “it assumes that because our culture puts such an unfounded value on beauty, she’s had everything handed to her as a reward for embodying the epitome of the cultural norm, and can’t have had the experiences that make the rest of us ‘deviants’ look outside the box.”
Okay, that did it. “Wait a second: how exactly do you figure you’re a ‘deviant’?”
Daniel frowned back. “Well, I don’t mean I think of anyone as deviant, I just meant cultures form norms which they define as right, no matter how insane they are, and anyone who doesn’t at least try to conform is viewed as wrong. And I definitely have experience with that.”
“True,” she remarked, recalling some of Colonel O’Neill’s horror stories about just what Daniel had endured for his theories on the pyramids. “But as for the looks thing…”
He raised his eyebrows. “What looks thing?”
“Well, you…” Was he putting her on? Just wanting to hear her say it? Could he really be that blind? “Your looks embody the cultural norm very nicely.”
He stared at her for a second, evidently taken aback. Then he glanced away. “How? I’m not exactly the square-jawed, rugged, all-American-”
“That’s a male standard of male beauty,” she cut him off. “Actually, more of a Hollywood standard. The female standards for male beauty are a lot more varied and - just trust me - you measure up.”
He crinkled up his face. “Oh, please. Okay, I mean, yeah. I know I’m not hideous-looking, but you’ve got to admit I fade into the background with ease. I was talking about women who are, like, heart-stoppingly beautiful. They walk into a restaurant, and conversations stop. It’s like a wave of silence rippling through the room.”
Sam raised an eyebrow. “Daniel, some women think you’re pretty heart-stopping.”
“They do not.”
“Yes, they-”
“No, they don’t!”
“Have you added the qualification woman to your title recently?” she asked. “Didn’t think so. Now, I’m not naming names, but I am aware of some women who think you’re drop-dead gorgeous.”
He glared at her. “And what do you think?”
“I think you’re very cute,” she admitted easily. “And every once in a while, when the light’s just right or something, I can see how someone might have a minor heart-palpitation over you.”
“Ugh,” he shuddered, viciously slicing into his waffle with a knife and fork. “You know, everybody thinks you’re gorgeous.” He rolled an enormous bite of waffles in syrup, stuffed it in his mouth, and glared at her triumphantly while he chewed.
Honestly, he was just so bizarre sometimes.
“No, they don’t,” she responded without thinking.
“A-ha!” he said with his mouth full, and swallowed quickly. “Have you recently added the qualification of man to your title, Sam?”
“You said ‘everybody’,” she dead-panned. “That includes women.”
“Janet says she’s just looking for an excuse to amputate your legs and reattach them to herself.” He sliced, he diced, he rolled another bite.
“Yeah, well, she’s got… a couple of parts I wouldn’t mind having. Everybody wishes-”
“I’ve heard entire teams drooling over you in the locker room.” He crammed his latest pyramid into his mouth.
She leaned forward. “Ditto. Or the equivalent number to a team, considering we don’t actually have any all-female teams.”
His eyes narrowed even further and swallowed before saying. “Jack and Teal’c both think you’re beautiful.” Quickly, he amended, “I do, too - I’m just not really into blonds.”
“Yeah, well,” she shrugged, “Colonel O’Neill thinks you’re hot, too.”
The knife slipped, and a chunk of waffle launched onto the table. “Excuse me?”
She smiled slyly. “Says he’ll never get a date again if he keeps hanging around you.”
He rolled his eyes and started slicing and dicing again. “You know, I never understood how you ended up with somebody like Jonas Hanson. And I don’t mean the beauty discrepancy.”
She shrugged. “Well, the same way you ended up with Linnea, I guess,” she answered.
He looked up, pausing for a moment in his waffle surgery. “I wasn’t planning on marrying her.”
She sighed. “It’s the same mechanism, though. Sometimes you see something in a person that no one else sees, and it’s kind of exciting, like a new discovery. You think you can bring it out, bring it to the surface, but you never do. Maybe sometimes it was never even there, and you were just imagining it.”
He’d stopped slicing to stare at her. “That’s insightful, Sam.”
Really? “Happens sometimes,” she said, feeling like Colonel O’Neill admitting to good thinking. She knew insights into human nature weren’t her specialty.
In a very serious tone, eyes on the tabletop, he said, “I knew it was her.”
“What?” Sam asked, rewinding the conversation to figure out who-
“Linnea,” he said quietly. “On some level, I knew it was her as soon as we realized she’d had a hand in what happened on Vias.”
Moments like these, she was so glad she wasn’t Daniel. She probably had some pretty scary patterns and baggage in her own head, but it stayed beneath the surface for her. Daniel’s intuitive insights applied to himself as much as anyone. “Then why…”
“I didn’t consciously know,” he explained. “Kera was so good. I needed to understand how someone like that could be someone like Linnea.”
Sam stared at him thoughtfully, remembering. “You were always fascinated by Linnea.”
“She helped us escape,” he shrugged. “She was true to her word. I’m still positive she saved my life somehow, because there’s just no way I got the upper hand with the Incredible Hulk.”
“And yet she can’t help but experiment lethally on massive populations for kicks,” Sam added.
“Exactly!” He looked miserable.
She didn’t think she could carry off cheerful, so she went for a slightly goofy voice. “We sure can pick ‘em. Still. Guess ya gotta cast a big net and catch a whole lot of guppies to get a sea bass.”
He looked amused as he returned to his breakfast. “You turning into a fishing boat captain or something?”
“Argh, matey.”
He flashed one of his blink-and-you-miss-it grins. “There’s got to be a better way. Like, going where there actually are sea bass, and casting a line.”
She frowned. “Did Colonel O’Neill ask you to go fishing again?”
“Yeah, we’re going in two weeks,” he said, then winced and pressed a hand against his abdomen, somewhere below table level. “Ow. Must’ve eaten too fast.”
Ya think? “So, if you’ve got all the answers, what’s your big secret to finding a woman who really appreciates you for who you are?”
He cracked a little bit of a smile, but still looked pained. “Something to do with a mastadge and the Eye of Ra, as I recall.”
She smiled back. She was pretty sure that was the first time since Sha’re’s death she’d seen him refer to her without having to leave the room immediately afterwards. “So you don’t have a solution that works on Earth people, either.”
“Well, no,” he acknowledged, finally moving his hand away from his stomach and looking more relaxed. “I came to terms a long time ago with the fact that I’m not exactly prize material when it comes to dating. Probably the best thing I can do for women everywhere is leave them alone.”
She frowned. “Didn’t we just establish you’re-”
“-an inconsiderate, self-centered workaholic who accidentally stands girlfriends up because he doesn’t realize today is Tuesday?”
“Ouch,” she grimaced. “You actually did that?”
“More than once. And not just on Tuesdays.”
“But you were so thoughtful when you took me out that time,” she said sweetly.
Daniel glanced around in a panic to make sure no one had heard. Like she’d have said something like that if anyone could. “That’s because it wasn’t a real date. I was on a mission to help a friend,” he explained irritably. “You hadn’t left the base in two months, working on that particle beam generator, and I just thought you needed a proper evening off.”
“Yes, and everything was perfect,” she said earnestly.
“And it exhausted all my reserves of boyfriendly behavior for two whole years.”
“Daniel!” she laughed.
“It’ll be early 2002 before I can impress a woman again,” he continued, now that he’d found a riff to work. He was as incorrigible as Colonel O’Neill, in his own way. “And I’ll blow it all on the first date, and she’ll break up with me on the third.”
Suddenly, it hit her. Two people-related insights in one day - she was going to blow a head gasket. But this one was coming through loud and clear. “Is that why you wear the glasses?”
He blinked at her. “What?”
She’d have to lead him to this logically. “What’s your very best physical feature, Daniel? The one the whole team and Janet agreed on at your birthday party last year.”
He frowned. “My eyes?”
“Your eyes,” she confirmed. “And you hide them behind glasses.”
“I don’t wear glasses to hide my eyes,” he said, sounding confused.
“Don’t you?”
“Hello? Near-sighted, here.”
She shrugged. “Hello? Contact lenses. Didn’t Colonel O’Neill tell you he’d feel a lot better taking you into combat if you didn’t have something that could break into shards right next to your eyeballs?”
“Yes, and I explained to him at length about the impracticalities of having clean, lint-free hands with which to change the lenses on missions, not to mention the additional burden of saline, rewetting drops-”
“Laser surgery?”
“Gives me the willies.”
“Still,” she continued undeterred. “You could wear contacts around here. Off-base. But you don’t.”
“I’m used to glasses,” he shrugged.
She tilted her head to the side. “I think you’re afraid of attracting women and then disappointing them.”
His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “That’s a little convoluted, isn’t it?”
“Not for you,” she said, feeling more and more sure of her theory. “You’re more concerned about protecting other people’s feelings than your own. If you’re really convinced you can’t do justice to a relationship with a woman, I can see you taking steps to prevent them from developing.”
He scrunched up his face. “Now who’s making women out to be shallow? You’re saying a pair of glasses can cause women to overlook a man as a potential mate?”
She shook her head and dead-panned again. “No, but it might weed out some of the shallow ones who only want you for your looks.”
He rolled his best features again, and this time she had to chuckle.
“But really,” she said, following her logic a little further, “it’s this whole… way that you present yourself. Bulky clothes, glasses. You look like someone who got hassled by the jocks in school.”
“I was.”
“Yeah, but you aren’t now,” she said, leaning forward. “Now you could probably beat up most of the jocks who ever gave you a hard time.”
He stared at her. Ha! She’d just beat him to an insight on human nature!
“Trust me, Daniel,” she said, going for the pounce, “if I put you in contact lenses and some nice clothes and took you out to a bar for four hours, you’d get a dozen phone numbers. Maybe worse. And then you’d never call any of them.”
“Right, so what’s the point of trying to attract that kind of attention?”
“Exactly! And that’s why you wear glasses and dumpy clothes!” Oops.
He looked offended. “I admit I don’t shop out of the Armani catalog, but ‘dumpy’?”
“Bad choice of words.”
“Yes,” he returned dryly. “So, let’s see. You dye your hair to hide the fact that you’re very serious and smart and busy. I wear glasses to hide…”
“…your smoldering good looks?”
He winced. “I was going to stick with my ability to defend myself physically nowadays. Anyway, you seem to think everybody’s trying to hide something.”
She thought about it for a second. “Yeah, sort of. I mean, that’s defense mechanism 101, isn’t it?”
He muttered something unflattering about pop psychology under his breath. “Okay, so let’s pick a random third party. What’s Jack trying to hide? No glasses, no hair dye.”
“I haven’t thought about him,” she admitted.
“Let’s think together,” he suggested. “He doesn’t try to hide his age.”
“No,” she agreed.
“Except…” Daniel trailed off, frowning into space. “That whole Simpsons thing.”
She gave him a long moment, but he didn’t follow up. “What whole Simpsons thing?”
“Well, he… he does try to make himself appear harmless, doesn’t he?” he finally continued. “He acts like Homer Simpson and plays dumb. And the grey hair might make people who don’t know him underestimate his physical skills, assume he’s past his prime.”
She nodded slowly. “Yeah, when he still has the reflexes of a cat.”
“And that whole yelling his head off when he’s injured thing?” Daniel scoffed. “That’s a Special Ops trick for making the enemy think you’re more hurt than you really are. And he’s really much more sensitive than he lets on.”
“Sensitive?” she echoed, not buying that one. Colonel O’Neill and the word sensitive didn’t belong in the same sentence.
“Trust me,” Daniel said. “He’s very aware of emotional nuances. Remember Thor’s Hammer, and him asking me to shoot it? He knew it had to be me who blew the thing up, or else I might have gone on resenting the decision. And even if I hadn’t, Teal’c would have wondered if I did.”
She thought that one over for a moment. “Huh. That does make sense.”
Daniel nodded, but then he winced again, his hand going back to his abdomen. Right side. “Maybe you’d better head to the infirmary,” she suggested. “You look kind of pale.”
“I’m fine. I gotta run. Jack asked me to meet him at 0800 and explain Buddhism to him.”
She frowned. “Buddhism?”
“Yeah, after our little visit to Camp Mother Nature,” he clarified, rubbing his abdomen again. “Oma Desala and all that. Apparently stirred up some latent philosophical - mmmphh - curiosity.”
“Daniel, where’s the pain, exactly?”
“I’m fine,” he said, standing up. “If it doesn’t get better by the time I’m done with Jack - which should take about five minutes - I’ll see about it.”
She was too focused on where his hand had been when he stood up to answer: lower right side. “Daniel, that’s your appendix. I’m going to call Janet right now.”
“No, you’re not,” he said. “I’ve had it before. It always goes away.”
Maybe. But he looked green. “If you say so,” she said doubtfully.
He tried to look reassuring, and did a fair job. “It’s perfectly harmless.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, like us?”
“No, really harmless. It’s not dying its hair or wearing glasses or pretending to be stupider than it really it. It’s just… flaring up a little. I’ll be fine.”
She gave up trying to convince him and decided on another course of action. “Okay. Hey, let me know how much intelligence and sensitivity Colonel O’Neill displays during your Buddhism lecture.”
He glared at her as he left, and she grinned back. As soon as he was gone, she jumped up and ran to the commissary phone to send Janet up to Daniel’s lab with a medical team.