SG-1, Ninja Style

Sound penetrated the haze first. Annoyingly cheerful, insanely loud, the twittering seemed to be precisely the right frequency to drill a hole through his skull. The same infuriating six notes looping endlessly, over and over and –

Birdsong, he sluggishly realized.

The next thought reluctantly slogged into his brain.

No birds in my apartment.

A minute passed before coherent thinking proceeded further, together with a slow return to sensation.

Discomfort: I’m not lying in my bed.

Or on my couch.

Pretty sure my carpet isn’t this prickly.

Or this wet.

Strands of… something were on his face, in irritating drifts across his nose and – ugh, in his mouth?

Spit it out.

Tongue isn’t working. Feels like acid sandpaper.

Eyes glued together.

That might be a good thing.

He heard a pitiful groan. After another long moment, he realized it had come from him.

“Daniel Jackson?”

The deep voice tunneled into his eardrums without mercy. He groaned again, this time with feeling.

“Daniel Jackson, are you ill?”

Neurons fired. Recognition dawned. He wrapped a single word around his tongue and forced himself into an approximation of speech.

“Teal’c?” he croaked.

“Yes.”

“Am I dead?”

There was a pause. “You are alive, Daniel Jackson.” Teal’c added in a thoughtful tone, “You do not seem to be very pleased about that, however.”

“Would you kill me?” Or maybe that bird? Either one would do.

Another pause. Then, “I do not think so.”

“Please?”

A firm grip fisted in the back of his shirt was the only warning before Daniel suddenly found himself hauled into a sitting position. The kaleidoscope of dizzying color that exploded against his inner eyelids was probably fascinating, but the ice pick that split his head open distracted him from enjoying it properly.

“S’not the way to do it, Teal’c,” he heard someone mutter.

“He is now vertical. Surely that is an improvement.”

“Do that to me and I’ll kill you soon’s I finish dying.”

“That might prove difficult to accomplish, O’Neill.”

Daniel risked forcing his eyes open. Light hammered his eyeballs into the back of the skull before he could manage to snap them shut again. That pitiful groan was him again, wasn’t it?

“We’re in a park,” a new voice moaned. “And who cut my head off?”

“Your head seems to be firmly attached to your body, Captain Carter.”

Daniel finally managed to get a hand up to the level of his face. He worked his fingers slowly across his cheek, trying to pry the dried whatever-it-was off his skin. It was his own hair flopping over his mouth and nose, he realized. He spat out the offensive strands and tried to pretend that the truly horrific taste in his mouth was from his hair and not from… something else.

“What happened?” he mumbled.

“I think we died,” Jack groaned. There were scuffling sounds, and Daniel took a chance and cracked his eyelids open again. Jack was slowly hauling himself into a sitting position, wincing every bit as much as Daniel.

“Too hung over to be dead, sir,” Sam said miserably. She seemed only slightly less the worse for wear than Jack and Daniel; she sat hunched over in the grass, her head buried in her hands. “How did we get here?”

“Your motorcycle ran out of gasoline, Captain Carter.”

There was a sudden silence.

“Say that again?” Jack asked weakly. He gave his 2IC a sidelong glance, vaguely interested in the way her pale face was suddenly highlighted by two bright spots of color on her cheeks.

“Captain Carter’s vehicle was no longer operable,” Teal’c said again, his expression utterly bland.

“We were all on my Harley?” Sam’s voice rose nearly an octave.

“You would only allow Daniel Jackson to ride with you,” Teal’c clarified.

Sam and Daniel both choked at this. Jack sat up a little straighter, feeling a kind of muzzy resentment.

“So what did you and I do?” he demanded. “Run alongside?”

“Your truck is parked next to Captain Carter’s motorcycle,” Teal’c said calmly.

“For crying out loud! Don’t tell me I drove here when I was –”

“You did, indeed, attempt to drive, O’Neill.” Teal’c reached into a pocket and pulled out a set of keys. “I thought it wise to operate your vehicle myself.”

Jack fumbled the easy toss, dropping the keys in the wet grass twice before he finally managed to shove them into his own pocket. “Hold on a second. You don’t know how to drive!”

Teal’c tilted his head at him. “So you observed last night. Since you were incapable of fitting the key in the ignition, however, you eventually agreed to let me make the attempt rather than allow Captain Carter to ‘hotwire’ your truck, as she offered to do.”

“I did not!” Sam squeaked, feeling her cheeks grow even hotter.

“You did indeed, Captain Carter,” Teal’c said relentlessly. “I confess that I found it somewhat difficult to follow you, as the speed of your motorcycle was –”

“Hey! You wouldn’t let the colonel drive drunk, but it was okay for Sam and me?” Daniel felt a little offended.

“I could hardly drive both vehicles at once,” Teal’c pointed out, his voice eminently reasonable. “And Captain Carter would not consent to abandon her motorcycle. She did seem very focused, Daniel Jackson. And she insisted you both wear helmets for safety, even when you maintained that you had not worn a helmet since our trip to the Land of Light, and that it made you look like a – I believe the word was ‘dork.’”

Sam clapped a hand over her mouth. Daniel rather meanly hoped it was to hold back her nausea, not her sniggers.

Jack was still frowning. “And we came here…?”

“We walked some two hundred meters to this spot, O’Neill. The three of you… fell asleep shortly thereafter.”

“And you stood guard over us, huh?”

“It is of no moment,” Teal’c assured them. “I was able to kel no reem even as I kept watch.”

“But why didn’t you stop us, Teal’c?” Daniel asked, a little plaintively.

Teal’c raised his eyebrows. “You were all rather determined.”

“But we were drunk!”

“Of this I am aware,” Teal’c said, and the slight dryness in his voice was the first hint that he was actually enjoying all this.

“You should have realized that we weren’t behaving normally, Teal’c,” Sam tried. “When we’re in our right minds, we would never…” Her voice trailed off as she looked warily down at herself and then at the others. They were dressed from head to toe in non-reflective black clothing that she didn’t recognize, including what she was wearing herself. Carved wooden sticks lay discarded on the wet grass next to numerous empty bottles. The colonel’s face and arms were streaked with dirt, his shirt stained; Daniel’s hair was so entangled with grass and twigs that he looked like Lya’s big brother. Her own trouser legs, she noticed uneasily, were caked from the knees down in drying mud. “…do whatever we were doing,” she finished lamely.

Teal’c regarded her thoughtfully. “You wish to know what you did?”

“Yes!” said Jack quickly.

“No!” blurted Sam, panicked. Jack glared at her. “Sir,” she added sulkily.

“I say yes,” Daniel said. He licked his repulsively dry lips with an equally disgusting tongue. “Whatever we did – I’m probably imagining something a lot worse right now.”

“Go ahead, Teal’c,” Jack sighed, flopping back into the grass and throwing his arm across his eyes. “Let’s hear the worst of it. How did we get here?”

Teal’c considered for a moment. “Precisely what do you remember, O’Neill?”

Jack frowned, then peeked out from behind his arm. “We were in Daniel’s apartment. Celebrating.”

“Saved the world,” Sam grumbled. “Allowed to celebrate after blowing up a couple of ships, aren’t we?”

“I was unaware that ‘celebrating’ is a synonym for ‘drinking large amounts of alcoholic beverages,’” Teal’c observed, and now there was no question that he was enjoying himself a lot. “If that is, indeed, how ‘celebrating’ is defined, then I would say that you are remembering the events of last night with great accuracy.”

“All right, all right!” Jack hid behind his arm again. “So we were stinking drunk.”

“I did not find you particularly odorous, but – ”

“Now I know you’re messing with me, Teal’c. Tell us the truth.”

Teal’c sat back, letting his eyebrow do all the talking as he replayed last night’s events in his head. “There was singing,” he offered finally.

Sam blanched. “Oh, boy.”

“O’Neill and Daniel Jackson argued quite vociferously about the relative explosive qualities of nuclear weapons versus large amounts of C4 on Goa’uld motherships. Captain Carter maintained that the disagreement was unfair, as she was in no position to compare the two, and that the data could not be considered empirical, since the methods of observation were different in each case.”

Jack moved his arm again to squint blearily at Teal’c. “Killing Ra over Abydos versus killing Apophis over Earth?” he hazarded. “Hey, there were two ships this time instead of one!”

“That was the main thrust of your argument at the time, O’Neill,” Teal’c agreed. “It was at that point, however, that Daniel Jackson also suggested that the ‘cool outfits’ we donned for our mission played a major factor in our victory. You were enthusiastic in endorsing this theory, O’Neill, but when you compared our clothing to that of ‘ninjas,’ Daniel Jackson became quite indignant. He insisted that our BDUs were not, in fact, reminiscent of ninjas at all, and that it would be relatively simple for us to procure ‘real’ ninja outfits.”

A heavy silence fell at this, broken only by Daniel’s appalled coughing fit. The wooden sticks on the ground – now easily recognized as practice bokkens they had apparently gotten from somewhere – seemed to grow in apprehensive significance.

“And what was I doing?” Sam asked suspiciously, as Teal’c helpfully pounded Daniel’s wheezing lungs into submission.

Teal’c hesitated. “You announced that real ninjas need real wheels, Captain Carter. You all agreed that a mission to procure proper ninja costumes, complete with accessories, was a most worthy endeavor. At that point, the logic of the conversation became somewhat difficult to follow...”

Jack, Sam, and Daniel listened with growing alarm as Teal’c recounted the events of the previous night, which had included Jack’s efforts to “borrow” the samurai swords Daniel kept mounted on his wall and Sam’s considerate offer to pick the lock on a nearby dojo’s door in order to take some practice bokkens instead.

“As if I’d let you use my swords while you go on a joy ride!” Daniel snorted.

“You’d rather Carter broke into a dojo instead?” Jack fired back.

“How did I even know the dojo existed?” Sam complained, her face burning now.

They had gone to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo at one point, apparently so that Jack could rescue any spacemonkeys that might have inadvertently been put behind bars. This factoid left Jack howling with laughter, and Daniel trying rather ineffectually to thump him. Sam had to practically sit on Daniel to get him to stop.

Teal’c continued implacably. Daniel had led them all in a charge to stop a mugging on a side-street; Sam had decked the police officer who tried to arrest them for frightening the victim a lot more than the original mugger had. There had been a possibly involuntary ducking in a muddy pond at one point, and a tree-climbing contest between Jack and Daniel, with Sam judging them both from her vantage point in the top branches. There had been numerous trips to various stores to replenish their drinking stock, until Jack had finally run out of money and Sam had finally run out of gas. At that point – sometime around three o’clock, according to Teal’c – they had staggered into the quiet little park, finished what was left of their liquor, and collapsed until morning.

Teal’c finished his account, and a broken record of birdsong tried to fill the silence that descended.

“Teal’c,” Daniel finally managed. His voice cracked a little, and he tried, without success, to clear his throat. “You just went along with all this?”

“Why not, Daniel Jackson? Despite my own state of sobriety, I found the night’s events most entertaining. I am quite pleased to have participated.”

“But you know we wouldn’t do things like that when we aren’t drunk! Why didn’t you even try to stop us?”

Teal’c tilted his head to one side, his face settling into that expressionless smirk that was completely, uniquely his own. “Daniel Jackson, I have often seen you deliberately poison yourself with caffeinated beverages.”

Daniel sputtered, even as Jack started to snicker. “That’s not the same! A coffee or two –”

“Or four or five,” cackled Jack.

“– that helps me wake up a little isn’t the same as drinking seven shots of – shut up, Jack!”

“And you, O’Neill,” continued an unfazed Teal’c, “have often extolled the glories of adult men pursuing a small rubber object with large wooden sticks. That seems to be similar to –”

“Now, hold on!” Jack said, laughter dying away as he sat up straight with indignation. “Hockey is nothing like chasing a mugger with a wooden bokken!”

“Captain Carter, you yourself suggested the use of your own vehicle, which you assured me you often ride for the purpose of enjoying the sensation of speed. Since that is precisely what you were doing when we escaped pursuit from the –”

“Teal’c!” Sam wailed.

Teal’c mercifully stopped cataloguing their regular habits and rose effortlessly to his feet, giving them a nod of infinite grace and superiority. “I regret that I was unable to differentiate your sober eccentricities from your inebriated ones,” he apologized with a completely straight face.

“In other words,” Jack sighed, “we Tau’ri are completely insane and beyond comprehension.”

“Indeed, O’Neill.” Teal’c reached out a hand and pulled a swaying Jack to his feet. “And yet, despite the oddity of your behavior, we have all achieved a great victory.”

“What’s so victorious about trying to save spacemonkeys in the zoo?” Daniel asked nastily. He was going to have to come up with some serious payback for that one.

Jack looked down at him and gave him a lazy, twisted grin. “Not the spacemonkey rescue, Daniel,” he explained with exaggerated patience. “The saving the world thing. And getting you back in one piece. Remember?”

“Oh. That.” Daniel scrubbed a hand across his sticky face as his own smile slowly grew. “Yeah.”

A great victory. Apophis’ ships destroyed, the SGC back in business. And that, Daniel decided – as they staggered to their feet, and they brushed thankfully unidentifiable debris off their probably stolen clothing, and he and Sam leaned gratefully against Teal’c as he guided them out of the park, and Jack actually allowed Teal’c to take back his keys for the drive home – that was more than enough for now.