The Darker Side of Paradise: Part 1

It felt strange to be home again.

Walking down the halls of the SGC, Jack pondered his return. Boots and socks again, not bare feet. Solid cement, not shifting dirt. The warm reassurance of people who weren't paranoid he was out to get them.

It was at once both a relief and a burden. After being MIA for a month - even if he'd had to put up with Maybourne – coming back to the SGC with its constant presence of hard steel, solid cement, and people all around him was harder than he'd expected. After so much solitude, he was uncertain if he could take community again.

The acclimatisation wasn't terribly hard – just...unfamiliar. It wasn't every day you returned to Earth after a prolonged absence and had to deal with going from no-tech to high-tech again. Of course, Jack had already done this once before.

There were even some similarities to the time after his return from Edora. People greeting him at every turn, smiles from the auxiliary staff of the SGC, and salutes and claps on the shoulder from the military staff in the corridors, Fraiser and her array of pointed needles - even Carter avoiding him.

And this time, at least, he had no idea why. Not that he'd had any idea why last time, it was just an...inkling.

He took the last turn which would bring him to just outside her office and paused. It seemed that, in his absence, his team had ended up spending a lot of time in Carter's office. Or at least Carter and Teal'c would spend a lot of time there, with Jonas apparently popping in and out as he asked questions, bounced theories off them, and informed them what the weather was like according to the weather channel.

And as he swiped his card at the door and nodded to the SF standing sentry, he found that today was no different.

Carter was at the computer, tapping out words or commands or whatever with lightning speed. Teal'c was at the second terminal, hunt-and-pecking his way through something - possibly a mission report. Jonas was in the corner, curled up on the cot that Jack had requisitioned for his 2IC after coming into the lab once too often to find Carter asleep over her computer or with her head down on her arms.

"Hey guys."

She glanced up, "Sir." Then she went right back to her typing. Well, fine then.

Teal'c was a little more forthcoming, at least. "O'Neill. Has Dr. Fraiser assured herself that you are in good health?"

"Yeah." He'd been scheduled for a check-up this morning so the Doc could poke and prod him, strip him down to a pair of jogging shorts and see how long and how fast he could run.

Evidently his performance had been satisfactory, his diet of arugula and fish hadn't done his physiology much harm, and the Doc had enjoyed her eyeful. She was humming when he got off the machine – tunelessly, no less.

He was declared medically fit and would be given a couple of days of downtime before being put back on the roster – just as a precaution against anything that 'Paradise' had left in his system.

Downtime sounded pretty good to him. But he wanted company with which to spend it. After a month by himself, he was all fished out and tired of solitude. He wanted people around him. Jonas with his indefatiguable enthusiasm, Teal'c with his quiet presence, Carter with her neverending stream of thought.

His people.

Of course, first he had to get them to come along with his plans.

That was a little bit harder.

"So what's everyone doing in the next couple of days?"

Teal'c regarded him stolidly, "I will not be accompanying you to your cabin, O'Neill."

"Hey, I wasn't necessarily going to ask you..."

"Is that not your purpose for coming down here? To request our presence on your down-time?" There was absolutely not one iota of question in Teal'c's voice. Jack had to admit that his team-mate knew him all too well.

"Well, yes... But you could at least pretend that I came down here just to be sociable and polite and see what was happening around here!" Jack looked over at Carter who was studiously typing away. "Carter?"

Without stopping, she answered, "I have a lot of work to catch up on, sir."

"After the last month?" SG-1 hadn't gone on any missions lately. They'd been on active duty, but taken off the off-world roster since he'd been marooned in 'Paradise'. So Carter should have had more-than-adequate time to catch up on her work, even while working out a way to reach him.

She looked up, but the fingers kept pattering over the keyboard. "Even after the last month."

Huh. He felt kinda slapped.

He glanced at the still-sleeping Jonas and pursed his lips. He could invite Jonas...

Nah. Not without Carter or Teal'c.

"Look, guys, I'm not actually going up to the cabin. I've just spent the last month fishing – do you think I want to do more fishing?"

"What is it that you want, O'Neill?"

"I wanna spend some time with my team? You know? Those people that I go through the gate with every couple of days?"

Carter looked up from her laptop and glanced over at Teal'c. They shared some silent kind of communication before she turned back to him. "Sir, I really do have a lot of work to catch up on."

"But you can take just a little time out to come around for a barbecue," Jack argued. "Four hours out of the middle of one of your days. For crying out loud, Carter, we're on downtime. For most people that means not coming in to work."

"Major Carter is not most people, O'Neill."

Jack sighed. "Tell me something I don't know, Teal'c... Barbecue. On Thursday. If you don't want to make polite small talk, we'll sit down and watch a game...or something. But you're coming along, Carter, if I have to drive into the base, put you over my shoulder and haul you out of here kicking and screaming. Capische?"

She gave him a challenging look. "I'd like to see you try, sir."

In another woman, such a statement would have been easily construed as flirting. Since it was Carter, it was just an assertion of independence.

"That will not be necessary, O'Neill. Should Major Carter refuse to attend your barbecue, rest assured that I will extract her from the base as required." Teal'c regarded Carter with an inscrutable look – one under which she wilted slightly.

Jack snorted with suppressed amusement. "Good man, Teal'c. I'll see you guys Thursday then? Bring your own beer. And Jonas."

"Do we each have to bring our own Jonas?" Carter asked, demurely, showing the first spark of good humour he'd seen since he'd returned to Earth in the company of Jalen the Tok'ra. "We only have one..."

"Thank God."

"I heard that, Colonel," came a muffled voice from down on the cot before Jonas sat up, rubbing his eyes.

"Well, bully for you." Jack told his newest team member, rolling his eyes for Carter and Teal'c to see. "Barbecue. Thursday. Or else."

"What will you do now, O'Neill?"

"Um...probably go home and sleep. Like a baby. In my own bed." Without having to worry about Maybourne stealing his gun or wondering if dead aliens had ghosts. Jack wasn't much of a believer in the supernatural, but that place had given him a bad case of the creeps.

"I shall call in on you tomorrow," Teal'c stated in his solemn manner. "It is well that you are back."

Which was Teal'c's way of saying that he'd missed Jack.

And Jack had missed his friends.

*

Teal'c found him sitting on his deck listening to Paganini's Concerto in D minor. "Good morning, O'Neill."

"Indeed it is, Teal'c." Jack felt strangely uplifted today. He had definitely slept like a baby yesterday – through most of the day and until early afternoon. Maybe it was just the euphoria of being home, but he felt rested and at peace with himself.

"You are feeling very well then?"

"Yup. How about you?"

"I am quite well, O'Neill."

"You can help me get some food – did you guys clear out the fridge?" Never mind that there was nobody else who would have cleared out the items in his fridge – mostly old boxes of takeaway if Jack recalled correctly.

"We did. Major Carter was unwilling, but Jonas Quinn pointed out the practicality of the situation." One corner of Teal'c's mouth tugged upwards. "I believe he was hungry."

Jack stared very hard at his friend. "Lemme get this straight. You cleaned out my fridge, because Jonas was hungry?"

"There was a great deal of discussion regarding it, but Jonas Quinn said it would be a waste to let the food spoil when he was hungry and there was no telling how long before you would be able to return. Major Carter reluctantly conceded the point, but doubted there would be anything that she considered fit to eat in it. She also informed Jonas Quinn that he would be paying for the restocking of your fridge when you returned."

"Sheesh," Jack muttered, not sure whether to be appalled or amused. He decided on amused. Jonas was going to be paying for his next grocery bill after all. "Well, we'd better get something from the supermarket. I have leftover pizza from last night, but you won't eat that."

"Indeed, O'Neill."

Teal'c pulled a squashed cap out of his jacket pocket and fitted it carefully over his brand. "I am ready to depart."

They were out the driveway and down the street before Jack asked the question that had been bugging him for a while. "So what's up with Carter?" From Teal'c's protective manner around Carter, he guessed that the big guy had been acting as a guard-dog around her. Carter could get pretty focused when...when things got hairy. It was one of her more admirable qualities as a scientist – and one of her worse qualities as an officer likely to move into command positions.

Commanders couldn't focus on the small things, they had to look at the bigger picture - more lives than their own might depend on it. Carter had a ways to go, but she'd learn. Give her time and she'd learn.

"Major Carter was frustrated by her inability to locate you, O'Neill."

Jack rather thought she might have been. His last 'enforced absence' from the SGC had been before...before a lot of things got very complex...and look how hard she'd worked then!

There were a limited number of questions Jack could ask about Carter's well-being, so he asked the most innocuous one. "Did she get enough sleep?"

"She got sufficient rest to continue looking for solutions." By which Teal'c effectively meant that Carter had snatched a couple of hours each night before getting back to the issue. "Both Jonas Quinn and myself ensured that she took care of herself, however she was...relentless."

Yeah, sounded like Carter all right. "I'll remember to thank her in a quiet moment at the barbecue." They stopped at a set of lights and Jack tapped his fingers on the steering wheel rim before he remembered that the truck had a radio and flicked it on. Then he remembered he had a passenger. "Do you mind...?"

"I do not, O'Neill."

The strains of Rossini filled the cabin and, once again, Jack was reminded of the little things that he had taken for granted while on Earth. He'd bet a steak dinner at O'Malleys that none of the people in 'Paradise' had ever written anything like Rossini's 'Barber of Seville' in their centuries of exile.

And all it had taken to destroy 'Paradise' was one Goa'uld with arugula-flavoured marijuana.

If there was anything to indicate quite exactly