Christmas Presents
by Setcheti
Disclaimer: I don’t own Stargate SG1 – or he wouldn’t be dead, I assure you.
Jack sat back down and stared blankly at the blue ribbon that ran
across the bottom of the TV screen again.
He was well and truly snowed in,
Not that that was a bad thing – not for Jack O’Neill, anyway. He felt bad for all the people whose holiday
plans had been spoiled by the weather, but his own situation had started to
look infinitely brighter when the first road closing had been announced. He was in his own home, he had cable and
plenty of food, there were no Christmas decorations anywhere…Jack was in
heaven. Carter had called an hour ago
from the base bemoaning the fact that he wouldn’t be able to spend Christmas
with the team. She’d gone on and on
about it and Jack had made appropriate noises for a while, but when she’d
started throwing out plans for overcoming the road conditions so they could all
be together he’d snapped. He’d most likely
hurt her feelings – and he knew he hadn’t made her understand – but Jack
couldn’t bring himself to care about Carter’s feelings right now. And he doubted she’d ever understand, damn
her anyway; sometimes he still couldn’t believe he’d ever thought he had deeper
feelings for the coldhearted b...
Jack stopped himself before he went there. She was still a member of his team, and
everyone had their own way of dealing with a loss. Apparently Carter’s was
just to replace whatever – or whoever – had
been taken away and go on with business as usual. It was the fact that she seemed to think
everyone should do it her way that was pissing him off. That, and Jack didn’t think Jonas was a
fitting replacement for Daniel’s left nut, much less for the whole archaeologist…linguist…anthropologist…
...Friend.
Even though Jack hadn’t been acting like much of one for a while there
before the end. Which
only made it worse, of course.
And which was why on this, his first Christmas without Daniel, he really
wanted to be alone and mourn a little in the man’s honor instead of hanging
around the SGC with a bunch of people who pretty much felt like Carter did and
who wouldn’t even be sparing a thought for their honored dead. Jack considered the howling blizzard outside
to be his own personal Christmas present from whatever higher power looked
after Air Force colonels and it was exactly what he’d been wanting this year,
thank you very much.
He puttered around the house most of the rest of that day, making sure
the pipes wouldn’t freeze and gloating over the weather report. He’d gotten two more calls from the base, the
first one from Ferretti who’d warned him that Sam and
Janet were making noises about depression and the colonel not needing to be
alone, and the second from Hammond who’d asked a few surprisingly pointed
questions and had then told Jack that he understood and that ‘because of the
weather’ he wasn’t allowing anyone to leave the SGC unless it was through the Stargate. Another
Christmas present, this one wrapped in the kind of ribbons conferred only by
rank; Jack had grinned for an hour afterwards, he really was getting everything
his little heart desired this year.
Well, almost everything, anyway.
It was enough.
Jack devoted the next day to sports and beer and the memory of how much
Daniel had disliked both. At one point,
out of fairness, he’d even filled in a gap between games by watching an hour’s
worth of the Discovery Channel and drinking one of the archaeologist’s imported
beers that he’d found in the back of his refrigerator; to Jack’s surprise he’d
enjoyed the program and the beer, not in the least because the beer had ‘matured’
significantly after having spent who knows how long forgotten in his fridge. All the way around it shaped up into a good
Christmas Eve for him, and he didn’t feel the least bit lonely.
His games and their accompanying drawn-out commentaries were all over
by nine, and after watching the news and cheering on the weatherman some more Jack
fell asleep on the couch heckling George Bailey on ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and
woke up at about three a.m. with a stiff neck and the distinct impression that
someone had called his name. “Daniel?”
No answer, but then he hadn’t really expected one; some miracles can’t
even happen at Christmas. He must have
been dreaming…yeah, that was it. He’d
had a dream where Daniel had been laughing at him because of the imported beer
and had then looked around his living room disappointedly and asked where his
tree was. And when he’d said he wasn’t
putting it up Daniel had whined his name as only Daniel could. “Jaaack…”
God, he’d missed that whine so much.
Peeling himself up off the couch, he went down to the basement and came
back up with the tree. Two more trips
had the ornament boxes up as well and then he plopped back down on the couch
with a sigh – the things a man will do for a pouting archaeologist, even at
Almost all his old ornaments had gone with his wife, of course, and he
was sure she hung them up ever single year in her new house with her new
husband looking on. But she’d left him
the one Charlie had made just for him and it was that one Jack hung on the tree
first, every year; a wooden clothespin dressed up in felt and
glue and inexplicably glitter to look like a soldier…a soldier like
Daddy. A few shabby creations from his
own childhood came next, lasting proof that Jack O’Neill
had never possessed even the tiniest shred of artistic ability; he occasionally
suspected his mother had ‘returned’ them to him just so she wouldn’t have to
look at them every year. No matter, they
went back in the highly visible places of honor where a certain archaeologist
had been hanging them for the past several years. Daniel had called them ‘pieces of history’.
Daniel hadn’t had any such small, shabby remnants of his own early childhood,
of course; any that might have existed had no doubt been tossed away as
worthless by the unsentimental hand of social services after his parents deaths. And
that thought led him to the next set of decorations, created in open defiance
of a world that had done its best to take away the childhood of a five year old
who’d grown up to become one of his best friends. Two of them were a much more recent reminder
that Jack O’Neill had not in later years developed any artistic ability he could
call his own either, but the other three had been carefully but delightedly
constructed by the talented hands of a meticulous archaeologist. He hung those in the front too, and the one
with the symbol for
When every last ball had been hung, the moment of truth had
arrived. Jack hadn’t thought to check
the lights, he’d just thrown them up there and if even one was broken he’d be
sitting here all through tomorrow looking at an unlighted tree. Christmas present number three arrived when
he plugged in the light string and every small bulb glowed with its own inner
fire. Jack turned off the living room
lights and sat down again on the couch to just enjoy the sight of it, and while
he was doing so he fell asleep again.
This time it was gray morning light filtering through the low-hanging
clouds that woke him. The snow had
stopped sometime during the night, and both the high drifts that blanketed the
ground and the smaller clumps that graced each tree branch had frozen into
sparkling perfection. Stretching, Jack pulled
himself up and wandered out to the kitchen to start some coffee and then padded
into the bathroom to get cleaned up; he knew he didn’t have to, but it was
Christmas after all.
One hot shower, a shave and some clean clothes later Jack looked almost
as good as the perfect world outside his picture window. He had his first cup of coffee while he made
himself some pancakes and then took his breakfast into the living room and ate
it in front of the tree. Some sort of
parade was on television and he amused himself by ‘helping’ the announcers
describe things for a while, then went back to the kitchen to get his new
cooker ready to make the turkey; the cooker had been Jack’s Christmas gift to
himself, the idea of being able to deep fry something so large appealing to his
natural male desire to make good food that was bad for him in large quantities
with minimal effort. It was a toy he
couldn’t have had if his very active son had still been alive,
a spindly-legged vat of boiling oil that looked primed for household disaster. For that matter, it wouldn’t have been a good
idea to use it around his accident-prone archaeologist either unless he’d
wanted to spend part of the holiday in the emergency room. He knew Daniel would have loved the crispy
fried turkey, though, and Jack promised himself he would eat enough of it for
both of them.
He didn’t go too overboard on the fixings, there being only one of him
there to eat them, but he did scrub up one regular potato and one sweet potato
for baking and pop open a can of refrigerator crescent rolls. A jar of mixed olives went into a bowl to sit
on the coffee table and some of his mother’s homemade fruitcake and cookies
were piled on a plate next to it. The
parade had ended by that time but the day’s sports offerings were just starting
and so Jack happily settled in again while his turkey cooked. It was done by halftime and he started to
fill his plate in the kitchen…and then decided that it would be easier just to
bring the turkey and rolls out to the coffee table with everything else so he
didn’t have to get up again. The living
room looked even more festive with his small feast spread out in front of the
football game and the lighted tree…but instead of feeling lonely because there
was no one there to share it with, Jack just felt even more contented.
It was a strange way to mourn, he admitted to himself as he sat back
with his filled plate and started happily digging in to the crispy turkey, but
to Jack’s mind there was no better way to remember the friend he was missing
than by spending Christmas with him, just the two of them. Sam and Janet didn’t understand, but