[Moments of Adoration]

Backup fic for whisper99 in the SG-1 Team Ficathon. Request: 1) Daniel's glasses to be broken at some point in the story, 2) some whumped Daniel, and 3) Jack to mention a teddy bear. Thanks to Karen for the beta.

"Hey. Whoa." Distinct words now, almost in his ear, and his stomach lurched as a sharp tug on his jacket brought him to a sudden stop. He struck out with both hands, but strong fingers caught his wrists. "Daniel, chill. It's me. We've got you."

Recognition eased the alarm that tightened his throat. When Daniel opened his eyes, he blinked at the ruddy blur of Jack's chin. "Fancy meeting you here."

*****

Six hours earlier...

Jack stood in the doorway of the Hall of Wisdom. Teal'c loomed over his shoulder. A few feet away, Sam grilled the Moaj, the head of the Dolgaran's intellectual society, with rapid-fire questions about the building's architecture. The man beamed, delight oozing from every pore. The ends of his ridiculously huge handle-bar moustache bounced as he answered Sam, his words tumbling in his exuberance.

The Moaj latched onto Daniel and Sam from the moment he'd gleaned that they were, as Jack joked, the brains of the outfit. "It is most refreshing," he'd said to Daniel during the greeting ceremonies the day before, "to speak with a mind of such capability as yours, Dr. Jackson. I do believe we will find we have a great deal in common."

"You guys good?" Jack jerked a thumb out the door. "T and I get to go hang out with the accountants for a while."

"Sure, sure." Daniel waved absently at Jack, eyes glued to the elaborately detailed frescos that marched around the perimeter of the massive rotunda, spiraling up to the ceiling twelve stories above. "This is incredible, Jack. Their entire history is recorded on these walls. And if we're right about this having once been an Ancient outpost, there could be a wealth of information here. For instance," Daniel pointed at the fresco next to the door, "that is a panel of their earliest history, framed as a creation mythos, and if I'm not mistaken, those-"

"Ah," Jack held up both hands. "You can tell me later. In your report. Which I won't read. Carter?"

She excused herself from the still-beaming Moaj and fell in next to Daniel. "Sir?"

"We're out of here. Radio check every four hours."

Before she could respond, the Moaj slung an arm around her shoulders and patted Daniel on the back with painful enthusiasm. "Please, Colonel, go and know that I will treat them with all the deference they are due. I anticipate ours will be a long and fruitful liaison."

*****

"So, want to explain how you ended up a piņata?" Jack let go of his arms, and Daniel let them drop below his head. Or was that above? He peered at Jack. From this angle, the curl of Jack's lips looked like a fun-house mirror smile. Turn that frown upside down.

The laugh that burbled up from deep in his chest came out nearer a high pitched giggle. Something patted against his cheek, soft at first, then a sharp sting. "Daniel. Snap out of it. Come on, don't make me slap you."

The muscles in his back spasmed when he tried to take a deep breath; he settled for a few long shallow breaths to calm down. His shoulders burned, the weight of his arms dragging on them, but he didn't know what else to do with them. In seven years of being captured and tortured, he'd never been hung upside down.

"Hang on, Daniel. Carter's going to get you down." The more Jack talked, gave him something to focus on, the clearer Daniel's head became.

And he clearly remembered why Sam was going to kill him once she got him down.

"Is she okay?"

"Yeah," there was an edge of humor in Jack's voice now. "But I think you're going to have to do a lot of sucking up for this one."

"That's an understatement, sir."

Bracing one hand against Jack's shoulder, Daniel turned enough to see a very tall blur of green a few feet to his right, topped with a bright splash of pale yellow that stood out against the dark backdrop of the tree currently supporting him. When he squinted, Jack said, "Here. Carter found them when she came to. They're mostly intact," and maneuvered Daniel's glasses into place, only jabbing him in the eye once.

Daniel's field of vision on the right side remained a blur from the spiderwebbed cracking on the lens, but the left resolved into Sam perched on Teal'c's shoulders, her arms extended up into a mass of dark green leaves. "Teal'c, I need to get closer."

"Brace on the branch, and stand on my shoulders." There was a confused jumble of arms and legs and then Sam was mostly obscured by the tree, Teal'c's hands wrapped around her calves.

A few muttered invectives fluttered down with a handful of leaves. "Damn," she said, "whatever this cable is, it's impressively strong. Okay, I'm going to need to examine how they rigged this closer to where Daniel is hanging." Teal'c grunted, and a contrite "Sorry!" came out from the leaves as she pushed off his shoulders, her legs vanishing upwards.

The branch bounced under her weight and Daniel clung to Jack. "I think I'm going to be sick."

Jack sighed. "Just try and miss my boots, okay?"

"Sir, I'm going to try and burn through the rigging with a magnesium strip. Make sure you have a hold on Daniel if it goes."

"We've got him." Jack cradled Daniel's shoulders, and Teal'c wrapped one arm around his waist, reaching up with the other to brace behind his knees.

"Igniting... now." A bright light flashed, and Daniel dropped as cable gave. His legs flopped awkwardly over Teal'c's shoulder as Jack and Teal'c braced his weight and gently lowered him to the ground. Above them, leaves rustled wildly until Sam slid out from their shadows and dropped to the ground.

His head swam as they all gathered around and peered down at him. "You good?" Jack asked as Sam and Teal'c crouched down by his feet, poking and prodding at the coil of cable wound around his ankles.

"Fantastic, actually." There was something jabbing him right under his right shoulder-blade and just above his butt. It was utterly blissful.

"Sir, we can't cut the cable, but Teal'c thinks we can work him out of this if we cut off his boots."

Daniel let Jack help him sit up. Teal'c had drawn his service knife and was considering his angle of attack. And Sam... The entire left side of her face was already mottled green and purple, and she glared at him out of a very puffy eye.

"Ouch," Daniel said. "He hit you pretty hard, huh?"

"He hit me with a chair, Daniel." A big, heavy hardwood chair, Daniel remembered. He winced in sympathy, an expression lost on the still disgruntled Sam.

Behind him, Jack shifted around until Daniel found himself leaning against Jack's back. "So," Jack said, "care to enlighten us?"

He didn't, so he asked, "How did you find me?"

"When you missed the check in, we came looking and found Carter in the big scroll vault, just coming to. We tracked down the Moaj, who informed us you had mortally insulted him and that he had responded as was his right."

"We convinced him that his response was not likely to encourage Earth to treat with the Dolgaran people, and he relented and informed us of your situation," Teal'c said. The faint hint of a smile played about his lips, which led Daniel to believe that Teal'c was understating the Moaj's capitulation.

"What the hell did you say to him?" Jack bumped against Daniel's shoulder. "When we left, he was practically cuddling you like a teddy bear."

"Yes. That." Daniel sighed. Might as well get this over with. "We were getting along so well, I thought it would be a nice gesture," Daniel said. "During the greeting ceremony, I kept hearing this word. From the context of its use, I took it to be a variant on 'friend'. It turns out that it is actually a derogatory reference to the intellectual society. Other society groups use it among themselves as a means of mockery. So when I said it, he pulled a knife and came at me. Sam intervened and disarmed him, and in the struggle to regain the knife, he hit her in the head with a chair."

His explanation was overtaken by incredulous silence and the soft whispering of the leaves overhead. Blood was starting to flow back into his legs, and he scrubbed at his thighs with the heels of his hands until Jack said, "Let me get this straight. You called him a nerd. And he tried to kill you."

Daniel felt Jack's shoulders shaking against his own. "Um, yes. The intellectual society apparently takes such things rather seriously."

"Makes academic rivalry back home pale in comparison, huh?" Sam looked up from wrestling with his shredded boots, her glare now a faint wry smile. When she started massaging the pins and needles out of his leg, he knew he was more or less forgiven. Teal'c stripped away the remains of Daniel's boots and eased his feet out of the cable coils, then repeated Sam's gentle and careful kneading on his other leg.

Finally relaxing, he settled back, letting Jack support his weight. "When I tried to get to Sam after the Moaj hit her, he hit me with what was left of the chair. Then I woke up... up." Daniel pointed up to where he had been hanging.

"Right. So we go home, make a detailed report to save the diplomatic team some grief, and call it a good day." Jack sounded all business, but Daniel still felt the slight quake of Jack's suppressed laughter jostling his shoulders.

"For your particularly deranged definition of good." Daniel said, wriggling his toes. When Teal'c held out his hand, Daniel grabbed it and let Teal'c pull him up. Sam steadied him when he wobbled, holding his elbow while he bounced from the ball of one foot to the other. Teal'c produced a spare pair of socks from his pack and handed them to Daniel.

"Well, good enough, then." Jack stood, brushing dirt and bit of fallen leaf from the seat of his pants. "I'm gonna go make sure there're no nerds lying in wait for us." His grin broke wide open. "T, I guess you'll have to protect Daniel and Carter from themselves."

Making a face at Jack's back as he vanished around the tree, Daniel said, "Can I shoot him?"

Sam ruffled his hair. "I won't tell."

He nodded in satisfaction as he pulled on the socks. Good enough.