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"We should do this more often," Jack said.
"Sir?" Sam sounded startled.
"On Earth, I mean," he added, looking up from the campfire. He looked around at his team members, who looked back at him with various eyebrow permutations. "Instead of offworld. Hang out, I mean. Around the fire…eat your hotdogs."
Sam caught Daniel's eye and looked away quickly, hiding her smirk behind her beer. Teal'c's eyebrow arched into a new angle, and then he nodded once and reached into the bag of buns.
"Save room for the marshmallows later," Daniel said. "Sam and I brought lots of chocolate bars."
"And graham crackers," Sam said. "Don't forget the graham crackers."
There were crickets chirping, somewhere nearby, and the lake behind them lapped to itself, whispering secrets that only Jack might have understood, and only sometimes. Daniel belonged to the desert, Sam to the sky, Teal'c to another world entirely, but Jack belonged to this lake, and so they had all agreed to come here, even if it meant they had to fish.
The sun gradually gave up the ghost, Jack went back into the cabin to grab everyone blankets or jackets as the breeze turned cooler, and when he came back out Sam ceremoniously presented him with a s'more. A single, lit candle stuck out of the side of the gooey marshmallow. All three of his team were grinning. Widely.
Jack glared impartially, swiped the s'more out of Sam's hand, and blew out the candle before picking it out of the marshmallow and thereby getting white goo all over his fingers. He took a big bite out of the dessert. It tasted like melted wax. He finished it off anyway.
Thankfully, none of his team felt a need to sing.
Sam and Daniel might have gotten into a marshmallow fight at one point, and Teal'c might have ended it by taking away the bag—not that there were many left by that point, between the fight and all the sacrificed marshmallows burnt in the flames (Daniel, who could clean the dirt away from artifacts thousands of years old with the most delicate of touches, apparently could not keep a marshmallow on a stick even if his dessert depended upon it). Jack snatched lone graham crackers whenever he could, and Sam finished the evening by breaking off pieces of chocolate and eating them singly, the chocolate leaving dark stains on her fingers like engine grease in the flickering light.
They kept the fire burning, huddled in their blankets and jackets, unwilling to go inside when the night surrounded them with noise and life and sleepy calm. They talked and laughed and drank beer, and eventually Sam fell asleep propped up against Teal'c, and Teal'c made sure she was securely tucked in under her blanket before dozing off himself.
Jack was trying to do a complicated calculation in his head, attempting to figure out what percentage of his life he'd known Daniel, but he kept getting muddled whenever he tried to take in factors like time travel and time dilation, whether he should count that year Daniel spent on Abydos or not (since they had no contact with each other), and how you measure years that held so much in them they probably should have been decades.
When he glanced over at his friend, Daniel was smiling in his sleep.
Jack looked at each of his three team members, each of his three friends, and decided that all in all, today had been a good day.