Quite Some Party, by Adele Shakal (PG-13)

[figs_sg1_rec]

Rec Category: Team

Pairing: none
Categories: team, gen, holiday, character study, humor, Jack O’Neill, Daniel Jackson, Samantha Carter, Teal’c, Janet Frasier, Cassie, George Hammond
Warnings: language (it’s in Jack’s POV, after all)
Author on LJ:shakal 
Author's Website: Adele’s Abydan Archive
Link: Quite Some Party

Why This Must Be Read: Early season classic team, great Jack POV, some really marvelous insights into character motivations – really, what’s not to love?

The team, with Janet’s active help and Hammond’s surreptitious assistance, bands together to cope with the onslaught of psychiatric and psychological evaluations. With typical SG-1 flair, they decide the meet the challenge head-on and stare their evaluators down at the mandatory costume party… or possibly they’re just insane enough to actually put a drunken plan into action.

Jack wonders just why Sam owns a whip to lend him for his costume. Daniel, with Janet’s assistance, indulges in a little ruthlessly pragmatic symbolism to deconstruct his own demons. Cassie turns into a Nox, Sam into a rather scary version of Xena, and Teal’c into one of the Men in Black. It’s SG-1 taking the SGC by storm, and you’ll be cheering them every step of the way!

Daniel interrupted her. "Hey! I'm not kidding... Seriously, we need to come up with costumes. Hammond told Jack about the guests, to give us time to come up with something good."

Janet was looking devious. "Jack, I'm no psychiatrist, but they're probably going to be looking for all sorts of hidden meanings in whatever you choose. You might as well have some fun with it."

Carter agreed. "Yeah, I mean, if we can get a head start on convincing the psychiatrists that we're doing just fine, we should do it."

Daniel was nodding vigorously, then cocked his head to one side like he was listening. "You know, I've sometimes managed to blow shrinks out of the water just by swamping them with information and lots and lots of unrelated data. They gave up trying to make sense out of me. We should do that, maybe nip this whole quarterly evals thing in the bud. If we give them lots to cope with with the costumes right off as a distraction, then they can't analyze us, and they won't make any progress with the evaluations, right? Let's throw them for a loop the first time they meet us!"

At the time, that sounded just fine by the rest of us. It was really late, or early. I think I'd had five beers. Or was that six? In any case, we all agreed fairly quickly that any course of action that could possibly get us out of multiple head-shrink visits on a regular basis would be a good course to pursue.

Sometime later it became obvious that we would need all the time we had before the party to gather up costume materials. Daniel even took a bunch of notes, and we all crashed at some point to sleep it off.

The next morning, after we'd all rediscovered exactly how miserable hangovers can be, we sat down over a very light brunch and calmly reconsidered what he'd written. Each of us remembered some part of the conversation, so we pieced it all together. It sounded pretty silly in the cold light of morning, but hell, what did we have to lose? We'd saved the planet a couple of times, for crying out loud, and I was damned if I was going to let a bunch of feel-good new-age pencilpushers muck with the best minds I'd ever had on a team.

Besides, Janet was in on it. You can't go wrong with that, she can think circles around the rest of the doctors on staff, and they're supposedly the best of the best of the best or whatever.

Later, maybe we'd decide it hadn't been a good idea after all. But hell, it was Halloween, and we were all feeling kind of vindictive and ready to let loose our inner brats at the party.

But there was a lot of work to be done.