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Disclaimer: Nope, I don't own Stargate or SG-1, MGM, Gecko, etc. own them. I just want to bring them home and pet them and love them and feed them cookies and call them 'George'. No, wait, that's General Hammond...
This work is entirely unbetaed, so please feel free to thwap me upside the head when you find oopses and point them out to me.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~SG-1~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Team movie night. Jack always enjoyed spending the time with SG-1, especially since he’d become ‘The Man’ and left the leadership of the team to Sam. But sitting here and watching damn near twelve hours of what amounted to one movie was hard on his well used body (he refused to say ‘aging’, even in his own thoughts). “When you said you had “The Lord of the Rings”, Daniel, I thought you meant you had one of the movies. Not the extended editions of all three!” Jack groused after the end of the second disk of ”Fellowship of the Ring”, as Daniel got up to put in the first disk of ”The Two Towers”.
“It’s one story, Jack, you can’t just watch one movie,” Daniel replied. “Besides, I thought you liked Tolkien.” He had seen "The Hobbit", "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Silmarillion” on Jack’s bookshelf in the den, along side sundry Air Force manuals and regulations, flight manuals and the expected techno thrillers of Tom Clancy and Dale Brown. What Daniel didn't know, nor did anyone else, was that Jack kept stashed safely in his fireproof firearms vault a complete set of the first UK printing of the volumes of "The History of Middle Earth", as well as carefully collected first editions of each of the rest of Professor Tolkien's works, a few of which were even signed by the man himself. Jack's first edition of "The Hobbit" had been personalized to Jack's mother, who had introduced him to the wonders of Middle Earth through that very book when he was a small child.
“You like Tolkien, sir?” Sam asked. “I thought you weren’t into fantasy or science fiction.”
“This is not fantasy, Colonel Carter,” Teal’c beat Jack to the punch. “It is a mythic tale of the struggle against insurmountable odds by a small group of persons to overthrow evil beings intent upon the domination and ruin of all. Very not unlike our own endeavors against the Goa’uld.”
“Yeah, what T said,” Jack added, waving a hand in the air. “I like the movies too, just not all at one looong shot,” drawing the adjective out for emphasis. He rose from the sofa and stretched, saying, “And on that statement, I’m going to go and stretch my legs for a bit before we start the next one. Would you mind phoning for the pizza, Carter?”
The pizza arrived and they watched the rest of the disks with stretch and bathroom breaks in between. When the strains of “Into the West” floated through the speakers as the end credits of ”The Return of the King” rolled, Jack sighed and said, “I gotta admit, I do love these movies and one of the things I enjoy the most about them is hearing the Elvish languages spoken.”
“How would you know Elvish from Dwarvish, Jack?” Daniel asked.
Sam chortled and said, “He’s pulling your leg, Daniel.”
“You wound me, Carter,” Jack said with an overdone look of offense, one hand pressed over his chest. “Le aniron henio i lam Edhellen bedin. For you non-speakers, that was Sindarin and it translates as ‘I want you to know that I speak Elvish’.”
Daniel closed his mouth, which had been hanging open, and reached across to Sam to push her jaw closed with the tip of a finger. Teal’c was looking at Jack with a slightly raised eyebrow over twinkling eyes and a definite smile, and said, “As I have said before, O’Neill is a man of many capabilities and hidden depths.”
“Indeed,” Daniel and Sam said at the same time, not even glancing at each other after they did it.
“Pân i valt law thilia ah ú-phain i reviar mistennen,” Jack said, shrugging his shoulders. He wasn’t overly modest.
“Come on sir, translate...no fair speaking Elf at us if you don’t translate,” Sam said.
“Why don’t you translate it, Daniel?” Jack asked, looking at Daniel.
Daniel actually huffed before replying, “Because I don’t do the geeky stuff, Jack. I never bothered with the constructed languages like Elvish or Klingon.”
Jack looked at Daniel in mild surprise. “But it’s such a beautiful language. I’d think you would have learned it just for the sounds and the way it tastes when you speak it.”
As they had been during the mission to the ‘redwood planet,’ as Jack called P7X-333, Daniel and Sam were both left speechless by their CO, nor did Teal’c comment. Finally, Sam asked, “What about that translation, sir?”
“‘All that is gold does not glitter and not all who wander are lost’, Carter. That’s the translation.” Jack smiled at his team and added, “I keep tellin’ you people, you don’t know everything there is to know about me,” and pushed stop on the DVD remote. He certainly wasn’t about to let the disc play the full fan credits and let them see one Jonathan ‘Jack’ O’Neill among the names therein.