Author’s Note: Just a bit of silly insanity that popped into my head, beginning with the line ‘dark and stormy night’. Strangely enough, I’ve been stuck on Delirious!Jack ever since “Jacob, did you know your ship’s bigger than ours?” (Jack in Tangent) I just find him so ... cute ... when he’s like that. Hence this thoroughly strange little fic.

“It was a dark and stormy night!” Jack O’Neill shouted at the sky.

“Jack,” Daniel Jackson said politely from behind him, “shut up.”

Jack glared, his expression indignant and a little bit hurt. “I was talking to the sky.”

“Yes, Jack. I know that.” Wearily, Daniel tried to decide whether to kill Jack or merely knock him unconscious.

“I was telling the sky that this is the biggest cliché ever created!” The last phrase was directed toward the offending sky, which predictably did not respond. Not even with lightning. Or hailstones. Or a tornado.

Jack O’Neill so needed help.

“Dark and stormy night?” He prompted his teammate. “Everybody knows that one, right? Even the Tok’ra know that one, I bet. I bet they do.”

“Yes, Jack,” Daniel replied, watching his last shreds of patience swirl down the drain. He was going crazy. Within a few moments, he was going to start screaming like a stark raving lunatic, and then he would probably strip naked and run sobbing out into the biggest storm he’d seen this side of “Storm Stories”.

Daniel Jackson knew what it was like to be crazy, or at least to act crazy. Having personal and vastly disturbing experience with that state of mind should have made Daniel sympathetic to Jack’s plight. Maybe it did - at first. Maybe that was why he’d lasted so long without killing his best friend.

Lightning flashed, the wind howled, and outside their damp and dismal cave, a few hailstones pelted the hapless local flora. Daniel imagined the flora must be looking rather the worse for wear. It was a pity, really - those purple flowers had been beautiful, even though they’d made him sneeze.

Jack started to sing.

Ye Gods, no! Please not singing!

“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, take one down, pass it around, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall, take one down - ”

“Jack!” Daniel shouted, over the audible sounds of his sanity cracking up into tiny pieces.

“What?” Jack sounded hurt. A flash of light showed that he had his lower lip thrust out, and his eyes were dark pools of misery.

It wasn’t fair. Daniel was supposed to be the one who did the pouting around here.

Wait! He amended quickly. I don’t pout. I may ... do a little convincing here and there ... but I do not pout!

Riiiiiiight, his Inner Jack drawled. The normal Jack. The one who wasn’t currently acting like a spoiled eight-year-old.

“Jack.” Daniel softened his tone as if speaking to a child, which, for all practical intents and purposes, he was. A silver-haired, fifty-year-old child who also happened to be a Colonel, even though his uniform didn’t actually say so.

“Please don’t sing, Jack. Okay?”

“I want to sing.” Ooh, now he was getting pissy. The next flash of lightning revealed Jack, arms crossed stubbornly over his chest, chin protruding. Daniel almost laughed as he got a glimpse of what it would be like to try to force a six-year-old Jack O’Neill to eat his broccoli.

The smile died very quickly.

“Ninety-seven bottles of beer on the wall - ”

“Jack.” Daniel’s voice was dead calm. He leaned forward slightly. “If you sing one more verse of that song, I will break your neck.”

From the darkness came the unmistakable sound of a formidable warrior blowing a raspberry.

Daniel’s own personal experience with insanity was somewhat different from the one Jack seemed to be having. Daniel had been scared out of his wits, certain that everyone and everything was out to get him. At some point he had become convinced that his grandmother was the antichrist, and that little evil plastic syringes were her minions, trying to take over the world. The latter could partly have been because he’d dreaded the shots so much, but he liked his grandmother. Really. He did.

Jack, meanwhile, seemed to suffer from no such paranoia. If anything, he was all too confident in his own ability to stay alive. At one point Daniel had had to physically restrain the older man to prevent him from running out into the storm. Not an easy task, but Jack hadn’t fought too hard, fortunately.

O’Neill also spoke to inanimate objects - namely, the sky, the cave walls, the deceased purple flowers, and whichever unlucky pebble happened to be poking his butt at the moment. He also sang. Daniel shuddered at the thought.

Perhaps ‘sang’ was too optimistic a word for it. No one had ever accused Colonel Jack O’Neill of being a songbird. A good friend, yes. A capable leader, yes. A damn good soldier, yes. But not a songbird. He couldn’t carry a tune in a dump truck, much less a bucket.

Another side effect of the alien wine was a marked deterioration of Jack’s people skills. Not that Jack was ever the most sunny extrovert, but even on his worst days he didn’t usually behave like an eight-year-old with a chip on his shoulder.

The ironic thing was that it had taken only a small sip of the potent stuff to regress O’Neill’s mental state some forty-odd years. Daniel didn’t want to think about what would have happened had more wine been consumed. He got a vague mental image of Jack O’Neill bawling like a newborn and having to wear a diaper. He shuddered and hastily moved on to other topics.

Jack seemed to have forgotten about his little spat with Daniel, and was now carrying on a gleeful one-sided conversation with a teddy bear. And not just any teddy bear - a teddy bear named Moochkins.

Hard-assed military man Jack O’Neill once had a teddy called Moochkins?

Daniel tucked away that useful tidbit of information for future blackmailing purposes.

He kept hoping - and praying, and begging - that the effects of the wine would wear off soon. It had been hours, if not years, since they’d taken shelter in the cave, and Jack remained every bit as muddled as he had been at the beginning.

Knowing it was futile, Daniel tuned out Jack’s inane babble and tried the radio again. “Sam? Teal’c? Come in.”

Static.

The cave must be blocking the signal. That had to be it. Daniel had to believe that the other two members of his team had made it to safety. Probably they’d found a cave of their own. And maybe even gotten some sleep, which Daniel had been unable to do, due to the fact that he was cooped up with a child on a sugar high.

The three ... normal members of SG-1 had been rushing to get Jack O’Neill back to Earth, to the infirmary, when two things had happened simultaneously: night had fallen, and the storm of the century had moved in.

Both events had occurred mostly without warning, and Daniel, trailing along behind Sam and Teal’c, had had no choice but to drag Jack into the nearest cave. The gale-force winds and severe hail had prevented him from looking for the others.

The fact that Jack, the most protective mother hen of all commanding officers, hadn’t asked about Sam and Teal’c even once told Daniel just how altered his brain currently was.

Daniel squirmed a little as he remembered that this whole situation was, essentially, his fault. He’d seen a disaster in the making when Jack had refused the cup of wine. Evidently the drink was considered a great luxury, offered only to the most honored guests. When Jack had tried to refuse it, the village elder had assumed the facial expression that usually led to the words ‘Kill them!’ or ‘Cook them for supper!’ or something else equally distasteful. No pun intended.

Not wanting to be remembered on N38-991 as “that guy who tasted really good roasted with garlic”, Daniel had, in a low voice, told Jack to “just drink a few sips. It won’t hurt you.”

Won’t hurt you.

Ha.

Poetic justice, he supposed.

Jack started singing again.

Fortunately for Jack, Daniel was distracted by the fact that the cave suddenly seemed a little brighter. One minute later, it was daylight. Evidently dawn was every bit as sudden as nightfall on The Planet of Potent Wine.

“It’s morning!” Jack stated observantly.

Ya think? Daniel’s Inner Jack replied wryly. They were talking to each other now, Juvenile Jack and Inner Jack. This was getting beyond scary.

With one last feeble roll of thunder, the storm dissipated. Maybe it didn’t like daylight. At the moment, Daniel didn’t really care - he just wanted the hell out of this cave.

His feet squished in mud when he stepped outside, but he even welcomed the mud. He started to reach for the radio again, but heard Sam’s voice calling from somewhere nearby. “Daniel! Daniel!”

“Sam!” He shouted back.

“Daniel.” She sounded relieved. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She came into sight, and Daniel waved at her. “You and Teal’c?”

“We’re fine. We found a cave. How’s the Colonel?”

“Oh ... ” Daniel glanced behind him, where Jack had knelt in the mud to examine the pulpy remains of the tragically fated purple flowers. “I’d say he’s about the same.”

“So I see.” Sam and Teal’c walked up beside Daniel and stared wordlessly at the spectacle their commanding officer made - knees and elbows planted firmly in the mud, rear end sticking up as he stared at the demolished plants with his nose one inch off the ground.

“Jack.” Daniel grabbed him by the arm and pulled him away. “Come on. It’s time to go home.”

“I don’t want to!” O’Neill whined, trying half-heartedly to pull away.

“I don’t care.” Daniel’s smile was positively homicidal and bordering on utterly loony. Sam and Teal’c inconspicuously moved away from him a little.

“You’re mean,” Jack announced as he was dragged toward the Stargate.

“Yes, I am,” Daniel said calmly. “Which is why I will kill you if you don’t shut up.”

Jack shut up.

A few steps before they reached the ‘gate, the Colonel tripped over a tree root and fell face first into the mud, hitting the side of his head on a rock. He rolled over with a groan and looked for someone to blame.

“Daniel!” He fairly roared at the first person he saw. “What in the hell is going on?”

“Jack?” Daniel said hopefully.

“No, the tooth fairy!” O’Neill snapped. “You want to tell me why I’m covered in mud?”

Without further ado, Dr. Daniel Jackson dropped to his knees in the muck and offered a prayer of thanksgiving toward the sky. In multiple languages.

“Well, this should be an interesting debriefing,” Sam Carter commented as she began dialing Earth. Teal’c raised an eyebrow.

“I can tell you one thing, Sam,” Daniel said just before stepping through the event horizon. “I will never, ever again complain that Jack is acting like a child.”