by Stargate
It had been too long.
Nearby, Sam worked in what remained of the dwelling’s front yard, uncovering something she’d found. She didn’t want to share until she’d made it look all neat and professional, she’d said. Hiding his amusement he’d nodded, one archaeologist to another, and wished her luck. SG-12 was spread over the rest of the dig, diligently revealing the ruined village’s long-buried secrets. A handful of houses, a scattering of shops—some still, incredibly, sheltering unbroken clay jars sloshing with oil—what looked like a meeting hall, a grand, imposing temple. These buildings formed the heart of the community. On its outskirts, a cemetery. Half a kilometer beyond that, the Stargate.
He was becoming more convinced that the settlement’s antecedents were Ancient Indian. Just yesterday he’d discovered what was almost certainly a possible proto-Buddha figure. Captain Brenda Faraday, however, wasn’t convinced and said so. Emphatically. Vigorous conversation had ensued.
Still. It was all part of the fun, wasn’t it? Toiling in dirt and debris through the day, sitting round the campfire at night eating MREs and tossing wild theories back and forth, dissecting competing explanations for the newest discoveries, never having to worry about being shut up, closed down, dismissed as a dreamer by someone who seriously thought The Simpsons was the apex of human cultural achievement…
Damn. And he’d promised himself he wasn’t going to think about Jack.
He lifted his head and considered Sam, still industriously excavating. As always, looking like a whole new person, out of uniform. “I’m on vacation,” she’d declared, with just a hint of defiance. “Technically, anyway. I’m going to wear jeans.”
Major Lee, SG-12’s team leader, had shrugged. “Wear what you like, Sam,” he’d replied with a grin. “Just leave room for a weapon.”
So she’d strapped on a shoulder holster to house her Beretta, and promptly pulled an eye-rolling face. “This is ridiculous,” she’d muttered. “I feel like Jamesina Bond.”
Holster abandoned within the first half-day of excavation, the gun was sitting on a rock near to her hand now. His own gun was in his tool kit; some habits were hard to break, even though the only living creature to disturb them in the last six days was something resembling a fox. Oh, yes. And the enormous flock of multi-colored birds that lived in the trees around their campsite. Birds who got out of bed at five a.m. and spent an hour telling each other at the tops of their raucous voices what they were going to do that day, flew away in a crashing of wings, then returned at dusk to spend another hour telling each other what it was they’d done.
Good thing Jack wasn’t here, really. He’d have shot them all for sure by now. Or cut down the trees. Instant eviction, O’Neill style, with a bonus of firewood. Early mornings really weren’t his thing.
On the whole, it was very… restful… without Jack. Odd, but restful. He kept expecting to hear that strident voice bellowing, “Pack it up, Daniel! If you’ve seen one pile of ancient rubble you’ve seen them all! Don’t you realize I’m missing a Burns retrospective?”
Funny. Even when he wasn’t here… he was here. Jack O’Neill’s aura was pervasive, like indelible ink: once spilled on the psyche, never to be removed.
Daniel shook himself. He didn’t want to think about Jack. About what might be happening to him back home. He refocused his attention on Sam instead.
For a brilliant astrophysicist she didn’t make a bad archaeologist. He wasn’t surprised. She had the kind of intuitive, multi-faceted intelligence that could turn its hand to just about anything. She was probably inventing a whole new strand of sub-atomic-quasi-quantum-ball of string-Stargate theory right now, while simultaneously uncovering the secrets of this village’s past. Without elevating her heart rate by so much as a single beat.
With her long denim-clad legs folded neatly out of the way, blue cotton tee-shirt stained with sweat and smears of clay, blonde hair a little grubby, normally immaculate fingernails ragged and clogged with dirt, she looked… at peace. Released from the burdens they carried as members of SG-1, flagship team of Stargate Command. Intergalactic scourge of the system lords. Goa’uld Enemy Number 1, with a bullet. Or, in their case, a zat blast. The team nearly everybody else looked up to. Modelled themselves upon. Speculated about.
Behind their backs they were called ‘The General’s Darlings’ by a handful of not nearly as sotto voce as they thought malcontents. Personnel who didn’t appreciate not getting away with the stuff Jack and his team got away with at least once a week.
Fame wasn’t anywhere near what it was cracked up to be.
Feeling his eyes upon her Sam looked up, excavation brush dangling from her fingers. Half-frowning, half-smiling she demanded, “What? Have I got dirt on my nose or something?”
Daniel grinned. “On your nose, your chin, the tips of your ears—” His gaze shifted downwards. “Your—”
“Okay, okay, I get the picture!” she retorted. “I’m a mess.”
“Yes, you are. But in case you hadn’t figured it out yet, making a mess is a big part of the fun.”
She let the brush drop to the ground, sat on her heels and stretched the kinks out of her back and neck. He could hear the popping sounds as her spine released its tension. “It is,” she agreed. “Daniel, I always knew you missed this, but I don’t think I truly understood how much. Not till this week. You are more completely you here than you are anywhere else.”
Reverently, he laid the glorious offering plate in the padded crate he’d prepared for it. “I know.”
Now she was the one studying him, razor-sharp intellect putting him under the microscope of her regard. He concentrated on getting the offering plate centred just right. She said, “Daniel, can I ask you a question?” She sounded hesitant. Almost awkward, which was practically unheard of for Sam.
He nodded. “I guess.”
“If you love it so much… if history—archaeology— this work… is so important to you and makes you so happy, why do you stay on SG-1? Hammond would give you any assignment you asked for. Hell, I bet he’d give you your own team of junior archaeologists if you asked him. No lurching from one near-death escape to the next. No injuries. No danger. Just… this.” She gestured around them, at the peace and tranquillity of the village.
With the plate safely settled, Daniel rested his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands and looked at her, unflinching. “You mean why do I stay when Sha’re’s dead, which means there’s no more reason for me to go through the Stargate?”
She blinked. “Well… I don’t think I’d have phrased it quite like that, but… all right. Yes.”
“Because I believe I can make a difference,” he said, shrugging. “That I have something valuable to contribute. To be honest, Sam, while I do love this work, passionately, it’s something any well-trained archaeologist could do. But on SG-1 I believe I fulfil a function that perhaps nobody else can.” Putting the brakes on Jack O’Neill. He let his gaze drop, then, and studied the fraying end of one bootlace, not saying out loud the thought that had been haunting him since the mission to Euronda. At least, that’s what I used to believe.
“Well, you’ll get no argument from me,” said Sam, grinning. “SG-1 does need you. I need you. Us geeks have to hang together, you know?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know.” Cautiously standing, he joined her and stood looking down at her painstaking excavation. “So what have you found here, anyway?”
She accepted the change of subject without argument, put her hands on her hips and looked with some pride at the result of her morning’s hard work. “I’m not quite sure. I think there’s a skeleton of something in here somewhere, but I haven’t uncovered it yet.”
“Can I give you a hand?”
“Sure.”
He fetched his own excavation tools and in amicable silence, with interruptions for a little teacher-student back and forth, they completed the task of exposing the remains to the light.
“Wow,” said Sam, staring. “Is
that—it looks like a cat. It must have been somebody’s pet, look, there’s a jewelled collar round its neck. Are those rubies?”
Daniel peered more closely, hands braced on either side of the pathetic little grave so he didn’t disturb the delicate, fleshless bones. “Yeah. I think so. Set in gold, it looks like. Alternated with a darker stone, might be sapphires.”
Sam pointed. “And there. What’s that? A clay tablet?”
Yes. Hardly breathing, he eased it out from between the cat’s front paws—if it was a cat, it looked like a cat but there was something not exactly cat-like about the skull—and gently blew away the loosened dirt. The tablet was the size of a playing card, its inscription hauntingly familiar and drawn by what looked to his eye like a childish hand.
“Can you read it?” said Sam, leaning close.
He could feel the grin spreading across his face. “I think so. It seems to be a variation on Vedic Sanskrit…” Which meant he was most likely right, the figurine he’d found was of a proto-Buddha, even though the timeline didn’t fit. Incredible. And now Faraday owed him fifty bucks…
“Well?” said Sam, and poked him in the knee. “What does it say?”
Haltingly he recited, softly, “Here lies Agni—Agni was an ancient Indian fire god—beloved of… I think it’s Panana. True friend. Stolen by—God, what is that? Stolen by—I’m pretty sure it’s—the serpent’s tooth. Oh, it was bitten by a snake. Poor thing. My tears will daily—river? No. Water! My tears will daily water his grave.”
Pleased with himself, he looked up—to see that Sam was crying. Not out loud. Silently. Tears welling and trickling, turning the dirt on her cheeks to mud. She flushed, and scrubbed them away. “Sorry. Sorry. Stupid, I’m being stupid.”
She hardly ever cried. Not because she was unemotional—he knew her feelings were never far from the surface—but because the pressures of the job, being a woman in the military, forced her to keep them strictly strait-jacketed. And that kind of control became a habit, along with carrying guns and always assuming a worst case scenario in any situation.
He rested his hand on her shoulder and shook her, just a little bit. “Hey. No. You’re right, it’s sad. Panana, whoever she was, loved her pet and it died and she cried. A lot. Don’t be ashamed of feeling her pain, Sam. That’s why what we’re doing here is important. We’re rediscovering these people’s humanity. Bringing their lives back to life. If you can’t be touched by this then what is any of it for? What good are we doing out here? Why fight so hard to save the human race?”
Sam shrugged. “I guess.” Then she shook her head. “No. You’re right, of course.” Contemplating the neatly composed curl of bones, she said, “I always wanted a cat. But Mark was allergic and we moved so often, from base to base. Dad said no.”
She hardly ever talked of her childhood, or her brother. “Must’ve been tough.”
Another shrug. “That’s life. So, what do you want to do with Agni, here?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe remove the entire grave, preserve it somehow. I don’t know. But until I make up my mind we should protect it from the elements.”
“Good idea.”
So he fetched a preservation kit from the campsite and they secured poor little Agni’s grave. With that done, and the temperature steadily rising, they paused to drink from their canteens and bask in the glow of a job well done.
But then the question that had been nagging at the back of his mind for weeks now rose spectre-like before him… and he knew he’d never have a better chance than right here, right now, to ask it. He cleared his throat. “So. I was thinking… can I ask you a question?”
Sam lowered her canteen. Kept her gaze pinned to it. “Tit for tat?”
“No. No, it’s just… something I need to know, Sam. Need to understand.”
She looked at him. “Then ask. But I don’t guarantee you’ll like the answer.”
Which meant she knew, or at least suspected, what was haunting him. That was the trouble with being this close to another person. Spending so much time with them, learning to read them as fluently as any hieroglyphics. Since Sha’re, sometimes he forgot it was a two-way street. Sam learning him, while he was learning her. She was warning him not to be surprised if she wasn’t on his side this time. Undaunted, he continued.
“Why didn’t you stop Jack from closing the iris, when you knew Alar would try to follow him to Earth?”
She answered his question with another question. “You agree with Kinsey, do you? You think it was murder? Or an execution?”
“I don’t. I—”
She snapped the lid back onto her canteen. “Let me put it this way, then. Do you think Jack is a murderer?”
She almost never did that. Refer to Jack by name, instead of rank. Not even when he wasn’t around. It was a measure of how strongly she felt. Her eyes were cool, calm, watchful. That scalpel intellect peeling back his layers, exposing his uncertain core. “No. Not a murderer. But he was angry, Sam. And you know what he’s like when he’s angry. He isn’t… safe.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “So, not murder? What, then? Manslaughter?”
God. He should’ve kept his big mouth shut. “Maybe. I honestly don’t know. Just answer what I asked you. Please?”
She examined her canteen. “Why didn’t I stop him from closing the iris?”
“You could have,” he said. “And I was watching him, Sam. I think a part of him might have wanted you to. Maybe. But you did nothing. You said nothing. Why?”
“Because I didn’t know what was coming through that wormhole, Daniel,” she retorted, tossing the canteen aside. “It might have been Alar. It might have been a bomb. There was no way I could tell. Neither could the colonel. And Alar knew the iris was there. It was his choice. His gamble. And he lost.”
It sounded good in theory. Could’ve been a bomb coming through, yeah, sure. Except she’d known it wasn’t, and so had Jack. That conviction had been stark in his eyes, which never left Sam’s face.
She said, “Anyway, I’m not the person you should be talking to about this, Daniel. If you have questions—reservations—you should talk to him.”
“I can’t,” he said, after a moment. “I tried, but…” There’d been a short, sharp scene he didn’t care to dwell on.
“Then give him more time. I think he’s earned that much.”
“He has. God, of course he has. I just… I need to work through this, okay? I need you to be a sounding board. Will you do that?”
She looked away, her jaw tightening. Tension thrumming through every long line of her body. All that lovely relaxation burned away. Curtly, she nodded. “All right. If you really want me to.”
For a long, silent moment Daniel debated whether or not to keep talking. But he had to talk, or go mad, and Sam was the only one he could talk to. About this, anyway. Teal’c didn’t see there was a problem. Alar was bad, Alar was dead. It was all good. Teal’c lived in a very… black and white world. Sometimes that was okay, other times it wasn’t exactly helpful.
Like now.
He took a deep breath and let it out, incrementally. “When I first met Jack,” he began, stringing thoughts together like beads on a wire, “I thought he was the most terrifying man I’d ever encountered. You know when people say things like: As hard as diamond. As cold as ice. As impenetrable as Fort Knox.” Sam nodded. “Well, the Jack who went to Abydos that first time… he was all those clichés and then some. Basically, when he stepped through the ’gate he was a dead man walking.”
Almost imperceptibly, a little of her chill thawed. “I know. But he’s not like that now, thanks to you.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. He’s never said as much. He’s never said anything, really, about that time. He is different, these days. He never smiled once, that first mission. There wasn’t a joke in sight. He can still be frightening, but he’s not dead inside any more. And we can talk—sometimes—about things that matter. Really matter.”
“So
what’s your problem?”
“My problem is that just when I think he’s finally moved past his blind military pragmatism, the kind of mindset that says the end really does justify the means… something like Euronda happens and I feel like I’m looking at this total stranger all over again.” Moodily, Daniel scraped his fingertips through the dirt. “Someone I’ll never understand or communicate with in any meaningful way if I live to be a thousand. And I don’t know if I can keep doing it, Sam. I get tired of fighting with him, you know? I just… I’m tired.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Then don’t fight.”
“Don’t fight?” He stared at her, disbelieving, as though she’d suggested he should stop breathing. “When he’s about to do something short-sighted? Something typically, pig-headedly Jack? How can I not fight?”
She sighed, and rubbed at a smear of dirt on her knee. “Okay, then fight. But then don’t bitch about it afterwards. Especially,” she added, pointedly, “since a lot of the time he agrees with you, eventually. Not always, I know, but then you’re not always right. The thing is, he takes your advice. He did in Euronda. He sided with you against Alar. Okay, so you had to fight to get there. But wasn’t it worth it? Isn’t that what you were talking about, before? The job only you can do? Because Daniel, I don’t know who else he’d listen to about stuff like that. There’s no-one. Not even—” She stopped, her intent gaze flickering away, then back again. “He listens to you.”
“I know, I know,” he said, fists clenched, “but don’t you see, Sam? This time he nearly didn’t. He was willing to close his eyes to what the Eurondans were doing because he wanted their technology.”
“Yeah, well, so did I.”
“You think I didn’t?” he demanded. “God, Sam. I’m as desperate to stop the Goa’uld as anyone. I wanted that technology—right up to the moment I realized we weren’t getting the full story or asking the right questions about our new best friends. But Jack—even when he knew something was wrong, he fought me. And he did know, Sam. You know he did. He just didn’t want to know because he was committed to procuring what the Eurondans offered us.”