Author:

This is not happening.
The thought sawed through Daniel’s mind, pounding edgy and dull, as the blast doors finally slammed down on the Jaffa pouring into the control room. At General O’Neill’s curt order, Sam and Catherine bolted through the Stargate, the last two of the Genesis personnel to make it out to the Beta Site.
“Autodestruct in one minute,” the pleasant female voice of the SGA base computer announced.
This is not happening.
As an explosion boomed and shattered concrete began to slither down the wall from behind the blast door, the stranger wearing Jack O’Neill’s face turned hard on his heel, a rough hand biting into Daniel’s shoulder.
“I should’ve sent that bomb,” he said, looking as if he hated Daniel as much as he hated the choice he’d been forced to make.
“Auto destruct in thirty seconds.”
“I thought you could reach Teal’c,” Daniel said, wretched at his miscalculation, his failure here. “The same way Jack did in my reality. I thought there was a chance.”
“Auto destruct in ten seconds.”
“There’s nothing!” General O’Neill snarled, wheeling around without warning to shoulder his MP-5 and track a fast-moving target.
“Nine seconds.”
The First Prime of Apophis dove to the ground in a headlong, complicated roll that brought him to his knees, his thickly braided top-knot swinging. His face a focused, familiar mask of aggressive concentration, Teal’c smoothly spun his staff weapon hand over hand, raising it to blast Jack.
It was the end of choice.
“Eight seconds.”
It was the end of everything.
“Seven seconds.”
Despairingly Daniel reached out for the friend he could save, hauling Jack bodily into the Stargate as he pulled the trigger on Teal’c.
Searing heat punched into Daniel’s arm, slamming him into the blue with Jack…
…and then he was falling flailing down onto concrete, Jack’s hard, resistant body thudding down full-force on him. He lay pinioned and breathless as Jack fought to control the arcing burst of rapid fire he’d intended for Teal’c.
Who was dead anyway.
This was happening.
As an iris closed over the Stargate, Daniel heard Sam’s urgent voice calling out for Jack, her shrillness cutting through the masculine noise and confusion battering at the edges of his consciousness as the weight on him shifted.
“Dr. Jackson!” Jack said, cradling Daniel’s neck and shoulders as he lifted him clear of the concrete ramp the Stargate was embedded into. “Daniel!”
“Oh my God,” Daniel whispered, straining around to meet the fierce dark eyes fixed on him. “I’m sorry!” he gasped in pale recognition of the enormity of the loss these people had suffered.
Jack — the real Jack, his Jack — would’ve told him to lighten the hell up, that it was only the end of the world, but apparently Daniel and this man holding on to him had never met. He had to try to remember that.
“We need a medic here!” Jack said, holding Daniel against him in shockingly gentle contradiction of his killing mood. “Fraiser! Somebody get me Fraiser!”
“Right here!” a sharp voice called out and then a warm, familiar face emerged from behind the sea of surrounding guards to fill Daniel’s vision. “The last group through told us the Goa’uld were closing in,” she informed the general. “I thought I might be needed, Sir.”
“Janet!” Daniel said, gratefully touching the quick hand reaching deftly to explore his wound.
Janet Fraiser’s double-take at this familiarity was quickly suppressed as she asked O’Neill about how Daniel had sustained his injury. Listening to the man’s explanation, it wasn’t clear if Daniel had saved his life or gotten in the way of his last kill.
Daniel watched numbly as Janet delicately cleared the singed cloth of his uniform from the edges of the staff weapon burn, cleaned it, applied an antimicrobial ointment and dressed it, all the while giving a grim-faced situation report to the general. Hand-picked personnel or not, it was the literal end of their world and the mood was one of mounting hysteria as people began to realise the true cost of their survival lay not in what was saved but in what was lost to them — in the deaths of family, friends, the homes and lives they knew.
“Is Cassandra okay?” Daniel asked, breaking in on Janet’s report, hardly able to face the death of someone else he was close to, not after losing George Hammond and Teal’c.
“Who?” she asked blankly, automatically looking to the general for her answer.
Reality, an entirely different reality, crashed down on Daniel. These were not his people. Not his life.
“I have to get out of here!”
He pushed away from Jack, who reacted as if this was a hostile act, the gentleness of his support replaced by a swift, restraining grip Daniel struggled to free himself from.
“Jack, please!” Daniel said, twisting around to glare at him. “I have to get home! Don’t you understand? This could be happening there. In my reality. And I have a chance to prevent it.”
Jack glared back at Daniel as if he was choking down an argument, then he nodded terse, grudging acknowledgement of the justice of his claim. “When I can spare someone to take you.”
“I don’t need an escort,” Daniel snapped.
“But I do need the intelligence,” Jack retorted, quick anger surging. Yet his hand was there again when Daniel scrambled to his feet, steadying him when pain, exhaustion and the suffocating sense of dislocation slammed down.
“I should go now,” Daniel insisted wearily. “I need to go.” Maybe it was selfish of him in the face of all this destruction, he didn’t know. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, only that it would kill him if he was too slow to save his own friends, his own world.
“And I need all the information you have about Apophis, the Goa’uld and those Jaffa you insisted I’d be better off if I left alive,” Jack countered with nothing that could be mistaken for patience.
“We still have the gate address for Chulak,” Catherine reminded Daniel.
“And more reason than ever to strike back,” Sam Carter said, looking bleakly around her at the SGA’s Beta Site.
With the short time they’d had for its construction, the site was impressive. The Stargate was standing in a hangar, doors on either side open to their widest extent. Directly in front of the Stargate, but set a short distance back from the DHD, was a control room with a bank of monitors and computers, presumably to control the iris, staffed by a team of technicians and watchful security guards. Another room held an armoury. There were aircraft runways either side of the hangar with various helicopters lined up one side and an array of military vehicles the other.
Behind some serious security fencing stood a huge military camp in regimented blocks of squat, concrete barracks, interspersed with massive warehouses, each several storeys high, and other large buildings of varying sizes. Construction was still under way on some. The roof of every structure bristled with solar panels, glinting in the strong sunshine. The roads and walkways between buildings were surfaced. There were clear spaces, green spaces in this sea of concrete, sports facilities.
The land around the fenced camp was cleared for agriculture, the plain beyond the large, flourishing crop fields and embryonic orchards thick with animal herds, literal food on the hoof. Oil derricks peppered the plain where the herds roamed. A forest was visible in the far distance, a dense, darkly green wall that rose to cover the foothills of an aggressively circling range of jagged mountains. Access roads crisscrossed the plain, penetrating into the forest.
With the light and heat, power and fuel, food and water, all these natural resources, it was impressive, it was a chance at life, until you remembered this was all that was left of Earth and what was here represented not the world, but America, and not the people of America, but its armed forces and whatever Genesis list civilian contractors, scientists, doctors had been squeezed through the Stargate in time.
And then it was frightening.
No one had to make the decision to sever the last tie with home and leave the Stargate. A couple of humvees rolled into the hangar and a vaguely familiar tall man in cammos emerged from the first of them.
“General?” the officer called, looking across at their small group in some dismay. “This is the last of you? What about the President?”
“Air Force One didn’t make it,” Jack said, marching across to him with Daniel in tow, not quite his prisoner but something close, Catherine and Sam trailing them.
“Is our position compromised, Sir?” the officer asked. “Are we expecting reprisals?”
“I erased these co-ordinates from the dialling computer as soon as we obtained a lock,” Sam said. “After the general activated the base auto-destruct, there was no time for the Jaffa to interrogate the dialling computer and the only visual display in the control room was the countdown. I think we’re pretty secure here.”
“For the moment,” Catherine sighed, unable to prevent the comment escaping.
The officer was peering beyond them, searching faces among the personnel gathered at the Stargate.
“Colonel Hammond?” he asked hesitantly.
“Didn’t make it,” Jack said shortly, a hard, defensive look in his eyes that suggested he knew how many people he’d lost and how often he was going to have to say this exact thing to his personnel.
“And this gentleman did?” the man gave way to a flash of anger, scowling in Daniel’s direction.
“Davis,” Daniel recalled with an effort, now he could focus in on the man’s face. “We met once before.”
“We’ve never met, sir,” Davis contradicted flatly.
“Major Davis, Pentagon liaison for the SGC,” Daniel said tiredly.
“SGC?” Davis frowned, glancing to the general for enlightenment.
“Dr. Daniel Jackson,” Jack introduced him dryly. “He’s from another dimension. In more ways than one.”
“Jack,” Catherine chided him before smiling at the major. “It’s good to see you, Paul.”
“Likewise, Dr. Langford.” Davis summoned up a smile for her. “And you too, Dr. Carter. We need your expertise. Less than fifty per cent of the Genesis personnel made it through and we’re coming up short on hard sciences.” He pulled a rueful face at Sam. “Let’s just say the guy we’re stuck with comes up long on arrogance and short on people skills.  He’s even arguing with his own sister.” He looked inquisitively at Daniel, ready to catalogue him as a possible resource.
“Dr. Jackson speaks Goa’uld,” Jack pointed out. “The only one of us who does.”
“I’m not one of you,” Daniel contradicted. “My people are on the other side of the mirror that brought me here.”
“Your people?” Davis said, looking Daniel over, quiet, assessing. “Do they have any resources we can tap into? Reinforcements? Weapons?”
Daniel startled them all with a choke of harsh laughter, unflinching when Jack’s glare strove to plant him six feet under. “You have security forces and no scientists,” he said, trying to explain the insane irony of it. “Jack — General O’Neill — in place of a duly elected president and a population that looks to be predominantly male as well as military. The last thing you should be looking for is more creative ways to kill the few of you who’re left. Your responsibility now isn’t to fight or to die, but to live.”

Author:

Jack saw a series of glassy images emerge from black, then fade back into black before he could make out meaning or detail. Fuzzy, frustrating images, more and more coming at him until they ran into one another. Formed a moving picture.
He was awake.
Hurting.
He became aware of a sweaty hand clenched around his, a bowed head resting awkwardly against the edge of the hospital bed gradually coming into focus.
Daniel.
Thank God.
Daniel was with him, holding onto his hand like he was anchoring him to life.
This intimacy, what it might mean, was too much for Jack to think about for now, although he’d been thinking about very little else for quite a while. Daniel was here with him and that part of it was good.
His knee was iced, elevated and bandaged, hurting so much he felt sick. Or was that from the spike he appeared to have driven through his head?
His head.
Jesus.
He got shot in the head.
He reached out uncertainly to rest his hand in Daniel’s tousled hair, which somehow always reminded him of autumn.
“Jack!” Daniel jerked upright at the touch, his face pinched and grey.
“I’m sorry,” Jack said.
“I could’ve killed you!” Daniel burst out. “I thought I had.”
Jack cringed at the lingering horror in Daniel’s soft voice and the devastated eyes fixed so intensely on his. He grabbed at Daniel’s trembling hand before he could move it and held on tight.
“Oh, God, I really thought…” Daniel choked with emotion. “I thought…before I got to you!”
“Listen to me,” Jack said.
He remembered. With Carter and Teal’c flanking either side of the gate, he’d needed to move and move fast, heading for the back side of the DHD while Daniel laid down covering fire.
“It was my fault. I blew out my knee.”
He was supposed to go straight up the middle, he was running, but he lurched right, staggering drunkenly as his leg tore, gave way under him.
It was tight, too damned tight, close quarters, he wasn’t going to make it and he tried to roll.
Shit-scared.
Then his head exploded.
Then nothing.
Here.
Jack reached up an unsteady hand to find a neat dressing over the furrowing pain across his temple.
“Crap. I bet that leaves a scar,” he said, deadpan.
Daniel’s head snapped back in shock. “I almost killed you, you stupid sonovabitch!” he said, shuddering with reaction. Convulsively, he buried his face again.
“Don’t cry, Daniel. Please.”
Jack clumsily patted his hair, unable to think of anything to do or say to comfort this wracking grief.
“Please.”
Daniel needed him but he hurt, his eyes were leaden and he slept.

**************

Jack blinked madly as the world bitched about swimming into something resembling focus.
“Daniel?”
A comforting weight had been lifted and everything hurt more.
Pressure on his fingers made him look around groggily to find Daniel out like a light in the Infirmary’s least comfortable chair. He was holding Jack’s hand, though. Still here, still holding on.
Didn’t they do the guilt-trip already? Jack thought fuzzily.
Daniel had to know by now all Jack had was a trick knee and a scratch on his head.
Sure, it could’ve been bad.
Jack could’ve been dead.
He wasn’t, though, and Daniel Jackson never had done the self-pity thing. Jack had been around when Daniel had picked himself up from worse, way worse than this was, and moved on.
Daniel was still here, though. He was in the chair, and Jack was more or less okay, so he had to want to be here. To be right here.
Daniel needed to know Jack was okay.
Confusing, how good this felt.
There was too much that was good, too much that Jack felt and it was too easy, second nature, so Jack blustered and bitched and pushed Daniel away.
Again and again and again, Jack would wish it was only about sex. Pray for it. Itches like that, he could scratch. He could almost convince himself of that. Exercise and stress-relief. Uncomplicated, easy, almost guilt-free.
But this was Daniel, everything got intense, it got tangled, and sex could only be the smallest part of what they had together, so Jack would want and want, panic and push him away.
Tried, anyway.
Daniel wanted to be near and near he stayed, the two of them circling, always connected, always pushing at the limits of what they did to each other; sometimes, maybe even aware of where this was taking them. Maybe Daniel never consciously framed the thought but Jack knew the thought was there. They were too aware. It was blistering and challenging. They were tempted, wanting and never going there.
Circling.
Now Jack was tired and hurting and still Daniel wanted to be near.
How long could they go on, not admitting anything that was between them?
How long could Jack?
His knee gave out and he got hurt more and more. He was slowing down.
His luck would hold, it always did.
He had to ask himself, though.
If it had been Daniel running, or Carter, exposed and waiting for him, needing him to be there?
How slow did he have to get before he got one of them killed?
**************
The next time Jack opened his eyes, Daniel was gone and General Hammond was at the foot of his bed.
“Did you have Teal’c carry him out?” Jack said, pissed at the empty chair and his inability to control his disappointment.
“I believe he and Major Carter lured Dr. Jackson away with promises of freshly brewed coffee.”
“Coffee?”
“They bought it as a treat for him.”
“Coffee?”
“Apparently the most expensive coffee in the world. It’s excreted by the Paradoxurus hermaphroditus civet of Sumatra,” Hammond said.
“Civet poop coffee?”
“Would you feel better if it was a Caffè Mocha from Starbucks?” the general said with a marked lack of sympathy.
Coffee! Even in his debilitated state, Jack knew when someone was messing with his mind.
“Dr. Fraiser informs me we’re looking at a twenty-week rehabilitation programme here.” Hammond nodded soberly down at Jack’s knee.
“I haven’t seen her majesty,” Jack said. Why did people keep coming to see him when he wasn’t awake
“She’ll be relieved to know you weren’t just pretending to sleep. As will Major Carter and Teal’c.”
“How long was I out?”
He and Daniel hadn’t exactly got into specifics, there.
“Approximately eighteen hours, and you’ve been drifting in and out of consciousness for two days.”
“That would be the concussion.” Jack pouted up at his dripped-dry drip.
“You’ve always been very vocal in your dislike of pain medication.” Hammond’s eyes gleamed.
“Not when I’m hurt.”
“This was a close call, Jack.”
“Tell me about it.”
“As an 0-6, you’ve done well to stay out in the field this long.”
“Time to consider my options, eh?” Jack said, because he still had his dignity and he didn’t need his C.O. to tell him he was getting to the point where he had to piss or get off the pot. Thinking about what would have happened if he’d gone down like that in front of Carter’s P-90, he was maybe there already.
Hammond seemed surprised Jack wasn’t arguing.
“I don’t think I owe anyone,” Jack said, coming slowly to realisation. “Not even myself.”
“No,” Hammond said. “You have nothing to prove in the field.” Bless the man, he actually sounded quite proud.
So.
What were Jack’s options?
His body would give up on him before his team did and there was Daniel, who wouldn’t give up on him at all, ever. Daniel and all this awareness and wanting they weren’t supposed to have or know.
“Hell, it’s not like I’ve never retired before,” Jack said.

Author:

Daniel Jackson, formerly deceased, recently de-ascended [and currently somewhat bemused] recovering amnesiac, ran his fingers lovingly across the spines of the books — his books. The newly remembered textures of leather and gold tantalised, suffusing him with guilty pleasure.

“It almost doesn’t feel right to get paid for this,” he confided to his omnipresent escort of three, seated in a relaxed row on the opposite side of his lab bench, looking as if they had no place they’d rather be. “Not when it’s so much…”

“Fun?” Samantha Carter interjected with a twinkle.

“Fun,” Daniel repeated, considering the concept.

“Not a lot of it to be had in the City of the Dead, eh?” Jack O’Neill enquired, with some certainty he knew the answer.

“Lost,” Daniel corrected automatically. “Vis Uban — it actually translates as…”

“Never mind!” Jack interrupted swiftly.

“I knew you’d say that!” Daniel said, beaming. “You hate when I talk about anything but you.”

Samantha – he had to remember to call her Sam – snorted, dropping her head to avoid Jack’s scowl.

“It appears your memory is indeed returning, DanielJackson,” Teal’c said.

“Selective memory,” Jack sniffed, still bearing a grudge over the whole Jim thing. “I have to show you how to flush, floss, shave and tie your shoelaces, but this…” He gestured at the book-filled walls of the lab with an expression of mock loathing. “This, you remember.”

“I told you what it was like for me,” Daniel said. “When you first found me on Vis Uban. How I felt my life was right there, floating in front of me. How I would reach out for a memory, and it would be gone.”

Jack had told him he was dead. Things had hardly got less confusing for him since.

“I’m still reaching out. All the time. Only, now, when I grab for them, the memories are there. I remember the books — my books,” he corrected himself, consciously asserting ownership. “Because I spent so much time here in the lab with Jonas preparing for the Anubis mission. I had to look at them all, every one of them, to trigger those memories. I know which books I have, but not necessarily what’s in them.”

“We are your friends, DanielJackson,” Teal’c said. “We do not require you to justify the progress of your recovery.”

“Speak for yourself,” Jack muttered.

“I agree with the colonel on this one,” Sam piped up. “At least in the sense I’d like to know more about what you’re going through, Daniel. I’d like to understand. And to help if I can.”

After due consideration, Teal’c inclined his head in acknowledgement of the sentiment. “As would I.”

“You’re going to annoy me either way,” Jack admitted cheerfully, squirming in what was either a vain search for a more comfortable spot on his stool or a symptom of his bored-toddler attention span.

Having intelligently deduced that one, alone, on his own, equated to a near-permanent party of four, Daniel capitulated with the best grace he could muster under the supportive, attentive blowtorch of three pairs of friendly eyes fixed on him.

“It’s not like a veil magically lifting,” he said, doing a little uncomfortable squirming of his own under the anvil of their undivided attention. “I have to…well, I have to work for it. I have to see a thing, need a thing — consciously think about it – before I can know a thing. I need that initial trigger.”

It appeared they needed more. Particularly Jack, who required life super-sized.

Daniel tried again.

“Half the time I don’t know what I know until I know it.”

“Yes?” Sam asked encouragingly.

“I…um…it’s a bit like when you haven’t thought about something for a long time. The memory is there, you just don’t know it’s there, not until something triggers it. You’ve forgotten it. Until you need it. And then it’s there. You know?”

“No.” Jack, unable to resist.

“I’m supposed to be better at this. Aren’t I?” Daniel appealed.

“Better at what?” Jack asked, on cue.

Daniel brightened at this recognition, that Jack would say just this, react in just this way, the latest small piece of his fascinating, frustrating puzzle. “Talking.”

“O’Neill,” Teal’c warned without even glancing at the suddenly galvanised colonel.

“Oh, come on, T!” Jack complained, with an eloquent gesture at Daniel. “He’s asking for it.”

“As are you,” Teal’c said, unmoved by Jack’s comedic needs.

“I’m just trying to help him feel normal,” Jack explained in wounded tones.

“I remember you doing a lot of that,” Daniel realised.

“A lot,” Sam, a fellow sufferer, agreed, ignoring another hard look from Jack.

“Your version of normal, anyway,” Daniel noted.

“Can we focus here?” Jack said. “The important thing is, do you remember us?”

“Yes.”

Well…

He was loathe to upset them, but felt he had to be honest.

“It’s…um…it’s the same,” Daniel admitted. “Sorry. I don’t remember everything. It’s just…something will happen, or one of you will say something, or do something…and I’ll remember something happened — something like that — happened before.”

“Triggers,” Jack said, his head down, suddenly rather interested in running his fingers along a suspected scratch on the surface of the table.

“Do you?” Sam started to ask, then stopped in sudden embarrassment.

“Does he what?” Jack said. “Don’t leave us in suspense, Carter. Spit it out.”

“Do you feel the same?” Sam winced openly, realising she was really putting Daniel on the spot as the words were coming out of her mouth. “About us? Our friendship, I mean?”

“Or is it like looking way back in your life?” Jack asked, surprising them with his attempt at insight. “Like knowing you were tight with some freckle-faced tyke in kindergarten but not really feeling it when the sonovabitch pulls you over and gives you a speeding ticket twenty years later?”

“Are you speaking from personal experience there, Sir?” Sam enquired.

“I was barely over the speed limit, Carter. Nothing astronomical.”

“We are brothers, DanielJackson,” Teal’c said, ignoring the byplay. “Do you know it?”

“I’m learning to,” Daniel offered, completely embarrassed. “I know you’re my friends.”

“Because you remember it,” Sam said, visibly disappointed. “Not because you feel it.”

“I’m learning to,” Daniel said again, with a hesitant smile.

“Those triggers we were talking about,” Jack said.

“I’m sorry.” What else could Daniel say?

“Don’t be!” Sam said. “It’s not your fault, Daniel. None of this is your fault. All you did was try to…to help people. Don’t ever apologise for that. It’s who you are.”

Teal’c inclined his head in that stately, beneficent way he had, smiling warm agreement.

“They didn’t deserve it,” Jack said, his face stubborn. “Not those people.”

“Colonel O’Neill did not willingly accept your replacement, DanielJackson,” Teal’c explained.

“Replacement?” Jack burst out. “He gets Daniel killed, then he gets his stuff? His life?”

“You told Jonas he earned it. When he was leaving. You said he earned it,” Daniel reminded Jack.

“Going back to that pit of vipers on Kelowna?” Jack snapped. “You bet he earned it!”

“It wasn’t his fault I died, Jack.”

“It was his fault you were the only one who died,” Jack argued, not giving ground. “He just sat back, let you do all the hero stuff, then lied about it to save his own ass.”

“He tried to put it right,” Sam reminded Jack.

“In time, Jonas Quinn became our friend, O’Neill,” Teal’c said.

“Not my friend.”

“The colonel accepted Jonas on SG-1 not because he was a replacement for you, Daniel, but because he wasn’t and never could be,” Sam said, surprising a quick, approving look from Jack.

There was a momentary silence, a sense they needed to say these things, but an awkwardness about it because no one had expected to be saying them now.

“My single strongest memory is of dying,” Daniel said, but not in a maudlin way, smiling reassuringly in response to Jack’s reflexive flinch.

It was what it was. Daniel had the memory of pain, of wanting to live and needing to die, but those were burdens he’d put away from himself. He was freed from that suffering.

Impulsively, Sam reached out across the crowded surface of the lab bench to squeeze his hand comfortingly. “It’s one of my strongest memories too,” she said softly. “One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to live through.”

Looking down at the table, busy with the scratch now, a restive Jack said nothing.

“Jacob…he couldn’t have saved me,” Daniel told her, wanting to reach out in his own way. “You do know that, don’t you? That it was too late for me?”

“You were too far gone,” Jack said in a rough, low tone, almost loathe to look up and meet Daniel’s eyes. “I knew that. Even if you’d lived, if Jacob could even do that, it…it wouldn’t have been you.”

“I wanted to go. I had to go,” Daniel apologised to them all. “I’m sorry. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, but it was my time, and when Oma came — I wasn’t ready to die. Or to live like someone dead. I…I had to let all of that go. I had to let you go. I can’t regret it,” Daniel warned, looking right at Jack, trusting, and steadied by the understanding in his dark, softening eyes.

“Neither can I,” Jack said.

“Nor I.”

After a moment of struggle, Sam nodded too, biting her lip.

“You’re not angry?” Daniel asked them all, but meaning Jack. There was a sense of familiarity about this, about putting Jack first. A settling into an old, old routine.

“Daniel,” Jack replied with gruff patience, “deep down, even you’re angry. Some day you’ll remember that. If you mean do I blame you for it, am I nursing a grudge? Then no. No, I’m not angry. I didn’t want you to die either.”

Daniel found his throat to be uncomfortably tight, too tight for him to talk or to find a place to put his hands, or his burning face. He felt a little cold and a little hot and completely shaken.

He remembered this — this unaccountably strong, glad feeling. The reality of friendship. He remembered Jack.

He found himself smiling and was certain of the new feeling, the old friendship, when Jack smiled back.

Author:

“I saw a star, I reached for it, and I missed. So I accepted the sky.”
Scott Fortini

“Hey.”

Daniel glanced up with a quick smile as Jack strolled unhurriedly into his lab.

“Is this the gizmo Carter was telling me about?” Jack asked curiously as he pulled a tall stool across to the lab bench, already stretching out inquisitive fingers as he sat down.

Daniel smoothly lifted the artefact out of reach, blandly ignoring Jack’s indignant expression.

“Leave it alone, Jack,” he instructed. “It’s a machine of some kind and we have no idea what it might do.”

“According to Carter, it doesn’t do anything,” Jack sniffed, pouting.

He liked toys.

“It hasn’t done anything yet,” Daniel countered.

“Then how do you know it’s a machine and not just a fancy paperweight?”

“It’s emitting a low-level energy reading.”

Jack looked unconvinced.

“We did find the artefact among Ma’chello’s inventions,” Daniel reminded him with some vehemence. “Look how well those worked out for us.”

“But didn’t you steal this gizmo from Carter on the pretence that it’s not like the other gizmos we found in Ma’chello’s lab and that, on the balance of probability, the old bastard didn’t rig it as some kind of booby trap?” Jack reminded Daniel in his very best approximation of a reasonable tone.

“We-ell…”

“Your objections would be a lot more convincing if you weren’t cuddling the thing like a baby,” Jack pointed out.

Slightly embarrassed, Daniel put the artefact back down on the bench between them.

Jack promptly reached out to put both hands on it, pantomiming an outrageously exaggerated electric shock.

Daniel glared at him.

Nothing else happened.

It continued to not happen.

Daniel continued to glare.

Thwarted of entertainment, Jack eventually sat back, visibly disappointed.

“My interest is in the inscriptions,” Daniel informed him a trifle coolly. “If you’ll look at them?”

He emphasised look.

Jack interpreted this to mean touch.

“You’ll see the inscriptions are familiar.”

Jack didn’t see anything of the kind, even when he turned the artefact upside down then around and around.

“I think they’re in the language of the Ancients,” Daniel explained, although even he wasn’t sure why he was taking the trouble.

“Ooo-kaaay,” Jack drawled, prudently deciding to give up on aggravating Daniel for the moment. An Ancient device had worked out about as well for him as Mach’ello’s had for Daniel. He put his always restless hands safely in his pockets. “Can you read what it says?”

“I’m working on it.”

“Which means no.”

“Sam and the R&D team only declared the artefact safe and let me take it this morning,” Daniel explained with dignity.

“So, basically, its function right now is to sit there and look decorative?” Perking up, Jack scented a new avenue of annoyance. “Like, say, a paperweight?”

“It is beautiful,” Daniel agreed quietly, his eyes tracing the soft, organic curves of delicately sculpted white metal surrounding a darkly golden opalescent sphere suspended in the centre.

One of its mysteries was how the globe supported itself – the encasing metal didn’t touch it at any point. The inscription flowed along the curves of metal, rising and falling in an intricate spiral.

“I’ve only just determined where the writing starts,” he murmured. “Starts and stops. It flows back on itself, ending exactly where it began, coming full circle. It’s fascinating.”

“I’m glad you got something out of the old goat in the end,” Jack said frankly. “I know how much it was pissing you off Ma’chello stole your body and then it was Carter who got to play with all of his cool toys.”

“Ma’chello was an engineer, not a historian,” Daniel reminded Jack. “I’m disturbed you think I was looking for some kind of payoff from his death.”

“Not from his death, no. Just from his attempt to take your life,” Jack countered unsympathetically. “And look how close he came to getting away with you.”

“He was a very sad man,” Daniel said quietly. “And a desperately lonely one, with a brilliant mind and will trapped in a frail shell that was failing him. For a short time I knew how terrible that was for him. I guess I don’t blame him for what he did to me so much as I pity him for what he did to himself.”

“I almost got my head shaved by Teal’c, you know,” Jack reminded Daniel tartly. “Pity is a stretch.”

“Then can you at least accept Ma’chello died knowing what — and who — he was fighting for all these years? And that he believed his terrible losses worthwhile?” Daniel urged Jack to understand. “He lived my life long enough to connect with people again and to make peace with his own life. I can be glad he was able to let go in the end.”

“The old goat didn’t let go!” Jack objected. “Carter pried you out of his dying carcase.” He shook his head in despair. “See? Stuff like this is why you’re the nice one.”

“Don’t worry about it, Jack. If my knees were as old and creaky as yours, I’d be crabby too,” Daniel said sweetly.

“Old?”

“I’ve been inside you too, remember?”

Jack let out a muffled snort but refused to explain what was so funny.

“I’m not even starting on the state of your back,” Daniel needled.

“It’s glowing,” Jack snapped, breaking in on Daniel’s teasing with startling abruptness.

Daniel was thrown by the complete non-sequitur as much as the change in Jack’s tone.

“This!” Jack stabbed a finger at the artefact.

Daniel straightened up, mirroring Jack’s alarm as tiny points of light began to flare inside the golden sphere. “Let’s get Sam,” he decided, grabbing for the phone.

“Let’s!” Jack agreed emphatically, picking up the artefact and heading at speed for the hallway. “Tell her to meet us in the gateroom.”

“You’re sending it through the gate?” Daniel confirmed, rapidly dialling Sam’s lab.

“You bet your ass I am! Remember what happened with the last shiny ball we brought…OW!” Jack howled, trying to throw down the now smoking sphere.

“Is it hot?” Daniel dropped the unanswered phone and rushed to help Jack as he staggered. “Are you hurt?”

“Cold!” Jack ground out, clearly in pain. “It’s stuck to my skin. I can’t let go of it.”

Daniel immediately punched out at the alarm to sound the base red alert, then took Jack’s shaking hands in his to help steady the artefact and see what could be done to free him from it.

Two SFs burst into the lab at a dead run, their side-arms drawn. Jack ordered them to get Captain Carter to the gateroom ASAP, and they put out an immediate alert over their radios before they took off to clear the way.

With Daniel helping to support Jack, they headed as fast as they could towards the elevator while the machine’s reaction intensified exponentially.

The dazzling golden flares now bursting from the sphere hurt the eyes and Daniel, battered by the unearthly staccato strobing, thought he saw the white-hot pricks of light begin to wheel.

“Oh, crap!” Jack breathed in horror as they pulled up short in front of the elevator doors. He saw it too.

The sphere was spinning inside its maze of metal, gaining tremendous momentum so rapidly, it appeared to be standing still but for the deepening whine of building energy and Jack’s shuddering pain as the cold ate into his flesh.

The wheeling lights punched out, the concussion buckling the elevator doors in eerie, muffled silence. The walls crumbled, the ceiling crumpled down and the floor fell away from them.

They fell into searing light and cold, liquid and burning.

Pulverised and blinded by light, unable to breathe, Daniel held on to Jack as hard as he held on to life, feeling only his stuttering heart and iron, gripping fingers. He fought not to fail as pain splintered, cracking him open to strangling dark.

He fell clear.

Hit a hard surface from some height, debris showering down as his body heaved, his first choke of air bitter with bile as he vomited.

He held on to Jack.

Retched and groaned and wracked up his lungs.

Held on to Jack.

His eyes were open long before his vision cleared. He could move only so far he found Jack, found a feeble pulse, cradled him.

When Daniel could see, when he could see more than Jack’s white face, he saw the sphere fall from Jack’s raw, bloody hands and roll away, a burnt-out husk. He saw a streak, a spattering of dirty, broken grey. Concrete. Walls and floor and ceiling ground down to dust.

Wavering, still feeling as if he was falling, Daniel sat huddled and tried to breathe, and he held on to Jack.

Everything was white. White and light and silent.

He didn’t know this place, he couldn’t think, and the dark rose again to strangle him.