Lost Ones
By: sorrel_rowan
CATEGORY: General
WARNINGS: Character Death
AUTHOR’S WEBSITE:
http://www.fanfiction.net/~sorrelrowan
“What is now proved
was once only imagin'd...
One thought fills
immensity...
Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of the truth.”
- William Blake
“I'll be finished in an hour,” Sam comments without looking up. “This might be vital in the fight.”
“Sam-”
“I couldn't look at it anymore.” Sam looks up, and
“Sam-”
“Yes?”
“I know.”
* * * *
Jack gets the phone call at three in the morning. He's on a flight by half past, using his pull as a general unconsciously this once. Staring out of the window and seeing the sky streaked with clouds, he can't think of why he needs to rush – he just does.
It doesn't occur to him that there's nothing left to do.
* * * *
Landry sits at his desk, hands folded neatly and controlled, reading the document in front of him. He almost wishes it were the mission report. He likes shouting at people, and right now Reynolds is simply begging for it. It's not that he wants to shout at Reynolds, exactly. It's that he wants to shout at the situation, and the fact that Jack O'Neill is halfway to the mountain. Jack will want or need to shout at him and do neither, causing a tightness in his gut that he can't name on duty.
Because he is still on duty, despite it feeling like he's in
his living room and just got the phone call saying his tour in
“Name:-”
“Well, that's an easy
one. Next question, please.”
“Age:-”
“Doesn't a girl get
some privacy in this institute? Then again, considering where your daughter put
that needle-”
“Date of Birth:-”
“Sam? Going to need
you for this one.”
“Position:-”
“Oh, there's so many.
I can multi-task, you know. Daniel, stop looking at me like that. It's true. I can
steal things, blow things up, punch people, and don't think I won't be able to
talk us out of just about anything, that is, unless Daniel-”
“Yes, yes, I think
that's quite enough, thanks.”
Now Daniel's voice is reverberating through his skull as well, its equal tones of amusement and exasperation hiding what they all saw before either of them. Landry can't shake it, the memories of sitting around the briefing room table with the two of them, Carter and Mitchell as spectators at the side as Vala filled in a form with utter deliberation. He still isn't sure how her credit card application became a team or official matter, but no one else was using the briefing room, in any case.
“Next of kin:-”
“So who's the lucky
one?” Vala looked around the briefing room, eyebrow raised. Her eyes stopped on
Daniel, then blinked. “No.”
“What-?”
“Well, it's not like
you have a reputation for being a constant on either this planet or plane of
existence, so how are they likely to reach you? And what if they want you to be
a-” she looks at the sheet, “Character reference? You've been dead twice, your
paperwork is hardly simple.”
“It's just a
formality-”
“Well, I think you'll do fine, won't you, General?”
Later, he remembers, Vala quietly knocks on his door with an envelope – the envelope sitting in front of him, unopened now.
“What's this?”
“Next of kin,” she
shrugs. “What is it you say? 'In the event of my demise.' Some people who should know, if only so they
don't budget on getting the money I owe them, or so they can forget about
paying me back.” She looks at the
plaque on his desk with a grin. “Although if you claim on them, with interest,
you can get a desk drawer that works.”
He isn't sure if it's time to open the envelope or not. It feels like the person to do it is missing.
* * * *
Teal'c finds his way to Daniel's office, and lights two candles on the still crowded desk. He runs a hand along the desktop and stares down at the papers, hearing a low murmur in his mind until he places it. Daniel Jackson always did talk or mumble to himself while he worked, turning pages and muttering all at once, lost between the lines.
He sees the Egyptian funerary statue he gave him during a much noisier death, sitting on a shelf on the bookcase, and isn't sure what symbolic purpose it serves for his friend nor why it sits next to books. Knowledge is the path to better or transcend death. An act of defiance. Death is not the end. That's where it fitted.
“I'm sure... there's gotta be some kind of rule against having candles on that desk. Fire hazard?”
“If there is, I am unaware of it, General O'Neill. And if I were, I suspect I would be unconcerned.”
They pause, Teal'c inclining his head slightly as Jack comes into the room almost tentatively. He stops at the side of the desk, seeing lines of strewn papers running from both sides of the desk and meshed somewhere in the middle around the foot of the two burning candles. He looks at the two stools, the solid, bitten biro and the glitter pencil. He lets out an sighand traces a hand a fingertip from the surface of the cups, coffee long gone cold. The two stools sit at angles to either side of the desk, and Teal'c hasn't disturbed them. Jack takes a slow breath, and then continues to stand.
There's a quiet knock on the door, and Sam walks into the room. She doesn't look at them but goes to the bottom drawer of the desk, opens it and takes out a long, shimmering scarf. “He's kept this in there since Kalana.”
Since Vala vanished.
“Carter, what the hell happened?”
Sam looks at him once, and Jack looks away. There's an apology in the air somewhere, but neither of them states or claims it. Sam deliberately and slowly folds the scarf, holding it as she stands.
“They went with SG-3 – a planet with an-”
“Ancient space gun, written instructions on building,” Jack finishes, nodding, “I read the report from the first visit.”
“You read the report?” Landry's voice can't escape a hint of sarcasm.
“Space gun, Hank,” Jack repeats. “That's all Daniel had to-”
There's a pause, and any hint of mitigating levity in the room is pulled in by the mention of one of their names.
“SG-3 got pinned down,” Sam continues after a beat, “Daniel and Vala went to help. From what Reynolds saw, Vala was shot in the abdomen covering the retreat, and they lost Daniel when he tried to lift her back to the 'gate.”
“Lost?” Jack asks, eyes on the table.
“They saw him stop-”
Daniel stops, noting
that Vala's lost consciousness.
“They saw him sit her down against a rock.”
Daniel shakes her,
shakes her a little harder, squats and leans her against a nearby rock, feeling
it rough on the back of his hands as he takes his hand from the small of her
back.
“Apparently a second group of Ori soldiers came from the ridge above. They might have been transported in – we don't know.”
Daniel hears boots on
the ground, an unsteady cacophony of syncopated beats on wet grass. He lost his
glasses ten steps back, but couldn't care less – he'd rather have the colour
back in Vala's cheeks.
“In any case, SG-3 doubled back through the valley.” Sam is surprised her voice can carry the song without breaking. She doesn't notice that Cam's come into the office, or that none of them have sat on the stools, leaving an untouched and candlelit hollow in the centre.
Daniel knows they're
surrounded, assumes Reynolds is headed back or they're about to be captured
again.
“We dialled in on schedule and were in radio contact with Daniel, brought in an emergency weapons capable UAV from the standby locker.”
“All right. We'll stay
low, you'll get us air cover.
Daniel puts his hand
on Vala's cheek, feeling it cold, and feels his hand start to shake.
They'd been together
for days – not long enough to confide in Sam or Jack, or any of the other
friends close enough to be insulted not to be told the minute it happened.
“Reynolds and the others ran for it- the UAV wouldn't launch, gate protocols-”
Sam stops, knowing when a report is becoming justification.
“We don't know if Vala- It happened too close together to tell, and we don't have the-”
She's a scientist and a soldier; they're all soldiers, combatants and murderers, but the clinical 'body for autopsy' won't pass her lips. They hear it and flinch, swallow or turn anyway.
Daniel is staring at
her closed eyes and wondering which breath was her last, and how he missed it.
Denial, he supposes in the shaking numb he finds himself in. He hears her voice
in his head, telling him to get up and go.
“Reynolds got close,”
Daniel moves his feet
closer together, levers his weight up and his sight from her blood-streaked
cheek. The blood that started in her veins is on his hands and returns to her
on her cheek. He heads to the south-west, the direction of the Stargate and, he
hopes, SG-3.
“They got him from the tree line.”
Daniel stands up –
Daniel hopes – Daniel falls, dies.
“SG-3 went for the gate,” Sam finishes.
Silence falls.
Jack stands and walks to the statue. “Did we-”
“We sent a UAV,” Landry reports. His posture changes, cries out anger, and he pauses. Jack turns. “You don't want them back.”
“I always want them back,” Jack says softly, voice laced with irony even now. “What aren't you telling me?”
“They're on display,” Landry answers without preamble. “On the top of the hill outside the village.”
“Not in the village?” Jack's posture has also changed, also cries out that his anger fills him to the level of his skin and will find a way to leave it.
“No. Do you want me to give the order?”
“I'm authorising it.”
They get up and leave, Sam blowing out the candles on the way, the tendrils of smoke winding around each other in an elaborate dance. They fade, turn and drift into the air.
* * * *
“Do you think he'd want this?” Sam asks Jack quietly, standing side by side and prepping a UAV.
“No,” Jack answers bluntly, “But this is what makes us better than them, and I won't see him – either of them – be yet another object lesson. We've all had enough of that, living, dead or-” Jack runs a hand through his hair, “otherwise.”
“I know that's not sound, but I can't find the flaw,” Sam states with a hint of a smile.
They nod and walk to the control room.
* * * *
They drive a MALP to within viewing distance – confirmation is required. They don't speak, and they don't acknowledge that Harriman, Siler, Lam, Lee and many others are not where they're meant to be but silently crowding the stairs and the corridor outside.
It's a communion particular to the Mountain, made of some parts defiance, some parts defence, some parts grief, gratitude and respect. They've done their duty to those that came before, those serving and those to come.
Fists tighten, and postures straighten as though a string runs through the human spine and is jerked taut when the hill comes into view. They are not alone. Jack tries to find relief in the fact that he can't tell who his friends were and who they were not but can't. It's no comfort that the bodies are bloated from the sun, that the heads are shaved uniformly and they are clothed in asexual deep blue smocks. It's no comfort that they hang on symbols of Origin.
“Oh, God,”
Sam takes a deep breath. “I can't tell if that one's alive or just –Christ – fresh.”
She looks to Jack, who nods.
A moment later, the hilltop is engulfed in flames and Jack isrelieved when the technician's hand shakes, slips and crashes the UAV.
The team and Harriman, staring still at the disengaged gate, don't see it. People salute, bow, cross themselves or simply nod, then leave.
* * * *
Days later, Landry opens the envelope. He doesn't protest when Jack insists on going with them – he says Daniel would expect it of him, and Landry like Sam knows it's not sound logic, but he can't figure out why.
* * * *
They meet Jacek in a field outside a small town full of white houses, after sending a transmission to the communications array Vala claimed not to know about.
Telling him of his daughter's death, the team aren't sure how to describe his reaction. He fits and starts, shaking while joking, shouting while steady. He claims to need a drink, but doesn't move to get one. He leaves blaming them for involving her.
* * * *
Jack goes back to
* * * *
“Sam-”
“Hmm?”
“You know those alternate, alternate universes?”
“ Do you mean parallel universes, Cameron Mitchell?”
“Tell me about them again, will you?”
Sam looks at Teal'c, who inclines his head, and suddenly
knows what
“'Everything possible to be imagined is an image of the truth,'” Sam starts, voice quiet, languid and rich in the air. “For every decision we make, major or minor, there's a fork in the road. For everything that happens, there's a universe that splinters off where it didn't.” She takes a breath. “For every object that falls, there's a universe where it doesn't. Every moment is ultimately filled with potential – we live in an infinite present.”
“You believe in cause and effect, do you not, Colonel Carter?” Teal'c asks.
“I do,” Sam admits, “but I believe in chance and coincidence. Some potentials have more weight and are more likely, but nothing is ever mutually exclusive from the moment we live in, no matter how small that margin of err-” Sam stops and smiles. “It's not a margin of error,” she corrects herself, “It's a margin of potential. And somewhere out there, even just one universe out of millions, the weight went that way instead. I have to believe that.”
They sit, talking only incidentally, until the depths of the night and one by one, they fall asleep. Their thoughts drift into 'what ifs' that they comfort themselves as having happened - just not for them.
Papers dance from side to side, debate rages with subtext. Stools are moved by other hands. Coffee cups burn, not candles nor silence. SG-3 isn't captured. The UAV flies. Vala runs, dials home. Daniel hopes.
The statue stays on the bookshelf, deprived of its last breath.
Knowledge is the path to better or transcend death. An act of defiance. Death is not the end; that's where they fitted.
** The End **
Feedback to: sorrel_rowan@yahoo.co.uk
Stories by Rating and Category
Copyright©2004-2011
Midnightstorms.net
All Rights Reserved.