Title: Magnets and Flares
Rating: T
Disclaimer: I don't own anything except the kids and animals.
Spoilers: I mean...it's a SG fic and SG has ended so yeah but definitely for Forever in a Day, Prometheus Unbound, Avalon.
Summary: This was an idea that popped into my head and wouldn't leave. What if now a Daniel and Sha're from a past, alternate reality came through the Stargate? It was a quite detailed idea at the time that I tried explaining to Ashley and she thought I was nuts because I couldn't explain it as well as I wanted so I started writing it and then I had her read what I had written so far which - at the time - ended mid-sentence. She liked it so I kept going.
Thank you to Ashley for being a sounding board and for betaing. Thank you to Sara for betaing even though she never watched Stargate and for helping me decide the gender of a baby. Thank you to Steph for her help and twin power.
TUESDAY
Daniel sat at his desk in his office with his six year old daughter, Skylar, as he went over her work. It was summer vacation for the almost-second grader but she asked that he teach her more languages. She already knew eleven languages but, as he told Vala, kids absorb languages very quickly. She was also quickly advancing in math and science thanks to Sam.
The little girl with long dark hair and his eyes swung her legs in her chair beside him. "You know it's right, Daddy," she grinned, just like her mother.
Daniel finished looking over her work and confirmed that it was, indeed, correct. "You're right. How are you so smart?"
"Good genes," Vala answered, coming into his office with some snacks. She kissed their daughter on the top of her head. "Let's hope your brother or sister gets those genes, too."
"Mama, when the baby is born in 4 months, can I start teaching it languages?" Skylar asked, excited that she could teach someone else what she has learned.
"Not for a little while," Vala shook her head, running her fingers through her daughter's hair, "Maybe a couple years."
Skylar's eyes widened. "I could learn 30 more languages by then!"
Daniel laughed. "Let's work on Alteran for now."
The Klaxons went off indicating and unscheduled activation of the Stargate and Daniel and Vala looked at one another. There were no more enemies in the universe.
"I'll go," Vala said. "Probably an SG team coming back early."
Vala got to the control room in time for Walter to say there was an IDC and Landry approved the opening of the Iris. Sam met her there and they all waited to see who was coming through the Stargate, the defense team ready
The watched as two people, dressed in sand tan robes walked through the Stargate.
"That's Dr. Jackson and…" General Landry started, not sure who the second person was.
"Sha're," Vala finished, "I recognize her from her photo. But Daniel is in his office with Skylar so that is not *my* Daniel."
"So how did they get here?" Sam asked, more to herself than the others.
General Landry bent down to the microphone to speak to the Gate Room. "Defense team stand down. Please accompany the visitors to the infirmary."
"How did they get here, Colonel Carter?" Landry asked.
"I don't know, sir," Sam answered, quite perplexed, "Vala and I can go talk to them and try to figure something out."
Landry nodded. "Let me know what you find out. Yesterday, I thought Monday was too quiet."
The Other Daniel and Sha're had various tests, met Dr. Lam, asked where Dr. Fraiser was, and were informed they would be told soon. Confused, The Other Daniel told Sha're everything was okay and they would find out what was going on soon.
Sam and Vala had a quick chat with Carolyn then entered the infirmary and found their new guests.
"Sam!" The Other Daniel greeted her, "What is going on?"
"Um," Sam replied.
"You're not where you think you are," Vala told them simply.
"What?" The Other Daniel asked, "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude, but who are you?"
Vala didn't know why but she found this sort of funny. It could be his hair. "I'm Vala. She's Sha're, you're Daniel but not the right Daniel. You're not where you think you are."
"What she means," Sam continued, "is that we are pretty sure that you're from an alternate reality."
"Dan-yel?" Sha're asked, confused. She knew a bit of English - conversational English - and she understood more than she could speak but this was beyond her. She got what Vala said about the names but the 'Daniel, not the right Daniel' set off some alarms and Vala spoke pretty quickly.
The Other Daniel took a minute to translate what they had said and answer her question of 'what do you mean alternate reality?!' with 'I don't know yet'.
"Okay well how long has it been since Daniel has been on Abydos?" Sam asked Vala while The Other Daniel was translating for Sha're.
Vala thought for a moment doing some mental math with how long she's known him and how old Skylar is, while Sam thought as well. "18 years, I believe."
Sam nodded, "About that. We should figure out if this Daniel and Sha're have just come from an Alternate Reality or if they have time traveled as well because I don't know about you but Daniel looks younger."
"I thought that, too. But does that matter? Do all alternate realities have to have the same timeline?" Vala asked.
"Yes," Sam told her, and everyone, really. "Imagine making a choice right now and making another choice at the same exact moment. That could create two different realities and two different timelines. It would happen at the same time."
"I've been on Abydos for about 7 years," The Other Daniel told them having overheard part of their conversation, "We visit Earth once a year. The Goa'uld were just defeated."
"That is another example of alternate realities," Sam explained, enthralled by it all, "They defeated the Goa'uld sooner than we did in this reality and Sha're was never taken as a host."
"Sha're was taken as a host in this reality?" The Other Daniel asked, shocked. "The Goa'uld never even came to Abydos. We have two children."
"So do you know Teal'c?" Vala asked, knowing they'd be talking kids later.
The Other Daniel nodded. "He was a Jaffa."
"Mama!" Skylar ran into the room, ahead of Daniel's shouted 'don't run, Sky!'.
"Who are you?" Skylar asked, "You look like my daddy but your hair is longer and you have big glasses. My name is Skylar but you can call me Sky. Like the Sky outside," then she turned to Sha're, "You're pretty. How did you get here? What's your name?"
"My name is Sha're," she said in her practiced English smiling at the girl, "it is nice to meet you."
"Sky," Sam started to explain to the talkative child, "you know how we told you about the time the Stargate took us waaay back in time to 1969?"
"Woah." Daniel said upon seeing...himself and especially Sha're.
As her daughter thoroughly distracted by a science explanation she could understand (and liked), Vala took Daniel's arm and moved him a few feet away.
"We think they have time traveled from an alternate reality," Vala told him, taking his hands.
"That's a new one," he said blowing out a deep breath, wrapping his mind around the alternate reality.
"Are you okay?" she asked.
"I think so," Daniel nodded. "It was just a surprise seeing her."
"I can imagine," Vala gave him a quick kiss before adding. "She's very pretty in person."
"She is," he agreed.
Vala squeezed his hands, "if you need to talk let me know."
"Daddy! Sha're speaks Abydonian!" Sky squeaked with excitement. Sam explained how Sha're and the man who looked like her Daddy got here and it made sense to her - they needed to get back to where they belonged. Then Sha're told The Other Daniel she was hungry.
Before Daniel could reply, Skylar bounced over to Sha're and spoke to her in Abydonian.
"Hi! I'm Skylar. I'm 6 and my daddy taught me Abydonian. I'm hungry, too. What do you like to eat?
"Hello Skylar. I am much older than 6. When we come visit Earth I like to eat pizza," Sha're replied to the energetic child.
Sky smiled widely, "I love pizza! We should get some!"
"What are they saying?" Vala whispered to Daniel.
Daniel laughed, "They want pizza."
They ordered pizza and were waiting for it to be delivered to an SF. In the meantime, Sam, Vala, and Daniel met with General Laundry; during which time another team came back who was not from the future nor from an alternate reality. Skylar decided to wait in the commissary with The Other Daniel and Sha're - she was geeking out over getting to talk to a real Abydonian person.
"What languages do you know?" The Other Daniel asked Skylar.
Skylar thought for a moment. "English, Spanish, French, Abydonian, German, Latin, Japanese, Chinese, Egyptian, Portuguese,...um," she counted on her fingers, "and Greek. And I'm learning Alteran."
The Other Daniel gave her a questioning look. "What is Alteran?"
"The language of the ancients! They're the ones who made the Stargate and they're really cool and they're all shimmery. I've never met them but I've heard about them. They're not suppoooosed to help people but some of them do and then they get in trouble but it turns out okay in the end because they don't really mind. It's like when I touch one of Daddy's artifacts. I'm not really supposed to but I just wanna see it closer! But I get caught and I explain why I did it and then I don't really get in trouble in the end because I was just trying to find out more and do stuff to help anyway. Anyway that's what Alteran is."
"That makes sense!" Sha're told her with a smile. From the short time she spent with Vala earlier she could tell this girl was very much like her mother.
"Do you have any kids?" The inquisitive girl asked.
"Yes," Sha're said said in English then continued, "We have two sons."
"Why didn't they come, too?"
"They weren't feeling well." She told Sky.
Skylar frowned. She doesn't like being sick. "What are their names? How old are they?"
"Akil is almost 6 years old, like you, and Lev is 4 years old," The Other Daniel told her, "And before you ask Akil does know a few languages but they prefer to play archeologist and have digs in the sand."
"What languages do they know?"
Daniel sat down with them, across from himself and next to chatterbox Skylar. "That's enough questions for now, sweetheart."
"They have two boys, Daddy," Skylar reported excitedly. "Do you think the baby will be a boy?"
"We'll have to wait and see, Darling," Vala replied, pizza boxes in hand and followed by Jack and Sam.
"I just had to see this!" Jack said, pulling a chair over to sit at the head of the table, adjacent to both Daniels. He gave a friendly wave to Sha're "Hey. I'm Jack."
"Hello. I am Sha're," she replied with a smile.
Sam sat next to Sha're and Vala sat across from her, on the other side of Skylar with some plates for everyone.
"You know," Jack continued, "I missed the other 'gate thing with the black hole when we got all the SG-1 teams. A whole room full of Carters. A whole room full of Daniels. I mean. The possibilities."
"I missed it, too," Vala lamented with Jack while Sam opened the pizza, "Being in the Ori Galaxy and all."
"I keep telling you, I'm not sure the Ori Galaxy was as bad as Washington, D.C. and all those politicians," Jack teased her with their ongoing argument.
Daniel broke in to diffuse this. "Where is your daughter, Jack?"
Jack shrugged. "She wanted to play basketball with Mitchell and T before she had some food. What can I say? She's a weird 7 year old who doesn't want pizza."
"She did like to experiment on it the other day," Sam said proudly, grabbing a slice.
Skylar turned her attention from her Abydonian conversation with Sha're and The Other Daniel about pizza and food on Abydos, "Olivia got to experiment on pizza?! Cool!"
"Maybe you can do food experiments with Liv this weekend at your sleepover," Sam told her 'niece'.
Cam and Teal'c finished their game with Olivia and came to the commissary for some food with Jack and Skylar. Sam, Vala, Daniel, The Other Daniel, and Sha're went to Sam's lab to try and figure out how The Other Daniel and Sha're got here and, once that was figured out, how to send them back.
Sha're took a seat at the work table, looking around. "All the things are so similar," she said in English.
"Wonko, isn't it?" Vala asked.
"Wonko?" Sha're questioned, never having heard that word before.
Vala waved her hands a little as she explained possibly her favorite word. "Strange, weird, odd, crazy."
Sha're smiled and nodded. "Yes, yes. Very wonko."
Daniel dropped his head and sighed slightly, knowing his wife's proclivity for that word. Getting anyone to use it made her happy. When Skylar started saying it as a toddler Vala was practically giddy.
"She's going to teach it to the kids when we go back," The Other Daniel told them knowing Sha're liked to teach them new words she learned while on their trips.
Vala grinned and bounced slightly next to her Daniel, "that's exciting!"
Sam looked up from her computer, "Okay I sent a message to Atlantis to have them check their records for anomalies before and around the time this Daniel and Sha're came through and I messaged Dr. Lee to have him and some others check as well. Now, we know that solar flares cause time travel."
"How do we know that?" The Other Daniel asked.
Daniel answered the question for, well, himself. "When we went back in time to 1969 the wormhole was too close to the sun and was hit by a solar flare. And then we went through the Stargate too soon when we were coming back so we went into the future."
"So we're looking for a solar flare and something else," Vala summed up, "Buuut what is the something else? Not a black hole again."
"Since SG-7 came back and they were this SG-7 we can assume it was something on the way from Abydos to Earth," Sam explained, thinking aloud, "You are probably correct that it's not a black hole because it would keep happening like before."
Vala went over to Sam's whiteboard, uncapped the black dry erase marker, and drew a circle on the left side and wrote an 'A' in the middle of it. Then she drew a circle on the right side and wrote an 'E' on the middle of that one. Between the two she drew a squiggly line. Under each circle she drew a stick figure with glasses. Under the circle with 'A' on it the stick figure with glasses had longer hair.
"Vala, what are you doing?" Daniel asked, watching her draw but also ready to stop the drawing.
Vala recapped the marker and tapped her chin with it. "I thought this might help me think. But really I just drew a picture of you both and the planets."
Sam looked at it for a moment. "Leave it. That could help later. You never know."
A beep from Sam's computer drew her attention back to it. She read the message and relayed it to the others. "Atlantis says they have a lot to look at and they probably won't be able to get back to us until the morning, our time."
"I mean. It's space after all." Vala reasoned.
"I can set up a program." Sam said while typing, already setting up said program, "to scan my programs for the data I want while we wait even while Dr. Lee's team is looking for the same things."
The Other Daniel nodded, "The more people….or programs looking the better."
"Then, I guess, we can get this Daniel and Sha're set up in a room, report to General Landry and," she finished typing, "take the kids home for the night."
"Quick question," Daniel scratched his nose once an SF took The Other Daniel and Sha're to VIP quarters, "Do we need to worry about entropic cascade failure?"
"What is entropic cascade failure?" Vala asked looking back and forth between Daniel and Sam.
"I don't think so," replied Sam sounding a tiny bit more unsure about her statement then Daniel would like. "I was thinking about that and in this case we are dealing with time travel as well so you're not exact replicas, let's say. It's like when we went back to 1969. I would surmise that in this instance that because the other you time traveled as well as came from an alternate reality we won't need to worry about entropic cascade failure."
"Daniel!" Vala demanded, "What is entropic cascade failure?"
Jack, Sam, and Olivia got home and Olivia's black great dane, Magnet, wagged her tail from her crate.
Olivia went to let her out from her crate and take her outside, and their grey cat lifted her head from her bed atop the dog's crate.
"Do you think we can get our new friends back to their time and place?" Jack asked, putting his keys in the dish by the door.
"I don't know," she said, scratching Quarks the cat's head on the way to the back of the house to check on Olivia and Magnet, the dog. "We've always gotten misplaced versions of ourselves home before. I'm hopeful."
Olivia and Magnet were running around the back yard in the light of the sunset. Sam watched them and Jack slid his arms around her waist from behind and dropped a kiss to her shoulder. "You'll figure it out."
Mags ran up to the door and Olivia followed her. Sam opened the sliding door for them and Magnet excitedly sniffed Sam and then Jack. He pet the tall dog before sitting on the couch.
"Sky is still sleeping over this weekend, right?" Olivia asked, sitting in her favorite chair adjacent to the couch.
Sam sat next to her husband, "Of course. Even if we're still working on it, Dad will be here with you two."
Olivia picked up her iPod Touch to text her friend. "Cool. We have to finish making up our language and we wanted to do some experiments on food and we wanted to teach Mags a new trick. We tried to teach Quarks but she's a cat and refused, obviously."
"Obviously," Jack replied as he would when Sam says something that makes perfect sense to her, "what are you trying to teach her?"
"How to roll over. It's for our plan," Olivia told him, while texting Skylar.
Jack looked at Sam, "She gets that talking and typing from you."
Sam nodded with a smile. "What are you two talking about, Liv?"
"Our language so far and *our* theory about Sha're and the other Uncle Daniel," Olivia explained, putting down her iPod to wait for a reply, "we think it was magnets."
Jack smiled, "That's my girl! It's always magnets!"
Magnet came over wagging her tail and sat by Jack, looking at him. Olivia giggled, "She thinks you called her!"
"Yeah, you're a good dog," Jack petted her head.
Skylar ate her chocolate ice cream at the kitchen island while texting Olivia from her iPod Touch. When she was finished with her ice cream she had to make a couple changes to their language in her notebook. They were discussing their sleepover plans for this weekend and how she could convince her parents to get a dog.
Vala checked on Sky after her shower, saw she was fine with her ice cream and laughing at her iPod - so the conversation with Olivia was going well - and found Daniel taking clothes out of the dryer.
"Wow, so helpful," she teased, folding her arms over the baby bump.
He feigned an offended look, "I do the laundry!"
"Yes, yes. Every other month or so…" grinned Vala, "Alright, I know. More often than that!"
Daniel pulled out the last couple items and put them in the laundry basket then closed the dryer door. Vala walked around and stood in front of him making him lean back against the dryer.
"How are you doing with…?" she gestured with her hand.
"The laundry?" He evaded.
Vala narrowed her eyes and rested her hands on his shoulders, "The other time and place you and Sha're thingy."
Daniel placed his hands on her hips, pausing a moment before answering. "It's incredibly weird. I thought it was weird before with the quantum mirror and seeing other SG-1s or with the black hole and all the other teams came through but that was the entire team. But it's weird to see them. So much has happened in my life to come to this point that to see a past alternate...thing but also it is a viable timeline. Incredibly weird."
"Understandable," Vala nodded, "If it was me with Tarek, who I was supposed to marry before I was taken by Qetesh I would find that very weird as well. Though how would we end up on Earth? It makes sense that they're here. I would have no reason to come to Earth. I suppose if there were -"
Daniel cut her off by kissing her softly, his hands sliding up to her back.
"Thank you," Vala said when they parted. "I would have just kept going on and on."
"I know," chuckled Daniel.
Vala ran her fingers through the hair on the back of his neck, "But like I said I think I know how I would feel and I wanted to make sure you were doing alright."
"It hurts less than I thought it would to see her," he explained, "but I'm happy to know she wasn't taken as a host and that ...the other us has a good life and at the same time I'm worried about the you in that reality."
"Oh don't worry about me in any reality," Vala grinned her plotting grin, "I'm probably stealing ships and finding treasures."
Daniel chuckled and the very real possibility of that fact, "I suppose you're right."
"I'm always right," she smirked, "and you're really okay?"
"Mostly," he told her honestly, "I'm okay that she's okay in that reality."
Vala accepted that answer seeing the truth in his eyes. "Do you think it's weird that Sky likes Sha're so much?"
Daniel shook his head. "She likes to talk - like you - and she gets to talk to someone who is actually a native Abydonian speaker. Plus Sha're is a nice person. I'm not surprised Sky likes her. She's a good judge of people, also like you."
"And you!"
"Mama?" Skylar asked from the end of the short hallway. "I think the baby wants ice cream. Can I have more?"
Vala laughed resting her forehead on Daniel's shoulder. She lifted her head to look at Skylar. "That's not how it works, Darling."
"Why not?" Skylar asked with a pout that could match her mother's.
Daniel let go of his wife so she could explain why pregnancy cravings apply only to her.
