Back on the Grid
Jack returns from Washington to check on his team after the events of episode 9.16 – "Off the Grid", spoilers for 2.1 "Serpent's Lair" and episodes 3-16 of season 9
Sam slowed to a stop and parked in front of Daniel's house, taking her keys out of the ignition and looking over at the man in her copilot seat, asleep, coiled against the door. The deep bruising on the left side of his face looked darker and more swollen in the evening light. She wondered how her own face looked.
"Daniel," she called, gently shaking his shoulder. He jerked awake, eyes wide, hands fumbling briefly with the seat belt straps before coming to cradle his head with a groan.
"Easy. We're at your house. You fell asleep in my car." The head under the hands let out a low mumble of understanding.
Sam undid her own seatbelt and exited her car, coming around and opening Daniel's door. He didn't move. Sam frowned. She'd been worried when he'd started slurring his words on P6G-452, but, despite complaining about his face, he'd seemed fine once they were beamed up to the Odyssey and she hadn't questioned him on Ba'al's ship. The fact that he had gone straight to the infirmary without showering and without prompting immediately after gating home, however, had sent up a big red flag. The big red flag multiplied into a vexillology when he'd been excused from the debriefing. She hadn't hesitated when he'd found her later in her lab and asked for a ride home.
Concussion. Migraine. Bruised ribs and possible facial fracture…
"Daniel. Hey, let's get you inside. Come on," she reached over him and undid his seat belt. The release of pressure against his chest and lap seemed to register and he released his head, eyes closed, feeling the rim of the car roof and guiding himself stiffly out of the car and onto the curb. Sam's frown deepened. Once vertical, his eyes snapped open, color draining from his face as he flailed, hands landing a death grip on her arm and the car door.
"Daniel?" She grabbed his upper arm, bracing for any loss of consciousness. He breathed slowly and deliberately through gritted teeth, eyes locked straight ahead with a determined focus.
"Daniel? Are you passing out on me? What's going on?" His grip on her arm and the car door relaxed, as did Sam when he shuffled his feet, resuming control over gravity.
"No. Sorry. Just really dizzy," came the mumbled reply, followed by an even softer, "wow, this sucks." Sam grimaced in sympathy. Daniel had an enviably high pain tolerance, but it seemed the events of the past day or so were catching up to him. She took one hand off his bicep and placed it on his upper back in a gesture of support.
"Think you can make it inside?" Daniel nodded, slowly shuffling up the walk, eyes closed. Sam took his keys from his hand and undid the locks, stopping to grab his mail from the porch as Daniel negotiated the lip of the door and following him inside.
"Couch or…" she began, but trailed off as Daniel sat heavily on the sofa, head returning to his hands as he curled up carefully around his ribs. She took the afghan off the back of the couch and draped it lightly over him before returning to the car to grab his prescriptions and his glasses from the cup holder, setting them quietly on the coffee table. She found a glass in the kitchen and filled it with tap water, wincing at her own reflection in the microwave. That was going to be colorful in the morning.
Grabbing Daniel's trusty icepack from the freezer, she returned to her patient and presented him with the gifts. The icepack was gratefully accepted, but the water glass was shunned with a grunt.
"Staying hydrated will help," she tried, receiving an even more disapproving grunt. Sam frowned and set the glass on the table with the pills.
"When did you take those?" Daniel brushed aside the question with a wave of his hand, drawing the blanket tighter.
"Oh, come on, Daniel." Sam regretted her tone the instant it left her mouth, born as it was out of her own exhaustion. Daniel blinked one un-icepacked eye back at her with a look of hurt confusion and frustration.
"Few hours ago. Can't take more yet. Too nauseous anyway… Sorry." He closed his eyes again and curled somehow smaller on the couch. Kicking herself, she snagged the little gray trashcan from Daniel's bathroom and a few plastic bags from under his kitchen sink before placing it by Daniel's head.
"I'm sorry, Daniel. Trashcan's at twelve o'clock… Want me to stay?" Daniel shook his head and mumbled something that sort of sounded like Cassie.
"She's pretty self-sufficient and she doesn't get home on break till tomorrow, anyway." He let out another mumble that could have been either I'm okay or go away. Sam decided it must have been the former and turned to go, turning back to add Daniel's phone to the pile of necessities in front of him on the table.
"Call me if you need anything. I'll check on you in the morning." Daniel's head moved in what she chose to interpret as a nod and she turned to go.
"Sam… thanks," he called quietly.
"Anytime. Feel better," she called back, locking the door behind her and heading home.
Brigadier General Jack O'Neill had strings he could pull that could get him all the way from Washington, D.C. to Cheyenne Mountain in just under three hours. He fantasized about pulling those strings on a daily basis, but sometimes those strings pulled him.
He'd felt a tug when he heard report about the brand new addictive space corn. He'd almost left when he heard SG-1 was the team heading out to P6G-452. Had it not been for a meeting with the Joint Chiefs, he would have been en route the minute they'd lost contact with SG-1, but he was on the way by the time Landry had contacted him to brief him on Ba'al's new stargate collection. His heart had skipped a beat and there was tightness in his chest he couldn't shake following communiqué from the Odyssey, all stargates but 1 accounted for, no SG-1, Ba'al's ship destroyed. His feet crossed the lintel of Landry's office at the same time he felt his cell-phone vibrate in his pocket, the calling phone receiver balanced in the crook of Landry's neck.
"Jack! I was just giving you a ring." Jack assessed the relaxed, cheery tone and let out a weary breath. SG-1 was safe.
"What the hell happened? Where are they?" Landry smiled and motioned at the chairs in front of him. Jack continued standing.
"They're fine. They gated off the ship before it exploded." Jack flashed back briefly to a similar incident on Apophis' ship too many years ago and one particular cooked archeologist lying in the hallway.
"And?" he prompted. Landry motioned to the seats again. This time Jack acquiesced.
"They're a little banged up, but not too bad. I've sent them home. Mitchell, Carter, and Teal'c are a bit bruised. Doctor Jackson has a concussion. They took a good beating but they've come home in far worse shape." Jack nodded, finally letting go of the tension he'd been building all day.
"Ba'al's assumed dead. All of him, we hope." Jack nodded again, shifting his feet anxiously as if they were already en route to his next destination. Landry sighed.
"Oh, go ahead. I'll send you the report in the morning," he shooed Jack back out of his office with a wave of his hand and Jack jumped back up, cell phone back out of his pocket, numbers dialed and phone ringing by the time he reached the surface.
"Carter?" a sleepy voice answered.
"Sorry, did I wake you?"
"Mmmmmm no," the sleepy voice lied and Jack could hear a muffled yawn.
"I've just been briefed. Sounded like a doozy. You okay?" he balanced the cell phone on his shoulder, unlocking his rental car.
"Yeah. We're all fine. Daniel's feeling pretty rough, took a strong blow to the face. Doc said he has a concussion, some bruised ribs, and the x-ray of his face was inconclusive, but he might have a facial fracture. He was nursing a migraine, too. I dropped him off a few hours ago…." Another muffled yawn interrupted her report.
"Sounds like a fun one. I'll give him a call. Glad you're okay. Get some sleep." He buckled his seat belt and hung up the phone following Sam's still half-asleep "mmhmm, night", starting the car and heading over to Daniel's place.
Daniel hadn't answered Jack's incessant ringing of his phone on the way over, but Jack knocked on his door before unlocking it out of courtesy. The house was pitch black from the outside and, despite it being nearly the middle of the night, the tightness in Jack's chest was back along with the vision of a much younger Daniel, propped up against the door of Apophis' ship, half his chest nearly blown away by a staff blast.
"Daniel?" he called quietly as he entered, immediately greeted by the unmistakable sound of vomiting. Jack followed the sound into the living room.
Silhouetted by the light from a streetlight outside the window, Daniel was sitting up on the couch, a picture of misery as he dry heaved into his trashcan. Jack winced. Rough was an understatement, but at least he was alive.
"Easy there, spacemonkey. No sarcophagus this time, huh?" The heaving half turned into a choked laugh and Daniel put the trashcan back on the floor, crumbling shakily back against the couch with a hoarse, "hey, Jack."
Jack tossed his coat onto a nearby chair and made his way blindly through the near darkness of the living room, whacking his shin loudly against an unseen piece of furniture before finding the switch to a lamp. Daniel groaned loudly at the intrusion of light, throwing an arm across his face and swearing at the sensation, but not before Jack got a glimpse of the damage.
"Sorry. Wow, they got you good, huh?" The fact that Daniel kept his eyes shut and didn't retort with some version of "you should have seen the other guy" was worrisome, but Jack guessed from the way that he was breathing and the shape of his cheek that he was fighting another round of nausea and opening his mouth hurt like hell.
Jack handed the man his trashcan with a sympathetic grimace and took inventory of the coffee table: half empty glass of water, glasses, phone, Reglan, and Toradol, Daniel's usual feeling like death cocktail.
"At least it looks like you've got the good stuff. Are you up on your meds?" Daniel let out a frustrated growl and removed the arm from across his face, resuming his earlier trashcan position.
"That's why this happened." Jack nodded and took stock of the situation. Daniel looked awful. Half his face was a mess of swollen, deep purple bruises and the other half was white as a sheet. He was shivering, but he was covered in a thin layer of sweat, possibly due to pain, the physical toll of vomiting, or both. He had pretty much admitted to tossing his meds and he was hunched in a way that made Jack question whether his ribs were just bruised.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" Daniel was squinting back at him with his good eye, curled back against the couch, trashcan back on the floor.
"Trying to decide whether to drag your sorry ass back to the SGC for an IV." Daniel mumbled something unintelligible that Jack was reasonably sure was a non-English swear. He pretended not to notice.
"Did you ice your face?" Daniel nodded.
"Icepack got warm. Back in the freezer. Left in on for a while. Ask Sam." Jack retrieved the once again frozen icepack, guiding Daniel's hand over it to keep it in place atop the bruising.
"Have you kept anything down?" Daniel didn't answer that question which was an answer in and of itself. Jack returned to the kitchen and looked in Daniel's fridge and cupboards, pleasantly stunned to find a small, but present amount of most likely stale saltines and ginger ale.
"If you can keep this down, we'll stay here. If not, we're going back," he proclaimed, setting the crackers in front of Daniel. To his surprise, Daniel nodded.
"Just ginger ale. Chewing hurts." Jack nodded and sat down next to him on the couch, passing him the soda. Daniel stared at it for a bit before taking a tentative sip.
"So, what even happened? I heard something about crack corn and Ba'al and stargates going missing…" Jack trailed off, leaving space for Daniel to fill.
Daniel was quiet for a minute, removing the icepack and running his hand over his left cheek as if recalling the blow before launching into the story of what had happened on PG6-452, the fact that none of them made good drug dealers, especially Mitchell, and everything else that had transpired since last they'd spoken - the issues with Caledonia and the Rand Protectorate, Ba'al's attempt to brainwash Teal'c, Jaffa democracy, the parallel universe versions of SG-1 (which Jack was disappointed to learn never included him), Janet, Mitchell's run in with the Galarans, the Prior plague, Anubis 2.0, the Sodan, Ba'al's clones, and Vala, especially Vala. The conversation was enough of a distraction that Daniel finished off the ginger ale, a couple crackers, and kept down the next round of his meds. By the time the rosy glow of dawn filled the windows of Daniel's living room, Jack had tucked his wayward, recovering archeologist in bed and was three hours away, back to Washington, D.C., all stargates and SG-1 accounted for and back where they belonged.