Disclaimer: no one mentioned belongs to me. Originally written 5/12/07.
"Did you hear?" said Grogan, catching up with Izzy and Hailey in the mess. "Elliot already got a spot. SG-17."
"What, you're surprised?" Hailey said, rolling her eyes. "He's Mr. Hero, after all."
"Lieutenant Hero," Grogan corrected.
"You're remarkably cheerful about the whole thing, for someone on a waiting list," Izzy observed. She eyed her lunch tray speculatively; the vegetable medley was looking soggy and unappealing out of the safety of sneeze guard fluorescents.
"Yeah, well, Colonel O'Neill's right. I did get shot again." He grinned cheerfully, grabbed the roll off of Izzy's tray. She glared, but didn't fight him for it.
"I can't figure out why you're proud of that," said Hailey.
"Well, if it wasn't me, it'd be someone else, right? I'd rather I get shot than someone else get shot trying to save me from getting shot."
It was a pretty nice sentiment, but Hailey seemed stuck on being irritable. Probably because Elliot had already been assigned. "You better hope they're not real bullets next time," she said.
"Well, aren't you the little prophetess of doom," said Grogan.
"I'm serious, Grogan, you're like a magnet. No unit leader is going to want you if you keep getting shot."
"And no unit leader is going to want you if you keep correcting everyone," Grogan retorted.
"Guys," Izzy cut in, pained. Half the mess was already casting curious glances at them, the newbies who shut down the base all afternoon for a training exercise, and Izzy wasn't in the mood to be any more notorious today. "They haven't even reviewed the tapes yet. We don't know that any of us are going to make a team."
Hailey and Grogan stared at her and let out twin sighs. "We'll make it," Grogan said.
"Yeah, all or nothing, remember?" said Hailey. "Elliot already got a spot, so I'm guessing it's going to be 'all.'"
Hailey didn't seem bothered. Even Grogan was smiling. Izzy envied them their confidence. She wasn't so sure.
Izzy managed to dodge every last harried scientist darting around with laptops and precariously perched coffee cups, all without instance, but it was Teal'c that nearly knocked her on her ass. He popped out from behind a corner, huge and looming, and scared the living daylights out of her. She was no longer in 'save the SGC' mode, she was in 'I haven't slept in thirty-nine hours and I need to get out of here before I kill someone for real' mode. Every nerve was on perilously edge, and Teal'c's sudden ninja prowess wasn't helping to soothe her frazzled mind.
"Lieutenant Satterfield," Teal'c greeted her solemnly, somehow making her name sound like one big, long word.
"Uh, hi, Teal'c," she fumbled, unsure how to address him. "Sir."
"You were the one who rigged the Goa'uld device to explode in today's exercise," he said.
"Yeah," said Izzy, "that was me." She thought he'd been unconscious at the time, but then again, knowing what she knew now, he was probably just faking it. For some reason, that information put her further on edge. Teal'c freaked her out a bit. Nothing against him, she understood he could be quite entertaining sometimes, but that didn't erase the fact he was a big guy who saw everything, didn't smile, and could break someone's neck with one hand.
"And then you dragged Daniel Jackson to safety," Teal'c continued. She didn't answer, waiting for that other shoe to drop. "Yet you did not go back for myself or the other men in the room."
"There wasn't time," she said.
"You put yourself at personal risk for the body of Daniel Jackson, did you not?"
"An SG unit officer doesn't leave a man behind," she answered crisply. "Doctor Jackson was the only one I could reach before the device detonated." Teal'c was staring at her impassively. She wondered if the members of SG-1 told each other everything, if Major Carter had passed it along that Izzy thought Dr. Jackson was cute. It was bad enough that Carter knew. Teal'c knowing bypassed embarrassing and went to downright creepy.
Not that it mattered, though, because personal feelings for Dr. Jackson aside, she really had been doing what she thought was best. And she would have gone back to save them all if she'd had the time. It wasn't their fault they'd been compromised by the alien device.
But if Teal'c suspected anything off about her claim, if Major Carter had said anything to him, he made no mention of it. "You rescued Daniel Jackson even though he was holding Stargate Command hostage."
"We determined that the device was exerting control over Doctor Jackson. We were working under the assumption that base personnel would return to normal if the device was destroyed." Off his stony face, she added defensively, "We didn't exactly have other options."
"Were you acting under orders when you performed the rescue?"
"Lieutenant Elliot didn't tell me to get Dr. Jackson, no. But he didn't tell me not to, either."
Teal'c contemplated this. "I see." He bowed his head slightly. "That is all I wished to know. Thank you."
"Mr. Teal'c?" she blurted, before he could leave.
He lifted an eyebrow.
"Does your opinion count in the final evaluation?"
"No," he said, then walked down the hallway, arms folded behind his back like some serene Jedi master.
Izzy had a sneaking suspicion he was irritated she hadn't tried to save him, as well.
Izzy had just added her name to the sign-out sheet when she heard the clatter of footsteps slowing at her six. "Lieutenant," Dr. Jackson panted, falling into step beside her en route to the elevator, "I was hoping to catch you before you left."
"Yeah?" she said, trying to quell that tiny shiver of hope in her stomach.
"Yeah. Listen, I know it might be awhile before you get your official assignment here, but I was hoping that in the interim, you might like to be a member of my research team."
"Really?"
"It's not exactly as exciting as going off-world, but it's a good learning experience, and frankly, I could use the extra hands. General Hammond has already approved it, if you're interested."
"I'm interested," she assured him, trying to sound restrained and not bursting-out-of-her-skin excited.
"Tell you what, we're not due for another mission for a few days yet, so why don't you swing by my office tomorrow morning, and we can discuss it some more?"
"Sure thing," she said easily, surprising herself with her level of cool. "Tomorrow. I'll be there." It was funny, just that morning, she'd been convinced Colonel O'Neill was going to fail them, and now she was being offered a position with one of the members of SG-1. "Thank you so much, Doctor Jackson."
"You're welcome," he said, grinning. "Oh, and, Lieutenant?"
"Yeah?"
"You really did do a good job today."
Dr. Jackson wasn't in his office. Anxious and trying not to show it, Izzy cornered one of the level guards in the hopes he followed the progress of SG-1 regularly. She figured that since they had a tendency to get into trouble, someone would be watching them at all times. If this was true, she didn't find out, because at the very least, the guard she questioned was neither knowledgeable nor interested. "Dr. Jackson? I don't know," he shrugged at her. "He moves around a lot. Try the labs." He pointed her in that direction, so it wasn't as though he was entirely unhelpful.
However, Dr. Jackson wasn't in his lab, either. There was just a pale man with unruly sideburns, hunching himself over a table swamped in paper. When Dr. Jackson said he needed extra hands, he had meant it; the guy was fighting a battle with the paper and losing.
"Hi," she said, and the man looked up, startled. "I'm looking for Dr. Jackson? I was supposed to meet with him this morning?" She was an officer, he was a civilian, and she should have been commanding respect, not ending every sentence in a question. A part of her was still thinking that Dr. Jackson would pop out from behind a corner at any minute and say, 'Oops, sorry, didn't mean you, don't want you.'
"You must be the new research assistant," the man said. "Um, Daniel's out with Major Carter, I think, not sure when he's going to be back. But you're welcome to pull up a chair and get started."
"What are you working on?" she asked, approaching the bench but not sitting down. She grabbed a paper by the edge and studied the neat lines of Goa'uld text in the photo.
"These are some photos Daniel took of a Goa'uld cartouche on P2R-275," the man said, already engrossed in the work again. His voice was roughly weary and Izzy wondered just how much of this burden he'd been shouldering before she'd shown up. "Just so you know, parts of the cartouche were eroded, so there are sizable chunks of the text missing. But this is one of the largest written documents we've found, and Dr. Jackson thinks it could help contribute to a comprehensive dictionary."
"Are you kidding?" Izzy said, studying one of the photos. "I'm going to need a dictionary just to get through this."
"I don't know," he said, not looking up from his magnifying glass. "Daniel said you already have a background in written and spoken Goa'uld."
"I've never put it to the test quite like this before," she admitted. Feeling like she was back in high school, she added slyly, "He told you about me?"
He jotted something down in his notebook before finally saying, "Yeah, he seemed excited."
Izzy grinned and blushed, feeling more and more thirteen by the minute. She was reading too much into it, she knew. He was probably just excited about her credentials and how little he would have to train her. She knew Goa'uld, he had a project, she had free time. That was all.
But still.
The man looked up suddenly, embarrassment marking his face. "Sorry, I'm being rude, aren't I? I'm Nyan."
Izzy smiled and stuck out her hand. "Lieutenant Isabel Satterfield, United States Air Force." Nyan blinked at her like a stunned deer and she added gently, "Call me Izzy."
They both stood frozen for a moment before comprehension dawned. "Shaking, right," he said, and shook firmly. "Sorry. Daniel gave me a crash course in Earth customs, but I never really get to use him." He waved his arm around the lab as if to say, 'I never leave.'
Izzy had certainly spent a lot of her life too busy for typical social customs. Nyan was a kindred spirit in that respect and so she slid onto a stool. "Catch me up," she said, resigning herself to the fate of the bookworms.
It was one of the rare instances were all three of them were holed in the lab translating. Dr. Jackson usually had a hundred other projects he was working on at any given time. They managed without him for the most part, but it wasn't always easy work. There were hundreds of photos of the cartouche some of the same piece of text from different angles, to compensate for the crumbled rock around them and the erosion that made some symbols impossible to figure out.
It was sort of humid in the room with all of them breathing down each other's necks, and Izzy's hair was starting to get frizzy. She flopped some strands away from her sticky forehead with the back of her hand and sighed. Her notes were achingly neat, yet even the best organization couldn't help her find something that was never there to begin with. She cross-referenced against everything she had, but the symbol still meant nothing.
She threw her hands in the air helplessly and announced, "I have no idea what this word is."
Dr. Jackson obligingly took the picture from her hand and studied it, his head slowly tilting sideways. "It sort of looks like..."
"I know," she said, "but it's not. The stroke is too thin here, there's a slight curve to it here, and besides, the context doesn't work at all."
"We could ask Teal'c," Dr. Jackson offered, and Izzy blanched before she could stop herself. Unfortunately, Dr. Jackson noticed. "Is everything okay?"
"I don't..." she hesitated, "I don't think Teal'c... likes me."
"Really." He looked like he was trying hard not to laugh.
Already humiliated, she said in a rush, "I think he's mad that I didn't try to save him from the Goa'uld device. I didn't really have time to, and I wasn't acting with anyone's approval, and you seemed like the most likely candidate to help us figure out what went wrong and how to fix it." Her stomach twisted into a sour knot; Dr. Jackson was now openly grinning at her. "What?"
"Just so you know, Teal'c wouldn't hold a grudge over something like that."
"Oh."
"Yeah, a lot of people misread Teal'c, it's the whole 'former First Prime' thing. But he's a nice guy, once you get to know him. Funny."
Izzy had no idea what to say to that.
"I wouldn't worry about it," Dr. Jackson said finally.
"I know," she fumbled. "But it's like, he looks at me, and all I can think about is that session, what I did wrong. He makes me question myself." It was weird to say aloud, weirder still to say to Dr. Jackson as if he cared. And besides, it wasn't an entire truth, Teal'c really did make her nervous.
Dr. Jackson was laughing, and even Nyan was smiling into his notebook. "What?" she asked, dread flooding her like the tide coming in.
Dr. Jackson shook his head, still smirking. "Nothing. It's just that Teal'c told me he thought you had a very good head on your shoulders."
It didn't come as a surprise when Hailey got assigned to one of the science teams. She was, after all, a genius, top of her class at the Academy, and with the backing of both Major Carter and Colonel O'Neill.
Izzy wasn't sure Colonel O'Neill even knew her name.
"We're going to be setting up operations at the alpha site," Hailey announced at lunch. She was beside herself, completely buzzing with energy. Izzy didn't think she'd ever seen Hailey happy before.
"I can't believe you get to go off-world," moaned Elliot enviously, stabbing a fork into his chicken. "17's benched until Stroman's leg heals."
"Being off-world isn't that exciting," Hailey said. "You can barely even tell. It looks just like Earth."
"Please," said Elliot, "tell me all over again how you got to go off-world when you were still in the Academy, because Major Carter handpicked you from all the rest of us lousy cadets. Because I really can't get enough of that."
"Stop whining," Izzy snapped at Elliot with childlike irritability. It had been a rough day. Izzy had mislabeled a few documents, altering the chronology completely and setting them back at least a day. "As if you don't have Colonel O'Neill's stamp of approval, as if you didn't get assigned immediately out of training."
Hailey's expression was more or less unreadable, but her voice ached with almost motherly sympathy. "You haven't gotten assigned, have you?" she asked.
Elliot, who'd been bridling for an argument, relaxed. Izzy chalked this up to another facet of her increasingly awful day; now they felt sorry for her. "I'm working with Dr. Jackson," she said, trying not to make it sound like an excuse. It wasn't, of course, she was doing something she loved, something she was good at, and hadn't Dr. Jackson hand-picked her for that, too? She was just as good as them. Even if she hadn't made it onto a unit, even if she was restless from her stagnant lifestyle.
"At least you're on base," Hailey said consolingly. "Grogan's stationed in Texas until he gets his assignment."
"You know, I wonder if they're going to start adding extra teams," Elliot mused.
He and Hailey started debating the merits of adding extra personnel to the already busy Stargate Command staff and Izzy tuned them out.
These lunches together were becoming less and less frequent, more of a courtesy than anything else. The four of them had gone through Stargate boot camp together, but the camaraderie that usually came from brutal COs was gone, and the glamour of possibility was fast fading, now that they had legitimate work to do.
Izzy realized she didn't even really know them at all.
"Guys, I gotta go," she said, rising to her feet smoothly. Hailey's gaze flicked to the tray clutched in Izzy's fingers, still half-full with a semi-appetizing meal. "There was a major screw-up today," Izzy explained vaguely, not adding she was the one who'd made the error and facilitated the backlog, "and now we're behind. I've got a lot of work to do."
"Okay, see you later," Hailey said. It was something of a futile response, considering that if she was going to be going to the alpha site, there wasn't much 'later' left. Izzy didn't call her on this.
"Good luck," added Elliot.
Izzy left them with a parting smile, though she was sure the exhaustion and insincerity in her face and body just screamed at them, even from across the room.
When she announced she was going to the mess to eat, and Dr. Jackson looked up from the book he was reading and said, "I'll join you."
He brought the book with him, read it in the elevator, and only tucked it under his arm just in time to grab a lunch tray. She tried not to notice that he reflexively scanned for SG-1, tried not to feel the hot flush of relief in her gut when he didn't find them. "What are you reading?" was all she said.
"Oh, these are just some of Rothman's old journals," he said. Rothman, the research assistant, the one before Izzy, even before Nyan. He'd died off-world two years ago, Nyan explained. That was all she got.
"Think they'll help with the text?" she asked.
Dr. Jackson nodded his tray in the direction of an empty table, and she followed him to it. "I was hoping," he said. "Maybe there'd be some sort of clue, something obscure, something that could help us. You never know."
"Right," she said, filling silence. "Uh, Dr. Jackson..."
"Daniel," he said.
"What?"
"You can call me Daniel." As if to make the decision easier, he added, "Nyan does."
"That's different. Nyan's..."
"An alien?"
"Not an officer," she answered.
Daniel acknowledged this with a slight smile. "Sam calls me Daniel. Jack calls me Daniel."
Though it wasn't the first time she'd heard it, there was something mind-boggling about referring to Major Carter and Colonel O'Neill as Sam and Jack. "All right," she said hesitantly, "but if we're going by what Nyan does, you should call me Izzy."
"Izzy, huh."
"Short for Isabel." She felt her face heat up and she poked at her potatoes to distract herself. "I was sort of a tomboy as a kid, so my dad said there was no point in giving me a girly name if I wasn't going to act girly. Everyone started calling me Izzy." She wondered when she'd stopped being a tomboy and ended up being a nerd.
"All right. Izzy." He started eating, so it seemed to be the end of their conversation, until he said, "You're welcome to take a look at Rothman's journals, if you want."
"Two heads are better than one," she offered brightly, then felt immediately ridiculous.
"Hmm, yeah," he said, but he was distracted again, studying the worn cover of the journal. Everything they did was studying the notes of those that had come before, but there was something so dark, so sad about the Rothman journal that made Izzy never want to touch it. Maybe because he wasn't some ancient scholar, but a person who'd actually been here in the base, who'd eaten in this mess and had conversations with Daniel just like Izzy was doing.
Izzy wondered if this eventually ended up the fate of the people crazy enough to sign up for the program. If someday Daniel would be sitting there, pouring through a post-mortem Izzy's old journals, looking for clues.
"We're going off-world," Elliot told her excitedly. Weirdly, the lunches had been easier to organize when there were more people. But Hailey had been at the alpha site for going on two weeks now (underground, it got harder and harder to separate days from each other), and so their get-togethers were few and far between. On the rare instances Izzy and Elliot ended up in the mess hall at the same time, he was with SG-17 or other officers from active units, whom she didn't recognize. Izzy occasionally sat with Nyan, but more often by herself.
"Cool," she said. She had bags under her eyes and was beginning to think she hadn't actually slept in years. Probably not since she'd joined the Academy. She still hadn't been assigned to a unit, although she was sure there must have been a slot opening up somewhere. She figured General Hammond had just forgotten all about her, forgotten she was even in this mountain.
"We're going to meet with the Tok'ra," Elliot continued blithely, apparently unaware of the slow unraveling of Izzy's sanity.
Izzy felt a stab of jealousy. No matter what Colonel O'Neill thought of them (and he was no stranger to voicing his opinions, loudly and often), she thought the Tok'ra would be fascinating to meet. Not to mention all of the vast knowledge they had of the universe that Izzy could only hope to learn.
"It should be interesting," which was all she could manage to say that still made her sound almost mature, or at least, not a petty child.
"Yeah, absolutely," he said. He was painfully excited, in that it was painful for to look at him and know she was committed to being chained up in the lab arguing with Nyan for the next day, the next week, the next month, whenever.
"Well, I hope you have fun," she said, meaning it and not meaning it. What did you say to someone who went off-world, anyway? 'I hope you come back alive'?
At least no one died in the archaeology lab, she thought with a degree of melancholy. Unless it was from boredom.
When she got back from lunch, she was well into her mental list of things that had gone wrong today. Some guy had cut her off on the highway, the security guy on level six still didn't recognize her from day to day, and Elliot was going off-world. Then when she returned, Daniel, without so much as looking up, said, "Can you do me a favor? I need you to go to the library and find this book for me," he said, handing her a scrap of paper. "Oh, and if you could get Teal'c for me, too, that'd be great." He furiously crossed out something on his legal pad.
Izzy froze for a moment, wondering when she'd suddenly stopped earning a 'hi, how are you.' This was the first she'd seen Daniel today, after all, that at least warranted some sort of polite greeting.
She bristled a little, too, at his list of demands. Daniel knew about her continued apprehensions about Teal'c, and while she knew he thought she was being silly, he never so much as mentioned it and was usually nice enough to act as a buffer should the two end up in the room together.
"The book's already on your desk," she said. There was no purpose in starting a fight, she was just in a bad mood. Besides, sometimes he got distracted and didn't realize the book he was looking for was the one he'd been holding under the one he'd been reading.
"Is it? Oh, so it is. Sorry. The library has another one, same author. That's the one I'm looking for."
Izzy gaped at him a few times, looking for words that wouldn't actually getting her fired or make Daniel hate her forever, but gave up and went off to the library like he asked. When she dropped Daniel's name, the librarian looked like she wanted to kill Izzy on the spot, so Daniel's rampage wasn't limited to his staff alone. Izzy drew limited comfort from this.
When she collected Teal'c, he followed her wordlessly. She had no way of knowing if his silence was because he was as preoccupied as his teammate, or if he still didn't like her. At the moment, she didn't particularly care.
Daniel muttered an insincere, barely audible thank you for her troubles, and Izzy stormed off to join Nyan with a headache brewing.
She huffed as she sat down and Nyan correctly interpreted the gesture as, "Daniel?"
The part of her still bristling over a bad day wanted to launch into a tantrum about his rudeness, but it would have been futile and petty. Daniel had always been so considerate, if not distracted, so his behavioral change probably had good reasoning behind it. She hated herself a little for falling back on the old crush and playing devil's advocate.
"He's been like that ever since the Tok'ra showed up," Nyan explained.
"I thought SG-17 were going on the Tok'ra mission," she said blankly.
"Are they?" Nyan didn't really follow anything that went on outside of his particular sphere. He was usually the one who knew about Daniel's whereabouts (provided, of course, that Daniel mentioned anything, although he had a tendency to wander off without warning), but past that, Nyan didn't much care. "Probably as backup, then. The Tok'ra want Daniel to go undercover as a slave for a System Lord. He's brushing up on his Goa'uld all day."
Her messy stew, questionable going down, started churning in her stomach. She couldn't concentrate the rest of the afternoon.
Izzy and Nyan didn't talk for hours, not even the standard. "Do you have page twenty-three?" or "Have you seen my pen?" It wasn't the first time Daniel had been off-world since Izzy had started, certainly not since Nyan had started, but there was a certain weight looming around this particular mission that left them both in a funk.
They jumped the first time the klaxons sounded, but it was just SG-5 returning from a recon.
Izzy was asleep the second time. Nyan was off getting a glass of water. She jolted awake to find drool on her sleeve, but thankfully, not on any documents. It turned out to just be SG-2. She was back at work by the time Nyan returned.
They were still in the habit of looking up even by the third time the alarms went off. It was a routine check-in by SG-12, a control room tech reported, stopping by to warn Izzy and Nyan that the team had found something 'big' they'd be bringing by the archaeology department when they returned.
She wasn't even on duty when SG-1 finally made it back, not that it mattered, because it was two days before Daniel even made it back to his office. Nyan and Izzy were so occupied with SG-12's giant globe-like device, having won the argument with the science department over who got to play with it first, that they hadn't even left in something like twenty-six hours. Symbols were starting to blur in front of Izzy's eyes, notes were starting to become completely incomprehensible, and she had just resigned herself to going and grabbing a cold piece of pie when Daniel shuffled into the room, looking only half-conscious.
"How did it go?" Izzy asked. She and Nyan never got gossip, and she reveled in the private luxury that she might get to hear about SG-1's exploits firsthand from a member of SG-1 himself.
But Daniel just blinked at her soberly. "You didn't hear?"
"Hear what?" Something in her body knew before her brain did, something twisted up in warning, but the twinge was like a tarot card, with any number of possible interpretations.
Daniel's eyes clouded. Izzy was beginning to get the feeling that a lot of things happened on the mission, none of it having to do anything with the plan they'd left with, but what Daniel decided to open with, the information he felt she need to hear first was, "SG-17 didn't make it back."
The news smacked her like a force, too big and strong for her to break down into its individual parts quite yet. "I..." was all she could manage past her lips.
"Lieutenant Elliot was briefly the host for the Tok'ra Lantash, but he... they... gave themselves up to the Jaffa so the rest of us could escape. He saved our lives." He fully appreciated Elliot's sacrifice, it was evident in his face. "I'm sorry, Izzy."
Izzy swallowed, blinked, made a little sound at the back of her throat, and ultimately shook her head. "No, it's okay. It's fine, I'm fine." Then she mumbled something that might have been 'excuse me,' and found the nearest bathroom, where she was pretty sure no one would follow. Elliot had been... what? A friend? An acquaintance? A teammate, briefly, someone who she had lunch with sometimes, but not someone with whom she had anything really in common. But they'd shared training together and she had, for awhile, trusted him with her life. An instinct which had ended up being completely right. They hadn't been friends, really, but they'd shared something Izzy couldn't really share with anyone else. And now he was gone, just gone, and she didn't know what happened from here.
Izzy grabbed a wad of toilet paper and wiped away the tears she didn't remember crying, made herself more or less presentable, and went back to the lab. Nyan didn't say anything. Daniel wasn't there. SG-12's giant globe, it turned out later, didn't do anything at all.
She found a Texas phone book and called three Grogans before she got someone who knew him.
"You're a friend of Johnny's?" the woman on the phone said.
"Yeah, from the Academy," Izzy said, holding the phone cord in a death grip.
"He's visiting for the weekend. I'll go get him, dear."
Her own mother didn't even call her 'dear.' She wasn't sure why she was doing this. They'd call Elliot's family, but who would call his friends? No one was going to bother to call up his former teammates and pass on the news.
"Hello?"
"Grogan?"
There was a pause. "Satterfield?"
"Yeah."
"Oh. Mom said it was the Air Force, I was expecting..."
"Yeah," she said uselessly, "I know. Um, I figured you might be out of the loop, so I thought I'd call, say hi, tell you what's going on."
"Thanks," he said in a rush of breath, and she was a little embarrassed by the obvious relief in his voice.
"It's Elliot," she said. "He's dead."
Grogan didn't answer for a minute and Izzy worried she'd lost the connection. "What happened? Right, you can't tell me. Clearance. Sorry. Forgot."
"Yeah," she said. "I just thought you should know."
"That sucks," he said.
"Yeah."
Izzy had always suspected that after Elliot, Hailey would get next assignment. What she didn't know was who would get the next after that, her or Grogan. It was something of a competition, whoever was assigned next was, in essence, better than the other.
She never found out. General Hammond did some crafty rearrangement, plucking Stargate Command personnel from this team and that to birth a new SG-17, and Izzy and Grogan got assigned at the same time. He got SG-9, and she was assigned to SG-11, under Colonel Perry.
She stumbled into the mess shortly after hearing the news and found Daniel sitting with SG-1. She had to walk past their table to get to the line anyway, and she was just trying to figure out whether to stop and say hi or pretend she was so hungry she didn't even notice them, when Colonel O'Neill, of all people, said, "Satterfield. Perry just told me you've been assigned to his team." There was nothing in his voice to give away what he thought of the situation, which was rare and left Izzy even more uncomfortable than ever.
Teal'c blinked and Major Carter made an effort to acknowledge her, albeit around a mouthful of food. Daniel was the only one who had a real reaction, actually smiled at her and said, "Nicely done, Izzy. Should I be expecting a letter of resignation, then?"
"I can still help with the cartouche," she offered. She wasn't about to give up on it now, she literally had a stack of notebooks.
"Nyan was managing before you got here, I think he can manage now," he said. "Don't worry about it. You'll be busier now, trust me."
She wished they weren't having this conversation in front of his friends. She was bursting with things she wanted to say to him. She wanted to thank him for all of his help and kindness and all of the things she'd learned, but she couldn't figure out how to say it without looking stupid in front of SG-1.
"Well," she said at last, "thanks."
As she went over to the lunch line, she could hear O'Neill saying, "'Izzy'?"
She ate lunch with Johnny Grogan the day before her first mission. "See, you've been here doing all the cool stuff," he said, ripping a dinner roll in half. "I got transferred to Texas, then I took some leave, visited my mom. I didn't think they were ever going to call me. She kept asking what I did in training and even if she had security clearance, I don't think she would have understood the first thing about intars. You know? Stun guns that work like real guns, it blows my mind even." He punctuated all of this by throwing one half of the roll in his mouth all at once and chewing.
"I've mostly been helping Dr. Jackson translate this cartouche," she said. For weeks now, her entire life had revolved around the digital photos of ruins on a planet they weren't sure they could even get back to, and now it was just 'this thing.'
"See?" said Grogan. "That's pretty cool."
"Yeah," shrugged Izzy, "I guess." Although, this was maybe the first thing she'd felt in days that wasn't overwhelming dread. "Can I tell you something?" she said in a low hiss.
Grogan shrugged. "Yeah, 'course."
"I'm scared."
"Why wouldn't you be? Look what happened to Elliot."
And that was it. Everyone was scared, but that was just part of the job. Never sleeping, always worrying, finding ways to cope, eating crappy cafeteria food, it was all just part of the job.
"Izzy?" Nyan was standing at their table, one of his rare ventures out of the lab.
"Nyan, hi, sit down. Um, this is Lieutenant John Grogan."
"Johnny," Grogan said, smiling at Nyan around his lunch. "SG-9."
"Mm," Nyan mumbled noncommittally.
"So," said Grogan, "you work with Satterfield? What do you guys do?"
Izzy sat back, let Nyan explain because his eyes lit up and he loved this a lot more than she did. She was scared to go out, but she'd been wanting this since she'd gotten to the SGC, and that restless buzz in her hadn't ever gone away. Nyan blathered about the subtle art of Goa'uld written language, something that had evolved from the clumpy paintings of restrictive Unas hands to the more delicate form of it existing today, transcending thousands of years, well beyond any language of his or their planets. And Grogan listened, and hell, Izzy listened, and suddenly, weirdly, she wasn't scared anymore. The galaxy was a huge place and she wanted to see it, know about it, breathe it in.
Colonel Perry was tough, but fair. Captain Sullivan had the dirtiest sense of humor she'd ever heard and he never once was afraid of using it around 'the token woman,' as he called her. Captain Allen was continually shaking his head and tossing Izzy apologetic looks, as if he was somehow responsible for Sullivan's lack of decorum. Perry just laughed at all of them like they were a traveling side show. But he could switch over to a steely business-meaning face in less than a heartbeat when circumstances changed.
Circumstances were changing all the time. Simple missions ended up in firefights, running for their lives, going back through the 'gate hot. Izzy sat in the infirmary with a broken arm one time and when she'd finished cursing under her breath and let the painkillers take over so the doctor could set her arm, she grinned with pride.
She dropped by the lab on her days off, settled in across from Nyan as if nothing had changed. She told him stories about her missions and while he'd never really seemed to care about the units going out, he listened to every word. Asked questions. Laughed and looked horrified in the right spots. They didn't always get work done, and she felt a little guilty about that, since he was back to doing it all himself and didn't really need the added setback. But he never complained and he never kicked her out.
Daniel and Nyan always let her have first look at anything SG-11 brought back through the Stargate. She always stayed late those nights. One night, Daniel came in, fresh from his own post-mission infirmary jaunt, poking idly at band-aid on his bicep. He seemed surprised that the lights were on.
"Izzy?"
"Hi, sir," she said automatically, returning her attention to the delicate grooves running around the device she'd picked up.
"Daniel, remember?" he said in an amused reprimand. "You shouldn't touch things, you know. Bad things always happen when people touch stuff."
"Too hard not to," she said. Then added, "You should know, Daniel."
He grinned adorably and shrugged. "I'm a hypocrite. Whatcha got?" He sidled up next to her, his body heat an immediate presence that made her blush because apparently, she still couldn't erase those stupid feelings.
"No idea."
"Ooh, best kind," he said, and hunkered down to peer at her notes.
"I've gotta admit," she said five minutes later, "I miss this."
"I don't blame you," he said. "Being in the field is slightly limiting. Although we have better resources here."
"Yeah."
"Do you like it out there?"
"Yeah. I mean, it's what I trained for, and I like my team, and it's fun. But sometimes I feel like..."
"You're torn between two worlds?" he offered. And it was like Izzy had stepped under a cool shower, the relief rushing down her body steadily and anchoring her. Nyan didn't quite get it, neither did Johnny. And somehow, she'd managed to forget that Daniel might.
"Yeah," she said again, "exactly."
"Well, they're lucky to have your mind," he said.
Izzy really loved this job.
The entire base was hushed when she signed in that morning. No one was talking, some people were pale and stricken, and Izzy was always just missing the tail of some hasty whisper. She went down to the lab and found Nyan just standing in the middle of the room, holding nothing, looking at nothing.
"What the hell's going on?" she demanded.
"It's Daniel," he said. When his eyes finally focused on her face, he looked like he was in shock.
"Nyan? Should I get you to the infirmary?" she asked gently.
Nyan shook his head furiously, horrified. "No, no, not there. It's Daniel, Izzy, he's..."
She knew without him having to say. "How?"
"Radiation." She didn't quite believe him; it was SG-1, after all, there should have been something a lot more impressive. An exploding mothership, some sort of sacrificial ritual, something dramatic and insane. Nyan blinked, clarity settling in. "Radiation poisoning. In Kelowna. He's dead, really... really dead."
"You're serious," she said. "What's going to happen? To the lab? To us?"
"I don't know," he said. "General Hammond hasn't said anything. No one's said anything."
"When did this happen?"
"He came back yesterday, and he died sometime last night." He choked on the last words in his hurry to get them out of his mouth and away from him. It was too much. "I'm sorry, I..." He gestured at the door, and Izzy nodded, stepping aside so he could go through.
"Yeah, sure," she said, barely even hearing her voice, as if it was coming from somewhere else.
She fumbled about for awhile, sitting down then standing up, picking up papers and setting them aside without looking at them. She had no idea how long this went on before her gaze finally dropped on a bound book on the edge of the table. Daniel's journal, lying open with a pen on it. She held herself at a distance, having to squint to read but unwilling to go any closer. He was taking notes on that device she'd brought back.
It was funny. She'd assumed that someone would end up flipping through her own notes after some mission had gone south. She never expected she'd do it to Daniel.
She shut the notebook.
Nyan left not long after that. Jonas Quinn, the Kelownan, kept hovering around the lab, around Daniel's office, trying to integrate himself into the work Daniel had left behind. General Hammond seemed to have no problem with this, or at least, no jurisdiction to stop it, but it bothered Nyan so deeply that he asked Hammond for 'retirement.' Hammond granted it, but said Nyan was always welcome to come back, that they'd always have a space for him.
Izzy was the one who took him to his apartment, with Grogan in the backseat. He didn't have much stuff to move, so Grogan's presence was technically uncessary, but he surprised them both by cooking dinner.
"Will you be all right?" Izzy asked Nyan, after they'd collapsed wearily on a couch so new it whined when they touched it.
"I should be. I don't know. I'm trying to look at it like another experiment."
"A social one," Grogan said.
"Yes." He looked at Izzy with big, sorrowful eyes. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I understand."
And she did. But her ties with the SGC ran a little deeper than Nyan's, so although it was like a sharp stab in her chest every time she walked into the lab, she kept going back.
"Hey, Iz," Grogan said, knocking on the lab door.
"Hi, Johnny," she greeted him, rubbing at the bridge of her nose. Things were starting to blur together on the page. Either she was working too hard, or she was going to need glasses soon. She made a mental note to ask Dr. Fraiser about it. "What's up?"
"Not much. I'm heading out for the day. You off anytime soon?"
She checked her watch. "I've been off for about six hours, actually."
Grogan raised an eyebrow and laughed a little. "Workaholic."
"Someone needs to," she said. Quinn was respectful about giving her space, working around her, but she still came back and found things moved, things already analyzed and shipped off for cataloguing when she'd only been working on it the day before and obviously hadn't finished it herself.
"C'mon, get out of here," he encouraged. "You do leave the base occasionally, right?"
"Sometimes." Izzy rolled her eyes obligingly, but she was glad Grogan was bothering to check up on her. She stood, stretched a little, felt a kink in her shoulder. "I'm starving."
"Do you want me to start bringing you lunch or something?" His voice was soft and earnest, taking Izzy by surprise enough that she had to duck her face so he couldn't see her blushing.
"I'm touched, Johnny, I didn't know you cared," she said, careful to throw a sarcastic spin on it so he knew she wasn't suggesting anything.
"Yeah, well," he said, unable to come up with an appropriate retort, and toeing the linoleum floor a little. "Can we go? This isn't entirely a selfless mission, you know. I'm hungry, too."
Izzy laughed. "Yeah, all right. You buying?"
"I was thinking we could go get Nyan, maybe he could buy with his big Earth paycheck, and all."
Izzy allowed him to steer her out of the room, but got in a dig anyway. "You're so magnanimous."
"Hey, I'm just looking out for the guy. He needs someone to teach him about Earth culture. I'm just showing him that yes, affections can be bought." Grogan swiped his ID at the elevator and the sound got caught up in her laughter. They crammed in the elevator. It still wasn't perfect, might never be. But she was adjusting.