Good Night, Junior
By
Denise
"The tretonin seems to be working," Janet said, walking up behind Sam. "Their vitals are stabilizing."
"That's good," Sam said distractedly, her gaze riveted on the small tank.
"Sam?" She laid a hand on the blonde's arm. "What's wrong?"
"He's dying," she said softly, nodding towards the creature floating in the water. Usually when Junior was confined to the tank, he'd swim around, exploring his new location. Not this time. Now he hung in the water, his fins only moving to keep him afloat when his tail touched the bottom of the tank.
"Yeah," Janet confirmed. "He can't heal himself. The strain of keeping two bodies alive was too much for him. Maybe if we had a healthy Jaffa for him to go into but…"
"Healthy symbiote-less Jaffa are even rarer than symbiotes right now," Sam interrupted.
"Sam, the one thing Teal'c's wanted more than anything the last few years has been to lose his dependence on his symbiote. If Jacob is right, this could mean that thousands of Jaffa could have their freedom. They won't have to serve a goa'uld just to survive any longer."
"I know," Sam said. "And I'm glad. I just…. Do you have any idea how many times he's saved our lives?" She reached out and gently tapped the tank. "How many times Teal'c being different has saved this planet?"
"Sam?"
Sam turned, facing her friend. "In the beginning, when we all got that caveman virus. Or Hathor. He was immune to her because of Junior. Junior kept him alive when those people drowned him, thinking he was the devil. And your evil double would have carved me up on a slab when the aliens from P3X118 invaded the base." Sam pointed her finger at her friend. "Not to mention all the help he was in sensing who was possessed by Marduk." She sighed. "The point is, he may have been a goa'uld, but he was a part of the team." Janet remained silent, apparently as a loss as to what to say. "What are they going to do with him?" Sam asked after a minute.
"Standing orders are that any goa'uld we recover, dead or alive, be sent to Area 51 for study," she said.
"So they'll dissect him. Slice him up and toss him in a jar of formaldehyde," she said, her disdain for the plan plain.
"Yeah," Janet confirmed.
Sam shook her head, disgusted. "It's not right," she muttered, turning on her heel. "It's just not right," she said, leaving the room.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
"You sure you want to do this?" Jacob asked, staring intently at his daughter.
"Yeah," she replied, not quite meeting his eyes. He frowned, reaching out to grab her arm. "Sam, what's wrong?"
"Who says there's anything wrong?" she asked, finally looking him in the eyes.
"Well, you've volunteered to help us clean up a battlefield for starters," he said, glancing at the carnage around them. "You can't tell me that the SGC is so slow that George is letting one of his best officers do a job better suited for a grunt," he said. He'd been more than a little surprised when Sam had contacted him, showing up at their new base of operations, quickly volunteering to help him and some of the rebel Jaffa deal with the carnage of the ambush.
The Jaffa's missions were clear, to dispose of their dead. Jacob's part was a little more gruesome. He'd been assigned to recover all the deceased symbiotes, getting them into stasis, hoping that they hadn't degraded too much so that they could be used to manufacture some of the tretonin.
"We're on downtime until Teal'c is back on his feet," she said with a small shrug. "And General Hammond isn't going to argue with me wanting to spend time with my dad."
He frowned the shrugged. Ok, so his daughter was officially weird. "Whatever." He held out a small container, about the size of a portable cooler. "This stasis chamber should hold about twenty to thirty of them. When you fill it up, just give me a call and I'll bring you another one." He pointed across the field at a large stack of wood. "They're going to cremate the bodies. The Jaffa have orders to have each one checked by one of us, to make sure either we or they remove the symbiote."
She nodded, taking the chamber from him. He watched her walk away, shaking his head in puzzlement. 'Something is wrong, Jacob,' Selmac said.
'Tell me about it,' he agreed. 'Let me know if you figure out what it is,' he said, picking up his stasis chamber and walking off in the other direction. Time was of the essence, every moment they tarried, the symbiotes degraded more.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Sam unlocked the door to her garage, fighting the urge to look over her shoulder. She was just being paranoid, she told herself. If someone had known what she'd done, she'd never have been allowed to leave the base, hell, she'd be in the brig at the moment.
She grabbed her spade and surveyed her yard, looking for a likely spot. Finally deciding on the area under her lilac bush, she walked across the grassy expanse, quickly and relatively easily digging a hole.
When she deemed it was deep enough, she set her spade aside, going back to the small porch and the little cedar box she'd left sitting on the steps.
She stared at it, her heart pounding in her chest. What she was doing was wrong, so wrong. Hell, it'd been wrong since that moment on the planet.
She'd impatiently waited until she was alone, the Jaffa walking back to the scene of the battle to carry two more corpses towards the waiting cairn. She looked through the stasis box, studying the bodies critically. The dead symbiotes had been in various stages of development, some very young, others nearly mature, their fins and fangs fully developed.
Soon after she'd started, she'd picked one out, one that looked the most familiar to her. Aware that she would not remain unobserved for long, she quickly grabbed the cold little corpse, pushing it into a large baggie that she sealed and shoved into her pocket.
She felt a brief moment of regret, disgust at the morbidity of her plan. A memory flitted through her brain, a pair of strong arms holding her up when she was at her lowest, gentle words and a caring person sustained by something others called a monster. The comforting tingle down her spine whenever she got close to him, a reassuring feeling she'd gotten used to over the years. A sixth sense that she knew she'd feel no more.
It hadn't taken them long to finish disposing of the bodies. She stood by her dad, honoring the fallen Jaffa with a brief service before the fire had been lit. They'd left soon after that, Sam pleading the need for a hot shower to facilitate her return to Earth.
Swapping the symbiotes had been incredibly easy, almost too easy. Junior had died while she was gone, his body sealed in a similar bag and placed in the infirmary freezer, awaiting his transport to Area 51.
It had been shockingly simple to swap the two bodies, no doubt aided by her knowing exactly what parts of the infirmary the cameras covered. It had also been very easy to slip out of the base, something that was no doubt aided by her rank and familiarity with the SF's. After all, she was Major Carter, de facto third in command of the facility, not some nameless airman. Who would ever suspect her of doing something wrong?
She still didn't know why she was doing this, why she was risking her career for a silly act, one that only she'd get some comfort from. No one else seemed to care, the colonel's first concern being that if they could only save one of them, that Bra'tac be sacrificed to save Teal'c. Jonas…Jonas had been fascinated by the whole thing and Janet's concern seemed to start and end with her two Jaffa patients, the symbiote being treated like a disposable item, an afterthought, a footnote on a report.
It was odd that she'd feel this sense of loss over a creature that hated her. Teal'c had told her one time, about the instances where he'd touched his symbiote's thoughts, that they were dark and hateful. That Junior despised them, hated all humans. In fact, he seemed to hate Teal'c the most, resenting the fact that he was sustaining the life of a man who'd devoted his life to defeating his brethren.
Still, no matter how inadvertently he'd done it, the creature had saved her life, saved Teal'c's life, saved the planet more times than she could count. And for that simple fact alone, he deserved better than to be cast aside, deemed fit to be nothing more than a scientific curiosity.
"You kept them alive," she whispered. "I know you did it for your own survival, not out of the goodness of your heart, but you kept them alive long enough for us to save them. And for that I thank you."
She knelt down, nestling the box in the earth before picking up her spade, burying it entirely in just a few minutes. She patted down the earth, impulsively pulling some dead leaves from the base of the lilac bush to camouflage the burial site.
Satisfied with her efforts, she replaced her spade in the garage, feeling a sense of completion sweep over her. "Good night, Junior," she said softly, going back into her house and locking the door.
Fin