Part 1: Past

"You taught me the courage of stars before you left..."

"What the Hell do you mean, you 'lost track of him'? Jonas was your responsibility, Major!"

Major Kofield broke eye contact with Colonel Jack O'Neill, looking shame-faced at the ground.

"And don't tell me he just up and wandered away!" O'Neill continued, dark eyes ablaze with barely contained fury, "Because I happen to know Jonas is not that stupid," here he paused thoughtfully, adding in a softer tone, "Usually."

Major Samantha Carter and Teal'c stood to either side and slightly behind the enraged Colonel, neither of them saying anything. O'Neill was plenty angry enough for all of them. Maybe he wasn't overly fond of Jonas, but the man was on his team and O'Neill would fulfill his duty of doing everything in his power to make sure everyone on his team returned from missions alive and well.

Colonel O'Neill and the rest of SG-1 all felt that what happened to Daniel was their fault in some way. Someone should have been there with him. Not that they could have stopped him or done anything to help, but they still felt that -if even one of them had been there- maybe Daniel would still be with them. It was this, more than anything else, that had O'Neill so riled up now.

"You were supposed to take care of him!" O'Neill was finally winding down, "So what the Hell happened!?"

Major Kofield hesitated, clearly waiting to be sure that O'Neill was well and truly finished before he started trying to explain himself. Kofield had reported Jonas as missing just hours before, and the result had been the deployment of SG-1 and SG-3 to Guf'yn. O'Neill was clearly on the warpath, prepared to yell at and/or shoot anyone who got in his way until he found the missing member of his team.

"He reported in via radio this morning on schedule," Kofield said, "Everything seemed fine."

"How would you know!?" Major Carter snapped before O'Neill could, "You weren't even there!"

"Maybe not," Captain Reiner, Kofield's second, said, "But one of ours was."

O'Neill turned on Reiner then, "Well yours isn't the one who's missing, are they!?"

"Sir, with respect," Kofield said, drawing O'Neill's attention back to himself, "this is not our fault."

"I suppose it's Jonas' fault then?" Carter said, anger in her words.

"Like you said, Major Carter," Kofield replied in a flat voice, "I wasn't there."

"Maybe you should have been," O'Neill said.

"Or maybe it wouldn't have made a bit of difference either way," Reiner put in, evidently willing to meet SG-1 head on even if Kofield was not, "And maybe, Colonel, you should withhold your judgment until you find out what really happened," a full twelve inches shorter than O'Neill, Reiner nevertheless looked right at him, ready to take this conflict to the mat if necessary.

"Me?" O'Neill exploded, "You don't even know what happened!"

"Neither do you!" Reiner shouted right back.

"Captain Reiner!" Kofield broke in, "That's enough."

Still visibly bristling, Reiner nonetheless fell silent. Reiner wasn't normally temperamental, but one of the side effects of aspiring to be like SG-1 was loyalty to one's team mates. That loyalty often transcended rank, rule and regulation. Reiner was defending his leader. Even in his anger, O'Neill had to respect that. And too, Reiner was correct. He didn't know what had happened. Nobody did.

"Alright," O'Neill said, taking a calming breath, "Let's take it from the top, Major. What happened?"

"When we got here," Kofield said neutrally, "the first thing any of us noticed was... how strange this place is. How quiet. But if Quinn was rattled, he gave no sign of it. The way he looked around, you'd think he'd just walked into a candy store."

"Jonas loves experiencing new things," Carter remarked coolly.

"He's weird like that," O'Neill put in.

Guf'yn, Three Days Earlier, 0830hrs

Jonas Quinn stood on the pedestal of the Stargate, for the moment reluctant to take the steps down. Each time he stepped through the Stargate, Jonas was struck anew by how very little of the universe he'd really seen, and how little he knew of it.

Beside him, Lt. Marshal of SG-7 was standing and staring around her. Despite the military ranking, Marshal was more of an analyst than a soldier. She had worked at the SGC for some time, but this was her first trip through the Stargate. She looked like a stunned gazelle, but Jonas wasn't sure if it was the trip through the Stargate itself or how things looked on the other side.

There was a circle surrounding the Stargate that was perfectly flat, cleared dirt. Just a few feet away, the MALP they'd sent through first sat at a slight angle to them, its camera pointed towards a small hill with ruins. On a zoomed in picture taken by the MALP's camera, Jonas had spotted some writings on those ruins that looked like Goa'uld symbols. That was why he was here.

Other than these features, there was only the uncannily straight rows of darkened trees. The trees stood with disturbing similarity, all exactly alike. The sameness of every tree bothered Jonas. Glancing at Marshal, he could tell that she was also uneasy, though she didn't seem sure why.

"You okay, Marshal?" Major Kofield inquired, glancing over his shoulder.

"It's very... blue," Marshal replied.

Jonas knew from her file that, normally, she would have launched into a headache-inducing explanation of how and why the properties of this planet's sun sapped the color from everything. In fact, the strange lighting was exactly what Marshal was here to study. It was the thing that had finally interested her enough to agree to 'Gate travel, something she had resisted for some time now.

But seeing the world reduced to blue, black and white on a monitor was one thing, actually being here was quite another, and it was clear Marshal hadn't fully prepared herself for that reality.

"It sure is that," Kofield acknowledged.

Major Kofield had headed up SG-7 for two years now, having been a member of the team since it had been rebuilt after the incident on Hanka in '97 killed the entire original team. The fact that he led a team that had once been completely destroyed did not appear to bother Kofield a great deal. Well, not as much as it seemed to bother him that Jonas had temporarily been assigned to it.

In fairness, this hadn't exactly been Jonas' idea either.

Major Carter had expressed interest in the celestial phenomenon, but SG-1 wasn't next up in the rotation. Colonel O'Neill had comforted her by saying that time off wasn't really so bad.

Jonas, meanwhile, had not minded that SG-1 had nothing scheduled for at least a week. He'd been so busy with the team lately that he hadn't been able to keep up with the Tau'ri's continued attempts to make the naquadria work for them in various ways. He'd fallen behind on the technical advancements of several projects he'd been following. It was all fascinating stuff, and he wouldn't have minded a little time to just take a breath and absorb all that had happened to him recently.

But Colonel O'Neill had volunteered Jonas for this mission, citing his skills as a linguist and the fact that SG-7 lacked just such an expert. This was far from the first time he'd been handed off to another team. Jonas knew he needed all the field experience he could get as fast as he could get it, but he was beginning to feel a bit like everyone was playing hot potato, with him as the potato.

He was tired of smiling at people who seemed to be mocking him. He was tired of being harassed by a bunch of military-types who couldn't translate their way out of a paper-bag yet somehow expected him to be able to completely study miles of ruins covered in symbols that seemed to belong to Ancient and Goa'uld dialects, yet didn't fully match either of those, and included markings that weren't covered even in the extensive notes of Dr. Daniel Jackson. He was tired of being left completely by himself for hours on end while the teams to which he'd been assigned hung out near the Stargate, killing time. But, most of all, he was tired of failing, which seemed to be the only thing he'd done since he arrived at the SGC.

The sound of Major Kofield's next orders drew him from his thoughts.

"Stick together. Nobody goes anywhere alone," Kofield looked especially hard at Jonas, who pretended not to notice, "SG-2 didn't come up with anything when they scouted here, but I think we can all agree that those trees didn't just grow like that naturally. What we don't know is who maintains them. For all we know, it could be somebody coming through the Stargate from off-world. Keep your guard up."

Jonas scuffed the toe of his boot against the dirt he was standing on. The same stuff surrounded the Stargate. It was less dirt than finely ground shale. Based off the report SG-2 had come back with, he knew it was fully impossible for the shale to have come here on its own. Someone had placed it, likely to prevent plant growth in the area surrounding the Stargate. Somehow, that seemed more telling to him than the trees did, but it led to the same conclusion so he supposed maybe it didn't matter much.

"Was it this quiet while SG-2 was here?" Lieutenant Lauder asked, looking around with evident unease.

"Griff didn't mention anything about it," Kofield responded, "Knowing him, he probably didn't notice, or didn't care if he did."

The main thing Jonas knew about Major Griff was that he despised babysitting duty. Over the course of the mission Jonas had accompanied SG-2 on, he became aware that Major Griff had held a grudging respect for Dr. Jackson, and despised Jonas all the more because he saw him as trying to replace the ascended Jackson. He would have been difficult to get along with anyway, but because of his affinity for Dr. Jackson, Major Griff had been completely impossible.

1045hrs

Jonas had been absorbed in photographing the Goa'uld symbols for the better part of two hours, while Lt. Marshal set up her equipment on the other side of the ruins. The hill was a perfect vantage point for her study. The rest of SG-7 was hanging out halfway between the ruin site and the Stargate, looking bored. Lt. Lauder was on watch, Major Kofield and Captain Reiner setting up the camp site.

Jonas knew he didn't have any reason to try and finish in a hurry, but he couldn't help it. His every instinct was to work as quickly as caution and thoroughness would allow. He'd spent almost his entire life striving to not only be faster, but also more accurate, than anyone around him.

"You're either the best, or you're nothing," his father and several teachers over the years had told him. To them, a man's worth was measured in how well he did academically.

Jonas set the camera aside and stood from where he'd been crouching. Some people took photos as they translated, but Jonas found he was able to work more fluidly if he completely recorded everything visible, then did the translation work and digging for concealed artifacts.

Typically, more archaeological personnel would be dispatched as they became available, but this was a relatively small, low-priority site. In other words, General Hammond deemed it just interesting enough not to ignore completely. But the main reason they were here was the unusual light phenomenon.

There had been a time when anything Goa'uld related was of intense interest. But after six years of abandoned worship sites that contained nothing more than a fragment of Goa'uld history that might or might not prove relevant to know at some unspecified later date (not to mention periodic funding cuts and constant threats) the SGC had gradually reduced emphasis on exploring such sites.

In other words, Jonas was here because nobody else wanted to be.

Jonas carefully packed the camera in its case to prevent it from being accidentally damaged, and then began walking around to stretch his legs, wandering over to where Lt. Marshal was working. Now absorbed in her task, Marshal had lost her stunned bunny look.

Marshal had a hard set to her jaw and cold look she offered anyone who made friendly advances. In fact, until this morning, Jonas hadn't been sure her hazel eyes ever lost their look of utter disdain for every human she encountered. But now she was merely intensely focused, so much so that she was ignoring the short strand of brunette hair that had fallen into her face while she set up her equipment, pausing now and then to look around her in evident wonder.

Jonas decided he liked her best when he was nowhere near her. She lost that hard edge when she wasn't engaging someone in conversation. She became more human when her hands were busy with her work. Marshal was far from the first person he'd encountered that came to life only when doing the work they loved. In fact, he'd spent most of his life surrounded by such people.

Jonas looked past where Marshal was working, toward a wide swath cut from the forest where the ground lowered into a long, narrow valley.

Jonas had found, much to his surprise, that most people were blind to anything that didn't move, or didn't conform to what they expected to see. People didn't consciously see any object unless they were paying direct, focused attention to it. If they didn't expect to see it, they literally didn't see it. It was called Inattentional Blindness, and many books had been written on the subject

But Jonas didn't see things that way. When he looked around, his brain cataloged every detail. When Dr. Fraser had administered a test trying to measure his visual memory, she'd said it was surprising he could function normally at all because his brain was trying to process everything it saw, without prioritizing any of it, ensuring absolute conscious recall of whatever he looked at.

And so it was hardly surprising that he not only saw the object at the other end of the valley, but it registered in his brain as an unnatural material. Unlike most people, he didn't need to take a second look. Instead, he needed time to process. He was already turning away from the valley and moving back towards the ruins by the time it struck him what he'd seen.

He stopped where he stood, and clicked the 'talk' button on his radio.

"Major Kofield, I think you should come see this."

Kofield's voice came over the radio, "Where are you, and what is it?"

"I'm with Lt. Marshal," Jonas answered meekly, realizing his radio skills still needed some work.

Before coming to the SGC, the concept of a hand-held radio was only a vague theory he'd overheard some technicians discussing. Back on Kelowna, radios used for communication were operated by trained military personnel. The small radio he carried on his person now was foreign to him.

Jonas returned to where Marshal had been working. He didn't try to explain to her what the commotion was about, he just pointed.

"I don't see anything," Marshal said.

Then the harsh light of the planet's sun reflected off the metallic surface as it moved towards them.

"Wait... that looks like... a vehicle of some kind."

Jonas nodded, "That's what I thought."

Kofield and the others had by then arrived, and followed Jonas and Marshal's gaze to the object.

"Looks like we're about to have some company," Kofield remarked dryly.

Author's Note: This story is completely written. I will be uploading one chapter per day. It is potentially slightly AU, but not on purpose. It doesn't matter a great deal, but it is set between "Cure" and "Prometheus", and references are made to episodes prior to that.

From the moment I joined this website, I have wanted to do a fic for SG-1. Between it being one of my all-time favorite TV shows, with a total of ten seasons, two (or three, depending on how you look at it) movies and a couple of spinoffs to its name and the fact that I wanted to do a fic with Jonas Quinn who was only in season six, the prospect was always daunting.

When I set out to write this story sometime last year, I did not anticipate the many, many hangups I would have. Problems I had heretofore never encountered in any story (fan fiction or otherwise) that I had ever worked on. For the first time, I found myself desperately wishing I had a friend who liked SG-1 who could Beta read a story for me.

SG-1 deserves better than this. But after three complete resets, much editing and more than one moment of panic, I can say with some certainty that this is the best I can do as of right now. That makes it good enough for me, and I hope it's good enough for you.

All of that said, I wrote this for my entertainment, and because it's been a personal private goal of mine for years. I am publishing it here for your entertainment, and I would not wish for anyone to continue reading the story if they were not enjoying it.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you enjoy reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it (when I wasn't freaking out about it, that is).