The Same Bend
The stargate whirs to life in front of them, clunking chevrons into place while she tugs on her army boots that are a size to big and if she had to wager, were taken from some deceased soldier's stash. The laces are frayed almost through at one point, but she has no idea who to complain to get a new pair. Mitchell doesn't seem interested in her grievances and General Landry was too busy to even hear her speak. She curls the laces around her fingers to tighten the boot, wiggling her toes inside.
"Daniel, do you think—"
"I already told you we won't be that long." Slams his foot down on the metal bench beside her, nimble fingers flipping at plump laces. "You don't have to come."
"Oh, but I do." Crosses her arms over his knee and senses his muscles tightening underneath her weight, or perhaps simply from her touch. "You're going to visit a previously unexplored planet because your MILK—"
"MALP," he corrects, his arm skimming against hers as he finishes lacing up.
Rests her chin against her arms, batting her lashes a bit innocent, a bit coquettish. "You needed me to accompany you in order for General Landry to approve your mission."
"Yeah." Elbows her off him, jolting her back into her seat. "And I'm sure you're going to hold it over me for the rest of our lives."
Generally, would reply with some snarky comment about their lives merging into a relationship that lasts a lifetime, but she's overworked, today being their rest day nonetheless, so her communication skills divert from away from the humor she's too tired to produce. "Oh Daniel, do you really think you'll know me that long?"
That makes him stop, his backpack sort of sloping down his shoulder to the crevice of his arm. He doesn't say anything to respond to her, but as they wait for the kawoosh to disperse, he analyzes her. His mouth might open, she doesn't really see, as she begins to walk through the gate, him lagging a few feet behind.
The image the MILK sent back is vastly different than what greets them. There is a working DHD and there is breathable oxygen, but the trees decorating the image drawing them to this planet are few and sparse without leaves and some without large portions of bark. The air cuts off her breath as she inhales, the atmosphere turbid and her lungs begin to itch.
Daniel begins coughing behind her as he breaks through the gate. The sky is colorless, a pale gray or a white without any clouds, just painted over and eerily bright. Dust clumps float around in the weak wind and she wishes Daniel would recover from coughing so he can do what needs to be done. The planet is frightening in the unknown and yet it feels oddly intimate.
"Well, the reading wasn't wrong, there are faint traces of Naquadah on this planet," coughs the words out and clears his throat, staring down at a data tablet as the breeze licks at his hair, depositing some dust there.
"I don't want to stay here long."
"Me neither," he agrees, spinning with the tablet and then finally clicking it off. When he glances over to her, his glasses have a thin layer of grime already gathering on them. "Let's just take a quick walk, see if anyone actually lives here, and get back." His glasses click when he folds them up, sliding them into the front pocket on his jacket.
She nods in agreement, but instead of trudging ahead eager to explore, bouncing around the haunted emptiness of a somewhat evolved city, she waits until he's at her side and begins the slow and silent decent down a twisting road through the boney trees and into the rooftops sprinkled gray with debris.
They don't speak, he doesn't tell her what he's looking for with the Naquadah, she doesn't ramble her mouth about any subject because the less said, the less air inhaled and it saves their lungs a bit. There's a scratch at the back of her throat, parched already from a few minutes of travel. The air is horribly dry, and very hot and her body begins to sweat.
Daniel pants beside her, dirt already clinging to his hair and blooming out in the crook of his nose and his hairline where he's begun to sweat as well. The path ends abruptly a few feet ahead of them, cobbled walkway broken free of stones and offering only hard, dry dirt. The hurdle is easily subverted, but a few feet further down, one of her too large boots hooks on an upturned stone and she stumbles forward crashing onto her hands and knees.
"Hey." Daniel hooks his arms under hers raising her back to her feet and pressing his flat palm into her lower back. It lingers. "Are you okay?"
The knees of her pants have a nasty rip in them exposing her skin, and her palms are a bit torn up. His fingers ring around her wrist to assess the damage to her hands and she shimmies her arm to reclaim them.
"Do you want some antiseptic for them?"
"No."
"They looked kind of bad."
"They're fine." Rubs the palms of her hands against her thighs almost absently, but there is a dull sting of open skin. "Let's just get this done so we can go back."
The wind, despite not being strong, and lapping rather passively, howls around them, drawing their eyes to the stillness in the pronged tree tops. His attention remaining in the distance over the roof of the nearest cottage, he mumbles, "yeah, let's do that."
They round the pathway into the town plodding their feet over the patterned stone. Daniel keeps coughing, long drawn-out wheezes, and when she snaps a concerned expression to him, he catches his cough in one hand and waves her away with the other. The town center is empty and their footfalls echo off the abandoned houses. All that remains is a bronze statue of a woman, that she squints at, familiarity on the tip of her tongue.
"The—" He chugs a long gulp of water, huffing a bit when he finally tips his bottle back upright, water drooling out the corners of his mouth. "The architecture, the layout of the city seems post-industrial. They had a working gate, and I'm willing to bet more basic versions of modern amenities."
It hits her hard, the memory physical in her head like a bullet. The statue isn't her but is but isn't. It's Qetesh's host, the one it wore before it chose her. The one it wore when it invaded her planet to conquer the rivers of Naquadah that ran beneath the surface until they flowed dry, people fought back, waged war, but war begets war begets war. Was removed from the planet by a weapon's dealer, and after years she returned to find her mother in the same home on the same river bend. But wars seldom stop and eventually when Qetesh became too incapacitated in its body, it chose another one, it chose hers.
Before she contemplates what she's doing, and while comprehending both what was her life and what wasn't, she's tearing through the trees, the dried brown leaves and snapping twigs, what's left of forest detritus. She still knows the way.
The air, the heat, the what she knows now to be ash floating in delicate motes irritate her lungs, but she refuses to cough until she gets there, because she will not allow Daniel to take her back until she gets there. The same house on the same bend, and her sprint doesn't end until she's through the front door and out the back where a sylvan garden blossomed years ago. In pinks and purples and oranges, the perfume of flowers, dirt and growth. Clary teas and rose flavored cookies. Peppermint balms for sickness, and fruits for pies all reduced to the same uninhabitable hard brown earth peppered with a layer of gray.
Behind the skeleton of a fairly large bush, the one that bloomed every spring with heavy white, honey smelling flowers, something catches her eye. Daniel wheezes through the front door, his feet stomping to a stop just as she pulls from the archway of the back door, floating towards the object, her doll, the one she abandoned when the weapon's smuggler came to retrieve her.
Not fancy in dress or design, the doll's cloth face is missing, stained by years and the elements and war, not unlike her own. She would sit in the back corner of the garden among the plants and insects and overhear her parents arguing, her father disappearing for weeks, months, a year, and her mother coping through the aid of a substance and when the war made that substance harder to procure, she was used in the bartering.
"Vala," Daniel gruffly coughs, unhappy about chasing her on a ten-minute run, honestly, she's surprised that he did and didn't just wait for her to toddle back to him, more so that he didn't just leave. His mouth gulps down water again, opening and closing like a landed fish. When his bottle runs dry she ambles her way back to him, her eyes on the doll until she sets it on a charred tree trunk. "What the hell are you doing? You've been with the SGC long enough to know that you don't just up and run in the middle of an explorative mission. What if—"
His coughs cut off his reprimand, his face grows red and the coughs deeper from within his chest. They need to leave; the planet is probably at least a bit radioactive from the years of war. She reaches into her backpack, straining her arms until she finds the metal bottle hooked to the side and hands him her water.
He sips it down, not being as liberal with her water as his own and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, returning the bottle to her. In a calmer voice, and furrowed brows, not the ones meant for reprimanding but the ones that want to understand her, he questions, "why did you come here?"
She does something she's not used to embracing while in his company, or in the company of any Tau'ri for that matter. She tells him the truth. "It's my childhood home."
Cocks his head at her while he tries to discern if her words are truth or lies or some elaborate scheme she's playing on him so she can steal treasure or shiny bits of baubles, but he doesn't understand the money was for food, for safety, for shelter. She gets those things for free at the SGC, and the frantic need to obtain objects for money to ensure her survival has slowly waned in the last three years.
"Really?"
"Yes. I would sit in that corner of the garden and draw pictures on the bricks in the wall. I would have tea parties with the ornaments and my doll. My mother used to make the best tea." Her smile is genuine but weary and gradually the picturesque memory of her childhood, her home, her garden, crumble back into the bleak image before her. "We should probably go."
"We can stay." He clears away the grit in his throat. "If you want to spend some time looking around—"
"You've got a nasty cough from the air here." She wears a smile for him, turning and shuffling by as he stares at her garden, never being able to see what she once did. "It's best we get back."
Upon their return to Cheyenne Mountain they're sequestered immediately in the medical lab for the usual post-off-world examination, plus extra probing because of the possible radioactive classification to her home world. Her and Daniel sit on beds a few feet apart. He inhales awful smelling mist from a medical hookah and she has been given an icepack to split between both her knees.
"How did your world get like that?" Each time he speaks the smoke curls into the air floating around his head a bit.
"War." It's the short of the long answer. "Why did they give me a tennis injection?"
"Tetanus," he coughs and the smoke hisses in three beats from his mouth. "It's because you broke skin off-world. Normal protocol."
"It hurts." The nurse jammed the needle in her upper arm, it practically scrapped her bone and now her skin is irritated red and burns a bit.
Daniel untangles the cords attaching him to the smoke machine, dragging it with him as he approaches. They're both steady on their feet still, unbroken mentally but fatigued from the two-and-a-half-hour journey. He plops to the bed beside her, intact pants and a black t-shirt, and scoops one of his warm hands under her arm.
"Let me see." He prods around the injection site that feels like they shot a marble underneath her skin. "It's just a little irritated."
"That nurse doesn't like me."
"Well, what did you do to her?"
"Why do you just assume I did something?"
"Because most people on this base still don't really know you." He pries the icepack away from her knee, red skin transforming into black and blue, and holds it against her shoulder. "So you probably did something to upset her."
"Hmm." Angles her head at him with narrowing eyes. "Perhaps she just fancies the archeologist who flutters over me all the time."
Expects him to argue with her. Grow red and scoot several inches back on the bed, but he doesn't. He pulls a tight grin, the kind he wears when they poke fun at each other and sets the icepack on the other side of the bed, then collects her hands in his. "You're freezing."
"I've been holding an icepack for the last thirty minutes," her voice adopts a lower tone, a sultrier one that she doesn't mean to employ, it just slips out.
He doesn't notice or ignores it entirely, but his face, his body are still distractingly close to hers. "I'm sorry you had to see your world like that."
"I knew it looked like that. It was no big shock."
"The SGC will probably blackgate the planet now."
"It's probably for the best." She does regret not staying a bit longer, taking a last look at her first home, perhaps her only home, but she cannot dwell on the past, on the house right on the bend of the river with the perfect garden where her mother still might be waiting.
"It's probably for the best that I scooped this up for you then." From the buttoned side pocket on his pants he retrieves the doll from the corner of her backyard. The one who sat beside her at the dinner table and was tucked into bed beside her. Her little floral dress is in rags and her face is no where to be found but the material still runs the same between her fingers.
"Thank you, Daniel." Her lips brush lightly over his cheek and his skin tastes like smoke, whether from her planet or from the machine.
He stays stationary, doesn't shrink away from her, or ramble on in sentences, or chastise her about trying to seduce him. Just keeps the warmth of his hand over hers, and the weird smoking tube to his lips, sturdies his shoulder when she drops her head to it, and continues to stare at the doll with her despite it meaning next to nothing to him.