Ghost
Colonel Jack O'Neill's fingers tapped out a random pattern on the briefing room table. Their owner hummed absently under his breath, the tune gradually morphing into the Simpsons theme song, as he looked out the large window at the dormant Stargate. It was an incredible view, really – made all the better by the fact that it was the only view in Cheyenne mountain. Personally, Jack preferred looking out at the stars, but since the Stargate actually travelled to the stars, it was the next best thing.
Speaking of travelling... "What's keeping General Hammond?" Jack wondered out loud. "The briefing was supposed to start 20 minutes ago."
Major Carter looked up from the report she had been re-reading to offer a slight shrug. "I think it might have something to do with a new scientist being reassigned here from Washington."
Jack rolled his eyes. "Another one? We're going to be overrun!" He noticed Carter's expression, and hastily added, "Not that the ones we have already aren't, uhh..."
"Digging yourself in deeper there, Jack," Daniel observed mildly, ritualistically cleaning his glasses before replacing them on the bridge of his nose. He'd repeated the motion at least a dozen times as they'd waited, so they had to be spotless by now.
Jack coughed. "Military or civilian?" he asked cautiously.
"Military I think, sir," Carter answered, diplomatically letting the earlier almost-insult slide, "but he doesn't work in the field. He's a weapons specialist. Improves older models, designs new ones, that sort of thing."
Jack started to nod, and then stopped mid-gesture, looking perplexed. "Hang on, Carter, how come you know all this and I don't?"
Carter smiled innocently. "There was a memo, sir."
"Ah." Yes, memos... Jack really needed to get around to reading those. He probably had a pile of them sitting on the desk in the office that had his name on the door but that he never used, some of them possibly dating back a couple of years... "So does this," he couldn't bring himself to say 'scientist' again, "weapons specialist have a name?"
"Yes he does, Colonel," General Hammond said from the doorway.
Jack stood up hastily and turned to face his superior, Major Carter doing the same beside him. "Sir," they acknowledged simultaneously.
"At ease, Colonel, Major. SG-1, sorry to keep you waiting, but I would like to introduce you to Dr. Kadeem Ashraf Raed." General Hammond stepped into the room and moved to the side, allowing the man behind him to enter as well.
Jack's heart skipped a beat, and then started pounding faster. He could feel the adrenaline rushing through his veins, and it took every ounce of his willpower to stop himself from going into defensive manoeuvres. He couldn't help putting a hand on his sidearm, though, and he was prepared to draw it at a split seconds notice.
He sensed the concerned gazes of his teammates on his back, and General Hammond's frown was obvious.
"Stand down, Colonel," Hammond ordered.
There were a few moments of awkward silence as Jack hesitated to obey. There was no chance that he was going to let his guard down around this man.
"A 9mm semi-automatic Beretta pistol, M9 series, isn't it?" Kadeem said good-naturedly, as though Jack was merely pointing out the weapon to him instead of threatening him with it. "My associates and I are quite fond of that model, so we haven't interfered too much with it. Handles well, doesn't it?"
Jack didn't reply, but he did reluctantly let go of the gun and drop his hand to his side. He didn't need a weapon to disable someone, anyway.
Hammond's frown eased slightly. "Doctor Kadeem, this is Colonel Jack O'Neill, Major Samantha Carter, Doctor Daniel Jackson and Teal'c."
"Pleasure to meet you," Kadeem said, offering a nod to each of them. Jack wasn't buying it.
"Doctor Kadeem has been assigned here so he can get a closer look at some of the alien weaponry our teams bring back through the gate," Hammond explained. "Hopefully, he will be able to reverse engineer some of them, or get ideas on how to improve our own."
Usually, Jack would have said 'Cool' to that kind of thing. "I thought Stargate Command was a national secret, sir," he commented instead. "Highly classified?"
"I have signed all the non-disclosure agreements, Colonel," Kadeem reassured him. When Jack didn't seem any less hostile, he continued, "...and I have lived in the United States for many years now. I am a citizen."
"And a valued member of the US Air Force, Colonel," Hammond added sternly, the glare he wore a silent warning to end the rudeness immediately.
"Yes, sir," Jack said grudgingly, but he still wasn't happy. Not by a long shot.
"I've given him a brief tour of the facility already," Hammond went on, "but Major Carter, would you be able to show him around the labs?"
Carter nodded. "Yes, sir, of course."
"And Teal'c, as our foremost expert on the staff weapon and zat gun, I would appreciate it if you could give Doctor Kadeem a demonstration later."
Teal'c inclined his head regally.
"Ah, sir," Jack interrupted, his forehead creased in puzzlement, "What about the mission to P5X-28 niner?"
"It's not urgent, Colonel," Hammond replied, "So I've postponed it until tomorrow."
That was not at all what Jack wanted to hear. He needed to get out of this place now, not stick around for another day.
"Yes, sir," was what he said aloud. "Are we dismissed?"
Hammond seemed disappointed with his attitude, but nodded his consent, waving a hand towards the door.
"Thank you, sir," Jack said, but rather than taking the indicated exit, he headed for the stairs. He wasn't going to get within three feet of Kadeem. No way in hell.
ooOOoo
In the slightly stunned wake of their leader's abrupt departure, the three remaining members of SG-1 exchanged glances.
"O'Neill did not seem pleased," Teal'c observed, the volume of his normally powerful voice lowered significantly so his words could not be overheard by Doctor Kadeem.
"No kidding," Sam said quietly, sitting down again and leaning a little towards her teammates. "Boy, he really has a thing against scientists, doesn't he?"
Daniel shook his head slowly, and mused, "I think there was more to it than that."
"Like what?" Sam wondered. "I didn't get the impression that they've met before or anything."
Teal'c raised an eyebrow. "And yet O'Neill was extremely tense."
"Yeah," Daniel agreed. "For a little while there, I thought Jack was ready to shoot the man." Everything in Jack's body language had screamed fight or flight, and Daniel had almost reflexively ducked for cover, expecting a gun to go off any second. He wished he could have seen Jack's face to get an idea of what he was thinking, but he'd had his back turned the whole time, and besides, the Colonel was an expert as schooling his expression when he wanted to.
Raising his voice to direct a question across the room, Daniel asked on a hunch, "Where are you from, Doctor?"
The man looked over from his conversation with the General and offered a smile. "Please, call me Kadeem. I am from Washington D.C. If you are referring to my country of origins, however, I was born in Iraq."
SG-1 exchanged glances again, knowing ones this time. Everything suddenly made sense.
"Forgive my asking," Kadeem said hesitantly, "but have I done something wrong? Your Colonel…"
Daniel winced. Jack certainly seemed to make a mess of first contact situations on a regular basis, whether off world or on Earth. "No, Kadeem. Colonel O'Neill is just not very, uh, diplomatically inclined. He tends not to trust anyone until he gets to know them."
"Understandable," Kadeem allowed. "He seemed to take an instant dislike to me, though."
"Yeah… he's not very fond of scientists, either," Daniel explained with a sheepish shrug. He really didn't want to go into the other reason for Jack's behaviour, not the least because it was a forbidden topic in Jack's books.
Kadeem frowned. "Is not Major Carter a scientist?"
"It took him a while to warm up to me, too, Kadeem," Sam assured him. "I wouldn't worry about it."
"If you say so."
"So, Kadeem, how about that tour?" Sam invited, eager to change the topic.
As Sam and Kadeem left the room, heading for the laboratories, Daniel reflected that winning Jack over wouldn't be as easy as they'd made it out to be. He could guess what Jack's expression would have been, now – fear, anger, hatred. Kadeem was a stark reminder of Jack's four-month imprisonment in an Iraqi prison, and Jack wasn't just going to get over that fact.
"I knew Colonel O'Neill wasn't going to like this," General Hammond sighed. "It went better than I expected, though."
It could have been worse, Daniel had to admit. Jack could have sworn at the man, stormed out, or possibly even gone with his shoot-first-ask-questions-later instinct. Giving Kadeem the cold shoulder and a few veiled insults was definitely better in comparison.
"I'm going to go find him," Daniel announced, getting up from his chair. "He probably won't want to talk, but it's worth a shot."
Hammond nodded. "Just be careful, Doctor Jackson."
Daniel didn't need to be told, but he was grateful for the reminder anyway. He knew from experience that Jack was a dangerous man to be around when he'd just had a nightmare or a flashback pertaining to his Special Ops days. Trying to wake him up was liable to get you a black eye or a bruised jaw, and for at least a few hours afterwards Jack was in a foul mood. Daniel had been terrified one time when they had stumbled across a Jaffa patrol after one such incident, and before he'd even realized what was happening, Jack had single-handedly killed half their attackers. He'd been like violence incarnate, and all that the rest of SG-1 had been able to do was get out of his way.
Right now, Jack was not going to be a happy camper. Hopefully, the sight of Kadeem hadn't brought all of Jack's bad memories to the surface, but Daniel wouldn't bet on it. Deliberately going after him was potentially a very bad idea. Daniel was going to do it anyway.
He tried to think where Jack would have gone, and narrowed it down to three possibilities. One, he was in the weights room working off the un-sated adrenaline rush. Two, he was on the top of the mountain, staring up at the sky in order to calm himself down. Three, he had left the base. If that was the case, he could be headed home, or to a pub… or anywhere. Daniel hoped that it wasn't the third option.
A search of the weights room and running track turned up nothing, so Daniel headed for the surface. It came as a slight surprise to him that it was dark outside, until he remembered that they'd planned to visit P5X-289 during its daytime, which didn't correspond with theirs. They were different planets with different orbits, after all.
It was a pleasantly warm evening, with a gentle breeze and a clear sky. His footsteps accompanied by the humming of hidden insects, Daniel made his way along the track that wound through the trees up to the clearing.
Sure enough, Jack lay sprawled in the grass, gazing up at the stars.
Reminding himself of his freedom, Daniel thought. Jack had told him once, when appointing Daniel with the Power of Attorney, that his greatest fear was never seeing the stars again. If ever Jack was dying with no hope of recovery – god forbid – he didn't want to be stuck in a hospital. He wanted to be outside when he died. He'd made Daniel promise to do all he could to see that it would happen that way, if the end wasn't sudden or unexpected. It was that important to him.
Daniel didn't try to disguise his approach, since sneaking up on the Colonel was not very smart and rarely effective anyway. Jack didn't move to look at him, but when Daniel was still a few metres away the older man spoke.
"I wondered when you'd find me. Is Careen mortally offended, then?"
Daniel sat down next to his friend, a faint smile playing on his lips at Jack's typical warping of names. "It's Kadeem. And no, he's not offended. A little confused, maybe."
"So I didn't manage to scare him away." Jack sounded disappointed.
"Is that what you were trying to do?" Daniel chuckled softly. "Well, you certainly scared me. I thought you were going to kill him for a little while there."
"Wish I had," Jack grumbled.
"Do you even know the guy?" Daniel asked.
Jack picked absently at a blade of grass. "No," he admitted.
"Then shouldn't you wait until you do know him before dubbing him friend or foe?" Daniel reasoned.
"Probably," Jack relented. "But he just looked so much like…" His voice trailed off, as the conversation threatened to enter taboo territory.
"Like people from your past?" Daniel supplied gently. "Men that captured you, locked you up for months?"
"And tortured me," Jack added in a whisper, rolling onto his side so he was facing away from Daniel. "I looked at him, and all of a sudden I was there again. I almost dropped to the floor and curled into a ball to protect myself from the blows I was so sure were coming."
"It was a long time ago," Daniel reminded him, pulling Jack out of the memories that he was close to losing himself in. "Kadeem would have just been a boy back then."
Jack sighed. "I know that. But the similarities are hard to ignore. He looks the same, sounds the same…"
"Focus on the differences," Daniel suggested. "I'd wager that those men weren't scientists."
Jack snorted. "Unless inflicting pain is a science."
"And I'd wager they didn't speak English very well, especially not with a slight American accent."
"Yeah," Jack confirmed, his voice emptying of emotion. "They just yelled at me in Arabic and expected me to understand what they wanted. They beat me up until I worked it out, and then beat me up some more when I refused to answer their questions anyway."
Daniel flinched at the imagery, even while he knew that Jack wasn't even telling him the half of it. It was no wonder that he had an adverse reaction to the Iraqi man.
"You know what else is different?"
"What?" came the toneless reply.
Daniel put a hand on his friend's shoulder, and was glad to notice that Jack didn't pull away. "You're not alone."
Jack rolled over, and for the first time in the conversation he met Daniel's eyes. The smile was faint, but it was there. "Thanks."
"You're welcome." Daniel flopped down on the grass beside his friend, and looked up at the night sky. "So, how many of the constellations up there do you know?"
"All of them," Jack said smugly. "And I've made a few up myself…"
Daniel lifted an incredulous eyebrow. "Oh yeah, like what?"
"Well, that one right there," Jack pointed, drawing an imaginary line in the sky, "is the yellow brick road. And over there are the red shoes, and that group over there make up the scarecrow…"
ooOOoo
The End
A/N: Originally this was going to be a much longer story, but my Stargate muse has apparently gone into hibernation. I found this when digging through my archives of unfinished fan fiction and thought it could stand as a one shot. Let me know what you think. Thanks for reading!