A/N Sorry this has taken so long, but real life has become chaotic of late with the run up to the holidays. It looks like the rest of the story will have to be finished after Christmas as I have a very hectic schedule. To tell you the truth, writing this chapter has been like pulling teeth and I have done so many rewrites that I had begun to get fed up with it, so if it isn't up to my usual standards then I apologise. Please leave a comment if you can, as at least then I will feel that I'm still heading in the right direction.
Happy Holidays everyone!
Two Million Light Years From Christmas
Chapter 2.
He had kept working on the translation until dark. Until the light had diminished significantly enough to have made reading almost impossible and his eyes had began to protest.
His joints and muscles ached with bitter complaint from having spent too long in the same position and he rubbed gingerly at them in the hope of dampening down their disapproval. Rising reluctantly from his makeshift desk, a large stone slab that sat in one corner of the small thatched hut that he and Sam shared, he began to work out the kinks that had taken up residence in his back and shoulders.
He stopped his ministrations long enough to switch on one of their battery operated hurricane lamps. It was only then, when the yellow shaft of light reached out into the small confines of the room, that he realised just how dark it had become.
And that he was still alone.
Sam has been gone for the better part of the afternoon and evening. She had put in a brief appearance at supper, but she had been distant and distracted and had soon made her apologies, rushing off to converse with some of the village elders before wandering off again with a group of children in tow.
It had become obvious to Daniel that she was avoiding him, if that was the case, and he was pretty sure that it was, then he couldn't say that he blamed her. If it wasn't for him and his selfishness, his best friend could have been looking forward to celebrating her first real family Christmas in years.
Unbeknown to Sam, he knew that they didn't need to be here. He had used the sketchy telemetry from the MALP as a convenient excuse to escape the base after his plans to go on an expedition to the Yucatan had fallen through.
He had jumped upon the first available thing he could find, but he had still needed someone to 'cover his six' as the military euphemistically called it. When Mitchell, Teal'c and even Vala had managed to exclude themselves from the mission, it had been left to Sam to fill the breach, and even she had needed some convincing.
And how had he repaid her?
By stranding them here on Christmas Eve of all nights.
Right now she should be on her way to San Diego, full of the joys of the season and looking forward to spending some much needed downtime with the people that she loved. Instead she was stranded on a planet that she didn't want to be on, with the one man that treated Christmas with about the same disdain as Scrooge.
What made matters worse was the fact that Daniel knew that things between Sam and her brother had been strained ever since Jacob's sudden passing. Mark had never believed the official line and had pestered his sister incessantly for the truth, a truth that she was duty bound to keep from him.
As a result, their personal relationship soured, to the point that they had hardly spoken to one another during the last two years.
The unexpected olive branch that her brother had offered this year had been a chance for them to ease some of that unwanted estrangement. Daniel could only hope that her brother didn't see Sam's imposed absence as a snub.
When he got back home he would have to find a way to contact him, to somehow explain that it wasn't Sam's fault that she couldn't make it home in time for the holidays.
It was the least that he could do.
Glancing at the luminescent dial on his watch showed him that it was getting late. Summer on this planet was pretty much like that upon Earth, with the sun going down late into the night.
He couldn't help but wonder if she was okay?
Was it possible that she might have gotten herself into some sort of trouble?
His hand inched its way toward the radio at his shoulder, but he stopped it before his fingers had the chance to touch it. The last time he had seen her, she had been with a group of villagers, if anything had happened surely they would have raised the alarm by now.
It was likely that she was using the time away from him to come to terms with the deep disappointment that she must have been feeling. No doubt she was internally railing against the injustice of it all, but he knew her well enough by now to know that by the time that she returned, her emotions would once again be tightly schooled behind that strict military façade that she wore.
"Hey."
He turned toward the sound of her voice, seeing her standing in the entrance of the hut, her hand brushing to one side the long, leather curtain that acted as their door to the outside world.
"I was just about to raise a search party and come looking for you." The relief that suddenly flooded his system at seeing her caused him to take an involuntary step forward.
"Sorry, Daniel, I didn't mean to worry you." She let go of the leather curtain as she stepped further into the hut, it swung a few times on its rail before sliding neatly back into position. "I just needed some time to sort a few things out."
So he was right.
She had needed to spend some time away from him.
"It's okay…" He picked up an artifact that was laying upon a small workbench, pretending to study it, running his fingers smoothly across its uneven surface. "If I were you…I'd probably need some time away from me too."
"Daniel, when are you going to stop beating yourself up all the time over things that you have absolutely no control over?" Her hand slipped gently across his, disengaging the artifact from his fingers, placing it back down upon the bench. "I do not hold you accountable for what has happened to us. It was just a combination of bad luck and even worse timing, that's all."
"But…" She silenced me him with a slender finger against his lips.
"No buts…I know that you feel bad that I've missed out on seeing my family this year, and yes I have to admit to being a little disappointed about that," Her finger moved away from his mouth, "but at least I'm not stranded here alone and thankfully I'm not freezing my ass off on some ice planet." She smiled softly at him. "I'm lucky enough to be on a planet where the locals are friendly, where we are safe from any threat to our welfare and where best of all..." her smile broadened until it was wide and bright, "…I get a chance to spend Christmas with you."
Daniel made a small huffing noise in the back of his throat.
"Trust me, Sam, you'd have been better off spending your Christmas as far away from me as you can get." He looked at her with earnest eyes. "I'm not the best person to be around, I'll just ruin this for you."
"Couldn't you try and overcome your despondency for just one year?" She moved closer to him, until she was within his personal space, it was something that she only ever did with him, as though she knew instinctively that he didn't mind the intrusion. "Even Scrooge managed to change a habit of a lifetime and look how it changed his life."
He contemplated her words, knowing that she was only uttering them because she was trying to help him shake off the cloying shroud of gloom and despondency that surrounded him, but he also knew that dispelling those feelings wouldn't be as easy as she made it sound.
"Come on, Daniel," Her hands came to rest upon his shoulders, shaking them gently, "whatever happened to your Christmas spirit?"
He closed his eyes against her enquiry, feeling the first tendrils of unhappiness begin to infiltrate his heart, winding firmly and inextricably around that most important of bodily organs, squeezing it with a severity that threatened to restrict its vital blood supply. At the same time, he could feel his entire demeanour changing, becoming heavy with a combination of immense sorrow and long held regrets.
"My Christmas spirit was taken away from me a long time ago."
"Then maybe it's time you found a way to get it back."
"I can't get it back." His words came out upon a whisper, their intonation matching the emotions that now weighed heavy within his chest. He opened his eyes to find her staring at him, seeing the curiosity that his words had aroused warring with her instinctive sense not to invade his privacy further. "I can't get it back, Sam, because it's in a place that I haven't allowed myself to go to in a very long time."
"Why?"
He just shook his head, unable to find suitable words to describe the complexities that drove his emotions during this time of year.
"Daniel, surely you can see that hiding from the people that care about you isn't working?"
He shrugged noncommittally, not knowing what else to say or do.
He felt Sam's hand take a firm grip upon his, linking her strong, slender fingers through his own until they were snugly entangled together.
"Come on, we're going for a walk in the moonlight."
For a moment he tried to hang back, not wanting to venture out into the night and partake in whatever it was that Sam had in mind. Then she turned around to face him, a silent question forming within the fathomless depths of her pale blue eyes.
Do you trust me?
Of course that was a no brainer.
He knew that he trusted Sam more than he trusted anyone else in his life.
For the last ten years he had allowed himself to go forth unwaveringly upon whatever course Sam had plotted for them as a team, without a shred of indecision or doubt. She had protected him, comforted him, encouraged him and had literally saved his life more times than he could count. Not only had she saved him in a professional sense, but she has also saved him in a personal one, coming to his aide time and time again when she had sensed that he had been floundering.
Without her, he feared that he would have lost his sanity a very long time ago.
Amid that moment of crystal clear clarity, he knew that he would follow her anywhere, to the ends of the cosmos if she were to ask him.
He took a step forward and followed her out of the hut.
Outside, the village was silent, its inhabitants presumably having already bedded down for the night. The torches that usually lit the thoroughfares had been doused for safety, and only the soft burnished moonlight illuminated the main square, its shafts of lunar radiance enough to navigate by.
"Where exactly are we going?"
"You'll see, it's not that far." Sam tugged at his hand, leading him along the deserted street until they reached the perimeter of the village. Instead of stopping as he had anticipated, she carried on into the small forested area that lay beyond, her steps measured and certain, as though she were following an instinctual path that nobody else could see.
"Ah…Sam…is this a good idea?"
"It'll be fine, Daniel, you're trusting me, remember."
The trees began to thin out, becoming more sparse as the woodland gave way to the dry grasslands beyond. Up ahead, he could just make out a faint glow in the night sky, but he was unable to see it clearly. Around this misshapen apparition were a group of tiny coloured lights, as indistinguishable as the object itself. He squinted into the darkness, scrunching up his eyes in an effort to see more clearly, but his myopic eyesight failed him and the fuzzy shapes refused to coalesce into a recognizable form. He glanced across at Sam, but she didn't seem disturbed by the lights ahead of them, in fact she appeared to be humming softly to herself.
He decided to relax and let her take the lead, it was the least that he could do considering what he had put her through that day. A thought suddenly occurred to him, but he shrugged it aside after only brief contemplation.
If it turned out that she was taking him out into the forest to exact some kind of revenge upon him…then so be it.
He deserved whatever punishment that she had waiting for him.
They broke from the trees and he found himself in a large clearing. Directly in front of him was a roaring camp fire, a curtain of heat radiated outward and he could feel its warmth prickle against his skin.
Two dozen feet beyond the camp fire stood a small tree, its branches festooned with shiny aluminium coloured decorations. He could distinctly pick out the shapes of stars, snowflakes and small silver bells. They swayed slightly in the cool evening breeze, fluttering to and fro, a shimmer of light glinting occasionally as the glow of the firelight played across them. Winding through the tree branches were the pinpricks of light that he had seen earlier and he realised that they belonged to a string of tiny white light bulbs inter-spaced with a range of different coloured crystals. They had been strung together upon thin strands of electrical wire. His eyes followed the wiring to its culmination and he was surprised to see that the makeshift cable was neatly plugged into the backup generator of the MALP.
They were two million light years from Earth and here he was standing before a Christmas tree!
On Christmas Eve.
It was so typically…Sam.
He turned in a tight circle, continuing to assimilate all the different sites that suddenly greeted his eyes.
He realised that his earlier assumption regarding the inhabitants of the village had been grossly misplaced, for it would appear that most, if not all of them, were not safely tucked up in bed as he had assumed, but were taking part in the impromptu party.
Trestle tables had been set up all along the perimeter of the clearing with countless arrays of local meats and savoury delicacies displayed upon them. Large iron pots containing delicious stews bubbled and spluttered upon small makeshift fires.
The various aromas permeated the air, sending Daniel's taste buds into a frenzy of high expectation.
Upon other tables, he could see barrels of ale and uncorked pottery urns full of wine, and it looked as though many of the villagers had already started the party without them, for they were walking around holding cups filled with a variety of concoctions.
At certain points around the perimeter, torches had been hammered into the ground and lit, illuminating the area so that everyone could see more clearly.
In a far corner, a group of villagers were setting up a very diverse ensemble of musical instruments, he could see planetary variations of tin whistles, recorders, reed instruments, and a drum. Perched high upon a stool, one man was busily tuning an apparatus that had the same shape and design as a violin.
Soon the sound of soft, sweet music filled the night air, its melodic cadence drifting upon the gentle night breeze. Groups of villagers began to pause in their conversations with each other to listen quietly to the music, while others began to make their way toward the musicians, laughing and joking merrily as they went.
Even though most of the preparations were alien by design and some in no way resembled Earthbound traditions, there were still enough similarities to evoke within Daniel memories that he wished would remain forever secreted away.
Inwardly he felt like groaning and a part of him wanted to make an excuse and return to the solitude of the village. If he were honest with himself, he knew that this was not what he needed right now. He didn't need the reminder of something that he annually tried so very hard to forget. It was bad enough on base, when come December, every inch of the underground complex began to look as though it had been taken over by some kind of yuletide alien virus.
He had thought that the military had strict codes about such things, but he had found out early on in his association with Stargate command that certain rules and regulations could be manipulated given the right incentive. Of course he couldn't really blame them, for most of the year, the command operated within the bounds of strict secrecy, within a myriad of regulations and protocols, so it seemed only right that when the rules were bent, they grasped it with open arms.
He only wished that they would leave him out of it.
Sometimes being on base almost became unbearable, compounding the desolation and melancholy that regularly descended upon him at this time of year.
And yet he couldn't tell anyone about it.
He wanted to.
He really did.
A couple of times he actually contemplated just telling Jack or Sam why it was that he found it so hard and painful to join in the festivities, but he could never bring himself to ruin the light hearted buzz that always seemed to follow his friends around during the holiday season.
He thought about telling Teal'c, but he wasn't sure that the Jaffa would understand either, especially as he seemed to get as caught up in the revelry as everyone else.
So, he kept it to himself, locked it away, pasted on a false smile and just tried to find some way of surviving what amounted to the toughest few days of the year. It had gotten easier since Jack's departure to Washington, the others didn't seem to go to the same extremes as Jack always had.
Unless you counted Vala, but then she had always been a law unto herself and Daniel had learned a long time ago the best way to deflect her penchant to party.
Plus, recently he had managed to find inventive ways in which to avoid the Christmas season altogether.
Until now.
"Daniel?"
There was a note of anxious concern within the timbre of Sam's voice and the sound of it made him realise that he had been silent for too long, staring vacantly at the glowing Christmas tree.
"Daniel, are you alright?"
Despite how he truly felt, he choose yet again to don his masquerade mask, this time purely for Sam's benefit.
"So this is what you have been up to for most of the afternoon and evening?" He managed to paste a smile upon his lips and hoped that Sam would not be able to see through the thinly disguised charade.
The ruse seemed to work because she nodded enthusiastically, an impish grin turning up the corners of her mouth. It was so endearing that he almost wanted to pull her into a hug, to pull her against him so that he could hide from all the turmoil that he was feeling by burrowing himself deep within the warmth of her embrace.
Instead his eyes left hers to scan the decorated tree, to give it the perusal that her efforts truly deserved. The first thing that he noticed was that the aluminium coloured adornments had once belonged to an SGC issue space blanket, the crystals and lights were undoubtedly part of the backup components for the MALP and DHD. Further scrutiny revealed other elements of their combined kit, no longer resembling their original intent, but jury rigged into decorations and embellishments.
It is obvious that Sam has gone to a lot of trouble, even to the point of hiking back to the Stargate to retrieve the MALP and painstakingly manoeuvring it back to the clearing.
That alone must have taken her hours.
He had to give her ten out of ten for sheer inventiveness.
This time when he smiled, it was genuine.
"I wonder what the Air Force is going to make of you misappropriating its supplies for your personal use?"
"Let's just say that these supplies were liberated and redeployed for cultural reasons."
Her impish grin intensified, causing her soft blue eyes to crinkle at the corners.
"Cultural reasons?" Daniel slipped his hands into his pockets and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, peering at her over the rims of his spectacles. "And exactly what cultural reasons would those be?"
"To share our cultural traditions with the inhabitants of this world." The side of her mouth quirked up slightly. "What better way than to throw a Christmas party." She crossed the couple of steps that separated them, slipping her arm easily around his waist, manoeuvring herself until their bodies were almost pressed tightly together."Will you do something for me tonight, Daniel?"
"What's that?"
"Will you let me show you another side of Christmas, one that doesn't have to be about despair and despondency, but full of hope?"
"I'll try, Sam." Even as the words left his mouth, he was unsure that he could live up to the promise that he had just given her.
She gave him that warm, tender smile that she always seemed to keep in reserve for him, before twisting out of his embrace and linking her arm through his. Together they started toward the group of musicians, stopping every now and again at one of the various trestle tables in order to sample its fare.
It wasn't long before Daniel's anthropological curiosity got the better of him and he found himself deep in conversation with the village elders. He discovered that there were indeed many similarities between Earth's winter festivals and those of the planet, although the elders seemed to find the idea of exchanging presents to be a curious custom.
In time he even found that he was beginning to enjoy himself, letting down some of the strict barriers that he had erected and fortified over the years, in order to allow some of the relaxed atmosphere of the party to infuse itself within him.
He knew that a big part of that relaxation process was thanks to Sam. She mingled with the villagers with an ease and grace that he had found beguiling, engaging with them in conversation, laughing and joking with them in a way that she seldom did when they were on official missions.
From time to time the firelight would catch her features in a particular way, causing her face to glow with excitement and unrestrained happiness, bringing out the soft blue hue of her incredible eyes, enhancing them as they seemed to dance with a merriment that she rarely allowed anyone to witness. Her short blonde hair cast a golden halo around her head, making her look as though she had been transformed by the firelight into a divine angel, sent down directly from the heart of heaven for the sole purpose of being with him upon this night.
She had never looked more beautiful or radiant and Daniel had never felt more drawn to her than he did that night.
As the night progressed, he began to wonder why he had allowed himself to be consumed by so much self imposed isolation over the years? Why had he not just thrown off the mantle of melancholia and allowed himself to believe that there could be optimism again in his life.
Why had he become so resistant to the idea that he could once again find happiness and harmony, peace and love?
His eyes drifted around the clearing, settling briefly upon the Christmas tree, feeling for the first time the absence of anguish as he looked upon it. Instead of the despondency and sadness that he usually associated with this symbol of yuletide cheer, he saw it for what it truly was, a beacon of light and hope.
He allowed a small appreciative smile to grace his lips.
Maybe, just maybe, there was hope for him after all.
He looked away from the sparkling tree, with its myriad of adornments and settled his attention upon a family that had gathered nearby. The husband was smiling happily toward his wife, they whispered something softly to one another before his hand smoothed across the small swell of his wife's abdomen. Their young son ran up to them, chatting enthusiastically with his parents, jumping up and down in unconcealed joy. The father picked him up, hoisting him aloft, throwing him skyward amid a torrent of whoops and giggles, catching him again in a pair of safe, strong arms as the boy plummeted back toward the ground, his giggles turning into peals of raucous laughter.
The cold hand of misery took that moment to wrap its desolate fingers around Daniel's heart once more, squeezing it within its clenched fist. He felt the first sharp pinpricks of tears prickle against the back of his eyes, felt the tightening of his larynx as his throat constricted against the sob that had threatened to break free.
Suddenly a torrent of bittersweet memories assailed his mind, overwhelming his now lowered fortifications, threatening to annihilate his lifelong barricades to mortally pierce his heart.
He cast a glance toward Sam, willing her to see the desolation that had once again befallen him, but she was in conversation with one of the women from the village.
She couldn't see him.
She couldn't render any aid in his rescue from the tumultuous feelings that were cascading through him.
His anchor had drifted away.
All at once, it all became too much for him to bear.
Pivoting around on his heel, his shoulders hunched against the torment and pain that he was feeling, Daniel left the celebrations, marching off into the forested woodland beyond the clearing and disappeared into the night.
