}~{ Gild the Lily }~{
~Three Months After Daniel's Death~
Music echoed in the hall as Rose walked along, trying to clear her head. She held a book in her hand and marked the page she was on with a finger. She followed the music and found that it was coming from Daniel's office. It was Vivaldi. She remembered when Daniel had sat her down at his desk, placing on her head the most ridiculous headgear that she had ever seen. From it though, came the most beautiful music she had ever heard.
Rose stopped at the doorway into Daniel's office where all the lights were turned on. She leaned against the doorway, resting her head to it as she stared at the desk. The television was on the Weather Channel, but the sound was turned off. She slowly entered and looked at everything left behind. Her fingers trailed the filing cabinets, the bookcases, touching photos and ripped out pages from books.
She made her way to the desk and sat down on the stool. She pulled the headgear from their place in the drawer and gently placed them on her head. She plugged them in and pressed the spongie cups tight to her ears. A smile crept across her lips as the music raced to her brain. She closed her eyes and turned up the volume. She leaned forward and placed her elbows on the desk when her arms become tired from holding the earpieces.
Jonas skidded to a stop at the doorway with a stack of notebooks beneath his arm. He looked back out in the hall, head turning left and right as if he expected to see someone else. He watched Rose at the desk, hands cupping her ears. Her hair was free from any bands or braids, flowing over her shoulder and down to the middle of her back. She wore a pair of tight tanned pants and a white peasant top held in place by a white dress corset that had a strap that went around the back of her neck. Boots covered her feet and stretched just below her knees.
Jonas couldn't help but notice. Besides it being a very strange outfit, much different from what women wore on both Earth and his own planet, it was both feminine and strapping. It reminded him of something the Earthlings called 'steampunk.'
"Uh hello." He moved closer when he realized she had headphones on. He set the stack down on the counter in the middle of the office and slowly approached Rose. He gently tapped her on the shoulder so his presence wouldn't frighten her, but of course it did. Rose jumped up, stool crashing to the cement floor as she jerked from the desk, but was caught by the headphones on her head.
"Let me help." Jonas was quick and took hold of the headphones. He gently lifted them from her head and then picked up the stool.
"Oh I'm so sorry, Jonas." Rose apologized and fixed her hair, tucking some behind her ears. "I'm always making a fool of myself around you."
"Hey, no worries. I make a fool of myself all the time." Jonas laughed as he held the headphones in his hands. He noticed something and cocked his head with a smile, pointing to one of his ears. Rose didn't understand and knitted her eyebrows together in confusion. "You're ears are pierced. I never realized."
"Oh!" Rose's hand instinctively went to her ear and touched the earrings. "Yes, you get them when you are initiated into a special branch of the Imperial Army."
"Special branch?" Jonas asked and unplugged the headphones before setting them down on the desk. "Oh you mean the–"
Jonas snapped his fingers and searched for the term in his head. He smiled and pointed a finger at her when he had gotten it, "Gunda. You were a female warrior."
"Uh yeah…" Rose looked away, continuing to play with her ear. Jonas, sensing her resistance, moved to another topic.
"You like Antonio Vivaldi?" He moved to the counter where he had set the stack of notebooks. He picked them up and moved them to the other side, sitting down on a tall stool. Rose looked down at the stereo and then nodded her head with a smile.
"Daniel showed it to me when I first came to Stargate Command." She looked over at Jonas and moved to the counter. Her fingers trailed over some of Daniel's old notes.
"You two were close." Jonas stated, already knowing that they had been. But he wondered about just how close? He had felt Sam and Teal'c out about it, but neither of them could really say for sure one way or the other. "I mean, it was pretty obvious you two had known each other a while. Had too of grown pretty close then."
"In my line of work, I can honestly say that there are few I can consider friends. Daniel is one of them; a true friend. I trusted him with everything. I met him and Jack about six years ago on a planet named Abydos." Rose explained and opened one of Daniel's notebooks. Her fingers touched the indents in the paper where Daniel had written.
"I read the mission report."
At this Rose looked across the counter at him with surprise, "Really? Why?"
"It seemed like a good idea. I read all of SG-1's reports." Jonas nodded and the motioned a finger to the room around them. "And besides, I've got nothing else better to do since I'm stuck here."
Jonas stood up and walked to one of the filing cabinets. Rose watched him as he searched through countless folders.
"You and me both." She whispered and looked away from him. He stopped and looked over his shoulder at her. He hadn't really believed she was stuck until that moment. He heard the crestfallen tone in her voice. She too was stuck on Earth, at Stargate Command. The only difference was he had chosen to be there and he could choose to go back. Granted, there was a big incentive to not going back, like being deemed a traitor, but he could still choose to go back. Both of those choices had been taken from Rose by someone she claimed she couldn't even remember.
Jonas went back to his search in the filing cabinet.
"Ah ha!" Jonas pulled out a blue folder and opened it to make sure it was the right one. He then shut the cabinet again and stroked up beside her, placing it on the counter. He looked through it quickly again. "Daniel wrote that you celebrated your twentieth birthday there."
Jonas looked up from the report and smiled at Rose.
"You're very odd. Do you know that?" Rose spoke with a straight face and narrowed eyes. She couldn't seem to quite figure him out. She had run into him a couple of times, not having many places to hide in Stargate Command. They had never really spoken though. Not like they were.
"I'm sorry…?" Jonas seemed taken aback by what she had said and was unsure of how to proceed. Rose's eyes went why as she tried to back track.
"I meant that in a good way. I swear. I just–" She fell short and pursed her lips. "I'm not very good at times with people I don't really know. I apologize. I blame my upbringing, but it's really just my personality."
"No worries." Jonas' face erupted into a grin. "I like your personality. It's… spunky."
"Spunky?" Rose gave a small laugh and smile in return. Jonas shrugged and then nodded, slipping through some pictures that were in the folder. She thought the word over in her mind and then decided that it was good. She looked down at the pictures and then to him from the corner of her eye, questioning why he was staring at her.
"Is there something wrong?" She asked finally, watching Jonas shake his head with the grin still lingering on his face. He looked down at the pictures once more.
"So Ra, huh?" Jonas asked and looked back at her. She licked her lips and nodded her head. Jonas turned his body towards her and leaned sideways against the counter, elbow hold up his weight as well as the stool beneath him. "Mission report only tells someone so much."
"Are you asking me to tell you personally about my experiences, Jonas Quinn?" Rose gave a small laugh and pulled a stool from behind her to sit down on.
"Jonas. You sound too much like Teal'c when you call me by my full name." He corrected her, eyes expressing his dislike.
"Okay, sorry, but at least people can remember your full name." Rose laughed. "Mine is about three names too long. Makes me sound like royalty or something, which I'm not."
"I'm very curious." Jonas began again. Rose was hoping to escape reliving the past for one day. She was more concerned with the future and whatever it held for her. "I've never left my planet before I came here. I'm more interested in everything out there in the universe, then files and mission reports that just recount events."
"You want to know how they felt instead of what they ate or saw." Rose knew the feeling. She had been on a sort of probation when she first became a Gunda. She had wanted nothing more than to go to arms and fight a battle with the women she had trained with for so long. Rose smiled at him. "You want an adventure of your own."
"Exactly! So, why did you go to Abydos?" Jonas asked and leaned in closer as if she was about to tell him a dark secret. At this, Rose laughed wholeheartedly. Her eyes seemed to sparkle from the light as they squinted, cheeks rising as she laughed again.
"It was purely an accident. I wouldn't have cared where I went to. I just wanted to leave." Rose looked back at the pictures and found one of the pyramid where the Stargate was held on Abydos. She touched it gently, remembering her first time stepping out of the Stargate.
"Why?"
"Why what?" She looked back at Jonas with confusion.
"Why did you want to leave? I've read the report on Luxima and it seemed like a nice place." Jonas was so naive.
"Looks can be deceiving." Rose looked around the room and then looked back at the file. She closed it and pushed it back from the edge of the counter. "Luxima wasn't the problem. It was the people. Mainly the Elders, who seemed to have strove to torment me any way possible. So, eventually I couldn't take any more and I went AWOL."
"What's that?" Jonas asked as he knitted his eyebrows together and shook his head.
"Absent without official leave. I basically… ran away in the heat of battle." Rose looked to Jonas, expecting him to be disappointed or express a look that would tell her she should be ashamed. Instead, he sat there smiling like some kind of sweet buffoon. Rose shook her head and sighed, scratching the back of her head. "If you've read the file, then you know all about the Elders and the things they did or rather, didn't do."
Jonas nodded, but said nothing.
"What the file doesn't say, is that at that time, I was in line to becoming one of them. My mother had been one and I had been fighting and fighting it, but the Elders made my life so miserable that I practically was forced into the office. So today, I hold the Seventh Seat as Elvira; the Impartial Judge." Rose pulled her hair over to one shoulder, twisting it so that it might stay in place.
"So the seats run by lineage."
"Yes and no. It is preferred that the same bloodlines keep a seat in Council. However, that isn't always the case. The High Elder, Uinseann, doesn't actually hold a bloodline to the Council. He was voted in during a time of war, which is extremely rare."
"Interesting."
"I have no respect for the Elders. Especially the ones that hold office with me currently. So, during that the time, I thought it perfectly rational to run from the Imperial Army and my station as a Gunda and find an adventure elsewhere through the Stargate. A new beginning of sorts. Did not turn out that way."
"You may not believe it, but I sort of understand how you felt then." Jonas motioned towards the file and then looked back at her.
"I know, Jonas." Rose was slow to jump in. Her smile was gone and replaced with sympathy.
"You do…?" Jonas seemed surprised and almost afraid of this. Rose nodded her head and looked down at her hands in her lap.
"Jack talks about it." Rose admitted and looked back at him. "A lot."
Jonas had been in a similar spot; he had been placed in a tricky situation, pitted between two difficult choices and had to choose. Rose actually felt that his decision had been harder than her own. She had acted like a spoiled brat and simply ran away from a tough decision. Jonas had been stuck between a rock and a hard place.
"He doesn't like me very much, does he?"
"Give him time. He'll come around. Always does." Rose halted to think and then bobbed her head a little. "Well, sometimes anyway."
"So why don't you like the Elders?" Jonas quickly changed the topic.
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Rose recited a phrase Jack had told her a long time ago when they had discussed the Elders and their decisions. "The Elders abused their power like anyone in any office and now that I am an Elder, I am even more ashamed and disgusted by them. Maybe it's because of my upbringing or my time as a Gunda, but–"
She couldn't exactly word it correctly. She clicked her teeth and shook her head, unable to pinpoint what she was trying to say. Jonas just watched, allowing her time to think and then caught it.
"You thought you could make a difference." Jonas leaned forward and placed a hand on her knee. "You still can."
"You're right. I thought I could make a difference." Rose closed her eyes and shook her head, feeling the weight of Jonas' hand like a conviction on her heart. "Turns out though that I can't do a damned thing. Especially not from here."
Rose looked around the room and shook her head again. Her hair swayed with the motion like stream of golden waves. She placed an elbow on the counter and covered her mouth by her hand. She stared out blankly with Jonas just watching her. His hand never left her knee as he just let her work through whatever was going on in her head.
"I don't even know what's going on back there." She started and looked back to him. "I have no idea what's happening. They could be in an all-out war. They could have been completely eradicated and I would have no way of knowing."
"So, let's figure out why we can't lock in the seventh chevron." Jonas sat back and looked at her as though it was the easiest solution in the world.
"How?" Rose was a little pointed without meaning to be. It didn't slow Jonas down a bit though. He ran a hand over his mouth and quickly looked around Daniel's office. He spotted something and looked back at Rose with a smirk, pointing a finger at a notebook sitting on a bookcase. He quickly retrieved it and began flipping through the worn pages. Rose just watched him utterly confused by what he was thinking.