A/N I realise that this has been a long time coming, and I aplogise for the long wait, but I had to get it to a point whereby I was happy to post it. It's been through a lot of rewrites, but finally I think it is right. I hope you all like it. Don't worry there are two more chapters to go and I've already written the last chapter, I've just got to write the penultimate one and I promise it isn't going to be so long in coming. Please, please, please let me know what you think.

Enjoy!

Pariah

Chapter 12

Daniel gently loosened the impacted earth from around the object that he had been diligently excavating for the last few hours. With a slight sucking sound, the dirt encrusted item came free from the place where it had lain undisturbed, sending a small cloud of reddish dust billowing into the air.

Daniel sneezed violently.

"Bless you, Doctor Jackson."

Daniel shifted slightly in his cramped position, casting a gaze over his shoulder toward his assistant.

"Thank you, Nyan."

"You're welcome." Nyan handed him a small handled brush and watched as the archaeologist gently, but deftly began to remove the encrusted dirt from the object in his hand. "What do you think it is?"

"Well, it's not linked to the main burial chamber that's for sure," Daniel turned the item over and proceeded to brush away the dirt from that side, which only served to confirm his earlier statement, " for one thing, it isn't ostentatious enough to have belonged to a Goa'uld. My guess is that it belonged to one of the workers engaged in the chambers construction."

"Should I mark it down as a significant find?"

Daniel smiled.

"Nyan, at this point we classify everything that we find as significant, even down to the lowliest item. Everything that we excavate is like a small piece of a giant jigsaw puzzle, the fun begins when we start to put all the pieces together." He continued cleaning the item as he spoke, flaking off small chunks of encrusted soil to reveal the sandstone coloured base of what appeared to be an ornamental bowl. As he finished the initial cleaning process he handed the item off to Nyan, "Make sure to have Doctor Grayson take a look at it, he's cataloguing all the findings relating to the workers."

Nyan pulled himself up and out of the trench, dusting himself down as he prepared to take the latest finds back to the other members of the excavation team situated on the far side of the dig site.

With a little more room to manoeuvre, now that Nyan had vacated the trench, Daniel took a moment to ease himself from his somewhat cramped position. He winced as the joints and tendons in his back and neck began their almost daily protest.

There was no way that he was going to admit to himself that he might be getting a little too old for this.

Best to put it down to just being out of practice.

Ignoring his discomfort, he pulled out a dusty bandana from the back pocket of his BDU's.

"Nyan..."

"Yes, Doctor Jackson?"

"Have SG-9 and Doctor Grayson set up the portable x-ray machine?"

Nyan nodded his head.

"SG-9 were in the process of installing it when I left to come over here. It should be fully functioning by now."

Daniel used the bandana to clean the dirt and sweat from his face before tying it around his neck. Boosting himself out of the trench, he stood beside Nyan and squinted in the direction of the field tent in the distance.

"Everyone knows that none of the canopic jars we found in the burial chamber are to be taken back through the Stargate until they have been x-rayed, right?"

"Yes, Doctor Jackson, you were very specific about that point." A worried look passed across Nyan's face. "Do you think that there might be a problem?"

"No, not a problem. I just don't want any nasty surprises. It's pretty unusual to find a Goa'uld inhabited planet this far out of their usual sphere of influence. What we've found so far points toward this planet being an outpost of some kind, probably mined extensively for its Naquada deposits, at least that was the case until the deposits ran out. There's some indication of Sekhmet's influence here, but there is no Royal Palace and the main burial chamber seems to have belonged to a lower dignitary, an ambassador or emissary of some kind." Daniel ran a hand through his dusty hair. "Don't look so worried, Nyan, I'm sure I'm just being overly cautious. I just don't want a repeat performance of the Osiris incident."

"I understand, Doctor Jackson. I believe there is an Earth saying that seems to fit this situation. 'It's best to be safe than sorry.' "

Daniel chuckled softly.

"Those Earth clichés are really coming along, aren't they?"

"General O'Neill bought me a calendar for the festivity that you call Christmas that had a new quote for every day of your Earth year."

Daniel was just about to comment on Jack's taste in Christmas presents when his radio crackled into life.

"Doctor Jackson, this is Sergeant Haines, just to let you know that the Stargate has just activated. I think it might be your requisition order, sir?"

"Already, that's pretty quick. I only put the order in yesterday. I just hope that they remembered the coffee this time?"

"Hallelujah to that, sir." Sergeant Haines replied.

"Okay, Nyan and I are heading back to the field tent, we have a couple of things that need dropping off... oh and Haines..."

"Sir?"

"If it is my requisition... I'm bagging the first cup of coffee."

"Trust me sir, a whole platoon of Marines wouldn't dream of standing in your way." Haines responded with just a trace of humour in his voice.

Daniel knew that he had been uncharacteristically cranky of late, especially in the mornings when he had needed his caffeine fix to kick start his day. From Haines' comment it was obvious that the rest of the expedition team were aware of it too. He just hoped that the commissary had had the good sense to send through the good stuff.

Actually if he were truly honest with himself, it wasn't only the coffee he was missing.

He was missing Sam.

A lot.

When this assignment had come up, he had jumped at the chance. After all when was the last time that he had had the opportunity to oversee the complete excavation of a dig site?

Not since Egypt.

Not since before he had joined the Stargate programme.

That little side show on Chaka's planet didn't count, he'd spent most of it trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey and didn't actually get much chance to excavate anything.

He had been excited by the thought of putting his skills as an archaeologist to the test once more, that was until it had dawned on him that he would have to be apart from Sam.

That had put a sizable dent in his enthusiasm.

The change in their relationship had progressed quickly taking both of them by surprise.

Of course he had known for a very long time that he loved her, but he had never for one moment entertained the thought that she could ever have loved him back.

His confession in Hawaii had changed all that.

And then some.

Sometimes he found it hard to believe that in just a few weeks he was going to be stationed with her on Atlantis, not only were they going to be in another galaxy together, but prior to their embarkation they were going to be married.

Soon they were going to start a completely new chapter of their lives together.

Of course that didn't stop him from missing her now.

He had even tried to convince her to come along, telling her that she could treat it as a vacation. She'd once told him that she would have liked to be a part of a dig, just to see what it was like, but he hadn't been able to persuade her.

Instead she was off somewhere on the Odyssey.

He missed waking up with her, missed that special feeling he got every morning when he realised that it wasn't a dream anymore, but a reality.

He missed being able to hold her in his arms, to kiss her awake, to watch those beautiful blue eyes of hers go from sleepy to aroused. He wanted to hear that sound she made when she...

The radio at his shoulder gave a loud shriek of static before it squawked into life, breaking Daniel from his wayward thoughts.

"Ah... Doctor Jackson?" Sergeant Haines voice sounded strained, which wasn't a good sign. He made a mental bet with himself that he would be going without coffee again.

"What's up, sergeant?"

"Ah, sir, Colonel Dixon wants to know your ETA?"

Daniel stopped dead in his tracks and stared down at the handset on his shoulder.

"Did you say Colonel Dixon? As in SG-13?"

"That's an affirmative, sir."

Daniel squinted in the bright sunlight toward the Stargate, situated a few hundred metres away from their main camp. He could just make out the silhouettes of a group of people standing at the base of the dais, the drab olive of their BDUs clearly marking them out as SGC personnel.

The FRED was conspicuously absent.

Daniel's heart sank.

Oh crap.

"Sir, do you have an ETA?" Sergeant Haines insisted, no doubt due to the hard glare that Col. Dave Dixon was giving him at that moment.

"I'll be with you in a couple of minutes."

"Copy."

Daniel turned to his assistant.

"Nyan, I'm going to see what's up. You take the artefacts back to Doctor Grayson and help him get started on the cataloguing."

"As you wish Doctor Jackson."

Nyan scuttled away toward the field tent as Daniel continued toward the Stargate.

He took a moment to look more carefully at the silhouettes of the new arrivals, wondering as he did so why the SGC would have found it necessary to send another team to the planet.

As he closed the distance something struck him as odd.

SG-13 seemed to consist of six team members instead of the usual four, that was unusual to say the least and it put Daniel's nerves on edge.

What the hell was going on?

Colonel Dave Dixon was easy to make out, even from a distance. Like Jack, he had that aura of command. Beside him were the rest of his team, Senior Airman Simon Wells, Lieutenant Bosworth and the archaeologist Dr. Balinsky. Much to Daniel's relief, their casual body language seemed to indicate that nothing bad was looming, in fact they all looked rather languid and relaxed, although they did look a little green around the gills.

By contrast, sitting almost sprawled upon the steps of the dais was a figure that Daniel didn't recognise, which was partly due to the fact that his BDU's made him look pretty much like every other member of Stargate Command.

The poor guy didn't look comfortable though and as he hauled himself upright, he let out an audible groan, followed almost instantaneously by his body slumping sideways across the dais steps so that he could vomit into the tall undergrowth.

Daniel couldn't help wincing in sympathy.

The guy's obvious distress prompted the final member of Dixon's team to move into action, breaking away from the knot of people around the Colonel to move with purpose toward the stricken man.

Daniel's eyes widened in disbelief.

Wait a minute...

He knew that long legged, confident stride. The way that body posture could look both at ease and ready to strike in an instant.

"Sam!"

At the sound of his voice, she turned, her eyes taking a moment to track and focus on him.

Her lips turned up in a broad smile.

"Hey, Daniel."

Daniel rapidly closed the distance between them.

He had to admit that even in BDU's she looked good. More than anything he wanted to reach out and take a hold of her, to pull her close and hug her tight. He wanted to let her know how much he had missed her, but he knew it was out of the question. It would have been highly inappropriate to show such unprofessional behaviour, so he deliberately shoved his hands in his pockets so that they wouldn't get him into trouble.

"This is a surprise?"

Sam tracked the movement of his hands, the side of her mouth twitching up slightly as she realised the reason behind it. They shared a long look, each of them using that unvoiced communication that they had developed over the years to fill in the words that they couldn't convey.

"Why aren't you on the Odyssey?" Daniel asked.

At his comment, Sam looked away, her gaze shifting back and forth between him and the impacted earth at her feet. She looked decidedly uncomfortable, which was something that Daniel couldn't ever remember seeing before.

Uncomfortable and a little uncertain.

"Uh... well... you see, Daniel, the thing is..."

"Jackson... my God... it really is you?"

Daniel felt the blood drain from his face at the sound of that voice, a voice that he had hoped he would never hear again. His eyes left Sam's and settled on the figure now sitting upright at the base of the dais.

"Adam?"

The figure dressed in olive BDU's lifted his head, his face a considerable few shades lighter than its normal well tanned hue.

"Oh, God... I think I'm going to be sick again."

The tall figure of Colonel Dixon moved toward Pritchard. "Bet you don't think that the Stargate is a Hollywood prop now, do you Professor?" The Colonel placed his hand upon the archaeologist's head. "Suck it up, Pritchard, just stick your head between your knees, take a few deep breaths and the nausea will go away."

"Oh, that's easy for you to say," Pritchard answered unsteadily between a bout of dry retching, "your kind don't care that they've just had every atom in their body deconstructed and reconstituted."

"Oh our kind care," Dixon replied sourly, his demeanour darkening at the other man's denigrating tone. "but we've got a job to do, protecting jumped up little ingrates like you, so we do it every day anyway and twice on Sunday's."

The Colonel gave Pritchard a none too gentle pat on the back of the head before moving away to rejoin his team.

"Adam... what the hell are you doing here?"

"Ask her..." Pritchard jabbed an unsteady hand in Sam's direction, "she's the one who abducted me."

Daniel turned incredulous eyes toward Sam.

"You did what...?"

Sam held up a placating hand.

"Daniel... listen... it wasn't like that..."

"Then what would you call it, Colonel." Pritchard forced himself up into a standing position, swaying slightly with the movement. "One minute I was in my hotel room and the next I'm on that... that ... ship of yours."

"You beamed him aboard the Odyssey!"

Without waiting to hear anymore, Daniel marched over to where she stood, taking a hold of her arm and walking her a little distance away from Dixon and his men, not wanting them to overhear the conversation they were about to have.

"What the hell do you think you're doing? Have you completely lost your mind?" He pointed toward Pritchard who, although still a little unsteady on his feet, had made his way to the DHD and was pondering it with a puzzled expression on his face. "Are you trying to ruin your career?"

"It's okay, I've got it covered."

"You've got it covered!" Daniel ran an exasperated hand through his hair. "He dines with Senators, he lunches with Congressmen. He's not going to let you get away with this, the minute he gets back he is going to do everything he can to have you court marshalled."

Sam shook her head.

"He's signed a full non-disclosure document and he knows that if he so much as utters one word of what he's seen, he's going to spend the rest of his miserable life incarcerated in a cell at Area 51."

"I thought we were past this, Sam?"

He tried to reign in some of his anger. He knew why she had done this, it was because of Hawaii, because of what had happened there. It didn't matter how many times he had told her to the contrary, she still believed that his expulsion was somehow her fault.

"In a couple of weeks we'll be in the Pegasus Galaxy and Pritchard and everything that happened in Hawaii will be behind us."

"Don't you see that's why..." Sam rested her hand upon his arm, a soothing gesture that did little at that moment to give him any comfort. "Unlike you, I can't just walk away and leave everything unresolved. I was the one that had to stand by and watch you humiliated in front of me. That son of a bitch used me as a weapon against you, it was me that discredited your theory, it was up to me to set the record straight and I have."

Daniel's eyes narrowed.

"What have you told him?"

"I've told him everything. He knows the truth, Daniel. I've shown him all the archived evidence pertaining to Abydos and Ra. I left out the private stuff, he doesn't know about Sha're, but he knows that it was your theories that made the Stargate programme possible. At least now that arrogant bastard knows that you were right all along."

"I don't believe this..." Daniel shook his head and took a couple of steps away from her, his thoughts in a turmoil. Then abruptly he turned back around and pinned her with his gaze. "Just how in hell did you manage to pull this off?"

Sam shrugged.

"What's the point of being owed favours if you can't cash them in every now and then..," a thoughtful, but melancholic look crossed her face, "...although I hadn't anticipated General O'Neill having to cash in most of his too."

"I should have known," Daniel's voice held a tinge of anger within it, "this whole scenario has Jack's name written all over it."

Sam shook her head vehemently.

"You can't blame the General, Daniel, this wasn't his idea. In fact, for the last five months he's been doing his best to talk me out of it."

"I wish he had because you're still standing on some pretty thin ice, Sam." He turned away and watched Pritchard as he moved around the base of the dais. He was looking better and he even seemed to be curious about the workings of the Stargate and the DHD. "Do you really trust him not to say anything?"

"He knows the consequences if he does. I made them blatantly clear to him."

Sam came up to stand next to him and despite Dixon and his men still being in close proximity, she slipped her hand inside his, her fingers softly entwining with his own. It was the first time they had touched each other in weeks and Daniel immediately felt the connection between them re-establish itself.

He could tell that she needed some reassurance, some sign from him that even though he didn't agree with what she had done, that they were okay. He turned to face her, letting her see through his eyes that he was prepared to forgive her.

"Promise me you won't take it in your head to go out on a limb like that again?"

Sam sucked in her bottom lip and gave him a sad, but knowing look.

"You know that I can't make you that promise, Daniel." He began to interrupt her, but she stalled his words with a firm hand against his chest. "You know as well as I do that as commander of the Atlantis Expedition I might be called upon to make the kind of decisions that I wouldn't ordinarily make. It's what being in command is all about. Sometimes you just have to play it by ear and hope it works out alright."

"But you know you've dodge a bullet this time, don't you?"

"Yes."

Daniel let out a long sigh, his gaze wandering away from that of his fiancée to land upon that of his long time nemesis.

"So I guess the question now is... now that he's here... what do I do with him?"

"The Odyssey's swinging by in eight hours to pick us up. You've got until then to give him the full guided tour." Sam nodded toward the errant archaeologist as he wandered around the base of the Stargate, his hands running over the inner rim of glyphs. "He actually seems quite curious, but then again that could be more to do with the fact that he's realised that he has no other option."

"He's quite literally and figuratively a captive audience."

Sam nodded.

"Show him the dig site, get his hands dirty, show him what real archaeology is all about. In short, Daniel, show him what you've been doing for the past decade."

Colonel Dixon hit one of the glyphs on the DHD sending the inner rim that Pritchard was studying spinning. Startled, the archaeologist back peddled away from the gate with such haste that he tripped and landed on his backside, much to the amusement of the Colonel and his team.

Daniel turned back to Sam.

"So... whose idea was it to tamper with the frequency dampeners?"

"The frequency dampeners?" Sam replied innocently, although the slight flush of her cheeks gave her away. "What makes you think they were tampered with?"

"Because that green and queasy look that Pritchard arrived with reminded me of a certain young Captain who came through the Abydos gate. A certain young Captain, I recall, who immediately remedied that particular quirk of gate travel."

Sam had the good grace to look away.

"Pritchard's arrogance combined with the fact that he doesn't hide the fact that he is contemptuous of the military managed to upset a lot of people at the Alpha site. Any one of them could have taken the dampeners off line."

"Uh huh, but only one person would know how to bypass the redundancies that she built into the system."

Having been busted, Sam held her hands up in mock surrender.

"I plead extraneous circumstances."

"Are you through playing with him now?"

Sam nodded.

"I might be, but I'm not so sure that Dixon and his men are, they're not likely to easily forget some of the things he called them."

"Just keep them in line, Sam, we want him to return to Earth in one piece."

"Which is why I made them leave their zat's on the Odyssey, that way they can't kill him and then hide the evidence."

Daniel looked at her aghast.

Sam winked at him.

"Gotcha, Doctor Jackson."

Tugging on the hand that he still held within his, he walked them toward where Dixon and Pritchard now stood glaring at each other.

"God... how I wish I had some coffee, it would make the prospect of spending eight hours with Adam Pritchard more bearable."

"Then it's a good job that I brought some of Kenya's finest Arabica beans with me then, isn't it?"

Daniel stopped and looked at her, a broad beam of a smile breaking across his lips.

"You're not kidding me?"

"C'mon, Daniel, you've tasted the coffee aboard the Odyssey." Sam affectionately patted the side of her backpack. "Now I make sure that I never leave home without some of the good stuff."

Despite the fact that he was probably breaking a whole host of rules... Daniel pulled her into his arms and kissed her.