Daniel waited by her side, holding her hand as he watched his wife sleep, thinking about how much she meant to him, how much he loved her. He made a silent promise to himself, and to her, that he would never hurt her again, especially in the ways that he had done so before now. He caressed her hair and her face, whispering declarations of his love to her.
Suddenly, her body began to glow a bright white, illuminating and then engulfing their surroundings. He called out, panicked, and blinded by the light as he turned to where he thought Carolyn would be,
"Carolyn!"
He received no answer, and then all began to fade into black as he felt himself falling, ever falling into eternity. As he did so, after he had got over the initial shock, he remarked to himself that he would never read Alice in Wonderland to Cammie ever again.
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Daniel opened his eyes and saw, much to his shock, surprise and confusion, a dark and initially foreboding night sky. He frowned and then began to cough. He tried to sit up and then hands grabbed his shoulders, steadying him. He looked around himself, startled at the contact as well as his surroundings, and found the rest of SG-1 kneeling around him. Cam and Teal'c holding his arms as he resumed coughing, the Archaeologist asked eventually,his voice hoarse,
"What's going on? What happened? Where are we?"
Cam asked, "Jackson, what's the last thing you remember?"
"Uh… I was with Sam in the Infirmary. She went to sleep and then... she was glowing. What's going on?"
Cam nodded at Vala, who said, "It appears that somehow we've been transported here from the SGC."
Daniel looked around himself once again and then finally noticed that they were all on a beach. He looked around at his friends again and asked,
"How do I even know that any of you are real?"
Jonas remarked, "Well, how are any of us real?"
Daniel muttered as Teal'c helped him to stand, "Good answer."
He asked when he had got to his feet, "Where are we?"
Teal'c replied as he kept his hands on the Archaeologist as a precautionary measure, "It would appear that we are inexplicably off-world."
As Cam and Vala scouted their immediate vicinity, Daniel asked, "Is it just us?"
Just then, they heard the Doctor call from a few metres away, "Hello!"
They all turned, and Cam called back, "Doc, is that you?"
The Time Lord approached them and said with a laugh, "Oh, thank goodness. Seriously, I've never been so happy to see you as I am right now… Wow. Ok…"
Teal'c asked as the Time Lord finally reached them, "Do you have any knowledge pertaining to our present location, Doctor?"
The Doctor shrugged as he looked around himself. He then poked his tongue out as they all looked at him in bemusement, and he said after a moment, raising a finger, "Ah… this tastes like Earth, but not your Earth… Oh, I taste the sixties. Each decade has its own taste and this is definitely the sixties."
He picked up a handful of damp sand and said, letting it drop slowly to the ground, "Yup, Earth… New England, if I'm not mistaken. So… New England, United States, Earth… round about mid 1960's."
Cam remarked with a smirk to Vala, "Looks like the Ancients were hippies after all."
Vala replied, amused, "Well, they're too stiff to have been hippies. Oh, what I wouldn't give for free love."
Jonas, embarrassed, looked down at his feet, and Daniel cleared is throat in embarrassment as the Doctor turned away, and the Archaeologist asked, now worried as he looked around them, "If you're all here, where's Sam?"
The Doctor replied as each member of the team shook their heads, "Haven't seen her… maybe she's here somewhere."
For the umpteenth moment in that half hour, they were shocked once again as a glowing mass of light shot down from the heavens, and took on a human form as it appeared before them. They all gaped in shock on seeing a glowing Sam, dressed in white, and Daniel asked, stepping forward slowly,
"Sam… what's going on?"
Sam took him by the hand with a small smile and said, "It's great being part-Ancient, the subject of a prophecy, and a dash of an age old legend. So much knowledge and opportunities for discovery… Follow me."
The group walked across the damp sand towards a pile of boulders, and Cam asked, uncertain, "You haven't ascended again, have you, Sam?"
Sam replied as Daniel gazed at her in a mixture of wonder and worry, "Remember the Christmas Carol time travelling I told you about? This is it. It just took a lot more power because I had to be specific… and I may have accidentally brought you all along for the ride. Sorry."
Cam remarked, glancing at his wife and then at Jonas and Teal'c, "Hey, no apologies… we're all for rides. The more intrepid and the weirder, the better. All in a day's work. Lead on, MacColonel."
They stopped at the base of the pile of boulders, a yellowish glowing in the cave above, and the Doctor asked, "We're not going to have to climb up that, are we? I mean, I know I'm small, but this is bordering on the insane."
Sam replied as she turned around, "Nope, no climbing involved."
She closed her eyes and her glowing intensified, spreading out until it was touching them, and then it engulfed them as most of them shielded their faces with their arms in fear.
They all opened their eyes a moment later and found themselves in a cave, a lit flashlight in the corner, and a very familiar looking man and woman sat on the floor, the latter very heavily pregnant. Cam raised his eyebrows briefly and then asked, glancing at Sam uneasily,
"They can't see us, right?"
Sam shook her head and replied, "Christmas Carol. This is just a replay of the past."
The Doctor said, glancing from the woman on the ground to Sam and back again, "That woman looks a lot like you."
Vala said, amusement shrouding her fear, "That would be because that is Samantha's mother, and that dashing man with the longish hair is Daniel's father."
The Doctor made a face but said nothing, and Sam kneeled by her mother's side as she listened to the words Grace and Melburn exchanged. Daniel kneeled by her side and gaped at how real his father appeared, much more vivid than the last time he saw him during a spell of time travel. He held his wife's hand in support as they listened to the words of love, their friends standing quietly behind them, and, admittedly, a little weirded out by the implications of it all.
When Melburn and Grace began to make love, everyone shied away out of embarrassment and awkwardness, and Sam froze the scene, rewinding it a little so that they wouldn't all be traumatised for life. The Doctor remarked in disbelief,
"Let me get this straight…"
He pointed at Sam and then Daniel. "Your mother, and your father had a relationship? How did you even get married? There's only one planet I know of that allows for that sort of thing…"
Daniel looked down to curb his resurfacing desire to punch the Time Lord's lights out, and Sam said, giving her husband's hand a little squeeze to let him know that she didn't want him to start getting violent, "We're not brother and sister. We're only related because our parents had a relationship. We've been through this already."
The Doctor nodded, looking a little uncomfortable, and Cam smirked at the Time Lord before Sam waved her hand, and the scene resumed just as they were putting their clothes back on. Daniel looked at Sam in surprise, as did the others, and Sam remarked, a little embarrassed,
"Ancient timing."
She and Daniel kneeled at her mother's side again, touched by the tears and hugs, and the parting words. Then everyone gaped in surprise as Melburn pulled a glowing red stone out of his pocket, giving it to Grace. Daniel said softly as he listened to his father explain where he had found the stone,
"He never wrote about that in his journal."
The Doctor remarked, beaming, "Oh, that's it!"
They all turned to look up at him, and he said, "That's the Star of Ma'at. He found it in Egypt."
They looked back at the Carter and Jackson of the past, to see the stone swiftly enter Sam's mother's abdomen, everyone aghast at the sight and the potential implications. Daniel hugged his now upset wife and said gently as she closed her eyes,
"Ssh, it's ok… you're fine. Nothing happened to you."
They watched, his arm still around her, as an image of a baby in a placenta appeared on the cave wall opposite their parents, followed up by a video of their wedding day. The Doctor said, fascinated by the images,
"Wow… it's telling them the future… your future... well, your past now. That's impossible."
Sam looked around at her friends as her mother, and her father-in-law said their farewells to each other, and she said, visibly upset as Daniel held her hand, "Come on, let's go."
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Back in the present, after Carolyn had notified Reynolds that not only her patient, but the full compliment of Earth's foremost planetary defence team along with the Doctor had vanished from the Infirmary in a burst of white light, the head of SG-3 and acting head of the base, ordered a search of the entire facility by all available SG-teams, along with a scientific team to check 'gate logs and to maintain contact with the Odyssey.
Carolyn paced the Infirmary floor impatiently, worried for Sam's welfare, worried for her husband's, and worried for everyone else's. She sighed and was on her way to her office for the umpteenth time that night when a huge conflagration of white light engulfed the vicinity behind her. She turned around, her back on her office door as she grasped at the handle, fearful, as SG-1 and the Doctor returned, the light fading around them in bluish-white hue.
She got a Nurse to phone Reynolds to get him to call off the search, and she stepped forward, intending to be professional, but instead, threw herself into her husband's arms as she asked, looking around at everyone in relief, happiness and confusion,
"What happened?"
She grabbed Sam quickly as the Colonel collapsed, a stream of white light escaping her mouth, and she and Teal'c got her into a bed, the medic attaching monitors. Daniel asked, worried,
"What happened?"
Before Carolyn could reply, Sam murmured tiredly, her eyes still closed, "Doctor… go to the gateroom in about three seconds."
Suddenly the unscheduled gate activation siren sounded, and Sam continued, smiling slightly, "The TARDIS is back."
As everyone, including the Doctor looked shocked, Reynolds running in, Sam whispered, too tired to open her eyes but smiling nonetheless, "Daniel, I think I figured out how to tap into my new power. I just had to be satisfied, and I am now. We have our little monsters. We know how this happened, what our parents went through… and I still have you."
Everyone else smirked and turned away out of awkwardness as Daniel smiled, touched, and he gently kissed his wife's forehead, whispering as he smoothed her cheek, "Get some sleep, fy Gwenhwyfar. I'll be here when you wake up."