Chapter Thirty-Five
"Daniel Jackson."
The archaeologist looked up and squinted through the gloom of his office towards the doorway. "Hey, Teal'c." He glanced down at the numbers in the lower right hand corner of his monitor and watched as they switched from 20:17 to 20:18. Intertwining his fingers over the keyboard, he straightened his arms and pressed his palms out, luxuriating in the feel of stiff joints popping all up and down his arms. He closed his eyes and let his head fall back, alternately rolling his neck and shrugging each shoulder, smiling slightly to himself as the tension fled away.
The Jaffa walked slowly forward through the dimly lit room until he stood just on the other side of Daniel's desk. Although his hands were clasped solidly behind his back in a very familiar gesture, the fall of his ceremonial robes always seemed to surround Teal'c with an aura of royalty and Daniel's smile widened. Teal'c had looked at home in the dull colored fatigues of the SGC from his first moment on base, but these soft robes – wearing them had a way of bringing out the alien's true power, nobility, and strength of spirit as no other clothing ever could.
"Getting ready to head out?"
"Indeed. Master Bra'tac and Vala Mal Doran await me in the 'gate room."
Daniel nodded in a quick acknowledgement, a brief flash of regret lowering his chin so that the light from his desk lamp turned his glasses into opaque pools that shielded his expressive eyes. The team was splitting up again. Even if it would only be for a week or so, Daniel regretted the necessity. Sam had taken off with the Odyssey to work on the circuits they'd damaged on their hell-bent for leather trek across the galaxy to get to Hosta on time. They owed Emerson at least that much. Jack was back in Washington dealing with the standard political fallout that always seemed to accompany a rescue mission these days. He shook his head, still unable to reconcile a government that attempted to balance costs of materials and resources with the value of human lives. Then again, Daniel smiled to himself, he was certainly too close to this particular 'issue' to have any sort of detached logic to bring to the problem, since he was the one who had to be rescued – again. And now Teal'c and Vala had committed themselves to a week among the Jaffa of Bren-Nek-Mok with SG-3 and 9, continuing relief efforts and helping rebuild the devastated society.
He closed his eyes. Morgan had lightened the burdens of his memories of the time spent in both Ba'al's and Thellesan's hands, but some images would never leave him. He allowed the vision of a young Jaffa's dark tortured eyes fill his thoughts, body and spirit already broken beneath the Goa'uld's blunt hand, and uttered another inner plea for forgiveness before he turned his attention outward towards his friend. Standing, Daniel moved to the end of his desk to settle his hip there, arms crossed. He was going to miss his large friend's restful presence, and, if he were honest, Vala's incessant energy. "Vala stole a few hearts there among the people of Bren-Nek-Mok."
"And I will endeavor to assure that she steals nothing else."
Daniel snorted in brief amusement before resting a more serious glance on Teal'c's face. "Kre'bat and his people will make great additions to the new free Jaffa. Especially considering what they've been through." He couldn't help the bitterness that colored his speech.
Teal'c's head tilted slightly. "It has been an eventful few weeks, Daniel Jackson."
Another smile chased the shadows from Daniel's eyes. "You just love the whole understatement thing, don't you?"
The past few days had been healing both for Daniel and the team, peppered with large, boisterous meals and very quiet, very private discussions. After the first day Sam had been able to stop touching him every few minutes, the need to remind herself that he was back and well slowly fading. Daniel didn't begrudge her the tactile cues; they'd been joined at the hip for ten years and her big-sister-protectiveness never came with the same sense of superiority and brashness that Jack's always did. And Jack had gotten a chance to exorcise some of his own inner demons, Daniel reflected - he'd watched the gradual relaxation of his friend's expression that brought with it the impression that General Jack O'Neill might, finally, be okay with this new SG-1 and its leader.
And Daniel had allowed the friendship and warmth to fill up some of his empty spaces in ways that he'd been denying himself for quite some time; the untroubled, glib façade finally dropping away as he let some of the self-betrayal and distrust go and let them all back in. Or, rather, he admitted, let some of them in for the first time. He still had fences to mend with Mitchell – he knew the Air Force officer had been waiting, patiently, until Daniel was ready to revisit those hours aboard Ba'al's ha'tak. As more time passed, Daniel was more and more reluctant to go there.
A slight movement of air brought Daniel's eyes back to his friend's. "Sorry," he murmured, "what can I do for you, Teal'c?"
Another tilt of the head brought immediate forgiveness for Daniel's distraction. "It is necessary that I know that you are fully recovered before I leave."
Ducking his head at his teammate's concern, Daniel shoved his hands into his pockets. "I'm fine – really, this time I am fine," he added quickly. "I don't know how she got away with it, but Morgan burned out the residual effects of the sarcophagus when we melded back in the Hostan temple." He shrugged. "I guess Dr. Lam has another 'miraculous come-back' to log in my medical file." Hopefully the IOA wouldn't use this as one more excuse to pull him from off-world missions – the extensive debriefing he and Col. Mitchell had been 'invited' to in Washington would take place in two days and he hoped the international representatives were ready for a fight.
Teal'c's nod seemed both an acceptance of Daniel's claim of fitness as well as an understanding of what the archaeologist did not say. "Very well. I have no wish to return to the SGC because an emergency has occurred that has left you unconscious – again." The lift to the Jaffa's left eyebrow was decidedly playful.
Daniel kept his own game-face on. "Hey, Vala's going with you this time so you should have no worries on my account." He waited a beat. "Maybe you should watch yourself."
Teal'c looked off in the subtle way that said, if he'd been a different type of man, he'd be slapping Daniel's back in the shared joke. But after only a moment the mood in the darkened office had changed and Daniel felt a heaviness settle around them. He stiffened, anticipating, a frown wrinkling his forehead.
"It was but fifteen days ago that you and I spoke here concerning the future of the Jaffa."
"I remember," Daniel admitted softly. It seemed like a year had passed.
"You said to me then that I must continue to fight for my people, even through bitterness and defeat." Teal'c angled his body so that the two faced each other, and his dark gaze was piercing, even in the low light from the single lamp.
"I did."
Teal'c bowed deeply. "You were correct."
"Teal'c, I-"
One large hand clasped Daniel's shoulder. "You have fought your own battles against these enemies, Daniel Jackson." His grip tightened and released. "Great battles leave great scars – not always where others can easily see them." Teal'c's voice dipped, barely ghosting across the arms-length distance between the two men. "Before I go with Bra'tac to discuss the future of the Jaffa with my brothers, I would have you know that I regret that I did not see those wounds that you have carried."
The frown grew as Daniel struggled against his emotions. The sense of utter failure, of a black abyss that awaited just one misstep before it consumed him, and his belief in the gradual darkening of his soul had receded with Morgan's illuminating touch, yet the memory of these feelings remained. But now they were balanced by others – the light of humanity returning to Sarah Gardner's eyes, reclaiming Vala in a dusty warehouse, Ry'ac – a child condemned to a life of servitude by the parasite within him – married and happy. Daniel had made a fundamental mistake, one that haunted his life from childhood, and had focused on the catastrophes that had heaped together over the past few years, narrowing his view of his contribution to the world around him to the dead faces of friends and colleagues and the blood on his own hands. Just as he'd admitted to Jack after his first encounter with the Ori, just as he'd whispered to Vala on the pier of the lost city of Atlantis, he'd let the loneliness and fear inside.
"Don't blame yourself, Teal'c," Daniel felt a wry grin pull up one side of his mouth. "I'm good at hiding – or didn't you listen to Dr. Lam's report about my super-power?"
Teal'c allowed the comment to pass, locking his gaze onto his human friend's. "A true brother would not have been so easily fooled, Daniel Jackson."
Daniel felt the implied apology deep within, felt it fill him like a strong liquor, bringing brightness and warmth. Before he could react, the Jaffa reached out, his right arm bent at the elbow. "Know that I consider you no less my brother than those with whom I shared the slavery of the Goa'uld. I shall not fail you again."
"Teal'c, you didn't…" Something in his teammate's expression convinced Daniel to let the thought die away. He clasped the outstretched arm and let Teal'c pull him into a one-handed embrace, his friend's strength welcome beneath his hands.
After a moment, Teal'c released his hold and stepped back and Daniel did his best to ignore the moisture in his eyes. The Jaffa bowed his head. "We will continue to hope, Daniel Jackson."
Daniel nodded. "Yes. Yes we will."
vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
Shaking a few flakes of snow from his black wool coat, Daniel stomped booted feet on the small front porch and waited, a slight frown teasing a line between his brows. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, he thought, turning to look up at the lowering sky, grey clouds packed full of snow hovering just out of reach overhead. The sports car in the driveway lay under a thin white blanket – to Daniel's experienced eyes it looked like it needed it, huddled there against the background of a Colorado winter. It was a car made for sunshine, straight, long roads, and the wind in your hair, not the twists and turns and harsh mountain weather of the Rockies.
Daniel felt the warmth rush out of the little house and swirl around his legs when the door opened at his back, and he turned, a cautious smile brightening his face.
"Hi."
"Jackson?"
He shrugged, suddenly at a loss for why he was doing this.
Cameron Mitchell opened the door wider and gestured with the folded magazine in his hand. "Come on in before you freeze."
Stepping carefully onto the hallway rug and wiping his feet, Daniel shifted to one side to allow Mitchell to pass by and lead him inside. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything," he began, eyes taking in the still steaming cup that sat on a table beside a brown leather recliner, a newspaper piled haphazardly on the floor to one side. He'd only been in his teammate's house once before, when Mitchell had the team over for poker night – something Daniel knew the former pilot had hoped would become a new SG-1 tradition. Standing in the doorway that separated the living room from the small kitchen, Daniel distractedly pulled off his gloves and wondered why it never caught on.
"Here, let me have that," Cam reached out and Daniel hurriedly dropped the coat from his shoulders. "And, to answer your question, nope." That one word contained just enough of a sigh to draw the archaeologist's attention from his own thoughts. "Just hanging out, trying to catch up with what's happening here on good old Earth for a change." He moved into the room and laid the damp wool coat across the arm of the sofa closest to the weakly burning fire. "I don't want to be out of the loop when we go meet the bigwigs in DC tomorrow."
Removing his glasses, Daniel folded them between his fingers, to wait for them recover from the temperature change.
"You want some coffee?" Mitchell shifted awkwardly towards the kitchen, wondering why he suddenly sounded like a guy on his first date, not someone welcoming an unexpected friend on a snowy morning. Of course, it might be because he'd never really spent a lot of one-on-one time with Jackson before, never did the beer and pizza nights that O'Neill had no end of stories about. But it probably had more to do with recently finding himself standing between his drugged-out teammate's pointed staff weapon and a Goa'uld sarcophagus.
"Uh, no – thanks," Daniel replied quickly, "I didn't plan on staying."
Mitchell studied the other man carefully. The black boots he was wearing were sturdy, clearly meant for a Colorado winter, but also elegant, up-scale. The dark grey trousers and thick white sweater also looked warm, but too dressy to fit a casual, spur-of-the-moment visit to a co-worker on their day off. And Jackson seemed nervous, edgy, his long fingers playing with his glasses even after the lenses were clear of steam. "Okay, Daniel Jackson is refusing coffee; did you come to tell me I was dying? Break it to me gently, whatever it is," he joked, trying to dispel the uneasy vibe radiating from his teammate.
The answering smile came and went quickly, and Daniel replaced his glasses. "Funny you should…" he started, "…I was just on my way…" He met SG-1's leader's puzzled stare and sighed softly. Habits of a lifetime, an ingrained sense of seclusion, and his usual retreat from sympathetic eyes almost cut off Daniel's access to the right words. This shouldn't be so hard, and yet it was. "I was wondering, if you're not busy, if you'd like to go for a ride. There's something I'd like to show you."
"Look, you don't owe me anything, Jackson," Mitchell quickly replied, hoping to head off any kind of misguided gush of gratitude from the ordinarily well-guarded linguist. "I didn't do anything any one of the others wouldn't have done – and probably better." He'd said some nasty things to his struggling teammate aboard Ba'al's vessel, words that he knew had cut an already wounded man, words that were kindled, if he were being completely honest, not just from a desire to save Jackson, but also from what he recognized as a deep well of hunger within himself. That need to be needed, to belong with SG-1 as securely as the others resurfaced every time Jack O'Neill paid a visit and showed him the unbreakable bond that existed among the team's original members, but especially between the crusty general and the stubborn scholar.
He understood, rationally, that he was accepted, his leadership acknowledged. His SG-1 worked well together, fought tooth and nail for each other, and would stand up to anything to keep a teammate from harm. Loyal, devoted, determined to win, to come home alive, to leave no one behind, to use their talents – individual and combined – to safeguard their world, their loved-ones. But clever phrases Cam had voiced to O'Neill in the commissary before the rescue mission notwithstanding, Mitchell wanted more – he wanted what the original leader of SG-1 had – all of it, all of the back-biting, snarky put-downs, the shared jokes, the one-word conversations. He felt the warmth on the fringes of the team's incendiary friendship, but was still excluded from its heart. And no well-rehearsed speech about thanks and indebtedness that might spout from Jackson's lips would let him in.
Daniel had been watching. "I know."
The two words that dropped into the silence of his living room stopped Cam's inner dialogue and he noticed the slightly raised eyebrows and the understanding playing over Daniel's face. Great, now the guy was a mind-reader.
"You know."
The archaeologist shrugged with studied nonchalance. "It's what we do," he stated firmly.
Something suddenly warmed within him and Cam smiled. "I guess it is." Those four words felt so much better than any heartfelt platitudes.
"So," Daniel buried his hands in his pockets and bounced up on his toes, "are we going?"
Mitchell eyed his teammate's attire. "Do I have to get all dressed up, too?"
The answering smile didn't quite make it to Daniel's eyes. "No. No one there will care what you're wearing."
Quickly securing the glass doors around his fireplace, Mitchell handed Daniel his coat. "Let's go."
The deeply grooved tires of Daniel's Jeep held tightly to the curves of the road, the inch of snow that had already fallen marred by other drivers before them. A few flakes still trickled from the sky, just enough to frustrate the windshield wipers even set on the lowest intermittent setting. Mitchell drew his sheepskin lined bomber jacket around him, tightening the zipper at his neck as Daniel grew the vehicle to a halt on the shoulder and switched it off. The two sat still for a long moment, and Cam simply gazed out at the quiet scene, waiting for Daniel to make the first move.
"It's not far." Daniel removed his seatbelt and opened the door, and Cam was waiting, standing beside the cooling Jeep by the time he'd made his way around the front.
They walked side by side, not hurrying. The snow made it easier, Mitchell observed, covering everything with an even blanket, letting visitors forget that they were treading on cherished memories. In sedate rows, or unevenly in larger mounds and figures, the headstones were uniformly mantled by white, but the archaeologist's course never wavered – this was a well-known path. At the top of a small rise, beneath the shadow of a tender-branched aspen, they halted.
Daniel knelt quickly to brush one gloved hand across a small granite square. Cam glanced down to see a spray of evergreen branches entwined with bright-berried holly still peeking through the snowfall, as if they'd been placed there within the past few days. He raised his eyes to read the words engraved on the simple headstone and swallowed quickly. "Charles Tyler O'Neill." The years that compassed the dates set beneath it were much too few. He watched his teammate pause, one hand atop the tiny monument now clear of snow, and offered up his own short prayer.
A sigh brought Cam's gaze back to Daniel's hands where they'd fallen to sweep the snow from a flat, bronze plaque set close beside the small boy's gravestone. A few lines of writing, clearly Ancient Egyptian, were all that decorated the 4" x 8" marker, and while Mitchell couldn't translate the language, he could guess what they said. Jackson dropped his head, unheeding of the cold wetness seeping into his trousers where he knelt, sitting back on his heels, in the snow. Moments later he stood and absently brushed at his knees.
"Jack offered, not long after I'd buried Sha're on Abydos," he stated, eyes still firmly glued to the reminder of his loss. "He said it would be good for me, to have a place to go to remember her on this world. And I think it was good for him, to think that Charlie would have someone else to remember him, too."
Mitchell swallowed again and nodded, moved by what his teammate was willing to share. "What does it say?" he finally asked.
"Sha're Jackson," he murmured. "Even if that wasn't really her name as she'd recognize it, it was who she was to me." Daniel's smile held a memory. "And beneath it says: 'My heart is light.'" Cam saw him raise his eyes towards the dark sky. "I remember once sitting in my room at one of my foster homes, looking out my window over the cemetery on the next hill. I remember thinking to myself of what a waste of land it was to use it up on people who would never know." The smile returned. "It wasn't until later that I realized that cemeteries weren't for the dead, they were for the living, those of us left behind."
A thought niggled at Mitchell's brain. "So, do you believe in heaven, Jackson?"
Daniel turned towards him, seemingly surprised by the question.
Mitchell continued. "With all you've seen, all the so-called gods you've encountered out there. Where does heaven come in?"
His teammate shook his head. "I don't know."
"You've been Ascended, lived on a higher plane of existence. Is that what's waiting for all of us when we die – Ascendance or nothing?" He'd asked a similar question when Jackson stood shivering in front of the sarcophagus, but he hoped that memory was cloudy behind the bright blue eyes.
"I'd like to think there's a place of peace, a place where we can finally rest." The archaeologist offered after a moment. "I hope that Sha're is there, and Charlie. My parents. Kowalsky. Robert. Martouf." He lowered his eyes to the markers that were slowly being re-covered by the now thickly falling snow. "I told you she was my first mistake."
Mitchell's breath was forced out of him in a grunt. He remembered. Daniel remembered what they'd said to each other on the ship. "It doesn't… I don't," now that they were here looking down at the physical reminder of his friend's grief he didn't know if he could handle it.
"I guess in some ways I'll always blame myself that she was taken by the Goa'uld," Daniel went on as if Mitchell hadn't spoken. "I'll consider myself responsible – for her slavery, her death, as well as for a lot of the other people who have suffered since I first opened the 'gate." He shrugged again. "It's a part of who I am." He turned his body towards the other man, his face open, without masks, without that studied impassive manner Cam had learned to expect. "And sometimes- now and then- I'm going to need a good friend to remind me of the truth."
"Bring you back to Earth," Cam forced some levity into air that was heavy with emotion.
"Just another 'feeble, flawed human'," Daniel nodded, realizing his offer of a connection, a deeper friendship, had been accepted.
"Definitely not an angel."
"Definitely."
The moment passed and the two men felt the bitter cold rush in around them and turned back towards the car. They trudged easily through the growing storm.