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Or Else No Flesh Should Live 4/6
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
mallorys-girl@cinci.rr.com
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And so he came to be standing in one of the lower vent rooms, the sound of Harlan's squawking computer still echoing in his ears, though the shouts of warning had faded. The blinking lights dimmed and stilled, all electric shades of color, and Daniel leaned against the wall, pressing thumb and forefinger against his temple.
"That," pronounced the young man, "was way too close."
"This thing is worse than a used car from 'Honest Jim's'," Jack snorted. "Soon as we plug up one hole, another appears." He reached up absently for the intercom Carter had only recently repaired. "Yo, Teal'c? Everything okay on your end?"
"The situation has calmed, O'Neill," the speaker warbled, poorly transferring the Jaffa's voice, "for the moment."
"See?" the colonel waved a hand as if to indicate the trace of impatience laced through Teal'c's voice. "Eleven thousand years of this."
"Or longer," Daniel pointed out, blue eyes an expressive, painful shade of twilight. "It's funny. Everyone fears death. We spend our lives trying to avoid it, to ignore the fact it walks with us. Now that we can't have it.... I think about it all the time, don't you?"
//He's right, you know. Death, at the dinner table, eating right next to you. In the passenger seat of the car, snoozing with her head resting against the window. Death as innocent and wanton as a gun in the bedroom drawer-- as obvious as a mine buried in the sand. As vague as 'the surface'... walking around, up there.//
"Thank you, Daniel," Jack said tersely around the iron claw at his heart, "You're a regular ray of sunshine." Was that how it would be one day? The fine, wonderful lines of Daniel's body crumpled into inactivity, hair falling over his face, which would be the face of a sleeping, dreaming young boy. A little resentfully, said without meaning to, "I thought you promised."
"Oh!" he looked up quickly, pushing at the ghost of his glasses, "I was just thinking. I mean-- no! I wouldn't. Jack... it wouldn't be fair to you. To any of you. I was speaking academically."
When his relief had been folded away, Jack murmured, "Meaning of life stuff."
"Yeah," Daniel rolled his shoulders. "We'll never see beyond 'life', not now. I always sort of wondered what death would be like. Which culture was right, and to what extent."
The colonel only found it in himself to grunt an affirmative, having once courted Death in his son's bedroom, kissing her cold hands. There were other hands in his now-- he realized he'd taken hold of Daniel's slim, artistic fingers, was studying their craftsmanship with a hunger he knew was in his eyes. He kept his head bent down, held on, and there was no quickening of the pulse or breath, because they had none. He thought, perhaps, he felt Daniel shake a little, like the sweet, high vibration of a violin.
//I know myself, right now. I know who I am, because of this feeling.//
The pain in... behind the wiring of his ribs surprised him, a want. He turned Daniel's hands over in his own, palms up now, tracing-- here!-- the love-line, the geometry of human superstition, and the ring finger where-- on a human-- there would be a elegant vein straight to the heart.
"Jack." The feeling of Daniel's eyes on him was keen, but Jack found he couldn't stop the desire to lift those hands to his lips. They were only an inch away, those slim digits. Pianists hands, the colonel thought dimly, could see them playing over the ivories, over sand and over etchings of clay that had, previously, only been touched by the dead. Quiet suddenly, he let Daniel go, feeling as if the pieces of their broken tableau were on the floor around him, awaiting clean up. Unworthiness sloshed between his wires--that same fluid Fraiser had extracted. He was thinking about eternity, the preservation of those beautiful things that were Daniel, even as he left the younger man to tidy the mess.
#(#)#
He did want something to hold onto-- the reasons were two fold as he sat hunched over on the stairs in some nowhere sector. The feeling of Daniel's skin beneath his was vivid and tantalizingly addictive; but Jack was casting back now in his memory, the moonbeam line of a fishing lure, searching.
Solace.
And the silver sheen of a fishing hook. The stars reflected on the lake.
The stars were his first love. The heady, idealistic love that refused to be squashed, to be thrust away, to be confined simply to a few years of his life. The fickle lover, drawing him in and then thrusting him away just as quickly, but so mesmerizing he couldn't take his eyes away.
Cassiopeia. Andromeda. The water carrier. Pegasus. The lion.
Bright points of light; but so much more. Worlds-- skies thousands and thousands of miles away from a mother who ignored him and a father who loved but was away too much for it to stick. He'd wanted to feel the wind on Mars-- on anywhere that wasn't Earth. Where the grass wasn't green.
Abydos.
Under the hot, double suns, he'd imagined that child-self walking out of the pyramid, running, tearing across the sand of another world. He'd seen, just out of the corner of his eyes, Daniel's held breath and wide eyes. He'd held down his own whoop of triumph and ordered the men to set up camp.
He should ask Daniel about that-- if he'd wanted a piece of the night sky, too, growing up. It seemed to Jack that he could easily imagine Daniel lying next to him on the ripe-summer-evening roof, painfully young. Arms folded behind their heads, eyes on the same places where the Goa'uld fought and the Nox hid and the Asgard did God-Only-Knows What.
He wanted a book to hold in his hands now. A comforting weight; that was something he could understand about Daniel. How it felt to hold a well-loved tome in your hand. Jack's smile was a little bit of melancholy lemonade-- not too sweet and a little icy when the sun was too bright. Now, a story's ghost crept up against him so that he was no longer alone on the stairs.
As a boy-- a boy he'd never really been-- he'd read Ray Bradbury. Gee!-- didn't every boy want to climb on one of that man's rockets? Mars was like Egypt, filled with monoliths mindful of the fact Earthmen could only toil and made temporary impressions on the red sand. There was a story (aptly named "The Long Years") that had made what had then seemed to be a fleeting impression on his boy-child mind. Now that, ridiculously, the story was in so many ways his life, he found he remembered whole lines. Remember the chill it had brought him as he closed the book and laid his head on the pillow for the night.
//When you get lonely--
Remember, remember Jack-- well, it was sometimes Johnny, then-- this story, crazy science fiction. Nothing like Ma's real science, her distracted eyes, her curve-scripted notes. Well. Can't stand scientists, got to tell you. But.
This story; a man all alone on Mars, with wife and daughters and son dead-- what does he do? Quick, to the workshop! Life seems too long with nothing to do and only too short with a goal. Wires and tin and plastic covering, wigs and glass eyes and voice modulators. And... TA-DAH! Feast your eyes. The likes of which you'll never see again. Wife and daughters and son, reborn from the ashes of an engine.
(Eleven thousand years!)
Oh, they'll live forever. But the maker is only human, and there comes a time when there are five graves instead of four. And the wife who is not a woman but a facsimile thereof... she raises her eyes to the Martian night sky, looks longingly at a green star. But HE didn't make her knowing how to be lonely, and HE didn't make her so she would know how to cry. All she can do is stare at a place she's never been, and doesn't even really want at all.//
Jack wanted to tell himself he'd stop dwelling on this. That he'd "wake-up" one day and decide that (for knees that didn't ache and for hair that would never gray further; for fear of death lifted and the ability to leap from tall walkways in a single bound) the trade off wasn't so bad.
You can't change things, soldier. So just get over it. Adapt.
If he followed that set of orders, he'd been drawn surely and sweetly into breaking another.
You see, sir, I got this problem, here.
Stiffly, the colonel reached up to touch his own cheeks, felt liquid slide against his finger tips.
//Well, soldier. Looks like _you_ know how to, after all.//
#(#)#
"Carter," he said by way of greeting, stepping into the alcove clustered with computer screens and symbol-ladden keyboards. The light filtering through the wires overhead was blue-- too blue, too light, as all the illumination around here was. Neon.
"Just a second, sir," Carter sang out, the upper half of her body hidden under a series of panels. After a moment, she pulled herself out and unconsciously shook her blond hair. She tilted her head in such a way that you could not tell her eyes were blue, and Jack thought-- not for the first time-- "she looks like Sara." He had done her a disservice, and he knew it.
On the heels of that thought came, 'I don't love her'. No surprise there; he'd pushed Carter when because he couldn't push Sara-- and if he handed her the illusion of some further-than-brotherly tenderness, it was because he was afraid he would hand the real thing to the young man standing beside him like he _belonged_.
"Just came to see how you're doing," he shrugged his shoulders, studying the expressions on her careful face. No, then-- her not-the-right-shade blue eyes were cool shimmering with excitement. This would not be an issue. Though, he imaged, thinking vinegar-laced thoughts about his Organic, it would become an issue for _him_ if he didn't look the truth in the face soon.
//We hold these truths to be self evident.
(Daniel--)
D'uh.//
He realized, a little alarmed, that he was very close to making a decision.
"Teal'c just went down a few levels to see if he can find me a wire with the proper insulation," Carter explained dutifully. Her fingers flew over the keys, both those with familiar and unfamiliar markings. "Sir-- this is amazing! The level of technology here is at least three hundred years past our own, if not more so. I know this place _looks_ shoddy, but that's because it's not well taken care of. Once Daniel deciphered the original language of Harlan's people, we had their records to look at. And--"
"So that's where Daniel's been," Jack said absently, meandering over to gaze at the screens. "You've been busy, I take it."
Carter ducked her head, "Yes, sir."
Tapping a simple projection, he turned to her, "What's this?"
"Oh--" she moved to the keyboard, lifting the contrast on the screen. He could see the two, short vertical white lines on either side of the screen, as well as the two in the middle, and the longer one dividing the black space in half. "That was an exercise I did to help me remember some of my basic computer programming skills. It's been a while, so I just programmed a game, to make sure what I learned is compatible with this type of system."
Blinking, Jack looked at the screen with wider eyes, "My God, Carter! This is Pong!"
There was laughter, low and indulgent, behind him; he turned to see Daniel in the doorway, looking like a mischievous little boy.
"Daniel!" he moved his hands, "Carter reinvented Pong!" Sitting heavily on a nearby chair, he pulled himself up to the keyboard, staring at it with some annoyance. "How do you work this thing?"
"Here," Daniel leaned over him a pleasant warmth at his back, "these two," he tapped the keys, "move the left paddle. Up and down respectively. These two move the right one. You can do one player or two-- it's set up for two right now."
"This was your idea?" Jack asked wonderingly, eyes on Daniel's in the black reflection of their faces.
"Well," Daniel said sheepishly, "Sam was looking for suggestions."
"This is awesome!" Jack praised, looking up when Teal'c's large frame dominated the threshold. "Hey, T. Come here and pull up a chair. Carter and Daniel made Pong!"
The Jaffa raised a customary eyebrow, siting patiently while Jack explained the game and Daniel put in bits of trivia no one would remember later. Tapping the keys quickly, Jack watched the little white dot sail across the screen, almost desperately relieved to have something to do, something that wasn't a pipe to fix or Harlan's instructions to carry out. Teal'c's enthusiasm for the game gained a little, but some time later Daniel took his seat. Jack smiled cheekily as his score climbed somewhere in the four hundreds; when Daniel missed the ball, he cursed colorfully and fluently in languages Jack didn't know. It was interesting to hear the younger man's voice over the words-- he spoke with such clarity. Sam had turned back to whatever project had absorbed her attention, touching wires and switch boards like familiar lovers. Across the room, the two men were cloistered together, elbows bumping if they pressed the keys too energetically.
Block. Bounce. Catch the ball at the bottom of the screen.
Arms pressed against each other-- Daniel gave him a little cheating shove, which of course deserved a shove in return. The ended up on their asses, laughing, while "GAME OVER" flashed red and exasperated against the glass.
Now Jack paused, helping Daniel to his feet, selfishly savoring the warmth and weight. They held gazes too long under the shady neon lights, with Carter watching them and Daniel scratching behind his neck sheepishly.
"I've lost track of time," the younger man seemed to blush-- though Jack wasn't sure if it was real, or something his own mind supplied-- throwing an apologetic glance to Sam. "I guess I ought to go rest. Tomorrow, Harlan's gonna show me the old personnel quarters. I'm very interested to see the sort of society that developed on the brink of global disaster, not to mention one put through such radical environmental and psychological cha---"
"Yadda," Jack said good-naturedly, ushering Daniel with his hand pressed to the lovely curve of the linguist's back. "Go on, Boy Wonder. I've got something to discuss with Carter."
Daniel cast suddenly still-water blue eyes towards Sam, "Alright." Said softly, a little resigned, while he bit his lip. Jack watched the expressions on his friend's face with care, suddenly realizing he'd played the situation to his advantage. He'd never looked for Daniel's reaction before, though perhaps that had always been the goal.
//Even as wire and mesh and battery power-- you're a real shit, O'Neill. Class-A, all the way. You want it bad, all those things you see in Daniel when the guy's too wrapped up in whatever discovery to notice. You want it and it's not his fault; no, not his fault you don't got much to give in return either. You could drink him down to the clear bottom of the glass and still only yell for more.
You do want it, you shit. No one's back to flay for that but your own.
You'd never make it like this without....
I feel so lonely.
The radio turned down low on a winter's night. After Christmas, when the sky's too cold and the snow's really slush.
So lonely, baby. So lonely, I could die.//
For a moment, Jack almost reached out to grab Daniel's sleeve, to somehow take whatever-it-was back; but Daniel was trotting out the door, down to wear Teal'c had retired on the benches, where the green lights blinked and watched.
"You wanted something, sir?" Carter asked, hands returning to her work. Her voice was a particular note-- one that rang with her preoccupation. It occurred to Jack that he'd only ever heard Dr. Fraiser able to snap Sam out of it.
"Ah, yeah. Got a question."
"Hmm?" She frowned at a troublesome blue switch, "If it's about the Pong, sir, I won't delete it now. Not if you like it so much. If you find a room you like, I'll put a computer with it in there."
"A room?" he asked with a creeping feeling of finality.
Sam looked up briefly, "Yes. We don't have to be in the... benchroom for the recharge to work, and certainly not for our so-called sleep cycles. Teal'c and I have been scouting around on level 12. Harlan says none of those rooms are in use anymore and since..."
"Since we're stuck here forever," Jack said flatly. Space-- she and Teal'c (and Daniel, knowing Daniel) were going to find a room, a space and call it their own. Fill it with things they'd make from scraps, with basic computer games and things they were fiddling with. Watching his 2Ic's fingers dancing over the circuitry, and then the way she triumphantly snapped the lid shut, he felt a sick kind of happiness for her.
"Carter! You're-- you're _happy_!" The words came out with a fire and accusation he hadn't known were hiding under his tongue.
"Not _happy_, sir," Carter looked almost caught, "_occupied_. These systems are frankly amazing and... I have something of the same complaint Daniel had. Even though I got to use my skills in the field--" it disturbed him, how easily she adjusted to using past tense, "-- I never really got to finish anything. We'd find technology I'd really want to get a look at, and I'd have to turn it over to someone else. I get to figure all this," she made a gesture with her hands, "out. I wouldn't have chosen this, but..."
"Make the best of a bad situation?" O'Neill grinned sardonically, filing his bitterness away for later. Feeling like an indulgent father, he asked, "How many projects do you have going now, Carter?"
"Ah--" her eyes flickered, "twelve."
"Mind making that lucky thirteen?" At her inquiring eyebrow, he continued, "Daniel misses taste. Could you, I dunno, rig something up so he'd get a..." Jack trailed off, a little too embarrassed to put forth the whole idea.
"The sensation, a simulation!" Carter snapped her fingers, "That could work. I hadn't even thought of that. But it's quite possible, and really the only way we'll ever taste anything again. I mean, despite the fact our systems make us, in most respects, function like humans, we certainly can't eat and drink. Boy," she gave a quirky little smile more directed at someone in her memory than at her commanding officer. "Chocolate. Coffee. Cake. Things we'll miss." She laughed with some measure of fear, and he thought that she had just been faced again with the reality of their situation. "I'll never gain another ounce!"
"Of course that's the first thing you worry about," Jack smirked. "So you can do it, right?"
"I'll certainly give it a shot!" Sam was already rooting around in her varied piles, probably looking for something to take notes on, "Thanks for the idea, sir!"
"Just, do me a favor," said casually enough. "Don't tell Daniel. I want it to be a surprise." His voice was steady and his eyes betrayed nothing; but he thought, in that moment, that she could _see_. And, before she could answer with caution and curiosity, he took his leave.