Categories: Daniel/Janet, team, angst and character death—but it turns out okay, I promise!
Season/Spoilers: "Moebius 1 & 2"; "Heroes 2"; little bit for "Threads"
Summary: Step on a bug and change all of human history. I just wish I knew which bug I had to kill in order to make a Jaffa fire a little wide about five thousand years from now.
Author's Notes: Partly inspired by an LJ exchange with Michelle. And to be perfectly honest, aesthetically, I think it would be better with just the first part, angst and all. But, to quote Virginia Woolf, "I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual."
circa 3000 B.C.
In the heat of the day, there was nothing to do but roast in the tent with the flaps open on either side in the vain hope that there would be cross-ventilation. But the closed, stifling air of the tent was better than the blistering sun, especially on the pale skin of three of them. Sam's—or Samantha, as this version preferred to call herself—skin was particularly vulnerable to the sun, and she had taken to covering even her face whenever she went outside during the day.
Daniel surveyed his three companions. Teal'c was deep in kelnoreem, and even though he had gotten used to his Teal'c without a symbiote or the need to kelnoreem, Daniel had to admit that it was pleasantly familiar to watch this Teal'c engaged in his meditation.
Nearby, Jack and Samantha sat next to one another. Jack was reclining with his eyes closed, and Daniel was fairly sure he was actually asleep this time. Then again, it was sometimes hard to tell with this Jack. He was so similar, and then every once in a while, some glaring difference would jar Daniel. The differences were almost more disconcerting because overall, this Jack was so much like his Jack.
Samantha was easier to deal with because she didn't remind him quite so much of his Sam. The difference in name helped. And without the military training, she wasn't as good at controlling all that nervous energy. He watched her now, sitting wide awake, working calculations in the dirt of the tent floor. She squinted at what she had written, sighed, and rubbed it out with her hand. She looked up then and saw him watching her.
"How can you just sit there doing nothing?" she asked.
He shrugged. "I'm not doing nothing. I'm thinking."
"About what?" she asked, clearly eager for conversation.
Daniel waved a hand in the air as though it might help him vocalize his difficult thoughts. "About time, the future. I'm wondering if we've gotten it right—what's it all going to be like in five thousand years?"
Jack's eyes opened to small slits. So he hadn't been asleep after all. "Don't you know what it's going to be like in five thousand years?" he asked suspiciously. "I thought the whole point of all this was to get it back the way you had it before?"
"Well, yes, as far as we know," replied Samantha. "But of course we'll never know for sure. I mean, just by virtue of us sitting here, breathing the air, eating the food, we may be changing the timeline."
"Actually," Daniel said after a moment, "I was wondering whether getting it back the way it was would really be worth it. Maybe things were better off in your timeline."
Samantha looked at him incredulously. "But we were miserable! We were living small, insignificant lives—how can that be better than being intergalactic heroes?"
"I don't know," Daniel sighed. "Maybe you're right. But there was so much pain in my timeline. If some of that could have been avoided…" He shrugged and opened his mouth as if to say something before closing it again.
"What?" asked Samantha.
Daniel pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment. "I was just wondering—I mean, you said that at the SGC, General Hammond was there, Major Davis, McKay. Kawalsky was still alive. And I guess I was just wondering—" He paused. "You had physicals in the infirmary before you left, right?" Samantha and Jack nodded quizzically. "Who was the doctor?" he asked.
Jack looked at him oddly before answering. "Some tyrannical little woman who stuck about a dozen needles in my butt."
Daniel took a deep breath and closed his eyes for an instant longer than a blink. "Janet," he said softly.
"I don't remember her name," Samantha admitted. "But Daniel—the other Daniel—kept flirting with her. He even said it was too bad we probably weren't coming back from the mission because he would have asked her to dinner. Personally, I thought she was a little out of his league."
Daniel's smile was both fond and pained. "She was out of his league. But that might not have stopped her from saying yes."
"Oh!" exclaimed Samantha. "So this Janet in your timeline—you and she were..." She trailed off. "Did you leave her behind?"
"Uh, no, not exactly," he answered, not quite meeting her eyes. "She died. About a year before we came here."
Comprehension and compassion overtook Samantha simultaneously, and for half a moment, he could have sworn it was his Sam. "And if everything goes back to your original timeline, you'll lose her again—or another version of you will lose another version of her."
"Yeah. I mean, we all lost so many people. Janet was the second woman I loved and then lost to the Goa'uld. And we all lost friends, family—Sam's dad most recently. I just—" He trailed off, pinching his nose again before wiping the beads of sweat from his brow. "Who knows what repercussions our just being here will have on the future? Step on a bug and change all of human history. I just wish I knew which bug I had to kill in order to make a Jaffa fire a little wide about five thousand years from now."
There was silence in the tent for a moment, and then Daniel stood up abruptly, grabbed his headdress, and left the tent.
"Daniel, it's too hot," Samantha called after him.
Jack stopped her with a hand on her arm. "Let him go."
2005 A.D.
"Um, college football is played on Saturdays; pro on Sundays; and there are no fish in my pond...at all...where I fish. Uh, I think that covers it for me."
Daniel stared at the tape once more in disbelief. His brain was starting to put the pieces together, but he still found it a little difficult to comprehend. They had gone back in time five thousand years so that they could procure a ZPM for themselves. Some version of himself had died in ancient Egypt five thousand years ago.
He looked up as he heard the familiar clip of high heels entering the room. "Whatcha watching?" Janet asked as she walked up to him.
"Oh, just watching the Egypt tape again. It's really astounding," Sam answered.
"What I can't understand," Jack replied, "is how the hell did we—that we—" He waved his hand at the tape "ever think this was a good plan? Doesn't it seem like there are about a zillion things that could have gone wrong?"
"Yeah," Daniel agreed, wrapping his arm around Janet and pulling her close. "It's little short of miraculous that they managed not to change the timeline."
Sam nodded before standing up and reaching for the box containing the ZPM. "I'm gonna get this up to the lab for analysis."
"No, I'll take it!" replied Jack, grabbing the box from her. "There's a whole room full of geeks up there just dying to get there hands on this. You've got packing to do!" He started to walk out of the room before pausing to turn around. "And that goes for the rest of you, too. And Doc, tell Cassie that she can't bring along her entire wardrobe—there's only so much room in my cabin."
They all laughed, and Daniel, Janet, and Teal'c started to leave the room. "Hey wait a minute!" Sam exclaimed. "On the video he said there were no fish in the pond—why are we going to fish in a pond with no fish?"
"When O'Neill coerced me into fishing with him several years ago, there were indeed fish in the pond," Teal'c said thoughtfully. "Though I still did not understand the point of fishing for recreation."
Sam raised her eyebrows. "So maybe the timeline did change some things," she said slowly. The four of them exchanged looks of vague alarm.
"I'm sure it's close enough," Janet said firmly. "Let's just go enjoy our time off."
The End