What Hurts the Most
Chapter 9: Apologies
It was months before Daniel and Sam finally moved in together at her place. They had decided to live at her house seeing as there was considerably more room instead of Daniel's apartment. There, they moved all of the artifacts that Daniel held in his possession to the shed in the backyard, where it was kept under lock and key. Most of his furniture at Daniel's apartment was sold, except for the very few items that they both wanted to keep.
" Jack's coming down to help finish moving ' your rocks', as he put it. Said that he'd be here in about fifteen minutes," Sam said from the kitchen as she prepared their lunch. " He's bringing Teal'c and Mitchell as extra hands."
" In other words, Jack's going to do the less of the work, letting us ' kids' do the bulk," Daniel said, slipping on a camouflaged muscle shirt. He had been arranging the artifacts into cushioned cardboard boxes as to prevent them from breaking, and to catalogue them as accurately as possible when Sam called him into the house for a lunch break.
Half an hour later, Jack's truck pulled up in the drive. Daniel was already back in the shed, arranging some more boxes that he had brought into the cramped space.
" Carter, where's Danny?" Jack called out through the front door.
" Back at work in the shed," came the answer from inside the kitchen.
At that moment, the phone rang. Sam picked it up after reading the I.D. It was from Cheyenne Mountain. " Hello?" she said.
" Samantha Carter?" a deep male voice asked.
" Yes," she answered.
" I have an important message for Dr. Daniel Jackson. He is to call the community of archeologists as soon as possible," the voice continued.
" I'll tell him right now. Thank you for calling," Sam said and hung up. She headed out to the shed, knowing that the community wanted to apologize to Daniel for turning him into an outcast because of his supposedly outrageous ideas about the pyramids. As she approached, she heard Jack complaining about the amount of boxes that had to be classified in a certain order.
" Jack, this is my way of working, the same way you have a working system, which is hardly a thing at all, considering that you hardly read any reports, or write them for that matter," Daniel said, placing a box in its right area. He noticed Sam as she came into the small space. " Hey Sam. What's wrong?"
" You have to call the community. They called Cheyenne Mountain not too long ago, and would like you to call back as soon as you can," Sam said, handing him the cordless phone, watching his posture as he exited the shed. She knew that he wanted to be alone to talk with them.
Daniel slowly dialed the number that he thought he would never use in his lifetime again. " This is Dr. Daniel Jackson. I understand that the heads of the community called Cheyenne Mountain to speak to me," he told the secretary when she answered.
" Please hold on while I transfer you, sir," the woman said before he was put on hold. A few minutes later, she came back on the line. " You may go ahead, sir. They are listening."
" Hello, Dr. Jackson. I see that you've received our message so soon. You may not know me, but I am the new head of directors, Joey Lionel. Here with me are Julie Steele, Duane Julios, Merle Sydney and Marc Hamilton," a man's voice said across the line.
" Hello, Mr. Lionel. I'm glad to make your acquaintance, though as to why you call me instead to arrange a meeting eludes me," Daniel told Lionel.
" We, as a whole, have feared a total humiliation by the entire public, and resolved to speak to you by phone. I hope that you can understand our predicament," Lionel started to say.
" No, I can't understand your predicament. I came straight out with my ideas about the pyramids and was humiliated severely by all of the community, but I was proven right in the end. You can't even stand a small amount of public humiliation. No, you are cowards," Daniel interrupted. " I don't care what you have to say. If you can't even stand some type of humiliation, I don't think that you deserve to be the head of the archeology community. I have been aware of this longer than you have, so leave alone until you can come down on your own. Good bye." Daniel hung up the phone and brought it back into the house. He was angry, so angry, at the community. Suddenly, a blinding pain tore through his entire body, causing him to cry out. His head was a size too small for his brain. Within seconds, he was unconscious on the floor, unaware of his friends and family surrounding him in worry.
Sam, upon hearing Daniel cry out in pain, rushed inside the house, unprepared for what had happened. It looked as if a small hurricane had passed through. Everything was flung around and in disarray, with Daniel lying curled up in a ball in the middle of it. Stumbling over some of the objects, she made her way to her husband and felt for a pulse. Luckily, there was one, though erratic and steady.
" Carter, what the hell happened in here?" Jack asked when he entered the house.
" I have no clue, sir. But I have a suspicion that somehow Daniel caused this," Sam answered. " I knew that he would be angry when the community of archeologists called instead of coming down or scheduling an appointment. I suppose that this is what happened. He had so much anger in him that it had to come out, and this is how it happened."
" Okay. I think that we should get him back to the base," Mitchell said. " I know that the whole world knows about the Stargate, but they have no clue about the ancients, and they have absolutely no way of handling this if he has another anger attack."
" Indeed," Teal'c said before bending down and picking Daniel up, bringing him to the truck. " This must be what Oma was talking about when she told us that Daniel Jackson had changed for the better? He must now possess the ability to project his feelings."
" That's one way of looking at it, T," Jack said as he slid into the driver's seat. He waited until Teal'c and Sam had installed themsleves in the bed of the truck while Mitchell got in the passenger side. Jack took off when the door to the bed was closed, paying no heed to any lights as he made his way to the Mountain by using the back roads that he had been using for a while now.
The guards at the gate had been busy trying to keep reporters and curious people out of the base when Jack rumbled up, honking his horn to clear a way for the vehicle. Startled, the crowd parted, but immediately tried to enter the base again once the truck had passed.
" I think that they'll need all the help they can get. T, help them to keep these people out. And call for a medical team to meet us at the last checkpoint," Jack ordered his former team-mate as he paused for a bit to let the alien out of the truck bed. " Tell them to hurry."
Teal'c left the bed of the truck, heading to the guard's booth to call for a medical team. Once that was done, he moved over to the crowd, and helped them push back the people who were trying to get in. Though they were intimidated by the large man, they still tried to find a way in, but they were blocked at every attempt.
Arriving at the final checkpoint, Jack pulled up close enough to the elevator to let the medical team have easy access to Daniel when they got topside of the base. When they got there, both Sam and Jack were holding the archeologist down as he struggled to get away from the pain. A few objects were flying around them, amazing the team when the elevator door opened.
" Dr. Lam, I suggest that you hurry up. I really don't think that I'd appreciate it if we started flying around too," Jack said, spurring every one into action. Two orderlies jumped into Jack and Sam's place holding Daniel down as the stretcher was carefully eased under him.
Daniel felt something under him. Unsure about what it was, he bolted upright into a sitting position, giving every one a sudden scare. He found Sam's arms around him as he fought to control his breathing. " What happened?" he managed to say in between gasps of air.
" You passed out, Daniel, and made a mess of my entry way," Sam said, gripping a bit more tightly. " What did the community say to you?"
" They wanted to call and say sorry, instead of coming down and apologizing face to face. I told them where to shove it, but in a more polite way. I hung up and discovered I had a major headache," Daniel whispered. " That's the last thing I remember."
After being asked if he could walk on his own, Daniel managed to get to his feet with a little help from Sam and Jack. He was a little wobbly, but he managed to stay on his limbs. Slowly, they all made their way to the infirmary, where Daniel was checked out to see if there was indeed anything wrong with him, suffering for two hours of poking and prodding. When the examination was done with, he exited the curtained off area and found Sam sitting on an available bed, looking as if she'd just fought with ten men, and lost miserably. He was about to ask what was wrong when she answered him before he could ask a thing.
" I just got a call from Mark. He says he's sorry for putting me down last time and wants to make it up," she said, shaking her head. " How do you accept an apology from a family member when they've hurt you so bad and then have ignored you for five months?"
" I really don't know how to do that, Sam. I just bear with it. I have no living family member, except for Nick, but he's not here anymore. But now I have you," Daniel said, hugging his wife as she cried.
" I want to go and beat the hell out of him," she told Daniel while wiping her eyes to get rid of the tears.
" I'll help you. He made my wife cry last time for no reason, and I think that he deserves to be spoken to. Not to say that I'm familiar in this area of expertise, it's just that that's what I would like to do," Daniel said gently, rubbing her shoulders. " Come on, I got the all clear to get out of here."
They drove to Mark's place, taking Sam's car seeing as they had taken Daniel's to come and go from the base. They left her car there incase of a family emergency and weren't able to take Daniel's if it was broke. Within a couple of hours, they pulled into Mark's drive way. They waited for a minute after knocking on the door before it was answered by a young girl.
" Hello, Aunt Sam. Who's this?" she said.
" Katie, this is my husband, Daniel," Sam answered the girl's question. " Where's your father? I need to speak to him about something very important."
" He's in the study, working on a problem," Katie said and led them to the study, promptly leaving to go play outside with her brother.
" Hello, Mark," Sam said in a stone cold voice, knowing that she would startle her brother with that tone of voice. She continued speaking without giving him the chance to say a thing. " I hope that you had you fill five months ago. I hoped that you would have understood, but you can't even say sorry to my face. You only had the guts to call me so that I could hang up in your face."
" Sammie, I'm so sorry," Mark started to say something before he noticed her condition. " When did that happen to you? I'll mince them to shredded meat if they raped you."
" That's nice to say to some one who made you an uncle," Daniel spoke up, eyes burning in anger.
" You? You married my sister? That abomination who opened the Stargate and endangered my little sister? I ought to," Mark trailed off, when he saw a plastic letter opener fly up from its place on the table, its end pointed straight at him.
" I really don't think that you would like to try that. I've got a habit to come back and bite things in the ass when things go wrong," Daniel warned, slowly putting the letter opener back on the table. He ignored the stunned look on his brother-in-law's face. " You know Sam, I think that he really doesn't care for your well being, or for your feelings any more. I hope that you call us back. I seriously want you to pay for this discomfort." He said to Mark before opening the door and ushering Sam through before closing the door in the other man's face.
Jamming the key in the ignition, Daniel sighed and drove off, away from the place that had almost cost him to lose control of his anger. He thought, ironically, that he could be the best serial murderer, but he quickly squashed that thought from his mind. He wanted to live a life with no interruptions, like it had been five years ago, before he had been shot at his own marriage ceremony.
Gazing sadly out from behind a curtain, Mark watched as his sister drove away with her husband. How could he have been so blind? If Sam was part of a government project that had to be kept secret, he knew that she would have kept it. Why did he have to blow up at her across the phone five months ago? She was only doing her job, and now there was a probability that she would never talk to him again. Daniel, he now knew, could kill him without much of a thought, or leave a clue; no one would know that it would have been him. Letting the curtain fall back to its original place, Mark turned away from the rest of his family. He was truly sorry for everything he had said to Sam. But now there was no way that he could apologize to her. Hearing the cries of his children, Mark hid the tears that threatened to fall and pasted on a smile when the back door opened.
There's that chapter. One more until this story is completed. Please remember to read and review. I want to know what you think of it, and if I should do a sequel.
Thank you to those who read my story and reviewed!