Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Spoilers: For SG-1, for all seasons; more pertinently for Atlantis, through Season four's Lifeline.
Notes: Crossover fic. Just something that was bothering me for a while. The last section simply had to be written for my peace of mind, and it couldn't stand without what preceded it. A bit Daniel/Vala if you squint, a bit Daniel/Elizabeth if you squint harder.
Ab urbe condita is Latin, and means from the foundation of the city. (There is a slight mistranslation on my part that makes 'foundation' into a noun rather than a verb function.)
Also, a language warning for one word they can't get away with saying on the show.
The Goa'uld text in front of him was not one that was particularly important.
"This is what you've been wasting away over the last two weeks?" Vala had asked somewhat incredulously two days ago when he'd caved and asked her for help, tossing the brittle papyrus sheaf carelessly to the side to his panicked – but hardly surprised – lunge to keep it intact.
Since SG-1's dissolution, much of his time had become free again, and Daniel felt free to unleash the archaeologist within, to set loose the inner linguist, and spare no man in his path (vernacular specific puzzles notwithstanding.) He'd had it coming for ten years, this bliss that would be monotony to anyone else; this slow unwinding over languages he hadn't had a chance to study in years; this measured sifting through Catherine's largely untouched collection.
And for once, the klaxons that blared in the hall did not demand his personal attention.
Vala had refused to elaborate, though it was obvious she could if only by the way her stance curved to lean against his desk, more unconsciously tolerant than deliberately sensuous.
"As I understand it, darling, the whole point of your little exercise here is that you don't go completely wonko," she told him. "At this particular moment you seem to be heading in that precise direction over a pithy piece of worthless Goa'uld literature that details, in excess, the specific ways whichever one of them preferred to be worshipped."
"Wouldn't it be easier to just tell me, then?" he'd demanded.
She'd crossed her arms and tossed her hair in response. "I'd just be aiding your habit, then, wouldn't I?"
Daniel sighed in exasperation. "Now I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Well, it's all an exercise in the art of being able to 'let go', right?" she'd air-quoted at him, with that expression on her face.
It was enough to make him want to strangle her – although that wasn't the first time that urge had surfaced (nor, he suspected, would it be the last), and that was probably her point.
The last time he'd stayed in his office until five thirty in the morning, he'd been trying to bring the meaning of three into one out of the twelve books strewn across his floor and desk for cross-reference, computer simulations running behind him and the fate of the galaxy hanging in the balance.
Some tiny part of him told him to stop being an idiot.
"Daniel."
He looked up to find Jack in the doorway, blank-faced, and Daniel's mind sounded a silent alarm.
"What's with the beard?" Jack asked, pantomiming an evil-twin beard with his forefinger and thumb.
"Five o'clock shadow," Daniel lobbied back, nodding at the clock. Wanting to forestall any other small talk, he asked, "What's up?"
Jack sighed heavily and sat down on a stool. "Suppose you haven't been up on the news around here, lately," he commented, gesturing again to Daniel's beard.
Daniel only shook his head slowly. "Jack…"
"Forty-six hours ago we lost contact with Atlantis," he said without preamble. "They were under attack by their galaxy's replicators. Three hours ago they were finally able to reestablish contact."
"And?" Daniel prompted, knowing there had to be more to the story than this.
"New home planet, they're getting used to the new scenery," Jack replied, slouching back with none of his usual nonchalance. "Carter's out there now, from Midway. Two fatalities from exposure to the energy beam used in the attack. Weir's missing in action."
For a minute, Daniel thought it was a bad joke and sat waiting for the punch line. It didn't come. "Fuck," he swore under his breath.
"Yeah," Jack quietly agreed.
"How the hell did that happen?"
"You heard about her episode with the nanites a while back?" Jack asked, and Daniel nodded.
"Not from her personally, but I don't imagine I'm exactly the person she'd talk to about something like that."
"She took the blast worse than anyone. McKay made the call to reactivate the bastards to save her life. Sheppard's furious."
Ab urbe condita, Elizabeth had once quoted at him in a subject line of a message, the first in a series he'd asked her to send during her first trip back to Earth. He'd felt the inherent meaning: From the foundation of the city, I write you this message; this research is from the foundation of the city; from the foundation of the city do we reinforce it.
We are the foundation of the city had been a meaning unintentionally submerged in her words, an unassuming and unpretentious statement of fact, her awe and terror of her position and its consequences summarized by one fragment of thought.
"It was a recon mission that shouldn't have gone right at all," Jack continued, uncharacteristically quiet. "Sheppard and his team needed her intel to have any chance of pulling it off. There was a side mission to reactivate some command code, and they ran out of time. Left her behind to bring back a working ZPM."
Daniel knew without asking that it had been on her own orders she had been left behind.
"Who's running the city?" he asked, looking up.
"Sheppard," Jack replied shortly, unintentionally.
The silence was damning.
oOo
At least three messages had been sitting ignored in his inbox, sent with the last few databursts from Atlantis, Daniel having only skimmed them once to assure himself that the survival of Atlantis wasn't hinged on his help. He opened the first when Jack left to go to his first meeting with the IOA.
The opening was, as ever, succinct and definitively Elizabeth:
Daniel
I didn't get more than a quick glance in at this before I sent it off, but I thought it might be more helpful in your neighborhood than it is collecting dust in mine.
When he'd caught her in the hall three years ago to broach talks of his joining the expedition, there'd been a year of silence between the two of them, their previous contact having amounted to two hectic weeks in which she'd reluctantly commanded the SGC, and – if it counted – his referencing her work in drawing up a treaty with the Tok'ra nearly four years before he'd even met her.
Her dark hair was curlier and unabashedly untamed, her green eyes wiser and wearier, sparked by an added determination. She'd smiled then, half-familiarly, calling him Dr. Jackson to his Dr. Weir.
Only later was she more candid, once it became clear that yes, SG-1 was disbanding (it didn't) and yes, he would be leaving with her and her senior staff on the Daedalus in two and a half week's time (he didn't.) There was a shared fascination of Atlantis, an idea to him, a reality to her; a shared awe that brokered the common ground between the two of them on those late nights before they left, when Elizabeth admitted to shamelessly poring over what she could get her hands on in the free time she'd had that first year.
At the time, she'd been comfortably seated in a darker corner of his office and cradling one of his ceramic coffee mugs in her hands, surrounded by the half-packed boxes that contained eight years of his life. She seemed to sense the weight of those boxes, and called him more than once on his readiness to actually leave.
He countered her every time. She'd tilted her head, seemingly looking through him, and let it go, calling him Daniel to his Elizabeth.
"In any case, I'm betting that what free time I had then will now be consumed pulling double the administrative duties I've had," she had said ruefully, thrown into shadows as she leaned back in her chair. "There was an advantage to being cut off from Earth, despite the way it seemed at the time."
"Less paperwork?"
"It's a universal conspiracy," she'd agreed with a glint in her eye.
Two weeks later, Daniel made the recommendation to allow Vala Mal Doran through the gate, and subsequently missed the Daedalus and the chance, once again, to go to Atlantis. Cam said a pretty brunette had stopped by to 'offer her condolences' while he'd been passed out in the infirmary.
(He'd sworn he'd heard her smirk, apologetic amusement and all.)
Vala herself, raven-haired and leather-clad, had been sulking in his office with a requisitioned magazine when he'd all but begged Elizabeth to send what she could when she had time.
"Anything in particular?" she'd asked on the monitor, ensconced by the bustle of her own control room.
Anything. Everything."Whatever catches your eye as useful or pertinent or otherwise interesting," he'd replied offhandedly, hands in pockets, and known she'd understood by the way she smiled.
He'd had the first communiqué with the next monthly status report.
Ab urbe condita, she'd headed it, full of a wealth of language and history and culture, valuable both as it stood on its own and in juxtaposition with Earth's. Treasures, these, was her unwritten thought; and he'd known it only because it had been his as well.
oOo
We'll be paying a visit to your fair city soon, actually, he'd written Elizabeth with his analyses of her notes a year later. More soon, if this pans out, though I'm sure you'll already be in the know by the time this gets to you.
You make me sound like some sort of goddess-protectorate, she'd written back wryly, rejecting an unintended and slightly ironic image of Athena Nike in gold and ivory. Though I'm flattered by the comparison. See you soon. Try not to go too stir-crazy aboard the Daedalus.
His first sight of Atlantis itself was not something he'd likely ever forget in his lifetime; bright reflections of a still brighter beacon on the distant horizon. With its vague reflections of assurance and beauty, its lights above rippling water, it seemed like an island without land, a drifting pharos, unable to guide any but those that were pulled with its current.
Elizabeth's office seemed to be a microcosm of the whole, its light functioning as a beacon within a beacon, a near-constant day and night.
Elizabeth herself tended to wax philosophical in the later hours of the night, he'd found from overheard conversations and past experience; and while he knew that she stayed up with productivity in mind – much like him – he doubted late night visitors honestly bothered her.
So he'd found himself the last night of their stay, tension thrumming through him like the oceans currents beneath the city, jarring him with their unfamiliarity as much as they seemed to soothe her.
"This glass city of yours," he'd remarked, a throwaway comment tacked onto the end of something much graver and heavier, hard on the heels of Ganos Lal's disappearance.
"It's even more beautiful at night," she'd replied, her full attention on him, her body language saying what she could not, sensing like him the raw quiet of the city, shrouded in subdued tones and disquieting moods.
He'd taken her hint, feeling her eyes on him as he found his way onto the balcony behind the atrium, greeted by lights and reflections of lights, and glass, glass, everywhere he looked, smooth and pure and untainted. It marked an unhidden transparency and fragility, and indicated an inner strength lent by the people it protected.
It was like a balm, though it hadn't been enough. Vala had eventually found her way outside, and they'd stood close in the silence that, after a few attempted words, had gone nearly unbroken.
Elizabeth had waved good night from her office, a small form in red from where could see her across the catwalk. She'd held his gaze from a distance, her eyes like hope, and he'd started to understand.
There'll be a day when you feel too old for your job, too, he remembered thinking at the time, disillusioned and dejected after the events of the day, two years younger than her in age, but eight years older in experience.
The wash of waves on the piers, the whole of the color spectrum caught in a gentle rush of sea spray. He'd left even as he began to understand, Elizabeth nodding at her from her office, soundlessly, through distance and glass.
(John Sheppard, sitting now in her vacant office and staring blankly through glass walls; ab urbe condita; a mockery of her words echoing in the empty space in the wake of their losses; we are these foundations, these ties that bind.)
There was repetition in the telling, in the damning.
"You're not still at it, are you?" Vala's exasperated voice broke into his thoughts from the doorway.
He didn't look up. "This is odd…"
"What is?" she asked carefully.
"It's Ancient," he explained, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, watching her slowly move closer as she sensed his mood. Elizabeth's shorthand glared at him from the margins, stark in black and white, Times New Roman, font size nine.
"In the Latin form it must have taken later it's Si mortui non resurgent manducemus et bibamus cras enim moriemur," he went on.
"Which means…" Vala prompted.
"'If the dead do not rise, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we may die.'"
"Life is quick," she summarized softly in the sudden stillness.
"It's from Dr. Weir," was all he said; and she was silent, obviously having known what was happening before he did. He almost asked why she hadn't told him, but didn't.
She's a real spitfire, Elizabeth, Jack had once remarked appreciatively before going to fight Washington for her. She'll do just fine.
"Come on," she said quietly, turning off his monitor and stepping away. "You need to get out of here."
Outside the door the klaxons wailed; and the dead did not rise.