XXVII
Jack found the kid sat slouched on the corner of a low balcony, one leg dangling down to brush the surface of the water.
It hadn't been hard to work out where his clone would be. He'd noted this place himself earlier. It looked like a prime fishing spot.
Jack took up a position on the opposite corner - same pose, though not quite so loose-limbed. His knees didn't swing over a balcony quite so easily these days. On the other hand, his legs were longer. He dipped the toe of his boot into the crest of a wave, just to prove that he could. An observer wouldn't have thought the boy was even watching, but Jack knew better.
A year or two more and that height difference would be gone, if Jack's own growth spurts were any guide. Then things would be even weirder than they were already. Not that weird was news.
They both sat in silence for a while, watching the waves.
"Casey okay?" The kid broke the silence in the same moment words were forming on Jack's tongue, which shouldn't have been a surprise.
"Clean and clear." As if either of those words held half the truth. Casey was a good soldier, but Jack knew the eyes of a man who'd have nightmares the rest of his life.
If the kid looked up at the same time he did, he could see them now.
Casey had lost half his team. Jack had held onto his through fire, flood and alien invasion, even now that they went out into the big bad universe without him there to hold their hands. He would have liked to take some credit for it, but Carter was just too smart to die, Teal'c was too damn cool, and Daniel, swear to God, had to have a bungee cord sewn into the back of his jockey shorts the number of times he'd been back and forth.
He'd kept his team. The kid hadn't.
Jack had stopped believing there were things he couldn't live without, because he knew there were and he'd already lost them. There was nothing left in the world that he couldn't survive, because to let anything else take the crown of being his breaking point would be an insult.
So the kid had survived. Made some friends. Got good grades. What did any of that prove?
"So you're sure?" Jack asked.
The kid gave him a sardonic smile. "I don't know. Are we?"
There was no way his smile had ever been that obnoxious. It had to be something the kid had picked up in high school.
"They're not going to like this back home," Jack warned.
The kid shrugged loosely. "I hear there's this new General in town might have my back."
"Yeah, but he's not as good as they think he is."
"Was he ever?" He flicked his eyebrows up archly.
There was no need to answer that, so they both sat and looked out to sea. It was peaceful. Atlantis would be a nice place to retire to. Aside from the soul-sucking aliens, of course, but hey, what place didn't have its niggling little drawbacks?
Jack knew full well that he'd never get to retire. He'd known it for years. Once he'd figured on going out in a blaze of glory - or a blaze of something, any rate. Now he'd been scaled down to pegging out at the desk when his heart gave out twenty years from now. Or ten. Or five. Or three. Letting SG-1 go out alone every week was a bigger strain on the ticker than any number of exploding spacecraft and Goa'uld torture chambers.
Wasn't much of a future, though it was probably better than he deserved. But the kid's might be different.
Good luck to him.
Jack left his other self out on the sun-drenched balcony, and headed back into the city.
It happened in less than a second. One brutal thwack divested her of her weapons, a second knocked her from her feet, and a third delivered to her midriff ensured that she would not be rising to challenge this opponent again.
There was a collective groan of sympathy from the assembled marines. Teyla simply smiled, and accepted the hand that was extended to her. She was hauled from the ground with the same ease she herself would have raised a young child.
"An interesting technique," she allowed, bowing her head and smiling. The big Jaffa warrior inclined his in turn, and gave the faintest ghost of a smile.
She had known he was a Jaffa without needing to be told; that the brand on his forehead marked him as a First Prime in the service of Apophis, who was weak and dead; that he was Shol'va, godless, free.
Her mind was filled with many thoughts that were not hers these days.
The burrowing snake had been... unpleasant, to say the least. Teyla had not known what to expect when it was held out over her, although she had known enough to struggle and try to clamp her mouth shut. The slimy sensation of the creature clawing its way down her throat was as nothing to the feeling of being released from her bonds - only to find her body was not hers.
The creature had sought to silence her, at first with threats and proud words, and then with pain. She had pretended to be cowed and silent, and instead entered a state of meditation, where she found she could touch the creature's thoughts as easily as it ransacked hers. It was young and arrogant, and once it thought her vanquished did not check on her again. She had pushed back through its memories of subjugating Lieutenant Brand, through vague recollections of endless time spent in the womb, and then found herself choking and drowning in a sea of unimaginable foulness. The Goa'uld had not lived long, but it remembered a thousand lifetimes - all of them spent in terrible deeds.
It would surely have used her body to do more, if not for Major Sheppard's perceptiveness. Teyla saw him hovering on the sidelines like a mother vrak watching over its chicks, and smiled fondly. He took it as invitation to approach.
"Lulling him into a false sense of security, right?" he said, as Teal'c politely withdrew.
"A technique I learned from you," she countered, straight-faced.
She was confident she could defeat Master Teal'c... eventually. For now, she was content to get in as many losing bouts as time allowed before his departure. To lose against a warrior of greater skill was a far more valuable experience than merely to defeat them by good luck.
That was a point of view she had yet to sway Sheppard towards, and suspected that she never would.
"Always leave them guessing. That's what I say." Sheppard gave a crinkled smile, and offered her his arm.
Feeling suddenly clean and carefree for the first time since the creature had invaded her mind, Teyla smiled back and linked her arm through his. As they approached the exit doors, she could see Lieutenant Ford and Doctor McKay waiting outside. They were clearly waiting for her and the Major, though caught up in their own conversation. McKay's face was turned away, the set of his shoulders petulant, and Ford was grinning.
"I think someone has a crush," she heard him say, his tone conveying the teasing even though the term was unfamiliar.
"Honestly, that's so juvenile," McKay retorted, sounding harassed.
"You asked me to pass her a note!"
"It was a correction to her calculations on ZPM subspace topography!"
Ford's grin widened. "Yeah, but I asked Doctor Zelenka, and he told me that's nerd for, 'wanna come play in my treehouse?'"
"That's- wait, you had a treehouse?" McKay was diverted. "I always wanted a treehouse. I drew up some architectural diagrams when I was six, but my father-"
"You don't use architectural plans to build a treehouse, McKay." Sheppard seamlessly slotted himself into the conversation as they approached. McKay spun around to face them, his expressive face forming a quick smile for Teyla and just as quickly bunching back into a frown as his gaze reached Sheppard.
"Oh, that's exactly like you, Major. I bet you were up there quick as a squirrel with two planks of wood and a hammer, nailing things together any way you please. What about stress and strain tests? Branch flexibility? Did you even calculate the position based on sunlight exposure vs. potential runoff from higher branches?"
The Major scrunched his eyebrows. "Who sits in a treehouse during a thunderstorm?"
"The collected water remains after the storm has finished, Major," McKay said bitingly. Then reconsidered. "Well, in most treehouses. Not mine. I designed a system of angled channels to-"
"Your treehouse design had a drainage system?" Ford asked incredulously. Teyla joined in his spluttering amusement.
As usual, two thirds of the context of the conversation was going completely over her head - and, as usual, she did not feel the slightest bit excluded by that fact.
She felt a warm rush of affection for her three unlikely companions. The Goa'uld were a great and terrible race who knew many dark secrets... but they did not know this. Teyla did not fear or envy them - in fact, she almost pitied them. They were not gods. And if they did not understand something as simple and strong as friendship, then in truth they were nothing at all.
With the aid of Samantha Carter, they had been able to configure the city's long range sensors to give them a few hours' warning of the Asgard vessel's approach. The newly de-Goa'ulded and rather subdued Colonel Casey seemed glad to be headed home, and General O'Neill was all but standing out on the landing platform holding a thumb up, but not everyone was quite so eager to depart.
Elizabeth couldn't help but smile as she rounded a corner and finally located the last person on her list. Daniel Jackson was lying on his belly in the middle of one of the less-travelled hallways, filming the inscriptions that ran along the edges of the stairs. He and his camera had become a familiar sight of late, although this particular angle was a new one on her. She took a moment to admire the view, and suppressed the mischievous urge to plant a foot on his backside.
She gave a delicate cough. "Doctor Jackson?"
"Daniel," he corrected pleasantly, without looking up or pausing in his task.
"General O'Neill requested that I remind you that you have four and a half minutes before he - and I quote - 'comes down here to zat your ass'." She quirked an eyebrow as he pushed himself back up to his knees. "How's the hand?" she was reminded to ask at the sight of his wrapped fingers.
"It's fine," he said distractedly. In Daniel Jackson's world, broken fingers were of far less note than an interesting linguistic discovery. He gazed down the length of the hallway with some dismay, still attempting to capture it all on his handheld camera. Elizabeth made a small wave as the lens passed over her, and he smiled wryly and lowered the camera.
"I could walk this city every day of my life and still not even begin to scrape the surface of the knowledge we could gain here," he said, a deep and aching wistfulness in his voice.
"I don't think General O'Neill would let you," she reminded him, not unkindly.
When she was first putting together the team for the Atlantis expedition, Elizabeth had found the General's steadfast refusal to let her poach his primary linguist both aggravating and oddly charming. She'd quickly recognised that no amount of bargaining would ever secure her Doctor Jackson, but just dropping his name into negotiations was a good way to prod O'Neill into coming up with a lesser concession he could make. It had been quite entertaining, and even a little sweet: O'Neill fallen for the same tactic time and time again, simply because he was so whole-heartedly sure that she must want to have Doctor Jackson every bit as much as he wanted to hold onto him.
Elizabeth wasn't sure she would have it in her to tease him over it now. It had only taken a few months working with John and Rodney and Carson and all the rest of her crazy, brilliant, wonderfully exasperating people to know that she would fight to the death to keep them with exactly the same passion.
Daniel showed her a wry smile. "Probably not, no," he admitted, without noticeable bitterness. He started to walk with her, but then stopped and twisted to point over his shoulder. "Oh, but, you know, I should I still have enough time to run over and-"
"Zat, Daniel," she said, in her best approximation of the General's dark tone.
"He's coached you well," Daniel noted, subsiding with a smile and a shake of his head. He weighed his camera in his hand, considering it. "I have the architectural footage I've been able to film, and Sam's downloaded a small - very small - portion of the Ancient database for us to take back with us... of course, even if I translate it all, there's no way of knowing when we'll be able to make contact again without a functional ZPM on either end."
"We're still holding out hope of finding one on one of the planets in the address database," Elizabeth assured him. "It certainly seems that the Ancients were reluctant to place all their eggs in one basket with the threat of the Wraith hanging over them. And of course we have the Goa'uld's hybrid ship now." Rodney had been all but salivating over it, and he and Colonel Carter had almost come to blows over his insistence that since she was leaving the galaxy she would hardly need to hog his team's valuable research time studying the vessel herself.
Daniel pulled an uncertain face. "Sam's pretty sure it's going to take months to restore the routines she erased, if they can do it at all. And it would be a three-week voyage either way, which, believe me, is no fun in a vessel the size of a tel'tak. I should warn you now, those things don't even have showers."
"I'll bear that in mind when I'm making the crew selection," she said dryly. They rounded the corner and found the rest of SG-1 and SG-6.
Her eyes were drawn inexorably to the two caskets that comprised the less fortunate half of Colonel Casey's team. At least the Asgard had the technology to keep the bodies in stasis so they could be returned to Earth and buried by their families. The Atlantis expedition's own lost hadn't had that luxury. In addition to the scientific and linguistic data Carter and Jackson had collected, SG-1 were taking home a set of letters of condolence that she had found excruciatingly difficult to write.
"Are we ready to go?" General O'Neill somehow managed to look every inch authoritarian while slouching against the wall with his hands in his pockets.
Even so, Daniel slowed and started to point back where he'd come from as if by Pavlovian conditioning. "Actually, I was just saying that we probably still have time for me to-"
"Aht!" O'Neill cut him off with a raised hand and a commanding noise. Elizabeth hid a smile behind her hand at what was obviously a well-practised routine.
Her gaze slid past the stoic Teal'c and smiling Colonel Carter to the slight figure lurking on the sidelines. The boy Jon had all the poise of the older O'Neill, though his body language was sending vastly different messages.
"You're sure about your decision?" she asked both O'Neills at once. Their identical eyes met for a moment, and there was a brief dance of eyebrows: the General cocked one questioningly, Jon lowered both of his in warning, and the General raised his in camp surrender. Both men swung around to face her simultaneously.
"He's sure," the older O'Neill said, nodding his head toward his younger self. Elizabeth had to admit, storing the two of them in separate galaxies would certainly cut down on the amount of brain space required for dealing with two people who were in essence the same man.
Even if she was going to have to train herself very hard to stop thinking of Jon as the boy he appeared to be and accept him as a combat specialist with more years of offworld experience than all her best people put together.
"This won't cause repercussions higher up the chain of command?" she asked the older version. She doubted Earth would be entirely thrilled to have a loose cannon extra O'Neill running about where they couldn't keep an eye on him.
"Oh, it will," he said, smiling nastily.
"Young O'Neill will make a most worthy addition to your forces," Teal'c informed her with great dignity, bowing his head. The O'Neills gave him identical looks of incredulity mixed with embarrassment.
"I'm sure he will," she said, smiling.
Carter stepped forward to catch the General's attention. "Sir? The Asgard vessel should be here in under a minute."
"We'll reestablish contact with Earth as soon as we get the hybrid ship functional or we manage to find a new ZPM," Elizabeth put in quickly. "If we can establish a means of two-way intergalactic travel, you'll be able to send us your Goa'uld hosts to have their parasites removed." It never hurt to give your allies additional motivation.
"We'll build a spa," Jon put in, smirking.
She wondered if it was too late to change her mind about accepting him.
O'Neill stepped back from her, arranging his hands on his weapon even though he was fully expecting to be picked up by friendlies. He lifted only his fingers off to deliver a miniature wave. "Don't forget to write, kids," he said.
A blaze of white light engulfed the group, and when it was gone, so were they.