Chapter 2

Jack Goes Back

The light filled Jack for a brief moment, and then he was standing in front of a bed, holding a shirt. Something was very wrong. He stared at the shirt and then at the duffel bag lying on the bed. Then he looked around the room, a dark foreboding sensation settling in the pit of his stomach. The room was familiar, very familiar, but also very very impossible. It looked like his old room, just like the one he had when he was a kid still living with his parents, perfect down to the model jets and the posters on the walls. Apparently he was either in the middle of packing or unpacking, judging by the bag and the shirt in his hands. He finally dropped the shirt, and cautiously walked over to his mirror. The face that looked back at him was not one he had seen for at least twenty-five years.

"Crap!" he said, his hand moving to his no longer gray hair, gliding over his smooth face and finally pinching his ear, hard. The pain was very real too, but he did not wake up. The face in the mirror couldn't have been much more than twenty years old, if it was even that. He looked around his room again, taking in details he had forgotten over the years, finally resting his eyes on a calendar featuring hockey. According to the page open it was sometime in the month of April, 1974.

The door opened, and Jack spun around to find himself face to face a woman both familiar and strangely foreign. She was much younger than the last time Jack had seen her, but already age had made itself known upon her face and Jack knew for a fact that her hair was dyed red.

"Mom," he said, his voice squeaking slightly.

"Are you all packed?" she asked, smiling that sad, proud sort of smile she always got when Jack had to leave home, "Don't want to miss your bus!"

"Almost," Jack answered, trying to get his voice to sound something approaching normal.

"Well, just come on down when you're finished. I've been making you a snack for the trip," she said, and after Jack attempted an appreciative grin she turned and left him alone. Jack sat down on his bed. He knew that this wasn't real. It had to be some sort of mind trip, like with the gamekeeper. Or maybe that machine or the solar flares or whatever caused hallucinations, or some sort of weird memory dream thing. He looked at the calendar again. 1974. Wasn't he still in the academy then? Looking down at his clothes he noticed for the first time that he was in an air force uniform; definitely not his SG1 outfit.

Doing a quick calculation in his head, he decided that he must be eighteen years old, almost nineteen. He had been in the academy then, so what was he doing at home? Perhaps it was some sort of vacation, and now he was supposed to go back. Well, Jack had no intention of playing along. Whether this was all in his head or he had somehow managed to go back in time, his first priority was to locate his team. He looked at the bag on his bed, went through it, then started to finish with his packing, but this time he made sure to grab a few extras he wouldn't have brought to the academy, like his fake driver's license hidden taped to the underside of his bed. Then he stopped to consider where he should go.

Teal'c, of course, was a lost cause; he would be with Apophis somewhere out there, perhaps working as his first prime again. Carter would be around ten, but other than that Jack had no idea where she would be. Perhaps he could look up her dad and find her that way. And Daniel would be...crap, he would be around eight years old, right when his parents died. Like the gamekeeper wasn't bad enough, now here they were again. So, Daniel was probably in New York. Jack frowned, considering. He was fairly certain, given the month and year, that Daniel would be nine in about three months. He knew his parents had died when he was barely eight, so they had to already be dead and Daniel would be in foster care. So that brought up another question; should he head to New York first and try and find Daniel, or should he try and look up Carter's dad and find out her address?

Jack hesitated between the two, but thinking about Daniel's childhood had already awakened darker thoughts. Daniel had never said it outright, but Jack had gotten the impression that some of the families he had stayed with over the years hadn't exactly been nourishing, and Jack shuddered to think of Daniel suddenly returned to that kind of life. He made up his mind. He would find out where Carter was and phone her, but he would travel to New York. Decision made, he grabbed his bag and went downstairs to face his mother.

''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

Samantha Carter found herself very suddenly upside down and only years of training led her into a controlled roll rather than a hard fall as she brought herself back to the ground and to a more upright position.

"Ha! I knew you couldn't do it! No way you could do a hand stand for a whole minute!" Sam turned her head and found herself staring at a boy just on the verge of adolescents with a toothy grin. Sam had the sudden urge to stick her tongue out at him, only stopping because her brain caught up with her at that moment and made her wonder what she had been doing standing on her hands in someone's backyard with a boy who, oddly enough, looked exactly like Mark used to when he was around twelve or so. It was only when she stood up, however, and discovered that she was in fact shorter than the boy that she really began to panic.

"I shrunk!" she exclaimed, startled, and the boy stared at her as though she had grown a second head.

"You stunk, you mean!" he said after that moment of hesitancy, and the grin returned. But Sam had stop listening. She had heard her voice, much higher than she was used to, and now she had taken the time to look down at herself. Even more noticeable than her size, her entire body seem to have changed drastically. She ran her hand cautiously over her now flat chest, and was startled when she noticed for the first time how long her hair was as it fell into her face. Finally, she had to accept that she was a kid. And if she was really a kid, then that mean that the boy who looked so much like her brother used to, he must in fact, really be…

"Mark!" A person called out from a screen door, her tone scolding, and Sam turned her eyes slowly upwards to see a face she had not seen, outside of photos, for over twenty years.

"Mom?" she whispered, feeling tears fill her eyes at the shock.

"Sammy?" the woman asked, concerned, "Are you hurt?"

"You…you're…" Sam began, wanting to explain that she was dead, but she couldn't say it. Then Sam rushed forwards and wrapped her arms around her mother, feeling her mother respond and return the hug. She would allow herself just this one moment before she started to analyze and solve what had happened.

"Please don't be the gamekeeper again," Sam murmured into her mother's dress. But the timing was wrong; Sam had been older when she died, and besides the gamekeeper's technology hadn't worked so well on her. When her mother finally started to pull back, though not so much away as to be able to see Sam's face, Sam tried to blink away her tears and accept that this couldn't be real.

"What's the matter, Sammy?" her mom asked, concerned by her tears, "Did Mark do something?"

"I didn't do nothing!" Mark shouted, indignantly, "She's just a baby!"

"I am not!" Sam cried, without thinking, and then blinked. She didn't talk like that. She didn't respond to a twelve-year-old's taunts, even if that twelve-year-old was her brother. Her mother considered them, a slight frown on her face.

"This isn't about your father, is it?" she asked, still concerned, "He'll be home soon, safe and sound."

"I'm ok," Sam answered, feeling anything but. It was surreal, being comforted by her mother. She felt ready to break down, knowing that she couldn't just accept this. She had to find out what had happened, and find out where the rest of SG1 had gone. Breaking away from her mother, she ran into the house and into a kitchen. Looking around quickly at the vaguely familiar room, she finally saw what she was looking for, a calendar. April 11, 1974. She continued on, out of the kitchen and instinctively down the hall to her own room. She didn't really remember that house; they must not have stayed there long, but at the same time it did feel familiar. She walked into a bedroom that seemed a strange mixture of dolls and outer space, pink dresses and toy pistols.

"Time travel or virtual reality?" she muttered to herself, "Or some sort of memory recall?" It didn't seem to be like the gamekeeper, even aside from the fact that that hadn't worked on her. Daniel hadn't changed his age when he had relived his parent's death, but she was definitely ten. Then she turned around and saw her mother standing in the door, watching her, still concerned. She blinked her eyes again.

I'll give it a day, she decided, and then she smiled at her mother, returning to her arms.

''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

Daniel closed his eyes against the blinding light, and then threw them open again as intense pain wracked through his body. His head had already felt jumbled from when Jack knocked him to the ground, but now confusion didn't even begin to cover it. He was against a wall, and he hurt, and there was a giant looming over him, bellowing angrily.

"No!" Daniel shouted, his voice sounding strange and high pitched in his ears. He was trapped in his nightmare again, and the giant was coming for him. Seeing the hand swinging towards him, he reacted instantly, using a move Teal'c had insisted he learn. Shocked, he discovered it actually worked, sending the giant tumbling to the ground. That had never happened before. Then he ran, stumbling upon legs that seemed to have trouble holding him up over a foreign house that was much too big. Never having a chance to clear his head, or to figure out what was going on, he accepted that this was probably a dream and decided he would keep running until he escaped from it and woke up. But then he tripped, unable to get his eyes to focus clearly on where he was going, and he fell on his side that was already burning with pain.

He screamed, curling into himself, and with an angry roar the giant was back, yanking him up from the floor so that he dangled in the air from his arm. The giant was shouting, screaming words at him but his brain had shut down, no longer processing the language. Daniel tried to escape, to force himself to wake up or to at least free himself from the giant's grasp, but the hand holding him was strong. Then a door was thrown open upon utter darkness. Daniel was dropped to the floor and the door was shut, taking all light with it.

Daniel scooted back into a corner, hunched in a ball and breathing in harsh, jagged breaths. The darkness was all powerful, as was pain and he closed his eyes against both. He didn't wonder how he had gotten there, or what had happened, too caught up in an old nightmare that had suddenly become real. It was hours before he came back to himself, opening his eyes upon darkness.