Rising from the Ashes of Ascension
Chapter 33
Disclaimer: As much as I might wish, I do not own Stargate: SG1, Highlander: the Series, or any recognizable characters from either show. However, any characters that are not from either show are mine and I will use and abuse them as I see fit. Everyone else will be returned eventually, for I am only borrowing for awhile, but they might end up a bit scuffed.
Warnings: Potty language, violence, and occasional sexual references
"Well, this is a pretty kettle of fish we seem to find ourselves in," Jack grumbled as he sat there on the hard floor of the museum, his hands and feet bound.
"It appears O'Neill that we are up an excrement stream in a semi-permeable Native American waterway transportation device without a proper propulsion device," Teal'c added, showing his displeasure and his keen wit.
Jack snorted and looked over at Amanda, checking to see if she was any closer to freeing herself from her zip-ties (the Hunters were smart enough to know that something as simple as metal handcuffs were not enough to keep the master thief down) after having been shot. Nope.
"Hey Daniel," he then called out in a whisper, trying to not draw any more unwanted attention from their captors.
"Yes Jack?" his Immortal best friend replied in a low voice from his spot in the corner closest to Jack and Teal'c, recovered nicely after also being shot.
"You remember when you told us that this would be easy and not to worry?"
Daniel sighed, hating himself for inadvertently cursing his team. "Yes Jack."
"When this is over, I'm going to beat the living shit out of you," the colonel hissed at his teammate.
"Thanks for the warning," Daniel muttered, sitting back, trying to get comfortable with his hands tightly secured by the plastic handcuffs. "So how did this happen?"
"Well Sunshine, three guys walked in and shot you in the heart," Jack sniped.
Daniel sighed deeply, reminding himself to count to ten. "Yes Jack, I remember that much," he hissed. "I was referring to what happened when I was suffering from a small case of death. How did we get tied up? You're a Colonel in the Air Force with a background in black ops. Teal'c is a Jaffa and former First Prime. How is it that you two managed to get handcuffed?"
Teal'c looked like he would happily throttle someone if only his hands were free. "The humans shot you and then AmandaMontrose. Then they proceeded to threaten to behead the both of you if we did not cooperate. Considering that the two shorter members of this unwanted intrusion held weapons that were capable of severing your head from your body, we felt it would be wise to not aggravate the situation any further," he intoned, his deep voice hushed slightly.
"Shut up!" the tallest human, a Watcher according to the visible tattoo on his wrist, yelled at Teal'c. To emphasize his point, the man pistol-whipped Daniel across the face.
"Ow!" Daniel yelled and proceeded to spit out a mouthful of blood and a tooth. "Why'd you hit me? Murray here was talking just now, not me! Why am I always the whipping boy for the group?" Daniel sounded quite petulant.
That only got him another whack across the face.
"Okay, enough of the playing whack-the-Immortal!" Daniel ground out, working his words around his fractured face, feeling the familiar tingle of his healing abilities starting to work on repairing the damage. "Why are the Watchers targeting me? I haven't messed with any of you in a couple of centuries. Did Amanda do something? Did she steal the ashes of your long dead great-Aunt?"
"Hey!" came her indignant reply from across the room. "That happened only one time and I returned them to the owner."
"Really? You stole someone's dead relative?" Jack asked, looking slightly disturbed.
"It's not like I meant to. Beside, who in their right mind would put the ashes of a relative in a wine jug from Ancient Sumerian? I'll tell you, a crazy person," the female Immortal ranted, but was interrupted by the head Watcher of the group.
"Shut up all of you!" he barked. "Why are you here, stealing from this museum?"
Daniel smiled a wicked smile, but said nothing.
The Watcher, a tall man with thinning, gray hair and pale skin, had a look of fury on his face. "I asked you a question!"
"You told me to shut up," Daniel said shrugging, despite the fact that his arms were handcuffed tightly behind his back, making the gesture slightly painful.
Jack snorted in ill-concealed mirth.
The Watcher, with his two lackeys flanking him silently (Jack had silently named them Darryl and his other brother Darryl), glared at all of them before raising his gun, a Beretta PX4 9mm with a silencer attached to the barrel and pointing it at Jack. "You had something to say?" he said coldly.
Jack stared at the man just as coldly, a dead-look in his eyes – the same one that he had given countless Goa'uld and Jaffa. He was quietly assessing the threat, judging the distance between him and Watchers (approximately ten yards), mentally placing where everyone and everything was located in the room. He knew logically that there was no way he could cover the distance between his spot on the floor and where the man was standing, while tied up, without getting shot in the process. Instead he chose to sit as quietly and as still as possible, being careful to not reveal the presence of his backup Swiss Army knife that was slowly hacking away at the heavy plastic zip-ties on his wrists.
The head guy returned his attention to Daniel. "Why were you stealing a statue from some no-name museum in the middle of nowhere America?"
"That's not very nice. Granted this isn't the Louvre or the British Museum, but it's not exactly a Podunk place either. The Nelson-Atkins Museum is actually quite nice," Daniel said blandly, stalling for time, knowing what Jack was up to. They had been teammates for too long for him to not know Jack.
As a reward for his attempt to delay the moment when the Watchers found out about the Stargate program, the guy in charge shot him in the shoulder.
It hurt like, well, getting shot, but his healing factor kicked in to repair the non-lethal damage.
"Now, you can either be honest with me or I can continue to shoot you until I get bored and I start shooting your mortal friends," he said just as blandly. "I know the old man here doesn't have that long left on Earth compared to your kind, but do you really want to make his stay here even shorter?"
"What makes you think I would even care about that? You've read my file. You know my past," Daniel said coldly, letting himself draw on his Danil-personna. "I've ridden with the Horsemen; I've killed people for less. Do you really think I actually care about them?"
The Watcher looked upon the Immortal sardonically as he replied, "If you don't care about them, how about I kill the thief first, let you absorb her Quickening and then kill you, with all of that power and knowledge going to waste? With any luck the humans would be killed this close to a Quickening. How about that?"
With the change in Daniel's demeanor, shifting from peaceful galaxy explorer, to blood-thirsty Immortal, Jack sat up a bit straighter. "I'm not that old damnit! My grey hair, caused mostly by Daniel, makes me look distinguished," he yelled, insulted that the guy with the gun could not look beyond his hair, hoping against hope that he could diffuse the situation somewhat. The last thing he wanted, besides dying, was for Danil to make an appearance.
"Shut up," Daniel and he Watcher both yelled. Daniel yelled out of fear for his friend's safety; the Watcher yelled because he was an ass.
"I feel like Rodney Dangerfield suddenly. I get no respect," he grumbled and went back to slowly sawing through his bindings.
Daniel glared at the Watchers, irritated that they would be so blasé about killing a person, but he couldn't help it when a small snicker escaped – Jack's sense of humor did amuse him from time to time. "I asked my friends to help me steal the statue because it once belonged to me centuries ago. The museum here somehow acquired it and it's not like I could ask the curator for it back. So I needed to steal it and Amanda is one of the best thieves around. My friends here are assisting my foray into modern-day larceny."
"If it was so precious to you, why did you break it? And what about this jar? Did you own that too?"
"Amanda broke it," was Daniel's immediate reply.
"Hey!" Amanda snapped.
"Well, you did," Daniel said, slightly petulantly.
The infamous thief looked at her longtime friend with more than a hint of disdain. "You were trying to do the same thing; I only hurried up the process. So why don't you get off your high horse, Mister Indiana Jones-wanna-be?"
Daniel looked insulted at that. "What do you mean wanna-be? I am much cooler than Indiana Jones could ever be and I could take him easily. He fought stupid Nazis who got their faces melted off thanks to lame special effects. I've done much cooler things in the past seven or so years, plus I speak twenty-eight languages. What can he do besides play with a whip and run around with the world's most annoying sidekick ever?"
"Shut up the both of you!" the watcher shouted. "My God, it's like herding cats with you and your friends!"
Jack snorted. "Tell me about it," he muttered, wincing at the sharp pain in his wrists and the stress put on his shoulder joints.
Daniel gave Jack a dirty look for that jab.
"What were you doing with the statue," the Watcher ground out, more than ready to shoot all of them, if only to get some silence.
Daniel shrugged. "Do you have a name?"
"Lawrence Newkirk," he replied testily.
"Okay Larry," Daniel said, sounding annoyed. "I owned the statue, or more importantly, what was hidden inside it centuries ago. I recently found out that it had been stolen from where I had put it for safe keeping and had been turned into a display for the public to behold."
"And what exactly is in it?" Newkirk asked, clearly annoyed. He had had it all planned out, sort of. He and his two colleagues (though that was a bit over stating things – more like idiots who knew how to take orders and shut up), had been following Daniel Jackson and Adam Pierson around ever since Ian Bancroft had called him in, questioning the validity of Mike Abbott's reports.
"I put the ashes of my wife in it and when I found out that it had been taken from the temple where it was supposed to be, I became annoyed. I wanted it back," Daniel said earnestly, his face open and honest, despite the fact that he was lying through his teeth. The last thing he wanted was one of the Watchers to open the jar and find one getting snaked.
"So, all of this sneaking around, crashing a wedding, weeks of plotting, years of Watcher reports that are nothing but lies, is all over the ashes of some human you lied to when you told her you loved her," Newkirk smirked. "What about the year you were declared MIA by the government?"
Daniel shrugged. "In case you haven't been reading the papers lately, the United States is at war in Afghanistan. The Air Force, the people I work for, sent me there as a cultural affairs expert and things went south." He sounded reasonable and unconcerned, but on the inside he was praying to whatever true god was out there that Methos and Sam come running to the rescue before things really went south.
Newkirk glared at Daniel. "Bullshit," he snarled.
Trying to look blasé about everything, Daniel gave a slight shrug, ignoring the pain shooting through his shoulders. "Don't believe it, I don't care. However, I can give you a nice description of what it is like to a guest of the Taliban. I do have to say that it was much worse than the first time I visited the country, but sadly enough not much had changed since then."
"You really do believe that don't you? You are so well versed in how to lie, you've actually started to believe the lies to be the truth," Newkirk sneered. "
"If any of them move, shoot them all and then behead the Immortals," he said to his cohorts.
He then turned his attention to the jar in his hands. "Odd," he muttered. "I can almost hear a humming sound coming from this."
"Oh crap! Don't open that jar, whatever you do!" Jack yelled.
"Newkirk, stop being stupid for once and wait," Daniel also yelled, immediately alarmed.
Newkirk just sneered, ignoring the advice, and proceeded to pull on the urn's carved lid, struggling to open something that had not been opened in centuries.
He managed to pry the lid open and looked in, amazed that there was a faint glow from within, as if there was modern technology inside an ancient treasure. He knew that Jackson had been lying about what his true intentions were; this only confirmed his suspicions.
Newkirk looked closer, his mouth slightly agape. "There is something moving in here," he said, shocked.
Jack, Teal'c, and Daniel all began to yell at the Watcher to drop the vase. In response, one of the sidekick-Watchers shot Daniel in the chest, cutting off his yells abruptly, as Jack and Teal'c ducked to avoid bullets flying their way.
Suddenly, a snake-like creature shot out of the jar, straight into the open mouth of the Watcher.
Newkirk let out a strangled half-scream as the alien creature burrowed its way into the soft tissue at the back of his throat, seeking out his spinal cord.
O'Neill! Hurry," Teal'c implored as he continued to struggle against his bonds, using his vast strength to break the zip-ties that held him bound.
As Newkirk stumbled and screamed, Jack gave up all pretenses at hiding his attempts to saw through his bonds. Squirming and twisting his shoulders, he sawed as furiously as he could through the plastic.
While all of this was going on, Daniel spent the time briefly choking on his own blood before dying, unable to assist his friends in freeing themselves. His last thought, before he slipped away, was: I came back from Ascension for this crap?
Just as Jack cut through his bonds, Newkirk stopped thrashing about and came to his senses. Check that, the Goa'uld came to his senses, having taken over the host's systems. His eyes glowed, showing that it was now the alien in control of the human's body.
A/N: So what do you think? Crap or not? Be a pal and leave me a constructive review to let me know what your thoughts are.
I know that it's been a long time since I've update this story and I don't have any good excuses, other than life, laziness, and prioritizing other things above fan fiction which all have gotten in the way of writing and posting. Please forgive me if you can. Also, thank you to Lori for be a constant cheerleader, encouraging me to get back to the story. I am lucky to have a friend like you in my life.