Disclaimer: Stargate: SG-1 and all related concepts are the property of MGM, while the character of Spike belongs to Joss Whedon and James Marsters, among other people (Also, the original idea for this story came from Jedi Buttercup's 'An Unexpected Gift', so I don't own it either, although I have put my own spin on things, and have been given his full permission to use his idea)
Feedback: I'd appreciate it, of course
AN: Regarding how long Spike says he's been the amulet, please remember that I've twisted the dating system of Buffy and SG-1 so that Season 7 of Buffy ended approximately while SG-1 were visiting Atlantis; the 'nineteen day' thing may have nothing to do with Spike coming out of the amulet when he did, but I'd rather be 'safe' than 'sorry' (For lack of a better expression)
The Ghost in the Team
Sam was in the middle of her current experiments to improve the device that Mitchell still referred to as the 'Anti-Prior Gun'- with the recent coming of the so-called 'Orici', Sam had no doubt that the SGC could use every advantage they could get right now- when the door to her office opened and Daniel walked in, looking over at her apologetically as he did so.
"Daniel, hi," she said, looking up at him with a slight smile on her face; after the weeks he'd spent away trying to find out anything useful on Merlin or Morgan le Fay, it was a welcome relief for her to see her friend again. For a moment, she thought he'd just dropped in to see her, then she took in the serious-yet-apologetic expression on his face and her hopes of a leisurely visit were dashed; Daniel only ever assumed that particular look when he had discovered something he needed her help with but simultaneously wasn't sure if he should be interrupting her about it.
"What's wrong?" she asked, looking anxiously at her friend.
"Well… it's kind of hard to explain; it's easier if I just show you," Daniel explained, before he glanced behind himself to look back at the door he'd just entered by. "Come on in."
Sam's eyes widened in surprise as, right in front of her, a man literally walked through the wall beside the door, staring ahead of himself with an almost sulky expression on his face as he entered the room, hands shoved in his pockets as he stared at his surroundings.
"Not a bad set-up you've got going here," he said, in a British accent that Sam hadn't expected from a man dressed in a manner that wouldn't have been out of place in a biker's bar, before he turned to look directly at Sam. "By the way, you are?"
"Uh… I'm Lieutenant Colonel Samantha Carter, of the United States Air Force" Sam said, looking at the man in confusion as she glanced over at Daniel. "Who is this, and… well, how could he do… that?" she added, indicating the area of the wall that this man had just walked through.
Daniel shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine," he said, as he indicated the man in question. "I was just going through my mail when I found this one package containing an amulet of some kind. I opened it, and… well, this man here just seemed to come out of it-"
"Wait; it was the sodding amulet that did this?" the man said, spinning around to stare incredulously at the two of them. "I don't bloody believe it; why the Hell did I agree to wear that stupid thing…?"
Sam and Daniel exchanged puzzled looks at that, but, unable to provide an answer to either of the two questions just asked by their spectral visitor, Sam sighed and shrugged uncertainly as she looked back at him.
"Well… seeing as how you came out of the 'amulet' that Daniel mentioned, it seems like a good guess that it was involved in… whatever did this to you," she said, indicating where his leg and thigh were currently standing in her desk. "Look, we'll try to answer your questions if we can, but, in the meantime, could you just wait a minute while I find my equipment? If we can figure out why you're… like this… we might be able to work out a means of reversing it; we've got… well, experience… in this kind of thing."
"Wait a minute; you've encountered somebody who's like this before?" the man said, staring at the two of them with renewed intensity, the edges of his mouth pulled back as though he was preparing to growl at them but was uncertain .
Exchanging an uncertain glance with Daniel, Sam knew that her friend was thinking pretty much the same thing that she was at this moment. Normally in this kind of situation- namely, any situation where somebody outside the military or SGC discovered the existence of the Stargate facility or got inside without them knowing it- their policy was to remain silent about any alien encounters or technology they'd acquired over the last decade or so and act as though they knew nothing.
However, given that this man was currently standing in Sam's desk- his legs were totally concealed by the lower part of the desk- staring at the lab around him with an expression that reminded Sam of Daniel's expression when he was about to jump from a great height for some reason- an expression that suggested he was sure that something would go wrong on an instinctive level no matter how safe he seemed- it seemed like a safe guess that he already knew that there was more to the world than was known to the general public.
Exactly how he knew that, Sam didn't know and wouldn't like to guess at the moment, but, so long as she avoided specifically mentioning aliens for the moment, she supposed she might be able to get through this without giving their strange visitor any important information about the reason for what the SGC was actually here to do.
"Well… yes, we have," Sam said, she and Daniel exchanging glances once more before Sam moved off to fetch some instruments from a cupboard while Daniel continued to study their visitor uncertainly. "I mean, it's been a while, but we were once attacked by a race that existed totally out of phase with us, allowing them to pass through objects like you; the only difference was that they were invisible, whereas you're clearly visible."
Daniel nodded in agreement as he looked at their visitor. "Trust me; you're one up on me at least," he said. As the man looked over at him in surprise, Daniel smiled slightly. "I was once rendered intangible and invisible myself; the only reason I'm not still like that is that we made contact with… someone… who'd been through the same thing and could thus communicate with me." Still smiling, he indicated Sam as she continued to search for her scanner. "Actually, Sam and I went through another experience like that only last year; the only difference was that then we actually had access to the device that caused it, and the only real difficulty lay in working out how to reverse what the device had done."
"Ah," the man said, looking at Daniel quizzically for a moment before continuing to speak. "So, seeing as you're clearly not ghosts nowadays, you must have managed to reverse it then… think you could use those old tricks to give me my body back this time around?"
"That's why we're doing this; to determine if that would actually be possible," Sam put in, her face lighting up hopefully as she began to check yet another drawer. "For all we know, your kind of intangibility could operate in a totally different manner from our own; if nothing else, we can actually see you, whereas all our previous experiences with this kind of thing also made the person who'd become intangible totally invisible to everyone else."
"I… see…" the man said, nodding in a brief, thoughtful manner before he turned to look inquiringly in Daniel's direction. "By the way, what does Captain Cornfed have to do with this whole set-up?"
"Who?" Sam asked, looking curiously up at the man as she pulled out a couple of scanners and began to run them over Spike as he stood in the middle of the room.
"The guy who you said sent that amulet to this place," the man said, continuing to look inquiringly over in Daniel's direction as Sam began to study the scanner's readout from its analysis of the man's 'physiology' (If it could be called that, given that he didn't have an actual body). "You know, you asked me if I knew him before we found out I'm not solid any more?"
"Oh, you mean that 'R Finn'?" Daniel said, looking over at Sam in a slightly apologetic manner as he indicated the man. "The package containing the amulet included a letter from someone called 'R Finn', explaining that he was the one who'd sent it to me because he thought that it might be useful to us; our… guest… recognised the name."
"Why shouldn't I?" the man said, glancing over critically at Daniel as Sam ran the scanner over him. "Stupid sod sent a couple of years working with me and the others back on good old Sunny-D; if he hadn't had such an inferiority complex when it came to anything relating to Peaches, he'd probably still have been there."
As she ran the scanner over the man, Sam exchanged an inquiringly glance with Daniel, who shook his head apologetically in answer to her unasked question; he didn't know anything more about their strange visitor than she'd already heard, and what had just been said made just as much sense to him as it had to her.
"Look, we'll do what we can to answer that question later; right now we have more immediate matters to attend to," Daniel said, looking back at the man as Sam continued to walk around him, studying the scanner in her hands. "For example, as long as you're here, could you possibly tell us your name? You already know mine and Sam's, and you know that we're going to do everything we can to try and help you; we should at least know what to call you."
It was at moments like this, in his opinion, that Daniel was almost grateful that Jack O'Neill was no longer a part of SG-1. Oh, he missed his friend greatly, and he'd never try to pretend otherwise, but he definitely didn't miss Jack's frustration at his occasional violations of the confidentiality clause in his contract. Admittedly, Jack had always understood the why of it, and knew that Daniel didn't do that sort of thing lightly, but it had still frustrated him at times.
For a time, Daniel thought that the man wasn't going to reply, as he remained staring at Daniel with an expression that reminded Daniel of the looks he'd received during the first Abydos mission; a look that made it clear that the man strongly doubted that Daniel could do anything useful in the current situation…
Then the man grimaced and shrugged.
"I'm Spike," he said simply, looking at them as though daring them to make a comment about the oddness of his name.
Before Sam or Daniel could say anything about their visitor's rather 'odd'- to say the least- name, the door to the lab opened.
"Hey, Sam?" Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell said as he walked into the room, Teal'c and Vala close behind him. "Sorry to bother, but we were wondering…" he began to say, only to stop as he took in the bizarre sight of a strange man dressed in a long black leather coat with nearly white hair standing in the middle of the room as Sam ran a scanner over him, Daniel standing off to the side as he turned around to look at the new arrivals. His position suggested that he'd been talking to the unknown man before the others had arrived, but that didn't answer any of Mitchell's other questions about who the man was and what he was doing here.
"What is this man doing here?" Teal'c asked, voicing the opinion of his new commanding officer as he looked quizzically at the new arrival.
"Well, that's actually what we're trying to figure out," Sam said, as she turned to look fully at her teammates. "Daniel received this amulet in the mail this morning from someone called 'R Finn'- a former member of this group called the DRI who were involved in the creation of the NID, apparently- and when he opened it…"
She shrugged in an apologetic manner as she indicated the man. "Well, this man showed up."
"Really?" Vala said, looking the man over with an appreciative gleam in her eyes as she walked forward slightly. "Well, I have to admit, this is a welcome surprise…"
"Excuse me?" the man said, turning to look at Vala (Mitchell vaguely noted that the man had a faint scar above his left eyebrow, and wondered what had put that there).
"Oh, come on," Vala said, grinning at the man in a coy manner as she began to walk towards him, "you can't honestly tell me that you can't at least guess what I'm talking abo- HEY!" she yelled in surprise; she'd just reached out one hand, as though to place it on the man's arm, and her entire hand had passed right through the man as though he wasn't there.
Not that Mitchell could blame her, of course; he definitely hadn't been expecting that.
"What the…?" he said, glancing over at Sam and Daniel in confusion. "Did something happen with that device of Merlin's again or something?"
Daniel shook his head. "Unfortunately not; Spike here-" he jerked a thumb at the man in question before he continued talking, "basically arrived here like this."
"Indeed," Teal'c said, looking the man who was apparently called 'Spike' up and down with a raised eyebrow as he took in what Daniel had said to him, that critical gleam in his eyes making it clear that he was assessing Spike's potential threat in a combat situation.
It's true what they say, Mitchell thought to himself with a small smile. You can take the Jaffa out of the First Prime, but you can't take the First Prime out of the Jaffa…
"Bloody hell…" Spike muttered to himself, his eyes fixed on the gold symbol on Teal'c's forehead before he shifted his gaze to Teal'c's eyes. "What's with the symbol, buddy?"
"It is a religious symbol of my people," Teal'c replied, folding his arms as he stared back at Spike, his expression that familiar blank look that left it hard for even the other members of SG-1 to know what he was thinking. "It and similar symbols were once placed on the heads of both men and women, but in recent times such a practice has fallen out of practice."
"Really?" Spike said, tilting his head critically to one side to study the Apophis logo on Teal'c's head, before he shrugged casually. "Well, at least it's something new."
"Talking of things being new," Mitchell put in, looking critically over at Sam as he spoke, "what's the new guy doing here anyway?"
"Sam was running some tests on him to see if we could learn anything more about how he's intangible," Daniel explained, as he turned to look inquiringly at the woman in question, who was currently looking at the readings on her scanner with a critical eye. "Anything encouraging?"
"Well, so far, I haven't really got much," Sam said, as she looked over at Spike apologetically before indicating her scanner. "All I can gather with my equipment is that you're definitely generating some kind of electromagnetic energy- fortunately not enough to interfere with anything on the base," she added, noticing Mitchell's concerned expression before continuing. "Also, you're radiating heat- it's significantly less than the average human, but you've definitely got a temperature of some kind- and I'm detecting brain activity."
"Really?" Spike said, glancing over at Sam with a small smile on his face. "Guess that shows the One-Eyed Man for calling me stupid, then."
"Who?" Mitchell asked, looking inquiringly at the strange figure who was currently standing in the middle of Sam's desk, his thigh and left hand passing through her keyboard.
"Just somebody I knew," Spike said simply, turning briefly to look in Mitchell's direction before glancing back at Sam. "So, now that you've got all the fine details recorded, any chance we can get on with solidifying me again?"
Looking at the information before her once more, Sam shook her head after taking a moment or two to think about what she'd uncovered.
"Sorry; it's not going to be as straightforward as all that," she said apologetically as she looked back at Spike. "These readings don't match anything we have on file about intangible beings; you're visible when we were always invisible, you're giving off electromagnetic energy unlike any frequencies I've seen before, and you actually have some kind of temperature…"
She sighed slightly as she put the scanner away before looking back at Spike. "If it's any consolation, the scans seem to indicate that you're more… well, 'in touch' is the best term I can come up with… with the rest of the world than some of the intangible beings we've encountered; they were always totally out of phase with reality, but you're only a few 'degrees'- for lack of a better term- displaced from the rest of us. If you concentrate enough, it's possible that you might be able to exert some kind of influence over objects in your immediate vicinity- a kind of 'mind over matter' situation, if you will."
Spike raised a thoughtful eyebrow at Sam as he turned to look at her, a thoughtful expression on his face.
"So… what; you think I can touch stuff?" he said, waving a hand through a nearby tap as he looked critically at her. "I'm not seeing much in the way of that happening right now."
"You're walking, aren't you?" Sam pointed out, indicating his feet. "That actually just helps to support my theory; you're not sinking through the floor when you walk about because, on some level, you're willing it to happen."
"Pardon?" Vala interjected, looking over at Sam in confusion. "How can he be willing himself to walk?"
"Mind over matter, essentially," Sam explained, as she looked back at Vala. "Spike here's become so used to being able to walk around that his body exists in an almost 'default' state of being able to walk about like that. Spike doesn't even need to concentrate to walk; his mind 'assumes' he'll be able to do it, so he does."
Spike opened his mouth to ask another question, but Sam held up a hand to stop him before he could even form the first word. "If you're wondering why you can't touch, take into account that we have to think consciously about picking things up; we don't even need to think about actually making contact with the ground. Your mind's subconsciously making up for your intangibility by almost making your feet tangible enough to walk, but you're still going to need to concentrate if you're actually going to touch anything."
Staring at his hand, Spike groaned as he experimentally jabbed one hand at a nearby beaker, only to watch as it passed through the glass object.
"Bugger…" he muttered, before he looked back up at the team. "Don't suppose there's any chance you could give some more pointers on the 'touching stuff' front?"
"Well, we're still in the early stages of working out anything about your current condition," Daniel said, shrugging apologetically at Spike. "Maybe we'll get a better idea of what you're actually capable of with further research into the matter, rather than just this initial scan."
"So, just wait and see what you can find out over time, eh?" Spike said, smiling in an almost wistful manner as he looked at Sam and Daniel. "You know, you two remind me of a couple of people I knew before… well, this happened…"
Before Sam or Daniel could ask what he meant by that, Spike shook his head slightly as he looked apologetically at Daniel. "Of course, the main difference is you ain't got the English accent and she isn't doing the birds- you aren't, are you?" he asked, looking inquiringly at Sam.
"Uh… I'm not a lesbian, if that's what you mean," Sam said, looking uncertainly at the man in front of her, strongly hoping she'd understood his meaning correctly (The alternative meaning, of course, would just have been way too disturbing to even think about…).
"Right," Spike said, before clapping his hands together once and turning around to look inquiringly at Daniel, a suddenly anxious expression on his face. "So, now we've got the scans out of the way, what's the date?"
"Uh… it's October first," Mitchell responded. "2006, to be exact."
After taking a moment to process this new information, Spike sighed, his expression growing bleak as he studied the walls around him, crossing his arms in a self-hugging action that Daniel remembered well.
"Nineteen days," he muttered to himself, as he continued to study his surroundings, as though he was looking for something. "Not a hundred forty-seven, but long enough."
"Excuse me?" Daniel prodded him. He guessed that the first reference was to how long it had been since the amulet had somehow been activated and done whatever it did to Spike, but the second reference escaped him.
"I died nineteen days ago," Spike clarified. "Was wearing that gaudy bit of jewelry at the time. Got no idea how it made its way to wherever-this-is."
Before any of SG-1 could respond to that statement of Spike's- even after all the times most of them had died, hearing someone else talk about their 'deaths' was still strange for them- the man in question turned to look at Daniel, a broad yet inquiring smile on his face. "Still, that's easily sorted; any chance you can see about giving Captain Cornfed a call and asking him why he sent that bloody amulet here in the first place?"
"Captain who?" Vala interjected in confusion, as she stared in confusion at Spike.
"I think Spike's actually referring to the Captain 'R Finn' who sent the amulet to me," Daniel said, turning to look inquiringly at Spike as he did so. "By the way, I don't suppose you can give me a first name for him? It'll make the search easier."
Spike paused for a moment, as though trying to decide whether or not he actually wanted to tell Daniel the information he was looking for- a fact that Daniel couldn't understand, given Spike's apparent eagerness to get a body back- but, finally, he sighed and nodded at Daniel.
"His first name's Riley," he said, before sighing and walking over to a nearby table, muttering under his breath. Daniel vaguely heard something about Spike resenting the fact that he'd soon owe 'Captain Cardboard' a favour, how he just knew the guy was going to rub it in…
Then he moved as though he was going to lean on a nearby table and his hands, followed closely by most of his upper body, fell right through the table to land on the floor.
"Bloody hell…" Spike muttered as he hauled himself back to his feet- grateful that he hadn't fallen through the floor- glaring back at the five SG-1 members, most of whom (Baring Teal'c; Spike had to wonder about that) had covered their mouths to try and stop themselves from laughing.
"S-sorry…" Daniel said, chuckling apologetically behind his hand as he indicated the table. "It's just… well, in our line of work… something like that…"
"DON'T," Spike reinforced, fixing Daniel with a determined glare. For a moment, the chuckling continued regardless of what Spike did, but, finally, the five people got themselves under control, all of them looking apologetically at Spike as they finally managed to contain the last of their giggles.
"S… sorry," Sam said, looking apologetically at Spike. "We… we didn't mean anything by it. It's just… well, it is kind of amusing..."
"Yeah, yeah, I get the picture," Spike said, rolling his eyes as he stuffed his hands back into his pockets and indicated the door. "Can we just get on with finding out what the bloody amulet's doing here in the first place?"
"Right…" Mitchell said, smiling awkwardly at Spike as he indicated the door. "Just follow us… we'll see what we can find."
Spike didn't bother to make a comment about the slight smirk that remained on the lieutenant colonel's face, he jus silently walked out of the door and began to walk down the corridor.
The worst part of it all, Spike mused to himself as Daniel and Sam walked on in front of him, was that he could understand what they found funny about what had just happened.
Hell, if it had been anyone but him, he'd probably have been laughing about it himself…
But, as it was, it was him, and now he was stuck with being totally intangible until somebody could work out how the hell they were going to fix this…
It's official, Spike mused to himself, as he rounded another corner and began to follow his new acquaintances up the stairs. Someone up there has it in for me… big time.