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
The Ghost in the Team
Two weeks later, Spike was standing dejectedly in the SGC exercise room, casually poking at a few weights that Mitchell had left on a nearby bench as he tried to get them to roll off onto the floor. It wasn't the most productive way to spend his time, of course, but given the general lack of progress that had been made as far as the search for Vala went since she'd vanished, it seemed like the only thing he really could do.
OK, there'd been the occasional mission since Vala had been lost- the SGC couldn't exactly stop all operations for one missing person, after all, no matter if she was one of the few aliens on staff-, but even then they'd just been simple survey missions to some of the currently unexplored worlds in the Stargate network; after losing one of their battlecruisers and with the Tau'ri/Jaffa alliance now stronger than it had been for a while, the Ori seemed to have decided to back off a bit and rethink their original strategies. Without any immediate threat, SG-1 had generally been put on stand-down until something else came up, with most of them taking advantage of the time-out to work on projects they'd been unable to get around to earlier.
Spike had been given the opportunity to work with another team, given that he wasn't an official member of SG-1 yet and could use the experience, but he'd refused; a six-man team might be a bit big, but he'd grown to like the rest of the group after all the time he'd spent with them after he'd 'woken up', and he wasn't in the mood for another radical upheaval in his life when he was still trying to get his head around being a 'sodding weird ghost' (He refused to think of himself as an actual ghost; he wasn't dead, he was just currently corporeally-challenged).
As he'd put it, he'd been accepted by SG-1 as one of their own- still a probationary 'one of their own', of course, but they were still willing to let him work with them when so few people apparently managed to pull that off-, and he was going to stick to that team for as long as he wanted to.
Besides, on some level he kind of liked the fact that he actually found a lot of similarities between them and the Scoobies (Not, of course, that he would ever admit it to anyone; he had a rep to keep up even if he was starting over again here); Sam was the computer-hacking witch without the lesbianism and with science rather than magic as her focus, Daniel was the younger Giles with a bit more of an action focus, Cam was kinda like a Xander/Captain Cardboard amalgamation (With the obvious exception that he actually liked this guy, although he freely admitted that that was probably because Cam didn't treat him like he was going to go psycho at a moment's notice), Teal'c reminded him a bit of himself and Peaches- both former 'bad guys' who turned against their old 'bosses'-, and as for Vala-
Spike stopped himself from going there; it was still way too soon to allow his thoughts to go there with things being the way they were right now!
Still… he couldn't honestly deny that there was something about his new (Albeit currently missing) teammate that had managed to capture his interest ever since he showed up here (And for those who'd known him in the past, it wasn't just the fact that the dark hair made her look a bit like Dru; he'd moved beyond that period of his life a hell of a long time ago).
Maybe it was the fact that she was kind of like him, albeit in a more roundabout way; from what he'd gathered about the Goa'uld, having one in you was kind of similar to being controlled by a vampire demon, except for the fact that as the host to a Goa'uld you apparently knew what was going on around you and couldn't do anything about it while as a vampire the original you didn't know what you were doing.
Plus, of course, there was the fact that, from what he'd gathered, she definitely didn't act like her Goa'uld self while he was still pretty much the same person he'd been before the demonic shaman had stuck his soul back into his body; he hadn't been expecting the soul thing, but even if he had he'd never have really expected himself to be this unaffected by having his back, particularly after seeing Peaches in his 'before and after' stages. He'd asked Giles and Willow for their opinions on that particular issue once, and the best theory they'd been able to offer was that, when the shaman had stuck his soul back, he'd merged it with Spike's demon rather than having it overshadow the demon like Angel's soul overshadowed Angelus…
And he was getting off-topic; the net result was that, even if there were some differences between him and Vala, she was still rather like him, in that she, like him, was trying to make up for stuff she'd done in her past by working with the SGC, even if she hadn't exactly been the guilty party responsible for what she was trying to atone for. He'd grown to kind of like her while she was part of the team, and right now he found himself wishing she was there again; he really wouldn't have minded getting the chance to talk to her a bit more, maybe find out a bit more about what it was really like out there…
He just wished that Daniel had managed to figure out more about that so-called 'Ancient treasure' that Vala had apparently been abducted to provide the location of; maybe if they'd known where what that screwy Goa'uld chick was looking for actually was, they might be able to track her down and see if they could get her help in finding where Vala actually was these days.
As it was, however, Vala was missing, the rest of SG-1 were occupied with their own projects, and all that Spike had to keep himself occupied while he waited for the quiet spell they were dealing with at the moment to end was work on his ability to touch stuff for longer than just to deliver the occasional punch. Teal'c had given him a few lessons in that 'kel-no-reem' thing to try and help him improve h is focus, but so far he wasn't having much luck.
"Everything OK?" a voice said from off to the side. Glancing over, Spike smiled slightly as he saw Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard walk into the room, looking curiously at the intangible vampire as he poked sullenly at some of the weights laid out before him.
"Oh, y'know, just a bit tired of being stuck here for so long; you know how it is," Spike replied casually, indicating a nearby chair where the new arrival could sit down if he wanted while he continued to stare intently at the object before him. "How about you?"
"Still trying to find possible candidates for the new team," Sheppard replied, sitting down sullenly on the bench beside Spike. "You never think you're going to miss somebody complaining until they actually leave you…"
"Tell me about it," Spike replied, smiling slightly at the former military commander of Atlantis (He still couldn't believe Atlantis was actually an alien city on another planet; so much for any theories that it was mystical in origin).
About a couple of days after Vala had gone missing, the SGC had announced the creation of the McKay-Carter Inter-Galactic Bridge, a vast 'bridge' of thirty-four Stargates taken from a multitude of different uninhabited planets from two galaxies- that part never failed to impress Spike; Earth had actually managed to send a bunch of people to another galaxy?- and subsequently 'laid out' between the Milky Way and Pegasus galaxies (He thought that was the name, at least), thus enabling quick and easy transport between any point in the aforementioned galaxies in a matter of minutes (So long as you had this small spaceship thing to travel through them; they still hadn't apparently finished the space station where the two ends of the 'bridge' met to make it safe for people to go through).
Unfortunately, as a result the expedition had discovered and 'woken up' some lost Ancients- the people who'd actually made Atlantis, based on what Spike remembered of his 'briefing' when he joined the SGC- who'd been stuck in some kind of slowed-time effect due to them moving at a fraction below the speed of light (The physics of it went over Spike's head; he thought he'd gathered that they'd been moving at a rate that meant that time had technically slowed down for them while moving normally for everyone else). The Ancients had been grateful enough for the save at the time, of course, but once they got to Atlantis, they'd just taken over the city and 'asked' every single human in the place to leave the city on the grounds that it was theirs.
Personally, Spike thought the SGC should have just told those Ancient sods where to stick it- there was like only a sodding hundred of them left and they'd been away for ten thousand years; did they really have the right to just march in and take over like that as though Earth hadn't gotten anywhere since their time?-, but the expedition members had been forced to move out nevertheless, with only that General O'Neill guy he'd met earlier- accompanied by the Woolsey prick, of course; Spike wondered how that guy was coping over there-, being allowed to hang around as liaisons between the Ancients and Earth. With nowhere else to go, most of the expedition's military force had taken up jobs at the SGC, with Colonel Sheppard in particular forming a bond with the members of SG-1 as they tried to help him adapt to his new life back on Earth, while the scientists were mostly shipped off to Area 51- Spike still couldn't believe that the theories about that place were all true; what else were the government covering up by publishing accurate whacko stories about it?- or sent off to whatever research project they wanted. Surprisingly enough, Spike had actually come to find that he particularly enjoyed spending time with the guy; he generally attributed it to the fact that, like him, John was the new guy at the SGC while still having a great deal of experience at dealing with stuff that most people didn't encounter normally.
OK, so John's experience was still related to the Stargate- albeit some slightly different Stargates; apparently the ones in the Pegasus Galaxy were a bit different from what they had here- while Spike's had been totally independent of the thing before coming here; from what Spike had heard about the Wraith, they weren't exactly like these 'Ori' buggers the Earth-based Stargate program had to deal with at the moment, so the fact remained that John was still getting used to changes in what he normally went up against. Heck, if Spike had the opportunity and still had his body- and if Earth's lot hadn't been booted out of that galaxy like they were a bunch of kids who'd been caught in their parents' bedroom after they got back from a night out, of course-, he might have asked if he could go on a mission at that end of the universe to see if the Wraiths' life-sucking abilities could have any effect on him give his technically-deceased status; it might have been interesting to pit Earth vampires against their apparent alien equivalent.
"So, what went wrong with the new guys this time around?" he asked, smiling slightly at his new friend; he knew that he shouldn't find it amusing, but somehow hearing about the various problem John had with his new team always managed to make him smile.
"In a nutshell?" John replied, looking over at Spike with a slight smile that nevertheless made it clear that he wasn't amused. "My scientist fell and broke his leg while examining some interesting-looking ruins and Captain Brooks- my second-in-command- nearly collapsed when it turned out he was allergic to something on that planet; some kind of bizarre rare plant's found there that doesn't seem to grow many places in the galaxy, apparently."
Spike blinked in shock
"Hold on; you lost one of your team to an allergy?" he said, looking over at John with a broad smile. "You're kidding me!"
"Wish I was; it'd at least actually be funny then," John replied, shrugging slightly as he sat back in his chair while looking at Spike. "How about you? Any progress with the touching thing?"
"Not yet; still can't make it last longer than a few secs," Spike replied, indicating a couple of dents in the floor where he'd dropped weights after losing his focus. "It really wasn't this hard when I was knocking Adria out…"
"Yeah, I've been meaning to ask; why would it be easier for you to focus in that kind of situation?" John asked, looking curiously at his new friend. Although he'd bonded with all of SG-1's members since he'd returned to Earth, he actually found it rather refreshing to have a chance to talk to a guy who, in his own way, was just as much the 'outsider' to this place as he was, even if it was because he was new rather than because he was used to working in a different part of the universe. "I would have thought that you'd find it harder to concentrate in that kind of situation, but it sounds like it was just the opposite…"
"Best guess is it was because I was thinking more about how much I wanted to just hurt her; probably gave me a bit more focus," Spike replied, shrugging uncertainly as he looked back at John. "Y'know, when I'm doing this with inanimate objects I'm trying to think about a hell of a lot of other stuff, but when I'm up against somebody who I know is about to blow up a planet…"
"All you need to do is focus on the fact that you don't want her to blow up the planet, right?" John asked, looking at Spike for clarification.
"Bingo," Spike replied, nodding briefly in confirmation. "Still working on getting it right when I don't have something like that to provoke me; really sucks, quite frankly."
"I'll bet," John replied, sighing slightly as he stared up at the ceiling. "Still, at least you know you can do it; we spent our first year in Atlantis without anything like the power supply we'd need to defend ourselves if things got ugly, and then-"
A knocking sound from off to one side broke off the conversation, prompting the two men to look up and see Sergeant Harriman standing at the door.
"Sorry to interrupt, but SG-1 are wanted in the briefing room," he said, looking apologetically between Spike and Colonel Sheppard. "We think we've managed to find Vala-"
"I'm there," Spike said, standing up and looking apologetically over at John. "Sorry, but-"
"Gotcha; duty calls," John replied, nodding at Spike with a slight smile. That was part of the reason so many of SG-1 liked hanging out with John, really; as the former head of the Atlantis military himself, he understood how difficult it could be for them to find time to socialise with people during work hours. "See you later?"
"'Course," Spike replied, nodding briefly at his friend before he turned around and walked through the wall to look at Harriman as the sergeant stepped back from the door to look at him in only slight surprise; the SGC staff had generally managed to come to terms with Spike's habit of not using doors in his condition, but it still unnerved them slightly whenever he did it. "So, where to?"
"Oh… you're joining the rest of SG-1 up top; we've received a police report of a waitress involved in a robbery who matches Vala's description and wasn't able to provide a name, so General Landry ordered that SG-1 be dispatched to retrieve her," Harriman replied, looking uncertainly at the intangible vampire as something occurred to him. "Uh… where's your amulet?"
"Oh, no worries; last time I checked, it's either with Sam or Danny depending on whose turn it is to take a crack," Spike smiled, shrugging casually at the man who dialled the Stargate- you had to admire the guy, really; from what Spike had heard dialling the Stargate without the 'DHD' things he'd seen on other planets was a lot harder than you'd expect-, before he turned his attention back to the corridors before him. "Anyway, let's go… uh, just what I have on will be fine, right?"
"SG-1 are strictly going in as civilians; you'll be fine as you are," Harriman assured him, unable to stop a slight smile from crossing his face at the private joke; as Spike gradually became a more permanent member of SG-1, the team had taken to joking about his inability to wear BDUs or change clothes due to his intangible status, although in general the dark leather jacket worked for camouflage purposes on most of the planets they visited these days.
AN: Sorry about the quality of this; it's mostly a filler to establish the presence of the Atlantis expedition here during the events of "The Return", which took place around a week ago. Given my timeline for this story, I needed to account for the Odyssey's possession of a ZPM as soon as possible, so I decided to have the expedition arrive during this two-week 'jump' that occurred during 'Memento Mori' as I wasn't entirely sure how to explore the SGC's reaction to it; we return to the events of 'Mori' as a whole next chapter