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
"So..." Spike asked after listening to a few of his team's more interesting tales about their victories over some Goa'uld in the past- the idea that they'd blown up a sun to stop a guy's fleet was a bit disturbing, even if he trusted that they would have made sure the sun wasn't in an inhabited solar system-, deciding that now was as good a time as any to ask a question that had been bothering him for a while, "what happened to that 'Oma' bird you mentioned to Merlin?"
"Well, that's a... bit of a complicated story," Daniel said, after briefly exchanging glances with the rest of the team before turning back to face Spike. "Have we told you about... Anubis?"
"Apart from some brief thing about the guy attacking Earth once... no, you haven't," Spike confirmed after a brief moment of reflection, looking curiously at his friends. "Who was he?"
"Well, that's... a bit complicated, really," Daniel replied. "He was originally a Goa'uld, but through some chain of events we aren't sure of, he discovered some ancient texts about Ascension, and was able to make contact with Oma Desala- an Ascended who's occasionally helped others learn how to Ascend herself; she's essentially the figure we've come to think of in mythology as 'Mother Earth'- and managed to trick her into helping him Ascend-"
"Hold on; a Goa'uld learned how to Ascend?" Spike repeated, his eyes widening incredulously at the news. "As in, one of those genocidal egotistical maniacs reached a god-like level of existence?"
"Yes and no," Daniel replied. "The other Ancients quickly realised what Anubis was and stripped him of most of his Ascended power, but to punish Oma for her mistake, they allowed Anubis to continue to exist in a partly Ascended state; he needed to use a force field to interact with others and give himself some kind of physical form unless he directly used someone as a host- and if he took someone as a host by possessing them, the body would eventually die due to the hostile reaction Anubis caused to their immune system-, but he couldn't actually be killed himself, and he'd also be able to use any Ancient technology he encountered. The only thing he was explicitly forbidden from doing was using any knowledge or power he couldn't have acquired as a normal Goa'uld, and even then he managed to find some ways around it; my best guess is that he directed his ships to locations where he 'knew' he'd find Ancient technology without deliberately directing his followers to specific planets..."
"Ah," Spike said, nodding slightly as he looked between his friends. "And... I take it all that made him pretty powerful?"
"You could say that," Sam confirmed. "He managed to use some of the Ancient technology he discovered to almost destroy us by setting the Stargate to overload, and on another occasion he discovered how to use an Ancient healing device to create a race of virtually indestructible drones to replace the Jaffa as his servants; we managed to stop him for a time by trapping his current host on an ice planet with a broken DHD- Ba'al actually took over some of his territory and resources during that time-, but he eventually got off the planet and tried to activate an Ancient weapon that would destroy all life in the galaxy-"
"Hold on; they invented something that could do that?" Spike repeated, staring incredulously at his friends. "Why the Hell'd they do something that stupid?"
"It is believed that the weapon was originally created in order to restore life to the galaxy after the Ancients indirectly spread a fatal plague throughout the galaxy that we believe was created by the Ori," Teal'c explained. "The Ancients were able to escape the plague by Ascending, but the weapon allowed them to restart life across the universe after they had done so, and thus undo the damage that the plague had caused. The weapon was then concealed for several centuries until we discovered its location in the temple of Dakara-"
"Oh, so that's where that thing came from?" Spike asked, snapping his fingers as he smiled at the Jaffa, before his expression became curious once again. "So... how'd you stop him?"
"That's where Oma's fate comes in," Daniel explained. "How it happened is a complicated story, but I ended up in a 'midway point' between Ascension and this plane of existence after I was nearly killed, where I encountered Oma and Anubis as Anubis was preparing to activate the weapon after we activated it to defeat a machine-race known as the Replicators. I was able to persuade Oma that she had to do something about Anubis, and she engaged him in battle before he could complete his plan."
"And destroyed him?" Spike asked.
"Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that," Daniel replied, a more subdued expression on his face now. "Due to Anubis's Ascended nature, Oma couldn't actually do anything while he was still on the lower planes as he would have been... well, 'outside her jurisdiction' is probably the best way to describe it... but by allowing him to Ascend to her level, she was able to engage him in permanent battle on the higher planes; he can't kill her and she can't kill him, but since he's focusing all of his energy on fighting against her..."
"He can't spare the time to do anything else?" Spike finished, shaking his head as he looked upwards with a grim smile; even his demon had to admire someone who'd dedicate eternity to fighting one guy for the sake of everyone else. "Damn... sounds like a pretty gutsy woman."
"She was definitely... dedicated," Daniel said, nodding slightly at the memory of the woman in question (Spike thought about making a joke, but decided against it; not only was Ba'al a real mood-killer, but Daniel's attitude when talking about this 'Oma' bird put him more in mind of Buffy's early relationship with Rupert- student respecting a teacher they didn't always agree with- rather than anyone who thought about the other person in a romantic sense).
Spike wished that he'd been able to reciprocate their tales with some of his own, but with Ba'al present Spike had a distinct feeling that giving that guy any information about vampires would be a bad idea, even if it wasn't likely the guy would be able to use any of it...
"So," Vala asked, looking uncertainly between Daniel and Merlin as she finally broke the near-taboo that the group had apparently been working under by asking the question that had been on their minds since their new associate had started his work, "he's been at this for hours; wanna take a guess at what he's doing?"
"Well," Daniel replied, studying the hologram that was still being generated above the platform, showing molecules moving and joining with each other, "from the looks of it, I'd say he's virtually piecing something together from base molecules."
"Another Sangraal?" Sam asked.
"What else would he be making?" Spike asked, shrugging slightly as he looked back at Sam; he might be new to this whole mess, but he couldn't think of anything else that Merlin could be doing with his time right now.
Before anyone could speculate any further on Merlin's current activities, the Ancient stepped back from the device with evident fatigue in his stance, forcing Sam and Daniel to hurry over and grab his arms before he could hit the ground.
"Thank you," Merlin said, his voice sounding uncomfortably fatigued for a man of his age given Spike's personal experience with the elderly. "I'm fine; I just... I just needed a rest..."
Just as Merlin was being lowered into a seat, the entire room seemed to shimmer and glow around them, and suddenly Spike found himself standing alone in the chamber.
"What the-?" he began, only to double over as he suddenly felt like something was trying to pull his spine out through his head-
"Not again!" he groaned as the pain ceased, leaving him standing in apparently the same room as they'd been in earlier (If he ever got a chance to talk with whatever higher power had linked him to that amulet, they were going to have words; did it have to hurt so damn much when he was dragged away from the thing?).
"What...?" Merlin began, looking at Spike in slightly weak confusion.
"That's a long and complicated story that this isn't the time for right now," Mitchell interjected in a low voice- Ba'al was looking the other way and didn't seem to have noticed the circumstances of Spike's arrival, but there was no point drawing attention to anything unless he had to- before he looked at the rest of the team. "What actually happened?"
"Colonels Mitchell and Carter," Teal'c's voice said over the radio, "come quickly. You will want to see this."
Glancing around herself, Sam nodded briefly at Vala before allowing the dark-haired woman to take hold of Merlin's left arm, Sam subsequently heading for the cave exit as Mitchell tapped Ba'al on the shoulder.
"Let's go," he said, the two lieutenant colonels hurrying down the passage as Ba'al followed in resignation.
"I'll... go with them, huh?" Spike said, shrugging slightly as he looked at Daniel and Vala; as much as he wanted to ask Merlin what the guy had meant by all that stuff about the origin of the supernatural, he didn't want to give himself the temptation to bother the guy with irrelevant questions given how tired he looked and the importance of what he had to do.
As he hurried along the corridor after his teammates- taking care to avoid going through anything; if he didn't want Ba'al to learn what was odd about him, he had to get into the habit of not walking through things while the guy wasn't watching him so that it would look more natural to do it when he was being watched-, Spike quickly found himself standing alongside his new friends and the ex-System Lord at the cave entrance. However, in contrast to the desert scene that had been described to him earlier, the current planet was dark, cold, and windy with snow flurries, with no indication that there had been any sun or sand here just moments before.
"What the Hell?" Spike asked, looking at the world around himself in confusion before he focused his attention on Teal'c. "I thought you said we were on a desert planet?"
"We were," Teal'c replied. "A few moments ago, the gate activated on its own. The crystal on the obelisk began to glow, and then everything changed."
"That's putting it mildly..." Spike muttered.
"We've been transported to another planet," Mitchell concluded.
"Well," Sam said, raising her voice slightly as they walked further out of the cave and the wind began to pick up, "if Daniel's right and Morgan wanted to keep Merlin hidden, this would be a great way to do it. My guess is, we're traveling through a circuit of planets, cut off from the rest of the gate system by a deliberate alteration of the DHD program."
"Then you believe we will be unable to dial out from this gate as well," Teal'c said.
"Well, we can give it a shot, but yeah, I doubt it'll work," Sam confirmed
"Until we find the automatic dialling program in the DHD processor and shut it down."
"You can do that, right?" Mitchell asked.
"I hope so," Sam said, after a too-long hesitation that Spike didn't need his long experience with people to know that she wasn't really that sure about the answer. To her credit, she didn't allow that doubt to show in her actions, but simply walked over to the mushroom-esque DHD in front of the Stargate and the obelisk just behind it as she began to work.
"Well," Spike said, glancing back at Mitchell, "you lot stay here; I'll just... go back and see how Merlin's doing, OK?"
He didn't bother to wait for a response, but turned around and began to hurry back down the corridor towards the main chamber; with snow blowing around out there, he didn't want to stick around and risk Ba'al noticing that he wasn't getting any on him. Cutting through a few rocks as he went, Spike made it back to the cavern just in time to see Merlin getting back up from the chair where he'd been sitting earlier and take up position in front of his modified Repository thing, Daniel and Vala just behind him as he turned to look at them.
"Good luck, Doctor Jackson," Merlin said.
With that, he turned back to face the machine in front of him and activated the device once again. For a moment, it seemed to be operating like it had before, only for the green light that it had been emitting earlier to be replaced by a bright white light that enveloped most of Merlin's head. The light had flared only for a moment before something suddenly thrust Merlin away from the device, the Ancient falling to the floor before anyone could reach him as the light shut down.
"What the Hell?" Spike yelled, hurrying over to join Daniel and Vala as they crouched around the fallen Ancient, Merlin taking a single last breath before he stopped.
"Oh, bugger," Spike said, looking over at Daniel. "Please tell me he's not...?"
In response, Daniel placed his fingers against Merlin's neck, only to look back up at the vampire with a grim expression.
"He's dead," the archaeologist said.
"Shit..." Spike muttered, turning around to stick his head in the rock wall behind him.
Just once, couldn't someone cut them a sodding break? It seemed like every time they had to deal with the really powerful crap, the people who knew what they were doing and could make the damn fight that bit easier- the Order of Dagon, that 'Guardian' woman who'd helped Buffy track down the Scythe, maybe that Walsh bitch (She'd been nuts, but she'd created Adam; she might've been able to help them work out a way to stop him/it if she'd stayed alive long enough)- had to go and die on them...
A few minutes later, Merlin's body lay on the table where he'd rested earlier- poor location for the greatest wizard of all time to be 'laid to rest', but they couldn't do much else with this planet's icy condition making it hard to do anything in the way of digging-, arms crossed over his chest as SG-1 and Ba'al stood around the room, each of them trying to take in what had just happened.
"He said 'Good luck'?" Sam asked, clearly unable to believe that those had been the last words the man they'd tried to find for so long had delivered to the rest of the universe.
"Very strange," Vala confirmed, rubbing her head with her fingers as she lay slumped in a chair. "It's almost as if he knew it was going to happen."
"Which leaves us with no Sangraal, and, for the moment, no way off this planet," Mitchell said, his voice low and his tone equally grim.
"I told you I can fix the dialling device," Ba'al suddenly said from his position leaning against the device that had projected Merlin's hologram earlier.
"Oh, bugger," Spike groaned, rolling his eyes in exasperation. "As if the situation wasn't crap enough, now you're talking again?"
"Merlin's little trick with my vocal cords expired at the same moment he did," Ba'al commented with a smug smirk that reminded Spike of a bearded Angelus.
"Yet another reason to mourn his passing," Teal'c noted.
"I second that emotion, buddy," Spike confirmed, looking scathingly at Ba'al. "I've barely known you a couple of hours and I already know that I preferred you silent."
"Joke all you want... Spike," Ba'al said, an expression on his face that made it clear that he was still wondering what Spike was doing with the rest of SG-1, "but I am the only one who can get us out of here."
"He is good with dialling programs," Sam said to Mitchell in a low voice that she clearly didn't want Ba'al to hear. "Maybe if we worked together..."
After a moment of contemplation, Mitchell nodded in resignation.
"Fine," he said, indicating the door. "Teal'c, you're with me and Sam; Jackson, you, Vala and Spike see if you can find anything around here that we can use to... do something, OK?"
Spike didn't even bother to make a disparaging comment to that last statement; right now, he was just trying to stop himself from 'vamping out' and trying to unleash his frustration and rage on the world around him, even if his best efforts at concentration would be nowhere near sufficient to do the kind of damage he'd need to do to vent all of his anger.
God... he'd had a chance to talk with Merlin about the origin of magic, and he'd completely lost it...
"He said he had one more thing to do before he could rest," Daniel said, breaking Spike's bleak mood after a few moments had passed.
"In case you hadn't noticed, he didn't exactly do that-!" Spike began.
"No, that doesn't fit anything; if he knew he had that little time available to him, trying to complete the weapon doesn't make sense," Daniel elaborated, as he walked over to study the device in front of him. "As I've said, this looks like the usual Ancient repositories we've found that were used to download all the knowledge of the Ancients into someone's mind, even if it doubles up as a user-interfaced design program. Both times that Jack- General O'Neill- tried to use them, it nearly destroyed his mind because his brain just wasn't equipped to cope with that kind of knowledge..."
He paused for a moment, contemplatively studying the device on the wall before him, before he spoke again. "But what if you could control it?"
"Control it?" Spike repeated uncertainly.
"You know, instead of using it to store all the knowledge of the Ancients, you use it to store something... more specific," Daniel finished.
"Like?" Vala asked, voicing the thought that was on her and Spike's minds.
"I'm not sure..." Daniel said, looking back at Merlin's body. Spike had just turned to look at the dead Ancient when he noted movement out of the corner of his eye, turning back just in time to see Daniel take hold of the device's handles and position himself in front of its 'mouth' as the green light shone once again.
"What the bloody-!" Spike began, only to halt himself mid-sentence as a white light began to envelop Daniel's head; he didn't know much about Ancient tech, but he was fairly sure that interrupting something that was doing something to another guy's head would not be on the list of 'smart things to do with Ancient tech'...
Fortunately, the decision on what to do was taken out of his hands when Daniel was sent flying away from the device just like Merlin had been, forcing Vala to get down on her knees and lift his body up so that it was resting against her, moving to activate her radio after she'd moved the archaeologist into a possibly comfortable position.
"Vala here," she said anxiously. "I'm going to need some help."
"What is it?" Mitchell's voice responded.
"It's Daniel," Vala replied, swallowing slightly as she looked anxiously up at Spike.
The vampire and the ex-thief only had to wait a few more moments before the lieutenant colonel came hurrying into the room, looking urgently at the still-unconscious archaeologist.
"Jackson?" he asked, crouching down beside Vala as he looked at the archaeologist in exasperation. "Jackson!"
When his yells met with no response, he turned his attention to the other two members of SG-1 still in the room. "What did he do?"
"Stuck his head in that thing, got hit by a big glow of some sort, and then..." Spike said, shrugging awkwardly at his inability to provide further details. "Hey, my knowledge of technology just goes up to what I need to know to work a mobile, and even that's pretty much useless to me now!"
"Great..." Mitchell groaned, leaning with one hand against the wall as he looked at the unconscious archaeologist in frustration. "Merlin's dead, we're completely cut from the rest of the galaxy, our best hope of getting out of here's a guy who'd be happy to kill us under normal circumstances, and the only guy who knows how to read Ancient's gone and knocked himself out and we don't even know what caused it..."
"Oh, thank you very much, Mitchell; go on about how screwed we are!" Spike groaned, walking over to glare at the lieutenant colonel. "You know, I may not have been the cheeriest sod back in the day, but at least I didn't repeat the problem-!"
"Look, I'm just tryin' to figure out a way out of this; if you've got a better idea-" Mitchell began, before a new burst of white light filled the room once again, fading to leave only Spike and Merlin's body in the room.
"Not agaiAARRGGHH!" Spike began, bending over as he felt the increasingly-familiar yank at what would have been his insides if he'd still have a body to have internal organs-
Followed by the disorientating feeling of landing somewhere else that looked exactly the same as where he'd been earlier, with only the absence of Merlin's body to provide any indication that he'd moved somewhere else.
"Damnit!" Spike yelled, before a sudden groan from Daniel prompted him to glance over in his friend's direction.
"You're awake?" Vala said, smiling encouragingly at the archaeologist as he sat up, rubbing the bridge of his nose with one hand as he looked uncertainly at the three people around him.
"OK, am I the only one worried about the fact that we've apparently jumped to another planet in this freaky system?" Mitchell asked, indicating their surroundings in exasperation before he activated his radio. "Sam, where are we now?"
"Well, on the bright side, this planet's a bit warmer than the last one, even if it's a bit spookier; I might be able to get some work done without Ba'al complaining now," Sam's voice replied. "How's Daniel?"
"He's... sitting up," Mitchell replied, looking grimly over at the archaeologist as Vala helped him into a chair. "I'll... get back to you on the rest."
"Danny-boy?" Spike asked, walking over to crouch down beside his new friend, Daniel removing his glasses and placing them in a pocket of his vest with one hand as he held his head up with the other. "You OK?"
"Here," Vala put in, reaching for a canteen as Mitchell joined Spike in crouching, although the lieutenant-colonel took up position on Daniel's other side.
"How you doing, sunshine?" the colonel asked.
As soon as he'd spoken, Daniel turned to look at him, blinking slowly as he took in the other man's face, apparently trying to place where he'd seen it before.
"He was right," he said at last, smiling briefly as he looked at the colonel. "You do look like Percival."
"What?" Spike asked, trying not to make it too obvious how thrown he was by this sudden change in the conversation.
"Excuse me?" Mitchell asked, clearly just as confused by this turn of events as Spike was.
"We spent a lot of time in this room," Daniel said, his eyes drifting upwards contemplatively.
"Who did?" Vala asked, exchanging worried glances with Cam and Spike.
"We did," Daniel began, before he closed his eyes and corrected him. "He did. Merlin."
Apparently unaware of the concern his last comments had generated in his friends, Daniel let out a slight chuckle. "Sorry, it's a little confusing having two sets of memories in your head. He wasn't kidding about living many lifetimes."
With that statement, Daniel grabbed Mitchell's shoulder with one hand and hauled himself back onto his feet, nearly walking through Spike as he took a few steps.
"Hold on; you're saying that you've got Merlin's memories?" Spike said, looking incredulously at Daniel.
"Some of them," Daniel clarified, placing a finger against his forehead as he walked. "Earth, Atlantis, and the different medieval societies he set up throughout the galaxy... and the work he did in this lab."
"Hey, whoa, hey, hey, hang on a second," Mitchell interjected, as Daniel looked thoughtfully at the room around him. "Are you telling me you can build the Sangraal?"
"He knew he didn't have the strength to finish it- his body had deteriorated too much during the stasis-, so he gave me the knowledge," Daniel explained, walking past his teammates to take up position in front of the device once again. With that explanation, Daniel placed his hands on the handles and activated the device, the green light illuminating his face once again as holographic images reappeared above the table.
"Wait!" Mitchell yelled, just before the holograms started to come together above the table, a circular shape quickly forming as the group spoke.
"I can see it now," Daniel said, his tone almost reverential as he began his work. "I can do this."
After glancing awkwardly around himself for a moment, Mitchell turned around and walked to a position a few feet away from Daniel, subtly beckoning Spike and Vala to come over and join him.
"Twice a device like that almost killed General O'Neill," the lieutenant colonel explained, apprehension clear in his voice as he looked back at the archaeologist. "Both times, it took the Asgard to save him."
"Daniel thought that this device might be different," Vala replied, a hopeful tone in her own voice. "That somehow the information could be limited."
"I hope he's right..." Mitchell muttered grimly, as the three of them looked back at the assembling pieces in the hologram above them.
Spike might be hopelessly out of his depth right now- even if a part of him was still hoping that whatever parts of Merlin were in Daniel would include an explanation for the guy's knowledge of magic and demons that he could tell Spike when this mess was over-, but that didn't mean he wasn't aware of the risks; if things went pear-shaped with Merlin's last gambit, they really didn't have the time or ability to call anyone for help...