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: Well, here we go; my retelling of "Line in the Sand"- set just a few days after the last chapter-, which I hope will meet with your approval

The Ghost in the Team

Despite the fact that little real progress had been made regarding the attempt to find where Daniel was at present, Spike had to admit that the rest of SG-1 had made a decent amount of headway in their attempts to figure out new ways of opposing the Ori in the absence of the Sangraal.

With the aid of a device that Sam explained they had discovered in an old laboratory of Merlin's- apparently he'd used it to conceal his research when he'd been making the Sangraal in the first place; the thing apparently worked by shifting matter into a dimension that even the Ascended couldn't see- they'd been doing a few tests on other planets to determine whether they could make the device work on a larger scale, and the last test had left Sam fairly confident that she was ready to use the device on a larger scale. Landry had subsequently called the rest of SG-1 into a meeting, but Spike had decided to wait outside for the moment; he'd be going along to the planet, but since his condition limited what he could do on a mission like this, his presence was considered surplus to requirements.

Plus... well, he had to admit, he found the whole thing a bit frustrating; without Daniel or Merlin's knowledge available to them right now, anything they tried to do to fight the Ori would just buy them some time unless they could figure out some other way of getting those Ori bastards out of the galaxy, and he still wasn't anywhere closer to becoming solid.

To Sam's credit, she'd also tried using the device on Spike in case it was able to do something about his currently intangible status, but even that hadn't accomplished anything. While the device had turned him invisible, otherwise he had remained just as physically handicapped as he always was, even if it had been interesting to note that he could still touch stuff where everyone else was left unable to make contact with anything.

He'd tried to sound amicable about it- after all, it wasn't like he'd really expected anything to happen; his condition was unprecedented even for magic, so the chances of science being able to fix it were really remote in his book-, but it had still been frustrating for him to realise that the best shot he had at regaining a real body with the resources available had come to nothing.

Spike wasn't going to kid himself that anyone was going to sponsor any mission exclusively focused on finding a way to make him solid again even if he hadn't shown that he was probably more useful like this, which meant that, for the foreseeable future, he couldn't do anything but stand around and walk through walls to amuse himself when he was alone...

"Everything all right?" Vala's voice asked, breaking into Spike's train of thought as he sat in an empty office, the dark-haired ex-thief smiling at him as she walked through the door.

"Just a bit down, I suppose," Spike replied, shrugging slightly as he looked back at her, even as the sight of her warmed whatever he was made of throughout his intangible body; as weird as it was, his new relationship with the space thief was a definite bright spot in his currently-frustrating existence. "Not used to being so useless, you know; that bloody Stargate gives your daughter too many places to hide Daniel even if we could be sure he wasn't on a ship right now, so my usual searching methods are pretty much useless, and that's before you take my whole goddamn problem..."

"Hey," Vala said, sitting down beside Spike on the desk before she leaned over to give him a brief peck on the cheek, smiling at the momentary sensation when her lips made contact with something as she pulled away to look at him. "Look at that; you're solid now-"

"Just getting the hang of the control part of the equation; it's not the same thing," Spike interjected, waving his hand through the computer on the desk behind him for additional emphasis. "Can turn it on at the right moments, but all I've got is moments, and I still can't feel things when I'm like this; if I could just know I could go through a day without needing to focus when I touched stuff..."

He sighed and stared up at the ceiling for a moment before he shrugged and turned to look at Vala; if he had to still exist like this, he couldn't let himself get caught up in moping right now. "Still; them's the breaks, right?"

"Quite," Vala said, nodding at him before she indicated the door. "Anyway, moping aside, we'd better be off; we've got three days to set up Merlin's device in a village that's been ordered to capitulate to the Ori or die, and naturally nobody's in favour of the first option."

"Nice place?" Spike asked inquiringly.

"It's rather like the last few places we've been on purpose; does that help?" Vala replied.

"Just so long as we can escape invasions, then yes," Spike said, smiling back at her even as he crossed his fingers in his pocket; a chance to relax would always be a good thing, but given the way this team's luck had gone on the last few missions, he didn't want to jinx anything...

A couple of days later, Spike stood casually at the corner of one of the many small houses in the village they'd come here to save, smiling slightly as he looked up at the sun in the sky above him as the villagers milled around him (Teal'c and Vala were chatting with everyone, but he was trying to stand slightly off to the side; he didn't want to get into a position where they'd notice that he wasn't solid, no matter how pleasant these guys were).

He might want to be solid again, but one thing that he was definitely going to miss when he got his body back was the opportunity to stand in the sunshine; even if he couldn't feel it right now, it was still nice to be able to just enjoy the sun's rays for once, rather than having to run about in a stupid blanket if he wanted to get anywhere without sewer access.

Right now, of course, he was mainly doing this to take his mind off the fact that there wasn't much else for him to do in this whole place; the more he saw and heard about these 'Ori' sods, the more he wished for the good old days when he could actually sort out the problem by beating the other sod to a pulp (Hitting Adria had been satisfying, but taking her out wouldn't do much to sort the problem in the long term).

The idea of the Ori forces who'd come here asking the village to 'prove' themselves by constructing something used to burn heretics did little to improve Spike's opinion of them; for beings that were meant to be several thousand years old, they never seemed to have learnt anything about being gentle with people even if they were intending to kill them later on.

God, even he'd known that sometimes you had to take your and at least try and be 'nice' if you were going to get at certain victims; the fact that he'd generally gone for the quick kill didn't change the fact that he'd known the importance of other ways of doing things!

Still, his frustration at the Ori aside, he had to admit that the village itself was a pleasant enough place; Thilana, the village leader, had certainly been welcoming enough when they'd arrived, and she'd willingly- if cautiously; like anyone would, she was just a bit anxious about relying something they didn't fully understand- accepted Sam's explanation for what they were trying to accomplish with Merlin's device; the only challenge right now was whether or not Sam would be able to set the thing up in time...

"Sam's all set," Mitchell said, walking up to place his hands on Teal'c and Vala's shoulders , drawing their attention back to him.

"Colonel Reynolds and his team are standing by the gate," Teal'c said, as Spike walked over to join the other four.

"Reynolds, this is Mitchell," the colonel added, activating his radio in response to Teal'c's confirmation. "Remember we're gonna be out of radio contact once we go out of phase."

"Understood," the other colonel's voice replied at the other end of the radio.

With that conversation concluded, Mitchell walked over to a nearby bench to stand on top of it, giving him a better chance to address the surrounding villagers as his teammates gathered around him.

"Listen up, folks!" he said, turning his head as he spoke to try and address everyone around him. "We're gonna try a little disappearing act here. Please remember to keep your arms and legs inside the village at all times, until we come to a complete and final stop."

Spike wasn't sure if he should roll his eyes at Mitchell's statement or chuckle at the obvious confusion on the villagers' faces (He sometimes wondered why the kind of jokes he'd have found frustrating from the one-eyed carpenter actually seemed kind of amusing when Mitchell did them; did the fact that the colonel didn't insult him all the time really make that much difference?).

"Blank stares work too," Mitchell said, pointing at a few villagers with a casual smile as he stepped off the bench and activated his radio once again. "Sam, light her up."

"Copy that," Sam replied, before the radio was shut off. A few moments later, a brilliant white light illuminated the whole village, and then it faded away once again, leaving Mitchell smiling slightly as he checked his radio only to be met with nothing but static when he tried to call the other SG-team still at the Stargate.

"Looks like we did it," the lieutenant colonel said, smiling over at the rest of his team before Spike stepped back slightly as the villagers moved in to warmly shake the hands of the various members of SG-1; so long as he wasn't too close to the centre, he'd only have to deal with a few stragglers, which should make it easier for him to focus long enough to shake what hands he had to shake...

Damnit, being intangible without letting anyone around you know it was a lot of sodding work.

A few hours later, as night had settled on the village, Spike couldn't help but smile at the sight of young girls presenting Sam and Vala with flowers as Teal'c and Mitchell ate their food (Spike had simply said that he was fasting in preparation for a personal trial he had coming up to account for his apparent lack of interest in eating; Daniel had recommended that he use that as an excuse during an earlier briefing in case it ever came up). Even after the ceremony where the Jaffa had thanked him for his role in saving Dakara, it was still nice to feel like people actually recognised what they were doing

"Tonight," Tharlina said, standing up from her position at the top of the table to address the surrounding villagers, "we honour our newest friends from Earth, whose wisdom, generosity and kindness have allowed us to resist those who wish to return us to slavery. We extend to you our deepest and most sincere thanks."

Just as the villagers were bowing to SG-1, the same light that had surrounded them when the device was activated flared up again before settling down.

Spike didn't need to be a genius to guess that the device they'd been relying on for their protection- he was definitely including himself in that category; he might be pretty much impossible to damage like this, but there had to be something out there that the amulet couldn't take- had just shut down; Sam's response to Vala's whispered inquiry about what had just happened about the field collapsing just confirmed it, leaving him with no other choice but to abandon the previous feast and hurry after his teammates to the building where the device had been set up earlier.

With his condition forcing him to take a slightly longer way around in order to stop anyone from not bumping into him and realising that he wasn't technically there, by the time Spike reached the library Sam had apparently finished examining the device itself and was already examining the read-outs on her laptop.

"OK," she said, looking up at the rest of the team just as Spike hurried through the door to join them, "I've got some good news and some bad news."

"Good first," Mitchell said, an attitude that Spike definitely agreed with.

"Well, in order to bring everything back completely, the machine has to maintain a connection with every single molecule that it sends out of phase," Sam began to explain (Spike thought momentarily about asking her to hurry up, but pushed that aside; she knew what she was talking about, and wouldn't be discussing something like this if she didn't think it was relevant). "Now, obviously that requires a lot of energy, so I implemented a failsafe that would automatically bring everything back into our dimension in the event of a power disruption."

"And such a disruption occurred," Teal'c said, moving towards Sam's desk from where he had been silently staring out of a window.

"Well, it was just a slight fluctuation, but it was enough to trigger the failsafe," Sam clarified.

"So what do we do?" Mitchell asked.

"Actually, that's the problem," Sam said, looking apologetically at the others sitting around her. "I thought I'd stabilized the power supply."

"Any chance you can sort out whatever happened there so that it won't happen again?" Spike asked, trying to ignore the immediate thought that whatever had happened was clearly something she didn't know how to fix if it had happened in the first place.

The uncertain expression on Sam's face was all the answer Spike needed to work out what they were up against now; evidently, knowing what had happened didn't translate into an ability to fix it.

So much for his hopes that they could have an easy mission...

The next morning once again found Spike standing around waiting for an opportunity to do something, except that he was now waiting outside the village, having been deprived of the opportunity to hope for the best and left with no alternative but to grimly prepare for the worst. Sam was still working away at her attempt to reactivate Merlin's device, but without knowing precisely what had caused the problem originally, there really wasn't much they could do except wait and see what Sam could pull out of her metaphorical hat.

Still, at least the village leaders hadn't expressed any interest in selling them out or giving into the Priors to save their own necks yet; that 'Matar' guy who seemed to be the equivalent of the deputy mayor here appeared to have his doubts, but Tharlina was sticking to her commitment to avoid submitting to another's rule after their time spent in servitude to the Goa'uld (The more Spike heard about those bastards, the more he hated them; at least when someone became a vampire their true selves actually 'died' and passed on, but those bastards practically forced the host to watch as they destroyed everything around them for the sake of it...).

The only question now was whether or not SG-1 would be able to live up to their promises and actually help these guys get away from the Priors. Mitchell and Teal'c were helping to coordinate some kind of defensive strategy while Sam kept up her work on the device, but that left Spike and Vala to just do whatever they could. Spike had volunteered to keep an eye on the Stargate in case the Prior came back- he might not be able to keep a radio on him, but he could still move fairly fast if the situation called for it-, but that still left Sam struggling to get the power on before any Ori forces showed up and orders that they couldn't let that thing fall into enemy hands if everything went pear-shaped.

That was one thing Spike definitely missed about magic; at least if someone forgot a spell there was a chance that someone else could rewrite it again later on, but with this kind of technology it would take probably anyone here centuries at best to rebuild that thing Merlin had come up with, even without the issue that he'd apparently built it with some knowledge he'd picked up while he was Ascended (God, what hadn't that guy done in his existence?).

If he ever got the chance to get back in touch with anyone from his old life, it might be interesting to see if anyone would be willing for him to see about getting permission for Red to take a look at some of the stuff the SGC had discovered over the years; she was one of the only people he'd known who'd looked at science and technology during their lives, even if she was definitely more 'magic-girl' these days...

Further musings on the nature of technology versus magic were cut short by the sound of what appeared to be small fighters passing by above his head, clearly heading for the village at significant speed- Spike just hoped that they were loud enough for the rest of the team to hear them before they got within firing range; they hadn't been expecting this kind of attack-, leaving Spike with no choice but to hurry towards the village at his fastest possible speed.

Even as the sight of a bunch of Ori troops appearing on some kind of platform a short distance away from him as he ran made it clear that he was wasting his hopes, he could only pray to whatever higher being might be listening to him that he could get there in time to help his friends; they might be up against really sucky odds right now, but that didn't mean they should just give up...

As she continued her work at the generator, Sam wished that she could more easily ignore the sound of what had to be the Ori equivalent of fighters or 'puddle jumpers'- given the Ori's ties to the Ancients, the second description was probably more accurate- outside the hut where she had set up the generator; even if she knew that getting this generator working was the only way to guarantee their safety, that didn't stop her from wishing that she could get out there and help her teammates and the villagers take down their current attackers in a more direct manner...

Still, if her current plan to use an Ancient capacitor to evenly divide the generators' power worked like she hoped it would, they could manage to save this village without too much damage being done to anything; the only problem was the time available to her to get it working...

"Sam, we've got fighters circling," Mitchell's voice said, his voice betraying his obvious sense of urgency at the current crisis. "How are you coming with that disappearing act?"

"Just a few more minutes!" Sam replied, continuing her work even as she heard the sound of gunfire outside, both the familiar firing of P-90s and the less familiar sound of the Ori soldiers' staff weapons in retaliation.

It was a meaningless thought, but Sam suddenly wished that Daniel was here; even if he'd just been outside helping the villagers defend themselves, she would have felt more relaxed knowing that he was there in case she needed him for something...

And where did that thought come from?

She knew that she'd been missing Daniel ever since they'd been forced to leave him behind, but ever since that conversation with Spike, it was as though she'd opened a door in herself she hadn't even known existed; she'd never really realised just how much she'd blamed herself for Daniel's Ascension-related deaths until she actually said it, and it just felt so much more... intense... then she'd ever expected.

She'd always felt responsible when a mistake she'd made ended up endangering others, but somehow just the idea of doing something like that to Daniel- no matter how many times he'd died already- made her feel almost physically ill in a manner that she thought she'd locked away long ago.

As much as she tried to push those feelings to the back of her mind, it was like Spike's 'prompting' had forced her to acknowledge something she'd tried to deny about herself for so long that she'd almost forgotten she was even denying it in the first place...

The sound of rapid footsteps as what could only be more Ori soldiers advanced into the village forced Sam back onto her current task; there would be plenty of time to consider whatever she might or might not feel for Daniel when Merlin's device was operational and the village was safe.