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: For those who wish to know, some of the scientific elements here was inspired by the Star Trek: Enterprise novel 'Daedalus's Children'- a rather good book; it's the second of a two-part novel where a dimensional rift sends Enterprise into a parallel universe-, regarding how some universes differ from each other; hope you like it.
The Ghost in the Team
After spending the better part of two hours sitting in their 'cell', alternating between Spike's initial suggestion of Charades and Sam writing out some equations from memory while Spike scribbled out something that he wouldn't let Sam read- she was just grateful that they'd been provided with paper; her and Spike might be friends, but there just weren't enough conversation topics available for them in this kind of environment-, a new pair of agents came to the door and took them back to the transporter room, refusing to answer either of their questions before they were sent back down to Stargate Command.
Sam's mood only picked up when the two of them were shown to her counterpart's lab, where they found Rodney McKay working on a computer; McKay might not be perfect, but they wouldn't exactly bring her and Spike to see him in a relatively small room if they had some kind of negative ulterior plan in mind.
"Ah, Colonel, how nice to see you again," McKay said, looking up at Sam before nodding awkwardly at the two agents who had escorted them here. "Yes... well... thank you."
"What are you doing here, Rod?" Spike asked, looking inquiringly at the Canadian physicist as the agents left the room and he and Sam walked further into it to stand on the other side of his desk.
"Ah, it's the, uh, first day on the new job," McKay replied, shrugging as he looked at Sam. "Your old job, actually; 'Special Advisor to the President'. Bit of a paycut, but, uh, well let's just say they were, uh... persuasive?"
"In other words, they basically told you to take over where we left off or they'd chuck you in jail for aiding certain parties that you may or may not have actually spent time talking to?" Spike asked, looking sympathetically at the physicist.
McKay said nothing in response, but his grim nod was all the answer that Sam and Spike needed; he'd received the job because it was easier for President Landry to put pressure on him than it was to try and make Sam and Spike do what he wanted.
"I'm so sorry," Sam said, looking apologetically at the Canadian physicist; McKay might be annoying at times, but he didn't deserve to have his career put on hold because someone else wanted him to do something.
"Yeah, me too," McKay replied, before he looked back at his desk, clearly preferring to move on to another topic. "Well, the first order of business is to create an inter-universal bridge. Something that I've done in another reality, apparently."
"Are you serious?" Sam said, looking at him in surprise; she'd almost given up hope that they'd ever get to go back, and now she was being told that someone had been ordered to help them?
"Mmm," McKay nodded in response. "Yeah, I'm not sure what you said, but, uh, they're letting you go." He smiled encouragingly at them. "They even let me bring one of my staff along to help with the equations."
"Really?" Sam said curiously. "Who?"
"OK," a female voice said, prompting Sam and Spike to turn around as a young red-haired woman walked into the lab, wire-frame glasses on her face as she studied various sheets of paper in her hands, walking around the desk to stand next to McKay without seemingly noticing the other two arrivals. "I've confirmed the specifics of the formulas used to construct the other bridge you told me about, and if we're dealing with matter that originated from the universe we're attempting to target, I should be able to calculate the dimensional frequency of the other world by-"
"Red?" Spike said, grinning broadly after a few moments of looking at the new arrival in stunned silence; the woman before him was dressed in a sharp-looking business suit and had her hair tied back in a professional manner, but she was surprisingly young for someone working with any version of the notoriously arrogant McKay.
"What-?" the red-haired woman said, briefly starting at the sight of Spike before she visibly calmed herself. "Oh... right; you're the other Spike I've heard about, right?"
"Depends on what way you're looking at it, but from where you stand, that's it, yep," Spike said, smiling at her. "And you're this world's Willow Rosenberg?"
"That's me," Willow said, smiling uncertainly back at him before she turned to look at Sam. "So... you're the Samantha Carter from another universe?"
"Yes," Sam said, nodding at Willow as she quickly went over what Spike had told her about this woman's counterpart; a gifted witch and computer hacker, suffered a period of magical 'addiction' last year when she became too used to using it to get what she wanted, discovered that she was a lesbian at college, but generally one of the smartest people Spike had met. "And... well, no offence intended to your world, but I'd like to get back to mine."
"Hey, I totally get; home is where your rump rests and all that," Willow said, smiling reassuringly at Sam before she turned her attention back to the notebook in her hand with a thoughtful frown. "I was just wondering... what's the Hubble Constant of your universe?"
"What's the Hubble Constant?" Spike asked, looking at Sam in confusion before she could answer that question. "Something to do with bubbles?"
"The Hubble Constant refers to the rate at which the universe is expanding outwards from the moment and location of the Big Bang," Sam explained, before she turned back to look at Willow with an intrigued smile. "You think you can use that to find our original universe?"
"Well, not just the Hubble Constant- considering what I've heard about Entropic Cascade Failure, there's also some ground to suggest that I could figure out where you come from if I can work out how the matter in your bodies differs from the matter around us, although that will obviously be more difficult to accomplish given that I can't compare you to your other selves here and work out how the universe knows which of you to 'reject'-, but whoever complained about having too much data when carrying out this kind of experiment, right?" Willow said, smiling brightly at Sam.
"Yeah..." Sam said, nodding at the young redhead with a slightly dazed smile; she'd known from Spike's occasional stories about his original 'group' that Willow was prone to talking a lot, but the idea that someone could come up with a sentence that long without stopping- even Daniel needed to take a breath when giving similar explanations- was still somewhat unexpected. "You think they might be different?"
"Well, if it was just a matter of the universe splitting when people have to make different decisions, things would be... well, a lot more complicated," Willow said, shrugging uncertainly as she looked at Sam. "I mean, most of that theory comes down to a whole series of quantum mechanics and calculations that I'm not sure many people outside this room could understand-"
"And probably only three of us here could understand that anyway," McKay added, looking over at Spike with a brief but pointed stare.
"Anyway," Sam said, drawing attention away from McKay's stare as she looked at Willow, "the point is, you think that you can calculate the conditions at our end of the cross-universal bridge and work out how to focus it onto our universe rather than just creating a bridge that links to other universes at random?"
"Well, what Doctor McKay showed me of the equations you've provided him with so far was enough to calculate how to create the bridge; the only really tricky bit was working out how to narrow it down to focus on a specific universe rather than just randomly opening it to a different universe when compared to our own, but I should be able to pull that off with whatever you can provide..." Willow said, before she looked curiously over at Spike. "You really come from another world?"
"Yeah, I do," Spike said, nodding briefly at her, his expression a blank one that gave no indication how he felt about Willow's sudden question.
"A world where... you continued to fight with us?" Willow continued, looking uncertainly at the vampire.
"Pretty much," Spike confirmed, shrugging in a slightly awkward manner (If Sam recalled his stories correctly, and considering when this timeline split from theirs, Spike probably wasn't sure how Willow would react to learning the specifics of what had happened to her in particular back home, so he was trying to avoid going to go into too much detail about that unless he really had to). "Oh, and you're still in touch with the rest of the gang back home last time I checked; I hear you split up after things went south fighting Glory here, but back home you all came through it pretty much intact, and stayed together at least until Sunnydale sank a few months back-"
"Sunnydale sank?" Willow repeated, looking at him in surprise, her apprehension at talking to the man she'd never had the chance to regard as anything other than an awkward enemy who'd only allied with them out of a lack of anything else to do with himself.
"Well, you all triggered the destruction of the Hellmouth to take out an army of uber-vampires being used by this psychotic force of evil; it was a thing that probably won't happen here, so no point talking about it," Spike said, shrugging as he looked awkwardly at Willow, clearly hoping that she wouldn't ask him for any more detail (Not that Sam could blame him for not wanting to talk about it; discussing the events that led to you collapsing into dust couldn't be pleasant, even if you were brought back to life afterwards).
"Anyway," McKay said, looking at Spike with a pointed glare- Sam wondered if it was just because he didn't understand or believe what Spike was talking about, but refrained from confronting him about it; that kind of attitude wasn't going to convince him to help them- before he indicated the current universe's version of Merlin's phase-shifting device, "talking of inter-universal differences, once we've completed the transfer, our second order of business is to make this work like yours..."
"And you wanted some pointers?" Spike asked, his expression souring as he looked at the physicist.
"Well... I know President Landry's made some mistakes, but that doesn't mean the entire planet deserves to be left without its best line of defence..." Willow began, looking awkwardly at the vampire.
"And assuming you succeed, what then?" Sam asked, addressing both of the other scientists, Spike standing behind her in his 'bodyguard' pose.
"Then... we're safe," McKay replied, clearly thinking that was enough.
"Key theme there is that Earth is safe," Spike pointed out, glaring at the other man as he subconsciously lowered his opinion of him. "There's still a whole galaxy out there to worry about."
"Exactly," Sam said, walking around the table as she looked at McKay and Willow. "Millions of people are dying, millions more are being subjugated to a false religion."
"You just never quit, do you?" McKay said, shaking his head slightly as Willow looked awkwardly around the room while trying not to look at Spike or Sam.
"Deep down," Sam said, looking at McKay firmly, "I know your President's a good man."
"Just like I know that your Buffy's still got to be a good person when it counts," Spike added, looking over at Willow. "Maybe you just need to give her the chance to remember it."
"We haven't spoken for years-" Willow began.
"She forgave you after you made some serious mistakes back home," Spike said, looking solemnly at her, hoping that his manner would compensate for his reluctance to provide the full details. "Can you really say you can't at least try to do the same thing for her here?"
Willow didn't reply to that statement, but the look of silent longing on her face was more than Spike needed.
Even if she wouldn't admit to it, she still missed her friend...
"Whatever they've become, they both fundamentally want to do the right thing," Sam said, looking between the other two scientists with an encouraging smile. "Maybe President Landry and Agent Summers just need... a persistent voice in their ears, nudging them in the right direction."
"And you think that we'd be good at that?" McKay asked.
"Whatever other crap they went through back home, my Buffy always had faith in my Willow," Spike said, looking firmly over at the red-haired wiccan/scientist. "I'm not going to buy that this one doesn't have some kind of faith in you."
"Just think about it," Sam said, looking over at McKay. "I don't know much about Willow Rosenberg back home, but I trust Spike's judgement, and the Rodney McKay I know is... very good at making his point."
"Oh," McKay said, looking at her with a thoughtful smile, before he shrugged. "Well, let's get on with it, shall we?"
The subsequent research into the recreation of the matter bridge went on relatively quickly, even if most of it went over Spike's head; he'd almost forgotten how good Red was at the scientific stuff, given how much the version he'd known had focused on magic in the last few years. With Sam providing information about her world that he couldn't believe she could remember that accurately, combined with the sheer natural scientific genius of the three of them, the necessary equipment had soon been put together, leaving them to prepare the equipment at their end.
"And you're sure this won't just turn me intangible again, right?" Spike asked, looking apprehensively at the other two scientists. "I mean, this isn't exactly normal..."
"What about this situation is normal?" Willow asked with a smile. "It's mostly guesswork, of course, but what I've seen of the equations suggests that, once you've been re-integrated, you'll stay that way; it's not like we understand how you ended up phased in the first place, after all."
Privately, Sam was slightly apprehensive about how things would go back in her world now that Spike was restored to corporeal form- they'd only just managed to keep his vampire status secret over here, and that had taken a significant effort at times, so how would an SGC aware of Spike's history react to the knowledge that he had a corporeal form once more?-, but this wasn't the time to worry about that when other things were going so well.
In any case, they could at least be certain that he would still be able to go on missions once they returned home, regardless of how alien suns affected vampires. The modified shield device that Spike had been using since he'd arrived here was still in his pocket, but Sam wasn't worried about any consequences of taking it along with them; a non-living object wouldn't be subject to the rules of entropic cascade failure, so Spike was perfectly free to take that back with him, and it would save her having to create a new one for him once they were home.
Whether the SGC or the IOA would allow him to go on missions was something she'd deal with when they got there…
"Well..." Willow said, shrugging uncertainly as she headed for the door to the lab, pausing only to look back at Sam and Spike. "Get ready to phase out, and... good luck."
"Thanks," Sam said, waiting a moment for Willow to leave the room and close the door behind her before she activated Merlin's device, the familiar glow surrounding her and Spike as they shifted back into another phase. After waiting for a moment, the same glowing hole that had appeared when they'd been taken into this world appeared in the air before them, followed by the familiar feeling of them being pulled into something, before they reappeared in a brighter version of the lab that they'd been in previously (Evidently, their greater control made this transference a lot smoother than it might have been).
Looking around after the sucking sensation had vanished, Sam and Spike quickly noted that the previously-empty room was occupied by Doctor Lee, standing a short distance away from them, pacing the room with a scanner and microphones. Having confirmed that there was nothing immediately in their area, Sam deactivated Merlin's device, allowing the bright light to surround them for a moment before it faded as they reverted back into corporeal form.
"Doctor Lee!" Sam said, Spike unable to stop himself from smiling slightly as Lee turned around so sharply that he dropped the scanner he was holding, causing a brief squeal of sound that prompted the two new arrivals to wince in sympathy before Lee pulled the headphones off, grinning enthusiastically at them.
"You're back!" he said.
"That we are," Spike confirmed, before he placed his hand on the table with a casual smile as he glanced over at Sam. "And it looks like I'm still solid."
"Solid?" Lee said, looking at the vampire in surprise. "Are- what-?"
"I'll... explain later," Sam said, smiling briefly at the doctor. "In the meantime... where's the rest of SG-1?"
When he was finally reunited with the rest of SG-1- Landry was fortunately off-base dealing with something else at the moment, so they weren't obliged to debrief him first-, all of Spike's planned quips and jokes went out of the window as soon as he saw Vala standing in Sam's lab alongside Teal'c and Mitchell. With previous restrictions and limitations on his physical condition no longer applicable, Spike walked over to the ex-space thief, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her until Vala's response to him began to slow down, prompting him to pull back as she gasped for oxygen.
"Sorry," Spike said, looking apologetically at Vala as she took deep breathes while grinning at the vampire in a slightly silly manner. "Last couple of partners I had... well, they had better lung capacity than the norm; guess I forgot-"
"Hold on; what actually happened there?" Mitchell asked, looking at the vampire in confusion. "I thought you couldn't... well..."
"Spike became solid while we were away," Sam said, looking at the others with a grin. "I'll explain the details in my report, but basically we were pulled into another reality while I was experimenting with Merlin's device, and we think that the transition from one reality to the other reintegrated Spike's molecules back into a single cohesive structure during the trip; he's been solid ever since we arrived in that world, and he stayed intact on the return as well."
For a moment, Sam paused, lost in recollection of the events of the last few weeks, but she swiftly turned her attention back to the teammates currently around her. "It wasn't always easy keeping him fed, of course- I had to steal some equipment so that I could extract my own blood to feed him at times when we couldn't access the infirmary supplies without suspicion-, but we couldn't risk anyone there finding out what he was-"
"But the key point is that he's now solid for good, right?" Vala asked, looking anxiously at Sam.
"As far as we can tell, yes," Sam confirmed.
"Well," Mitchell said, looking at Spike with a slight smile, "we lose the intangible guy, but gain a vampire; that's... something, anyway."
"You're not worried about that?" Spike asked, looking at Mitchell in surprise.
"I think we can agree that you've earned some trust after saving Dakara," Mitchell said, shrugging as he looked at the vampire. "You might be a vampire, but you're the vamp who saved a planet and helped us get our hands on an enemy ship when we'd done nothing to help you with your problem other than toss around some ideas; we're not going to drop you just because you've got… a socially awkward appetite."
"Indeed," Teal'c said, nodding in agreement of Mitchell's assessment. "You have proven yourself to be an honourable ally and a courageous teammate, Spike; we will not abandon you merely because you have an unusual diet."
"Talking of the team... have you found out anything about Daniel?" Sam asked, looking hopefully at the others, only for her hope to die as she noticed their grim expressions. "No news, huh?"
"Nothing," Vala said, her arm still around Spike even as she shook her head apologetically at Sam's question.
"Well, at least we got you two back," Mitchell said, looking down at the desk dejectedly as he sat on a chair on the other side, the initial optimism created by Spike's return to corporeal form lost with the reminder that they were still one man short.
"And we're very glad to be back," Sam said, smiling as she looked at the rest of the team. "The whole thing was kind of creepy."
"Tell me about it; my ex is a cyborg and Red's a programmer for the arrogant Canadian git..." Spike mused.
"When you say 'arrogant Canadian git', you mean McKay, right?" Mitchell asked, looking at the vampire curiously. "Your friend worked in Atlantis?"
"Actually, McKay was just a dot-com guy," Sam clarified. "From what Spike and I could tell, Atlantis never really got off the ground, what with all the local problems they were dealing with over there..."
"Talking of which, what was I like in that reality?" Vala asked.
"In jail," Spike said simply; he and Sam had already agreed not to tell anyone about Vala's counterpart's 'black ops' missions unless they absolutely had to, given what it said about the descent of that world's government (Privately, Spike also wanted to avoid giving anyone any ideas about asking Vala to do that here, but he hadn't voiced it).
"Not again!" Vala said, rolling her eyes at the news.
"What about the rest of us?" Mitchell asked, after looking at Vala with an ambiguous smile.
"You know," Sam said, looking awkwardly at the rest of the team, "to be honest, I'd really rather not talk about it."
"We'd rather hear about things over here," Spike said, smiling hopefully at them. "What have you been doing while we were away?"
For a moment, there was silence as the others exchanged awkward looks, until Teal'c finally answered the question.
"When you did not return for several hours, we began to suspect that something might have gone wrong," the Jaffa said.
"Well, we just assumed that the machine had malfunctioned, and you were stuck out of phase," Vala clarified, smiling awkwardly at Sam and Spike.
"We attempted to communicate with you using the Sodan cloaking device, and when that failed..." Teal'c continued, looking between the two returnees.
"What?" Sam asked, when nobody continued Teal'c's story.
"We took shifts," Vala said. "Trying to keep... you company..."
"Hold on; you mean-?" Spike said, smiling at the image created.
"Yeah, we talked to an empty room," Mitchell said, clearly wanting to get it said before anyone else did.
"For two weeks?" Sam asked, unable to restrain the incredulous tone at that idea.
"It did stop eventually," Mitchell said, clearly trying to salvage his dignity before he resigned himself to confessing the facts, "but it did go on... for... quite some time."
"Indeed," Teal'c said, looking shamefully at the floor.
"Well, that must have been some conversation," Sam said, leaning over her desk as she smiled at the others. "What did you say?"
"You know, I've got a file to read," Mitchell said, quickly standing up and heading for the door.
"I have a sparring session with Sergeant Siler," Teal'c said, before he headed for the door himself.
"While I would normally be all for talking," Vala said, leaning over to place a hand on Spike's shoulder, "right now I think you both understand that I'd prefer to do this."
With that said, Vala pulled Spike towards her so that her mouth met his, her arms wrapping around his neck as she gave him a very enthusiastic kiss that seemed to be trying to make up for all the kisses they'd been unable to share in the past.
"I'll just... go," Sam said, smiling slightly at the satisfied expression on Spike's face as he wrapped his arms around Vala, clearly revelling in his restored corporeal form as he explored the side of his relationship that they'd never had the chance to develop before now.
A part of Sam wasn't sure how the restoration of physical contact to the equation would affect their future- she and Daniel had privately wondered if part of what made Spike and Vala work as a couple was the fact that neither of them could simply 'shag the other and leave' as Spike might put it (They had been spending too much time with him if he was having that kind of impact on them)- but the rest of her was just satisfied that her friends seemed to be doing well in their renewed relationship despite the weeks they'd spent apart.
As Sam walked away to leave the vampire and the ex-thief to their own devices, she barely registered the small part of herself that was wishing that someone was here to give her a kiss like that...
But it wasn't happening; the person she wanted to kiss... the person she'd spent so long trying not to think about in that sense because she didn't want to risk their friendship... the person who'd been on her mind most of the time after SG-1 went their separate ways after the final defeat of Anubis and the Replicators...
He wasn't here.
And she didn't know when he'd be back...
None of the SGC staff could have known it, but even as SG-1 were reunited, in a room several miles away from the SGC, a man covered in tattoos was already aware of their reunion.
"Finally..." Lindsay McDonald said, smiling as he stared at the glowing crystal that indicated Spike's return to corporeal form.
Tracking that amulet down and forming this kind of link with it had been tedious to the extreme, but with his initial spell to restore Spike having failed, he'd had to resort to more time-consuming methods; given how quickly the gem had gone dark after he'd acquired it, he'd wondered for a time if it had been destroyed, but the current glow clearly indicated that Spike was not only back, but restored to full corporeal form.
It might not be because of his own machinations, but he finally had what he was looking for; the other vampire with a soul, with a new lease on life, a need for a purpose, and a grudge against Angel into the bargain.
All he had to do now was approach the guy with the right message...
AN 2: Well, that's Sam and Spike back on their Earth; I have an idea or two coming up for the next chapter or so before we get into "The Shroud" and the conclusion of this story, but suggestions will be considered