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
"Hey there," Spike said, walking into Sam's laboratory the morning after his date with Vala, all thoughts of his exasperating encounter with the mysterious Doyle forgotten after a highly pleasant evening.
Admittedly, he and Vala still hadn't quite gone… all the way… yet- he'd dived into that too quickly last time on top of everything else, and was just trying to take advantage of the other benefits to their relationship; even their reunion hadn't gone further than taking their tops off-, but he was finding that there was something nice about being able to share conversation with someone without sex having to be a factor in anything. Vala found his tales of Earth history as fascinating as he found some of her stories about life out in space- even if they'd had to be careful about who could hear them and had avoided topics from the more negative parts of their backgrounds-, and they'd even found the time to exchange a few combat tips in case anything came up…
Right now, however, with Vala off on a quick shopping trip with Mitchell as a guide- she might be a member of the flagship team, but she still needed company when going anywhere on Earth until everyone in the command structure was satisfied that she was going to be all right-, and Teal'c attending to a meeting at the Jaffa High Council, Spike was taking the chance to deal with something that he and Sam had discussed during their time away but not had the opportunity to do yet.
"Spike?" Sam said, looking up at the vampire with a slight smile. "Is everything all right?"
"Fine, thanks; had a good night out with Vala last night, anyway," Spike said, smiling reassuringly at the woman who'd been his closest confidant during some of the most difficult weeks he'd ever experienced. "Taking our time, but… well, after the way things went last time I tried dating anyone…"
"I know what you mean," Sam said, smiling slightly at the vampire with a grim manner about her expression. "I've been there myself once or twice; I let my last relationships go too far too fast, and ended up with nothing to show for it but…"
She shrugged, a slightly self-deprecating smile on her face. "Well, you've seen where I am now."
She didn't elaborate, and Spike didn't bother to ask; they might have become better friends during their time in that other world, but there were still some lines you didn't cross, and discussing something like Sam's personal life was definitely up there.
He'd only learned about Danny's wife because the other guy had brought it up himself, and accepted the limited amount of information that he'd been willing to share then; if Sam wanted to keep quiet about her old relationships and how they'd turned out in the end, that was her call and he'd respect it.
"Anyway," Sam continued, looking curiously at Spike, clearly trying to get away from their previous topic and move on to a less personally awkward conversation, "is there something I can help you with?"
"Just… now that we're somewhere where they don't mind us looking up stuff that you don't need to know to keep Earth safe, wondered if you'd want to… well, do those tests you mentioned," Spike said, looking curiously at her.
If he'd been asked about this last year, he would have laughed off the idea of him ever essentially volunteering to go through what the Initiative had tried to do again, but after everything that Sam had done to help him keep his secret while they'd been stuck in that other reality, from finding the shield device to giving him blood, it seemed kind of stupid to be against the idea of her taking a quick look at him.
"Well… if you're willing, I wouldn't say no," Sam said, smiling back at him as she walked over to a nearby cabinet and opened a drawer, searching for a moment before she pulled out a file and put it on her desk. "We have some information on file for you already, but obviously it's not much-"
"You had a file about me?" Spike said, looking at her in surprise.
"It mostly just included some basic personal details at first, along with the results of your initial profile when you were being tested to decide if you should be allowed to join SG-1," Sam explained. "I got in touch with Agent Finn and asked him to send over a few of the test results from when the DRI had captured you while I was recovering after my injury- just so that we'd have a better idea of what you'd be capable of when we managed to get your body back, you know-, and there's the results of that MRI scan you went through after we got back to take into account as well, but there's not really much there. Aside from keeping you drugged after you were captured so that they could put that chip in your brain, they didn't have the time to carry out many experiments on you before you escaped, so all they really have is a few notes about the effort it took to bring you in and some speculations about your age compared to other vampires they've studied…"
"In other words, practically zilch," Spike said; he'd glanced over that file during his brief alliance with Adam as part of his attempt to find a way to remove the chip, and had been frustrated at how little information there actually was in it (He might not have understood half of the terms used, but that was enough to know that there was nothing there about the chip and a bunch of random guesstimates about his strength). "So… since you'd be starting from scratch, any ideas where you'd like to kick these tests off?"
"Well… if you wouldn't mind, an obvious approach would be to work out what kind of reaction happens when you come in contact with… holy artefacts," Sam said, looking uncertainly at Spike. "I mean, I know that it hurts, but-"
"When and where?" Spike asked.
"Excuse me?" Sam said, looking at him in surprise.
"Used to practise doing stuff like that with Angelus back when we were both evil as a whole 'macho man' thing- show that we could stand it for longer than the other guy, you know-; after that, you get used to the burns," Spike said, shrugging nonchalantly as he looked reassuringly at her. "Not something I'd like to do long-term, but if you just need a few moments for each… well, I'm game."
"Thanks," Sam said, smiling slightly at Spike. "I already have a few ideas about that- we know that observation of events can affect them on a quantum level, so it's possible that something about the idea of these artefacts being holy affects the way your body responds to them-, but that's only one of the obvious theories, and it might turn out to be wrong anyway…"
"Uh… right," Spike said, nodding in bemused acceptance of her theory.
The science stuff may be over his head, but he thought he got the idea behind what she was suggesting; he just wouldn't have the slightest idea how to test for something like that himself…
"Talking of affecting stuff, how about how those Ancients come into play?" he asked, looking curiously at her. "I mean, from what you've said, they're pretty powerful; any way we could see if anything about me compares to what you know about them?"
"Well… it's complicated, but we do have some avenues we could explore in that regard," Sam said. "We've managed to carry out a few surveys on Ancients in the past, and that's given us some idea of the energies they generate, but that doesn't exactly help us work out how that energy might affect you…"
"That refer to my soul, or the fact that I'm a walking corpse?" Spike asked.
"A bit of both," Sam said, shrugging as she looked apologetically at him. "Believe me, Spike, I'm at least as interested in working out how… well, everything you are fits in with everything we know about the Ancients… as you are, but there's only so much we can get away with even now. I mean, there's obviously something animating your body, but there's not exactly a practical way for us to analyse how your body compares to someone who's actually been… well, dead… for the same amount of time as you…"
"And there's a few issues about you doing that to the body of anyone who snuffed it in the line of duty, right?" Spike asked.
"Aside from anything else, that's just… getting a bit outside of my league," Sam said, looking increasingly awkward at the direction that this conversation had taken. "I'm not exactly a biology expert, after all; I could maybe see if Doctor Lam would be interested in helping us carry out a few tests in that area, but I can't promise anything, particularly since we wouldn't even know what we're looking for. So much of Ancient science is still outside of our understanding even after we've been studying them for the better part of a decade, particularly when it comes to anything relating to their biological knowledge; we've been focusing on analysing their technology. We know that they created a means of containing an energy-based life form that may have been related to their early experiments in Ascension in a kind of prison, but we're still lost for how they managed to make that work…"
She looked thoughtfully at Spike. "I don't suppose you… know any witches-?"
"Who'd be willing to let you test 'em?" Spike asked, looking at her with an apologetic shrug. "Wish I could say 'yes', but can't; only witch I know regularly these days was Red, and I'm not sure I'd be a glowing recommendation to get you to let her test how magic works, given how messed up things got when Captain Cardboard's lot tried to do anything with demons and the fact that my relationship with her was always complicated at best."
"Ah," Sam said, looking awkwardly at Spike. "Things… didn't go well back then, did they?"
"Well, I hit a low point when I tried to betray 'em to Adam to get the chip out, but you've got to keep in mind that I wasn't exactly who I am now back then…" Spike said, looking awkwardly at his friend.
"Spike," Sam said, looking at him with a reassuring smile, "we've trusted Teal'c despite the fact that his first contact with anyone we knew was when he handed Daniel's wife over to the Goa'uld who took her as a host for three years, and Vala's first meeting with us resulted in her trying to steal Earth's first interstellar ship; we're not going to hold your own past against you when you technically weren't… well, you, if I understand what you've told me about vampires…"
"Thanks," Spike said, smiling at her.
"You're welcome," Sam replied, grinning back at him before she looked back at her computer and sighed. "We've come so far since we started the program, but sometimes I feel like we're always going to be dealing with Clarke's Law no matter how hard we try to catch up."
"Clarke's Law?" Spike repeated in confusion.
"Arthur C. Clarke," Sam said, looking at Spike for a moment before she recognised that he legitimately didn't know what she was talking about. "He was a science-fiction writer who once wrote that 'Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'; the idea was that science and magic reach a point where the feats they can achieve are so incredible that they're virtually indistinguishable from each other."
"Ah," Spike said. "So… you think that applies here?"
"Well, we know that the Ancients have been able to perform feats that could have been considered magic after they Ascended, and the Stargate itself could be considered a 'magic portal' from the right perspective," Sam said with a shrug. "As I said, I have some ideas about how science and magic could come together to fit what we know with the world you know, but there's only so much that we can find out with you as… well…"
"I get it," Spike said, nodding in understanding. "Can't get anywhere when your only source only knows the basics, huh?"
He understood that Sam had been trying to say that he was their only 'subject' with regular contact with magical energy without actually saying anything to suggest that she saw him as an object rather than a person; even if he wouldn't have interpreted it that way after everything they'd been through together, it was… nice… to feel that someone was actually that concerned about his feelings.
"Anyway," Spike said after a moment's awkward silence, deciding to get them back to a topic that they knew they could do something about, "still no news of Daniel, eh?"
"Nothing," Sam said, sighing as she leant against her desk, the slight smile on her face the only sign that she appreciated his attempt to change the subject. "I mean, I think we can all agree that Adria wouldn't have killed him, since he still had Merlin's knowledge and is probably her only real hope of completing the Sangraal, but that doesn't help us work out where he is now. Even if you helped us capture one of the Ori battlecruisers and we managed to destroy another with the Supergate, that still leaves two possible locations for Daniel even if we assume that they wanted to keep him under observation rather than on a converted world, and the fact that they're mobile just makes it worse."
"Ah," Spike said, nodding in understanding.
He'd carried out a few searches for people in the past, but even if most of those hunts hadn't been performed with the intention of killing the target in the end, that didn't help them at this point; he was used to working on the basis that he only had to search a single planet, not an entire galaxy, and that was before you took into account the fact that their target could be moving around.
"Life, eh?" he said, out of a lack of anything else to say.
"What else can we do?" Sam sighed. "I've cancelled my planned meeting with Mark to focus on this, and we're still no closer to finding what we're looking for…"
"Who's Mark?" Spike asked, looking curiously at Sam.
"My brother," Sam replied, in an automatic tone that suggested this was something she thought Spike would know already.
"Brother?" Spike repeated, looking at her in shock. "You never mentioned you had a brother?"
Admittedly, he'd never thought to ask, but he supposed that was just part of his time with the Sunnydale group rubbing off on him; virtually everyone he spent time with there had been an only child- Buffy and Tara were the anomalies, but Dawn had come to be an independent member of the group in her own right and nobody really thought about Tara's family after their only appearance-, and Spike had pretty much assumed that the new group were in the same boat…
"We're… well, we're not as close as we were," Sam said, shrugging awkwardly. "He never really forgave Dad for Mom's death-"
"Your mum's dead?" Spike said, looking at her sympathetically after he realised how abrupt the statement had been.
"It was a car accident, back when I was a teenager," Sam said. "Mark always blamed Dad for it because he felt that Dad should have been there to pick her up- he was in the Air Force and was delayed due to an assignment of some sort; I don't really remember what now or if he ever mentioned it-, and after that Mark never really bothered to even try to spend time with him; I only even followed my dad into the military because I wanted to be an astronaut, but with assignments and everything else, we only actually spent any time together after he became Earth's Tok'ra ambassador…"
"Tok'ra?" Spike repeated.
"They're an offshoot of the Goa'uld that we formed an alliance with in the second year of the program," Sam explained. "The Tok'ra are biologically similar to the Goa'uld, but thanks to their original queen suppressing the genetic knowledge she passed to them- one of the main sources of Goa'uld arrogance is the knowledge they artificially receive from their parent passing on the genetic desire to conquer- the Tok'ra voluntarily share control with their hosts rather than dominating them completely. When my dad was dying of cancer, we were able to put him forward as a Tok'ra host for a Tok'ra leader whose original host was dying, with the symbiote healing his cancer and allowing him to act as a liaison between us and them."
"Really?" Spike said, looking at her with a grin before his expression shifted. "How come we haven't called 'em for some info?"
"My dad died two years ago," Sam said, her own expression becoming grimmer at the memory.
"Oh," Spike said, suddenly feeling as inadequate as he'd felt after he'd first heard about Joyce's death. "What happened?"
"Selmak- the Tok'ra he was bonded with- just… became too old, really," Sam said. "Selmak died, and Dad died with him because he didn't have the strength to separate; we still try and maintain contact with the Tok'ra, but with the Ori the threat instead of the Goa'uld… well, there's not much they can really do now."
If there was one thing Spike regretted about having a soul, it was the fact that he now felt so awkward after making a statement like that; it had been so much easier when he didn't give a crap about people's feelings…
"How'd you take it?" he asked uncertainly. "Losing your dad, I mean?"
"How does anything cope with that?" Sam said, looking at him with a slight shrug. "It's been… well, it was difficult, but I think him becoming a Tok'ra helped; we actually spent more time together in the six years he spent as their ambassador than we'd ever spent together in the decade or so before that."
"Something to be happy about, anyway," Spike said, shrugging slightly as he looked at his friend. "Never knew my own dad, really; back when I was alive, it was me and me mum for as long as I could remember, and after… well, Angelus mostly spent his time lording it over me rather than really acting as any kind of parent."
"He was more of an inspiration than a teacher?" Sam asked, curious about this new information about vampire family dynamics despite herself.
"Could say that, yeah; he had to do most of the training because my actual sire was too bloody bonkers to do it herself, but he mainly stuck to the essentials of how not to get killed or attract attention and left me to worry about the fine print of what I wanted to do with myself," Spike said- there wasn't much that he could say about the way things had been with Angelus without discussing the way he'd been when he was evil in more detail than he liked-, before he looked curiously at Sam. "Ever really miss Mark?"
"Well… it comes and goes, really," Sam said. "I mean, I'd like it if we spent more time together- family is family, after all-, but it's not like I don't have a good dynamic with the rest of the team here… actually, when you get down to it, I've probably seen you more since you arrived here than I've managed to see Mark since I joined the program."
"Really?" Spike said. He'd only been at the SGC for a few months; surely Sam couldn't have spent that little time with Mark….
Actually, now that he thought about it, if the way she'd acted most of the time he'd been here was any indication, she probably could have; Sam tended to get rather caught up in things, even if it had been a bit more obvious since Daniel was abducted…
"It's the way it works on SG-1; we've spent so long together that… well, when you get down to it, we're more of a family than a team," Sam said, smiling slightly awkwardly at Spike. "I mean, you and I spent all that time together in that other universe, Cam was always a good friend even before he joined the rest of us, Teal'c's been a major part of my life for ten years and could probably be an older cousin rather than just a teammate, Vala… well, she's actually become more tolerable since you got together, if you don't mind me saying so…"
"Hey, after dating a permanent loon for a century, it's good to know I can have a positive influence on someone," Spike said, smiling at Sam before a slightly teasing grin crossed his face. "And what about Danny?"
"Daniel?" Sam repeated.
"Where's he in that?" Spike asked. "I mean, General Jack's probably moved on from whatever role he had then since he isn't regularly here any more, but Danny-boy is…?"
"Daniel is…" Sam began, only to stop talking mid-sentence, suddenly looking awkward about whatever she'd been about to say. "Daniel's… well, we've been friends since SG-1's first mission- I knew I'd like him from the files before I even met him in the first place-, but it's been… well, you know…"
"Yes?" Spike said, unable to stop himself smiling at the sight of Sam being so caught out at such a simple question; there was something slightly amusing at the sight of the woman who had saved Earth through use of advanced alien technology so many times being caught out by such a simple query…
"Well… he's been a good friend since we started working together; let's leave it at that," Sam said, a slight edge to her voice making it clear that she was giving Spike an order rather than a suggestion, the room momentarily silent before the astrophysicist smiled at the vampire. "Anyway, enough talk about what we can't control; let's just… get back to what we can do, shall we?"
"The tests, right?" Spike said, looking at her with a slightly teasing smile; he could tell when someone was trying to awkwardly change the subject easily enough, but after what Sam and him had gone through in that other world, he could allow her some slack for the moment.
"Exactly," Sam said. "We may not be able to work out how to define magic without any… witches… but I did have one or two ideas about how we can get a better feel for your physical limitations…"
As the conversation continued, Spike could only smile and nod as Sam began to speculate about what she could do to try and find some scientific perspective on vampires.
It was an unusual way for someone to distract themselves from thinking too much about something they weren't comfortable looking at in greater detail, but if thinking about scientifically defining the supernatural worked for Sam, Spike wasn't going to call her on it just yet.
There'd be time enough for that when Daniel was here to… benefit from her final epiphany first-hand…