A Week Later
Jack is by his wife's side when his little daughter Jenny enters the world for the first time. It's the first time he's been able to help her through a birth. She helped him through one of course, but that's different.
Neither of them can help but feel that something is missing. They're back to having two daughters, but it really feels like it should be three.
Five Months Later
Spoilers for "Heroes"
He refused to leave her side. He knew that it was foolishness as much as those around him. They tried to get him to come away to eat, or sleep, or go home to his children.
He just kept his vigil over her dead body.
She was his wife, and she was dead.
This is not the first time it had been true. He'd lost a wife before, and he'd thought that this was the worst thing that could ever happen to him. But he'd hardly known Sha'uri. He'd spent a year with her, and for a good part of that time the two of them hadn't even spoken the same language.
It was different with Janet. True, the two of them had only been together a bit more than six years, but they wouldn't have known each other any better if it had been a lifetime. He'd reached the point where he knew her ever action from the way she raised the dish soap up and down as she poured it out of the dispenser to the way she did CPR with a distinctive two hard, and one soft push of the palm of her hand.
"Sir, we're going to have to take her now," a nurse says softly, thinking to herself that dealing with the grieving anthropologist is way above her pay grade.
"You're taking her? To where?" he asks lifting up his head in confusion. His eyes are red beneath the rims of his glasses, and there are huge droplets on the glasses that used to be tears, before they dried. He has a pounding headache, and it's hard for him to form any thoughts through it, but he knows that they shouldn't take her anywhere, and that if they are going to take her somewhere he ought to go to.
"We're taking her to the morgue, sir," the poor nurse whispers hoping that the word isn't going to send him over the edge.
"Ok," he says standing beside the bed, clearly ready to follow wherever he was led.
"Sir, you can't come," she whispers.
"Why not?" he asks looking at her confused.
The nurse tries to form some answer which won't be horribly insulting. She rejects, "because it's weird," "It's just not done," and "what are you nuts?" before landing on a gentle, "It's cold there."
"I'm already cold," he says in a voice that clearly shows he thinks the matter is settled, and not at all in the way that she thinks it is settled.
"I've got this," Shelby says walking in, and touching her fellow nurse lightly on the arm by way of tag team. The other women nods her head before gratefully escaping.
"Daniel, we've got to take her now," she says.
He shakes his head.
"Daniel, you know that we can't just leave a dead body in an exam room forever. We've got to get her ready for burial."
"They wouldn't let me see my parents after they died," Daniel says as much to his own surprise as Shelby's. He hadn't actually thought the words before they came spilling out of his mouth.
"Well, you've seen Janet."
"It's not her, anymore, not really," he says looking at her sadly.
"That's right, so you've got to let her body go," Shelby says softly.
"It's not her, but it's the closest thing that I have left," Daniel says stroking the hand had had grown cold hours back.
"That's not true, her spirit is still out there. It's with God," Shelby says.
Daniel laughs, and the sound has an unnerving echo in the room, "Which God? The ones we've been fighting against for years?"
"I'm talking about God-God, not some Goa'uld."
"From where I'm sitting, any god who lets a person like Janet die is no different from a Goa'uld. Go ahead, take the body, I'll be in my quarters."
Five Days Later
At first Cassie didn't notice that her dad wasn't home. Well, of course she noticed it, but it didn't really matter to her. When someone dies, especially someone as young as Janet, their family is never left alone for long.
Her mother's family, and Catherine and Ernest, the closet thing her father had to family, and all of SG-1 which had become family to them, were around her ever hour of the day.
Someone was always cleaning something around their house or taking one of her siblings home with them for the night, or holding her when she cried.
Then the funeral came, and slowly they all trickled home. They were leaving them all to get back to life as it had been before.
Only, life was never going to go back the way that it had been before. How could it? Her mother was gone, and so was her father.
He wasn't dead of course, he just wasn't around. She had barely seen him since her mother had died. He wasn't even the one that had broken the news to the children. Teal'c, and Sam had driven to their schools. Teal'c had driven the van while Sam had held them all unbuckled in the backseat and sobbed harder than they had.
Her father had showed up to the funeral. Cassie had been more than a little worried that he wouldn't. He'd sat between Olivia, and Will, and put his hand around their shoulders.
He hadn't cried. He'd just looked angry.
She figured after that he'd come home. He knew that everyone was leaving, that they'd all be alone, but he didn't come home.
So it was left to her.
Maybe this was the way the universe worked. You could get love, when you needed it most, but whatever you took, was something that you were going to have to pay back in the end. It was more of a loan than a gift.
If you were an orphan taken in by people who were no blood relation, maybe it meant that one day you would be called on to do the same thing for someone else.
Some days, Cassie resented the idea of taking care of her siblings, even for a day, let alone forever. She thinks about how young they are, and how young she is. She's only eighteen, and she still trudges off to high school after dropping the younger ones off at day cares and schools all over town. She wanted to go to college. She wanted to get married before becoming a mother. When she thinks about these things she gets furious.
Other times, she accepts it. She doesn't know what she wants to do with her life. She had plans to go to college, but if she's really honest with herself, college is a waste of money until she figures out what she wants to be.
It's an American idea anyway, this college, and she's not American. In her culture, she'd be married by now. It was rare for marriages to happen much after someone turned seventeen, unless of course it was a second marriage. She'd be a mother on her world, so why was it so strange that she as becoming one on this one?
Cassie had given up on any ideas of becoming a mother a few years back. She carried within her a disease, one that she would pass on to any children. One which would kill her children if they weren't treated by Nirti when they turned sixteen years old. Sure, Nirti had saved her, she had saved her like she had all the children of her village, but she hadn't saved her quite enough to keep her from passing it on to the next generation
So maybe this was meant to be, maybe this was how she got to be a mother.
Maybe raising her mother's babies is the most noble and precious way that she can carry on her mother's legacy.
Daniel, she's not going to think of him as her father anymore, isn't home again. It's getting close to the bedtime for the little ones. So she bathes the little ones, and puts them in their precious little footie pajamas. Then she reads them a bedtime story, and hugs them when they cry.
Then the four of them, eighteen year old Cassie, ten year old Olivia, three-year old Will, and 1 year old Drew crawl into their parent's bed to snuggle as they sleep.
"This how puppies sleep?" Will asks.
"Yes," Olivia says.
"Why sleep like puppies?" Willa asks.
"Because," Cassie says, and she's about to leave it just like that. It's the sort of answer that parents give, and if she's going to be a parent she might as well learn to give them. At the last minute a better answer comes to mind, "Because cuddles make you happy. Puppies are so happy, because they are always cuddling one another."
"I'm not very happy," Olivia says with a deadpan voice.
Cassie puts her arm around her little sister, and pulls her closer to herself, "That's because you're not snuggled in enough."
The Next Afternoon
"Who are you here for?" the day care worker asks.
"Will and Drew Jackson," she says looking over the partition to see if she can see her brothers.
"Two of them huh? I can barely handle one little rug rat myself. You look really young to have two children," a man in his early twenties next to Cassie says.
"Oh, they are so not mine! I'm way too young! I'm there sister, and actually I take care of three, we've got a ten year old sister," she says as her brother's come out, and he gives the name of his son to the day care worker.
"You're raising three kids by yourself?" he says obviously impressed.
"Well, I am right now. Mom just…" she looks at her brothers, and decides not to finish the sentence. She would much rather be vague with a stranger than cause her brothers to start to cry. Well, Will anyway, Drew was still too young to know what was going on.
"I'm sorry," he says. "My name is James by the way."
"Thanks, I've got to pick my sister up at school," she says picking up Drew, and taking Will by the hand.
"How about a date?" he asks.
"Ah…actually, I have a boyfriend," Cassie mutters a bit confused.
"I'm sorry, that came out wrong. I meant to say play date, for the kids. My Hunter is right between the ages of the boys, it might be fun for them."
Right, Cassie thinks to herself, she ought to be planning things like this. Ever since her mother had died it had been nothing but survival, but life was about a whole lot more than survival. She had to do more than just keep the kids alive, she had to make sure that they went back to living.
"That would be great," she says.
"Can I have your number to set it up?" he asks.
"Yeah, you have something to write on?" she asks.
He pulls out a piece of paper and a pen that were suspiciously at the ready. She jots her number down, and Will waves "bye-bye," as the three of them walk out of the day care center.
That Night
Dominic sneaks into Cassie's window as he has so many times before. He's surprised when he finds her bed empty. He doesn't panic though. His mind is so unused to tragedy that it doesn't go there straight off the bat. He figures she probably went over to someone's house or something. Stuff like that has been happening ever since her Mom died.
He calls her cell phone, and hears it ringing in her parent's bedroom. A second later Cassie rushes out of the bedroom with her phone in her hand. She almost runs into him, and is shocked and angry.
"What are you doing here?"
"I thought I would come comfort you," he offers.
She rolls her eyes. He hasn't been around much more than her father has the last couple of days. He showed up for the funeral, and came few other times to drop off homework before she went back to school, and sit looking uncomfortable in the living room.
Between classes at school, he'd tried to resume the relationships that they'd had before all of this had happened. He'd not understood that they were standing on whole new ground. That that would be like trying to lay a beach towel down to sunbath on hot lava.
"You did not, you came here for sex."
"Sex, can be very comforting," he teases.
"Get out," she points toward the front door. She would have liked to yell, but her siblings are only sleeping a little way away from her.
"Ok, I was teasing, I just wanted to make sure you were ok."
"It's the middle of the night?"
"It's ten o'clock. We used to stay up a lot later than that."
"Do you know what time toddlers wake up?"
"Not really."
"Well, it's early, and that's what time I get up in the morning. So please, leave me alone, so I can get some sleep."
"Where is your dad?" Dominic asks concerned.
"I don't know."
"Well, shouldn't you call child protective services or something? He can't just leave the kids alone like that."
"He didn't leave them alone. He left them with me."
"Right, but like all the time?"
"Dominic, leave us alone!" she says spinning out of the room.
A moment ago she was a child, but he can already tell that he will never be going back to a moment ago.