Daniel

My heart stopped. Jonas Quinn walked out of the gate arm and arm with her, at least it looked like her. It couldn't be her. She was wearing my jacket draped across her body, her eyes shifted across the room until she caught mine and I stood there frozen in place. A ghost of the woman I loved, radiant and alive. The breath was sucked from my lungs as the world rendered in full pigment around me. Technicolor and radiance exploding from her as our eyes locked. Jonas tossed a heavy rucksack onto the ground and motioned for Jack, but my eyes were glued to her, to Eleanor.

"Daniel?" Her voice was close to a whisper and I nodded. "My Daniel?"

"Always," I croaked out and watched as she unhooked herself from Jonas and cautiously made her way closer to me. I ran to meet her, to hold her, to touch her. Her hand was reaching out to touch me and I leaned in, breathless and unbelieving. I breathed and in one fluid motion her hand connected to my face in a stinging slap sending my glasses flying to the ground. I heard Jack shout but his voice was muffled in my head. There was tunnel vision leading just to her rage filled face, a face that looked as if she had seen horrors and nightmares alone. A face that haunted my dreams in the best of ways, and was here now with me.

"You said you'd find me!" She screamed, jabbing a finger in my chest, and the hurt in her voice stung more than any hit. "You said across every life that you'd find me." Her voice echoed against the gate room walls as Jonas and Siler went to restrain her, eyes brimming in tears. "I crossed voids in time looking for you. For you! What have you done Daniel? You gave up on me."

"Let her go." I shouted back, reaching down to collect my glasses and placed them crookedly back on to get a better look at her. Beautiful, savage, honest her. "You were dead." I swallowed and looked back to see my Eleanor trembling in the room but staring only back at me, at my failures. "Your body is in the ground in Kansas City. You died." I walked toward her slowly, hands up to my chest in an act of peace. "But somehow here you are, you found me and I'm sorry. I'm sorry that you had to go through whatever you did to get here, but I'm not sorry that you did because it brought you back here. To me." With each step I took her body tensed. "I heard you Eleanor, from across the universe I heard you, and you heard me I know you did. I knew you were there, I was trying. You were just faster." I couldn't keep the smile from my face.

"So is this it then?" Jack asked from behind her and she spun around to face him.

"I have spent months in solitude to get here, have had my body ripped through the threads of time. You can give me one goddamn minute Jack O'Neill." Her eyes flared and his matched in response.

"Daniel?" He turned to me with an expression of disbelief. I took another step, hands shaking and pulled her into me as I swept her face up to my lips crashing into hers greedily. Wrapping her arms around my neck bringing her in deeper as it all came rushing to me like she had never left.

"I never stopped looking for a way back to you, loving you." I whispered against her mouth and she tugged me in again, fingers twisting through my hair. No one in the room, in the whole of the world, mattered to me at that moment. Every moment alone wondering how I could continue, what the point of it all was, it was for this. For the intertwining of souls into one another melding to one. She was that part of me that found joy, that brought color and life back to me, the part of me that was pure love, and she was, well all of it.

"Does someone care to explain to me what is going on here?" Hammond bellowed from the doorway and I laughed weakly pressing my forehead to hers, looking back into her. She had done it, done everything I couldn't.

"General Hammond," Jonas started, "this is Eleanor Owens, I believe Dr. Jackson has a more intimate relationship with her than I do," Jonas continued, "but she was very respectful during our interview when she came through the gate, she knew a lot about you all. More than I remembered to be fair, and she knew the alpha site."

Eleanor turned back to the general grinning with a bleary eyed face, lacing her fingers into mine.

"General, it's good to see you again. I come bearing gifts." She motioned to the pack Jonas had tossed at Jack's feet. "There are well over 30 journals written about the Ancients database. Blueprints on the device I built to jump back here, and hundreds of gate addresses."

"What do you want in exchange for this?" He looked at her with reservations and she just smiled back at me.

"To be home."

Sam

Jack had come barreling through the lab with Teal'c while I was in the middle readjusting the settings on a prototype naquadah generator. He looked around and closed the door behind him and slammed both hands on the table just staring down.

"You alright sir?" I glanced over at Teal'c who just stood there, solitary against the door.

"No, I am not Carter." He turned his head up to mine.

"You remember Daniel's dead girlfriend?"

"Which one?"

He took in a deep inhale and crossed his arms, "oh, the one he left behind in his timeline to come here, then buried his own dead body about a hundred yards from this very room. You know, we had him on a mental health watch for a month because of it? We thought he was hearing voices for half a year, he said it was her talking to him through time? That one."

"Eleanor, I believe?"

"Yes," he clasped his hands together and put them up to his mouth. "Well, she's in Hammond's office right now, and I have to act like this is normal. That I didn't shit all over Daniel, again. You know one of these days, if I did believe him, he'd be wrong and I'd still look like the asshole."

I dropped the screwdriver in my hands and heard the clattering on the metal table in shock. "She, how?"

"I too am confused." Teal'c spoke.

"Oh it gets better!" His hand made a fist as he bit down on a knuckle to keep from exploding. "She has the Ancient's library still downloaded into her head, so I have to call in Thor, hope he is home and can just reverse that little gift for us. Because of that library she was able to manufacture a single use time jump, complete with blueprints and journals and everything for us. Don't get me wrong, I am thrilled with the information, and I am so happy our Romeo has his Juliet, but what are we going to do with a dead woman?"

"Daniel knows?" I smiled, knowing the pain that he had gone through, how he pretended he was okay the past few months but it was clear to us all he wasn't. The small stories he'd tell me about her, in the beginning and then stopped because for him it was bizarre to seek solidarity with someone who had no memory of events.

"He's with her and Hammond in the debriefing. He won't let her out of his sight, and vice versa." His eyes rolled and I glanced back to Teal'c who had a small knowing half smile as well.

"I mean, fair. They thought one another had died, or were dead, was dead. Not sure on the logistics but yes. That's good for them."

"Aside from the hiding a dead woman part." He looked at us both like we had lost our minds. "Am I the only one looking at the consequences here? Her family lives in Missouri, she's buried there, in Missouri. She can't call them, she can't let them know she's alive and here. Ever. Hammond isn't going to let her leave the base. She'll be trapped here, again."

"But she will have Daniel Jackson, is that not why she came back?" Teal'c cocked his head to the side and I didn't realize what a romantic he was.

"That and she was going to die if she didn't leave," Jack shrugged.

"I'm sure once Hammond trusts her he will let her venture out more. Daniel isn't going to let her stay cooped up here." I picked up the screwdriver and went back to tinkering as Jack continued venting. Thoughts swirling around my head until I stopped and looked back up at him. "She's going to need something to change into."

"What?" He squinted back at me.

"She's going to want to shower, Janet will want to meet her and do a physical. Did you even ask her if she needed to eat?"

He balked back, "Carter, she is in Hammond's office, she'll easily be there the next hour or longer to go over what she endured, according to Jonas it sounds terrible, and then Hammond will go into detail about what to do from here. I'm sure Jonas fed her. He took care of Daniel's fish for a couple years, I'm sure he managed to help her. She can worry about everything else after she has been told she can stay, if she can stay."

"I don't love comparing a woman who went through hell and back to a fish in a tank, sir." I snarked in response as I checked my watch. "I'm going to find something for her to change into, though I'm not really sure what size in anything she is. But I can gather some toiletries for the night."

"Just, just don't be weird about it." Jack's tone changed and I noticed a touch of empathy splash across his face. "When she is from, we knew her. Enough so that she knows all of our birthdays, our coffee orders, small details about us that she learned from almost two years of working together. Here, well you don't even know what she looks like let alone anything about her. That would be hard for anyone to accept, that your coworkers, friends, family don't know you." My heart warmed at seeing this Jack, the one who put up a hard exterior and saw the rational side of things before the emotional, but did genuinely care about those he loved. Daniel, his brother, had a part of him back and even though I knew Jack didn't trust her yet, he wanted Daniel to be okay.