Eleanor

I believed a month had passed, and at this point my hopes that Daniel, or anyone would come were now falling and I was growing restless. I'd ventured out past the supercenter of my first trip outside the bunker, but the further out I went I noticed the trees were decaying, bushes drying into husks and the grass had died and gone brown. I went to Daniel's apartment and found the houseplants I had brought over just a month prior when our lives were normal and happy, had turned black and shriveled. There was a soft film of dust on the surface as if the apartment had been evacuated for years.

In the attempt to get my own clothes and a few comfort items I found I looked over at the dresser we shared, his spare glasses resting there on top next to the pair I used for reading late in the evenings. I swiped both pairs, putting them in the pocket of his military issued jacket I had grown fond of wearing on my outings. The pockets were exponentially useful when finding little trinkets and items I thought would come in handy for future projects. My feet wandered into the kitchen rummaging around for any canned goods and found a grimy jar of blackberry preserves I had made that summer.

I tucked it into my pocket and said allowed to an empty room, "you better be eating Daniel."

"You know me." I heard his voice mutter in my ears and a smile pricked at my lips.

"Take away I'm sure." I scoffed back.

"I'm trying, and food is food. You spoiled me, I can't go back to calling grilled cheese sandwiches a meal."

Of course I was going crazy having conversations with him in my head. I was attention starved. Hallucinating was the only explanation to missing him, missing any connection or contact. Sometimes I would hear him ranting in that way he had when stuck in his own head and I couldn't help but laugh out loud to his frenzied questions. My mind was going delirious from all the crashing information the Ancient library fed into me as well as the solitude, and all I could think of was his times of frustration.

I went through our former library to find any novels I could ingest before bed and tossed a couple into my pack. I could only watch the DVD's I had smuggled from the nearby store so many more times until the batteries wore down, and I knew by the rate the organic material around me was rotting and dying the batteries wouldn't have much life left. My body turned around and I took in the rest of the apartment before me. A faint whistling sound came from the kitchen and as I turned to check on it a leather bound notebook fell from the shelf I had just pulled a novel of medieval English fables from. I didn't remember seeing the notebook on the shelf, and picked it up to put back, as if anyone would notice the clumsy mess.

But, something pulled me to the tidy binding of it, and I checked the pages, seeing if it was anything that I would be interested in taking back with me. What I saw had my heart stopped. Allowing my fingers to trace the pages of his hand writing, his words I started reading.

February 24th

It snowed again today, and I couldn't help but think of the evenings we spent watching the same snow drift through the windows onto the street. Wrapped in a blanket in each other's arms, and talking long into the night. She used to make herbal teas, take three sips and forget about them to go off and do something else. I'd go behind her, taking the cups to the sink after an hour or so and she'd come back looking for her tea she's swear she was working on. I miss seeing those half-sipped cups, now the only ones are mine...

I ran back over the words to make sure I wasn't missing something. The ink smeared along with my fingers where the writing was and a small gasp escaped me. I turned to see if there were any more entries but that was it. The resentment, the frustration of him not coming to find me finally broke through. What if he thought I was gone, he didn't even think to come look for me. What if he was happy with an alternate timeline me, that would be good enough, but I had to know. I had to find my own way out.

I rubbed the oil slick ink between my fingers, and looked back at the page. The few tears that I allowed myself to feel fell in two salty drops next to where the ink had smudged against the parchment. My eyes longingly looked back to the windows, I ached for that moment again. The windows here were hazy with the same orange twilight glow that appeared at all hours of the day, particles of dust and debris glinting in the rays. I missed the glinting of the snow in the same evening or predawn sun. His hand tracing patterns onto my bare back leaving a trail of bumps in its wake while I laid my head on his chest listening to him read aloud in languages I didn't understand, but from the cadence of his voice felt moved by as we looked out those big windows. I closed the diary, feeling awkwardly about an invasion of his privacy, as much as I wanted to know his thoughts and feelings, and slid the notebook back onto the shelf.

I swallowed back the threat of more tears as I walked over to the murky windows. Using my arm to wipe the grime away from a pane I felt my heart drop into my gut.

"What is that?" I gasped aloud. I could see a molten charged mass of swirling blues making a wall that reached up into the sky off into the distance encompassing the street a few blocks away. It was as if a visual electrical cloud was consuming everything behind it, the same moving blue nothingness that the Stargate formed when on.

If this quite literally the end of time, the timeline I'm in, that Daniel has reset, that must be the void of time. I thought to myself. I grabbed my pack and flew down the stairs, jumping onto the bicycle that I had stolen and rode as quickly as I could to inspect the cloud. Each pump of my feet against the pedals I could feel the static charge coming off the barrier. I skidded to a stop, noticing that the wall was moving, creeping at a snail's pace, but moving nonetheless, and in the direction of the SGC. It dawned on me, of course it was moving toward the SGC. I didn't belong here. This timeline was supposed to end and yet somehow I stayed behind, tethered to the gate where it began. I needed to find a way out, before it was too late and this barrier, this encompassing ending swallowed me whole. I placed the headphones of my walkman on and pedaled back to the bunker of Stargate Command with a new plan, no more waiting, I would save myself.

Jack

Just because Sam had asked to take an emotional break I believe she worded it, didn't mean that I couldn't bother her in the office while she was picking apart Daniel's time contraption. I was sitting in her office chair throwing a tennis ball into the air while she stood at her desk, in that tight black t-shirt I loved so much. It was taunting and quite honestly rude how much she was flaunting in front of me. I respected her choice, she needed to sort her feelings about me, about us. Especially after seeing Daniel's breakdown over this Eleanor he spoke of. It had been a month now and he was still clearly distraught over her. I felt for him, I did, but I didn't know her. I couldn't console him like he needed. A few nights Teal'c and I went over with beers and he sat there staring at the wall, broken. He was just broken. It wasn't until the last week that he was mission ready to go off world again, and he was more like the Daniel I knew, but in his eyes he was still numb inside. When he came back so damaged Sam took a second look at us, at what she and I had and it scared her. The losses that we had encountered, the moments we were on the brink of collapse and she took a step back, closing the door that we had allowed just cracked open between us. There wasn't a lock on the door of any possibility for us, but it was shut indefinitely and I felt a small resentment for it. I understood, I knew Daniel wasn't at fault, I knew Sam, my Sam, deserved space and I was not always as emotionally vulnerable as I should be. Yet, part of me needed her to understand there was no one else for me, and we were wasting our time pretending anymore. We couldn't mourn one another, we couldn't afford to worry publicly if something happened to us, and I think this break was more her way of trying to help me. But, I didn't need help, I needed her. It took everything in me to keep from turning her around on that table she was leaned against and telling her that. Letting her know I'd give all this up for her, but she deserved something more stable than what we had.

I threw the tennis ball in the air again and caught it as Daniel came bounding into the room, Teal'c striding in behind him as he was going on about timelines. I have had this conversation with him a dozen times, he couldn't go back. There was nothing there for him.

"What are you getting into now boys?" I sighed, rolling my head in their direction. "Carter is busy working on a new toy for us."

"What is at the end of a disrupted timeline?" Daniel blurted out and Sam took the goggles off her face blinking back. Her mouth did that little half open pause, the one where her eyes squinted off to the side as she processed the millions of ideas floating around her brilliant mind and she looked as if she were in mid sentence. The face I thought about so often when I was alone in my own thoughts, and I pursed my lips in a tight line to keep from looking at her, from letting any emotion slip from me.

"What would be considered a disrupted timeline?" Dr. McKay spoke up entering the room and I couldn't keep my eyes from rolling into the back of my head. His incessant need to be a part of the conversation when he wasn't invited grated on my every nerve. I wondered if he was always like this, if as a bumbling child he burst every bubble in the room. He was smart, I'd give him that, but he was no Samantha Carter.

"Rodney," Daniel gave him a tight lipped polite smile and nod and McKay brushed him off.

"Is this about the device I was brought in to dissect?" He waggled his eyebrows and Sam snapped her mouth shut looking back at Daniel.

"Hypothetically, there would be nothing. It ceased to exist. If your line of questioning is going where I believe it's going, you jumped from point b back to point a. There is now no point b."

"But, what if there was?" He looked back at her and pulled out a leather bound journal.

"I mean, physics dictates that there isn't." McKay shot back.

"However," she countered, "physics also dictates you can't just jump through time willy nilly and here he is." She gestured to Daniel. "With a device from the Ancients he claims we made that does just that."

"I'll ask again Daniel. Where are you going with this?" I leaned back in the chair folding my arms across my chest. "Because I have a sneaking suspicion I know, and I don't like it." He opened the journal flat on the table for us to read and pointed at smudged ink and tear tracks. "Oh now, we don't need to read your diary entries." I cringed.

"Don't," he muttered. "Yesterday evening was the first time I have been back to our," he paused and took a moment, "my apartment, since I came back. I um, have taken up journaling to try and get myself in the right headspace. That doesn't matter, what does is that mid entry I stopped to collect my thoughts and take the whistling kettle off the stove. When I came back the ink had smudged on the page and there were water drop stains." His finger circled the marks on the parchment.

"So, you are a sloppy writer, what's your point?" I shrugged.

"No Jack, there was no ink on me, on my hands, nothing. Plus no reason for the water marks." He looked back at Sam and McKay. "So, what is at the end of a timeline? Does it end completely or does it come full circle to my landing point? Does it branch off and continue its own path?"

"No one really knows," she whispered.

"I still don't grasp what you're getting at?" McKay stared down at the journal still.

"He thinks she's still there." I sucked in through my teeth. "But I think you have a ghost in your apartment messing with you Daniel."

"This isn't the first instance." He shook his head. "You all have never met her, she is supposed to be dead in this timeline. She's buried in a graveyard in Kansas City." His voice grew shaky, "but I hear her sometimes, answering my questions. Laughing at jokes I tell myself. I smell her cooking in our, my kitchen."

"Look," I sighed, "I don't want to come across as a dick. I'm empathetic to your situation, I am." I tried to be as gentle and understanding as I could, "it's called mourning, you've been through loss like this before. You saw Sha're in your dreams..."

"It's not like that," he cut me off. His hands were gripping the table with such force I could hear the cracking of his knuckles and he looked up at the ceiling trying to compose himself. "I'm not willing to accept that she is gone, and I'm not imagining this." He pointed to the journal again. "This is not the weirdest thing that has happened here. I'm not an astrophysicist," he pointed at Sam and looked back at McKay, "I'm an archeologist, but I have jumped through time and watched the two of you build a device to do just that. So now I'm asking if there is a way she has continued living in that timeline."

The room grew silent in thought and Teal'c cleared his throat, "you are referring to polmek'til." He looked around the room for any recognition and continued, "soul binding. It happens when one person can feel the presence of another even when not in the same space. It is written that this may occur when two beings are connected in mind and body."

Daniel snapped and pointed in Teal'c direction. "Thank you! Yes, someone who doesn't think I'm crazy for once." He clasped his hands together and threw me a pointed glance.

"Daniel Jackson, I believe you are going through polmek'til. However, I know little of the circumstances around it. Only that when it had occurred it was because of life altering intervention."

"Like bringing someone back to life with a device that nearly killed you." Sam's eyes shot back to Daniel. "Isn't that what you said happened? She nearly died bringing you back to life last month in your timeline?"

"The device that was smelted down to make that," he pointed to the taken apart remote on the table between McKay and Sam. "Do you happen to know anything else about this polmek'til?"

"I regrettably do not." Teal'c's eyes seemed curious and undeniably empathetic to Daniel's case and in return he gave a nod in gratitude. He swiped the journal off the table and walked out mumbling something about research and I turned back to Sam who seemed to be making a point to avoid my glance. I took the hint and motioned for Teal'c to follow so she and the doctor could continue on their work.