You Can't Always Get What You Want, Part 2
Continued from Part 1.
“So what actually convinced you, Teal’c?” Jack asked as he brushed his hand over the gate dialing panel. From his seat in the cockpit, he could see Carter futzing with the cloaking controls of the puddle jumper, and Teal’c standing beside her, holding a flashlight on the spot where she was working.
“When I heard that my son was free in the original timeline,” he answered without needing to think.
“Yeah,” Jack sighed. “I can imagine that would be pretty inspiring.”
“Did you leave behind sons or daughters of your own, O’Neill?”
Jack looked up sharply. “No.”
Teal’c looked back at him, waiting in case he said more.
“I did,” Jack amended. “A son. He died.”
“Oh, my god,” Carter murmured. “I’m sorry. How?”
He was thinking about how to answer - or maybe avoid answering - when he looked up to see Danny behind them, near the entrance. He’d just walked in, wearing desert camos instead of robes, and carrying a jug and some of those drinking bowl things. From the expression on his face, Jack had a feeling… “You know, don’t you?”
Sam and Teal’c turned to see the newcomer. First thing this morning, Danny had decked them all out in desert robes so that, in his words, they wouldn’t “stick out like two Gumbys and a Tin Man” when they walked through the desert. To Jack, the wearin’ o’ the camos flaunted that Danny had something comfy to wear and they didn’t. Not to mention flaunting the rest of him, which Carter was practically licking with her eyeballs. Fickle, thy name is woman. Or… something.
“Know what?” Danny asked mildly, setting the jug down beside the breakfast tray. Then his eyes narrowed at Jack. “You weren’t talking… Charlie?”
Jack nodded, curious to see where he’d take it. “Tell ‘em.”
Danny frowned at him, but turned to Sam and Teal’c. “If it’s the same as it was in my timeline, Charlie accidentally shot himself with Jack’s personal gun.”
Sam dropped something that clanked loudly. Teal’c just stood there with that same listening look. Danny looked at Jack appraisingly, then turned away to nod at the breakfast tray. “You guys aren’t eating?”
“No coffee,” Jack quipped. “Unless…” He nodded at the jug.
Danny shook his head, but his expression was sort of teasing. Almost playful. Now, what was that about?
“I was kinda wondering what breakfast is,” Carter said to Danny in a semi-breathy voice Jack could only describe as sultry. Why don’t you just tackle him and pin him to the floor?
Oblivious, Danny started pointing to various bowls on the tray. “Dried pomegranate. Dates… some kind of melon that tastes like honeydew… figs… The bread is, uh… well, it tastes good - it’s got sesame, lentils, cumin… sand.”
“Sand?” Jack echoed, walking over to the tray of food.
“They have no way of eliminating it from the grinding process,” Danny shrugged. “I’d eat it sparingly because… well, otherwise, it’ll eventually wear your teeth down to nothing.”
Jack cocked his eyebrows, opting for some pieces of fruit and whatever that was in the bowl Danny hadn’t yet identified - just to be cool. “How do you know?”
“Skeletal remains from the period.”
“No dental records, huh?”
Danny narrowed his eyes, which wasn’t as bad a reaction as Jack deserved, really, for such a half-ass joke. “And that…” Danny pointed at the last bowl, nodding toward the piece Jack had grabbed, “is a sort of jerky. Made from duck.”
“Duck jerky?” Jack queried.
Danny gave him another look - then his gaze dropped to a midpoint between the floor and the middle console thingie, and froze there. He wasn’t exactly easy to read, but Jack thought he suddenly looked distraught. And he couldn’t begin to guess why.
“Duck’s good,” Jack offered in what he hoped was an upbeat tone.
Danny glanced back up, shaking off the dark mood. “Well, you haven’t gotten to the best part yet, because we ate so late last night.”
“What’s that?” Jack asked, tracking Danny’s glance to the jug.
“Guess what the beverage of choice is around here?”
“Mud?”
“Beer.”
“Beer?”
Danny nodded, grinning slightly.
“You brought me beer for breakfast?” Jack asked, suspecting the look on his face was utterly loopy, possibly even beatific.
Danny actually chuckled. “It’s a staple around here. We have it with almost every meal.”
“I don’t care,” Jack said emphatically. His instinct was to chase Danny around the room and try to kiss him on the lips, but something told him this guy wouldn’t appreciate the fine art of locker room horseplay the same way Kowalski had. So he settled for clapping him on the shoulder and saying in a mock-somber tone, “You brought me beer for breakfast. Are you seeing anybody?”
Danny laughed again, looking away in embarrassment. “Um, okay, it’s not Guinness, but, uh… It’s too bad we don’t really have time to play - you might have some fun working on recipes. They use a lot of different spices to flavor it. It’s a very interesting process.”
One corner of Jack’s mouth turned up in a genuine smile and he dropped his hand from Danny’s shoulder. “I’ll bet.”
And Danny’s smile faltered. This time, Jack was sure it wasn’t anything he’d said or done. The kid’s gaze dropped again, and for a second, Jack could’ve sworn his left hand was shaking. What the hell? Every time he thought he was cracking that façade…
“Well, we’ll have time after the rebellion,” Sam piped up.
Oh, right - there were other people in the room. Jack got up to pour himself a beer.
Danny frowned at Sam. “How do you figure?”
“Well…” she floundered, “after the rebellion, we’re going to have to try to live out our lives here without affecting the timeline.”
Danny made eye contact with Jack - a signal for backup, if Jack wasn’t mistaken - then turned toward Sam. “You sure staying here is the best way to avoid screwing up the timeline? That’s not what your counterpart suggested.”
“What do you suggest?” Jack asked Danny before Sam could respond. He took a drink of the beer. Huh. It was kind of fruity and not as bitter as he was used to - nor as strong - but he could definitely get used to it.
Danny turned to him. “Seems to me as soon as the rebellion’s done, we should get the hell out of here before we cause anymore damage.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s…” Sam paused for a second, “…such a good idea.”
“Why not?” Jack asked... in near-perfect synch with Danny. They looked at each other, startled. Teal’c looked curious.
“Um…” Sam was struggling. “Well, where would you want to go?”
“Back to…” Danny grimaced. “…the future.”
Apparently, that movie was a constant in both timelines.
“That won’t work,” Sam replied, suddenly getting all animated with her topic. “If we managed to reset the timeline properly, and somehow didn’t screw it up again just by traveling back to 2005, then we’d cease to exist! The original SG-1 will go on as if this never happened. But because they don’t have the ZPM, they’ll still go back in time just like they did originally-“
“Sam!” Jack cut her off impatiently.
She stared at him, bewildered.
“Condensed version,” Danny prompted.
“Right,” she muttered. “We’d only succeed in creating a loop. They go back, screw up the timeline, we go back, fix the timeline. Again and again.”
“How do you know?” Danny asked mildly. “It’s not exactly like it’s been tested in a lab, is it?”
“I don’t know, but the theory makes sense. Like your pyramid theory.“
“And if we stay here,” Jack pointed out, “we risk screwing up the timeline - leaving us with no loop, but also no ZPM. Or Stargate. Or defense against the Goa’uld.”
“So,” Danny said, “we travel to about a month before the original team went back in time, and plant the ZPM at a first dynasty tomb that got excavated around that time.”
Sam shook her head rapidly. “You don’t understand. There can’t be two of us in one timeline.”
Danny frowned at her. “Yes, there can. I’ve-”
“No, Daniel, it would-” Sam began.
“Would you listen?” he cut her off. “We accidentally traveled thirty years into the past and spent a few days in 1969. Even though we didn’t run into them, our younger selves must have been around.”
She looked down for a moment, thinking. “How’d you get back?”
“Solar flare. That’s how we wound up going back in time to start with.”
“So how do you know you even got back to your reality?”
This time, Danny rolled his eyes in no uncertain terms. “Everything was exactly the same. Okay? Not a hair out of place. Besides, we didn’t use an alternate reality traveling device, just a stargate with an unexpected solar flare. That couldn’t send us to an alternate reality, could it?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she agreed. “But if the whole point is to stop us from ever having taken this trip back to the past, then what happens to this us when the time comes and they don’t go? I mean, you’ve aged five years. You think there’s going to be two of you wandering around, one five years older than the other?”
Damn, I actually followed that.
“Why not?” Danny shrugged obstinately.
She sighed. “I think you’re confusing alternate realities with same reality time travel. See, alternate reality doubles aren’t really… well, you.”
“Yeah? And?” Danny drawled.
“Well,” she looked uncertain. “We’re the same SG-1 that exists in 2005. I know it seems like two different timelines, but it’s really two versions of the same-“
“It’s an alternate reality,” Danny insisted. “All that fork in the road stuff? Maybe I can’t go back to 2005 in my timeline, but the three of you can.”
“No,” she said. “That’s just it. Like you said about 1969, we didn’t use an alternate reality traveling device to get here. So we are the very same people you knew, just… with a different history.”
For some reason Danny turned his frown on Jack. That face was deceptively calm, but Jack knew simmering rage when he saw it. He wasn’t sure what was bothering Danny so much - seemed like more than just the possibility of being stuck here forever, which he must have come to terms with in the past few years. Then he remembered what Danny had said yesterday: no matter what you have in common, you’re not him.
Danny walked slowly and deliberately over to the time console. “Where’s the screen?”
Sam frowned. “What screen?”
Danny leaned down and ran his hand along the side of the console, and a small screen popped up on the surface, with some sort of scrolling, glowy script running on it.
“Whoa,” Jack commented. “What’s that?”
“Instructions,” Daniel replied. “In Ancient.”
“The people who built the ship?” Sam asked. “You can read it?”
“Yep.”
“Is there one like it on the cloaking console?”
He glanced up. “Probably. Look for a sensor and run your hand over it. I’ll translate for you when I’m done here.”
“Is the cloaking device not a higher priority, Daniel?” Teal’c asked pointedly.
“I’ll do it in a minute.” He was already engrossed in reading.
“Daniel,” Jack said.
Danny turned to him, smothering the anger with a look of acknowledgment. “Five minutes. I promise. Unless Sam needs you and your Ancient gene, you could go meet Katep and take a look at our defenses and the terrain.” He turned back to what he was doing, and the rest of them ceased to exist.
Until Teal’c said, “I agree with Doctor Carter.”
Danny looked up, startled. “What?”
“We are those with whom you originally traveled here.”
Danny’s face didn’t change, but his voice turned low and tight. “You mean the ones I buried outside the settlement?”
They stared at him, the three of them, until Danny broke the gaze with Teal’c and turned back to his Ancient screen.
“C’mon, Teal’c,” Jack sighed, putting his beer down, grabbing one last piece of duck jerky and turning toward the back of the ship. As they weaved past the time console on their way out of the ship, Jack let his shoulder brush against Daniel’s, on an impulse. He got no response, but then he hadn’t been after one. Not really.
~~~~~~~~~
“Yep,” O’Neill said as he peered through the binoculars over the ridge. “With a couple of thousand troops and that ship, this’ll be a piece of cake.”
“Cake?” Teal’c repeated. The Tau’ri seemed to speak in metaphors and other contextual constructs that kept their speech cryptic, even to those who knew their language.
“It’ll be easy,” O’Neill clarified. “Katep and his people storm the temple and keep Ra occupied, and we cable the gate to the ship and yank it away.”
“What of the dialing device?” Katep asked from O’Neill’s other side.
“We don’t need it,” O’Neill explained. “The ship has its own dialing computer.”
“Yes,” Katep agreed. “But should the dialing device be hidden?”
O’Neill glanced at Teal’c - Daniel had chosen his second-in-command well. “Probably, but we can do that after the fact,” O’Neill said to Katep. Then he frowned suddenly. “Katep… what went wrong with the first rebellion?”
“We were betrayed before we could execute the plan,” the young man explained.
“Yeah, Daniel more or less said that,” O’Neill nodded. “Who betrayed them?”
Katep nodded toward the settlement below them. “Worshippers of Ra, who remained loyal to him.”
“Just out of the goodness of their hearts?” O’Neill pressed. Katep looked confused, and he added, “I’m trying to guess whether Ra has spies among us here.”
Katep’s eyes narrowed and he looked over the tents below pensively. “I do not believe we were betrayed by spies. Those who betrayed us did not seek us out.”
O’Neill nodded thoughtfully and turned back to Teal’c.
“It is most unlikely Ra would bother planting spies amongst his subjugated people,” Teal’c offered.
“Yeah, but does he still think they’re so subjugated?” O’Neill asked. “That attempted rebellion might just have tipped him off.”
“It was not the first,” Katep informed him. “Ra believes he is invincible.”
O’Neill still looked unconvinced. “Okay. So, how did the three of us - them - manage to get captured, but not Daniel?”
“When Ra’s Jaffa came,” Katep answered, “It was very sudden. Teal’c and Colonel Carter were unable to hide. They were captured immediately. Daniel and O’Neill were stashing weapons in one of the underground hidings.”
“Like that thing we hid in today?” O’Neill asked.
Katep nodded. “Daniel was down below, as O’Neill handed weapons down to him from above, in the tent. There was no one to cover the trapdoor if they both hid, and so O’Neill closed the door upon Daniel, and the Jaffa never knew of his presence. Daniel was most displeased.”
The statement seemed so obvious as to be unnecessary, which caused Teal’c to think he might be missing a subtle nuance. “With what, specifically, was he displeased?” Teal’c asked.
“That he was not given the option of dying to save O’Neill,” Katep answered, as if it should have been obvious.
O’Neill winced and turned to Teal’c. “That explains a few things.”
Teal’c cocked an eyebrow. “Daniel’s anger.”
O’Neill nodded and spoke quietly, his eyes taking on an unfocused look. “He’s down below, the Jaffa are coming, and one guy makes the decision for both of them.”
And the fact that it was the only rational decision would not have assuaged Daniel’s feelings. “His comrades died as one,” Teal’c deduced, “and he was left to mourn and rebuild alone.”
O’Neill shook his head ruefully. “A civilian, Teal’c. The guy’s a freakin’ archeologist, and because I jumped the gun on this whole plan, he ends up stuck here with the mess.”
Teal’c noted that O’Neill had begun to speak of his other self in the first person, but saw no point in remarking upon it. “He has the heart of a warrior, O’Neill. He shared responsibility in the decision to act sooner rather than later.”
“Yeah, but I was in charge. I screwed him over, Teal’c. Royally. Now I’m impressed he’s even being civil.”
“On the contrary. He described O’Neill as the best friend he ever had.”
O’Neill stared at him, stunned, and Teal’c wondered what exactly he had said that was so surprising.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Four hot, sandy, beerless hours later, Jack, Teal’c and Katep made their way back to the settlement for lunch. Danny and Sam were already there in one of the tents, sitting at the table, their plates still full. Either they’d just started, or they were too busy to remember to eat.
Danny’s hands were all over the place as he talked to Sam in an animated voice, his eyes boring into hers. Now, that was the Daniel who’d spent an hour on Jack’s boat trying to light a fire under his ass. And apparently Sam was feeling the heat, because when she wasn’t talking back, she just sat there staring into his eyes with this dazed look, like a lizard basking on a rock in the sun. Why don’t you just… oh, whatever.
He refocused on the present as Katep guided them to the table and they sat down. He knew what was going to happen as soon as Danny saw him.
“…think about it!” Danny was saying urgently to Sam as he turned to the others, ending the conversation. All the passion cooled instantly. “Hi.”
Yep, just as expected. “Hey,” Jack nodded. “What’s all the hubbub?”
“We made some progress on the cloaking device,” Sam announced. “It’s really simple now that we found the screen and Daniel’s translating everything on it.”
“That’s good news,” Jack replied. Katep’s wife brought him a plate of food and a bowl-thingie of beer. Maybe living out the rest of his life here wasn’t such a bad idea. Speaking of which, he turned to Danny. “What’d you find out about going home?”
Danny grunted. “I’m not even sure where to start.”
Jack lifted his hand to make an inviting gesture, and the couscous like-stuff he’d forgotten was on the end of the fork he’d forgotten was in his hand got flung into the corner of the tent. Ignoring Teal’c’s raised eyebrow, he said, “Why don’t you bottom line it for me, then give me the details?”
Danny sat back, looking at Jack with undisguised curiosity.
“What?” He sensed it wasn’t about the couscous stuff.
“Okay,” Danny shrugged. “The bottom line is, we should be able to go back to 2005, even though the other versions of ourselves would be there, too.”
Jack took a bite and thought for a moment. “So we’re really not the same people you knew.”
Danny sighed loudly and turned to Sam.
“Actually, we are,” she said timidly, without offering to elaborate.
“How does that work, then?” Jack asked. Then, to Danny: “And why are you looking at me that way?”
Danny raised his eyebrows. “Well… the Jack O’Neill I knew didn’t have much patience for ‘how’ and ‘why’.”
Jack narrowed his eyes at Danny thoughtfully. “How often did you tell him there were three of him in the same timeline?”
Danny looked impressed - maybe by the fact that Jack had counted properly (the colonel, the general and the corpse) - then tilted his head. “You have a point there.”
Jack nodded and went back to his food.
“It was never more than two at a time,” Danny added with a perfectly innocent look on his face.
Smart ass. Jack looked up and glared. “Just tell me how it works.”
The corner of Danny’s mouth twitched. “Right. Okay. As the Ancients were developing time travel technology, they had some failed experiments. We actually stumbled across one that never did anything but loop about every ten hours, which you… uh, never mind. Not relevant. But apparently they learned a few things from their failures.”
After a couple of seconds’ silence, Jack looked up to see Danny watching him expectantly. God, he remembered that look from Charlie. “What’d they learn?” he asked, playing along.
And Danny responded like Charlie, happily ripping into phase two of his encyclopedic discourse. “Apparently, the rules of physics as they understood them don’t allow you to use time travel to create alternate realities. Unless you have technology that can traverse the dimensions from one reality to another, you can time travel all you want, and never affect any timeline but your own. That’s how we know you’re…” He gestured toward Jack, apparently at a loss for words.
“…really some guy who ran around saving the galaxy for eight years, about whom you know more than I do?” Jack finished. “Hey, it’s weird for me, too.”
“For me as well,” Teal’c said, just as Sam said, “Me, too.” She smiled at the Jaffa, and he bowed his head to her. Well, that was nice - maybe sometime they’d have a stereophonic conversation between Sam and Teal’c in unison on the one side, and Jack and Danny on the other.
Danny nodded his agreement. “Yeah. So, you can only change your own timeline. From what I translated, the puddle jumper either can’t or won’t cross the barrier to an alternate reality.”
“So if we try to go back to 2005…?”
“…we’ll be able to coexist with our other selves, plant the ZPM and do whatever we want, with no fear of getting stuck in an alternate reality.”
“But we can still screw up our timeline,” Sam pointed out. “Planting the ZPM means changing the timeline.”
“But getting it back to the way it was,” Danny countered.
“Yeah,” she agreed slowly. “But I think we have to be careful not to make it worse.”
Jack put his fingers on his temples for a moment. “So what are we going to do after that?”
Sam looked puzzled by the question. Danny looked like he didn’t want to answer.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Jack continued, “but we don’t belong anywhere. No matter where we go, we have to spend the rest of our lives hoping we don’t step on a bug.”
“Yes,” Sam said firmly.
Jack narrowed his eyes at her. “Maybe the best thing would be for us not to survive the rebellion at all.”
Danny gave him a concerned look - or maybe he just felt the same way.
“That could affect the timeline, too,” Sam answered.
Danny rolled his eyes and shifted impatiently in his seat. He was holding it in for now, but Jack sensed he was going to go off like an unpinned grenade if Sam didn’t back off.
“So even offing ourselves isn’t an option?” Jack demanded impatiently.
Danny had a faraway look in his eye, and Jack had to play back what he’d just said to make a guess about it. Oh, so you know about that, too. How the hell close had he been to this guy?
Jack glanced at Teal’c to see how he was taking all this… yep, peeling fruit, totally unconcerned. He turned back to Danny, who understood. “Then we might as well risk changing the timeline some place really nice. I’m thinking Maui, circa 1840.”
“1840?” Danny echoed thoughtfully.
“The more we run around, doing stuff, the more we risk messing things up,” Sam put in. At least this time she had the decency to look sympathetic. “I’m not exactly thrilled at the prospect of staying here forever myself, you know.”
Danny turned to her. “You just said even if we die here, it could change things, and we’re going to have to die sometime. There’s only one place - or, rather, time - we can go to where we won’t risk changing the future.”
Jack stared at him. “The future future!”
“Exactly.”
“Hold on a minute,” Sam said. “You mean you want to travel into the distant future and-”
“Yes!” Jack and Danny said at the same time.
Sam flinched, but didn’t get the message. “But we’d still be affecting the timeline! Just because it’s not a future we were ever supposed to live to see, do you think we have the right-”
“You know what?” Danny suddenly snapped - and Jack had a feeling the pin had just been pulled. “We made decisions on a near-daily basis that affected the present of the entire galaxy.” He turned to her again with the full force of that superheated gaze, and his words started to build speed and volume. “We took out Goa’uld system lords. We nearly infected Earth with Replicators trying to learn something from this robot we found. In fact, I can’t remember how many viruses and plagues we brought back, and time bombs and booby traps. You blew up a star! We skipped a dialing protocol once, and it was only through the intervention of the Asgard or fate that we didn’t destroy that world! We saved one world from self-destructing, but then there was another world we did everything we could to save and didn’t. So don’t tell me we have to stop affecting the timeline, because that is all we do! That’s all we ever did!”
The whole speech had crescendoed to a blazing shout that left Jack’s nerves buzzing. The Egyptians in the tent had all stopped to stare, as had Sam and Teal’c. Danny turned to Jack, looking uncomfortable. But some of the fire was still there in his eyes, and it kindled something in Jack. He held Danny’s gaze for a few seconds - until Danny stood up and broke it.
“Excuse me,” he said, making his way quickly out of the tent.
Sam looked mortified. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean to…”
Jack nodded some sort of reassurance to her, then turned to see Teal’c looking at him expectantly. “What?”
“Should we not pursue him, O’Neill?”
“Let him cool off for a few minutes,” Jack suggested. “Then we’ll… I’ll go.”
Teal’c raised an eyebrow.
“What, you think I can’t handle it?”
“I have every confidence in you. I offer only my assistance in tracking him.”
“Jack,” Sam suddenly piped up.
He turned to her. Then he saw a struggle on her face. Something bothering her, and she was summoning courage to say it. “Maybe there are some other things you ought to know before you go after him.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Daniel saw the shadow before he heard any footsteps. That was the problem with deserts - you couldn’t hear people coming. Then again, he’d have bet a one-way get-out-of-hell free card no one would come looking for him…
…least of all, Jack. The shadow stopped a couple of yards away, and the man attached to it pushed back his hood, but Daniel had already recognized him from the way he walked.
“What are you doing here?” he asked in as neutral a tone as he could manage.
Jack looked around at the outcropping of rock, and the expanse of sand below it. “What are you doing here?”
“Minding my own business,” Daniel responded.
Jack walked over and sat near him under the outcropping, in the shade that covered an area the size of a small room. “Me, too.”
“You’re minding my business?”
He stretched out his legs and squinted out into the sunlight, not bothering to answer.
“You know,” Daniel remarked, “the other you would’ve known to leave me alone.”
Jack turned the squint on him. “The other me let you get killed. Four times, rumor has it.”
Daniel closed his eyes, wondering what the hell had possessed him to tell Sam that, anyway. “Look. I’m sorry I haven’t exactly been the welcome wagon since you got here. But I really need to be alone right now, so could you please just go away?”
“Daniel,” he said slowly, “this is a little easier for us than it is for you.”
Daniel frowned, not at all sure where he was going with this.
Apparently, Jack had rehearsed this speech ahead of time - or else, this Jack was more habitually eloquent than the one Daniel remembered. “For us, you’re someone entirely new to get to know. But for you… we look like them, and I’m guessing we sort of act like them… but we don’t have any memories of you. These eight years you spent-”
“Nine.”
“What?”
“With you, it was nine.”
Jack looked curious, but put aside his questions for now. “Well, it’s got to hurt just having us around. Like they’re back, except there’s this huge gap where you used to be.”
Oh, god. Daniel closed his eyes and tipped his head back against the rock, suddenly feeling like the world’s biggest ass.
“What?” Jack prompted.
Daniel shook his head, too drained to talk about it. But the worried look on Jack’s face forced it out of him. “I lost my memory once. Couldn’t remember anybody, any part of my life. Kept calling you… I kept calling him Jim. Every once in a while, he’d suddenly look at me hopefully, and I never knew why. Then I’d say or do something wrong, and he’d get so hurt and pissed. Later, after it all came back, I realized: every time I acted like my old self, he thought the memories were coming back. Then when he realized they weren’t…”
Jack looked thoughtful, and for the first time, Daniel saw it from his angle. He was trying to piece together this other life he might have had. Size it up against the life he’d had instead. Sort out what kind of a future he could build with all the discordant pieces.
And, Daniel suddenly knew intuitively, he was thinking maybe he wished he’d lived that other life. Like the robot Jack or the clone, this Jack was suspecting the other one might have enjoyed some benefits he was missing out on. The Jack that Daniel had known had never even been curious about his duplicates’ lives - in fact, he’d been a little paranoid they’d try to steal his life… which must have meant he thought he had something or some things every Jack wanted. Daniel wondered what exactly that had been.
“Well,” Jack finally said. “Thing is, we’re not going to get our memories back, because we never had them.”
“I know,” Daniel assured him.
Jack looked around again. “This is a nice spot.”
Daniel couldn’t quite keep his mouth from twitching, which was odd really, because it wasn’t funny at all. “I’m, uh… I’m glad you like it.” Or maybe it was funny. He couldn’t resist adding, “I thought you would.”
Jack looked at him - at first with suspicion, then with dawning horror. “Where, exactly?” he asked warily, scooting closer to Daniel until their arms were touching, and looking around as if he expected something to reach up through the sand and grab him.
Daniel chuckled, but he thought it might be at least partially from hysteria. “Over there,” he said, pointing to a spot a few feet from Jack’s other side. “Don’t tell me you’re superstitious.”
“About walking over graves in general, no,” Jack replied sourly. “My own, however…”
Daniel grinned at the reaction, thinking absurdly it was just what Jack would have done. “It’s good that you know, actually. Sometimes I come out here and… think aloud. Now if you ever see me doing that, you’ll know I’m not exactly talking to myself.”
Jack finally relaxed his stance and turned back to face Daniel, but stayed pressed against him, apparently sharing the other Jack’s hypocritical disregard for anyone’s personal space but his own. “I used to do that with Charlie some.”
“Did it help?”
“Not really.”
“Yeah,” Daniel agreed. “It never helped with my wife, either. Not that I got many chances to visit her grave - she was buried off world. Then I let a Goa’uld destroy that world, and… I couldn’t visit her at all anymore.” He gave a nervous little guff of laughter. See? Funny! God, I really am going mad.
Jack looked at him, probably thinking the same thing. Or maybe wondering how exactly Daniel had let a Goa’uld destroy a world, and whether he could be trusted to help plan this rebellion. “Tell me about her,” Jack said unexpectedly.
“Sha’re?” Daniel blurted. At Jack’s encouraging nod, he found himself startled into continuing. “She was from a world called Abydos, named after the place in Egypt from which Ra took her people to start a slave colony.” He glanced up to see what Jack needed clarified. Even though Daniel had explained on the tape how the ancient peoples of Earth had seeded the galaxy, Jack would have skimmed over the history lesson in his search for strategic clues.
“Go on,” Jack said.
“Oh,” Daniel said, taken aback. “Well, she, uh… it’s a long story, but she helped start an uprising against Ra. You and I got all the credit for actually killing him, but she and her brother did most of the organizing and planning. I never met anyone more courageous than Sha’re in my life. And not just with enemies.” He let that one hang in the air, refusing to elaborate about Sha’re’s battle to get through Daniel’s thick armor, and his sometimes alarming reactions to the dismantling of his defenses. She’d met every bluff, and every time he thought she’d taken away something real and tangible, she’d replaced it with something much stronger.
None of which had depended on her presence; all of which had stayed with him permanently, as a gift from her soul to his. Damn it, he felt that prickling at the back of his eyes. He didn’t want to cry, not here. Not now.
“Sounds like my wife,” Jack said.
Daniel chuckled. “Yeah, that’s true.”
“You knew my wife?” Jack asked, sounding startled.
“I met her a couple of times,” Daniel shrugged. “Didn’t strike me as someone who’d put up with much bullshit.”
“Yeah, well,” Jack shrugged. Then he looked serious. “I may have given Sam the impression you were gay.”
A startled laugh broke out before Daniel could stop it. “You what?”
“Oh,” Jack waved a hand dismissively. “She said she was attracted to you, so I… you know.”
“Tried to discourage her by using the method favored by nine out of ten junior high boys?”
Jack cleared his throat. “That many eleven-year-olds can’t be wrong.”
Daniel shook his head. “Are you really interested in her?”
Jack clenched his face uncomfortably. “I’m not sure. The only reason I was flirting with her was, she was complaining about not having a boyfriend. Can you imagine that? I mean, she is hot. I just don’t think I’m the right man for the job, you know? What was the question?”
“Jack, she takes everything at face value. You can’t just play with Sam like that - she’ll assume you mean it.”
“How do you know?”
Daniel’s brain was getting whiplash. “Because I’ve had this conversation before. Just… if you’re serious, fine, but if you’re not, don’t confuse her.”
“I think you’re the one who’s got her confused,” Jack remarked.
Daniel felt himself blushing. “Well, we talked it through.”
“Oh, really?” Jack asked smugly. “You told her you weren’t interested?”
“I…” Daniel trailed off. Holy shit.
Jack grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. Then he pressed down on Daniel’s shoulder to support himself getting to his feet.
“Ow,” Daniel complained.
Jack reached out a hand to him. “You’re forgetting one very important thing, Daniel.”
“What’s that?” Daniel asked, clasping Jack’s wrist and let the man help him to a standing position.
“Sam doesn’t have final say over what we do with that time ship,” Jack replied. “I do.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sam Carter was sleepy, achy, grumpy, tipsy and probably three other dwarves as well. It wasn’t fair. She was supposed to be Snow White.
She’d had an interesting conversation with Teal’c while they waited for Jack to bring Daniel back. He’d wanted to know everything about modern American culture, and she’d been surprised to realize she really didn’t know much. She couldn’t remember the last movie she’d seen - they were all alike - and he didn’t seem very interested in hearing about Sex and the City, so that conversation had been short. They’d ended up talking about Jaffa culture and customs, and symbiote incubation and how fast Goa’uld motherships could fly. Still, it had been… nice. She felt comfortable with him, and she thought he felt the same way with her.
Then Jack and Daniel had come back. There was something different about them that she couldn’t pin down. It felt like something that bothered her, but shouldn’t. She didn’t like things like that. She liked things clean and simple and straightforward. Well, who was she kidding? She liked other people to be clean and simple and straightforward, while she kept her own motives unexamined. And now that Daniel had called her on it, that didn’t feel right anymore.
She was supposed to be Snow White. Nothing murky, nothing un-nice.
Then Daniel had taken her back to the puddle jumper and translated everything on the Ancient screen, and they’d gotten the cloaking device repaired. He’d been in such a good mood the whole time that some of that élan from the other Daniel had bubbled through the amazing self-possession that defined this one, and the mix was irresistible. And it had awakened something in her she’d never expected to feel again.
Once they got the cloak working, she’d hugged him and wished she didn’t have to let him go. And he must have picked up on it, because that was when he’d carefully pulled back and explained to her that he didn’t want to pursue anything romantic. He insisted it wasn’t about his history with the other Sam - he just didn’t feel that way about her, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to feel that way about anybody just now.
And he had the most beautiful smile she’d ever seen.
But she knew it had to be because of the other Sam - bitch - and whatever she’d done to hurt Daniel, because her Daniel, her sweet and wonderful Daniel who wouldn’t leave her behind but never got to say goodbye… he’d felt that way about her. She was positive.
Or was she deluding herself? If she was being completely honest here, it was the Daniel on the tape she’d fallen for, even though she’d really liked the Daniel in her reality, too. Maybe she’d only wanted to believe her Daniel had feelings for her because then she could imagine this one having feelings for her.
What the hell kind of person could develop a love triangle that pitted one guy against… himself?
“What,” she asked loudly, suddenly clamping a hand down on Daniel’s forearm on the dinner table, “do you know about Snow White?”
Daniel’s eyebrows popped up and he glanced over at Jack. “The story, or the history of how it changed over the years, or-”
“What it means!” she half-shouted. Then she realized she was half-shouting, and made an apologetic gesture. She whispered, “I want to know what the story means.”
“Sam,” Jack said softly, “maybe you want to slow down on the beer a little.”
“I don’t think so,” she responded, feeling very certain. “I have found that the one time I don’t have to worry about screwing up the timeline or pissing somebody off is when I’m too plastered to care. In fact, I vote we just stay here and stay totally sloshed for the rest of our lives. I think that’s the solution. But I was talking to Daniel, so if you don’t mind…”
“Um,” Daniel said. “Well, in the broadest sense, it’s about envy. In most modern variations, it’s a wicked stepmother realizing her stepdaughter has surpassed her in beauty. But in older versions, it’s a mother and daughter. In yet another version, the whole plot is a little different and it’s a brother’s wife mistaking her for his mistress and then turning her into a slave.”
“But a prince always comes for her,” Sam stated, but really she was asking.
Daniel nodded. “Yeah, in every variation, some male figure comes along and restores her proper social status.”
“It’s like she’s kept frozen all those years,” Sam muttered, amazed at the quality of revelations she was having, “missing out on her whole life because she’s waiting for something that’s never going to happen… but then it does happen.”
Daniel exchanged another glance with Jack. “Well, yes, but Gilbert and Gubar argued that it’s just a cycle. The voice in the mirror telling the queen who’s the fairest - that’s actually the absent husband-father who wields so much power over the women in the story, he doesn’t even need to put in an appearance. The queen lives by his approval, and when she loses it to Snow White, Snow White is in turn doomed to live by her prince’s approval, which she’ll someday lose to a fairer woman.”
Sam thought about that for a moment. It was all about male domination, then. The women fighting each other for male approval, never realizing it wasn’t a way out - it was, at best, a way to survive. It wasn’t living at all, it was literally being put in a glass coffin until some man needed to get his rocks off, it was… “That sucks.”
“Sounds fairly sexist,” Jack agreed.
“Oh, it sounds extremely sexist,” Daniel said, sounding so much like the other Daniel that Sam felt a pang. “Unfortunately, it’s also extremely true.”
Jack’s eyes narrowed. “How do you mean?”
I thought my father would approve of me someday? I was so hung up on waiting for that, I forgot to go out and find my own life?
“A lot of societies throughout history foster the idea of women competing for the affections of men,” Daniel pointed out.
“This is not true among Jaffa,” Teal’c remarked. “Men compete for the affections of women. Once that affection is won, a man can be branded an outcast if he fails to meet the needs of his wife.”
Daniel, Jack and Teal’c then launched into a detailed comparison of the problems women faced in various societies. Sam wondered how long it would take them to notice she wasn’t participating. After ten minutes, she gave up. Right in the middle of Jack saying something rather smart about how men also compete for the approval of other men, particularly in the military, Sam interrupted with, “This is a really nice discussion, guys, but don’t you think it’s kind of belied by the fact that I’m sitting right here, and not once have you shown the slightest interest in my thoughts and opinions? I mean, I do have kind of an expert opinion in this topic, wouldn’t you say?”
All three guys turned to her, looking like little boys who’d been caught doing something naughty.
“Sss okay,” Sam slurred. “You weren’t interested in my time travel ideas, either, and I have degrees in that. Degrees are, like, male approval on paper.”
“What, just because we didn’t agree?” Jack demanded.
“No!” her voice sounded dangerously close to whiney, and she suddenly felt so tired.
“You’re right, Sam,” Daniel finally said. “To a point, at least. I’m sorry.”
Jack shrugged. “Yeah, okay. I’m sorry.”
Teal’c regarded her with a frown. “I supported one of your theories, which proved to be corroborated by the Ancient information Daniel was able to translate.”
Chagrined, Sam said, “I’m sorry, Teal’c. ‘Course you did. Thank you.” Why had she left him out like that? Because he was an alien? Because he wasn’t part of the male hierarchy in her world?
She didn’t remember exactly how she got to bed, but once there, she dreamed, and knew she dreamed, but was powerless to awaken.
~~~~~~~~~~~
“Wendy,” came a familiar voice in Sam’s dream.
She opened her eyes to see Jack sitting on the edge of her pallet, looking dejected. “My name is Sam.”
“Uh-huh,” Jack said, then by way of introduction: “Peter Pan.”
“No - Jack.”
“Whatever. Listen, my shadow came off. Thought maybe you could do something about it, since you’re a genius.”
“Well,” she said, feeling immensely flattered as she sat up to examine the errant shadow. It was dancing around on the wall of its own accord, like an insane marionette. Even though what she was looking at was patently impossible, she felt compelled to offer some suggestion. “I think the laws of thermodynamics just need time to work,” she said, thinking that was probably the stupidest idea ever.
“Oh, you’re right,” Jack said happily, pointing at where the shadow had knitted itself back onto his foot.
Suddenly, Sam noticed something else odd. “Why is that glowing?” She pointed at one of Katep’s trunks, and more specifically, the soft chartreuse light coming out between the lid and the base.
“Oh, crap,” Jack said, running over to the trunk. Sam was relieved to notice his shadow stayed with him. He opened the trunk quickly, spreading the glow all through the room, and Sam heard a tiny, angry voice yelling at Jack.
“Well, sorry,” Jack grumbled. “I didn’t mean to shut you in there.”
A tiny glowing creature - this had to be Tinkerbell - flew out of the trunk and proceeded to flit all around the room, chattering maniacally until finally it lit in the corner and… turned into a life-size version of Daniel in camos, glowing softly.
He crossed his arms and looked at her disdainfully. “It’s a great, huge, ugly girl, Jack.”
“Up yours,” she replied. She was a lot more forward in her dreams than she was in reality.
Daniel gave her a mocking smile as Jack said, “I know. But she can do stuff.”
“Why are you glowing?” Sam asked Daniel.
“A great, huge, ugly, stupid girl,” Daniel amended.
“He’s a fairy,” Jack explained. “I already told you that.”
“I didn’t believe you.”
Daniel abruptly dropped dead.
Jack jumped up and ran to him, frantically checking for signs of life. “Daniel! Daniel, come on, stay with me!” Then to Sam: “You can’t do that! Every time someone says they don’t believe in fairies, one of them dies!”
Unnerved, Sam responded hastily. “I didn’t say I don’t believe in them. I said I didn’t believe you when you said he was one.”
“Oh, that’s all right, then,” Daniel said, sitting up, alive again. Jack patted him enthusiastically on the back and mussed his hair. Daniel rolled his eyes at Jack affectionately and muttered the Tinkerbell catch phrase: “You silly ass.”
“How could you not believe he was a fairy?” Jack demanded. “Look at all the fairy dust.” He pointed to the ground around Daniel, who smiled proudly as Jack helped him up.
“That’s sand,” Sam replied. “It’s everywhere.”
Daniel glared. “I’ve been on a dig! I try to wipe my feet, but digs do get dusty. Jack, did you hear that? Alliteration!”
The two of them proceeded to repeat “digs do get dusty” over and over in a singsong unison, until Sam put her hands over her ears.
Jack cleared his throat, putting an arm around Daniel’s shoulders. “Anyway… we’re going to fly away on a time travel ship to Neverland, and we wondered if you’d like to come along.”
“Sure!” Sam responded enthusiastically. “I love adventures. But… I thought I was a great, huge, ugly, stupid girl.”
“Maybe not so stupid,” Daniel smiled condescendingly.
“But you can do stuff,” Jack said.
“Like what?” Sam asked. Suddenly, she noticed that the two guys’ merged shadow very much resembled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Yep, she could even see the white lettering on the label. Now, that was weird.
“You can tell us stories,” Jack suggested.
Daniel smiled sweetly. “I can tell better ones.”
Ignoring him, Jack added, “You can clean up whatever mess we make in the timeline. You can figure out how we can manage to get showers and steal food and where we’re going to sleep so we don’t change the future.”
Now, that sounded like an intriguing challenge. In the future, how could they go around renting motel rooms without money? And how could they get money without doing things that might change the timeline? And… “Wait a second. Basically, you want me to manage the household, so to speak. Keep the home fires burning for you.”
“Yeah,” Jack nodded enthusiastically.
“Do you do windows?” Daniel asked sweetly.
Smiling back just as sweetly, Sam said, “I don’t believe in fairies.”
Daniel collapsed in a decidedly non-glowing heap. Jack dove to his side, frantically shaking and slapping him around. “Daniel!” he cried, and he literally was crying, his tears dropping like unrealistically huge and perfect dew drops on Daniel’s chest. “Danny, she didn’t mean it! Did you, Sam?”
Humming to herself, Sam curled her legs under her and began filing her nails in a hard patch of sand that felt a lot like an emery board.
“Stand aside,” said Teal’c as he entered the tent, wearing an Indian headdress.
“Oh, for god’s sake,” Sam muttered.
“Teal’c Lily?” Jack asked hopefully. “Can you save Danny?”
“You will not save him by slapping him around, O’Neill.”
“He needs mouth-to-mouth,” Sam advised. Even she had enough first-aid training to know that.
When Jack looked at her blankly, she rolled her eyes and crawled over to Daniel’s side. As she leaned down to put her mouth to his, Jack pushed her shoulder - a bit harder than necessary, in her opinion. “Whoa, what are you doing?” he demanded.
“He’s not breathing,” she explained. “I’m going to breathe for him, and that will get him started on his own.”
“Well, he’s not gonna want girl-breath in him,” Jack pointed out.
“He’s not going to be alive to want anything if we don’t do something,” Sam pointed out right back.
“What he requires is belief,” Teal’c remarked. “Samantha Wendy informed me of your modern internet. I shall create a website and start a petition, and everyone who believes in Tinkerdaniel and wishes to save him will sign it, and I will then forward it along the appropriate chain of command, so that many voices of belief will form a unified…” Blah blah blah, he continued.
“That’ll take too long,” Jack said to Sam, looking desperate.
“Right,” she said, and leaned down again, pinching Daniel’s nose closed and covering his mouth with hers. She breathed with all the force she could muster, struggling to fill his non-responsive lungs. Doing this on a live person was even harder than it had been on the special dummies her class had trained on - the ones that were supposed to simulate just how tough it was to put air into someone who wasn’t inhaling.
She paused, and breathed again. Still nothing. She felt her face must be very red when she looked up to meet Jack’s panicked and grief-stricken eyes. She moved her hands toward Daniel’s chest. “I’m sorry. I may not be strong enough. I’m going to have to pump his chest-”
“Maybe I’m strong enough?” Jack suggested hopefully.
“Uh…” she stared at him, thinking. “Might as well try. You need to-”
Before she could give him any instructions, he leaned down and put his mouth on Daniel’s. Sam thought it looked more like kissing than CPR, and so she said, “You have to… blow,” which, as she said it, she realized didn’t exactly sound any better. But she supposed there had to be a kiss of some sort, because it was a fairy tale.
Whatever Jack did or didn’t do, Daniel suddenly grunted and shoved him halfway across the tent. “Get off me!”
Sam looked at Daniel. “Still think I’m a great, huge, ugly-”
“You killed me!” he shouted, fanning his beautiful wings - wings? - as he stood up, all aglow once again.
“You wanted to make me into your mother!”
“Well, duh!” Daniel snapped. “What else would we want you for?”
“I want to go on adventures just like you!” Sam shouted. “We can all do our share of the drudge work, and still have lots of time for excitement and exploring!”
“Yeah,” Jack said, getting to his feet, “but you said the timeline-”
“Oh, screw the timeline, pal-”
~~~~~~~~~~
“Sam.”
“-girls just wanna have fun!”
“Sam!”
Someone was shaking her shoulder and calling out to her. Sam forced her eyes open - ouch, was it morning already? - and saw Jack, Daniel and Teal’c crowding around her, looking concerned. “I want to go with you to the future,” she said. “But I’m not going to be your mother, and I’m not going to do all the un-fun stuff while you guys have all the fun.”
Daniel and Jack glanced at each other. It was like somehow yesterday they’d suddenly developed some telepathic guy-language, which made Sam want to barf. No, maybe it was the beer making her want to barf.
Jack patted her shoulder and grinned affectionately. “You got it, tiger.”
Tiger Lily? Whom all the guys wanted but couldn’t have, because she was truly one of them? Beats the hell out of being Wendy. “Oh, and I’m not anybody’s girlfriend, either. Well, not any of yours, anyway.”
“Yeah, well,” Daniel said wryly, “that’s probably a sound choice.”
Continue on to Part 3.