(no subject)
beta and idea from Mona.
Contains mild spoilers for all of S10 of SG1
It's about Daniel, seriously, it's me.
The Continuation of Life (not quite san souci)
Daniel’s life is, well, best not mulled over too hard. Or that’s generally his policy. Brooding over ‘what-if’s, second-guessing himself, regret, yes, that’s all well and good. He indulges there on a nearly daily basis. But serious deep thought on what the intrinsic meaning of his life is? That way lies Ascension, and he needs to stay corporeal for now. Besides, he hates those neighbors.
“The point of life is to just survive it. Make more people, keep them alive long enough to make more people.” Ronon Dex is an alien. That doesn’t mean that much to Daniel. He actually has more in common with aliens than he does with people from, say, Ohio.
Rodney slaps his hand on the top of the table and food trays and cutlery rattle and bounce. “Oh, that’s nice, Cro-Magnon Man. Do you have any more insights on reproduction? Like how to drag your mate by her hair into your well-appointed and tastefully decorated cave? I hear line drawings of leaping bulls are in this year…”
Daniel watches as Ronon bares his teeth at Rodney in exaggerated pantomimed fearsomeness, Teyla smiles and tips her head down so her hair falls in her face to hide her smile, and Colonel Sheppard rolls his eyes.
“As far as it goes, the big guy ain’t wrong.” Cam rolls his head on his shoulders with several loud cracks. He catches Daniel’s eye and smiles. “He just left out basketball and homemade macaroni and cheese.”
“Like that Kraft Dinner?” Ronon watches Cam with less wariness than he does most people. Daniel doesn’t understand their rapport, but there is definitely one there.
Rodney makes a loud scoffing noise.
Daniel cycles out of the conversation and barely registers the loud conversation about various sorts of cheese and pasta combinations being tossed around the table. He does sort of pick up the fact that the Athosians apparently make something Rodney remarks is “better than old sharp cheddar” but Daniel is occupied by Wraith dialect, the sibilant whine flickering at him, flashing in his mind as particles accumulating prefixes and vowels shifting to express time…
“Gonna eat that?”
Cam bumps his shoulder and Daniel blinks at him. “What?”
“Too late, already ate it.” Daniel looks down on his tray where the cupcake was. He narrows his eyes and hardens his mouth, but he doesn’t really mean it and Cam knows that. The slap on his shoulder stings. Cam’s face is sunburned from helping the Athosians bring in their grain. His eyes are unclouded, direct. He’s not really happy, but he’s laughing.
*
Daniel spends most of his time off-world. That was always how he’d wanted his work at the SGC to go, but with Jack constantly convinced that Daniel was always one step away from walking into a caldera or being ass-raped by dinosaurs his leash was short. Landry mainly did what Jack wanted. Mainly. How he deviated never mattered to Daniel in more than an academic way.
But on Atlantis, Daniel does pretty much as he pleases. He can admit that, for the most part, this was always the case, but now pretty much means exactly. Daniel does exactly as he wants. Sometimes, like today, he stays in Atlantis and explores with the Alef Team and the Bet Team-Daniel’s names for Sheppard’s team and Major Lorne’s team that have sort of accidentally stuck.
“Daaaaaaaaaaniel,” Vala also does exactly as she wants. She’s not his problem now. Weir actually appears to have an ability to “handle” her. Surprising, but in a lifetime of shocks, not all that important.
“No, you can’t come. Too many things not nailed down that could end up shoved down your pants.” He snaps the shoulder flap of his tac vest and looks down his nose at her. The stern daddy look he’s developed with the wrinkles and weight of two galaxies on his back.
She swings at the waist a bit. “You could check in my pants before we leave…” The sass is there, but the invitation isn’t real. Not all that real. She’s sleeping with someone regularly. He’s not sure who, doesn’t care all that much since it keeps her out of his hair for the most part. There’s the residual pang there, the something lost before it’s even really glimpsed, like crumpling papyrus or corrupted Asgard files, but there’s nothing he can do about that.
His thoughts still write themselves over his face. No matter how old he gets, he’ll never be fluent in guarding himself from people like Vala-insightful, aware people. Her smile twists into the ironic one. “Well. I’ll just go see what Sam’s up to then.” She skips away before he can say anything. She steals his words a lot. He’s marginally used to it.
The doors whoosh closed behind Vala’s fluttering pigtail and he stares after her wondering what long-ago lost words would have fixed her in the grammar of his life in a way he could call structured rather than how it is now-poetic. Daniel indulges in some self-indulgent personal irony and loses track of time flipping through the notes he’d written in Mandarin…
“You need a leash.” Cam lifts his eyebrows. Over his shoulder, Daniel sees Colonel Sheppard smirking. Today is an Exploring Atlantis With Alef And Bet Day.
“Those little halters people use on toddlers. How about that?” Sheppard turns his head to the left as Cam watches Daniel with measuring eyes.
Cam doesn’t hide himself much better than Daniel does. Cam’s worried about something. He’s always worried about something. It’s why Jack trusted him in the first place, why Jack trusted him to assess Atlantis in the wake of the Ori and Asgard extinctions.
“What do you think, Rodney, we could rig you up with a baby halter and…” Sheppard starts.
“Whatever joke you’re about to make please spare us all. It’s already not funny.” Rodney sighs out his words. Daniel lifts his eyebrows at Cam. Cam hadn’t known Rodney before, but he still finds him annoying. Daniel was shocked by Dr. McKay in a way he imagines is similar to running into an old school friend who has suddenly become a gou’ld would be-but in reverse.
Cam’s hand comes down on Daniel’s shoulder, and he subtly yanks him out of his quarters. “The pool on Sheppard being the one to futz up the mission is up to fifteen dinars.”
Earth money means little in Atlantis. Bets based on Earth money were so abstract that bets rose and rose to hyperbolic levels. So, instead, Atlantis has established their own currency-the dinar or dinarii-that works in a different way from bank-drawn drafts. Dinarii can be traded for room on the Daedalus, for personal items, traded for goods and services in Atlantis itself (such as better shifts, trading non-essential missions, extending leave with the Athosians, and so on), and used generally as an intermediary system between bartering and a true monetary system.
“Jackson hasn’t fallen down any wells yet,” Colonel Sheppard replies with his usual good natured, falsely pained voice.
“I could toss McKay into any holes we come across. Do I get the pot then?” Ronon rumbles over Daniel’s shoulder. Daniel laughs and pushes his glasses up.
*
Sam meets them on the fly. She’s clicking a short nail against the touch screen of an Ancient tablet computer that Daniel only tangentially cares about in that he often has to translate the Ancient flowing across their screens for the primary users.
“There’s a high likelihood that even if this lab is in fact a map room that because of the expansion of…”
“Yes, yes, we won’t recognize what the maps are of. Do you really think…” Rodney pushes past Sheppard and Lorne and snaps his fingers at Sam’s computer.
Daniel can feel Ronon close behind him. He moves with the sort of efficiency and silence Daniel used to find uncanny and off-putting but now associates with all the people he loves most-soldiers, warriors, people who die so other people can live.
“She reminds me of the women I knew on my home planet.” Ronon grates in the half-whisper that is his normal speaking voice. Daniel looks over his shoulder to see Ronon looking right back.
“You had a large gradation of skin and hair color like most of Pegasus seems to on Sateda?” He’s feeling Ronon out, trying to gauge what is acceptable to ask, what isn’t.
Ronon lifts an eyebrow and the corresponding side of his mouth. “Yeah. There were people like me and people like Cadman.”
“I’m not sure I know him,” Daniel tries to remember who Cadman is.
“Her.” Ronon zings back and Daniel’s about to ask more, but that’s when the explosions start.
*
There’s a clarity that comes in a crisis. People who do not experience this clarity either die swiftly or fall apart and are useless. Daniel feels a tremor in the soles of his boots and immediately ducks into a squat that is mirrored by everyone in their party besides Rodney. He follows a complete second later.
Major Lorne flattens his palm and pushes down with his hand three times, points to both his eyes with a V of his first two right fingers and points to the end of the corridor where shockwaves are rolling through the walls and floor in visible ripples. Daniel finds the back of Sam’s head and crawls to crouch behind her.
“Daniel!” She whispers loudly. “Where’s…” she flicks her eyes over his shoulder and must make eye contact with Cam because she immediately turns back to her computer.
Fingers snap behind his back, but Daniel keeps a steady focus on the doors set fifteen feet down the hall where the ripples emanate from. He slides to the side a little to let Sheppard, Teyla, and Ronon around him. They scurry down the hall towards danger while Daniel watches Rodney and Sam tap each other’s computer screens and communicate in grunts and clicks.
“Weird to watch someone else go in first,” Cam sighs behind him.
“We’re the elders now,” Daniel answers, and that’s how he feels. Like the antecedent, the ancestor.
Sheppard stretches to wave his hand over the control crystal to open the door, but before he manages, the doors disintegrate, crumpling in a stream of pixilated pastel rainbow colors. Ronon is the first one through the opening where the doors were, Sheppard behind him, with Teyla next, and Cam, Rodney, Sam, Lorne, and Daniel more like a multiheaded hydra, all creeping down the hall in a fluid motion and popping into the still rippling lab one after another with bowed heads and guns drawn.
Along the right wall, water-filtration tanks bubble madly -- five, Daniel counts -- floor to ceiling forming the actual outside wall of the room. Opposite the missing doors, a bright corona pulses from the wall. Yellow at its heart, orange, red, white, yellow, orange, red, white. Four bodies lay prone on their faces under the light. Teyla crouches over them checking vital signs as Sheppard calls for a med team. Sam and McKay spiral through the room pressing buttons and running machines over various surfaces. Cam hits his knees across from Teyla and starts giving mouth to mouth followed by chest compressions. Daniel follows suit and he loses himself in that repetitive action as all of the images from the room dance and fall into place inside his mind.
Ronon is the only one static. The only one who doesn’t look away from the light.
*
All four scientists are dead. This happens often enough that the shock is missing from the mourning cycle in Atlantis. Grief sets in immediately. No denial, just tears and renewed self-preservative terror. How this has happened, Daniel isn’t sure, but he’s become some sort of clergy-person designate. This happened many years ago. The part Daniel is surprised by is that people in Atlantis expect him to act in this capacity.
He sits in his quarters, translating a poem by Omar Khayyam off the top of his head and listening to Cam’s iPod, when the owner of said iPod appears at his elbow.
“Something weird going on with the natives.” Cam flops down on the edge of Daniel’s bed as Daniel removes the headphones.
“Weird?” How any one thing could be weirder than another here was one of those mysteries of the universe-the truth is, though, there is a baseline weirdness that sticks pretty close to a static pattern and spikes of utter insanity were generally met with continued surprise.
Cam rolls his eyes and shakes his head, braces his forearms against his spread thighs and looks up at him. “Yeah, I don’t know, Big D. These people are about as easy to read as your notes, but I think something new and horrible must be going on.”
Daniel doubts that anything would happen with them around that Elizabeth would keep from them. She respects their experience. She’s diplomatic and feels equally guilty and troubled about SG-1’s place in Atlantis-like she is caught on a fulcrum worrying about employing their knowledge and that she was about to be usurped. But Daniel knows her well enough to know she wouldn’t keep anything important from them.
“Yeah, yeah. You and Liz are tight.” Cam’s greatest skill is his ability to read the minds of his allies and enemies alike. “Still, wouldn’t hurt to engage in some Mission Impossible.”
“You have to hang from the ceiling, then. I’m getting arthritis.” Daniel taps his pen against his notebook and smiles even though he’s trying to keep the joke deadpan.
Cam claps his hands together and points a finger at Daniel’s face. “Teal’c! No way you watched that on your own!”
He’s, naturally, completely correct about that. Daniel smiles, and Cam reaches out with his pointing finger and taps the end of Daniel’s nose. “Don’t get too uppity, Sparky, I got your number,” Cam’s seductive voice is strangely…well, seductive. That had been a surprise, that the broken-consonants and up-pitched As would darken straight through to smoky-whisky promise and crooked inflection.
The door flies open behind Daniel and Sam starts nattering. “You’re not going to believe THIS!”
Cam’s eyes don’t drop from Daniel’s. The string that ties them together thrums once, twice, and Daniel’s blood pressure hits the level he needs medication for now. They don’t awkwardly leap across the room or pretend they’re doing anything other than sitting very close together in Daniel’s quarters staring at each other. This is the new thing they do, the new understanding that SG-1 has. Saving the world comes first, but now they take a little bit back for themselves. Career military doesn’t mean dead. Not dead yet--Daniel can hear Jack’s sharp Ts at the end, elongation to underscore. No, they weren’t dead yet.
“Do you know what that lab was?” Sam sounds excited. Not much gets her much more than mildly interested anymore. Dan and Cam look towards her in one, conjoined motion. Daniel rolls his hand in a circle to urge her on.
“Are we suppose to guess?” Cam asks. “Brewery!”
Sam rolls her eyes. “You two are hopelessly cynical.” She smiles like a sun going nova all the same, affection behind her chiding, always affection there. “It’s an incubation room!”
“What?” Cam’s on his feet immediately, hands going into his pockets and eyes narrowing.
Daniel removes his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Please tell me that light wasn’t the incubators activating.” He already knows it was.
“Yup, you betcha.” She laughs, a little trill of elation. “Do you know what this technology could mean to Earth?”
*
Daniel wears his suit to the memorial service for the scientists who died in the incubation explosion. He has his theories on how their deaths are related to the fetuses growing in the see-through incubation machine. He chooses to not to voice those theories, though, because everyone else seems, well, thrilled by it all. Four dead bodies, four new lives…Daniel doesn’t believe much in coincidence.
Daniel gave up the idea of having any sort of family other than SG-1. He’s an orphan. He’ll never have children. He won’t remarry. He views the baby madness flooding Atlantis from an anthropological remove.
Cam, though, is suspiciously curious about the children and Sam is openly beside herself with pleasure. Neither of those reactions are all that surprising.
“Do you suppose it’s hormones?” Vala says slinking up to him in the gateroom the afternoon of the memorial service. She has her arms crossed over her chest and the hard line between her eyebrows is pressed deep. Vala has even less reason to get excited about babies than Daniel.
“Could be. I wonder if there’ll be a riot when the SGC demands they get sent back to Earth.” Daniel pats the front of his vest to make sure his spare set of glasses are in his pocket.
“Oh, Daniel.” She pats his cheek. “There’s no risk of that. I would be shocked if Liz has even reported the existence of the children.”
She flounces around him and down the stairs to the gate. He watches knowing without hesitation that she’s right. Atlantis is becoming a powerful duchy within a fragmenting feudal system.
*
Chaos ensues.
First there’s the anti-Wraith deathray that doesn’t really work…at all.
Then Sam finds some kind of astronomical abnormality on the far side of the galaxy that she thinks might actually be a fold in space/time. Much debate ensues.
Meanwhile, Cam is getting restless. “As cool as this place is, it ain’t your daddy’s intergalactic outpost. No tv, for one.”
Daniel is immediately worried. Cam usually makes his own fun when none is on offer. Daniel stands and turns away from Cam to indicate he is busy, busy, busy. “Uhhhhhhhh,” Daniel looks down at the artifact from M21-778, obsidian eyes stare back at him from a distinctly Asian face-which is strange since no markedly Asiatic people…
“You’re not busy, are ya, Daniel?” Cam’s fingers creep around the side of his neck. They’re in one of the rooms Daniel thinks were a kind of library, the circular structure like most Ancient knowledge repositories. Daniel looks towards the door as Cam presses fully against his back, hand coming around to hold the front of Daniel’s neck, thumb pressing against the bone of his jaw and dropping to rest against the thump of his carotid artery. Cam tilts Daniel’s head and compresses the artery slightly, kicks Daniel’s feet apart and yanks open the Velcro that’s replaced the snaps on the SC uniform pants. “You always have time for me, huh?” Cam kisses him behind the ear, tongue lifting the end of his glasses and tilting them so they clatter off Daniel’s face and hit the work top between Daniel’s braced hands.
The palm of Cam’s left hand presses Daniel’s erection against his belly. “Daniel?” Cam’s sex voice drips into Daniel’s skin all Karo syrup and humidity, slow and heavy, full of the unknown.
Cam’s thumb presses harder, cutting off the blood to Daniel’s brain. Daniel lets him, one quick trip through the Canaanite alphabet, enough to see spots on the edge of his vision, and he yanks the hand away and sucks Cam’s thumb into his mouth. Cam’s hips press Daniel forward, down, his weight shoving Daniel onto his belly against paper and pens and glasses. Cam’s fingers curl around Daniel’s cock and pull and he groans right into Daniel’s ear.
“Baby,” Cam whispers. Daniel sucks harder around the smile. Daniel’s never been called pet names in English by a sex partner before, never ones full of endearment, soft vowels and undertones of crinkled paper lace and growing old together. Daniel’s already growing old,; he supposes who he’ll do it with is already around. “Stop thinking!” Cam commands into Daniel’s ear and twists his wrist. His tongue touches the lobe of Daniel’s ear. “Ces serments, ces parfums, ces baisers infinis, renaîtront-ils d’un gouffre interdit à nos sondes…” Cam begins and Daniel falls with the words, rolls his hips up to meet the language of his cradle, of his dreams, rides Cam’s beautifully Southern accented French and comes all over his notes.
A piece of paper that has been ripped out of his notebook sticks to his face as he turns his head to just catch Cam’s eyes squeezing shut as he finishes himself up, his feet braced shoulder-width apart and neck crumpling to the side. Cam bites his lip when he comes, even when they’re completely alone.
Daniel watches Cameron Mitchell and once again he forgets to ask him where he learned to speak French and why he has Baudelaire memorized when Cam chokes out his name, Dan-yal, like he’s being crushed under something. The sound sets the hair on Daniel’s neck at attention and kicks adrenaline into his bloodstream.
Nothing can ever be simple for Daniel.
*
Another case in point: Daniel has his glasses on top of his head as he comes into the mess because he’s having a hard time reading small print now with them on. He’s scanning a printout that Radek had given him of some of the Wraith-language data they’d accumulated over the years. He hears Sam’s laughter and tilts his head so his glasses fall from the top of his head into place. Sam is sitting with her back towards Daniel, but across from her is Major Lorne who is also laughing with his head thrown back, slapping the top of the table.
Two tables over, Rodney is sitting with his neck extended at attention looking on like an overgrown prairie dog. He looks more miffed than usual. At his elbow, John is gesturing towards Rodney with his fork and rolling his eyes. His shoulders are tense. He reminds Daniel a lot of Jack in moments like that-totally opaque to most people but transparent to anyone who looks at him in the right light. Teyla has her back towards Daniel, so he can’t see her reactions to John and Rodney.
Daniel really doesn’t want to know what kind of social dynamic is going on here. It seems too close to a morality play. He turns on his heel and almost walks right into Cam and Vala who both smile at him with their own, personal versions of secret smiles.
“Gettin’ heavy in there,” Cam says.
“You Taur’i are utterly ridiculous,” Vala says.
“I’m not really hungry anyway,” Daniel says.
Luckily, Katie Brown is in the hallway outside and Vala charms them into dinner with the botany staff who always have apricot wine and fresh fruit.
*
The babies in the vat grow. Daniel doesn’t pay much attention to that because he has so much to translate, day and night, constant, constant, more information to synthesize than he can imagine being teased out in his lifetime. Even if he gets a do-over and a reset.
All of the Atlantis personnel most proficient at language are under Daniel’s aegis. They are divided into teams. One to teach others. One to go over the Wraith data. Two transcribing the virtual data to hardcopies-Daniel has a very strong preference for the tactile and a belief that all technology is inherently unreliable. Two translating the thousands of years of information contained in the Atlantis databases.
One afternoon, late -- and Daniel knows that because the light coming through the gold and crimson glass of the repository he’s working in slants low and leaves streaks across the floor and worktops that remind him of Cam for no real reason besides that they seem over-saturated and alive -- Ronon finds him. They’re friendly, not really friends, but Daniel appreciates Ronon’s dry humor and his obvious affection for his team and Atlantis in general.
“You’re The Archivist?” Ronon lifts an eyebrow and sits one hip on the edge of a desk, leaning down to brace his forearm across his thigh. Daniel hears the capitalization in the question and wonders if he is The Archivist. He leans back in his seat and feels his spine pop and crack.
“Right now, I suppose I am.” That’s the best he can do on that. Daniel’s not sure what his life’s work really is. There have been times when he was absolutely sure-finding the truth, saving the world, saving the galaxy, just surviving. Now he’s not sure at all.
Ronon pulls two crystals out of a pocket in his vest and holds them out to Daniel. Daniel takes them by instinct and out of ingrained politeness. He lifts both eyebrows and feels his mouth open slightly, waiting.
“Those are from Sateda. What I’ve collected, from others.” He doesn’t explain and Daniel doesn’t press. “You should put that with the other stuff.”
Just as unexpectedly as he’d come, Ronon leaves again. Daniel stares down at the pinkish crystals and wonders if there’ll be a compatibility problem with Atlantis’ computers. The last knowledge from a dead planet…Daniel sticks his pen in his pocket, grabs his notebook and hustles out of the lab hitting his headcom.
“Sam? Hey, could you meet me…”
*
It turns out that Sateda had a tradition of complex lyrical poetry not unlike the Celts that passed on knowledge from generation to generation. Daniel has no trouble memorizing huge chunks. The words roll through his mind and stick themselves into unexpected interstices.
When the Daedalus arrives to pick up SG-1, none of them intend to go just yet. That was unspoken, as most things are with them. Daniel’s actually in the baby vat lab with Ronon when the ship arrives, completely unaware of the scampering and scurrying going on across the city.
“People always find a way to survive,” Daniel says watching pinkish bubbles rise around a curling fetal fist.
“There are different kinds of survival. Some aren’t better than being dead,” Ronon replies as he presses two fingers against the Ancient glass right over the cheek of one of the fetuses. Daniel watches him and wonders how much of Ronon’s survival has been the kind where death might be the better option.
Daniel realizes this is his Ever After and that maybe the fairytales finish where they do for a reason.
**
The second part of the story I will write when I am blocked next week doing the edit on my book.
I sort of telegraphed where it's going.
Contains mild spoilers for all of S10 of SG1
It's about Daniel, seriously, it's me.
The Continuation of Life (not quite san souci)
Daniel’s life is, well, best not mulled over too hard. Or that’s generally his policy. Brooding over ‘what-if’s, second-guessing himself, regret, yes, that’s all well and good. He indulges there on a nearly daily basis. But serious deep thought on what the intrinsic meaning of his life is? That way lies Ascension, and he needs to stay corporeal for now. Besides, he hates those neighbors.
“The point of life is to just survive it. Make more people, keep them alive long enough to make more people.” Ronon Dex is an alien. That doesn’t mean that much to Daniel. He actually has more in common with aliens than he does with people from, say, Ohio.
Rodney slaps his hand on the top of the table and food trays and cutlery rattle and bounce. “Oh, that’s nice, Cro-Magnon Man. Do you have any more insights on reproduction? Like how to drag your mate by her hair into your well-appointed and tastefully decorated cave? I hear line drawings of leaping bulls are in this year…”
Daniel watches as Ronon bares his teeth at Rodney in exaggerated pantomimed fearsomeness, Teyla smiles and tips her head down so her hair falls in her face to hide her smile, and Colonel Sheppard rolls his eyes.
“As far as it goes, the big guy ain’t wrong.” Cam rolls his head on his shoulders with several loud cracks. He catches Daniel’s eye and smiles. “He just left out basketball and homemade macaroni and cheese.”
“Like that Kraft Dinner?” Ronon watches Cam with less wariness than he does most people. Daniel doesn’t understand their rapport, but there is definitely one there.
Rodney makes a loud scoffing noise.
Daniel cycles out of the conversation and barely registers the loud conversation about various sorts of cheese and pasta combinations being tossed around the table. He does sort of pick up the fact that the Athosians apparently make something Rodney remarks is “better than old sharp cheddar” but Daniel is occupied by Wraith dialect, the sibilant whine flickering at him, flashing in his mind as particles accumulating prefixes and vowels shifting to express time…
“Gonna eat that?”
Cam bumps his shoulder and Daniel blinks at him. “What?”
“Too late, already ate it.” Daniel looks down on his tray where the cupcake was. He narrows his eyes and hardens his mouth, but he doesn’t really mean it and Cam knows that. The slap on his shoulder stings. Cam’s face is sunburned from helping the Athosians bring in their grain. His eyes are unclouded, direct. He’s not really happy, but he’s laughing.
*
Daniel spends most of his time off-world. That was always how he’d wanted his work at the SGC to go, but with Jack constantly convinced that Daniel was always one step away from walking into a caldera or being ass-raped by dinosaurs his leash was short. Landry mainly did what Jack wanted. Mainly. How he deviated never mattered to Daniel in more than an academic way.
But on Atlantis, Daniel does pretty much as he pleases. He can admit that, for the most part, this was always the case, but now pretty much means exactly. Daniel does exactly as he wants. Sometimes, like today, he stays in Atlantis and explores with the Alef Team and the Bet Team-Daniel’s names for Sheppard’s team and Major Lorne’s team that have sort of accidentally stuck.
“Daaaaaaaaaaniel,” Vala also does exactly as she wants. She’s not his problem now. Weir actually appears to have an ability to “handle” her. Surprising, but in a lifetime of shocks, not all that important.
“No, you can’t come. Too many things not nailed down that could end up shoved down your pants.” He snaps the shoulder flap of his tac vest and looks down his nose at her. The stern daddy look he’s developed with the wrinkles and weight of two galaxies on his back.
She swings at the waist a bit. “You could check in my pants before we leave…” The sass is there, but the invitation isn’t real. Not all that real. She’s sleeping with someone regularly. He’s not sure who, doesn’t care all that much since it keeps her out of his hair for the most part. There’s the residual pang there, the something lost before it’s even really glimpsed, like crumpling papyrus or corrupted Asgard files, but there’s nothing he can do about that.
His thoughts still write themselves over his face. No matter how old he gets, he’ll never be fluent in guarding himself from people like Vala-insightful, aware people. Her smile twists into the ironic one. “Well. I’ll just go see what Sam’s up to then.” She skips away before he can say anything. She steals his words a lot. He’s marginally used to it.
The doors whoosh closed behind Vala’s fluttering pigtail and he stares after her wondering what long-ago lost words would have fixed her in the grammar of his life in a way he could call structured rather than how it is now-poetic. Daniel indulges in some self-indulgent personal irony and loses track of time flipping through the notes he’d written in Mandarin…
“You need a leash.” Cam lifts his eyebrows. Over his shoulder, Daniel sees Colonel Sheppard smirking. Today is an Exploring Atlantis With Alef And Bet Day.
“Those little halters people use on toddlers. How about that?” Sheppard turns his head to the left as Cam watches Daniel with measuring eyes.
Cam doesn’t hide himself much better than Daniel does. Cam’s worried about something. He’s always worried about something. It’s why Jack trusted him in the first place, why Jack trusted him to assess Atlantis in the wake of the Ori and Asgard extinctions.
“What do you think, Rodney, we could rig you up with a baby halter and…” Sheppard starts.
“Whatever joke you’re about to make please spare us all. It’s already not funny.” Rodney sighs out his words. Daniel lifts his eyebrows at Cam. Cam hadn’t known Rodney before, but he still finds him annoying. Daniel was shocked by Dr. McKay in a way he imagines is similar to running into an old school friend who has suddenly become a gou’ld would be-but in reverse.
Cam’s hand comes down on Daniel’s shoulder, and he subtly yanks him out of his quarters. “The pool on Sheppard being the one to futz up the mission is up to fifteen dinars.”
Earth money means little in Atlantis. Bets based on Earth money were so abstract that bets rose and rose to hyperbolic levels. So, instead, Atlantis has established their own currency-the dinar or dinarii-that works in a different way from bank-drawn drafts. Dinarii can be traded for room on the Daedalus, for personal items, traded for goods and services in Atlantis itself (such as better shifts, trading non-essential missions, extending leave with the Athosians, and so on), and used generally as an intermediary system between bartering and a true monetary system.
“Jackson hasn’t fallen down any wells yet,” Colonel Sheppard replies with his usual good natured, falsely pained voice.
“I could toss McKay into any holes we come across. Do I get the pot then?” Ronon rumbles over Daniel’s shoulder. Daniel laughs and pushes his glasses up.
*
Sam meets them on the fly. She’s clicking a short nail against the touch screen of an Ancient tablet computer that Daniel only tangentially cares about in that he often has to translate the Ancient flowing across their screens for the primary users.
“There’s a high likelihood that even if this lab is in fact a map room that because of the expansion of…”
“Yes, yes, we won’t recognize what the maps are of. Do you really think…” Rodney pushes past Sheppard and Lorne and snaps his fingers at Sam’s computer.
Daniel can feel Ronon close behind him. He moves with the sort of efficiency and silence Daniel used to find uncanny and off-putting but now associates with all the people he loves most-soldiers, warriors, people who die so other people can live.
“She reminds me of the women I knew on my home planet.” Ronon grates in the half-whisper that is his normal speaking voice. Daniel looks over his shoulder to see Ronon looking right back.
“You had a large gradation of skin and hair color like most of Pegasus seems to on Sateda?” He’s feeling Ronon out, trying to gauge what is acceptable to ask, what isn’t.
Ronon lifts an eyebrow and the corresponding side of his mouth. “Yeah. There were people like me and people like Cadman.”
“I’m not sure I know him,” Daniel tries to remember who Cadman is.
“Her.” Ronon zings back and Daniel’s about to ask more, but that’s when the explosions start.
*
There’s a clarity that comes in a crisis. People who do not experience this clarity either die swiftly or fall apart and are useless. Daniel feels a tremor in the soles of his boots and immediately ducks into a squat that is mirrored by everyone in their party besides Rodney. He follows a complete second later.
Major Lorne flattens his palm and pushes down with his hand three times, points to both his eyes with a V of his first two right fingers and points to the end of the corridor where shockwaves are rolling through the walls and floor in visible ripples. Daniel finds the back of Sam’s head and crawls to crouch behind her.
“Daniel!” She whispers loudly. “Where’s…” she flicks her eyes over his shoulder and must make eye contact with Cam because she immediately turns back to her computer.
Fingers snap behind his back, but Daniel keeps a steady focus on the doors set fifteen feet down the hall where the ripples emanate from. He slides to the side a little to let Sheppard, Teyla, and Ronon around him. They scurry down the hall towards danger while Daniel watches Rodney and Sam tap each other’s computer screens and communicate in grunts and clicks.
“Weird to watch someone else go in first,” Cam sighs behind him.
“We’re the elders now,” Daniel answers, and that’s how he feels. Like the antecedent, the ancestor.
Sheppard stretches to wave his hand over the control crystal to open the door, but before he manages, the doors disintegrate, crumpling in a stream of pixilated pastel rainbow colors. Ronon is the first one through the opening where the doors were, Sheppard behind him, with Teyla next, and Cam, Rodney, Sam, Lorne, and Daniel more like a multiheaded hydra, all creeping down the hall in a fluid motion and popping into the still rippling lab one after another with bowed heads and guns drawn.
Along the right wall, water-filtration tanks bubble madly -- five, Daniel counts -- floor to ceiling forming the actual outside wall of the room. Opposite the missing doors, a bright corona pulses from the wall. Yellow at its heart, orange, red, white, yellow, orange, red, white. Four bodies lay prone on their faces under the light. Teyla crouches over them checking vital signs as Sheppard calls for a med team. Sam and McKay spiral through the room pressing buttons and running machines over various surfaces. Cam hits his knees across from Teyla and starts giving mouth to mouth followed by chest compressions. Daniel follows suit and he loses himself in that repetitive action as all of the images from the room dance and fall into place inside his mind.
Ronon is the only one static. The only one who doesn’t look away from the light.
*
All four scientists are dead. This happens often enough that the shock is missing from the mourning cycle in Atlantis. Grief sets in immediately. No denial, just tears and renewed self-preservative terror. How this has happened, Daniel isn’t sure, but he’s become some sort of clergy-person designate. This happened many years ago. The part Daniel is surprised by is that people in Atlantis expect him to act in this capacity.
He sits in his quarters, translating a poem by Omar Khayyam off the top of his head and listening to Cam’s iPod, when the owner of said iPod appears at his elbow.
“Something weird going on with the natives.” Cam flops down on the edge of Daniel’s bed as Daniel removes the headphones.
“Weird?” How any one thing could be weirder than another here was one of those mysteries of the universe-the truth is, though, there is a baseline weirdness that sticks pretty close to a static pattern and spikes of utter insanity were generally met with continued surprise.
Cam rolls his eyes and shakes his head, braces his forearms against his spread thighs and looks up at him. “Yeah, I don’t know, Big D. These people are about as easy to read as your notes, but I think something new and horrible must be going on.”
Daniel doubts that anything would happen with them around that Elizabeth would keep from them. She respects their experience. She’s diplomatic and feels equally guilty and troubled about SG-1’s place in Atlantis-like she is caught on a fulcrum worrying about employing their knowledge and that she was about to be usurped. But Daniel knows her well enough to know she wouldn’t keep anything important from them.
“Yeah, yeah. You and Liz are tight.” Cam’s greatest skill is his ability to read the minds of his allies and enemies alike. “Still, wouldn’t hurt to engage in some Mission Impossible.”
“You have to hang from the ceiling, then. I’m getting arthritis.” Daniel taps his pen against his notebook and smiles even though he’s trying to keep the joke deadpan.
Cam claps his hands together and points a finger at Daniel’s face. “Teal’c! No way you watched that on your own!”
He’s, naturally, completely correct about that. Daniel smiles, and Cam reaches out with his pointing finger and taps the end of Daniel’s nose. “Don’t get too uppity, Sparky, I got your number,” Cam’s seductive voice is strangely…well, seductive. That had been a surprise, that the broken-consonants and up-pitched As would darken straight through to smoky-whisky promise and crooked inflection.
The door flies open behind Daniel and Sam starts nattering. “You’re not going to believe THIS!”
Cam’s eyes don’t drop from Daniel’s. The string that ties them together thrums once, twice, and Daniel’s blood pressure hits the level he needs medication for now. They don’t awkwardly leap across the room or pretend they’re doing anything other than sitting very close together in Daniel’s quarters staring at each other. This is the new thing they do, the new understanding that SG-1 has. Saving the world comes first, but now they take a little bit back for themselves. Career military doesn’t mean dead. Not dead yet--Daniel can hear Jack’s sharp Ts at the end, elongation to underscore. No, they weren’t dead yet.
“Do you know what that lab was?” Sam sounds excited. Not much gets her much more than mildly interested anymore. Dan and Cam look towards her in one, conjoined motion. Daniel rolls his hand in a circle to urge her on.
“Are we suppose to guess?” Cam asks. “Brewery!”
Sam rolls her eyes. “You two are hopelessly cynical.” She smiles like a sun going nova all the same, affection behind her chiding, always affection there. “It’s an incubation room!”
“What?” Cam’s on his feet immediately, hands going into his pockets and eyes narrowing.
Daniel removes his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Please tell me that light wasn’t the incubators activating.” He already knows it was.
“Yup, you betcha.” She laughs, a little trill of elation. “Do you know what this technology could mean to Earth?”
*
Daniel wears his suit to the memorial service for the scientists who died in the incubation explosion. He has his theories on how their deaths are related to the fetuses growing in the see-through incubation machine. He chooses to not to voice those theories, though, because everyone else seems, well, thrilled by it all. Four dead bodies, four new lives…Daniel doesn’t believe much in coincidence.
Daniel gave up the idea of having any sort of family other than SG-1. He’s an orphan. He’ll never have children. He won’t remarry. He views the baby madness flooding Atlantis from an anthropological remove.
Cam, though, is suspiciously curious about the children and Sam is openly beside herself with pleasure. Neither of those reactions are all that surprising.
“Do you suppose it’s hormones?” Vala says slinking up to him in the gateroom the afternoon of the memorial service. She has her arms crossed over her chest and the hard line between her eyebrows is pressed deep. Vala has even less reason to get excited about babies than Daniel.
“Could be. I wonder if there’ll be a riot when the SGC demands they get sent back to Earth.” Daniel pats the front of his vest to make sure his spare set of glasses are in his pocket.
“Oh, Daniel.” She pats his cheek. “There’s no risk of that. I would be shocked if Liz has even reported the existence of the children.”
She flounces around him and down the stairs to the gate. He watches knowing without hesitation that she’s right. Atlantis is becoming a powerful duchy within a fragmenting feudal system.
*
Chaos ensues.
First there’s the anti-Wraith deathray that doesn’t really work…at all.
Then Sam finds some kind of astronomical abnormality on the far side of the galaxy that she thinks might actually be a fold in space/time. Much debate ensues.
Meanwhile, Cam is getting restless. “As cool as this place is, it ain’t your daddy’s intergalactic outpost. No tv, for one.”
Daniel is immediately worried. Cam usually makes his own fun when none is on offer. Daniel stands and turns away from Cam to indicate he is busy, busy, busy. “Uhhhhhhhh,” Daniel looks down at the artifact from M21-778, obsidian eyes stare back at him from a distinctly Asian face-which is strange since no markedly Asiatic people…
“You’re not busy, are ya, Daniel?” Cam’s fingers creep around the side of his neck. They’re in one of the rooms Daniel thinks were a kind of library, the circular structure like most Ancient knowledge repositories. Daniel looks towards the door as Cam presses fully against his back, hand coming around to hold the front of Daniel’s neck, thumb pressing against the bone of his jaw and dropping to rest against the thump of his carotid artery. Cam tilts Daniel’s head and compresses the artery slightly, kicks Daniel’s feet apart and yanks open the Velcro that’s replaced the snaps on the SC uniform pants. “You always have time for me, huh?” Cam kisses him behind the ear, tongue lifting the end of his glasses and tilting them so they clatter off Daniel’s face and hit the work top between Daniel’s braced hands.
The palm of Cam’s left hand presses Daniel’s erection against his belly. “Daniel?” Cam’s sex voice drips into Daniel’s skin all Karo syrup and humidity, slow and heavy, full of the unknown.
Cam’s thumb presses harder, cutting off the blood to Daniel’s brain. Daniel lets him, one quick trip through the Canaanite alphabet, enough to see spots on the edge of his vision, and he yanks the hand away and sucks Cam’s thumb into his mouth. Cam’s hips press Daniel forward, down, his weight shoving Daniel onto his belly against paper and pens and glasses. Cam’s fingers curl around Daniel’s cock and pull and he groans right into Daniel’s ear.
“Baby,” Cam whispers. Daniel sucks harder around the smile. Daniel’s never been called pet names in English by a sex partner before, never ones full of endearment, soft vowels and undertones of crinkled paper lace and growing old together. Daniel’s already growing old,; he supposes who he’ll do it with is already around. “Stop thinking!” Cam commands into Daniel’s ear and twists his wrist. His tongue touches the lobe of Daniel’s ear. “Ces serments, ces parfums, ces baisers infinis, renaîtront-ils d’un gouffre interdit à nos sondes…” Cam begins and Daniel falls with the words, rolls his hips up to meet the language of his cradle, of his dreams, rides Cam’s beautifully Southern accented French and comes all over his notes.
A piece of paper that has been ripped out of his notebook sticks to his face as he turns his head to just catch Cam’s eyes squeezing shut as he finishes himself up, his feet braced shoulder-width apart and neck crumpling to the side. Cam bites his lip when he comes, even when they’re completely alone.
Daniel watches Cameron Mitchell and once again he forgets to ask him where he learned to speak French and why he has Baudelaire memorized when Cam chokes out his name, Dan-yal, like he’s being crushed under something. The sound sets the hair on Daniel’s neck at attention and kicks adrenaline into his bloodstream.
Nothing can ever be simple for Daniel.
*
Another case in point: Daniel has his glasses on top of his head as he comes into the mess because he’s having a hard time reading small print now with them on. He’s scanning a printout that Radek had given him of some of the Wraith-language data they’d accumulated over the years. He hears Sam’s laughter and tilts his head so his glasses fall from the top of his head into place. Sam is sitting with her back towards Daniel, but across from her is Major Lorne who is also laughing with his head thrown back, slapping the top of the table.
Two tables over, Rodney is sitting with his neck extended at attention looking on like an overgrown prairie dog. He looks more miffed than usual. At his elbow, John is gesturing towards Rodney with his fork and rolling his eyes. His shoulders are tense. He reminds Daniel a lot of Jack in moments like that-totally opaque to most people but transparent to anyone who looks at him in the right light. Teyla has her back towards Daniel, so he can’t see her reactions to John and Rodney.
Daniel really doesn’t want to know what kind of social dynamic is going on here. It seems too close to a morality play. He turns on his heel and almost walks right into Cam and Vala who both smile at him with their own, personal versions of secret smiles.
“Gettin’ heavy in there,” Cam says.
“You Taur’i are utterly ridiculous,” Vala says.
“I’m not really hungry anyway,” Daniel says.
Luckily, Katie Brown is in the hallway outside and Vala charms them into dinner with the botany staff who always have apricot wine and fresh fruit.
*
The babies in the vat grow. Daniel doesn’t pay much attention to that because he has so much to translate, day and night, constant, constant, more information to synthesize than he can imagine being teased out in his lifetime. Even if he gets a do-over and a reset.
All of the Atlantis personnel most proficient at language are under Daniel’s aegis. They are divided into teams. One to teach others. One to go over the Wraith data. Two transcribing the virtual data to hardcopies-Daniel has a very strong preference for the tactile and a belief that all technology is inherently unreliable. Two translating the thousands of years of information contained in the Atlantis databases.
One afternoon, late -- and Daniel knows that because the light coming through the gold and crimson glass of the repository he’s working in slants low and leaves streaks across the floor and worktops that remind him of Cam for no real reason besides that they seem over-saturated and alive -- Ronon finds him. They’re friendly, not really friends, but Daniel appreciates Ronon’s dry humor and his obvious affection for his team and Atlantis in general.
“You’re The Archivist?” Ronon lifts an eyebrow and sits one hip on the edge of a desk, leaning down to brace his forearm across his thigh. Daniel hears the capitalization in the question and wonders if he is The Archivist. He leans back in his seat and feels his spine pop and crack.
“Right now, I suppose I am.” That’s the best he can do on that. Daniel’s not sure what his life’s work really is. There have been times when he was absolutely sure-finding the truth, saving the world, saving the galaxy, just surviving. Now he’s not sure at all.
Ronon pulls two crystals out of a pocket in his vest and holds them out to Daniel. Daniel takes them by instinct and out of ingrained politeness. He lifts both eyebrows and feels his mouth open slightly, waiting.
“Those are from Sateda. What I’ve collected, from others.” He doesn’t explain and Daniel doesn’t press. “You should put that with the other stuff.”
Just as unexpectedly as he’d come, Ronon leaves again. Daniel stares down at the pinkish crystals and wonders if there’ll be a compatibility problem with Atlantis’ computers. The last knowledge from a dead planet…Daniel sticks his pen in his pocket, grabs his notebook and hustles out of the lab hitting his headcom.
“Sam? Hey, could you meet me…”
*
It turns out that Sateda had a tradition of complex lyrical poetry not unlike the Celts that passed on knowledge from generation to generation. Daniel has no trouble memorizing huge chunks. The words roll through his mind and stick themselves into unexpected interstices.
When the Daedalus arrives to pick up SG-1, none of them intend to go just yet. That was unspoken, as most things are with them. Daniel’s actually in the baby vat lab with Ronon when the ship arrives, completely unaware of the scampering and scurrying going on across the city.
“People always find a way to survive,” Daniel says watching pinkish bubbles rise around a curling fetal fist.
“There are different kinds of survival. Some aren’t better than being dead,” Ronon replies as he presses two fingers against the Ancient glass right over the cheek of one of the fetuses. Daniel watches him and wonders how much of Ronon’s survival has been the kind where death might be the better option.
Daniel realizes this is his Ever After and that maybe the fairytales finish where they do for a reason.
**
The second part of the story I will write when I am blocked next week doing the edit on my book.
I sort of telegraphed where it's going.