SG Fic: Five Holidays That Jack O'Neill Never Celebrated
So here it is, just in time for Christmas. A little sad, a little happy. Many thanks for the sharp eyeballs of a few folks, including leadensky, minnow1212, tafkarfanfic, and troyswann. Mwah. And, of course, Happy Holidays to everyone, whatever festivities you celebrate at this time of year.
(For those few who don't know the structure, there's a popular multi-fandom fic concept of the five-part AU, in which five short stories of Things That Never Happened are strung together.)
Five Holidays That Jack O'Neill Never Celebrated
by cofax
Rating: PG
December 2004
Spoilers through season 6
1. Christmas
"Jack, what are you still doing here?"
"He said 7, it's only 5:30." On the screen, Swanson slammed into the barrier, and Jack grinned. Thank god he'd shelled out for the expanded cable package; there wasn't any hockey on broadcast at this hour on a Thursday.
The day-timer dropped with a thump on the coffee table in front of him. "He said 6." The calendar confirmed it, in Sara's spiky green penmanship. Charlie-- Greyhound- 6 pm
"Yah, but --"
The keys dropped on top of the day-timer, slid sideways, and caught on the metal binding. "Jack. You haven't seen him in four months!"
"All right, all right, I'm going." Jack fished the keys out with difficulty--they wanted to stay where they were, and maybe watch the game too. But Sara was staring at him, arms folded, three shirts dangling from her right hand. "I'm going!"
It was beginning to snow. Jack pulled a hat on, a ski cap Charlie gave him three years ago, and started the truck. The neighbors all had their lights up. The O'Neills were behind; Sara was busy during the holiday rush and Jack had been in Washington for the past six weeks for meetings. That was how he'd missed seeing Charlie for Thanksgiving, although if he'd really tried he could have come home. Now he felt a little bad about it, as if he'd done something wrong.
There was an accident on the frontage road; by the time Jack got to the station, the bus had left. Charlie was sitting on the curb in the light snow, smoking a cigarette he stubbed out as soon as Jack pulled up. Jack pretended he didn't see that when he jumped out of the cab.
"Hey--" He was a dad, so he put his arms around his son, who was too thin, but almost as tall as Jack himself now. Tall, and thin, and studying classics. Greek and Latin and that sort of thing. Jack didn't see the appeal, but they'd had this argument in August.
Charlie ducked his head, returned the hug, and then backed away to pick up his backpack. "Hey dad. How y'doin'?" But he looked at the truck, instead of Jack's face, and didn't seem to notice when Jack didn't reply.
Jack couldn't reply. He was staring at Charlie's head. He kept staring as Charlie threw his pack into the back of the truck, and went to the passenger-side door.
Charlie had cut his hair very short and pierced his left ear up high, with a dangly silver doodad. Dingleberry. Whatever.
The starter ground as he turned the key but wouldn't start. Jack pumped it, holding the key in the ignition so it whined -- and held it for too long and flooded the engine. The whiff of gasoline seeped into the cabin.
The snow was falling faster now, swirling in the headlights, gathering on the windshield. Charlie pulled on his headphones and stared out the window.
Jack dropped his head against the steering wheel. Washington was looking better and better all the time.
+=+=+
2. Saint Patrick's Day
The brown grain made a dark and tasty beer, if a little sweeter than Jack had always liked. Still, it was a hell of a lot closer to beer than most of what he'd been forced to drink lately, and when he had the chance and Luke's attention was elsewhere, he filled his cup again. Twice.
The village headman's name was something unpronounceable. Jere-madaradawadathing. But Jack didn't have to pronounce it; Luke took care of that, enunciating carefully around the alcohol in his bloodstream. Jack tuned out; it was the same stuff that Daniel always used to ask: "Has anyone come through the chaapa'ai lately? Who is your god? Have you seen him/her lately? Do you mine any metals?" Disturbing, really, how similar it all was.
Instead of listening -- Luke would remember it all anyway, that's what he was here for -- Jack looked around the room. The hall was long and low, the smoke from the fires in the pit along the center of the floor hanging close above in the rafters. The roofs were turf, which at least relieved some of the fear of fire, but the place reeked. Not just of smoke; at one end of the hall was a low wicker railing, and behind that were penned tall deer-like cattle, their antlers cropped and capped with silver.
The people looked, if anything, Filipino. Dark complexioned, slight builds, wide dark eyes. But whatever they were speaking, Jack was pretty sure it wasn't Tagalog and it sure as hell wasn't Spanish. The women wore cropped embroidered jackets over full black pants, while the adult men wore robes with embroidered sashes. There was a whole embroidery thing going on that probably had a lot of cultural meaning.
Jack turned to the left; the headman was speaking, and gesturing at two young people standing behind him. Shit. A young boy and a young girl, neither of them older than fifteen. They both smiled, and Jack found himself smiling back, and nodding at the headman.
But then both children stepped forward, the girl reaching for his hand to lift him from his cramped but honorable seat next to the headman. And Jere-whatever was waving them off to the alcove behind him, where blankets and cushions were piled for the comfort of the clan's honorable guest.
Jack protested. "Shit, no. No children!"
Luke was having none of it. "This is how we assert our authority. And the girl is most attractive, don't you think? Besides, she's done this before."
Which was likely true enough; she was definitely unclothing Jack fast enough. "Luke, goddammit, no! I won't!"
Jack found himself smiling and running his hand down the boy's hair while the girl did interesting things with his dick. Her hands were small, and warm, and -- oh, shit. "No."
"It is not your decision."
Fuck. Time to bring out the big guns. "I'll start singing, Luke."
Pain "Aargh! Fuck!"
"My name is Lugh, Lugh of the Long Hand. Remember that, slave." The snake lay back on the cushions, oblivious of the audience in the main room. That was, in fact, the point.
Jack couldn't close his eyes or ears or stop feeling -- that. But he could bring up the memory of one too many Irish weddings. "Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes, are calling..." The thing about "Danny Boy" was that once Jack got going, he could shift to autopilot and the song would earworm Lugh really nicely.
Lugh snarled. Jack pictured the conga line at cousin Bernadette's wedding in 1972. "From glen to glen, and down the mountainside..."
Petty victories were about all Jack could manage these days. He did what he could.
+=+=+
3. Memorial Day
Something had gotten into the bird-coop overnight; there was nothing left of the biggest hen but a puff of iridescent black feathers on the ground. Jack swore mildly and went looking for something, anything to fix up the coop. He didn't exactly like the eggs the hens laid, but they boiled well and were a reliable source of winter protein that wasn't smoked fish.
The chest he'd found in New York City, the largest set of ruins, was just inside the front door. He crouched next to it, careful of his bad knee, and rummaged, only half his mind on the task. Spring was rolling into summer again; as good a time as any for the hike down to the lake. He could bring something. Not flowers, though.
Flowers, for me? How thoughtful of you, Jack. I never knew you cared.
There was a length of badly-twisted hemp coiled in the bottom of the chest. Jack used that to wire the coop back together, bracing it with a stump he'd been trying to chop into burnable pieces for the last few months.
When he was done, it was mid-morning. He got the P90, and the precious last cartridge, picked up a canteen to fill at the spring along the way, and headed downhill. It was a nice day, the kind of day that made you think about girls in bikinis, summer vacations, Beach Boys songs. He found himself humming.
Wouldn't it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn't have to wait so long--
No.
Jack had moved into the uplands after that first year; the area around the lake felt dank with heat and sour with the odor of death. Plus, he didn't trust the water down there. He spent a lot of time there in the fall, fishing and smoking the fish, but he wasn't comfortable until he was back up in the hills, away from the flies and the swampy ground. And after all, it wasn't like he needed to be near the gateway. Nobody was coming through.
He wondered, sometimes, how long they'd searched. He figured Carter would have moved heaven and earth to find him, and Hammond would have called in all the favors he could. Sometimes, that first winter, he was bitter about it, but he got over it. You did what you could, and then you moved on. On warm nights Jack imagined his team -- they were his team, always, even though he was sure they'd have replaced him or promoted Carter to command -- sitting around a table in the commissary, or better yet, in a bar, drinking beer and telling stories about Colonel Jack O'Neill and the way he used to piss everyone off. That picture made him smile.
The winter weather had done some damage to the old trail: a couple of trees were down, one section of the road washed out completely. Jack picked up one of the blue stones they used for cobbles and put it in his pocket. The old ruins looked the same when he came out of the woods, desolate and empty. Sad, in the way that a lot of the others weren't.
He skirted around the ruins and came out into an open field with a view of the mountains. The yellow flowers hadn't bloomed yet, but the planet was just rising. It was pretty. In the center of the field was an oval lump, overgrown with weeds and marked at one end with a stone the size of a human head.
He stopped there and put his hands in his pockets, looking at the grave.
"If you touch me again, so help me, Maybourne, I'll kill you."
Harry laughed. He wasn't dangerous anymore, but he hadn't been stable in a long time. "Oh, c'mon, Jack. Don't be so virginal. You can't tell me you never once-- not even when you were a prisoner?"
"I. Said. No." Jack zipped his pants, fumbled for the nine-mil, but he'd stopped wearing it when Harry stopped eating that damned plant. "And whatever I did or didn't do isn't any of your business."
Harry just smiled, and raised his hand to Jack, palm still slick with the evidence of his little search-and-fellate mission. "What are ya gonna do, Jack? Aren't you tired of wacking off alone? Two heads are better than one!"
Jack came out of the lean-to with a roar, but Harry skipped back into the shrubbery and away. It wasn't worth chasing him; Jack would wait until Harry came back and they'd have a serious talk about personal boundaries.
But Maybourne hadn't come back. Three days later Jack had found him under a tree about a mile from camp. He couldn't find any obvious injuries, and he doubted it was suicide. And there was no way in hell he was gonna try an autopsy.
Harry was heavier than he looked; it had taken a while to drag him on a litter to the field. And without a shovel, Jack couldn't bury him. So he laid Harry out as peacefully as he could, and then piled rocks over him. But first Jack gritted his teeth and stripped him: cloth was too valuable to waste.
The wind and the rapid growing season had covered the tomb with a rich growth of that damned plant that had almost killed them both. Jack figured Harry would appreciate the irony.
He took the blue stone out of his pocket and put it on the grave, and added four feathers from the hen. One for each year since he'd last seen a living human being. He wanted to say something, but really there was nothing to say.
So he upended his canteen onto the grave--water was all he had to spare--and turned away.
+=+=+
4. Homecoming
"Daniel!" The front room was empty. A battered notebook was weighted down by a jar of Kasuf's ale, but the owner of the precious ball-point pen on the table was nowhere to be seen.
Jack stuck his head through the curtain to the bedroom. "Daniel!"
"Jack?" Daniel's voice was muffled.
Jack looked around in confusion, and realized the ladder was propped against the back wall instead of filling the hole in the fence that kept the mastadges out of the garden. He scampered up -- well, okay, climbed -- the ladder to the somewhat unstable roof of the tiny house. "Daniel, damnit, if we lose all the squash again this summer--"
He stopped when he saw what Daniel had in his hands. Sha're's scarf, the cloth she had wrapped around her head and shoulders when they'd last seen her, before the aliens had come and taken her away. Before the alien soldiers had blown up the gate-dialing device.
When the grieving was done and the boys buried, along with Ferretti, who'd lingered a long time, as if expecting Carter or Jack to save him -- when that was all done, Daniel had taken Sha're's scarf and folded it carefully into a small wooden box. Skaara had made the box, and Kasuf gave it to Daniel at a torch-lit ceremony Jack never did understand the meaning of.
"She's not dead, Jack," Daniel had said, his eyes red-rimmed but the tears dry, finally. "I don't know where she is, but she's not dead. I'm going to find her." He'd closed the box with an unsettling finality.
That was before they realized how fucked they were, though. Carter was smart: brilliant, even, Jack was willing to admit. But brilliance gets you almost nowhere without the tools and supplies you need, and there was no way to repair the gate device with hand-thrown pottery, charcoal, and mastadge dung. Which hadn't kept Carter from trying.
Now the box was open, the scarf spread across Daniel's knees as he perched on the low railing around the edge of the roof. The horizon to the west was blurred. Somewhere under that dust cloud was the pyramid, and in the pyramid was the Stargate.
"Daniel?" Jack put his hand on Daniel's shoulder. His tanned hand, scratched from the construction work he'd been doing on Skaara's new house, made Daniel's pale robes look white by contrast in the bright midday sun. "What is it?"
Daniel put his hand over Jack's, clutched it tightly, then swiveled around until he was facing Jack, their hands still clasped. He lifted his face to Jack's, and the expression made Jack step back a pace, dropping Daniel's hand. Daniel looked exalted, and desolate, both. In that moment, Jack wanted, shamefully, to close his ears, to close Daniel's mouth with the palm of his hand, scabbed fingers against Daniel's lips and bristled jawline.
But he couldn't.
"She made it work, Jack. Sam fixed the Stargate."
They were going back to Earth.
+=+=+
5. Thanksgiving
"So, what'd Hammond say?"
Carter had left her outerwear in the entryway, but the ice in her hair was melting in the warmth of the central room, dripping on the tile floor. She glanced back at Teal'c, still divesting, and wiped her face against a damp sleeve.
"We couldn't get through, sir."
Jack sat up with a frown. "Care to expand on that, Major?"
"You saw the weather, sir," replied Carter with a wave behind her. Supporting her point, a sudden gust of wind hit the side window, rattling the shutters. "And it's even colder up on the mesa. The sleet hits the gate and freezes in place, so the inner circle can't turn. By the time we left, the DHD was under half an inch of ice. We can try again tomorrow, but--"
"No, we can't," said Daniel, from the corner, where he'd been huddled with their grumpy hostess, one Grassamna, head of the Jaguar clan. "According to the Pensai, these storms last for weeks, and it'll keep getting colder for at least another--" he cut off, and spoke to Grassamna, who shook her greying head and held up five fingers. "Well, nearly a week, apparently."
"Ever a bearer of good news, Daniel."
Daniel gave Jack the evil eye before turning back to his conversation.
"It is very cold outside already," said Teal'c, carefully passing through the low doorway into the main room. All the Pensai they had met were on the short side, and their architecture was built to scale. As a result, all the buildings felt cramped for Jack, Daniel, and Teal'c, although they had yet to hit their heads on anything.
That time would come, Jack thought darkly, if they had to stay here for another week.
"Wait a minute," said Carter. "A week? But--"
"But what? And c'mon, get near the fire--you two look frozen." Jack pulled himself out of the low chair and waved Carter and Teal'c closer to the fire. As Carter stepped past, he pulled a twig out of her hair and gave it to her.
She tossed it into the fire with a pout. "But it's Thanksgiving, sir. Dad was coming home, we were going to Mark's..."
"Gives 'over the river and through the woods' a new meaning, doesn't it?" But Jack rested a hand on Carter's shoulder when he handed her a blanket. She took it thankfully and huddled, looking a lot smaller curled up in the chair than she usually did with a P90 in her hands.
Teal'c settled down on the hearth and began rebuilding the fire, big hands moving easily around the flames. "We do not have sufficient rations for a week offworld," he said after a moment, and glanced at Daniel.
"Believe me, I'm aware of that," muttered Daniel, before diving back into conversation with Grassamna, firelight flickering off his glasses, hands fluttering in explication.
"Colonel O'Neill," said another voice, one far more resonant than Teal'c's even on a good day.
Jack upended his pack and began counting out MREs. "Come out to play, have you?" He shot a look at the chair by the fire, where the decidedly non-regulation fifth member of SG-1 had decided to join in the conversation.
It was odd how immediately evident it was that Carter was no longer there. Lantash was shorter somehow, a little less precise in his diction, and smiled more broadly than Carter did. Jack found it deeply unsettling, especially at first.
Of course, at first there had been far more pressing concerns than how O'Neill was going to respond. Like getting home from Revanna without getting killed, and then keeping Hammond from jailing Carter immediately.
They'd ended up in negotiations with the Tok'ra for weeks, because -- and here was the real kicker -- Carter and Lantash really hit it off. Not in a romantic way, and O'Neill really didn't like to think about that part, but in a like-minds kind of way. Lantash liked Carter, and thought he could do a lot of good where he was; Carter said she agreed with him, but then wasn't that the problem with the Tok'ra anyway?
The one factor that convinced O'Neill that maybe he could live with this was how utterly opposed all of the Tok'ra (well, except Jacob) were to the idea. If Lantash was pissing off all of his old friends to team up with Carter, maybe he wasn't going to shaft Carter, and the SGC, along the way.
But then the issue of military protocol raised its ugly head. Lantash was over a thousand years old, and had far more experience than the rest of SG-1 put together. Which didn't put stars in Hammond's eyes, or in O'Neill's. If Lantash got an idea in his head, there was nothing anyone on SG-1, Carter included, could do to stop him. In the end, it was Teal'c who suggested a solution of sorts. "Could Lantash not swear the same oath taken by Major Carter?"
So Carter stood in her dress blues before an audience of five, and Lantash was sworn into the United States Air Force, with all the privileges and responsibilities thereof. He did, of course, require to read the Constitution beforehand, and said something in a low murmur to Daniel just before the ceremony that made Daniel choke coffee all over the conference table.
Lantash was officially a second Lieutenant; unofficially, he was the SG-1 expert on All Things Goa'uld, swiftly outpacing Teal'c in the depth and breadth of his knowledge. He saved their asses at least twice already, and Jack figured that his own record on that score was probably in jeopardy. Not that he was complaining; it was nice to share the load.
So when Lantash smiled at him cheerfully, and said, "I may be able to solve the problem with the chaapa'ai, but it will require some time, and a supply of naquadah," Jack didn't roll his eyes.
Instead he nodded and started counting again, since he'd lost track. "Nice idea, lieutenant, except (a) we don't have any naquadah, and (b) what's the rush?" It went unstated that without a damned good reason to go out into that storm, Jack wasn't sending anyone. They had shelter, they had some food, and they had their gear. They'd be fine.
He looked up in time to see Lantash nod, and an emotion cross his face that might, Jack suspected, even have been embarrassment. Lantash wanted to give Carter her Thanksgiving with her family. It was sweet; but it was also not going to happen.
Ah, he found what he was looking for, deep in one of the side pockets of his pack. "Carter."
"Sir?" Lantash went away, and it was Carter again, blinking blearily at him in the firelight. Could the host sleep while the symbiote was in charge? Jesus.
Jack grinned, and tossed something towards Carter. It landed in her lap with a crinkly thump, and she lifted it with two dubious fingers. "We won't be home for Thanksgiving, Carter, but at least we have pie." The cellophane wrapping of the miniature pie crinkled as she turned it, her eyes beginning to twinkle despite her fatigue.
"Pie?" Jack groaned as Daniel's head swiveled around. "There's pie? I hope you brought enough for everyone, Jack."
Oh, great, and now Teal'c was turning on him. "O'Neill. I believe you have been holding out on us."
Jack made it to the entryway before Teal'c caught him, but it was Daniel and Carter who found the three extra pies in Jack's pack, and Lantash who decided that a game was really the most equitable way to distribute the loot. It was a setup all the way, Jack announced the next morning, because nobody could have expected Teal'c to know all the words to Gilligan's Island. But that didn't keep Jack from enjoying his coffee, or Daniel from sharing his pie.
Jack had had worse Thanksgivings.
END
Feedback gratefully received here or at cofaxATmindspring.com
(For those few who don't know the structure, there's a popular multi-fandom fic concept of the five-part AU, in which five short stories of Things That Never Happened are strung together.)
Five Holidays That Jack O'Neill Never Celebrated
by cofax
Rating: PG
December 2004
Spoilers through season 6
1. Christmas
"Jack, what are you still doing here?"
"He said 7, it's only 5:30." On the screen, Swanson slammed into the barrier, and Jack grinned. Thank god he'd shelled out for the expanded cable package; there wasn't any hockey on broadcast at this hour on a Thursday.
The day-timer dropped with a thump on the coffee table in front of him. "He said 6." The calendar confirmed it, in Sara's spiky green penmanship. Charlie-- Greyhound- 6 pm
"Yah, but --"
The keys dropped on top of the day-timer, slid sideways, and caught on the metal binding. "Jack. You haven't seen him in four months!"
"All right, all right, I'm going." Jack fished the keys out with difficulty--they wanted to stay where they were, and maybe watch the game too. But Sara was staring at him, arms folded, three shirts dangling from her right hand. "I'm going!"
It was beginning to snow. Jack pulled a hat on, a ski cap Charlie gave him three years ago, and started the truck. The neighbors all had their lights up. The O'Neills were behind; Sara was busy during the holiday rush and Jack had been in Washington for the past six weeks for meetings. That was how he'd missed seeing Charlie for Thanksgiving, although if he'd really tried he could have come home. Now he felt a little bad about it, as if he'd done something wrong.
There was an accident on the frontage road; by the time Jack got to the station, the bus had left. Charlie was sitting on the curb in the light snow, smoking a cigarette he stubbed out as soon as Jack pulled up. Jack pretended he didn't see that when he jumped out of the cab.
"Hey--" He was a dad, so he put his arms around his son, who was too thin, but almost as tall as Jack himself now. Tall, and thin, and studying classics. Greek and Latin and that sort of thing. Jack didn't see the appeal, but they'd had this argument in August.
Charlie ducked his head, returned the hug, and then backed away to pick up his backpack. "Hey dad. How y'doin'?" But he looked at the truck, instead of Jack's face, and didn't seem to notice when Jack didn't reply.
Jack couldn't reply. He was staring at Charlie's head. He kept staring as Charlie threw his pack into the back of the truck, and went to the passenger-side door.
Charlie had cut his hair very short and pierced his left ear up high, with a dangly silver doodad. Dingleberry. Whatever.
The starter ground as he turned the key but wouldn't start. Jack pumped it, holding the key in the ignition so it whined -- and held it for too long and flooded the engine. The whiff of gasoline seeped into the cabin.
The snow was falling faster now, swirling in the headlights, gathering on the windshield. Charlie pulled on his headphones and stared out the window.
Jack dropped his head against the steering wheel. Washington was looking better and better all the time.
+=+=+
2. Saint Patrick's Day
The brown grain made a dark and tasty beer, if a little sweeter than Jack had always liked. Still, it was a hell of a lot closer to beer than most of what he'd been forced to drink lately, and when he had the chance and Luke's attention was elsewhere, he filled his cup again. Twice.
The village headman's name was something unpronounceable. Jere-madaradawadathing. But Jack didn't have to pronounce it; Luke took care of that, enunciating carefully around the alcohol in his bloodstream. Jack tuned out; it was the same stuff that Daniel always used to ask: "Has anyone come through the chaapa'ai lately? Who is your god? Have you seen him/her lately? Do you mine any metals?" Disturbing, really, how similar it all was.
Instead of listening -- Luke would remember it all anyway, that's what he was here for -- Jack looked around the room. The hall was long and low, the smoke from the fires in the pit along the center of the floor hanging close above in the rafters. The roofs were turf, which at least relieved some of the fear of fire, but the place reeked. Not just of smoke; at one end of the hall was a low wicker railing, and behind that were penned tall deer-like cattle, their antlers cropped and capped with silver.
The people looked, if anything, Filipino. Dark complexioned, slight builds, wide dark eyes. But whatever they were speaking, Jack was pretty sure it wasn't Tagalog and it sure as hell wasn't Spanish. The women wore cropped embroidered jackets over full black pants, while the adult men wore robes with embroidered sashes. There was a whole embroidery thing going on that probably had a lot of cultural meaning.
Jack turned to the left; the headman was speaking, and gesturing at two young people standing behind him. Shit. A young boy and a young girl, neither of them older than fifteen. They both smiled, and Jack found himself smiling back, and nodding at the headman.
But then both children stepped forward, the girl reaching for his hand to lift him from his cramped but honorable seat next to the headman. And Jere-whatever was waving them off to the alcove behind him, where blankets and cushions were piled for the comfort of the clan's honorable guest.
Jack protested. "Shit, no. No children!"
Luke was having none of it. "This is how we assert our authority. And the girl is most attractive, don't you think? Besides, she's done this before."
Which was likely true enough; she was definitely unclothing Jack fast enough. "Luke, goddammit, no! I won't!"
Jack found himself smiling and running his hand down the boy's hair while the girl did interesting things with his dick. Her hands were small, and warm, and -- oh, shit. "No."
"It is not your decision."
Fuck. Time to bring out the big guns. "I'll start singing, Luke."
Pain "Aargh! Fuck!"
"My name is Lugh, Lugh of the Long Hand. Remember that, slave." The snake lay back on the cushions, oblivious of the audience in the main room. That was, in fact, the point.
Jack couldn't close his eyes or ears or stop feeling -- that. But he could bring up the memory of one too many Irish weddings. "Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes, are calling..." The thing about "Danny Boy" was that once Jack got going, he could shift to autopilot and the song would earworm Lugh really nicely.
Lugh snarled. Jack pictured the conga line at cousin Bernadette's wedding in 1972. "From glen to glen, and down the mountainside..."
Petty victories were about all Jack could manage these days. He did what he could.
+=+=+
3. Memorial Day
Something had gotten into the bird-coop overnight; there was nothing left of the biggest hen but a puff of iridescent black feathers on the ground. Jack swore mildly and went looking for something, anything to fix up the coop. He didn't exactly like the eggs the hens laid, but they boiled well and were a reliable source of winter protein that wasn't smoked fish.
The chest he'd found in New York City, the largest set of ruins, was just inside the front door. He crouched next to it, careful of his bad knee, and rummaged, only half his mind on the task. Spring was rolling into summer again; as good a time as any for the hike down to the lake. He could bring something. Not flowers, though.
Flowers, for me? How thoughtful of you, Jack. I never knew you cared.
There was a length of badly-twisted hemp coiled in the bottom of the chest. Jack used that to wire the coop back together, bracing it with a stump he'd been trying to chop into burnable pieces for the last few months.
When he was done, it was mid-morning. He got the P90, and the precious last cartridge, picked up a canteen to fill at the spring along the way, and headed downhill. It was a nice day, the kind of day that made you think about girls in bikinis, summer vacations, Beach Boys songs. He found himself humming.
Wouldn't it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn't have to wait so long--
No.
Jack had moved into the uplands after that first year; the area around the lake felt dank with heat and sour with the odor of death. Plus, he didn't trust the water down there. He spent a lot of time there in the fall, fishing and smoking the fish, but he wasn't comfortable until he was back up in the hills, away from the flies and the swampy ground. And after all, it wasn't like he needed to be near the gateway. Nobody was coming through.
He wondered, sometimes, how long they'd searched. He figured Carter would have moved heaven and earth to find him, and Hammond would have called in all the favors he could. Sometimes, that first winter, he was bitter about it, but he got over it. You did what you could, and then you moved on. On warm nights Jack imagined his team -- they were his team, always, even though he was sure they'd have replaced him or promoted Carter to command -- sitting around a table in the commissary, or better yet, in a bar, drinking beer and telling stories about Colonel Jack O'Neill and the way he used to piss everyone off. That picture made him smile.
The winter weather had done some damage to the old trail: a couple of trees were down, one section of the road washed out completely. Jack picked up one of the blue stones they used for cobbles and put it in his pocket. The old ruins looked the same when he came out of the woods, desolate and empty. Sad, in the way that a lot of the others weren't.
He skirted around the ruins and came out into an open field with a view of the mountains. The yellow flowers hadn't bloomed yet, but the planet was just rising. It was pretty. In the center of the field was an oval lump, overgrown with weeds and marked at one end with a stone the size of a human head.
He stopped there and put his hands in his pockets, looking at the grave.
"If you touch me again, so help me, Maybourne, I'll kill you."
Harry laughed. He wasn't dangerous anymore, but he hadn't been stable in a long time. "Oh, c'mon, Jack. Don't be so virginal. You can't tell me you never once-- not even when you were a prisoner?"
"I. Said. No." Jack zipped his pants, fumbled for the nine-mil, but he'd stopped wearing it when Harry stopped eating that damned plant. "And whatever I did or didn't do isn't any of your business."
Harry just smiled, and raised his hand to Jack, palm still slick with the evidence of his little search-and-fellate mission. "What are ya gonna do, Jack? Aren't you tired of wacking off alone? Two heads are better than one!"
Jack came out of the lean-to with a roar, but Harry skipped back into the shrubbery and away. It wasn't worth chasing him; Jack would wait until Harry came back and they'd have a serious talk about personal boundaries.
But Maybourne hadn't come back. Three days later Jack had found him under a tree about a mile from camp. He couldn't find any obvious injuries, and he doubted it was suicide. And there was no way in hell he was gonna try an autopsy.
Harry was heavier than he looked; it had taken a while to drag him on a litter to the field. And without a shovel, Jack couldn't bury him. So he laid Harry out as peacefully as he could, and then piled rocks over him. But first Jack gritted his teeth and stripped him: cloth was too valuable to waste.
The wind and the rapid growing season had covered the tomb with a rich growth of that damned plant that had almost killed them both. Jack figured Harry would appreciate the irony.
He took the blue stone out of his pocket and put it on the grave, and added four feathers from the hen. One for each year since he'd last seen a living human being. He wanted to say something, but really there was nothing to say.
So he upended his canteen onto the grave--water was all he had to spare--and turned away.
+=+=+
4. Homecoming
"Daniel!" The front room was empty. A battered notebook was weighted down by a jar of Kasuf's ale, but the owner of the precious ball-point pen on the table was nowhere to be seen.
Jack stuck his head through the curtain to the bedroom. "Daniel!"
"Jack?" Daniel's voice was muffled.
Jack looked around in confusion, and realized the ladder was propped against the back wall instead of filling the hole in the fence that kept the mastadges out of the garden. He scampered up -- well, okay, climbed -- the ladder to the somewhat unstable roof of the tiny house. "Daniel, damnit, if we lose all the squash again this summer--"
He stopped when he saw what Daniel had in his hands. Sha're's scarf, the cloth she had wrapped around her head and shoulders when they'd last seen her, before the aliens had come and taken her away. Before the alien soldiers had blown up the gate-dialing device.
When the grieving was done and the boys buried, along with Ferretti, who'd lingered a long time, as if expecting Carter or Jack to save him -- when that was all done, Daniel had taken Sha're's scarf and folded it carefully into a small wooden box. Skaara had made the box, and Kasuf gave it to Daniel at a torch-lit ceremony Jack never did understand the meaning of.
"She's not dead, Jack," Daniel had said, his eyes red-rimmed but the tears dry, finally. "I don't know where she is, but she's not dead. I'm going to find her." He'd closed the box with an unsettling finality.
That was before they realized how fucked they were, though. Carter was smart: brilliant, even, Jack was willing to admit. But brilliance gets you almost nowhere without the tools and supplies you need, and there was no way to repair the gate device with hand-thrown pottery, charcoal, and mastadge dung. Which hadn't kept Carter from trying.
Now the box was open, the scarf spread across Daniel's knees as he perched on the low railing around the edge of the roof. The horizon to the west was blurred. Somewhere under that dust cloud was the pyramid, and in the pyramid was the Stargate.
"Daniel?" Jack put his hand on Daniel's shoulder. His tanned hand, scratched from the construction work he'd been doing on Skaara's new house, made Daniel's pale robes look white by contrast in the bright midday sun. "What is it?"
Daniel put his hand over Jack's, clutched it tightly, then swiveled around until he was facing Jack, their hands still clasped. He lifted his face to Jack's, and the expression made Jack step back a pace, dropping Daniel's hand. Daniel looked exalted, and desolate, both. In that moment, Jack wanted, shamefully, to close his ears, to close Daniel's mouth with the palm of his hand, scabbed fingers against Daniel's lips and bristled jawline.
But he couldn't.
"She made it work, Jack. Sam fixed the Stargate."
They were going back to Earth.
+=+=+
5. Thanksgiving
"So, what'd Hammond say?"
Carter had left her outerwear in the entryway, but the ice in her hair was melting in the warmth of the central room, dripping on the tile floor. She glanced back at Teal'c, still divesting, and wiped her face against a damp sleeve.
"We couldn't get through, sir."
Jack sat up with a frown. "Care to expand on that, Major?"
"You saw the weather, sir," replied Carter with a wave behind her. Supporting her point, a sudden gust of wind hit the side window, rattling the shutters. "And it's even colder up on the mesa. The sleet hits the gate and freezes in place, so the inner circle can't turn. By the time we left, the DHD was under half an inch of ice. We can try again tomorrow, but--"
"No, we can't," said Daniel, from the corner, where he'd been huddled with their grumpy hostess, one Grassamna, head of the Jaguar clan. "According to the Pensai, these storms last for weeks, and it'll keep getting colder for at least another--" he cut off, and spoke to Grassamna, who shook her greying head and held up five fingers. "Well, nearly a week, apparently."
"Ever a bearer of good news, Daniel."
Daniel gave Jack the evil eye before turning back to his conversation.
"It is very cold outside already," said Teal'c, carefully passing through the low doorway into the main room. All the Pensai they had met were on the short side, and their architecture was built to scale. As a result, all the buildings felt cramped for Jack, Daniel, and Teal'c, although they had yet to hit their heads on anything.
That time would come, Jack thought darkly, if they had to stay here for another week.
"Wait a minute," said Carter. "A week? But--"
"But what? And c'mon, get near the fire--you two look frozen." Jack pulled himself out of the low chair and waved Carter and Teal'c closer to the fire. As Carter stepped past, he pulled a twig out of her hair and gave it to her.
She tossed it into the fire with a pout. "But it's Thanksgiving, sir. Dad was coming home, we were going to Mark's..."
"Gives 'over the river and through the woods' a new meaning, doesn't it?" But Jack rested a hand on Carter's shoulder when he handed her a blanket. She took it thankfully and huddled, looking a lot smaller curled up in the chair than she usually did with a P90 in her hands.
Teal'c settled down on the hearth and began rebuilding the fire, big hands moving easily around the flames. "We do not have sufficient rations for a week offworld," he said after a moment, and glanced at Daniel.
"Believe me, I'm aware of that," muttered Daniel, before diving back into conversation with Grassamna, firelight flickering off his glasses, hands fluttering in explication.
"Colonel O'Neill," said another voice, one far more resonant than Teal'c's even on a good day.
Jack upended his pack and began counting out MREs. "Come out to play, have you?" He shot a look at the chair by the fire, where the decidedly non-regulation fifth member of SG-1 had decided to join in the conversation.
It was odd how immediately evident it was that Carter was no longer there. Lantash was shorter somehow, a little less precise in his diction, and smiled more broadly than Carter did. Jack found it deeply unsettling, especially at first.
Of course, at first there had been far more pressing concerns than how O'Neill was going to respond. Like getting home from Revanna without getting killed, and then keeping Hammond from jailing Carter immediately.
They'd ended up in negotiations with the Tok'ra for weeks, because -- and here was the real kicker -- Carter and Lantash really hit it off. Not in a romantic way, and O'Neill really didn't like to think about that part, but in a like-minds kind of way. Lantash liked Carter, and thought he could do a lot of good where he was; Carter said she agreed with him, but then wasn't that the problem with the Tok'ra anyway?
The one factor that convinced O'Neill that maybe he could live with this was how utterly opposed all of the Tok'ra (well, except Jacob) were to the idea. If Lantash was pissing off all of his old friends to team up with Carter, maybe he wasn't going to shaft Carter, and the SGC, along the way.
But then the issue of military protocol raised its ugly head. Lantash was over a thousand years old, and had far more experience than the rest of SG-1 put together. Which didn't put stars in Hammond's eyes, or in O'Neill's. If Lantash got an idea in his head, there was nothing anyone on SG-1, Carter included, could do to stop him. In the end, it was Teal'c who suggested a solution of sorts. "Could Lantash not swear the same oath taken by Major Carter?"
So Carter stood in her dress blues before an audience of five, and Lantash was sworn into the United States Air Force, with all the privileges and responsibilities thereof. He did, of course, require to read the Constitution beforehand, and said something in a low murmur to Daniel just before the ceremony that made Daniel choke coffee all over the conference table.
Lantash was officially a second Lieutenant; unofficially, he was the SG-1 expert on All Things Goa'uld, swiftly outpacing Teal'c in the depth and breadth of his knowledge. He saved their asses at least twice already, and Jack figured that his own record on that score was probably in jeopardy. Not that he was complaining; it was nice to share the load.
So when Lantash smiled at him cheerfully, and said, "I may be able to solve the problem with the chaapa'ai, but it will require some time, and a supply of naquadah," Jack didn't roll his eyes.
Instead he nodded and started counting again, since he'd lost track. "Nice idea, lieutenant, except (a) we don't have any naquadah, and (b) what's the rush?" It went unstated that without a damned good reason to go out into that storm, Jack wasn't sending anyone. They had shelter, they had some food, and they had their gear. They'd be fine.
He looked up in time to see Lantash nod, and an emotion cross his face that might, Jack suspected, even have been embarrassment. Lantash wanted to give Carter her Thanksgiving with her family. It was sweet; but it was also not going to happen.
Ah, he found what he was looking for, deep in one of the side pockets of his pack. "Carter."
"Sir?" Lantash went away, and it was Carter again, blinking blearily at him in the firelight. Could the host sleep while the symbiote was in charge? Jesus.
Jack grinned, and tossed something towards Carter. It landed in her lap with a crinkly thump, and she lifted it with two dubious fingers. "We won't be home for Thanksgiving, Carter, but at least we have pie." The cellophane wrapping of the miniature pie crinkled as she turned it, her eyes beginning to twinkle despite her fatigue.
"Pie?" Jack groaned as Daniel's head swiveled around. "There's pie? I hope you brought enough for everyone, Jack."
Oh, great, and now Teal'c was turning on him. "O'Neill. I believe you have been holding out on us."
Jack made it to the entryway before Teal'c caught him, but it was Daniel and Carter who found the three extra pies in Jack's pack, and Lantash who decided that a game was really the most equitable way to distribute the loot. It was a setup all the way, Jack announced the next morning, because nobody could have expected Teal'c to know all the words to Gilligan's Island. But that didn't keep Jack from enjoying his coffee, or Daniel from sharing his pie.
Jack had had worse Thanksgivings.
END
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