Fic: It's Not The End Of The World, But You Can See It From There
Title: It's Not The End Of The World, But You Can See It From There
Genre: Friendship, Humour, Apocafic, AU
Rating: T
Spoilers: None.
Disclaimer: Mine? No? Damn.
The grunts and groans of three men battling inertia echo hollowly through the long abandoned building. Occasionally their efforts are rewarded with the satisfying screech of ragged metal scraping across concrete, but not nearly often enough, in their opinions.
“Just another few inches, guys,” Sam encourages.
One keen blue eye remains glued to the slowly growing gap between the twisted metal wreckage and the empty shell of a building while the other ceaselessly scans their surroundings, performing an ongoing threat assessment. The foursome has visited enough post-apocalyptic worlds to know that danger doesn’t disappear once life does. Sometimes dead worlds - or those that seem so at first blush - can be the most dangerous.
And besides, even though some mission objectives are worth dying for, this isn’t one of them.
“Carter, we really need to work on your definition of ‘a few’.”
“Jack, you spent the last two and a half hours of our hike out here insisting we were only ‘a few more minutes’ away.”
“That was different.”
“How so?”
“Carter’s the precise, scientific one. I’m... not.”
Across the relic of a dead civilization’s solution to storing items in bulk, Teal’c shoots Sam a long-suffering look. She offers up a wry smile in return.
Jack and Daniel’s usual bickering and bantering can wear at the best of times and this certainly isn’t the best of times. But their exchanges serve to distract from the utter devastation all around the team, keeping all four of them from getting too wrapped up in the magnitude of what’s been lost from this place. Sam welcomes the diversion and, despite outward appearances, she knows Teal’c does too.
The men lapse into silence again, focused on eking out those last few inches that will allow them to proceed into the derelict building. Sam continues to divide her attention between the desolate horizon and the slowly widening gap.
Fifteen tense minutes later, she declares their efforts a success. With some muscle and a side of hearty cursing, they’ve created an opening just large enough for Sam to slip through effortlessly. Provided he holds his breath and twists just so, Daniel can accompany her inside.
“Radio contact every three minutes.” Jack tosses the reminder over his shoulder, his attention already turned over to sentry duty.
Once upon a time, the rule had been radio contact every fifteen minutes. Then it had started taking too much time and effort to clear a way for Teal’c’s bulky muscle to slip inside tight spaces and Jack had taken to teaming up with the Jaffa outside, leaving the two leanest members of his team to go squeezing into places they didn’t belong. With one half of the team effectively cut off from the other, Jack had dropped the interval between communications down to just two minutes.
It took five months, but eventually Sam and Daniel had negotiated their way up to three. Even two years into the new routine, separation makes Jack twitchy.
“We’ll be careful,” Daniel promises absentmindedly.
His flashlight beam dances over the newly discovered treasure trove of artifacts from another time, but the finds don't sweep him away as they once did. His enthusiasm is no longer rooted in what might be learned from the past, but rather in how it might help them in the here and now.
“Stick together,” Jack adds unnecessarily.
“Jack.” Daniel’s voice, thick with exasperation, echoes eerily through the shell of a once impressive building.
“What?” Feigned innocence, intended to rile Daniel up. Some things never change.
“I said we’ll be careful. We always are.”
“I know you are. That’s what worries me.”
It’s a joke that’s been made a thousand times before. Daniel and Sam, SG-1’s Resident Geniuses and Wonder Twins Extraordinaire, have a reputation for being careful but still winding up in heaps of trouble anyway. In that respect, they’re no different from Jack or Teal’c, both of whom excel in exercising caution and still finding themselves in tight spots.
But four and a half months ago, when Sam and Daniel were in the midst of being careful, a mutt of a creature had snuck up on them. The attack had left Daniel with a festering bite and a raging infection. The two weeks it had taken him to rally and beat the infection had badly rattled his teammates, but not nearly as much as the additional week and a half it had taken for the archaeologist to be able to get out of bed under his own steam.
The experience had shaken them all and made Jack even more over-protective than usual. Which was saying a lot.
“Where to first?” Sam asks, keeping her voice down to little more than a whisper.
Daniel squints at the writing high overhead and gestures to the right. “We’ll start over this way and make our way to the other end.”
She nods sharply then takes the lead. She tries to keep her footfalls light, wary of alerting anyone or anything that might be lurking in the shadows to their presence. Lapsing into a comfortable rhythm, she and Daniel work their way up one side of the building and down the other, picking up items every so often and packing them in the carrying cases they’d brought along for exactly this purpose. It’s a familiar dance, one, as always, set to the dulcet tone of Jack O’Neill’s radiophonically distorted voice chattering in their earpieces.
Once upon a time the routine had been about acquiring knowledge and understanding. Now it’s all about utility: what they need to defeat the Goa’uld and what they might be able to use to buy themselves a little more time in the meanwhile.
Somewhere between the sixteenth and seventeenth sit rep delivered to their impatient CO, Daniel speaks up.
“After all this time, it still doesn’t sit right. It feels like stealing.”
Sam glances up from her careful comparison of two devices and pins him with a pointed look. “It’s not like there’s anyone left to care, Daniel.”
He sighs and scrubs a weary hand through his hair, but his eyes never stop searching the darkness for threats and the calloused tip of his right index finger never breaks contact with his P90’s trigger. “I know. That doesn’t sit right either.”
He’s right, but that’s not what he needs to hear right now. Usually it’s Teal’c’s job to make an uplifting, inspiring speech about the coming defeat of false gods and the inevitable victory of just causes, but Teal’c’s not here right now and even though she’s feeling decidedly unpeppy, Sam knows it’s up to her to raise Daniel’s spirits, at least a little.
“Daniel...”
He waves her off with his free hand, pre-empting the clichéd pep talk Sam’s pretty sure she paraphrased from Laurence Fishbourne’s character in The Matrix Reloaded.
“We’re stealing from the dead to try and save the living. The Goa’uld deserve what’s coming to them and if we could ask the people we’re stealing from, they’d probably tell us to take what we needed and destroy the Goa’uld and everything they stand for once and for all. I know.”
“So what’s the problem?” Sam asks as she decides there’s no real difference between the two devices and gently sets both inside an empty case.
“The Goa’uld steal from dead civilizations, just like we’re doing now.”
“The Goa’uld are the ones who destroyed most of the civilizations we scavenge from in the first place,” Sam reminds. “There’s a big difference.”
“Is there?”
“Yes.”
Daniel turns for the briefest of seconds and blinks at her, surprised. “That’s it? Just ‘yes’?”
“Yes.” Sam picks up the case and follows Daniel a few dozen yards to the next set of items on their list. “The Goa’uld do what they do for their own gain. We do what we do for humans throughout the galaxy.”
“The greater good?” Daniel suggests. There’s something mocking in his voice. Sam knows he’s amused by her naivete. She can’t help but wonder when she became the idealistic one on the team.
“Something like that.”
Daniel shrugs indifferently, drops his weapon and turns his attention to the mostly intact shelves stretched out before him, trusting Sam to take over as lookout.
She does as he expects, scanning for trouble even as she continues the conversation.
“What should we do then? Give up?”
Daniel sighs and Sam takes it for what it is: a concession of defeat. She’s made her point - the one it was his turn to make 11 days ago when she was the one questioning whether they were doing the right thing - and now they can both devote themselves wholeheartedly to the mission the team has set for itself.
Behind her, she can hear Daniel carefully stacking box after box in a case. She just hopes that this time, he remembers not to stack anything on the devices she’s already picked out. Last time he’d forgotten and crushed six of the seven things she’d planned on cannibalizing for parts.
She hadn’t spoken to him for three days. Not until he’d handed over the chocolate he’d stashed away in his pack. Then all was forgiven.
“Done,” he declares a few minutes later.
Sam rolls her eyes and thumbs her radio. They’ve been through this enough times to know that they’re not quite done yet and, if they leave now, Jack will bitch and moan until the next time they make a trip like this.
“Daniel.”
“He’s a grown man, Sam. He can make do with what we’ve already got.”
“If we leave now, you’ll be begging to come back in three days just to shut him up.”
Daniel sighs theatrically but does as he’s told. He gently kicks the case down the aisle, mindful of the delicate equipment she’d painstakingly packed into one compartment, and stops before a brightly coloured row of boxes.
“I feel ridiculous,” he admits.
“Colonel O’Neill has that effect on people,” Sam says helpfully. As subtly as she can, she drops her hand away from her radio.
“I can hear you,” Jack grouses, right on cue.
Grinning widely, Sam thumbs her radio again, ignoring the glare Daniel shoots her way. “Sorry, sir. My transmit button must have caught on something and started broadcasting accidentally.”
“I’m sure that’s exactly what happened, Major.” Jack’s tone promises retribution, but he’s also amused. After years of coaxing, Sam is finally starting to loosen up. “Daniel, don’t even think about walking out of there without my Fruit Loops!”
``I wouldn’t dream of it, Jack.”
Daniel is still glaring at her as he loads half a dozen boxes of their fearless leader’s favourite cereal into the case. When he’s finished, he gleefully slams the lid on Toucan Sam.
Human Sam winces and silently vows to kill him if he damages her tech toys again.
Daniel flicks his radio over to transmit continuously before hefting the case. Sam lets him lead the way out of the labyrinth-like remains of the building, covering their six, just in case.
“You know, of all the times I had occasion to think about the end of the world, not even once did I imagine that I would spend the post-apocalyptic period shopping in the kids’ section of the Wal-Mart cereal aisle,” Daniel says conversationally.
Teal`c`s mellow bass carries easily up from Sam`s radio. “It is, in fact, a Wal-Mart Superstore, Daniel Jackson.”
Even from behind, she can tell Daniel`s eyes are rolling, and Sam has to laugh.
She laughs harder when Jack’s tinny voice comes on, assuring them all that it’s worth hauling a few extra boxes of cereal back to his cabin because Fruit Loops are the pinnacle of human achievement on Earth.
If Sam has to be trapped on a post-apocalyptic version of her home planet for the rest of her life, there are no three people she’d rather be with.
Genre: Friendship, Humour, Apocafic, AU
Rating: T
Spoilers: None.
Disclaimer: Mine? No? Damn.
The grunts and groans of three men battling inertia echo hollowly through the long abandoned building. Occasionally their efforts are rewarded with the satisfying screech of ragged metal scraping across concrete, but not nearly often enough, in their opinions.
“Just another few inches, guys,” Sam encourages.
One keen blue eye remains glued to the slowly growing gap between the twisted metal wreckage and the empty shell of a building while the other ceaselessly scans their surroundings, performing an ongoing threat assessment. The foursome has visited enough post-apocalyptic worlds to know that danger doesn’t disappear once life does. Sometimes dead worlds - or those that seem so at first blush - can be the most dangerous.
And besides, even though some mission objectives are worth dying for, this isn’t one of them.
“Carter, we really need to work on your definition of ‘a few’.”
“Jack, you spent the last two and a half hours of our hike out here insisting we were only ‘a few more minutes’ away.”
“That was different.”
“How so?”
“Carter’s the precise, scientific one. I’m... not.”
Across the relic of a dead civilization’s solution to storing items in bulk, Teal’c shoots Sam a long-suffering look. She offers up a wry smile in return.
Jack and Daniel’s usual bickering and bantering can wear at the best of times and this certainly isn’t the best of times. But their exchanges serve to distract from the utter devastation all around the team, keeping all four of them from getting too wrapped up in the magnitude of what’s been lost from this place. Sam welcomes the diversion and, despite outward appearances, she knows Teal’c does too.
The men lapse into silence again, focused on eking out those last few inches that will allow them to proceed into the derelict building. Sam continues to divide her attention between the desolate horizon and the slowly widening gap.
Fifteen tense minutes later, she declares their efforts a success. With some muscle and a side of hearty cursing, they’ve created an opening just large enough for Sam to slip through effortlessly. Provided he holds his breath and twists just so, Daniel can accompany her inside.
“Radio contact every three minutes.” Jack tosses the reminder over his shoulder, his attention already turned over to sentry duty.
Once upon a time, the rule had been radio contact every fifteen minutes. Then it had started taking too much time and effort to clear a way for Teal’c’s bulky muscle to slip inside tight spaces and Jack had taken to teaming up with the Jaffa outside, leaving the two leanest members of his team to go squeezing into places they didn’t belong. With one half of the team effectively cut off from the other, Jack had dropped the interval between communications down to just two minutes.
It took five months, but eventually Sam and Daniel had negotiated their way up to three. Even two years into the new routine, separation makes Jack twitchy.
“We’ll be careful,” Daniel promises absentmindedly.
His flashlight beam dances over the newly discovered treasure trove of artifacts from another time, but the finds don't sweep him away as they once did. His enthusiasm is no longer rooted in what might be learned from the past, but rather in how it might help them in the here and now.
“Stick together,” Jack adds unnecessarily.
“Jack.” Daniel’s voice, thick with exasperation, echoes eerily through the shell of a once impressive building.
“What?” Feigned innocence, intended to rile Daniel up. Some things never change.
“I said we’ll be careful. We always are.”
“I know you are. That’s what worries me.”
It’s a joke that’s been made a thousand times before. Daniel and Sam, SG-1’s Resident Geniuses and Wonder Twins Extraordinaire, have a reputation for being careful but still winding up in heaps of trouble anyway. In that respect, they’re no different from Jack or Teal’c, both of whom excel in exercising caution and still finding themselves in tight spots.
But four and a half months ago, when Sam and Daniel were in the midst of being careful, a mutt of a creature had snuck up on them. The attack had left Daniel with a festering bite and a raging infection. The two weeks it had taken him to rally and beat the infection had badly rattled his teammates, but not nearly as much as the additional week and a half it had taken for the archaeologist to be able to get out of bed under his own steam.
The experience had shaken them all and made Jack even more over-protective than usual. Which was saying a lot.
“Where to first?” Sam asks, keeping her voice down to little more than a whisper.
Daniel squints at the writing high overhead and gestures to the right. “We’ll start over this way and make our way to the other end.”
She nods sharply then takes the lead. She tries to keep her footfalls light, wary of alerting anyone or anything that might be lurking in the shadows to their presence. Lapsing into a comfortable rhythm, she and Daniel work their way up one side of the building and down the other, picking up items every so often and packing them in the carrying cases they’d brought along for exactly this purpose. It’s a familiar dance, one, as always, set to the dulcet tone of Jack O’Neill’s radiophonically distorted voice chattering in their earpieces.
Once upon a time the routine had been about acquiring knowledge and understanding. Now it’s all about utility: what they need to defeat the Goa’uld and what they might be able to use to buy themselves a little more time in the meanwhile.
Somewhere between the sixteenth and seventeenth sit rep delivered to their impatient CO, Daniel speaks up.
“After all this time, it still doesn’t sit right. It feels like stealing.”
Sam glances up from her careful comparison of two devices and pins him with a pointed look. “It’s not like there’s anyone left to care, Daniel.”
He sighs and scrubs a weary hand through his hair, but his eyes never stop searching the darkness for threats and the calloused tip of his right index finger never breaks contact with his P90’s trigger. “I know. That doesn’t sit right either.”
He’s right, but that’s not what he needs to hear right now. Usually it’s Teal’c’s job to make an uplifting, inspiring speech about the coming defeat of false gods and the inevitable victory of just causes, but Teal’c’s not here right now and even though she’s feeling decidedly unpeppy, Sam knows it’s up to her to raise Daniel’s spirits, at least a little.
“Daniel...”
He waves her off with his free hand, pre-empting the clichéd pep talk Sam’s pretty sure she paraphrased from Laurence Fishbourne’s character in The Matrix Reloaded.
“We’re stealing from the dead to try and save the living. The Goa’uld deserve what’s coming to them and if we could ask the people we’re stealing from, they’d probably tell us to take what we needed and destroy the Goa’uld and everything they stand for once and for all. I know.”
“So what’s the problem?” Sam asks as she decides there’s no real difference between the two devices and gently sets both inside an empty case.
“The Goa’uld steal from dead civilizations, just like we’re doing now.”
“The Goa’uld are the ones who destroyed most of the civilizations we scavenge from in the first place,” Sam reminds. “There’s a big difference.”
“Is there?”
“Yes.”
Daniel turns for the briefest of seconds and blinks at her, surprised. “That’s it? Just ‘yes’?”
“Yes.” Sam picks up the case and follows Daniel a few dozen yards to the next set of items on their list. “The Goa’uld do what they do for their own gain. We do what we do for humans throughout the galaxy.”
“The greater good?” Daniel suggests. There’s something mocking in his voice. Sam knows he’s amused by her naivete. She can’t help but wonder when she became the idealistic one on the team.
“Something like that.”
Daniel shrugs indifferently, drops his weapon and turns his attention to the mostly intact shelves stretched out before him, trusting Sam to take over as lookout.
She does as he expects, scanning for trouble even as she continues the conversation.
“What should we do then? Give up?”
Daniel sighs and Sam takes it for what it is: a concession of defeat. She’s made her point - the one it was his turn to make 11 days ago when she was the one questioning whether they were doing the right thing - and now they can both devote themselves wholeheartedly to the mission the team has set for itself.
Behind her, she can hear Daniel carefully stacking box after box in a case. She just hopes that this time, he remembers not to stack anything on the devices she’s already picked out. Last time he’d forgotten and crushed six of the seven things she’d planned on cannibalizing for parts.
She hadn’t spoken to him for three days. Not until he’d handed over the chocolate he’d stashed away in his pack. Then all was forgiven.
“Done,” he declares a few minutes later.
Sam rolls her eyes and thumbs her radio. They’ve been through this enough times to know that they’re not quite done yet and, if they leave now, Jack will bitch and moan until the next time they make a trip like this.
“Daniel.”
“He’s a grown man, Sam. He can make do with what we’ve already got.”
“If we leave now, you’ll be begging to come back in three days just to shut him up.”
Daniel sighs theatrically but does as he’s told. He gently kicks the case down the aisle, mindful of the delicate equipment she’d painstakingly packed into one compartment, and stops before a brightly coloured row of boxes.
“I feel ridiculous,” he admits.
“Colonel O’Neill has that effect on people,” Sam says helpfully. As subtly as she can, she drops her hand away from her radio.
“I can hear you,” Jack grouses, right on cue.
Grinning widely, Sam thumbs her radio again, ignoring the glare Daniel shoots her way. “Sorry, sir. My transmit button must have caught on something and started broadcasting accidentally.”
“I’m sure that’s exactly what happened, Major.” Jack’s tone promises retribution, but he’s also amused. After years of coaxing, Sam is finally starting to loosen up. “Daniel, don’t even think about walking out of there without my Fruit Loops!”
``I wouldn’t dream of it, Jack.”
Daniel is still glaring at her as he loads half a dozen boxes of their fearless leader’s favourite cereal into the case. When he’s finished, he gleefully slams the lid on Toucan Sam.
Human Sam winces and silently vows to kill him if he damages her tech toys again.
Daniel flicks his radio over to transmit continuously before hefting the case. Sam lets him lead the way out of the labyrinth-like remains of the building, covering their six, just in case.
“You know, of all the times I had occasion to think about the end of the world, not even once did I imagine that I would spend the post-apocalyptic period shopping in the kids’ section of the Wal-Mart cereal aisle,” Daniel says conversationally.
Teal`c`s mellow bass carries easily up from Sam`s radio. “It is, in fact, a Wal-Mart Superstore, Daniel Jackson.”
Even from behind, she can tell Daniel`s eyes are rolling, and Sam has to laugh.
She laughs harder when Jack’s tinny voice comes on, assuring them all that it’s worth hauling a few extra boxes of cereal back to his cabin because Fruit Loops are the pinnacle of human achievement on Earth.
If Sam has to be trapped on a post-apocalyptic version of her home planet for the rest of her life, there are no three people she’d rather be with.