Building Fertile Valleys Again - Part 3
Title: Building Fertile Valleys Again - Part 3
Original Title: Eroding Away the Mountains
Original Author:
abyssinia4077
Back to Part 2
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After Daniel comes back from his turn at being stranded on another planet-and he would get the one in a civil war, not the nice rural world-and after he nearly ascends before finding human form again, and after Sam loses her father and ends her engagement, they decide to climb Pike's Peak as they did years ago. Teal'c is on Dakara in meetings to build a free Jaffa nation, and the general declines their invitation, saying they're a little old for this, so they'd better get this out of their systems while they can. This answer makes no sense, which is typical Jack. But Sam thinks it's the general's way of giving them time on their own. They're all supposed to meet at his cabin next week for what he calls strenuous fishing. It's probably for the best the general does not join them, because neither of them is in the mood for wisecracks and the path is harder than she remembers and filled with enough weekend warriors that they can't talk freely.
When they reach the top Daniel flops onto his back, raising a tiny dust cloud, and flings an arm over his eyes. Sam sits next to him and digs through her pack, throwing a granola bar onto his stomach where it rises and falls with each breath. "I think Jack is right," he wheezes. "We are too old for this."
Sam ignores him and starts peeling an orange. It's been days since she ate something that wasn't field rations, cafeteria food, quick bites grabbed between battling what the general now calls bug-bots. It's longer since she's actually cooked. When she opened her fridge this morning the vegetable crisper boasted five new species of mold, but the orange was miraculously untouched. Daniel sits up and decides the chocolate chip granola bar is acceptable. He rips it open and stuffs the wrapper into his pocket before taking a bite. This is as familiar to her as this trail.
It seems to be to Daniel as well because he pulls the wrapper out again, looks at it, then at her. "You asked me once if I ever felt like leaving something like this lying around? So some future archaeologist could find it?"
She nods and smiles and Daniel examines the wrapper, squinting as the silvery foil flashes the sunlight into his eyes. "You said you wouldn't," she tells him.
"I thought I said I didn't feel like littering so someone could know we had granola bars."
She throws an orange peel at him. "You said if they didn't already know English, the words wouldn't help them much. But that that much writing on something as simple as a food wrapper implies a literacy that isn't limited to the upper class. Then you went on about the material-obviously engineered, indicates a degree of technological sophistication, and the fact that we have food this processed, this portable, means we've advanced to the point where the act of food gathering doesn't take most of our resources and we can devote time to study and development." Tilting her head, she pulls up the rest of it from memory. "Oh, and you mentioned there'll be enough saved copies of magazines and commercials for anyone to know Quaker Oats existed."
Sam grins at him, then eats a slice of orange. She loves this about him, that his mind works in this fashion. She looks at a new artifact and tries to backwards-engineer it, determine what it's made of, how it works, but Daniel has always looked at something and backwards-engineers the people who made it, the culture it came from.
"Do you miss it?" she asks him.
"I miss a lot of things," he says, looking at her over the tops of his glasses. "I missed breakfast."
"I mean archaeology. Going on digs and finding new things about ancient civilizations," she insists, not letting it drop. "We don't even do much of that anymore."
"Yes, but how many archaeologists have had the chance to meet descendants of those civilizations who still maintain the culture? Anyway, I couldn't go back now, knowing how much is wrong. And if I try to tell anyone the truth, I'll end up back in an institution with those nice white jackets. Or dead." She can hear the regret in his voice-it's still there, has been for years. She knows how he feels. They've started slow leaks from the program, but while she can pass along some of the science, Daniel has no viable cover story to rewrite history.
Sam thinks about asking Daniel what he wants now, with Anubis really, finally gone, and the Goa'uld mostly beaten, and the Replicators wiped out. Does he want to stay on an SG team that doesn't do first contact, one of the teams who can go back to a planet and spend weeks digging into ruins, exploring cultures? She knows he keeps up on all the reports, but he no longer has even a chance to beg for one more day in an ancient temple. That hasn't been on SG-1's agenda for some time. No wonder he thinks about Atlantis with longing-that's a city still waiting for exploration.
But she isn't sure she wants to know his answer. Instead she stands up, shoulders her pack, and reaches her hand out to help Daniel up.
Daniel has become expert at straddling too many worlds-no longer an archaeologist, not quite a soldier, a diplomat who can be tactless in the extreme, a man who knows over two dozen languages but who doesn't get the chance to speak them. And she will swear ever time he comes back from the dead he has new muscles on him. She feels their power as she pulls him to his feet. He's not an expert marksman, but he can wield just about any weapon. He can take point and cover their six. He still isn't as quick to draw his weapon as the others, he's still horrible at hand-to-hand, he will flinch at loud explosions. But he is her choice for who she wants with her when she steps through the Stargate, because he's agile as a ferret at getting out of tight spots. And he has more 'gate addresses in memory than anyone.
As she follows him down the mountain, she sees a new level of awareness in him, new fluidity to his movements. Daniel actually seems to own his body now. She remembers watching him hike down this path during their early years, all legs and lean mass with his hand brushing his thigh, seeking to stabilize his Beretta, which he wasn't wearing. He still has that habit.
Most of the way down, they cross a field blooming with wildflowers that remind Sam of the ones Daniel brought her after Jolinar died. She hung them upside down around her living room to dry because she couldn't remember the last time anyone had given her flowers. Her hands drag over a few soft petals and, on a whim, she picks two yellow somethings and calls out to Daniel, "Your hair's too short for flowers."
Years ago, last hike here, she'd stuck flowers in Daniel's hair before turning to run back into the field. He came after her, tackled her, shoved a fistful of flowers down the back of her shirt. They'd rolled on the ground, wrestling and laughing and luckily not finding any bees, until Daniel had started sneezing his head off.
Coming back, he takes the flowers from her hand, tucks one behind each ear. "Your hair's not too short," he says. Then he kisses each cheek, left then right, a soft brush of his lips. She grins up at him, links her hand with his, starts down the trail again, both of them in step.
"Daniel, why haven't we ever…?" she lets the words drift into a sigh.
"What?" he asks.
Shaking her head, she decides her guys have it right. There are some things that need no words.
He reaches over, brushes pollen or something away from her cheek. Then he reads her mind, or whatever is on her face, "Maybe I'm saving you for when I'm sixty and really desperate."
"What?" she gets the word out around a choked laugh.
"You know, like that pretty woman movie."
"You mean Julia Roberts and that was My Best Friend's Wedding. And wasn't her best friend gay? And why do you even know either of these films?"
"Teal'c. That was just after he heard the phase 'chick flick' from Jack. And you know Teal'c-he'll watch anything."
"That's scary."
"Oh, no, scary is Teal'c coming to me for an explanation of the origin of the phase and suitable examples-and I had them." Daniel frowns at that, then lifts his free hand in a wave. "But wasn't the gay guy her other best friend? Anyway, we could have the same arrangement-we'll marry each other if we're still single in twenty years." Then Daniel slants her a look, and just asks, "So what happened with Pete?"
She's dazzled enough by this fast flow of words that she just answers. "More like what didn't happen-you were right about the adoration. It is fun, but…well, it's not enough. And to be honest…" she hesitates, then wets her lip and finds the truth, or something close enough to it.
"It was the dog."
"The dog?" He turns to look at her, but keeps walking and keeps her hand.
"Pete wanted a house. And a yard with a dog." She stops there because this isn't explaining anything, but Daniel smiles.
"And you're more of a cat person?" he asks. Only it isn't really a question.
She grins at him, because he understands. And this is Daniel. If she needs the words, she can ask for them and get them. Pete is terrific. Pete is the perfect guy. He was also what she needed at the time, but she isn't right for what he needs. And, what is it with these guys-even Fifth wanted to tuck her away someplace safe and domestic. Her team, however, has done nothing but push her to get out there and do more than she thought she could. No wonder she can't settle for less now.
As Daniel leads them back down the trail again, Sam thinks they're both walking a bit lighter.
"Hey, what are you bringing to the general's solstice party?" she asks as the trail widens and flattens.
"Uh, Sam, are we anywhere near midsummer? Or even sure that Jack really knows what a solstice is, and why does he still plan a party for it?"
She sorts through the questions, decides to pick a different answer. "He does know how to use his telescope, Daniel. Anyway, you know it's just an excuse to drink beer and fire up the grill."
"He's 'the man' and he still needs an excuse? These things used to be important in our culture, you know. Solstice celebrations are some of the oldest holidays. Even the most ancient of Earth cultures celebrated the solstice, and most of the people we've found have something similar. Recognizing the importance of the sun, its life giving force, seems universal among human cultures. And we trivialize this into an excuse for a party?"
Sam nods. She's had this lecture before from him and it led to her asking what solstice had been like on Abydos.
Two days, he'd told her. But it was different the year he was there, since he had helped those people kill their sun god. The women spent an entire week preparing food, the men hunted, and the children helped clean and decorate Nagada. Daniel hadn't been good at hunting, so he'd helped in the city instead.
Sam suspects this was the Abydonians way of trying to get Daniel to do less. Her first time to Abydos, she saw the way they treated him-revered him. They'd probably wanted him to act the honored hero, stay distant as befitting someone able to kill a god. Knowing Daniel, he would have found that boring and inconvenient, so he'd have climbed down from any pedestal they put him on just so he could be in the middle of all the action. He must have driven them crazy since they couldn't exactly tell their honored hero what to do. After a year of that, no wonder Daniel arrived on SG-1 complete with the attitude that he should have equal standing in all decisions.
She bumps her hip into his and asks, "Daniel, tell me about Abydos and the solstice again. About the feast, the children born being presented and given their proper names."
"Sounds like you should tell it," he says, but she nudges him again. They're almost down the mountain now. He gives a shrug and gives in.
"Well, in the late afternoon, everyone separated with women on one end part of the main meeting square and men on the other. And Children who had reached their thirteenth year were initiated as adults. Sha're wouldn't tell me what happened on the women's side, but the men's side involved lots of chanting, face paint, and moonshine."
"You mean paint thinner."
"Hey, who's telling this? So we drank, chanted, drummed. The drumming went on and on, until it became a rumble that got into your chest. It was more intoxicating than drink. As the sun set, everyone gathered and the drums stopped. We told stories, ate and drank until close to dawn."
"And the stories?" she prompts.
He looks at her with a smile in his eyes but not on his lips, and she thinks he'll go stubborn and won't indulge her, but he says, "They were tales of their history, and of heroes. Skaara's impression of Jack was priceless." Daniel laughs. It's a rare sound and leaves her smiling. "The next morning anyone still awake at dawn woke the others to welcome the sun and we fasted until night fall-the idea was to accompany the sun on its longest stay of the year. That evening, at the end of the first feast of the new sun-year, any newly married couples were brought forth and blessed with long life and, uh, fertility and..." Daniel's voice drifts and Sam knows the memories are happy, but bittersweet, and the times are too long gone. Then he says, his voice soft, "It was a night I'll never forget."
"I bet." Sam pokes him in the ribs to pull him back to her. "Remember the year you performed the Abydonian traditions for Jack's party? Anderson's wife had had a baby and Cooper on SG-9 had gotten married. We should do that again."
"Uh, maybe not all of it," Daniel says. "You know, you're as bad as Sha're."
It's more than sun warming her face now. She's flattered as always by the comparison. She loves the reverence in his voice the rare times Daniel talks about the woman he loved and married and lost. But she is never certain how much it pains Daniel to remember this particular failure.
But he's told her of Sha're's fascination with Earth's holidays, and with Earth in general. The woman raised with one people, one god, couldn't believe in a place with so many different people, religions, gods, and traditions. Sam is still not sure she could list off all the holidays celebrated in America. But Daniel, the student of his own culture, carried them to another world.
Daniel has explained Santa Claus to a woman who'd never seen a chimney. "Or try Flag Day," he told Sam, when he talked about the cultural exchange he made on another world. But he did not just teach the holidays. At Sha're's insistence, they had celebrated each one. From Diwali to Purim to Martin Luther King Day to Valentine's Day-and Sam still cannot imagine what a desert people might have used to make a bunch of red and pink hearts. She only hopes no real hearts were involved.
She glances now at Daniel, sees the distance in his eyes. Abydos is long gone into nothing more than memory and dust. She hates that Daniel no longer has even the hope of home and family-Abydos is his past but not his future. But there's also relief for her. It's selfish of her, and she chides herself for it. But she's greedy. They got Daniel back in part because of the loss of Abydos-that was where ascended Daniel made his last stand against the partly ascended Anubis. That's where Daniel fell from grace, because of them, because of his passion, because of Abydos. She searches her heart for the sharp twinge of jealousy over the life Daniel once longed to reclaim; a simple life with desert people. But all she finds now is regret for what could have made him happy.
Three weeks later they haven't been to Ancient Egypt, but they have a ZPM. And there are fish in the general's lake. She has been thinking about this for a few days now, ever since they got back from a cabin with something that's really more like a big pond. She's been wondering how to compare timelines when she has nothing to use as a benchmark; they have the tape that they went back to the past, but what the hell did they do? She seeks out Daniel because he is always willing to tackle issues loaded with too much potential existential angst.
"So how do we know we're us?" she asks him.
He frowns, pushes up his glasses. "We think, therefore, we think we're in trouble here? Maybe the fish weren't in Jack's pond, but they were somewhere else-the pond next door?"
"Daniel!"
"No, I'm being serious, Sam. If a difference makes no difference, is there a difference? Do you feel-different? Wrong somehow?"
"Do you think we'd notice?"
She is aware that time travel is not really possible, given current physics, but they've been doing the impossible for years. She also doesn't fully trust that the Ancients knew what they were doing. Stargates shouldn't work. But they do. And the Ancients messed around with time-travel on other words and only ended up creating nothing more than disasters for the unwary.
"You know, each time we step through the 'gate, we're broken into energy signatures, and made over again," she tells Daniel.
"So-I haven't been me since I first went to Abydos? It really is our consciousness, our souls that make us who we are?"
She shrugs. There are places where physics touch metaphysics and she's never liked straying into those boggy areas. "Well, quantum particles can exist two places at once. That's been proven."
"So, on the quantum level, we can be dead and buried a few thousand years in Egypt, or be bouncing around some other time, and be here, and also be in another reality somewhere, but it's all the same soul stretched across infinity? That would fit most spiritual philosophies-an infinite soul ought to handle that really well."
They stare at each other for a few seconds, then she says, "That's the trouble with infinity-it's impossible to compress into finite thought, words and concepts."
"So, we're left with what? If we fixed the timeline-a timeline-maybe we did a great job, or a lousy one, but it all boils down to how comfortable we are with where we are right now? If it feels right, it's good enough?"
She checks in with how she does feel-something Daniel has taught her. She does feel right-this feels right with Daniel. Or it's good enough for government work. Finally, she says, "Yeah. I guess. Works for me."
That evening, the general hosts his not-midsummer solstice party, and announces his transfer to DC. He's already told his team-he took Sam aside earlier today, and she sees that Daniel doesn't look surprised so he's in on it, too, and Teal'c is going to be leaving for Dakara again soon. Later, she finds Daniel up on the roof, by the general's telescope.
It was just a few years ago, during one of the other solstice parties, that O'Neill had tried to grill burgers with one arm in a sling due to a trinium arrow. Teal'c had had to tie him to a chair on his deck to keep him still, and Siler kept the beers in O'Neill's good hand to keep him happy. At sunset, Daniel held Anderson's baby boy to the sun, bestowed the traditional Abydonian blessings for good health and courage. They told stories long into the night, and counted absent friends in silence.
She is soon to be absent. Transfer orders are pending for her-long overdue. She should have been rotated out years ago, except for the fact that Hammond needed her, and O'Neill kept her, and now that most of the threat is gone Cassie needs her elsewhere. None of this will be a comfort to Daniel.
Of all of them, he is the one who most belongs in the Stargate program. He started it by opening the 'gate. He has made himself into someone who no longer fits his own world. Or perhaps he was always someone whose unique set of skills have always been waiting for this place. Sitting with him, she holds his hand, and tells him, "I spoke to the general-he's going to put in for Atlantis for you."
Daniel's head comes up and, in the twilight, his eyes glitter bright. "What? Atlantis? But he's said-"
"He needed you here. He did. But he's going to Washington. I'm going to Nevada. Teal'c is headed to Dakara. Did you think we'd leave you behind? You're going, too."
He shakes his head, can't speak, can't answer. That's all the answer she needs. His arm tightens around her shoulders. "God, I'm going to miss you."
She lightly punches his arm. "There's always data bursts. And you better tell me everything."
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Sam shifts awkwardly on the concrete step and rings the doorbell again. General O'Neill has gone back to Washington, but his house is still here and Daniel is again homeless and staying in the spare room. By all good sense, the general should sell his house-he's in Colorado Springs only a few times for a few days each year. But he swears he hates hotels, so his house remains his-and SG-1's-second home. Teal'c stays here when he wants to spend a few days outside the Mountain. She used the house last year when she got her home fumigated. Now Daniel's here because he missed the Daedalus, and because he was attached by the wrist to an alien con-artist and stuck inside the Mountain. The bracelet is gone, so is Vala, and so is Daniel's apartment.
He mumbled something to Sam that at least this time the official records did not list him as dead, so how hard would it be to get a lease. That was two weeks ago. After being confined within the Mountain, in small rooms, Daniel was probably willing to live anywhere that had windows. But there are times Sam wonders if he misses the open spaces of Abydos, or even of Vis Urban.
She's turning to go, giving up her errand as foolish-he's probably sleeping, which he's been doing a lot of since the bracelet came off and Vala disappeared into an intergalactic wormhole. But then Daniel finally opens the door and blinks at her myopically with his glasses on top of his head. He's barefoot in faded sweatpants and a blue t-shirt that declares "I'd rather be fishing." She knows these clothes. They were the ones he had when he had nothing more than the robe he wore back from Abydos and his mission BDUs. The way that some people have comfort food, Daniel has comfort clothes. She's amazed these have survived the years, the moves, and the not-really-but-almost-dead experiences.
On the other hand, these could be Jack's clothes, dug out of his closet. The general gives away nothing, throws out even less, and she is still astonished at the stuff of Daniel's that keeps turning up that the general has hung onto.
She says, "Am I bothering you?" at the same time he says, "Sam, I'm afraid Jack isn't here."
They both smile at the same time, then she says. "I know. He's back in DC."
Daniel rubs a hand through his hair, leaving it rumpled. It's shaggy, but he's shaved off that scruffy beard that had been coming in red-gold and left him looking ready for a pirate crew. "Actually, Jack took Mitchell fishing."
That leaves her eyebrows climbing, because she can't picture the general and Cam kicking back with some beers and some rods and swapping fishing lures and stories. Daniel's smile is sly, so she says, "In other words…."
"Yeah, he took Mitchell off to be eaten by mosquitoes that could double for death gliders…."
"While he gets a few words in about how Cam had better lead this team better?" Sam grins now, because she can picture the general kicking back with a beer, and just enough words to give Cam one of the worst weekends of his life.
"So, fishing," she says. "Actually, though, I came to see you, but if you're busy-" She leaves the words and thumbs a gesture over her shoulder.
"No, no, come in." He pauses for a minute before stepping aside so she can actually come through the door. "I was, uh, reading. I've been going through Jack's magazines for the year I was-well, I thought I'd finally catch up on contemporary culture for the year I wasn't." His smile still has that touch of shyness, as if he's inviting her to share the humor, but still a little worried she'll think him a geek for an interest in already outdated history.
"Oh. Well, NASA started mapping Mars with a thermal emission imaging system, we invaded Afghanistan, the first Spider-Man movie came out, and I have no idea who won the Stanley Cup that year," she tells him.
"What, you mean Jack didn't tell everyone?"
She glances at him and shakes her head. And she is not going to tell him about that year, and how for more than a few months O'Neill became so much a bastard that everyone pretty much kept out of his way. Instead, she checks out the general's house. There is still a poster of Mars on the wall and a model of an Apollo capsule on the bar. Some things really do not change.
Daniel's absent nod is another of those constants, as is the fact that if she asks him three days from now, he'll be able to tell her exactly what she said. There are photographic memories, but Daniel has an auditory memory-hit the right button and you can play back anything he's heard. She remembers now her initial awe of him-how she knew she had nothing to offer this man.
She developed the dialing program and she can explain some of the physics behind how the 'gate works, but Daniel translated the symbols, stepped through into the unknown, helped kill a Goa'uld without any military training, and lived for a year on an alien planet. That was when he was just getting started.
He seemed a little larger than life back when she'd read the mission reports and thought him dead. But then she met him, he came back with them, and when she hunted him up at O'Neill's place, she had Daniel standing in front of her like this, wearing rumpled sweatpants and a confused smile, and she found herself more nervous than for her doctoral defense. He has always kept her off-balance and guessing-Daniel's like quicksilver, his mind as agile and fluid as mercury in its liquid state.
Daniel just pulls his glasses down onto his face and moves to the fridge. "Would you like something to drink? Jack's got beer-of course-if you want, though it's, ah, a little early I guess. Um, soda? Orange juice?" She catches a glimpse around his shoulder and sees a few cans on the top shelf with some cheese and a package of ham-exactly what she's come to expect from the general's fridge. The bottom shelves overflow with fruits and vegetables-peppers, apples, broccoli, a kiwi, and something she thinks might be a cactus. It's more produce than you usually see in an Air Force officer's refrigerator and it's Daniel's work.
His first time back from Abydos, he returned with a certain reverence to all things modern-a year in a primitive desert community had transformed internal plumbing into magic. She is more than pleased that Daniel hasn't lost the ability to be entranced by something as simple and wonderful as the variety of colors and shape to be found at the local farmer's market.
He catches her staring into the fridge and flashes her another of those shy smiles of his. "Yeah, went crazy again. Been a while since I was last off base and had anything that didn't come out of a can. Of course, now I don’t know how I'll eat it all before it spoils."
"Bring it back with you to SGC," she suggests, as he snags the juice and then pours two glasses. He gives her one, and she follows him into the living room. "Teal'c will thank you for it, even if the Marines don't."
"Maybe," he says, then sprawls into a chair. "So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?"
He leaves the implication hanging in his tone that he suspects she's checking up on him, that he couldn't possibly be exactly exciting enough on his own to entice anyone's interest. Ever. He has always underplayed his value-it's not important to him, so he shrugs it off. He is not the kind of man who associates formal titles with automatic respect-not for himself, and not for others. And she smiles at a memory.
The first time he offered, "Call me Daniel," he smiled at her like he was offering a present-or the password for a private club. He uses his formal address when it suits him, when he thinks it appropriate, when he wants emotional distance, or really doesn't want someone calling him Daniel because he doesn't like that person. In turn, it's been Sam and Jack for him-they are on the inside of that club. But she's never found the freedom, or any comfort, in calling the general by his first name. He's been the colonel, then the general. He's been O'Neill-only rarely Jack, because her habit after this many years really is to think of him as 'sir.'
Sam leans back into the couch cushions but doesn't go as far as Daniel, who puts his feet up on the coffee table as if he's more than at home. The table, she notices, is overflowing with issues of Newsweek and National Geographic.
"Actually, I was wondering if you wanted to go hiking?" she asks. "You know how beautiful it is this time of year, and I just moved back, and I thought maybe you'd like to get out, get some unrecycled air after too much-"
"I'd love to," he says, stopping her before she can work up to a full babble. "Just let me find some shoes."
He leaves her sitting in the general's living room to rummage somewhere in the back of the house, calling out behind him, "Why don't you grab some stuff from the fridge for lunch? There's plenty of apples."
Ah, yes. Daniel's idea of a balanced meal is something that he can fit in one hand and eat while he's on the move or poring over a book.
Rummaging gives her something to do, and by the time Daniel comes back to the kitchen, sweats swapped for jeans and boots, she's grabbed two apples, some carrots, the cheese, and a carton of strawberries with that overripe sweet aroma which means eat now or toss tomorrow. She shoves everything into a plastic bag that she found under the sink.
"Do you have a coat or something?" she asks, amused he's still wearing the fishing shirt.
"I'll borrow one of Jack's," he says, grabbing something blue that looks potentially waterproof from the hall closet as he follows her out the door.
Daniel keeps his face pressed to the window most of the drive up into the mountains, reminding Sam of making this drive with him before. It also reminds her of her niece's expression when Mark let her take the girl for the day a few years ago. Daniel can be an adult when he chooses, but he shares in common with the general an ability to revert, in about five seconds, to about twelve.
Sam picks a trail she remembers from her Academy days. It's one they've hiked before, the one that leads to a pond and climbs high without ever being too steep, because she isn't sure how well Daniel will handle the altitude right now. The after effects of the bracelets that locked his body chemistry to Vala are still unknown. Other than passing out on the bridge of the Prometheus, and an unusual amount of fatigue, nothing much else has shown up. Still, she's going to be careful.
She shouldn't have worried. He talks her ear off most of the way up, finding enough breath for the hike and a rambling lecture about how the Shoshone hunted the northern part of Colorado, their language being one of the Northern Uto-Aztecan dialects, while the Cheyenne and Arapaho claimed territory to the east, and everyone dealt with Apache raids. But Apache in Zuñi means 'enemy' and the tribe who raided this area was really known as the Jicarilla, which is Spanish for 'little basket,' but their name for themselves was the Tinde.
She has no idea how he accumulates these details-sleepless nights and the Internet? Or just too many books? But she lets him ramble because she likes the sound of his voice, and she's interested, despite herself.
He tells her more stories about his first dig in college, when he uncovered human remains in New Mexico and misidentified a fake Navajo pot made in the late 19th century as an authentic pre-Columbian artifact. He connects the Hopi snake dance to story-telling warnings about the Goa'uld, and then shifts over to the ancient pyramid mound found in Mississippi, and Cahokia, the prehistoric city built by the Natchez.
Possibly remembering she's an astrophysicist, he transitions from there into the cosmology of the tribes and how mounds and pyramids are built to track the movement of stars, sun and moon. Sam nods, asks questions, and swaps more recent information from the Hubble telescope for studying the universe. It's a familiar pattern by now, a give and take from their separate areas of expertise.
Soon they've hiked high enough that the trees have changed in both type and color. Every now and then, Daniel stops talking and she looks back to find him staring in open-mouthed wonder at an aspen that shudders and shimmers in the breeze under a crystalline sky. He eats it all in with eyes that have spent too long seeing the grays of a military base, and she watches him silently each time he pauses, not wanting to break the spell. When they finally reach the small pond, he lets out a long, deep satisfied breath.
They settle on a log near the edge of the water and watch tiny fish zip towards bits of cheese that Daniel tosses onto the surface. By the end of lunch their fingers are dyed red with strawberry and Sam's tongue echoes with the sharp taste of cheddar. Daniel leans back onto his elbows, face to the sky, and Sam doesn't warn him about burning quickly at high elevations because his smile is more radiant than the sun.
"Sha're really would have loved it here," he sighs.
She presses her lips tight. The first time they made this hike, he'd said this, but he had been able to use the future tense. She had told him in return that someday they would take Sha're here after they found her. In some other perfect universe, Daniel found Sha're and saved her. That, however, is not this Daniel's universe. Now he has lost someone else. They have lost Vala, and while she was not one of them, she sacrificed herself for them. Because Vala destroyed the Ori supergate, one of them did not have to. Sam worries that Vala Mal Doran has become Daniel's Joe Faxon.
Pulling her knees up, Sam rests her chin on them and dares to ask, "Tell me more about Sha're."
Daniel looks at her with a blue-eyed intensity that catches her breath in her throat. "God, you know it all already, Sam. She was the best thing that ever happened to me. If my whole life before was a storm, Sha're was the rainbow that came after and made it all worth it. She kept me grounded, showed me patience. She was fierce and brave, full of wonder and love…" His voice trails off and for a minute Sam is worried she has probed into painful memories, but he smiles at her instead. "She would have liked you, Sam, if she'd gotten the chance to really spend time with you. You'd have liked her."
Sam spent one sandstorm-a few hours-with Sha're. Most of that time, the woman stuck close to Daniel, had hung back. Sam figures the reticence was not due to shyness-a shy woman would not kiss her man the way that Sha're had kissed Daniel before he'd left her to take them to the cartouche room. Cultural conditioning had probably kept Sha're in the background-the norm in the Middle East is for women to avoid a public presence. However, Sam knows Sha're as a woman who was able to mentally fight back against a Goa'uld-that argues a formidable strength of will and intelligence. So, yes, she would have liked to have known that woman. She would have liked to have gotten to know Vala a little better, too.
Since she's already there in thoughts, Sam lets the words out. "And Vala?"
Daniel glances at her, eyebrows arching with a question in return, his head tilts, making sunlight gleams off the wire edge of his glasses. Then he frowns. "Vala was-difficult. Different. Trouble. And I wish to hell she'd told us-she had no business going off in that ship by herself."
She thinks about how Daniel has darted ahead to save a woman from throwing herself off a cliff. About how he shot out a window and dove into killing radiation to save a planet. About him on his own, facing off against a megalomaniac version of herself made of Replicator parts. "You mean if you'd thought of it first, you wouldn't have jumped ahead with action, no matter the consequences?"
His mouth pulls down. "Not without help," he tells her, but then his voice softens and he admits, "I'm not that good a pilot. But if she'd had someone else to work the rings-"
"We'd be missing two instead of one."
He turns to look out over the water. "Do you think it's foolish to hope she is missing-that she's not…." He glances at her again. "I spent years hoping for Sha're. Here I am back at the same place, doing the same thing and thinking it can work out different just because I want a better result."
"Daniel, I'm so sorry about Vala. I know you two, well-you did connect. And maybe…god, I really don't want to say someday again. This place is turning out to be a spot for that. And I'm not sure that's a good thing."
"It is. Sometimes all we have is hope, however fragile or rare it is to find it. And, well, just because one time doesn't work out, that doesn't invalidate the next possibility. Aren't the statistics the same every time a roulette wheel spins?"
She has to smile at that. "Mathematical probabilities as a means to optimism? I suppose there are worse things."
Sitting up, she turns to put the leftovers back into her daypack. A sudden splash of freezing water on her back makes her shout, and she swings around to find Daniel grinning at her, his fingers cupped and reaching into the pond for another handful. By the time the fight is over, she's toppled Daniel into the pond and he's taken her with him. They're both soaked from the hips down and getting there from the hips up. He shakes his head, sending droplets flying, and Sam ducks, pushing him away. He no longer has hair that reaches his collar, but with the haircut he has-and his slouch-there's no way anyone would mistake him for military. He reaches for her and she knows he's going to dunk her again, so she raises her hands for a truce. And it's good to see him grinning like a damn fool.
By the time they reach the car, the sun has mostly dried them off so Sam doesn't have to dig into her trunk on the off chance of finding some blankets or towels to protect the seats. They stop on the way home for pescados y mariscos burritos smothered in cheese and red sauce because Daniel says it's been too long since he had decent Mexican-the general, when he's in town, feeds them all pizza, hot dogs, and potato chips. The sun dips below the horizon as they eat outdoors and a chill seeps into the air.
When Sam pulls into the general's driveway, Daniel thanks her, tells her they shouldn't leave it so long until another outing like this. His smile says even more, offers gratitude for the company. He pauses in the door to wave to her before disappearing into the dark house and she waits for a light to turn on before backing out.
Driving home, she thinks about the first time she went hiking with Daniel. About how, afterwards, she finally believed this Stargate thing might really work out for her. It has done far more than that. She's smiling the entire drive home and long into the night.
======
He misses Sam.
She's no longer a couple of floors away, or even a couple of states away. And Daniel tells himself he is not going to be jealous that Sam is in Atlantis. He still has other things to think about, like the remnants of the Ori army, and expanding R&D exploration now that Jack has the IOA out of the picture and better funding back from the Pentagon. But, damn, he misses Sam, and he wonders if she's missing him. That's when he makes up his mind.
If he's learned anything over the past eleven years, over all the years of his life, in fact, it's that the universe never pauses for you to catch up. Whatever happened yesterday, tomorrow will still come, because even time traps don't last forever. It's best to act while you can.
Grabbing a pack, he stuffs a digital recorder into it, remembers to grab a couple of power bars that he keeps in his desk and a bottle of water from his 'I live here too much of the time' stash. He stops to change into civilian clothes, but he keeps his boots, then he heads out of the mountain.
It's the kind of weather Sam loves-fall nips the air, and the trees will be changing colors. There's no traffic, no one else is playing hooky, and a sense of guilt stirs in him, leaving him wishing he had Sam to share his bad behavior. But he does have her with him in a sense. On the trail, he turns on the recorder and keeps it pointing at the scenery-the ragged mountains, the soft pines, the sharp sky.
"Hey, Sam, thought you might like a hike, so I'm taking you along even if you are in another galaxy. It's not too warm to go fast, so we're going to cover a lot of ground today."
He keeps up the commentary as his stride covers the ground, filling the recording with gossip from the base. Rumor is that Siler's accidents are now due to his having developed a crush on Dr. Lam. Mitchell's trying to get a SG team basketball league going, but given everyone's schedule there's only been one game. Vala's becoming the only research assistant Daniel's ever had who understands his filing system. Teal'c's additional years have finally bought him some respect, and he's actually making progress at restoring a strong Jaffa coalition. It's not all good news, but Daniel leaves out the bad. Sam will know all that already. And, somehow, non-sequiturs weave their way into everything.
When he makes it to the pond, he figures he's almost out of time-the battery light is blinking-so he turns the camera and speaks into it. It'll be days, if not weeks, before he manages to get this transmission slipped to her.
"It's still someday here, Sam. I wanted you to know that. Someday you'll be back, or…well, this time I'm hanging onto a someday with you here." He stops, thinks about it, and the words are sticking in his throat, so he makes his voice go bright and fast, "Unless, of course, you've found a better spot there, and there's no way Jack's not letting me get back to Atlantis for a visit."
He runs out of anything other than emotions, so he waves at the camera. Shutting off the recorder, he stares at the scenery, wishes there was a someday that could keep him here. But he has responsibilities that can't be ignored. He'll go back to the Mountain, to his lab, and a job he loves, even when it hurts. He will argue with Vala, and probably with Mitchell, and sit in long silences with Teal'c. And he'll think about Sam, and how she admitted before she left that she still wants to tell everyone about those who have died for them so they can fight over the closest parking space.
Eventually, it will get easier. They've been split before-god, he was gone for a year. He just hates being the one left behind. Eventually, he'll be able to accept, even understand, Sam's decision to go-not that she had much choice. It's the military, and she goes where she's sent. And he'll forgive Jack for letting it happen because that's what he and Jack do. But Sam has given him an understanding that has nothing to do with books or intellect. She's shown him far more than this trail. There's peace in the idea that some friendships last beyond any boundaries of space or time. And whatever may be next, he won't be facing it alone. Nor will Sam.
Original Title: Eroding Away the Mountains
Original Author:
abyssinia4077
Back to Part 2
======
After Daniel comes back from his turn at being stranded on another planet-and he would get the one in a civil war, not the nice rural world-and after he nearly ascends before finding human form again, and after Sam loses her father and ends her engagement, they decide to climb Pike's Peak as they did years ago. Teal'c is on Dakara in meetings to build a free Jaffa nation, and the general declines their invitation, saying they're a little old for this, so they'd better get this out of their systems while they can. This answer makes no sense, which is typical Jack. But Sam thinks it's the general's way of giving them time on their own. They're all supposed to meet at his cabin next week for what he calls strenuous fishing. It's probably for the best the general does not join them, because neither of them is in the mood for wisecracks and the path is harder than she remembers and filled with enough weekend warriors that they can't talk freely.
When they reach the top Daniel flops onto his back, raising a tiny dust cloud, and flings an arm over his eyes. Sam sits next to him and digs through her pack, throwing a granola bar onto his stomach where it rises and falls with each breath. "I think Jack is right," he wheezes. "We are too old for this."
Sam ignores him and starts peeling an orange. It's been days since she ate something that wasn't field rations, cafeteria food, quick bites grabbed between battling what the general now calls bug-bots. It's longer since she's actually cooked. When she opened her fridge this morning the vegetable crisper boasted five new species of mold, but the orange was miraculously untouched. Daniel sits up and decides the chocolate chip granola bar is acceptable. He rips it open and stuffs the wrapper into his pocket before taking a bite. This is as familiar to her as this trail.
It seems to be to Daniel as well because he pulls the wrapper out again, looks at it, then at her. "You asked me once if I ever felt like leaving something like this lying around? So some future archaeologist could find it?"
She nods and smiles and Daniel examines the wrapper, squinting as the silvery foil flashes the sunlight into his eyes. "You said you wouldn't," she tells him.
"I thought I said I didn't feel like littering so someone could know we had granola bars."
She throws an orange peel at him. "You said if they didn't already know English, the words wouldn't help them much. But that that much writing on something as simple as a food wrapper implies a literacy that isn't limited to the upper class. Then you went on about the material-obviously engineered, indicates a degree of technological sophistication, and the fact that we have food this processed, this portable, means we've advanced to the point where the act of food gathering doesn't take most of our resources and we can devote time to study and development." Tilting her head, she pulls up the rest of it from memory. "Oh, and you mentioned there'll be enough saved copies of magazines and commercials for anyone to know Quaker Oats existed."
Sam grins at him, then eats a slice of orange. She loves this about him, that his mind works in this fashion. She looks at a new artifact and tries to backwards-engineer it, determine what it's made of, how it works, but Daniel has always looked at something and backwards-engineers the people who made it, the culture it came from.
"Do you miss it?" she asks him.
"I miss a lot of things," he says, looking at her over the tops of his glasses. "I missed breakfast."
"I mean archaeology. Going on digs and finding new things about ancient civilizations," she insists, not letting it drop. "We don't even do much of that anymore."
"Yes, but how many archaeologists have had the chance to meet descendants of those civilizations who still maintain the culture? Anyway, I couldn't go back now, knowing how much is wrong. And if I try to tell anyone the truth, I'll end up back in an institution with those nice white jackets. Or dead." She can hear the regret in his voice-it's still there, has been for years. She knows how he feels. They've started slow leaks from the program, but while she can pass along some of the science, Daniel has no viable cover story to rewrite history.
Sam thinks about asking Daniel what he wants now, with Anubis really, finally gone, and the Goa'uld mostly beaten, and the Replicators wiped out. Does he want to stay on an SG team that doesn't do first contact, one of the teams who can go back to a planet and spend weeks digging into ruins, exploring cultures? She knows he keeps up on all the reports, but he no longer has even a chance to beg for one more day in an ancient temple. That hasn't been on SG-1's agenda for some time. No wonder he thinks about Atlantis with longing-that's a city still waiting for exploration.
But she isn't sure she wants to know his answer. Instead she stands up, shoulders her pack, and reaches her hand out to help Daniel up.
Daniel has become expert at straddling too many worlds-no longer an archaeologist, not quite a soldier, a diplomat who can be tactless in the extreme, a man who knows over two dozen languages but who doesn't get the chance to speak them. And she will swear ever time he comes back from the dead he has new muscles on him. She feels their power as she pulls him to his feet. He's not an expert marksman, but he can wield just about any weapon. He can take point and cover their six. He still isn't as quick to draw his weapon as the others, he's still horrible at hand-to-hand, he will flinch at loud explosions. But he is her choice for who she wants with her when she steps through the Stargate, because he's agile as a ferret at getting out of tight spots. And he has more 'gate addresses in memory than anyone.
As she follows him down the mountain, she sees a new level of awareness in him, new fluidity to his movements. Daniel actually seems to own his body now. She remembers watching him hike down this path during their early years, all legs and lean mass with his hand brushing his thigh, seeking to stabilize his Beretta, which he wasn't wearing. He still has that habit.
Most of the way down, they cross a field blooming with wildflowers that remind Sam of the ones Daniel brought her after Jolinar died. She hung them upside down around her living room to dry because she couldn't remember the last time anyone had given her flowers. Her hands drag over a few soft petals and, on a whim, she picks two yellow somethings and calls out to Daniel, "Your hair's too short for flowers."
Years ago, last hike here, she'd stuck flowers in Daniel's hair before turning to run back into the field. He came after her, tackled her, shoved a fistful of flowers down the back of her shirt. They'd rolled on the ground, wrestling and laughing and luckily not finding any bees, until Daniel had started sneezing his head off.
Coming back, he takes the flowers from her hand, tucks one behind each ear. "Your hair's not too short," he says. Then he kisses each cheek, left then right, a soft brush of his lips. She grins up at him, links her hand with his, starts down the trail again, both of them in step.
"Daniel, why haven't we ever…?" she lets the words drift into a sigh.
"What?" he asks.
Shaking her head, she decides her guys have it right. There are some things that need no words.
He reaches over, brushes pollen or something away from her cheek. Then he reads her mind, or whatever is on her face, "Maybe I'm saving you for when I'm sixty and really desperate."
"What?" she gets the word out around a choked laugh.
"You know, like that pretty woman movie."
"You mean Julia Roberts and that was My Best Friend's Wedding. And wasn't her best friend gay? And why do you even know either of these films?"
"Teal'c. That was just after he heard the phase 'chick flick' from Jack. And you know Teal'c-he'll watch anything."
"That's scary."
"Oh, no, scary is Teal'c coming to me for an explanation of the origin of the phase and suitable examples-and I had them." Daniel frowns at that, then lifts his free hand in a wave. "But wasn't the gay guy her other best friend? Anyway, we could have the same arrangement-we'll marry each other if we're still single in twenty years." Then Daniel slants her a look, and just asks, "So what happened with Pete?"
She's dazzled enough by this fast flow of words that she just answers. "More like what didn't happen-you were right about the adoration. It is fun, but…well, it's not enough. And to be honest…" she hesitates, then wets her lip and finds the truth, or something close enough to it.
"It was the dog."
"The dog?" He turns to look at her, but keeps walking and keeps her hand.
"Pete wanted a house. And a yard with a dog." She stops there because this isn't explaining anything, but Daniel smiles.
"And you're more of a cat person?" he asks. Only it isn't really a question.
She grins at him, because he understands. And this is Daniel. If she needs the words, she can ask for them and get them. Pete is terrific. Pete is the perfect guy. He was also what she needed at the time, but she isn't right for what he needs. And, what is it with these guys-even Fifth wanted to tuck her away someplace safe and domestic. Her team, however, has done nothing but push her to get out there and do more than she thought she could. No wonder she can't settle for less now.
As Daniel leads them back down the trail again, Sam thinks they're both walking a bit lighter.
"Hey, what are you bringing to the general's solstice party?" she asks as the trail widens and flattens.
"Uh, Sam, are we anywhere near midsummer? Or even sure that Jack really knows what a solstice is, and why does he still plan a party for it?"
She sorts through the questions, decides to pick a different answer. "He does know how to use his telescope, Daniel. Anyway, you know it's just an excuse to drink beer and fire up the grill."
"He's 'the man' and he still needs an excuse? These things used to be important in our culture, you know. Solstice celebrations are some of the oldest holidays. Even the most ancient of Earth cultures celebrated the solstice, and most of the people we've found have something similar. Recognizing the importance of the sun, its life giving force, seems universal among human cultures. And we trivialize this into an excuse for a party?"
Sam nods. She's had this lecture before from him and it led to her asking what solstice had been like on Abydos.
Two days, he'd told her. But it was different the year he was there, since he had helped those people kill their sun god. The women spent an entire week preparing food, the men hunted, and the children helped clean and decorate Nagada. Daniel hadn't been good at hunting, so he'd helped in the city instead.
Sam suspects this was the Abydonians way of trying to get Daniel to do less. Her first time to Abydos, she saw the way they treated him-revered him. They'd probably wanted him to act the honored hero, stay distant as befitting someone able to kill a god. Knowing Daniel, he would have found that boring and inconvenient, so he'd have climbed down from any pedestal they put him on just so he could be in the middle of all the action. He must have driven them crazy since they couldn't exactly tell their honored hero what to do. After a year of that, no wonder Daniel arrived on SG-1 complete with the attitude that he should have equal standing in all decisions.
She bumps her hip into his and asks, "Daniel, tell me about Abydos and the solstice again. About the feast, the children born being presented and given their proper names."
"Sounds like you should tell it," he says, but she nudges him again. They're almost down the mountain now. He gives a shrug and gives in.
"Well, in the late afternoon, everyone separated with women on one end part of the main meeting square and men on the other. And Children who had reached their thirteenth year were initiated as adults. Sha're wouldn't tell me what happened on the women's side, but the men's side involved lots of chanting, face paint, and moonshine."
"You mean paint thinner."
"Hey, who's telling this? So we drank, chanted, drummed. The drumming went on and on, until it became a rumble that got into your chest. It was more intoxicating than drink. As the sun set, everyone gathered and the drums stopped. We told stories, ate and drank until close to dawn."
"And the stories?" she prompts.
He looks at her with a smile in his eyes but not on his lips, and she thinks he'll go stubborn and won't indulge her, but he says, "They were tales of their history, and of heroes. Skaara's impression of Jack was priceless." Daniel laughs. It's a rare sound and leaves her smiling. "The next morning anyone still awake at dawn woke the others to welcome the sun and we fasted until night fall-the idea was to accompany the sun on its longest stay of the year. That evening, at the end of the first feast of the new sun-year, any newly married couples were brought forth and blessed with long life and, uh, fertility and..." Daniel's voice drifts and Sam knows the memories are happy, but bittersweet, and the times are too long gone. Then he says, his voice soft, "It was a night I'll never forget."
"I bet." Sam pokes him in the ribs to pull him back to her. "Remember the year you performed the Abydonian traditions for Jack's party? Anderson's wife had had a baby and Cooper on SG-9 had gotten married. We should do that again."
"Uh, maybe not all of it," Daniel says. "You know, you're as bad as Sha're."
It's more than sun warming her face now. She's flattered as always by the comparison. She loves the reverence in his voice the rare times Daniel talks about the woman he loved and married and lost. But she is never certain how much it pains Daniel to remember this particular failure.
But he's told her of Sha're's fascination with Earth's holidays, and with Earth in general. The woman raised with one people, one god, couldn't believe in a place with so many different people, religions, gods, and traditions. Sam is still not sure she could list off all the holidays celebrated in America. But Daniel, the student of his own culture, carried them to another world.
Daniel has explained Santa Claus to a woman who'd never seen a chimney. "Or try Flag Day," he told Sam, when he talked about the cultural exchange he made on another world. But he did not just teach the holidays. At Sha're's insistence, they had celebrated each one. From Diwali to Purim to Martin Luther King Day to Valentine's Day-and Sam still cannot imagine what a desert people might have used to make a bunch of red and pink hearts. She only hopes no real hearts were involved.
She glances now at Daniel, sees the distance in his eyes. Abydos is long gone into nothing more than memory and dust. She hates that Daniel no longer has even the hope of home and family-Abydos is his past but not his future. But there's also relief for her. It's selfish of her, and she chides herself for it. But she's greedy. They got Daniel back in part because of the loss of Abydos-that was where ascended Daniel made his last stand against the partly ascended Anubis. That's where Daniel fell from grace, because of them, because of his passion, because of Abydos. She searches her heart for the sharp twinge of jealousy over the life Daniel once longed to reclaim; a simple life with desert people. But all she finds now is regret for what could have made him happy.
Three weeks later they haven't been to Ancient Egypt, but they have a ZPM. And there are fish in the general's lake. She has been thinking about this for a few days now, ever since they got back from a cabin with something that's really more like a big pond. She's been wondering how to compare timelines when she has nothing to use as a benchmark; they have the tape that they went back to the past, but what the hell did they do? She seeks out Daniel because he is always willing to tackle issues loaded with too much potential existential angst.
"So how do we know we're us?" she asks him.
He frowns, pushes up his glasses. "We think, therefore, we think we're in trouble here? Maybe the fish weren't in Jack's pond, but they were somewhere else-the pond next door?"
"Daniel!"
"No, I'm being serious, Sam. If a difference makes no difference, is there a difference? Do you feel-different? Wrong somehow?"
"Do you think we'd notice?"
She is aware that time travel is not really possible, given current physics, but they've been doing the impossible for years. She also doesn't fully trust that the Ancients knew what they were doing. Stargates shouldn't work. But they do. And the Ancients messed around with time-travel on other words and only ended up creating nothing more than disasters for the unwary.
"You know, each time we step through the 'gate, we're broken into energy signatures, and made over again," she tells Daniel.
"So-I haven't been me since I first went to Abydos? It really is our consciousness, our souls that make us who we are?"
She shrugs. There are places where physics touch metaphysics and she's never liked straying into those boggy areas. "Well, quantum particles can exist two places at once. That's been proven."
"So, on the quantum level, we can be dead and buried a few thousand years in Egypt, or be bouncing around some other time, and be here, and also be in another reality somewhere, but it's all the same soul stretched across infinity? That would fit most spiritual philosophies-an infinite soul ought to handle that really well."
They stare at each other for a few seconds, then she says, "That's the trouble with infinity-it's impossible to compress into finite thought, words and concepts."
"So, we're left with what? If we fixed the timeline-a timeline-maybe we did a great job, or a lousy one, but it all boils down to how comfortable we are with where we are right now? If it feels right, it's good enough?"
She checks in with how she does feel-something Daniel has taught her. She does feel right-this feels right with Daniel. Or it's good enough for government work. Finally, she says, "Yeah. I guess. Works for me."
That evening, the general hosts his not-midsummer solstice party, and announces his transfer to DC. He's already told his team-he took Sam aside earlier today, and she sees that Daniel doesn't look surprised so he's in on it, too, and Teal'c is going to be leaving for Dakara again soon. Later, she finds Daniel up on the roof, by the general's telescope.
It was just a few years ago, during one of the other solstice parties, that O'Neill had tried to grill burgers with one arm in a sling due to a trinium arrow. Teal'c had had to tie him to a chair on his deck to keep him still, and Siler kept the beers in O'Neill's good hand to keep him happy. At sunset, Daniel held Anderson's baby boy to the sun, bestowed the traditional Abydonian blessings for good health and courage. They told stories long into the night, and counted absent friends in silence.
She is soon to be absent. Transfer orders are pending for her-long overdue. She should have been rotated out years ago, except for the fact that Hammond needed her, and O'Neill kept her, and now that most of the threat is gone Cassie needs her elsewhere. None of this will be a comfort to Daniel.
Of all of them, he is the one who most belongs in the Stargate program. He started it by opening the 'gate. He has made himself into someone who no longer fits his own world. Or perhaps he was always someone whose unique set of skills have always been waiting for this place. Sitting with him, she holds his hand, and tells him, "I spoke to the general-he's going to put in for Atlantis for you."
Daniel's head comes up and, in the twilight, his eyes glitter bright. "What? Atlantis? But he's said-"
"He needed you here. He did. But he's going to Washington. I'm going to Nevada. Teal'c is headed to Dakara. Did you think we'd leave you behind? You're going, too."
He shakes his head, can't speak, can't answer. That's all the answer she needs. His arm tightens around her shoulders. "God, I'm going to miss you."
She lightly punches his arm. "There's always data bursts. And you better tell me everything."
======
Sam shifts awkwardly on the concrete step and rings the doorbell again. General O'Neill has gone back to Washington, but his house is still here and Daniel is again homeless and staying in the spare room. By all good sense, the general should sell his house-he's in Colorado Springs only a few times for a few days each year. But he swears he hates hotels, so his house remains his-and SG-1's-second home. Teal'c stays here when he wants to spend a few days outside the Mountain. She used the house last year when she got her home fumigated. Now Daniel's here because he missed the Daedalus, and because he was attached by the wrist to an alien con-artist and stuck inside the Mountain. The bracelet is gone, so is Vala, and so is Daniel's apartment.
He mumbled something to Sam that at least this time the official records did not list him as dead, so how hard would it be to get a lease. That was two weeks ago. After being confined within the Mountain, in small rooms, Daniel was probably willing to live anywhere that had windows. But there are times Sam wonders if he misses the open spaces of Abydos, or even of Vis Urban.
She's turning to go, giving up her errand as foolish-he's probably sleeping, which he's been doing a lot of since the bracelet came off and Vala disappeared into an intergalactic wormhole. But then Daniel finally opens the door and blinks at her myopically with his glasses on top of his head. He's barefoot in faded sweatpants and a blue t-shirt that declares "I'd rather be fishing." She knows these clothes. They were the ones he had when he had nothing more than the robe he wore back from Abydos and his mission BDUs. The way that some people have comfort food, Daniel has comfort clothes. She's amazed these have survived the years, the moves, and the not-really-but-almost-dead experiences.
On the other hand, these could be Jack's clothes, dug out of his closet. The general gives away nothing, throws out even less, and she is still astonished at the stuff of Daniel's that keeps turning up that the general has hung onto.
She says, "Am I bothering you?" at the same time he says, "Sam, I'm afraid Jack isn't here."
They both smile at the same time, then she says. "I know. He's back in DC."
Daniel rubs a hand through his hair, leaving it rumpled. It's shaggy, but he's shaved off that scruffy beard that had been coming in red-gold and left him looking ready for a pirate crew. "Actually, Jack took Mitchell fishing."
That leaves her eyebrows climbing, because she can't picture the general and Cam kicking back with some beers and some rods and swapping fishing lures and stories. Daniel's smile is sly, so she says, "In other words…."
"Yeah, he took Mitchell off to be eaten by mosquitoes that could double for death gliders…."
"While he gets a few words in about how Cam had better lead this team better?" Sam grins now, because she can picture the general kicking back with a beer, and just enough words to give Cam one of the worst weekends of his life.
"So, fishing," she says. "Actually, though, I came to see you, but if you're busy-" She leaves the words and thumbs a gesture over her shoulder.
"No, no, come in." He pauses for a minute before stepping aside so she can actually come through the door. "I was, uh, reading. I've been going through Jack's magazines for the year I was-well, I thought I'd finally catch up on contemporary culture for the year I wasn't." His smile still has that touch of shyness, as if he's inviting her to share the humor, but still a little worried she'll think him a geek for an interest in already outdated history.
"Oh. Well, NASA started mapping Mars with a thermal emission imaging system, we invaded Afghanistan, the first Spider-Man movie came out, and I have no idea who won the Stanley Cup that year," she tells him.
"What, you mean Jack didn't tell everyone?"
She glances at him and shakes her head. And she is not going to tell him about that year, and how for more than a few months O'Neill became so much a bastard that everyone pretty much kept out of his way. Instead, she checks out the general's house. There is still a poster of Mars on the wall and a model of an Apollo capsule on the bar. Some things really do not change.
Daniel's absent nod is another of those constants, as is the fact that if she asks him three days from now, he'll be able to tell her exactly what she said. There are photographic memories, but Daniel has an auditory memory-hit the right button and you can play back anything he's heard. She remembers now her initial awe of him-how she knew she had nothing to offer this man.
She developed the dialing program and she can explain some of the physics behind how the 'gate works, but Daniel translated the symbols, stepped through into the unknown, helped kill a Goa'uld without any military training, and lived for a year on an alien planet. That was when he was just getting started.
He seemed a little larger than life back when she'd read the mission reports and thought him dead. But then she met him, he came back with them, and when she hunted him up at O'Neill's place, she had Daniel standing in front of her like this, wearing rumpled sweatpants and a confused smile, and she found herself more nervous than for her doctoral defense. He has always kept her off-balance and guessing-Daniel's like quicksilver, his mind as agile and fluid as mercury in its liquid state.
Daniel just pulls his glasses down onto his face and moves to the fridge. "Would you like something to drink? Jack's got beer-of course-if you want, though it's, ah, a little early I guess. Um, soda? Orange juice?" She catches a glimpse around his shoulder and sees a few cans on the top shelf with some cheese and a package of ham-exactly what she's come to expect from the general's fridge. The bottom shelves overflow with fruits and vegetables-peppers, apples, broccoli, a kiwi, and something she thinks might be a cactus. It's more produce than you usually see in an Air Force officer's refrigerator and it's Daniel's work.
His first time back from Abydos, he returned with a certain reverence to all things modern-a year in a primitive desert community had transformed internal plumbing into magic. She is more than pleased that Daniel hasn't lost the ability to be entranced by something as simple and wonderful as the variety of colors and shape to be found at the local farmer's market.
He catches her staring into the fridge and flashes her another of those shy smiles of his. "Yeah, went crazy again. Been a while since I was last off base and had anything that didn't come out of a can. Of course, now I don’t know how I'll eat it all before it spoils."
"Bring it back with you to SGC," she suggests, as he snags the juice and then pours two glasses. He gives her one, and she follows him into the living room. "Teal'c will thank you for it, even if the Marines don't."
"Maybe," he says, then sprawls into a chair. "So, to what do I owe the pleasure of your company?"
He leaves the implication hanging in his tone that he suspects she's checking up on him, that he couldn't possibly be exactly exciting enough on his own to entice anyone's interest. Ever. He has always underplayed his value-it's not important to him, so he shrugs it off. He is not the kind of man who associates formal titles with automatic respect-not for himself, and not for others. And she smiles at a memory.
The first time he offered, "Call me Daniel," he smiled at her like he was offering a present-or the password for a private club. He uses his formal address when it suits him, when he thinks it appropriate, when he wants emotional distance, or really doesn't want someone calling him Daniel because he doesn't like that person. In turn, it's been Sam and Jack for him-they are on the inside of that club. But she's never found the freedom, or any comfort, in calling the general by his first name. He's been the colonel, then the general. He's been O'Neill-only rarely Jack, because her habit after this many years really is to think of him as 'sir.'
Sam leans back into the couch cushions but doesn't go as far as Daniel, who puts his feet up on the coffee table as if he's more than at home. The table, she notices, is overflowing with issues of Newsweek and National Geographic.
"Actually, I was wondering if you wanted to go hiking?" she asks. "You know how beautiful it is this time of year, and I just moved back, and I thought maybe you'd like to get out, get some unrecycled air after too much-"
"I'd love to," he says, stopping her before she can work up to a full babble. "Just let me find some shoes."
He leaves her sitting in the general's living room to rummage somewhere in the back of the house, calling out behind him, "Why don't you grab some stuff from the fridge for lunch? There's plenty of apples."
Ah, yes. Daniel's idea of a balanced meal is something that he can fit in one hand and eat while he's on the move or poring over a book.
Rummaging gives her something to do, and by the time Daniel comes back to the kitchen, sweats swapped for jeans and boots, she's grabbed two apples, some carrots, the cheese, and a carton of strawberries with that overripe sweet aroma which means eat now or toss tomorrow. She shoves everything into a plastic bag that she found under the sink.
"Do you have a coat or something?" she asks, amused he's still wearing the fishing shirt.
"I'll borrow one of Jack's," he says, grabbing something blue that looks potentially waterproof from the hall closet as he follows her out the door.
Daniel keeps his face pressed to the window most of the drive up into the mountains, reminding Sam of making this drive with him before. It also reminds her of her niece's expression when Mark let her take the girl for the day a few years ago. Daniel can be an adult when he chooses, but he shares in common with the general an ability to revert, in about five seconds, to about twelve.
Sam picks a trail she remembers from her Academy days. It's one they've hiked before, the one that leads to a pond and climbs high without ever being too steep, because she isn't sure how well Daniel will handle the altitude right now. The after effects of the bracelets that locked his body chemistry to Vala are still unknown. Other than passing out on the bridge of the Prometheus, and an unusual amount of fatigue, nothing much else has shown up. Still, she's going to be careful.
She shouldn't have worried. He talks her ear off most of the way up, finding enough breath for the hike and a rambling lecture about how the Shoshone hunted the northern part of Colorado, their language being one of the Northern Uto-Aztecan dialects, while the Cheyenne and Arapaho claimed territory to the east, and everyone dealt with Apache raids. But Apache in Zuñi means 'enemy' and the tribe who raided this area was really known as the Jicarilla, which is Spanish for 'little basket,' but their name for themselves was the Tinde.
She has no idea how he accumulates these details-sleepless nights and the Internet? Or just too many books? But she lets him ramble because she likes the sound of his voice, and she's interested, despite herself.
He tells her more stories about his first dig in college, when he uncovered human remains in New Mexico and misidentified a fake Navajo pot made in the late 19th century as an authentic pre-Columbian artifact. He connects the Hopi snake dance to story-telling warnings about the Goa'uld, and then shifts over to the ancient pyramid mound found in Mississippi, and Cahokia, the prehistoric city built by the Natchez.
Possibly remembering she's an astrophysicist, he transitions from there into the cosmology of the tribes and how mounds and pyramids are built to track the movement of stars, sun and moon. Sam nods, asks questions, and swaps more recent information from the Hubble telescope for studying the universe. It's a familiar pattern by now, a give and take from their separate areas of expertise.
Soon they've hiked high enough that the trees have changed in both type and color. Every now and then, Daniel stops talking and she looks back to find him staring in open-mouthed wonder at an aspen that shudders and shimmers in the breeze under a crystalline sky. He eats it all in with eyes that have spent too long seeing the grays of a military base, and she watches him silently each time he pauses, not wanting to break the spell. When they finally reach the small pond, he lets out a long, deep satisfied breath.
They settle on a log near the edge of the water and watch tiny fish zip towards bits of cheese that Daniel tosses onto the surface. By the end of lunch their fingers are dyed red with strawberry and Sam's tongue echoes with the sharp taste of cheddar. Daniel leans back onto his elbows, face to the sky, and Sam doesn't warn him about burning quickly at high elevations because his smile is more radiant than the sun.
"Sha're really would have loved it here," he sighs.
She presses her lips tight. The first time they made this hike, he'd said this, but he had been able to use the future tense. She had told him in return that someday they would take Sha're here after they found her. In some other perfect universe, Daniel found Sha're and saved her. That, however, is not this Daniel's universe. Now he has lost someone else. They have lost Vala, and while she was not one of them, she sacrificed herself for them. Because Vala destroyed the Ori supergate, one of them did not have to. Sam worries that Vala Mal Doran has become Daniel's Joe Faxon.
Pulling her knees up, Sam rests her chin on them and dares to ask, "Tell me more about Sha're."
Daniel looks at her with a blue-eyed intensity that catches her breath in her throat. "God, you know it all already, Sam. She was the best thing that ever happened to me. If my whole life before was a storm, Sha're was the rainbow that came after and made it all worth it. She kept me grounded, showed me patience. She was fierce and brave, full of wonder and love…" His voice trails off and for a minute Sam is worried she has probed into painful memories, but he smiles at her instead. "She would have liked you, Sam, if she'd gotten the chance to really spend time with you. You'd have liked her."
Sam spent one sandstorm-a few hours-with Sha're. Most of that time, the woman stuck close to Daniel, had hung back. Sam figures the reticence was not due to shyness-a shy woman would not kiss her man the way that Sha're had kissed Daniel before he'd left her to take them to the cartouche room. Cultural conditioning had probably kept Sha're in the background-the norm in the Middle East is for women to avoid a public presence. However, Sam knows Sha're as a woman who was able to mentally fight back against a Goa'uld-that argues a formidable strength of will and intelligence. So, yes, she would have liked to have known that woman. She would have liked to have gotten to know Vala a little better, too.
Since she's already there in thoughts, Sam lets the words out. "And Vala?"
Daniel glances at her, eyebrows arching with a question in return, his head tilts, making sunlight gleams off the wire edge of his glasses. Then he frowns. "Vala was-difficult. Different. Trouble. And I wish to hell she'd told us-she had no business going off in that ship by herself."
She thinks about how Daniel has darted ahead to save a woman from throwing herself off a cliff. About how he shot out a window and dove into killing radiation to save a planet. About him on his own, facing off against a megalomaniac version of herself made of Replicator parts. "You mean if you'd thought of it first, you wouldn't have jumped ahead with action, no matter the consequences?"
His mouth pulls down. "Not without help," he tells her, but then his voice softens and he admits, "I'm not that good a pilot. But if she'd had someone else to work the rings-"
"We'd be missing two instead of one."
He turns to look out over the water. "Do you think it's foolish to hope she is missing-that she's not…." He glances at her again. "I spent years hoping for Sha're. Here I am back at the same place, doing the same thing and thinking it can work out different just because I want a better result."
"Daniel, I'm so sorry about Vala. I know you two, well-you did connect. And maybe…god, I really don't want to say someday again. This place is turning out to be a spot for that. And I'm not sure that's a good thing."
"It is. Sometimes all we have is hope, however fragile or rare it is to find it. And, well, just because one time doesn't work out, that doesn't invalidate the next possibility. Aren't the statistics the same every time a roulette wheel spins?"
She has to smile at that. "Mathematical probabilities as a means to optimism? I suppose there are worse things."
Sitting up, she turns to put the leftovers back into her daypack. A sudden splash of freezing water on her back makes her shout, and she swings around to find Daniel grinning at her, his fingers cupped and reaching into the pond for another handful. By the time the fight is over, she's toppled Daniel into the pond and he's taken her with him. They're both soaked from the hips down and getting there from the hips up. He shakes his head, sending droplets flying, and Sam ducks, pushing him away. He no longer has hair that reaches his collar, but with the haircut he has-and his slouch-there's no way anyone would mistake him for military. He reaches for her and she knows he's going to dunk her again, so she raises her hands for a truce. And it's good to see him grinning like a damn fool.
By the time they reach the car, the sun has mostly dried them off so Sam doesn't have to dig into her trunk on the off chance of finding some blankets or towels to protect the seats. They stop on the way home for pescados y mariscos burritos smothered in cheese and red sauce because Daniel says it's been too long since he had decent Mexican-the general, when he's in town, feeds them all pizza, hot dogs, and potato chips. The sun dips below the horizon as they eat outdoors and a chill seeps into the air.
When Sam pulls into the general's driveway, Daniel thanks her, tells her they shouldn't leave it so long until another outing like this. His smile says even more, offers gratitude for the company. He pauses in the door to wave to her before disappearing into the dark house and she waits for a light to turn on before backing out.
Driving home, she thinks about the first time she went hiking with Daniel. About how, afterwards, she finally believed this Stargate thing might really work out for her. It has done far more than that. She's smiling the entire drive home and long into the night.
======
He misses Sam.
She's no longer a couple of floors away, or even a couple of states away. And Daniel tells himself he is not going to be jealous that Sam is in Atlantis. He still has other things to think about, like the remnants of the Ori army, and expanding R&D exploration now that Jack has the IOA out of the picture and better funding back from the Pentagon. But, damn, he misses Sam, and he wonders if she's missing him. That's when he makes up his mind.
If he's learned anything over the past eleven years, over all the years of his life, in fact, it's that the universe never pauses for you to catch up. Whatever happened yesterday, tomorrow will still come, because even time traps don't last forever. It's best to act while you can.
Grabbing a pack, he stuffs a digital recorder into it, remembers to grab a couple of power bars that he keeps in his desk and a bottle of water from his 'I live here too much of the time' stash. He stops to change into civilian clothes, but he keeps his boots, then he heads out of the mountain.
It's the kind of weather Sam loves-fall nips the air, and the trees will be changing colors. There's no traffic, no one else is playing hooky, and a sense of guilt stirs in him, leaving him wishing he had Sam to share his bad behavior. But he does have her with him in a sense. On the trail, he turns on the recorder and keeps it pointing at the scenery-the ragged mountains, the soft pines, the sharp sky.
"Hey, Sam, thought you might like a hike, so I'm taking you along even if you are in another galaxy. It's not too warm to go fast, so we're going to cover a lot of ground today."
He keeps up the commentary as his stride covers the ground, filling the recording with gossip from the base. Rumor is that Siler's accidents are now due to his having developed a crush on Dr. Lam. Mitchell's trying to get a SG team basketball league going, but given everyone's schedule there's only been one game. Vala's becoming the only research assistant Daniel's ever had who understands his filing system. Teal'c's additional years have finally bought him some respect, and he's actually making progress at restoring a strong Jaffa coalition. It's not all good news, but Daniel leaves out the bad. Sam will know all that already. And, somehow, non-sequiturs weave their way into everything.
When he makes it to the pond, he figures he's almost out of time-the battery light is blinking-so he turns the camera and speaks into it. It'll be days, if not weeks, before he manages to get this transmission slipped to her.
"It's still someday here, Sam. I wanted you to know that. Someday you'll be back, or…well, this time I'm hanging onto a someday with you here." He stops, thinks about it, and the words are sticking in his throat, so he makes his voice go bright and fast, "Unless, of course, you've found a better spot there, and there's no way Jack's not letting me get back to Atlantis for a visit."
He runs out of anything other than emotions, so he waves at the camera. Shutting off the recorder, he stares at the scenery, wishes there was a someday that could keep him here. But he has responsibilities that can't be ignored. He'll go back to the Mountain, to his lab, and a job he loves, even when it hurts. He will argue with Vala, and probably with Mitchell, and sit in long silences with Teal'c. And he'll think about Sam, and how she admitted before she left that she still wants to tell everyone about those who have died for them so they can fight over the closest parking space.
Eventually, it will get easier. They've been split before-god, he was gone for a year. He just hates being the one left behind. Eventually, he'll be able to accept, even understand, Sam's decision to go-not that she had much choice. It's the military, and she goes where she's sent. And he'll forgive Jack for letting it happen because that's what he and Jack do. But Sam has given him an understanding that has nothing to do with books or intellect. She's shown him far more than this trail. There's peace in the idea that some friendships last beyond any boundaries of space or time. And whatever may be next, he won't be facing it alone. Nor will Sam.