triumvirate - chapter four - overpowered
part two: bomb in a birdcage
Jack rips the electrodes from his forehead and rushes toward the metal door; he saw the shadow of a stranger and heard Carter cry for help, adrenaline coursing through her system. He reaches the door just as it clangs shut, slamming his palms onto the cold metal. “How the hell do you open this?” He can’t find a doorknob or a sensor, so he pounds on it even though he knows it won’t do any good. “Carter!” He shouts. He puts his ear to the door and thinks he can hear muffled thuds and curses and the sound of bodies being moved.
Daniel closes his eyes and listens. He blocks out Jack shouting for Marko to open the damn door and quiets Jack’s mental cursing that if anyone so much as thinks about hurting Carter, he’ll have them killed.
He doesn’t hear Sam. His heart sinks.
Somehow, though, he knows she’s alive; the thread of Sam that he’s felt for the past month still hums in his head. Dimmer than usual, but there.
Jack finally convinces Marko to open the door, only to reveal an empty room with an upturned stool and diagnostic equipment smashed to pieces scattered across the floor. He dashes through the open door on the other side of the room and finds himself in an inconspicuous hallway. It’s empty. Jack kicks the wall in frustration, satisfied when his boot leaves a black scuff mark against the perfect, shiny white tile. He slowly walks back to Daniel, bending down to pick up Sam’s combat bracelet from the floor on his way. He adjusts the leather straps and slides it on to his own wrist. “Where is she?”
“I do not know where your friend is,” Marko says.
Daniel grabs Jack’s arm to keep him from stepping any closer to Marko; he has no doubt that, given the opportunity, Jack would follow through with his intention to punch the much larger man. He might even win. Daniel’s not sure he’s ever seen such hatred in Jack’s eyes. He squeezes Jack’s arm: they can’t afford to piss these people off. “Who took her?”
“I do not know.”
“You’re lying,” Jack spits out as he takes a step forward around Daniel.
Marko tilts his head. “I do not know what you ask.”
Daniel turns just in time and shoves Jack’s shoulders backwards, forcing the other man into a chair. Stay. Once he’s certain Jack won’t get up, Daniel turns back to Marko. “Obviously there’s someone we’re supposed to call when guests of your government spontaneously disappear for no good reason.”
“Planetary Peacekeeping has already been informed. They will arrive shortly.”
Jack crosses his arms and tips back in the chair until it hits the wall. “We’ll wait.”
Someone roughly pulls the hood off of Sam’s head and she blinks rapidly in the unexpected harsh light. She shakes her head to get her hair out of her face and squints up at her backlit captor standing in front of her. She tries to rotate her wrists, testing the bonds that hold her to the chair, but she can’t; the knots around her ankles are just as tight as those around her wrists. Whoever it is has also divested her of her shirt, jacket and pants though, oddly, left her with boots. She debates asking what they want - and certainly thinks that she’s entitled to being just a little bit bitchy - but her training takes over and she stays silent.
“Beautiful,” her captor turns to the side and she can see that he’s male and, by his posture, that he’s not entirely pleased. It doesn’t stop him from leering at her. Sam resists the urge to spit in his eye. “She is, however, not Hokari.”
He steps further into the light and Sam swallows a gasp. Everything happened so quickly in the medical lab that she hadn’t had a moment to think where she’d seen the green-skinned aliens before. In the back of what she assumed was a transport pod, when she woke up with her head pounding from the energy weapon, she’d convinced herself that they looked like the Orions from Star Trek and that was the end of it. But now, with the stark glare of the bare light bulb shining on the man’s brilliant green skin, highlighting the subtle dark green mottling across his shoulders, she knows exactly where she’s seen them before: the MALP footage.
She hadn’t mentioned it at the time; they were all too caught up in the possibility that the telepathy problem could be gone by dinnertime (they’ve never been so lucky, but it was worth the hope) to focus on the meaning of two different aliens species on the same planet.
“What’s the problem, Driva?” a voice from the corner asks, tired.
“None, for the moment,” Driva says, trailing a green-tinged finger across Sam’s collarbone. He leans in, sniffing her hair, and Sam closes her eyes. He chuckles and dips his finger lower, tracing the edge of her sports bra. “She is…unique. We may get a high price for her.”
Sam tenses and forces her eyes open to scan the room while Driva discusses currency with voices in the shadows. The room is empty, save the chair she’s sitting in and a bare, brilliant light bulb hanging from the ceiling, with only one door she can see. She’s tied tightly enough that the chances of escaping are zero and she won’t be able to hurt anyone unless they come in range of a head butt; even then, she makes out enough shapes in the shadows to make that an unwise course of action - she’d hurt one, but the others would hurt her more.
She feels her watch still attached to her wrist, but she can’t twist to read it without drawing attention to herself; she has no idea how long she was out before waking up in the transport pod, or how far away from Daniel and Jack she is. But it can’t hurt. She closes her eyes.
DANIEL!
“She is shouting for her friend,” an unseen male voice announces. Sam pauses, confused. The voice speaks in the same bored, flat cadence of the Hokari.
Driva stops in the middle of his sentence to smack her with the back of his hand. “Silence.”
Sam feels blood trickle into her mouth. She spits, deciding she doesn’t care. JACK!
“Again,” the voice reports.
Her head snaps to the right and a blinding pain explodes behind her eye.
“Ivān,” Driva says, wiping Sam’s blood off of his knuckles. He points to a spot in front of Sam’s chair. “She shouts, you hit her. Understand?”
A hulking silhouette lumbers out of the shadows to stand before her. Driva walks off with the others and the last thing she hears before the door clangs shut is something about destroying perfectly good merchandise. Sam eyes Ivān’s massive hands and apologizes to herself in advance. She relaxes as much as she can. DANIEL!
She has a moment to wonder whether her head actually spun all the way around or it just felt that way and then she blacks out.
“What happened?” General Hammond asks as soon as the wormhole closes behind Jack and Daniel. They’d contacted him as soon as Planetary Peacekeeping had allowed, but Jack’s fidgeting in the background of the video feed while Daniel told him what happened had made Hammond think that they may already be too late. By the looks on the faces of the two men, things hadn’t improved much in the hours afterward.
Daniel barely manages to not shove an SF out of his way as he walks down the ramp. He desperately wants to kick - or punch or break or hurt - something: the situation had devolved into complete unproductivity and looking at thirty seconds worth of video footage while talking to people who were predictably disinclined to help. They’d given up after three hours.
Jack looks around the gate room. “Your office, General.” News that Sam is missing has probably already made it around the base, but not everyone needs to know the details of the situation or any of their suspicions. He sees Teal’c in the corner and nods to his friend, assuming Hammond had called him as soon as they’d hung up the first time.
Hammond nods and leads them up to his office where he repeats the question once the door shuts behind Teal’c.
“They took Carter,” Jack says, simply. “We got split up, something about cultural practices and her having to be in a different room than me and Daniel.”
Daniel jumps in, having committed the security camera footage to memory. “An alien came into the room Sam was in and shut the door. Three others showed up and shot Sam and the doctor with some kind of energy weapon. They took both of them and ran off.” He knows that there’s other footage somewhere - Ito had said that there wasn’t a single move made in the Ministry District that wasn’t recorded, so there must be security cameras in the hallways and elevators - but he asked for it and gotten there is no more in response. “The Hokari said that the aliens who took her were probably a rogue group of…” he trails off, remembering the exact language, “Venkati - one of the races protected by the Collective - engaging in guerrilla terrorist attacks against the Hokari. They didn’t elaborate on the why.”
“General, we have to go back,” Jack starts, hitting the palm of his hand against the chair. “They couldn’t possibly have wanted Carter; it sounds like their beef is with the Hokari and Carter just happened to be there. The doctor they took didn’t seem too high on the food chain. I know not every terrorist group operates the same, but they’ve gotta know that no one’s going to spend time finding the doc. Not when they have bigger problems.”
“What do you mean, Colonel?”
“The Hokari have security coming out their asses, sir. There’s no way those little green men just walked in there with ray guns.”
Hammond leans back in his chair. He files the obvious security problem away for future reference and focuses on his missing officer. “Let’s assume, for the moment, that they’re smart terrorists. And that Major Carter was not the target. If they know no one’s going to come looking for the doctor - and no one will pay ransom or whatever it is they want - why take them?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
Liar.
Jack glares at Daniel, gesturing for him to say that which neither of them wants to say out loud. If Daniel’s going to call him a liar - and it’s really only a guess - the other man can damn well say it.
“General, one of the things we discovered before we even went is that the Hokari are having a problem with their people disappearing and showing up months later in brothels on the other side of the galaxy. I think we can safely assume that the Venkati have something to do with that. We can stand here and hope that they’ll let her go because she’s human, but…” Daniel swallows, letting everything unsaid hang in the air.
Teal’c takes a step forward. “If Major Carter was abducted by those who would wish her harm, it would be best to return to the planet as soon as possible before they have a chance to move her.”
General Hammond nods. “Unfortunately, the Hokari have not proven themselves particularly helpful or friendly toward visitors. We’ll have to do this carefully.”
Sam wakes up on her side, a rock digging into her right shoulder. “Fuck,” she groans, placing her palm on the ground to push herself upward and sitting. She leans against the wall behind her for support and closes her eyes against the nausea. When counting very slowly and focusing on breathing doesn’t work, she gives in to the urge and pitches forward onto her knees and throws up.
Her stomach seemingly appeased, she moves to wipe her mouth with the sleeve of her shirt before remembering that most of her clothing is long gone. She settles for the back of her hand and brushes some dirt over the vomit to suppress the smell. “You are not hungry,” she mutters to herself when her stomach starts to grumble as she settles into a corner of the cell. The only light comes from the hallway, so dim it barely makes it halfway into the tiny cell, casting shadows through the bars. She exhales and surveys the small space, brushing at the floor when she realizes that the walls and ceiling make for a very irregularly-shaped room. She moves away about half an inch of dirt before her fingers reach stone. “You’re underground,” she whispers to herself, shivering slightly against the cool, dank air.
She spies a lump of fabric and a mug near the bars. After nearly passing out during the ten seconds it takes to crawl to the bars, she decides to just stay there. The fabric is a blanket, thin but dry and better than the bare skin she currently has as protection against the dampness. She pulls it around her shoulders and inspects the contents of the mug. The liquid doesn’t smell like anything, so she dips her fingertip in and inspects the results; a drop of something clear falls into the dirt below and she assumes that if they wanted to kill her, someone would’ve ordered Ivān to take care of it and she wouldn’t be stuck here, mostly naked and contemplating whether or not what appears to be water is actually water. She sucks her fingertip into her mouth, just to make sure, and then takes a sip. Definitely water.
She finishes half the mug before realizing she should probably ration the water, not knowing if or when anyone’s going to replace it. With a sigh, she sets the mug aside, careful to place it out of the way of the bars in case they open inward. She peers out of the cell, trying to determine if there’s anyone around. Intending to rest her forehead against the bars and squint down the hallway, she places her hand on one of the metallic bars.
She’s instantly rewarded with an electric shock and the entire wall of bars lights up momentarily with a brilliant green flash. Cursing to herself, she shakes out her hand and the sharp tingling recedes into something she can ignore. “Force shield,” she mutters, “why even bother with the bars?” The shock reawakens the thudding in her temple she’d forgotten about in favor of focusing on the nausea and then the water. She gingerly touches her head. It’s sticky and she squints at her fingertip in the dim light: dark red. The room hasn’t entirely stopped spinning since she woke up, which makes her think that there’s a concussion behind it all. “Wonderful,” she grimaces, and dips a corner of the blanket into the mug before pressing it to her temple, trying to clean a wound she can’t even see.
This is a waste of time. Jack balls his hand into a fist underneath the table and out of sight of the monitors; the Assistant Hokari Under Minister for Being a Pain in the Ass isn’t telling them anything they don’t already know.
Daniel kicks him under the table while pretending to be interested in whatever the talking heads are going on about now. Half an hour ago, it was denying the mere presence of abductors and stating that Sam got up and walked away on her own. Now, at least, they appear to have agreed to the truth of their own security footage and moved on to denying official knowledge of anyone who was in the room. We can’t just storm in there, Jack.
It would make me feel better.
We were together a long time before you came along, slips through Daniel’s mental block before he has a chance to reel it in. He knows Jack didn’t miss the protection and jealousy in his voice.
What? And you think I only care about her because I’m sleeping with her? That’s bullshit. Carter and I, we’ve…
Right, right. Military code. Don’t leave a man behind, stay with each other in battle, whatever. I’ve been there too, Jack. Every step of the way.
Except for that year where you left us.
It was Ascend or die. This way, I had the chance to come back.
Daniel ignores everything else Jack thinks at him and returns his focus to the Hokari. They aren’t saying anything helpful, but it’s much better than trying to have an argument about who cares more about Sam. Whoever it is onscreen nods to General Hammond, who thanks him for his time, and turns off the video feed. The wormhole closes in the Gate Room below them.
“Well,” General Hammond starts, turning away from the monitors and facing Jack and Daniel and Teal’c and the other officers collected around the table. He’s interrupted by the klaxons signaling an incoming wormhole. “What the hell?” He stands and rushes out to the control room, everyone else following him. “Report.”
Sergeant Harriman looks up at the general through his wire-rimmed glasses. “It’s Hokari Prime, sir. Video and audio.”
“Didn’t we just hang up with them?” Jack asks, not really expecting a response.
Hammond nods. “Put it through.”
After a moment of static, the video clears and reveals the face of a Hokari Hammond doesn’t recognize. “Doctor Jackson, Colonel O’Neill,” he says.
“Ito,” Daniel says, shocked. “What are you…?”
“I heard what happened to Major Carter. And doubt those to whom you just spoke were completely forthcoming with information.”
“You know this man?” Hammond looks at Jack.
“He was the friendlier one of the two that escorted us to the city.”
Nodding, Hammond gestures for Harriman to direct the feed into the briefing room. Once everyone is settled in their seats again, he frowns. “I am General Hammond, I am Major Carter’s commanding officer. What can you tell us?”
“I do not know the location of your officer, General. But I can assure you that despite whatever the Associate Minister for Planetary Peacekeeping told you, no resources are being expended on her search.”
“That’s not very reassuring,” Jack says.
“I apologize, Colonel O’Neill. I do not have much time before someone realizes I am speaking to you. Please.”
“Go ahead,” Hammond says with a stern look at Jack.
“The Collective requires raw materials in exchange for protection. The Venkati believe that the prices we ask are too great for the protection we provide. We require extreme amounts of supplies in order to manufacture the technology used to protect them and the other races in the Collective; our solar system is almost depleted of useful material. These prices are necessary, though the Venkati do not believe so. Most of the Venkati simply grumble about this, but others take more drastic measures.”
“Like kidnapping a doctor and her patient?” Jack waves his hand in apology to General Hammond’s glare; he couldn’t help himself.
“In recent years they have become more active and our cities have seen an increase in terrorist attacks. Buildings have been leveled, cargo ships full of the very supplies in question blown up on their way to Hokari Prime, mines on our outer planets collapsed with Hokari workers in them, and the like. And, yes, they have also resorted to kidnapping. Because of our telepathy, each Hokari has not only their own thoughts and knowledge, but that of hundreds of others. Should they take someone with true power - a high government official or an engineer - we would be at risk for countless security breaches. Additionally, as I am sure you can understand, a Hokari is worth quite a bit on the black market; telepathy is beneficial in more than simply communication and negotiation.”
Daniel tries not to squirm awkwardly in his seat and hopes that General Hammond gets Ito’s drift without needing someone to explain it. Luckily, he does.
“Thank you for the information, but how does this help us?”
“General, it has become obvious in the past several months that there must be Hokari helping the Venkati. I have heard rumors of Hokari being sympathetic to the Venkati cause, even agreeing that our prices are too steep despite that they are necessary to keep our way of life and territories safe. I do not know how far into the government it reaches, but I would be hesitant to trust anyone.” Ito looks over his shoulder. “I must go. I believe that, by now, the Venkati who captured her have no doubt determined that Major Carter has some level of telepathy. Unless she can convince them she is only connected to Colonel O’Neill and Doctor Jackson, they will try to sell her. I am sorry.”
The video feed goes blank.
“Oh, crap,” Jack says, speaking for everyone at the table.
Sam spits blood onto the concrete floor and tests her jaw. She feels a click that wasn’t there before, but it’s not broken. She squints through one eye at Driva standing in front of her. “I’m not lying,” she says, on the verge of begging, “I really can’t hear you.”
It’s been like this for days, or what feels like days to Sam. She hasn’t seen daylight since she entered the medical center. Ever since the moment she first called for Jack and Daniel, her captors have been convinced she can hear everything they’re thinking. They’ve been intent on beating the answer out of her and, for once, she actually can’t tell them what they want to hear.
Driva tilts his head, studying by the single bare light bulb in the room. He turns to someone standing in the shadows. “Bring it in.”
Sam takes a deep breath that tastes of copper and mentally screams again for Daniel and Jack. For all his initial concern and interest in finding out if she can hear his thoughts, Driva currently seems remarkably unconcerned with the possibility that she’s trying to contact those whose thoughts she can hear; she’s wondered for a while why there hasn’t been a Hokari in here to make sure she isn’t doing exactly that.
She uses the pause between beatings to assess the damage: she can’t see out of her left eye and she’s pretty sure that a few ribs are bruised, if not cracked. The bruises and inevitable swelling everywhere else are tolerable, but her knee slammed into the floor as they dragged her out of her cell this time and the throbbing is worrying her.
The single door opens and Sam watches as a body is haphazardly thrown into the room. Despite their small stature, she’s learned the hard way that these aliens are surprisingly strong. She frowns as Driva walks toward the newcomer and grasps a handful of clothing, dragging the other prisoner toward Sam and the light. Sam gasps: underneath the bruising and blood and dirt, she recognizes Kaia by the haughty stare.
“Well?”
“She speaks the truth,” Kaia says. “The human cannot hear anyone but the two to whom she is connected. Which makes her more evolved than you, Venkati.” She spits at the man’s feet.
Driva sweeps his foot out and catches Kaia just underneath her chin. She flies across the room and hits the wall with a sickening thump. Sam winces; nobody, regardless of physiology, gets up from a hit like that. He again turns his attentions to Sam. “You see what happens when you lie, Human?”
He moves into the direct line of the light bulb and Sam starts to panic. Her hands are tied behind her back, holding her to the chair, but he left her feet unbound. She grits her teeth and braces herself for leverage; if he gets any closer, she plans to kick him, hard. She has a theory - one she doesn’t like, at all - about where this is going and has no intentions of allowing it to actually happen.
She’s saved from having to kick him, and probably incur even more wrath, by the door opening when he’s just barely out of range.
“Untie her,” a voice from the shadows orders. “She’s being moved.”
The newcomer produces a hood from somewhere and wrestles it onto Sam’s head. She bites his hand and, once she’s standing, earns herself a punch to the stomach for her trouble. There’s a new ache in her side as a result, and she’s pretty sure that hand hasn’t been washed in recent history, and she has no idea where she’s being taken, but the man yelps and she smiles at the small victory.
Daniel doesn’t go home. It’s not intentional (and he figures that the order to go home was to be taken in the vein of “Get off base and out of my hair and let the negotiation and political teams do their jobs” rather than with any specific destination in mind) and, to his credit, he does try. He just misses the turnoff for his apartment and determines the amount of work necessary to turn around at 5:17 on a Friday to be more than he can handle. So he stays straight and takes a left three miles later and eventually ends up parked in front of Sam’s house.
He turns off his car and sits with his head resting on the window until he sees a twitch of the curtain from her neighbor’s house. He knows he should get out of his car and actually go inside, and he tries to tell himself that he’s done this before: he has a key and while he’s usually here only when Sam is, there have been times when he’s had to water her plants or clean out her fridge while a tactical team plans a rescue, and more often than not her I’ll only be five minutes, go ahead - I’ll meet you there turns into two hours and a phone call reminding her to come up for air.
But this is different.
She isn’t five minutes or two hours behind him and he isn’t just stopping by to make sure her plants aren’t dead or things in her refrigerator haven’t grown legs and walked off. And he didn’t leave behind a tactical team planning a rescue; he left behind moderately-skilled politicians trying to pry information out of a collective of aliens who, when asked what color the sky is, would ask you to define color and then turn the discussion into a philosophical debate on subjectivity.
“Get out of the car, Jackson,” he says to himself and counts to ten before following his own order.
He slams the door and jogs up her sidewalk, pausing to pick up a week’s worth of mail and newspapers. He nearly drops everything while wrestling with the door, but makes it inside and into the kitchen before emptying the contents of his arms onto the kitchen table.
Turning on lights as he goes, he pours a glass of water and makes his way around her living room, filling up all of the plants marked with a blue smiley face sticker on their pot. He smiles at the stickers, undoubtedly a gift from Cassie several years ago, and frowns almost immediately. How is it that the outcome of their daily work is so unreliable that it requires them to mark which plants get water, and which ones can go without, so caring friends don’t accidentally kill something?
He’s tempted to pick up a clay pot and throw it against the wall - and if he had made the effort to turn around and go back to his own apartment, he certainly would - but fiddles with the stereo instead, trying to remember what button turns on what set of speakers and whether the orange light means on or asleep. If he’s going to attack her fridge - which he knows for a fact was full of I’ll-throw-them-out-tomorrows before they went on this misadventure - he’s going to need background music.
After two days - she gets fed more regularly here, and she’s assuming three meals to a day - she figures out that she’s in the basement of some sort of club or bar. At night, she can faintly hear a dull thudding coming from above that at first she thought was construction, but soon realized was music. She shudders at the thought of what’s going on above her, and what being brought to the basement of such a place means for her.
But she decides to believe that at least she’s still on Hokari Prime. She thinks she would know, somehow, if she were on a different planet; years of coming home to Earth after days on planets with slightly different rotations have honed her sense of gravity. And still being on Hokari Prime, despite being a bit terrified, means that there’s still a chance she can get home.
She notices a folded pile of fabric next to her food tray and decides to investigate that before eating what was offered. The fabric turns out to be a pair of pants and she whispers her thanks to whoever brought them to her. Putting them on hurts - she’s stiff and sore and her knee is swollen and purple to the point where she’s genuinely concerned that something may be torn and her attempt at setting what she thought was a dislocation made things worse - but she manages with only a few hissed curses. She pushes the tray toward the back corner of her cell where her sleeping pallet is and awkwardly scoots back toward it. She wraps the blanket, thicker than the one in the first cell and twice as long, around her shoulders and leans against the solid back wall; the floor is dirt, but the other walls are barred. As far as she can tell, this entire section is prison cells. The other occupants ignore her attempts to talk.
Sam picks up the bowl and spoon and starts to eat. The food reminds her of elementary school cafeteria oatmeal. She sighs. At least she hasn’t been beaten since she awoke on the floor, the hood still on her head.
Jack isn’t surprised to find Daniel’s car parked outside Sam’s house. He pulls his truck behind the car and walks up to Sam’s front door through the snow beginning to dust the sidewalk. He pauses for a moment, wondering about his answer if Daniel should ask why on earth Jack’s here, but figures that Daniel can’t possibly have a good answer to that question either. He knows where the spare key is and he finally put the copy she gave him years ago on his keychain only a few weeks ago, but the awkwardness of just walking into Sam’s house when Sam is there hasn’t worn off, so he rings the doorbell instead.
Jack’s eyes water at the smell of bleach hanging around Daniel when the other man opens the door. “Going blonde, are we?”
Daniel rolls his eyes and steps aside. “Fridge,” he explains, jerking an elbow in the direction of two overflowing plastic bags waiting to be taken out. He double-bagged, throwing out containers along with contents if it looked like it might degrade within the next ten thousand years. They’ve saved the planet a few times - Earth owes him one.
Jack hoists the black garbage bags and wonders whether the one in his right hand will hold for the time it takes to walk out to the trash cans.
“Walk quickly,” Daniel suggests, his head already back in the fridge.
Jack’s pretty sure the inside of Sam’s fridge hasn’t been that clean probably since she bought it, if ever, but doesn’t comment on his way past Daniel. He’s never understood the bleach-the-entire-house idea as therapy, leaning more towards drinking-too-heavily and avoiding-the-world himself, but to each his own. “She’s alive,” he says, leaning on the counter next to the open refrigerator door.
Daniel leans back on his heels, torn between frowning at a spot of something that may actually be part of the appliance and frowning at Jack. “I know,” he says, choosing to pick at the spot with his thumbnail and avoid looking at Jack.
Jack shakes his head. Daniel doesn’t sound convincing and even if he did, Jack can tell that Daniel’s conviction is beginning to get worn down as the days since they last saw Sam start creeping above double digits. “Carter’s still alive, Daniel.”
Giving up on the mysterious spot, and deciding that he’ll cover it up with a jar of jelly he knows Sam used exactly once but won’t go bad anytime in the foreseeable future, Daniel gives the shelves a final rub down with a wet cloth and starts putting food back in. “I know,” he says again, accepting the cans of Diet Coke Jack hands him from the counter and carefully placing them in the door of the fridge. “I just…” he exhales sharply and decides that the fridge looks painfully bare, but at least it’s clean now. “I can’t stop thinking about what they might be doing to her.”
“Try,” Jack suggests, unhelpfully.
“I have,” Daniel says smartly, “it hasn’t worked. Why else do you think I’ve been cleaning her house for the past…” two hours is silenced by Jack’s lips forcefully on his. It’s an awkward position with Daniel kneeling on the floor and Jack leaning over, gripping the counter for support, and they break apart quickly. “What the hell?” They’ve kissed before, certainly, but always with Sam around and usually when at least one of the three of them is naked or well on their way to being naked; now that he thinks about it, Daniel finds it odd that Jack will fuck him but not kiss him unless there’s an end goal in mind. An analysis for another time, he realizes, given that Jack is staring at him with darkened eyes and he can feel both their arousals beginning to stir. He stands and bumps the refrigerator door shut with his hip.
“Shut up, Daniel,” Jack says.
In that moment, Daniel realizes that Jack cares for Sam a lot more than he’s been letting on and that this thing between the three of them isn’t just about sex anymore, if it ever was.
He leans in and kisses Jack, soft and tender until he picks up on Jack’s sense of need and deepens the kiss, letting Jack take over. They trip over each other and shoes and furniture but somehow manage to lose all of their clothes by the time they reach the bedroom. Jack’s hand is warm on Daniel’s cock and it all feels weird without Sam there to encourage them; without her soft fingers on Daniel’s chest, one hand teasing his nipple while the other searches the drawer for the bottle of lube, her concentration lost when Jack slides a finger into her and she has to take a moment to gasp before nipping Daniel’s earlobe and asking, huskily, if they mind if she sits over there and watches. Daniel drops to his knees, shaking his head to clear it of the memory, and takes Jack’s cock into his mouth, trying to experience the moment instead of the past.
Jack groans and gently cups the back of Daniel’s head with his hand. This isn’t how he wants it to end tonight, but Daniel’s mouth is warm and wet and it’s okay if they stay this way for a bit. They’ve done this before but Jack finds it odd without Sam. He certainly knows the mechanics of how this works and he knows that the two of them are perfectly capable of making it good without her, but there’s another level she adds that he can’t find in just the personal touches of her bedroom. He taps Daniel’s shoulder and pulls him up off his knees, spinning him around so he can push Daniel onto the bed. Daniel smirks and grabs a condom and the bottle of lube from the bedside drawer.
“How do you want it?” Jack asks as he rolls the condom onto his cock, his voice gravelly with arousal. He pops the top on the lube and spreads some over his fingers.
Daniel rolls onto his stomach and gets on his knees. They might have to do laundry, but he doesn’t really care. A groan falls from his lips as Jack’s slick fingers press against him, gently sliding inside of him. He drops his head onto the pillow in front of him; it smells like Sam.
Jack pulls his fingers out and nudges Daniel’s ass with his cock. “You ready?” He waits for Daniel’s nod before pushing forward, his moan getting lost with Daniel’s.
It almost seems wrong, doing this without Sam. She should be here, underneath Daniel, or in the chair in the corner with her legs spread, teasing herself as she watches the two of them. But she’s not, and maybe because they both know it doesn’t seem right is what makes it okay.
Jack nods at General Hammond, come to send them off. Daniel had had an epiphany after they’d collapsed onto Sam’s bed, exhausted. Jack hadn’t paid attention to the details as the other man scrambled for his pants and gestured for Jack to do the same, but it had eventually led to an official reason for them to go back to the planet and look for Sam. He palms the butt of his gun and nods. “General.” The wormhole whooshes open behind him.
“Officially, this tour has been scheduled to reassure us of the Hokari security features and that they are doing everything in their power to find her. You three are to listen and learn. Unofficially…”
“Find Sam,” Daniel finishes.
Hammond nods. “SG-1,” he winces; the complete team doesn’t stand before him. “You have a go.”
Sam wakes to the sound of boots clanging angrily on the metal floor of the hallway outside. She remains still, pretending to be asleep in the hope that they’ll keep walking and pass her by. The steps change to dull thudding when they hit the dirt of the cells and stop right in front of her. She tries to keep her breathing even, glad that she chose to curl up in the back corner where shadows could conceal that she’s never been very good at feigning sleep.
The door opens and the owner of the boots stomps inside. He pauses in the light cast by the hallway and Sam swallows: it’s Driva. She’d taken comfort that she hadn’t been forced to share space with him since she’d been moved; he’d been meaner each time she’d seen him, hitting harder, cutting deeper, and it’s his fault she can’t move her knee. But over the past week, while she’s been focusing on lying still and not moving her leg, he’s walked by her cell two or three times a day, usually with a few other men who look at her the way she looked at her bike before she bought it.
She scrambles and pushes herself as far back in the cell as she can get. The motion brings tears to her eyes. He snarls at her.
“You are proving difficult to sell,” he spits out. He bends over and rips her pants and underwear off with one sharp pull; his hands brush harshly against her injured knee and she can’t hold back a whimper. She kicks upward with her good leg, but it’s sloppy and he easily dodges out of the way. He punches her for her efforts and she spits blood onto the pallet beneath her. “And I think someone should have a taste. You’ve been so much trouble.”
Sam sets her jaw and tries to angle herself better so she can trip him, maybe crawl out of the cell: he left the door open. But Driva anticipates her movement and steps on her good leg, trapping it against the floor. He quickly grasps her flailing hands and ties them to the metal bars.
[navigation: forward to Chapter Five (converted thieves) // return to index]