Daniel/Janet Ficathon: 'Free Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow'
For the danjanficathon!
Title: Free Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow
Author: nikej
Rating: G
Category: Daniel/Janet friendship, some oddness.
Spoilers: Only CotG. Set early S1.
Disclaimer: The show belongs to a whole lot of people who aren’t me and who, hopefully, will not sue.
Summary: Janet suspects they chose SG-1 as her first detail because they believed that, in tow with the base’s top-notch, flagship team, she couldn’t possibly get into any sort of really serious trouble on an easy recon like this, could she?
This is for moonshayde, who asked for: Janet accompanying SG-1 offworld where they all suffer from hallucinations/delusions; UST, friendship, or ship; and a happy ending to the plot, and got this. ;) Not to be included were ‘wussy OOC stuff’; excessive H/C; death; smarm; and no Dan/Jan prior or anywhere near Sha're's death. For some reason, the mention of Sha’re stuck in my head, which is how this ended up being set in S1. Hee. I don’t know if it’s what you were looking for, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. ;) Major thanks to On_Demons_Wings and tenchi_saz for the beta, and to meg-tdj for organizing this baby. You must be off your rocker. ;D
Free Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow
The original idea, as Janet thinks she remembers it, was primarily that as the SGC’s brand-new shiny CMO and an expert on rare and exotic diseases in her former life, she should accompany a team or two offworld a few times to do a preliminary study on the effects of varying alien environments on the human body. Just to give the big brass back home some idea of whether or not demolecuralizing four people on a daily basis and sending them into climates unknown was any sort of long term health hazard and - more importantly - if it was, whether or not it was going to cost them any significant amount of money in the future. On another level, she assumes, it was to give her a chance to get her ‘Gate-legs, because if there was some major extra-terrestrial catastrophe and she needed to make the mother of all call-outs, the last thing they needed was a doctor who was personally too space sick to move.
Janet suspects they chose SG-1 as her first detail because they believed that, in tow with the base’s top-notch, flagship team, she couldn’t possibly get into any sort of really serious trouble on an easy recon like this, could she?
Some people never learned.
~
They’ve been here three days already, and this mission was only supposed to last twenty-four hours. It was on the first night, she thinks, things started to go wrong, when they were sitting in the woods (they almost always ended up in woods, Daniel confided to her later, every planet and moon they went to). They had settled around the fire Colonel O’Neill had set to ward off the chill in the evening air and Daniel had suddenly firmly believed they were on a camping trip and had gone off into the trees to pick some marshmallows. Teal’c had brought him back and she’d had to sedate him, but by then they were all feeling a little sleepy and a little odd. She’s sure the SGC will be trying to contact them, again, but when they spoke to General Hammond the next morning and offered him five different explanations for why they were late, Sam had declared that she was allergic to the radios and they had to leave them behind.
Janet knows General Hammond doesn’t like unnecessary risks, so she doesn’t think he’ll be sending anyone after them. Everyone knows that something’s off-kilter, that things aren’t quite…normal, even if they can’t really remember what it is they’re supposed to be doing here. Over the past few days she’s had moments where she knows, suddenly, that they’re all acting strangely, but those are interspersed with times where she doesn’t notice anything wrong at all, and it’s getting harder to tell the difference.
They know they have to get back to the Stargate, except no-one can quite remember where they left it. They stand uselessly for a while, deliberating over which way they came, until Jack announces with authority that it’s in the Emerald City and they’ll just have to follow the Yellow Brick Road. Janet doesn’t know him well enough yet to know if he’s being delusional, or metaphorical, or if he just has a really twisted sense of humour. They set off West accordingly.
It’s a game, he declares when she looks worried; it’s all a game, and he’s the scarecrow and Daniel’s the Lion and Teal’c’s Tin Man. Sam has to be Dorothy because she’s a girl. She makes one last stand for rationality (because she thinks she knows that’s not quite right, or maybe just because she feels left out) and he labels her a petty dictator, so she shuts up and follows behind and waits for a house to drop on her head.
At least she’s not a Munchkin.
~
She wants to figure this out, because she’s the doctor and she’s good at diseases, if that’s what this is; she feels like she’s drunk, or like she’s thinking underwater and things that should make sense won’t, and things that shouldn’t make sense do, but she’s not sure what’s supposed to make sense anymore. And that doesn’t make sense. She’s thinking in knots.
She sat down yesterday evening after they made camp and unpacked her portable med-kit so she could start looking for things to explain why everyone is acting so weird, in her professional opinion, but as she laid it out on the grass all her equipment grew legs and walked away. Her thermometer had started up a conversation with Sam’s radiation meter and, not wanting to interrupt, she had moved over to speak to Daniel instead.
“Do you think we’re going the right way?” she’d asked, quietly. Colonel O’Neill’s her superior officer and she shouldn’t really question him in front of a civilian, but she likes Daniel, and he seems to know O’Neill best. He smiled at her and took her hand in his amiably. “We’ll get there.”
Colonel O’Neill glared at them warily over the fire, but whether he knew they were talking about him, or whether he still suspected she was really a Wicked Witch, she doesn’t know.
~
The day after that Daniel declares her Queen of Planet Head Trip, because common sense rears its head just often enough for them to know now that they’re all delusional - Colonel O’Neill says ‘wacko!’ in a loud and cheerful voice, but she says delusional because it’s more befitting of her position - but not often enough for them to be properly concerned. Plus, they point out with infuriating logic even though they’re dippy, as the doctor Janet really ought to be the one to do something about it. If her pill-bottles hadn’t wandered off (or had she left them behind somewhere?) she might have been able to give them some medicine to help them think straight, but they’re gone, so she doesn’t. Instead, they race each other across the grassy slopes while Jack keeps an eye out for flying monkeys. Sam wins because her legs are longer. Daniel picks her a bunch of flowers for losing, anyway, bowing and calling her ‘Your Majesty’, and gives her a funny kind of smile that makes her quite happy to queen, for today.
~
Maybe they’re phantasms, she decides at one point, caused by something in the air or in the flora, or some sort of alien parasite. Or phantoms, which sounds almost the same, and it’s not really medical but supernatural; this planet’s haunted and there’s nothing she can do about it. For a while she thinks she’s Dana Scully and speaks to the rest of them in clipped tones, waving her unlit flashlight into the foliage. Daniel gets to be Mulder, since he’d believed in aliens before any of them.
They’re sticking together now, anyway, after Colonel O’Neill accused them of being ‘in cahoots’ over the campfire. She quite likes being in cahoots, even if she doesn’t know about what. They’ll pick something up along the way.
~
She falls into a doze under a tree that night, next to Daniel, her head resting on his shoulder. The other three are a few feet away, arguing good-naturedly about the colour of the flames of the campfire while Colonel O’Neill stokes it up - they’re purple, Teal’c thinks, and Sam says that’s an obnoxious colour for a fire anyway - but Daniel’s tired and quiet and worn out by the walk today, and so is she, so she makes herself comfortable against him and tries not to listen.
She’s sorry, she thinks unexpectedly, snuggled up against him, that his wife was taken by the Goa’uld. She doesn’t know Daniel very well yet but the past few days and nights have thrown them into each others’ company more than they expected and she’s sure that if she were thinking right and if he were thinking right that they would get on well together anyway. She must have been very nice, his wife, because Sam said the Abydonians were good people and she can’t imagine him marrying anyone if they weren’t a good person. She hopes he finds her, someday; she hopes that they’ll become friends and that she’ll stay at the SGC long enough for her to find out if he does. It can’t be very nice to be a Goa'uld.
All this pondering on Goa'ulds makes her twitchy, suddenly, and she thinks she sees one lurking in the bushes in a silly hat and says so, alarming them all and sending them scrambling for cover. They emerge a few moments later having decided that there are definitely no despotic alien tyrants amid the shrubbery. They all huddle back down, closer to the campfire, except for Teal’c, who never moved and is still sitting cross-legged in front of a vibrant violet blaze only he can see, humming “Purple Rain.”
~
When she wakes up on the fourth morning the fire’s gone out and she’s nestled up against Daniel. There’s a brief moment of awkwardness when he opens his eyes and they both realise they’re lying almost nose-to-nose, but then she starts to giggle and so does he, and despite her covering her mouth with her hands and his trying to stifle the sound in his bedroll, they wake up the others anyway. No-one remembered to keep watch last night, and they were all tired after hunting Goa’uld in the bushes. They gather up their things and set out again in what they hope is the right direction, and even though Sam’s a little twitchy and Colonel O’Neill still glances upwards every so often, they walk mostly in silence. Suddenly they’re all a little homesick and a lot more worried, and the wrongness seems to lie over them much heavier and thicker than before. She keeps in step with Daniel out of habit already, and her quietness and her anxiety seem to get to him, because he lays a hand on her arm after a while. When she looks up at him questioningly he smiles that smile again and says, confident and comforting, “Nearly home.”
~
They’re foraging ahead, Daniel swinging Teal’c’s staff weapon because he thinks it’s a sword and shouting challenges in an obscure language at the odd rock or two he considers particularly threatening (she can tell his heart’s not really in it though) when O’Neill suddenly pulls up short and points the way into an unexpected clearing. “The Emerald City!” he crows, triumphantly.
And she can see it’s not the Emerald City, of course: it’s another tree, but the Stargate is squatting on its stone pedestal beneath it, so it’s more welcome a tree than any city would be anyway. They set off at a run as Teal’c snatches his staff back from an unprotesting Daniel, nearly dragging him off his feet in the process, and even though a brief argument ensues at the DHD over where exactly they should go - a myriad of different worlds and fantastical places are suggested, most of which they just make up on the spot, coordinates and all - eventually they punch in the sequence for Earth, and watch entranced as the liquid blue centre spirals outward and in again. Jack, it turns out, has had one of their radios stashed in his pack all this time, and even though Sam shrieks and runs back the way they came for a meter or so, they coax her back and make contact with Hammond and he promises to let them back through.
When Jack and Sam and Teal’c have skipped through the open wormhole, just before she’s set to follow, she turns and gives Daniel a brilliant smile. He bounds forwards and picks her up in a hug without preamble, and even though she’s surprised she hugs him back and laughs until he puts her down. “Nearly home,” she utters back to him, and he grins.
~
Janet stands in her office almost a week after she first set foot on what they’re simply calling that planet, after spending a few days as a patient in her own infirmary and convincing every doctor and nurse on her medical staff that they much prefer to have her on their side of thing, really, when it gets right down to it. She finishes putting away all her test samples, charts and case notes on the incident and filing her reports in triplicate, giving General Hammond an account that will be in the very least entertaining - it turned out to be the firewood, in the end. It hadn’t occurred to anybody on that first night, when Colonel O’Neill had built the campfire using twig and branches from the local trees, that when they threw the wood on the fire it might include sap containing a mild hallucinogenic chemical which, when oxidised, would turn into an easy-to-breathe, horizon-expanding gas and a three-day stay in la-la land for his top team and (she cringes) first-class Chief Medical Officer. Their saving grace had been letting the fire go out on that last night: it had let them regain enough clarity to recognise the Stargate when they found it. Janet doesn’t want to think about how far off course they might have wandered if circumstances had been different. They’d probably still be there now. You live, you learn. Every team was now being sent out with a small drill, a testing kit, and a smirk.
Once she’s stowed it all away, she checks quickly to make sure no-one’s watching and, satisfied, snaps open her portable med kit to take out the few flowers she’d stowed there from the coronation bunch Daniel picked her. She’d kept them because she’d thought at the time they were important. She’d probably thought at the time they were magic, actually, but now they’re important. She hasn’t seen much of Dr. Jackson since they set foot back in the SGC and were bundled immediately into quarantine; she was given her own recovery room once they’d established they were all only temporarily loopy, one of the perks of the job, she supposes. They’d passed each other in the hall this morning, though, and said “hi”, and offered one another slightly-embarrassed, ‘can you believe those things we did?’ grins that were, nevertheless, different from the polite head-nods they’d exchanged in the past. It’s a change for the better, and the flowers are a symbol of something, of the something that started on that planet while they all huddled round a psychedelic campfire and sang their own nonsense rhymes to old Broadway tunes which only seemed fair since Teal’c didn’t know any of the actual words. A fledgling friendship, something still delicate that hangs between them now, waiting for the chance to blossom. He offered her comfort and a little stability when the world was topsy-turvy, and one day hopefully she’ll get to do the same for him. Someday soon, she’ll sit him down and have a conversation with him that’s not to do with how he’s ended up in her infirmary. She’ll learn about him, get to know him. The flowers, she decides, are a symbol of that; of that future. They’re a symbol of cahoots.
Carefully, she reaches up and takes one of her heavy medical textbooks down from the shelves along the wall, and presses one of the flowers between the pages. She’ll probably forget about it in a few days: it’ll slide out of her mind, and she might only recall it on occasion when she sees him (or until she really needs to know something about Parasitic and Infectious Diseases (Illustrated)), but it’ll still be in there, waiting. She smiles, brief and warm, then closes the tome and slides it back into place. Leaving the book to settle on its shelf, Janet Fraiser turns, strides out into the infirmary proper, and gets back to work. For now, at least, she knows it’s there, and that’s enough to be getting on with.
*finis*
Title: Free Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow
Author: nikej
Rating: G
Category: Daniel/Janet friendship, some oddness.
Spoilers: Only CotG. Set early S1.
Disclaimer: The show belongs to a whole lot of people who aren’t me and who, hopefully, will not sue.
Summary: Janet suspects they chose SG-1 as her first detail because they believed that, in tow with the base’s top-notch, flagship team, she couldn’t possibly get into any sort of really serious trouble on an easy recon like this, could she?
This is for moonshayde, who asked for: Janet accompanying SG-1 offworld where they all suffer from hallucinations/delusions; UST, friendship, or ship; and a happy ending to the plot, and got this. ;) Not to be included were ‘wussy OOC stuff’; excessive H/C; death; smarm; and no Dan/Jan prior or anywhere near Sha're's death. For some reason, the mention of Sha’re stuck in my head, which is how this ended up being set in S1. Hee. I don’t know if it’s what you were looking for, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. ;) Major thanks to On_Demons_Wings and tenchi_saz for the beta, and to meg-tdj for organizing this baby. You must be off your rocker. ;D
Free Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow
The original idea, as Janet thinks she remembers it, was primarily that as the SGC’s brand-new shiny CMO and an expert on rare and exotic diseases in her former life, she should accompany a team or two offworld a few times to do a preliminary study on the effects of varying alien environments on the human body. Just to give the big brass back home some idea of whether or not demolecuralizing four people on a daily basis and sending them into climates unknown was any sort of long term health hazard and - more importantly - if it was, whether or not it was going to cost them any significant amount of money in the future. On another level, she assumes, it was to give her a chance to get her ‘Gate-legs, because if there was some major extra-terrestrial catastrophe and she needed to make the mother of all call-outs, the last thing they needed was a doctor who was personally too space sick to move.
Janet suspects they chose SG-1 as her first detail because they believed that, in tow with the base’s top-notch, flagship team, she couldn’t possibly get into any sort of really serious trouble on an easy recon like this, could she?
Some people never learned.
~
They’ve been here three days already, and this mission was only supposed to last twenty-four hours. It was on the first night, she thinks, things started to go wrong, when they were sitting in the woods (they almost always ended up in woods, Daniel confided to her later, every planet and moon they went to). They had settled around the fire Colonel O’Neill had set to ward off the chill in the evening air and Daniel had suddenly firmly believed they were on a camping trip and had gone off into the trees to pick some marshmallows. Teal’c had brought him back and she’d had to sedate him, but by then they were all feeling a little sleepy and a little odd. She’s sure the SGC will be trying to contact them, again, but when they spoke to General Hammond the next morning and offered him five different explanations for why they were late, Sam had declared that she was allergic to the radios and they had to leave them behind.
Janet knows General Hammond doesn’t like unnecessary risks, so she doesn’t think he’ll be sending anyone after them. Everyone knows that something’s off-kilter, that things aren’t quite…normal, even if they can’t really remember what it is they’re supposed to be doing here. Over the past few days she’s had moments where she knows, suddenly, that they’re all acting strangely, but those are interspersed with times where she doesn’t notice anything wrong at all, and it’s getting harder to tell the difference.
They know they have to get back to the Stargate, except no-one can quite remember where they left it. They stand uselessly for a while, deliberating over which way they came, until Jack announces with authority that it’s in the Emerald City and they’ll just have to follow the Yellow Brick Road. Janet doesn’t know him well enough yet to know if he’s being delusional, or metaphorical, or if he just has a really twisted sense of humour. They set off West accordingly.
It’s a game, he declares when she looks worried; it’s all a game, and he’s the scarecrow and Daniel’s the Lion and Teal’c’s Tin Man. Sam has to be Dorothy because she’s a girl. She makes one last stand for rationality (because she thinks she knows that’s not quite right, or maybe just because she feels left out) and he labels her a petty dictator, so she shuts up and follows behind and waits for a house to drop on her head.
At least she’s not a Munchkin.
~
She wants to figure this out, because she’s the doctor and she’s good at diseases, if that’s what this is; she feels like she’s drunk, or like she’s thinking underwater and things that should make sense won’t, and things that shouldn’t make sense do, but she’s not sure what’s supposed to make sense anymore. And that doesn’t make sense. She’s thinking in knots.
She sat down yesterday evening after they made camp and unpacked her portable med-kit so she could start looking for things to explain why everyone is acting so weird, in her professional opinion, but as she laid it out on the grass all her equipment grew legs and walked away. Her thermometer had started up a conversation with Sam’s radiation meter and, not wanting to interrupt, she had moved over to speak to Daniel instead.
“Do you think we’re going the right way?” she’d asked, quietly. Colonel O’Neill’s her superior officer and she shouldn’t really question him in front of a civilian, but she likes Daniel, and he seems to know O’Neill best. He smiled at her and took her hand in his amiably. “We’ll get there.”
Colonel O’Neill glared at them warily over the fire, but whether he knew they were talking about him, or whether he still suspected she was really a Wicked Witch, she doesn’t know.
~
The day after that Daniel declares her Queen of Planet Head Trip, because common sense rears its head just often enough for them to know now that they’re all delusional - Colonel O’Neill says ‘wacko!’ in a loud and cheerful voice, but she says delusional because it’s more befitting of her position - but not often enough for them to be properly concerned. Plus, they point out with infuriating logic even though they’re dippy, as the doctor Janet really ought to be the one to do something about it. If her pill-bottles hadn’t wandered off (or had she left them behind somewhere?) she might have been able to give them some medicine to help them think straight, but they’re gone, so she doesn’t. Instead, they race each other across the grassy slopes while Jack keeps an eye out for flying monkeys. Sam wins because her legs are longer. Daniel picks her a bunch of flowers for losing, anyway, bowing and calling her ‘Your Majesty’, and gives her a funny kind of smile that makes her quite happy to queen, for today.
~
Maybe they’re phantasms, she decides at one point, caused by something in the air or in the flora, or some sort of alien parasite. Or phantoms, which sounds almost the same, and it’s not really medical but supernatural; this planet’s haunted and there’s nothing she can do about it. For a while she thinks she’s Dana Scully and speaks to the rest of them in clipped tones, waving her unlit flashlight into the foliage. Daniel gets to be Mulder, since he’d believed in aliens before any of them.
They’re sticking together now, anyway, after Colonel O’Neill accused them of being ‘in cahoots’ over the campfire. She quite likes being in cahoots, even if she doesn’t know about what. They’ll pick something up along the way.
~
She falls into a doze under a tree that night, next to Daniel, her head resting on his shoulder. The other three are a few feet away, arguing good-naturedly about the colour of the flames of the campfire while Colonel O’Neill stokes it up - they’re purple, Teal’c thinks, and Sam says that’s an obnoxious colour for a fire anyway - but Daniel’s tired and quiet and worn out by the walk today, and so is she, so she makes herself comfortable against him and tries not to listen.
She’s sorry, she thinks unexpectedly, snuggled up against him, that his wife was taken by the Goa’uld. She doesn’t know Daniel very well yet but the past few days and nights have thrown them into each others’ company more than they expected and she’s sure that if she were thinking right and if he were thinking right that they would get on well together anyway. She must have been very nice, his wife, because Sam said the Abydonians were good people and she can’t imagine him marrying anyone if they weren’t a good person. She hopes he finds her, someday; she hopes that they’ll become friends and that she’ll stay at the SGC long enough for her to find out if he does. It can’t be very nice to be a Goa'uld.
All this pondering on Goa'ulds makes her twitchy, suddenly, and she thinks she sees one lurking in the bushes in a silly hat and says so, alarming them all and sending them scrambling for cover. They emerge a few moments later having decided that there are definitely no despotic alien tyrants amid the shrubbery. They all huddle back down, closer to the campfire, except for Teal’c, who never moved and is still sitting cross-legged in front of a vibrant violet blaze only he can see, humming “Purple Rain.”
~
When she wakes up on the fourth morning the fire’s gone out and she’s nestled up against Daniel. There’s a brief moment of awkwardness when he opens his eyes and they both realise they’re lying almost nose-to-nose, but then she starts to giggle and so does he, and despite her covering her mouth with her hands and his trying to stifle the sound in his bedroll, they wake up the others anyway. No-one remembered to keep watch last night, and they were all tired after hunting Goa’uld in the bushes. They gather up their things and set out again in what they hope is the right direction, and even though Sam’s a little twitchy and Colonel O’Neill still glances upwards every so often, they walk mostly in silence. Suddenly they’re all a little homesick and a lot more worried, and the wrongness seems to lie over them much heavier and thicker than before. She keeps in step with Daniel out of habit already, and her quietness and her anxiety seem to get to him, because he lays a hand on her arm after a while. When she looks up at him questioningly he smiles that smile again and says, confident and comforting, “Nearly home.”
~
They’re foraging ahead, Daniel swinging Teal’c’s staff weapon because he thinks it’s a sword and shouting challenges in an obscure language at the odd rock or two he considers particularly threatening (she can tell his heart’s not really in it though) when O’Neill suddenly pulls up short and points the way into an unexpected clearing. “The Emerald City!” he crows, triumphantly.
And she can see it’s not the Emerald City, of course: it’s another tree, but the Stargate is squatting on its stone pedestal beneath it, so it’s more welcome a tree than any city would be anyway. They set off at a run as Teal’c snatches his staff back from an unprotesting Daniel, nearly dragging him off his feet in the process, and even though a brief argument ensues at the DHD over where exactly they should go - a myriad of different worlds and fantastical places are suggested, most of which they just make up on the spot, coordinates and all - eventually they punch in the sequence for Earth, and watch entranced as the liquid blue centre spirals outward and in again. Jack, it turns out, has had one of their radios stashed in his pack all this time, and even though Sam shrieks and runs back the way they came for a meter or so, they coax her back and make contact with Hammond and he promises to let them back through.
When Jack and Sam and Teal’c have skipped through the open wormhole, just before she’s set to follow, she turns and gives Daniel a brilliant smile. He bounds forwards and picks her up in a hug without preamble, and even though she’s surprised she hugs him back and laughs until he puts her down. “Nearly home,” she utters back to him, and he grins.
~
Janet stands in her office almost a week after she first set foot on what they’re simply calling that planet, after spending a few days as a patient in her own infirmary and convincing every doctor and nurse on her medical staff that they much prefer to have her on their side of thing, really, when it gets right down to it. She finishes putting away all her test samples, charts and case notes on the incident and filing her reports in triplicate, giving General Hammond an account that will be in the very least entertaining - it turned out to be the firewood, in the end. It hadn’t occurred to anybody on that first night, when Colonel O’Neill had built the campfire using twig and branches from the local trees, that when they threw the wood on the fire it might include sap containing a mild hallucinogenic chemical which, when oxidised, would turn into an easy-to-breathe, horizon-expanding gas and a three-day stay in la-la land for his top team and (she cringes) first-class Chief Medical Officer. Their saving grace had been letting the fire go out on that last night: it had let them regain enough clarity to recognise the Stargate when they found it. Janet doesn’t want to think about how far off course they might have wandered if circumstances had been different. They’d probably still be there now. You live, you learn. Every team was now being sent out with a small drill, a testing kit, and a smirk.
Once she’s stowed it all away, she checks quickly to make sure no-one’s watching and, satisfied, snaps open her portable med kit to take out the few flowers she’d stowed there from the coronation bunch Daniel picked her. She’d kept them because she’d thought at the time they were important. She’d probably thought at the time they were magic, actually, but now they’re important. She hasn’t seen much of Dr. Jackson since they set foot back in the SGC and were bundled immediately into quarantine; she was given her own recovery room once they’d established they were all only temporarily loopy, one of the perks of the job, she supposes. They’d passed each other in the hall this morning, though, and said “hi”, and offered one another slightly-embarrassed, ‘can you believe those things we did?’ grins that were, nevertheless, different from the polite head-nods they’d exchanged in the past. It’s a change for the better, and the flowers are a symbol of something, of the something that started on that planet while they all huddled round a psychedelic campfire and sang their own nonsense rhymes to old Broadway tunes which only seemed fair since Teal’c didn’t know any of the actual words. A fledgling friendship, something still delicate that hangs between them now, waiting for the chance to blossom. He offered her comfort and a little stability when the world was topsy-turvy, and one day hopefully she’ll get to do the same for him. Someday soon, she’ll sit him down and have a conversation with him that’s not to do with how he’s ended up in her infirmary. She’ll learn about him, get to know him. The flowers, she decides, are a symbol of that; of that future. They’re a symbol of cahoots.
Carefully, she reaches up and takes one of her heavy medical textbooks down from the shelves along the wall, and presses one of the flowers between the pages. She’ll probably forget about it in a few days: it’ll slide out of her mind, and she might only recall it on occasion when she sees him (or until she really needs to know something about Parasitic and Infectious Diseases (Illustrated)), but it’ll still be in there, waiting. She smiles, brief and warm, then closes the tome and slides it back into place. Leaving the book to settle on its shelf, Janet Fraiser turns, strides out into the infirmary proper, and gets back to work. For now, at least, she knows it’s there, and that’s enough to be getting on with.
*finis*