SG-1/SGA Fanfic Commentary: The Pegasus Connection [Part 2/3]
The Giant Fanfic Commentary of Doom, continued from part 1.
X
He shook his head ruefully. "He came to see me twice and he seemed fine both times, I'm afraid I didn't take him very seriously."
Even though McKay was a member of his team, John couldn't really blame Beckett for that. If ever there was a candidate for 'the boy who cried respiratory infection'...
While I'm not above a good 'no one realises the hypochondriac really is ill' story, the usual, 'oh, woe, how did we not notice and what terrible friends are we?' angst kind of annoys me. Being pragmatic at heart I'm not very inclined to irrational guilt, and I tend to make my characters the same way.
My made up stretchy science surrounding the alien spores may well be totally ridiculous to anyone who knows their stuff, but hey, that's a Stargate tradition.
People made cracks about his own disaster-prone medical record, but the truth was Jack got beaten up more often than anyone bar Siler. He just had a knack for doing it in situations that earned descriptors like 'heroic', whereas Daniel's infirmary time tended to be accompanied by phrases like 'really unlucky', 'distracted by an interesting inscription' and 'why does every alien within a billion light-years feel compelled to keep me as a pet?'
Why does fanon make such a big thing of Daniel supposedly getting whumped all the time? I'd swear Jack gets beat up on just as much or more. I guess context is everything.
The Maltok'va Hawkins remained smugly silent in the face of questioning. Although Teal'c admired the strict honour code of his Tauri allies, there were times at which he found it... most confining. Hawkins was a man without honour, without bravery; his security was his belief that none would touch him.
More derived Goa'uld: Tal mal'tiak mal we'ia apparently means "I am honoured", and I figured the syllable "mal" was likely the honour part as it also comes up in the rite of Mal sharran. Tok means "against" and va comes from Shol'va (traitor), so: Maltok'va, one who is a disgrace against honour.
Honour among the Tauri was a complicated business. The Goa'uld would not understand it, could literally never conceive of it. Yet the Tauri culture was so steeped in such complex values that they could look upon a work of great spiritual depth like the movie Star Wars, and laugh off its lessons as things learned a thousand times over from earliest childhood.
This is actually worth unpacking a little. In all of the fanfic and meta I've seen (and to a certain extent I suppose actual canon) Teal'c's affection for Star Wars is touched on only as a cute running gag. Space ships and lightsabers and fluff entertainment, oh my. But... just think about it a second.
I don't know what's considered suitable entertainment for the young Jaffa, but you can bet that First Prime Teal'c had never met a 'plucky underdog rebels overthrow the all-powerful Emperor' story. Ever. It's revolutionary in the most literal sense. All that painfully trite fairytale morality about searching your feelings, winning by choosing not to fight, looking for the good in the heart of your enemy, taking on the system just because it's wrong? Revolutionary. Things that the Jaffa are not taught to think, are deliberately taught not to think.
And, you know, people like to play the cutesy character comparison game where Jack is Han, Daniel Luke and Carter Leia (or vice versa, sometimes) but you rarely see them pull out the most obvious parallel: the fact that Teal'c is Darth Vader. And the entire emotional arc of the Star Wars OT is telling the tale of how this monstrous warrior who's done terrible, terrible things as the right-hand man to a creature of pure evil still has the power to turn aside, find his redemption, and overthrow his master.
Is it really any wonder Teal'c's digging this stuff?
The codes provided by the Tok'ra had given them access to the original technical information retrieved from P2C-491, as the Goa'uld had not been able to encrypt the language of the Ancients as thoroughly as they did their own. The notes of the Goa'uld scientists would take much longer to decipher, and it was this task Jacob Carter had returned to the Tok'ra to attempt.
I totally made this up as an excuse for why they were able to look at tech specs then and there but mysteriously have to wait for Jacob to play exposition boy to get the rest of the info at a dramatically appropriate time.
"The operative Hawkins is being..." He contemplated an appropriate translation for Mik'shok, and deemed it unsuitable for present company. "...Unhelpful."
And another Goa'uld insult. "Mik" is familiar from Mik'ta (arse, apparently) and since ta pops up in several contexts - Kree'ta (stop that/leave it) and Kresh'ta (outcastes) - related to things being left or got rid of, that suggests that one's Mik'ta is a place for getting rid of Mik. I couldn't find a derivation for "head", so I made up "Shok" based on the fact that a lot of words to do with commands, ideas, and making choices seem to be "sh-" words.
"What of the computer program you and Daniel Jackson discovered at Mountain Springs High School?"
I didn't make the school name up; I yoinked it from a banner you see at the end of Fragile Balance.
He sat up to find Jon perched on the end of the other bed, swinging his legs and playing with a gadget about the size of a toaster. It looked... well, it looked like what it almost certainly was, an unholy hybrid of dismantled appliances and duct tape, but it had a strange kind of functional attractiveness. It exuded the impression that it might not be obvious why that part had been stuck there, but you'd better believe it was exactly the right place for it.
Sometimes the MacGyver injokes are compulsory.
XI
Ted had enough years under his own belt to recognise that anyone with hair that was grey verging on white should not be able to wear baggy pants, a yellow shirt, and sunglasses indoors without looking ridiculous.
I am almost totally oblivious to clothing - mine and other people's - and even I WTF in response to some of the things Jack wears in his downtime. Daniel may fail at dressing himself stylishly, but at least he doesn't have an alarming attraction to pastels and bright primary colours.
"Uh, you're his-" he bit down on 'father' just in time, remembering Jon's orphaned status, "...uncle?"
"Cousin," the man corrected, nodding to himself. Then he pulled a dissatisfied face and let it smooth out again. "Removed," he added. "Or... the other thing. Daniel?" He swivelled round.
Jackson blinked at being addressed. "Um. Well, he's your... uncle's grandson? So that makes you his-"
"Grandfather's nephew," O'Neill overrode him, smiling in smug satisfaction at having arrived at a term he was happy with.
I gave Jack and 'Jon' this slightly convoluted relationship because it seemed like it would be harder to disprove. Also, in Fragile Balance, Jack's old military buddy doesn't seem to think Jack had any siblings. Not that this proves much, given that Kawalsky was equally surprised to discover Jack had a son. Jack's family history is a blank slate, completely up for grabs in any direction, and I find it equally easy to believe that he has none, he has some but has cut all ties with them, or he's off home to visit his mom every other weekend and has just completely failed to mention it.
"Kids. In the back." Jack jerked a thumb at them. He'd managed to commandeer the passenger seat from the get-go, citing the privileges of age, rank, and longer legs. Teal'c, of course, was driving.
I don't know where I picked up the impression that Teal'c likes to drive, but... somehow I have it. It's not like he gets out of the mountain much, after all.
Take an adult man, and place him in the body of his fifteen-year-old self - did he become fifteen? Did he think and feel exactly as he would if he were still an adult, or did hormones and the physical structure of the brain make him an emotional teenager? Did he get crushes on girls his age, or women more appropriate to 'his age' - and did either way feel disturbing to him, or did instinct and biology make it natural? Was instinct biology? Did Jack's new body possess reflexes it had never been trained to, or was even a simple task like catching a ball something to relearn now that all the dimensions had changed?
I sidestepped all these questions by not using Jon's point of view. I think he's more interesting if they're not explicitly resolved.
From what I can gather, there should be a second component to the device; what we have would be used by the parent - or, or teacher, or doctor - to set the, um, the learning program that would play on the second device."
"Master and slave," said Sam, nodding. Daniel frowned.
"Um, there's no evidence the Ancients ever-"
She cut him off with a warm smile. "Computer terminology, Daniel. A master-slave network has a single computer acting as a server that distributes information to all the client terminals - as opposed to the peer-to-peer model, where any station can send or receive requests for services. As near as we can tell, the data stream from the device is unidirectional, which suggests a host-based or master-slave setup."
Hosts, masters, slaves... was it him, or did all this computer terminology sound disturbingly Goa'uldish?
It's useful when I can have Sam or McKay technobabble about areas I am actually qualified in. Thus far, Stargate fanfic and improved icon-making are the only practical uses I've ever put my degree to.
Daniel flipped through a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare that had been left on Jon's coffee table. No annotations, although there was a doodle of a bumblebee on page 57. Rather endearingly, it had been outfitted with a speech bubble that read 'Bzzz bzzz'.
...Don't look at me, I don't know.
The cracked one had been removed to one of the worktops, and now had a note taped to it that said: 'Do not throw. Does not bounce.' John made a mental note to find out which marines had been given the duty of carrying Zelenka's equipment for him.
This inspired by McKay's 'Really Really Dangerous, Don't Touch' sign on the naquadah generators.
His teammates, and many others at the SGC, had often remarked in wonder at the rapport O'Neill had struck with such a lofty representative of a race so alien. Teal'c kept his own counsel. Warrior souls called to one another, and no boundary of race could stand between them. His time among the Tauri had taught him that there were more routes to close kinship than the Jaffa acknowledged, but the one he had known longest was the most universal.
The burden of battles lost and hard won was always visible in the eyes of those who carried it. Teal'c had seen it in O'Neill on Chulak, and known in that instant that while hundreds had stood before him and made claims even more grandiose, here at last was a man who knew the weight of what he offered and still offered it.
He had no doubt Thor had seen the same in O'Neill's eyes, and realised that the Tauri were not so young and foolish as the Asgard had believed.
Thor is a war leader. It's easy to forget. As commander of the Asgard military, perhaps it's not so surprising he relates to Jack best.
"It couldn't wait 'til we got back to the Batcave?" O'Neill asked, spreading his hands.
Teal'c had, through the convenience of DVD rental, familiarised himself with the mythology of the warrior known as Batman, but Thor was doubtless uncertain to what O'Neill referred.
This is an excellent example of why writing in Teal'c's POV is So. Much. Fun.
XII
The big guy... Well, he had a thing going on with his eyebrow that could mean amusement, disdain, or homicidal tendencies. It was almost easier to read the alien.
And this is why OC POVs are fun too. It can get bit too cutesy if you're not careful, but I do like it when fic plays with things the audience knows and the POV character doesn't.
Teal'c beams back down to the SGC with Jamie because I was writing The Epic Exposition Scene of Doom at the end of this chapter and realised I couldn't find room to give him any lines. And I think that when that happens, it's better to find an excuse to have the character just... not be there rather than leave them to stand around being furniture. (Especially since that's Teal'c's role way too often in both fic and canon). It seems logical to have someone accompany Jamie down anyway.
"Oh, yes. This whole room is a..." He gestured as he chewed over the right choice of words. "Scanning chamber, yes? Like... MRI room. Fully shielded."
Writing Zelenka, there's a dangerous impulse to make him drop his articles. Thing is, he doesn't actually do that much - if ever - in canon. If you ignore the accent and just listen to the words, his English is flawless. So I tried to police my Zelenka scenes for that and only let it through in a few places where he's distracted or very excited.
Radek quirked an eyebrow her way. "Rodney is usually right. This is why we do not mutiny and replace him with a more agreeable man."
You know it's true.
Aha, and now we come to The Epic Exposition Scene of Doom (mentally subtitled that from the moment I first started writing it). Oddly enough, this my very favourite scene in the entire fic, even though it's largely Thor giving out technobabble. I think this is my Jack voice at its very best.
Is that your dad? The innocent and obvious assumption had stung, and not just because of the age thing. He'd once had a son, who would be not a million miles away from his clone's apparent age, if-
If. Best to stay well away from that 'if', because it led to some places that were difficult to claw his way back out of.
But yeah, there was an uncomfortable paternal feeling going on there, and knowing how messed up it was to be wanting to parent yourself wasn't enough to switch it off.
Jack's instinctive reaction to kids meets Jack's instinctive reaction to copies of himself; that's headache fuel right there.
"Our scans indicate that his genetic code has undergone structural alterations on a level currently impossible to achieve by human technological standards. In addition, his brainwaves have adopted a pattern similar to that manifested in you after your exposure to the Ancient database."
See, it wasn't that Jack had a problem with big words; it was just that when you strung a whole lot of them together into one big-ass technical explanation, the part of his brain that was supposed to be doing more important things - like, say, monitoring their immediate environment for things that might explode, bite, take them as hosts or assign him paperwork - objected to freeing up that much processing power. In the time it took to decode Thor's version of 'It's just like that time with the head-sucker thing' he could have done three sweeps of the room and gone for donuts.
I had to fight with myself not to simplify Thor's dialogue here even though it was supposed to be hard to digest. That first sentence is a brain-breaker because it's all high-speed syllables with no natural pauses anywhere.
Thor nodded. "I believe the device that you describe was one of many created by the Ancients in an attempt to stave off the plague that threatened their people. It was intended to help regenerate deteriorating tissue, in order to keep those infected in a stable condition while a cure was sought."
I was very pleased with myself when I came up with the idea of a device to fix brain-damaged Ancients as an explanation for my otherwise highly McGuffin-y 'make Jon and Jack into Ancients' machine.
"You mean it's all still in there?" Jack's eyes widened.
Thor tilted his head. "It is inaccessible to your conscious mind in its current format."
"Like deleting a piece of software instead of properly uninstalling it," Carter said. Jack raised an eyebrow her way for clarification. "Remember that talk about not just pressing 'delete' we had, sir?" she said, smirking. "If you just erase the executable file then the program no longer runs, but your system is still clogged up with lots of subsidiary files that no longer serve any purpose."
I was pleased with this analogy, too.
Yup, definitely one of my favourite sections of the story.
XIII"Oh, my brain's been plenty altered for a long time." Jon gave her a wry look. "General?" he added incredulously.
"You didn't notice?" Daniel said.
"I was a little preoccupied by the low-flying pigs." He raised his eyebrows. "When, why, and what kind of recreational drugs were involved?"
I couldn't make up my mind whether Jon would have known about Jack's promotion or not. On the one hand, I doubt he'd want any contact; on the other, if he had no one reporting back at all then no one would have informed him of Janet's death, which is really kind of awful.
Lieutenant Brand's quick fingers danced over the interface. He was working from memories of things he'd never had the chance to put into practise before, but the Goa'uld words scrolling across the screen bore out the fact that everything was running smoothly.
This scene is a little exercise in linguistic trickery (mostly for my own amusement; there's no real significance to the reveal that Brand is a Goa'uld). The natural assumption is that 'Brand' and 'he' are the same person, but they're not; it's Brand's fingers, Brand's memories surfacing, etc., but 'he' always refers to the Goa'uld.
The reveal comes so soon after that it's more or less pointless; it's just me having geeky fun with pronouns.
"Lord Baal. The hyperdrive is successfully integrated with the craft, and we should reach the city of the Ancients in approximately eight days as the Tauri reckon time. Exactly as you anticipated."
I had trouble with the time-lining of the two journeys to Atlantis, and dealt with this by fudging every single aspect of it so there's not a solid frame of reference anywhere. We know the Daedelus takes three weeks to make the trip, but Baal has a souped-up Ancient hyperdrive and it's not clear exactly when he set off, and the SGC team have not just an Asgard ship but a never-seen-before Asgard explorer-class ship, and Jon monkeys with the engines. So it's completely impossible to for the readers to make informed calculations on any of it, and they just have to accept my timeline as it stands. Result!
(Even so, the way it meshes with the SGA-side timeline means poor Rodney spends a very long time shut up in the infirmary. No wonder he's crawling up the walls by the time the Goa'uld arrive.)
XIV
"Fine." Jack forced himself to straighten his face out of the grimace of pain. "Fine," he repeated, more gruffly. "Go."
The kid didn't look happy about it, but he went. Jack watched until he was inside the house, and then restarted the engine.
And so Jamie vanishes rather unceremoniously from the story. I did feel it was a little too abrupt considering he'd had so many POV scenes in the first half of the story, but the alternative was to have a really tagged-on 'Trust guys go after Jamie' subplot of some kind (which would be even more egregiously out of place given that all the other plot threads are just beginning to converge as the action transfers to Atlantis). So, he gets left behind as the story shifts into its second phase.
"Yeah. Okay, well-" The kid popped the door open and the light came on. It caused the blond in his hair to glow, and Jack couldn't help flinching at the brightness, slamming his elbow on the steering wheel.
The first hint that Jack is beginning to go the same way Jon is.
I believe the not-so-subtle reference to Jamie's hair colour here was a late insert because one of the reviewers requested a clearer picture of what my OCs look like. I'm not big on physical descriptions of characters at the best of times (I don't visualise at all when I'm reading, so any description is just a list of bullet-point factoids to me) and I often have to be prodded to remember to put them in for other people.
"The Atlantis team could be dead," Jack said dourly.
I set this story pre-Letters From Pegasus because obviously it worked better dramatically if there had been no contact with Earth before the Goa'uld arrived, but also to avoid the "Yikes, hive ships!" arc that ran all through the back half of Atlantis season one. It would have been a big distraction from the action to have that additional threat hanging over the city.
Where did you draw the line between imposing your values on others and attempting to prevent atrocities or unnecessary suffering? It was an ethical question the Stargate Programme had wrestled with since its inception, and there was little they could do except deal with each case as best they could as it came up.
Prime Directive? The SGC laughs at your Prime Directive. There are relatively few alien societies that they haven't cheerfully shattered to pieces and rebuilt in the process of passing through them. Sometimes it's even intentional.
They were sharing the ship with five Asgard, but none of them were much inclined to talk technology with her. There was a perky little guy named Bragi who only wanted to pepper her with questions about Earth, the surly expedition leader Frode who either didn't speak English or was pretending not to, and three engineer types who were fascinated by their primitive Tauri gear but barely seemed to register that it came with real live primitive Tauri.
There was no denying it. They were onboard a ship crewed by Asgard science nerds.
These guys are left over from when the story was The Asgard Connection and they had a much bigger role in it. I didn't want to use big time gods (although Bragi is apparently the god of poetry) so I scouted out Norse names on the internet. (The veracity of internet name lists is not always so good, but hey, when it's aliens you're naming it doesn't matter that much.) Frode means "wise", and the other three - although only one of them actually gets a namecheck - are Ymir (giant), Regin (blacksmith) and Ostein (cheerful). Maybe I'll bring them back in a different story, because I'm really kind of charmed by the idea of Asgard nerds.
The Skidbladnir was actually Freyr's longship, mythologically speaking, but I didn't want to use Freyr because of the similarity to Freya (Anise). Maybe it's a rental.
John didn't think the Iaeronans had ulterior motives, and it was pretty unlikely they'd get hit by the Wraith again this soon after the last raid, but he still would have liked to join Ford and Teyla in escorting her. Unfortunately, on the rare occasions Elizabeth Weir went off-world, he was exactly the last person who should be out there with her. Especially with McKay incapacitated.
Of course, in canon whenever Weir goes off-world they invariably both go with her. Who would end up in charge if they never came back? Bates? Beckett? Zelenka? Random Marine #4? This expedition is badly in need of an org chart. And a couple of good hard thwacks with the common sense bat.
XV
O'Neill and his clone were avoiding each other, a state of affairs that Daniel Jackson continually sought to remedy, but Teal'c, perhaps selfishly, preferred to see continue. It distressed him to see his brother's discomfort in the presence of his duplicate. Daniel Jackson spoke teasingly of alpha males and pack behaviour, but Teal'c believed his affection for O'Neill blinded him to a more troubling truth.
O'Neill was uncomfortable with his double because O'Neill was uncomfortable with himself.
Jack's behaviour with his duplicates does not speak to me of alpha male posturing. (Well, okay, maybe the wrestling thing.) But mostly, it seems to me to be pure naked distrust. It's not that I think he's crippled by emo self-loathing, but Jack is very aware of the dark side of his own nature, and when he sees that externally, he reacts to it as a threat. Jack is loyalty-driven rather than principle-driven; he knows he'll do anything to protect his people, but he can't know who a duplicate's 'people' are.
I think that the big, fundamental yin/yang difference between Jack and Daniel's outlooks is that while they both have near identical moral codes, Daniel won't ever go against his principles, while Jack will go against his to any degree if it's the best way to protect his people. (Daniel would let the world burn rather than damage his soul, and Jack would let his soul burn rather than damage the world. It's all kinds of fascinating.) But, yeah. That's why I think Jack so deeply mistrusts his own duplicates. He knows that the fact the other him is arguably 'a good person' doesn't mean squat if said duplicate has a good enough reason to ignore that. Damned distasteful things, and all that.
The Jaffa knew little of rehabilitation: wounds and sicknesses came in two groups, those that healed quickly and those that were kek. To be weak was to die. But among the Tauri, even minor hurts healed slowly - and so they had never learned to draw such a line between lesser and greater injury. Teal'c had seen and marvelled at machines to breathe air for lungs that could not, to clean blood that the body could not clean itself, to shock life into a heart that no longer wished to beat.
The whole science of Tauri medicine must be astonishing to a Jaffa. I think it took Teal'c a long time to get to grips with the idea of the fight for life being just as worthy a battle as any other; that weakness was something to be triumphantly overcome rather than a killing shame. I suspect that deep down, for a long time, he carried a secret double standard where he considered that kind of frailty to be fine and shameless for his weaker Tauri friends, but dishonourable for him. I think it took his serious injury in Orpheus for Teal'c to embrace his inner humanity, as it were; to finally break away from a lifetime's brainwashing and accept that he's not just a Jaffa who lives among humans, but rather a human who happens to be a Jaffa. That was the moment when he became Teal'c of the Tauri instead of Teal'c of Chulak.
"I can't spar with Daniel! Even if he has got muscles now." Teal'c was forced to admit that this was true. Daniel Jackson had become a warrior that no man or Jaffa could feel shamed to fight beside, but much of that skill had originated from O'Neill, and he still hesitated to strike a friend with his full strength in training.
While Daniel can kick ass all he needs to in an actual fight, I can't really see him getting on with mock-combat. I think he'd question the necessity of it. In the middle of it. While Jack is trying to spar with him.
Not that Teal'c truly believed this. But, after nearly three days aboard an Asgard vessel with no enemy to fight and no mission to complete, he would privately have to admit to being rel hal'toc.
Or, as the Tauri would put it, bored stupid.
I didn't think the Jaffa would have a direct translation of 'bored' (not a very safe thing for a Jaffa to be) so rel'hal'toc comes from rel'toc (which comes up twice in the context of Jaffa being told to do some duty or other) and hal a word I made up to mean "futile" based on ha (bad); literally, then, to be working on something futile or stuck on punishment duty.
The older O'Neill had appeared in the doorway behind them, scowling and holding his head. It was unclear whether this was due to a continuing headache or a futile attempt to tame what the sleep pods had done to his hair.
It's all about the hair.
"Wait, Doctor Facinelli has a goldfish?"
McKay gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Actually it's more of a pinkfish. The xenoichthyologists liberated it from a lab on... that planet with the upside-down trees. They think it might be genetically engineered as a living water-purifier. So far they've discovered it eats paper, any kind of biological waste, and those little tiny screws that hold the arms on to a pair of glasses. Doctor Stansfield was not pleased. They only managed to stop him trying to flush it down the toilet by pointing out that we don't know what kind of scanning protocols the city has in place in the sewage treatment centre."
Wouldn't it be awesome to be a xenoichthyologist? You could have it on all of your business cards, and when people say, "What the hell is that?" you can tell them that you study alien fish.
There's a lot of scientists in Atlantis, and they're not all employed fiddling with Ancient tech, so you have to wonder what the rest of them are up to. We rarely find out unless it comes to life and starts terrorising the city.
Zelenka looked up from the screen he was examining. "Two things. One, apparently we have long-range scanners. Two, our long-range scanners are picking up a ship."
For the purposes of this AU I had to move forward the discovery of the long-range sensors that occurred in Brotherhood. It's basically the same scenario as occurred with the high-speed dart in that episode, except that Baal's ship has its own hyperdrive instead of having to use the nearest Stargate so it was able to appear closer to the city.
And now it's revealed why Baal went to the effort of making SG-6 into hosts. He and Nirrti are the only Goa'uld we've seen capable of beating back their natural arrogance long enough to execute plans that require sneakiness. (And they're both more intelligent and technology-oriented, too. Perhaps their symbiotes are from the same branch of the bloodline. I wonder, actually, if there's some genetic link to the Tok'ra mama Egeria; they could even be her early children from before she had her epiphany and started passing on a conscience along with the predisposition towards technical skills and stealth infiltration.)
XVI
He would keep O'Neill and his clone's secret - for the moment. If the time came that sharing it would benefit O'Neill, then that would change. As Master Bra'tac would have put it: kol'ma a kol'sha nai'eem.
Loyalty is not the same thing as obedience.
Huh, there's more homemade Goa'uld in this story than I remembered. Anyway:
* "Kol" is from Tel kol, which appears to be something along the lines of "show respect". "Ma" as I've said elsewhere seems to be "warrior" and "sha" based on Kel sha (an acknowledgement of a command) I assume means an order.
* "Nai" is from Korush'nai (Goa'uld warning to turn back from a contaminated world) and Ne'nai ("no, don't") so it seems to be a negation. Thus, "nai'eem": not in balance or not the same.
* "a" shows up in a'roush (village) and gal a'quel (give me that) and so seems to be roughly analogous to 'that'. I basically just stuck it in there because I felt the phrase needed another syllable to give it balance.
So, literally, "[respect for a warrior] [that] [respect for a command] [does not balance]" or "respecting a warrior does not necessarily equate to respecting his commands". Or what Teal'c said.
Daniel had stilled. "So you think Jon... and Jack... may not need curing at all?"
She spread her hands helplessly. "I'm just saying, if the process does achieve stability... is it right to 'cure' somebody of having evolved to a higher level?"
The question took on a new resonance considering who she was posing it to: Daniel, who had once himself evolved beyond the human form, and then returned stripped not just of his powers but of the knowledge of what it had been to have them. She had often wondered how it felt to him to be mortal once more; whether his Ascension was as distant to him as a dream lost on waking, or if he was aware somehow of his shrunken limitations, conscious of feeling smaller, lesser, more contained.
There were a million questions, and all of them would go unasked, because the scientist in her was still shouted down by the part that was just selfishly glad to have him back.
I think the stress of season six was when we really saw how much Sam has come to rely on the other members of SG-1, and perhaps the first time she realised it too. Sam strikes me as someone who's always been very self-contained and happy in isolation (which is something I like about her; it's not at all common in female characters). She's warm and she forms friendships and tries romantic relationships when the opportunity pops up, but she's not needy for those things. She doesn't angst about her lack of social life - quite the opposite, in fact - and never seems overly troubled by singledom or any ticking biological clocks; she's got her work and if that was all she had, she'd still be happy.
But I think in SG-1 she's finally found people that she does allow herself to lean on, relationships that have wormed their way into her life to such an extent that their loss really would be shattering. I think maybe it's the first time she's connected with anyone that strongly since her mom died. And that's got to be quite scary and disconcerting for her. Sam's not used to having people it would really hurt to lose.
Also, it seems very Sam to me to scientifically analyse her emotional reactions and try to figure out if she's got them 'right'.
O'Neill had seemed okay - weird, and kinda blunt for a General, but okay - but then, at the time, John hadn't been assessing him as anything more than another random bigwig he had to chauffeur about for a day or two.
It's kind of interesting to think about the perception that Sheppard - who met Jack only in his General incarnation, and that fairly briefly - might have of Jack compared to the one that the rest of us do. Doctor Weir had enough exposure to Jack's... um, unique... personality to know what he was like (and perhaps McKay did too, around the fringes of what we saw on-screen of his visits to the SGC) but Sheppard only really saw him when he was on his best behaviour. (Which is a pity, really, because Sheppard has massive command issues out the wazoo, and it might have done him some good to get to know a superior officer as laid-back, undiplomatic and just plain weird as Jack.)
The only other person he'd heard much about was Samantha Carter, and all he knew about her was that she was A, a Lieutenant Colonel, B, tragically dim for somebody who'd apparently designed the entire Stargate program from scratch, and C, madly in love with Rodney McKay. He had doubts about the veracity of at least two of those pieces of information.
Good luck trying to get an accurate picture of anybody's personality or capabilities by listening to McKay.
To be honest, John had kind of expected that if the SGC were going to make contact with them, they'd either send a couple of hundred people or put the famous SG-1 on contact duty. This five-man team of relative nobodies was pinging his alarm bells, even though Casey's explanation - that they were the most qualified expendables to shove aboard a highly experimental ship - held water.
Apparently John's instincts are tuned to the "they wouldn't do this in a TV episode" channel.
For some reason, those wacky Ancients liked to write the equivalent of calming haiku on their staircases. Because nothing added that extra touch of Zen to your day quite like walking into the guy in front because you were trying to read a message at foot level.
It seems to me the edges of stairs are not the most sensible place to write messages. It's just as well Daniel didn't go along on the original mission, or else he'd have been trampled to death trying to read them all.
"Doyle," the man said, as the patch on his SGC uniform indeed bore out. He paused for a moment and tilted his head as if thinking, and then added smugly, "Jack Doyle."
You've probably forgotten by now that Doyle was the SGC scientist reported missing in the very first scene of the fic. I thought Baal picking Jack as a name was a nicely nasty touch.
He grimaced over the untranslated annotations. Languages were not his thing; his knowledge of Ancient was mostly limited to computer syntax, a few standard phrases, and every conceivable variation on 'Urgent/Do Not Touch/Lethal/Caution'. The autotranslator could process the computer code itself, but it would slow everything down ridiculously to try and plug in even a halfway complete Ancient dictionary.
I've noticed their laptops seem to have some sort of translation program going, which seems... unlikely, given the current state of automated translators (*cough* Babelfish *cough*). So I'm assuming the Ancients have a particular programming language with a restricted syntax and the translators only work on that.
On the plus side, he could tell from some familiar-looking time delay calculations that he was working with an array of transducers arranged over a plane, so it was obviously some kind of beamforming. It was child's play to assign a pixel colour to each value and put together an ultrasound-style picture.
Once again, my degree is showing. We spent an unnecessarily long time covering beamforming in my Computing and Instrumentation module. I had to do a paper on its use in radio astronomy, which will come in very handy should I ever have to sell a cover story about working in Deep Space Radar Telemetry.
XVII
John hesitated in the doorway of the briefing room, suddenly very, very reluctant to step in. Pretty much the entire population of Atlantis was gathered there to hear the SGC representatives speak.
Not really sure what the population of Atlantis was midway through season one, but we see a fairly large-scale gathering in The Siege (and also the party at the end of the pilot) so I presumed it was plausible to stuff all or most of them into one room.
"He is still conscious."
"The Tauri have observed that our zat'nikatels react unpredictably with their physiology."
Or: the viewers have observed that the effects of zat blasts vary considerably according to plot necessity.
"...patriam... asordo... non paratus... indeo inver... non anquientam..."
More 'Ancient' rambling; asordo, indeo, and anquientam are words nicked from The Fifth Race, and this roughly 'translates' to "home... assistance... not prepared... need reversal... not an Ancient..."
Confinement of any kind never sat easily with Jack, whether it was paperwork chaining him to his desk, injuries chaining him to his infirmary bed, or bad guys chaining him to the first thing that was handy. Stasis took even more control from him than that, leaving him not only trapped, but completely helpless until someone on the outside chose to revive him. Daniel still remembered waking up in the Hathor House of Fun four or five years ago, being told he was the only one who had survived and everyone he knew was decades dead. He could understand full well why Jack wouldn't want to risk that ever again.
Of course, that didn't mean he wasn't selfish enough to shove Jack into a stasis pod kicking and screaming if necessary, privileging his right to have a Jack O'Neill in his life over Jack's right to choose his own destiny.
I think Daniel fundamentally cannot accept the line of mortality that Jack has drawn for himself. In Abyss he could not, wilfully would not accept Jack's own decision to choose death over Ascension. It's immediately obvious to anyone who's known him for twelve seconds that becoming a floaty energy being with a non-interference policy would be absolute torture for Jack, but Daniel has never met an opposing opinion he didn't think he had the God-given right to bludgeon into submission.
I do believe that, pushed into a true balls-to-the-wall situation where it really is death or the unpalatable option, Daniel has the potential to commit a crime against Jack that Jack would never forgive him for. Because Jack has very clearly defined lines about what he isn't willing to do or become to survive, and while Teal'c would respect those lines and Sam would argue but ultimately accede, Daniel would override Jack's wishes on the assumption that Jack could be persuaded it was the right thing after the fact. And he would believe to the very end that he was right and Jack just wasn't listening, too.
Daniel had many thoughts about the nature of loyalty, religious indoctrination and attitudes to faith, but they would remain forever unvoiced. He'd died, fought gods, and defied the Ascended, but nothing could make him prepared for the likely reactions of both parties to the suggestion that Jack might be Teal'c's god-substitute.
I think that in the beginning, however subconsciously, Teal'c was looking for a new 'god'; a better leader to throw his lot in with. He wasn't ready to walk away on his own. And while I don't think he actually perceives Jack as a god - I doubt it would have taken much time among the Tauri to dispel that impression (like, five minutes?) - I think there is a trace of that religious loyalty still there, the sense of faith rewarded. And so there's always been that extra layer on Teal'c's relationship with Jack that isn't there with anyone else.
"Months," Rodney corrected, giving him a stern eyebrow. "The Goa'uld aren't smarter than us, they just need fewer coffee breaks. And there weren't that many high-stakes players left when we left the galaxy. Let's see... Osiris? No, wait, SG-1 dealt with him - her? - and freed the host. There's Yu... but I don't recall him ever using Ancient technology, and anyway, last I heard he'd gone ga-ga. No, I think there are two main contenders." His face darkened. "It's got to be either Baal or Anubis."
What happened to Yu? (Oh, the endless puns.) I don't think he got killed off, did he? He just kind of vanished from the scene. Maybe he died of 'natural' causes, since I seem to recall his senility had reached a point where the sarcophagus couldn't help. Or maybe his Jaffa bumped him off. Either that, or they've stuffed him in an old folk's home somewhere. ("I am Yu!" / "No, you're not, dear. Eat your porridge.")
XVIII
Ah, a Carson scene. It's funny how when I hit one of these I just completely relax. I don't think I realised until that first happened exactly how much effort I'm putting in the whole time to try and 'write American'. Not that Carson's voice is a total match for mine (I'm from south east England) but I can use my own natural vocabulary without having to think about it, and it flows so much easier.
Carson couldn't help but remember that humans weren't the first race the Goa'uld had used as hosts - and genetically, the Unas were not exactly humanity's closest cousins. If a leap that big had been made before, could it be made again?
He was probably the closest thing this galaxy had to an expert on the internal workings of the Wraith, and what that expertise told him was chilling. Because while aspects of the Wraith were very alien, they were basically hybrid creatures... and he'd already discovered their bodies contained a quite surprising proportion of human DNA.
I had already written this section, raising the possibility of Wraith as hosts, before I came to the parts of season two that clarified how closely related to humans they are. So this worst-case-scenario jumped from possible to extremely plausible.
Goa'uld Wraith. Now that would be scary-cool.
"You - not him," McKay corrected. "He's a Goa'uld."
"...Okay." John had no idea what that word was, but it had way more vowels than he could deal with right now.
McKay shoved him into a transporter and sighed explosively. "Major, did you do any background reading at all before you signed on for this mission?"
John blinked a few times. "There were assigned texts?"
We learn in later seasons that Sheppard does know about the Goa'uld, but at the time of writing (and given when this story is set) it seemed plausible that he'd got relatively little background information before being rushed through the gate to Atlantis the first time. I figured he would surely have heard the general 'at war with evil aliens' info but not necessarily the details. (And I needed someone to play Exposition Boy, dammit.)
"The Goa'uld are able to absorb naquadah - or produce it, or excrete it, or something. I don't know. Biology." He handwaved that as unimportant. "Some of their technology can only be activated by a host with naquadah particles in their bloodstream. There's some speculation that the race the Goa'uld stole the tech from reverse-engineered an Ancient device and replaced the gene requirement with a naquadah trigger."
This speculation is mine rather than canonical, but given that the Goa'uld are established to be tech scavengers and the similarities between gene-based vs. naquadah-based mental activation, it seems like a decent theory to me.
Here, a hallway in the city of Atlantis. Now, about thirty seconds since Ymir had pointed out three travelling life-form blips, said in his melodic Asgard voice, "We will transport you here where the population density is low enough to prevent collision," and kicked their butts the hell off the Skidbladnir without further discussion.
See the author transparently try to handwave the convenience of SG-1 appearing right next to our guys instead of in the thick of it.
Jack absently threat assessed the identities of the three blips - scientist, scientist, that Sheppard guy, none of them pointing anything dangerous at him - and then turned to Daniel. "Hey! They're just gonna dump us here?"
Check for immediate death threats, then bitch. It's the SG-1 way.
I'm pretty sure the only reason this is happening at all is because Thor has a bit of a thing for you."
Okay, that got his attention. "Thor is a four foot tall grey alien of indeterminate gender with no genitals!"
Daniel wiggled his eyebrows. "I didn't say it was an easily classifiable thing."
This exchange has been floating around in various incarnations since this fic was very first conceived. (Although I'm not sure if the estimation of Asgard height is accurate. I didn't have a good full-length screencap to try and figure it out.)
He exchanged a look with his clone, and the same unpleasant, obvious thought flew both ways through the space between them. Baal.
Who else could it be?
Sheppard half narrowed his unfocused eyes, and then raised a wavering finger. "Um. Did somebody just say something about... balls?" he asked uncertainly.
Sheppard seems to be very receptive to Ancient-style mental connections, if his gift for using the tech is any guide. So I figured he might conceivably pick up some faint whisper of the O'Neills' communication. Especially with his brain laid open somewhat more than usual after having been ribbon-deviced.
(Sheppard gets hit with a rather ridiculous number of energy blasts as this story progresses. It just happened that way, I swear!)
General O'Neill, Radek knew of through his two conflicting reputations: the superhuman military hero who left no one behind, and the overgrown child whose place in the rigid confines of the USAF command structure was a mystery. Radek's own concept of O'Neill, however, would be forever influenced by the near-funereal image of him frozen in the Ancient stasis booth in Antarctica. In the days before they had known if he would be possible to revive, even the scientists assigned to study the unit had tiptoed around him, nervous and respectful before that unseeing gaze.
This occurred to me as I was writing. Presumably many of those scientists running about Antarctica during the Atlantis pilot were there when Jack was frozen in stasis, and possibly even worked on the issue of whether it was safe to revive him. Now there's an interesting way to be introduced to somebody.
He suppressed an unbecoming flicker of jealousy. The gene therapy had not taken with him; it was simply a minor deficiency in his genetic code, no worse than his being short-sighted, and to dwell on it was childish.
Still, to talk to the city with his mind... how could any true scientist not dream of it?
It must really suck to be a scientist on Atlantis who couldn't get the gene. Especially if you have to live with Rodney crowing about it.
"No," snapped O'Neill, at the same time as Jon blurted "Non sum!", Colonel Carter smiled and said "Essentially," and Daniel Jackson said "Ah... in a sense." A flurry of looks were exchanged between the four of them, and Teal'c raised a single eyebrow pointedly. It was the only contribution he had made to the conversation so far.
I like this. Ah, SG-1. They're all on the same page, but they're always reading it completely differently.
Perhaps it was as well that the prisoner had escaped. Kaermec permitted his host body to display a small smile. Yes, this was not a failure, this was wisdom. If he allowed Baal to take a new host who possessed the city's genetic key, it would only give him an advantage over his fellow Goa'uld. It made far more sense to let the host run free until Kaermec was in a position to take control of it.
I didn't want to overcomplicate things too much by giving all the minion Goa'uld their own personalities and identities, but it was necessary to use a POV scene here. I wrote the young Goa'uld with even less self-awareness than Baal; it's a never-ending chain of, "Yeah, so, I totally meant to do that, and really, it's the best thing anyway because this is all my genius plan."
It would be an interesting exercise in unreliable narrators to write a typical SG-1 adventure from the Goa'uld's POV, actually.
Concluded in part 3.
X
He shook his head ruefully. "He came to see me twice and he seemed fine both times, I'm afraid I didn't take him very seriously."
Even though McKay was a member of his team, John couldn't really blame Beckett for that. If ever there was a candidate for 'the boy who cried respiratory infection'...
While I'm not above a good 'no one realises the hypochondriac really is ill' story, the usual, 'oh, woe, how did we not notice and what terrible friends are we?' angst kind of annoys me. Being pragmatic at heart I'm not very inclined to irrational guilt, and I tend to make my characters the same way.
My made up stretchy science surrounding the alien spores may well be totally ridiculous to anyone who knows their stuff, but hey, that's a Stargate tradition.
People made cracks about his own disaster-prone medical record, but the truth was Jack got beaten up more often than anyone bar Siler. He just had a knack for doing it in situations that earned descriptors like 'heroic', whereas Daniel's infirmary time tended to be accompanied by phrases like 'really unlucky', 'distracted by an interesting inscription' and 'why does every alien within a billion light-years feel compelled to keep me as a pet?'
Why does fanon make such a big thing of Daniel supposedly getting whumped all the time? I'd swear Jack gets beat up on just as much or more. I guess context is everything.
The Maltok'va Hawkins remained smugly silent in the face of questioning. Although Teal'c admired the strict honour code of his Tauri allies, there were times at which he found it... most confining. Hawkins was a man without honour, without bravery; his security was his belief that none would touch him.
More derived Goa'uld: Tal mal'tiak mal we'ia apparently means "I am honoured", and I figured the syllable "mal" was likely the honour part as it also comes up in the rite of Mal sharran. Tok means "against" and va comes from Shol'va (traitor), so: Maltok'va, one who is a disgrace against honour.
Honour among the Tauri was a complicated business. The Goa'uld would not understand it, could literally never conceive of it. Yet the Tauri culture was so steeped in such complex values that they could look upon a work of great spiritual depth like the movie Star Wars, and laugh off its lessons as things learned a thousand times over from earliest childhood.
This is actually worth unpacking a little. In all of the fanfic and meta I've seen (and to a certain extent I suppose actual canon) Teal'c's affection for Star Wars is touched on only as a cute running gag. Space ships and lightsabers and fluff entertainment, oh my. But... just think about it a second.
I don't know what's considered suitable entertainment for the young Jaffa, but you can bet that First Prime Teal'c had never met a 'plucky underdog rebels overthrow the all-powerful Emperor' story. Ever. It's revolutionary in the most literal sense. All that painfully trite fairytale morality about searching your feelings, winning by choosing not to fight, looking for the good in the heart of your enemy, taking on the system just because it's wrong? Revolutionary. Things that the Jaffa are not taught to think, are deliberately taught not to think.
And, you know, people like to play the cutesy character comparison game where Jack is Han, Daniel Luke and Carter Leia (or vice versa, sometimes) but you rarely see them pull out the most obvious parallel: the fact that Teal'c is Darth Vader. And the entire emotional arc of the Star Wars OT is telling the tale of how this monstrous warrior who's done terrible, terrible things as the right-hand man to a creature of pure evil still has the power to turn aside, find his redemption, and overthrow his master.
Is it really any wonder Teal'c's digging this stuff?
The codes provided by the Tok'ra had given them access to the original technical information retrieved from P2C-491, as the Goa'uld had not been able to encrypt the language of the Ancients as thoroughly as they did their own. The notes of the Goa'uld scientists would take much longer to decipher, and it was this task Jacob Carter had returned to the Tok'ra to attempt.
I totally made this up as an excuse for why they were able to look at tech specs then and there but mysteriously have to wait for Jacob to play exposition boy to get the rest of the info at a dramatically appropriate time.
"The operative Hawkins is being..." He contemplated an appropriate translation for Mik'shok, and deemed it unsuitable for present company. "...Unhelpful."
And another Goa'uld insult. "Mik" is familiar from Mik'ta (arse, apparently) and since ta pops up in several contexts - Kree'ta (stop that/leave it) and Kresh'ta (outcastes) - related to things being left or got rid of, that suggests that one's Mik'ta is a place for getting rid of Mik. I couldn't find a derivation for "head", so I made up "Shok" based on the fact that a lot of words to do with commands, ideas, and making choices seem to be "sh-" words.
"What of the computer program you and Daniel Jackson discovered at Mountain Springs High School?"
I didn't make the school name up; I yoinked it from a banner you see at the end of Fragile Balance.
He sat up to find Jon perched on the end of the other bed, swinging his legs and playing with a gadget about the size of a toaster. It looked... well, it looked like what it almost certainly was, an unholy hybrid of dismantled appliances and duct tape, but it had a strange kind of functional attractiveness. It exuded the impression that it might not be obvious why that part had been stuck there, but you'd better believe it was exactly the right place for it.
Sometimes the MacGyver injokes are compulsory.
XI
Ted had enough years under his own belt to recognise that anyone with hair that was grey verging on white should not be able to wear baggy pants, a yellow shirt, and sunglasses indoors without looking ridiculous.
I am almost totally oblivious to clothing - mine and other people's - and even I WTF in response to some of the things Jack wears in his downtime. Daniel may fail at dressing himself stylishly, but at least he doesn't have an alarming attraction to pastels and bright primary colours.
"Uh, you're his-" he bit down on 'father' just in time, remembering Jon's orphaned status, "...uncle?"
"Cousin," the man corrected, nodding to himself. Then he pulled a dissatisfied face and let it smooth out again. "Removed," he added. "Or... the other thing. Daniel?" He swivelled round.
Jackson blinked at being addressed. "Um. Well, he's your... uncle's grandson? So that makes you his-"
"Grandfather's nephew," O'Neill overrode him, smiling in smug satisfaction at having arrived at a term he was happy with.
I gave Jack and 'Jon' this slightly convoluted relationship because it seemed like it would be harder to disprove. Also, in Fragile Balance, Jack's old military buddy doesn't seem to think Jack had any siblings. Not that this proves much, given that Kawalsky was equally surprised to discover Jack had a son. Jack's family history is a blank slate, completely up for grabs in any direction, and I find it equally easy to believe that he has none, he has some but has cut all ties with them, or he's off home to visit his mom every other weekend and has just completely failed to mention it.
"Kids. In the back." Jack jerked a thumb at them. He'd managed to commandeer the passenger seat from the get-go, citing the privileges of age, rank, and longer legs. Teal'c, of course, was driving.
I don't know where I picked up the impression that Teal'c likes to drive, but... somehow I have it. It's not like he gets out of the mountain much, after all.
Take an adult man, and place him in the body of his fifteen-year-old self - did he become fifteen? Did he think and feel exactly as he would if he were still an adult, or did hormones and the physical structure of the brain make him an emotional teenager? Did he get crushes on girls his age, or women more appropriate to 'his age' - and did either way feel disturbing to him, or did instinct and biology make it natural? Was instinct biology? Did Jack's new body possess reflexes it had never been trained to, or was even a simple task like catching a ball something to relearn now that all the dimensions had changed?
I sidestepped all these questions by not using Jon's point of view. I think he's more interesting if they're not explicitly resolved.
From what I can gather, there should be a second component to the device; what we have would be used by the parent - or, or teacher, or doctor - to set the, um, the learning program that would play on the second device."
"Master and slave," said Sam, nodding. Daniel frowned.
"Um, there's no evidence the Ancients ever-"
She cut him off with a warm smile. "Computer terminology, Daniel. A master-slave network has a single computer acting as a server that distributes information to all the client terminals - as opposed to the peer-to-peer model, where any station can send or receive requests for services. As near as we can tell, the data stream from the device is unidirectional, which suggests a host-based or master-slave setup."
Hosts, masters, slaves... was it him, or did all this computer terminology sound disturbingly Goa'uldish?
It's useful when I can have Sam or McKay technobabble about areas I am actually qualified in. Thus far, Stargate fanfic and improved icon-making are the only practical uses I've ever put my degree to.
Daniel flipped through a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare that had been left on Jon's coffee table. No annotations, although there was a doodle of a bumblebee on page 57. Rather endearingly, it had been outfitted with a speech bubble that read 'Bzzz bzzz'.
...Don't look at me, I don't know.
The cracked one had been removed to one of the worktops, and now had a note taped to it that said: 'Do not throw. Does not bounce.' John made a mental note to find out which marines had been given the duty of carrying Zelenka's equipment for him.
This inspired by McKay's 'Really Really Dangerous, Don't Touch' sign on the naquadah generators.
His teammates, and many others at the SGC, had often remarked in wonder at the rapport O'Neill had struck with such a lofty representative of a race so alien. Teal'c kept his own counsel. Warrior souls called to one another, and no boundary of race could stand between them. His time among the Tauri had taught him that there were more routes to close kinship than the Jaffa acknowledged, but the one he had known longest was the most universal.
The burden of battles lost and hard won was always visible in the eyes of those who carried it. Teal'c had seen it in O'Neill on Chulak, and known in that instant that while hundreds had stood before him and made claims even more grandiose, here at last was a man who knew the weight of what he offered and still offered it.
He had no doubt Thor had seen the same in O'Neill's eyes, and realised that the Tauri were not so young and foolish as the Asgard had believed.
Thor is a war leader. It's easy to forget. As commander of the Asgard military, perhaps it's not so surprising he relates to Jack best.
"It couldn't wait 'til we got back to the Batcave?" O'Neill asked, spreading his hands.
Teal'c had, through the convenience of DVD rental, familiarised himself with the mythology of the warrior known as Batman, but Thor was doubtless uncertain to what O'Neill referred.
This is an excellent example of why writing in Teal'c's POV is So. Much. Fun.
XII
The big guy... Well, he had a thing going on with his eyebrow that could mean amusement, disdain, or homicidal tendencies. It was almost easier to read the alien.
And this is why OC POVs are fun too. It can get bit too cutesy if you're not careful, but I do like it when fic plays with things the audience knows and the POV character doesn't.
Teal'c beams back down to the SGC with Jamie because I was writing The Epic Exposition Scene of Doom at the end of this chapter and realised I couldn't find room to give him any lines. And I think that when that happens, it's better to find an excuse to have the character just... not be there rather than leave them to stand around being furniture. (Especially since that's Teal'c's role way too often in both fic and canon). It seems logical to have someone accompany Jamie down anyway.
"Oh, yes. This whole room is a..." He gestured as he chewed over the right choice of words. "Scanning chamber, yes? Like... MRI room. Fully shielded."
Writing Zelenka, there's a dangerous impulse to make him drop his articles. Thing is, he doesn't actually do that much - if ever - in canon. If you ignore the accent and just listen to the words, his English is flawless. So I tried to police my Zelenka scenes for that and only let it through in a few places where he's distracted or very excited.
Radek quirked an eyebrow her way. "Rodney is usually right. This is why we do not mutiny and replace him with a more agreeable man."
You know it's true.
Aha, and now we come to The Epic Exposition Scene of Doom (mentally subtitled that from the moment I first started writing it). Oddly enough, this my very favourite scene in the entire fic, even though it's largely Thor giving out technobabble. I think this is my Jack voice at its very best.
Is that your dad? The innocent and obvious assumption had stung, and not just because of the age thing. He'd once had a son, who would be not a million miles away from his clone's apparent age, if-
If. Best to stay well away from that 'if', because it led to some places that were difficult to claw his way back out of.
But yeah, there was an uncomfortable paternal feeling going on there, and knowing how messed up it was to be wanting to parent yourself wasn't enough to switch it off.
Jack's instinctive reaction to kids meets Jack's instinctive reaction to copies of himself; that's headache fuel right there.
"Our scans indicate that his genetic code has undergone structural alterations on a level currently impossible to achieve by human technological standards. In addition, his brainwaves have adopted a pattern similar to that manifested in you after your exposure to the Ancient database."
See, it wasn't that Jack had a problem with big words; it was just that when you strung a whole lot of them together into one big-ass technical explanation, the part of his brain that was supposed to be doing more important things - like, say, monitoring their immediate environment for things that might explode, bite, take them as hosts or assign him paperwork - objected to freeing up that much processing power. In the time it took to decode Thor's version of 'It's just like that time with the head-sucker thing' he could have done three sweeps of the room and gone for donuts.
I had to fight with myself not to simplify Thor's dialogue here even though it was supposed to be hard to digest. That first sentence is a brain-breaker because it's all high-speed syllables with no natural pauses anywhere.
Thor nodded. "I believe the device that you describe was one of many created by the Ancients in an attempt to stave off the plague that threatened their people. It was intended to help regenerate deteriorating tissue, in order to keep those infected in a stable condition while a cure was sought."
I was very pleased with myself when I came up with the idea of a device to fix brain-damaged Ancients as an explanation for my otherwise highly McGuffin-y 'make Jon and Jack into Ancients' machine.
"You mean it's all still in there?" Jack's eyes widened.
Thor tilted his head. "It is inaccessible to your conscious mind in its current format."
"Like deleting a piece of software instead of properly uninstalling it," Carter said. Jack raised an eyebrow her way for clarification. "Remember that talk about not just pressing 'delete' we had, sir?" she said, smirking. "If you just erase the executable file then the program no longer runs, but your system is still clogged up with lots of subsidiary files that no longer serve any purpose."
I was pleased with this analogy, too.
Yup, definitely one of my favourite sections of the story.
XIII"Oh, my brain's been plenty altered for a long time." Jon gave her a wry look. "General?" he added incredulously.
"You didn't notice?" Daniel said.
"I was a little preoccupied by the low-flying pigs." He raised his eyebrows. "When, why, and what kind of recreational drugs were involved?"
I couldn't make up my mind whether Jon would have known about Jack's promotion or not. On the one hand, I doubt he'd want any contact; on the other, if he had no one reporting back at all then no one would have informed him of Janet's death, which is really kind of awful.
Lieutenant Brand's quick fingers danced over the interface. He was working from memories of things he'd never had the chance to put into practise before, but the Goa'uld words scrolling across the screen bore out the fact that everything was running smoothly.
This scene is a little exercise in linguistic trickery (mostly for my own amusement; there's no real significance to the reveal that Brand is a Goa'uld). The natural assumption is that 'Brand' and 'he' are the same person, but they're not; it's Brand's fingers, Brand's memories surfacing, etc., but 'he' always refers to the Goa'uld.
The reveal comes so soon after that it's more or less pointless; it's just me having geeky fun with pronouns.
"Lord Baal. The hyperdrive is successfully integrated with the craft, and we should reach the city of the Ancients in approximately eight days as the Tauri reckon time. Exactly as you anticipated."
I had trouble with the time-lining of the two journeys to Atlantis, and dealt with this by fudging every single aspect of it so there's not a solid frame of reference anywhere. We know the Daedelus takes three weeks to make the trip, but Baal has a souped-up Ancient hyperdrive and it's not clear exactly when he set off, and the SGC team have not just an Asgard ship but a never-seen-before Asgard explorer-class ship, and Jon monkeys with the engines. So it's completely impossible to for the readers to make informed calculations on any of it, and they just have to accept my timeline as it stands. Result!
(Even so, the way it meshes with the SGA-side timeline means poor Rodney spends a very long time shut up in the infirmary. No wonder he's crawling up the walls by the time the Goa'uld arrive.)
XIV
"Fine." Jack forced himself to straighten his face out of the grimace of pain. "Fine," he repeated, more gruffly. "Go."
The kid didn't look happy about it, but he went. Jack watched until he was inside the house, and then restarted the engine.
And so Jamie vanishes rather unceremoniously from the story. I did feel it was a little too abrupt considering he'd had so many POV scenes in the first half of the story, but the alternative was to have a really tagged-on 'Trust guys go after Jamie' subplot of some kind (which would be even more egregiously out of place given that all the other plot threads are just beginning to converge as the action transfers to Atlantis). So, he gets left behind as the story shifts into its second phase.
"Yeah. Okay, well-" The kid popped the door open and the light came on. It caused the blond in his hair to glow, and Jack couldn't help flinching at the brightness, slamming his elbow on the steering wheel.
The first hint that Jack is beginning to go the same way Jon is.
I believe the not-so-subtle reference to Jamie's hair colour here was a late insert because one of the reviewers requested a clearer picture of what my OCs look like. I'm not big on physical descriptions of characters at the best of times (I don't visualise at all when I'm reading, so any description is just a list of bullet-point factoids to me) and I often have to be prodded to remember to put them in for other people.
"The Atlantis team could be dead," Jack said dourly.
I set this story pre-Letters From Pegasus because obviously it worked better dramatically if there had been no contact with Earth before the Goa'uld arrived, but also to avoid the "Yikes, hive ships!" arc that ran all through the back half of Atlantis season one. It would have been a big distraction from the action to have that additional threat hanging over the city.
Where did you draw the line between imposing your values on others and attempting to prevent atrocities or unnecessary suffering? It was an ethical question the Stargate Programme had wrestled with since its inception, and there was little they could do except deal with each case as best they could as it came up.
Prime Directive? The SGC laughs at your Prime Directive. There are relatively few alien societies that they haven't cheerfully shattered to pieces and rebuilt in the process of passing through them. Sometimes it's even intentional.
They were sharing the ship with five Asgard, but none of them were much inclined to talk technology with her. There was a perky little guy named Bragi who only wanted to pepper her with questions about Earth, the surly expedition leader Frode who either didn't speak English or was pretending not to, and three engineer types who were fascinated by their primitive Tauri gear but barely seemed to register that it came with real live primitive Tauri.
There was no denying it. They were onboard a ship crewed by Asgard science nerds.
These guys are left over from when the story was The Asgard Connection and they had a much bigger role in it. I didn't want to use big time gods (although Bragi is apparently the god of poetry) so I scouted out Norse names on the internet. (The veracity of internet name lists is not always so good, but hey, when it's aliens you're naming it doesn't matter that much.) Frode means "wise", and the other three - although only one of them actually gets a namecheck - are Ymir (giant), Regin (blacksmith) and Ostein (cheerful). Maybe I'll bring them back in a different story, because I'm really kind of charmed by the idea of Asgard nerds.
The Skidbladnir was actually Freyr's longship, mythologically speaking, but I didn't want to use Freyr because of the similarity to Freya (Anise). Maybe it's a rental.
John didn't think the Iaeronans had ulterior motives, and it was pretty unlikely they'd get hit by the Wraith again this soon after the last raid, but he still would have liked to join Ford and Teyla in escorting her. Unfortunately, on the rare occasions Elizabeth Weir went off-world, he was exactly the last person who should be out there with her. Especially with McKay incapacitated.
Of course, in canon whenever Weir goes off-world they invariably both go with her. Who would end up in charge if they never came back? Bates? Beckett? Zelenka? Random Marine #4? This expedition is badly in need of an org chart. And a couple of good hard thwacks with the common sense bat.
XV
O'Neill and his clone were avoiding each other, a state of affairs that Daniel Jackson continually sought to remedy, but Teal'c, perhaps selfishly, preferred to see continue. It distressed him to see his brother's discomfort in the presence of his duplicate. Daniel Jackson spoke teasingly of alpha males and pack behaviour, but Teal'c believed his affection for O'Neill blinded him to a more troubling truth.
O'Neill was uncomfortable with his double because O'Neill was uncomfortable with himself.
Jack's behaviour with his duplicates does not speak to me of alpha male posturing. (Well, okay, maybe the wrestling thing.) But mostly, it seems to me to be pure naked distrust. It's not that I think he's crippled by emo self-loathing, but Jack is very aware of the dark side of his own nature, and when he sees that externally, he reacts to it as a threat. Jack is loyalty-driven rather than principle-driven; he knows he'll do anything to protect his people, but he can't know who a duplicate's 'people' are.
I think that the big, fundamental yin/yang difference between Jack and Daniel's outlooks is that while they both have near identical moral codes, Daniel won't ever go against his principles, while Jack will go against his to any degree if it's the best way to protect his people. (Daniel would let the world burn rather than damage his soul, and Jack would let his soul burn rather than damage the world. It's all kinds of fascinating.) But, yeah. That's why I think Jack so deeply mistrusts his own duplicates. He knows that the fact the other him is arguably 'a good person' doesn't mean squat if said duplicate has a good enough reason to ignore that. Damned distasteful things, and all that.
The Jaffa knew little of rehabilitation: wounds and sicknesses came in two groups, those that healed quickly and those that were kek. To be weak was to die. But among the Tauri, even minor hurts healed slowly - and so they had never learned to draw such a line between lesser and greater injury. Teal'c had seen and marvelled at machines to breathe air for lungs that could not, to clean blood that the body could not clean itself, to shock life into a heart that no longer wished to beat.
The whole science of Tauri medicine must be astonishing to a Jaffa. I think it took Teal'c a long time to get to grips with the idea of the fight for life being just as worthy a battle as any other; that weakness was something to be triumphantly overcome rather than a killing shame. I suspect that deep down, for a long time, he carried a secret double standard where he considered that kind of frailty to be fine and shameless for his weaker Tauri friends, but dishonourable for him. I think it took his serious injury in Orpheus for Teal'c to embrace his inner humanity, as it were; to finally break away from a lifetime's brainwashing and accept that he's not just a Jaffa who lives among humans, but rather a human who happens to be a Jaffa. That was the moment when he became Teal'c of the Tauri instead of Teal'c of Chulak.
"I can't spar with Daniel! Even if he has got muscles now." Teal'c was forced to admit that this was true. Daniel Jackson had become a warrior that no man or Jaffa could feel shamed to fight beside, but much of that skill had originated from O'Neill, and he still hesitated to strike a friend with his full strength in training.
While Daniel can kick ass all he needs to in an actual fight, I can't really see him getting on with mock-combat. I think he'd question the necessity of it. In the middle of it. While Jack is trying to spar with him.
Not that Teal'c truly believed this. But, after nearly three days aboard an Asgard vessel with no enemy to fight and no mission to complete, he would privately have to admit to being rel hal'toc.
Or, as the Tauri would put it, bored stupid.
I didn't think the Jaffa would have a direct translation of 'bored' (not a very safe thing for a Jaffa to be) so rel'hal'toc comes from rel'toc (which comes up twice in the context of Jaffa being told to do some duty or other) and hal a word I made up to mean "futile" based on ha (bad); literally, then, to be working on something futile or stuck on punishment duty.
The older O'Neill had appeared in the doorway behind them, scowling and holding his head. It was unclear whether this was due to a continuing headache or a futile attempt to tame what the sleep pods had done to his hair.
It's all about the hair.
"Wait, Doctor Facinelli has a goldfish?"
McKay gave a one-shouldered shrug. "Actually it's more of a pinkfish. The xenoichthyologists liberated it from a lab on... that planet with the upside-down trees. They think it might be genetically engineered as a living water-purifier. So far they've discovered it eats paper, any kind of biological waste, and those little tiny screws that hold the arms on to a pair of glasses. Doctor Stansfield was not pleased. They only managed to stop him trying to flush it down the toilet by pointing out that we don't know what kind of scanning protocols the city has in place in the sewage treatment centre."
Wouldn't it be awesome to be a xenoichthyologist? You could have it on all of your business cards, and when people say, "What the hell is that?" you can tell them that you study alien fish.
There's a lot of scientists in Atlantis, and they're not all employed fiddling with Ancient tech, so you have to wonder what the rest of them are up to. We rarely find out unless it comes to life and starts terrorising the city.
Zelenka looked up from the screen he was examining. "Two things. One, apparently we have long-range scanners. Two, our long-range scanners are picking up a ship."
For the purposes of this AU I had to move forward the discovery of the long-range sensors that occurred in Brotherhood. It's basically the same scenario as occurred with the high-speed dart in that episode, except that Baal's ship has its own hyperdrive instead of having to use the nearest Stargate so it was able to appear closer to the city.
And now it's revealed why Baal went to the effort of making SG-6 into hosts. He and Nirrti are the only Goa'uld we've seen capable of beating back their natural arrogance long enough to execute plans that require sneakiness. (And they're both more intelligent and technology-oriented, too. Perhaps their symbiotes are from the same branch of the bloodline. I wonder, actually, if there's some genetic link to the Tok'ra mama Egeria; they could even be her early children from before she had her epiphany and started passing on a conscience along with the predisposition towards technical skills and stealth infiltration.)
XVI
He would keep O'Neill and his clone's secret - for the moment. If the time came that sharing it would benefit O'Neill, then that would change. As Master Bra'tac would have put it: kol'ma a kol'sha nai'eem.
Loyalty is not the same thing as obedience.
Huh, there's more homemade Goa'uld in this story than I remembered. Anyway:
* "Kol" is from Tel kol, which appears to be something along the lines of "show respect". "Ma" as I've said elsewhere seems to be "warrior" and "sha" based on Kel sha (an acknowledgement of a command) I assume means an order.
* "Nai" is from Korush'nai (Goa'uld warning to turn back from a contaminated world) and Ne'nai ("no, don't") so it seems to be a negation. Thus, "nai'eem": not in balance or not the same.
* "a" shows up in a'roush (village) and gal a'quel (give me that) and so seems to be roughly analogous to 'that'. I basically just stuck it in there because I felt the phrase needed another syllable to give it balance.
So, literally, "[respect for a warrior] [that] [respect for a command] [does not balance]" or "respecting a warrior does not necessarily equate to respecting his commands". Or what Teal'c said.
Daniel had stilled. "So you think Jon... and Jack... may not need curing at all?"
She spread her hands helplessly. "I'm just saying, if the process does achieve stability... is it right to 'cure' somebody of having evolved to a higher level?"
The question took on a new resonance considering who she was posing it to: Daniel, who had once himself evolved beyond the human form, and then returned stripped not just of his powers but of the knowledge of what it had been to have them. She had often wondered how it felt to him to be mortal once more; whether his Ascension was as distant to him as a dream lost on waking, or if he was aware somehow of his shrunken limitations, conscious of feeling smaller, lesser, more contained.
There were a million questions, and all of them would go unasked, because the scientist in her was still shouted down by the part that was just selfishly glad to have him back.
I think the stress of season six was when we really saw how much Sam has come to rely on the other members of SG-1, and perhaps the first time she realised it too. Sam strikes me as someone who's always been very self-contained and happy in isolation (which is something I like about her; it's not at all common in female characters). She's warm and she forms friendships and tries romantic relationships when the opportunity pops up, but she's not needy for those things. She doesn't angst about her lack of social life - quite the opposite, in fact - and never seems overly troubled by singledom or any ticking biological clocks; she's got her work and if that was all she had, she'd still be happy.
But I think in SG-1 she's finally found people that she does allow herself to lean on, relationships that have wormed their way into her life to such an extent that their loss really would be shattering. I think maybe it's the first time she's connected with anyone that strongly since her mom died. And that's got to be quite scary and disconcerting for her. Sam's not used to having people it would really hurt to lose.
Also, it seems very Sam to me to scientifically analyse her emotional reactions and try to figure out if she's got them 'right'.
O'Neill had seemed okay - weird, and kinda blunt for a General, but okay - but then, at the time, John hadn't been assessing him as anything more than another random bigwig he had to chauffeur about for a day or two.
It's kind of interesting to think about the perception that Sheppard - who met Jack only in his General incarnation, and that fairly briefly - might have of Jack compared to the one that the rest of us do. Doctor Weir had enough exposure to Jack's... um, unique... personality to know what he was like (and perhaps McKay did too, around the fringes of what we saw on-screen of his visits to the SGC) but Sheppard only really saw him when he was on his best behaviour. (Which is a pity, really, because Sheppard has massive command issues out the wazoo, and it might have done him some good to get to know a superior officer as laid-back, undiplomatic and just plain weird as Jack.)
The only other person he'd heard much about was Samantha Carter, and all he knew about her was that she was A, a Lieutenant Colonel, B, tragically dim for somebody who'd apparently designed the entire Stargate program from scratch, and C, madly in love with Rodney McKay. He had doubts about the veracity of at least two of those pieces of information.
Good luck trying to get an accurate picture of anybody's personality or capabilities by listening to McKay.
To be honest, John had kind of expected that if the SGC were going to make contact with them, they'd either send a couple of hundred people or put the famous SG-1 on contact duty. This five-man team of relative nobodies was pinging his alarm bells, even though Casey's explanation - that they were the most qualified expendables to shove aboard a highly experimental ship - held water.
Apparently John's instincts are tuned to the "they wouldn't do this in a TV episode" channel.
For some reason, those wacky Ancients liked to write the equivalent of calming haiku on their staircases. Because nothing added that extra touch of Zen to your day quite like walking into the guy in front because you were trying to read a message at foot level.
It seems to me the edges of stairs are not the most sensible place to write messages. It's just as well Daniel didn't go along on the original mission, or else he'd have been trampled to death trying to read them all.
"Doyle," the man said, as the patch on his SGC uniform indeed bore out. He paused for a moment and tilted his head as if thinking, and then added smugly, "Jack Doyle."
You've probably forgotten by now that Doyle was the SGC scientist reported missing in the very first scene of the fic. I thought Baal picking Jack as a name was a nicely nasty touch.
He grimaced over the untranslated annotations. Languages were not his thing; his knowledge of Ancient was mostly limited to computer syntax, a few standard phrases, and every conceivable variation on 'Urgent/Do Not Touch/Lethal/Caution'. The autotranslator could process the computer code itself, but it would slow everything down ridiculously to try and plug in even a halfway complete Ancient dictionary.
I've noticed their laptops seem to have some sort of translation program going, which seems... unlikely, given the current state of automated translators (*cough* Babelfish *cough*). So I'm assuming the Ancients have a particular programming language with a restricted syntax and the translators only work on that.
On the plus side, he could tell from some familiar-looking time delay calculations that he was working with an array of transducers arranged over a plane, so it was obviously some kind of beamforming. It was child's play to assign a pixel colour to each value and put together an ultrasound-style picture.
Once again, my degree is showing. We spent an unnecessarily long time covering beamforming in my Computing and Instrumentation module. I had to do a paper on its use in radio astronomy, which will come in very handy should I ever have to sell a cover story about working in Deep Space Radar Telemetry.
XVII
John hesitated in the doorway of the briefing room, suddenly very, very reluctant to step in. Pretty much the entire population of Atlantis was gathered there to hear the SGC representatives speak.
Not really sure what the population of Atlantis was midway through season one, but we see a fairly large-scale gathering in The Siege (and also the party at the end of the pilot) so I presumed it was plausible to stuff all or most of them into one room.
"He is still conscious."
"The Tauri have observed that our zat'nikatels react unpredictably with their physiology."
Or: the viewers have observed that the effects of zat blasts vary considerably according to plot necessity.
"...patriam... asordo... non paratus... indeo inver... non anquientam..."
More 'Ancient' rambling; asordo, indeo, and anquientam are words nicked from The Fifth Race, and this roughly 'translates' to "home... assistance... not prepared... need reversal... not an Ancient..."
Confinement of any kind never sat easily with Jack, whether it was paperwork chaining him to his desk, injuries chaining him to his infirmary bed, or bad guys chaining him to the first thing that was handy. Stasis took even more control from him than that, leaving him not only trapped, but completely helpless until someone on the outside chose to revive him. Daniel still remembered waking up in the Hathor House of Fun four or five years ago, being told he was the only one who had survived and everyone he knew was decades dead. He could understand full well why Jack wouldn't want to risk that ever again.
Of course, that didn't mean he wasn't selfish enough to shove Jack into a stasis pod kicking and screaming if necessary, privileging his right to have a Jack O'Neill in his life over Jack's right to choose his own destiny.
I think Daniel fundamentally cannot accept the line of mortality that Jack has drawn for himself. In Abyss he could not, wilfully would not accept Jack's own decision to choose death over Ascension. It's immediately obvious to anyone who's known him for twelve seconds that becoming a floaty energy being with a non-interference policy would be absolute torture for Jack, but Daniel has never met an opposing opinion he didn't think he had the God-given right to bludgeon into submission.
I do believe that, pushed into a true balls-to-the-wall situation where it really is death or the unpalatable option, Daniel has the potential to commit a crime against Jack that Jack would never forgive him for. Because Jack has very clearly defined lines about what he isn't willing to do or become to survive, and while Teal'c would respect those lines and Sam would argue but ultimately accede, Daniel would override Jack's wishes on the assumption that Jack could be persuaded it was the right thing after the fact. And he would believe to the very end that he was right and Jack just wasn't listening, too.
Daniel had many thoughts about the nature of loyalty, religious indoctrination and attitudes to faith, but they would remain forever unvoiced. He'd died, fought gods, and defied the Ascended, but nothing could make him prepared for the likely reactions of both parties to the suggestion that Jack might be Teal'c's god-substitute.
I think that in the beginning, however subconsciously, Teal'c was looking for a new 'god'; a better leader to throw his lot in with. He wasn't ready to walk away on his own. And while I don't think he actually perceives Jack as a god - I doubt it would have taken much time among the Tauri to dispel that impression (like, five minutes?) - I think there is a trace of that religious loyalty still there, the sense of faith rewarded. And so there's always been that extra layer on Teal'c's relationship with Jack that isn't there with anyone else.
"Months," Rodney corrected, giving him a stern eyebrow. "The Goa'uld aren't smarter than us, they just need fewer coffee breaks. And there weren't that many high-stakes players left when we left the galaxy. Let's see... Osiris? No, wait, SG-1 dealt with him - her? - and freed the host. There's Yu... but I don't recall him ever using Ancient technology, and anyway, last I heard he'd gone ga-ga. No, I think there are two main contenders." His face darkened. "It's got to be either Baal or Anubis."
What happened to Yu? (Oh, the endless puns.) I don't think he got killed off, did he? He just kind of vanished from the scene. Maybe he died of 'natural' causes, since I seem to recall his senility had reached a point where the sarcophagus couldn't help. Or maybe his Jaffa bumped him off. Either that, or they've stuffed him in an old folk's home somewhere. ("I am Yu!" / "No, you're not, dear. Eat your porridge.")
XVIII
Ah, a Carson scene. It's funny how when I hit one of these I just completely relax. I don't think I realised until that first happened exactly how much effort I'm putting in the whole time to try and 'write American'. Not that Carson's voice is a total match for mine (I'm from south east England) but I can use my own natural vocabulary without having to think about it, and it flows so much easier.
Carson couldn't help but remember that humans weren't the first race the Goa'uld had used as hosts - and genetically, the Unas were not exactly humanity's closest cousins. If a leap that big had been made before, could it be made again?
He was probably the closest thing this galaxy had to an expert on the internal workings of the Wraith, and what that expertise told him was chilling. Because while aspects of the Wraith were very alien, they were basically hybrid creatures... and he'd already discovered their bodies contained a quite surprising proportion of human DNA.
I had already written this section, raising the possibility of Wraith as hosts, before I came to the parts of season two that clarified how closely related to humans they are. So this worst-case-scenario jumped from possible to extremely plausible.
Goa'uld Wraith. Now that would be scary-cool.
"You - not him," McKay corrected. "He's a Goa'uld."
"...Okay." John had no idea what that word was, but it had way more vowels than he could deal with right now.
McKay shoved him into a transporter and sighed explosively. "Major, did you do any background reading at all before you signed on for this mission?"
John blinked a few times. "There were assigned texts?"
We learn in later seasons that Sheppard does know about the Goa'uld, but at the time of writing (and given when this story is set) it seemed plausible that he'd got relatively little background information before being rushed through the gate to Atlantis the first time. I figured he would surely have heard the general 'at war with evil aliens' info but not necessarily the details. (And I needed someone to play Exposition Boy, dammit.)
"The Goa'uld are able to absorb naquadah - or produce it, or excrete it, or something. I don't know. Biology." He handwaved that as unimportant. "Some of their technology can only be activated by a host with naquadah particles in their bloodstream. There's some speculation that the race the Goa'uld stole the tech from reverse-engineered an Ancient device and replaced the gene requirement with a naquadah trigger."
This speculation is mine rather than canonical, but given that the Goa'uld are established to be tech scavengers and the similarities between gene-based vs. naquadah-based mental activation, it seems like a decent theory to me.
Here, a hallway in the city of Atlantis. Now, about thirty seconds since Ymir had pointed out three travelling life-form blips, said in his melodic Asgard voice, "We will transport you here where the population density is low enough to prevent collision," and kicked their butts the hell off the Skidbladnir without further discussion.
See the author transparently try to handwave the convenience of SG-1 appearing right next to our guys instead of in the thick of it.
Jack absently threat assessed the identities of the three blips - scientist, scientist, that Sheppard guy, none of them pointing anything dangerous at him - and then turned to Daniel. "Hey! They're just gonna dump us here?"
Check for immediate death threats, then bitch. It's the SG-1 way.
I'm pretty sure the only reason this is happening at all is because Thor has a bit of a thing for you."
Okay, that got his attention. "Thor is a four foot tall grey alien of indeterminate gender with no genitals!"
Daniel wiggled his eyebrows. "I didn't say it was an easily classifiable thing."
This exchange has been floating around in various incarnations since this fic was very first conceived. (Although I'm not sure if the estimation of Asgard height is accurate. I didn't have a good full-length screencap to try and figure it out.)
He exchanged a look with his clone, and the same unpleasant, obvious thought flew both ways through the space between them. Baal.
Who else could it be?
Sheppard half narrowed his unfocused eyes, and then raised a wavering finger. "Um. Did somebody just say something about... balls?" he asked uncertainly.
Sheppard seems to be very receptive to Ancient-style mental connections, if his gift for using the tech is any guide. So I figured he might conceivably pick up some faint whisper of the O'Neills' communication. Especially with his brain laid open somewhat more than usual after having been ribbon-deviced.
(Sheppard gets hit with a rather ridiculous number of energy blasts as this story progresses. It just happened that way, I swear!)
General O'Neill, Radek knew of through his two conflicting reputations: the superhuman military hero who left no one behind, and the overgrown child whose place in the rigid confines of the USAF command structure was a mystery. Radek's own concept of O'Neill, however, would be forever influenced by the near-funereal image of him frozen in the Ancient stasis booth in Antarctica. In the days before they had known if he would be possible to revive, even the scientists assigned to study the unit had tiptoed around him, nervous and respectful before that unseeing gaze.
This occurred to me as I was writing. Presumably many of those scientists running about Antarctica during the Atlantis pilot were there when Jack was frozen in stasis, and possibly even worked on the issue of whether it was safe to revive him. Now there's an interesting way to be introduced to somebody.
He suppressed an unbecoming flicker of jealousy. The gene therapy had not taken with him; it was simply a minor deficiency in his genetic code, no worse than his being short-sighted, and to dwell on it was childish.
Still, to talk to the city with his mind... how could any true scientist not dream of it?
It must really suck to be a scientist on Atlantis who couldn't get the gene. Especially if you have to live with Rodney crowing about it.
"No," snapped O'Neill, at the same time as Jon blurted "Non sum!", Colonel Carter smiled and said "Essentially," and Daniel Jackson said "Ah... in a sense." A flurry of looks were exchanged between the four of them, and Teal'c raised a single eyebrow pointedly. It was the only contribution he had made to the conversation so far.
I like this. Ah, SG-1. They're all on the same page, but they're always reading it completely differently.
Perhaps it was as well that the prisoner had escaped. Kaermec permitted his host body to display a small smile. Yes, this was not a failure, this was wisdom. If he allowed Baal to take a new host who possessed the city's genetic key, it would only give him an advantage over his fellow Goa'uld. It made far more sense to let the host run free until Kaermec was in a position to take control of it.
I didn't want to overcomplicate things too much by giving all the minion Goa'uld their own personalities and identities, but it was necessary to use a POV scene here. I wrote the young Goa'uld with even less self-awareness than Baal; it's a never-ending chain of, "Yeah, so, I totally meant to do that, and really, it's the best thing anyway because this is all my genius plan."
It would be an interesting exercise in unreliable narrators to write a typical SG-1 adventure from the Goa'uld's POV, actually.
Concluded in part 3.