5 times Vala wanted to leave
Dec. 21st, 2007 12:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vain_gloriousWord Count: 2,125
1. The SG-1 team nights she wasn’t invited to.
Once Vala had been on earth long enough to decode words like “DVD,” “Domino’s,” and “Star Wars”, she figured out that Daniel, Cameon, Sam, and Teal’c all got together just about once a week to socialize completely independent of the SGC. They ate fatty foods, drank alcoholic beverages, and made fun of Taur’i fictional depictions of alien life forms.
And Vala wasn’t welcome.
For the most part, they tried to be discreet about it. But since they had to make the arrangements while still on base so Teal’c would know where to go, Vala couldn’t help but hear. Sam and Cam, at least, were polite about excluding her. They acted like it was a casual, unorganized thing which just happened to be in a place she was forbidden from going. This was Teal’c’s line of defense, as well. He told her that in his early days on Earth he too had been prohibited from leaving the base and dubbed a security risk.
Everyone else acted like this was flawless reasoning, despite the fact that Vala wasn’t an enormous, mean-looking Jaffa with a symbiote pouch or a conspicuous gold tattoo in the middle of her face.
“But you are a security risk,” Daniel snapped. “The entire planet is safer with you in here. This way, you won’t get arrested for stealing something and I won’t get arrested for murdering you.”
Vala rolled her eyes. She knew he used hyperbole because it was much harder to dispute, which made her mad and mean, and resulted in a screaming match that made him look like he was right.
So, she spent these “team nights” alone in the SGC. Well, not alone, since technically she was in the company of nearly a thousand Air Force members. And she was almost never truly alone.
One of the nurses had lent Vala some DVDs from the infirmary’s collection for patients that got quarantined or otherwise confined for the long term. And Vala, it seemed, fit into that last category. One night, Vala had picked “Sex & the City” based on the title; they didn’t have this “Star Wars” Teal’c was always talking about and the nurse said she was pretty sure this was because he’d confiscated their copy.
“Sex & the City” turned out to be pretty disappointing. It was about Taur’i women enjoying female companionship – something Vala had no experience with – while pursuing male sexual companionship – something Vala was currently deprived of. It wasn’t graphic enough to be entertaining visually and watching the characters enjoy expensive clothing and male attention while freely strolling the streets of this “New York City” sex Mecca ending up putting Vala in a worse mood.
She considered requesting something with “sex” in the title that was actually satisfying, mostly to embarrass the orderlies. But the nurse had been nice to try to entertain her, and Vala didn’t actually want to watch something scintillating alone in her quarters with the little red eye of the security camera blinking at her the whole time.
Vala rose from the edge of the bed and ejected the disc, putting it back in the case to return to its owner. The hallway outside her quarters was completely clear of traffic. Most members of the SGC vanished on the weekend unless they were unlucky enough to have a duty shift. Initially, Landry had had two SFs posted outside her quarters. Vala had been well-behaved enough in the general sense, while simultaneously focusing all her energy on corrupting and compromising her guards such that the General had relieved them. She actually kind of missed them; tormenting them had been fun, and for a while she’d had this one that kind of looked like a younger, beefier Daniel. He’d been extra fun.
Now, only the whir of the security camera followed her. She returned the DVD and went on an aimless stroll around the SGC. Well, aimless enough that she ended up at Daniel’s office. He’d added an extra lock shortly after her arrival, but she now had a key to both so it didn’t really matter.
She entered his dark office, pulling the door shut behind her, and blindly finding her way to his seat. After turning on his desk lamp, Vala idly rearranged the collection of rocks he had sitting on the desk. They weren’t pretty enough to look valuable and maybe they’d been in a particular order, but if he didn’t want her messing with his stuff he shouldn’t leave her alone with it.
Daniel’s desk was fun to go through. He always had something new and interesting, and frequently shiny. There were usually cookies in the drawer and if she were feeling particularly vengeful – which at this point in the evening she always was – she could drink his entire stash of specialty coffee and replace it with decaf. Security never stopped her, if his office was even monitored. But she always came here, so they knew where she was.
Daniel probably knew she’d been here, too. Periodically, she’d rearrange the picture frames on his desk. One of these days, she was going to add one of herself. She’d put it between the one of his parents, the old guy with the fishing rod, and the team photo taken when Mitchell took over. And then she’d glue it to the desk surface so he couldn’t remove it. She thought if she added her face to the team photo, it might even be a while ‘til he noticed.
More often, she figured she wasn’t going to be here much longer and why bother. She’d sit at his desk all night, since there wasn’t anything better to do and his coffee kept her mind buzzing. She thought of all the things she could take from the SGC and how easy it would be to sneak to the Gateroom and zat her way out. And these nights, Vala truly did want to leave. There were other places in the universe where she could be locked up, more interesting chemicals, and all the other adventures she’d left behind by sticking around. These nights, the reasons she’d stayed weren’t here.
2. After the Oraci.
Vala actually would have been happier if she’d personally, deliberately, and intentionally unleashed the Ori into the galaxy.
Not that she would have, mind you, just that she would have felt better about it.
She’d done bad things, before. To listen to Daniel, she was pretty much constantly doing bad things. On the great cosmic scale, she figured that her lifetime collection of bad things might actually equal or outweigh the Ori and their poisonous Origin.
All her little cons had fallout, if just in the little lives of the people she had to use.
But it just wasn’t fair that that little baby was the worst thing Vala had ever done.
She wasn’t used to feeling guilty. Not about anything, and definitely not about her failure to smash a newborn’s skull in.
And in something equally new, no one blamed her. This just added another dimension of weird. The guilt and the patronizing separately were strange and unpleasant; together they were unbearable. Vala felt vulnerable and brittle and she thought the others could tell.
She wanted to leave, then. Go somewhere where no one knew whose mommy she was, probably a chain of somewheres where she could live her usual life of entrepreneurship and dodge and weave her way around the wars her daughter was starting.
3. After meeting Jack O’Neill.
He didn’t like her.
Daniel had painted a fairly one-sided picture of her, it seemed, and the man that had invited Apophis’s own first prime to make himself at home on Earth didn’t have the same welcome for Vala.
After the meeting with the bosses – which Daniel termed ‘a total disaster’ and blamed on her – General O’Neill asked her to stick around for a private meeting in his office. Well, not so much asked as ordered, and as was so frequently the frustrating case Vala couldn’t say no.
Oddly enough, Sam and Daniel both stuck up for her and told totally untrue stories about needing to get back to Colorado immediately. Even Teal’c did his deep head inclination deal, and asked if the meeting were truly necessary.
She wasn’t intimidated by General O’Neill. Not one bit. Vala knew enough about him from the stories Daniel told that no matter what he said he wasn’t really going to have her sent to this place called “Area 51” where she would be locked up in a little box and dissected psychologically if not physiologically until she was of no more use to Earth if she betrayed the SGC.
O’Neill was just warning her that there’d be hell to pay if she hurt his team – his, not Cameron’s, evidently. Vala understood this, and she was able to laugh off his threats, shimmy across his desk, and try to straddle his office chair before Daniel burst in and ended the lecture prematurely.
She thought his intimidation efforts were cute, and the only thing the even slightly pinged her radar was his focused affection for Daniel.
The reason she wanted to leave was because she knew he wasn’t making this “Area 51” place up, and there were people in charge who wanted her sent there period, and that everything he said about spending the rest of her life in a small box was almost certainly true, if her trust in these Taur’i was misplaced.
4. When she got her SG-1 team patch.
It coincided with the return of her memories, in which Vala saw the history of a woman who never stayed anywhere longer than was safe, made no personal connections beyond short-term physical arrangements purely for satisfaction or false friendships because she was conning someone out of something valuable. It wasn’t always a happy story, but as the infirmary used Tok’ra technology to further integrate her memories, Vala became more and more confident that it was indeed her story.
With those memories, she would have shot Daniel Jackson and fled. She’d already stayed longer than was usual, although practically-speaking she was getting nothing from these people. She was only making herself vulnerable to a number of evil and crazy forces, embedding herself on the side that was losing a war, and starting to rely on these more than likely doomed people for both safety and company. It made no sense.
When she got her most recent memories back, she changed her mind about shooting Daniel and was glad she hadn’t. And in a way, this made her want to leave all the more urgently. She didn’t like feel this odd, unsatisfied attraction. She didn’t like that even though there was undeniably heat between them, Daniel held her at a distance. She didn’t like that despite this, she had stayed where his detachment could hurt her.
Vala also didn’t like the way she tingled when she remember the rest of SG-1, and how much she liked them. She wasn’t used to having so many aspects of her life connected to things she couldn’t stick in a bag and carry with her, or sell for bigger, shinier things. The people – Sam, Daniel, Cam, and Teal’c – could be sold, of course. But not by her.
She had never been more scared than when she realized these were people she would never be able to betray.
5. When the Ori captured Daniel and Sam vanished.
It was exactly what she had known would happen. Well, not exactly. She hadn’t predicted the specifics, but in general terms she’d expected this. Daniel did something rash, dangerously stupid, and then sacrificed himself so the rest of SG-1 could escape Vala’s murderous daughter. Sam was messing with dangerous technology, trying to protect them all from - yup, still Vala’s murderous daughter - and either vaporized herself or turned herself invisible with unknown means of coming back.
Vala’s predictions ended there. In her head, she had taken this opportunity to leave. Because it would hurt, and that was always the time to leave.
And it did hurt. It stung somewhere deep in her chest, such that she found herself having to take deep breaths and swallow hard. She’s not an idiot, and she knows what grief feels like. She wants to leave, not just leave by travel backwards in time to before she cared about them, to when leaving would have made a difference.
She knows now, that no matter where she is in the universe, members of SG-1 will be with her, living or dead, inside her head and her heart. Sweet as this sounds, it also encourages her to go while she can still think of some of them as living.
1. The SG-1 team nights she wasn’t invited to.
Once Vala had been on earth long enough to decode words like “DVD,” “Domino’s,” and “Star Wars”, she figured out that Daniel, Cameon, Sam, and Teal’c all got together just about once a week to socialize completely independent of the SGC. They ate fatty foods, drank alcoholic beverages, and made fun of Taur’i fictional depictions of alien life forms.
And Vala wasn’t welcome.
For the most part, they tried to be discreet about it. But since they had to make the arrangements while still on base so Teal’c would know where to go, Vala couldn’t help but hear. Sam and Cam, at least, were polite about excluding her. They acted like it was a casual, unorganized thing which just happened to be in a place she was forbidden from going. This was Teal’c’s line of defense, as well. He told her that in his early days on Earth he too had been prohibited from leaving the base and dubbed a security risk.
Everyone else acted like this was flawless reasoning, despite the fact that Vala wasn’t an enormous, mean-looking Jaffa with a symbiote pouch or a conspicuous gold tattoo in the middle of her face.
“But you are a security risk,” Daniel snapped. “The entire planet is safer with you in here. This way, you won’t get arrested for stealing something and I won’t get arrested for murdering you.”
Vala rolled her eyes. She knew he used hyperbole because it was much harder to dispute, which made her mad and mean, and resulted in a screaming match that made him look like he was right.
So, she spent these “team nights” alone in the SGC. Well, not alone, since technically she was in the company of nearly a thousand Air Force members. And she was almost never truly alone.
One of the nurses had lent Vala some DVDs from the infirmary’s collection for patients that got quarantined or otherwise confined for the long term. And Vala, it seemed, fit into that last category. One night, Vala had picked “Sex & the City” based on the title; they didn’t have this “Star Wars” Teal’c was always talking about and the nurse said she was pretty sure this was because he’d confiscated their copy.
“Sex & the City” turned out to be pretty disappointing. It was about Taur’i women enjoying female companionship – something Vala had no experience with – while pursuing male sexual companionship – something Vala was currently deprived of. It wasn’t graphic enough to be entertaining visually and watching the characters enjoy expensive clothing and male attention while freely strolling the streets of this “New York City” sex Mecca ending up putting Vala in a worse mood.
She considered requesting something with “sex” in the title that was actually satisfying, mostly to embarrass the orderlies. But the nurse had been nice to try to entertain her, and Vala didn’t actually want to watch something scintillating alone in her quarters with the little red eye of the security camera blinking at her the whole time.
Vala rose from the edge of the bed and ejected the disc, putting it back in the case to return to its owner. The hallway outside her quarters was completely clear of traffic. Most members of the SGC vanished on the weekend unless they were unlucky enough to have a duty shift. Initially, Landry had had two SFs posted outside her quarters. Vala had been well-behaved enough in the general sense, while simultaneously focusing all her energy on corrupting and compromising her guards such that the General had relieved them. She actually kind of missed them; tormenting them had been fun, and for a while she’d had this one that kind of looked like a younger, beefier Daniel. He’d been extra fun.
Now, only the whir of the security camera followed her. She returned the DVD and went on an aimless stroll around the SGC. Well, aimless enough that she ended up at Daniel’s office. He’d added an extra lock shortly after her arrival, but she now had a key to both so it didn’t really matter.
She entered his dark office, pulling the door shut behind her, and blindly finding her way to his seat. After turning on his desk lamp, Vala idly rearranged the collection of rocks he had sitting on the desk. They weren’t pretty enough to look valuable and maybe they’d been in a particular order, but if he didn’t want her messing with his stuff he shouldn’t leave her alone with it.
Daniel’s desk was fun to go through. He always had something new and interesting, and frequently shiny. There were usually cookies in the drawer and if she were feeling particularly vengeful – which at this point in the evening she always was – she could drink his entire stash of specialty coffee and replace it with decaf. Security never stopped her, if his office was even monitored. But she always came here, so they knew where she was.
Daniel probably knew she’d been here, too. Periodically, she’d rearrange the picture frames on his desk. One of these days, she was going to add one of herself. She’d put it between the one of his parents, the old guy with the fishing rod, and the team photo taken when Mitchell took over. And then she’d glue it to the desk surface so he couldn’t remove it. She thought if she added her face to the team photo, it might even be a while ‘til he noticed.
More often, she figured she wasn’t going to be here much longer and why bother. She’d sit at his desk all night, since there wasn’t anything better to do and his coffee kept her mind buzzing. She thought of all the things she could take from the SGC and how easy it would be to sneak to the Gateroom and zat her way out. And these nights, Vala truly did want to leave. There were other places in the universe where she could be locked up, more interesting chemicals, and all the other adventures she’d left behind by sticking around. These nights, the reasons she’d stayed weren’t here.
2. After the Oraci.
Vala actually would have been happier if she’d personally, deliberately, and intentionally unleashed the Ori into the galaxy.
Not that she would have, mind you, just that she would have felt better about it.
She’d done bad things, before. To listen to Daniel, she was pretty much constantly doing bad things. On the great cosmic scale, she figured that her lifetime collection of bad things might actually equal or outweigh the Ori and their poisonous Origin.
All her little cons had fallout, if just in the little lives of the people she had to use.
But it just wasn’t fair that that little baby was the worst thing Vala had ever done.
She wasn’t used to feeling guilty. Not about anything, and definitely not about her failure to smash a newborn’s skull in.
And in something equally new, no one blamed her. This just added another dimension of weird. The guilt and the patronizing separately were strange and unpleasant; together they were unbearable. Vala felt vulnerable and brittle and she thought the others could tell.
She wanted to leave, then. Go somewhere where no one knew whose mommy she was, probably a chain of somewheres where she could live her usual life of entrepreneurship and dodge and weave her way around the wars her daughter was starting.
3. After meeting Jack O’Neill.
He didn’t like her.
Daniel had painted a fairly one-sided picture of her, it seemed, and the man that had invited Apophis’s own first prime to make himself at home on Earth didn’t have the same welcome for Vala.
After the meeting with the bosses – which Daniel termed ‘a total disaster’ and blamed on her – General O’Neill asked her to stick around for a private meeting in his office. Well, not so much asked as ordered, and as was so frequently the frustrating case Vala couldn’t say no.
Oddly enough, Sam and Daniel both stuck up for her and told totally untrue stories about needing to get back to Colorado immediately. Even Teal’c did his deep head inclination deal, and asked if the meeting were truly necessary.
She wasn’t intimidated by General O’Neill. Not one bit. Vala knew enough about him from the stories Daniel told that no matter what he said he wasn’t really going to have her sent to this place called “Area 51” where she would be locked up in a little box and dissected psychologically if not physiologically until she was of no more use to Earth if she betrayed the SGC.
O’Neill was just warning her that there’d be hell to pay if she hurt his team – his, not Cameron’s, evidently. Vala understood this, and she was able to laugh off his threats, shimmy across his desk, and try to straddle his office chair before Daniel burst in and ended the lecture prematurely.
She thought his intimidation efforts were cute, and the only thing the even slightly pinged her radar was his focused affection for Daniel.
The reason she wanted to leave was because she knew he wasn’t making this “Area 51” place up, and there were people in charge who wanted her sent there period, and that everything he said about spending the rest of her life in a small box was almost certainly true, if her trust in these Taur’i was misplaced.
4. When she got her SG-1 team patch.
It coincided with the return of her memories, in which Vala saw the history of a woman who never stayed anywhere longer than was safe, made no personal connections beyond short-term physical arrangements purely for satisfaction or false friendships because she was conning someone out of something valuable. It wasn’t always a happy story, but as the infirmary used Tok’ra technology to further integrate her memories, Vala became more and more confident that it was indeed her story.
With those memories, she would have shot Daniel Jackson and fled. She’d already stayed longer than was usual, although practically-speaking she was getting nothing from these people. She was only making herself vulnerable to a number of evil and crazy forces, embedding herself on the side that was losing a war, and starting to rely on these more than likely doomed people for both safety and company. It made no sense.
When she got her most recent memories back, she changed her mind about shooting Daniel and was glad she hadn’t. And in a way, this made her want to leave all the more urgently. She didn’t like feel this odd, unsatisfied attraction. She didn’t like that even though there was undeniably heat between them, Daniel held her at a distance. She didn’t like that despite this, she had stayed where his detachment could hurt her.
Vala also didn’t like the way she tingled when she remember the rest of SG-1, and how much she liked them. She wasn’t used to having so many aspects of her life connected to things she couldn’t stick in a bag and carry with her, or sell for bigger, shinier things. The people – Sam, Daniel, Cam, and Teal’c – could be sold, of course. But not by her.
She had never been more scared than when she realized these were people she would never be able to betray.
5. When the Ori captured Daniel and Sam vanished.
It was exactly what she had known would happen. Well, not exactly. She hadn’t predicted the specifics, but in general terms she’d expected this. Daniel did something rash, dangerously stupid, and then sacrificed himself so the rest of SG-1 could escape Vala’s murderous daughter. Sam was messing with dangerous technology, trying to protect them all from - yup, still Vala’s murderous daughter - and either vaporized herself or turned herself invisible with unknown means of coming back.
Vala’s predictions ended there. In her head, she had taken this opportunity to leave. Because it would hurt, and that was always the time to leave.
And it did hurt. It stung somewhere deep in her chest, such that she found herself having to take deep breaths and swallow hard. She’s not an idiot, and she knows what grief feels like. She wants to leave, not just leave by travel backwards in time to before she cared about them, to when leaving would have made a difference.
She knows now, that no matter where she is in the universe, members of SG-1 will be with her, living or dead, inside her head and her heart. Sweet as this sounds, it also encourages her to go while she can still think of some of them as living.
