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vain_gloriousWord Count: 1,588
1. Right about the time the Ori showed up.
Not because of the new alien menace – that was actually kind of exciting in a way that was deeply shameful because, hello, an imminent threat to earth was not supposed to make Jack even remotely happy.
Daniel called shortly after that first encounter. He didn’t say anything much about the Ori themselves, either knowing that Jack had already gotten all the reports or because something else was weighing heavily on his mind.
He talked mostly about Vala, the alien chick that had hijacked the Prometheus and from what Jack had read from the mission summaries, generally made herself into Daniel’s own personal hemorrhoid.
Daniel didn’t sound too pissed, though. He was speaking very quietly and rambling – more than usual, ahem – and Jack didn’t ask but he started listening for slurring and wondering if his friend had been drinking.
Gradually the story came out that Daniel had been there as a bunch of Ori disciples took it upon themselves to execute an unbeliever by burning Vala alive. He described watching her die, unable to stop the flames racing towards her, and the way her skin was so, so hot to the touch when he cradled her body.
Jack said very little. He’d decided that Daniel, though not drunk, had probably at least broken into a little wine, and that meant that however much this chick had bothered him, he was in a bad place over her death. Daniel’s voice was hollow and occasionally his breathing hitched.
In his tidy office and comfy leather swivel chair, as he listened to his best friend describe watching a woman burn to death - with the unsaid full expectation that he was next - Jack had a moment where he didn’t miss going through the Stargate.
It was a fleeting thought straight from his gut. And mostly it came from knowing exactly how helpless Daniel had to have felt, and exactly how awful it was to watch the murder of another human being.
And he still understood when Daniel sighed, abruptly gave a thick chuckle, and in the next breath told Jack that the Ori brought Vala back to life, and that she survived this nightmare First Contact with her ability to irritate the bejeezus out of Daniel completely intact.
He heard Daniel take a gulp of something liquid, and then he asked if Jack couldn’t get Vala sent to Area 51 or something.
2. The Ori Plague
It’s not a threat to Earth anymore, but it keeps showing up in SG teams’ mission reports. It’s gotten to the point where if the MALP finds certain criteria – bodies by the gate, empty structures, abandoned crops – they don’t even send a team through.
That’s also about the point Jack stops being even vaguely intrigued by the Ori and joins the rest of the SG program in being pretty fucking scared. These are dead planets. All human life wiped out.
Jack gets the chills just reading the early mission reports, back when they still bothered to confirm the MALP readings. He can imagine going through the Gate, again and again, only to find the same scene. A bloodless massacre is still a massacre, and it makes him sick. The reports are depressing enough, and he’s unexpectedly glad that tallying up the Ori death toll is not his job. The Gou’ald were motherfuckers, but this is a whole new level.
He’s also much nicer to Cameron Mitchell, the next time they talk.
3. Sam
Of course, he worries about his team. They’re going through the Gate after these monsters, after all, and he’s not there to watch their backs, or grab ‘em by the neck/belt/nearest body part and yank them out of the line of fire. And they’re always getting hurt, of course, because that’s what being on SG-1 means. He gets injury reports, and his team is always on there, even if it’s just ‘new boots gave blister; needed a bandaid’ or ‘grabbed alien cactus; 34 splinters in hand’ or ‘drank alien potion; fell into campfire and got 3rd degree burns on ass’.
He’s not going to lie and say he misses the SGC infirmary (although he does, every day, miss a certain doctor).
But he gets the mission report where Mitchell and Carter ended up trapped in one of those phase-shifting thingies he doesn’t fully understand, and Sam had a bullet in her.
He reads Sam and Mitchell’s reports before the doctors’. They’re predictably sterile, and Sam claims not to remember very much due to her injury. Mitchell’s has a direct line about expecting Carter to die, a quick allusion to just how bad off she was. Jack knows how to write about something like that with all the dry military decorum in the world, and so does Mitchell.
The medical report is clinical, of course, but Jack gets from it that Sam, his Sam, was gutshot.
Jack knows what that looks like, and it’s lucky his office has its own bathroom, because he has to go throw up immediately after reading that. But he didn’t have to see it, and when he calls, Sam is cheerful and doesn’t even mention the time she spent in the infirmary. He calls Mitchell afterwards, and gets around to thanking him for being there with her. Not directly, but he hopes the other man understands.
4. Daniel.
On this one, Jack can be honest. He can’t even imagine being there, going through the gate, and leaving Daniel behind with the Oraci bitch. Being told about it is bad enough.
He can be honest, but it does nothing for the guilt. He listens to Sam sobbing on the phone, hears the hitch in Mitchell’s voice, and even Teal’c sounds like he’s bordering the land between stoicism and furor.
It’s completely unfair, but Jack is glad he wasn’t there.
5. Daniel and Sam.
Jack forgets one day, and he calls Daniel. He forgets, which is awful enough to begin with, because unlike all the other times Daniel was missing, it doesn’t impact Jack’s every day life. He doesn’t get constant reminders in the form of Daniel’s absence. He can pretend that his friend is just off-world, out of contact for an unspecified amount of time. He’s not deluding himself, it’s just the ruse his brain comes up with because it makes sense.
He calls Daniel’s apartment, and the phone rings 3 times before it picks up. Had it gone to a fourth, Jack probably would have remembered. But it stops ringing, he hears the receiver click on, and someone’s on the other end.
“Hello?” Jack says. With his other hand he’s digging his cell phone out and scrolling down for the SGC’s emergency number. Whoever’s in Daniel’s apartment is about to get some SFs on their ass.
“Hrmph?” comes from the other end, and it sounds muffled. Then, “Oops,” more clearly, now, and identifiable as a female voice.
“Who is this?” Jack demands.
“Who is this?” the woman retorts, and Jack figures it out.
“This is General Jack O’Neill,” he says. “What are you doing in Daniel’s apartment, Vala? Do you even have permission to be off base?”
For a moment, there’s silence. Jack keeps one finger on the send button of his cell phone.
“I do,” she says, and for the first time Jack realizes that the muffled quality isn’t poor reception. She sounds sad.
“He gave you a key?”
“I have a key,” Vala says, not answering the question. She clears her throat. “I was feeding his fish.”
“Sam does that.” He realizes too late, of course, that Sam is gone too. She was playing with another one of her God damn phase devices, and they haven’t gotten her back yet. “Oh,” he says.
“Yeah,” Vala says. “It’s my job now. Teal’c doesn’t like fish.”
“No?”
“He wants to set them free.”
Jack puts away his cell phone, then. He’s still pretty sure that Vala isn’t supposed to be off base by herself, but if all she’s doing is sitting in Daniel’s apartment weeping over his fish, it’s okay.
Vala, oddly enough, keeps talking. She tells Jack that yesterday, she and Teal’c cleaned out the refrigerator. There wasn’t much, of course, but what there was had gotten furry. They’re taking turns keeping Sam company while she’s out of phase, and whenever it’s not Vala’s time, she comes here to ‘take care of the fish’.
She’s kind of babbling, and for some reason Jack lets her. He doesn’t know her very well, just from what the other members of SG-1 say about her in passing. It doesn’t sound like she’s doing well, and he can guess that with her personality, loneliness and fear aren’t handled in healthy ways.
He doesn’t offer platitudes, or reassure her in any way. He doesn’t think that’s what she wants, and he doesn’t have any reassurances to give.
“I miss them,” Vala says, and her pain is so sharp that Jack has to rub at his eyes.
He can’t deny that the distance dulls how much it hurts. Not in anyway that makes it feel any better, but seeing as he’s at work, filling out forms, and reading reports, and not holed up in the home of somebody who may never return, he knows he’s a lot more okay. If he was still in Colorado, he has no idea where’d he be. At Sam’s invisible side, or in Daniel’s empty apartment. Vala is ricocheting between the two, and she sounds like she’s coming apart.
1. Right about the time the Ori showed up.
Not because of the new alien menace – that was actually kind of exciting in a way that was deeply shameful because, hello, an imminent threat to earth was not supposed to make Jack even remotely happy.
Daniel called shortly after that first encounter. He didn’t say anything much about the Ori themselves, either knowing that Jack had already gotten all the reports or because something else was weighing heavily on his mind.
He talked mostly about Vala, the alien chick that had hijacked the Prometheus and from what Jack had read from the mission summaries, generally made herself into Daniel’s own personal hemorrhoid.
Daniel didn’t sound too pissed, though. He was speaking very quietly and rambling – more than usual, ahem – and Jack didn’t ask but he started listening for slurring and wondering if his friend had been drinking.
Gradually the story came out that Daniel had been there as a bunch of Ori disciples took it upon themselves to execute an unbeliever by burning Vala alive. He described watching her die, unable to stop the flames racing towards her, and the way her skin was so, so hot to the touch when he cradled her body.
Jack said very little. He’d decided that Daniel, though not drunk, had probably at least broken into a little wine, and that meant that however much this chick had bothered him, he was in a bad place over her death. Daniel’s voice was hollow and occasionally his breathing hitched.
In his tidy office and comfy leather swivel chair, as he listened to his best friend describe watching a woman burn to death - with the unsaid full expectation that he was next - Jack had a moment where he didn’t miss going through the Stargate.
It was a fleeting thought straight from his gut. And mostly it came from knowing exactly how helpless Daniel had to have felt, and exactly how awful it was to watch the murder of another human being.
And he still understood when Daniel sighed, abruptly gave a thick chuckle, and in the next breath told Jack that the Ori brought Vala back to life, and that she survived this nightmare First Contact with her ability to irritate the bejeezus out of Daniel completely intact.
He heard Daniel take a gulp of something liquid, and then he asked if Jack couldn’t get Vala sent to Area 51 or something.
2. The Ori Plague
It’s not a threat to Earth anymore, but it keeps showing up in SG teams’ mission reports. It’s gotten to the point where if the MALP finds certain criteria – bodies by the gate, empty structures, abandoned crops – they don’t even send a team through.
That’s also about the point Jack stops being even vaguely intrigued by the Ori and joins the rest of the SG program in being pretty fucking scared. These are dead planets. All human life wiped out.
Jack gets the chills just reading the early mission reports, back when they still bothered to confirm the MALP readings. He can imagine going through the Gate, again and again, only to find the same scene. A bloodless massacre is still a massacre, and it makes him sick. The reports are depressing enough, and he’s unexpectedly glad that tallying up the Ori death toll is not his job. The Gou’ald were motherfuckers, but this is a whole new level.
He’s also much nicer to Cameron Mitchell, the next time they talk.
3. Sam
Of course, he worries about his team. They’re going through the Gate after these monsters, after all, and he’s not there to watch their backs, or grab ‘em by the neck/belt/nearest body part and yank them out of the line of fire. And they’re always getting hurt, of course, because that’s what being on SG-1 means. He gets injury reports, and his team is always on there, even if it’s just ‘new boots gave blister; needed a bandaid’ or ‘grabbed alien cactus; 34 splinters in hand’ or ‘drank alien potion; fell into campfire and got 3rd degree burns on ass’.
He’s not going to lie and say he misses the SGC infirmary (although he does, every day, miss a certain doctor).
But he gets the mission report where Mitchell and Carter ended up trapped in one of those phase-shifting thingies he doesn’t fully understand, and Sam had a bullet in her.
He reads Sam and Mitchell’s reports before the doctors’. They’re predictably sterile, and Sam claims not to remember very much due to her injury. Mitchell’s has a direct line about expecting Carter to die, a quick allusion to just how bad off she was. Jack knows how to write about something like that with all the dry military decorum in the world, and so does Mitchell.
The medical report is clinical, of course, but Jack gets from it that Sam, his Sam, was gutshot.
Jack knows what that looks like, and it’s lucky his office has its own bathroom, because he has to go throw up immediately after reading that. But he didn’t have to see it, and when he calls, Sam is cheerful and doesn’t even mention the time she spent in the infirmary. He calls Mitchell afterwards, and gets around to thanking him for being there with her. Not directly, but he hopes the other man understands.
4. Daniel.
On this one, Jack can be honest. He can’t even imagine being there, going through the gate, and leaving Daniel behind with the Oraci bitch. Being told about it is bad enough.
He can be honest, but it does nothing for the guilt. He listens to Sam sobbing on the phone, hears the hitch in Mitchell’s voice, and even Teal’c sounds like he’s bordering the land between stoicism and furor.
It’s completely unfair, but Jack is glad he wasn’t there.
5. Daniel and Sam.
Jack forgets one day, and he calls Daniel. He forgets, which is awful enough to begin with, because unlike all the other times Daniel was missing, it doesn’t impact Jack’s every day life. He doesn’t get constant reminders in the form of Daniel’s absence. He can pretend that his friend is just off-world, out of contact for an unspecified amount of time. He’s not deluding himself, it’s just the ruse his brain comes up with because it makes sense.
He calls Daniel’s apartment, and the phone rings 3 times before it picks up. Had it gone to a fourth, Jack probably would have remembered. But it stops ringing, he hears the receiver click on, and someone’s on the other end.
“Hello?” Jack says. With his other hand he’s digging his cell phone out and scrolling down for the SGC’s emergency number. Whoever’s in Daniel’s apartment is about to get some SFs on their ass.
“Hrmph?” comes from the other end, and it sounds muffled. Then, “Oops,” more clearly, now, and identifiable as a female voice.
“Who is this?” Jack demands.
“Who is this?” the woman retorts, and Jack figures it out.
“This is General Jack O’Neill,” he says. “What are you doing in Daniel’s apartment, Vala? Do you even have permission to be off base?”
For a moment, there’s silence. Jack keeps one finger on the send button of his cell phone.
“I do,” she says, and for the first time Jack realizes that the muffled quality isn’t poor reception. She sounds sad.
“He gave you a key?”
“I have a key,” Vala says, not answering the question. She clears her throat. “I was feeding his fish.”
“Sam does that.” He realizes too late, of course, that Sam is gone too. She was playing with another one of her God damn phase devices, and they haven’t gotten her back yet. “Oh,” he says.
“Yeah,” Vala says. “It’s my job now. Teal’c doesn’t like fish.”
“No?”
“He wants to set them free.”
Jack puts away his cell phone, then. He’s still pretty sure that Vala isn’t supposed to be off base by herself, but if all she’s doing is sitting in Daniel’s apartment weeping over his fish, it’s okay.
Vala, oddly enough, keeps talking. She tells Jack that yesterday, she and Teal’c cleaned out the refrigerator. There wasn’t much, of course, but what there was had gotten furry. They’re taking turns keeping Sam company while she’s out of phase, and whenever it’s not Vala’s time, she comes here to ‘take care of the fish’.
She’s kind of babbling, and for some reason Jack lets her. He doesn’t know her very well, just from what the other members of SG-1 say about her in passing. It doesn’t sound like she’s doing well, and he can guess that with her personality, loneliness and fear aren’t handled in healthy ways.
He doesn’t offer platitudes, or reassure her in any way. He doesn’t think that’s what she wants, and he doesn’t have any reassurances to give.
“I miss them,” Vala says, and her pain is so sharp that Jack has to rub at his eyes.
He can’t deny that the distance dulls how much it hurts. Not in anyway that makes it feel any better, but seeing as he’s at work, filling out forms, and reading reports, and not holed up in the home of somebody who may never return, he knows he’s a lot more okay. If he was still in Colorado, he has no idea where’d he be. At Sam’s invisible side, or in Daniel’s empty apartment. Vala is ricocheting between the two, and she sounds like she’s coming apart.
