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Skeletal Remains (Part 1 of 3 or 4)
I'm about 3000 or 4000 words from done, and my week is not shaping up for a lot of writing. I can't STAND that I have a good 7000 words or so ready to post. So...
Title: Skeletal Remains (1/3 or 4)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
muck_a_luck, posting in brainofck
Pairing: JO/SC, JO/SC/DJ, JO/DJ, JO/CM, JS/RM/VMD implied
Rating: NC-17
Summary: A terrible, horrible stranded story.
Content/warnings: Character death. I can't emphasize this enough. I have been referring to this as the character death fic of doom.
Words: Full piece is over 10,000 words and counting. This section is 2781 or so.
Beta: NONE! Bwahahahahahahaha!
Disclaimer: If anybody is planning a script like this for SG-1, I'm certainly not going to claim any rights to it. However, I'd be delighted to work in a co-writing/consulting/first-reader/advisory-type capacity, with my fee to be negotiated at that time. :D
Archive rights: Absolutely none. My journals only.muck_a_luck and brainofck
The Matrix: Years. The Matrix is located here.
Teal'c, Bra'tac, and a whole contingent of insurgent Jaffa leaders stood surrounded, disarmed, humiliated. Jacob and a handful of Tok'ra already lay dead on the ground, along with dozens of Jaffa who had died defending their rebellion.
SG-1 was bloody and bruised, but still alive - down and bound and completely helpless to do anything but watch the slaughter come to its final conclusion. The heel of a Jaffa boot ground between Jack's shoulder blades.
The end was anticlimactic, in a way. Staff blasts and death.
But not for SG-1.
Daniel was out cold. The last of the departing Jaffa unbound his hands and left them there with the dead.
They laid Teal'c and Bra'tac and Jacob side by side in their own graves, Teal'c in the middle.
Sam's face had been cold and hard. Weirdly expressionless.
He found it unnerving when she played the good little soldier. But that wasn't really fair, since he knew they were having the same reaction. A certain grief over their fallen comrades and loved ones, but even more an overwhelming desire to kill someone. Cleverly. Or painfully. Or even better - many someones in a perfect crossfire. He suspected his major's preference would be large explosions. Or a really satisfying strafing run.
Daniel had cried silently all morning until there were no more tears left. Then he was just silent.
"This is the best we're going to do, sir," she said.
The planet had been chosen for its lack of a Gate. All the participants in the meeting had arrived by ship. Almost all of the vessels had been demolished in the ambush, but they had found a tel'tac that would still fly. Barely.
"The hyperdrive is a total loss and the environmental systems are only just functional, but the navigation computer seems to be intact and the hull is spaceworthy."
"No hyperdrive," Daniel clarified.
She nodded.
"So, to put it technically," Jack said, "We're totally screwed."
"Not necessarily, sir," she began.
"This is what I like about you people," he said with a sort of grim positivism.
"According to the computer, there's a planetary system not too far from here with a Gate."
"How far is 'not too far?'" Daniel asked. The million dollar question.
"Two weeks at this thing's best speed. It'll be no fun with the environmental systems as they are, but assuming nothing goes wrong, we'll make it."
Daniel laughed. He sounded edgy. Bitter.
"Assuming nothing goes wrong?" he repeated. "I can't remember the last time something went right."
Jack thought of saying, When they didn't kill us, too. But on the heels of so much loss, it seemed like the wrong thing to say, so he didn't. They had only finished burying the dead that morning.
They had been breathing damp, foul, oxygen-depleted air for two weeks. They all had headaches – though the headaches could have been from watching Sam flit constantly from CO2 scrubbers, to temperature control, to water recycling, to artificial gravity, and back again, in an endless cycle, for fourteen days in a row. The blue planet out the front window looked like paradise.
The closer they got, the more like home it started to feel. Satellites in orbit, but no sign of space traffic.
But no radio traffic either. That had made them all antsy.
"I don't like this at all," Sam said. Jack quietly agreed with her.
They were flying over the landscape, without challenge from local authorities.
And now they were making low passes over a large city, and it was starting to be pretty clear why nobody cared about the arrival of a strange ship from outer space.
As best they could tell from the sky, all that was left were the bones.
"We can't stay in here," Sam said heatedly. "And we will never make it to another populated system in our lifetimes without hyperdrive."
Jack made a face.
"Fine. We go out and try to figure out what happened here. Look for supplies and anything that might let us repair this flying piece of crap. We treat the locals as hostiles until we're sure they aren't going to go all Omega Man on us.
"Assuming there are any locals left," Daniel said grimly.
They found an airfield, and Sam tried to fix the hyperdrive using this and that of tools and technology the planet had to offer.
Jack and Daniel hunted the city, scavenging for anything useful.
They found lots of interesting stuff. And bones. Lots and lots of bones.
On the first day, Daniel found a major library right away, and Jack took almost perverse pleasure in making Daniel leave it behind. They were trying to be careful, avoid possible sources of biological contamination, not set themselves up for possible attack by survivors or whatever might have destroyed this planet.
They found some useful things and scurried back to Sam.
But as the days went by, they saw no sign of survivors, and none of them got sick and eventually it was business as usual to say goodbye to Sam over their breakfast and head into the city to explore the most interesting buildings.
Eventually, they had rounded up enough supplies that Jack was ready to let Daniel do his thing.
"So, Daniel. Library today?" he offered, as they began the now familiar hike into the heart of the town.
Daniel smiled a little and hefted his empty pack a bit on his shoulders.
"Nope."
They ended up in what was obviously a bookstore. A large one, like Borders or Barnes and Noble, but with bodies littering the floor and books with strange, unreadable print.
It didn't take Daniel long to find what he was looking for.
"The children's section, Daniel?"
His friend shrugged.
"I still haven't been able to get a clue about this language. Time to learn some basic nouns," he said. He made a beeline for the basket of board books in the corner.
Sam couldn't stop snickering, as she and Jack cooked dinner and Daniel poured over his hoard of children's books.
"You laugh now, but wait 'til the alien equivalent of Dr. Seuss' ABC teaches me enough for me to find us a Stargate."
Sam laughed anyway.
Daniel pelted her with a pointy, hard, colorful book clearly about a trip to the zoo. Jack picked it up. He could use a good read.
"I don't get it," Jack complained, staring around the warehouse-sized store. "We just found the mother lode of booze. How can there not be beer?"
Daniel shrugged and continued browsing the wines.
They built campfires at night.
Alone on this lonely planet, it was comforting to build a fire near the foot of the ship's ramp, draw up a few alien lawn chairs or a log, and create a circle of heat and space and humanity to ward off the empty night. The smell of woodsmoke was comforting.
These nights, they didn't talk about much. Daniel was making little to no progress building a vocabulary big enough to actually read something. He had instead resorted to sifting through the library by brute strength, hoping to find maps or pictures that would lead them to the Stargate, starting with what appeared to be the reference room. At the beginning, Daniel used to bring interesting books back with him to talk about delightedly, full of his usual intellectual curiosity in the face of certain doom. Those events had become fewer and fewer until they stopped, as Daniel found nothing that would help them get any closer to getting home. Jack thought Daniel deliberately left his archaeologist's excitement behind when he came back to camp, since Sam tended to get irritated these days when he rambled on about possible links to Earth civilizations and cultures.
Sam was worn and tired. She started her days looking fatigued, and ended them snappish and frustrated. So it surprised him when she was the one who broke the eerie silence of the night.
"So what did it?" Sam asked.
He and Daniel both knew what "it" was without having to ask.
"Something big," Jack suggested. "I've been thinking an airborn agent, since it killed a whole hell of a lot of people, not to mention apparently everything else that breathed, pretty damned fast."
"Yeah," Sam agreed. "Nobody ran. There wasn't any panic or looting. Nobody rioted. They all just fell down and died on the spot."
"Not everybody," Daniel said quietly.
"What?!" Jack nearly shouted in alarm.
"No, no! Not survivors!" Daniel hastened to correct the false impression. "There were people who ran. And not everybody died on the spot."
He had their attention.
He shrugged and sipped his wine. "I've noticed whenever we go into a residential building with a lot of levels. There are more bodies on the upper floors than there are below, particularly in the upper part of the stairwells."
"That's true," Jack agreed slowly. He could see it now. Sometimes the upper landings could get pretty crowded.
"Plus, people jumped."
Sam, who wasn't as familiar with the town, looked startled.
"Jumped?" she repeated.
"Yeah. All around tall buildings we see glass broken out of the upper windows and very untidy bone scatter patterns on the ground. Like the victims smashed into the ground and their bodies were predated on after they broke apart."
Jack nodded. He had noticed the jumpers, too, now that Daniel mentioned it. Still...
"It couldn't have been a predator, though," Jack objected. "These people weren't hunted down. They collapsed in heaps. The bones are in neat little piles. And it must have happened basically simultaneously everywhere."
"I agree. The state of decay of the bodies is almost exactly the same across the entire city. Across species. Everywhere. Perfectly clean, smooth bones, undisturbed by predators, or weather. But when you look at the bones carefully... I think they were cleaned."
Daniel met his eyes across the fire, and Jack was suddenly frightened. Daniel had a haunted look. The fear flitted across Daniel's face, then was gone, but Jack saw it.
"I think they were attacked and devoured by insects," Daniel said quietly. "Maybe some kind of aggressive beetle. I looked at some of the bones under a big microscope over at the university..." Jack wondered if Daniel had just used handy samples from one of the lab chairs.
"Bugs?" Jack asked. Sam looked around reflexively. The night suddenly seemed a lot less friendly. "That's not possible. How could bugs have gotten the whole place that fast?"
Daniel shrugged.
"Sam asked. That's my best guess. Bugs that ate every land animal on the planet. In a hurry."
"That sounds like a weapon," Jack said.
"It sure does," Sam agreed. "And I'm totally creeped out now. I'm going in."
So they packed up the alien lawn chairs and put out the fire and went in. It was a relief when the ramp closed behind him.
They spent the next several nights inside.
It took him 100 days to give up on Edora. But on Edora he was alone, among people who told him that hope was a luxury, a waste of time, where life depended on hard work and sweat and strong backs. A day spent digging for a way home was a day wasted. He had moved on. He wasn't proud of that. He had given up, but they hadn't and because of that, he wasn't on Edora anymore.
But here, he wasn't alone. He could depend on his kids to tell him when it was time to give up. And it had taken Sam three times 100 days, but the day had finally come.
Sam strolled down the shallow ramp from the ship and casually dropped the handful of crystals onto the pavement, where they shattered into dozens of pieces and dust.
She kept walking away from them, over the hill and out of sight, back towards the river they had been using to bathe.
Daniel looked at the sharp, glinting shards on the ground with slightly raised eyebrows. A painful reminder of their lost fourth.
"I guess she's done," Daniel said mildly.
"So. Retirement," he said.
Jack just looked at him. Daniel waved his arms in a vague gesture.
"This is it."
"Nah. We've still got Plan C."
"A systematic aerial survey of the entire planet in hopes of just finding the Gate? Jack, that's not a plan. That's a hobby – no, an obsession – until we all agree to a place to settle down. Maybe a nice lakeside villa where you could fish and Sam can putter and I could write."
"You're just giving up, then?" Jack asked him. Daniel made an exasperated sound.
"I gave up on the Stargate months ago, Jack, I told you that. These people might have come from Earth, but it was a very long time ago and their written language isn't like anything I've ever seen. Without someone to talk to, I knew in forty-eight hours that our only hope was for Sam to fix the hyperdrive. We're stuck here."
Jack would never have thought that Daniel would give up quicker than he had.
"So."
"So what?" Jack replied.
"Retirement," Daniel repeated.
Jack looked around.
"Well, setting aside the planet-killing plague or nasty weaponized superbugs or whatever, there could be worse places. Though I figured retirement would include hockey. And beer."
"I guarantee you once we pick a spot to stay, I can make you beer."
Jack nodded thoughtfully.
"And we can probably put together a little hockey. We've got unlimited miles on that thing," Daniel gestured toward their flying mobile home. "We can pick our frozen lake or whatever anytime you want."
"You play? You never said!"
"Of course I don't. But," Daniel spread his hands, "All the time in the world."
"Good point."
"And of course, there's Sam."
"Yup. Carter and you. Company could be worse, too."
"No. I meant Sam. Don't try to tell me that she hasn't figured high in your retirement fantasies all these years."
Jack was so surprised that Daniel would actually say the forbidden words that for a moment he didn't know how to reply.
"Come on, Jack. Oh. Don't look at me like that. What's to stop you?"
"Well, for one thing, we're still in the field. I'm the CO here," he ground out. "Not really appropriate to proposition my junior officers."
"Give it a rest, Jack. 'Weaponized superbugs aside', it's just the three of us. Probably forever. I think it's time to rearrange our priorities."
Jack stared at the more and more familiar stars overhead.
"OK. Let's talk about priorities. What if she turned me down?"
Daniel snorted.
"Next?"
"OK. It's just the three of us. Probably forever. If…" he couldn't bring himself to say 'Sam' in this context. But he couldn't really say 'Carter' either. "If – she- said yes, where would that leave you?"
"Happy that two of the most important people in my life were happier." Jack could hear the smile in Daniel's voice. He meant it. And that pissed Jack off.
"Give me a break. We sleep about 20 feet apart. It would be wrong."
"Privacy's a modern invention, Jack. Humans been dealing with these issues since the dawn of humanity. We're all adults. You guys will do your thing. Maybe I'll need to do my thing. And we'll all pretend not to notice and it'll work itself out."
"You say that now," Jack muttered.
The three of them sat quietly enjoying the cool breeze and clear, star-studded sky. Daniel seemed lost in thought and far away, but Sam had been chatting about this and that all evening. Freed from thinking constantly about how to get them off the planet, now she seemed to be full of ideas. She had plans for restructuring and modifying the tel'tak's small hold. She had strategies for executing Daniel's idea of mapping seasonal availability of food crops so that they could make the planet into their own year-round supermarket and stop depending on canned foods of dubious age scavanged from the town.
"Daniel says I should think of this as an unexpected retirement," Jack said when she paused to peel some grilled fish off its bones. That was one thing Jack was starting to hate about this place. All the fishing. And the eating of fish. It was great for the first, oh, six months, but it was really starting to get old.
"Really?" she said in surprise. "What about Plan C?"
Jack shrugged.
"Plan C or not, we've been here almost a year now, and it's gonna be a lot longer than that before we ever get off this rock."
He walked over to her log and went down on one knee.
Part 2
If you're interested, all my stories, in order, from one page. Also, my fiction recommendations.
Title: Skeletal Remains (1/3 or 4)
Author:
muck_a_luck, posting in brainofckPairing: JO/SC, JO/SC/DJ, JO/DJ, JO/CM, JS/RM/VMD implied
Rating: NC-17
Summary: A terrible, horrible stranded story.
Content/warnings: Character death. I can't emphasize this enough. I have been referring to this as the character death fic of doom.
Words: Full piece is over 10,000 words and counting. This section is 2781 or so.
Beta: NONE! Bwahahahahahahaha!
Disclaimer: If anybody is planning a script like this for SG-1, I'm certainly not going to claim any rights to it. However, I'd be delighted to work in a co-writing/consulting/first-reader/advisory-type capacity, with my fee to be negotiated at that time. :D
Archive rights: Absolutely none. My journals only.
muck_a_luck and brainofckThe Matrix: Years. The Matrix is located here.
Teal'c, Bra'tac, and a whole contingent of insurgent Jaffa leaders stood surrounded, disarmed, humiliated. Jacob and a handful of Tok'ra already lay dead on the ground, along with dozens of Jaffa who had died defending their rebellion.
SG-1 was bloody and bruised, but still alive - down and bound and completely helpless to do anything but watch the slaughter come to its final conclusion. The heel of a Jaffa boot ground between Jack's shoulder blades.
The end was anticlimactic, in a way. Staff blasts and death.
But not for SG-1.
Daniel was out cold. The last of the departing Jaffa unbound his hands and left them there with the dead.
They laid Teal'c and Bra'tac and Jacob side by side in their own graves, Teal'c in the middle.
Sam's face had been cold and hard. Weirdly expressionless.
He found it unnerving when she played the good little soldier. But that wasn't really fair, since he knew they were having the same reaction. A certain grief over their fallen comrades and loved ones, but even more an overwhelming desire to kill someone. Cleverly. Or painfully. Or even better - many someones in a perfect crossfire. He suspected his major's preference would be large explosions. Or a really satisfying strafing run.
Daniel had cried silently all morning until there were no more tears left. Then he was just silent.
"This is the best we're going to do, sir," she said.
The planet had been chosen for its lack of a Gate. All the participants in the meeting had arrived by ship. Almost all of the vessels had been demolished in the ambush, but they had found a tel'tac that would still fly. Barely.
"The hyperdrive is a total loss and the environmental systems are only just functional, but the navigation computer seems to be intact and the hull is spaceworthy."
"No hyperdrive," Daniel clarified.
She nodded.
"So, to put it technically," Jack said, "We're totally screwed."
"Not necessarily, sir," she began.
"This is what I like about you people," he said with a sort of grim positivism.
"According to the computer, there's a planetary system not too far from here with a Gate."
"How far is 'not too far?'" Daniel asked. The million dollar question.
"Two weeks at this thing's best speed. It'll be no fun with the environmental systems as they are, but assuming nothing goes wrong, we'll make it."
Daniel laughed. He sounded edgy. Bitter.
"Assuming nothing goes wrong?" he repeated. "I can't remember the last time something went right."
Jack thought of saying, When they didn't kill us, too. But on the heels of so much loss, it seemed like the wrong thing to say, so he didn't. They had only finished burying the dead that morning.
They had been breathing damp, foul, oxygen-depleted air for two weeks. They all had headaches – though the headaches could have been from watching Sam flit constantly from CO2 scrubbers, to temperature control, to water recycling, to artificial gravity, and back again, in an endless cycle, for fourteen days in a row. The blue planet out the front window looked like paradise.
The closer they got, the more like home it started to feel. Satellites in orbit, but no sign of space traffic.
But no radio traffic either. That had made them all antsy.
"I don't like this at all," Sam said. Jack quietly agreed with her.
They were flying over the landscape, without challenge from local authorities.
And now they were making low passes over a large city, and it was starting to be pretty clear why nobody cared about the arrival of a strange ship from outer space.
As best they could tell from the sky, all that was left were the bones.
"We can't stay in here," Sam said heatedly. "And we will never make it to another populated system in our lifetimes without hyperdrive."
Jack made a face.
"Fine. We go out and try to figure out what happened here. Look for supplies and anything that might let us repair this flying piece of crap. We treat the locals as hostiles until we're sure they aren't going to go all Omega Man on us.
"Assuming there are any locals left," Daniel said grimly.
They found an airfield, and Sam tried to fix the hyperdrive using this and that of tools and technology the planet had to offer.
Jack and Daniel hunted the city, scavenging for anything useful.
They found lots of interesting stuff. And bones. Lots and lots of bones.
On the first day, Daniel found a major library right away, and Jack took almost perverse pleasure in making Daniel leave it behind. They were trying to be careful, avoid possible sources of biological contamination, not set themselves up for possible attack by survivors or whatever might have destroyed this planet.
They found some useful things and scurried back to Sam.
But as the days went by, they saw no sign of survivors, and none of them got sick and eventually it was business as usual to say goodbye to Sam over their breakfast and head into the city to explore the most interesting buildings.
Eventually, they had rounded up enough supplies that Jack was ready to let Daniel do his thing.
"So, Daniel. Library today?" he offered, as they began the now familiar hike into the heart of the town.
Daniel smiled a little and hefted his empty pack a bit on his shoulders.
"Nope."
They ended up in what was obviously a bookstore. A large one, like Borders or Barnes and Noble, but with bodies littering the floor and books with strange, unreadable print.
It didn't take Daniel long to find what he was looking for.
"The children's section, Daniel?"
His friend shrugged.
"I still haven't been able to get a clue about this language. Time to learn some basic nouns," he said. He made a beeline for the basket of board books in the corner.
Sam couldn't stop snickering, as she and Jack cooked dinner and Daniel poured over his hoard of children's books.
"You laugh now, but wait 'til the alien equivalent of Dr. Seuss' ABC teaches me enough for me to find us a Stargate."
Sam laughed anyway.
Daniel pelted her with a pointy, hard, colorful book clearly about a trip to the zoo. Jack picked it up. He could use a good read.
"I don't get it," Jack complained, staring around the warehouse-sized store. "We just found the mother lode of booze. How can there not be beer?"
Daniel shrugged and continued browsing the wines.
They built campfires at night.
Alone on this lonely planet, it was comforting to build a fire near the foot of the ship's ramp, draw up a few alien lawn chairs or a log, and create a circle of heat and space and humanity to ward off the empty night. The smell of woodsmoke was comforting.
These nights, they didn't talk about much. Daniel was making little to no progress building a vocabulary big enough to actually read something. He had instead resorted to sifting through the library by brute strength, hoping to find maps or pictures that would lead them to the Stargate, starting with what appeared to be the reference room. At the beginning, Daniel used to bring interesting books back with him to talk about delightedly, full of his usual intellectual curiosity in the face of certain doom. Those events had become fewer and fewer until they stopped, as Daniel found nothing that would help them get any closer to getting home. Jack thought Daniel deliberately left his archaeologist's excitement behind when he came back to camp, since Sam tended to get irritated these days when he rambled on about possible links to Earth civilizations and cultures.
Sam was worn and tired. She started her days looking fatigued, and ended them snappish and frustrated. So it surprised him when she was the one who broke the eerie silence of the night.
"So what did it?" Sam asked.
He and Daniel both knew what "it" was without having to ask.
"Something big," Jack suggested. "I've been thinking an airborn agent, since it killed a whole hell of a lot of people, not to mention apparently everything else that breathed, pretty damned fast."
"Yeah," Sam agreed. "Nobody ran. There wasn't any panic or looting. Nobody rioted. They all just fell down and died on the spot."
"Not everybody," Daniel said quietly.
"What?!" Jack nearly shouted in alarm.
"No, no! Not survivors!" Daniel hastened to correct the false impression. "There were people who ran. And not everybody died on the spot."
He had their attention.
He shrugged and sipped his wine. "I've noticed whenever we go into a residential building with a lot of levels. There are more bodies on the upper floors than there are below, particularly in the upper part of the stairwells."
"That's true," Jack agreed slowly. He could see it now. Sometimes the upper landings could get pretty crowded.
"Plus, people jumped."
Sam, who wasn't as familiar with the town, looked startled.
"Jumped?" she repeated.
"Yeah. All around tall buildings we see glass broken out of the upper windows and very untidy bone scatter patterns on the ground. Like the victims smashed into the ground and their bodies were predated on after they broke apart."
Jack nodded. He had noticed the jumpers, too, now that Daniel mentioned it. Still...
"It couldn't have been a predator, though," Jack objected. "These people weren't hunted down. They collapsed in heaps. The bones are in neat little piles. And it must have happened basically simultaneously everywhere."
"I agree. The state of decay of the bodies is almost exactly the same across the entire city. Across species. Everywhere. Perfectly clean, smooth bones, undisturbed by predators, or weather. But when you look at the bones carefully... I think they were cleaned."
Daniel met his eyes across the fire, and Jack was suddenly frightened. Daniel had a haunted look. The fear flitted across Daniel's face, then was gone, but Jack saw it.
"I think they were attacked and devoured by insects," Daniel said quietly. "Maybe some kind of aggressive beetle. I looked at some of the bones under a big microscope over at the university..." Jack wondered if Daniel had just used handy samples from one of the lab chairs.
"Bugs?" Jack asked. Sam looked around reflexively. The night suddenly seemed a lot less friendly. "That's not possible. How could bugs have gotten the whole place that fast?"
Daniel shrugged.
"Sam asked. That's my best guess. Bugs that ate every land animal on the planet. In a hurry."
"That sounds like a weapon," Jack said.
"It sure does," Sam agreed. "And I'm totally creeped out now. I'm going in."
So they packed up the alien lawn chairs and put out the fire and went in. It was a relief when the ramp closed behind him.
They spent the next several nights inside.
It took him 100 days to give up on Edora. But on Edora he was alone, among people who told him that hope was a luxury, a waste of time, where life depended on hard work and sweat and strong backs. A day spent digging for a way home was a day wasted. He had moved on. He wasn't proud of that. He had given up, but they hadn't and because of that, he wasn't on Edora anymore.
But here, he wasn't alone. He could depend on his kids to tell him when it was time to give up. And it had taken Sam three times 100 days, but the day had finally come.
Sam strolled down the shallow ramp from the ship and casually dropped the handful of crystals onto the pavement, where they shattered into dozens of pieces and dust.
She kept walking away from them, over the hill and out of sight, back towards the river they had been using to bathe.
Daniel looked at the sharp, glinting shards on the ground with slightly raised eyebrows. A painful reminder of their lost fourth.
"I guess she's done," Daniel said mildly.
"So. Retirement," he said.
Jack just looked at him. Daniel waved his arms in a vague gesture.
"This is it."
"Nah. We've still got Plan C."
"A systematic aerial survey of the entire planet in hopes of just finding the Gate? Jack, that's not a plan. That's a hobby – no, an obsession – until we all agree to a place to settle down. Maybe a nice lakeside villa where you could fish and Sam can putter and I could write."
"You're just giving up, then?" Jack asked him. Daniel made an exasperated sound.
"I gave up on the Stargate months ago, Jack, I told you that. These people might have come from Earth, but it was a very long time ago and their written language isn't like anything I've ever seen. Without someone to talk to, I knew in forty-eight hours that our only hope was for Sam to fix the hyperdrive. We're stuck here."
Jack would never have thought that Daniel would give up quicker than he had.
"So."
"So what?" Jack replied.
"Retirement," Daniel repeated.
Jack looked around.
"Well, setting aside the planet-killing plague or nasty weaponized superbugs or whatever, there could be worse places. Though I figured retirement would include hockey. And beer."
"I guarantee you once we pick a spot to stay, I can make you beer."
Jack nodded thoughtfully.
"And we can probably put together a little hockey. We've got unlimited miles on that thing," Daniel gestured toward their flying mobile home. "We can pick our frozen lake or whatever anytime you want."
"You play? You never said!"
"Of course I don't. But," Daniel spread his hands, "All the time in the world."
"Good point."
"And of course, there's Sam."
"Yup. Carter and you. Company could be worse, too."
"No. I meant Sam. Don't try to tell me that she hasn't figured high in your retirement fantasies all these years."
Jack was so surprised that Daniel would actually say the forbidden words that for a moment he didn't know how to reply.
"Come on, Jack. Oh. Don't look at me like that. What's to stop you?"
"Well, for one thing, we're still in the field. I'm the CO here," he ground out. "Not really appropriate to proposition my junior officers."
"Give it a rest, Jack. 'Weaponized superbugs aside', it's just the three of us. Probably forever. I think it's time to rearrange our priorities."
Jack stared at the more and more familiar stars overhead.
"OK. Let's talk about priorities. What if she turned me down?"
Daniel snorted.
"Next?"
"OK. It's just the three of us. Probably forever. If…" he couldn't bring himself to say 'Sam' in this context. But he couldn't really say 'Carter' either. "If – she- said yes, where would that leave you?"
"Happy that two of the most important people in my life were happier." Jack could hear the smile in Daniel's voice. He meant it. And that pissed Jack off.
"Give me a break. We sleep about 20 feet apart. It would be wrong."
"Privacy's a modern invention, Jack. Humans been dealing with these issues since the dawn of humanity. We're all adults. You guys will do your thing. Maybe I'll need to do my thing. And we'll all pretend not to notice and it'll work itself out."
"You say that now," Jack muttered.
The three of them sat quietly enjoying the cool breeze and clear, star-studded sky. Daniel seemed lost in thought and far away, but Sam had been chatting about this and that all evening. Freed from thinking constantly about how to get them off the planet, now she seemed to be full of ideas. She had plans for restructuring and modifying the tel'tak's small hold. She had strategies for executing Daniel's idea of mapping seasonal availability of food crops so that they could make the planet into their own year-round supermarket and stop depending on canned foods of dubious age scavanged from the town.
"Daniel says I should think of this as an unexpected retirement," Jack said when she paused to peel some grilled fish off its bones. That was one thing Jack was starting to hate about this place. All the fishing. And the eating of fish. It was great for the first, oh, six months, but it was really starting to get old.
"Really?" she said in surprise. "What about Plan C?"
Jack shrugged.
"Plan C or not, we've been here almost a year now, and it's gonna be a lot longer than that before we ever get off this rock."
He walked over to her log and went down on one knee.
Part 2
If you're interested, all my stories, in order, from one page. Also, my fiction recommendations.
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John Sheppard. Rodney McKay.
Loving your icon!!!! :D
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(I have to say, it's a mark of how much I love you that I'm reading this at all, since Jack/Sam/Daniel makes me cry.)
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That aside, can't wait for the next part. Is this the superbugs from "The Scourge"? And obviously the world finds them again, so I'd love to see how that works out. And wah *cries for Teal'c*.
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*buffs nails on shirt*
*is smug*
And in the first 2500 word or so, killed Teal'c, Bratac, Jacob, the Jaffa rebellion, a bunch of Tokra, and an entire planet, including animals! Go me! :D
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Daniel's analysis of the bugs really creeped me out. Why is it always bugs? Ick.
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I did a little timeline thing, but I'm posting it as an author's note at the end, because it is full of spoilers for the story. I figured it might be useful for the kind of people who really want to *know* exactly. But hopefully people familiar with canon events will be able to tell approximately where they fell out of the canon timeline and how what happens to them fits in later.
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Jack agrees with you. :D
Heh. I loved that in Dr. Jackson's Diary. Jack wasn't just manfully scared of bugs, like "ick-smash*. He was, like, girl-slap scared of bugs. *snickers*
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Um, planet stuff v. good and creepy. Love the bookstore and liquor warehouse!
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Wait for it... :D
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SO MANY BONES! Even at the end, skinning the fish... fish bones. Bones. Too many bones.
It's obvious you have a super-huge overall concept in your evil brain. I am scared and entralled!
I shall commence to be shuddering now. Please to be continuing this asap pleeze kthnx.
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Angie
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You can't stop THERE! Please I must have more immediately!
:D.
Great world building. Can't wait to see where you go with this. Except it will really suck if you leave them there forever and they all have to watch each other die. You know -- just like REAL LIFE!
No no, it won't suck. Truly -- Can't wait for more. Thank you. I'm only begging because I know you've got it written already.
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Glad you liked it!
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I never beg writers anymore. I used to, then I went through a dry spell and I realized how futile it is.
But knowing you've got it all there on your HD means I can beg. Hee hee.
I took another look at the pairings you listed and realized this is going off in a direction I had no idea would happen, so I'm really looking forward to it.
Fun! Angst! Stranded!
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*goes to look for next installment*
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I keep feeling badly for Daniel, trying so hard to learn the local language. And I keep hoping he'll break through and be able to wallow in the local books.
I should probably be more focused on the hint of relationships to come... but suddenly illiterate!Daniel has me rapt!
More from me soon! Onward!
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Heh. Wallowing in local books. :D