Work Text:
Auburn, Shawnee County, Kansas, 11:06 p.m.
Less than an hour after going to bed, Wendy and Frank wake gasping.
Frank lies still, trying to get his breath. Wendy turns and clutches at him; he puts his arms around her, wraps her up tight, and their hearts hammer against each other through their ribcages.
They know it wasn't just a bad dream. They know it wasn't a bad dream they happened to have at the same moment. They can feel in each other the old impulse to get up, go down the hall, check on the boys. In Frank it's so strong that he's flung an arm out to reach for his legs before he catches himself. He pulls Wendy closer against his side with the other arm.
They know where their younger son is; they can hear his voice through the window, rising up from the patio, quiet but reassuringly audible as he chats away on the phone with his girl. He's telling her what a nice visit he's having with the folks, how they'd love if she'd come along next time.
"He's all right," Frank says. He's not talking about that one.
"Yes," Wendy says. "I know. I feel that now. But what ... "
"I don't know," Frank says. "Best forgotten, maybe."
"Yes," Wendy says. But they both know that they'll be freezing at the sound of every ringing phone, every knock on the door, until they've got Cam alive and well on the other end of a telephone line.
Cheyenne Mountain, 2206 hours
Carolyn has worked at Stargate Command long enough to know that when she experiences a wave of vertigo so debilitating that she drops what's she holding and staggers, accompanied by a feeling of grief so visceral and so powerful that she comes close to vomiting, and a moment later feels so physically fine and emotionally serene that it's as if it never happened, it's unlikely that the battery of tests she mentally schedules herself for will indicate any somatic etiology.
She'll schedule them anyway. She'll have to take herself off duty in any case -- two SG teams have come back from missions with injuries serious enough that she was called back in, but there are enough personnel to cover -- and besides being the right course of action, it will keep her occupied.
Inexplicable calm after the inexplicable storm or not, she'll need to do whatever she can to keep her mind off the feeling that her father was irretrievably lost when they'd only just started to find their way back to each other.
San Diego, 9:06 p.m.
Mark always brings work home with him, never stays late at the office. The kids are playing a video game on the living-room TV, and he's camped out at the dining table with his notebook and his blueprints. He lobs a pro-forma "Keep it down, guys" at them every now and then to remind them that their mother's idea of a relaxing bath does not include a soundtrack of two rowdy teenagers carrying on downstairs, but he loves their laughter and the oblivious poetry of their running narrative, and the game noise doesn't bother him until it stops.
The sound stops, the screen flicker stops, their voices stop. It's as if somebody hit the pause button on reality.
He looks up sharply, and everything's going again. No sign from the kids that anything weird just happened. He'd chalk it up to overwork, some kind of brain blip like déjà vu, or even some highly unlikely but not impossible accident of timing where the game lagged just as both kids were taking a breath ... except that he's had time, now, to register what he felt in that moment, and recognize it.
When his daughter was three, she got away from him on the street. As he was lunging for her, he saw the open stairs to a shop cellar directly on the path of her current trajectory, and as he was grabbing her arm and immobilizing her, he saw her falling down the stairs, as clearly as if it was actually happening. He went to his knees, hugged her to his chest, and knelt there frozen until he could actually feel her safe in his arms.
What he just felt was exactly that feeling. Not the terror, not the visual, but the sense of sitting freeze-framed between realities, what wasn't happening overlaid on what was.
He's not prone to brain blips. He never had another experience like that, and life with two kids is full of could-have-happeneds, way too many near-misses to this day.
The kids are OK. His wife is calling down that she's out of the bathroom and headed for bed, the kids are calling good-nights to her. He takes what he just felt seriously, but he doesn't know what its significance is. He'll probably never know. His sister is the only family he has left outside this house, and he knows perfectly well that deep-space telemetry is a cover story, so all he can think is that it had something to do with her.
He picks up his phone and fires off a text before thinking it through: HEY. CALL ME, TEXT ME, WHATEVER. I NEED TO KNOW YOU DIDN'T FALL DOWN THE CELLAR STAIRS.
He can't remember if he ever told her about that time. He's the solid, boring one in the family, and that text is going to sound pretty crazy if he didn't.
He doesn't care, as long as she answers.
Lucia, midafternoon
Lucia City is full of back alleys, and all of the alleys are lined with back doors, and between some of the doors are shadowy openings, and most of the openings are tunnels that run through to the next alley. But in one alley there's a turnaround: a tunnel that goes in a few steps and then loops back to open on the same alley. You can go past one opening, duck into the next, and come out the first -- five strides behind where you went in, and five strides behind whoever's chasing you.
Jacek is standing three-quarters of the way around the loop, holding a sack full of Goa'uld devices, waiting to hear his pursuers' bootfalls go by, when he's shaken by the most confounding blast of what if he's ever felt.
It's like his life passing before his eyes, but his life as it could have been, a vision as sparkling and shiny as any treasure hoard, crowned with triumphs and bedecked with luxuries, glittering with opportunities, an infinity of golden fruits for the plucking -- if only that selfish harridan of a wife had let him take the girl.
The thought has crossed his mind before in idle moments, brief bitter flashes of recrimination when he was running a con where a child would have been the perfect foil. A little girl with a winning smile and a quick wit, a head as sharp as her father's -- what a team they would have made. He's thought it before, but never seen it: how together they could have stolen the galaxy. Conned the systems from the System Lords, bilked the Ori of their worshippers. It's a vision so stunning it leaves him weak with hunger and longing, overflowing with love for the clever child who helped him realize it.
Blast that woman for clutching the child to her bosom the moment he offered to take her off her hands. Pulling the weapon on him was the last straw. He was willing to negotiate! All the deals he's made, all the possessions he's appropriated, and it turns out that his own daughter was the most important thing he could have stolen.
The vision leaves as fast as it came on, and he's standing there shaking his head in the shadows, wondering what in blazes got into him. He hefts the sack, considering; if the Goa'uld gewgaws have some kind of psychotropic powers, he should up his asking price considerably, and the market's already pretty sweet, with all the former hosts running loose these days.
Speaking of running, here they come.
He listens, times his exit, comes out of the turnaround five strides behind where he came in, and goes back the way he came.
New Hak'tyl, midday
With a seasoned warrior, Ishta would have fought this bout a dozen times before it began. Potential moves and responses and counterresponses cascade from each shift of weight, each adjustment of stance, played out to their inevitable conclusion in the blink of an eye, and all that's left to chance is error, misjudgment, hidden weak points in their weapons; the bout is won or lost based on which of them is more fatigued or badly injured, which of their weapons is better crafted or more damaged from recent battle. All things being equal, two seasoned warriors would never lock weapons at all, but win or lose in a dance of opening stances, both able to read the outcome in the starting points.
With this apprentice, everything is left to chance but her own victory. The outcome is assured; she will win. How it is achieved depends on how the apprentice errs, and each apprentice errs differently in every bout. But unpredictability is not enough to explain what Ishta sees when she confronts her young opponent across the hard-packed dirt.
It is as if the greyish shadows cast by this world's pale single sun had torn away from each other, then multiplied. The beautiful cascading spatial logic of movement and response becomes a blur, a smear of madness, an impossibility attempting to manifest, and failing, and turning monstrous. She tastes death on her tongue, ashes, the shadows gone to windblown dust, nothing to cast them anymore. The extrapolations of strike and counterstrike twist inwards on themselves and implode.
She shifts her stance, her grip, reflexively from offensive to defensive, and the vision is gone. She does not think its departure was her doing. The apprentice has blanched at whatever she saw on Ishta's face, and she has dropped her guard into a shapeless slump, a lapse that will earn her a stinging reprimand, but all is as it should be around her once again.
Ishta has no explanation for what she saw, but she thinks on Teal'c locked in combat with the Ori, and fervently hopes that he is well.
Then she commands the apprentice to begin again, and lifts her weapon in defiance of the burnt hole the vision has left in her heart. It will heal, as Chulak will heal, and apprentices must be made masters, more urgently now than ever before.
P7X-377, morning
The blink of a human eye is a snap of muscle, a flick of movement, a flicker of darkness. The blink of a giant alien's eye is a slow thing, to human perception. Nick has grown accustomed to living among diaphanous giants; when he occasionally has dealings with other humans, they seem to him peculiarly small creatures, strangely solid, like plastic dolls one could hold in one's hand. But this blink of Quetzalcoatl's great eyes stretches, for one endless moment, into eternity.
At the start of that moment, Nick feels he is being phased again, perhaps sent away; he is washed by the fizzy sparkling waves emanated by the transportation crystals, and his impulse is to cry out against it, ask latitude for whatever it is he's done wrong, ask to stay. The Goa'uld have been routed, but he believes himself to be a friend to these beings now, not merely an ally against a common foe, and he cannot understand why they would cast him out.
By the end of the moment, he is ashamed, and afraid, for he senses that whatever is happening is not their doing, and nothing to do with him. At least, nothing to do with his work here, or his worthiness, or his behavior. It's been a long time since he lived under the observation of authorities who judged him, but in times of confusion he sometimes reverts to the patterns he acquired under their care. By the time the wave passes, in the elongated blink of an enormous gossamer eye, he is deeply afraid that it has something to do with his grandson, and that he himself, being in this place out of phase, may be the only one who could perceive it.
Quetzalcoatl's brethren have joined him, as perturbed as he has ever seen them, proof that he was not hallucinating, although he is secure in his assessment of his perceptions. He asks them what happened, and they cannot tell him. He is unable to determine whether that means they don't know. Their syntax suggests that he has phrased the question in an unanswerable way, but he recasts it several times to no avail.
He has been happy here. He has seen no reason to return to the world of his birth, the world where he suffered so much loss and so much confusion. He has been more than content to pass his notes along to the teams that come from Earth to find out what he's learned. They leave a different numeric code with him each time, to use for safe passage through their barrier should he choose to return, and a radio with which to communicate; he does not know if the most recent code will still work, or if anyone will be there to receive his transmission. But he knows, now, that he has to try.
In all these years, his grandson has visited him only twice. He understands that it's not the same as when he was hospitalized. He understands that there has been war, and that the stargate is operated at great cost that prohibits frequent travel for personal reasons. But he has not visited his grandson even once.
It's time for him to face his fears and his discomfort with the world he left, and check on Daniel. And he must do it believing that, if all is well and perhaps especially if it is not, Quetzalcoatl's people will welcome his return.
The Pentagon, 0006 hours
Jack whips around so fast and so hard to look at the wall of world clocks that the airman's chair he was leaning on swivels several inches the opposite way with the airman in it.
Like most career field operatives, Jack has an ingrained, intuitive ability to keep track of time, and the only things that can knock his internal chronometer out of whack are drugs and extended periods of unconsciousness. Even in captivity, even in lightless places, even when he doesn't know what day it is, he knows what time it is. Time for the guard to change. Time for another interrogation, and if they're changing up the time to confuse him and wear him down, how long it's been since it should have been time for another interrogation. He always knows how much time has passed since the last time he had a point of reference.
Thirty-two seconds into the seventh minute of the day, something happens in his brain that feels the way loss of gravity feels in a spacecraft. He becomes weightless at his core. His points of reference vanish.
It's over by the time his eyes have focused on the clock faces. At a glance they appear to be frozen. He watches unblinking until their minute hands jerk forward to the next tick mark, a minute, mechanized kickline. 0007.
"Sir?" the airman says. His tone is calm but guarded. He's voicing the question for the room, as active as it was a few seconds ago, but quiet now, watchful. These people don't spook, but Jack doesn't move like that very often.
"I'm not sure," Jack says honestly. The experiences he's had over the past eleven years make "Could have been anything" the understatement of the decade, century, millennium, pick your calendar range. "It's over, whatever it was." He turns his back on the clocks, fans his fingers at his personnel. "Carry on."
He doesn't shrug it off. He's been in this business too long to dismiss a feeling as strong as whatever the hell that was. He could take a moment, try to examine it; but it's already fading into the ordinary sensation of post-adrenaline-dump washout, and he's got two live operations in progress, and an SGC whose commander is off hobnobbing with the Asgard because he had to be here to run them. Later will have to be soon enough for reflection.
He doesn't let the deeper knowledge anywhere close to his conscious mind, but in his gut he knows that it's his team, and he's luckier than most: he'll be the first to know when they're headed home.