Disclaimer - MGM/Gekko/Double Secret own them.
A small, *small* ‘Children of The Gods’ episode addition, set after the episode ends.
*
The briefing was completed and Daniel, more than a little worse for wear, stumbled into the communal locker room. Thankfully it was empty - well, apart from Jack, who strode in after him.
It was just as well. Daniel’s mind was spinning with thoughts of Sha’re, Skaara, and the prospect of an entire race actually living out Earth mythology. He needed room to think, and Jack wasn’t in the habit of saying anything particularly thought provoking.
He knew that wasn’t exactly fair to Jack, that the Colonel was smarter that even he gave him credit for, but right now he just needed to...think.
Exhausted, physically and emotionally, he thumped down onto the bench in the middle of the locker-lined room, and stared at the empty doorway.
Jack hovered to the right, just out of sight. Hey, that rhymed...
He seriously needed to sleep, but knew it wasn’t going to happen for a long time. Sha're...
“Hey,”
That was it. Jack O’Neill’s standard way of asking if he was all right, without actually asking if he was all right. It also covered all the bases, because it would have been pretty stupid to ask if he was all right when it was patently obvious that he wasn't.
So, the standard reply: “Hey,”
“Hell of a day, huh?”
Also a standard question: don't discuss the specifics or the implications; just simplify everything into an overall picture. His eyes were dangerously close to shutting. “Yeah.”
The sound of movement, ripping Velcro, and clothes being shifted. Jack was changing. A locker opened, it's metallic sound distinctive and echoing through the bare room.
Just like the base. Everything there was bare: without life.
Without meaning.
Sha're...
Daniel knew he had to change too. They’d provided him with what were apparently ‘BDU’s’ for the mission, but as he was leaving the base soon he was supposed to change back into ‘normal’ clothes.
The clothes he’d been wearing earlier hadn’t even belonged to him; all he owned anymore were the robes and glasses he’d come back to Earth in.
Glasses...he was going to have to get new ones. Abydos sands were pretty relentless on smooth surfaces.
There was so much he had to do, had to readjust to.
“Here,” Jack’s hands appeared in front of his despairing gaze – still focused on the doorway – and he eventually looked at them to see what Jack was holding out.
Oh. The borrowed clothes.
Though he had ‘officially’ been made a member of SG-1, he’d yet to be assigned his own locker – or anything else for that matter. So when they’d changed into BDU’s before heading off to Chulak, Jack had volunteered to keep his clothes in his own locker.
“Thanks,” Daniel muttered glumly, resuming his view of the doorway, as Jack resumed getting changed.
A few more minutes of uncomfortable silence passed, and about thirty seconds after he finished pulling his shirt on, Jack spoke. “We will find her. *Them*.”
“So you said,” and he had no reason to doubt it. If anyone could pull it off, it was Jack. The man had the unnerving ability – other than being generally obnoxious – to stay alive. Daniel had the feeling that he was going to have to develop the same talent in the quest for his wife.
A quest with Jack, Doctor Carter, and Teal’c.
The man – the Jaffa – who’d been Apophis’ right hand man. The man who, by his own admission, had sat by and done nothing while Sha’re was...changed.
Oh God...
His eyes closed, his hands tightening around the clothes he still held. They were going to find her. They *were*.
His mind, eager for a temporary respite from the black pit it was dangling over, grabbed back onto his previous train of thought.
Teal’c. He was going to have to work with someone he didn’t know he’d ever be able to forgive.
And as for Carter...
The words came out and he didn’t want to stop them, desperate to do something other than just *feel*. “What do you think of Doctor Carter?”
Jack had moved, sitting sideways on the bench, behind Daniel. Starting to pull his first boot on, he sighed dramatically. “Don’t you mean ‘Captain’?” He asked, as sarcastic as it was rhetoric. “She’s...smart. Maybe too smart. She knows everything, and *knows* she knows everything. She was convinced I was going to hate her before she even met me, so of course I *did* because she came into the briefing room looking to piss me off. She’s a scientist, and they’re never my favourite people,” He paused for breath then, or maybe just because he realised he who he was sitting next to. “She’s unbelievably arrogant, if anything *she’s* the sexist, and did you see how *stupid* her hair looked in that helmet?”
Daniel blinked, for the first time tilting his head away from the exit. Jack hadn’t even finished putting on his boot yet, and by now his hands were gesturing wildly. “I really didn’t notice-”
“And then when we were under attack on Chulak, she tells me – *me* – that we’re under attack! Thanks for pointing out the blindingly obvious, *Captain*, and for making it sound like it was my fault. I wasn’t flying the goddamned alien aircraft.”
Daniel’s head had craned round even further, to the point where he could actually see Jack’s face now.
The Colonel shook his head as if he hadn’t said anything at all, and firmly shoved his left foot into the matching boot. Pulling his laces so tight that his fingers began to lose colour, he grunted. “Why? What do you think of her?”
A small yet significant smile threatened to appear on Daniel’s lips.
“I like her.”
He had a feeling he wasn’t the only one.
~FINIS