Reading Time: 106 Minutes

Title: Theft of the Thunder Instrument
Author: Sunryder
Fandom: SG-1, 9-1-1
Genre: Family, Fusion, Hurt/Comfort, Kid!fic, Pre-Relationship
Relationship(s): Gen
Content Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence-Graphic, Violence-Against Children/Child Abuse, Minor Relationship, Canon-Slavery, Canon-Torture, Canon-Child Abuse, Canon-War, Discussion-Torture, Discussion-Suicidality,
Word Count: 52,704
Summary: 10 years ago, one the madder scientists at the SGC got fired for off-book experiments with Jack’s DNA. Turns out, one of those experiments was an embryo. Daniel really would’ve appreciated finding out about Jack’s kid while Jack was on Earth. But no, tiny Jack was now Daniel’s responsibility.
Artist: Kylia

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Chapter One

P4A-526 had a temple.

Not Egyptian. Not Ancient. But… European. (When Daniel called it Romanesque, Dr. Fitzpatrick turned purple and said the materials alone made it Norse.)

Daniel said Romanesque because the temple had the same silhouette as a stouter, shorter Speyer Cathedral. Sure, there was no transept giving it the common cross-shape, but the ceilings were vaulted, with clerestory windows up top that would make it glow when they figured out how to get inside.

Fitzpatrick said Norse because the temple was a picture-perfect recreation of the Temple at Uppsala. (Fitzpatrick won.)

The SGC first dialed P4A-526 during a dull patch six years ago. The standard drone scan revealed a breathable atmosphere with a single, old building within several miles walking distance from the gate. No signs of civilization or naquadah bumped P4A from ‘visit soon’ to ‘explore when we have time for exploring.’ Which, between the Goa’uld on the run and the Replicators destroyed, had been two weeks ago.

Dr. Leon Fitzpatrick—the only other archaeologist permanently assigned to a gate team—took SG-14 to examine the lone building on P4A-526. According to Major Hughes, their team followed the logical path through grassy, rolling hills and rounded a corner into a shallow valley. Thick trees blanketed the far side, laid out like the dark green background of a painting for a temple that glinted like gold in the midday sun. Hughes teased that Leon had frozen like a kid at Disneyland seeing a princess for the first time. Hughes said Leon didn’t break eye contact with the building, just mindlessly patted Dr. Greer until he pulled out the team camera to record. Leon didn’t say a word for the rest of the trip, just tracked a circle around the entire building—pointedly staying away from the trees—and hauled ass back to the gate to call home and demand to speak with Daniel.

General Landry had been clear over the radio that SG-14 wasn’t calling with an emergency, but years of psychological conditioning had Daniel jogging into the command center, prepared for the worst.

“Uppsala.” Leon blurted out the moment Daniel came into view.

“What?”

Leon held up the little screen of his field camera to the drone’s lens and showed an off-color, ground-level, pixelated photo of what looked like the famous woodcut of the Temple at Uppsala.

“Uppsala,” Fitzpatrick repeated.

There was no proper, archaeological evidence of the Temple at Uppsala, just a writing from the legendary medieval chronicler Adam of Breman, who described the building as ‘made out of gold,’ complete with a golden chain surrounding the temple and hanging from the gables. A temple that really did look like a Catholic cathedral, which made the story sound fake. Adam’s description of a grove beside the temple, where the rotting corpses of men and animals hung as sacrifices to the pagan gods only supported that consensus.

Despite being the guy who staked his entire career on aliens making the pyramids, Daniel hadn’t believed in Uppsala. Let alone expected a perfect replica of the building to be on a planet that looked like it hadn’t seen regular human presence in the thousand years since Adam of Breman had been writing.

The building on P4A wasn’t made of gold, but of a particular shade of petrified wood. Leon was pretty sure the ‘chain’ hanging from the roof and wrapped around the gables would be a beam of light reflecting around strategically placed pieces of metal, probably meant to show at Midsummer. Out front were stone pillars covered in an as yet unseen hybrid dialect of Asgardian with Ancient loan words and spellings. Daniel had counted three different words that were a few morphologies and a few hundred years away from Proto-Norse. Which suggested new thoughts about the intermingling between Asgardian protected planets and Ancient descendants after both races retreated to their corners of the galaxy and stopped paying attention.

The whole thing was fascinating. And studying alien archaeological sites without the pressure of a world-ending threat had pretty much been the dream ever since Catherine first showed Daniel the Stargate.

But Daniel couldn’t seem to make himself care.

Like muscle memory, Daniel could hear the high, nasal pitch of his first doctoral advisor scolding him for thinking any bit of history was ‘boring.’ (“They’re people, Daniel. They lived and died, and they deserve our respect.”) Which was true, but Daniel had spent the last decade translating with the fate of the galaxy hanging in the balance.

Translating just because wasn’t… well, it wasn’t quite how Daniel remembered.

Daniel snapped closed the manila folder of printouts and dropped it on his desk’s least-unbalanced stack. If Jack were here, he’d take one look at the bunches of books and piles of paperwork mounded on every flat surface in Daniel’s office and know something was wrong.

Jack would also force Daniel into his coat like a 1960s prom date, ‘uh-huh-ing’ his way through Daniel’s explanation that ‘stack of shit’ was a perfectly valid method for organizing research data, and Daniel’s memory was good enough to know which tower went with which topic and/or research binge. Jack would do Daniel the courtesy of silently giving him the look that meant Daniel’s office only looked like this during world-ending disasters or when something was particularly fascinating. Neither of which applied here. And did Daniel want to talk about what was upsetting him, or did he just want to go home with Jack and drink some beer? (Jack had a very expressive face.)

But Jack wasn’t here, and Daniel was man enough to admit that was part of the problem.

Jack was on Dakara with Teal’c, partly reaffirming the Tau’ri alliance with the Free Jaffa, and partly giving Hank Landry space to establish himself as Commander of the SGC now that they’d promoted Jack to Homeworld Command. Sam was at Area 51, establishing her own command and silently showing everyone that she would take orders from Landry. Mitchell was bustling around the SGC smoothing ruffled feathers about an outsider coming in and snatching SG-1 and Landry’s second-in-command from Colonels who’d been at the SGC much longer. Vala… Daniel was pretty sure Vala had spent the last two weeks taking over the SGC’s illegal gambling ring. Which, to be frank, he was surprised she hadn’t done earlier, but didn’t want to ask.

Everyone was out and about doing new and exciting things, and Daniel was… here. Breaking down Asgardian morphologies and learning about Uppsala.

It wasn’t wrong. And it wasn’t boring, no matter what the doctoral advisor in his head accused him of feeling. It was… weird. Not the Uppsala of it all—again, aliens and pyramids—but… life.

Daniel slouched in his chair and twisted back and forth. It was a cozy cave of an office, with Ikea bookshelves lining the walls, and books and file folders stacked like fortifications around his desk. The piles spread to chairs that people never sat on, but Jack had brought in after Daniel tripped over a floor pile and sprained his wrist.

Daniel’s office should be clean right now. The books on the right shelves, some of them back home. The folders digitized or tucked away in a filing cabinet in one of the storage rooms, just in case. Yes, Uppsala was a research project, but not the leaning tower of paperwork and stack of left-open books sort of research project. He should’ve had a few older texts spread neatly on the corner of his desk and a tidy whiteboard while he theorized about morphologies and flicked through pictures on his tablet.

The archaeologist in Daniel looked at the wall he’d built between himself and the door and made assumptions that made the man in Daniel sigh.

It was just… weird.

Daniel knew 23 languages, and weird was still the best word he could come up with.

Daniel had lost enough people, and transferred enough universities, and moved enough places that he knew this was the uncomfortable in-between phase while the new world settled in.

It would all be fine. Mitchell would sort through the hard scientists and find someone with the chops to join SG-1, and they’d take the new guy and Vala out into the galaxy, stumbling across things that might change humanity. Or they’d made Uppsala discoveries, or start another war, or end more System Lords. Sam would establish her own fiefdom at Area 51 and come in every so often to consult because the SGC couldn’t help itself. And Daniel would visit Teal’c on Dakara, and when he took too long, Teal’c would come visit him. And Daniel would go visit Jack in DC to irritate him, and Jack would come back to the SGC because it’s part of his command.

Everything would end up all right.

It always did.

This was just the in-between place where Daniel felt… weird.

“Hey, Daniel?” A voice interrupted with the hesitancy of someone who’d had to call twice.

“Yes?” Daniel whipped around from the corner of nothingness he’d been staring at. “Oh, hey, Carolyn.” Dr. Carolyn Lam paused just inside the doorway. She was being trailed by a young scientist with a tablet cradled to her chest and the wide eyes junior researchers got when they had to talk to Sam for the first time.

Carolyn opened her mouth, paused, then nudged the scientist into the room and shut the door as if she were about to tell Daniel he was pregnant. “What’s up?”

“When’s the last time you swept for bugs?”

Daniel’s eyebrows went up. “About four months. If I need to, I…” He pointed at an Ancient ‘paperweight’ on his desk that, as far as they could tell, only scrambled signals. Carolyn shoved her hands into the pockets of her lab coat and nodded. With a tap, the ‘paperweight’ glowed a soft blue.

Carolyn stepped up to Daniel’s desk while the young scientist stayed frozen like a statue right where Carolyn had left her. The poor kid looked like she needed a blanket and a sedative. “What do you know about our ATA gene collection program?”

Daniel blinked. He really should stop trying to guess what comes next. He never got it right. “I know the military has been collecting samples from all personnel as they come in for regular medical checks. I know that everyone not read in has been told the collection is to support the Human Genome Project, which it is, but they also send the research to a lab at Area 51. I also know military personnel have the right to opt out of sharing with the Genome Project, but they don’t have the right to opt out of ATA collection because they don’t know it exists.” Carolyn was surprisingly unrufflable for a new SGC hire, but she had a tell, which was showing at Daniel’s level of information. “Jack and I fought about the ethics of undisclosed human experimentation.”

“I didn’t know you were a part of the ATA meetings.”

“I wasn’t.” Daniel shrugged. “Jack was, and he asked Sam and me for our opinions. Sam explained the science; I explained the moral repugnance. What did they do?”

“General O’Neill was on record as agreeing with the scientific oversight committee’s objections about undisclosed testing, which didn’t stop the testing—”

“Of course.” The government was still the government.

“But the committee got the concession that samples from people who denied Genome Project permission had to be treated as anonymous.”

Daniel hummed. When Daniel asked how the meeting went, Jack had brushed off the question with a tone that meant he’d tried and failed, so Daniel hadn’t pushed.

“What’s the loophole for identifying someone with a strong ATA gene?”

Carolyn went to sit down as if this were a regular conversation, only to pause at the stack of file folders in her way. Daniel got up and moved them to the floor while Carolyn began explaining they hadn’t come across that problem yet. “But the scientist running the lab is military, so we can assume he’ll be ordered to turn over the original identifying data.”

“Isn’t that deleted?”

“Everything is recoverable.” Daniel nodded as he moved the books from the other chair and gestured the frozen scientist into the other seat.

She stayed by the door and Carolyn stayed silent, so Daniel went back to his seat to give them the space it seemed this conversation needed. Daniel rested his hands on top of the desk. Ironically, a move he’d learned from Janet when she had to give terrible news. “What else do you think I need to know about the collection program?”

That made Carolyn straighten and put on her doctor voice. “The system reviews all blood samples from all military hospitals and military clinics. From the outside, it looks like it’s just a pause to check the permissions before sending the information to the Genome Project. In reality, the sample is sent to a lab at Area 51. First, they check for the ATA gene. Second, they check if the sample has the subject’s permission to be shared. If the gene isn’t present but permission is given, the system discards the sample and sends it on to the Human Genome Project. If the gene isn’t present and permission to share isn’t given, the sample is supposed to be discarded. If the ATA gene is present and permission is given, the sample is sent both to our system and to the Project. If the gene is present and there is no permission, the scientist at the lab,” Carolyn gestured to her frozen colleague, “is to scrub the sample of all identifying information and submit only the ATA information to our database.”

“That makes sense?”

“The system collects samples from all blood tests done at military hospitals and clinics… which doesn’t limit itself to those done to military personnel.”

Daniel gave a long, gusty sigh and nudged his glasses up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “How the hell did this happen? Their entire argument for running tests that military personnel didn’t agree to is because those people signed contracts. That argument doesn’t hold for civilian family members getting treated at the same place.”

“That’s not the problem.” Carolyn cut Daniel off before he could get properly geared up for the fight.

“It’s not?” Daniel assumed Carolyn had just discovered the massive ethics problem and brought it to him to raise holy hell.

“It is a problem,” Carolyn agreed, “but it’s not today’s problem.”

“Okay?” Daniel was rapidly losing the patience to exude calm and propped his cheek up on his fist.

“You know that just from SGC personnel we identified five specific Ancient haplogroups.”

“Yes.”

“I read the memo you put out theorizing that we’d end up with either 13 or 39 haplogroup ancestors.”

“Yes. And I saw your memo that the exterior gene research has gathered enough information to identify nine.”

“Yes. Most of the nine groups are plentiful, but they tend to have weaker genes. Isen in biology has a theory that the different groups are going to prove to be skilled with certain kinds of Ancient technology, but we don’t have enough people to function as a decent test group, or enough Ancient technology to say for sure if certain types of the gene are hard-wired to be better at certain kinds of Ancient technology.”

“I know.” Daniel drawled, cheek still on fist.

“Right.” Carolyn dulled her enthusiasm. She wasn’t nervous in Daniel’s office about haplogroups. “One thing we do know is that Jack is the only one with what we’re calling the O’Neill variant.”

Daniel sure as hell knew that. The entire SGC had vacillated between hope that exterior testing would turn up someone else with a gene like Jack’s so he could take a nap, and fear that maybe Jack’s gene might end up in a guy without Jack’s code.

At the beginning of the ATA project, the NID sent out a team to harvest DNA samples and run tests on all Jack’s living cousins, vague relatives, and everyone loosely related to his family tree still in Ireland. No one in Jack’s maternal or paternal lines, branching out multiple generations until it got ridiculous, had the ATA gene. Most interesting was that when Jack’s tree branch came into contact with another potential gene-carrying line, the O’Neill family’s non-existent ATA neutralized the gene introduced by the other ancestry. The genetics department came to literal blows over the anomalous data. (Daniel had bought the good coffee for the scientist responsible for that discovery. Before that, the working theory was that breeding between ATA gene carriers would make for a stronger ATA gene. Proof that sometimes strong ATA genes could cancel everything out had shut down that conversation.)

Rather than get into that, Daniel just said, “I know.” After all, he’d been part of the team that razed the NID lab to get Jack’s DNA back. (It was outside Daniel’s purview, but if they’d found dissected fetuses in that lab, the military thought Daniel was the only one who could talk Jack down. He wouldn’t have, but that wasn’t the point.)

But Carolyn replied, “I know,” with weight to it. Like Daniel had just stumbled upon something he didn’t know the answer to.

“Carolyn?”

“Three days ago, Evan Buckley sprained his ankle.”

“What?” Daniel’s brain screeched at the whiplash.

“Two days ago, with the ankle not feeling better, Evan went to an Army Health Clinic, an hour away from his home in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was a severe sprain. The doctors prescribed rest, ice, compression, and elevation, as standard. But scrapes on his forearms that he incurred from the fall were starting to inflame, so the doctors drew some blood to check for infection before they prescribed an antibiotic. A very cautious approach, but the doctor is young and he hasn’t treated a lot of children.”

Daniel heard all the words. He knew what was coming next and why Carolyn was taking forever to get there, but his brain refused to process it.

“It was blood drawn at a military hospital, so a DNA profile went to our ATA lab at Area 51, where, thankfully, Dr. Dandekar was on duty.” The scientist unclenched from her tablet just enough to wave. “Dr. Dandekar is an Information Systems Specialist with a PhD in genetics formatting. We poached her from the Genome Project. There was no permission to transfer on file, so Dr. Dandekar scrubbed all the identifying information and submitted the ATA gene to our system.”

Carolyn paused. Like if she waited long enough, she wouldn’t have to say the words. Daniel scrubbed a hand through his hair and took it off her hands. “It’s Jack’s gene.”

“Yes. It is.”

This was bad.

This was ‘new System Lord has been taking over planets while we didn’t know about it bad.’ There was another person in the US military with Jack’s gene. That meant they could replace him. Jack already didn’t want to go to Homeworld, and now he’d lost the bargaining chip of being the only person on the planet who could properly work Ancient technology. And worse, this was proof positive that Jack’s gene could be inherited. That meant experiments to figure out how.

“Daniel,” Carolyn interrupted his spiral and held out her hand for the tablet Dr. Dandekar was clutching like a teddy bear. But Dandekar didn’t hand it over. She put the tablet directly on Daniel’s desk, as if she didn’t trust it to anyone else’s hands. “Daniel, Evan Buckley is seven years old.”

“What?” Daniel flicked the tablet on and found a medical record with a picture of a little blond kid with a birthmark over his left eyebrow, with not a trace of Jack anywhere in his features. “What?”

“Evan Buckley, born 19— in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Moved to Hershey, Pennsylvania at age 2.” Dandekar answered, her voice shaky but sure. “I checked all our records and neither of his parents is in the military, nor are any extended family. None of them have even worked for the military or government.”

“Why was he being treated on base?” The boy had a sweet, round face with a bright smile, even for a doctor’s office photo.

“A Health Clinic, not a base. This one is near a distribution center, not enough military to make up a base,” Carolyn said. “As for why, we don’t know.”

“I can’t find any of the common justifications. But if I had to guess, his parents took him to the base hospital because it’s close, but not their closest.”

Daniel knew that tone. He looked up from the screen. Dr. Dandekar was young, with thick curly hair pulled up in a bun.

“They’ve got a flag on their file at their closest hospital because Evan has had too many accidents.” Dandekar tapped a few pages forward on the tablet to a summary report. “Evan usually goes to the family doctor, who has nothing about him or the parents flagged, but for big stuff and weekend stuff they go to the hospital, and the hospital has a flag.”

“The last time he came in with an injury, the hospital social worker interviewed him. The notes say he was trying to build his own trampoline. It wasn’t his parents. All of his injuries have good explanations, Daniel.” Carolyn interrupted, trying and failing to soothe.

“You think otherwise.” Daniel said to Dandekar, and her knowing brown eyes.

“I think the parents are rich and white in a rich, white neighborhood.”

“Given the number of injuries,” Carolyn interrupted, “it’s likely that one of the injuries would have looked like actual abuse by now. I’ve reviewed his file and everything looks like an accident.”

“It always does.” Dandekar said. And Daniel didn’t disagree. His foster parents were always rich white people in rich white neighborhoods, and he knew better.

But Daniel just nodded, because as much as he’d like to turn up at this kid’s house and lecture his parents on the proper treatment of minors, that wasn’t why they were here. “So, you think one of Evan’s parents is Jack’s illegitimate sibling?” Daniel tapped through the rest of the file, hoping for a photo of Margaret and/or Phillip Buckley to see if there was any of Jack in their faces.

Daniel’s thought was met with a heavy silence. He glanced up and found Dandekar looking at Carolyn with terrified eyes, a refusal to be the one to answer. Oh, they thought, “The file says Evan is seven. Eight years ago, the SGC was in full swing, and Jack had only left Colorado to leave the planet.”

“Evan is the youngest of three siblings.” Carolyn picked the wrong tack to work her way into the point, like she had with the kid’s existence. She was gearing up to impugn Jack’s honor, and Daniel refused to let her get there.

“Carolyn,” Daniel snapped. “Jack wouldn’t sleep with a married woman.”

“Evan is a savior sibling.” Dandekar blurted out. “The oldest, also a Daniel, had leukemia and was treated at Shriners in Philadelphia. They made an HLA match.”

“Okay?” Daniel knew more about science and genetics than the average archaeologist, but not this.

“Daniel.” Carolyn leaned over and took his hand with more empathy than she was prone to show. “Dr. Fisher did the genetic work to make Evan’s embryo an HLA match.”

Who was Doctor… Dr. Fisher.

“Dr Fisher who worked…”

“Here, yes.”

“Fisher,” Daniel repeated.

“Neither of us are hackers, Daniel. And I can’t imagine that if Dr. Fisher left anything anywhere about what he did to Evan that…” they would’ve found him still free in Pennsylvania. “Ali and I don’t know the specifics, neither of us was with the program then, but his file says that Jack’s ATA gene Fisher’s focus of study.”

“It was,” Daniel croaked. Dr. Fisher was fired from the SGC in its second year for colluding with the NID on genetic research into Jack’s family tree. He funneled information to the Trust and avoided prison time because he claimed he didn’t catch the red flags. He avoided a black-site prison by being too well-known to disappear. He was supposed to stay on a watchlist for the rest of his life, but he ‘died in a car crash’ a year after he left the SGC. A car crash no one looked into because they didn’t know if the NID killed him, or if Jack did.

“I can only hypothesize about his plan. Maybe he thought that growing a test subject with a functional ATA gene would win him back the SGC. Or maybe he thought incorporating Jack’s gene would help save the sick sibling from cancer. Or maybe he wanted to make some more gene he could test with. Or… he did it because he could. We don’t know. We’ll likely never know.”

Carolyn took the tablet from Daniel’s hands and tapped through to the relevant pages. “What we do know is that Evan Buckley was a perfect HLA match for his brother. However, the boy had a minor infection when they did the transplant. That infection plus the immunosuppressants killed him.” Carolyn handed him back the tablet, open to a genetics test. “What we also know is that Dr. Fisher used as much of Jack’s DNA as he could get away with and still make an HLA match.” Daniel looked down at a chart that made little sense to him, but apparently meant, “Jack O’Neill has a living child.”

“Well, technically,” Dandekar corrected, “if we were to run a traditional paternity test, General O’Neill would be his grandfather. Closer to great grandfather. About 15%.” Yes, Daniel could see a 15% on the chart, but that didn’t mean a damn thing.

“Why did you bring this to me?” Daniel flicked the tablet closed and leaned back in his chair.

“Um,” Carolyn blinked, “General O’Neill is on Dakara and will be for at least another week. If he were coming home tonight or tomorrow, I’d wait. But… we can’t wait a week.” Carolyn said it as if it were obvious. “I’ve treated an unconscious O’Neill enough times to know that you’re his power of attorney for everything.”

“Why did you?” Daniel rolled his head to Dandekar.

“It seemed like O’Neill should find out he had a genetic match before everyone else did.” She shrugged and looked to Carolyn.

“Daniel.” Carolyn took Daniel’s hand again. He gave her a little squeeze, but his attention was back on that dark corner of the room, brain spinning. Some part of Daniel recognized the women’s voices still talking. Carolyn promising she’d double-checked the tests, Dandekar saying she’d done her best to hide the result, temporarily severing the tie between the clinic and the SGC while yanking the result out of the ATA catalogue before she reconnected things, but she wasn’t good enough to wipe it completely.

They could wait, Daniel thought for a moment. Ask Sam to scrub any connection of the kid to the ATA gene and hope that whatever luck had kept him from being discovered before held until Jack came back and made a decision.

(Or, as Daniel’s worst impulse pointed out, he could do what they were supposed to do and go to Landry’s office, trusting the man Jack had handpicked to do the honorable thing for Jack’s child. They could take the kid and his parents into custody, get Jack home, and pray that the hundred people who found out about the child before Jack didn’t betray them to the Trust or spirit the kid away to be drained of DNA.)

“Go back to work.” Daniel interrupted something about General Landry being a good man.

“Daniel?”

“I need you two to go back to work and be normal.”

“What are you going to do?” Carolyn demanded.

“Carolyn. Dr. Dandekar.” He met their eyes in turn. “Thank you for telling me. I’ll let you know if I need anything else. But right now, the best thing you can do is go back to work and pretend like nothing happened.”

The two women shared a look, which Daniel didn’t understand and frankly didn’t care enough to try. Dandekar had been good enough to go to Carolyn, and Carolyn he could trust. Not positive, but close enough. “Daniel, you can’t just go to Pennsylvania.”

“Carolyn, I’m not an idiot.” She blinked, as if she’d been expecting him to toss on his jacket and demand to be beamed to the kid’s front door.

“What–”

“What you don’t know, you can’t get court marshalled for.”

“I’m a civilian,” Dandekar pointed out.

“And so am I,” Carolyn snapped, like she liked to argue with General Landry. Daniel ignored it.

“Dr. Dandekar. If anyone asks, there was a glitch in the ATA data transfer yesterday. You fixed it on your end and came to the SGC to make sure it didn’t compromise our data. Carolyn brought you here because…” Daniel looked to her.

Carolyn didn’t like this at all, but she sighed and finished, “Because we think we’re about to find a tenth haplogroup and I thought you’d be excited.”

“Why would—”

“You’re handsome when you’re excited.”

That was… expected. And probably said to make him uncomfortable, just like he was doing to her. “Thank you. That’s the cover story. Now, go.”

“Daniel–”

“I promise, Carolyn, I’ll tell you if I need you. Until then, stick to that story.” Both women left with discomfort on their faces, and Daniel hoped Carolyn got Dandekar out of the Mountain before she sent up red flags.

Daniel went back to his desk and laid out his folder full of Uppsala translations and didn’t even bother to pretend to care. Staring at the pictures and flipping his pen over his fingers would have to be enough to trick anyone walking past his door.

Jack had a kid. Jack had a son.

Daniel’s imagination helpfully supplied a visual of Jack standing on the end of his dock, teaching a little blond boy who didn’t look a thing like him to fish. Daniel shoved the thought away and tried to focus on the hitherto unseen presence of an Old Norse ogonek under an Alteran /æ/, but somewhere in the last five minutes the in-between phase Daniel had shifted from weird to catastrophic.

No. This didn’t have to be a catastrophe.

Daniel cut his thoughts off before they could properly form. Jack might not retire to be with his kid. Jack might not even get to keep the kid. Which meant Jack would—

No.

Daniel leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, feet flat on the floor, hands flat on the armrests, meditative like he learned when he hadn’t been in a body that could breathe. Daniel ‘breathed’ like he was bobbing along on the flow of the universe. It was much easier to settle his mind like ripples on a pond when time didn’t have meaning, but there was a ‘muscle memory’ there that even being stripped of his memory and in a different plane of existence couldn’t take from him.

Daniel floated along in silence until the water of his mind stilled, until he could see beneath the surface and find the rock that had caused the ripples. Daniel didn’t need to look, though. He knew what was down there.

Chapter Two

“Daniel, I’m offended.” Vala swanned into his office mid-flirt. “I had to hear from commissary gossip that you were looking for a polycule. If all you wanted was another woman, I could’ve found one for us, darling.”

Daniel didn’t know how he could tell, but right about ‘gossip’ Vala noticed there was something wrong. With all the skill of a con woman, she didn’t break stride or break flirt, just kept talking until she locked the door behind her. Then she dropped all pretense and asked what had happened.

Daniel tapped the Ancient jamming device on his desk. “Fuck.” Vala hissed. “Did you hear from Jack?”

“No, why would I—”

“Because he and Teal’c are the only ones I haven’t laid eyes on in the last two days.” Vala shoved the precarious stack of books to the edge of the desk. Daniel half-rose from his chair to catch them before they tumbled, but he didn’t need to. Vala never knocked things over unless she meant to. Instead, she perched on the edge of his desk and glanced down at the text on Old Norse translations as if it might be the source of Daniel’s worries. “Do you have something terrible to tell Thor?”

Well, yes. But not like Vala was thinking to make her straighten up like that.

“Daniel?”

“The SGC figured out pretty early on that Ancient technology existed and that it only worked for a few select people. And that one of those people was Jack. But to figure out why, the SGC brought in a geneticist who already had classified security clearance. He’s the one who isolated the ATA gene.”

“Hamilton, in the biology department,” and purveyor of base gossip, “told me the doctor who found the ATA gene got fired from the SGC for gross stupidity and ‘accidentally’ working with the NID.”

“Trust agents in the NID spearheaded a project to gather DNA samples from Jack’s entire family tree.”

“Ah, ‘fired’ to an offworld prison.”

“No, actually. Technically, Eli Fisher, the ATA geneticist, did nothing wrong. And he claimed he thought it was a super-secret project, not off-book.”

“Jack kill him?” Vala asked with an unworried kick of her feet.

“I don’t think so.” Vala snorted. “Really. He’s dead, but we think the NID did it.” Vala’s eyebrow went up. Daniel couldn’t regret the odd friendship Vala and Jack had struck up, both of them able to see through one another’s facades. “It was a car accident.”

“Oh, then no.” Vala shrugged it off, and Daniel… didn’t want to unpack that he agreed with her, and probably for the same reasons.

“But before Fisher died, he the government allowed him to go into the private sector and do genetic work there.”

“In case they needed him again.”

“Probably. He ended up as a specialist making HLA matches for leukemia patients.” Daniel didn’t know how Vala had picked up all the nuanced information about Earth life that she had, and he never quite knew where the gaps would be. Yes, Vala had run around the planet with various other teams than SG-1, but so had Teal’c. Even after all Teal’c’s years with Tau’ri, Vala had started to be the one to explain things to him when they got lost in translation. As it was, Daniel just assumed Vala would know what he was talking about and would if she needed to.

Though how Vala knew about pediatric cancer treatments, Daniel couldn’t begin to guess. Vala just cocked her head and asked, “Did Fisher use one of the cancer children as a carrier for Jack’s ATA gene?”

Daniel huffed out a relieved breath that Vala connected the dots faster than he had. “He implanted it in a savior sibling.”

Vala stilled. “A sibling.”

“A savior sibling is when doctors can’t find a marrow donor for someone with leukemia.” Vala said nothing, but she also didn’t look confused. “They take an embryo from the parents and…” Daniel didn’t know, and said so. He assumed they did something to the genes to improve the chances of making the new child a bone marrow donor. “We don’t know why he thought adding Jack’s DNA to the mix would help anything or if…” damn it. Daniel nudged up his glasses to rub his eyes. “Or if he didn’t even care and that little boy died of cancer when he didn’t need to. From what Carolyn said, the kid was still a match and they did the donation, but it didn’t work.” Daniel opened the tablet Dandekar had left on his desk to make sure he wasn’t remembering wrong.

“But, a baby.” Vala repeated.

“Well, not a baby anymore.” This was going a direction Daniel did not expect. “I mean,” he held up the picture of the kid, just as blond and unlike Jack as ever.

Vala’s hand shook as she took the tablet from him. “Vala?”

“This scientist made Jack O’Neill: Kek’onac, Hak’tylla, a living child?”

“Technically, a great-grandchild.” Daniel said, knowing it sounded stupid.

“No one is going to care about that.”

Goa’uld was the lingua franca of the Milky Way, but the language protocols the Ancients had built into the Stargate made it so Daniel hadn’t needed to translate High Goa’uld since the last time a System Lord was trying to make SG-1 feel inferior. Even then, lack of exposure meant he’d never been great at spoken High Goa’uld.

“About—who?” But Vala was already typing on her phone. And Daniel was pretty sure Vala had just called Jack ‘Goa’uld Killer’ and ‘Freedom Giver’ like they were titles. “Wait, who are you texting?”

“Yates.” Daniel didn’t recognize the name. “Team lead for SG-19. If you want me to kidnap a child, I’m going to need more hands.” Vala hopped off the desk and went for the door as if that wasn’t insane.

“You’re not kidnapping him!”

“Really?” Vala twisted the tablet around to show Daniel the picture of the kid, like that was going to do anything to convince him.

“No! No kidnapping!”

“Daniel, have you talked to Sam about this?”

“Don’t—” Daniel hated that tone.

“Daniel,” Vala scolded, as if he were the child here and unworthy of diverting her attention as she flicked through the tablet.

“Vala.” Daniel gritted his teeth because Ancient jamming devices didn’t do a damn thing to stop eavesdroppers in the hall. “We’re not kidnapping anyone.”

“Ah,” Vala paused at something on the screen. “You want me to see if he’s being abused so we can abduct him legally.”

“No.” Daniel hopped up and snatched the tablet out of her hands. Which wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t let it. “You’re just going to see if he’s okay. See if he’s happy.”

It wasn’t until Vala gave him a flick of a smile that Daniel remembered kidnapping hadn’t been his idea. He opened his mouth to take it back, but… yes. He wanted to know that the kid was happy. Daniel hadn’t noticed it was eating at him until he said it out loud. Of course he wanted to know. And Vala sure as hell would not take no for an answer. If Daniel didn’t give her something to do, Vala was going to ‘go on vacation’ to Area 51 and get Sam involved.

“Just a wellness check.” Daniel threatened and handed back the tablet.

But Vala didn’t re-open the file. “Why haven’t you told Samantha?”

“I’ve only known about it for ten minutes.”

“They left your office an hour ago.”

Daniel… hadn’t noticed that. Vala had to be exaggerating. There was no way he’d been staring at his wall for the last hour. Daniel didn’t even have to say it for Vala to grab his wrist and twist it around to make him look at his watch. Which, yeah, was significantly later than Daniel thought it was. “Tell Sam.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“So, she can do what?” Daniel went back behind the safety of his desk.

“Help.”

“How? She’s got command of Area 51. She can’t just walk away from that.”

“She would in a heartbeat.”

“I know. But what she doesn’t know can’t cause a court-martial.” Another thing Daniel hadn’t realized he meant until he said it out loud.

“You think they’ll go after you for not reporting it?”

“I have no idea.” Daniel slouched back into his chair and scrubbed a hand under his glasses.

Daniel didn’t have to look at Vala to see half a dozen thoughts and plans flicking over her face. Twenty questions, and just as many plots, before she came back around to the perching spot on the corner of his desk. Casual demeanor either meant simple commentary, or he was about to get blindsided. “So, we’re not bringing Jack’s child home to him?”

Blindsided it was. Daniel dragged his palm down his face and leaned on the armrest, mouth hiding in the curl of his hand as if that would make the words go away. “He’s not Jack’s.”

Somewhere during the month they were bound together with the kor mak bracelets, Vala had decided to throw in with Daniel, like she’d been on SG-1 since the beginning. Plenty of others had tried the same, but Vala was the only one who made it work. Imposed familiarity meant Vala often knew what Daniel was thinking before he did, understanding on a level that was only supposed to happen when you’d saved the planet together a few times. But it also meant Vala would fight him tooth and claw with none of the ‘but he’s Daniel Jackson’ worries that stopped the rest of the SGC.

And she was about to.

Daniel was saved by a sharp knock on the door.

“Come in.” Daniel called, only to be answered with a shudder because Vala had left the door locked.

Vala smiled a dirty smile at him, but at least kept her commentary to herself while Daniel got up to unlock it. “Sorry about that.” He ushered in Major Yates, who, now that Daniel had eyes on him, he recognized as Jimmy, instead of his surname. First-name basis meant he was a friend of Jack’s from before the SGC. Daniel didn’t know quite how Yates and Jack knew one another, but common sense told him that Jack had done some spec ops work with Jimmy Yates in his life before.

But today, Yates waited two seconds for the door to shut before he said, “It’s not a sexy camping trip,” with the air of a man who’d had to explain himself ten times already and had looped back around to amused.

“What?”

Vala just waved her phone at Daniel. Yates, it seemed, believed in words. “Vala told me to come to your office to tell you all about our sexy camping trip. It’s not sexy. Camping hasn’t been sexy for me since college. It’s so she gets an idea of Earth’s environment so we can better train the kids in offworld survival basics. You know what happened to SG-5 last month.” Daniel did not. Unless base gossip involved someone from the science department, Daniel had to get it from Jack.

“But I’m clearly not here about that.”

“Daniel needs us to go ‘camping’.” Vala drawled.

Yates looked to Daniel, who could read the, ‘sexy camping?’ in his handsome expression.

Yay for progress—though Jack’s soldiers tended to consider flirting with Daniel akin to flirting with their little best friend’s little brother. But the little smirk looked like it belonged on Jack’s face and made Daniel so comfortable that he almost spilled the entire story all over the floor. But newly recognized worries about Courts Martial couldn’t be undone.

Rather than let Daniel figure out how to give Yates some warning and a chance to refuse, Vala said, “Daniel needs us to pretend to be camping and go spying for him.”

“Vala,” Daniel sighed and dropped back into his chair, taking a long moment to figure out how to go forward.

“Daniel, you can trust him.”

“That’s not the problem.” Both of them looked at Daniel as if they didn’t believe that. “It’s part of the problem.” He admitted.

“What’s the other part?” Yates squared up before Daniel’s desk, as if he were standing before a superior officer. The SGC troops never saluted Daniel because he wasn’t in their chain of command, but anyone less than a Colonel always looked like they thought about it. (As Sam said, Daniel wasn’t not in their chain of command.) Daniel hesitated.

“Don’t fritter about, Daniel.” Vala not-quite teased. “He needs us not to tell Landry. Or the IOA. Or anyone, apparently.” Vala directed that scolding back at Daniel. “Daniel needs everyone to think you and I went on a sexy camping trip and to not ask any follow up questions.”

“And if they do?”

“We lie. To everyone.”

Yates looked to Daniel, who confirmed. “Pretty much.”

“Is it private?” A roundabout way of asking if Landry wasn’t to be trusted.

“It’s private… for Jack. I wouldn’t be asking this if he were here.”

Yates had been a member of the SGC since year three, when Jack finally got too well-known to do all the SGC’s on-world, off-books operations. Jack explained that they’d need someone who’d be good enough to do the work and good enough to basically torpedo their career for the good of the world. Yates was the only man on Jack’s list. (Daniel had felt terrible about the torpedoing. “Don’t worry. He’ll get all the awards and promotions due to him in the last week before he retires.” “But Jack, still.” “Small price to pay, Daniel.”) Yates was Jack’s man, down to his marrow.

“What do you need?”

“I need you to go camping. And I need to happen as soon as possible.” Daniel held the tablet out to Yates, but kept his grip on it. “You can say no. You can look at the file and turn around. I’m trusting that even if you say no, you’ll keep it to yourself. This is… big. But not, ‘save the world and get forgiven big.’” With a little tug, Yates took the tablet.

Yates did them both the courtesy of not asking Daniel if this was all for real. But over the next ten minutes, Daniel could track Yates’ progress through the file based on his little tells. (And the not-so-little ones. Soldiers in the Mountain weren’t known for letting their knees go out from under them and dropping into chairs.)

Mouth scrubbing and seat shifting told Daniel plenty of things, but about four tells in, Daniel lost track of what the man was reacting to. Daniel mentally lamented the effects of stress on memory before his ever-so-helpful brain pointed out that he hadn’t read the entire file. Yes, several chunks of pages that his memory would trot out to torment him, but for all the file had been sitting on his desk while Daniel stared at walls, he hadn’t actually read it.

Yates was scrubbing his hand through his hair over details that Daniel didn’t know.

Before Daniel could remonstrate himself too much, Yates hmm-ed to himself and looked up. “Camping is our best bet. We’ll have to put it off for a day or so to read my team in and get everything set up on the other end, but everyone already knows we’re planning on going. All we’d need is for Vala to corner you in the mess and ‘accidentally’ con you into going.”

The common idiom was, ‘he might as well have been speaking Greek.’ Daniel spoke Greek, but the feeling was close enough. “What?”

“You won’t have to do much acting. Vala will do all the heavy lifting, you just let Vala start talking about the trip: she’ll say no Tau’ri know what they’re doing, you say you’ve lived on Abydos, she’ll say, great, see you then, and flounce off.”

“I don’t flounce.” Vala said, perched on his desk like a mermaid.

“Sure.” Yates rolled his eyes like he and Daniel were in cahoots. “From there, Vala puts the bug in Mitchell’s ear that you need time off base. Everyone will buy that because everyone knows you get twitchy when SG-1 is out there without you, and Jack passed his last check-in off to his team lead. Frankly, Landry should be relieved at Vala getting you out of contact, and no one will ask any questions while we’re all in Pennsylvania.”

All in—

Daniel’s brain scrambled to catch up.

“That simple?” Vala asked.

“It’s not like we can pretend he’s willingly going to take a last-minute vacation when the General isn’t here to drag him on one. The only other way to get him out of contact for a few days without the IOA getting twitchy enough to send along company is to send him offworld, but no one is going to okay that while the General isn’t here.”

“They’ve let him leave.”

“General Landry had to toss some weight around to get them to okay his going to the Viking temple planet for a day. They will not consent to a real vacation.”

“Norse Germanic.” Daniel mumbled, the first words his brain could grab, like tumbling down a mountainside and catching a root.

“What’s that, Doc?”

“Colloquially, Viking. But Vikings were a specific, raiding subset of the people. It’s acceptable but inaccurate to refer to all of them by that title, especially when we’re talking about a stable, non-raiding part of their culture, and I’m not going.”

“…to the not-Viking temple?”

“To Pennsylvania. You’re going. I’m staying here.”

Yates leaned in, arms braced on his knees, and a soothing smile. Ah, there was that ‘friend’s little brother’ feeling again. “Don’t worry, Doc. We can get you out. The IOA will be huffy about it, but they don’t want you joining Jack and Dakara, so Vala dragging you on a mini-vacation into the forest is the lesser of two evils. It won’t raise any red flags. Simple lies are better ones.”

“The IOA isn’t being huffy about anything.” Daniel objected. For two con artists, they both needed to be more subtle about the looks they shared. “They’re not. No one had a problem with me going to P4A. I’m not going to Pennsylvania because I was never planning on going to Pennsylvania. I wasn’t even planning on sending Vala. She’s just going to go whether or not I approve, and the IOA will care about that.”

Yates straightened in his chair; the silent shift soldiers made from dealing with ‘Jack’s friendly civilian,’ to ‘civilian commander making a stupid call.’ “If that’s the case, then I’m going to need to read my team in.” Before Daniel could ask ‘why’ without it being an insult, Yates answered. “Dr. Jackson, this isn’t just observation. It’s recon and protection detail. Extra hands mean we can do a better job, and frankly, I want them around in case the worst happens.”

“It’s the suburbs.”

“Sir.” There was a surprising world of, ‘you know better’ in such a flat tone. No wonder Jack liked Yates so much.

“All right. But the more people know about this…”

“The higher the risk spreading, yes, sir. May I ask: have you read in Colonel Carter?”

“No.”

Yates didn’t look to Vala and didn’t ask him, ‘Why the hell not?’ “I assume you’re not reading Colonel Mitchell in, then.”

“No.” The answer caught in his throat.

“Then I absolutely need my team.”

No Sam. No Teal’c. No Hammond. No Jack. Just a bunch of strangers and—

“Okay.” Daniel’s voice cracked.

“Hey.” Yates bent from his stiff-backed posture, leaning in on Daniel’s desk. “We got this, Doc.”

Daniel’s tongue sealed to the top of his mouth. All he could do was nod.

It was enough. Yates ended the conversation with a midwestern tap on his thighs. “Vala, give me half an hour to get my guys up to speed?”

“Meet you in the corner?”

Yates nodded and grabbed the tablet as he stood. Daniel snatched his hand back from trying to grab it. “Sorry.”

“You can—”

“No, it’s—”

“I’ll just need a copy.”

“No. No. You… take it.” Daniel thunked back in his chair. “We don’t have a copy.”

“We can make a copy?” Yates looked to Vala.

“No,” Daniel interrupted. Right now, the only proof in the world was on that tablet, and it should probably stay that way. “It’s fine. Just… it’s fine.”

“He says it’s fine.” Vala said, like Daniel wasn’t stuttering like a crazy person. “The corner in an hour.”

Yates gave them a half-salute with the tablet, then slipped out the door, doing Daniel the favor of shutting it behind him. Daniel didn’t have to worry about tossing off his glasses and burying his face in his hands.

“Daniel.”

“It’s fine.” He groaned.

“Yes, Daniel. It will be.” He felt more than saw Vala crouch down at his side, close enough that he could glance at her through the cage of his fingers.

“Go.”

Then Vala, with all the tact of someone who’d nearly bled out on Daniel at least once before, scrubbed her hand through Daniel’s hair like a golden retriever. Against his will, Daniel cracked a smile.

“Talk soon, darling.” Vala dropped a kiss to his now-ruined hair and flounced to the door. “But remember: we’re not sexy camping.” With a wink, she was gone, leaving the door wide open.

It was such a stupid thing, but Daniel was grateful for it. The ‘what the hell’ of his thoughts unclenched at Vala’s little tease. With one final scrub over his face, Daniel grabbed the folder of photos from P4A and tried to force himself back into translation.

Chapter Three

When actual consciousness finally settled on Daniel, he’d realize that the sudden presence of the sharp, overhead lights had initially woken him.

Before that, he recognized coffee.

Daniel blinked his eyes open to the warm and comfortable darkness of a good sleeping bag pulled over his head. Dark, save for a little hole that had been burrowed open right in front of his face. A hole with enough light to show steam tendrils curling up alongside the scent of coffee. Daniel dragged the blanket off his face and flinched away from the fluorescent light, pushing himself up to reach for the mug Mitchell was holding outside Daniel’s blanket like he was luring a cartoon cat with the scent of pie.

“Why are you in my room?” Daniel groaned. “Did we have a mission?” Daniel scrubbed his eyes, bringing the world and his memory into focus. Daniel was not in his bedroom on base. “Ah.”

“Nope. No mission,” Mitchell answered, hovering just long enough to make sure Daniel had a firm grip on the mug before he tried to give Daniel enough space to pull himself together. Not much space, since Daniel’s office was the same one he’d had since Stargate Command was three floors at the bottom of NORAD. Enough room to feel cozy when it was just Daniel and his books. Downright crowded when Mitchell had to step over the triangle braces on the chalkboard and under strands of paracord Daniel didn’t remember bringing into his office.

No mission. No missed meeting. Just Daniel crashed on the folding mattress pad he kept in his office for nights spent in a research fugue. Daniel tried some ‘good morning’ stretches, which turned into cricks. Daniel’s back reminded him he hadn’t slept on his office floor since he’d hit 35, and wow, was he feeling the difference. Though maybe it was a punishment for the stupidity of sleeping in his office when he had a perfectly usable room on base. He just had to go up five floors to sleep in his own, military-appointed bed.

Daniel’s brain helpfully pointed out that he’d tried said bed last night at the reasonable hour of eleven. But curling up in a nice, dark room while his brain still had enough energy to panic just opened the door to the 175 questions he’d been fending off all day. Daniel had gone back to work to tire himself out. Which led to awkwardly angled chalkboards and collapsing on his floor.

Mitchell spent the silence taking a tour over the board, but had the grace to wait until Daniel finished his coffee and rolled stiff joints out of bed before he asked. “Are we investigating a murder?”

That was… “What? No. It’s a mind map.” Centered on the chalkboard was an aerial printout of P4A’s temple, circled by close-up photos of the different pillars joined to their aerial overhead dots by strands of paracord.

At least, that was the base layer. Each pillar photo had a mind map of its own, with more photos, jotted notes, photocopies of Norse texts, intrapersonal arguments about root cognates, color-coordinated highlights, and sticky notes of no coordination all layered over the top like a scrapbook. The whole thing spread like fungus from the tightly packed circle on Daniel’s chalkboard to more photos and notes taped and cord-matched to the bookshelves.

“It… was a mind map.” Daniel scrubbed a hand through his grimy hair. Mitchell just gave him a polite, midwestern ‘hmm.’

Daniel explained as he opened his bottom desk drawer and grabbed the pack of wet wipes he kept in his office for days like this (starting with the ones Sam bought him just for his face). “I’ve got—I think I’ve got the actual morphological chain from Old Norse to the language on the pillars. Human beings are creatures of habit and pattern. I’ve spent the last week or so trying to nail down the system these people used to adjust just one of these morphemes. I hit the system last night and I’ve expanded the pattern to apply it to the rest.”

Mitchell had the look of someone desperately wishing Jack were here to translate. Which Daniel always found ridiculous, because he always ended up translating for Jack anyway.

“So, how that works is—” In between wet wipes, Daniel gestured his way across the board, explaining root cognates and phonetic shifts rooted in time and cultural expansion. Specifically, pertaining to cognate usage as regarded in class standing, and what translation into modern English typically utilized as past v. present tense, but in contemporary usage would’ve been living v. dead.

“That’s… fascinating?” Mitchell tried.

“Well, yes, it is.” Daniel took a step back from the bit of board where he’d untaped a section—and re-taped onto some free bookshelf—to clear space where he could write out the different cognate variations and their meanings. “But more than fascinating: cognates for high-class standing, plus the cognates for dead, equals burial ground.”

“Burial ground.”

“We don’t have a broad aerial picture of the area surrounding the temple.” Daniel peeled back the layers that had encroached on the photo still at board center. “But if I were to guess, we’ll find traces of burials in the forest, or in the surrounding valleys.” Daniel gestured to the spots on the board where those pictures would’ve been on a broader map.

“Not in the basement?”

“That doesn’t align with Norse funereal practices.”

“Right.”

Ah, Daniel had missed the joke. “They’re not murderers.” He scrubbed a hand under his glasses.

“Sorry. It’s an ancient Norse burial site.”

‘Ancient’ Norse wasn’t a thing, but since this site was older than Old Norse and Uppsala was likely a recreation, “Sure.”

“And burial sites matter because…”

“Because how a culture treats its dead is one of the fundamental tenets of understanding them? As much as we study, we can never really understand the living values of a dead culture—”

Mitchell waved him away. “No, I get that part. I meant: why does it matter here. Not anthropologically, I get that.” Daniel doubted that very much. “But to the mission.”

Daniel slowly pointed back at the board and repeated. “Because it’s a burial ground.”

“Danny.” They both grimaced. “Right, no. That was bad. Sorry. What do we get from a burial ground other than bones? And,” Mitchell sped out before Daniel could object, “culturally significant details.”

“DNA?”

“You sound unsure.”

“I’m unsure where the breakdown in communication is.”

“Talk to me like it’s my first day.” Mitchell settled cross-legged on Daniel’s desk, all youthful enthusiasm that Daniel couldn’t remember ever having, despite barely being two years older than Mitchell.

“Okay.” Daniel turned back to the board and immediately decided there was no way to shuffle the papers enough to actually write. He tugged the paracord free from both sides and, after an awkward shuffle, managed to get the board far enough away from the wall to flip it over.

“So.” Where to start? Daniel drew a semi-straight horizontal line and struck a hash mark in the middle of the board. “The Ancients returned to the Milky Way around 10,000 BCE.” Daniel looked to Mitchell, who gave a thumbs up. “The Ancients interbred with humans before they died out or ascended. But, after 10,000 years,” a hash mark to the right, “their DNA remains present enough that we can operate their technology and could still interbreed with one, if anyone retook physical form.”

“How do we know that?”

“I, just uh,” Daniel gave the board a little tap, “do.” Sometimes post-ascension surety just struck him.

Daniel thanked gods he didn’t believe in that Mitchell pressed his lips together and waved Daniel along instead of making the joke lurking in his eyes.

“Right.” Daniel cleared his throat. “On the other hand, we have the Asgard, who have had a cloning program since before they left their original galaxy, but which, at that time, was only supplemental. Then, approximately 30,000 years ago,” Daniel stepped to the far left and made another mark, “a plague hit that wiped out over half of Asgard’s population and rendered most of the rest sterile. Thus, cloning became the default, reducing their already limited genetic diversity, and worsening their cellular degradation so much they’ve spent the last 30,000 years trying and failing to solve it.” Mitchell nodded along, and had the grace to look like he hadn’t had this lecture before.

“We know that 30,000 years ago,” Daniel tapped the mark, “the Asgard were humanoid. Not indistinguishable from humans in the same way as Ancients. But close enough that they were only aesthetic differences, like larger craniums and bigger brains. But again, before the plague, the Asgard were still capable of cellular meiosis.”

“Meaning sex.”

“No. Neither the Ancients nor the Asgard were all that big on physical procreation. Even 30,000 years ago, all interbreeding was done in a lab.”

“Fun times.”

Daniel opened his mouth to defend the Asgard because culture was complicated and should be respected, but… yeah. Despite years of pro forma defense, Daniel kind of agreed with Jack on that one. “We know that the Ancients who didn’t ascend were stuck on Earth 10,000 years ago, and we know that whether they made use of their organs, or they stuck to tradition and used a lab, or,” Daniel sighed, “the Ancients more recently interfered in our genetics, the end result is the same and the Ancients interbred with Humans.” Daniel loathed the hypothesis that the Ancients had broken their own rules and implanted the ATA gene after Earth unburied the Stargate. But Daniel’s ‘post-ascension surety’ wasn’t enough to discount it entirely.

“Most likely, stranded Ancients blended with the locals and started spreading their DNA around.” Daniel tapped the line between his middle and right hash marks. “10,000 years and we still have usable Ancient DNA roaming around. And we have no way of knowing how much of our genes overlap beyond just the various ATA clusters.”

“Wait. Wait,” Mitchell straightened. “You’re thinking the Asgard pulled an Ancient?”

“Technically, the Ancients would’ve been pulling an Asgard.”

Mitchell waved that off. “But you think the big-headed, humanoid-looking Asgard might’ve made human babies like the Ancients did.”

“Yes.”

“But leftover specks of DNA after 30,000 years is a hell of a lot different from 10,000.”

“The temple of P4A predates the Ancients settling on Earth.”

“So, 20,000.” Mitchell rolled his eyes.

“Again, before the plague, the Asgard weren’t sexually active, but they had the capacity. They likely wouldn’t have interbred with humans after the plague because they had so few fertile people left.”

“So, we’re back to 30,000?” Daniel couldn’t give him an answer on that. Not from cognate usage in an Old Norse/Asgardian hybrid that he couldn’t translate yet.

“Either/or. Maybe over 30,000 when they had more fertile people and fewer worries about continuing their species. Or maybe under when the few fertile people they had were trying to increase the gene pool.”

“But the Asgard?”

Fair. “People can change in 30,000 years.” Mitchell’s face said, ‘bullshit.’

Daniel put down his chalk and brushed his fingers off. “Do I think it’s likely? No. But do I think that a Jack from 30,000 years ago could’ve talked a Thor from 30,000 years ago into getting drunk and having sex? Yes.”

Mitchell’s mouth did the ripple that meant he was trying desperately hard not to react.

Daniel rolled his eyes. “Not with each other. I mean…” Hmm. Daniel had never had that thought before and didn’t know what to do with it.

Not the moment.

“I know nothing about what the sexual mores of the Asgard were. Think about it: if all your children are all genetically engineered, how would that impact your sexuality? I mean, if you spend thousands of years separating the pleasure itself from the—”

“Task at hand, Doc.” Mitchell grabbed Daniel’s shoulder and tugged him back around from where he’d turned back to the chalkboard for another mind map. “So, you think some drunk Asgard might’ve gotten adventurous with the locals and spread their DNA around, and those kids might be the ones buried in mounds on P4A, and their bones might help the Asgard.”

“It’s a hypothesis.”

“That’s why I said ‘might.’” Mitchell took a long breath and looked around the room, from Daniel’s hash marks, to the photos still taped to the bookshelves, to the mattress pad puddle on the floor. “And this is what you were up all night doing.”

“Not all night.”

Mitchell panned his head back to the mattress pad, like sleeping wasn’t directly counter to working, and Daniel said so. Mitchell just rolled his eyes and nudged Daniel towards the door.

“You said there wasn’t a meeting.”

“There isn’t. There’s breakfast. Or brunch at this point.”

Cameron Mitchell was not on the short list of people allowed to interrupt Daniel at his work and drag him to the commissary, but coffee and a lecture were enough to tell Daniel that yes, he was, in fact, hungry.

But still.

“Now that I’ve figured out the linguistic evolutionary track, I should—”

“Come on, Doc. I’m already going to get in trouble for this. Don’t make it worse.”

“Trouble for what?”

“General O’Neill gave me orders about the care and feeding of Daniel Jackson. Overnights weren’t on the list.”

“They absolutely were.” Jack only cared about the sleep schedules of children.

Which thought crashed into Daniel like a staff blast to the chest.

Vala and SG-19 had been gone for nearly a week, all of which Daniel had spent focused on his translation.

Well, mostly focused.

Daniel neither knew where the second cell phone came from, nor how SG-19 had rigged an unauthorized device to work in the Mountain. (He also didn’t know how it had taken him two days to notice it tucked under the Ancient jammer on his desk, but admittedly, that was the least surprising part.)

Vala’s texts “safe arrival” and “nest secured” were fine.

“His hair is curly,” was not.

Neither was, “He loves learning, but he has a hard time sitting still.”

“He’s in remedial summer school.”

“He doesn’t like the teacher.”

“The teacher doesn’t understand him.”

“Neither does his father.”

Daniel didn’t have Yates’ number to shut her up. And Vala knew full well that Daniel couldn’t and wouldn’t just ignore his phone. Staying in Colorado was one thing; being out of contact if something went wrong? That was another.

Vala spent the week drip-feeding Daniel information designed not to update, but to torture.

“He has a stick he keeps in the yard to use as a sword.”

“King Arthur is his favorite.”

“He talks to the neighbors.”

“He wants to learn to rollerblade.”

“His mother wouldn’t buy him any, so he built his own.”

Daniel knew Vala was mad at him for staying home. Mad at him for not just picking the kid up and bringing him to Colorado. (For not picking the kid up and taking him straight to Dakara.)

But this wasn’t that.

As much as Daniel wanted it to be nothing more than Vala venting her spleen, the part of Daniel that had done terrible things out in the field with Vala at his side knew with each passing text message that it was something worse than that.

Not something terrible enough that Vala had said, ‘fuck it’ and taken the kid to Dakara herself, but something.

Daniel got nudged out of his worry and back into the moment by Mitchell taking a bowl of fruit and yogurt pack off his own tray and putting them next to the coffee and toast Daniel had mindlessly put on his own tray.

“Mitchell—”

“How important is this?”

Breakfast? According to Janet’s lectures, breakfast was less the ‘most important meal of the day’ and more of a personal decision based on individual biology. But—

“I mean, on a scale of one to ten, with ten being a fully charged ZPM and one being, ‘now we know where the story of Thor dressing up as a bride actually happened,’ what are we thinking about these burial mounds?”

“Þrymskviða,” Daniel said without thinking, “the epic poem where the giant Thrym steals Mjölnir, Thor’s hammer, and—”

“Says he’ll give it back if he can marry Freya,” Mitchell finished through a waved fork and mouthful of pasta salad. That was… “I read things.” Mitchell added, which wasn’t what Daniel meant, but close enough. “Scale of one to ten.

“You can’t really—”

“Daniel.” Mitchell put the fork down. “You want to go offworld, then we need a reason.”

Daniel, uh… “What?” Daniel was discussing the theoretical possibilities of burial mounds, not campaigning for a mission offworld. He couldn’t go offworld right now. Not that he could admit that.

“Jackson,” Mitchell sighed, like Daniel should know what he was talking about.

“What? I go offworld all the time.” Which, now that Daniel thought about it, was an overstatement. He used to off world all the time but hadn’t been since Dr. Fitzpatrick turned up on the computer screen talking about Uppsala and Daniel threw himself through the gate. But Daniel was still a member of SG-1.

“Doc, you can’t leave the planet while Teal’c and General O’Neill are offworld.”

“I went to P4A.”

“With three gate teams to keep you company and General Landry was in a meeting at the Pentagon, so he couldn’t tell us no.”

Daniel blinked. “We needed three teams because had lots of recordings to do.” Daniel remembered being happy that Mitchell was so accommodating.

“Sure. Many hands make light work. That’s why. Not because if anything happened to you while they were out of contact, the General would sense it, and I would look back on my time in recovery like a vacation.” Daniel sputtered in disbelief, but Mitchell just twisted his fork like, ‘carry on.’ “So, one to ten?”

“An… eight?” Daniel said the first number he could think of, most of his brain now busy reviewing his mission history for evidence contrary to Mitchell’s assertions.

“Seriously? Because if we go there and this is something a drone or a bunch of greenies who need more gate time could’ve done—”

“It’s either a two or a ten.”

Mitchell put his fork down. “That’s a bit of a swing, Doc.”

“Like I said at the beginning: burial grounds are archaeologically fascinating, and this is a piece of Protected Planet culture that we know nothing about. And from the trace evidence that Dr. Fitzpatrick has gathered, looks like the Asgard know nothing about. But in your analogy, that’s closer to mythology. But if we find a grave that can cover some genetic gaps and help save the Asgard, that’s better than a ZPM.”

“But first we’d have to dig up a body and run some genetic tests.”

“Not first.”

“What’s first?”

“We haven’t even found a burial mound yet, Mitchell. Common sense just says there should be one. After we find one, we’ll need to block out the site to preserve everything, then map it out with ground-penetrating radar. Then you dig, layer by layer.”

“Layer by layer,” Mitchell repeated, deadpan.

“Yes. You can’t just go in with a backhoe. You’ll miss something.”

“Of course. And you have to go to P4A to hunt for burial mounds that we don’t even know are there because of something you figured out in your research this week, and not because Vala took off with the whole of SG-19.”

That wasn’t—Daniel hadn’t even—he sputtered. Not in disbelief, but close enough to anger that Mitchell knew he’d overstepped.

“Hey,” Mitchell caught Daniel before he could snap. “I know.” Mitchell leaned in and repeated, “I know,” with weight.

Daniel felt like they’d been at cross purposes all morning, but now he heard the question. ‘Why did Vala feel the need to take off on a camping trip with the SGC’s best spec ops team? Why did she do it before Daniel spent days wrapped up in archaeological records he’d had for the last two months? Records that had barely interrupted Daniel’s lunch, let alone kept him up all night and made him look as if he’d been hit by a truck. Did something happen?’

It was an impressive amount of questioning wrapped up in two words. Not as good as Jack, who could’ve conveyed all that by the degree of raise in his eyebrow, but it gave Daniel hope Mitchell could grow into it someday.

But Daniel couldn’t answer Mitchell’s question. He also couldn’t say that he hadn’t been trying to get offworld. Daniel just couldn’t sleep because every time he did, a little boy who looked nothing like Jack popped into his head. Instead, Daniel made himself look down and eat some fruit. “It’s amazing what you can figure out when people leave you alone in your office for a few hours.”

Mitchell hunched down, shoulder to the table, forcing Daniel to look him in the eye.

“Okay, then. I’ll run it by Landry. And you’ll let me know if you figure out anything else?”

“Of course.” Daniel agreed. Daniel had lied to System Lords. Forced eye contact with a man he barely liked would not break him.

@@@@@

Sam, however, was a problem.

“You know, plenty of people have called me to say that you’re being weird.” Sam said from the screen set up in her lab at Area 51.

“Scientists at the SGC are accusing other people of being weird?” Daniel teased.

Sam gave him a ‘point’ with her fork. “I mentioned that out to them. But most of them ignore me and say that you’re pining over Vala. Which I know isn’t true.” Sam added, like it even needed to be said. “One or two people think you’re getting twitchy about how long Jack has been gone.”

“Jack never remembers check-ins if you or Teal’c don’t remind him.”

“That’s what I said. But Teal’c has been checking in, and the other members of the team he took, which is better than last time.”

Daniel really wished people would stop bringing that up. “That was the Tok’ra.”

“I reminded them.” Sam chased a tomato around her salad. He and Sam would never quite agree on the Tok’ra. Martouf and Selmac would always color Sam’s experience of them, while Kanan’s betrayal of Jack would taint Daniel’s.

“A couple of people are offended the IOA has been putting its foot in mission schedules and you aren’t being allowed to do field research on P4A.”

That had been an awkward conversation with Landry. He’d looked like he expected Daniel to kick up more of a fuss about, “Why don’t we let Dr. Fitpatrick take point on this one?” But Daniel hadn’t cared at all. Daniel wasn’t leaving the planet right now, not even if the world were in peril. The awkwardness had led Mitchell to blindside him with a lunch appointment that was really screen time with Sam.

Sam, who was leading up to something.

“Is that why the schedule changed?”

Sam smirked at him. “You finally noticed that you’ve been doing fewer missions.”

“Mitchell had to point it out.” Daniel conceded. “But he blamed Jack.”

“To be fair to Cam, that’s definitely part of it. General O’Neill has never liked us going offworld without him. He says we get into too much trouble without backup.”

“Speaking of hypocrisy.”

“Yes. Let’s.” Sam said, a wealth of reminders in her dry tone.

“Your spreadsheet said that Jack gets into just as much trouble as the two of us,” Daniel defended.

“And General O’Neill said…?”

Daniel grimaced. Jack had made an unexpected and beer-filled argument that consistency of chaos over time plus volume of trouble generated counted for more than the pure number of incidences that Sam was counting. (Jack had won the argument by virtue of Daniel and Sam being blindsided by Jack willingly using ‘consistency’ and ‘volume’ in a sentence. He’d faked extra dumb for the next three days until they stopped mentioning it.)

“But still. This is an important archaeological find. Whether it turns out to be important for the mission or not.”

“When General O’Neill gets back, you could ask to spearhead it.” Sam’s cherry tomatoes did not require that much attention.

Anyone else and Daniel would point out that he’d already be spearheading the research, which was just as good as the field team. But Sam knew him better than almost anyone in the known worlds. And he knew Sam just the same. Daniel didn’t have to stay on SG-1 with Mitchell, whom she liked better than him. And he didn’t have to stay in the SGC where the IOA was interfering in his assignments so obviously that even the SGC’s infamously tunnel-visioned scientists had noticed.

Daniel didn’t have to do any of the things he didn’t like right now, but he was doing them anyway. And for no good reason that she could see.

“You know what I think is really weird?” Sam asked.

“What?”

“All these people who’ve called me to talk about all the stuff they’ve noticed about you. But I haven’t heard a thing from Carolyn.” That was… yup. That was absolutely suspicious. Carolyn had probably been avoiding Sam’s calls to keep from having to lie to her face.

“Daniel, you’re not having problems leftover from being dead, or ascended, or—”

“No, no, no.” Daniel looked up at the screen for the first time since Sam stopped pretending to see through him. Daniel was grateful that Mitchell had shoved Daniel and his sandwich into one of the empty labs so he could talk to Sam as close to face-to-face as they could manage. Daniel didn’t mind a little misplaced guilt when it got him Sam.

But right now, Sam’s kind eyes weren’t a blessing. They were a curse.

Daniel desperately wanted to say their code phrase. To have Sam fake a reason to come back to Colorado so Daniel could tell her the truth, could hand the whole mess over to her and let Sam make the plan while Daniel didn’t have to do more than critique.

But he also… didn’t. Not because of what Sam would do, but because Daniel just… didn’t.

Daniel could barely remember the last time he’d deliberately wanted to keep something from Sam. And it had never been anything so terrible as Jack’s child. But Daniel didn’t want to tell her, and his stomach churned that he didn’t know why.

“Really, Sam. I’m fine.” Daniel gave her a sickly smile, but didn’t give her the code word.

@@@@@

Daniel stumbled out of the SGC in the pale dark of late midsummer, just enough light leftover to remind you that the world hadn’t ended while you were underground. A man could only spend so many consecutive hours in the Mountain before something in his brain cracked. And this was not a time for cracking.

Muscle memory carried Daniel home and through a frozen dinner, but his brain didn’t register any of it. His prefrontal cortex kicked back on at the sight of the cracked, red spine of Catullus on the bookcase set aside for miscellaneous. Tucked in between the sturdy covers of Horace and Augustine, the collection was as tall and thick as a regular book, but shallow. The pages had been cut long and thin so no poem was split mid-verse to turn the page.

The purposefully odd shape meant that when Daniel pulled it level with the almost-matching spines of the books on either side, there was a three-inch gap between the edges of the page and the back of the shelf.

The perfect amount of space for an Asgardian SOS.

The Beacon was supposed to be with Jack at all times, but it usually lived in the bottom drawer of Jack’s bedside table, behind the lube and hidden in a box of condoms. (Daniel told Jack that if he really wanted to throw off a potential search team, he ought to hide it in plain sight among some sex toys. It was bullet-shaped, after all. Jack had blushed a delightful shade of pink.)

On the rare occasions Jack left the planet without SG-1, the Beacon stayed in the nook behind Catullus, just in case. (Daniel’s apartment was closest to the base, and no one could order him to retrieve it.)

A few weeks ago, Daniel stood in this room, unnecessarily rearranging books, while Jack tossed the ‘ET Phone Home’ like it wasn’t a sensitive piece of alien equipment that could summon one of the most powerful beings in the galaxy.

“Jack, will you stop it!”

“I’m not doing anything, Daniel.”

This was punishment for not getting takeout. Daniel knew it. Jack was supposed to head to Dakara at 0600 tomorrow, which meant he was supposed to sleep in his quarters at the SGC, which would never happen if they got takeout, ‘watched’ a game, and Jack crashed on Daniel’s sofa. (Which Jack always complained about, but Daniel knew was better than the base mattresses. Daniel had bought it specifically for that reason.) But Jack was not staying here because Daniel was not waking up at 0400 when Jack made coffee.

“You’re going to break it.”

Jack rolled his eyes and tossed the Beacon all the higher, only to fumble it straight onto the sofa.

“Told you.”

“It’s not broken.”

Daniel regretted moving his books around to avoid this argument. Jack always found a way. Daniel shoved everything back in the general vicinity of where it belonged and yanked Catullus out of the way. “Give.”

“So touchy, Daniel.”

“Jack, so help me…”

Jack rolled his eyes again but didn’t make Daniel try to finish the threat. Jack leaned against the bookcase and handed it over. “Here.” The device wasn’t big, barely longer than a palm. But big enough for both of them to have a grip when Daniel took it, but Jack didn’t let go.

“You sure you don’t wanna come, Danny?”

Daniel rested his forehead against the shelf to avoid looking into those warm brown eyes.

Two weeks ago, when Jack had offered to take Daniel along, life had still just been the weird of in-between, of life as it had been and life as it would be. But the weird-feeling part of Daniel didn’t believe Jack didn’t Dakara.

Or he did, but he meant DC too. He meant any of it. He meant, ‘Run away with me.’

But Jack didn’t mean that. Jack would never walk away from his duty, and there was no science for Daniel to do in DC. Jack just didn’t want the job. He wanted to go back five years to when they’d been happy. But things were never as good as you remembered, and the only way out was through.

That night, three minutes before Jack headed out the door to leave for Dakara, Daniel just rolled his eyes and tucked the Beacon and the moment away.

Now, Daniel had the small metal cylinder in one hand, and Catullus in the other. It was uninterrupted metal, save for an invisible button near the top, a brief bend in the curve that would give way with a soft click. The only thing alien-looking about it was the russet sheen to the metal. Daniel traced his thumb over it, half hoping to hit the button by accident.

This wasn’t what the Beacon was for.

But Daniel pressed it anyway.

Chapter Four

As was becoming the pattern, Daniel woke to irritation. Specifically: buzzing at an annoying volume that phones only ever seemed to reach when he was sleeping. Daniel blindly smacked at his bedside table, trying to lay hands on his cell. Less to answer, more to shut it up.

Which was fine, because by the time Daniel caught it, the phone had stopped buzzing.

Daniel dropped the phone somewhere in his covers, on the certainty that they’d call—and there it went. Buzzing again. It was quieter this time. Daniel’s brain was just awake enough to parse the buzz felt different from it had before.

Daniel double-checked the caller, even though pre-dawn phone calls usually only came from one place. “Vala?” He croaked. “Why are you calling? At—” Daniel glanced at the screen, “5:13? Did something happen?”

Daniel knew it hadn’t. Vala wouldn’t wait until a semi-polite time to call if it had.

But… Vala didn’t say no.

“Vala,” Daniel repeated, adrenaline shocking him awake, “what happened?”

“Evan had an accident.”

“What?” Daniel lurched up. Potentially abusive parents and an ‘accident’ could mean a hell of a lot of things.

“An actual accident, Daniel.” Vala didn’t quite soothe. “Evan made himself a bike ramp that didn’t hold. It would’ve broken.”

The linguistic difference choked off Daniel’s surge of relief. “Would’ve?”

“Yates stopped him.”

“Dammit, Vala.” Daniel scrubbed a hand over his eyes. “You weren’t supposed to make contact.”

Vala had pointedly not complained about that restriction. Instead, she’d done a terrifying job picking up details without actually talking to the kid. In true suburban fashion, the neighbors were happy to gossip with the newcomers about the least-favorite family on the street. Phillip and Margaret Buckley were universally considered uncomfortable, impersonal, and fussy. But not endearingly. The Buckleys were invited to all the block parties because that’s what good suburbanites did, but Margaret brought store-bought potato salad and took too much of other people’s leftovers. (A faux pas that transcended language and culture. Even Vala understood the offense.)

“Daniel.” Vala sighed in a way that meant Daniel would not like what came next. She usually hit him with that sigh right before she did something the US military would disapprove of.

The tone was familiar. But the silence afterwards was not.

Vala’s silence gave Daniel the first proper quiet since he’d woken. Quiet enough that his brain caught buzzing from his living room to an entirely different beat than his phone. Daniel didn’t know that sound, but he could guess.

Daniel tossed off his blankets and scrambled out of bed. “Uh, Vala—”

“If we’d let him fall, his sprained ankle would’ve turned into a broken one.”

“That would’ve—”

“And his parents weren’t going to be home for hours.”

Daniel felt terrible for thinking it, but that’s what good neighbors were for. Or cell phones. Not breaking cover. Daniel said so as he went to the closest bookcase and tried to nudge tomes out of the way one-handed.

“That’s not the problem, Daniel.” Vala snapped, in perfect ironic timing with the Asgard device, which had changed rhythm to annoy Jack into picking it up.

“It is the problem, Vala. As much as I don’t like the thought—” Daniel wrapped his palm around the device to pull it free, and the world vanished around him in a flash of light.

The afterimage faded just as fast as it came on, leaving Daniel looking at the tall, triangular back of a captain’s chair, and beyond it, an ovular window overlooking Earth.

“Daniel!” Vala’s shout echoed as the phone re-established connection.

“I’m fine. But I gotta go.”

“Where are you?” Vala asked, full of panic that meant she’d heard the low pop and metallic ring of a transporter.

It seemed to be a universal law of physics that you couldn’t beam anyplace and come out facing the right way. Daniel heel-turned from his home world to a little, grey alien. “With Thor.”

“Dr. Jackson.”

“Hey, Thor.” Daniel flicked his phone closed on Vala’s silence and went to slip it in a pocket his pajama pants didn’t have. Daniel barreled through his embarrassed freeze. “That was quick. I wasn’t expecting you for a few days.”

“The last time O’Neill used the Beacon, Anubis was attacking your planet.” A pointed beat. “According to my scans, Earth does not appear to be in peril.”

“No, no peril.” Asgard didn’t have eyebrows, or particularly mobile faces. But Thor conveyed ‘get on with it then,’ just as well as George Hammond. “I have some, uh, paperwork. On a tablet, that explains things. If you wouldn’t mind beaming me back down I’ll, uh, call Vala for that, and get some, uh…” Daniel awkwardly crossed his arms over his peaked nipples, “clothes.”

Daniel recognized Thor was giving him the same look he gave Jack when he said something deliberately stupid. But somehow, when he directed the look at Jack, it seemed fond. Daniel just felt small.

In answer, Thor reached out one long, spindly finger and tapped three spots on the long console/table that took up the center of his bridge.

Daniel’s relief was short-lived.

Instead of beaming Daniel back down, Thor, with his terrifying level of precision, beamed up yesterday’s shirt that Daniel had stripped onto the top of his hamper.

Also, Vala. Tablet in hand.

Despite being dragged away from a different state, Vala caught up faster than Daniel did.

Rather than wasting time asking ‘what’ or ‘why,’ Vala aimed her dirtiest smile at Thor. Daniel shut Jack down every time he tried to talk about Asgardian sex and his theory that they just needed a bunch of orgasms to clear out the mental block keeping them from solving their genetics problem. Daniel had never thought about the logistics, but if there was anyone in the galaxy who could figure out how to have sex with an Asgard, it was Vala.

(And now, apparently, Jack. But Daniel really didn’t want to be having thoughts about drunk Jack and drunk Thor from 30,000 years ago. Right. Stop panicking. This was fine.)

This string of realizations wasn’t helped at all by Thor looking back at Vala as if she were interesting.

Nope. Not today.

Daniel held out his hand, and Vala handed over the tablet, eyes still on Thor.

“Shirt.” Daniel over-enunciated.

Vala rolled her eyes and said, “He’s no fun at all, is he?” to Thor, like they were old friends. “You must be Supreme Commander Thor.”

“And you are Vala Mal Doran.”

“You know who I am?” Vala asked, delighted.

“O’Neill and I discuss matters when we are fishing.”

Daniel paused with his shirt halfway over his head. “You know there’s no fish in that pond, right?”

“O’Neill says that catching fish is not the purpose of the activity.”

Daniel… didn’t really know what to do with that and finished pulling on his shirt. Daniel had gotten the same speech and hadn’t taken it with the same equanimity as Thor.

“Thor, thank you for coming. We have a problem.”

“It’s only a problem because Daniel is being difficult.” Vala said and went to perch on Thor’s console.

“No.” Thor said without looking. Vala slithered off as if that’s what she meant to do the entire time. “What is the problem?”

“Well, uh…” Thankfully, Vala kept her mouth shut. Daniel couldn’t quite find the words, but hesitation seemed better than the alternative.

However, Thor disagreed. Daniel had barely gotten the tablet unlocked before the device’s contents appeared in a hologram floating above Thor’s table. With a flick of his fingers, every document spread out like a constellation while Thor and his massive intellect shuffled through the information like cards.

Daniel and Vala both waited in a silence that lasted just long enough that Daniel had a niggle of worry that he’d have to say it out loud. But in truth, less than twenty seconds later, Thor stilled.

“O’Neill has genetic offspring.” Thor wasn’t one for tonal inflection, but Daniel had been there when Thor thought he was dying, and when Thor first believed they could really defeat the Replicators. Daniel knew the entire breadth of Thor’s emotions. Which meant Daniel could hear the depth in Thor’s voice. Not a tremble, not a hesitation, but something profound in that narrow chest.

Daniel had known Thor would care. Thor cared about life generally, and about Jack O’Neill specifically. But Thor stared at the picture of that little blond boy with the same hallowed reverence he showed an exploding Replicator cruiser. In all his 3,000 years, Thor had never had genetic offspring. And with each passing year, it looked less and less likely that he ever would.

Now, floating in a projection was proof that some mad scientist had given Jack Thor’s fondest wish.

“Thor,” Daniel started, but the Asgard didn’t pay attention. Thor tapped something on the console, and the documents slid to the side as another screen popped up in the center. This one showed Earth below. The view from the ovular front window snapped from Northern Canada, to the continental United States, to the Eastern seaboard, to what context told Daniel was probably Hershey, Massachusetts. The view landed on a specific roof. Daniel raised an eyebrow at Vala, who nodded in confirmation that it was the kid’s house.

“That’s a little creepy, Thor.” She said.

“O’Neill’s DNA is easy to track.” Thor answered, all his attention on the map.

“What?” Daniel stepped to the console, careful to keep his hands to himself.

“DNA tracking is often an inefficient means of location. However, O’Neill’s DNA is unique, even among the Ancient descendants. The child bears O’Neill’s unique markers.”

“You scanned the entire planet for Jack’s DNA and found Evan?” Vala asked, leaning on the console to watch the data scrolling past as if she could make sense of them. Thor glanced at Vala’s hands to make sure she wasn’t touching anything, but moved on without comment. The image of Earth resolved back to the original.

“No. The program relies on O’Neill’s usual locations. Evan O’Neill was conveniently located.”

“His usual—” Daniel disregarded the view of Earth zooming in with a smooth transition rather than jumping between zones. “Do you track Jack?”

“O’Neill does not carry the beacon I made for him.”

Nope. No, he didn’t. And Daniel didn’t know if he wished for or was terrified that Jack had told Thor about his hiding place. “You could… call?”

“I do. He does not answer.”

“He’s on Dakara.” Daniel answered mindlessly.

“Not the important part, Daniel!” Vala interrupted. “Jack gave you a cell phone?” That wasn’t the important part either, but Daniel didn’t know why he ever thought Vala would give a shit about Jack’s privacy.

Thor tapped something off to the side, and a corner of the table snicked open a little sliding door and elevated a disemboweled cell phone that’d been hot-wired into Thor’s systems.

“You couldn’t just… tap into the network?”

“Yes. But O’Neill feigned offense when I did not use his gift.”

“If it was feigned, then why…” Daniel turned to Thor, who looked away from the table with an expression so flat, Jack would’ve been impressed. “You were messing with him. Right.” The image reached the Eastern seaboard again, zeroing in on a specific cluster of DNA.

Thor had offered to strip the ATA gene from the clone of Jack that Loki made, back in those brief few days where Thor thought he could stabilize things and the clone could survive. Daniel had completely forgotten, but Jack would remember. If possible, that procedure would be the cleanest way to solve all of this.

“Uh, Thor. You, uh… he’s definitely got Jack’s DNA?”

A separate screen popped up before Daniel’s face, showing several strings of numbers and what looked to be a clumpy, lopsided, bisected bowtie, with several parts highlighted. “Uh, I don’t—”

“Evan O’Neill is 15.3% O’Neill’s offspring. 98% of O’Neill’s Ancient heritage was successfully transposed. Without primary source material from both O’Neill and Evan O’Neill, I cannot offer a more detailed analysis.”

98% was already pretty detailed. “Evan Buckley.”

Thor turned his face away from the map, where Daniel could pick out the thin lines of rivers and the seemingly endless green of trees getting steadily closer.

“His parents’ surname is Buckley.” Daniel repeated

Thor blinked. A slow and deliberate action that Daniel didn’t know if he’d ever actually seen Thor do before. And then Thor looked to Vala, who sighed and shook her head.

“What—” Daniel tried to ask. Vala interrupted him before he could. And honestly, Daniel wasn’t sure what his question would’ve been.

“Have you found any mention of Evan outside of where we partitioned it in our system?” Vala asked.

“No. There is no trace that the information has been accessed or utilized outside of Dr. Jackson’s tablet. You may inform the scientist who discovered the information that I have destroyed any traces of the test or Evan’s DNA. The only record exists on Dr. Jackson’s device, on my device, and in her memory.”

“That means nothing leaked.” Vala said to Daniel.

“Yes, I got that. Thor, what are you doing?” The map had resolved onto the same roof as before, but the image settled over the kid’s backyard and changed angles to look at the back of the kid’s house, in a way that a camera stationed on Thor’s ship could never do.

“It’s a drone, Daniel.” Vala explained.

“I understand that.” Daniel lied. “Why?” Daniel bit back his temper. There was no yelling at Thor. The Supreme Commander of the Asgard fleet did whatever the hell he wanted, and unless Daniel could explain why this violated Earth norms, he wasn’t going to stop. And even then, maybe not. It wasn’t like Daniel had a reason other than he didn’t want them to.

Thor ignored the question entirely, focused on hovering his drone outside the house’s back windows. “No one appears to be present in the structure.”

Vala licked her lips and, ‘Umm-ed.’

“Vala.”

“He’s probably across the street.”

“Vala.”

“Well, we couldn’t turn him away when he came over for breakfast, Daniel.”

“Came over for—you said you stopped him from breaking his leg!”

“Exactly. And then maybe we invited him in for dinner.” Daniel dug his hands into his hair and tried not to scream. “He’d never had Thai food before!”

“That’s not an excuse.” Daniel hissed.

“Yates didn’t catch him quite in time, so we invited Evan in to check him over.”

“You could’ve checked him on the street.”

“Daniel,” Vala gasped, like he’d said, ‘We can move those artifacts; they’re not important.’ “It was a perfect opportunity to have a little conversation.”

“Conversation!” Daniel lost control.

“He ate drunken noodles, giggled about the name drunken noodles, and said his parents wouldn’t mind him missing dinner. We asked a few more questions, and Evan accidentally admitted that he gets into accidents to get their attention. He didn’t realize that’s what he was saying, but it’s what he meant. His parents keep telling him to be more careful, but they don’t realize they’re doing it either, so he’s going to keep doing it.” Vala spilled out the words in a rush, distracting him with the flood of information. “Yates says it’s not enough to rise to neglect, but we couldn’t just tell him not to come back!”

Thor ignored their argument. In the corner of Daniel’s vision, he watched as the drone ventured across the street, phasing through the front door with technology Daniel didn’t know the Asgard possessed.

Like so many houses in the suburbs, the front door opened to the bottom stairs that turned left up to the second floor. The drone slipped to the right, into a small sitting room, then into an open-plan living room and kitchen that took up the whole back of the house, full of windows to the bright green backyard.

Daniel tried to mentally name the members of SG-19 in the kitchen. And he tried to let his internal Jack make an adolescent joke about Pop-Tarts. And he tried to wonder how in the hell they were supposed to train any of these spec-ops soldiers to look for drones that it seemed no one could see.

But honestly, the first thing Daniel noticed was a Clark Kent curl of blond hair on the little boy’s forehead.

He was perched on the corner of the counter, drumming little legs against the cupboard while someone from SG-19 handled the toaster. Sound clicked on and a sweet, enthusiastic voice echoed around Thor’s bridge, mid-ramble about bugs.

The kid still didn’t look a thing like Jack.

Nothing from the structure of his round face, to the line of his jaw, the honey-blond of his hair, the curls, to the soft pink skin. Not even the bright blue of his eyes instead of the warm brown of Jack’s.

Not an inch of him looked like Jack. Just 15.3% of his DNA. And that wasn’t enough.

The baby-faced member of SG-19 fumbled the extraction of the toaster-hot Pop-Tarts, and Evan rolled his eyes.

Such a simple, stupid, universal thing. Everyone did it.

But that…

Daniel hadn’t been around a lot of children. A few casual visits at work barbecues, but not consistently, not since Abydos. But every so often Sha’re and Skaara would sigh in this way that felt exactly like Kasuf. It wasn’t like no one else on Abydos sighed, but the way they did it… if asked, Daniel would say that everyone sighed the same way. But there was some movement in the face, some shift in expression that was so perfectly Kasuf that words couldn’t describe.

Some shift in expression that was so perfectly Jack, that Daniel’s breath caught.

A dip in volume jolted Daniel back to his body, breaking the haze of white noise that had fallen over Daniel as he stared at a little kid fold his Pop-Tart in half and eat it like a frosting sandwich.

Daniel looked to Thor, who was unmoving before the image of Evan laughing with Jack’s smile at SG-19’s burned tongue. “What do you need of me, Dr. Jackson?”

“I was going to ask if you had a subcutaneous transmitter.” Daniel shoved aside the surge of guilt. A transmitter hadn’t even crossed his mind, but it was all he could think about now.

“We have shared such technology with your people.”

“Yeah, but the SGC controls those, and the IOA can demand access.”

Thor hmm-ed. “I will provide you with a transmitter that will respond only to Asgardian technology. That will require me to remain and monitor.”

“What a sudden and unexpected sacrifice,” Vala drawled as she leaned on the table, laughing about Evan puckering his nose at the smell of instant coffee. Thor didn’t even need to tap for the table to zap Vala off.

“Can you keep the drone on him?” Daniel tried not to beg.

“O’Neill has informed me that constant surveillance is an inappropriate violation of privacy for your people,” Thor said with that specific flavor of deadpan that meany wry.

That startled Daniel back to proper consciousness. Thor couldn’t have meant—no, he absolutely did. Daniel bit his lip to keep from laughing at the thought of Jack’s reaction when he found out Thor had probably watched him jerk off.

…Jack.

“I want to keep him out of our system until Jack gets home.”

Until Jack decided what to do.

Until Jack decided… fuck that.

“I also need you to beam me down.”

Vala whipped around from where she’d been tip-toeing her fingers along the edge of Thor’s console, trying to find the line. “Daniel?” Thor blinked again.

Daniel scrubbed a hand under his glasses. “That’s Jack’s son.” He managed to get out.

Vala approached Daniel like a wild animal, running a steady hand over his shoulders. “It is.”

“He’s Jack’s kid.” Daniel’s voice broke like a dam under all the thoughts he hadn’t been having

But before he could have those thoughts, Thor interrupted with the zing of an internal transporter. An injector appeared on the closest corner of his console. “The device will sting. In the future, I will reprogram it to operate on a human wavelength so he will not need to be re-injected. For now, I will be the only one who can track him.”

“Thank you, Thor.”

“You are welcome, Dr. Jackson. You will keep me notified of O’Neill’s return.” Thor stated rather than asked.

“Of course, he will.” Vala interrupted. “After all, you’ll be beaming Daniel over every night after work.”

Thor tilted his head and agreed, turning on the metallic snap/slide of the transporter before Daniel had the chance to disagree.

Chapter Five

The dark grey of Thor’s bridge resolved into the soft light of morning filtered through a massive tree outside a large window, painting everything just a tinge of tea green. Daniel was so accustomed to transporting from spaceship to Mountain that it took a few rapid blinks for his eyes and brain to adjust.

“I had enough time to tell the team you were talking to Thor before he beamed me up, but they’re probably a little on edge.” Vala said with a pat to Daniel’s shoulder. “Give me 45 seconds to warn them.” Vala waited for a nod before she tossed open the bedroom door and started down the stairs, singing loudly in warning.

Daniel rolled his eyes and started the mental countdown. They’d transported into what was supposed to be a bedroom on the second floor. But it looked like all the staging furniture Vala had bought to pretend normalcy was downstairs. Instead, the small room with cream walls and dark wood trim had a single collapsible cot tucked in the far corner, with Vala’s go bag beside it. In the blind corner—out of sight of anyone walking by the door—were cases of weapons and prepared, but unpacked, tactical gear. (Ready to throw on in the worst, but not so ready that they were actually planning on the worst. Daniel had learned that logistical distinction the hard way.)

There were three rooms upstairs, separated by a short landing and stairs down to the foyer. Daniel caught the desk pushed to the window in the front room, with books and a computer set up for cover, beside a fake plant which Daniel assumed held the camera recording Evan’s house across the street. He also caught the other three cots in the room next to Vala, but Daniel’s mental counter had barely hit 20 before voices carried upstairs.

Some part of Daniel clocked the too-slick carpet on the stairs, and the perfectly bland living room furniture open planning to the kitchen, but the rest of him heard a bright, young voice shout, “Hey, Vala!” and nothing else mattered.

“They said you weren’t home.”

“I wasn’t. I just got back.”

“You didn’t say hello.”

There in the kitchen was the kid.

Looking up at Vala as if she’d broken his fragile little heart by ignoring him. Then flattening out and stepping behind Vala when he caught sight of Daniel.

Vala carried on like everything was normal. “I had to get my friend settled first.” She leaned down and stage whispered, “If he doesn’t get his luggage put away at the beginning, he’ll leave it by the front door the entire trip.”

Vala smiled at Evan as if she were expecting a quip. But he didn’t.

And Daniel didn’t. Not even when Vala looked at him like he was supposed to snap back that he’d done that one time and it was an ancient temple, he could be forgiven for getting distracted. Which is what he’d done the last time Vala brought it up. But today… there were no words.

“Evan,” Vala stepped aside and nudged the kid forward in one smooth motion, “let me introduce my friend, Daniel.”

Evan tried and failed to dig his heels into the tile, skidding along.

Daniel’s brain was entirely white noise, so muscle memory carried him through. Daniel dropped to the standard crouch for meeting small children, but all he could manage was, “Hi.”

Evan leaned back against Vala. If she moved, he was going to tumble back to the kitchen floor. “Hi.”

And that was… that.

Contrary to popular assumption, Daniel had never been good with children. And it didn’t help that SG-19 was sharing not-so-subtle looks from their defensive points around the room.

‘Vala said…’ Nothing. Vala had said nothing. She’d implied plenty of things via text message, but all of those were grown-up implications about how terrible Evan’s parents were and not a conversation starter.

‘I hear you like,’ but nope, that didn’t work either. What? ‘Jumping off trees?’ ‘Almost breaking your arm?’ He couldn’t say ‘skateboarding,’ not when the only reason they were here talking was because Evan had almost crashed.

Just, “Hi,” again.

And Evan, ‘hi-ed’ right back.

“Daniel could help with your homework.” Someone burst out.

In an unexpected moment of solidarity, both Daniel and Evan turned to look at the youngest member of SG-19, who had his back pressed to the sliding glass doors like his parents were fighting and he wanted out.

Genetics ran true, and Evan gave the Sergeant a glower worthy of Jack.

“You came over with your textbook and a worksheet!” Evan looked horribly betrayed. If Daniel had to guess, Evan had been looking for an excuse to visit and would’ve preferred that everyone just forgot about the homework. Like Jack would turn up with a six-pack and say he wanted someone to watch the game with, even though he knew Daniel would not look up from his book.

“It’s a good idea, kid.” Yates took mercy on them all. “I promise. Dr. Jackson is one of the smartest people you’re ever going to meet.”

In for a penny, as it were. Yates’ Lieutenant took Evan by the shoulders and steered him to the kitchen table, ignoring the glower. Vala didn’t so much nudge Daniel along as she two-handed shoved him to join the kid. Yates gave him a ‘you got this’ look, while Vala pressed down on his shoulders until Daniel dropped and gave him a, ‘how are you so bad at this?’

One was more helpful than the other.

And somehow Daniel had missed Evan staring up at him, thumbing over the corner of the textbook like he didn’t buy what everyone was selling.

“Really, kid. Smartest ever.”

“That’s not quite true.” Daniel couldn’t help but say. Vala and Yates shared a look as if it was time for day drinking.

“Oh, come on, Dr. J. You’re the best.” Daniel probably should know the young man’s name, but he didn’t think asking for it right now would help his reputation in Evan’s eyes.

“I know a lot of languages, and I’m good at the things I’ve studied.”

“What… what’s that?” Evan asked.

“Archaeology.”

Evan furrowed like he’d heard the word, but didn’t know what it meant.

The Corporal leaned over Evan’s shoulder and smiled. “Egyptology.” With all the emphasis on Egypt.

Evan straightened. “Like pharaohs and stuff?”

“Well, it’s more—” Vala smacked him in the arm “—yeah, pharaohs and stuff.”

For the first time, Evan smiled. And Daniel smiled in relief. Daniel could absolutely talk about Egypt.

The Corporal explained that “the little man” was having trouble in math.

Daniel didn’t bother catching his grimace. “Not my best subject.” And there went the smile. “One of my best friends, Sam, is great at math. She usually does mine.”

“Why?” Evan asked, like he couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to be good at math.

“Because she’s an astrophysicist.” The Lieutenant had placed himself in the kitchen on coffee duty, and looked back at Daniel like, ‘Come on, man.’ “That’s a scientist who studies stars and planets. And they have to know a lot of math.” Daniel’s brain finally shifted gears into the same place it went when he had to translate for Chaka. Evan perked up at the mention of a girl best friend, but then furrowed again, an entirely new kind.

Evan wasn’t upset over the homework or Daniel fumbling. He hadn’t been scared of Daniel this entire time. Or nervous. No, Daniel knew that little furrow like he knew German conjugations, and Daniel could finally put a word to it just as well. Evan was looking at Daniel like he didn’t make sense. Like Daniel was a puzzle Evan needed to solve, but wasn’t coming together. Or, more familiarly, like Daniel was some alien piece of technology that lit up when he came into the room and in-built genetics weren’t telling him what it did.

But Evan didn’t ask. Just nudged over his textbook, and the two of them got to work on long division. Which turned out to be hell for them both. It had been a long while since Daniel had done any math that didn’t involve a tip, and apparently they taught division differently now than when he’d learned it. But not differently than when Corporal Nadir had learned it, so it was embarrassing to drag the kid in to help them. Or it would’ve been embarrassing if Daniel were a different man, but he recognized the edge of it.

Together, the three of them managed to survive most of question one. Enough that Daniel accepted his coffee from the Lieutenant. (Who traded places with the team civilian and took up watch from the upstairs bedroom. Apparently she’d been out of Daniel’s direct line-of-sight upstairs and he’d missed her entirely. He apologized. She said, “That’s kind of the point, Doc.”)

Daniel called for a break halfway through the first question. Which made everyone look at him like he was insane. But Daniel didn’t understand how the rest of them couldn’t see Evan with his feet tucked onto the chair, all but rocking forward on his knees, then back to his toes, unable to sit still.

“Are you okay, Doc?” The Corporal asked. Yates must keep the kid out of undercover operations because his poker face would use some work.

Vala made to step in, like Daniel was bailing on homework and needed saving. But Daniel regularly sat through briefings with Jack O’Neill. “Don’t you feel itchy? Like you need to move?” He asked Evan.

“You’re supposed to sit still until you get your homework done.” Evan said, heartbroken to be delivering this tragic news to Daniel.

“But what do you do when you need to wiggle?” Daniel gave a little shimmy in his chair.

Vala dropped into the chair opposite him. “I have never seen you wiggle before.”

Daniel smirked at Evan and wiggled again, who almost giggled off the chair.

“See, a little better?”

“A little.”

“It doesn’t have to be a big break. You can do some jumping jacks, run around the yard, just move until you can think again.”

Neither shimmying, nor wiggling, nor jumping jacks, nor running around properly did the job. SG-19’s computer tech/civilian had a hacky sack—which was definitely going to get her teased as soon as Evan was out of the room. Evan tried to kick it around the kitchen—thankfully sparse because the stagers hadn’t stocked with plates or utensils—and Daniel was decent at getting him back on track. Evan adjusted quickly and happily to the fresh approach to homework.

It didn’t make the math easier to solve, but it helped.

They eventually settled on Legos that someone from SG-19 liberated from Evan’s house, and Evan got to work building his own little spaceship in between fragments of math questions. Daniel explained he had a friend, Jack, who liked to do something with his hands when they had to do grown-up homework. “Jack likes playing paper football,” which Daniel had to show Evan how to make. Neither of them had good aim. “If he doesn’t have anything else, he’ll flick around a pen,” try again, much better than football, “and he always has this little ball he’ll bounce off the wall. But his favorite is to build stuff out of office supplies.” Daniel shuffled around the Legos, stacking them up in a short, fat pyramid, smiling to himself at the memory. “He made a Christmas tree out of multi-colored paperclips once. But he really likes—”

“Sugar cubes.” Evan interrupted.

“What?” Daniel startled.

Evan stared at a blank space on the table, zoned out at something none of them could see. “Evan?”

The room paused, waiting for Evan to blink himself back to them. “Sugar cubes are great.”

“Yeah.” Daniel shot a quick look at Vala. She shook her head. This wasn’t typical. “Jack loves doing sugar cubes too.”

“‘Cause you can lick ‘em and make stick together.”

Daniel couldn’t help his little laugh. “Exactly.”

Evan turned to Daniel and with more clarity than he’d ever had before. “Daniel.” Evan said it heavy.

“Yeah?”

Evan stumbled around the table and crashed into Daniel like they were reuniting after months apart.

“Ev?” Daniel scooped him close and pressed his face to Evan’s hair, that sunshine/sweat smell of little boy.

Evan didn’t answer. Just gave Daniel a smile bigger and brighter than any of them had seen before, and dragged the Legos over for building.

Chapter Six

Daniel took the rest of the day off to stay with Evan. And meant to take the next.

He hadn’t planned on it, but sleeping across the street proved almost beyond Daniel’s ability, let alone functioning if he went back to Colorado.

Maybe Daniel should’ve given Mitchell more than a text that he wasn’t coming in.

Daniel didn’t catch the red flag until Mitchell called the morning of day two. “I told everyone that Landry told you to take the day off.”

“Hello to you too,” Daniel said, rolling his eyes for the benefit of Snyder (the young Corporal), who froze at the sound of Daniel’s phone.

“When you get back, pretend that’s the truth.” Mitchell carried along.

“Is Landry also pretending it’s the truth?” And there went Snyder to get Vala and/or Yates.

“No, Daniel. I thought I’d put words in my boss’ mouth and then leave him out to swing when the IOA asked about it.”

“Point. But why do I need to pretend to be ordered to take a few days off?”

“I had to say something to keep everyone calm.”

“Calm about what?”

“Daniel, the last time HR told you to take a vacation, you turned up the next morning and said the ‘vacation’ was staying in your office and people not being allowed to ask you questions.”

“That wasn’t the last time.”

“You’re right, because the last time, General O’Neill broke your phone and dragged you to his cabin. You staying home just because General Landry recommended it? That’s suspicious.”

“What do they have to be suspicious about? I’m camping.”

Mitchell scoffed. “Your camping isn’t suspicious. You taking a vacation that O’Neill didn’t enforce is out of character. And you being out of character was enough for people to finally clock that General O’Neill is running late.”

Daniel paused his aimless poking around the kitchen. “Jack ‘running late’ to enjoy spending his time off world is in character.”

“And Vala stealing things from your desk is ‘in character,’ but that doesn’t make it any less stressful.”

Vala came skidding into the room at precisely that moment. “Point.” Daniel knew he ought to open his mouth and ask if Mitchell needed him to come back, but he couldn’t make himself do it. Instead, he cleared his throat, ignoring both Vala and Yates, who were watching him with raised eyebrows.

“Everything okay, Jackson?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.” And if Daniel’s voice could get on board, he’d appreciate it.

“Put Vala on the phone.”

“She’s not—”

“Jackson, put Vala on the phone.”

Daniel sighed, but didn’t bother pretending. He gestured the phone in Vala’s general direction. “Mitchell would like to talk to you.”

Vala snatched the phone from Daniel’s hand and drawled, “Cameron, darling,” on her way to the relative privacy of the garage.

“Anything I need to know, Doc?”

“Mitchell told everyone that General Landry asked me to take some time off.” Yates was very good at his job. Nothing about his body changed as he grabbed a banana from bowl on the counter and started peeling, but Daniel knew that change in the air.

“What?”

“That’s a pretty simple thing. Makes sense. Why did he have to tell Vala?”

“I don’t know what they’re talking about.”

“No?”

Daniel put down the second mug of sad coffee for the morning. “Seriously, Yates. I don’t know.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything, Jackson.”

“But you’re worried.”

“It’s my job to worry.”

Whatever argument Daniel was going to have, he didn’t get to. Vala stormed back into the kitchen. Daniel didn’t know how he’d done it, but Mitchell won their argument. Daniel needed to get back to the Mountain.

“Vala—”

“The plan is to keep things normal until Jack gets back and can decide. Right?” Vala said it like she was calling Daniel’s bluff. But that was actually the plan. And a better plan than kidnapping, of which Daniel reminded her.

“You took the day off yesterday because Landry recommended it, then had a lie-in today because your body caught up to you. That’s perfectly normal. But you taking two days off in a row? Not normal.”

Daniel looked to Yates for an explanation, but the man was deeply focused on that banana. “Mitchell said he told everyone—”

“Cameron had to answer questions about it. Questions are not our friend right now, Daniel. That means you need to come back after work. After a regular day of work.”

“Vala, what’s going on? People shouldn’t be panicking about me taking a day off, and you and Mitchell shouldn’t be this worried about it.”

“Nothing is going on, Daniel. We’re just—”

“Vala. Please don’t lie to me.”

Vala paused, then reoriented. “Nothing is going on yet. And Cameron is trying very hard to keep it that way.”

“Why is that taking so much work? I took the day off.”

“I could try to explain it, but I’d rather you not have the answer to that.”

“Why?”

“Because you, Daniel, need to go to the office and be normal.” Vala stepped into Daniel’s space and straightened his overshirt like the lapels of a suit jacket. “If I tell you about it, you’ll worry, and worry doesn’t let you be normal. You’re already coming in to the office after a day where you slept, which is the opposite of normal. Please, Daniel. Just trust us in this.”

And so, Daniel went. Evan didn’t like it, and Daniel liked it less, but he went. Daniel said his ‘see you laters’ and let Thor beam him back to his apartment. Daniel turned up at the SGC looking over-rested and perfectly functional. Like he had actually taken a day and change off and his body didn’t know what to do with the unexpected sleep. Which probably wasn’t what Vala and Mitchell were going for, but was more normal-looking than well-rested.

Daniel arrived at work with a library book in hand, dropped his satchel in his office, and went for lunch in the commissary, reading all the while. If Daniel hadn’t been faking normal—and flipping unread pages whenever the time felt right—he wouldn’t have noticed the extra glances and whispers. (Which was probably a sign he wasn’t playing normal well enough.)

Half a chapter after Daniel properly settled into his book and his oatmeal—filling but no risk of book spillage—Ms. Moore sat across from Daniel with her tea and a bright, interrupting, “Hello!”

Ms. Moore was the IOA representative from Great Britain: genial, friendly, and close enough to an actual ally that sometimes people forgot the IOA wasn’t their friend. “Hello.” Daniel forced himself not to look up from his book and not to look for the Airman assigned to keep Moore company. Daniel remembered the strange afternoon Jack and Yates had spent sorting through personnel files looking for security who were low-ranking enough that following the IOA representatives around would be procedure, not a red flag, but came with enough common sense to understand that this was a real security assignment. A surprisingly short list.

Apparently assigning security to the UK, Canada, France, and Woolsey was even more complicated than China and Russia. At least those representatives expected to be monitored every minute they were in the SGC. But the old allies expected to have free rein, and you didn’t want to offend an ally that you’d need later. Which was why Moore and her mug of substandard tea were allowed to be alone at a table with Daniel.

“What is your book about?”

Daniel kept ‘reading’ in the hope she’d leave it alone.

“Dr. Jackson.” No such luck.

“Hmm?” Daniel tilted his face up, but not his eyes, skimming over words that weren’t sinking into his brain.

“Dr. Jackson, I asked what your book is about.”

“Lipiec’s critique of Adam of Bremen.”

“I would assume that, given Lipiec’s incredibly Catholic interpretation of European history that there wouldn’t be any value to his critiques.”

That got Daniel to look up. And Moore looked damn proud of it. “There’s value in everyone’s critique. Even if they’re intensely Catholic.”

“I imagine it’s the same as politics. You can’t argue against a point of view if you don’t know it exists.”

“Anthropology is more about understanding than it is about arguing.”

Whatever her response might’ve been, Captain Peters cut it off, thunking his tray down next to Daniel. “Heya, Doc. Ma’am.” He gave Moore a polite little nod. “Doc, we need you to settle something for us.”

And there went the trays for the rest of SG-5 around the table, two of them blocking Moore in without getting too much into her space. “I can’t tell you why they think mashed potatoes are a lunchtime food, Peters.”

Most of the team snickered, though the young Sergeant across the way looked mortified. “We don’t have to bother Dr. Jackson with it.”

“No, kid,” Fable, the team’s astrophysicist teased, “now we all gotta know: where did pie come from?”

“Where did pie come from?”

The team Lieutenant leaned into Daniel’s side. “They’ve been having this argument since we went to the harvest festival on P62.”

If Daniel recalled correctly, SG-5 and SG-12 had taken half the anthropology department and several negotiators to P62 intending to make nice with a planetary collective whose resident Goa’uld had died in an accident 200 years ago, giving rise to a culture independent of the rest of the galaxy’s development. And more importantly to the government: they’d also done a decent job mining a substandard form of naquadah. Given that most of the galaxy responded well to his and Jack’s dog and pony show, Daniel figured SG-5’s argument about pie had done just as well.

“It really wasn’t about pie, sir.” The poor Sergeant argued. “I just asked who the first people were to wrap fruit in dough and eat it. And these—guys,” he remembered the woman sitting next to him and course-corrected, “haven’t let it go.”

“Egypt, actually.” Daniel interrupted.

“Egypt, what?”

“Egypt has the first recorded instance of what we’d now consider pie.”

“Shut up,” and “The hell you say,” overlapped one another. Daniel figured no one had actually been expecting him to have an answer. They were just planning on doing their own dance to keep Moore from getting out another word. To Moore’s credit, she looked bemused by the distraction.

“The Egyptians made what we’d consider galettes, which are a sort of freeform, French pies. The Egyptians made them with water, and barley, wheat, or rye, with nuts, honey, and meat as filling. Though the first ‘fruit’ pie as we consider it today comes from Medieval England. There are records of dates and other dried fruits being included in pies before that, but that’s not quite the same thing. Interestingly, the tomb walls of Pharaoh Ramesses II included a feast scene, and pie was one of the foods painted on this massive, celebratory table. The earliest written mention of a pie was a recipe for chicken pie etched on a tablet in Sumer dated sometime before 2000 BCE.”

Somewhere along the way, Daniel tucked in his bookmark and ate spoonfuls of oatmeal in between explanations. (Also seasoned with nuts and honey, because humans had always been and always would be humans.) The oats were tasty enough that it took Daniel a moment to recognize the echoing silence in reply to his mini-lecture.

He looked up and found SG-5 plus one IOA representative staring at him in disbelief. “What?”

“How the fuck do you know that?” Peters’ tongue caught up with his brain, and he looked mortified.

“I’m an Egyptologist.”

“No, but really,” Fable asked.

“You’re asking me why I know a lot about pie.” Daniel gave them all a little smirk.

Captains Peters snorted. “The General.”

Daniel agreed with a wave of his spoon. “What did General O’Neill do?” Mitchell asked as he budged the Sergeant over and took the space next to Daniel. With the sudden appearance of a superior officer, something in SG-5 unclenched.

“Dr. Jackson says that pie came from Ancient Egypt.”

“No foolin’? What was Thanksgiving like in Ancient Egypt?”

“That’s not a—”

“Better question: what would a pie crust taste like without butter?” Peters interrupted. Mitchell paused mid-forkful of mashed potatoes. “Jackson said it was just wheat and water, no butter.”

“Of course, not butter, you make pie crust with shortening.” The Lieutenant argued.

Mitchell scoffed. “Lard, California. A person doesn’t make anything with shortening, and you only use butter when you’re out of lard.”

“What the hell is lard, sir?”

Daniel stopped trying to keep track of the devolving conversation from there. Usually, he’d be baffled at the turns, but he’d been around the military for a long time. Plus, Daniel had the added benefit of knowing they were deliberately twisting the conversation to keep Moore from having anything to say. She was clever enough to manage something, but Daniel just propped his book against an empty coffee mug and got back to reading while the nonsensical conversation about different flavors of lard went on around him.

Daniel had made it another half a chapter before Walter turned up to let Ms. Moore know that General Landry was ready for her. Credit to Moore, she thanked them for the discussion and said she’d have to ask more questions about pasties when she got home.

The Sergeant waited until she was a table away before he asked what a pasty was, and that performative conversation carried on until the door closed behind her. The words and the tension hissed away like an escaped balloon.

“Thank you for the interference, gentlemen.” Mitchell sighed.

“Happy to help, sir,” Peters said to a round of nods.

“So, what was the point all—”

“Show me that analysis your computer has been doing, Jackson,” Mitchell interrupted so calmly and casually. For all Vala and Mitchell were worried about people being stressed at the SGC, Mitchell seemed fine doing something he should’ve known would stress everyone out more. SG-5 looked like their parents were fighting. Since normal was so important and Mitchell couldn’t seem to reach it, Daniel gave a dramatic eye roll for SG-5’s sake, which didn’t do as much good as he’d hoped.

Mitchell maintained a monologue about his Mee-Maw’s pie crust all the way from the commissary to Daniel’s office, talking nonstop until Daniel flicked the lock closed and clicked on the Ancient scrambling device.

“What in the hell is going on?” Daniel asked, more baffled than irritated.

“Moore didn’t have a meeting with General Landry scheduled this morning.”

“He just… pretended he did?”

“No. She turned up this morning and asked to be put on his schedule whenever convenient. ‘No rush, just wanted to talk to him today.’”

“Then why didn’t she call?”

“Because she wasn’t here to talk to Landry. She was here to poke around.”

Daniel dropped into his chair. “You’re going to say she was poking around because I took a day off.”

“Daniel.” Mitchell groaned and vigorously scrubbed his hands through his hair.

As much as Daniel wanted to snap, he was, first and foremost, a scientist. “I clearly don’t understand what you and Vala are seeing. But I can’t help if I don’t understand. So please explain it to me.”

Mitchell groaned and dropped into one of Daniel’s spare chairs. Honestly, more boneless than Daniel had seen him in weeks. (Now that he’d noticed, Daniel thought that maybe Mitchell had been tense since Jack left for Dakara.)

“You catch how twitchy everyone is?”

Instead of the automatic ‘no,’ or pointing out that he’d been wrapped up in his book, Daniel forced himself to recall details that he hadn’t logged at the time. “Not twitchy. But people did notice me in the hall in a way they usually don’t.” It pinged the old ‘new kid in school’ part of his brain. “But I still don’t understand why my missing a day of work would cause that.”

“It’s not that you missed. And it’s not that O’Neill is late for his check-in. It’s both together.”

“Both are perfectly normal.”

“Perfectly normal apart. Not perfectly normal together.”

Daniel tried to object, but… laid out like that, Mitchell wasn’t wrong.

“The last time O’Neill missed a check in when he was visiting allies, you gave him twenty minutes and then had Walter call him—without the approval of the Colonel who had temporary command of the SGC—and chewed him out like a Jewish grandmother.”

Daniel felt his face flush red-hot. “How—you weren’t even stationed here then!”

“Everyone in the program knows about that, Daniel! I think people in the Pentagon who aren’t even read in on the Stargate know about it. It’s one of the 101 stories they tell the new recruits about you!”

“Well, that’s…” mortifying. Daniel scrubbed underneath his glasses. “Maybe Jack was embarrassed, and I decided not to do that to him again?”

“Jackson.” Mitchell sighed, like, ‘don’t bother lying if you can’t do it well.’

“In my defense, Jack was with the Tok’ra that day.”

“And they have a history of losing O’Neill so he gets tortured by Ba’al, I know.”

“Not a history of it—”

“But despite all your big talk about ‘long-term allies’ and ‘improved relations’ after they implanted O’Neill and then lost him, and the couple of good years since, that all went out the window when O’Neill was late.”

“It was longer than twenty minutes.” Daniel grumbled his only defense. “If I just haven’t been freaking out enough, then why did Vala tell me to be normal?”

“Because you were already faking normal. If we changed directions now, that would be worse.”

“So, I responded wrong.”

“Jackson, you responded like you expected O’Neill to miss his check-in.”

“Of course, I did.” Mitchell blinked. He hadn’t expected Daniel to admit it. Jack wasn’t thrilled about his new job, but that was a private matter, not something to be discussed with a man under Jack’s command.

“Either way, O’Neill missed a check-in, and you were calm about it. That was weird, but not that weird because he was with Teal’c on Dakara. But then you got weirder.”

“I thought you said I was behaving normally.”

“Exactly. That’s the weird part. You left base when O’Neill was off planet. You took a vacation day when O’Neill was off the planet.”

That was… “Fair.”

“Everyone clocked it, but we could’ve gotten through that with no problems. The real trouble is that someone has been talking to the IOA. And when the IOA starts calling SGC personnel from their countries and turning up for appointments they don’t have scheduled, that’s when everybody starts worrying.”

“There really is nothing to worry about.” Not worry. Just low-grade, constant anxiety that you’d look the wrong direction and the Trust would be there with a syringe.

“They’re not worried that something happened. They’re worried if there’s something they should be helping you and O’Neill cover up. If nothing else, the SGC is loyal.”

“Except for the people talking to the IOA.”

Mitchell accepted that with a nod. Then just sat there, expecting something else from Daniel that Daniel didn’t know how to provide.

Mitchell did not huff out a sigh, because he wasn’t an idiot and he knew he wasn’t on the short list of people allowed to do that at Daniel. “Jackson, implicit in this is a bunch of worry that there’s something going on.”

“There isn’t. The IOA wanted SG-1 to give Landry room to function and for us to follow his orders. That’s what I’m doing.”

“Daniel, nobody in this mountain is an idiot.”

“I don’t think that.”

And Daniel didn’t. Mitchell’s expression said he believed Daniel, but still, the silence lingered. Mitchell didn’t actually ask what was happening, but he let the implication hang in the air. And for a man Mitchell outranked, that might’ve worked.

Daniel didn’t consider Mitchell a teammate. They were… co-workers? Something more than co-workers, more than the other SG teams Daniel had to spend his time with, but less than an actual team. Bekannter, perhaps. Daniel knew Mitchell wanted the trust of a teammate. To be held in the same confidence that Daniel had for Vala. And maybe the way Vala trusted Mitchell if she was willing to send Daniel to work this morning.

But it wasn’t coming. Not today, at least. Not with so much at stake.

Mitchell wasn’t the type to leak, but if everyone was already nervous about something so small as a change in routine, Daniel couldn’t add Evan to the board.

Before Daniel had to come up with a polite way to throw Mitchell out of his office, Daniel’s phone buzzed. Daniel checked the text, of course, and Mitchell rolled his eyes.

It was from Thor. Summoning him back to the ship.

“I’ve got to go.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“No, really.” Daniel scrambled up. “I have to go.”

“Sure, fine,” Mitchell snapped.

“It’s Thor.”

Mitchell froze. “Thor. Supreme Commander of the Asgard Fleet, Thor?”

“Yes. I have to go.”

Mitchell shook off his discontent. “Got it.”

“You’ll—”

“Tell Landry that you had to leave but you’re safe, and tell him that you’ll answer me if I call.” Mitchell interrupted like a statement.

Daniel nodded.

“Landry said he doesn’t want to know details if he doesn’t have to.”

“No problem.”

“Is there… a problem?”

Daniel didn’t have the chance to answer before Thor beamed him up.

Chapter Seven

Thor began playing the footage almost before Daniel even had the chance to materialize on the bridge.

The invisible drone was in a kitchen the same size and layout as the house where they’d been staying. But it was paler and somehow more grandma-like, with gauzy white curtains, a table runner, and a vase of fake flowers on the kitchen table. Thor had it cued up as a 3D projection, the entire tidy kitchen taking up all the real estate on Thor’s console, giving a perfect, all-around view of an earnest-faced Evan saying, “No, Mom. I promise I got all my homework done. My new friend, Daniel, showed me how to do the math.”

It’s a sweet face, so earnest. Daniel was torn between how sweet Evan looked talking about his new friend, and the stomach-sinking certainty that Thor had brought him up here to watch Evan’s parents panic about their seven-year-old son hanging out with the strange man across the street.

Somewhere along the third alternate reality, Daniel had stopped being blindsided by sudden and seemingly unexpected turns of events.

But no bomb, betrayal, or Ascended Goa’uld met with the whiplash of a WASP mother half-lunging across the table to grab her seven-year-old son by the shoulders to shake him and scream, “Don’t you dare say his name!”

Instinct made Daniel lunge to protect the little holographic Evan, as if he could reach through time.

Then Margaret just… collapsed. A puddle of weeping melancholy on the table.

Evan sat there, stunned. The purest definition of the word Daniel had ever seen.

“Evan, go to your room.” Phillip snapped. To Daniel, Philip wasn’t angry at Evan, but Evan didn’t have the benefit of adulthood to know his father was panicking. The shock of Philip’s tone jolted Evan out of his chair and sent him fleeing for the stairs, leaving the kitchen table in the middle of the projection while Philip slipped his shattered wife into his arms.

“What… the hell just happened?”

“The savior sibling, Daniel.” Vala said, from a spot away from the console, where she and Yates—had Thor dragged him up? Or Vala—had been observing Daniel while he watched.

“I remember, but Margaret has never come across another kid named Daniel in the last six years?”

“Maybe not.” Vala shrugged.

“I know I’m the only Daniel in the program, but it’s a common name. Especially in this part of the world.”

“The odds are that she’s heard it before, but there’s something about today.” Yates said. “We know from Evan that she’s been busy at work the last week, and you didn’t get the beginning of the conversation, but she was picking at Evan for every little thing. She was primed to lose her temper about something, and the name Daniel was it.”

“That’s no excuse.” Vala snapped.

“It’s not an excuse; it’s an explanation.” Yates turned back to Daniel. “We’ve been explaining to the Supreme Commander that we can’t just remove a child from his home after one violent incident. Especially if we can’t explain how we know about it.”

“We say were roaming past the window.” Vala carried on the argument.

“The window at the back of the house?” ‘We were telling the Supreme Commander’ seemed to mean Yates had been trying to talk Vala and Thor both out of going nuclear.

While they argued, Daniel stepped around the projection so he could get a clear view of Evan, of his heartbroken little face, tripping up the stairs with eyes too wet to see his feet. Philip and Margaret in the background, with no attention on their living son.

“Where is Evan now?” The image jumped forward to the present. To a projection of a little boy’s room, polka dot wallpaper, framed art projects on the walls, and a lump on the tiny, twin bed. Daniel stepped around the console again, ignoring Yates’ argument about procedure, and Vala hissing something at him in untranslatable High Goa’uld. Nothing was visible beneath the mountain of blankets but shaggy blond hair and the sticky, red face of despair. Evan swallowed back a sob and Daniel sank to his knees beside the table, watching Evan shove the covers in his face, trying to muffle his heartbreak.

Daniel looks up and through the projected echo of Evan and found Thor across the room, who hadn’t said a thing and somehow, Daniel hadn’t noticed. But the Supreme Commander of the Asgard was there, and he was furious.

“O’Neill has given you the authority to make decisions.” Thor intoned, cutting off all discussion.

“We cannot, we absolutely cannot steal a child from his parents’ home in the middle of the night. Not unless we can swear under oath that we thought the child was about to be subjected to immediate and irreparable harm.” Yates repeated with the air of a man who wished he had a unit who would shut up and follow orders. “We know it happened. That means we can keep an eye out in case things turn. But we have to wait until Evan comes over tomorrow and spills everything.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then we wait until his parents leave and stop by with some cookies because we miss him. Evan will spill every secret without a second thought. If we take him now, we hurt Jack’s case. Evan is safe in his room. Depending on the judge, it might already be weird and a little creepy that we bought the house across the street to stake him out. Everything we can do like normal people, with full respect for the system, we need to. And that means not transporting a kid when we have no way of knowing that he’s upset.”

Yates was right. Daniel didn’t need to know much about the legal system to realize that. Jack would say it was like waiting until night to stage your rescue. You didn’t want to leave your teammates in jail until 2:00 a.m., but that’s when the guards got sloppy. You just had to pray that nothing goes wrong between now and then.

But still, Daniel brushed his shaking fingers over the tiny projection of Evan, like he could soothe through the pixels.

Evan hitched his breath, like the boy had actually been touched. Evan scrubbed the cover over his face, then he curled up and gave of shriek/groans into his pillow. Daniel froze for an entirely new kind of crying, but when Evan flopped the blankets away from his face, he came out with a clenched jaw and what will someday be a thousand-yard stare. Evan heaved himself out of bed, like a little Jack on his way to face the guillotine. Daniel was expecting him to go downstairs, and was ready to get someone from the team outside for a ‘late night walk’ across the street where they could plausibly hear the yelling.

But Evan jacked open his window and went for a tree branch with the skill of a man who had sneaking out down pat.

“Thor.” Thor beamed Daniel down without a second thought.

Daniel materialized in the same empty space of Vala’s bedroom.

“Sir.” Corporal Snyder snapped a salute from his watch point at the back window. Daniel waved him off and started down the stairs. Meg leaned back from the front bedroom observation desk—but didn’t look away from her view—and called over her shoulder that Evan had just about cleared the tree.

The same part of Daniel that recognized the benefit of 2:00 a.m. rescues told him to wait for Evan to cross the street and knock on the door. Plausibility was their friend.

The part of Daniel that punched Apophis said, ‘fuck it’ and sent him stumbling through the front door. Evan had had already made it to his front yard. Evan looked up at the sudden burst of light on the dark street. He stutter-stepped as a sob stole his breath and broke into a run. Daniel put on all speed and scooped Evan into a hug before he was the one who went running into the street. Evan wilted into his arms. Daniel wanted to bury his face in Evan’s hair. Wanted to ask if he was okay. Wanted to soothe. But they were on the sidewalk, still early enough in the night that Jack would’ve never let them stage a jail break.

Daniel heel turned and carried Evan across the road and into the house, quietly murmuring nonsense comfort all the while. Some member of SG-19 snapped the door lock behind them, just as Vala and Yates came down the stairs from their own beaming.

Meg was still at the top of the stairs, wanting to set her own eyes on them before she went back on duty as lookout. “Snyder,” Daniel called up to the Corporal still hovering at the top of the stairs, “can you get me the first aid kit, please?” The kid blinked, then scampered into the main bunk room. As much as Daniel wanted to take Evan to the much more defensible upstairs, he kept hearing Yates’ voice repeat, ‘plausibility.’

Daniel took Evan to the living room, where Lieutenant Jasper had secured the bottom of the house. Daniel dropped onto the sofa, keeping Evan curled against his chest and letting him sob as long as needed. Daniel ignored the murmur of Vala’s voice explaining to the earthbound members of SG-19 why Thor had demanded their presence. Soon enough, Evan petered out and apologized for crying. “It’s okay, baby.”

“Dad says ‘big boys don’t cry.’”

“Well, I say that tears are another way of asking for help. And asking for help is always okay.” Daniel nudged Evan’s face back so he could look him in the eye. “Okay?”

Evan answered with a comically gross snort of snot. “Okay.”

“Now, what happened?” With muscle memory, Daniel nudged Evan’s chin from side to side, checking his face, even though—

A bruise was blossoming on his cheek.

That hadn’t—

“Who did this?”

Evan hiccupped. “My mom.” And dropped back into tears.

It took everything Daniel had to unclench and go straight back to rocking and soothing. Evan needed the space to cry it out. To not worry about a grownup’s feelings about what he’d been through, just his own. This wasn’t like a broken bone or a gunshot wound. His mother hit him. That was an entirely different kind of pain.

But still, Daniel looked up over at Vala. When had Margeret—had Thor not shown him? Vala looked confused by Daniel’s confusion. Vala stepped up to Yates and mimed her way through Margaret’s attack. Daniel had been so caught up in the shaking that Vala suggested he’d missed Margaret making contact with Evan’s face.

That led to a bit more forced muscle relaxation, but Daniel let Evan’s tears peter out. His little, exhausted body was running out of endurance.

“I need to take a look at your face, Ev.”

Evan hiccupped, but leaned away. Daniel picked Evan up and set him on the counter in the farthest corner of the kitchen. It wasn’t until Vala handed over the fully-stocked first aid kit that Daniel realized he’d put Evan’s back to the interior wall so he could see the entrances and exits. Exactly where Jack would’ve wanted to be if he was hurt.

The soft light of the living room and the drone footage of Evan’s bedroom had both done a lot to conceal the damage to Evan’s face. On the right, his cheek was the sunburned red of skin ready to bruise. On the left, Margaret had missed Evan’s cheek and instead caught his lower lip, already a little swollen and crusted with smears of blood.

Daniel accepted a wet paper towel and gently dabbed the blood away, trying and failing to keep the fragile wound closed. Light also showed Daniel the blood smeared and dried across Evan’s face, like he’d tried to wipe it away but couldn’t see himself properly. Daniel bet that bed cover was stained.

Daniel swallowed the rage bubbling at the base of this throat and tried to ask, “What happened?” in his most archaeologist voice. Two days were enough to know Evan liked when the adults talked to him like a grownup.

“Mom and Dad came home from work. And Mom was tired.”

“Okay.”

“She was tired, Daniel.” Evan said, like it was the most important information in the world. Like that made hitting your son okay.

“Hey.” Daniel cradled his little, unbattered jaw. “Okay.”

Daniel had thought… he’d done first aid on plenty of civilians in the worst sort of circumstances. The Goa’uld were monsters with no respect for life. Barely even respect for their own. Daniel thought this was the same. He could disconnect and treat Evan like any other injured civilian. Because when you had an injured civilian on your hands, you maintained. Keep calm and get the job done because that kept them calm.

Evan told him all about how great dinner was, and how proud Mom and Dad were for him getting his homework done. And under Daniel’s hands a corner of the bruise started to bloom purple with broken vessels from getting hit by something harder than a hand. Probably her wedding ring.

Daniel couldn’t listen anymore.

Oh, he nodded at all the right parts, and smiled when Evan smiled, but he was going to have to ask Vala for the actual details. Or get the playback from Lieutenant Snyder lurking in the corner with the camera he’d brought back from upstairs.

Daniel had to keep deliberately unclenching his shoulders, lowering them away from his ears. Daniel fought Goa’uld on a monthly basis, but this was a different kind of rage. Evan was his. Daniel’s shoulders went back up and his breath caught with the rage boiling in his chest. Daniel wasn’t the same young man who threw himself against Apophis and twenty Jaffa trying to get Sha’re back. But his son was crying in front of him, tears slowly tracking down his cheeks, and it took everything Daniel had not to be that same, stupid man, storming across the street to fight Phillip Buckley over his son’s tears. The man was not a Goa’uld slaver, but damn did he feel like it.

“And then Mom, she…” Evan trailed off, not wanting to admit it out loud. His little eyes welling up with tears. “I said something she didn’t like, and she… she shook me.” Evan hiccupped.

“Evan.” Daniel tilted the little man’s chin and waited until he looked him in the eye. “There is nothing you could’ve said that would make hitting you okay. Not even if you said something mean. Or something dirty.”

“I’d never! I just—” Evan cut himself off. “I don’t know what I said.” Evan refused to look at him.

Daniel nudged his chin up, trying again. But Evan’s eyes stayed down. “Evan, you can’t remember what you said?” Daniel started panicking. Did Evan get hit hard enough for a concussion?

“Daniel.” Vala interrupted. “I think Evan just doesn’t want to repeat what he said.”

Evan nodded.

Vala nudges Daniel out of the way and leaned in to whisper, “Why don’t you tell me?” Evan looked nauseous at the prospect, but pressed his lips to Vala’s ear and gave a proper whisper.

Vala nodded along, then said, full of secret-sharing inflection, “That was silly of her.” Evan broke with the first giggle they’d gotten from him all night. “Would you like me to tell him?” Evan nodded.

Daniel knew what was coming. He saw the footage. But when Vala said that Margaret didn’t like Evan saying his name, he couldn’t stop the flinch. And, of course, Evan saw.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I don’t know why she didn’t like it!”

“Hey, hey.” Daniel cradled him close again. “I don’t care.” Pause for Jack-inherited glare. “I don’t care that you said it. I care that she hurt you because of my name.”

“Vala said it was silly.”

“That’s a word for it.” Daniel pushed Evan’s hair off his forehead. “Mean might be more accurate.”

Evan buried his face in Daniel’s chest.

Daniel let him snuggle there for a moment and didn’t press. It had taken Daniel years to admit it was wrong and he was mad, and it only been Daniel’s grandfather doing the hitting. He couldn’t imagine how long it would’ve taken if it had been his own mother.

“I’m sorry, Ev, but I have to ask what happened next?”

“I went upstairs.” Evan said to Daniel’s chest. “Dad always makes Mom stop when she starts yelling, but she’s never…” Evan lost the ability to say the word and just gave a little shake of his fist instead. “I went to bed. And Dad came up.”

Another thing Thor hadn’t shared.

“I didn’t turn over. But Dad knew I was awake. He told me Mom was having a bad day. And he told me I can never say the name Daniel again. I should pretend like my new friend has a different name. Not even Danny. I said, ‘Okay.’”

Daniel made the hand brushing through Evan’s hair stay steady. “And then what?”

“He left.” Evan’s voice cracked. “He went back downstairs to Mom. And I got up to get my tissues because you’re not supposed to wipe your nose on the sheets, and I looked out my window and came over here.”

Daniel dropped a kiss to Evan’s curls and murmured, “You did the right thing. Now, Snyder is going to take some pictures of your face so we can make sure this never happens again, okay?”

Daniel waited until he got a nod from Evan, then stepped back to let Corporal Snyder and his bright smile handle the pictures. And Yates handle the direction. Daniel didn’t know when Yates had done his research on child welfare cases, but he kept dropping details a layman wouldn’t know.

Daniel stepped back, and Evan half-lurched off the counter. “Where are you going?”

Daniel grabbed his hand, but didn’t pull Evan back into a hug like he wanted to. If he did, he’d never leave. “I have to make a phone call. I’ll just be right over there on the other side of the room, okay? You’ll still be able to see me.” He waited again for Evan’s nod, then stepped as far into the living room as he could manage.

By the time Daniel got there, he was shaking too hard to pick up his phone.

Daniel had asked Evan if his parents ever hit him and Evan said ‘no.’ Daniel thought that was true. But Evan loved hugs and cuddling on the couch. There was something wrong there and Daniel hadn’t seen it. Daniel left—

Daniel left a kid in a house with his abusive parents. Daniel left Jack’s son with abusive parents.

Daniel flicked open his phone and found it already connected to Thor. “Dr. Jackson.”

“Jack is on Dakara. And I need you to go get him.”

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