Chapter Text
During the midday meal, the see-through lobster yelped something about wormholes, and that was all the warning they got before a man with eyes as black as the universe popped into existence beside the table.
Thankfully, Cam wasn’t the only one freaked out by this, and both Aeryn and Jothee responded by pointing weapons at the man’s head. He retaliated with a slow blink, and both Aeryn’s gun and Jothee’s sword yanked out of their hands to crash against the wall behind him.
“Do not be afraid,” he said emotionlessly. “I am not here to hurt you.”
“You’re an Ancient,” Aeryn said furiously. “You put the wormhole knowledge in John’s head!”
“Not I. But I did remove it.”
Cam frowned. As human as the man looked, he had read all the reports about ascended beings. None of them mentioned eyes like that. And they didn’t interfere so bluntly. He decided to place bets on this reality’s Ancients being different than his, and stayed silent.
“What have you done to him this time?” she demanded. “Where’s John?”
“He is undergoing a test,” the man said calmly, and although he didn’t have eyes, Cam knew he was being stared at. “While this man learns the material for his own.”
Crichton stared around the surprisingly homey room, feeling vaguely off-balance. Not only had he been marched out of the interrogation room, down three halls and into what felt an awful lot like a hotel room in the middle of a military base, but Maria von Trapp over there was boiling him a cup of coffee.
“I thought Vala was the mind-game portion of the evening,” he said, as Spader stepped in front of him. “What is all this?”
“It’s late,” he replied. “We’re all tired, and we have better things to do than baby-sit you all night.”
“Okay, so, where’s my cell?” he asked.
“This is it.”
“Excuse me?”
“We’re comfortable with the belief that you don’t mean us any active harm,” Maria explained. “And we want to get you home as soon as possible. So until we can figure out how to do that, you’re being treated as an ally, not a prisoner.”
He raised an eyebrow, but his initial witty comment was cut off as Spader lifted a key into his line of sight. He blinked, and then watched warily as the key was lowered and inserted into the cuffs. He briefly considered knocking Spader out and making a run for it, but he could practically feel the zen Mr. T looming behind him. He figured he’d get three steps and wake up in a real cell, rather than this cushy hotel. So he settled for rubbing his wrists and meeting Spader’s gaze with a perplexed stare.
“Here. It’s still instant, but it includes sugar and a dash of milk,” Maria said, and he looked around and back down to see the mug being presented to him. She quirked a smile at his glance. “I guessed you prefer it white.”
“Yeah,” he said, taking the mug more out of instinct than anything. “Thanks. So uh… what now?”
“Now, you’re confined to this room until we come back at eight tomorrow morning,” Spader said calmly. “Vala’s getting you some dinner. Tomorrow, we’re going to pool our resources and try to figure out what you’re doing here. If you’d like to help, I suggest you spend the night sorting out your thoughts.”
He blinked again in response. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
And, judging by the quick smile Maria gave him, and the way everyone else trooped out of the room, that really was it.
They showed him the footage, and Cam fought the urge to throw up.
Stargate used wormholes to travel.
“That thing wasn’t going to stop at a planet,” he said evenly, staring at the apocalypse.
“John wasn’t sure where it would stop,” Aeryn said quietly. “It could have been the system, or the galaxy. If left unchecked, it might have been the universe.”
“And it was a weapon that did this,” he said. “A weapon that uses wormholes.”
“Yes.”
His hands tightened into fists against his thighs.
Sam, it turned out, disliked being called Maria, especially after he gave the full name version. She thought it was funny, and mentioned Mitchell had apparently called her Mary Poppins before, but she still didn’t like it.
After she found him some real milk to drink and offered to share her private stash of chocolate, he agreed to forgo the nicknames.
She and Vala stuck around while he ate dinner. “Maybe it’s something about his tongue,” Vala said when he was halfway through an orgasmic mouthful of meatloaf. “It must be a mutation.”
“Huh?”
“You and Cameron are the only people I’ve seen enjoy the food here,” Sam explained. “Most of us agree it tastes like rubber.”
Crichton gave her a direct look. “There is oregano in this. Bread. Mince. Tomatoes. I recognise all of the flavours. Eight years ago, I would have called it cardboard. Today, it’s the first thing I’ve eaten in over a year where I recognise the recipe and all the ingredients,” he pointed out. “You learn to appreciate that.”
“You don’t have tomatoes where you come from?” asked Vala. “All the planets I’ve been to tend to have the same kind of foods, just used differently.”
“Mm-mm. Sometimes things get kind of close, I mean… vegetables and fruits and meat, you know what they are, but… it’s all different,” he said, and speared a piece of carrot to hold up in front of their eyes. “This is a carrot. A root vegetable, grown underground. They used to be purple before medieval civilisation did some genetic engineering to turn most of them orange. I know this. The closest thing to this I’ve found out in space is an herb that grows on a tree on this desert planet known as Cumdergin, or something like that, my pronunciation generally sucks. It’s poisonous to most species.”
“Fascinating,” Sam commented, and he gave her the look such a comment deserved as he ate said carrot.
“Yeah, fascinating, until you discover having them on board your ship is grounds for arrest in most systems. And that was after I spent the better part of a day convincing my crew I wasn’t suicidal for wanting to eat them.”
The girls laughed, so he smiled for them before going back to his meal. Truthfully, that had been a truly suck-tacular discussion, since it happened while they had Scorpy on board and he was pretending to hate Aeryn. Chiana had confiscated his guns for a week.
“So what kind of foods do you have? Is anything bright pink?” Vala asked, and he took a moment to gauge how funny she thought she was being, and therefore how much detail he needed to go into.
“A few things. Weirdly, things usually end up looking like stuff you recognise. It just doesn’t taste the same,” he said. “But I have it on good authority that Earth food actually is some of the best. You don’t get the same kind of diversity on other planets, which limits the cooking.”
The food conversation continued until he was finished, which took a while since he procrastinated about the jello. It was bright blue and looked like the alcohol he’d been slurping on Greebus last week during Chiana’s depression-induced bender. The hangover had nearly killed him, especially with D’Argo crying all night. He wouldn’t have eaten it, except he missed sugar, so it just took him a good half hour to finish.
By then he’d relaxed enough to start telling them about his friends. Sam was intrigued by his descriptions of the different species, and when they explained how few variations they themselves had seen, he couldn’t blame them. “Seriously? Humans are your major species?”
“We were the Ancients’ colonists,” Sam confirmed. “There are a few minor differences from evolving in different climes, but they went to a lot of effort to make similar and stable environments for us. There’s always grass and trees.”
“Huh.”
“And Earth is one of the most advanced colonies, since it’s one of the oldest,” Vala added. “The Tau’ri were mostly left alone after the Ancients left, so their technology really flourished.”
He shrugged. “I’d say that’s different, but a lot of the planets I’ve been to were visited by other species long before we were. It’s kind of hard to judge an isolated planet in the middle of nowhere against a military race raised by space explorers.”
He told them about the sebaceans – how they were all PeaceKeepers until some of them had the bright idea to split off. They couldn’t seem to wrap their minds around the fact that when he said ‘the entire race’, that included the female population as well.
“I mean, it’s great, it’s just unusual,” Sam said blankly. “Most of our universe runs on patriarchal systems.”
“I’ve seen a couple planets where women are considered the lesser species,” he admitted. “But it’s generally considered an outdated concept. My Earth is still struggling with it.”
“So backwater,” she said playfully. “Have you been to many worlds where the women are in charge?”
“Sure. Sebaceans gravitate towards matriarchies, outside the military. And there’s a lotta species where you can’t tell the difference anyway,” he added. “Mostly, it seems related to how much butt you can kick. Which is why Aeryn is captain of our ship and I’m just the eye candy.”
Sam choked on the chocolate she’d just put in her mouth, and Crichton smirked. “Hey, come on. I know I’m not exactly hot stuff here on Earth, but out in space, it seems like everyone wants in my pants.” When that didn’t help her ability to breathe, he turned to Vala, who smiled and wrapped her arms around her bended knee.
“It’s very romantic. The beauty marrying the great captain,” she teased, and he laughed.
“Well, she only became captain after the fact, but uh… yeah, kinda.”
“How’d you two meet?”
She looked so much like a lovestruck teenager that he had to laugh. “What do you mean, how’d we meet? How’d you meet your husband?”
She just grinned, so he laughed again and leaned forward to snag a piece of chocolate. “It was a prison break. She was one of the guards, I got hijacked by the prisoners, she beat my head in…”
Sam finally stopped coughing to stare at him, and he shrugged again.
“We have what you’d call a complicated history.”
“Love at first pummel?” Vala asked.
“Something like that,” he said, then smiled, remembering those early days. The first time she smiled at him. The night she started teaching him how to fight and he realised she was partly doing it for an excuse to touch him. That tense day with Gilina, when she called him ‘interesting’. That first kiss. The night in the Ancients’ illusion. What they both knew, but didn’t say for so long… “It took us a while to admit it, but…”
“Oh my god,” Sam murmured.
“See? You see what I mean?” Vala asked, and Crichton looked up, startled by what felt like a complete change in tone.
“Oh, that’s horrible,” Sam said, and stuffed another piece of chocolate in her mouth. Vala reached over and took a piece herself, something about it screaming solidarity with her fellow female. “It’s completely unfair.”
“What is?” Crichton asked blankly. “What’s wrong?”
They just glared at him, and he shifted warily, not sure what he’d done wrong.
The conversation drifted. The Goa’uld, Egypt, this world’s Ancients, and what happened when ascended beings tried to help lesser mortals. Sam even admitted to falling in love with one of the Ancients, but it had ended badly. When the Ancient descended to help her a second time, he’d had to become an ordinary thirteen year old boy. The way she talked about it, Crichton couldn’t figure out what had been worse – a thirteen year old with the memories of an Ancient, or having to watch someone you’d loved forget everything he really was.
“The people I care about never seem to come out of it very well,” she said quietly, and Vala reached over to gently hold her knee. Crichton averted his gaze, since he knew he couldn’t do anything else.
They talked about their team. T’ealc, the great warrior, and Daniel, the scholar that could shoot. He and Vala had a strange relationship, he realised – too caught up in their own issues to deal with each other’s, but clearly involved. There was also O’Neill, which amused Crichton to no end. Apparently he had a better sense of humour than he’d had in the movie. He’d been the bossman, until he got promoted out of the loop, but it was clear from the way Sam talked about him that he hadn’t gone too far from her mind.
Weirdly, Crichton had to ask about Mitchell, and both women hesitated, looking awkward.
“What?” he asked. “You don’t like him or something?”
“Oh, no,” Sam said quickly. “No, that – we do. Cam’s a great guy, a good friend. It’s just…”
“It’s very strange,” Vala continued where she’d left off. “Thinking about him while looking at you.”
“Why? We too similar?”
They exchanged glances, Sam pressing her lips together in a pained sort of half-smile. “There is the looks, of course.”
“You act completely differently,” Vala assured him, but then added, “That’s what’s so strange about it.”
Crichton stretched his legs out in front of him and folded his arms over his stomach, nestling back against the bed with an amused grunt. “Well, let me guess, then. You said he was the military type, right? Upright, respects orders, that sort of thing?”
“He has Southern Charm, too,” Vala said, putting on a horrible approximation of an American accent. “Good ole’ boy from Kansas. Has horrible taste in women though. So boring,” she added blandly, and Crichton smirked.
“Jealous?”
“Hah!”
“He’s our team leader,” Sam said, as if that settled the matter, but at his look, she admitted, “And besides, he’s too… Cameron. He plays video games, for crying out loud.”
Crichton’s smirk only got wider, and Vala shrugged. “Personally, I wouldn’t mind the video games, if he didn’t always have that look on his face.”
“What look?” Sam and Crichton both asked, only to exchange smiles at the jinx.
Vala ignored it, pulling her expression into a pretty good impression of Rygel. “This is a problem I want to fix but I’m not allowed to fix it so I’m going to follow orders and not bitch about it even though I clearly want to.” She then raised her eyebrows at Sam. “That look.”
They stared at her for a few seconds, until Crichton looked to Sam, who blinked rapidly for a few seconds before jerking her head in concession. “He does do that a lot,” she admitted. “But it’s better than the one he used to have.”
They both smiled expectantly, and she held up a hand. “No, I… I couldn’t, I…” She hesitated, then glanced back at the door before reluctantly ducking her head. When she pulled it back up again, she’d widened her eyes and opened her mouth in an excited little grin. “The planet is being threatened by explosive reality-warping aliens from the future! This is just like file two hundred and twelve only better ’cause I’m living it!”
Vala burst out laughing, and Crichton snorted, while Sam buried her bright red face in her hands and giggled. “Ohh, that was horrible. I am a horrible person.”
“Oh, oh, I’ve got one!” Vala cried, flailing her hands. When Sam finally managed to peek over her fingers, Vala widened her own eyes, jaw dropping in abject horror. “What do you mean this in an explored, peaceful planet with no chance of danger? What’s the point in going if there’s no risk of death?”
Sam buried her giggles again, and Crichton chuckled, shaking his head. “Wow.”
“He is a good team leader, though,” Sam said, once she’d tamped down her grin. “He keeps us all on track, most of the time. But he thought he was joining SG-1 as a team member, not its leader, and… well, there’s good reason for that. He’s barely old enough for his rank, and he certainly doesn’t have the experience.”
“But he has the heart,” Vala said, and when they met her gaze, it was defiant. “He does. He might be boring and a little bit mean sometimes, but Cameron Mitchell is a good man. I trust him to do the right thing. Always.”
Sam stared at her for a few seconds, then smiled and nodded. “Yeah. Me too.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, staring at the Ancient. “Wh- what makes this John Crichton guy so special? Why give him the knowledge of the universe?”
“Because he was capable of discovering it on his own,” he said simply. “Because he would not have learned its secrets in time to stop it from falling into the hands of those who would misuse it. Because he has the instinct to wield its power. Because he has the compassion to know he must not.”
Cam stared at him quietly for a few seconds, then pointed out, “I’m not a scientist. I’m not smart enough to understand wormholes. Someone points me and I walk over the event horizon, and that’s what I can do with a wormhole.”
“That is why you will not be given this knowledge.”
“Oh. Cool. Just so we’re clear, because… yeah, I’ve heard what that stuff did to this Crichton guy,” he said, then hesitated before asking, “So why involve me at all? Why show me what the wormholes can do?”
“Because there are those in your reality who will discover their power. Because you have the ruthlessness to stop them at any cost. Because you have the goodness in you to understand why you must.”
“Yeah, but surely there were better options. Most of my team is more suited to this! Daniel was an ascended, Sam already gets wormholes, T’ealc’s practically the leader of his people! I’m a pilot.”
“They are qualified, yes. But can you honestly say that none of them would want to see that power? To build it, to have it, to use as a threat they claim they will never follow through on? Do you honestly believe they would not?”
“I have set off nukes.”
“And John Crichton used the wormhole weapon,” he replied. “We once thought that was reason enough to remove the knowledge from him.”
“And wasn’t it?”
“You would use a nuclear weapon. Would you build one?”
“I don’t know –”
“Would you build one?”
He couldn’t answer for a long time. Because he’d used a nuclear warhead. He’d dropped missiles on innocent people. He’d done horrible, unforgivable things. Who the hell was he to pass judgement on anyone?
And yet…
And yet.
If he’d been Einstein, designing the nuclear bomb – if he’d been Sam, or Daniel, or… whoever… with the smarts and talent to build something like that…
“No, I wouldn’t build one.”
“Some threats cannot be avoided,” he said. “There must always be those willing to fight them.”
“You have the power! You can fight your own damn battles!”
“We thought we could. But we are not powerful creatures. Our only natural ability is to trap others in a reality of their own making. Our only technology involves wormholes. We would do more harm than good. We have decided to teach.”
“Those who cannot do…” he muttered. “Yeah… yeah, okay, I get that.”
“And that is why you were shown this reality, and its risks.”
Cam sighed and turned his gaze back to the stars.
Sam wasn’t really sure why she stayed. Vala fell asleep around two, curled up on the bed and surrounded by chocolate wrappings. John watched her with that heartbreakingly open look, and Sam really wished she could bring herself to leave.
She should have. If not to go home, then she should have at least headed to her quarters, but something kept her where she was.
Part of it, she had to admit, was attraction. John was the most effortlessly sensual man she’d ever seen, peering out from under his eyebrows, biting or licking his lips, fiddling with his fingers, and every move he made was a smooth slide that drew her eyes, whether it was the tilt of his head or the shift of his legs. She was pretty sure he wasn’t aware of it, but whenever they stopped talking for more than thirty seconds, she found herself thinking things she shouldn’t.
Another part of it was fascination. He was from another reality. And not just one a few degrees away from theirs – he was from a place where everything was different. Where aliens came in a million shapes and colours, where Earth was practically the final frontier to the rest of the Universe, where Cameron Mitchell was a scientist warrior named John Crichton and Vala Mal Doran was his devoted soldier love. She wanted to know all about it.
And part of it, the cold, scientific side of her, knew it was because she wanted to know about wormholes. Even if he didn’t know anymore, she wanted to know what he could remember, how it got taken away from him and why.
It was that part of her that started talking about the stargate.
He shut down at first, staring at her with an unreadable expression, but she pushed on. She explained how Jack and Daniel had been the first to use it, and then how it worked. His eyes flickered slightly when she described the dialling mechanism, and she knew she’d got him.
When she started extrapolating, talking about her own theories about how maybe the wormholes could be used in other ways, he suddenly sharpened, losing his allure and becoming far more like the man he looked like. She even paused for a second to check. “Wait… Cam?”
“No,” he said, barely moving enough to get the word out. “Still me.”
It was kind of weird, but then he’d hardly be the first person she’d met who separated work and life into two completely different personalities. So she cleared her throat and continued, explaining how some of the accidents they’d had made her think about the possibilities of wormholes. Of time travel and different realities. That maybe all wormholes were connected, across all time and space. The stargates just worked on a single wavelength, dialling specific locations on a preset network. If they could build on that, then they could literally go anywhere they wanted. Any time they wanted.
“Time travel’s not safe,” he said suddenly. “You start changing the past and there’s no telling what’ll happen to the future.”
“That’s the theory, but my experience with it has told me that… that history will always try to fix itself,” she said. “It will avoid paradoxes. And – and that’s why the time ripples can’t effect the people who change the past. Because you, as a person, are a singular being, and the time field can’t reach you if you’re not within the blast radius.”
“But that theory implies that you then have to remove yourself from the singularity,” he argued. “By going back in the past, you remove yourself from time. Because the you that will be created following your changes to the past will still exist. But they will have different memories than you, so the you that’s affecting the past is, by the sheer fact of existing, a paradox.”
“But that’s not my experience,” she said. “I’ve lived this, John. I went back to 1969, I saw history change.”
“Hey, I’ve had time travel too, twice over,” he said. “I’m not saying that you’re wrong, because it matches one example of what I experienced. But that had some serious magic mumbo jumbo going on along with it. You’re talking about straight-up wormhole science.”
“There’s no difference.”
“Yeah, there is. There is science, and then there’s magic. Two completely separate rule books.”
She scoffed. “Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.”
“No it is not!” he cried. “You are comparing sex and unity here; they are two completely separate things. And – no, you know what, no, I’m not getting into that argument. Your whole life is that argument and I do not want to be a part of it,” he said firmly, then pointed at her. “We agree that wormholes are cosmic entities, physical and scientific, completely measurable and, with the right knowledge, controllable, right?”
“Within certain limitations, yes. Chaos theory is somewhat quantifiable,” she agreed. “But there will always be a certain level of instability. Time travel falls into that grey area. When you go back in time, your reality ceases at that point, and you are removed from it, as a singular, complete human. It’s like being a leaf lying on a pond. When you are removed, there are ripples that effect everything around you, but you yourself can’t get wet until you are put back in the pond.”
He grunted like she was causing him physical pain, and the argument continued. It was kind of thrilling, because it was the kind of fight she hadn’t had for a long time, almost since college. And it was the first time she’d been able to use her practical experiences in a theoretical discussion. She’d always been bound by military confidentiality before, or else the people she was talking to didn’t have the academic knowledge that she did. It lasted over twenty minutes before John gave in, citing different realities having different rules of plausibility, which was basically a very nice way of saying ‘let’s agree to disagree’. She didn’t let him have it.
“No, if wormholes are what we’ve agreed them to be, physical and cosmic entities—”
“—measurable and controllable—” he quoted with her, since that was the statement they kept coming back to.
“—then they are the constant that exists across all realities. So that means all realities have to abide by the same basic rules.”
“No,” he said. “No, that’s not right.”
“How is it not right? You are living proof! How else could you get here, from another reality, unless there are fundamental rules which allow our realities to connect? How could they connect if they don’t abide by identical rules?”
“Oh, come on, Sam, universal variables are basic knowledge,” he snapped, and looked around, hands flexing. “I need a pen. Paper.”
“Hold on,” she grumbled, and crawled over to the bedside table. As expected, there was a bible in the bottom drawer, and she went out into the hallway to break the pen off the sign in sheet outside the door. She barely acknowledged the weird look the guard gave her for still being here and looking so grouchy at three in the morning, let alone stealing pens, just slammed the door shut and threw John the pen.
“Okay, so wormholes stretch everywhere. A network like the multiverse nervous system, whatever,” he said, sketching a rough series of lines on the inside of the bible cover. Sam had a brief flash of Cameron wincing when he saw a cross thrown on the ground, but was too caught up in the academic debate to think about sacrilege too much. “This theory only really works if there exists a central point, yes? A prime universe—reality—where the rules are absolute.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Everything else is an offshoot of a prime reality, that’s standard M theory. It’s just the details that get lost.”
“Okay, good, now for the sake of argument, we’re going to agree that neither you nor I live in the prime reality. We’re gonna call that Alpha. Alpha encountered one difference. That was a split. New world. Beta. Probably mostly identical, just one little difference. Then Beta splits. Gamma. Probably still not much to write home about. It splits again. Delta, Epsilon, Zeta, all the way down to Omega, and that’s when things start getting funky. The pyramids are built by aliens. Twenty-first century humans know what a spleen does. All that fun stuff. But go back to Alpha. And the way it split with Beta, it also split into Fehu. Which led to Uruz. Purisaz. All the way to Dagaz. And that seems weird too. Blue ferns, people who have to stitch their faces together to keep their skin on. Different rules. The further out you go, the more different things are. The more things change. The rules get looser, and they split in different ways.”
As he spoke, his hands kept moving, sketching lines and cross hatches, each one identified by a symbol. She recognised them at first – Ancient Greek, then runes, and then something that looked like Ancient, before he started using different symbols altogether.
“The rules change. Gods are higher evolved beings. Magic exists. Technology is the one truth. All are true, but none match, because by this point we’re too far gone from Alpha to recognise anything but the similarities. Humans. Bipedal sentient beings. And the one constant that networks across all of them: wormholes,” he said, and finally his hand stopped, pen frozen at the end of a complex symbol that he just stared at blankly.
Sam frowned, recognising the change in his mood. “John?”
He dropped the pen and bible like they’d burned, and then scrambled to his feet, hands rising to hover near his ears. “No. No, no, no, I left it behind, I’m not interested,” he muttered, pacing away from her. His voice dropped out of her hearing, moving into snarls and desperation with only short half-sentences clear enough for her to follow. “Happy. I’m happy with how things are… Aeryn and Deke… Promised her. Promised! No more wormholes. Not interested. No.”
“John,” she said again, louder.
He muttered something under his breath, and when he reached the wall he leaned into it, fists twisting against the plaster. “Chose Moya. Left Earth. I chose that. I chose… oh, god, no, please…”
“Crichton!” she shouted, and as Vala stirred on the bed, he snapped around to look at her, all sharp edges and barely contained fury. She took a half-step back despite herself.
“Oh, no,” Vala muttered, breathing in through her nose and rolling onto her back. “Are you two still fighting over time travel?”
Sam glanced at her, then back up at John. Gone was the sweetly sensual man. The brilliant theorist had disappeared in a flash. All that was left was tightly coiled fury and eyes that did not look right. She stretched her hand toward the bed, signalling for Vala to stay down. “John.”
“What are you?” he demanded lowly. “What are you doing to me?”
“John, I –”
“Don’t lie to me!” he yelled, and then jerked his arm up and out to point at her. The tendons in his arms stood out like wires. “Don’t you dare lie to me.”
“I swear,” she said quietly. “I swear I don’t know what you’re upset about. If you explain it to me, then –”
“That would take too long.”
At the new voice, everyone flinched and looked around, and Vala nearly screamed at the sight of the man stepping out of the shadows of the bathroom. At first, he seemed like a small, thin man on the wrong side of middle-age, but his eyes were completely black, and he radiated power. John bared his teeth, shoulders hunching. “Einstein.”
The man looked at him quietly for a few seconds. “Truth.”
“Has nothing to do with you!” he spat.
“Truth.”
“You said you’d take it away! You said that if I built that thing you’d never let me use the knowledge again!”
“Truth.”
“It was gone! It was all gone! It was done!” he sobbed. Actual tears spilled down his cheeks, and Sam stared at them. She’d never seen Cameron cry. Not once.
“Truth.”
John just stared at him, crying soundlessly.
“Truth.”
He looked away, then back again. “And lies.”
“Truth.”
“Hurts.”
“Truth.”
“Heals.”
“Truth”
“Will set you free!” he yelled. “You tell me, Einstein! What truth do you want me to know?”
He stopped, gaze flickering around the room before returning to him. “We were wrong.”
“What?”
“We thought that we were the only ones who could comprehend wormhole technology,” he said. “We thought that the only way anyone would ever learn it would be if we were to give them the knowledge.”
“Well, you know, thought put a feather in the ground,” he snarled. “What happened? Who screwed you?”
“You did.”
“I did not. The only person who knows, who could’ve…” He looked at Sam. “It was only when I talked to her. When I… she brought it back. I didn’t –”
“You were further along in the wormhole knowledge than you realised,” the stranger said. “And you gave that information to a creature known as Furlow.”
John stilled. “No,” he said, his head jerking around. “No, she didn’t… Aeryn told me about… she – Furlow… Furlow built a replica of my module just from seeing it. And she saw the weapon… Frell.”
“We did not put that knowledge in her head,” the stranger said. “We cannot take it out.”
“So kill her!”
“We cannot.”
“You can!” he shouted. “You build weapons to blow up solar systems!”
“You built the Farscape module before you ever met the one you called Jack,” he said. “You learned the knowledge that set Furlow on her way. You, John Crichton. There will be others like you.” He turned his head, and Sam flinched. He was staring at her. “There are already those like you.”
“Sam?” Vala asked quietly, and she shook her head. She had no idea what was going on either.
John was still crying, but he seemed to be under slightly more control now. He closed his eyes, hand thumping against his leg. “S- Y- okay, fine. Fine, it… the secret’s gonna get out, all hell is gonna break loose, what am I supposed to do about it?”
“We cannot touch Furlow. We cannot engage with…” The stranger stared at her for another moment, “those like her. You can.”
“No,” John said firmly, pointing at him. “No, I’m not gonna be your hitman.”
Sam flinched. “What?”
“No!” Vala snapped, rolling off the bed. She came to a stop in front of Sam, arms out protectively. “No one is hurting Sam!”
“Exactly,” John agreed. “And besides, this isn’t my reality. Not my problem. And even if it was, it’s still not my problem. Because we had a deal, Einstein. Wormholes can do whatever they like, and people can do whatever they like with them, because they no longer have anything to do with me. You took the knowledge out of my brain –”
“I can put it back.”
“No!” he yelled. “I don’t want it!”
“That is not truth,” the stranger replied. “All it took was one small push. One simple conversation. And you were trying to understand them again.”
John shook his head hard and turned away, folding his hands behind his neck. “No. No, no, no, don’t… no. Promised Aeryn. Promised me.” He spun around again, glaring hard. “I have a family now. A son to protect.”
“This knowledge can keep him safe.”
“The hell it –”
“Time,” the stranger said sharply. “Speeds and stops.”
John froze for a full five seconds, before his arms dropped to hang by his sides.
“How will you keep him safe? How will you hide him amongst the stars?” the stranger asked. “There is a planet that will do this. A planet you cannot reach without our knowledge.”
“Earth,” John whispered, “is only safe when no one can get to it.”
“Then you must ensure no one else can.”
“You don’t…!” He stopped again, his hand curled into claws over his head. “You don’t know! What it is you’re asking me, you don’t know. This isn’t… this isn’t just… wormholes, knowledge, safety of my son, this is… my head. It’s mine. It’s finally all mine. There’s no pain, no pressure, nothing but me,” he whispered, and thumped his chest. “If it comes back… so does he.”
“Perhaps.”
The two men just stared at each other for a few seconds, before John dropped to his knees and then further until his forehead touched the carpet. He stayed there, and Sam looked up at the stranger. “What… what are you asking him to do?”
“That is no concern of yours,” he said, and she clenched her fists.
“That’s not fair. It’s not fair. You can’t just bring him here, torture him like this, in front of us, and then act like we’re not involved!”
“I am asking him to accept the consequences of knowing the truth about wormholes,” he said coldly. “This is what it leads to, Samantha Carter. And yet you persist in your quest for truth.”
“Leave her alone,” John said, barely lifting his head from the carpet. “She doesn’t know anything.”
“She will. Give her time, she will learn.”
“You don’t know that,” he snarled, pushing himself back to his knees. “You didn’t know that with me, you don’t know it with Furlow. They’re just travellers. That’s all they use it for. And Furlow, she just… she’s a capitalist, she’s just… she’s… I’ll… I’ll find her. I’ll find her, I’ll stop her. I will. Just…”
“Will you take back what we took?”
He closed his eyes, but nodded. It looked more painful than anything Sam had ever seen. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll… I’ll do what needs to be done. Hell, I’ll even take Harvey if it helps me keep Deke safe. Aeryn’s gonna kill me,” he added with a humourless laugh. Then he lifted his hand as if to hold off the stranger and staggered to his feet. “Gimme a microt before we go. I gotta… gotta talk to these girls.”
“We will need the transdimensional sifter if you are to return,” the stranger said, and John glared.
“I don’t even know…” He paused, then clenched his eyes shut. “Oh, come on! Five minutes, you couldn’t give me five minutes before starting to put stuff in my head?”
“You are more likely to know where the sifter is located.”
He sighed and turned his back on the man, moving over to stand in front of Vala. He pulled his lips into his mouth, then smiled at her weakly. “Sorry. About all this.”
“What’s going on?” she asked, and he shrugged.
“Life… sucks. My life, specifically,” he said, and reached up to hold her face in his hands. Sam couldn’t see clearly, but he stroked his thumb over her cheek, and the soft look came back. “You are beautiful, no matter who you are. He might never tell you that, and if he can’t see it, he doesn’t deserve you. But you should know it, Vala Mal Doran. You are beautiful.”
“You only like me for my looks,” she said, trying to laugh, but his smile was kind.
“You deserve better than that. Hold out for it, okay?” He waited until she nodded, and then pulled her into his shoulder. As he hugged her, he looked up to meet Sam’s gaze. “I know about wormholes. Knew, actually. Will know. Not right now, but it’s coming back. Soon, I’ll know how to do terrible, horrible, apocalyptic things with wormholes. That kind of power is… wrong. No one should ever have that.”
She smiled helplessly. A lot of people said that about nuclear weapons too, but they all had those, now.
“That’s why they took it away from me,” he said, as he let Vala go. She leaned into his shoulder instead, clinging to the gentle strength he was currently providing. How he was managing it when he’d literally broken down only a few minutes prior, Sam couldn’t understand, but she was lost in his eyes all the same. “But… the knowledge is out there for people to find, so… apparently these guys want me fighting fire with fire. My versions of the Ancients,” he explained wryly. “They’re a little more liberal with their um… interference.”
“I wish you could tell me more,” she said, and pushed her hands in her back pockets. “Why’d they bring you here?”
“Ahh, well… probably a few reasons. I wouldn’t have had that discussion we had with anyone back home,” he said, and then sighed again. “And he needed to get me away from Aeryn and Chiana and… all the people who would’ve stopped me from saying yes. And… and he probably wanted to show you what the knowledge did to me. You’re smart, Sam. You’re gonna figure it out one day, and… and when that happens, it’s gonna be up to you to decide what you do with the knowledge.”
“I’ll do what you did,” she said. “I’ll do what needs to be done.”
He stared at her, a small, horrible smile twisting his lips. “No, Sam,” he said, and gently pried Vala off. “I don’t think you will. But that’s your problem. I got my own reality to deal with. Ain’t that right, Einstein?”
The stranger only looked at them, patient and waiting. John scoffed and took the last step forward to bring himself into her personal space.
His eyes were still red-rimmed, tears wet on his cheeks. But as he chewed his lip and stared into her eyes, all of that faded away. Once again, he was the easy, comfortable man she’d found herself attracted to all night.
He chuckled at whatever was on her face.
“It ain’t me, honey,” he said. “I know you don’t believe in magic, so maybe believe that knowledge shines through. Even when it’s hidden. Everybody only loves me for my brain.”
She blinked, and he laughed, then gently leaned down and closed his lips over hers.
Just like the rest of him, it was soft and slow, but firmly reassuring. She almost melted into it, but he pulled away before he could, pressing his lips together in a guilty, sympathetic smile.
“I need the ball,” he whispered. “In your pocket.”
She blinked, then tore her gaze away and looked down, taking the artefact out to hand it over. Once he took it, he used the hand holding it to brush a knuckle against her cheek, then turned away.
“Let’s get this show on the road.”
The stranger nodded, and there was a flash of blue light, before John stumbled. Sam and Vala jerked forward, and that was all the distraction it took for the stranger to disappear.
The argument was loud and predictable, and ended with Aeryn and Crichton kneeling together in the middle of their quarters, clinging to each other and crying.
By the next day, Crichton’s arms and reams of paper spread all over maintenance bay one were covered in equations and he was found curled in a ball in the middle of it, visibly hating himself but calm, because he’d finally found a way to keep his son safe from the people who would use him.
And as Chiana sang little D’Argo to sleep, Aeryn wrapped herself around her husband, and swore to keep him safe in return.
“No, it was amazing,” Cam said as he shovelled more food into his mouth. “These aliens, Jackson, they were just incredible. Just on this one ship, there were like five different species, and the ship itself! The ship itself was alive! Oh, hey girls.”
Sam and Vala nodded as they joined the table. They’d both slept in late after reporting in to General Landry that morning, the late night and stressful end exhausting them both. Cam, however, seemed even more energised than normal, and had apparently been gushing about his adventures in the other reality to anyone that would listen.
“Only about half of these people even looked remotely human. One of them had an extra eye, that was Nianti. And there was Chiana, who… I mean, first of all, she was grey, like her skin, which is weird enough, but the way she held herself was like…” He paused to contort his back for a few seconds before going back to his food. “And the only one I thought actually was human turned out to be this whole other race. Cold-blooded, can you believe it? And she looked exactly like Vala.”
“Aeryn,” Vala surmised, and Cam stopped eating long enough to look at her. She frowned, fingers tightening around her coffee mug. “John told us about her. Aeryn.”
“Yeah,” he said, and for a few seconds, it was awkward. He glanced at Daniel, then coughed and asked, “She uh… she and John apparently have a real… thing.”
“Yeah,” she agreed.
Daniel raised his eyebrows, utterly incapable of knowing exactly what Vala and Cam had seen in their counterparts’ lovers to affect them so badly, but Sam gave him a firm warning look to keep him silent until they were ready to talk again.
“Anyway, it was… amazing. Really cool,” Cam continued, obviously forcing himself a little now. “Wish I’d been able to stick around for more than twenty-four hours.”
“So did anything happen, while you were there?” asked Sam. “We had that world’s version of an Ancient here, for a little while. You see anything like that?”
“Ancient?” he repeated, looking up with wide eyes. “No. No, didn’t see anything like that.”
“Really? Well, did they tell you anything?” she asked. “Wormholes are apparently a big thing, with John… That come up at all?”
He shovelled another forkful of food into his mouth and chewed slowly, watching her from under furrowed brows. On anyone else, it might have seemed like a delaying tactic, but she knew Cam better than that. It was just that like any proper soldier, he prized food where he could get it, and his expression was hard by default. When he swallowed, he smiled, as innocent and full of excitement as ever. “No. I dunno about John, but um… wormholes only came up when I explained how the stargates work, and uh… yeah, apparently they’re kind of a taboo topic. Sorry, Sam.”
“Oh, no, that kind of fits,” she said. “Shame though. John apparently knows a fair bit about them. Would’ve been nice to learn.”
“Hm,” he said, and went back to his meal, his expression relaxing back into its normal frown as he watched her. “So you didn’t learn anything either?”
“Just about the possibilities,” she said, already thinking about the simulations she could run.
“Possibilities,” Cam repeated quietly, but when she looked at him again, he was focussed on his food.
She smiled and gently nudged Vala, who tried to cheer up, but with Daniel beside her, looking as uninterested as ever, all she managed was a weak chuckle.
And so things continued on. Just another day at Stargate Command.