Chapter Text
Daniel was not having the best month. Actually, that was an understatement. Sha’re was dead. His wife was dead. Teal’c was the one to kill her. He knew that Teal’c had done so just to stop Daniel from being killed, but that didn’t make it any easier. In fact, it made it harder to think about. His life for hers. But, no, that wasn’t the only thing that had happened. No, not at all. He was in an interrogation room. Not even a Goa’uld interrogation room.
An FBI one.
He’d prefer the Goa’uld one. At least that way he’d be able to shoot his way out. Or SG-1 could shoot their way in and then they would shoot his way out.
Daniel shivered and rubbed his arms, the chain of his handcuffs rattling as he did so. The uncomfortable metal chair he had been shoved into was inconveniently placed under an air vent. The FBI agents or the policemen or whatever had arrested him at what Jack would call an unholy hour of the morning. He was still in his sleeping clothes, a worn t-shirt and some slightly too large sweatpants that he may have stolen from Jack. Both were far too thin for this freezing interrogation room.
He still didn’t do too well in the cold, even though it had been three and a half years since he lived on Abydos. And yet, Daniel was still used to the desert climate. Hell, sometimes he was still expecting for people to speak the Ancient Egyptian dialect that the Abydosians used. It was like culture shock, just with his own culture. He shook his thoughts away and sighed. An FBI interrogation room was not the place to contemplate that.
He glanced around the room. The walls were painted a bland, pale, grey-washed blue. There was a one-sided mirror taking up most of the wall he was facing. He’d never been on this side of one of those. They were sometimes used on the base to watch various untrustworthies. There were no pictures or anything in the room. Not even a clock. He had no idea how long he had been in this room, but it had to have been at least two hours. God, he was probably late for work. Jack would freak out when he didn’t come in. The colonel was keeping a close eye on him since the day Daniel had un-resigned.
Daniel wasn’t sure that the FBI needed to inform General Hammond that he had been arrested. He wasn’t actually in the military. He just worked for them.
Daniel rubbed at his temples. He had a headache just thinking about his team’s reaction to finding his apartment trashed. If the police had left by the time they got there, they would assume that Daniel had been kidnapped. Which he had been, kinda, just, you know, legally. They had broken down his door! In the middle of the night and whisked him away. After they had read him his rights, of course.
He startled when the door swung open. Two agents entered the room. He recognized them from the damn raid in his apartment. One was tall, black, and very muscular. He had been the one to tackle and handcuff Daniel. The other was also tall, with neat dark hair and a perfect suit. He was carrying a manila folder. The muscular one sat on the table, looming over Daniel. The other one, who reminded Daniel of the leadership ability of Jack in his serious moments with the poker-face of Teal’c, sat on the chair across from Daniel.
“I’m Agent Hotchner and this is Agent Morgan.” Said the agent across from Daniel. “We’re with the BAU, the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI.”
“I’m Doctor Daniel Jackson, though I suspect you already know that.” He said, glancing at the agents. They didn’t give any indication either way. No nod, no shake of the head.
“Do you know George Artly?” Hotchner asked calmly.
“Yeah?” Daniel’s brow furrowed in confusion. “We worked a dig in Giza together. It was—five or six years ago, maybe?” Definitely a couple years before Cathrine had found him about translating the Stargate. “He broke my nose.” That he remembered quite clearly.
“Why did he break your nose?”
“Uh, an argument about what the hieroglyphs meant? I thought it was literal, but he thought it was metaphorical. Why are we talking about this?” Daniel was confused. Like honestly bewildered. He had never been arrested before—not on Earth anyway—but if it happened, he’d expect it due to something happening about the Stargate, not an infuriating archeologist he met years ago.
“Was that the last argument you had?” Hotchner asked.
“Yeah, I think so?” Daniel said. “I don’t really remember. What’s this about? Did he do something? Look, honestly, he’s an asshole, but I don’t think he’d ever do anything that would,” He gestured vaguely. He knew twenty-three-ish languages (he was still learning the various Goa’uld dialects) and yet he still forgot the word he needed in English. He hated when that happened. “Would, uhh,” He continued to gesture vaguely. Sam would have jumped in be now to give him the word he needed. Except she wasn’t here since he was in an FBI interrogation room.
Daniel ran his hands through his hair, cursing under his breath in the Ancient Egyptian of Abydos. He hadn’t exactly slept in the last, oh, week and a half. “Anziehen! No, that’s German. Attract! Is-is the English word I was looking for.” He caught himself. This wasn’t Stargate Command. No one would fondly complain about his inability to keep to English. “Look, Artly is an asshole, is what I’m saying. But I don’t think he’d be ever do anything that would catch the FBI’s attention.”
“Well, he did.” This time it was Morgan who spoke.
“What did he do? And why am here if he did something?”
“He died.” Morgan took Hotchner’s folder, opened it, and passed a photo to Daniel.
“Died? What—” Daniel cursed harshly in several languages, both alien and not, as he caught a look at the picture. There was blood and body parts and who fucking knew what strewn around that scene. Artly had been eviscerated. Messily. He dropped it onto the table as if it was on fire. It was only due to his adventures with SG-1 and that gore from various fights with the Goa’uld that Daniel didn’t lose his lunch instantly. Still, he had to swallow down the bile that was climbing up his throat.
“And that’s why I’m here?” He looked at them. “You-you think I did this?”
“Where were you on October fifth at ten in the morning?” Hotchner asked placidly.
“The fifth? That’s last Tuesday.” Last Tuesday, Daniel had been on P7M-118, lightyears away from this mess, helping the inhabitants build after a Goa’uld attack. But that was classified to hell and back. He sighed and ran a hand over his mouth and chin. “I can’t tell you that.”
“You don’t remember?” Morgan asked in a disbelieving tone.
“It wasn’t that long ago.” Hotchner said calmly. “Please try to recall what you were doing at ten AM on October fifth.” If Daniel wasn’t in this situation, he’d laugh about how cliche they were. Good cop, bad cop? That was cliche hundreds of years ago.
“No, I can’t tell you.” He repeated.
“You can’t or won’t?” Morgan said. There was an edge to his voice.
Daniel shrugged. He couldn’t tell them because it was classified or he wouldn’t tell them because it was classified. Either worked. “I can’t tell you. Can I have my phone call now?” He needed to talk to General Hammond, like, yesterday.
“Yeah.” Hotchner nodded to Morgan. They got up and left. “Someone will get you a phone.”
——————————————————————————————————————————————
“So, what are you thinking?” Gideon asked in the observation room. He watched as Hotch and Morgan interrogated Dr. Jackson. The man was an odd one. An archeologist working with the US Air Force? But he fit the behavior of the Unsub. Smart, very educated in obscure languages like the cryptic clues that had been painted in blood at the scenes had been written in, emotionally unstable, and had an antagonistic history with all four of the victims.
“He hasn’t slept in a long time.” Prentiss said almost immediately. “Look at the bags under his eyes. It’s been at least seventy-two hours since he slept any more than a three hours.”
“That was when the third body was found,” Gideon said.
“Guilt?” Reid asked as he flipped through their file on Dr. Jackson. “He had a psychotic break from a nervous breakdown only a few months ago. He could have killed them in a psychosis episode and only realized it later.”
“Mm.” Gideon hummed as he watched the doctor struggle with finding a word. “Did you catch that?”
“He said ‘he’s’ not ‘he’d’. Present tense.” Prentiss said.
Gideon nodded. “If he is the unsub and went through a psychotic episode, he might not remember it.”
They kept observing. Dr. Jackson was muttering in some language as he ran his hands through his hair, obviously annoyed with his inability to express himself in English.
“How many languages do you know, Reid?”
“Only English fluently, but I can identify most of them.” The young genius said.
“What’s he speaking now?” Gideon watched Jackson closely. Hotch and Morgan were doing the same thing, of course. The man wasn’t agitated, but he was definitely not stable.
“Uh, sounds vaguely Arabic-like? But also very different than any dialect I’ve ever heard. It’s harsher sounding than most. But—” Reid cut himself off after a particularly harsh word, probably a curse or something similar. “Oh. I think that’s Ancient Egyptian. I-i mean, I’m guessing here, since languages aren’t my forte and Ancient Egyptian, like Hebrew and Arabic, dropped the vowels when writing so we don’t actually know the sound of most of the words.” He cut himself off as a somewhat amused glance came from Gideon, “He studied the language extensively, one of the best in that field.”
“So it’s probable.” Gideon said. Reid nodded.
“So that’s Ancient Egyptian, huh?” Prentiss said.
Morgan just handed the archeologist the goriest crime scene photo, that of George Artly, the second victim. Jackson was obviously surprised and slipped out of English to curse again. The man swallowed harshly but didn’t throw up.
“I’m surprised he didn’t lose his lunch.” Prentiss said. “Even I was queasy at that picture.”
“He’s seen dead bodies before. Fresh ones, not just buried remains.” Gideon tilted his head as he looked at Jackson. “He may have killed before.”
Hotch and Morgan asked where he was when George Artly was killed.
“I can’t tell you that.”
“That’s an interesting response.” Gideon noted. “Not ‘I don’t remember’, not ‘I wasn’t there’, not even ‘I have an alibi’. He said he can’t tell us.”
“You can’t or won’t?” Jackson shrugged, more obviously stressed than he was a few minutes ago. Then again, being accused of murder was stressful.
“I can’t tell you. Can I have my phone call now?”
Morgan and Hotch left the room. They entered the observation room.
“He works for the Air Force at the NORAD base in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, doesn’t he?” Gideon asked rhetorically. The other agents nodded anyway. “He might not actually be able to tell us where he was.”
“You mean if the work he’s doing is classified?” Reid asked.
“He isn’t calling a lawyer,” Hotchner observed. “He’s calling his superior officer.”
The agents shared a glance before they went back to observing their suspect.
——————————————————————————————————————————————
General George Hammond was not having the best day. First there was an attempted breach of the Iris that was welded around the Stargate. Now, there was this.
His phone rang. Not the Red Phone or even the White Phone, but his regular grey phone. General Hammond picked it up, expecting some bureaucratic nonsense. That, however, was not what happened.
“Hello, this is General Hammond speaking.” He said.
“General! It’s me, Daniel!” Some tension in the General’s spine relaxed as he heard their missing archeologist’s voice. Some, not all. Jackson was tense and stressed. He heard it in the younger man’s voice.
“What happened? You nearly gave Colonel O’Neill a heart attack when you didn’t show up.”
“Umm, I-I kinda got arrested.”
“You what?” Hammond might’ve expected that from O’Neill one of these days, but definitely not Daniel. “What for? Where are you?” Maybe a bar fight or just a regular altercation?
“I’m a suspect in a murder case.” Daniel gave a sharp laugh. “I can’t even tell them where I was. I wasn’t even, you know,” Hammond did know. On-World was what the doctor meant. “I’m—I have no idea where I am, actually. The police station a couple blocks from the Starbucks Sam likes, I think?” There was a muffled answer, probably a policeman in the room. “Yeah, they say I’m at the 14th Precinct.”
“Okay. I’ll come down with O’Neill and sort this out.” Hammond rubbed at his forehead. SG-1 was a great team, smart and strong, but they also had the worst luck of anyone Hammond had ever known. The best luck too, since they usually got out of the situations and incidents they found themselves in mostly intact. “We’ll get you out of this, Dr. Jackson, don’t worry.” He hung up. Then he leant forward and pressed the intercom button to his secretary, “Get me SG-1.”