Chapter Text
“She’s late.”
He stands a few feet behind Harriman and the other guys running around the control room, running diagnostics on the gate, and trying not to look desperate when they attempt to contact the off-world team.
It’s taking everything in him to remain calm because he was against this from the start.
“It’s been less than an hour,” Harriman doesn’t bother looking up from all the buttons and dials before him. “SG-7, do you read me?”
He shouldn’t have let her go—but it was one of those things that’s beyond his control, like when she’s pregnant and wants to get stuck in ruins, or when she’s in labor at a system lord’s compound. She won’t go off base—will come up with one of a million reasons not to leave the mountain that day—it’s too hot, it’s raining, she’s tired, Josie is fussy—but they’re all shit excuses.
Won’t step foot onto Earth soil despite him securing their old house—the one with the broken in front door—he’s been back there a few times to start cleaning up, to set up some of the things they need for Josie. Since she didn’t really have a baby shower, and the crib that the Jacksons bought her burned up in the farmhouse fire, they’re really hurting for a lot of the normal baby swag.
All the things he fretted about while trying to stretch out his aching leg on Thea, while she snored in the bedroom with a cat. How he couldn’t put together a crib because he was missing a part and had one extra part and it didn’t feel like the safest thing to stick a newborn in a rickety pile of his failure.
How she put it together in under an hour because she’s able to focus on the details.
Like how no one on SG-7 was thin enough to slip through the cracks in the wall, and the rungs in the ceiling of an old shrine the way she could.
He’s focusing on a few details too.
Like how she hasn’t been cleared medically for active duty yet—she’s also not cleared for sex, but he’s trying to not let it be one of the details he’s focusing on.
Instead, he adjusts his arms and the little girl within them who stares up at him with wide, deep blue eyes as she sucks greedily on a bottle he finally convinced his wife to pump, so he could spend more of his half jacked paternity leave with their daughter, who she seems incapable of allowing anyone else to care for.
Even him.
It’s not that she doesn’t trust him, as told him as much, but she just thinks every single person wants to take their daughter, so she’s trying to be proactive in keeping their daughter safe.
A little too proactive.
When he tries to explain that plenty of people in Colorado Springs have had babies in the last two months, and that none of them have had their newborns stolen from inside bassinets or strollers, she argues that most people don’t have the enemy list she’s accumulated—and, well, he can’t argue with that.
He and the Jacksons are trying to get her to be more open with the therapist—not because there’s anything wrong with her, or because she’s mentally unsound—but her obsession with keeping Josie safe is sort of starting to get in the way of them doing normal things, like taking a walk in the park, like living off base, like maybe having sex—he doesn’t know about that one, but he has an inkling.
So, when the other him just scheduled her to go off-world with a team full of air men that she’s never worked with before in order for her to slink through a primitive security system to lay claim to a sizeable amount of treasure in the form of tomes written by the ancients, he’s surprised she jumped at the opportunity.
Josie’s hand touches his thumb. She’s been starting to reach for things, for people, mostly for Vala, but sometimes when he gets to her before his wife does, she’ll reach for him just the same.
It’s not exactly professional, standing in the gate room, waiting for his wife to get back from a mission she shouldn’t have even been on while feeding their two-month-old daughter the last bottle of pumped breast milk he has, but if he’s learned anything over the years—especially in the last one—rules don’t really matter anymore.
“You get through to them yet?” Despite the tiny hand grasping onto his thumb, his voice is terse, because even though he didn’t authorize her going—he doesn’t have any type of authority over her anymore as a husband or as the team leader—he authorized it anyway.
“Not yet, Colonel.” Harriman, angles his head slightly, offering him attention, but still more focused on the console and comm in front of him.
Josie finishes eating, continuing to suck the air out of the bottle before he pries it from her mouth. She smacks her lips together, a bit of bubbling mixture of breast milk and drool leaking from the corner of her mouth, as she offers him just the weakest of grins.
He should take her back to the room, try to spend his day bonding with her since he’s missed a little less than half her life at this point, but he knows if something happens, especially just after he leaves, he’ll have to wake a sleeping baby and lug her down to the command room because there’s no one else to watch her.
As he’s weighing his decisions, someone he really doesn’t want to see—the one who’s responsible for this whole damn thing—enters the command room, dressed up to the nines in his full Colonel’s uniform.
Show off.
The guy doesn’t even acknowledge him and strides by him and his milk leaky daughter, to stand beside Harriman.
“Any intel from SG-7?”
“No, Sir.”
“Alright, contact me if they remain radio silent and become overdue by two more hours.”
Harriman is obviously a little taken back by the guy’s lack of concern, but when he glares down, waiting for a proper answer, he nods. “Yes, Sir.”
Again, the guy moves to march right by him, onto bigger and better things like paperwork.
Dozens of trees worth of paperwork instead of changing a baby’s diaper.
“Don’t you think that’s kind of pushing it?”
The other him continues to play deaf—who knows, maybe there was an irregularity in the copy—intent on exiting the room before a conversation happens.
But he has other plans.
Reaching out, he catches himself under the bicep, purposefully wrinkling his ironed jacket.
“Hey—”
His double wrenches his arm away, shaking it off like he might have set it on fire, glaring at him with stern eyes he’s never seen on himself. “Do not—”
“Then answer me.”
The other him rolls his shoulders, attempting to relax himself, to regain his good composure among all the other air men—figures if they were alone, his attitude would be really different—he’s never gotten aggressive or threatening with him, but Vala does not like the other him.
Which is a good enough reason for him.
In a low voice, as if issuing a warning, other him replies, “if you have a problem with the way I’m running my missions, then I suggest you take it up with General Landry when he returns from Washington.”
“Why’d you send her?”
More importantly, if she hates the other him, why did she agree to go?
The other him cocks his head to the side, as if he misheard what was asked—as if something about the question has piqued his interest.
“I needed someone who could fit through the—”
“You needed someone to offer up as sacrifice, to set off the traps.”
Josie starts to fuss in his arms, her little legs covered by feety pajamas twitching in the air as he immediately adjusts her, trying to get her to calm so that the conversation can continue.
“She didn’t have to say yes, Colonel—”
“But you knew she wouldn’t say no.”
Other him remains standing straight, but starts to lean over, his feet never sliding from their spot on the tiled floor. In a hushed whisper, but on that promotes a challenge, he poses, “and what does that say about her?”
In high school he had some self-esteem issues, but he’s never hated himself more.
Before he can lash out, before the other air men and Harriman in the tight room jump up to pull him off of—well, him—the baby in his arms hits nuclear and just starts screaming, unhappy with the raised voices, unhappy with the prospect of another him—who she won’t even look at—and most of all, unhappy with the absence of her mother.
“Oh, Honey, it’s okay.”
He flips her so she’s leaning against his shoulder, wailing with one of his large hands covering her whole back. He can feel how hot she’s getting, see how red her face is, and feel the air she inhales as her back expands.
“Looks like you have other duties to attend to, Colonel,” other him speaks with a sneer, turning on spot to continue marching to the doorway. “I suggest you take the baby and retreat to your room where she won’t be a disturbance to anyone on duty.”
His shoes echo as they clomp down the metal steps from the control room, the to the hallway back to his office—what used to be his office. When there’s no sight or sound of him, Josie calms to a whimper in his arms.
“I’ll be in our room. The moment she comes back, you contact me, okay?”
“Of course, Colonel.” Harriman nods, squeaking, half-turning in his chair. “Colonel?”
“Yeah?”
He’s distracted. Worried. About Vala, about SG7, about whatever else the other him has done.
Everyone he’s spoken too—without even asking—has told him what an asshole the other him is.
How he lacks the soul that he has, and it’s scary and disturbing because not only does he feel responsible for bringing the guy to life, but that it’s part of him willingly sending teams out into the unknown without caring enough to relay with the research department, without doing the background work and making sure that everyone is okay with where they’re going, without really caring if they come back alive or in a body bag.
If his wife comes back alive or—
She said she didn’t like him.
Actually, she said that she can’t stand him and refuses to be in a room alone with him.
All of those are warning signs, something that he’s asked her about, because if she doesn’t trust a guy who for all purposes is him minus a bit of the personality and heart that got him to where he is today, it’s a red flag in his book.
But she just fed him some measly story about having an exchange with him that didn’t go as planned. He didn’t push but made note of it to keep the other him away from his wife because that can lead to some entanglements that he’s not sure they could straighten out.
“Josie isn’t disturbing us.” Harriman adds with a small smile, maybe actually happy to see a baby on the base for once because sometimes it’s nice to remember that from all the shit they have to deal with on a regular basis that good things happen too—hell, he can’t think of a time anyone is happier than when someone with a new baby or new puppy comes to do rounds.
His cheek grazes the top of Josie’s head, where the tuft of puppet hair she was born with is starting to spread out more, starting to lighten despite not really getting outside that much—or at all.
He resigns to head back to the room, but there are worse ways he can think to spend the day.
“I know.”