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Daniel was slow leaving the Unas clan's cave. It wasn't just fatigue; he was dragging, dawdling. He had trouble, sometimes, making the transition from fight-for-your-life to it's-over-and-now-we-have-to-get-home. For Jack the tricky time was right after he got back, when normal life felt more alien than whatever alien world he'd been on. For Daniel it was overcoming the post-adrenaline slump to get there.
Carter was up ahead covering the entrance, Teal'c around the bend behind them covering the rear. They'd already stayed long enough for Daniel to sketch in a rough picture of what happened to him, and that was longer than they should have. The young buck's shambling exit had looked pretty final, but Jack didn't trust his authority over the others to stick. He wanted to be well clear in case somebody pointed out that the skinny hornless guys with the firesticks softened the old guy up for him and a more vengeance-minded alpha wannabe took a shot and won.
Jack dropped back to take Daniel by the elbow. He looked like he needed the support, and sometimes a gentle touch could turn the ignition when his engine stalled. Daniel wrenched away with something like a snarl, a guttural sound snapped out like an order. Seemed like he'd picked up more than verbal language from his new pal.
"Sorry," Daniel said, in that way he had of mumbling politenesses he didn't mean. "Just ... " He shook himself, then took a stagger-step to catch his balance. He was holding his arm as if Jack's light touch had left a bruise.
Just don't, Jack finished for him. He'd had enough manhandling. I get it. My mistake. "We gotta move, Daniel."
"I know." Daniel looked back one more time, as if there were something to see in the flickering shadows, then waved loosely in the direction of the cave mouth. "OK."
They came out squinting into daylight. Carter said "Clear, sir" and told him she'd apprised SG-2 that they had Daniel in hand. Jack appreciated the brevity enough not to wince at the phrasing. Nineteen klicks back to base camp, another eight to the gate, and Daniel dehydrated, underfed, sleep-deprived -- not the time to fill him in on specifics. He gestured for Carter to take point, and set off after her, with Teal'c behind Daniel. Carter set a considerate pace. Daniel didn't keel over or trip on anything in his fatigue. He ate the snacks they passed him and sipped regularly from the canteen. They hiked in silence, with brief rest breaks every forty minutes. They wouldn't make the gate by dark, but they might just make the dig site.
At the halfway point, with a comfortable distance between them and the cave, Jack called a longer halt so that Carter could see to the facial laceration that Daniel claimed was just a scratch.
"Loder didn't make it, did he," Daniel said, after Carter had cleaned the crusted blood and soil away and said that it didn't look deep enough to warrant sutures. It had started bleeding, reopened by the antiseptic wipes. Daniel was applying pressure with a sterile pad while she got the stuff out to dress it.
"No," Jack said.
Nobody said anything else. The bleeding stopped. Carter taped on some fresh gauze, then cleaned up his bloody wrists and put cream on the chafing. She didn't fuss -- Carter was professional and efficient -- but Daniel shifted uncomfortably, not happy about being fussed over. At the fifteen-minute mark they got going again. Gave Snake Lake a wide berth. Got to camp as the sun was dropping into the mountains.
Jack wanted Daniel in the SGC infirmary stat. He'd been knocked unconscious, he'd drunk unpurified water from a place that evolved sentient parasites, and the mark on his face had pretty obviously been scored by a you-don't-know-where-that-thing-has-been claw. But a night hike through the forest between them and the gate was out. Even with two moons up they'd need flashlights, which might attract any other Unas roaming around, and if Daniel crapped out, then either Teal'c would be hindered by having to carry him, or two of them would have their hands full with a litter. He didn't expect trouble, but he didn't know if there were rival clans around, didn't know if there was an Unas grapevine, didn't know whether an event like this would send ripples of unrest out into a bigger pond than they could see. He radioed Coburn, told him to dig in for one more night. Coburn would dial home and let Hammond know. Griff was in the infirmary, but he had Pierce and Bellamy and plenty of ordnance.
He cranked up the generator to run the lights, and had Daniel stand watch with him while he could still stand so that Carter and Teal'c could wolf down some MREs. Then he sat Daniel down at a camp table to eat more slowly.
They looked out across the dig site. Didn't look sandy enough be an ancient seabed. More like dry mud. Maybe an ancient lakebed. But what did he know.
"There's something else," Daniel said.
There usually was. Jack waited.
After a while, Daniel said, "I mean, there's something you haven't told me. I'm assuming there were more casualties. You'd have brought more backup. There'd be people here looking after the site."
They were cornering the table, Daniel at one end, Jack ninety degrees to his right. They had breakfast like this every morning after they'd spent a night together, sitting the same way, whether at his dining-room table or in Daniel's kitchen. He didn't usually think about stuff like that on duty. Two separate worlds. Only way it could work. But there were times. This was a time.
"Casualties were Tran and Griff," he said. "Fatalities were Sanchez, Hawkins, and Rothman."
Daniel flinched, then looked sharply away. After a second, he let out a low sound, like the kind a sick animal made when you tried to move it.
Jack said, "I'm sorry," because it was what you said. He was glad Daniel had finished eating before he started asking questions, although he figured that was deliberate. Then he was less glad, because it looked like Daniel might upchuck. He offered Daniel a canteen. Daniel shook his head, then reached for it anyway. Drank, capped it. Looked out across the graveyard of primordial Goa'uld.
"How?" he said.
"Hawkins and Rothman were Goulded. We don't know for how long. They attacked us and two members of SG-2 on the way up to the cave. Teal'c shot Hawkins." He hesitated for only a fraction of a second, but he knew the tiny silence roared. "I shot Rothman."
How many times had he said he wanted to kill the guy? And now he had. I'm not too good at people. They're too ... recent. He was Daniel's friend. Daniel's protégé and colleague. Asthmatic, undisciplined, a snarky pain in the ass. He'd been out of breath when he came through the gate, as though he'd been in pursuit with everyone else right after the abduction and someone had sent him running back for help. That might account for the three hours if Hawkins hadn't been Goa'ulded yet either, except that Hawkins wouldn't have waited that long to call for backup. The dig site was only five miles from the gate -- through forest, yeah, but walkable in a little over an hour in daylight. Even an Unas couldn't have outdistanced them that fast encumbered with two hundred pounds of deadweight Daniel, and Hawkins and Sanchez and Tran would have emptied as many clips into the thing as it took to bring it down, shooting its legs out from under it if they had to, if it had Daniel slung over a shoulder. Sanchez was a crack shot. They all had plenty of ammo.
None of it made sense unless a snaked Rothman had hung back, waiting or deliberating, and then come to fetch more hosts from Earth. In retrospect, Jack thought, his distress was overacted and his facts didn't add up. Three hours? Nobody waited three hours to get in contact after the kind of attack Rothman described. Nobody was still that shaken and confused after three hours. But he'd written it off as typical Rothman. He'd had that little use for the guy. So he'd missed the signs that it wasn't Rothman talking. Let him get away with turning right back around and going out again, instead of making him follow post-mission protocol and submit to an MRI. It might not have changed much. Rothman would still be dead, or he'd be wishing he were. But it wouldn't have been Jack who fired the rounds.
"Teal'c felt the same way after Kawalsky," Daniel said quietly. "I don't know if you know that." He'd looked at Jack again, at some point, and Jack had screened it out of his vision, on purpose.
For a split second he was angry. Not surprised that Daniel could read him, but what the fuck, reopening that old wound? Then he got it. Didn't know what to say, didn't know what to do with it, but he got it.
He said to Daniel what Teal'c had said to him. "He was your friend."
"Yeah." Daniel nodded. He even smiled a little; he'd liked Rothman that much, so much that the smile reflex trumped the grief response even when he could still barely breathe from the gut punch. "We had good times, in California. Crazy times. He was an amazing runner then. The stuff we pulled ... We laughed. All the time." The smile faded. He took a slug from the canteen, put it down, lined it up parallel to his edge of the table. "Tell me what happened."
Jack told him about Rothman gating in, about the clues he'd missed, about finding Hawkins and the clues he'd missed there too, mistaking bad Goa'uld puppeteering for shell-shock when he should have known better, when he knew that men with Hawkins' experience didn't go into that kind of dazed funk until it was over. Daniel said that suggested the Goa'ulding was recent, that in both cases the symbiote was still learning what it needed to know to pass as the host. Jack said maybe. He told Daniel what Teal'c figured out at the lake; Daniel said that he knew it was snake-infested, that he'd tried to swim across and made it back barely in time, that a snake had leaped out of the water after him and the Unas had snatched it out of the air and wound up roasting it for supper. Then he had to tell Daniel about the sting Teal'c set up, and how Rothman's snake had failed to hide the evidence that it broke its restraints too, and nailed Griff in the shoulder with a staff blast. He didn't tell Daniel about the look on Rothman's face, after he was hit but before he fell. He didn't tell Daniel that it was Rothman's shock, Rothman's uncomprehending betrayal that he saw when Rothman looked at him, as though Rothman had been jerked out of a sound sleep to find Jack shooting him full of holes, and couldn't understand why Jack was hurting him like that. I'm still not awake yet, Colonel. I'm sorry.
The snakes seemed to bail right before the host body died. Release control, lose control. Maybe the experience of dying was too powerful for a Goa'uld to suppress; maybe the shock of taking a mortal wound made the host consciousness surge up with so much force that it knocked the Goa'uld on its neurological ass. Sha're had been herself, in those last moments, Daniel had said. Teal'c said he'd seen gratitude in Kawalsky's eyes. Jack hadn't really wanted to know that. If a snake was going to get you killed, it should fucking well let you sleep through it. Or maybe it was better for your last conscious thought in this life to be your own, free and clear; for your last waking experience to be the moment you were freed, not the moment you were taken. He didn't know. But he wouldn't tell Daniel now. Later, maybe. Later Daniel would ask, and then he'd tell.
Because Jack hadn't left express orders to bury the dead, Griff and Pierce had decided to rig a couple of travois to transport the bodies back to the gate and bring them home for their families. Coburn was halfway to the dig site when they radioed ahead. He sent Bellamy up to relieve Griff and found Tran when he went to recover Sanchez. Tran hadn't come around before they sent him back to the SGC, so an eyewitness account would have to wait for if-and-when. But Coburn had reported that there were no signs of Unas in the clearing -- no footprints, no green blood. Sanchez had no marks on him from claws or teeth, only mottling on his throat in the shape of human hands. Hawkins' story about the Unas tearing up his men was most likely a fabrication on the part of the snake he'd picked up. His men had seen his eyes glow, and the snake had put them both out of commission.
"These Goa'uld are primitive," Daniel said. "If they even have the capacity to store memory genetically, if that isn't linked to naquadah in some way, the only memory they can possibly have is of parasitizing Unas, and any other life-forms they tried out on this planet. There'd be a steep curve in learning to control a human host well enough to conceal themselves from other humans."
"You think that explains the three hours?"
"The three hours, the fight in the clearing, and Hawkins' appearance of combat fatigue. Yes. But I may be influenced by wishful thinking. I'd like to believe that Robert was ... still Robert, the last time I was with him. I'd like to believe that he and Hawkins didn't suffer very long. I liked Hawkins. Not that it would be any different if I hadn't, but ... We played chess, in the evenings. He was good. Smart. I enjoyed his company." Daniel's voice was getting tight. "Sanchez's too. I was teaching him Spanish. All he learned from his parents was how to curse. And Loder ... "
Jack got up, picked up his chair, turned it ninety degrees, set it back down, and sat in it. Daniel was still for a few seconds, and then leaned into him, shoulder to shoulder.
"Loder protected me with his life," Daniel said. "He could have dived or ducked under or rolled away and shot from the side. He didn't. He drew his gun and stood his ground, between me and the threat, and kept shooting until he couldn't anymore."
"Yeah," Jack said. Tim Loder was new on the gate-duty roster, passed every phase of offworld training with flying colors except for the drills and psych modules involving scaryass monsters trying to clean your clock. On those he had a tendency to freeze, flinch, fumble. SG-11 was a geological and archaeological unit. 888 was supposed to be a quiet posting, a chance to get his bearings offworld without scaryass monsters trying to clean his clock. In the event, he hadn't flinched. He'd stood his ground. He'd fought to protect the personnel it was his job to protect. "He did."
They sat and watched the moons play their slow game of tag across the sky. Carter and Teal'c called over periodically, reporting all clear. Daniel was fighting a silent battle between grief and sleep. Jack didn't order him to his bunk. After a while, he put an arm around him. Not something they did outside the house, not anymore, but it was only the team here. Daniel put a hand on his thigh and squeezed, briefly and excruciatingly hard. Jack felt the squeeze in the muscle of his heart: all the relief and pain and rage and forgiveness that couldn't be spoken, all concentrated into that one intense touch. He squeezed back, gently, and rubbed.
They watched the moons chase the sun down into the dark, distant peaks. One had passed the other. It would swing by again in a few hours, catch the other on the flip side, then do the same tomorrow, in daylight.
"Is that a conjunction when that happens, or a partial eclipse, or what?" Daniel asked.
"A transit, maybe. When the small one crosses the big one. Not sure, though. Hafta ask Carter."
"Moon chant," Daniel said, and shook his head. "Robert would give me so much shit about that."
Jack let it go. Later, sometime, Daniel would explain it to him. He just sat in the metal folding chair, marveling at the crazy crap the military expected people to hump five miles through alien forest, wondering whatever happened to canvas camp chairs, ignoring the cold metal against his butt and his back, appreciating the warmth of Daniel in the circle of his arm.
"One of these days I'd like to hear some of those UCLA stories," he said, finally, when the watch was half gone and Daniel needed to wake up enough to show him where he slept and get into the cot.
"It's all geek humor," Daniel said, pushing up off the table and Jack's leg. "I don't think you'd appreciate it much."
"Try me sometime," Jack said, putting the arm back around him and letting Daniel choose the direction.
"OK," Daniel said, and leaned into him, and kept walking.