Echoes Of An Empty Place
When the world has become predictable, Daniel isn't. He's like a summer storm, the kind that breaks the heat on a sweltering day, welcome but inevitably resulting in devastation.
It's been nearly a year this time. "I've missed you," he says, kissing her temple.
"You know where to find me, "she says. She lets him follow her into the kitchen. She has a pot on the stovetop, and she looks inside gingerly. A recipe book is open on a stand by the stove.
"What are you doing?" he says.
"I'm cooking."
"I can see that." He crosses the floor and inspects the pot. "Were you expecting someone?"
"No - I'm taking a cooking class."
Daniel laughs. She gives him a stern look and he stops. "God - you're serious. Why?"
She shrugs. "I can't cook. I burn toast. I need instructions to make soup from a can."
Daniel tests the concoction with a spoon. He raises his eyebrows. "Carbonara?"
She nods.
"It needs salt," he says.
"Salt?"
"Universal seasoning. Trust me, it can make or break a dish."
"You know how to cook?"
"There was no fast food on Abydos."
She blinks, looks up at him with profound amazement. He surprises her. After all this time he still surprises her. "Why are you here, Daniel?"
He leans back against the bench and puts his hands in his pockets. "I'm going to Alaris on Thursday."
"So this is a fly-in visit?"
He reaches out and pulls her toward him. His arms circle her waist, clasping in the small of her back. "I did miss you."
"I'm sure," she says. He kisses her.
He flies in, flies out and she's here waiting for him. She hates that she isn't out, hates that she doesn’t have a date for him to exchange awkward pleasantries with. Hates that she's always pleased to see him.
It's eight months before she sees him again. He appears without warming - no call, no email - but a hint from Sam means she expects him this time. He's three days later than he should be but he's there and they're together and they fall into routine as quickly as they fall into each other: sex, mornings, coffee and Danish, afternoons of lazy conversation drifting into evenings of wine and soft music.
At night he talks in his sleep. The sound wakes her and at first she thinks of Cassandra. She raises to her elbows and listens hard, training her ears to hear what she can't see.
And then she is reminded of Daniel. She turns to her side and he is there, muttering and murmuring and making garbled noises. She makes out a word here and there: "Jack", "Apophis", "Sha'Ree" but in general it's just noise, language before the words.
She doesn't believe she features in his dreams, and it doesn't surprise her that Jack does. Not for the first time, she wonders if he's lost when he comes to her, lost on his way to somewhere else. Somewhere he belongs.
He seems distressed and she wonders whether she should wake him. She watches his face for a while, looking for clues before tapping his shoulder. "Daniel?"
"No!" he says.
"It's just a dream, Daniel." REM cycle dreamers take in external stimuli. She taps him again. "Just wake up and everything will be okay."
"No!" he says again.
"Daniel?" She taps harder this time.
His eyes flick open and he gasps.
She smooths a hand over his hair. "It's okay," she whispers.
He breaths hard, his eyes fixed on a spot somewhere beyond the ceiling. And then he finds her. "Janet?"
"Bad dream, huh?"
He takes a breath, lets it out slowly. "Bad dream," he affirms.
"You were talking in your sleep."
"Really?" He frowns. "What was I saying?"
She throws her legs over the side of the bed and reaches for her robe. "Just names - Jack, Sha'ree…"
He looks at the ceiling again. "It's strange," he says. "I still dream about her after all these years."
She ties the robe at her waist. "It's not strange."
"Where are you going?"
"To make coffee. Would you like one?" Light is filtering in through the drawn blinds. It's morning, early, but she won't go back to sleep now.
"Sure, " he says but his mind is elsewhere.
She makes coffee. Five days of Daniel - dreams and coffee and mornings wondering how long he'll stay this time.
One year later Sam is engaged. Daniel shows up for the party making Jack's absence even more conspicuous.
He finds her in the kitchen fussing over hors doevres. "You've improved," he says, taking a crab puff.
"Catering. I still can't cook." She thrusts a tray into his hands. "Pass these around."
He takes the tray stealing another crab puff for himself. "Who are these people?"
She hears the question that isn't asked: why isn't Jack here? She expected him to know.
"Joe's friends - some people Sam works with." There are po-faced Aschen in the corner, refusing champagne and generally not mixing. She told Sam she found them unsettling and Sam laughed. "You get used to them," she said.
Daniel shuffles from foot to foot, the tray still in his hand. "So no word from…?"
She wonders why no one wants to say it, why even Daniel can't say it. "Jack?"
"Yeah."
"No."
He 'hmms' and raises his hand to his nose to touch the spot where his glasses used to be. Years of habit does not readily disappear despite miracle cures and microsurgery.
And it's never really discussed but they go home together, sharing a cab and trying not to think about Sam, Jack, them and everything the way it shouldn't be.
He stays because he always does.
In the morning he sleeps in and she does the laundry. She read "War and Peace" last week and she misses it now. It was the last big project she had.
She's bored. The office misses her but she's bored there too. Air Force personnel still drop by to talk and she is reminded that being a Doctor wasn't always about being cured, but not everyone can disassociate that connection. When she doesn't heal, she isn't needed.
And she still can't cook.
Daniel appears in the laundry, towel wrapped around his hips and his hair in disarray. God, if he wasn't so beautiful…
"You want to go out for dinner?"
She comes back to Earth. "Dinner? You mean, tonight?"
"Yes."
"Us."
"Yes."
"Like on a date?"
He shrugs. "Sure."
She can't picture it. She just can't. She shakes her head. "Oh no, you've got it all backwards. The date comes before the sex."
"It's never too late."
"Sure I'll call Sam, we'll go out with her and Joe and discuss mortgages on the East Side."
"If you want."
"No I don’t want!" She slams her hand down on the washer and Daniel jumps.
He looks at her like he's trying to make her out, like he's separating her from the blur of her surroundings. "Janet…"
She looks at the floor. It shouldn't be this hard to be two adults in a sexual relationship. It shouldn't be this mess. "I'm sorry, Daniel. I do want to go to dinner, it's just… you surprise me sometimes."
"Dinner surprises you?"
"You don't need to pretend for me."
"Pretend what?"
"That we have something we don't."
He lifts a hand to his head and leans back against the doorway. He looks at her for a while, adding her up. "What do we have?"
She holds her arms out to the sides. "This."
"Your laundry?"
She smiles, almost laughs. It's difficult to argue when you don't know what you're arguing for. She'd rather laugh.
"Where do you want to go?"
The wedding comes and goes with Jack's absence once again conspicuous and unspoken. Things change around her, change around them all as Sam settles into married life, Cassie takes up a research position in Sri Lanka and Daniel spends a year off world looking for the Ancients.
It gets quiet and it feels like only yesterday that she couldn't find time to spray the roses for aphids. She wasn't meant to live a quiet life. It sits ill at ease with her.
But events are never linear and everything seems to go in circles so it's no surprise that one day there's fresh-faced, public relations types on her doorstep telling her it's been ten years since the first contact with the Aschen and they need her presence at the celebrations.
She feels ridiculous, of course, the Doctor on the sides who only ever got asked about her relationship with SG-1. Even when they asked for her autobiography, they asked for gossip rather than her treatise on the role of a medical team in First Contact situations.
She has gossip. And there's something quite reckless about turning down several million to reveal it. Something profound.
She goes to the celebrations because they're all (nearly all) there and she loves them and she wouldn't really miss it for the world and Daniel is there on her doorstep again, saying things like, "I've missed you," and "it's so good to see you." She finds him in the kitchen later, after Sam, after dinner, after the whole thing comes crashing down around them. She finds him there and suddenly she's feeling like she's not on steady ground anymore.
He's strangely quiet too and she sees it in his face: he was wrong, idealistic and naive and it's been a long time since he was any of those things.
He leans against the kitchen counter eyeing the steam rising above his coffee. She's on the other side of the room, eyes on the floor. The room feels empty. And it is. They stand like that for some time. She thinks the tiling should have been replaced five years ago and she really should do something about the matching carpet. She sighs, places her cup on the sink, and looks at him, waits for him to speak, move, breath.
"It's not your fault."
He looks at her, finally noticing she's there. "How can you say that? Of course it's my fault. He told me and I didn't listen."
"None of us did."
"But I should have! Christ, this is Jack! When did Jack… when was he ever wrong? I should have trusted him."
She could name dates, incidents - Jack wasn't infallible but that had been the great thing about SG-1, and they balanced each other out, corrected themselves and established equilibrium.
And when that failed, they had back up Hammond, herself, Slier, Davis. It was the sum of the parts. United we stand, united we fall.
And when General Hammond died under suspicious circumstances, she said nothing.
"I'm going to bed," she says, and she leaves him in the kitchen staring at her wrong-colour tiles.
He kisses her bared shoulder and runs a hand along her rib cage to her thigh, distracting her from the point she was making. No loss. It was probably something forgettable.
"So what have you been doing all these years?" he says, his hand snaking along the inside of her thigh.
She turns over so that she is facing him. "Do you really want to talk about this now?" She kisses him, lightly.
"No." He pulls her against him and kisses her back.
Later, in the darkness she can't sleep. His arm pulls her to his chest and she listens to his breathing against her ear. They're crazy enough to think they can change things and she's crazy enough to believe them, but they've always done the impossible and this is as much about remembering who they are as saving the world.
And when she asks herself who she is she answers, "not this." Never this.
"You know," he says. "This could be the last time we do this."
She laughs.
"What's so funny?"
"Daniel, I always think it will be the last time we do this."
She sees him one last time before she disappears into the event horizon. He waves to her from the balcony, a casual salute that says everything that is needed: Goodbye. It's been fun. Sorry.
She knows that even if it doesn't work they're all going to die and Chulak won't hide her if the Aschen come looking. This really is the final mission, which is why it's funny that it should be her going through the wormhole, but it's a time for ironies.
She looks at him one last time, lets his face burn into her retina in the hope that she never forgets, no matter what happens, because for all those years of comings and goingsshe really needed him.
And that's something, isn't it?
On Chulak Teal'c puts a hand on her shoulder and tells her, "we die well, Doctor Fraiser," and she envies him for getting to see them one last time, getting to know what happens to them all.
She is left to wait, not knowing what to expect. Sam had theorised on the outcomes of changing the past in order to change the future but she hadn't concluded her hypotheses.
"There could be an inevitability to all things," she said. "In which case it doesn't matter what we do because the end result will be the same."
"Do you believe that," Janet asked, and Sam had turned away.
"I don't want to believe that," she said.
"What's the alternative theory?"
"We wake up in a different future - a future that always was."
Here one day, somewhere else the next. No memory of the time before, no hint that things might have been different only seconds earlier.
Her life isn't what she wanted and there's nothing here for her that wasn't around before the Aschen. She has nothing to lose, but for some reason the image of Daniel burns at the back of her eyes.
And she tells herself, don't forget, never forget.
"Dr Fraiser?"
The youth leaning over her has glasses and long eyelashes. Quite attractive really. She wonders where she's seen him before.
"Dr Fraiser we're about to land. Colonel Carter has told me to inform you she's arranged a car to take you straight to Cheyenne Mountain."
She'd hoped for a chance to change before work. She wonders whether she has a spare uniform in her locker. "Thank you…" She checks the insignia on the youth's uniform. "…Lieutenant."
She flips her laptop shut. The Colonel would be on the phone personally if there was an emergency so it's possibly just an opinion they're after, something that can't wait. Or maybe Sam knows that Janet can't resist checking up on them after she's been away and this is Sam's way of giving her the excuse she needs. If so, she's grateful. She really can't stay away.
"Is there anything I can get you, Ma'am?" The Lieutenant is still there. She thinks she's probably too old to be staring at young attractive Lieutenants and Cassandra would find the whole thing perverse. Not that Cassandra has to know.
"Water, thank you," she says. He leaves and returns shortly with water.
He reminds her of Daniel, only he doesn't because the jaw's the wrong shape and the eyes are the wrong colour, but for some reason it's an impression of Daniel that he leaves behind when he walks away.
Daniel. For some reason his memory unsettles her, like there's something she forgot to do. She goes through dates in her head: no birthday, no anniversary, nothing on the calendar that should have caused her to think of him.
She considers that perhaps it's just residual guilt leftover from feelings of frustration at being unable to ease Daniel's pain when he was dying of radiation burns - a resurfacing emotion brought to the fore by the sight of the young Lieutenant.
It's a plausible theory but it fails to convince her. It was so long ago.
The plane touches down as the sun begins to set over Colorado. Outside the air is warm and a light breeze tickles the back of her neck. She wonders whether it's a sign, the atmosphere itself conspiring to remind her of something she's not sure she remembered in the first place.
Colonel Carter - Sam - is waiting in her office. She stands up, smiles, kisses Janet on the cheek, and tells her she looks rested.
Janet laughs as she sits in the seat opposite Sam's desk. "It wasn't that kind of conference, but I'll take compliments where I can get them. What's the emergency?"
Sam waves a hand dismissively. "Well it's not really an emergency, but there's a quarantine situation at the Beta Settlement Science Station. No fatalities, and no critical conditions but I'd like you to take a look at it as soon as you can."
"Who I am taking?"
Sam has a Palm-size on her desk which she hands to Janet. "Everyone on there. Extraterrestrial Affairs wants a full investigation so there's a couple of people from the department there, but don't worry, I think they just want to get off-world for a few days."
They laugh. Everyone wants to get off world. They should arrange tours. Janet peruses her list and notes the Department officials. She contemplates briefly whether the Stargate programme had been more fun when it was covert. They'd been able to shut themselves away down here, hidden from the rest of the world, a family with a big, big secret.
"I'll send you that," Sam says, indicating the list. "And McCormick and Taylor's reports as well. They're the bio-team on the case - they've been monitoring the station for the last five days."
"Is Jonas still off-world?"
"I can recall him is you like?"
She purses her lips thoughtfully. Jonas and his encyclopaedic knowledge of all things alien is always an asset which is why he is constantly in demand. "I'll let you know when I get there."
She leans back in her seat. It never stops: the constant flow of discovery and danger that has become so familiar. She's been asked to write a book on several occasions and she thinks this would be fun if only she had the time.
She sighs and Sam raises an eyebrow. "Everything okay?" She asks.
"Just tired," she says. "How's the 'Ambassador'?" "Taking the kids to spend some time with their grandfather. I'm on my own for a few days."
"Getting some peace and quiet, huh?"
"Well - the kids will be gone for a week, but Jack's coming back tomorrow."
"Maybe you could suggest he take a fishing holiday on Kataris. I hear they don't have any fish in their lake either."
They laugh and then suddenly that feeling washes over her again, the feeling that something is wrong, something she missed.
She clears her throat. "You know, I was thinking of Daniel today."
Sam frowns. "Is that strange?"
"No. It was just… I was thinking about him a lot." She presses her lips together tightly. There really are no words for what she's been feeling. She shrugs and shakes her head. "It's nothing, I just - I feel like there's something I was supposed to remember."
Sam doesn't respond. And then she leans a finger thoughtfully against the side of her face. "It's funny - I've been feeling pretty weird today too."
There's no such thing as coincidence, she tells herself. And in their line of work a gut feeling is always taken seriously, but if there's something she's supposed to know then she's no closer to it than she was an hour ago, and she needs something more tangible before she can act.
"It’s like an echo," she says quietly.
Sam looks up. "What?"
Janet looks at the list in her hands. There was something there but now there isn't and all that's left is an echo of whatever it was supposed to be. "It's nothing," she raises the palm-size. "I'll get onto this immediately."
They stand. "Well," Sam says. "Welcome back."
She grins. "It's good to be home."