WIP amnesty: time-traveling OT3 kidfic. of doom.

[dira]

So before I got around to writing, or even plotting, my Stargate SG-1 magnum opus, I really, really wanted to write a Moebius story. You remember Moebius, right? It's the one where SG-1 goes back mumble thousand years in time, and everyone EXCEPT Daniel dies, and then he's trapped alone in ancient Egypt for years until an alternate-timeline Sam, Jack, and Teal'c show up to fix the timeline, and then, reality having been repaired, that Daniel, Sam, Jack, and Teal'c are left in ancient Egypt to live out their lives.

Well, I thought to myself, this begs some questions. One was: How does Teal'c survive in a world with no Goa'uld and no Tretonin? And the answer was, he probably doesn't. Another was: How the hell does this hardened, battle-scarred, even-more-fucked-up-than-most Daniel deal with spending the rest of his life with alternate versions of Sam and Jack?

But the most pressing question was why, this time, Daniel survived when his team died. So obviously I came up with a more satisfying answer than "to defeat Ra" and it was "because he and Sam and Jack had a baby and Daniel was the parent best equipped to raise her alone in ancient Egypt, so he was designated to hang back and survive if things went wrong in the uprising."

I mean. Obviously, right?

But the idea of Daniel raising his daughter in ancient Egypt, with all the miseries and limits that would entail, was also really depressing. Ah, I thought, well. There's still a puddlejumper around somewhere--that first one that got buried in the desert, stranding the original team in the past. It's bound to get unburied eventually, and when it does, hey presto! They can all go home!

And it was that--the going home, with all the complications it would entail, all the ways it would disrupt the equilibrium they might have arrived at, Daniel raising his daughter with doppelgangers of her other parents--that I found I really wanted to write. I made several starts at it. With the Dying, my story about the alternate Teal'c dying in ancient Egypt, was one of those starts.

The next one picked up right after that and just kept going, with the shaky start of Daniel's relationship to the geek!verse Sam and Jack, and the introduction of Daniel's daughter.



Sam reclassified the second Daniel Jackson from "quiet, kinda hot" to "creepy, possibly sociopathic," when he walked up while they were eating breakfast and said expressionlessly, "Teal'c's dead." She felt a little proud of herself even as she made the mental switch, because usually she didn't catch that sort of thing before three months of dating or six months of employment. Here, though, she was on edge, alert, paying attention.

When she looked over at Jack to see what he thought, he was squinting up at Daniel, holding his clay mug of hot-morning-beverage-that-definitely-wasn't-coffee right in front of his mouth. Sam swallowed her own bite of pottage and said, "What? How?" and then bit her lip when Daniel's blank blue stare turned her way. She stared back as steadily as she could, and just when her eyes were starting to water he blinked and looked away.

"His symbiote was damaged," Jackson said with a slight shrug, as though that explained everything or in fact anything. Symbiote?

He stared down at his hands, his right closing into a fist and then springing open again, as though letting go of something. "With Ra gone, there was no way to get him another one."

Sam saw Jack unfreeze in the corner of her eye, finally taking a long-delayed sip from his mug.

"I don't understand," Sam said, hearing the curious-helpless sound of her voice pitching upward and unable to bring it down. "What symbiote?"

Daniel's head jerked up, as though she'd startled him, and he frowned at her and Jack for a moment and then rubbed his face with one hand, muttering something to himself that sounded like, "How would you know?"

When he dropped his hand his face was neutral again, but when he looked at her this time Sam thought he might actually be seeing her, and not just some object that talked. "Not that it really matters anymore, but--Jaffa carry immature Goa'uld larvae which replace their immune systems. If the symbiote matures or dies and is not quickly replaced, the Jaffa who carried it will die."
Sam could feel her own eyes widening--she wasn't sure she wanted to know what Daniel meant by 'carry,' but she knew Teal'c hadn't had any luggage. Daniel wasn't even looking at her anymore. He was eyeing the breakfast pot. Beside her, Jack set down his mug and picked up the spoon. "Mush?"

Daniel glanced over his shoulder, away from the sun, and then said, "Thanks," and sat down with them, pouring himself a mug of whatever-it-was to drink.


***

Jack watched Daniel carefully as Daniel and Sam finished eating their breakfasts. It had been the other Daniel who'd seemed on the fey side to him; this one looked like a man who'd done a few damned distasteful things in his life, and lived to tell about it. Jack wasn't sure how recently the last distasteful thing had happened--but then Teal'c had killed the other Daniel for having a snake in him. Maybe it had been some kind of revenge, or maybe it had been necessary, or maybe it had been nothing at all, like the man had said.

In any case, he seemed peaceable enough for now. Jack eased his elbow away from the hilt of the knife he'd started wearing strapped to his belt and looked out toward the horizon as he drank his second cup of hot morning stuff.

The pyramids and the little town around them that had housed Ra's pet humans were behind Jack, and Daniel never looked up from his breakfast mush to so much as glance at it, but he turned to look over his shoulder more than once, toward the empty western horizon. Jack noticed other people glancing that way too, more often than an empty blue sky could account for, so he kept an eye on the rolling sand, and after a while he saw the dust cloud approaching.

He thought it was impossibly far off at first, and then realized that he was thinking of the dust kicked up by tanks or humvees, and revised his estimate. This would be animals, carts, people on foot. He didn't point it out to Daniel, but everyone in the camp began turning that way, stopping what they were doing to stand and wait for whatever was coming. Not a threat; no one was picking up weapons. But they were all watching, turning like compass needles to north toward that dust cloud. Daniel joined them soon enough, dropped his bowl and stood up. Sam looked to Jack with a question in her wide eyes, and he shrugged and got up as well, following Daniel to the edge of the camp.

The dust cloud resolved into a herd of sheep, driven by an assortment of boys and followed by women and a cart loaded with old people and smaller children. Jack realized abruptly that this had been a war camp, with the very young and very old hidden away somewhere safe. He wondered how long they'd been hiding, tried to remember if they'd seen children in the camp when they'd first come.


A few people walked or ran out to meet returning family; shepherd boys were subjected to embraces that seemed to embarrass them, and women and men ran across the sand to meet each other. Daniel stood perfectly still until the foremost sheep had nearly reached the camp, and then he waded out into the middle of the herd. He seemed to wrestle with one of the sheep before he emerged with a bundle under his arm. When he returned to the lee side of a tent and held it out at arm's length, it resolved into a small child, so thoroughly robed and scarved that no more was visible than a snub nose and two small bare feet.

"What have I told you," he said through gritted teeth, shaking the child slightly for emphasis, making the little feet swing like pendulums, "about riding the sheep?"

The little head ducked, and Daniel stood there holding the child out at arm's length and glaring, until a small voice said in perfect native English, "Don't fall off."

Daniel kept still for another few seconds, then sighed and dragged the kid close, hugging--her?--tightly as he said, "Don't fall off. You'd be trampled into paste, and very old, toothless jackals would eat you, and then I'd never be able to find you, if I even bothered to look, which I probably wouldn't once Ketep told me you'd been riding the sheep again."



My third try at the story was next in internal chronology, jumping forward a year and a half, to a point where Daniel and the new Sam and Jack have settled into a new triad relationship, and also more or less settled into living in ancient Egypt.

This also showcases the way ancient poetry and backstory were going to be sprinkled into the story--the title by this time had advanced from "OT3gypt" to "Out of the Unexpected", which is one of Sappho's more fragmentary bits of poetry.



In the middle of a crowd, Daniel reached back and brushed his fingers over the top of his daughter's head. Her headscarf was still firmly in place, and he marveled as he did every day at how easy it was to touch her without breaking stride. She seemed taller every day; she was up to his hip now.

Her hand twisted in the fold of his robe, tightening her grip without the sharp tug that would have signaled her need for his attention. It wasn't so long ago that he'd carried Shy everywhere; surely he hadn't taken more than a deep breath or two since she was born. Surely he'd barely blinked his eyes since a motley team (not even a team, not even three-quarters of a team) sent back in time from the SGC invaded his life on the eve of revolution and turned it upside down in ways he'd never expected.

Daniel dropped his hand as the camouflage of people around them dissipated, and continued down the street toward their home. His stride automatically accommodated the length of his daughter's legs, but no one hurried much around here. With the Goa'uld gone and a human council in place, people felt comfortable dawdling a little on their way around the city. Anyway, the heat of the day had not yet come on, and it was still rather pleasant to be outside.

Daniel turned the last corner before their home and, seeing no one but neighbors between them and their door, he turned and swept Shy up over his shoulder. She giggled, whisper-quiet but close to his ear, too soft to draw the attention of anyone they passed, though the neighbors watched them go, unsurprised by their foreign antics. He waited until they were in the house with the door shut behind them before he dropped Shy on her feet and said, "Honey, we're home."

It was for Shy's benefit that he said it, signaling that it was safe to speak English, since Jack and Sam were sitting right there at the table. Jack was mixing something in a wooden bowl while Sam sat beside him, working on something fiddly in the light of the window. Jack glanced up at Daniel, and Daniel looked down at Shy to cover the disorientation he still felt, knowing that Jack knew that Daniel was imitating a different man with the same face when he said those words. They'd already been fixed as ritual by the time he met this Jack and Sam, part of his effort to keep Shy from spilling the secret language of the revolution throughout the camp.

Shy, forever inventing her own rituals, echoed him as she unwrapped her headscarf, revealing bright blond hair tied up in anachronistic pigtails. "Sam, Jack, we're home."

Sam didn't look up from the mechanism she was working on, but she smiled as she said, "Welcome home, honey."

Jack said, "Shy, sweetheart, come here and taste this, I need a second opinion."

Shy started to move in his direction, and Daniel said quietly, "Sandals."

"Sorry, Jack," Shy said, kneeling to unfasten her sandals, and then burst out with one of Sam's phrases, which she did more and more often lately. "One second."

"Sure," Jack said, giving Daniel a faint, apologetic look. Jack had a tendency to forget rules. Daniel shrugged as he knelt to take off his own sandals. It'd probably be Jack cleaning the floor if Shy tracked dust over it. Sooner or later he'd learn to insist she be careful, but in the meantime it was easier to remind her.

Shy shrugged out of her outer robe as well without being reminded, and hung up robe and scarf on the peg by the door. Daniel hung his up beside Sam's, covering Shy's on the lower peg, and followed at a more sedate pace as she ran barefoot to Jack. He leaned his hip against the table, careful not to intrude into Sam's light. It was easy to lay his hand on the back of this Sam's neck; she had no instincts against an approach from behind.

She tipped her head back into the touch, in fact, smiling up at him without taking her hands from the mechanism. When she tilted her chin up and pursed her lips, he leaned down obediently and gave her a brief kiss hello, different and the same as his own--his first Sam.

Beside him, Shy said to Jack, "it needs more salt," and in the same breath to Daniel, "Aba, Jack needs a kiss too."

"Sure," Daniel said, glancing over at Jack without quite straightening up from kissing Sam, making his smile a little wry but not at all apologetic. Jack smirked this time, confident that he was forgiven. This was still new enough to feel strange to Daniel, but after all the stories he'd told Shy every night since she was born, she didn't seem to find it strange at all.

He still dreaded, a little, selfishly, the day she started calling Sam and Jack Mommy and Daddy, and started forgetting the difference. Because if Shy ever forgot, Daniel might find himself forgetting too, if only for a moment here and there.

For now, knowing full well what he was doing, Daniel pressed a kiss to Jack's lips.

***

Darkness falling meant time to sleep for all of them, and now there was only one pallet by the hearth, big enough for four people if one of them was small and they all needed to keep warm through a desert night. Daniel lay with Shy in his arms, his own back to the outside of the pallet, and Jack slept likewise, facing in from behind Sam. When all four of them were settled, Daniel yawned and said, "Story first or lesson, Shy?"

"Lesson," Shy said promptly, and Daniel yawned again and racked his brain for something he hadn't taught her yet. Something he remembered with certainty, because even if it was all completely unverifiable he'd be damned if he taught Shy to repeat inaccuracies.

"Ego d' epi malðakan tulan spoleo melea," he recited finally. "Sappho, do you remember Sappho?"

"Sappho," Shy repeated. "Greek--Attic. Sixth century bee cee. Ego d' epi--malðakan--tulan spoleo--melea."

"But upon a soft cushion," Daniel translated, for Sam and Jack more than Shy, who probably had it already, "I recline my limbs."

"Ego d' epi," Shy mumbled again, "malðakan tulan--spoleo melea. But upon a soft cushion I recline my limbs. Are you saying you're too tired for a story, Aba?"

"No," Daniel murmured, hugging Shy closer. "I'm saying I'm very comfortable. Lesson over, what story do you want?"

"Ego d' epi malðakan tulan spoleo melea," Shy repeated again, and then, still in Greek, "I want a story about us--us that are here. When we began to be a family."

"All right," Daniel said, in English, not even bothering to wonder how she'd caught his thoughts from earlier. Shy did that. "A story about us, about when we began to be a family."

Daniel glanced across at Sam and Jack, who lay still, listening, like they weren't equally able to tell this story. They wouldn't intrude on the ritual of his stories for Shy; if they had editorials they'd add them later. Hopefully.

Daniel took a breath, and started the story the way every story started. "This is a story about our family, which we don't repeat to other people, because they wouldn't understand and anyway it's none of their business."

Out of the corner of his eye Daniel could see Sam and Jack mouthing that along with him, but he was looking down at Shy. She had her face turned up to watch him as he spoke, listening as intently as if he'd never told her a story before. He didn't think he'd ever told her this one. She'd been there for most of it, after all.

***

This was going to be interesting, Jack thought. Daniel had been telling Shy stories in front of him and Sam almost since the beginning. Lots of them were stories from before--which was to say, stories from the future--but enough of them had been stories about Shy's parents that he and Sam had gotten the picture pretty quick. Jack had wondered if it was some kind of weird, passive-aggressive come-on for a while, and eventually he'd realized that there was nothing passive about it, and no particular come-on, either.

Daniel's stories represented an absolutely aggressive insistence on honesty with and around Shy. She had three parents, and two of them had been Jack O'Neill and Sam Carter, but they'd died when Shy was a baby, along with her godfather Teal'c. Jack and Sam were--apparently, judging by the disclaimer at the beginning of the story and the fact that they were allowed to hear--part of Daniel and Shy's family, but they could still go to hell as far as Daniel was concerned, if they were going to give his daughter any grief about where she came from.

Jack didn't think that part had changed just because history had--so to speak--repeated itself and they were all in one bed again. Still, he was curious about how that first day had looked to Daniel.

"The first thing that happened, on the morning that we began to be a family, which was the second day after Ra fled from the Earth," Daniel said, "was that a man named Teal'c, who was not quite your godfather, died. I buried him among the dunes near the war camp. He was a great warrior who helped to throw off the god Ra from the Earth, but we were strangers to him, and he could not live in a world with no Goa'uld. He sacrificed his life to be free. He died free. You must remember that Teal'c died free, and that I was with him, so he would not be alone."

Even as Shy obediently repeated--in English, because the stories were always in English--"Teal'c who was not my godfather died free, and you were with him, Aba, so he wasn't alone," Jack remembered that morning.

He remembered a hard-eyed stranger named Daniel coming to find him and Sam while they were eating breakfast and saying expressionlessly, "Teal'c is dead."

Jack had wondered then if Daniel had killed him. Teal'c--that Teal'c, not Shy's godfather--had killed the other Daniel, the innocent geek. Teal'c's natural loyalty lay on the other side, even if he had come over in time to help them out. It made a certain amount of sense, and Jack had decided immediately not to really hold it against Daniel while at the same time never leaving Sam alone with Daniel.


The middle attempt at the story got the furthest in terms of words written, although it spans maybe three or four hours of internal time, tops. It's set a day or two after the scene above, on a very eventful day.



A little bit of context, to repair the narrative coyness that I'd thought better of when I abandoned this draft and started over with the above attempt. What happens just before this part starts up is that Daniel has taken Shy, and Sam and Jack, out to the desert on a periodic pilgrimage to the location of the buried puddlejumper. This time they find the jumper unburied and still functional. Jack is able to get it open, and when they go inside and are all looking around, Shy touches the time-travel console and activates it--which means that Shy has the Ancient gene and is therefore incontrovertibly Jack's biological child.

Daniel freaks out immediately, comprehensively, and continuously throughout the next 15,000 words, because he's taking his daughter, the touchstone and center of his life, into a future where she will be scientifically demonstrably the daughter of two (or four) living people, none of whom are him.

****

Shy was the first to speak, breaking them all out of the softly-lit, frozen silence. She wiggled in Daniel's grip-- he was faintly aware that he was holding on too tight, he would hurt her--and said, "Aba?"

He shifted his arms around her, tucking the top of her head under his chin. There was a ringing in his ears, and his chest felt like it was full of lead. The puddlejumper's time travel device had lit up, which meant--which meant--

Sam said, "Daniel, breathe."

He nodded without raising his gaze from the lights. Shy wiggled again, and kneed him in the stomach this time--which hurt or helped, depending on your angle of view. It made him finally inhale, anyway.

Daniel shifted his daughter to sit on his hip instead of--whatever he'd been trying to do, for that breathless minute. Hide her with just his own arms, he supposed, from the only two people he trusted at all, standing in arm's reach.

He finally forced himself to look at Jack, only to find Jack standing at ease, one hand on the time travel device, so helpfully, functionally lit up. Jack was staring at the dark windshield, still buried in sand, leaving Daniel to study his profile. It told Daniel little beyond the fact that this Jack still didn't have the familiar old scar bisecting his eyebrow.

"So, it works," Jack said. "So we could go back."

"No," Sam said, "actually we can't."

Daniel frowned a little, looking at her. Sam--this Sam--had complained disturbingly little about life in protodynastic Egypt, but Daniel hadn't expected her to hesitate if they got the chance.

Jack was giving her a guarded look. Uncertain why she was objecting but approving of her willingness to object, Daniel parsed it. Because this Jack wouldn't just yell back at him and Sam and expect them to fight it out, and he had particular reason to be careful of crushing this Sam's hard-won confidence.

Sam herself looked determined, though she shot a quick sideways look at Jack--and an equally quick one at Daniel, making him wonder what he looked like right now--before she spoke. "We can't go back. I mean, we could, but I don't think any of us really wants to trade the Bronze Age for the Stone Age. All we can do is go forward, into whatever future we created when we fixed things here."

The lights on the displays actually brightened a little at that. No, going back to anywhere other than his own timeline wasn't going to deter Jack.

"It's something we have to remember," Sam said firmly, though Daniel noticed she didn't say consider, like it might actually affect their decision. "We're going to be supernumerary. Just as each of us re-occurred in our timeline while you were here," Sam gestured to Daniel and, by implication, all of SG-1, "we will likely have re-occurred again in any future we can travel to."

"If we're surplus, so is the jumper," Jack said, shrugging. "They're going to owe us just for the ordnance we bring in."

Daniel hadn't even thought of that. It hadn't occurred to him that they'd need anyone to owe them. The SGC, for all its faults, was home. When he had to go there, they had to take him in.

"We may be supernumerary, but I don't think we'll really be surplus," Daniel offered, realizing only after both their gazes fixed on him--even Shy, who had been resting quietly against his shoulder, twisted to look and listen--that it was the first he'd actually managed to speak since they'd come inside the jumper.

"As often as I wished I could clone myself..." he hadn't dared to think it very loudly, after Harlan, but even knowing he'd wished for it sometimes. "And Sam, they'll be even more excited about you. They'll have to bring you up to speed on current projects, but your mind is--" the most desperately overstretched resource in two galaxies, but Sam was already biting her lip and looking away. She was just going to have to learn her own value the hard way.

"What," Jack said, "no one ever wanted to clone me?"

Daniel managed to meet Jack's eyes, thinking even as he did of the teenager who'd worn Jack's clothes--and Jack's authority--and would have teased him in just that desert-dry tone.

"It was tried, actually," Daniel informed him. "Both agreed that one of you was more than enough."

Jack raised his eyebrows, then nodded. "Sounds like me, yeah."

"That's perfect, though," Sam said cheerfully. "If Daniel and I are working for the SGC, you can stay home with Shy."

Daniel forced himself not to clutch his daughter tighter again. She was the reason he couldn't contemplate anything but going back--forward, whichever--and she was going to be the hardest part, the most perilous.

Daniel backed away from the console, sat down on the jumper's side bench and settled Shy on his lap. She looked up at him expectantly--more curious than afraid, though merely the fact that she was obediently waiting to be spoken to before speaking showed that she had sensed the gravity of the situation.

"Stella," Daniel said, and she sat up a little straighter at his use of her proper name. He pushed her headscarf back to run his hand over her bright blonde hair, gazing steadily into her eyes, blue in a way the sky never was in the desert.

"Do you understand what we've been talking about?"

She bit her lip and nodded a little, cautiously, then said, "Going to... to our faraway home?"

Daniel nodded. "Not exactly where Sam and Jack and I came from," and it should be Mama and Daddy and Aba, when he spoke of his own Sam and Jack and himself, except that he couldn't bring himself to say the words now. "And not exactly where," he nodded in their direction, unable to look at them, though Shy did, "Sam and Jack come from. But very near to there, where we'll be able to live."

Shy's small hands wrapped themselves in his robes, a familiar sign of her resistance to him going away, or sending her away. "All of us?"

"Yes," Daniel said, and he did look up then, to find Sam and Jack watching him--Sam with tears shining in her eyes, Jack with the careful blankness that hid so much. Daniel didn't deserve either of them, and neither of them deserved the fears that choked Daniel's breath. Still...

Still. It was true enough to say to his daughter, and that was enough for today. "Yes, we'll all be together."

Shy nodded, and though she was used to accepting her father's decisions, Daniel felt compelled to sell it to her anyway. He dimly remembered his parents doing the same, before packing him off to one of their digs when he was her age. "Everyone speaks our language there. You'll get to see trees, and snow, and--"

Words failed him, looking into his daughter's face, trying to think of ways to say to a four-year-old, you'll be safe there, you'll have a future you haven't even realized you can't imagine here.

"You can go to school," Sam supplied. "Everyone learns to read and write there, and do math and learn about--all kinds of things."

"And after school," Jack added, "ice skating."

Shy looked at each of them as they spoke, though Daniel could only watch her, the dawning curiosity and wonder on her face. She looked back at Daniel and tugged eagerly on his robes where she was already holding on. "Aba? Please?"

Daniel was powerless to do anything but smile back at her. He opened his mouth to tell her yes, yes, of course, didn't I just say we're going?

Jack said, sharply, commandingly, "Daniel, wait."

Daniel froze and then looked up. He couldn't think of when he'd heard Jack--this Jack--take that tone. He didn't do it habitually, though of course he had it in him, that CO voice. Even his own Jack, his first Jack, hadn't used it much. Only when he was about to be absolutely rigid about something.

In fact, the last time Daniel could really remember hearing that tone of voice, Jack had said, "Daniel, I am making it an order. If anything goes wrong with the uprising, you will get away clean and you will survive. Shy needs at least one of her parents alive and you can handle this place better than anybody."

There hadn't been a goddamn thing Daniel could say to that; even in retrospect all the what ifs died in his throat compared to Jack's order, and the utter necessity behind it.

He stared blankly at this other Jack, now, waiting for another axe to fall.

Jack shook his head slightly, and said, "Listen, you're the only one who knows what we'd be walking into. You need to think before you answer this question. If we did fix things so there's a Stargate Command waiting for us when we get there, is it possible--is there any universe where we hand ourselves over to them and then regret it?"

Daniel blinked a couple of times, his brain still stuck for half a second on Jack commanding anything--and the fact that he'd shut right up for that voice, and would have been badly tempted to follow whatever order it issued, no matter which Jack was speaking. Then Daniel jolted forward to Jack's actual words, and the array of awful possibilities they conjured.

"Well, when you say is it possible--" Daniel shuffled through memories, near-misses, alternate realities not quite alternate enough. "I mean, anything's possible, a world where we screwed up somewhere along the line and Apophis or Anubis rules the Earth is possible..."

"I think it's unlikely," Sam offered, and both of them turned to look. She seemed ready for the scrutiny this time, and rolled on almost without hesitation. "Look at our timeline--the changes made five thousand years in the past, according to chaos theory, could have led to a huge range of different futures. Forget a butterfly, the team must have caused thousands of variations in history, but when you get down to our lifetimes, the majority of the changes we found were directly attributable to the absence of the Stargate. On the geopolitical scale our worlds remained very similar."

The longer she talked, the more Sam she was, the more agonizingly, gorgeously familiar in the bone-deep way that said team to Daniel. In a year and a half, Daniel had yet to stop being spellbound by the phenomenon.

"It's like the timeline corrected all the little anomalies, and only the ones that couldn't be smoothed over, like the absence of the Stargate, remained. So if the same process takes place again, we should find a Stargate Command that's re-occurred very much like the one Daniel remembers. Give or take, you know... some wobbles."

By that standard, Sam Carter not joining the Air Force was a wobble; Daniel was uncomfortably aware of how much variation that allowed.

"Okay," Sam added, voice gone sharp and bright, "or we could stay here and all die in a--"

"Sandstorm," Jack said abruptly, turning to face the windshield as a heads up display bloomed against the darkness. "Headed our direction. It's going to bury the jumper again if we don't move it."

That was still no reason to go right now--they could just move the jumper. They could doubtless wait out the storm and then move the jumper, now that they'd found it again and gotten inside.

But this was going to require an absolutely clean break. They'd planned to be away for several days, on Daniel and Shy's regular pilgrimage into the desert, back to the place it all began. They'd brought along most of their belongings, including all of the most precious ones. It didn't add up to more than the three of them could carry, even allowing for the possibility of one of them or another carrying Shy as well.

Daniel took a breath, looked down at Shy, and said it. "I say we go. Now."

"Go," Sam seconded immediately.

Jack moved to settle into the pilot's seat, then looked back. "Shy?"

Shy looked from Jack to Daniel, and Daniel gave her a nod.

"Go," she parroted.

"We have a go," Jack announced, and Daniel moved to a jump seat up front as Sam settled into the co-pilot's chair. He braced his feet and held on firmly to Shy, but the inertial dampeners mostly cushioned them as Jack got the jumper the rest of the way out of the sand dune and properly airborne.

Daniel glimpsed the desert falling away beneath them, and then there was nothing but the pale clear blue of the sky as they rose into it. They were accelerating rapidly enough for some sense of motion to cut through; Daniel felt pressed down into his seat, and Shy's weight against his chest was amplified.

The blue of the sky was darkening steadily as they rose. Daniel looked down to see how Shy was taking it, and huffed out a laugh. She was lying against his chest, her eyes barely open; well, it had been a long day already, a long walk over the dunes, and she'd insisted on walking as much as she could. From her perspective it had to seem as if the excitement was over and it was time to catch a nap.

Daniel shifted, tugging free one side of his robe and wrapping it around her, to shield her from the (probably mostly psychosomatic) chill of high altitude. She snuggled closer, and Daniel looped his arms comfortably around her and tilted his own head back, watching the color of the sky darken to the color of his daughter's eyes, and then darken further.

Stars were coming out as Jack said, "Forty thousand feet. Hockey."

"Mmm," Sam said. "Laser pointers."

There was a silence--there was always a silence, while Jack and Sam waited to see if Daniel was going to join them in the game, as masochistic and ritualized as any sport. He mostly hadn't, the first year; in his worse moments he'd taken a turn just to shut them down. They hadn't played much lately, becoming more settled in the world around them than in reminiscences of the world they'd lost.

Still. It was unavoidable now. And they were waiting for him.

"Photocopiers," Daniel said. His legs were going numb under Shy's acceleration-increased weight. It didn't matter.

"Pizza," Jack said promptly.

"Diet Coke," Sam contributed.

"Umm," Daniel said, buying himself a second to think of something. His own limbs, and eyelids, felt as heavy as Shy did. The sky was nearly black now, the stars blazing. "Prescription-strength antihistamines."

Jack and Sam laughed at that, and Daniel smiled, and didn't hear what either of them said next.

***

Daniel knew he was dreaming, because Teal'c was there. He'd lost Teal'c and regained him only to lose him again.

Daniel always dreamed of Teal'c dying, but at least he'd started to dream of the second death instead of the first.

The Teal'c who had come back to him had chosen his death (except that it had been no choice at all once the rebellion succeeded, in a world with no Goa'uld and no Tretonin, no options for a Jaffa who relied on a symbiote to live). He had drawn the larval Goa'uld from his body, killed it with his own hands to rid the world of the last Goa'uld they could reach, and pronounced his last words.
"Dal shakka mel."

I die free.

Daniel had sat beside him as he died, because Daniel at least understood the choice and the necessity. Jack and Sam had not--not then, not until long after, when Daniel was finally able to explain. Even then it was really only a story to them; they had known Teal'c for a couple of days, no more. If Daniel hadn't spoken of him they might not remember him at all, any more than they remembered those of Katep's people who had died in the rebellion.

Daniel had scarcely spoken to Teal'c on the day of his death, but in Daniel's dreams that death lasted forever, and Daniel said everything he ought to have said, or could have said, or feared he might have said.

Now, dreaming, Daniel said, "You have a son, don't you? Back on Chulak?"

"Rya'c," Teal'c affirmed. "A loyal Jaffa to Apophis. He is young and strong, and has no use for his father's traitorous thoughts. His zeal may protect him, now that I am shol'va."

Unspoken: it might not. Rya'c might be cast out or killed for what Teal'c had done to help Jack and Sam escape Apophis--and, in so doing, to free the Earth from Ra, allowing the Tau'ri to rise into a civilization ready to fight the Goa'uld. He who saves one life saves the world entire.

"It won't happen that way, now," Daniel offered. "We'll meet you before his prim'ta, and you will join the Tau'ri. He will learn from you and from Bra'tac and join in the fight. He'll be free. He'll marry."

Teal'c said nothing for a time, and then, "Good."

Daniel nodded, staring at the sand, and then ventured, "I have a daughter. She's in hiding now, with the women and the other children, but... Jack and Sam and I--the ones who came through with me, the ones who died, we were--we had a little girl. Teal'c was her godfather--kes'la'tor, he said, was your word, but there's more connotation of kinship for us."

"An honor," Teal'c said.

Daniel shrugged, nodded, letting sand run through his fingers. "He would have been her third father, if he'd wished to be. We would--we would have shared everything. If we'd had more time, maybe..."

A silence fell, and covered all the maybes Daniel couldn't--even in dreams--put into words about those years and their aftermath.

Teal'c said, "What is your daughter's name?"

"Sorry," Daniel said automatically, and then, "Stella. It means star. Stella Cheyenne, actually--the Cheyenne was kind of a joke that stuck. It's the name of the place where Sam and Jack and I all met, where our team was based all the time we worked together. We called her Shy most of the time."

"Star Home," Teal'c repeated solemnly. "Shy."

"I wish you could have met her," Daniel said. "She's... she's the most amazing little thing in the world. And I wish she could have met you. I tell her stories, but..."

Daniel looked up from the sand that fell endlessly through his fingers, and Teal'c was no longer sitting beside him; there was only a cairn of stones, sand already encroaching over them. Daniel stood, looking around for Sam and Jack, and then spotted them, standing on top of the next dune.

Sam waved to him, but Jack's arms were full--Jack was holding Shy. He set her down, but kept hold of her hand, and then Sam took her other hand as they turned away. They disappeared down the other side of the dune, walking hand in hand in hand.

Daniel tried to follow them, but the stones of the cairn held him down. He tried to shout after them, but the sand filled his mouth. He was alone.

***

"We're going to have to be up above satellite orbit before we go through," Sam said quietly. "Knocking out satcomm wouldn't be the greatest first impression."

"Yeah," Jack said in a too-casual voice. "I think I can find us a nice quiet spot."

Sam looked over at Jack, and when she looked back to the heads up display, there was a chart showing their progress between the Earth and the Moon.

"Jack," Sam said, trying and failing to put a note of warning into her voice. She was too excited: about going to the future, to a future where she might be allowed to work on the Stargate program, going back to hot showers and solid walls and electricity--but it seemed like too much to wish for, to get all that and on the same day go to the Moon, which had been the very most she'd ever known to dream of, before.

"First woman on the Moon," Jack said, smiling sideways at her. "Well, you and Shy, first women. And I guess Daniel and I will be the first men on the Moon, actually, since it's 3,000 BC and all."

"We can't know that for sure," Sam said, but she was grinning helplessly now. "Ra might have sent some Jaffa to check it out."

"First humans, still counts," Jack said cheerfully.

Behind them, Daniel made a sound--barely a sound at all, just a choked-off breath that anyone but Daniel might have released as a sob. Sam froze, and she saw Jack wince.

"Should I wake him?"

Jack looked over at her, and back at Daniel, who held Shy carefully on his lap, even fast asleep. Daniel's eyelids were flickering, his mouth working soundlessly--a bad dream. But then it seemed like all of Daniel's dreams were bad, one way or another.

"He can probably use the sleep," Jack said finally. "Going home's not going to be easy for him. And you and I need to talk."

"Jack," Sam said quickly. The warning came effortlessly into her voice this time; Jack had better not be thinking of planning anything while Daniel slept.

"Shy's his daughter," Jack said firmly, and Sam snapped her mouth shut. "His, theirs. Not yours or mine, except however much Daniel says we're family. That's always been true and it's always going to be true. Right?"

"Right," Sam said, and if her voice wavered it was only because of the forcefulness of Jack's words, not because she doubted it.

From the moment they'd met Daniel's blue-eyed and blonde-haired daughter in Egypt, there had been no question that her mother's name must have been Samantha Carter; that didn't make Sam her mom. She'd gotten attached to Shy in the year and a half they'd spent in Egypt, all living together. She felt a kind of wistfulness toward Daniel's daughter sometimes, the inescapable knowledge of what might have been, if her world had been different.

But Shy was Daniel's daughter, first, last, and always. He'd shaped his entire life in Egypt around keeping her safe, and he was Shy's whole world. A few months ago she'd still been calling Sam and Jack auntie and uncle. Even now, they were... stepparents, at most.

"Right," Jack said. "We just... we're all going to need to be clear on that, when we get where we're going."

"Ten four," Sam said, and Jack gave her a ghost of a smile.

Sam stood, and stepped behind Jack. Daniel's breath hitched again, his head shifting from side to side. The tiny indicators of his dreams were long since familiar now, and Sam knew just what to do.

She reached out and touched the backs of her fingers to his cheek, and said, "Shh, easy there," in a low whisper.

Daniel turned into the touch, his mouth easing into a half-smile, and her heart clenched even as he relaxed. Daniel Jackson was strange and brave and amazing--one of her two favorite men in the universe, the second of two she never thought she'd have.

She could only ease his nightmares because he didn't know which Sam Carter she was when he was asleep.

***

Daniel woke when Shy moved in his grip. He loosened his arms, and she said, "Aba, what's that?"

Daniel opened his eyes, blinked a couple of times, focusing his eyes--the sky was black outside, the ground white--it could almost be Egypt again, but the light was too stark, too...

"The view's better back here," Sam said, her voice hushed with awe.

Daniel leaned around the doorway into the rear compartment, and his breath stopped and arms locked on Shy for a second. The rear hatch stood open, and beyond was the barren landscape of the Moon, which meant that outside the hatch was vacuum.

"Sam rigged a shield," Jack said. "Obviously. Come on, have a look."

Shy wiggled impatiently, and Daniel kissed the top of her head and set her on her feet. "You stay behind Sam and Jack, Shy, not one inch farther."

She nodded, rewrapping her headscarf like she was going outside. She had her eyes fixed on the place beyond the hatch that must look, to her, like a new and different desert. Daniel stood and followed her, and when she plastered herself against Sam's leg, Daniel dropped to his knees beside her, to see just what she was seeing.

The ground was white and gray, pocked with craters inside craters, and above the horizon the sky was black, scattered with a dazzle of diamond-bright stars. Fifteen degrees up, shining bright as the moon, hung the Earth, blue and green and beautiful.

"Shy," Daniel said, tugging her from behind Sam to stand against his side. "Here, it's all right, you're all right with me."

Shy leaned trustingly into his grip, and when he looked down he could see the blue and green of the earth reflected in her eyes, and had to blink his own eyes clear.

"Shy," he said. "Stella--"

She turned her gaze to him, and Daniel shook his head, redirecting her with a finger on her cheek.

"Look out there. Just look and look, and see all that you can. You must remember this, Stella Cheyenne, because one day this will be a story, one of our most important stories. This will be a story about our family," and the familiar words spilled from his mouth automatically, "which we don't tell to anyone else because they wouldn't understand, and anyway it's none of their business."

He glanced up at Sam and Jack as he said it, and caught both of them mouthing that along, as they usually did. Jack had his arm around Sam's shoulders, Sam had her arm around his waist, and as the familiar introduction ended, they both settled down to sit on the other side of Shy from Daniel. That put Sam and Shy between Jack and Daniel, in the familiar arrangement.

Daniel closed his eyes for a moment, and then looked out again, following Shy's rapt gaze.

"One day, a long time from now, you will tell this story to your own family," Daniel said. "I want you to learn the story now, while it's happening, so you will always remember. Repeat after me, Stella: in the spring of my fifth year..."

Shy tipped her head to lean against his. "In the spring of my fifth year."

"We left Egypt, where I was born."

Shy's hand caught his, and her fingers curled around two of his. "We left Egypt, where I was born."

"We boarded an Ancient spaceship."

"We boarded an Ancient spaceship." Shy repeated the words blandly, in the same tone Daniel recited them, with no idea of how preposterous they were. She would learn, or maybe she never would.

"And Jack flew us all the way to the Moon."

Shy gasped, and turned her head to look toward Jack, who nodded confirmation. "And Jack flew us all the way to the Moon."

Daniel nodded back, letting his eyes stay on Jack's. "And we landed in the..."

"Mare Humboldtianum," Jack supplied smoothly.

"And we landed in the Mare Humboldtianum," Shy repeated, blithely correcting Jack's Latin pronunciation as she looked back out at the Lunar landscape.

Daniel smiled and kissed the bit of her cheek that showed above her scarf. "And I looked out at the brilliant stars in the black sky."

"And I looked out at the brilliant stars in the black sky." Shy turned her head from side to side, taking in all she could.

"And I looked up at the Earth, all blue and green and bright."

Shy's gaze fixed on it. "And I looked up at the Earth, all blue and green and bright."

Daniel lifted Shy into his arms and shifted to sit close to Sam's side, setting Shy down in Sam's lap. Shy kept hold of his hand, and Daniel kept hold of hers, wrapping his other arm around Sam. Jack's arm shifted to hold on over Daniel's, and Daniel saw Shy reach out for Jack's other hand with hers, as Sam's arms went around her, all circuits occupied, all circuits complete.

"And I knew that--" Daniel looked out at the darkness of the sky, the glow of the earth, and then closed his eyes and said the words, the way Shy should remember it. It was true for now, it was true today, it was enough. "My family loved me very much, and we were going home."

Shy's hand squeezed on his, and he didn't know if the quiver in her voice was her own, or mimicry of him. "And I knew that my family loved me very much, and we were going home."

***

Ten four. Jack sat still, staring at the surface of the moon. He was conscious of the place his arm crossed over Daniel's, Shy's hand holding on to his, the warmth of Sam at his side, more than he was of what he was looking at. The moon, up close and personal. My family.

Jack would take it while he could get it, and wouldn't think too hard about what was coming next. Being in the puddlejumper here was almost like being back on his boat, that way. What mattered--what was real--was what was within reach. Everything else was somewhere else, out of his hands.

Something chirped in the jumper, and Sam twitched beside him--making to stand up and then realizing she was at the middle of the tangle of arms. "Jack, would you shut the door? We have to take the shield down now or the power's going to go down too far to get home."

Jack nodded and stood, and the rear hatch started coming up even as he turned toward the main controls. "Oh. Yeah."

Sam grinned up at him while Shy kept staring out at the narrowing sliver of sky. Daniel, of course, was watching Shy.

Daniel stood as the hatch sealed, though, and took Shy from Sam as she moved to undo whatever she'd done to the two panels she'd opened up in the back.

"We should probably change clothes," Daniel said, turning toward one of the benches and lifting the top to reveal stowage. Jack itched to reach out and take Shy, to free both of Daniel's hands--he'd have done it yesterday, and no one would have batted an eye--but now was not the time.

Jack rubbed his empty hands against his thighs. "Hey, it'll be nice to have pockets again."

Daniel flashed Jack a half-smile and turned to hand him a folded set of black fatigues. The smile slipped as he said, "These should be your size."

Sam finished what she was doing and snapped the panels back into place, then turned to Daniel as he held out another folded set of clothes.

"Oh," she said, "they probably won't..."

"They'll fit," Daniel said firmly, and Sam nodded and turned her back to both of them as she unwrapped the scarf from her head.

Daniel tossed down the last of the extra clothes on the next section of bench and then closed the one he'd been standing at. Jack couldn't help noticing he'd taken out two pairs--there were supposed to be four on the team, of course. Jack wasn't quite sure what Daniel was planning on doing with Teal'c's clothes, but then Daniel put Shy on her feet on the bench and said, "Here, you're going to put on some clothes from our home."

So that answered that question. Jack turned away and busied himself changing, quick and efficient and without looking around, locker room style. Just as he was tugging on a t-shirt--God, a t-shirt, he'd almost forgotten (never could ever forget) what cotton knit felt like against his skin--Sam laughed.

Jack turned to look, and saw that Daniel had put Shy in the black t-shirt. It came down nearly to her feet, belted with the tie of her outer robe.

Daniel shot Sam a sheepish smile and said, "Yeah, it's a little... improvised."

But Shy suddenly looked like an American kid playing dress-up in her dad's shirt, not like a kid who belonged in ancient Egypt despite her blue eyes, and that was the whole point here. They needed to look more like us than them to the SGC.

"Right, my turn." Daniel reached for the remaining fatigues, and Shy sat down on the bench to wait for him. Sam reached for her, and Shy held her hands up--this time at least Jack had pockets to jam his own hands into. He watched Daniel change, for something to do, though he faced slightly away while he did it, out of permanent habit. Daniel had the locker room quick-change down pretty well, but Jack savored the glimpses of skin he got.

When Daniel turned around dressed in fatigue pants and a t-shirt, he looked half-naked, his bared arms milk-pale above his tanned hands. Daniel looked down at himself and quirked another brief smile. "Desert tan. Wonderful."

Jack nodded. "It's a look."

"Yeah," Daniel said, and then he braced himself, telegraphing his next move all the way. Jack kept his hands in his pockets and the half-smile on his face as Daniel stepped across the space between them, put his hands to Jack's cheeks, and gave him a deliberate, thorough kiss.

Jack was breathless by the time Daniel broke away, and his hands had found their way to Daniel's hips. Daniel met his eyes and held them for a few seconds. Jack knew he probably ought to say something, and that Daniel wasn't expecting a word.

"Aba!" Shy said, bright and delighted. "Aba, Sam next!"

Jack dropped his hands and dropped his gaze as Daniel turned away, stared at his own toes as Daniel murmured, "Yes, of course, Sam next. If she doesn't mind?"

The answer was just the soft sound of lips on lips, and Jack was only goddamn human and a goddamn idiot. He looked up, and there they were, the three of them, Shy on Sam's hip looking more like mini-Sam than ever in their matching clothes, Daniel's hands gently framing Sam's face as he kissed her. As she kissed him right back.

It felt the same today as it had felt yesterday--like he was looking across a very short space at everything he wanted in this or any world, with that niggling edge of fuck, that would have been simpler. Would've sucked for him, but he was pretty used to things sucking for him, and it would've been better for them. Better for Daniel, at least, or easier. Less confusing for Shy (not that Shy seemed confused in the slightest).

Would've been simple, anyway: one man, one woman, one kid. One used-up old guy hanging around their house.

Daniel and Sam broke apart and to nobody's surprise, when Daniel took a step back from her he was holding Shy again.

Shy looked over at Jack, still smiling brightly, and he couldn't resist smiling back. Never could.

"Now you and Sam," she said imperiously, sweeping her hands together like a conductor.

Jack gave Shy a quick salute and turned toward Sam, and there she was, stepping into his arms.

Could've been simple like this, too--had been simple like this, for more than a year. Jack had Sam, Daniel had Shy; if they'd just found the jumper sooner it could've stayed simple. But Jack closed his eyes and kissed Sam, heard Shy applauding and felt Daniel watching, and he knew that whatever happened next, it was never going to be simple again.

My family. And we're going home.

***

Jack settled into the pilot's seat and then looked back toward Daniel. "Ah... you're navigating, once we get where we're going."

"Oh," Daniel said. "Of course."

It would be up to Daniel to speak to the SGC, to have any idea what to say. It had been seven years, but he still remembered his (thank God, probably unnecessary, even if they could trust it to be accurate) last IDC code, to say nothing of the other procedures they'd been drilled on for emergency situations.

Daniel turned to Sam, who was already reaching for Shy.

"Right," Daniel said, letting go, and then went and took the seat beside Jack. "We can't risk getting there before they've found the video or it'll all be much harder to explain, and we may as well keep your and Sam's subjective timelines intact. Aim for a year and a half after you left."

"Yeah," Jack said, "Okay, I'll just--"

The light outside changed; the Earth, which had previously been visible from the back hatch, was now hanging in the sky in front of them.

"--do that," Jack finished.

"Right," Daniel said, squinting; there was a twinkling around the earth that might be a halo of satellites, or might be... anything, nothing, a sign that his vision had gotten worse again. "Is there any way to pick up transmissions from Earth on the communications system? Radio, TV, anything that will let us see when exactly we've come to without revealing ourselves..."

"I think I can do something with the long range scanners," Sam said. "Hang on."

Daniel looked back, to see Sam expertly popping open panels with Shy balanced on her hip; after a moment she set Shy down and pulled a rack of crystals out.

"Here, honey, hold this for me," she said. Shy accepted a crystal into her hands and held it there, above her head, while Sam rerouted wires and rearranged crystals.

"Thanks, Shy," Sam said, when she took the crystal, and Shy turned to look at Daniel as she smiled at the praise. Daniel smiled back and nodded--yes, he'd seen that she'd done well helping Sam, yes, he approved.

"Try it now," Sam said, resting a hand casually on top of Shy's head. Shy leaned against Sam's leg, and then the generically familiar tones of an American newscaster rang out in the jumper, the picture blooming across the heads up display.

Shy squeaked, and when Daniel looked back again she was in Sam's arms, and Sam was murmuring in her ear. Daniel forced his attention back to CNN, scanning for clues.

"Nailed the date," Jack murmured, and Daniel nodded.

"President's right," Daniel contributed. There was no mention of the SGC, aliens, Goa'uld overlords. Just the same damned wars still lingering on--not even two years since he'd left, Daniel reminded himself. Not seven.

There were sports scores, and Jack was muttering to himself about the hockey season. Daniel shut his eyes against all the input and didn't let himself think about it.

"All right," Daniel said. "We should try for the SGC--the comm frequency should still be set, hopefully they're using the same one here. Now. Whatever."

CNN disappeared, and Jack made a silent gesture of invitation to Daniel. He cleared his throat and said crisply, "This is Daniel Jackson for the SGC, SGC come in."

"Doctor Jackson, this is SGC! Sir, where are you? Did the Ori--"

Daniel recognized the voice, and obviously the voice recognized him. From the sound of things, he was missing again. Ori? What the hell had they gotten mixed up in now?

"Hold on, Sergeant. It's ... complicated. I need to speak to the general immediately, his ears only."

"Of course, sir. I'll patch you right through to him."

So, okay, there was still a general in charge at the SGC--it might even still be Jack, if Daniel was having an especially lucky day.

"Doctor Jackson," said a hearty and totally unfamiliar voice. "Good to hear from you again, where the hell are you?"

"Uh," Daniel said. "Sir, please don't take this the wrong way, but could you tell me your name before we go any further into this conversation?"

There was a short pause, and then the man at the SGC said evenly, "This is General Hank Landry, Dr. Jackson. I succeeded General Jack O'Neill about a year and a half ago, now--does that name ring any bells?"

Beside him, Jack raised his eyebrows.

"Yes, it does," Daniel said. "I, ah--it's not amnesia or anything this time, General Landry, I just--I'm not exactly the Daniel Jackson you were expecting."

There was another short pause, and then a very low murmur of, "Oh, Christ."

Jack snorted, and Daniel couldn't hold back a brief smile.

"Feel free to explain that whenever you're ready, Dr. Jackson," Landry said.

Daniel nodded. "Yes, well--hopefully, at some point in the last couple of years, there was a digital camera found inside a canopic jar from a dig in Egypt, and on the camera was a recording from the members of SG-1."

"Yes," Landry said. "Yes, I read that file--it was one of the ones O'Neill flagged because it might come back to bite us in the ass later. You're the Daniel Jackson who traveled back in time?"

"I am," Daniel said, glancing over at Jack to see him looking rather pleased with his counterpart's forethought. Daniel was pretty pleased himself; it would have been easy for the ones who didn't need to fix anything to just forget the whole incident, and that would have made all of this much, much harder to explain.

When Landry spoke again, it was with an only faintly disbelieving tone. "Doctor Jackson, are you speaking to me from the Moon?"

"Uh, yes, sir," Daniel said, glancing around. "We... didn't want to be in anyone's way when we got here."

"The Odyssey has your telemetry--they're reading four life signs. Do you have the rest of your team with you?"

Daniel glanced around the jumper. Jack had propped one elbow on the console, his chin in his hand, watching Daniel with every sign of utter fascination. Sam was standing just behind their seats watching him much the same way, and Shy, on her hip, was listening attentively. "No, sir. Uh, not exactly."

"Not... exactly," Landry said, making it sound a lot like oh, Christ.

"Colonel Jack O'Neill, retired, is piloting the puddlejumper," Daniel said. "Doctor Samantha Carter is also with us."

"And Teal'c? He there in a snake helmet?"

Daniel winced, remembering the Teal'c who had died mere days after rebelling against Apophis.

"No, sir. Teal'c didn't make it." Before Landry could say anything--Daniel had a feeling it would be something unbearably decent--he went on, "The fourth is my daughter, Stella. She's four years old. I don't suppose you'll mind her coming along?"

"Of course not, Doctor Jackson," Landry said, and then, in a voice only slightly adjusted for a small child, "Hello there, Stella."

Daniel looked back in time to see Shy's lips part in wonder, and she glanced at Daniel, wide-eyed; he nodded, and gestured toward the speaker generating the sound.

"Hello, sir," Shy said, in her politest tone, and Daniel smiled and reached out to squeeze her knee.

Landry laughed a little. "And hello, Colonel O'Neill and Doctor Carter, of course."

Jack and Sam chorused a "Hello, sir," and "Hello, General," back.

"Right," Landry said, "why don't we continue this conversation where we can all see each other--are you folks familiar with the Asgard beaming technology?"

"I am," Daniel said to Landry, and to Jack and Sam, "Star Trek, basically. You don't feel a thing."

He got to his feet, gesturing for Jack to follow, and Shy nearly leapt out of Sam's arms to him.

"One thing, General," Daniel called out, as Sam and Jack gathered up their gear and discarded clothing. "This puddlejumper has been Stella's first impression of the modern world."

Sam and Jack rejoined him, Sam holding her own pack, and Jack with his own and Daniel's.

"Wherever you send us will be the second. I would just--appreciate it if you kept that in mind."

"Understood, Doctor Jackson. We'll see you soon."

Daniel hugged Shy tighter--she buried her head against his shoulder--there was that faint ticklish fizzy sensation that Sam had told him had something to do with air being displaced. Daniel opened his eyes without realizing he'd closed them, and stared around at a familiar VIP suite.

They hadn't changed the decorating scheme since he'd been gone.

The air smelled exactly the same. The light looked the same. The faint noises from outside, the vibration of the workings of the mountain under his feet, they were all just the same.

Seven years he'd been in the desert--three of those years alone, with nothing but a baby's name to remember this place by.

Daniel was home.

***

Jack registered military installation (which meant home and safe and quite probably mission accomplished) at his first glance. He did the automatic count, self-two-three-four, but they'd all come through just fine--Sam tucked between him and Daniel, Shy in Daniel's arms, Daniel...

Daniel's breathing had gone funny, quietly gut-punched. He had a pretty decent start on a thousand-yard stare and his face had drained pale under his tan. Shy was pushing away a little bit, enough to look at him, already aware something was wrong; Sam was staring up at the fluorescent lights. Jack took a careful step away and dropped the bags he was holding.

"Sam," Jack said, low and soft and easy. "Sam, could you take her? I think we're gonna need a minute. Honey, hey, go with Sam."

Shy gave her father a worried look, but Daniel had taught her to listen to adults, and he wasn't countermanding Jack now. She reached out for Sam, who shot Jack an even more worried look, but put her hands on Shy's sides and helped her wiggle free of Daniel's frozen grip. Daniel didn't resist. Jack was pretty sure he would have, if Jack had tried to take her.

He waved Sam and Shy toward the far corner of the room--there were armchairs, a stocked bookshelf, all the wonders of the modern world--and only when they were clear did he move into Daniel's space, meeting eyes that stared right through him.

"Daniel," he said. "Daniel, hey, it's Jack."

A ghost of a smile passed over Daniel's face, and then he crumpled. He ducked his head, covering his face with his hands, so Jack barely saw the flash of naked something on Daniel's face. Between that and hearing him sirring a general and explaining things in a tone that reminded Jack, just a little, of a hopeless geek he'd known once for a few days, he was seeing all kinds of new angles on Daniel.

Mostly nothing he wanted to see, so far.

"Daniel," he said softly. "Hey, it's all right."

Jack had seen a lot of men come back from a lot of unspeakable missions, back in another life, another universe (one where he'd never come anywhere near having stars on his shoulders, and thank God for that). He'd been one of those men, plenty of times. Technically he even was one right now, but he could put it off a little while. Right now it was looking like Daniel's turn.

Daniel had spent seven years cut off from all support, seen his whole team die and still carried on the mission alone--had fathered a child in the middle of a war and kept waging it even as he raised her. And now he was home and now, like plenty of guys Jack had known, he was falling apart a little. Jack wasn't the least surprised that Daniel was one of the ones who did it silently; he was just glad it had happened fast, or he might have missed it completely.

Daniel shook his head, and lifted his face from his hands. He was still horribly pale, but now there were tears streaming down his cheeks.

"I, uh... I think I'm in shock?" His voice was thin and faint and like just about nothing Jack had ever heard from the hard-eyed man he'd met in the desert, but at least Daniel seemed to be operating in the present again.

"Yeah," Jack said, "You are. It's a physical reaction, it happens to everybody."

Daniel nodded, ducking his head again and scrubbing at his face with the heels of his hands, "And since when do I even--I'm not--"

He let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob and then choked it back and said almost evenly, "Sam's got Shy?"

Jack looked over quickly to see Sam and Shy both watching them, two wide-eyed gazes just alike. He flashed a quick thumbs up even as he said, "Yeah, they're right over there, everybody's here."

Daniel nodded, looked over toward them and then quickly away.

"Come on," Jack said softly. "Sit down before you fall down."

Jack guided him to the bed and sat down on the foot beside him, and Daniel curled right over, face in hands and elbows on knees. Jack sat beside him, leaving a couple of inches between them--he was trying not to think about the inevitable surveillance, except, whoops, there he went thinking about it. But touching Daniel would be a pretty iffy idea right now anyway.

He was shaking, his breathing still audibly rough. Jack made himself a sucker bet about what the next word he said was going to be.

"Shy," Daniel said, after about a minute and a half.

Win.

"She shouldn't drink the water right away," Daniel said. His voice was low and pained, but pretty steady. "Give her what's in the canteens first, top them up with the filtered drinking water until she's transitioned."

"Sure," Jack said. He didn't say, you're right here, you can take care of it.

"Ask for MII rations, if they've got them here. Back home, Janet--one of the doctors, she developed them for her daughter."

"MII?" Jack loved a good three-letter acronym, but this place probably had its own alphabet's worth.

"Minimum Industrial Impact." Daniel raised his hands from his face to rub them over his hair, then covered his eyes again. "Organic hippie food, basically. It's better for people from pre-industrial societies, they react badly to modern stuff sometimes."

"We should probably all have those for a while, huh," Jack said. "I'd been meaning to cut back on the MSG anyway."

Daniel snorted wetly and shrugged. "You and Sam, you don't need to--all the stuff you've been missing, you--"

"We'll get there," Jack said patiently, though as soon as he said it he remembered the exact taste of deep-dish pizza and his mouth started watering. "All of us will, together. Meantime, we'll all eat what Shy can eat. That's only fair."

He thought about Charlie--he'd missed a hell of a lot, but the letters Sara had sent him had been full of stuff like this, and he'd read them over and over.

"We'll watch out for allergies, too, right? Peanuts, milk--you don't have any food allergies, do you?"

Daniel flinched at that, but he said, "Scratch test. And vaccinations. Epi pen, in case."

"Sure," Jack said, filing it away, in case... in case of anything, in case by some remote and horrible chance he actually had to take on the responsibility Daniel was trying to prepare him for. "Hey, and you can finally get some antihistamines, huh?"

Daniel muttered, "Kleenex," and then slumped forward, burying his face against his arms, shaking like he was going to rattle apart. Jack took a breath and leaned over him, like sheltering a man down. He closed his arms around the hard frame of Daniel's shoulders, and Daniel leaned into Jack and shook harder.

***

Sam's knees went kind of weak at the thought of sitting in an actual comfortable chair again; she found herself on the floor in front of it, Shy in her lap, with no memory of deciding to sit down there. She glanced at Daniel--standing frozen in the middle of the room, Jack talking softly to him--and worried that however badly she was reacting, Daniel might actually be worse off.

It almost didn't compute; sure, he'd loosened up a lot since the beginning, let Sam and Jack in a lot more, but he was still Daniel. He knew how to handle everything, who to talk to and how. He'd overthrown Ra. Twice, as they'd found out when he finally explained how he met the Jack O'Neill from his own timeline. The thought that he felt as overwhelmed and unmoored as she did right now just... didn't bear thinking about.

But Jack was handling Daniel, and Jack was fantastically capable in his own right. Sam... Sam had Shy, her own Jackson to wrangle.

Shy was leaning forward in Sam's lap, running her hands over the flat industrial carpeting in apparent fascination. Sam leaned over Shy, pressing her lips against Shy's hair as she set down her hand beside Shy's. Big and little, mini and full-size.

Shy twisted away slightly, looking up at her with a smile, and said, "Sam, are we underground?"

Sam blinked, wondering when and how Shy had picked up that concept--what stories had Daniel told her?--but nodded. "Yes. Very deep underground, that's why there are no windows."

This had to be the SGC, after all. Sam recognized the feel of the base, though she hadn't realized there were quarters quite this nice during her first stay.

Shy nodded. "Like the hiding tunnels."

Sam remembered, then--the rebel weapons cache Daniel had shown to her and Jack had been underground. But the year and a half since the uprising had been a third of Shy's lifetime, and Daniel had kept her well clear of the fighting.

"You remember that?" she asked, even though obviously Shy did.

Shy nodded, twisting in Sam's lap to peer over her shoulder, studying the armchair behind them, patting the upholstery gingerly. "When strangers came, or when there was danger, I hid there. I had a--"

Shy lapsed into Egyptian to say something Sam didn't understand, then tried again in English, "Hole. Cub-hole."

"Cubbyhole," Sam offered, and felt a little sick as she pictured it.

"Cubbyhole," Shy repeated. In the same casual tone, she added, "Aba said I was more precious than everything else in the hiding tunnels, so I must have the best hiding place."

Shy reported it as a plain fact, not an emotional declaration, but then in Sam's experience that was the form Daniel's emotional declarations tended to take. Sam wanted to ask whether--how many times--Shy had had to use the cubbyhole. Had she been there, hidden from the strangers in the camp, when Daniel showed them the cache? Had they walked right by her, unaware?

Sam wanted to ask--couldn't bear to, and was afraid she couldn't resist--but at just that moment Daniel let out something that sounded awfully close to a sob.

Shy went instantly tense, turning to stare in her father's direction--another kid would have run to him, called out to him, Sam thought, but Shy had been told to stay with Sam, and didn't speak unless spoken to. She didn't move and didn't make a sound.

Daniel was sitting on the bed now, with Jack at his side, talking softly to him. Sam was tempted to run to them herself, but she had a responsibility here. Sam cuddled Shy close, and just then Jack and Daniel both looked up, and Jack flashed them a thumbs-up. Shy didn't relax any, but when Sam turned her away from them Shy gave in quickly, winding her hands into Sam's t-shirt and pressing close for reassurance.

"You know what," Sam said, reaching for the first distraction she could think of. "We didn't just come home, Shy. This is the place where your name comes from--this base is called Cheyenne Mountain."

It was enough to ease Shy's grip a little--Shy loved stories about her family background more than anything. "What does Cheyenne Mountain mean?"

"Well," Sam said, don't blow it, don't blow it. "The Cheyenne were a tribe of people who used to live here--not in this base, but on the land."

God, now was not the time to try to explain Native Americans and cultural appropriation, and anyway that was going to be Daniel's talk to give her. "And, well, the base is under a mountain, so. Mountain."

Shy freed one hand from Sam's shirt, and made the groping-for-words gesture she'd obviously learned from Daniel. "A mountain is a... a high place."

"A very high place," Sam agreed. "Bigger than the pyramids, bigger than anything. Like a huge dune, made of hard earth and rock, so it doesn't move. And we're far underneath that, hidden."

"Mountain," Shy repeated, like she did when Daniel gave her lessons. "We're underneath a whole mountain, made of hard earth and rock."

"That's right," Sam said, and for a second the almost-tangible weight of it was somehow reassuring and claustrophobic all at once. Nothing was going to get in here, but nothing was going to get out unless it was permitted.

"It must be very safe here," Shy concluded. "And very hidden."

It didn't mean they had any special bond, Sam reminded herself, not for the first time. They were together in this situation. They were family. That was all, and that was plenty.

Out loud, Sam said, "Very safe, sweetheart. We wouldn't have brought you here if it wasn't."

She glanced over at Daniel--folded over on himself, and Jack was hugging him now, not too differently from the way Sam was holding on to Shy.

She hoped to God she wasn't lying.

***

Things got simple, eventually. His back hurt and his head hurt and he wasn't really crying anymore, just hyperventilating. Shy was probably freaking out, and Jack had to be pretty tired of muttering soothingly at one-minute intervals. Daniel could feel himself sweating all over the place, which had to put some kind of time limit on the embrace.

He pushed up a little against Jack's weight over his back, and Jack pulled away at once, leaving Daniel feeling clammy-cold. Daniel sat up ran his wet hands over his wet face. "I, um--I'm gonna--"

"Yeah," Jack said softly. Maybe Daniel was imagining the slight hoarseness in his voice, but maybe not.

Daniel nodded, and glanced toward Sam and Shy--Shy was in Sam's lap, and there was a scattering of pebbles on the floor, maybe a game of Go, maybe one of Sam's math lessons disguised as a game. In any case, Shy was safely distracted, oblivious to his breakdown.

That was good, of course. That was better. That was why a kid should have more than one parent. More than two, even, if she was lucky. If they were all lucky.

Daniel took a deep breath and stood, turning away from his daughter to find the bathroom.

Toilet paper was the first imperative--these were definitely the VIP quarters, they had the nice stuff, even better than the pretty decent brand the SG team locker rooms had merited. He blew his nose and told himself he was not going to start crying again at, of all goddamned stupid things, toilet paper. Not today, anyway.

A few impossible tears leaked from his eyes, and Daniel blotted them away and told himself to call it culture shock. Since when do I even try to be some boys-don't-cry macho man? Since when do I even care about crying? He hadn't even managed to say it to Jack. He hadn't broken down in a long time, and maybe never in front of this Sam and Jack--never like that, for certain. Never in front of Shy once she was old enough to understand.

Right on cue, a voice called out cautiously, "Aba?"

Daniel glanced at himself in the mirror--red-eyed and disheveled, and he could feel wetness drying on his bare arms, sweat drying everywhere else. Well, it wasn't as if he could hide himself from her.

"In here, Shy, come on in."

Shy came just to the open door and peered in, and Daniel smiled and switched on the sink tap, watching her eyes go wide.

"I was just going to wash up a little. Come here, I'll show you."

Shy came over to the sink and peered over the edge, staring at the running water. Daniel turned it off and on a couple of times, so she could see how the tap worked.

"We have lots of water here," Daniel said to his desert-born daughter. "More than we need. We use it for everything."

He bent over Shy, got some soap--it smelled different, industrial-clear instead of industrial-yellow--and started washing his hands and up his arms. When Shy reached out her hands over the sink, he took her hands between his and lathered them, too, and then realized she couldn't quite reach the stream of water to rinse, and he was dripping wet.

"Here," Jack said softly. Daniel shifted sideways and Jack knelt beside Shy, boosting her up to rinse her hands.

"Thanks," Daniel said quietly, meeting Jack's eyes over Shy's head, and Jack nodded.

Daniel shut off the water and turned away, grabbed a towel and dried himself, then offered it to Shy, who dried her hands--and arms, though she hadn't washed that high--and then her face, rubbing her cheek against the terrycloth.

"Okay, that's enough," Daniel said, and Shy straightened up and handed the towel back.

Daniel hung it on the rack and then looked down to see Shy peering curiously at the toilet. Right. First things first.

Daniel crouched down next to it, and Shy immediately came to stand next to him, peering in curiously. Daniel had a brief flash of some joke-archaeology picture book he'd been given in grad school. The archaeologists of the far future had excavated an American motel; someone wound up concluding the toilet seat was a ceremonial headdress, if he remembered the illustrations right.

"This is the latrine," Daniel said. "The toilet. Instead of burying waste, we use water to carry it away."

Shy looked up at him, scandalized. "Water?"

Daniel nodded, and reached out to grab the wad of toilet paper he'd blown his nose with from the edge of the sink. He dropped it in, then said, "Here, watch. It's kind of loud."

He flushed, and Shy jumped and grabbed his arm, staring as the toilet paper swirled away and water flowed back in.

"So, here we don't say, 'I need to go to the latrine,' we say, 'I need to go to the toilet' or 'to the bathroom,' which is what we call this room. The bath is over there." Daniel gestured toward it. "Understood?"

Shy nodded.

Daniel looked up at the sound of hands clapping and Jack said, "I believe that's a land-speed record for potty training, Daniel. Good work."

Sam was leaning in the doorway, watching with a smile, and Daniel smiled back and shrugged, ripped off some toilet paper and wiped his nose again. As he tossed the toilet paper in, he said, "It wasn't quite that fast the first time."

Shy extended her hand toward the toilet's handle and said, "Aba, may I?"

Daniel nodded. "Go for it, Shy."

She flushed, and this time Jack and Sam both applauded; when Shy joined in, laughing, Daniel did too.

From the room beyond, there was a sharp knock on the door, and everyone went silent, turning to look. Daniel brushed past Jack and Sam, so that all three of them were between Shy and whoever was coming in.

The door opened to admit a man in full dress blues, stars on his shoulders. He had a shock of graying brown hair, and his eyes were surrounded by smile lines.

"Doctor Jackson, I presume," he said, coming in and closing the door behind him--no armed escort, no weapons in evidence.

Daniel nodded, and came forward to meet him. "General Landry. Allow me to introduce Sam Carter," he turned to check; as he'd expected, Sam had followed him. Jack was hanging back a little--because Shy was hiding behind him, Daniel realized. Jack was looking over his shoulder at her.

"And Jack O'Neill," Daniel said.

Jack looked up and stepped aside, revealing Shy, who had unwrapped the scarf belting the oversized t-shirt, and wrapped it around her head and face.

Because she was meeting a stranger, someone not of her family, and Daniel had long since taught her to conceal her fairness, which stood out like a beacon in ancient Giza.

"And my daughter Stella," Daniel said, beckoning to Shy with his fingers. Shy hurried to his side, and Daniel pushed back the covering from her head. "Stella, this is General Landry, who spoke to you when we were aboard the ship. He's a friend. We don't have to hide ourselves from him or from his people here on the base. Remember, this is our country. We aren't different here."

That was probably a pretty strong contender for the biggest lie he'd told his daughter today, but Shy nodded trustingly and said, "It's nice to meet you, sir."

Landry smiled. "It's nice to meet you, too, Stella. It's nice to meet all of you. Doctor Carter--I assume, since you are not the Sam Carter who initially traveled back, that there was some complication with timelines and time travel?"

Sam looked startled to be addressed, but nodded quickly. "Yes, sir. Jack and I are the survivors of the team that was sent to find out about the situation after the video was found. Our timeline had turned out very differently."

Landry nodded. "SG-1 is offworld, but I've asked them to return immediately. They'll assist in debriefing you, which I'm sure will be a fascinating process--Doctor, you and Colonel Carter will have a great deal to talk about, I'm sure. In the meantime, I'd like you all to come up to the infirmary to get checked out."

Daniel nodded, and glanced down at his feet--he'd left Shy's sandals on when he helped her change clothes, but he was barefoot, and so were Sam and Jack.

"Yes," Daniel said. "We'll just need some shoes."

***

Sam had gotten pretty adept at watching Daniel and Jack for cues, back in Egypt. Daniel, then as now, was the expert in local customs; Jack was best at reading the overall threat level of any given situation.

As they left the room they'd been placed in and followed General Landry down the corridor, Sam guessed the guys were classifying the SGC as friendly-but-unpredictable. Daniel carried the bag of things he thought might interest the doctor, but he let Shy walk on her own rather than insisting that someone carry her. He automatically placed himself in the lead, at Landry's side, and Jack just as automatically fell back a step, so that Sam was walking beside Shy, sandwiched safely between them.

Shy, for her part, was staring around at the tunnels, the lights, the numbers written on the walls, with wide-eyed fascination. It was only when the elevator doors opened that she grabbed Sam's hand, and Sam looked down at her and smiled, giving Shy's fingers a squeeze as she led her inside.

"It's not actually this quiet," Landry said, looking around at all of them as the elevator doors closed. "But we cleared a path, just to cut down confusion about you folks--and in case of disease exposure, for Stella's sake. Seems to be working so far."

"Thank you," Daniel said, just as the elevator jolted into motion, and Shy gasped and plastered herself to Sam's leg.

Daniel turned to look at her, hands coming out automatically, but Shy had her eyes shut and was clinging to Sam. Sam petted her and said, "It's all right, sweetheart, it's supposed to do that. It's all right."

Daniel turned around again a second before the elevator stopped, and hesitated to step forward just until the elevator doors were opening--he knew the timing, Sam realized. He knew exactly how long the trip was from 25 to 23, and how long it took the doors to open. He knew this place.

Shy loosened her grip on Sam's leg as soon as the doors opened and grabbed Sam's hand again, all but dragging her out onto solid ground in Daniel and the general's wake. It wasn't far to the infirmary--down a corridor, through a set of double doors. There were curtains drawn around a couple of beds, and the general led them quickly past, to where the doctor, a white-coated Asian woman, was waiting for them with a cart of paper-covered instrument trays.

"Folks, this is Doctor Carolyn Lam--she's our Chief Medical Officer, she'll take good care of you. Doctor, Colonel Jack O'Neill--"

"Retired," Jack contributed, and Sam noticed the same smile flicker across Daniel and Landry's faces. It was something the other Jack would have said, she guessed.

"And Doctor Daniel Jackson, Doctor Samantha Carter, and young Miss Stella Jackson."

Dr. Lam smiled at them all and said, "It's nice to meet you--you can take a seat on the beds here. I'm going to have to take blood samples."

Sam tried to read the smile--she was pretty sure she caught a certain searching look, a sign that Dr. Lam knew the other versions of them and was looking for them in the faces before her. It was an expression of Daniel's that she'd be seeing everywhere, now--she might even look at someone that way herself, if she met the other Jack and Daniel, to say nothing of meeting Colonel Carter...

Jack hung back, but Daniel turned and picked up Shy, and set her and the knapsack down side-by-side on one of the infirmary beds.

Sam took a spot directly opposite Shy and Jack sat beside her while Daniel sat opposite him, placing himself automatically nearer to the door than Shy, and facing it. General Landry beamed impartially at all of them and then excused himself.

"I'll go first," Daniel said, as Dr. Lam took out a hypodermic. "Stella, watch this--it hurts a little bit, but it's all right."

Shy sat perfectly still, watching, while Dr. Lam started prepping Daniel for a blood draw.

"I understand that you're about the same as our Doctor Jackson," she said, "up to a point. As far as your medical history..."

"Appendix out, twice ascended and descended, standard SGC vaccinations up to two years ago in your timeline, seven years ago for me," Daniel recited. "Um... lots of other things that didn't leave much evidence. I'm about five years older than he is now, and I guess I have a few distinguishing marks."

Sam glanced sideways at Jack, to see if he was remembering what she was, and he raised an eyebrow as he met her eyes, cracking a tiny smile.

They'd never seen the scar until recently--until the night they finally managed to arrange time and privacy to have sex together, all three, naked and lying down and unhurried. Even then Sam hadn't really noticed until afterward, her hand lying on Daniel's stomach, fingers creeping lower, and then she found the spot like a seam across his abdomen, pale and long-healed but crossing nearly from one hip-bone to the other, just above the curls of pubic hair.

He'd laughed--they'd all been a little drunk, and beyond that Daniel had been happy. That night it had seemed like everything was simple, like everything was going to be all right just like that. They'd all been happy. She and Jack had smiled when Daniel laughed.

"That," Daniel had said. "That's my C-section scar."

Jack had laughed; Sam had stared, which made Daniel laugh harder, which made Sam hit him a couple of times, until he and Jack managed to catch her hands.

"It is, it is, honestly," Daniel had said. "Sort of."

Then he'd told them the story--he'd stopped laughing, but hadn't lost the easiness of his body, sprawled comfortably beside them. It was the first time he'd told them a story directly, without the guise of telling it to Shy; it was a story he hadn't told her, in fact, and might never tell her. It was a story just for them, the three of them, a story about the adults of their family.

Daniel and Jack had gotten scared when Sam got pregnant, worried about all the things that could go wrong. Teal'c had been less worried, but humored them, and the three men had plotted the theft from Ra of a healing device. Only a Goa'uld or a former host could use the device, but both Sam and Jack had once hosted Tok'ra, good Goa'ulds, so they had the ability. Sam had had a lot of practice, but if anyone was going to use it on Sam, it would have to be Jack, and Jack had never used one.

They'd pulled off the theft--Daniel glossed over that part of the story in the way that meant it had been much more interesting than that--and Jack had started practicing with the device. First he'd tried it on Teal'c, who would heal quickly from practice injuries even if Jack couldn’t heal them, and then, once he had the idea, he'd started practicing on Daniel, whose healing would be more like Sam's.

It was around then that Sam had found out; she'd wanted them to quit, but gave up on convincing them and spotted Jack through the rest of his trials on Daniel. Every wound they'd inflicted had been healed without a trace, except the last one, which left that scar.

"We had to know we could do whatever we might need to do," Daniel had said quietly, tapping his finger on the narrow mark. He'd looked up then, smiling sheepishly. "And then Sam's labor wound up lasting about three, four hours, and bang, there was the baby. She wasn't even all squished. Jack ran the healing device over both of them just so it wouldn't go to waste, and that was it."

To Dr. Lam, now, he said without expression, "Old knife wound."

***

Daniel held Shy on his lap while she had her blood drawn, murmuring comfort in her ear and carefully not watching a needle pierce her flesh. She'd have to have injections--dozens, he thought vaguely, recalling SGC inoculation standards--and who knew what else. He would be with her for all of it, but he couldn't watch this. He couldn't watch them taking her blood.

Shy handled it bravely, though, and it was over quickly; she held her own cotton ball to the crook of her elbow, and then Dr. Lam offered her the first brightly-colored Band-Aid of her life.

Shy froze up at the choice of two neon colors or three varieties of cartoon character--sensory overload, Daniel thought. Jack and Sam had brought along a little of the 21st century with them, but Shy's life had still not included many trivial choices among equally entrancing options. When she looked to Daniel for help, he glanced at the options--rejecting pink automatically and all the cartoon characters as beyond his power to explain--and said, "Green."

Shy nodded quickly, pointing to the bright green bandage, and Daniel almost managed not to notice the sideways look Dr. Lam gave him as she placed it on Shy's arm.

She said, "Thank you, Dr. Lam," which earned a smile from the doctor, directed entirely at Shy. Daniel gave her a little squeeze of approval, and Shy smiled up at him as Dr. Lam turned away toward Jack.

"Now, in your case, Colonel," Dr. Lam said, "and in yours, Doctor Carter--"

Daniel glanced down at Shy's tug on his t-shirt and saw her make the small gesture asking permission to speak without being spoken to, here in a public place while adults were speaking.

Daniel glanced toward the other bed in time to see Sam and Jack nodding as Dr. Lam explained that they were distinguishable from their local doubles because they had never been Goa'uld hosts, as she would positively establish by blood test in a moment.

Daniel looked back down at Shy and pitched his voice for her alone. "Yes?"

Shy looked back down at her arm, tracing one finger around the edge of the bandage, and said just as softly, "Aba, how does it stay?"

"Oh, it has an adhesive, here and here," Daniel said, pointing. "Adhesive is sticky stuff--more like honey than like glue, not completely drying out. We use it to hold things together; to make them adhere to each other, hence adhesive. From adhaerere."

"Adhaerere, Latin, adhere, adhesive," Shy murmured, and then she wrinkled her nose in thought. "How will I get it off my arm, if it's stuck?"

"Ah," Daniel said, abruptly aware that he had thoughtlessly introduced the Band-Aid removal dilemma into his daughter's life. "Well, there are a couple of options."

"The best is to leave it alone," Sam contributed, and Daniel looked up sharply, as did Shy.

"Wait until you take a bath--the warm water will loosen it right off," Sam said. "Remember, we have lots of water."

Shy nodded quickly, and Daniel mouthed thank you over her head. Sam grinned and then offered her arm to Dr. Lam.

After the four vials of blood had been handed off to an orderly, Dr. Lam turned her attention to Shy again. "Stella, you're the youngest, so you get first checkup. Come over here, so I can see how tall you are."

Daniel slid down to his feet and set Shy on hers; she reached for his hand and held tightly to it as they followed Dr. Lam to the doctor's scale. As Dr. Lam started bringing the height measurement down from its accustomed position around six feet, Daniel said, "Sandals off."

Shy quickly tugged her shoes off, standing first on one foot and then the other, and then cautiously approached the scale.

"Put your feet in the footprints, sweetie," Dr. Lam said. Shy nodded and centered her feet carefully in the airman-sized outlines.

Dr. Lam adjusted the height and the balance, glanced at a clipboard, and frowned. "Doctor Jackson, you said Stella is four years old?"

"Yes," Daniel said. "We managed to calculate with reasonable certainty that her birthday is August 12th, and I believe we've come through close to the same time of year we left, so, yes. Four and three-quarters."

Dr. Lam raised her eyebrows and then looked from the clipboard to the scale again. Daniel glanced at the height measurement--thirty-seven inches; about half his own height, like he'd thought.

"She's very small," Dr. Lam said.

Daniel shrugged. "She was one of the tallest kids of her age in Giza. Modern genetics can only hold so much ground against prehistoric nutrition."

Dr. Lam gave him a look that made Daniel realize that that anthropological observation had been heard as so my daughter starved, what of it.

"By which I mean, we didn't have any Flintstones vitamins," Daniel gritted out. He glanced down at Shy, who was making a slightly frantic hand signal, though with her hands properly at her sides. Asking permission to come back to him; the sudden tension was obvious, and she knew the cause had to do with where she stood.

Daniel exhaled.

He signed back reassurance, and shook his head slightly. Shy nodded and stood up straight as Dr. Lam's attention turned back to her.

"Do you have any idea what her growth pattern has been? Has she been growing steadily?"

"Oh," Daniel said. "She has, yes, I think. I brought--"

He turned toward the bed, but Sam had already gotten the jar from the knapsack he'd brought down and was offering it to him. Daniel nodded his thanks and carefully removed the tight-fitting lid. The jar was nearly full: folded papyrus, coiled cords, and at the bottom, heavier than anything else, the healing device Sam had scarcely needed. It had never come out of the jar until he'd had to explain the scar to Sam and Jack, and then--

Daniel grabbed the cords. "It was the best we could do without access to standard measurements," Daniel said. "This one's how long she was at birth, and then all her birthdays--"

Which left one extra, of course. There were six, and only one was tagged in Sam's handwriting.

***

They all knew what was going to happen at the dark of the moon, three days later, and they all knew how wrong it might go. Nobody had to announce it.

What Jack said was, "I think we should have a half-birthday party for Shy."

Sam was feeding her at the time. Stella was having one of those weeks when she was hungry all the time, or maybe she was just picking up on what everyone else in the tent also knew and wanted her mother close.

Sam raised her eyebrows.

Daniel said, "Her name is still Stella, Jack."

Teal'c said, "Is it not customary to wait a year before celebrating the day of a child's birth?"

Jack rolled his eyes, like they were all being the unreasonable ones. "Half-birthday. Kids back home would do it at school if they had summer birthdays--celebrate their half-birthday while everybody's still around."

The analogy was so horribly apt that Daniel couldn't argue with it, and Sam and Teal'c had seemed satisfied as well. There had been a honey-sweetened pudding instead of cake, with a single stubby candle. Sam had "helped" Stella blow it out, and her birthday sweet had been Stella's first solid food. She'd laughed, showing off her single tooth as she smeared it all over her face.

Jack had given her a teething ring carved from wood, and Teal'c had given her an anklet carved of bone, with designs that signified good luck and health. Daniel had given her a tablet of soft wax and a stylus as blunt as a crayon.

Sam pulled out the healing device and laid it in her daughter's hands. Stella gummed it curiously, made a solid attempt at hitting herself in the head with it, and then--surely accidentally--activated it, sending a faint but visible wash of golden light into Sam's thigh before she dropped it, startled.

"Ha," Sam said, picking it up and laying it next to the other three presents, while Daniel and Jack and Teal'c all stared at her. "Naquadah does pass through the placental barrier. Ten points for me."

"I thought we agreed to stop keeping score," Daniel said, "after you demanded and received ten million points for giving birth in the, I quote without remarking upon your accuracy, Goddamned Stone Age."

"Well, now I have ten million and ten," Sam said patiently, "because I gave birth to a baby who can use Goa'uld technology, in the Goddamned Stone Age."

Sam had been grinning, and Daniel had smiled. Jack laughed and Teal'c said something approving, and that--that was the worst part, really, when Daniel remembered it afterward. They should have been quiet, oppressed with the knowledge of what was to come, the crushing awareness that they would leave Shy three-quarters orphaned, that they would fail.

But that night, as they measured a squirming, laughing Shy, as they sang to her and put her through the motions of ridiculous party games, they had still been SG-1. They had still been invincible.

It wasn't until the next night, at the dark of the moon, that everything really changed.

***

Sam's hand touched his, and Daniel felt that idiot thrill, that instant of it didn't really happen, it's all right. He kept his head down, blinking, as he came all the way back to himself, trying not to let her see his face as it happened.

"And this one is six months," he said quietly, holding out the last cord to Dr. Lam. "She was weaned pretty abruptly after that. If her growth dropped off, it might have been there."

Dr. Lam accepted the last cord with a curious glance at Sam, who looked startled at the unasked question and then looked to Daniel for help.

They were going to have to explain it, Daniel realized. Again and again and again, and right now. He said, "Stella was six months old when her mother died."

Shy gave him another pleading look from where she stood, small and lost-looking in a man's black t-shirt. Daniel was about to relent and beckon her over to himself when he heard the infirmary door swing open, and turned to see who had come in to disturb the courteous stillness surrounding them.

She was wearing black fatigues--SGC insignia--but her black hair was in long, unmilitary pigtails. He knew her, he knew he did. She was beaming at him, holding her hands to her heart as she approached at a jog. "Daniel!"

He remembered all at once--the Prometheus, the pirate woman--Vala, that was her name, Vala Mal Doran. Here, inside the SGC, where he'd told everyone they would be safe--where he had entrusted his daughter, entrusted Sam, told Jack to lower his guard.

She was wearing the uniform, and it struck him suddenly that he'd seen no one at all who he knew. He'd heard a familiar voice over the audio comm, but hadn't seen the man--and yet he had trusted this Landry, this Dr. Lam, had accepted their explanation for the emptiness of the corridors--

"Sam," Daniel snapped, gesturing sharply behind himself, toward Shy, hoping she would react quickly enough (there was no such thing as quickly enough anymore, not for more than an hour now). Vala was still smiling, still holding her hands together--concealing some weapon? Readying for a strike?

But she had a zat holstered on her thigh, she was still smiling, and Daniel took two strides and lunged, grabbed both of her hands in a hard grip and jerked upward as he brought the weapon out and up, jamming it under her jaw.

There was utter silence in the infirmary, and Vala tensed in his grip and then went still, leaning against him. Daniel wasn't going to fall for that again; he hauled her around so that he could see the others without his back to the doors, and then slammed a knee into her thigh, tightening his grip on her hands and twisting. She folded down to her knees even as Daniel flicked a glance up to check the rest of the room.

Sam was holding Shy--one hand on the back of Shy's head to keep her face down on Sam's shoulder, so that she wouldn't have to see this. Good. Jack stood in front of them, holding a scalpel and a syringe in the same hand, the best weapons to hand on the instant. Dr. Lam was clutching the clipboard to her chest and inching toward a red phone.

"So," Vala said, with a faint tremor in her voice. "I get the impression that you're not especially happy to see me, then."

"You could say that," Daniel said, not much steadier. There was no point asking her how, why, when--none of that mattered, and she would only lie. Nothing mattered but getting his family out of here.

"Go ahead, Dr. Lam, call," Daniel said, using the zat to force Vala's head slightly sideways, exposing her throat. "Tell General Landry to open the gate to an unoccupied world--and I'm going to want to see MALP telemetry on that--"

The doors opened again; this was it, then, that was all the time he'd managed to buy them.

Teal'c stood in the doorway, wearing black fatigues that matched Vala's and looking, in his way, as happy to see Daniel as Vala--for whatever reason--had, though his expression blanked quickly as he took in the scene. "Daniel Jackson."

Daniel swallowed hard, his palm suddenly slick against the zat--Teal'c, Teal'c who he only ever saw in dreams, Teal'c, alive--but--

He was doubled over in pain before he realized that Vala had managed to head-butt him in the crotch, and then what felt like a knee hit his cheek as an arm hooked around his leg, bringing him crashing all the way to the concrete floor; he heard Jack and Teal'c both shouting, along with another male voice, unfamiliar and more loudly agitated than the others. He managed to twist the hand of Vala's that was still, somehow, in his grip, and heard a sick crunching pop. He made an indiscriminate swing with the zat which--judging by the following grunt of discomfort, an octave lower than he expected--hit someone other than Vala.

The zat was wrenched out of his grasp. There was an arm around his throat and another around his middle, and he was being dragged backward across the floor to see Vala being similarly restrained by another stranger in matching black fatigues.

"Okay," that man snapped, struggling a little to keep Vala still, though she was holding her hands to her heart again, knuckles pale with pressure. One must have already been hurt; Daniel had added, by the sound, a dislocation and a break. "Now we are all just going to take a time out and calm the hell down."

"Jack," Daniel said, forcing himself not to struggle against Teal'c to get a look.

"We're all right so far," Jack said firmly, and his voice made Vala go utterly still, and the black-fatigued man jerk his chin up, as though trying to come to attention on his knees with his arms full of space pirate. Daniel felt Teal'c, at his back, twist slightly in Jack's direction.

Daniel watched Vala, instead, and saw her eye take them in, one-two-three, nuclear family. He couldn't be sure, but he thought her gaze was lingering on Shy, and his fingers itched to be around her throat.

"Daniel Jackson," Teal'c said again, and Daniel squeezed his eyes shut. He would not let Vala see--he would not--but Teal'c, Teal'c was alive, Teal'c was at his back, warm and solid and real and here and safe.

"Teal'c," Daniel said, opening his eyes again. Vala and the other man were watching him now, at least, instead of looking at his daughter and Sam and Jack. Daniel cleared his throat, and Teal'c's arm shifted slightly to make certain he could breathe without allowing him to move.

"I don't believe I've been introduced to either of these people," Daniel said, raising his hand slightly in a neutral gesture toward Vala. "Would you do the honors?"

Vala and the other man both looked immediately enlightened, like his not knowing them was a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything that had just happened--which, when you wore the uniform they wore, it practically was.

"Of course," Teal'c said. "Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell, commander of SG-1."

Mitchell nodded. "Call me Cam."

Daniel was going to need an explanation of that--where the hell was--oh God, where was their Sam? But Landry had mentioned her, and if Teal'c was here then Landry had to be all right, but--where was Sam?

"And Vala Mal Doran," Teal'c continued smoothly. "An alien who was once our enemy, but who has proved her worth and her loyalty and joined SG-1. Just as I once did," Teal'c added, only a little heavy-handedly.

Vala dimpled at him, even though she had to be in terrible pain. She'd be as hard to read as Teal'c, in her way.

"You yourself were the first to truly accept her," Teal'c added.

Daniel shook his head, closed his eyes, and allowed himself the small, illicit luxury of leaning back against Teal'c as he took a moment to choose his words. "No. Not me. I'm not your Daniel Jackson. I'm about five years older than he is, for starters."

"Perhaps you should also make introductions, then," Teal'c said. Daniel felt him tense a little, though his grip didn't tighten; Daniel sat up straighter.

Daniel raised his voice a little when he spoke again. "Sam, Jack, meet Teal'c, Cam, and Vala. Doctor Samantha Carter, Colonel Jack O'Neill."

****

And then Daniel would have reluctantly introduced Shy to Teal'c and perforce to Cam and Vala, and something something Shy would have asked to try healing Vala with the healing device, which Vala herself would help Shy with. Hooray, learning and trust-building for everyone!

And then some ... stuff ... would happen. Acclimation to the future/present, and a lot of awkward feelingsy stuff, and Sam meeting her counterpart, and Jack meeting his counterpart, while the Daniel who belongs there remains AWOL with the Ori. Whatever was going on in season ten; I'm a little hazy on it at this point. And everyone, unanimously, would understand and defend Daniel's claim to paternity of Shy because they all know their Daniels. Shy would, however, have an array of step-parents, aunts, and uncles to beat everything.

Oh, also I had this whole idea about them becoming a part of the community of displaced aliens living on earth (they were to be named, in this story, the Tauri Family Association, and have seasonal festivals and ~family reunions~ and it was a whole thing).

And of course there is some angst with the reconstituted OT3 cracking a bit under the sudden loss of atmospheric pressure holding them together, and getting back together stronger than ever. And eventually they had a baby together, biologically Daniel's for sure this time, and I believe his name was Henry Carter, and I'm blanking on the middle name I chose for him but it meant 'Pyramid' in Arabic, thus representing where his parents met. Henry was probably an Indiana Jones joke selected to torment Daniel forever, because Daniel has this weird delusion that he has any room to throw stones at Indiana Jones as an archaeologist, which Sam and Jack find adorable.

And a few times a week, to make sure Daniel bonded with his other kid and detached a little bit from Shy, Jack and Sam would send Daniel out of the house with Henry in a baby backpack, and Daniel would sit in a coffee shop, reading reports, with his son cuddled against his chest, and it would strike him what his life had been like when Shy was this size--alone and grieving in an ancient, distant desert, terrified of failing his daughter, terrified of failing the world--and he would smile as he sipped his coffee.



So, if it's not already obvious: I still love this story to tiny, team-y, kidfic-y bits. But, yeah, there's no way I'm ever writing it, so I hope that other people get some warm fuzzies from these pieces of it!

Comments

[cofax7]

Oh, that makes my heart break more than a little. Especially the glimpses of original SG-1 trapped in Egypt. And Daniel's grief, because they're all DEAD. And having people like them back just isn't the same.

But Shy? She's adorable.

[cofax7]

Also, I totally remember meeting you at WIscon some years ago, and you telling me about this story. I'm sorry it won't get written, but I'm really glad I had the chance to read some of it...

[dira]

Thank you! And, yes, I think I recall babbling to you about this one--I never could let it go, even though it was never enormously likely to get finished. ♥