Part One
Things crawl to the surface slowly, piece by piece, moment by moment. The only constant is the liquid cold flowing where blood should be, a creak instead of a heartbeat. A tin man in desperate need of oil in his joints.
He knows he can’t be dead because he doesn’t remember death hurting this much.
“Hey, wake up.”
There is insistent poking and he tries to move away, but it follows.
“That’s it, open your eyes.”
A sharper pinch somewhere near his shoulder and his eyes snap open with a mad rush of adrenaline.
“Ah, there you are. Welcome back.”
A familiar face framed in dark, wild hair swims into focus and then eventually the rest of her body, perched on his chest.
“What?” he tries to ask, but the word dribbles out as little more than a moan.
The woman squirts liquid into his gaping mouth and he chokes against it, his bones rattling around in protest.
“I know this can’t be fun,” the woman says, placing warm hands on his forehead. “You’ve been a popsicle for fifty years or so.”
His head lolls to the side, taking in his surroundings. He spots a blue and grey reclining chair in the distance and he feels a phantom flash of energy pouring through his body and out into the sky that he belatedly identifies as a memory.
“Ancient outpost,” he mumbles, slightly more coherent now.
“Yes. They stuck you in the stasis chamber when they ran out of time to figure out what was wrong with you.”
He’s started to shiver violently and some part of his brain tells him that this is a good sign. His body is putting up a fight, working up friction to build heat.
She helps him to a sitting position, wrapping a thick blanket around his shoulders. A hot cup of something is pressed into his hands and he almost drops it from the pain that drives up his arm in reaction to such warmth.
“Look, I don’t mean to rush you, but we don’t have a lot of time here.”
There is an urgency lacing her voice that he can’t ignore, so he lets the woman help him to his feet and urge him towards a circle on the floor. A whoosh of light and everything around him changes. Ring platform. The new space that materializes is much smaller with tarnished, rusty brown walls.
As he looks around, words ping in his mind as he makes tentative associations with objects around him. The endless expanse of whiteness out the front windows brings the word Antarctica to the front of his mind. He feels the swoop as they lift off the ground, the ice beginning to flow past them at rapid speeds.
He stares hard at the woman’s face as she flies the ship, a somewhat solid memory rising to the surface.
They’re sitting across a table from each other, twenty different plastic bowls spread between them filled with various substances. She’s smiling brightly, poking a fork into one bowl for a taste and then another and another.
A leg presses against his and he turns to see a different woman with golden hair spinning a bottle between her hands and watching the dark haired woman with amusement.
“Vala made Daniel buy one of every kind of deli salad at the supermarket,” the blonde says with a smile.
“I think this red one is just fantastic. What’s it called? Parfait?” Vala shoves a huge forkful into her mouth and Jack can’t help but laugh, his knee bumping casually against Sam’s.
“Sam,” Jack rasps.
Vala’s expression doesn’t change as she stares straight ahead. “She’s not here.”
That’s wrong. Somehow he knows that he is Jack and that this is all wrong. Words are no longer so elusive. “Vala,” he says, trying the name out. “What’s going on?”
She smiles at his use of her name, but it’s just a pale ghost compared to the one from his memory. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Jack closes his eyes, trying to concentrate, but everything is swirled together, a giant jumble as if someone has taken a mixer to his brain. There had been pain, something terribly wrong with him, but it’s little more than an echo of sensation. “I can’t…”
“Your memory is probably a little spotty. To be expected, I imagine.”
“Why?”
“From being defrosted, put on ice for half a century, infected with The Stain…take your pick.”
“Infected?” That is a word he recognizes but instantly dislikes.
“A virus,” she says.
The landscape around them has begun to change, white giving way to grey and then brown and green. The ship plunges down towards the ground, hovering just above the treetops. But then the trees give way to buildings and streets.
It takes Jack’s over-stimulated, sluggish brain a while to recognize what’s missing.
“People,” he says. “Where are the people?”
Vala is staring straight ahead again, her eyes on the sky instead of the empty deserts that had once been cities. “The Stain,” she says. “It spread.”
“The SGC?” Jack asks, but Vala just shakes her head.
“They’re all dead, Jack.” Her voice is as hard as the ice in his bones and he would have thought her completely heartless if not for the way her hands whitened on the controls.
“Everyone?”
“Everyone but me. And Panos.”
“Panos?”
She jabs a finger at the back of her neck. “My little Tok’ra passenger. How else could I still look this good after fifty years?”
There is no disputing that she still looks young, but good is something else entirely. Jack wants to point out her gauntness and the flat, underused quality of her voice, but decides she probably doesn’t want to hear it. “And this Panos, he kept you from dying from the virus thing?”
“No,” Vala says with a shake of her head, “even the Tok’ra couldn’t stop it. And without hosts…”
He knows he harbors no great affection for the Tok’ra, but word of their demise sits heavily in his stomach. “You’re saying this has happened other places.”
“When I said they’re all dead, Jack, I meant everybody.”
“As in we are the only two humans left in the entire galaxy?”
“Welcome to the future.” He’s not sure he remembers her being quite this bitter.
“But how did you survive?”
She shrugs. “I was never infected. It’s sort of what I do, right? I survive. My own personal curse.” Her tone is light and full of self-deprecation and it grates across Jack’s skin as she pulls the ship up higher, altering their course.
When the familiar shape of Cheyenne Mountain appears, Vala lands the craft in an empty parking lot near the entrance. But instead of heading straight down into the SGC, she wordlessly leads Jack off to the side just beyond the first screen of trees.
Gesturing him forward, Vala stops short of the next hill. And when he steps out he finally understands why. The entire slope is covered in graves.
If he needs proof, here it is.
It’s not until he’s standing among the rough piles of stone and rotting wood that he really understands the passage of time, the complete desolation encompassing the planet, the galaxy.
“They turned on each other, in the end, trying to lay blame,” Vala says, her voice thin and distant as she comes up behind him. “Humans and their fear helping to destroy themselves. But soon after there weren’t even enough people left to fight.”
Jack doesn’t have to ask to know these words aren’t hers. He can almost hear the ghostly cadence of Daniel’s voice underneath, see her staying with him until the very end, watching as the world went to hell around them.
Now she stands here with Jack and the ghost of Daniel and a thousand others, staring as if to somehow absorb the enormity of what the small piles represent. But then she roughly shakes her head and averts her eyes from the graves, her voice becoming business-like once more. “We don’t have a lot of time.”
“You mean I don’t have a lot of time.” Jack knows he speaks the truth, he can already feel something crawling inside of him, sapping his energy.
“Yes. You’re dying,” she says in that same hard voice. “I can keep you going for a few hours with adrenaline shots, but no longer.”
“A cure?”
“There isn’t one.”
Jack turns his back on the graves, hoping to resist the torture of asking where in that jumble his closest friends lay. “Why? Why bother waking me if I’m just going to die? Did I really need to see all of this?”
For the first time, there is something of sadness in her eyes, maybe regret. “I need you to go back and fix this, make sure it doesn’t happen.”
Jack’s head snaps up. “You had better not be talking about time travel, because I remember enough to know that never works.”
She just smiles her empty smile again and pulls him underground to the lower levels of the SGC. He watches her manually dial the gate with her Tok’ra provided strength and tries not to notice the dead, stale air all around him or the evidence that something has taken up nesting in what was once the beating heart of the SGC.
When the wormhole swells into life, splashing the wrecked interior with cool, blue light, Jack wants nothing more than to escape the nightmare that the SGC has become. But his strength is failing him quickly. Vala returns to Jack’s side to help him the rest of the way, pulling out another syringe as she goes, sliding it painfully into his arm. The resulting rush is enough to get him up the ramp and through the wormhole.
The world that materializes around them is far too familiar for Jack, stone altars in a sea of sand sitting under a moody orange sky. The goddamned time-looper. Vala hops down the steps and begins manipulating the altar’s symbols as if she’s done it a million times before.
Jack follows after her, his pace much more reluctant. “That doesn’t work, Vala. Trust me, I should know.”
She is unfazed by Jack’s claim. “You didn’t have half a century to figure it out. Not to mention a dozen more spent looped.”
The sheer amount of time she’s discussing causes Jack’s head to hurt even more and makes him wonder about the wavering edge he sees in her, as if she’s left bits of herself here and there over the centuries. He’d only looped for months and that had been enough to stretch his sanity thin. And he hadn’t been alone.
But she misunderstands his appalled expression because she says, “What? It’s not like there are humans out there to inconvenience.”
“The Ancients couldn’t even figure it out,” Jack points out.
She shrugs again, the gesture worn as if by overuse. “I guess they still had something left to lose.”
Jack feels her words impact him and he’s once again painfully aware that everything around him is off kilter. This isn’t right. But he tries to forget for a moment about all the death and focus hard on what Vala is asking of him, because he is sure that if he allows himself even a moment to wallow in it, to really consider it, he’ll be stuck.
“Wait,” he says. “If you really figured this machine out, then why didn’t you just go back and fix this yourself?”
Her hands finally stall in their motions, hesitating just above the surface. “I’ve done enough,” she says, eyes averted and voice cracked with anguish. “I can’t go back there again. You didn’t live through any of it, you can’t possibly know…”
“You’re not going back with me,” Jack says.
She looks on the edge of confessing something when her hands suddenly resume their work in jerky gestures. Her head falls forward, eyes flashing on the way back up. “We both agreed the option to end your life should come from you.”
The abrupt change from host to symbiote jars Jack, but not nearly as much as the way the snake ever so casually drops the idea. “Excuse me?”
“You were the first victim, General O’Neill. The disease started with you.”
First to sicken, last to die. That’s as wrong as everything else. “What’s your point?”
Panos just looks at Jack in a way he supposes is meant to be meaningful.
“You’re saying I did this,” Jack says, no longer able to avoid giving voice to the lurking thought.
Panos simply nods.
Those graves and empty cities are his fault. Jack grabs on to the edge of the altar, locking his knees in an attempt to stay upright.
“I cannot know for sure if it was something you carried around for years before it manifested, or if someone was simply attempting to assassinate you, but either way, the stasis chamber acted as an incubator.” Panos now watches him with a strangely kind look, as if that might soften the discovery that he caused of the extinction of his entire race. “I am certain that if you go back and stop this from happening you will prevent the extinction of our two races.”
It sounds simple enough, which is exactly why Jack distrusts it. Simple never is. “What about Vala? What does she think?”
As Vala once again takes control, she suddenly looks every one of her endless years. “I think you’re the one variable, Jack, the one detail left over,” she says tiredly. “And you’re pretty much dead either way. At least this way gives us a fighting chance.”
He can feel the crackle of electricity building up around them and time feels like it’s bleeding away from him far too quickly, the adrenaline fading as the disease crawls endlessly forward.
It’s not a hard decision between dying here, the last of his kind, or in the past to save them from such a bleak future.
“How do I end the loop?” he asks.
She looks relieved that he will go along with their plan, but he can’t be sure if that is Vala or Panos.
“If the events that lead up to this moment are changed, it will naturally end,” Panos explains. “The only reason it kept repeating itself in your previous experience was because of the alien scientist. He was the one who chose to perpetuate the loop. This time, there will be no one but you. As long as you don’t end up back in that stasis chamber, the loop will be broken.”
As long as you die, he hears unspoken behind her explanation.
“But if you do get frozen again, we’ll all just end up right back here again,” Vala tacks on at the end, her eyes full of that strange luminosity again.
She doesn’t say good luck or goodbye, just steps back from the altar as it begins to groan and move. The last thing Jack sees is Vala’s face, hopefulness blending with something else he doesn’t have time to identify.
Flash.
Beneath the Stains of Time von Annerb
Story Bemerkung:
Author’s Note: Written for apocalypse_kree. This story takes place in a vague post-season ten future where the movies never happened, but completely ignores the canon established in ‘Family Ties.’ I am unabashedly going fanon for Vala’s background. Just wanted to warn you. Oh, and the title is borrowed from Johnny Cash’s Hurt (lyrics provided at end). Special thanks to syxp, aurora_novarum, holdouttrout, and triciabyrne1978 for the betas. You all saved my sanity.