Part Three
In the ice, time means nothing. It’s a bit like anesthesia, decades passing in a flash, but capped with a period of fever, opaque ghostly images in the moment before consciousness.
Sam’s stained face, the glint of gun metal, Vala’s empty eyes. Eyes he’s seen somewhere before.
There’s a thump and muffled gasp from behind the partially ajar door of Daniel’s study. Jack pauses in the hallway, listening a moment before pushing the door open.
Vala sits at Daniel’s desk, her hands flat and white across the surface, her gaze unfocused.
“You okay, Vala? I thought I heard something.”
She looks stricken for a moment, but it passes so quickly, morphing into a smile, that Jack just assumes he imagined it. Crossing the room, she takes his arm, her hand tucking smoothly around his elbow, clenching briefly against his skin.
“I’m fine,” she says, pressing her body just a little too close. “But we should probably rejoin the party before we start to give people the wrong idea.” She winks up at him and Jack chuckles.
“Right,” he says. “We certainly wouldn’t want to do that.”
The haze lifts gradually, but the memory sticks, a prickling in his mind that makes it impossible to ignore. He worries it over and over again, flipping it around, shifting all the information he’s gathered into various piles, searching for patterns, answers.
Part of him listens to Vala and reenacts the reprisal of his original trip from Antarctica to the SGC and then the planet with the ancient machine. They are standing in front of the altar once again when something finally clicks into place.
Vala.
He places his hand on hers, pressing down and stalling her from manipulating the time machine.
“What happened that day?” he asks. “The last time we were all together?”
She looks frightened and eager all at once. “At Daniel’s?”
“Yes. Something happened that day, didn’t it?”
“I’m not sure.” He’s certain she’s hedging. “It was a long time ago, Jack.”
The empty smile is back, a weak attempt to imitate her old self. He recognizes it now for what it is--an attempt to distract--but he’s not taking the bait. Not this time.
“What happened that day?” Jack demands again, penning her in against the altar, giving her no room to escape.
She tries to shove past him, but even with the virus running rampant through him and her Tok’ra strength, the thin ghost she has become can’t overcome the force lent by Jack’s certainty.
“I don’t remember!” she finally yells, her free hand slapping against his chest as her empty smile cracks into panic. She’s frantic now, almost crazed and Jack stumbles back a few steps.
Then her eyes flash, another voice struggling towards the surface, thin and reedy as if aged. “She is not lying. She truly does not remember.”
“Panos?”
Vala’s head inclines. “There is a large empty spot in her memory from that time. May I ask why this particular moment interests you?”
“It just feels important,” Jack says, unable to put into words the lingering memory and the certainty that he clings to as his body continues to fail.
“I can’t think how,” Panos replies. “I always found Vala’s fascination with that particular moment in her life unfathomable.”
“Her fascination?”
Panos tilts her head to one side as if remembering. “When we finally deciphered how to work this machine, she first chose to revisit that day. In fact, she spent many decades of time in that afternoon.”
“Why?”
“I am not sure. There is obviously some sort of a deep-seated personal trauma that her mind is suppressing.” She says this dismissively, as if humans and their mental woes were something below consideration of any rational being.
“And what makes you say that?” Jack asks.
“Because every time we looped, I was sent back in my own past. But when she showed up as my host lay dying and allowed me to blend with her, as she had before, she still had no memory of that time. It was as if something had wiped her mind clean.”
“And yet you blended with her again and again, even knowing what was going to happen?” Jack asks, beginning to wonder if the snake is entirely all there either.
“I was able to finally persuade her towards more important pursuits. After all, have I not lost just as much as you?”
Jack doubts that, but doesn’t think telling the snake that will help.
“I am sorry to be blunt,” Panos says, “but I don’t see what this has to do with anything. We are here to stop the extinction of our races, not relive Vala’s admittedly colorful past.”
“And if they’re somehow the same?”
Panos’ brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Look,” Jack says, suddenly wishing he was dealing with the slightly frantic Vala again rather than this unmovable Tok’ra. “I know I’m not the source of this disease, so preventing my stasis is not going to fix this.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because Sam told me and frankly, I trust her judgment a lot more than any of ours right now.” He discovers as he says it that he really does mean it. Sam obviously knew something that he didn’t, and if she told him that it wasn’t him, then he believes her.
“If that is the case, then we are truly out of options.”
That is such a Tok’ra reaction that Jack can’t quite stop sighing with annoyance. “I’m beginning to think we’ve been going about this all wrong. I want you to send me even further back.”
“I fail to see what her sentimentality has to do with anything, General. Her weak need to relive a happier time with her friends, to see them again, neither brought them back nor made her feel any better. It changed nothing.”
Jack’s flooded with great sympathy for Vala. Putting up with Panos for so long could not have been fun. “That’s the problem with you Tok’ra, you’ve always confused sentiment with instinct. Now dial it up or whatever.”
For a moment Jack is certain that Panos will put up a fight, but then she begins slowly moving through the sequence to start up the machine. This time, Jack watches closely.
* * *
“-truck, Jack?”
Jack is standing in Daniel’s driveway in the process of shutting the door to his truck. It takes a few moments for everything to slide back together and he’s intensely grateful to have escaped coming back in the middle of driving somewhere.
“Jack?” Daniel asks in a tone that implies it hasn’t been the first time.
“What?” Jack says, slipping the keys into his pocket.
“I asked if you could help Cam unload his truck.”
“Right,” Jack says. “Of course.”
He turns and heads back down the driveway where he sees Mitchell pulling bags out of the bed of a dark blue truck. Jack reaches over and grabs a large cooler.
“Sir,” Mitchell says, straightening a little too much. “You really don’t have to do that.”
An automatic retort rises on Jack’s tongue, memories of this day flowing over him.
“I thought we talked about this ‘sir’ bit, Mitchell,” Jack says, letting a little bit of a bark into his tone just to be perverse.
“Yes, sir, we did.”
“And yet…”
“Sorry…Jack.”
“Good. Now let me carry the damn cooler.”
But this time, Mitchell refuses to be flustered, not only letting Jack lug the cooler, but adding an enormous bag of briquettes on top for good measure. “Thanks for the help, Jack.”
Yup. Mitchell has definitely been on SG-1 too long.
Jack absolutely refuses to stumble under the weight, but despite himself, he is definitely short of breath by the time he makes it to Daniel’s backyard. To buy himself time, he pops open the cooler, only to gasp.
“Okay,” Jack says loudly. “Who let Mitchell buy the beer?”
“I didn’t hear you volunteer, Jack,” Daniel says.
Jack hefts up the bottle of Bud, shaking it for emphasis. “But it’s American!”
Everyone continues on as if Jack had never spoken. Spoilsports.
“That reminds me of a joke Gary in the commissary told me!” Vala chirps, leaning over the cooler to snatch out a beer. “What do American beer and sex in a boat have in common?”
Daniel’s hand appears over her mouth before she can enlighten the rest of them. “I’m sure we’ve all heard it before,” he says, giving Vala a stern look before pulling his hand back away. But Jack can see the way his fingers deliberately trail along her skin as he moves away.
Vala pouts, but then Teal’c says, “I have, in fact, not heard this joke.”
Vala runs up to him and Teal’c helpfully leans down in order to better hear her whisper. After a moment Teal’c’s eyebrow pops up and he smiles. “That is most amusing, Vala Mal Doran.”
Vala looks smug, doing a little jig before setting herself down to the serious task of laying out each of her hard-won deli salads.
“That gives me an idea,” Jack says lowly to Sam as he snaps the lid shut on the cooler, “for the next time we go up to the cabin.”
Sam just gives Jack an impertinent little smirk before stealing his beer and abandoning him to help Vala unload.
Jack shakes his head to free himself of the memory, looking up to find Mitchell watching him closely. “Everything ok, sir?”
No. Nothing is okay.
Jack leaves the cooler sitting where it is, picking up the bag of briquettes instead. “Fine, Mitchell,” he says, leaving the younger man standing by his truck.
The cheerful flow of levity is all around Jack as he watches people who should be familiar move around the yard, old jokes and easy camaraderie between them. For Jack, it feels like a séance and he tries to remember feeling something as stupid as caring what brand his beer is. Abandoning it as a lost cause, he watches Vala’s every move instead, waiting for that final clue to drop into place.
Less than twenty minutes later, he’s sitting across the table, watching Vala eat when it finally happens. He sees the moment Vala loops, the fork suddenly clenched in her hand, her eyes empty where they had just been full.
Jack reaches across the table and grabs her wrist, heedless of the bowls he knocks from the table.
Vala meets his eyes and he sees her calculating, working out the unexpected twist in a far too familiar situation. She tries to tug her arm free. “What are you doing, Jack?” she asks in a passable imitation of the woman she once was.
Jack ignores her struggles and her empty words and grips her arm even tighter, feeling the fragility of her bones under his fingers. “It’s you, Vala,” he says.
“What are you talking about?” Her head tilts to the side in the perfect picture of confusion.
But he’s done with her games. Done with being manipulated. “It was always you.”
“Jack, what are you doing?” Sam asks, having pushed to her feet. Jack can feel the whole team pressing forward around the table, Teal’c just over Sam’s shoulder, Daniel and Mitchell flanking Vala. He hates the feeling that he is the odd man out here in more ways than one.
“Sir,” Mitchell interjects, but Jack silences him with a stern glare.
Vala throws a desperate glance over her shoulder at Daniel and he takes a few steps closer, looking between Jack and Vala, obviously torn.
“Go ahead, Vala,” Jack says. “Tell them why we’re here.”
Her composure slips enough to betray her mounting panic and she tugs against his grip again.
“You brought it down on them,” Jack says.
“No!” she says, her forced nonchalance shattering. “You were the first victim!”
“First victim, yes. But not the source.”
“But Panos is certain! I promised him this would be the last time I came back here.”
Jack can see it now, the edge of madness that has settled over her during the centuries of witnessing an immutable future. The missing memory that gnawed away at her, piece by piece until she had no course but to listen to the insidious whispers of her parasite.
“You were the only person left in the entire Galaxy, Vala. Didn’t that ever make you a little suspicious?”
“Panos said-.”
“Forget Panos. It’s just you and me, Vala, just the way you planned it.”
“I didn’t!” she protests, but there is doubt in her voice now.
“Not yet, but you will.” Jack circles around the table to stand next to her, sliding his hand up her arm to grip her shoulder. “You watched every single person you’ve ever known drop, one by one, over and over again. You didn’t even get to die with them, because for you, death has never been an option.”
“I’m not scared of death,” Vala snaps.
“Really? Then why the snake? Why the endless centuries spent looping? Hell, why not just put a bullet in your brain and leave me frozen and forgotten?”
“Because I have to fix it! I have to bring them all back!”
“If you really thought you could fix it, you would have. You never would have hesitated to kill me yourself. But you didn’t because part of you has always known that I wasn’t the answer, no matter how much the snake tried to convince you.”
She’s openly crying now, hands hiding her face. “I tried. I tried over and over again.”
He knows she did. Century after century of trying, of failing, of watching them all die again and again.
“You woke me for a reason, Vala,” Jack says, his voice softening of its own accord. “You knew I would find what you were hiding.”
“I can’t remember,” she whispers, looking up at him through her tears.
Jack finally loosens his grip, sliding one hand around her back. “But I can.”
“Jack. What the hell is going on?” Daniel asks, breaking the astonished silence of the others.
Jack doesn’t really have the patience to get into it, but he knows he might need their help. “Reader’s Digest version? We’ve both traveled back fifty years because sometime soon, the entire human race will go the way of the dinosaur. And I think today is when it started.”
He can see Sam’s mouth pop open to ask what he knows will be a million questions. But Jack shakes his head at her, stalling her words. Turning back to Vala, he leads her towards the house, the others following behind.
“I remember you in Daniel’s office,” Jack says. “Why do you go in there?”
“I…I’ll go inside to use the bathroom.” She glances at her watch. “Twelve minutes from now.”
She’s not quite meeting his eye. “You mean you’ll go in to snoop around.”
She shrugs, not bothering to deny it.
Jack gestures for her to precede him into the house and follows her in, aware that Daniel and the others are close on his heels.
Vala strolls through the house making various stops as if following an oft-practiced routine only she knows the steps to. Her hands run over the back of the couch, flick on and off switches and flip through a stack of mail by the door. Then she turns down the hall, pausing in front of the door to Daniel’s study.
“I’m not even sure why I went in,” she says, her hand hovering just over the knob. “As soon as I walk in…” She squeezes her eyes shut in deep concentration. “It’s just gone. The next thing I remember is you coming in.”
Jack steps in front of her, walking into Daniel’s study first. Everything is just as he remembered, the walls covered in overburdened bookshelves, a couch under the window and a desk in the center of the room. The surface is cluttered with piles of papers, open books and various bizarre objects.
He looks back at Vala hovering in the open doorway and she slowly raises one arm to point at the desk.
At first glance, Jack doesn’t see anything remotely out of place. Gingerly pushing a notepad to the side, he uncovers a metal box about the size of a tennis ball. The dull green-black surface is covered in broad writing and solidly set in the lid is a brilliant, clear stone that looks an awful lot like a diamond.
From behind him, Vala makes a rough sound, her hand gripping white knuckled at the doorjamb.
“What is this?” Jack demands, turning to Daniel.
“Oh. I usually keep things locked up in the safe, I must have forgotten,” Daniel stutters. “Not that I make a habit of taking things home from the SGC.”
“Daniel,” Jack says. “We can talk about your dubious treatment of classified materials later. I’m more interested in what the hell this thing is.”
“Of course,” Daniel says, grabbing a file from his desk. “It’s an artifact from my last mission with SG-6. I never could figure out how to open it.”
Jack glances at Vala again to see that Teal’c has shifted slightly closer to her. “What about this writing, Daniel. Did you translate it?”
“Some,” he says, his voice gaining animation. “It mostly talks about the ‘The Hand of God.’”
“What language?”
“Ancient.”
Jack hefts the small object, wondering if he imagines the hum of power emanating from it. “Could it be Ori?”
“Ori,” Daniel repeats. “What makes you think-.”
“It was never a disease. It was genocide,” Jack quotes. When everyone just stares at him as if he’s just sprouted a second head, he shrugs. “Something Sam said to me. Or will say,” he corrects when they all turn to look at Sam.
“Like an Ori plague?” Sam asks.
Jack nods. “Only this one couldn’t be stopped, and only one person in the whole galaxy was immune.” He turns back to the silent woman hovering near the door. “You, Vala. The sole survivor, forced to watch helplessly, never able to do anything, no matter how many times you relived it.”
“Jesus,” Mitchell swears. “That sounds like torture.”
“Yeah, it does,” Jack says. “And who, exactly, might be pissed enough to not only leave the galaxy barren, but to force Vala to watch?”
Sam’s eyes widen. “If you mean Adria…”
“I do.”
“But she’s dead. Ascended, whatever,” Mitchell says.
“Yeah, but she left a little something behind, didn’t she?” Jack lifts the box with its lustrous diamond square and center. “It was the only way she could get to us. She used you, Vala. She made you the vehicle of death, and then left you to live with it. And she did it the only way she could without the Ancients stepping in to stop her.”
Jack crosses the room to stand in front of Vala. “Did she whisper to you in your dreams? Give you the key to the puzzle, banking on your one greatest weakness?”
“I don’t know,” she whispers, her eyes latched on the box.
“You’re a survivor, Vala. No matter how horrible life gets, you survive. She poisoned you and set you on the entire galaxy, knowing you would. A wandering Typhoid Mary with no memory of having ever done it.”
Jack hands the box back to Daniel, who wastes no time carrying the offending item to his safe.
“I opened it,” Vala says, her voice distant and her back pressed back against the doorjamb. “I killed them.”
She looks ready to crumble under the slightest touch, but Jack still finds himself crossing the room, reaching for her face.
“Yes,” he says, the feel of her cheek cool under his fingers. “But you also woke me up. The one leftover detail.”
She looks up at him with those luminous, broken eyes and leans into him, his arms automatically wrapping around her slender frame, holding her up when she begins to slip.
He can feel the eyes of the others on them, their collective confusion, horror and helplessness a tangible presence. But then Mitchell flips open his phone, loudly demanding that a recovery team be sent from the SGC as soon as possible. Sam turns to Daniel, quizzing him on every detail about the artifact, turning to the security of work in the face of the unknown.
Jack and Vala stay were they are, the others moving around them, flowing past like the blinding ice of the Antarctic beneath the hull of a tel’tac. There is the distinct sound of a safe snapping soundly shut, a reverberating gong leaving nothing behind but the feel of Vala’s fingers digging into his back.
“It’s over,” she whispers into his shoulder.
There’s a flash of lightening striking a nearby tree before a rampant downpour rains out their little family barbeque.
Maybe it’s just Jack, but he doesn’t think wrath and revenge seem like very enlightened, ascended-y traits.