Part Four
With the Ori plague box contained and scheduled for destruction, Jack waits for the days to pass, one hand pressed searchingly to that spot low on his hip where The Stain first took hold. When the prophesized date comes and goes with no sign, Jack tries to understand the strange wistfulness that fills him.
He decides it must be due to Vala. Because they may have saved the human race, but Vala is far from deliverance.
Jack and Vala share a special bond, which is not surprising considering what they experienced. But Jack can’t be sure their relationship isn’t really about the great gulf between them and the rest of the team. Artificial or not, Jack spends a great deal of time with her in her cozy white room with a wall of mirror-like, one-way glass where she undergoes a sort of permanent ‘psychological observation.’
Jack visits her every day, listening to her talk about a thousand different things or perhaps nothing at all. They both find it amusing that she’s on suicide watch, considering everything they know.
“You were right,” she says one day as she stares out her tiny, barred window onto the grounds below. “Death is something I’ve never been able to face.”
She traces strange symbols on the glass, her fingers dancing over the surface. “There was always that tiny suspicion, knowledge that something had happened that day, even if I couldn’t remember it. But even with it, I couldn’t bring myself to end my own life.”
Jack nods even though she can’t see him.
“My mother did,” she confesses. “Isn’t that trite? Poor Vala with her pathetic, weak mother who would rather be dead than care for her.”
“Thanks to her I learned early exactly how much I was worth,” Vala says. “She died, leaving me with a chronically absent father, but even that was preferable to the woman he brought home to replace her. My stepmother didn’t like having me around. Maybe she thought I split my father’s affections, or she just didn’t want the burden of caring for me. I don’t know. She sold me to a passing trader. That’s how I ended up a palace servant in Qetesh’s court.
“I think that’s what these psychiatrists want to hear, but they just don’t get it. It’s not about my pathetic family life or being held hostage to a goa’uld for decades and decades while everyone else grew old and died.
“It’s the fact that I thought I was trying to save them, but I was really just trying to survive. And that’s what destroyed them in the end.”
Her head falls against the bars, the small shaft of daylight streaking through her hair.
“I couldn’t do it either,” Jack says, the confession catching him off guard. “I thought I had it in me, I really did, but I just tried to foist the responsibility on to other people.” On to Sam. And then he had the gall to hate her for not doing something he couldn’t bring himself to do.
But maybe the anger just makes the distance easier to deal with.
“I don’t know why I couldn’t,” Jack says. He’d been so close for so long, right there on the edge.
“It was SG-1, the team. They made you want to live.” Her voice is wistful, but all Jack can hear is the past tense she uses to talk about living, breathing people.
“I’m glad you didn’t go through with it,” Vala says, finally leaving the window to wrap her arms around his waist and press her head to his chest.
He doesn’t tell her that most days he isn’t. He just absently pats at her hair and listens to her stories. Always in the past. That’s all she seems to have left.
Once your curiosity gets your entire race killed off, though, he guesses you can never quite be the same.
When Vala finally drifts off to sleep, Jack quietly leaves the room and finds Daniel standing in front of the observation window. He’s here most days as Jack leaves.
“You’re the only one she’ll speak to,” Daniel says, his eyes on her small form curled in sleep. “She treats the rest of us as if we’re already dead.”
Jack forces himself to ignore the instinct to flee, instead coming to a stop by Daniel’s side. He knows Daniel deserves something, and he’s not going to get it from her.
“For her, you already are,” Jack explains. “She buried you, Daniel. She buried all of you, over and over again. Even Vala has her limits for what she can bounce back from.”
That’s the problem with the loops. They take a little more away each time. It’s way worse this time and Jack doesn’t know if it’s the combination of freezing with the disease on top of it, or if it’s just the greater chunk of time, like the effort to jump back that far eats away at you. It’s probably the latter, if Vala is anything to judge by. She has trouble now knowing when she is. The relief of finally escaping the endless repetition of time seems to have snapped her last tentative connection with reality.
“What about you?” Daniel asks, staring intently at him, but Jack just feels it pass straight through him, like he’s not quite in synch with everyone else around him.
Maybe Jack’s problem is just the opposite. For him, he’s the dead one.
“I’m not the same man anymore,” he says, walking away.
“We know.”
Daniel’s soft words follow him down the hall as Jack leaves him to watch Vala crumble on his own.
They all mourn her, watch her with sad eyes as they try to figure out what happened to her levity and off-color jokes from only weeks before. As for Jack, he’s beginning to realize that he may not be able to do anything about his own disconnect, but there is still one last chance for Vala.
Jack already feels thinner somehow, like vapor. Another trip back would be risky, but he can’t help but consider it, even knowing that nothing in the universe ever comes for free.
In the end, Sam is the one to suspect, waiting for him outside Vala’s room the next time he comes out. Jack is surprised that as much as he’s changed, she can still read him this well. He wonders if she suspects that when he looks at her, he struggles to feel anything at all.
He stops a careful distance away from her, his hands stuck deep in his pockets. “I’m going back, one last time,” he says.
Sam nods. “To save her?”
“She never wanted to remember. I don’t really blame her.”
“And what about you?”
“Someone has to remember,” he says with a shrug.
They stand in silence for a while, watching Vala in her sterile cage.
“Let me go instead.”
Jack stares at Sam in a mix of horror and shock, hating that part of him desperately wants to take her up on the offer. It would be so nice to just forget, to let someone else carry the burden of remembering. But he recalls all too clearly the sight of Sam sitting in silent desperation at his table, trying to save a man who seemed to hate her for something she’d never even done.
He can’t let any of this bleed onto anyone else. He won’t be that weak this time.
“Not going to happen, Sam.”
She doesn’t argue or look surprised, and he has to wonder if her offer had simply been a test.
“Will you tell me about all this?” she asks.
He won’t, he knows, because having her know makes it worse. Maybe he could forget, someday, if no one else ever knew. He’s ashamed to admit that he’s even considered going back far enough to stop them from ever being together. She deserves so much more than a man who might never properly defrost.
He also knows that she more than suspects this, knows he’s hurting her again, keeping that cold distance between them.
She steps forward, though, her touch hesitant but warm, one hand wrapping around his arm. “Just…try not to shut me out, Jack. I won’t understand, but I’ll want to.”
Jack feels himself sway ever so slightly towards her, catching the soft scent of her hair. “Sam…,” he whispers, feeling something creaking inside.
She tries to smile, but the gesture doesn’t stick and she pulls abruptly away, leaving him standing alone in the hall.
* * *
Jack loops one last time, going back far enough to eliminate every jump ever taken by Vala. He struggles, though, to ignore the part of him that doesn’t want to let her go, knowing that broken, ghostly Vala is the only person who could ever properly understand. The last bit of connection he feels with anyone.
He’s also tempted to change things. To warn someone about a tornado he knows will strike, to stop SG-12 from going to PX3-729 where one of them will come back paralyzed. But he can’t risk the victory over the Ori. He lets events slide past him, making decisions exactly as he has before.
The only small blessing is that everything is so rushed that he never has to spend any real time with any of them. He doesn’t see Sam, doesn’t have to pretend to be that other man. He doesn’t see Vala. He worries about it though, because a meeting is inevitable, the war drawing necessarily towards its end.
And then the time comes. The Ori die, Adria ascends and Jack takes a trip out to the SGC in the middle of the night, dialing the gate himself. The box is right where Daniel said it would be, its enormous gem glittering brilliantly.
Jack dials the gate once more and tosses the alluring booby trap into the outward flush of the connecting wormhole, evaporating it instantly, erasing the future with it. So little effort to achieve something that had taken so many lives, so many centuries to work out.
Back on Earth, he’s faced with the daunting task of attending Daniel’s get-together one final time.
He considers not going, letting the future finally divert its path.
In the end he goes, remembering Sam’s last request, her hand warm on his arm. He’s tired of thinking of them all in the past tense, of being made of ice. But he finds himself hugging the edges when he gets there, watching them together and wondering if this distance he feels will always be there.
He’d visited Vala one last time before the final loop, getting instructions on how to work the altar. She’d laid her head on his shoulder, her fingers dancing on his thigh. “Don’t turn into me, Jack. You shouldn’t have to pay for my mistakes.”
He’d left her there, her head lowered to her arms, eyes staring.
Now he watches her pick up a fork, an almost blinding sparkle in her eye as she throws Daniel a saucy smirk over her shoulder. He knows there is a lot hidden behind that smile, and it’s both strange and comforting to know so much about her. The sheer force of life emanating from her feels a bit like that first cup of warmth pressed into his freezing fingers, sharply painful, but necessary.
Just as he remembers, Sam sits across from Vala, occasionally pointing at one of the bowls and saying something that makes Vala laugh. Mitchell stops by, a hand on Sam’s shoulder as he offers her a beer. And when Sam catches Jack’s eye, beckoning him closer with a playful toss of her head, he forces his feet to move, to cross the distance and sit down next to her.
She offers him her beer, but after a moment of consideration, he passes up the chilled bottle in favor of her hand. He watches their fingers twine together, staring a little too long at this simple contact, because when he finally looks up, Sam’s expression has subtly shifted, now curious and slightly concerned.
He moves a little closer to her, letting her scent and the glint of her hair in sunlight creep into his skin, willing the familiar feel of her to bring back everything they had been, would be, could maybe be again.
He recognizes the slight canting of her head as a question. You okay? He answers with a small half smile and a squeeze of her hand that seem to satisfy her.
Across the table, Vala is still systematically exploring the dishes in front of them, Mitchell and Teal’c watching on when not razzing a harried-looking Daniel over by the barbeque. When Sam turns her head into Jack’s shoulder to muffle a laugh at Vala’s appalled look after a large bite of seafood salad, he is pretty sure he hears an audible thump where a creak used to be.
“Try the parfait, Vala,” Jack says. “I think you’ll like it.”
~The End~
Full of broken thoughts I cannot repair,
Beneath the stains of time the feelings disappear.
You are someone else, I am still right here.
What have I become, my sweetest friend?
Everyone I know goes away in the end.
And you could have it all, my empire of dirt.
I will let you down, I will make you hurt.
If I could start again, a million miles away,
I would keep myself, I would find a way.
-“Hurt” by Johnny Cash