Missing Pieces
I hobbled my way through the door, nodding at the young airman holding it for me, and feeling every day of my many years. There was a scurry of movement as Carter, Ferretti and Reynolds stood, waiting for me to laboriously take my seat at the head of the table.
“Here, sir.” Hands pulled my chair out, and I tried not to glare at Ferretti’s smiling face. What was he, less than ten years younger than me? Treating me like an old man!
I muttered an ungrateful “Thanks,” and eased myself down, taking care not to bump my still very tender knee.
It wasn’t until I picked the pen up from the top of the report on the tabletop that the unusual silence registered.
“Where’s Daniel?”
Carter looked around the room as if she had just noticed her team mate’s absence.
Oh come on now! I could almost see the cogs turning in her head as she searched desperately for an excuse that I hadn’t already used with General Hammond to explain my wayward friend’s tardiness. I cocked my head, and raised an eyebrow, giving her my most implacable general’s stare, and she shifted uneasily, her eyes flickering to Teal’c as if mutely pleading for assistance.
Teal’c sat, eyes never wavering from mine, and I concealed a spark of glee. He wasn’t playing. And he was thoroughly enjoying himself.
After all these years I could read them like a book.
“I don’t know, General.”
Ah – decided to go with the little used ‘truth’ strategy, Carter? A novel move, and one I had rarely utilised.
I frowned. “Well, given that he was going to brief us on the archaeological wonders of PF3-749, there doesn’t seem to be any point in continuing this meeting.” I pushed myself up, pulling my audience with me like puppets.
Except Teal’c.
He stayed, solidly sitting.
I eyed him.
He stared impassively back.
I sighed.
What was the point? He was twice my age, twice as experienced at command, and twice as fit.
I knew exactly where I stood with him. I had his respect and his friendship. I didn’t need anything else.
I turned back to Carter.
“Find him. He better have a good reason for not being here. I don’t want to hear that he slept in, or his car broke down. I want it to be much more inventive than that. I want to be entertained. Do you get my drift, Colonel?”
She nodded, and smiled. “I understand perfectly, sir.”
“Good, Carter. My day needs to be enlivened. I have the quarterly reports to complete.”
And with that I stumped off, dragging my aged limbs back to work.
o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o
The knock on my door was very welcome. There are just so many columns of figures and graphs that you can look at without going slightly insane.
“Colonel Carter, sir.”
“Send her in, Walter.”
Interesting. Carter, two hours later and still without Daniel.
“He hasn’t signed in at all today, sir. He isn’t at his apartment, and he isn’t answering his cell.” She sounded worried, and I had to admit to a slight feeling of unease, but I firmly squashed it down.
Daniel was an adult, and quite capable of looking after himself. There would be a totally logical explanation.
I turned the pages of the report on the top of the pile, feeling Carter’s eyes on me.
“You should check with his friends.” I nonchalantly threw out the suggestion.
She answered immediately, a small hint of exasperation in her voice. “I am, sir, but you haven’t seen him and neither has Teal’c. Any idea who else I should contact?”
I thought about it for a moment and came up blank. Shit – we were a sad lot, really. Carter was right, we kept to ourselves, hiding here in the bowels of the earth. My life outside the mountain was almost as sterile as Daniel’s. “Nope, can’t think of anyone. What about the hospitals?”
I already knew the answer before she replied. “I’ve had them checked. His car is gone from outside his apartment.”
“He could have been…” I waved my hands vaguely in the air, indicating an upward whoosh, knowing Carter would figure it out.
“Been abducted by aliens, sir?’
Was that snippiness I heard?
I nodded. “Stranger things have happened at sea, Carter.” At her puzzled look, I hurried on, my supply of outdated sayings depleted by one. “Have you tried contacting Thor?”
“Yes. There was no answer, so I can only assume the Asgard aren’t in the vicinity of Earth.”
Of course, we both knew it wasn’t just the Asgard that could have beamed Daniel up, but I refused to contemplate his being in the hands of the Goa’uld. We needed to look a little closer to home before we started panicking.
I tapped my pen on the desk, mentally running through options. Wait and see if Daniel turned up? Get Carter to do a little more hunting? Send in the investigators?
I stood, my decision made, and god help him if he came wandering in now. “Walter.” I called, waiting for him to appear in the doorway before I continued. “Get Colonel Ferretti in here.”
o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o
A search of Daniel’s apartment turned up no sign of the missing man. A team, under Lou Ferretti’s command, was coordinating a search of the Colorado Springs area, while Carter was tracing Daniel’s last known movements. I had the hardest task – trying to think what to say to the President if he hadn’t been found in the next few hours. Explaining how I’d managed to lose our leading expert on alien cultures would not be easy.
As the hours stretched on, and the day lengthened into night up top, I became more and more concerned, which translated into my pacing the halls and trying not to glare at passing personnel. After the first couple of hours Carter very unsubtly hinted that if I didn’t stop distracting her from her investigations, she would …well, she didn’t say what she would do, but I had my suspicions that only the risk of a court martial was preventing her from taking action. I backed away very quickly and retreated to my office. Ten minutes later I was pacing the corridors again.
I don’t do waiting. Never have, never will. I don’t know how Hammond stood it.
SG-5’s return from an exploratory mission, one member absent and another with serious injuries, became a welcome distraction despite the ill fortune of the team and the urgency of the situation. The organisation of a rescue mission to extract the missing man from hostile locals took all my attention, and it was with some surprise that I caught a glimpse of a clock and saw that several hours had passed without my even thinking about my missing friend.
I reached for the phone.
“Carter, any word?”
I could visualise her look of worry and frustration when she answered. “No, sir. Nothing.”
Damn! Where the hell was he?
o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o
The buzzing of my cell woke me from a restless sleep. Pulling it from the nightstand, I held it up to my ear, yawning widely.
“O’Neill.”
The voice was soft, and I was barely able to hear it through the background noise. “Jack.”
I sat up, my muzzy head clearing immediately.
“Daniel? Are you all right? Where the hell are you?”
There was silence, and for a second I thought the connection had been cut, then there was a sound suspiciously like a sob on the line.
“I’m at the Mater Hospital.”
“Why? Are you hurt?”
My frantic questions were interrupted before I could complete them.
“No, I’m okay.” There was another pause. “Can you come?” My heart sank. His voice sounded lost, desolate. “I’m in Emergency.”
I had barely time to say yes, before the clunk of a receiver being put down echoed in my ear.
The trip to the hospital passed in a blur, as my mind spiralled through all the possible reasons for Daniel being at a local hospital. I called Carter as I drove one handed, and gave her the few facts that I had. I rejected her offer to meet me, telling her that I would contact her with an update as soon as I knew anything. She would call Teal’c and Ferretti and hopefully manage to get some sleep, or if not sleep, at least some rest. There was no point in us all being awake.
I didn’t even get into the hospital building before I saw him, a hunched over figure sitting on a bench near the entrance, hands stuffed into his overcoat pockets. He didn’t look up, even when I sat beside him.
“Daniel?”
At least my voice got some reaction. A slow hand lifted up to eyes red and swollen, rubbing across them.
“Daniel? What is it? What’s happened?” I kept my voice low and raised a hand to his shoulder. He was trembling.
He kept his eyes down and took a gulp of the cold night air as if steeling himself before saying what he had to say. “It’s Catherine. She’s…” He finally turned his head, and I saw a single tear track down his face, sliding over his skin to drop on his shoulder. “She’s…dead.”
Catherine? Maybe it was the lateness of the hour, maybe it was being woken up from sleep, restless though it had been, but I couldn’t seem to get my head around his words. Catherine? The only Catherine I knew was Catherine Langford, but she was home in New York.
Wasn’t she?
My heart sank.
“She had a heart attack. At her hotel. I should ring Ernest, but I just can’t.” The tear was joined by another. “I don’t know what to say. How can I tell him?”
I gathered him in, holding him to me as he cried silently into my shoulder, and my memory flashed back to comforting Carter after Janet’s death.
It never got any easier.
Suddenly Daniel straightened up, and pushed himself away from me.
“Sorry.” He scrubbed at his face with the back of his hand, the embarrassment obvious in his voice.
“Oh shit, Daniel, you’ve got nothing to be sorry for.” I waited for a moment, until his posture relaxed, then touched his arm, bringing his attention back to me. “Want to tell me what happened? I didn’t know Catherine was here.”
He nodded, leaning back and shutting his eyes, his face lined with tiredness. “She arrived this morning. It was meant to be a surprise.”
“A surprise? Didn’t you know she was coming?”
“No – a surprise for you. We had planned a birthday…” His words trailed off. “God, Jack, I’m sorry.”
It was my birthday in a couple of days time. Catherine hadn’t been able to make the last one, even though most of my off world friends had. I hadn’t planned anything this year, thinking that nothing could top the events of the last one, but obviously my team had other plans.
I lurched to my feet, my stomach turning somersaults, and took a few limping steps away from the bench.
She had been going to surprise me. If it wasn’t for me, she would have been home, with Ernest. Maybe this would never have happened. Maybe she wouldn’t have died. The stress of the trip had probably been too much for her.
She shouldn’t be dead.
“Jack.” The sound of Daniel’s voice at my shoulder took me by surprise. “Hell, I shouldn’t have said anything.” There was a tug on my arm, and I reluctantly turned. “It isn’t your fault.”
I looked into his still tear filled eyes and saw the guilt, guilt that Daniel didn’t need right now, so I pushed the knowledge of my own culpability into the far corner of my mind, and focused on my friend.
“Come on, we should go somewhere warmer.” When he hesitated, I played the sympathy card, bending down to rub my knee. “What say we sit in my truck and you tell me what happened?”
I turned without waiting for an answer, leading him across the parking lot. Getting into the vehicle was much harder than I had expected, my leg feeling stiff and sore, and I welcomed Daniel’s helping hand. He looked at me worriedly as he settled into the seat next to me.
“You okay?”
I nodded, massaging the joint, glad to be out of the wind. “What happened?”
“She died, Jack. I told you that!” He snapped out the words, then sighed. “Sorry.”
I didn’t answer, letting him take his time.
“I picked her up from the airport and took her to her hotel. She arrived on an early flight, and we’d planned to have breakfast together before I went to work.” He stopped, and I saw his face turn pale. “She’d just started to unpack. She was showing me the present she bought you.” His eyes flicked to me, and he hurried on. “There wasn’t any warning…she just collapsed. I called 911 and did CPR, but she died before they even got her to the hospital…a massive heart attack they said.”
“And you’ve been here ever since?”
He nodded. “I couldn’t seem to leave.”
I knew what that was like. Sitting in that small room they set aside for grieving relatives, hoping that it would all go away if you didn’t do anything – didn’t move – didn’t think. As if you could hold time still. As if the reality of that small body on those bloody sheets would become some awful dream, and you would awaken to find everything back to the way it was – back to when your life hadn’t changed so suddenly, and with such devastation.
Oh God!
I couldn’t go there. I wouldn’t.
My hand turned the key in the ignition, almost at its own volition.
“Come on, you’ve been here long enough.”
And we drove away, leaving our dead behind.
o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o
The funeral was small, despite her many friends. It was the way Catherine had wanted it, her wishes made clear in a letter she had left for Ernest.
He held up well, his too frail frame held together by sheer willpower and determination, his emotions in check, but I wasn’t fooled. He had been returned to us by a miracle of fate, and the last few years had been wonderful, but Catherine had been his driving force. I expected that he would shortly follow her, and knowing that, also knew we had no right to try and hold him back from that journey.
General Hammond was there, representing the President, but also as a friend. He stood beside me, emotionless on the outside, just as I knew I seemed, together in our neat blue uniforms, our medals shining.
Daniel spoke, his love for Catherine shining through his words, and when he returned to his seat he smiled back at Carter sitting beside him, and took her hand, offering his support as Catherine had offered hers to him so many times, Teal’c’s strength and calm presence bolstering them both.
Her books and papers she had left to Daniel, almost the work of a lifetime just to go through them, but I knew that they would keep her memory alive, and when the time came, if it ever did, that the Stargate became common knowledge, they would be a testament to her unfailing search for answers to questions no one else had even known to ask.
The wake was filled with laughter and celebration of a life long lived and finally happy, and I joined in, repeating stories that Catherine had told me of her early adventures with her father, the parallels to Daniel’s early years uncanny, but after a while I slipped away.
o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o=o
For once I didn’t care about appearances, taking a stool at the bar and ignoring the startled glances.
The whiskey did nothing to warm me.
I sat there, remembering another time and another place, before I knew what real responsibility for death was like, when taking lives was an impersonal process. Before my family and friends began to die around me.
And I stayed coldly sober until another warrior came and found me, to take me back.
“Come on, son. They’re getting worried about you.”
And I nodded and followed George out of that dimly lit room, back into the light that shone so brightly and exposed me to the world again.
The End
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