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This is going to be dark and bits of it disturbed me writing it. It's set maybe S4, off-world to start with and I've been writing it all day when I should've been doing other stuff but I couldn't move away from it.
If bad things happening to Daniel bother you, don't read, although I can promise he doesn't die because I don't kill characters off. Well, apart from Wesley once, and Willow off-screen. Hmm. I don't do it often.
ETA A complete, beta'd version of this is now up at my web page. Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
theemdash for beta reading ::hugs::
Leaving Time
Leaving Time
Part One
When he finds him, Daniel's wearing a collar. Seeing it dark and tight around the grubby, bruised neck makes Jack cold inside, closes his ears momentarily, blinds his eyes. He breathes out slowly and hooks his fingers inside it to find the fastening.
Daniel screams, as high and loud as he can, given the state of his throat. It's a cracked whimper of a cry that hurts to hear. Jack's fingers slip free and he rubs them clean on his leg against the mud-encrusted fabric, frantically trying to scrub off the hideous twitch and slither and squeeze.
"What the hell is that?" he asks, revulsion choking him. Looks like leather, utilitarian and brown, rough-edged and primitive but it moved.
Daniel rocks out of his crouch to kneel back on his heels, brushing the dirt from his palms. His eyes focus and he blinks. "Jack?"
"Yeah." Jack kneels in filth and reaches out his hand. It hangs, irresolute, as he tries to find a safe place to pat Daniel and then falls to his side. He's already told Daniel it's him, already given him water, but Daniel doesn't seem able to hold onto it, any of it. "You knew we wouldn't leave you, right? Knew we'd come back..."
"Knew you'd come back..." Daniel echoes doubtfully.
Jack grits his teeth and rests his hand with infinite care on Daniel's shoulder, placing his finger just so and making sure he doesn't press down on raw, grazed skin, showing red through the faded, torn cloth. "We came as soon as possible after the Shalin dropped out of touch. Had to gate to the next planet over and come here by Tok'ra ship, but we've got people working on unburying the 'gate in the village; you'll be home tonight, I promise you."
"It took us a long time to bury it," Daniel says, his hands flexing as if they're clutching a shovel. Blisters crack and clear liquid makes snail tracks through the dirt painting his palms brown and grey.
"They made you --?" Jack bites off the words. "Yeah, guess they would."
Daniel nods and doesn't stop, his head bobbing up and down, impelled by an exhaustion deep enough that the effort of moving is less than the will needed to stop. Jack's hand cups his face and stills the movement. "It's going to be okay, Daniel."
Stone-dry, tear-empty eyes stare up at him.
"Really." Jack's talking for both of them now, wondering where the hell Carter and Teal'c are, and then knowing he doesn't want them to see Daniel like this. "Get you cleaned up, get you back; let Janet fix you up... get that thing off you..." He screws up his nose, glad of the chance to do it without hurting Daniel's feelings. The man stinks; organic odours of piss and shit and sweat overlaid with fear and pain. Jack's brain is screaming at him to run, kill, hide, all kinds of memories stirred up in the first sniff of the air inside Daniel's cage. "What's it made of?"
Daniel doesn't touch the collar. Jack's used to watching Daniel's fingers absently caress what he's describing, but he doesn't miss that habit now.
"It's flesh from a lindess tree."
Jack waits, puzzled, but Daniel's finished talking as if he's said enough. He offers Daniel some more water, holding the canteen to the split, dried lips, and waits until Daniel's swallowed five, six times before he takes the canteen away, hating how easy it is to fend off Daniel's clutching fingers. "Take it slow, huh? Don't want you throwing it back up again."
Daniel stares at him as if he hates him.
"Want me to cut it off? The collar?"
"No! Nonononono..." The words chatter out in a panicked rush and lose their meaning half way through for both of them.
"Easy!" Jack's hands fit snugly around Daniel's wrists and hold him in place. "Daniel, tell me why you don't want that fucking thing off you."
"You'll kill it." Daniel's shivering now, convulsive shudders that crawl over his skin like spiders.
"What?" Jack stares at it. "It's alive?" He's seen too much weirdness to be entirely disbelieving, especially since he remembers the way it moved against his skin.
Daniel gives a jerk of his head that Jack takes for assent.
"Okay. So we kill it. I've got no problems with that."
None. Zero. Jack's still coming down from the fight and not all of the reek of the place is from Daniel. Jack's skin is slicked with sweat and his face splattered with blood, dried now and flaking. It itches but he doesn't care.
Not his blood, after all.
Daniel turns around, hunches over, and very carefully splits the shaggy fall of hair at the back of his neck with his hands.
Jack edges closer and peers at the collar as it presses against the nape of Daniel's neck. It takes him a moment to work out what he's looking at in the dimness of the hut that houses Daniel's cage and when he does he turns his head and spits out sourness, stomach heaving.
"God..."
How deep the tendrils go inside Daniel's body, he doesn't know. Enough that they're piercing the once smooth skin, blood black and crusted around the entrance wounds. Enough that Daniel's doubly bound by the thing.
"What the fuck is it?"
Daniel turns back, so that he's close, too close, and Jack can't stop the instinctive recoil. Daniel reaches out and snatches the canteen off him, gulping at it, cradling it to him. Jack knows that's something that's going to be left behind. No way could he ever drink from it again.
"It's part of a sentient tree." Daniel lowers the canteen and gives Jack a look that's still vaguely hostile. "The Shalin shape the branches when they fall and they retain a connection to the mother tree until it dies. The resultant artwork is fascinating; some of it is centuries old and still living, changing subtly... " The crisp, swift explanation falters to a drawl, as if Daniel's clockwork-driven now, winding down. He plucks at the torn, stiff jacket he's wearing. "Sorry. Got this very messy. Do you think they'll let me requisition another?"
"Yeah," Jack says. "It's a write-off."
"I think it is," Daniel says seriously, as if the loss of a uniform matters when he's got a fucking alien life form screwing his brains up.
"So what do they do with this tree? They make wicker baskets out of it, or something?"
Daniel snickers. "Noooo. Just basket cases."
Jack glances toward the door, ignoring Daniel's breathless, gasped giggles. "Daniel; this place stinks and I can't see you. Want to get the hell out of here and let me torch the place?"
Daniel bites his lip to silence himself, his teeth fitting neatly into already dented skin. "Out?"
"Yeah. Out." Jack goes to the door and looks around. The smoke from the fighting and the fires hangs over the village in wisps of grey, tainting the fresh air he's sucking gratefully into his lungs, but he can't see anyone alive in sight. He'd told Carter and Teal'c to join him once they'd overseen the start of the digging; with a jolt of shock, he realises that they've only been gone a short while. It feels as if he's been inside that cramped hovel for an hour.
He goes back to Daniel and takes his hand. "Come on. No one's out there. It's safe."
There's something inside that's telling him Daniel needs shielding, shouldn't be seen like this. It's the instinct of a child covering for an alcoholic mother. No one's going to look at Daniel with pity or disgust. No one.
Daniel leaves the hut readily enough and Jack leads him across to the shallow river on the eastern side of the village. He's got spare clothes in his pack; no spare boots, but Daniel's been going barefoot for a while by the look of it. They can strip him down, wash him, scour off some of the dirt. Daniel's moving like a man who's been kept in a cage too small to stretch out in, and his skin's peppered with contusions and scars, but Jack can't see anything that would make a wash a bad idea.
Unless that fucking tree around his neck doesn't like getting wet.
They've been walking past bodies without Daniel reacting but he pauses at one, his gaze scanning the twisted, limp corpse curiously.
"What?" Jack asks. This was one of his kills. He remembers it. Bullets sewing a red thread across the man's chest and a sword swinging up from nowhere as Jack got closer...
"It's Sacer," Daniel says.
... the hilt of the sword warm in Jack's hand as he took it out of a loose grip and --
"Didn't he have a head?" Daniel turns a puzzled look on Jack. "I think he had a head." Dull eyes brighten as Jack nods silently at a brownish lump a few yards away, stripped of personality by death. "Oh, right. There it is."
Jack swallows. "Yeah. I didn't mean to --"
"He's the one who put the collar on me," Daniel says dreamily. "They're loose at first, you know, wet with sap, and then they tighten as they dry. If they aren't the right size they strangle you slowly."
Jack's hand tightens on Daniel's sleeve but he doesn't trust himself to reply.
"That's how Alice died," Daniel carries on. "She was in the cage next to me and she was choking and gasping and begging Sacer to cut it off her. It took a long time for her to die and I could feel my collar getting tighter and tighter, squeezing my neck, cracking my bones until the blood gushed out and I drowned."
"That wasn't you," Jack says urgently, shaking Daniel until he stops droning out the details of Alice Stewart's death. Jack remembers her in the gateroom; blonde, with short, wispy hair tied in a knot on top of her head, blue eyes snapping with excitement because she was off to another planet. One of Daniel's fellow geeks.
"Will of the gods," Daniel mutters. "Why is it always the will of the gods? Why can't they just admit that they're sadists with a disturbing knack for torture and an inability to measure?"
That sounds promising. Anger, spiced with spite. Jack's all for encouraging that.
They make it to the river with Daniel still muttering imprecations against Sacer and Jack nodding agreement, Daniel's weight numbing his arm. Jack's feeling optimistic. He's found Daniel, and even if he's the only survivor from the six who were taken, even though he's got a sentient fucking twig rammed into his skull, well, he's alive, sane enough to be sarcastic, and apart from Benson cracking his wrist, the rescuers have suffered no casualties.
Fraiser'll get it off him Jack thinks. Or Thor, or the Tok'ra, or Carter. Between 'em, they can do just about anything. Shit, we can spray it with weed killer if it comes to that.
Daniel stares at the water and then at Jack.
"Daniel -- one friend to another; you stink." Jack shrugs out of his pack and rummages through it, bringing out a folded set of BDU's and a pair of socks. He tosses a small bottle of liquid soap in the air and catches it. "Get in, get the worst of it off, and then use this," he says, keeping his voice light and impersonal.
Daniel starts to undress, his movement hesitant, averting his face. It's not shyness --God knows they've showered side by side often enough -- but shame, Jack realises. Daniel doesn't want him to see --
Oh God.
The last of the rags fall to the ground and Daniel takes an unsteady step forward and then stumbles. Jack watches him fall, shocked into immobility, shaking it off too late to catch him. Daniel lies in the dirt, his skin mottled and patterned with weeks of abuse, and then he goes to his hands and knees and starts to crawl.
"Shit --" Jack goes to him and helps him up, yanks him up, dragging Daniel to his feet and running his hands over the skin that's covering a skeleton that's subtly not right. Too much of it, too many bumps and protrusions.
"Am I beautiful?" Daniel asks him, his eyes blue again under the sky. "He said I would be. Said it was a pity criminals were never exhibited because I'd be much admired."
Jack wishes he wasn't working this out so quickly.
"Not wicker baskets."
Daniel's head is cradled against Jack's arm, his body cool and oddly weighted. Too little flesh, too much --
"No. Just me."
Hollows and dips and sunken, shrinking, stretching skin... Daniel sucked dry, changing...
"What will -- how will it end?"
Hardest question he's ever had to ask but Daniel just shrugs, easing out of Jack's grip and walking toward the water.
"I won't die from it," Daniel says. "Not all the way. You'll have to kill me. Promise you will?" The sunlight scatters across the water and dazzles Jack's eyes so that all he sees is Daniel, naked and smiling at him, serenely confident that Jack'll agree. Then the water swallows him up and Jack blinks away the sting of tears and slides his sunglasses on.
By the time Daniel's dressed, matted hair slicked back, body mercifully shrouded, Jack's starting to wish he had more people to kill.
"They said you were being held," he tells Daniel. "Unharmed and held, pending an investigation."
The ponderous, measured tones of the Shalin ambassador had left Jack on edge but Hammond had seemed satisfied, even as he'd argued for a release, pleading the case of Daniel's team -- what was left of it. The deaths of the marines sent to guard the archeologists were already dealt with, the four men buried with words like 'regrettable', 'unfortunate', 'tragic misunderstanding' carved on their gravestones.
"We were," Daniel says dryly. "The investigation just didn't take as long as they told you." He's walking with confidence now, as if the wash and fresh clothes have helped, biting hungrily at an energy bar Jack's found, crumbling and squashed, in his pocket. "They really don't care about lying. Not after what we did."
Jack halts Daniel with a hand on his arm. "Just what did you do, Daniel? Any of you? What the fuck could you do to deserve this?"
Daniel stares at the woods where Carter and Teal'c can be seen hurrying along a narrow track. "I pissed off their gods, Jack."
"Yeah, well, we do that sort of thing all the fucking time," Jack snaps.
"Yes, we do," Daniel agrees, starting to walk again, angling away from his approaching friends. He pauses by a tree growing out of a heap of rocks. "But we don't get away with murder."
"Oh God." Sickness takes Jack, twisting his gut. Teal'c starts to run, and by the time Jack's finished throwing up, SG-1's together again, after weeks apart. Carter's eyes are wide and anxious, her hand on Daniel's arm, Teal'c's impassive face lit by a small smile that fades fast, but they're all close enough to touch.
"Sir?" Carter strokes Daniel's arm and smiles at him again before turning her attention to her superior officer, puking and shaking on the fucking ground.
She should've been looking at the tree. The tree that was managing to sway without a breeze, the rustle of its leaves a sibilant scream.
"Sacer liked this one," Daniel says, studying it dispassionately. "But he said Simon struggled too much at the end. The best results are when you let the tree have control of your final shape, but not many people can do that. It hurts quite a lot, you see. He hoped I'd be braver than Simon was and I said I'd try."
"Daniel?" Carter sounds freaked and concerned. "What are you talking about?"
Teal'c does what Jack couldn't have, not ever, and rests his hand against the bark of the tree. "I believe Daniel Jackson is telling us that this was once a member of his team, Major Carter." He sounds shaken out of his customary composure. "Although I do not know how this transformation has been effected, or the purpose of it."
"It's done as both a punishment and a privilege," Daniel says. "Those who volunteer are greatly honoured. They create a living blend between the two dominant life forms on the planet, you see."
"No," Carter says, shaking her head violently. "I don't see. How can it be a punishment if it's an honour?"
Daniel smiles as Teal'c cries out, snatching his fingers back as the tree shrieks at him, woken and angry. "The ones who blend are allowed to forget. Absorbed entirely. Gifted with wisdom and immortal. The others -- the tree takes from them and gains strength from their life force, but gives nothing back." The intent furrow between Daniel's eyebrows deepens. "They remember who they were. It's why they scream like that. It's forbidden to look at the punishment trees; they're taboo, but Sacer told me that he's heard music made from the sounds they make and that it was.." Daniel's lips pout as he tries to remember. "Compelling and eerily complex," he says finally with a nod.
He starts to walk away. "If you set fire to it, I think that will work," he calls back over his shoulder. "For Simon's sake, I hope you can find a quicker way to kill him, though."
Part Two
If bad things happening to Daniel bother you, don't read, although I can promise he doesn't die because I don't kill characters off. Well, apart from Wesley once, and Willow off-screen. Hmm. I don't do it often.
ETA A complete, beta'd version of this is now up at my web page. Thanks to
theemdash for beta reading ::hugs::Leaving Time
Leaving Time
Part One
When he finds him, Daniel's wearing a collar. Seeing it dark and tight around the grubby, bruised neck makes Jack cold inside, closes his ears momentarily, blinds his eyes. He breathes out slowly and hooks his fingers inside it to find the fastening.
Daniel screams, as high and loud as he can, given the state of his throat. It's a cracked whimper of a cry that hurts to hear. Jack's fingers slip free and he rubs them clean on his leg against the mud-encrusted fabric, frantically trying to scrub off the hideous twitch and slither and squeeze.
"What the hell is that?" he asks, revulsion choking him. Looks like leather, utilitarian and brown, rough-edged and primitive but it moved.
Daniel rocks out of his crouch to kneel back on his heels, brushing the dirt from his palms. His eyes focus and he blinks. "Jack?"
"Yeah." Jack kneels in filth and reaches out his hand. It hangs, irresolute, as he tries to find a safe place to pat Daniel and then falls to his side. He's already told Daniel it's him, already given him water, but Daniel doesn't seem able to hold onto it, any of it. "You knew we wouldn't leave you, right? Knew we'd come back..."
"Knew you'd come back..." Daniel echoes doubtfully.
Jack grits his teeth and rests his hand with infinite care on Daniel's shoulder, placing his finger just so and making sure he doesn't press down on raw, grazed skin, showing red through the faded, torn cloth. "We came as soon as possible after the Shalin dropped out of touch. Had to gate to the next planet over and come here by Tok'ra ship, but we've got people working on unburying the 'gate in the village; you'll be home tonight, I promise you."
"It took us a long time to bury it," Daniel says, his hands flexing as if they're clutching a shovel. Blisters crack and clear liquid makes snail tracks through the dirt painting his palms brown and grey.
"They made you --?" Jack bites off the words. "Yeah, guess they would."
Daniel nods and doesn't stop, his head bobbing up and down, impelled by an exhaustion deep enough that the effort of moving is less than the will needed to stop. Jack's hand cups his face and stills the movement. "It's going to be okay, Daniel."
Stone-dry, tear-empty eyes stare up at him.
"Really." Jack's talking for both of them now, wondering where the hell Carter and Teal'c are, and then knowing he doesn't want them to see Daniel like this. "Get you cleaned up, get you back; let Janet fix you up... get that thing off you..." He screws up his nose, glad of the chance to do it without hurting Daniel's feelings. The man stinks; organic odours of piss and shit and sweat overlaid with fear and pain. Jack's brain is screaming at him to run, kill, hide, all kinds of memories stirred up in the first sniff of the air inside Daniel's cage. "What's it made of?"
Daniel doesn't touch the collar. Jack's used to watching Daniel's fingers absently caress what he's describing, but he doesn't miss that habit now.
"It's flesh from a lindess tree."
Jack waits, puzzled, but Daniel's finished talking as if he's said enough. He offers Daniel some more water, holding the canteen to the split, dried lips, and waits until Daniel's swallowed five, six times before he takes the canteen away, hating how easy it is to fend off Daniel's clutching fingers. "Take it slow, huh? Don't want you throwing it back up again."
Daniel stares at him as if he hates him.
"Want me to cut it off? The collar?"
"No! Nonononono..." The words chatter out in a panicked rush and lose their meaning half way through for both of them.
"Easy!" Jack's hands fit snugly around Daniel's wrists and hold him in place. "Daniel, tell me why you don't want that fucking thing off you."
"You'll kill it." Daniel's shivering now, convulsive shudders that crawl over his skin like spiders.
"What?" Jack stares at it. "It's alive?" He's seen too much weirdness to be entirely disbelieving, especially since he remembers the way it moved against his skin.
Daniel gives a jerk of his head that Jack takes for assent.
"Okay. So we kill it. I've got no problems with that."
None. Zero. Jack's still coming down from the fight and not all of the reek of the place is from Daniel. Jack's skin is slicked with sweat and his face splattered with blood, dried now and flaking. It itches but he doesn't care.
Not his blood, after all.
Daniel turns around, hunches over, and very carefully splits the shaggy fall of hair at the back of his neck with his hands.
Jack edges closer and peers at the collar as it presses against the nape of Daniel's neck. It takes him a moment to work out what he's looking at in the dimness of the hut that houses Daniel's cage and when he does he turns his head and spits out sourness, stomach heaving.
"God..."
How deep the tendrils go inside Daniel's body, he doesn't know. Enough that they're piercing the once smooth skin, blood black and crusted around the entrance wounds. Enough that Daniel's doubly bound by the thing.
"What the fuck is it?"
Daniel turns back, so that he's close, too close, and Jack can't stop the instinctive recoil. Daniel reaches out and snatches the canteen off him, gulping at it, cradling it to him. Jack knows that's something that's going to be left behind. No way could he ever drink from it again.
"It's part of a sentient tree." Daniel lowers the canteen and gives Jack a look that's still vaguely hostile. "The Shalin shape the branches when they fall and they retain a connection to the mother tree until it dies. The resultant artwork is fascinating; some of it is centuries old and still living, changing subtly... " The crisp, swift explanation falters to a drawl, as if Daniel's clockwork-driven now, winding down. He plucks at the torn, stiff jacket he's wearing. "Sorry. Got this very messy. Do you think they'll let me requisition another?"
"Yeah," Jack says. "It's a write-off."
"I think it is," Daniel says seriously, as if the loss of a uniform matters when he's got a fucking alien life form screwing his brains up.
"So what do they do with this tree? They make wicker baskets out of it, or something?"
Daniel snickers. "Noooo. Just basket cases."
Jack glances toward the door, ignoring Daniel's breathless, gasped giggles. "Daniel; this place stinks and I can't see you. Want to get the hell out of here and let me torch the place?"
Daniel bites his lip to silence himself, his teeth fitting neatly into already dented skin. "Out?"
"Yeah. Out." Jack goes to the door and looks around. The smoke from the fighting and the fires hangs over the village in wisps of grey, tainting the fresh air he's sucking gratefully into his lungs, but he can't see anyone alive in sight. He'd told Carter and Teal'c to join him once they'd overseen the start of the digging; with a jolt of shock, he realises that they've only been gone a short while. It feels as if he's been inside that cramped hovel for an hour.
He goes back to Daniel and takes his hand. "Come on. No one's out there. It's safe."
There's something inside that's telling him Daniel needs shielding, shouldn't be seen like this. It's the instinct of a child covering for an alcoholic mother. No one's going to look at Daniel with pity or disgust. No one.
Daniel leaves the hut readily enough and Jack leads him across to the shallow river on the eastern side of the village. He's got spare clothes in his pack; no spare boots, but Daniel's been going barefoot for a while by the look of it. They can strip him down, wash him, scour off some of the dirt. Daniel's moving like a man who's been kept in a cage too small to stretch out in, and his skin's peppered with contusions and scars, but Jack can't see anything that would make a wash a bad idea.
Unless that fucking tree around his neck doesn't like getting wet.
They've been walking past bodies without Daniel reacting but he pauses at one, his gaze scanning the twisted, limp corpse curiously.
"What?" Jack asks. This was one of his kills. He remembers it. Bullets sewing a red thread across the man's chest and a sword swinging up from nowhere as Jack got closer...
"It's Sacer," Daniel says.
... the hilt of the sword warm in Jack's hand as he took it out of a loose grip and --
"Didn't he have a head?" Daniel turns a puzzled look on Jack. "I think he had a head." Dull eyes brighten as Jack nods silently at a brownish lump a few yards away, stripped of personality by death. "Oh, right. There it is."
Jack swallows. "Yeah. I didn't mean to --"
"He's the one who put the collar on me," Daniel says dreamily. "They're loose at first, you know, wet with sap, and then they tighten as they dry. If they aren't the right size they strangle you slowly."
Jack's hand tightens on Daniel's sleeve but he doesn't trust himself to reply.
"That's how Alice died," Daniel carries on. "She was in the cage next to me and she was choking and gasping and begging Sacer to cut it off her. It took a long time for her to die and I could feel my collar getting tighter and tighter, squeezing my neck, cracking my bones until the blood gushed out and I drowned."
"That wasn't you," Jack says urgently, shaking Daniel until he stops droning out the details of Alice Stewart's death. Jack remembers her in the gateroom; blonde, with short, wispy hair tied in a knot on top of her head, blue eyes snapping with excitement because she was off to another planet. One of Daniel's fellow geeks.
"Will of the gods," Daniel mutters. "Why is it always the will of the gods? Why can't they just admit that they're sadists with a disturbing knack for torture and an inability to measure?"
That sounds promising. Anger, spiced with spite. Jack's all for encouraging that.
They make it to the river with Daniel still muttering imprecations against Sacer and Jack nodding agreement, Daniel's weight numbing his arm. Jack's feeling optimistic. He's found Daniel, and even if he's the only survivor from the six who were taken, even though he's got a sentient fucking twig rammed into his skull, well, he's alive, sane enough to be sarcastic, and apart from Benson cracking his wrist, the rescuers have suffered no casualties.
Fraiser'll get it off him Jack thinks. Or Thor, or the Tok'ra, or Carter. Between 'em, they can do just about anything. Shit, we can spray it with weed killer if it comes to that.
Daniel stares at the water and then at Jack.
"Daniel -- one friend to another; you stink." Jack shrugs out of his pack and rummages through it, bringing out a folded set of BDU's and a pair of socks. He tosses a small bottle of liquid soap in the air and catches it. "Get in, get the worst of it off, and then use this," he says, keeping his voice light and impersonal.
Daniel starts to undress, his movement hesitant, averting his face. It's not shyness --God knows they've showered side by side often enough -- but shame, Jack realises. Daniel doesn't want him to see --
Oh God.
The last of the rags fall to the ground and Daniel takes an unsteady step forward and then stumbles. Jack watches him fall, shocked into immobility, shaking it off too late to catch him. Daniel lies in the dirt, his skin mottled and patterned with weeks of abuse, and then he goes to his hands and knees and starts to crawl.
"Shit --" Jack goes to him and helps him up, yanks him up, dragging Daniel to his feet and running his hands over the skin that's covering a skeleton that's subtly not right. Too much of it, too many bumps and protrusions.
"Am I beautiful?" Daniel asks him, his eyes blue again under the sky. "He said I would be. Said it was a pity criminals were never exhibited because I'd be much admired."
Jack wishes he wasn't working this out so quickly.
"Not wicker baskets."
Daniel's head is cradled against Jack's arm, his body cool and oddly weighted. Too little flesh, too much --
"No. Just me."
Hollows and dips and sunken, shrinking, stretching skin... Daniel sucked dry, changing...
"What will -- how will it end?"
Hardest question he's ever had to ask but Daniel just shrugs, easing out of Jack's grip and walking toward the water.
"I won't die from it," Daniel says. "Not all the way. You'll have to kill me. Promise you will?" The sunlight scatters across the water and dazzles Jack's eyes so that all he sees is Daniel, naked and smiling at him, serenely confident that Jack'll agree. Then the water swallows him up and Jack blinks away the sting of tears and slides his sunglasses on.
By the time Daniel's dressed, matted hair slicked back, body mercifully shrouded, Jack's starting to wish he had more people to kill.
"They said you were being held," he tells Daniel. "Unharmed and held, pending an investigation."
The ponderous, measured tones of the Shalin ambassador had left Jack on edge but Hammond had seemed satisfied, even as he'd argued for a release, pleading the case of Daniel's team -- what was left of it. The deaths of the marines sent to guard the archeologists were already dealt with, the four men buried with words like 'regrettable', 'unfortunate', 'tragic misunderstanding' carved on their gravestones.
"We were," Daniel says dryly. "The investigation just didn't take as long as they told you." He's walking with confidence now, as if the wash and fresh clothes have helped, biting hungrily at an energy bar Jack's found, crumbling and squashed, in his pocket. "They really don't care about lying. Not after what we did."
Jack halts Daniel with a hand on his arm. "Just what did you do, Daniel? Any of you? What the fuck could you do to deserve this?"
Daniel stares at the woods where Carter and Teal'c can be seen hurrying along a narrow track. "I pissed off their gods, Jack."
"Yeah, well, we do that sort of thing all the fucking time," Jack snaps.
"Yes, we do," Daniel agrees, starting to walk again, angling away from his approaching friends. He pauses by a tree growing out of a heap of rocks. "But we don't get away with murder."
"Oh God." Sickness takes Jack, twisting his gut. Teal'c starts to run, and by the time Jack's finished throwing up, SG-1's together again, after weeks apart. Carter's eyes are wide and anxious, her hand on Daniel's arm, Teal'c's impassive face lit by a small smile that fades fast, but they're all close enough to touch.
"Sir?" Carter strokes Daniel's arm and smiles at him again before turning her attention to her superior officer, puking and shaking on the fucking ground.
She should've been looking at the tree. The tree that was managing to sway without a breeze, the rustle of its leaves a sibilant scream.
"Sacer liked this one," Daniel says, studying it dispassionately. "But he said Simon struggled too much at the end. The best results are when you let the tree have control of your final shape, but not many people can do that. It hurts quite a lot, you see. He hoped I'd be braver than Simon was and I said I'd try."
"Daniel?" Carter sounds freaked and concerned. "What are you talking about?"
Teal'c does what Jack couldn't have, not ever, and rests his hand against the bark of the tree. "I believe Daniel Jackson is telling us that this was once a member of his team, Major Carter." He sounds shaken out of his customary composure. "Although I do not know how this transformation has been effected, or the purpose of it."
"It's done as both a punishment and a privilege," Daniel says. "Those who volunteer are greatly honoured. They create a living blend between the two dominant life forms on the planet, you see."
"No," Carter says, shaking her head violently. "I don't see. How can it be a punishment if it's an honour?"
Daniel smiles as Teal'c cries out, snatching his fingers back as the tree shrieks at him, woken and angry. "The ones who blend are allowed to forget. Absorbed entirely. Gifted with wisdom and immortal. The others -- the tree takes from them and gains strength from their life force, but gives nothing back." The intent furrow between Daniel's eyebrows deepens. "They remember who they were. It's why they scream like that. It's forbidden to look at the punishment trees; they're taboo, but Sacer told me that he's heard music made from the sounds they make and that it was.." Daniel's lips pout as he tries to remember. "Compelling and eerily complex," he says finally with a nod.
He starts to walk away. "If you set fire to it, I think that will work," he calls back over his shoulder. "For Simon's sake, I hope you can find a quicker way to kill him, though."
Part Two
Tags:
- fic,
- jack/daniel,
- sg-1,
- slash