She took Jack’s hand, linking their fingers and swinging their hands. “I think the dock needs to be rebuilt,” she commented. “Instead of paying someone to do it, maybe we can negotiate for a trade.”
Jack snickered as Nick’s eyes narrowed. “You are paying entirely too much attention to the queen,” Nick informed her. Sam shrugged and took the bug from him, slipping into her pocket.
“Maybe, but she makes a mean cup of tea,” she said. “Make sure the sides of the dock are secure and there needs to be a gate on the end. Kids running around, you know.”
Jack smiled and brought their hands up, pressing his mouth to her knuckles.
“Maybe holders for fishing poles,” she said.
“That sounds good,” Jack nodded. “I didn’t think of that one.”
Nick shook his head and led his buddies back to his house where Paul was just getting out of his car and looking their way.
“Let’s see how badly he wants a new toy in his arsenal,” Jack said to her. “That was clever, honey; I never thought to bribe him to get the dock fixed.” He kissed her in appreciation.
“And I think that you can say no to adults, but the little ones need the owies kissed,” she told him. Jack wrinkled his face in protest.
“You look like Olivia just before she throws a tantrum,” Sam commented. Jack smoothed his face out and opened the door, ushering her before him.
“You’re mean,” he told her.
It was just after dawn when a body dropped into their bed. Jack opened one eye for a moment and then sank back into his pillow.
“Why is the engineering corps in our back yard?” Daniel muttered into his own pillow. Jack’s eye re-opened. He groaned as he rolled out of bed and went to the sliding door, stepping out onto the back porch. There were indeed a group of men in the back yard, all in fatigues and carrying supplies from around the side of the house. Fang was hooked up to his runner, watching the action, and wagged his tail at Jack.
“Soldier,” Jack called to one of the young men as he bent to scratch the dog. They all stopped and came to attention. “At ease,” Jack said and pointed to one of the men. “You. Who’s in charge?”
“Colonel William Grey, sir. Good morning, sir, I hope we didn’t disturb your sleep.”
Jack took a second look at the young man. “No, you didn’t, mister, thank you. What’s your name?”
“Cadet James Stinson, sir.”
“Thank you, cadet. As you were.”
Jack padded in his bare feet and pajama bottoms around to the front of the house. He found a truck that was being unloaded with wood and equipment. The cadets all paused and saluted, and once more Jack waved them on.
“Colonel Grey?” Jack called out. A man jumped down from the back of the truck and saluted.
“Good morning, sir, I’m Colonel Grey.” Jack returned the salute and looked at the man’s jacket. USACE patches.
“Jack.” He looked at the driveway. Nick was walking up to the house.
“You called in the US Army Corps of Engineers?” Jack asked. “For my deck??”
Nick snapped his gum, a glint in his eyes of what Jack had learned was humor. “Sam wanted the deck fixed. She didn’t say I needed to actually do it myself.”
“But….” Jack looked around. “Over night??”
“We weren’t too far away, General,” Grey assured him. “We were on a training exercise at the Yampa Plateau. These are mostly cadets from West Point. This isn’t an imposition, sir.”
“And I did tell you I had connections,” Nick reminded him.
“Yeah, but….” Jack scratched at his head and threw his arms out. “Alright. Colonel, I appreciate the help. I have kids and a pup, so the deck needs to support and protect them.”
“Yes, sir.”
Jack shook his head and went back inside to fall back into his bed.
“Wuss doin’?” Sam muttered.
“Nick called the engineering corps to fix the deck,” Jack told her. “We have a yard full of West Point cadets.”
“Are they cute?” she asked. Jack lifted his head and looked over Daniel’s back at her. “Well, I have another day of ovulation and those boys are much younger and stronger….”
Jack leapt over Daniel and tackled her.
Chapter 60
One by one, the children placed flowers on the grave. Only the baby toddled around on the grass while the rest of the family was mindful of Michael saying prayers for his father and daughter over Megan’s grave. It was hard, remembering those lost while celebrating Olivia’s first year, a miracle herself. Jack had an arm around his mother’s shoulder and held Katie’s hand with the other hand. Daniel kept Davy close, standing behind him, his arms over the boy’s shoulders and hands gripped while Sam held Stacey’s hand and Fang’s leash. Matthew stood, sullen, at the back of their small crowd, his hands buried in his pants pockets. Jack knew the boy was upset. He also knew Matty would come to him when he was ready. Except at that moment. Matty turned and began to run. Fang gave a woof and Michael paused, looked at his grandson and then at Jack.
“Let him run it off,” Jack told them, watching the boy run away. There seemed to be an unusual number of police near the cemetery. “He knows where we’ll be.” He called the SF that were waiting unobtrusively at the far end of the cemetery and had one of them follow Matthew and keep an eye on him. They’d be at Cousin Joey’s house for lunch, if the boy had not returned by the time they left. By the time Michael concluded the family business in the cemetery, Matthew had still not returned. Jack sensed for him.
“He’s a few blocks away,” he finally told them. “Let him work it out.”
“He’s a child, Jack,” Maggie frowned at him. “You need to go after him.”
“He’s fifteen, Mom, he doesn’t need his new manhood babied,” Jack told her. “He needs to work it out for himself. When he’s ready, he’ll talk. It’s a guy thing, Ma, trust me.”
Jack kept Katie under his wing on the way to Joey and Erin’s house. Davy wasn’t completely sure of what was happening and was content to have Daniel’s attention. For all their delicate probing of what Davy did and didn’t understand, they found that he lived mostly in the Now. The past was an abstract subject for him and he didn’t understand questions about the future. He did miss his mother and he was sure she was still around and watching over them, so his grief didn’t take the same form as Matthew or Katie’s. They knew he was sad when he carried his mangled red feather around, which he was gripping tightly. Daniel was pretty sure she didn’t ascend, since they had seen her body in the casket. If having his mother’s spirit around made David feel good, no one was going to make him believe otherwise. He even wore a locket containing her picture. Michael questioned the wisdom of such a feminine thing, but Davy wanted it out of his mother’s jewelry box and Jack didn’t have an issue with it. If anything surprised them, it was Davy’s request for a picture of Sam for the other side of the locket where he had torn out his father Andrew’s image. Daniel commented privately, and with humor, that the boy was well on his way to worship of the Feminine Divine. They decided not to mention it to Michael.
Katie had been sniffling throughout their trip up north and all morning. Her nose was red and her face was blotchy. She alternated dampening the shoulders of all the adults. Jack was drying out, so she was on his shoulder. He felt a strong feeling from her and instinctively reached to find out what it was. Smarty-pants, he thought to himself. She’s learning how to focus. She wanted him to know without alerting the others that she feared for the return of her father. He lifted her chin, looked into her reddened eyes, and gave a slight shake of his head before pecking her forehead and stroking her hair. He had already given the SF orders to be on the lookout for Andrew, just in case he decided to show his face. Jack highly doubted he would, the cowardly piece of shit excuse for a man.
The afternoon was spent at Joey and Erin’s home with some of the family who came to celebrate a birthday instead of a death. The SF brought
Matthew to them and he was quietly sent to nap with Olivia until he was ready. The family got their stories and Daniel signed books. His book had hit the stands and immediately went to the top of the charts. People all over the world were clamoring for his attention. The conspiracy nuts were typing at light speed across the internet. The nuts in Sam and Daniel’s labs, those that knew more than they should, were keeping track of the theories and making bets on which of the wackos got closest to any hidden facts. So far, there was an Aussie in Sydney who seemed to have a talent for reading between the lines. He was put on a watch list.
The day with their cousins seemed to show the children that although family will always be there for them, they couldn’t go back to the past. Their old neighborhood was no longer their home and the al'kesh flight back to Colorado Springs was bitter-sweet.
As they settled in back home, Daniel was preoccupied with a phone call. He argued with his lab and finally ordered them to send the information to his computer. While he disappeared into his den, Matthew disappeared into his own room. Jack looked from one end of the house to the other and decided to head upstairs first. Matthew was belly-down, getting his music situated and his headphones untangled. Jack watched and then took the headphones, dangling them until they unwound and then handed them back to the boy.
“Do I have to go to school tomorrow?” Matthew asked.
“Yup.”
After a moment, Jack gave Matty’s back a rub. “Want to go fishing this weekend? In the mountains, not out back. See if there’s any trout around.”
That got a little more response and there seemed to be a small spark of interest.
“I guess so.”
Jack gave a nod and touched the boy’s hair. Matthew was sore inside; he’d be alright, though. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea for the kids to visit their mother’s grave so soon. Opening wounds was never the first choice.
“Should we have skipped this?” Jack asked when he went into the kitchen. Sam and Jerrie looked at him and continued to get the younger kids a snack.
“They’ll be fine,” Jerrie told him. “Pretending the day never happened is unhealthy. Learning that life and death are equal partners is more important. Just be present for them and let them sort it out.”
“I didn’t visit my mother’s grave until I was an adult,” Sam said, putting applesauce in front of Olivia. The baby happily stuck her fingers into the bowl, making “ap ap” sounds. “I had the idea that if I didn’t see her grave, then she really wasn’t dead. Thinking about it now, I would have liked to have spent time there, talking to her, spilling my teenager girl’s heart to her whenever I needed my Mom. Next year, ask the kids what they want to do. Maybe just Livie’s birthday would be fine. If they want to go and visit their mother, they can do that, too.”
Daniel came into the kitchen, scowling at a piece of paper. He stopped short. “Am I interrupting something?”
“No,” Jack shrugged. “What’s going on?”
“This,” Daniel said, waving the paper. “That site in Orkney. The excavators must have gotten their data wrong or else decided that the readings were out of whack. It…. that….”
They looked at Jerrie.
“I think I left my radio on,” she said and left the room.
Daniel began to pace the room. “Now, we know that the Ancients were the first round of humanoids on this planet. So where is all the evidence of their past here? Where are all the cities?”
Sam also frowned as she read the paper. Jack looked over her shoulder and decided he wasn’t going to get anywhere that way.
“This is saying Skara Brae is over….. 600,000 years old,” Sam said, looking up in astonishment. Daniel nodded hard enough for his head to almost fall off.
“Yes, yes! And there was lots of life around, then, but there is no evidence of people in Europe until about 500,000 years ago and this was only in the form of flints and stuff. Very primitive. And if I hadn’t known better, and if I were one of the excavators and I saw that carbon dating, I would have thought something was wrong with the equipment or the formula!” They noticed Jack’s eyes.
“There was a major greenhouse warming that occurred around that time,” Daniel said, bringing it down a little, “warming the oceans to a point where even Antarctica was green. The entire planet was balmy. There is no reason humans couldn’t have lived here.”
“Who’s to say this was the Ancients’ original home anyway?” Sam asked. “Maybe they did come from somewhere else and live in domes which they took down when they left? Atlantis is an entire city that is capable of space travel.”
Jack found a beer and contemplated things as he opened it and took a sip. “So… are you suggesting that this Skara Brae is a leftover from the Ancients?”
“Uh, yes and no,” Daniel said. “First, it shows no signs of being something that belonged to the Ancients and there was no evidence of any technology, writings, or hidden stashes. Neanderthals were around early on, but they didn’t get much further than hardened tipped spears.”
“Daniel, what are you trying to say?” Jack asked, becoming exasperated. Daniel pulled at his hair as he paced.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “According to everything we know about how people spread out across the world, there should NOT have been anyone in northern Scotland before seven thousand BCE, unless you want to count a caveman or two, and no one knows where they came from, but their left-over buildings look a little like those from Crete. Celts came to Europe about one thousand BCE and England wasn’t officially an island until about two thousand BCE, if that helps with perspective.
“Now. Supposedly, the Ancients left because of some sort of disease that swept through the galaxy. I think you got a dose of it when I was Ascended.” Jack nodded and grimaced. He also remembered what happened while he was still with Kanan and the Tok'ra; he went on a mission and was captured by Baal who tortured him to death, literally, and then would use a sarcophagus to heal him, only to torture him again. Jack had been ready to die, but Daniel visited him in spirit form while Ascended. He was angry with Daniel, then, actually hated him, for not helping him out of the situation. Daniel kept telling him to trust. Soon after, Sam, Teal'c, and Jonas discovered Baal's planet, and rescued him. Jack never told Daniel about it. If Daniel remembered, one day, then they would talk about it.
“We didn’t figure out what it was, but the Tok’ra cured it,” Sam commented.
“A nasty cure,” Jack said. “I don’t recommend it on a regular basis.”
Daniel waited for them. “Okay, so what if a few of the Ancients remained behind?” he suggested. “I’m guessing that they didn’t start off as an entire society of equal classes, I’m sure they worked up to it just like we are doing. Remember that they weren’t Ascending yet. What if they left behind a few, shall we say, unwanted individuals? Look, I know that we think that the Ancients evolved here on this planet, but where is there any documentation that says that? How do we know they didn’t come here from someplace else and just settle in? Enki messed with us, or we wouldn’t be here. So how could the Ancients have evolved here long before the dinosaurs? It doesn’t make sense. I think this assumption about the Ancients evolving here is wrong.”
“Forget the Ancients’ evolution, what about that building in Scotland?” Jack asked, waving his arms for Daniel’s attention.
“I’m not sure, Jack,” Daniel said. “That place is dating from the middle Paleolithic and it shouldn’t be.”
“What about….” Sam looked at the ceiling, thinking hard. “Look, that hopper we just got rid of…. the very existence of it doesn’t make sense, either, right? What if… okay, this is completely out of the ball park, but what if the owners of that ship hid themselves in time? What if they sent themselves backward to a point where no one would find them and whatever they were doing? What if the Ancients did evolve here, but in another timeline and somehow ended up in our timeline?”
“Wouldn’t that mess with our present?” Jack asked. They had c
ertainly had their own share of time jumping. Sam shook her head.
“Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “A small group of people would probably have died out within a couple of generations.”
“Look, we’ve been told that the Ancients were running from a virus,” Daniel said, speaking excitedly at the ceiling. “What if that virus wasn’t started in this timeline but in their original timeline, and during their run, they ended up here? What if...”
Sam's face was on fire with an inner light. "What if...! They are from the future, not the past?! What if.... OH MY GOD! What if WE are the Ancients!!!"
“Alright, alright!” Jack called out, waving his arms. “This is all a little too convoluted for me; run it by Asgard and Furling brains and the Atlantis computers. Get me proof. Without anything else to go by, I’m not down with it.”
In the morning, Daniel sent a flurry of messages to Kalam, Orilla, and Atlantis. McKay decided that Daniel had finally fallen off his rock. McKay also wanted to know who really came up with the schematics for the ZPMs because it sure as hell wasn’t O’Neill.
“Just query the computers, Rodney,” Daniel sighed. He was exhausted, having been awake all night contemplating the possibility of humans, primates tinkered with by Enki in the past, and becoming the Ancients in the future, who then went to the past to hide themselves from something unknown that frightened even them. The complex dynamics were hurting his head.
The phone rang and he looked daggers at it before answering. “Mrs. Herbert. What did my daughter do now? Oh. Let him spin; it’s his way of dealing with feelings. It’s the first anniversary of his mother’s death, so give him a little space. He should be ready in about an hour.”
“Davy?”
Daniel jumped. “Jack. Wear a bell or something, please? Yes, Davy.”
Jack went into Daniel’s office and looked at the photos on the walls. Mostly pictures of their family, handfasting pictures from Kelowna and from their recent, more private renewal which was just immediate family and dinner. A few new pictures of his cousin and their family. Jack didn’t remember Daniel having many pictures when they were at the SGC. One or two of the team, one of Sha’re. He stared at a picture of the two of them puckering up playfully at each other, and smiled.
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