"Captain - Doctor - "
She gave him a sidelong look out of those blue eyes that he couldn't quite think of as military. "Sam. Please."
"Okay. Sam. But only if you quit calling me Dr. Jackson."
"Deal."
"Sam, you obviously think I have some kind of inside track with Jack, but that's just not true. Believe me, the fact that I've known him a little longer doesn't mean he listens to me any more than you... just the opposite. Jack and I, we see things from opposite sides. That helps, sometimes. And sometimes it doesn't." He shrugged and fiddled with the MRE, pulled the heating tab and waited for the entree to cook. "He respects you. He may not seem like it sometimes, but believe me, Jack's good at reading people. If he let you on the team, then he trusts you."
"Nice to know." Her smile was sudden and genuine. "Do you?"
He felt his eyebrows pull higher. "You're kidding, right? I've seen you under fire. The question is, do you trust me?"
Her smile switched off, leaving him feeling oddly cold. "I'd trust you better if I didn't understand you so well."
"I'm not sure I - "
"You didn't wait before you bounced out there to talk to a bunch of strangers," she said. "Daniel, if Alsiros had pulled out a knife and stabbed you, we wouldn't have been able to do a damn thing except bury you, and maybe with company. You need to value your life a little higher. I do. So does the colonel."
Daniel had almost forgotten his presence, the Jaffa was sitting so silently, but Teal'c looked over and said, "As do I, Daniel Jackson."
"Hey, wait a minute, guys, I'm not helpless, you know...."
"You're a civilian," Carter cut across his protest. "The three of us are trained for situations like this, you're not. From now on, wait until we give you the all-clear, okay? We don't want to lose you."
Teal'c inclined his head a bare degree, then turned his attention back to the outside. Daniel felt his throat close under the grip of something he barely understood - frustration, grief, fierce and aching relief.
We don't want to lose you. All his life, he'd been waiting for someone to say that to him, to give him a sense of belonging. Throwing himself out in front had always been a way of life, not a choice - get noticed, get attention, get people to cooperate. It was going to be tough to undo the habit.
He looked down, stirred his jambalaya, and spooned up a quick mouthful to cover his emotion, then murmured, "I'll work on it. Thanks."
He felt her hand settle on his shoulder briefly, squeeze, and retreat again. She devoted herself to the MIRE, and they retreated to the safety of mundane topics, like the merits of Disks, Chocolate, With Crisped Rice, over Disks, Chocolate, With Peanut Butter.
He was dozing before he could think to ask about when he was supposed to wake up to take a turn at watch. Just before he tipped over into true, dark sleep, he felt the remembered tactile sensation of Sha're's soft black hair dragging over his chest, and her warm weight settling in his arms.
In sleep, he could still have her for his dreams. For twilight, wak ing dreams.
And for nightmares.
"You don't sleep. "
Sha're settles on the sand next to him, pulling her robes closer against the night's chill, and draws her knees in close to her chest. He gives her an absent smile and puts his arm around her Overhead, the moon pours pale light and turns the desert sands to a dry, frozen sparkle.
"You miss it, 11 she says. "Your home. Your people. Your rituals."
"Only some, " he replies, and rests his chin on top of her scented dark hair. "Coffee. Showers. Kleenex. "Although he hasn't sneezed in weeks now, as his body adjusts to the new climate. "Okay, and toilet paper I miss toilet paper I really miss toilet paper. "
She laughs. Her English is good, getting better all the time, but some things still strike her as ridiculous. He's had a very hard time explaining toilet paper Throwing anything away is a foreign concept to theAbydonians.
"I made you chal " she says. "You say it is like coffee. "
It's hot, dark, and it keeps him awake. That mostly qualifies. "Yes. Like coffee. " He smoothes her hair back and admires the ivory curve of her face in the moonlight. Share? "
"Yes? "
"Why did you... " He can't even put it into words, but she knows, and smiles.
"You were different, " she says. "And you were favored of the gods. "
"Not sure I like that. "
She makes a frustrated gesture. "Not the false gods. The real ones. They mark you. "
He isn't sure he likes that either The ancient gods rarely marked anyone that they didn'tplan to play with. Punish. Destroy.
He kisses her hair her forehead, moves his lips slowly down to touch hers.
"Dan'yel, " she whispers in his ear and puts her arms around his neck.
Close, so close to forgetting...
There is something wrong with him. Something black and thick inside him, like dread, like hunger and when he pulls away, he sees that there is something wrong with Share, too.
Her face is different. The lines are the same, but what lives inside it, what looks out of those eyes, is not his beloved.
Her eyesflash white in the moonlight, brighter than should be possible.
"Worship me, " she says, and smiles with Sha're's lips.
He feels oddly remote as he asks, "Who are you? "
"I am moon and fire and the loss of self. I am the death at the end, when the stag can run no more. I am the bursting heart and the flying arrow, the hart and the hare and the spear "
She kisses him fiercely, and they are Sha're's lips, Sha're's hands on him, and he can't resist her.
"Mine, " she whispers, and the word breathes warm over his skin. "There is no beauty so complete as in its destruction. "
He has a knife in his hand, and he knows what she wants him to do.
"Dan'yel, " she says, and her Goa'uld eyes flash again, ordering. "My love."
And he strikes.
Out in the city, someone screamed. It was a long distance off but very clear as it hovered and shivered thinly in the night air. It sent a pure bolt of adrenaline down Samantha Carter's back and catapulted her to a fast, fluid crouch next to Teal'c at the door. He had gone still, listening. When the cry faded into silence, Carter let her breath out slowly and looked over her shoulder at Daniel and the colonel, but they were still sleeping. Good. They were exhausted. Daniel hadn't let on, but that crack on the head hadn't done him any good, and the colonel... damn. She couldn't believe he was walking. She'd have been crawling, if moving at all.
"Captain Carter," Teal'c said. "I will stand watch. You should sleep."
He didn't even look at her as he said it - no flicker of attention off what was going on, or not going on, outside the doorway. She felt amazingly small next to the Jaffa. Colonel O'Neill was a tall, strong man, and he filled a room, no doubt about it, and when she stood next to him she felt included, as if his strength attached itself to hers and multiplied it. Daniel... he was bigger than he looked, and civilian or not, she knew there was a core of endurance to him that would put some gung-ho Marines to shame.
But Teal'c was something else. He was like a mountain, alone and imposing, and when she was next to him there was no sense of being with him, only beside him, like standing next to the Sphinx in Egypt.
But it felt safe, next to him. Very, very safe.
"I wish we knew what was happening out there," she said. "And I wish we could help them."
"It would be dangerous to leave this shelter," he said. She felt that, too, a strong sense of something out there moving, but just at the comer of their vision. "The scream came from the direction in which Alsiros took his party."
"Damn." Those young kids...
"Do you believe that some enemy hunts this place?"
"All I know is that those people back there didn't decide to commit suicide by dismembering themselves."
Teal'c cast a look at her, fast and unreadable, and she felt that gap again, dark and unbridgeable. She actually
understood Daniel a hell of a lot more than she did Teal'c. The colonel had forged an instant bond with the Jaffa, and Daniel seemed to have reached some sense of comfort with him, but she sensed that it might take more time with her. Then again, if she'd been serving Apophis for a hundred years, enduring who-knew-what at the hands of the Goa'uld, she might have been a little careful with her trust, too.
"I will watch through the night," he said.
"No need, Teal'c. I'll take a shift."
"I do not require sleep as humans do. You should rest."
She was thrown. "You don't sleep?" For some reason, that was odder and more off-putting than the idea of the larval Goa'uld stirring in that pouch in his stomach. "You must rest sometime."
He didn't elaborate, his focus entirely on the outside. It was looking a little less murky out there; she risked sticking her head out to see that there was a large white moon rising, larger than Earth's satellite. Nearly full. It put a silver hush over everything, a silken weight that felt somehow ominous.
"Sleep, Captain Carter," Teal'c said again. "I will wake you at first light."
She wasn't sure she could sleep, but now that she thought about it, her muscles were aching and craving oblivion even if her mind wasn't ready. She went back to the stove, turned it to a lower setting, and finally braced herself in a comer of the room, MP5 at the ready, to close her eyes.
I won't be able to relax, she thought, and then exhaustion washed over her in a black tide, carrying her away into moonlit silence.
Running, always running. Feet pounding, back aching, sweat dripping cold down his spine, and the moonlight, silver moonlight freezing everything in cold silence. The city looks like a pillaged corpse, but it is a living thing, hungry and waiting. There are hiding places but they are filled, with others desperate to conceal themselves, and the hunters, behind, are running too, fanning out to flush their prey out of shadows. Some fight when they are caught, but one thing is sure: they all scream.
Before the end, they all scream.
He looks up, gasping, and sees the silver-white gleam of the temple, itsflowing columns, its motionlessfigures standing and watching. So far... too far... he cannot run. Not now
The hunters are coursing fast behind him. They make no sound, and that is worse, somehow, than if they bayed like hounds for his blood. He risks a glimpse over his shoulder and sees that they are drawing closer, black shadows flickering white as they pass into the open, the moonstones black at their throats like death-clouded eyes. He has retained a weapon, stolen from an old man who was too weak to survive anyway, but he knows that if he turns to face them he will die, and fear drives him on, always on.
He rounds a blind corner, and she is there.
His goddess. Silver white mistress, tall and ethereal, crowned with night and stars. She is majesty and beauty and the stark face of his ending, and he collapses to his knees, staring, spreading his hands in worship. The knife falls free, lost.
Artemis walks toward him, her white clouds of robes drifting in the cold wind, and the alabaster of her skin is like that of the dead, drained of life and blood, but still beautiful, so beautiful.
She puts her cold fingers under his chin and tilts his head up, and he is ashamed to soil her perfection with his sweat, his trembling, his mortality.
She smiles.
"I accept your sacrifice, " she says, and there is silver music in her voice, nothing human in it, nothing mortal. "You who once served one dear to me. "
Her eyes flash white, pure white with black centers, and then the pack of hunters is on him, and no amount of worship or prayer can save him.
Everyone screams, in the end. His is drawn from him as a blade is driven deep into the vulnerable center of him, and his symbiote is cut and slashed and dismembered. They hold its mutilated, twitching body before him, laughing silently behind their jackal smiles, and their eyes are black and wide and avid.
Then they begin to take him apart, alive.
His last vision is of the goddess of the hunt, smiling, drinking his dying like smooth dark wine.
"Teal'c!"
Jack bolted upright, aware he'd said it out loud but not aware of much else, initially; his heart was thudding as if he'd run a marathon, flat out, and under the thick BDU fabric his whole body was dripping with sweat.
The dream was fading, but the images, the sickening sense of inevitability...
He turned his head and saw Teal'c moving toward him. The big Jaffa crouched next to him, frowning.
"All is well, O'Neill," he said. "There is no cause for alarm." Even so, he looked spooked. Distressed.
"Yeah. Yeah, okay." Jack took off his hat and rubbed his hands over close-cropped hair, then ran his sleeve over his face to wipe off the worst of the sweat. Felt like he was choking, tried to pull at the neck of his shirt and bumped fingers into cold metal.
The collar hadn't been a dream. He tugged at it, but it was as firmly fastened as ever.
Teal'c was still watching him with concern.
"Just a nightmare. Sorry. Shit. You didn't dream, did you?"
"Jaffa do not dream."
"Right." Jack looked at him for a second, but Teal'c's eyes were unreadable. "So you didn't see yourself out there, running in the moonlight."
Teal'c changed the subject. "There has been no movement. The dawn is coming soon."
"Good." The word tasted like ashes in his mouth. He tried to remember the dream but it slid away, fish in the night river. He remembered running, and moonlight, and dying. Not much else. Screw it. Just a dream. No shock that a place like this would bring up nightmares, considering their nearest neighbors seemed to be dismembered corpses.
Jack tugged his cap back on, seated it carefully with one hand at the back, and gestured for Teal'c to help him up. His ankle had taken the opportunity to swell until his whole foot was numb; that was both a blessing, from a pain point of view, and a curse, from the point of trying not to fall on his ass. He hobbled around experimentally, bracing himself against the wall, until he felt some of the numbness subside and a deep-seated hot ache return.
Ah. Better.
Carter was sacked out in the far comer, huddled up in a small ball but still clutching her MPS. Daniel was on the floor, on his side, facing the wavering glow of the brazier. He hadn't taken off his glasses. They were knocked cockeyed on his face.
"All quiet?" Jack asked Teal'c, who'd gone back to his post by the door. The Jaffa nodded. "You didn't sleep at all?"
"No."
"I'm up now. You take a rest period." When Teal'c didn't move, Jack limped over and nudged him. "Hey. That's an order."
Teal'c nodded, rose from his crouch like some perfectly balanced machine, and moved to the spot Jack had abandoned against the wall. He sat down in a lotus position, put his palms upward on his knees, and closed his eyes.
"I kinda meant sleep," Jack said, but there was no point in push ing the issue. He negotiated his way to a sitting position - too old for crouching, definitely, not to mention the ankle - and laid the weight of his MP5 across his lap. The world outside was dark and quiet. No movement. No moonlight. He was glad of that, even though it would have made things easier to see.
On the other side of the room, Captain Carter made a soft whimpering sound. He glanced over at her, but she shifted position, moving dream-slow, and subsided. A few minutes later, it was Daniel's turn... not so much a whimper as a cry, half-formed. His whole body twitched. Not like Daniel had any shortage of bad dream material to work with, Jack thought. Nowhere near as much as Jack had himself, of course; years of black ops and POW stints were the proverbial winning hand in that area. Well, maybe Teal'c could beat him. No question that Teal'c must have seen and suffered a lot under Apophis; no question that he'd performed atrocities, even if he hadn't been through them himself. Jack wasn't so sure that it was any easier from the side of the aggressor. A lot of his late-night regrets had to do with pulling triggers, rather than getting shot.
He wondered if Teal'c would ever
talk about that, and thought he probably wouldn't. The Jaffa didn't seem to be big with the sharing.
Carter whimpered again, then made a louder sound, kind of an eager moan. Jack glanced over at her again and saw that her head was back, light falling over her face, and she was smiling.
At least one of them was having a good dream.
Running. Always running.
She vaults soundlessly over a fallen stone column, lands with perfect balance and continues the chase. She can hear the panicked heartbeat of her prey, loud as thunder in her ears. He is clumsy, and she is elegantly quick. Her skin flashes white in the moonlight as she moves from shadow into the open.
She sees another hunter break cover to run with her hunting in concert. His grace and strength match her own, and they run, run, pacing and panting, following the prey that clumsily dodges ahead, looking for shelter.
There is no shelter; no mercy, nothing but the inevitability of moonlight. She laughs soundlessly, full offierce and aching joy, red red joy, and feels the echo of itfrom the one who runs with her. His hair is lank and sweated to his face in darkpoints, and he has lost the trappings of who he once was, but she knows him - knew him - as someone else.
His eyes are all blackpupil, blown open with fierce desire, and she feels the same rising tide of need and frantic hunger
They run, chasing the prey.
Just as the prey turns to fight them, just before she tastes blood, she sees that the prey wears Jack O'Neill r face and has a clear moment of sanity that shakes her to the core, and she thinks No this can't be happening no I have to stop now but then it is gone, and there is only red, and joy, and the screaming.
Something outside.
Jack came instantly on alert but didn't make an outward move or sound; whatever it was, it was moving slowly, with a faint, rhythmic scrape. It stayed in the deepest shadows, next to the still-intact far wall, and it wasn't until he used his peripheral vision that he spotted what was making the noise.
Human. Crawling.
"Teal'c," Jack said. The Jaffa's eyes snapped open, and he practically levitated up to join Jack at the door. Jack jerked his chin in the direction of the sound. "Cover me."
Stargate SG-1: Sacrifice Moon Page 8
