Landscapes
By Jmas

 

So many gates, so little time…

You’d think after seven years all this would get old, but it never really does. Even when times are bad, even when we aren’t sure if we’ll make it back through and home. The only time it did was when Daniel… well. When he was gone. That got old in a hurry. Always does.

Not that I’d ever share how much I enjoy the whole peaceful explorer gig. Carter wouldn’t believe me. Teal’c would give me the evil Jaffa eye and disown me in a heartbeat. And Daniel would never let me live it down.

But I do enjoy stepping out on a new planet, meeting and greeting when it all goes well, seeing what’s happened to people like us who just had to learn other ways to survive when some goa’uld thought they had the right to steal them away from the only home they’d ever known and force them into slavery and worse.

When it doesn’t go well… I take a great deal of pleasure in getting my team home as safely as possible, preferably all in one piece. I take it very personally when some s.o.b. alien or other tries to keep them from being in one piece.  Very personally. The Kelownans, now, they went straight to the bottom of my shit list in a hurry and Quinn wasn’t much better to be honest. He did the right thing in the end, but I was never quite sure if it was for the right reasons. When Daniel told Quinn they were even after he took a shot meant for Daniel all I could think was ‘the hell you are’. A staff blast to the arm does not equate to dying a short, painful death as your insides melt away. No where close to even in my book.

Ancient history now though, no pun intended.

It’s nice, sitting here in the shade with all my kids doing what they do best. This is our first mission since we almost lost Daniel in Honduras. Nice, quiet, safe, uninhabited world. No bogeymen coming out of the shadows, no goa’uld or Jaffa or Anubis or anything more dangerous than a few bugs and some killer beachfront. Nice.

Daniel packed chips and dip. Just in case, he said. Meaning of we had some free time. What he doesn’t know is Teal’c’s got some marshmallows in his pack he thinks I didn’t see him grab from the commissary cooks. Carter brought chocolate and plenty of it. I connected the dots and did my part and brought the honey grahams. Gonna have a party tonight on the beach. I already gathered some driftwood for a bonfire. Too bad we couldn’t bring a cooler with beer and hotdogs, but even Hammond has limits when it comes to ‘our boy’.

We kinda got cheated of a real reunion with Daniel. He didn’t remember us at first and things got so busy by the time he really got it all together that we never really had a chance to let him know how glad we were we got him back. Almost losing him in Honduras, and how we let him go off alone to a hostile region like that with only Bill Lee as back up is beyond me, made us all reassess some priorities.

Needless to say, together and apart, we decided the team is the important thing. We also decided the separate missions have got to stop unless the situation is totally dire. It’s one thing to be the go-to guys, it’s quite another to have us scattered to the four winds with no team to watch our backs. Hammond agrees. We aren’t superhuman and we can’t do it all. Yeah, we’re the best… no brag, just fact as the old saying goes… but we have limits and the reason we are the best is because we work together so well. No plug and play team members here. Quinn proved that.

Daniel looks up suddenly from where he’s playing with his artifacts and smiles at me as if he knows what I’ve been thinking. No way he could, of course… I think… but I just let my sunglasses drop enough for him to see the wink aimed at him. He laughs and gives me a thumbs up.

“Ready for a break?” I ask.

He nods and rises, stretching stiff muscles in a completely abandoned gesture that strikes me suddenly as somehow un-Daniel-like. Then I realize it isn’t. Daniel is just Daniel, whether ascended, un-ascended, or somewhere in between. The original out-of-the-box thinker has become an out-of-the-box kind of man. And who can blame him really? The man he is now has evolved from a pretty evolved sort of person from day one, sometimes I think he was born evolved. No big mystery that he’d just keep growing… one way or the other.

I notice Carter and Teal’c packing up, heading for their stashed goodies. It’s s’mores and chips time. A well-deserved respite for SG1, a time to reconnect and get silly without feeling like total idiots. Something we need, have needed since Vis Uban. Better late than never, right?

Damn shame about the beer though.