SG1 Fic: The Stars Up Above You Feel Wrong

The Stars Up Above You Feel Wrong
SG1, rated G, 1400 words.
I guess this is gen. Holy shit. Weird.
AN: Source for the title and quote. Set before "Forever in a Day." Because I have never written apocalypse before, despite loving it more than anything.


The nights and the shadows grow long.
The stars up above you feel wrong.
This is not your sky...
Crucified to a strange constellation

Daniel exited the building and came up beside him. Jack didn't move from where he sat on the ground, head tipped back to the sky. He could smell the faint not-quite-right of crushed alien grass beneath Daniel's boots. Could hear him breathe, low and steady under reedy not-quite-crickets.

Finally, Daniel sat.

A tiny flare of light beside him signaled Daniel checking his watch. He said, "Forty minutes."

In forty minutes they would attempt to dial Earth, and Ferretti's team would attempt to dial the alpha site. Try for five minutes, then leave the gate clear for Ferretti to report. Everything was timed and coordinated down to the minute to try to avoid busy signals, prevent unexpected activations from upsetting the SGC's carefully choreographed evacuation efforts.

In forty minutes they would know if Earth still existed.

Jesus, but it had been a long five hours already. Jack seized a twig from the ground beside him and started methodically stripping it of bark. This wasn't the way he normally thought. He had to pull out of this dive; falling down this mental rabbit hole was the worst possible coping strategy right now.

He used to be better at waiting.

"SG-3 will manage. You like Colonel Reynolds. You trust his team." Daniel spoke with the monotone awkwardness of someone reciting facts not believed.

"Of course I do." There was one especially problematic knot on this twig, rough beneath his fingertips.

"Jack." That flicker of movement in his peripheral vision would be Daniel glancing sideways at him, then away quickly, as though guilty. "It doesn't always have to be you."

"Of course it doesn't." Daniel needed to stop talking about it now.

"I know you're bad at just sitting and waiting--"

Jack had to head this off. "Believe it or not, I didn't start out as a colonel. I have plenty of practice sitting and waiting. Doing it better than you." He flicked the bare twig at Daniel's leg.

"Oh," Daniel said. "In that case, any pointers?"

"Yeah. Rule number one: Stop thinking about it."

"How the hell am I not supposed to think about the fact that, right this very minute, Earth is probably-- Tell me, Jack, what should I be thinking about?"

Jack stayed very still for a long moment. He kept his eyes fixed ahead and up at the sky, but every sense was keyed in to Daniel beside him; the rustling of his clothes as he shifted in frustration, the prickling of proximity along his skin as Daniel leaned closer, the shape of his tense, hunched shoulders out of the corner of his eye.

Jack pointed up and left, his arm a black shadow against the only slightly less black sky. "See that star there, bluish, bottom of that little triangle?"

He felt more than saw Daniel's nod.

"And that one, ten o'clock from the moon, and that one" -- Jack twisted nearly completely around -- "right above the point of that tree?"

"Yes. And?"

"Orion's belt," Jack said, and let his arm drop back down to the grass.

"Huh," Daniel said, lifting his head. "Spread out like that?"

"Trick of perspective in three dimensions. Constellations aren't groups."

Again that shadowy peripheral-vision nod. "So how did you figure that out?"

Jack jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the dark building behind him. "Our buddies are very keen to know where their new allies live. Carter was helping them correlate their star charts to ours. Lots of complicated software."

"Which you watched avidly while pretending not to understand any of it."

Daniel had had his number for a long time. It was worth letting the pretense slip here, to distract them both.

Daniel sounded almost like his normal self as he said, "At least we got stranded someplace with computers. Hot and cold running water. Flush toilets."

"I would rather have been stranded someplace with lavatories and abacuses and real big spaceships." Jack paused for dramatic effect. "Abacuses? Abacii?"

Silence.

"Missed your cue, there, Daniel."

Daniel moved suddenly, like he was jolting himself out of reverie. "Abacus, abaci, masculine, Latin second declension. But the root abax is Semitic, so some people say the plural in English..."

His heart obviously wasn't in it. After another long pause, Daniel asked with a false lightness, "So anything else I know of? Big dipper, North Star?"

Jack wondered who was distracting who, here. And if it mattered.

"That greenish one there, and that one to the left of the spire? Planets." His arm cut a line through the darkness, then pointed up and behind them. "That's the plane of their ecliptic. And one of that cluster up there is our North Star."

Daniel thought about as loudly as anyone Jack had ever met. The wheels were turning audibly now, as Daniel shifted and made low noises and tried to piece together the spatial model in his head to draw the necessary inferences.

"So the plane of this system is different from ours."

"Nope. Nearly exactly the same, in fact."

He didn't give Daniel any hints, just left the puzzle lying out there on the table. Possibly a little cruel of him, but effective. At last Daniel said, "Different axial tilt," and Jack nodded, knowing that Daniel was attuned enough to him in the darkness to see it.

"So where is--"

Jack pointed about two degrees below the horizon, and thought, Please don't ask when it rises, please don't ask... He knew the time to the minute. It wouldn't do them any good; this planet wouldn't see that star go dark until hundreds of years later.

Somehow in all the twisting and turning, Daniel had ended up close enough that their legs pressed together from knee to ankle. The warmth was shocking. It almost felt like a betrayal, to be warm right now. Daniel didn't pull away, and his jagged breathing calmed just enough.

Colonel Reynolds was a good soldier with a good team. There was nothing that Jack would be doing right now that Reynolds wasn't probably already doing.

It doesn't always have to be you.

But it would be nice not to be so damn far away.

Golden light spilled out of the doorway behind them, sending his and Daniel's shadows stretching as one down the lawn. Carter said, "It's almost time, sir," behind him. He waved a hand in acknowledgment, and soon her booted footsteps retreated.

For one single, horrifying split second, getting up to face it was completely unendurable. Jack stayed on the grass, legs like lead. He should send Daniel ahead, have this breakdown where none of his team could see. But somehow, being seen by Daniel didn't seem like the worst fate.

"I like that planet," he said, hearing the hoarseness in his voice and knowing that he was hiding nothing.

"So do I."

Except he didn't. Not Daniel, who had picked up and left Earth without even packing a bag. Who would leave it again the moment he saved Sha're. Not Daniel, who could spend the rest of his life learning and studying and observing a hundred different cultures and would never feel the complete destruction of the one he was born into.

"Jack. Do you really think it won't be my homeworld as long as I live?" Daniel's voice was laced with pain, and Jack felt the guilt of thinking that way, of letting those thoughts show so clearly on his face. He closed his eyes and took a long, slow breath. Let that feeling ground him and bring him back: time to take care of his team.

Jack pushed to his feet and preceded Daniel into the courtyard with the gate. Sam and Teal'c were waiting. Sam checked her watch and said, "Twenty seconds, sir."

Jack watched the foreign stars through the empty ring. After a long slow count he said, "Okay Daniel. Phone home."