Stargate SG1: Suffer the Little Children (8/19)
All disclaimers, notes, warnings and summary are in the Master post: Suffer the Little Children
Chapter Eight
The nurse was slower than Daniel thought she had to be when it came to finalizing his release. He’d been hoping to be gone from the infirmary long before Janet returned from whatever emergency had summoned her to the gate room, but it wasn’t to be. He was still sitting on the gurney, waiting for his walking papers, when the first nurse came back in, supporting the weight of the limping commander of SG-8. Two more members of the beaten and bedraggled looking team followed, with three more nurses. Behind them were Janet, two other nurses, and a gurney bearing the fourth team member.
Daniel couldn’t help but flinch when he saw them; SG-1 had returned home in that exact same condition more times than he cared to count.
Janet glanced around the infirmary quickly, saw Daniel still sitting on the gurney against the wall, and frowned. She barked some instructions to the nurses with her around the gurney, and moved off quickly to find Debra, the nurse she had charged with Daniel’s release. A few heated words and gestures in his directions later, and Debra - Daniel’s favorite day-shift nurse - was walking toward him.
"I’m sorry for your wait, Dr. Jackson." She held a clipboard in one hand and made rapid notes on it with the other. "Let’s get you out of here, okay?"
Daniel nodded, his eyes riveted to the team on the other side of the room. "Are they going to be all right?"
Debra glanced over her shoulder and then turned back to him with a tight smile. "They should be. Captain Williams is the worst; he’ll be going in for surgery just as soon as Dr. Fraiser can get him prepped."
Daniel gulped. Oh, yes… a very familiar scenario. There was a reason he knew Debra, after all.
Debra didn’t notice his response as she turned back to her clipboard and continued making notes on it. "I wish I could stay and help them," she said quietly.
Daniel tipped his head and turned his head to look directly at her. "Why can’t you?"
Debra shrugged. "Dr. Fraiser needs me to go pick her daughter up. I guess her babysitter made it very clear that she had plans tonight and that Cassie absolutely had to be picked up by 5:00."
Daniel glanced up at the clock. It was already 4:30; just going into town would take half an hour. If she had to finish his discharge, and change, and sign out… she was never going to make it. And it was obvious that she really wanted to stay and do her job.
Daniel smiled as a thought occurred to him. He wanted to get out of the mountain as quickly as possible; Debra wanted to stay. He was medically cleared from the concussion, all restrictions lifted Janet had said, so he could drive. All he had to do was walk to the surface, sign out, and head into town. And he thought it would be a relaxing way to spend his evening - hanging out at Janet’s house, watching television with Cassie.
"Why don’t I pick her up?"
Debra looked up in surprise, a smile on her face. "Really?"
Daniel shrugged. "Sure. I don’t have anything else to do tonight, and besides, I enjoy spending time with Cassie. That way, you can stay here and help SG-8, and Cassie gets picked up on time."
Debra smiled and nodded. "Let me just write down the babysitter’s address?"
Daniel nodded.
Debra scribbled something else down on his discharge papers, then pulled them free and handed them to him.
"Thank you so much, Dr. Jackson. I really appreciate it."
"It’s no problem at all," Daniel said as he hopped down off the gurney and started for the door, holding the papers in his fist. "I think it’ll be fun."
"How can there possibly be no record of the case?" Jack demanded.
Sam shook her head and leaned back in her chair. "I have no idea, sir. If the FBI investigated Jenny’s death, I should be able to find some record of them having done so. Actually, I should be able to find the entire casefile."
"And there’s nothing?" Jack asked again.
"No, sir, nothing."
"Perhaps the newspaper was incorrect in their reporting of this as well," Teal’c said.
Jack shook his head. "No, they were there," he insisted.
"But, sir," Carter began, "the archives…"
"The archives don’t know everything," Jack said as he reached for the phone. "But I know someone who does."
Daniel stopped by the locker room just long enough to change out of his blue uniform in what had to be record time. He hoped that the temperature hadn’t fallen much in the past few hours, because he didn’t have a jacket with him. He’d been wearing one when he’d gone to play football, but it had ended up so coated with mud that he’d let Janet throw it away rather than try to wash it. He reached into his locker one last time, grabbed his cell phone, and slipped it into his pants pocket.
He showed his ID at the gate and walked across the parking lot, disappointed to realize that the temperature had dropped considerably since he’d gone to the police station with Jack that morning. He was already shivering slightly by the time he reached his car. He opened the door, got in, and started it up. The first thing he did was turn the heater up, chasing most of the chill from his skin.
As Daniel pulled out of the parking lot and on to the street, he felt as though a massive weight had lifted from his shoulders. He hoped that leaving the mountain would leave behind the nightmares that had plagued him for the past day and a half, and he knew that hanging out with Cassie and watching silly movies all night long would go a long way toward easing his mind. He still couldn’t help but rub his arm once more though, absently, as he drove down the street.
He pulled up to the stoplight, glancing in his rearview mirror just long enough to make certain that the car behind him was stopping as well, and picked up the discharge papers to double-check the address that Debra had given him. It wasn’t that far, really. He checked the clock on his dashboard - 4:43. He should be there in plenty of time.
The light turned green while he was checking the clock, and the car behind him honked to let him know it was time to move. Daniel raised his hand and waved slightly out the back window as he pulled away.
"Come on, Doug," Jack said to the man on the other end of the phone line. "You know I wouldn’t be asking you to do this if it weren’t important."
Agent Doug Baker sighed. "I know that, Jack. I just don’t know if I should be doing this."
"You owe me, Doug," Jack reminded him, not a hint of threat in his voice. "And it’s not my fault that the archives are missing the very casefile I need, now is it?"
"Yeah, about that," Doug said. "How exactly did you get into the archives in the first place?"
Jack cleared his throat. "I’ve got a higher security clearance than you do, Doug. Do you really think the FBI case archives are off-limits to me?"
If he answered it with "yes" then Jack was in serious trouble.
Instead, Doug’s answer was another sigh. "Okay, Jack. What is it you want me to look for?"
"Jenny Miller," Jack answered quickly. "Thirteen years old, murdered in Albany, New York in 1977."
Jack could hear Doug typing through the phone, and he turned to give Sam and Teal’c a quick thumbs up to let them know that things were going according to plan.
"Jenny Miller," Doug said as he typed. "Yeah, I remember her. I’d just joined up and really hoped I’d get assigned to her case, since I was from New York."
"You didn’t work it?" Jack asked, passing the time as Doug continued to type.
"No, not me. That case was Mike Phillips’ baby from the get-go. He wouldn’t let anyone else near it."
Jack froze.
Daniel smiled as he turned toward Janet’s house. Cassie was chattering away in the seat beside him, telling him all about school and her friends and the boys she liked… everything that had happened in the month since he’d seen her, actually. He would nod every now and then, say, "Yeah," at all the right times, but for the most part, he just let her talk. Hearing her voice, so young and innocent and relaxed, was putting him more and more at ease as the drive went on.
He glanced into the rearview mirror once more and saw a car turn onto the street behind them. A slight sense of déjà vu came over him - wasn’t that the same car that had been behind him at the street light?
Before he could think any more on it, Cassie had moved on to telling him about the snowman she and Janet had built the weekend before, and Daniel looked back down at her with a smile. It might have seemed like an odd conversation to have with a child who’d watched her entire planet be murdered less than a year before, but Daniel knew better. Daniel knew better than anyone just how quickly children could readjust to life after having lost everything that mattered to them.
"Your first snowman?" he asked. "Tell me all about it."
Jack and Teal’c were barreling down the corridor toward the infirmary, neither one of them noticing or caring about the people that had to jump out of their way.
Jack had left Doug on the phone with Sam with the instructions that he fax over absolutely everything he’d found so Sam could start briefing General Hammond on the new developments. And Doug had found the information that was missing from the archives; he’d found it in Michael Phillips personal files.
Damn it, Jack had known there was something wrong about that man, had known it from the moment Daniel had passed out after just seeing his face.
But now they had proof - proof that Phillips had known Daniel all along and hadn’t bothered to let anyone in on that little fact. The questions he had for Agent Michael Phillips were piling up in Jack’s head but for now, they could wait. For now, he and Teal’c were just going to get Daniel back into the VIP room where they would know he was safe.
They didn’t stop running until they were in the infirmary, until they noticed a distinct lack of Daniel.
"Colonel!" Janet called out in surprise. She walked toward him from where she had been busy settling Colonel Hutchens of SG-8, anger written clearly on her face. "Colonel O’Neill, you should know by now that you can’t just barge into my infirmary like a…!"
Jack didn’t have time for the dressing down, though he was sure she believed he deserved it. "Where is he?" he demanded of her. "Did you release him? Where’d he go?"
"Who?" she asked, confused.
"What is the location of Daniel Jackson?" Teal’c asked calmly.
"I released him, sir," she answered tersely. "Almost an hour ago. Debra…" Janet glanced around the infirmary, stopping when she realized that Debra was still there, attending to another member of SG-8. "Debra, what are you doing here? I thought I asked you to go get Cassie for me."
Debra looked up from the cast she was applying to Lieutenant Anderson’s arm. "Dr. Jackson volunteered to get her, ma’am. You’d cleared him for driving and I know he’s watched her before, so I didn’t think…"
Janet turned back to Jack, a question clear in her eyes, but Jack didn’t have time to answer it. He had to get Daniel back into the mountain, back where he was safe, and he had to do it now.
He left Teal’c to explain things to Janet while he pulled out his cell phone and started dialing.
Daniel felt good as he pulled into the driveway of Janet’s home. The sun had set but the last of its light had yet to fade from the sky, and the sunset he saw over the mountain somehow calmed away the last of his tension. Janet’s house sat at the end of a quiet little cul de sac, not entirely secluded but more than peaceful enough for Daniel. He turned the car off, leaned back against the seat, and breathed deeply.
"Daniel?" Cassie said from the seat beside him.
He sat up and smiled at her, the first real smile he’d felt on his face in more than a day. "You go inside; I’ll get the groceries."
Cassie smiled as she hopped out of the car and walked toward the front door, her keys already jangling in her hand.
Daniel got out, too, and headed for the trunk. He knew that Janet would most likely give him a lecture about the proper way to feed a growing young girl, but Cassie had begged him to stop at the grocery store. They’d gone in together, bought pizza and cheesesticks and soda. Daniel frowned when he thought of the car that had been parked beside him when they came out of the store. Was that the same car… no, it couldn’t be. It was just a dark four-door sedan; they weren’t exactly uncommon.
His arm had started throbbing again, badly, and he rubbed at it again. He’d have to ask Cassie where Janet kept the Tylenol; he wouldn’t be able to enjoy his time with Cassie if he was constantly focusing on an old scar that for some reason had decided to start hurting. He shrugged and looked down at the keys in his hand, searching through them to find the one that would open the trunk.
Without warning, the keys flew from his hand as he felt something large and powerful slam into his back. He fell forward against the trunk, all the air knocked from his lungs. A large hand wrapped around his left wrist and pushed it toward his shoulder blades, twisting his elbow painfully, and another large hand pinned his right shoulder against the car.
He turned his head, trying to see who was behind him. His eyes widened in shock and fear and his breath caught in his throat - he recognized the man immediately.
"Hello, Daniel," a frighteningly familiar voice whispered in his ear.
Before either man could say anything further, Daniel’s cell phone started to ring.
Chapter Eight
The nurse was slower than Daniel thought she had to be when it came to finalizing his release. He’d been hoping to be gone from the infirmary long before Janet returned from whatever emergency had summoned her to the gate room, but it wasn’t to be. He was still sitting on the gurney, waiting for his walking papers, when the first nurse came back in, supporting the weight of the limping commander of SG-8. Two more members of the beaten and bedraggled looking team followed, with three more nurses. Behind them were Janet, two other nurses, and a gurney bearing the fourth team member.
Daniel couldn’t help but flinch when he saw them; SG-1 had returned home in that exact same condition more times than he cared to count.
Janet glanced around the infirmary quickly, saw Daniel still sitting on the gurney against the wall, and frowned. She barked some instructions to the nurses with her around the gurney, and moved off quickly to find Debra, the nurse she had charged with Daniel’s release. A few heated words and gestures in his directions later, and Debra - Daniel’s favorite day-shift nurse - was walking toward him.
"I’m sorry for your wait, Dr. Jackson." She held a clipboard in one hand and made rapid notes on it with the other. "Let’s get you out of here, okay?"
Daniel nodded, his eyes riveted to the team on the other side of the room. "Are they going to be all right?"
Debra glanced over her shoulder and then turned back to him with a tight smile. "They should be. Captain Williams is the worst; he’ll be going in for surgery just as soon as Dr. Fraiser can get him prepped."
Daniel gulped. Oh, yes… a very familiar scenario. There was a reason he knew Debra, after all.
Debra didn’t notice his response as she turned back to her clipboard and continued making notes on it. "I wish I could stay and help them," she said quietly.
Daniel tipped his head and turned his head to look directly at her. "Why can’t you?"
Debra shrugged. "Dr. Fraiser needs me to go pick her daughter up. I guess her babysitter made it very clear that she had plans tonight and that Cassie absolutely had to be picked up by 5:00."
Daniel glanced up at the clock. It was already 4:30; just going into town would take half an hour. If she had to finish his discharge, and change, and sign out… she was never going to make it. And it was obvious that she really wanted to stay and do her job.
Daniel smiled as a thought occurred to him. He wanted to get out of the mountain as quickly as possible; Debra wanted to stay. He was medically cleared from the concussion, all restrictions lifted Janet had said, so he could drive. All he had to do was walk to the surface, sign out, and head into town. And he thought it would be a relaxing way to spend his evening - hanging out at Janet’s house, watching television with Cassie.
"Why don’t I pick her up?"
Debra looked up in surprise, a smile on her face. "Really?"
Daniel shrugged. "Sure. I don’t have anything else to do tonight, and besides, I enjoy spending time with Cassie. That way, you can stay here and help SG-8, and Cassie gets picked up on time."
Debra smiled and nodded. "Let me just write down the babysitter’s address?"
Daniel nodded.
Debra scribbled something else down on his discharge papers, then pulled them free and handed them to him.
"Thank you so much, Dr. Jackson. I really appreciate it."
"It’s no problem at all," Daniel said as he hopped down off the gurney and started for the door, holding the papers in his fist. "I think it’ll be fun."
"How can there possibly be no record of the case?" Jack demanded.
Sam shook her head and leaned back in her chair. "I have no idea, sir. If the FBI investigated Jenny’s death, I should be able to find some record of them having done so. Actually, I should be able to find the entire casefile."
"And there’s nothing?" Jack asked again.
"No, sir, nothing."
"Perhaps the newspaper was incorrect in their reporting of this as well," Teal’c said.
Jack shook his head. "No, they were there," he insisted.
"But, sir," Carter began, "the archives…"
"The archives don’t know everything," Jack said as he reached for the phone. "But I know someone who does."
Daniel stopped by the locker room just long enough to change out of his blue uniform in what had to be record time. He hoped that the temperature hadn’t fallen much in the past few hours, because he didn’t have a jacket with him. He’d been wearing one when he’d gone to play football, but it had ended up so coated with mud that he’d let Janet throw it away rather than try to wash it. He reached into his locker one last time, grabbed his cell phone, and slipped it into his pants pocket.
He showed his ID at the gate and walked across the parking lot, disappointed to realize that the temperature had dropped considerably since he’d gone to the police station with Jack that morning. He was already shivering slightly by the time he reached his car. He opened the door, got in, and started it up. The first thing he did was turn the heater up, chasing most of the chill from his skin.
As Daniel pulled out of the parking lot and on to the street, he felt as though a massive weight had lifted from his shoulders. He hoped that leaving the mountain would leave behind the nightmares that had plagued him for the past day and a half, and he knew that hanging out with Cassie and watching silly movies all night long would go a long way toward easing his mind. He still couldn’t help but rub his arm once more though, absently, as he drove down the street.
He pulled up to the stoplight, glancing in his rearview mirror just long enough to make certain that the car behind him was stopping as well, and picked up the discharge papers to double-check the address that Debra had given him. It wasn’t that far, really. He checked the clock on his dashboard - 4:43. He should be there in plenty of time.
The light turned green while he was checking the clock, and the car behind him honked to let him know it was time to move. Daniel raised his hand and waved slightly out the back window as he pulled away.
"Come on, Doug," Jack said to the man on the other end of the phone line. "You know I wouldn’t be asking you to do this if it weren’t important."
Agent Doug Baker sighed. "I know that, Jack. I just don’t know if I should be doing this."
"You owe me, Doug," Jack reminded him, not a hint of threat in his voice. "And it’s not my fault that the archives are missing the very casefile I need, now is it?"
"Yeah, about that," Doug said. "How exactly did you get into the archives in the first place?"
Jack cleared his throat. "I’ve got a higher security clearance than you do, Doug. Do you really think the FBI case archives are off-limits to me?"
If he answered it with "yes" then Jack was in serious trouble.
Instead, Doug’s answer was another sigh. "Okay, Jack. What is it you want me to look for?"
"Jenny Miller," Jack answered quickly. "Thirteen years old, murdered in Albany, New York in 1977."
Jack could hear Doug typing through the phone, and he turned to give Sam and Teal’c a quick thumbs up to let them know that things were going according to plan.
"Jenny Miller," Doug said as he typed. "Yeah, I remember her. I’d just joined up and really hoped I’d get assigned to her case, since I was from New York."
"You didn’t work it?" Jack asked, passing the time as Doug continued to type.
"No, not me. That case was Mike Phillips’ baby from the get-go. He wouldn’t let anyone else near it."
Jack froze.
Daniel smiled as he turned toward Janet’s house. Cassie was chattering away in the seat beside him, telling him all about school and her friends and the boys she liked… everything that had happened in the month since he’d seen her, actually. He would nod every now and then, say, "Yeah," at all the right times, but for the most part, he just let her talk. Hearing her voice, so young and innocent and relaxed, was putting him more and more at ease as the drive went on.
He glanced into the rearview mirror once more and saw a car turn onto the street behind them. A slight sense of déjà vu came over him - wasn’t that the same car that had been behind him at the street light?
Before he could think any more on it, Cassie had moved on to telling him about the snowman she and Janet had built the weekend before, and Daniel looked back down at her with a smile. It might have seemed like an odd conversation to have with a child who’d watched her entire planet be murdered less than a year before, but Daniel knew better. Daniel knew better than anyone just how quickly children could readjust to life after having lost everything that mattered to them.
"Your first snowman?" he asked. "Tell me all about it."
Jack and Teal’c were barreling down the corridor toward the infirmary, neither one of them noticing or caring about the people that had to jump out of their way.
Jack had left Doug on the phone with Sam with the instructions that he fax over absolutely everything he’d found so Sam could start briefing General Hammond on the new developments. And Doug had found the information that was missing from the archives; he’d found it in Michael Phillips personal files.
Damn it, Jack had known there was something wrong about that man, had known it from the moment Daniel had passed out after just seeing his face.
But now they had proof - proof that Phillips had known Daniel all along and hadn’t bothered to let anyone in on that little fact. The questions he had for Agent Michael Phillips were piling up in Jack’s head but for now, they could wait. For now, he and Teal’c were just going to get Daniel back into the VIP room where they would know he was safe.
They didn’t stop running until they were in the infirmary, until they noticed a distinct lack of Daniel.
"Colonel!" Janet called out in surprise. She walked toward him from where she had been busy settling Colonel Hutchens of SG-8, anger written clearly on her face. "Colonel O’Neill, you should know by now that you can’t just barge into my infirmary like a…!"
Jack didn’t have time for the dressing down, though he was sure she believed he deserved it. "Where is he?" he demanded of her. "Did you release him? Where’d he go?"
"Who?" she asked, confused.
"What is the location of Daniel Jackson?" Teal’c asked calmly.
"I released him, sir," she answered tersely. "Almost an hour ago. Debra…" Janet glanced around the infirmary, stopping when she realized that Debra was still there, attending to another member of SG-8. "Debra, what are you doing here? I thought I asked you to go get Cassie for me."
Debra looked up from the cast she was applying to Lieutenant Anderson’s arm. "Dr. Jackson volunteered to get her, ma’am. You’d cleared him for driving and I know he’s watched her before, so I didn’t think…"
Janet turned back to Jack, a question clear in her eyes, but Jack didn’t have time to answer it. He had to get Daniel back into the mountain, back where he was safe, and he had to do it now.
He left Teal’c to explain things to Janet while he pulled out his cell phone and started dialing.
Daniel felt good as he pulled into the driveway of Janet’s home. The sun had set but the last of its light had yet to fade from the sky, and the sunset he saw over the mountain somehow calmed away the last of his tension. Janet’s house sat at the end of a quiet little cul de sac, not entirely secluded but more than peaceful enough for Daniel. He turned the car off, leaned back against the seat, and breathed deeply.
"Daniel?" Cassie said from the seat beside him.
He sat up and smiled at her, the first real smile he’d felt on his face in more than a day. "You go inside; I’ll get the groceries."
Cassie smiled as she hopped out of the car and walked toward the front door, her keys already jangling in her hand.
Daniel got out, too, and headed for the trunk. He knew that Janet would most likely give him a lecture about the proper way to feed a growing young girl, but Cassie had begged him to stop at the grocery store. They’d gone in together, bought pizza and cheesesticks and soda. Daniel frowned when he thought of the car that had been parked beside him when they came out of the store. Was that the same car… no, it couldn’t be. It was just a dark four-door sedan; they weren’t exactly uncommon.
His arm had started throbbing again, badly, and he rubbed at it again. He’d have to ask Cassie where Janet kept the Tylenol; he wouldn’t be able to enjoy his time with Cassie if he was constantly focusing on an old scar that for some reason had decided to start hurting. He shrugged and looked down at the keys in his hand, searching through them to find the one that would open the trunk.
Without warning, the keys flew from his hand as he felt something large and powerful slam into his back. He fell forward against the trunk, all the air knocked from his lungs. A large hand wrapped around his left wrist and pushed it toward his shoulder blades, twisting his elbow painfully, and another large hand pinned his right shoulder against the car.
He turned his head, trying to see who was behind him. His eyes widened in shock and fear and his breath caught in his throat - he recognized the man immediately.
"Hello, Daniel," a frighteningly familiar voice whispered in his ear.
Before either man could say anything further, Daniel’s cell phone started to ring.