FIC: Wandering Blind, Part 1 (Stargate SG-1)
Title: Wandering Blind
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Summary: Just more questions / different kind. A sequel set two months after In the Wrong Story.
Dedication: Once upon a time, years ago, vonnie_k sent me Tim Tams. I said, "I will write you a ficlet! Do you want post-col, or zombies?" "Why," said she, "I want both!" So I wrote, and I wrote, and I got it betaed, and I wrote again, and I got it betaed again, and I spent about a year cringing every time I went to open up the file, and long story short, it's been years since she even read SG-1 and so she should not feel at all obligated to read this, but it's for her anyway, with gratitude. Thanks for everything, Vonnie.
Notes, rating, pairing information, etc. can be found at the end. Also available on my website: Wandering Blind.
Wandering Blind, Part 1
The house was definitely mocking him.
If Jack leaned out just a little farther, he'd be able to reach the end of the gutter, over at the northwest corner of the house. Of course, if he leaned out just a little farther, the ladder might tip. Okay, probably not, but if it did, that'd be a damn stupid way to die.
So the question was, did he really want to go to the trouble of moving the ladder for five inches?
As long as he paid attention, watched his balance...
"Mister O'Neill!"
Jack flinched, wobbled a little, snatched his hand back to grab onto the ladder, and then turned around very carefully to see exactly what he'd known he would see: Britzie McLean coming down the driveway. Britzie was one of the thirteen Coloradans living in Brewster--fourteen, now, if you counted Jack, which she ostentatiously did not. She was thirteen years old, and between being a born romantic and very fond of Daniel she had not approved of Carter's little cross-country jaunt to fetch Another Man.
The rest of the Colorado gang clearly thought this was cute. Jack didn't--it hit just a little too close to home--but he smiled for her anyway. You didn't want to make enemies in small towns, even if the enemy's barely into puberty, and he had high hopes that she'd eventually come around and start calling him Jack.
Britzie stood at the base of the ladder and frowned up at him. "I'm looking for Sam. Or Daniel."
"They're not here. Can I help you?"
"Where are they?"
Not here, he didn't say. And people said he didn't know how to hold his tongue. "They were going over to Helen's. Some sort of problem with the cistern."
She sighed. Helen lived another half hour's walk up the river, and judging from her frown Britzie was taking that fact personally. "Are they coming back?"
"I think there's a pretty good chance of that, yeah," Jack said.
"Soon?"
"Well, I don't know, Brit," Jack said, trying to be patient. "Why don't you tell me what you want them for, and then if it's not urgent I can tell them when they get back."
She thought about this for a while, presumably balancing the strain of an extra hour's travel against having to entrust her news to Jack, of all people. Laziness conquered vendetta, and some excitement crept into her voice as she said, "A trader came in up at the north door, and Christina wanted Sam to come and look. It's wagons not trucks, but he's got four of them, and they're big. He's from New Orleans!"
"Really?" That was a surprise. It was the rare person who got desperate enough to go into one of the cities, between the bodies and the difficulty of travel and the lingering fear of the gas, which had been potent enough to kill for months after the attack. Even in Brewster, where people knew the cities should be clean by now, no one had shown any particular desire to move back into one full-time.
"Well, you know, originally. Not now." She paused, scrunching her face up in thought. "You know, you're gonna have to move that ladder," she added, and walked away without a backward look.
"Thanks for the help," Jack muttered under his breath.
That night, he and Carter and Daniel all got to have dinner with Christina and Mark Payne (who, due to their location at the north entrance to town and their possession of a spare room, had a minor side business putting up travellers) and Mister Tony Spinosa, late of New Orleans. Carter was invited because she maintained a prodigious mental list of desired items, along with a well-deserved reputation for using said items for the public good. Daniel was invited because he and Carter were a package deal. Jack, as far as he could tell, was invited because he'd been standing right there at the time, which was fine with him. It had been beans and cornbread all week at home, but because Tony was a guest, Mark had barbecued rabbit.
Rabbit wasn't steak, of course, but it was a step in the right direction.
Eventually, the conversation came around to What Were You Doing When, as getting-to-know-you conversations pretty much always did. The Coloradans had sat down somewhere in Kansas and come up with a cover story, and surprisingly enough, their actual cover story had been useful for once; deep-space radar telemetry, last-minute calls from the Mountain, escape from Colorado Springs in the nick of time. It was even mostly true. The part where a few of them had known about the aliens for years before that didn't get mentioned, because hey, why ask for trouble?
When it came time to hear Tony's story, it turned out that he was alive because he liked to fish--Jack nodded approvingly at this--and he owned a boat. When everything had gone to hell, he'd headed for the boat rather than trying to drive out of the city, and then he'd bolted for the Gulf of Mexico. The Goa'uld had taken a while to get to New Orleans, and the wind patterns had been lucky--for Tony, anyway--so he'd lived to tell the tale.
"I saw one of the ships," he said, sounding almost awe-struck, even now. "I mean, you could tell it wasn't no airplane. That's how I knew it wasn't World War Three or nothing. It was this big thing, looked like... you know Star Wars? That first ship you see, kinda spear-shaped? Like that. Big thing, just cruising along, and then it went down."
They looked up at that, all three of them, surprised. "Went down?" Carter asked.
"Yeah. Crashed right into the Superdome."
"Intact?" Oh, yeah, Carter was definitely paying attention now.
Tony frowned at her over a forkful of green beans. "Well, I'm guessing the stadium's a got a big-ass hole in it, yeah. The ship wasn't, like, blown up, if that's what you're asking. Wait, you don't want to get near that thing, do you?"
"I'm just interested," Carter said, smiling widely and looking as innocently blonde as she possibly could. "I mean, come on, an alien spaceship. Can you imagine how amazing it must be?"
Gold interior, lousy climate control, and bizarre bathrooms with no showers, Jack thought. Yeah, I can imagine.
Tony chewed his beans in silence, then fixed Carter with a look, pointing his fork in her direction. "Not a good idea. I mean, yeah, I'll go in farther than most people, but I don't go into the core, and I sure as hell ain't getting near one of the things they used to spread the gas." He speared another couple of beans and waved them at Daniel. "Don't you let her do nothing stupid like that, okay? I don't want to come back through here a year from now and feel guilty when I hear she got herself killed."
Daniel gave him a closed-lipped smile and murmured that he certainly wouldn't want that either. Christina hid a smirk behind her napkin. Carter kept a smile on her face, but Jack could see her left hand tightening into a fist in her lap.
"So!" Jack said in a bright, throw-yourself-between-the-civilian-and-the-bullet kind of way. "Tony, you don't sound like you're from around here. Actually, I'm from Chicago myself, and I think I detect just a hint of the Windy City. Yes or no?"
***
Daniel, mostly deprived of the opportunity to pursue any more academic interests than amateur chemistry in drinkable form, had traded in his fascination with the workings of the past for one with the workings of the present. Once dinner had been cleared away, he talked Tony into the living room, produced a notebook, and began to pump him for information as thoroughly--if not more so--than he ever had any of the offworlders they'd encountered over the years.
At the first gap in their conversation, Carter leaned over and touched him on the arm. "Jack and I are going to go," she said, though Jack was fairly certain he'd have remembered if they'd discussed anything like that. He shot her a look, which went unreturned. "I'm guessing that this is going to take a while."
Daniel looked up at her, frowning slightly for a moment before his expression cleared. "Right. Yes, of course. I'll see you in a couple of hours. Don't wait up."
"Make a lot of noise coming in," Carter said over her shoulder, as Christina ushered her and Jack out the front door. "I have a shotgun, remember."
A front was coming through; the moon was still visible, but half of the stars were gone, disappeared behind clouds. Behind them, the screen door slammed open twice in the wind before someone latched it more securely. Carter's hair, now well past her chin, whipped around her face until she tucked it firmly behind her ears.
"Tony's got no idea what he's in for, does he?" Jack said.
Carter shrugged. "I think he's probably used to it." She pushed hair out of her eyes again. "I really need a haircut."
"You missing hairspray again?"
She smiled. "Yes, actually." They took a right onto Chestnut, leaving the last of the lighted windows behind. Carter slipped her hand into the pocket of his jacket and took his hand, squeezing it.
"Carter…"
"Hours, he said. He'll make sure not to show up early. And I really wish you'd drop the Carter thing."
"I tried. It felt weird. Actually, you can probably take 'it felt weird' as a given. You know, in general."
"Well, I could always settle down with a good book..."
"I didn't say that." He hadn't been able to break the ingrained habit of calling her Carter; why had he thought he'd be able to break the habit of wanting her that had made it so important for him to use that name in the first place? Even if he'd wanted to, and he wasn't that stupid. Christ, she was beautiful. And pushy; he kind of liked that about this new version of her. You'd think the end of the world would make someone more easily frightened, but with Carter, it seemed to have stripped her fears away instead, like someone walking out of a doctor's office with three months to live and a hankering to skydive.
"We could hang a sock on the door if it'd make you feel better."
"Dammit, Carter…" He shook his head, hard, trying to dislodge the weird feeling without looking at it too closely. "Let's not talk about it, okay?"
"Okay," she said.
She'd talk about it with Daniel, he thought, followed by: Right, because Daniel would make her. You just know he's like that with women. And then he lifted Carter's hand to kiss it, because it felt like the right thing to do, and because the feel of her skin against his lips made all of his confusion drain away.
Still, he took her into his bed rather than joining her in the one she shared with Daniel, and by the time Daniel came home, Jack was alone. Daniel was loud on his way up the stairs, whether by accident or by design, and Jack tracked his footsteps down the hall until they disappeared into the braided rug beside his bed.
***
The next morning was grey, with clouds hanging so low that they skimmed the tops of the pines. It hadn't rained overnight as far as he could tell, but the temperature had dropped enough that Jack pulled on a pair of wool socks and seriously considered firing up the wood stove. Then he thought about wood-chopping, and didn't.
The house was filled to the rafters with a heavy quiet, as if it was trying to match the gloom outside. Jack wandered into the kitchen, stared blearily into the silent refrigerator for a while, then dug a pint-sized Tupperware container of dried apples out of the back of the bottom shelf. Very briefly, he considered the possibility that they'd been put out of the way on purpose, but hey, he really didn't think he could be expected to read minds.
A flash of color caught Jack's eye, and he looked out the back window to see Daniel on his hands and knees in the garden, wearing his I-am-so-going-to-get-filthy orange sweatshirt. He looked up briefly when the screen door slammed, then went back to his task, inching down the row of sweet potatoes toward the house.
"Whatcha doing?" Jack asked, eating a slice of apple.
Daniel waved a knife at him. "Cutting the vines."
"And why are you cutting the vines? At... a fairly early hour, I might add. Wait, have you been reading agricultural manuals again?"
"No, this is the same way we did it last year," Daniel said. "Straight from Helen's mouth. You're not supposed to let the vines--" he grunted a little, sawing at a difficult stalk--"die first. It's not like regular potatoes."
Jack thought about this, eyeing the growing pile of greenery along the garden's edge. "Okay, well, you sure you don't want to use the shears for that? Or a hoe?"
Daniel sat up, letting his legs sprawl out to the side. He scratched at his neck--with his non-knife-wielding hand, thankfully--leaving a wide streak of dirt behind. "No, I don't want to use the shears. They're unwieldy. And every time I use a hoe I'm worried that I'm going to take my own toe off. What are you eating?"
"Dried apple." Jack waded into the ankle-deep vines and settled down next to Daniel, holding out the Tupperware. "Not bad."
"Where'd you find these?" Daniel asked, staring into the container.
"Fridge. Back of the bottom shelf, behind that big can of olive oil."
"Uh, you realize it was probably back there for a reason, right?"
Jack shrugged and ate another slice. "I wanted something sweet. Carter doesn't want me eating something, she's welcome to put a note on it."
"Trust me," Daniel said, "you don't want to go down that road. I had this roommate in grad school... I think we were communicating entirely through notes by the end. Bastard ate my peanut butter." He wiped his hand on his pants and took a slice of apple for himself, apparently unconcerned by any possible hypocrisy.
"Well, I say we should look on the bright side." Jack paused dramatically, but Daniel waited him out without changing expression, damn his eyes. "He's probably dead."
Daniel gave Jack a pursed-lipped look. "Oh, yes, thank you, that helps my leftover roommate psychosis a great deal."
"I aim to please," Jack said airily. He reached out toward the dirty streak on Daniel's neck, making the other man start. "Hold still, willya? You've got enough dirt under there to grow radishes."
"You know, in five minutes I'm going to be back in the dirt," Daniel said, but there was more amusement than irritation in his voice and he held still, letting Jack scrub at the stubble beneath his jaw. "Are you actually helping, or are you just smearing it around?"
Jack resisted the urge to lick his thumb to clean the last of the smudge off, brushing at an imagined spot on the other man's shoulder instead before drawing his hand back into his lap. "I'm helping, because I'm a helpful guy. I'm not planning to crawl down the rest of this row with you, though. Wait, didn't we talk about this? Weren't we going to leave them another couple of weeks?"
"Yeah." Daniel tapped the flat side of the knife against his knee. "Sam wants to go to New Orleans, though. I think it's likely we won't be here in a couple of weeks."
"Did she tell you that?"
"Did she have to? It was pretty obvious. I thought she might have mentioned it to you last night, actually. She was asleep by the time I got in." He glanced up quickly, then back down, pulling a bit of greenery out from under his laces and tossing it to the side.
"Ah, no, we didn't talk about it. Maybe she figured she'd do us both at the same time--" Jack faltered for a second, then forged ahead. "--two birds, one stone, that kind of thing."
"Right. Well, that's certainly possible." Daniel looked down and away, squirmed a little, and arched his back, stretching. Apparently they were going to let that particular slip of the tongue slide right on by. Okay then. "Anyway, I'm looking to cut down on reasons for her to say oh, Daniel, someone should stay home, there so much to be done..." He made a disgusted face. "I'm not giving her any excuse to leave me here again. And I wanted to get outside anyway. I've been feeling itchy all morning."
"I hate to break it to you, but that's the fleas."
Jack expected another look, but Daniel just smiled a little at the ground instead. "Yes, that must be it. What's your opinion?"
"About fleas?"
"About New Orleans," Daniel said, in his very special Jack-don't-be-a-dumbass voice, which Jack thought was a little unfair, really. He shrugged.
"Well, assuming our buddy Tony's telling the truth in the first place, if the thing could fly it'll be gone by now. Even if it's there, is it really worth the trip? Not to mention for all we know it'd still have a full load of the er-whatever-it-was gas stuff, which I'm a little leery of, just between you and me."
Daniel leaned forward a little, warming to the discussion. "Ereshmahar. And either it's still sealed, in which case we'd be fine, or there was a leak, in which case we'd still be fine because it would've activated on contact with oxygen and then died off."
"There's still the trip..."
"...says the man who drove cross-country last summer and said he had barely any trouble..."
"What's the point, Daniel?" Damn, he hadn't meant to say that out loud. Or that loudly. Daniel didn't blink twice, though, as if he hadn't been startled at all. Jack had always figured that as you got to know someone better, they got easier to understand, but sometimes he felt like the longer he knew Daniel the harder he was to read. Or maybe the more alarming Jack found the idea of being able to read him. One of those things.
"Well," Daniel said, considering, "as far as I'm concerned the point is that Sam wants to go and I'm willing to hear her out. She'll probably be able to convince me. I mean, if it makes her happy, right?"
Jack grunted and got to his feet. "Happy's no reason to be stupid."
"I'm not sure I'd agree with that, actually," Daniel said thoughtfully. "I mean, I think you can make a valid argument that happy is the best reason to do just about anything. Sam's certainly embraced it as a goal."
Jack looked down at him sharply, but Daniel was looking up at the house, not at him. Jack followed his gaze up to the window of the master bedroom just in time to see Carter appear in a flannel robe. She stood there for a moment, then made an exaggerated shrugging motion which Jack interpreted as "the hell?" She disappeared as Daniel said "I think we're in trouble."
"We?" Jack said, back on solid ground now. "Oh no. I'm throwing you to the wolves the first chance I get."
"You're the one holding the Tupperware."
"It was in the fridge! What, I can't eat something out of my own... Carter! Morning."
Carter paused on the porch steps, then came down the path on quiet, moccasined feet. It still seemed vaguely unnatural to see her without boots; why that was weirder than seeing her wrapped in a green-and-black plaid flannel robe he had no idea. Naked he'd gotten used to fast, but then he'd had motivation. Besides, he'd thought about Naked Carter before. Though apparently never about the fact that she wasn't likely to be wearing her boots in bed, so no foot fetishist he, and crap, she'd just said something. "What?"
"I said, are those the dried apples I put in the back of the fridge?"
"Well, they are dried apples, and they were in the back of the fridge, so I think it's reasonable to say... yes, they probably are."
Carter frowned a little. "Did it occur to you that I put them behind the olive oil and under two tins of potted meat product for a reason? Do I have to start putting notes on things saying 'save for holidays?'"
"I wouldn't recommend it," Jack said. "Apparently that leads to peanut butter theft."
Carter looked confused for a moment, turned to Daniel, turned back to Jack. "Peanut butter?"
"Grad school," Daniel said. "I told you that story, didn't I? Roommate Craig? Stole my peanut butter?"
"I don't think so--no, wait. Is he the one who put his name on his salt shaker?"
"That's him. Jack's trying to help by pointing out that there's a considerably better-than-even chance that he's dead."
"What can I say?" Jack shrugged. "I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy."
"Right. Anyway..." Daniel squinted up at Carter. "You're up early."
"So are you. Daniel, what are you doing?"
Daniel smiled, a little tightly. "Using up some energy. Getting rid of excuses for you to leave me here when you go to New Orleans. You know."
Carter rolled her eyes a little. "As if I wanted to have that argument again. I didn't expect you to be so gung-ho about the idea, though." She looked over at Jack. "You both coming?"
"We're talking, what, a couple of weeks, right?"
Carter nodded. "Probably. We'll have to swing north around Baton Rouge, I haven't heard that any of those roads have been cleared, but then we can come around from there and cross into the city on the causeway..."
"It's gone," Daniel said. "Or so Tony says."
"Really? Damn. Well, if we can't do that we get as close as we can with the truck, walk the rest of the way. Even if we can only get as far as Baton Rouge, that's what, fifty, sixty miles, all pretty much level? That's walkable, though not a lot of fun if we're carrying something on the way back, now that I think about it. We might be better off taking a page from Tony's book and getting a boat. I don't know if anyone's still living on the lake...?" She trailed off, looking questioningly at Daniel.
"Tony said there were, but not many, and they don't go into the city."
"That's what bribery is for," Jack said. "Carter, what do you want to get out of this? Are we talking hey, let's take a road trip or do you really expect to find something useful?"
Carter yawned, waving a hand apologetically, then pulled the robe a little more tightly around herself, pulling her hands up into the sleeves to ward off the morning chill. "Assuming it's an al'kesh, and assuming it's untouched--which I admit we don't know as of now--there are several potential benefits. For one thing, it might have an armory, so we've got an opportunity to acquire considerable firepower and the associated energy sources. I'd have to figure out a way to interface them with the remaining infrastructure, but if I could, we might be able to bring the power grid back online for a while."
"And?" Jack asked. "You said 'several.'"
"Communications."
Daniel looked up sharply. "Off world, you mean?"
"Yes. Now, I know the al'kesh don't usually have long-range communications, but the system they do have would be able to detect anything in-system, including Tok'ra emergency frequencies."
"Kind of a longshot," Jack said.
Carter leaned forward, tucking her hands into her pockets. "Not necessarily. I'm not talking about a live broadcast, I'm talking about an automated beacon--something like the beacon we used on Revanna. Assuming the Alpha Site wasn't compromised, all they would have had to have done was get here and set up a transmission saying hey, anyone else out there? Then they'd just have to check in every now and then. They've done similar things in the past as way to communicate with operatives. And before you say it, I know what you think of the Tok'ra, but Jack, my father's with them. I think he'd try." She trailed off, looking almost embarrassed to bring that up, but hell, of course Jacob would try, given a thread of hope to hang on.
"He'd have good reason to think you were dead," Daniel said, in that frustrating devil's-advocate tone of his.
"Yeah, well, so did I," Jack pointed out. "And yet, here I am."
"True." Daniel looked up--he was going to get a crick in his neck, sitting like that--and offered Jack a fleeting smile. "Okay. Let's say it works. Jacob calls, stops by for a visit, we're all glad to see him, we kill the fatted calf..."
"...or chicken, or rabbit..." Jack said, because he was pretty sure they couldn't spare a cow.
"...fine, whatever, fatted squirrel if you want, that's not the point. What then? I mean, don't look now, but saving the world's kind of a moot point."
"We've discussed this," Carter said.
"We discussed this theoretically nearly two years ago, and if I remember correctly you avoided the question at the time."
Carter sighed and dug at the lawn with the toe of her moccasin. "I don't know. I think--things are going to get worse here. We are not going to be allowed--" her voice caught a little, but she forged on--"to rebuild. You know that as well as I do. So if--if!--we're given another option, I think we should seriously consider it."
"Okay," Daniel said, and then, gently, almost embarrassed, "whither thou goest, you know."
"Sure, complaining all the way," she said lightly, aiming the faintest hint of a conspirator's smile in Jack's direction. "Jack? You don't have to come if you don't want to. Actually, it might be best if someone did stay here."
"You think I'm going to let you two go to New Orleans and have all the fun without me?"
"You do realize the French Quarter is no longer a going concern, right?" Carter asked.
"Yes, Carter, I'd noticed that," he said, feeling a little irritated until he saw the smile still lurking around her eyes.
"Fine." She yawned again, blinking hard and not bothering to cover her mouth. "I'm… going to go change. Daniel, you did notice we've got dark clouds?"
Daniel looked up, frowning. "So?"
"So it might rain…" She trailed off, obviously expecting Daniel to know where she was going, but he just looked at her sidelong, squinting a little more tightly. "…which is bad… because the yams need to be cured… which won't work very well if they get rained on…"
"Oh." Daniel glanced over the garden, then up at the sky again. "Right. Well. Hopefully it won't rain?"
"We'll bring them inside," Carter said authoritatively.
***
"You know, there's a marina in Monroe," Mark said. "Moon something. Moon River, maybe?" He stuck his head into the cramped stairwell leading out of the kitchen, aiming his voice upward. "Christina, what's the place I'm thinking of? The marina in Monroe, where we went to the wakeboard festival that time. Is it Moon River?"
"Moon Lake," she called. "Moon River's a song, sweetie." From her tone, Jack felt sure that if Christina had been in the room she'd have given Carter the look that said "Men," the one that he figured girls were all taught at about the same time boys were learning how to hide a hard-on.
"People name places after songs all the time," Mark shouted back a little grumpily before turning his attention back to Carter. "I know you've got a thing for big road trips, but I'd take the river instead if it was me. They've got the lock in Columbia rigged up so you can get it to work by hand; don't know if there are any more farther south, but we used to get shipping up through here, barges and stuff. So you used to be able to get through." He leaned back against the kitchen counter, eyes flicking from Carter to Jack and back again. "If you're just looking to scavenge, there's closer places, you know."
"None of them have crashed spaceships, though," Carter said.
"Right." Mark paused, leaving a space for Carter to continue, but she just played with the miniature lathe Tony'd left for them, spinning one of the handwheels back and forth. He turned his attention to Jack, who shrugged.
"It's a geek thing. You know Carter."
"Right," Mark said again. "You going to bring us back alien toys to play with, Sam?" His tone was half-curious, half-challenging, which was pretty much what Carter had said she expected during their walk into town. It's not that I don't trust Mark, she'd said, but… Jack, who'd lived a good portion of his adult life under one veil of secrecy or another, had just nodded.
"Well, it depends on what's there, and whether I can make it work," Carter said, and that was true, as it happened. "You don't think the marina would be cleared out by now?"
"Maybe, maybe not. Seems to me it'd be worth a shot, though. Especially if you want to be carrying things out of New Orleans, because I can't think the roads are anywhere near passable down there."
There was a pounding of footsteps on the stairs, followed by a sharp "Taylor!" from above. Mark turned his head to listen, then frowned at his daughter as she appeared in the doorway with Christina at her back and a chamberpot carefully cradled in her arms.
"Go on," Christina said, putting her hands on Taylor's shoulders and giving her a little push. Taylor screwed up her face in disgust, but complied, pink sneakers squeaking with every step down the hall to the front door. "She's supposed to empty it first thing if she uses it overnight," she continued in mother-expecting-sympathy tones to the room at large, "but somehow that never seems to happen, and someone didn't refill the toilet tank last night. How are you, Sam? Jack."
"Good," Carter said, over the top of Mark declaring, "They're going to New Orleans."
"Told you so." Christina poked Mark in the arm, obviously pleased with herself and not feeling any need for further public shaming over the tank issue. "They're going to go down the river?"
Carter looked over at Jack, who gestured with one hand: Go ahead. "That was Mark's suggestion," she said. "If the marina's been picked over it'd be a waste of time, but if there was something there… it'd be a lot faster. And we should be able to round up enough gas."
This last was directed toward Jack again, who figured he must look like he needed more convincing than he actually did. "Hey, if it gets me out of walking from Baton Rouge, I'm all for it. It won't be me making the thing run."
"You are taking Daniel this time, right?" Christina asked. "Please tell me you're taking Daniel this time. Because I'm not covering for you when he's not deathly ill."
"Believe me, we've already had that conversation." Ah, there it was--the "Men" look. Or possibly that look was specifically dedicated to Daniel, though Jack was pretty sure he remembered it having passed over his own head more than once back in the Mountain. "All three of us are going, once we get the house in order and find someone to feed the chickens. I was thinking about asking Britzie, actually."
"Be careful I'm not there when you do," Jack muttered.
Sam smiled widely. "She likes him, really," she told Christina--inaccurately, but Jack figured it wasn't worth arguing about. She'd learn the truth eventually. "And we'll have to get directions to the marina--do you have the address?"
"We've still got the Yellow Pages around here somewhere. It should be in there. You know," Christina added with a glance at Mark, "it'd be a lot faster for them to take the truck up there. You'd just need someone to drive it back--"
"They'd be coming right past here on the river!"
"And I miss driving, you know," Christina finished, as if she hadn't heard a word Mark had said.
"You leaving me a note?" Mark asked.
"What is it, forty, fifty miles? I'll be back before you notice I'm gone." She reached out and touched his elbow, eyes more serious now. "The north road's perfectly safe, Mark. Do you know how long it's been since I got out of town for a day?"
"Used to be you hated that commute," Mark grumbled. "Don't look at me--it's not my truck."
Christina turned a pleading look on Carter, who shrugged. "It's okay with me." Generous of her, Jack thought--she was protective of her vehicles, and didn't let just anyone drive them--but then she owed Christina one from the summer, didn't she?
Half an hour later, Mark still had the distinct look of a man who wanted to argue, but knew it'd be pointless. "She'd just come up with some damn reason or other that it made perfect sense for her to go if I did," he said, as he and Jack hauled the lathe out to the garden cart he and Carter had brought from home. "That's the worst part, when they get logical on you. You ever been married?"
"Once. Divorced." I don't want to talk about it, his tone said, and thankfully Mark let it drop. He wondered about Sara sometimes, when he wasn't quick enough to stop himself. She'd still been living in Colorado Springs, as far as he knew. They'd been hit very early on; it was possible she'd never even known what was coming. He hoped so.
Later, pulling his half of the load, he told Carter that it looked like she'd managed to make the entire male population of Brewster paranoid. She laughed. "Well, that's Mark for you. But if nothing else, he knows Christina would never take off and leave Taylor--he was poking me more than her. Probably revenge for having to listen to Daniel complain all summer."
Jack kicked a fallen branch out of the way of the wheels, then scuffed at the ground again, just to make the gravel spin from one side of the road to the other with a satisfying clatter. "Well, you gotta admit, that was some pretty impressive taking one for the team they did. What'd you do, blow your lifetime supply of negotiating skills on 'hey, stay with grumpy, pissed-off, convalescing Daniel for a few weeks for me while I run off to Utah?'"
"No, it wasn't… hang on, I need to switch hands." She stopped, letting go of the cart and stretching her hand as wide as it could go. The cart kept rolling for a bit, broad handle nudging Jack in the back, and he stumbled. "Sorry. It wasn't that hard. They'd seen how sick he was before we finally diagnosed the malaria--someone had to keep an eye on him, and I was leaving. That part wasn't negotiable."
"Hey, I'm just saying, you're lucky they agreed." Jack switched over to her side, taking hold of the metal bar where it was still a little warm from Carter's hand. Doing this errand before lunch had sounded like a much better idea an hour and a half ago than it did now, empty-stomached and still almost a mile from home.
"He's fine," Carter said, a little defensively.
"I didn't say he wasn't! I'm not arguing with you, Carter. Go over it all yet again with Daniel if you want, but give me five minutes' warning so I can get out of the house, will you?"
"Sorry," she muttered. "It's not you. It's just--" Her gestures sharpened, became more urgent. "After we were talking this morning, about leaving... that's part of why I think... you weren't here then. He was so sick. We don't know what strain it was, but if it was a bad one, he could have died." She looked away, frustration all over her face. "I can't fix people, and they're dying from the stupidest..."
"Yeah. Well. Not your fault." He wanted to reach out, pat her on the arm, something, but she had herself wrapped up as tightly as Daniel on a bad day and he honestly wasn't sure he'd keep all of his fingers. "This is why I personally prefer problems that can be solved with explosives," he said, offering up a joke instead.
She smiled--success!--and gave her hand one last shake before taking hold of the cart. "You know, I haven't blown anything up in years. I kind of miss it."
"We'll get you some fireworks in New Orleans," Jack said as they started down the road. "Shoot 'em off in the Superdome. It'll be great."
***
Used to be that departure times meant something--even to Daniel, who was easily distracted but rarely intentionally late. Jack still wore a watch, end of the world or no end of the world; he'd dug up a solar-powered one a couple of months after the attack, and followed the dictates of time zones and Daylight Savings Time to the letter. It was a satisfying, grounding sort of thing to do, and while Jack had always been a big fan of realism, he didn't think there was any harm in holding onto a few threads of the past. Or more than a few, so long as you didn't get crazy about it.
So on the one hand, he was annoyed. They'd planned to leave at 8:30; it was now 8:52 by his watch, and they hadn't even started to load the truck yet. On the other hand, motor vehicles were a rarity nowadays--well, the running kind were, anyway--and he wasn't even halfway heartless enough to begrudge Britzie the impromptu driving lesson Carter'd offered her when she'd shown up that morning to see them off.
Britzie was tall for her age, almost as tall as Carter, but the way she was hunched forward over the wheel Jack wondered if she could even see ahead of her. Carter had backed the truck out of the garage and into the road herself before sliding over and letting Britzie take her place behind the wheel, and Jack watched her blonde head hovering anxiously next to Britzie's dark cornrows until the glass caught the sun and he had to look away.
"Has Sam let her go over five miles an hour yet?" Daniel asked, sitting himself down next to Jack with a thump.
"Hell, no. She hasn't gone in reverse either." The truck drew a wide arc in the road, inching along the edge of a ditch and pointing its nose for home. She was going to miss the driveway with her right tires, but hey, what good was four-wheel drive anyway if you couldn't take it off-roading on the lawn? "Looks like that's that. You got everything?"
"Yes, Jack, I've got everything," Daniel said, all exaggerated patience. Carter had made the packing list, with Jack looking over her shoulder. Left to his own devices, Daniel preferred to pack from memory, but he'd done them the favor of going down the checklist the night before. Water for the first day; they'd drink from the river after that, filtered and boiled. Camp stove, though they'd likely go the campfire route instead if they could, since Carter fretted over the butane supply. Two tarps; they'd argued about that, but if things went according to plan they'd be in shelter anyway for the entire trip, so Jack put his foot down about anything heavier. Carter's blowtorch, with extra propane--also fretted over, and hopefully they'd be able to replenish that along the way. Gas for the truck, some of which would become gas for the boat. The Beretta Carter'd owned for years and the shotgun Jack had picked up in Utah. Peanuts, and jerky, and a copy of A Tale of Two Cities with a bookmark at page 152, because Jack had always kind of thought he should read Dickens and he sure as hell had the time to do it now.
The truck jerked to a halt halfway down the driveway, and Britzie hopped down from the driver's seat, beaming. "Oh my God, I so want a car," she declared.
"Well, you can't have mine," Carter said, coming around the hood. "Or my gas. Sorry, bucko."
"I know." Britzie slumped back against the door, kicking at the driveway. "It sucks. I miss cars." For once, Jack completely sympathized with the whine in her voice, though he didn't go so far as to say so. "Thanks for letting me drive yours, though," she continued, only a little grudgingly. "That was cool."
"Can we go now?" Jack tapped his watch, then held it up facing in Carter's direction, even though he knew she was much too far away to read it. She was a bright woman. She'd get the hint.
She actually looked embarrassed, and her "Sorry, Jack," sounded like it should have a sir tacked onto the end, which Jack enjoyed just a little more than he felt he really ought to. When he looked over to get Daniel moving, the other man was rolling his eyes, and that was pleasantly familiar too, so. Success all 'round.
"Wait," Carter said. "Why am I apologizing?"
Damn, Jack thought. So close. "Because we were supposed to leave half an hour ago?"
"Mm." Carter leaned conspiratorially in Britzie's direction, but her gaze stayed with Jack. "He has no sense of fun, you know."
"I have no sense of fun? Coming from the woman who used to go into work during her vacation? Of your own free will, I might add."
"That was fun, Jack."
"Fine. Whatever. Watch out for this one, Brit. Spend too much time around her and you'll start thinking calculus is better than sex." Daniel turned around, pack dangling from his hands, just to blink at him. Jack wilted a little under Carter's glare. "Which you shouldn't be having. Or thinking about. Obviously. Can we go?"
"Oh, I think we should," Carter said.
They dropped Britzie off a block from her house, Daniel promising to bring her a souvenir and Carter spouting reminders until Jack reached over and put the truck in drive himself as a subtle hint. When they drove up to Mark and Christina's their fourth was sitting on her front porch, elastics in her mouth, braiding Taylor's hair. The little girl started to get to her feet when she saw the truck, but was tugged back down firmly, head bouncing a little with the movements of her mother's hands.
They all wandered over and gaggled on the porch, Daniel explaining something to a patient Mark and Jack and Carter both examining Taylor's newly missing tooth with the appropriate gravity. Jack would never have mentioned the tooth fairy, but Taylor brought it up herself, insisting that she had to show them the new Barbie outfit she'd gotten in trade. "Eventually I'm going to run out of the stockpile from the after-Christmas sales that last year," Christina muttered as soon as her daughter was out of earshot. She looked genuinely worried about it, so Jack refrained from pointing out the long list of rather more important things they were also steadily running out of. Besides, the kid was seven. Toys were important too.
Jack had been expecting tears, but Taylor accepted hugs and kisses as her due and waved them goodbye merrily. Watching in the passenger's side mirror as they pulled away, Jack could see her waving until they were out of sight, though only Daniel in the back was facing her.
Another half a mile down the road, Christina held up a homemade tape triumphantly, and she looked so thrilled at the chance to actually listen to it that Jack managed to find it in his heart to suffer through the Nirvana. About twenty-five minutes in, he did promise himself a long, suspicious talk with Daniel, though. Upon further consideration, he'd volunteered to ride in the back just a little bit too cheerfully for a man who hadn't known that noise was in the offing.
They took the back road, crossing over the Bayou Lafourche in Hebert and motoring on through the woods up to Buckner and Rhymes. Monroe itself was still clogged, but the smaller roads surrounding it had mostly been cleared. "I have to assume all of the cars through here would've been stripped a long time ago," Carter said--needlessly, since Jack could see broken glass and dangling gas caps as well as anyone else, and there was no need to worry about the gas gauge just yet. They stopped three times in the first two hours, giving a couple of rides (including one to a woman with a two-year-old and a goat, who Jack quite gleefully stuck in the back with Daniel) and screeching to a halt just a few feet in front of a sprawled dog who looked up at them, yawned casually, and strolled off to the side of the road, having established who was in charge of passage around here.
They switched drivers at the highway in Rhymes, putting Christina behind the wheel so that she could prove her trustworthiness when it came to handling Carter's baby. Their route took them farther north, through the edges of what had been suburb, then back around and down, finally reaching roads too close to murdered Monroe for them to have been cleared. They were able to make another mile or so by going off-road, but eventually even the grassy strip between the shoulder and the trees became clogged and Christina gave up.
There hadn't even been any foot traffic for miles, but they opened the windows and the door over the gas cap anyway, trying to make the truck look like just another abandoned vehicle. Jack could see Carter frowning a little at the dirt it had picked up on the drive, too, but while her expression promised detailing, there wasn't much of anything she could do about it just then.
Daniel stretched out the kinks from a long, bumpy ride while the other three pulled their packs out of the back. If they'd been planning to walk any real distance Jack would've thought they'd brought too much stuff, but for the couple of miles they had to go the packs were all right, if a bit unwieldy when navigating through obstructions natural and man-made. Christina in particular made a habit of catching herself on things, though she did keep a sense of humor about it. Jack approved. He didn't mind complaining himself, but his patience for hearing it from other people was damn short.
The Ouachita veered into and out of view, now pacing the road, now hidden behind the oaks and other, less familiar trees. The sun was halfway down the sky when they finally reached the marina, coming to a halt at the closed gate to the driveway. Off to the right, there was a building that looked like a private residence; owners, maybe? The driveway went on past it and down to a boathouse by the river; if there were any actual boats to go with it, he sure couldn't see them from where he was.
"Anyone home, you think?" Jack asked.
"I doubt it." Daniel hitched his pack up a little higher and gestured at the late-model SUV parked in the driveway. "There's a body in the driver's seat. If someone had moved in, I'm guessing they would've cleaned that out."
"Yeah. Well. Still." Jack unslung the shotgun from his shoulder, saw Carter drop her hand to rest on the Beretta where it was strapped to her leg. Just like old times, he almost said, before remembering that they had a guest.
Carter took the lead, calling out a hello in the most feminine, I'm-no-threat-to-you-please-ignore-my-firearm voice she could muster, to no reaction from anything but a mourning dove on the telephone wire. Christina gave the SUV a wide berth; Daniel glanced inside, then looked away, mouth tightening.
"We should try siphoning the gas," Jack said, his voice sounding louder than he'd expected. Funny, how quickly you got used to having engine noise around again. "Carter?"
"Yeah, in a minute," she said, already halfway to the boathouse. She reached the corner, then turned around to walk backwards for a few steps, grinning. "We have boats! Anyone got a preference as to type?"
"Get me something expensive," Jack said. "I always wanted a yacht."
Despite the lateness of the hour, Christina insisted that she'd rather leave right away, in hopes that she could make it home that night. About half an hour after that, Carter started to look very, very sorry that it was Daniel who'd agreed to walk Christina back to the truck. She and Jack were waiting out on the lawn in a gathering twilight when Daniel came down the driveway, shotgun slung over his shoulder. "If you're going to tell me we have to walk back," Daniel said, "then… please don't tell me we're going to have to walk back."
"Nope, we're good," Jack said cheerily. "Just waiting for a tiebreaker."
Carter's expression, which had already been less than cheerful, sank even farther into Pissed. "We're having a disagreement on which boat to take."
"Okay, so…" Daniel let the shotgun slide through his hand to the ground, leaning on it while he craned his head around to look at the marina. "What are my choices?"
Jack opened his mouth, but Carter got there first. "Number one, we have the nice little green motorboat on the end there. It's small, it looks pretty new, and it won't burn a lot of gas."
Daniel shifted his gaze to Jack. "What's number two?"
Jack let the smile hit his face, annoyed Carter or no annoyed Carter. "There's a houseboat. Which has--you had your turn, Carter, now it's mine--bed space for all, a flush toilet, a TV and VCR, and a VHS collection which includes, among other things, what appears to be the complete oeuvre of that noted artiste Jean-Claude Van Damme. He's French, you know."
"He was Belgian," Carter said, sounding a little snappish. "And I still can't believe you're seriously considering taking that thing."
"Why the hell not? You'll forgive me if the idea of a few creature comforts is appealing."
"Yes, I get that it's appealing, but is it smart? Come on, be realistic."
"Does it run, Jack?" Daniel interjected. He was frowning, but at least he was frowning at Jack, which was definitely a good sign.
"Haven't tried yet. Don't see any reason why it'd be any less likely to than any of the others, though." Jack tried on his most winning smile, which he was pretty sure wasn't a patch on Carter's, but hey, you do what you can with what you've got. "Did I mention the potential for a hot shower?"
"Well, now you have." Daniel was suppressing the smile, but Jack could see in his eyes that he'd won. "Sorry, Sam. Jack's got my vote. Assuming--" he held up one hand--"that it runs."
"Fine." Still grumpy, Jack thought. Damn. Well, so long as nothing went wrong she'd get over it quickly enough. "When we run out of gas, you two are going to get more and I'm staying in bed." She broke out That Tone when she muttered "stupid" under her breath a few moments later, but Jack ignored it. He liked being magnanimous in victory.
Jack had to admit that a houseboat wasn't really the most practical option, and he'd always thought of himself as a practical kind of guy. But that'd been back when he didn't have to be practical if he didn't want to, and these days if the universe was going to give him the chance to use a microwave and watch a crappy movie or two he was damn well going to take it. Plus, his back would thank him for the bed, which would improve his mood, which would make the whole trip much better for everyone. So really, it was all in his team's best interest.
He hadn't thought of them as his team in a while, come to think of it. Something about going on the road with the two of them, probably. It was... kind of nice, really. Familiar, except for the Teal'c-shaped hole in the world to his right. An easy little salvage milk run, there and back again, no muss no fuss no need to make a daring run to the Stargate for backup. Hopefully, anyway, since that was gonna be a hell of a trip if they had to try it.
It was really too late to be fooling around with engines unless you were in a much bigger rush than they were, so they bedded down on the boat, well-bundled against the hint of winter in the air. Not that it was a real winter, the kind they had in Minnesota or Chicago or Colorado Springs, but Jack wasn't really feeling the need to prove his manliness by pointing that out. Carter and Daniel took the larger bed in the back; Jack took the single tucked away right behind the front console, which was still neatly made with musty-smelling bedding that reminded Jack vaguely of track suits from the 1980s. Older than the boat, almost certainly, and if you were going to buy a whole big houseboat wouldn't you buy new bedding to go with it? Jack thought he would have, or if he'd still been married--and why would he have bought a houseboat if he hadn't been?--Sara would have insisted.
Sara had liked flannel sheets, and had always wanted a down comforter, except she was allergic and so that was off the menu. And why was Sara on his mind again? She'd been doing that a lot recently, popping up in his thoughts more than she had in years. Something about the weird domesticity of the house in Brewster, maybe; Sara had been the last person he'd really shared a home with before moving in with Carter and Daniel.
They hadn't bothered to pull the sliding wall all the way closed, and he could listen to if not understand their murmured voices, hear the rustling of blankets and the creak of the mattress as someone turned over. That'd be a noisy bed to have sex in, Jack thought. Even if they tried to be quiet, he'd be able to hear them, guess what they were...
Crap. Dammit. No. No, he was not getting hard just from thinking about listening to his two best friends having sex. Definitely not. And he certainly wasn't picturing the way Carter looked when she came, or wishing he'd paid more attention to what she and Daniel were like together that one time he'd had the chance to watch.
Not at all.
***
It was Carter who woke him the next morning. More specifically, it was the clatter of a panel being removed with gusto and without consideration for anyone who might be sleeping six feet away. Jack grunted and lifted his head up off the pillow, squinting blearily in Carter's direction. She smiled, and if there was malice in her heart he couldn't tell by looking at her face. Her chipper "I know you like to get going early, so I figured I'd get started," was kind of a giveaway, though. Well, whatever. The boat was going to be worth it. She'd see.
Daniel joined him on shore, shamelessly ransacking the house while Carter handled the travel arrangements. They hit the kitchen first, emptying the pantry of everything that hadn't been devoured by the goddamn bugs that got into everything down here. Whoever had lived here before--Jack had made a point of not looking for their name--obviously hadn't been much into cooking from scratch, but they had a wide selection of everything from macaroni and cheese to several kinds of Hamburger Helper, and a stash of spices that was small in the grand scheme of things but made Daniel crow with delight anyway.
Frankly, Jack thought Daniel would've started prying fixtures out of the walls if Jack had let him. Everyone was kind of a packrat these days, and combined with what Jack would never, ever have described as Daniel's natural instinct for grave-robbing, well. Daniel'd had a squeamish side once too, Jack was sure he remembered that, but if so it was gone now.
They were debating the cost-benefit ratio of finding a place for the mountain bike when they heard a crystal-clear "Go, you bastard!" followed by the sound of an engine starting. The engine had died by the time they got outside, but Carter seemed cheery enough as she came up the lawn. "Well, it'll run," she said. "I had to switch out the battery, but I found an equivalent, so we should be all right. Are you done up here?"
"No," Daniel said, in concert with Jack saying "Depends on whether you want to open a Wal-Mart."
"Jack--"
"Daniel, we already have furniture of our very own back at the house, and if we overload ourselves we will sink the boat."
"Well, we're not talking about furniture, are we? We're talking about the bike, which is not all that heavy. Besides, we can offload in Brewster. We're going to go right past the house, for God's sake."
"I don't care about the damn bike, I just don't want you dragging the lawnmower onboard--"
"I didn't say anything about the lawnmower--"
"Hey!" Carter said sharply. "Is there an actual point to any of this, or are you just arguing for fun?"
Daniel crossed his arms against his chest, irritated. "We have…"
"…philosophical differences," Jack finished with him.
Carter stared them down for a moment, then sighed. "Look. I'm going to pull another spare battery if I can find it, and then I need to figure out how to run the gas pump off of the boat so we've got some backup supply in case we can't find more. Please, just… work it out, will you? Without bruises, if possible. And once you have, I'd appreciate a hand." She forced a smile, turned on her heel, and went back down to the river, following the path Jack and Daniel had beaten down that morning.
And well, okay, it was just a bike, and making Carter wait was a bad idea, and when had he become such a pushover, anyway?
In the end, Jack had to admit that the haul was pretty reasonable. He did one last walkthrough of the house before they took off, confirming that Daniel had managed to resist whatever urge to collect tchochkes he might've been feeling. It was funny, the things Jack did and didn't feel good about taking. Anything from the public areas of the house, fine; clothes, okay; jewelry, no, though he knew Daniel had gotten over that one and he had to admit it was probably just as well. People still valued sparkly stuff, and Jack didn't mind taking advantage of that, not even a little bit.
There was an overlooked stash of pens in the daughter's bedroom; he took them, along with the notebooks in what had presumably been her backpack, though only after he tore out the used pages and left them on her stripped bed. He briefly thought that he ought to look for something for Taylor, but it looked like the room's inhabitant had gotten the chance to grow out of dolls before she died. Or didn't die, the Daniel in his head said, but then the Daniel in his head was a hopeless optimist. More so than the real one, come to think of it. Huh.
Carter was easing the boat away from the dock about ten seconds after Jack's boots hit the deck--funny, how she got itchy when it was her schedule at stake. He tossed his prizes onto Daniel and Carter's bed, walking backwards for a few steps to make sure they all stayed where he'd thrown them before going on up to the front. A couple of minor, if noisy, scrapes later--it was a big boat, after all--they moved out into the middle of the river, with the engines going just fast enough to let them steer. It was actually Jack who'd reminded the other two about the whole concept of a current, and yes, he'd enjoyed the what an excellent point! look on Carter's face and the oh for fuck's sake, of course look on Daniel's very much, thank you.
"Should've done this when it was still hot out," Jack said, watching Monroe slide by. "Little barbecue on the deck, little swimming... we could've made a regular summer vacation of it."
Carter flashed him a smile. "But Jack, I thought you liked Texas."
"Hey, I liked Texas fine. I'm just saying, there was a distinct lack of barbecue and swimming. And frying eggs on the hood of the car doesn't count."
Daniel looked up from the pile of booty he was sorting through, a pair of kneesocks dangling from his hands. "Did you really--"
"No, of course not. We didn't have any eggs." Carter raised up off the seat a little so she could see the way ahead a little better, than sank back down, apparently satisfied. "Hey, we should get some in Brewster for the trip. The range does work, doesn't it?"
"Carter, have I been in here alone since you got this thing running? How would I know?"
"Well, you could always check," Daniel said innocently. "Since Sam's driving, and I'm kind of buried right now..."
Jack stared at Daniel. Daniel stared right back, straight-faced, not even an eyebrow twitch.
"Fine," Jack said. "Fine. You win. But I'm checking the TV first, and I'm calling dibs on the shower."
***
The shower was fucking fabulous. Carter had volunteered to go last, probably out of pure self-preservation, since she'd been in there for half an hour and showed no signs of emerging. She was even singing--badly, but singing, all the same.
"You know, if you'd told me three years ago that canned turkey existed, I probably wouldn't have believed you," Daniel said, poking at the pot on the stove. Jack wasn't entirely sure how he felt about what he'd seen going into that pot; sometimes Daniel got creative when it was his night to cook. But, hey, Jack was tough. Well-trained, iron stomach. Plus, Midwestern, so the dried soup packets hadn't thrown him.
"Six years of MREs and you're surprised by canned turkey?"
Daniel shrugged and poked at his creation again. His hair, still a little damp, was sticking up in back, and Jack had been resisting the urge to smooth it down since Daniel had emerged from the bathroom, warm and relaxed and smelling faintly of soap. "People don't buy MREs at the store. I don't know, canned poultry, it's kind of fifties bomb shelter, isn't it?"
"Who's laughing now on that one, huh?"
"Good point." Daniel switched off the burner and moved the pot over, slapping a plate on top in lieu of a cover, then flopped down next to Jack on the couch. "Brewster tomorrow sometime, I guess? So we'll have to offload all of..." He waved one hand at the stuff piled around the boat. They were more organized piles than they'd been when they'd pushed off, but still, piles. Moving sucked.
"Yeah. Midday maybe." There was still a faint strip of color along the horizon off to the west, but as of that moment the lights they had on were the brightest thing to be seen from one end of the river to the other. That was a weird combination of comforting and alarming; it was an old pleasure, having easy light to keep the dark at bay, but Jack wasn't entirely thrilled about being the brightest thing for miles. Not that he had any reason to expect trouble, but... but. Paranoia had never hurt anyone. Okay, it had rarely hurt people as badly as being insufficiently paranoid and thus shot had. "So, your... thing is ready?"
"Turkey tetrazzini," Daniel says, and Jack was fairly certain that classic turkey tetrazzini wasn't made with ramen noodles, but oh well. "Yeah. Shouldn't she be out of hot water by now?"
"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" Jack stared at the closed bathroom door, willing the shower to shut off. It didn't. "Think she'll mope if we eat without her?"
"Well, I'm not sure 'mope' is really the word I would use." Daniel paused. "You, uh... you want me to try to get her out of there, don't you."
Jack smiled a little. "Better you than me, buddy."
Part 2
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Summary: Just more questions / different kind. A sequel set two months after In the Wrong Story.
Dedication: Once upon a time, years ago, vonnie_k sent me Tim Tams. I said, "I will write you a ficlet! Do you want post-col, or zombies?" "Why," said she, "I want both!" So I wrote, and I wrote, and I got it betaed, and I wrote again, and I got it betaed again, and I spent about a year cringing every time I went to open up the file, and long story short, it's been years since she even read SG-1 and so she should not feel at all obligated to read this, but it's for her anyway, with gratitude. Thanks for everything, Vonnie.
Notes, rating, pairing information, etc. can be found at the end. Also available on my website: Wandering Blind.
Wandering Blind, Part 1
The house was definitely mocking him.
If Jack leaned out just a little farther, he'd be able to reach the end of the gutter, over at the northwest corner of the house. Of course, if he leaned out just a little farther, the ladder might tip. Okay, probably not, but if it did, that'd be a damn stupid way to die.
So the question was, did he really want to go to the trouble of moving the ladder for five inches?
As long as he paid attention, watched his balance...
"Mister O'Neill!"
Jack flinched, wobbled a little, snatched his hand back to grab onto the ladder, and then turned around very carefully to see exactly what he'd known he would see: Britzie McLean coming down the driveway. Britzie was one of the thirteen Coloradans living in Brewster--fourteen, now, if you counted Jack, which she ostentatiously did not. She was thirteen years old, and between being a born romantic and very fond of Daniel she had not approved of Carter's little cross-country jaunt to fetch Another Man.
The rest of the Colorado gang clearly thought this was cute. Jack didn't--it hit just a little too close to home--but he smiled for her anyway. You didn't want to make enemies in small towns, even if the enemy's barely into puberty, and he had high hopes that she'd eventually come around and start calling him Jack.
Britzie stood at the base of the ladder and frowned up at him. "I'm looking for Sam. Or Daniel."
"They're not here. Can I help you?"
"Where are they?"
Not here, he didn't say. And people said he didn't know how to hold his tongue. "They were going over to Helen's. Some sort of problem with the cistern."
She sighed. Helen lived another half hour's walk up the river, and judging from her frown Britzie was taking that fact personally. "Are they coming back?"
"I think there's a pretty good chance of that, yeah," Jack said.
"Soon?"
"Well, I don't know, Brit," Jack said, trying to be patient. "Why don't you tell me what you want them for, and then if it's not urgent I can tell them when they get back."
She thought about this for a while, presumably balancing the strain of an extra hour's travel against having to entrust her news to Jack, of all people. Laziness conquered vendetta, and some excitement crept into her voice as she said, "A trader came in up at the north door, and Christina wanted Sam to come and look. It's wagons not trucks, but he's got four of them, and they're big. He's from New Orleans!"
"Really?" That was a surprise. It was the rare person who got desperate enough to go into one of the cities, between the bodies and the difficulty of travel and the lingering fear of the gas, which had been potent enough to kill for months after the attack. Even in Brewster, where people knew the cities should be clean by now, no one had shown any particular desire to move back into one full-time.
"Well, you know, originally. Not now." She paused, scrunching her face up in thought. "You know, you're gonna have to move that ladder," she added, and walked away without a backward look.
"Thanks for the help," Jack muttered under his breath.
That night, he and Carter and Daniel all got to have dinner with Christina and Mark Payne (who, due to their location at the north entrance to town and their possession of a spare room, had a minor side business putting up travellers) and Mister Tony Spinosa, late of New Orleans. Carter was invited because she maintained a prodigious mental list of desired items, along with a well-deserved reputation for using said items for the public good. Daniel was invited because he and Carter were a package deal. Jack, as far as he could tell, was invited because he'd been standing right there at the time, which was fine with him. It had been beans and cornbread all week at home, but because Tony was a guest, Mark had barbecued rabbit.
Rabbit wasn't steak, of course, but it was a step in the right direction.
Eventually, the conversation came around to What Were You Doing When, as getting-to-know-you conversations pretty much always did. The Coloradans had sat down somewhere in Kansas and come up with a cover story, and surprisingly enough, their actual cover story had been useful for once; deep-space radar telemetry, last-minute calls from the Mountain, escape from Colorado Springs in the nick of time. It was even mostly true. The part where a few of them had known about the aliens for years before that didn't get mentioned, because hey, why ask for trouble?
When it came time to hear Tony's story, it turned out that he was alive because he liked to fish--Jack nodded approvingly at this--and he owned a boat. When everything had gone to hell, he'd headed for the boat rather than trying to drive out of the city, and then he'd bolted for the Gulf of Mexico. The Goa'uld had taken a while to get to New Orleans, and the wind patterns had been lucky--for Tony, anyway--so he'd lived to tell the tale.
"I saw one of the ships," he said, sounding almost awe-struck, even now. "I mean, you could tell it wasn't no airplane. That's how I knew it wasn't World War Three or nothing. It was this big thing, looked like... you know Star Wars? That first ship you see, kinda spear-shaped? Like that. Big thing, just cruising along, and then it went down."
They looked up at that, all three of them, surprised. "Went down?" Carter asked.
"Yeah. Crashed right into the Superdome."
"Intact?" Oh, yeah, Carter was definitely paying attention now.
Tony frowned at her over a forkful of green beans. "Well, I'm guessing the stadium's a got a big-ass hole in it, yeah. The ship wasn't, like, blown up, if that's what you're asking. Wait, you don't want to get near that thing, do you?"
"I'm just interested," Carter said, smiling widely and looking as innocently blonde as she possibly could. "I mean, come on, an alien spaceship. Can you imagine how amazing it must be?"
Gold interior, lousy climate control, and bizarre bathrooms with no showers, Jack thought. Yeah, I can imagine.
Tony chewed his beans in silence, then fixed Carter with a look, pointing his fork in her direction. "Not a good idea. I mean, yeah, I'll go in farther than most people, but I don't go into the core, and I sure as hell ain't getting near one of the things they used to spread the gas." He speared another couple of beans and waved them at Daniel. "Don't you let her do nothing stupid like that, okay? I don't want to come back through here a year from now and feel guilty when I hear she got herself killed."
Daniel gave him a closed-lipped smile and murmured that he certainly wouldn't want that either. Christina hid a smirk behind her napkin. Carter kept a smile on her face, but Jack could see her left hand tightening into a fist in her lap.
"So!" Jack said in a bright, throw-yourself-between-the-civilian-and-the-bullet kind of way. "Tony, you don't sound like you're from around here. Actually, I'm from Chicago myself, and I think I detect just a hint of the Windy City. Yes or no?"
***
Daniel, mostly deprived of the opportunity to pursue any more academic interests than amateur chemistry in drinkable form, had traded in his fascination with the workings of the past for one with the workings of the present. Once dinner had been cleared away, he talked Tony into the living room, produced a notebook, and began to pump him for information as thoroughly--if not more so--than he ever had any of the offworlders they'd encountered over the years.
At the first gap in their conversation, Carter leaned over and touched him on the arm. "Jack and I are going to go," she said, though Jack was fairly certain he'd have remembered if they'd discussed anything like that. He shot her a look, which went unreturned. "I'm guessing that this is going to take a while."
Daniel looked up at her, frowning slightly for a moment before his expression cleared. "Right. Yes, of course. I'll see you in a couple of hours. Don't wait up."
"Make a lot of noise coming in," Carter said over her shoulder, as Christina ushered her and Jack out the front door. "I have a shotgun, remember."
A front was coming through; the moon was still visible, but half of the stars were gone, disappeared behind clouds. Behind them, the screen door slammed open twice in the wind before someone latched it more securely. Carter's hair, now well past her chin, whipped around her face until she tucked it firmly behind her ears.
"Tony's got no idea what he's in for, does he?" Jack said.
Carter shrugged. "I think he's probably used to it." She pushed hair out of her eyes again. "I really need a haircut."
"You missing hairspray again?"
She smiled. "Yes, actually." They took a right onto Chestnut, leaving the last of the lighted windows behind. Carter slipped her hand into the pocket of his jacket and took his hand, squeezing it.
"Carter…"
"Hours, he said. He'll make sure not to show up early. And I really wish you'd drop the Carter thing."
"I tried. It felt weird. Actually, you can probably take 'it felt weird' as a given. You know, in general."
"Well, I could always settle down with a good book..."
"I didn't say that." He hadn't been able to break the ingrained habit of calling her Carter; why had he thought he'd be able to break the habit of wanting her that had made it so important for him to use that name in the first place? Even if he'd wanted to, and he wasn't that stupid. Christ, she was beautiful. And pushy; he kind of liked that about this new version of her. You'd think the end of the world would make someone more easily frightened, but with Carter, it seemed to have stripped her fears away instead, like someone walking out of a doctor's office with three months to live and a hankering to skydive.
"We could hang a sock on the door if it'd make you feel better."
"Dammit, Carter…" He shook his head, hard, trying to dislodge the weird feeling without looking at it too closely. "Let's not talk about it, okay?"
"Okay," she said.
She'd talk about it with Daniel, he thought, followed by: Right, because Daniel would make her. You just know he's like that with women. And then he lifted Carter's hand to kiss it, because it felt like the right thing to do, and because the feel of her skin against his lips made all of his confusion drain away.
Still, he took her into his bed rather than joining her in the one she shared with Daniel, and by the time Daniel came home, Jack was alone. Daniel was loud on his way up the stairs, whether by accident or by design, and Jack tracked his footsteps down the hall until they disappeared into the braided rug beside his bed.
***
The next morning was grey, with clouds hanging so low that they skimmed the tops of the pines. It hadn't rained overnight as far as he could tell, but the temperature had dropped enough that Jack pulled on a pair of wool socks and seriously considered firing up the wood stove. Then he thought about wood-chopping, and didn't.
The house was filled to the rafters with a heavy quiet, as if it was trying to match the gloom outside. Jack wandered into the kitchen, stared blearily into the silent refrigerator for a while, then dug a pint-sized Tupperware container of dried apples out of the back of the bottom shelf. Very briefly, he considered the possibility that they'd been put out of the way on purpose, but hey, he really didn't think he could be expected to read minds.
A flash of color caught Jack's eye, and he looked out the back window to see Daniel on his hands and knees in the garden, wearing his I-am-so-going-to-get-filthy orange sweatshirt. He looked up briefly when the screen door slammed, then went back to his task, inching down the row of sweet potatoes toward the house.
"Whatcha doing?" Jack asked, eating a slice of apple.
Daniel waved a knife at him. "Cutting the vines."
"And why are you cutting the vines? At... a fairly early hour, I might add. Wait, have you been reading agricultural manuals again?"
"No, this is the same way we did it last year," Daniel said. "Straight from Helen's mouth. You're not supposed to let the vines--" he grunted a little, sawing at a difficult stalk--"die first. It's not like regular potatoes."
Jack thought about this, eyeing the growing pile of greenery along the garden's edge. "Okay, well, you sure you don't want to use the shears for that? Or a hoe?"
Daniel sat up, letting his legs sprawl out to the side. He scratched at his neck--with his non-knife-wielding hand, thankfully--leaving a wide streak of dirt behind. "No, I don't want to use the shears. They're unwieldy. And every time I use a hoe I'm worried that I'm going to take my own toe off. What are you eating?"
"Dried apple." Jack waded into the ankle-deep vines and settled down next to Daniel, holding out the Tupperware. "Not bad."
"Where'd you find these?" Daniel asked, staring into the container.
"Fridge. Back of the bottom shelf, behind that big can of olive oil."
"Uh, you realize it was probably back there for a reason, right?"
Jack shrugged and ate another slice. "I wanted something sweet. Carter doesn't want me eating something, she's welcome to put a note on it."
"Trust me," Daniel said, "you don't want to go down that road. I had this roommate in grad school... I think we were communicating entirely through notes by the end. Bastard ate my peanut butter." He wiped his hand on his pants and took a slice of apple for himself, apparently unconcerned by any possible hypocrisy.
"Well, I say we should look on the bright side." Jack paused dramatically, but Daniel waited him out without changing expression, damn his eyes. "He's probably dead."
Daniel gave Jack a pursed-lipped look. "Oh, yes, thank you, that helps my leftover roommate psychosis a great deal."
"I aim to please," Jack said airily. He reached out toward the dirty streak on Daniel's neck, making the other man start. "Hold still, willya? You've got enough dirt under there to grow radishes."
"You know, in five minutes I'm going to be back in the dirt," Daniel said, but there was more amusement than irritation in his voice and he held still, letting Jack scrub at the stubble beneath his jaw. "Are you actually helping, or are you just smearing it around?"
Jack resisted the urge to lick his thumb to clean the last of the smudge off, brushing at an imagined spot on the other man's shoulder instead before drawing his hand back into his lap. "I'm helping, because I'm a helpful guy. I'm not planning to crawl down the rest of this row with you, though. Wait, didn't we talk about this? Weren't we going to leave them another couple of weeks?"
"Yeah." Daniel tapped the flat side of the knife against his knee. "Sam wants to go to New Orleans, though. I think it's likely we won't be here in a couple of weeks."
"Did she tell you that?"
"Did she have to? It was pretty obvious. I thought she might have mentioned it to you last night, actually. She was asleep by the time I got in." He glanced up quickly, then back down, pulling a bit of greenery out from under his laces and tossing it to the side.
"Ah, no, we didn't talk about it. Maybe she figured she'd do us both at the same time--" Jack faltered for a second, then forged ahead. "--two birds, one stone, that kind of thing."
"Right. Well, that's certainly possible." Daniel looked down and away, squirmed a little, and arched his back, stretching. Apparently they were going to let that particular slip of the tongue slide right on by. Okay then. "Anyway, I'm looking to cut down on reasons for her to say oh, Daniel, someone should stay home, there so much to be done..." He made a disgusted face. "I'm not giving her any excuse to leave me here again. And I wanted to get outside anyway. I've been feeling itchy all morning."
"I hate to break it to you, but that's the fleas."
Jack expected another look, but Daniel just smiled a little at the ground instead. "Yes, that must be it. What's your opinion?"
"About fleas?"
"About New Orleans," Daniel said, in his very special Jack-don't-be-a-dumbass voice, which Jack thought was a little unfair, really. He shrugged.
"Well, assuming our buddy Tony's telling the truth in the first place, if the thing could fly it'll be gone by now. Even if it's there, is it really worth the trip? Not to mention for all we know it'd still have a full load of the er-whatever-it-was gas stuff, which I'm a little leery of, just between you and me."
Daniel leaned forward a little, warming to the discussion. "Ereshmahar. And either it's still sealed, in which case we'd be fine, or there was a leak, in which case we'd still be fine because it would've activated on contact with oxygen and then died off."
"There's still the trip..."
"...says the man who drove cross-country last summer and said he had barely any trouble..."
"What's the point, Daniel?" Damn, he hadn't meant to say that out loud. Or that loudly. Daniel didn't blink twice, though, as if he hadn't been startled at all. Jack had always figured that as you got to know someone better, they got easier to understand, but sometimes he felt like the longer he knew Daniel the harder he was to read. Or maybe the more alarming Jack found the idea of being able to read him. One of those things.
"Well," Daniel said, considering, "as far as I'm concerned the point is that Sam wants to go and I'm willing to hear her out. She'll probably be able to convince me. I mean, if it makes her happy, right?"
Jack grunted and got to his feet. "Happy's no reason to be stupid."
"I'm not sure I'd agree with that, actually," Daniel said thoughtfully. "I mean, I think you can make a valid argument that happy is the best reason to do just about anything. Sam's certainly embraced it as a goal."
Jack looked down at him sharply, but Daniel was looking up at the house, not at him. Jack followed his gaze up to the window of the master bedroom just in time to see Carter appear in a flannel robe. She stood there for a moment, then made an exaggerated shrugging motion which Jack interpreted as "the hell?" She disappeared as Daniel said "I think we're in trouble."
"We?" Jack said, back on solid ground now. "Oh no. I'm throwing you to the wolves the first chance I get."
"You're the one holding the Tupperware."
"It was in the fridge! What, I can't eat something out of my own... Carter! Morning."
Carter paused on the porch steps, then came down the path on quiet, moccasined feet. It still seemed vaguely unnatural to see her without boots; why that was weirder than seeing her wrapped in a green-and-black plaid flannel robe he had no idea. Naked he'd gotten used to fast, but then he'd had motivation. Besides, he'd thought about Naked Carter before. Though apparently never about the fact that she wasn't likely to be wearing her boots in bed, so no foot fetishist he, and crap, she'd just said something. "What?"
"I said, are those the dried apples I put in the back of the fridge?"
"Well, they are dried apples, and they were in the back of the fridge, so I think it's reasonable to say... yes, they probably are."
Carter frowned a little. "Did it occur to you that I put them behind the olive oil and under two tins of potted meat product for a reason? Do I have to start putting notes on things saying 'save for holidays?'"
"I wouldn't recommend it," Jack said. "Apparently that leads to peanut butter theft."
Carter looked confused for a moment, turned to Daniel, turned back to Jack. "Peanut butter?"
"Grad school," Daniel said. "I told you that story, didn't I? Roommate Craig? Stole my peanut butter?"
"I don't think so--no, wait. Is he the one who put his name on his salt shaker?"
"That's him. Jack's trying to help by pointing out that there's a considerably better-than-even chance that he's dead."
"What can I say?" Jack shrugged. "I'm a glass-half-full kind of guy."
"Right. Anyway..." Daniel squinted up at Carter. "You're up early."
"So are you. Daniel, what are you doing?"
Daniel smiled, a little tightly. "Using up some energy. Getting rid of excuses for you to leave me here when you go to New Orleans. You know."
Carter rolled her eyes a little. "As if I wanted to have that argument again. I didn't expect you to be so gung-ho about the idea, though." She looked over at Jack. "You both coming?"
"We're talking, what, a couple of weeks, right?"
Carter nodded. "Probably. We'll have to swing north around Baton Rouge, I haven't heard that any of those roads have been cleared, but then we can come around from there and cross into the city on the causeway..."
"It's gone," Daniel said. "Or so Tony says."
"Really? Damn. Well, if we can't do that we get as close as we can with the truck, walk the rest of the way. Even if we can only get as far as Baton Rouge, that's what, fifty, sixty miles, all pretty much level? That's walkable, though not a lot of fun if we're carrying something on the way back, now that I think about it. We might be better off taking a page from Tony's book and getting a boat. I don't know if anyone's still living on the lake...?" She trailed off, looking questioningly at Daniel.
"Tony said there were, but not many, and they don't go into the city."
"That's what bribery is for," Jack said. "Carter, what do you want to get out of this? Are we talking hey, let's take a road trip or do you really expect to find something useful?"
Carter yawned, waving a hand apologetically, then pulled the robe a little more tightly around herself, pulling her hands up into the sleeves to ward off the morning chill. "Assuming it's an al'kesh, and assuming it's untouched--which I admit we don't know as of now--there are several potential benefits. For one thing, it might have an armory, so we've got an opportunity to acquire considerable firepower and the associated energy sources. I'd have to figure out a way to interface them with the remaining infrastructure, but if I could, we might be able to bring the power grid back online for a while."
"And?" Jack asked. "You said 'several.'"
"Communications."
Daniel looked up sharply. "Off world, you mean?"
"Yes. Now, I know the al'kesh don't usually have long-range communications, but the system they do have would be able to detect anything in-system, including Tok'ra emergency frequencies."
"Kind of a longshot," Jack said.
Carter leaned forward, tucking her hands into her pockets. "Not necessarily. I'm not talking about a live broadcast, I'm talking about an automated beacon--something like the beacon we used on Revanna. Assuming the Alpha Site wasn't compromised, all they would have had to have done was get here and set up a transmission saying hey, anyone else out there? Then they'd just have to check in every now and then. They've done similar things in the past as way to communicate with operatives. And before you say it, I know what you think of the Tok'ra, but Jack, my father's with them. I think he'd try." She trailed off, looking almost embarrassed to bring that up, but hell, of course Jacob would try, given a thread of hope to hang on.
"He'd have good reason to think you were dead," Daniel said, in that frustrating devil's-advocate tone of his.
"Yeah, well, so did I," Jack pointed out. "And yet, here I am."
"True." Daniel looked up--he was going to get a crick in his neck, sitting like that--and offered Jack a fleeting smile. "Okay. Let's say it works. Jacob calls, stops by for a visit, we're all glad to see him, we kill the fatted calf..."
"...or chicken, or rabbit..." Jack said, because he was pretty sure they couldn't spare a cow.
"...fine, whatever, fatted squirrel if you want, that's not the point. What then? I mean, don't look now, but saving the world's kind of a moot point."
"We've discussed this," Carter said.
"We discussed this theoretically nearly two years ago, and if I remember correctly you avoided the question at the time."
Carter sighed and dug at the lawn with the toe of her moccasin. "I don't know. I think--things are going to get worse here. We are not going to be allowed--" her voice caught a little, but she forged on--"to rebuild. You know that as well as I do. So if--if!--we're given another option, I think we should seriously consider it."
"Okay," Daniel said, and then, gently, almost embarrassed, "whither thou goest, you know."
"Sure, complaining all the way," she said lightly, aiming the faintest hint of a conspirator's smile in Jack's direction. "Jack? You don't have to come if you don't want to. Actually, it might be best if someone did stay here."
"You think I'm going to let you two go to New Orleans and have all the fun without me?"
"You do realize the French Quarter is no longer a going concern, right?" Carter asked.
"Yes, Carter, I'd noticed that," he said, feeling a little irritated until he saw the smile still lurking around her eyes.
"Fine." She yawned again, blinking hard and not bothering to cover her mouth. "I'm… going to go change. Daniel, you did notice we've got dark clouds?"
Daniel looked up, frowning. "So?"
"So it might rain…" She trailed off, obviously expecting Daniel to know where she was going, but he just looked at her sidelong, squinting a little more tightly. "…which is bad… because the yams need to be cured… which won't work very well if they get rained on…"
"Oh." Daniel glanced over the garden, then up at the sky again. "Right. Well. Hopefully it won't rain?"
"We'll bring them inside," Carter said authoritatively.
***
"You know, there's a marina in Monroe," Mark said. "Moon something. Moon River, maybe?" He stuck his head into the cramped stairwell leading out of the kitchen, aiming his voice upward. "Christina, what's the place I'm thinking of? The marina in Monroe, where we went to the wakeboard festival that time. Is it Moon River?"
"Moon Lake," she called. "Moon River's a song, sweetie." From her tone, Jack felt sure that if Christina had been in the room she'd have given Carter the look that said "Men," the one that he figured girls were all taught at about the same time boys were learning how to hide a hard-on.
"People name places after songs all the time," Mark shouted back a little grumpily before turning his attention back to Carter. "I know you've got a thing for big road trips, but I'd take the river instead if it was me. They've got the lock in Columbia rigged up so you can get it to work by hand; don't know if there are any more farther south, but we used to get shipping up through here, barges and stuff. So you used to be able to get through." He leaned back against the kitchen counter, eyes flicking from Carter to Jack and back again. "If you're just looking to scavenge, there's closer places, you know."
"None of them have crashed spaceships, though," Carter said.
"Right." Mark paused, leaving a space for Carter to continue, but she just played with the miniature lathe Tony'd left for them, spinning one of the handwheels back and forth. He turned his attention to Jack, who shrugged.
"It's a geek thing. You know Carter."
"Right," Mark said again. "You going to bring us back alien toys to play with, Sam?" His tone was half-curious, half-challenging, which was pretty much what Carter had said she expected during their walk into town. It's not that I don't trust Mark, she'd said, but… Jack, who'd lived a good portion of his adult life under one veil of secrecy or another, had just nodded.
"Well, it depends on what's there, and whether I can make it work," Carter said, and that was true, as it happened. "You don't think the marina would be cleared out by now?"
"Maybe, maybe not. Seems to me it'd be worth a shot, though. Especially if you want to be carrying things out of New Orleans, because I can't think the roads are anywhere near passable down there."
There was a pounding of footsteps on the stairs, followed by a sharp "Taylor!" from above. Mark turned his head to listen, then frowned at his daughter as she appeared in the doorway with Christina at her back and a chamberpot carefully cradled in her arms.
"Go on," Christina said, putting her hands on Taylor's shoulders and giving her a little push. Taylor screwed up her face in disgust, but complied, pink sneakers squeaking with every step down the hall to the front door. "She's supposed to empty it first thing if she uses it overnight," she continued in mother-expecting-sympathy tones to the room at large, "but somehow that never seems to happen, and someone didn't refill the toilet tank last night. How are you, Sam? Jack."
"Good," Carter said, over the top of Mark declaring, "They're going to New Orleans."
"Told you so." Christina poked Mark in the arm, obviously pleased with herself and not feeling any need for further public shaming over the tank issue. "They're going to go down the river?"
Carter looked over at Jack, who gestured with one hand: Go ahead. "That was Mark's suggestion," she said. "If the marina's been picked over it'd be a waste of time, but if there was something there… it'd be a lot faster. And we should be able to round up enough gas."
This last was directed toward Jack again, who figured he must look like he needed more convincing than he actually did. "Hey, if it gets me out of walking from Baton Rouge, I'm all for it. It won't be me making the thing run."
"You are taking Daniel this time, right?" Christina asked. "Please tell me you're taking Daniel this time. Because I'm not covering for you when he's not deathly ill."
"Believe me, we've already had that conversation." Ah, there it was--the "Men" look. Or possibly that look was specifically dedicated to Daniel, though Jack was pretty sure he remembered it having passed over his own head more than once back in the Mountain. "All three of us are going, once we get the house in order and find someone to feed the chickens. I was thinking about asking Britzie, actually."
"Be careful I'm not there when you do," Jack muttered.
Sam smiled widely. "She likes him, really," she told Christina--inaccurately, but Jack figured it wasn't worth arguing about. She'd learn the truth eventually. "And we'll have to get directions to the marina--do you have the address?"
"We've still got the Yellow Pages around here somewhere. It should be in there. You know," Christina added with a glance at Mark, "it'd be a lot faster for them to take the truck up there. You'd just need someone to drive it back--"
"They'd be coming right past here on the river!"
"And I miss driving, you know," Christina finished, as if she hadn't heard a word Mark had said.
"You leaving me a note?" Mark asked.
"What is it, forty, fifty miles? I'll be back before you notice I'm gone." She reached out and touched his elbow, eyes more serious now. "The north road's perfectly safe, Mark. Do you know how long it's been since I got out of town for a day?"
"Used to be you hated that commute," Mark grumbled. "Don't look at me--it's not my truck."
Christina turned a pleading look on Carter, who shrugged. "It's okay with me." Generous of her, Jack thought--she was protective of her vehicles, and didn't let just anyone drive them--but then she owed Christina one from the summer, didn't she?
Half an hour later, Mark still had the distinct look of a man who wanted to argue, but knew it'd be pointless. "She'd just come up with some damn reason or other that it made perfect sense for her to go if I did," he said, as he and Jack hauled the lathe out to the garden cart he and Carter had brought from home. "That's the worst part, when they get logical on you. You ever been married?"
"Once. Divorced." I don't want to talk about it, his tone said, and thankfully Mark let it drop. He wondered about Sara sometimes, when he wasn't quick enough to stop himself. She'd still been living in Colorado Springs, as far as he knew. They'd been hit very early on; it was possible she'd never even known what was coming. He hoped so.
Later, pulling his half of the load, he told Carter that it looked like she'd managed to make the entire male population of Brewster paranoid. She laughed. "Well, that's Mark for you. But if nothing else, he knows Christina would never take off and leave Taylor--he was poking me more than her. Probably revenge for having to listen to Daniel complain all summer."
Jack kicked a fallen branch out of the way of the wheels, then scuffed at the ground again, just to make the gravel spin from one side of the road to the other with a satisfying clatter. "Well, you gotta admit, that was some pretty impressive taking one for the team they did. What'd you do, blow your lifetime supply of negotiating skills on 'hey, stay with grumpy, pissed-off, convalescing Daniel for a few weeks for me while I run off to Utah?'"
"No, it wasn't… hang on, I need to switch hands." She stopped, letting go of the cart and stretching her hand as wide as it could go. The cart kept rolling for a bit, broad handle nudging Jack in the back, and he stumbled. "Sorry. It wasn't that hard. They'd seen how sick he was before we finally diagnosed the malaria--someone had to keep an eye on him, and I was leaving. That part wasn't negotiable."
"Hey, I'm just saying, you're lucky they agreed." Jack switched over to her side, taking hold of the metal bar where it was still a little warm from Carter's hand. Doing this errand before lunch had sounded like a much better idea an hour and a half ago than it did now, empty-stomached and still almost a mile from home.
"He's fine," Carter said, a little defensively.
"I didn't say he wasn't! I'm not arguing with you, Carter. Go over it all yet again with Daniel if you want, but give me five minutes' warning so I can get out of the house, will you?"
"Sorry," she muttered. "It's not you. It's just--" Her gestures sharpened, became more urgent. "After we were talking this morning, about leaving... that's part of why I think... you weren't here then. He was so sick. We don't know what strain it was, but if it was a bad one, he could have died." She looked away, frustration all over her face. "I can't fix people, and they're dying from the stupidest..."
"Yeah. Well. Not your fault." He wanted to reach out, pat her on the arm, something, but she had herself wrapped up as tightly as Daniel on a bad day and he honestly wasn't sure he'd keep all of his fingers. "This is why I personally prefer problems that can be solved with explosives," he said, offering up a joke instead.
She smiled--success!--and gave her hand one last shake before taking hold of the cart. "You know, I haven't blown anything up in years. I kind of miss it."
"We'll get you some fireworks in New Orleans," Jack said as they started down the road. "Shoot 'em off in the Superdome. It'll be great."
***
Used to be that departure times meant something--even to Daniel, who was easily distracted but rarely intentionally late. Jack still wore a watch, end of the world or no end of the world; he'd dug up a solar-powered one a couple of months after the attack, and followed the dictates of time zones and Daylight Savings Time to the letter. It was a satisfying, grounding sort of thing to do, and while Jack had always been a big fan of realism, he didn't think there was any harm in holding onto a few threads of the past. Or more than a few, so long as you didn't get crazy about it.
So on the one hand, he was annoyed. They'd planned to leave at 8:30; it was now 8:52 by his watch, and they hadn't even started to load the truck yet. On the other hand, motor vehicles were a rarity nowadays--well, the running kind were, anyway--and he wasn't even halfway heartless enough to begrudge Britzie the impromptu driving lesson Carter'd offered her when she'd shown up that morning to see them off.
Britzie was tall for her age, almost as tall as Carter, but the way she was hunched forward over the wheel Jack wondered if she could even see ahead of her. Carter had backed the truck out of the garage and into the road herself before sliding over and letting Britzie take her place behind the wheel, and Jack watched her blonde head hovering anxiously next to Britzie's dark cornrows until the glass caught the sun and he had to look away.
"Has Sam let her go over five miles an hour yet?" Daniel asked, sitting himself down next to Jack with a thump.
"Hell, no. She hasn't gone in reverse either." The truck drew a wide arc in the road, inching along the edge of a ditch and pointing its nose for home. She was going to miss the driveway with her right tires, but hey, what good was four-wheel drive anyway if you couldn't take it off-roading on the lawn? "Looks like that's that. You got everything?"
"Yes, Jack, I've got everything," Daniel said, all exaggerated patience. Carter had made the packing list, with Jack looking over her shoulder. Left to his own devices, Daniel preferred to pack from memory, but he'd done them the favor of going down the checklist the night before. Water for the first day; they'd drink from the river after that, filtered and boiled. Camp stove, though they'd likely go the campfire route instead if they could, since Carter fretted over the butane supply. Two tarps; they'd argued about that, but if things went according to plan they'd be in shelter anyway for the entire trip, so Jack put his foot down about anything heavier. Carter's blowtorch, with extra propane--also fretted over, and hopefully they'd be able to replenish that along the way. Gas for the truck, some of which would become gas for the boat. The Beretta Carter'd owned for years and the shotgun Jack had picked up in Utah. Peanuts, and jerky, and a copy of A Tale of Two Cities with a bookmark at page 152, because Jack had always kind of thought he should read Dickens and he sure as hell had the time to do it now.
The truck jerked to a halt halfway down the driveway, and Britzie hopped down from the driver's seat, beaming. "Oh my God, I so want a car," she declared.
"Well, you can't have mine," Carter said, coming around the hood. "Or my gas. Sorry, bucko."
"I know." Britzie slumped back against the door, kicking at the driveway. "It sucks. I miss cars." For once, Jack completely sympathized with the whine in her voice, though he didn't go so far as to say so. "Thanks for letting me drive yours, though," she continued, only a little grudgingly. "That was cool."
"Can we go now?" Jack tapped his watch, then held it up facing in Carter's direction, even though he knew she was much too far away to read it. She was a bright woman. She'd get the hint.
She actually looked embarrassed, and her "Sorry, Jack," sounded like it should have a sir tacked onto the end, which Jack enjoyed just a little more than he felt he really ought to. When he looked over to get Daniel moving, the other man was rolling his eyes, and that was pleasantly familiar too, so. Success all 'round.
"Wait," Carter said. "Why am I apologizing?"
Damn, Jack thought. So close. "Because we were supposed to leave half an hour ago?"
"Mm." Carter leaned conspiratorially in Britzie's direction, but her gaze stayed with Jack. "He has no sense of fun, you know."
"I have no sense of fun? Coming from the woman who used to go into work during her vacation? Of your own free will, I might add."
"That was fun, Jack."
"Fine. Whatever. Watch out for this one, Brit. Spend too much time around her and you'll start thinking calculus is better than sex." Daniel turned around, pack dangling from his hands, just to blink at him. Jack wilted a little under Carter's glare. "Which you shouldn't be having. Or thinking about. Obviously. Can we go?"
"Oh, I think we should," Carter said.
They dropped Britzie off a block from her house, Daniel promising to bring her a souvenir and Carter spouting reminders until Jack reached over and put the truck in drive himself as a subtle hint. When they drove up to Mark and Christina's their fourth was sitting on her front porch, elastics in her mouth, braiding Taylor's hair. The little girl started to get to her feet when she saw the truck, but was tugged back down firmly, head bouncing a little with the movements of her mother's hands.
They all wandered over and gaggled on the porch, Daniel explaining something to a patient Mark and Jack and Carter both examining Taylor's newly missing tooth with the appropriate gravity. Jack would never have mentioned the tooth fairy, but Taylor brought it up herself, insisting that she had to show them the new Barbie outfit she'd gotten in trade. "Eventually I'm going to run out of the stockpile from the after-Christmas sales that last year," Christina muttered as soon as her daughter was out of earshot. She looked genuinely worried about it, so Jack refrained from pointing out the long list of rather more important things they were also steadily running out of. Besides, the kid was seven. Toys were important too.
Jack had been expecting tears, but Taylor accepted hugs and kisses as her due and waved them goodbye merrily. Watching in the passenger's side mirror as they pulled away, Jack could see her waving until they were out of sight, though only Daniel in the back was facing her.
Another half a mile down the road, Christina held up a homemade tape triumphantly, and she looked so thrilled at the chance to actually listen to it that Jack managed to find it in his heart to suffer through the Nirvana. About twenty-five minutes in, he did promise himself a long, suspicious talk with Daniel, though. Upon further consideration, he'd volunteered to ride in the back just a little bit too cheerfully for a man who hadn't known that noise was in the offing.
They took the back road, crossing over the Bayou Lafourche in Hebert and motoring on through the woods up to Buckner and Rhymes. Monroe itself was still clogged, but the smaller roads surrounding it had mostly been cleared. "I have to assume all of the cars through here would've been stripped a long time ago," Carter said--needlessly, since Jack could see broken glass and dangling gas caps as well as anyone else, and there was no need to worry about the gas gauge just yet. They stopped three times in the first two hours, giving a couple of rides (including one to a woman with a two-year-old and a goat, who Jack quite gleefully stuck in the back with Daniel) and screeching to a halt just a few feet in front of a sprawled dog who looked up at them, yawned casually, and strolled off to the side of the road, having established who was in charge of passage around here.
They switched drivers at the highway in Rhymes, putting Christina behind the wheel so that she could prove her trustworthiness when it came to handling Carter's baby. Their route took them farther north, through the edges of what had been suburb, then back around and down, finally reaching roads too close to murdered Monroe for them to have been cleared. They were able to make another mile or so by going off-road, but eventually even the grassy strip between the shoulder and the trees became clogged and Christina gave up.
There hadn't even been any foot traffic for miles, but they opened the windows and the door over the gas cap anyway, trying to make the truck look like just another abandoned vehicle. Jack could see Carter frowning a little at the dirt it had picked up on the drive, too, but while her expression promised detailing, there wasn't much of anything she could do about it just then.
Daniel stretched out the kinks from a long, bumpy ride while the other three pulled their packs out of the back. If they'd been planning to walk any real distance Jack would've thought they'd brought too much stuff, but for the couple of miles they had to go the packs were all right, if a bit unwieldy when navigating through obstructions natural and man-made. Christina in particular made a habit of catching herself on things, though she did keep a sense of humor about it. Jack approved. He didn't mind complaining himself, but his patience for hearing it from other people was damn short.
The Ouachita veered into and out of view, now pacing the road, now hidden behind the oaks and other, less familiar trees. The sun was halfway down the sky when they finally reached the marina, coming to a halt at the closed gate to the driveway. Off to the right, there was a building that looked like a private residence; owners, maybe? The driveway went on past it and down to a boathouse by the river; if there were any actual boats to go with it, he sure couldn't see them from where he was.
"Anyone home, you think?" Jack asked.
"I doubt it." Daniel hitched his pack up a little higher and gestured at the late-model SUV parked in the driveway. "There's a body in the driver's seat. If someone had moved in, I'm guessing they would've cleaned that out."
"Yeah. Well. Still." Jack unslung the shotgun from his shoulder, saw Carter drop her hand to rest on the Beretta where it was strapped to her leg. Just like old times, he almost said, before remembering that they had a guest.
Carter took the lead, calling out a hello in the most feminine, I'm-no-threat-to-you-please-ignore-my-firearm voice she could muster, to no reaction from anything but a mourning dove on the telephone wire. Christina gave the SUV a wide berth; Daniel glanced inside, then looked away, mouth tightening.
"We should try siphoning the gas," Jack said, his voice sounding louder than he'd expected. Funny, how quickly you got used to having engine noise around again. "Carter?"
"Yeah, in a minute," she said, already halfway to the boathouse. She reached the corner, then turned around to walk backwards for a few steps, grinning. "We have boats! Anyone got a preference as to type?"
"Get me something expensive," Jack said. "I always wanted a yacht."
Despite the lateness of the hour, Christina insisted that she'd rather leave right away, in hopes that she could make it home that night. About half an hour after that, Carter started to look very, very sorry that it was Daniel who'd agreed to walk Christina back to the truck. She and Jack were waiting out on the lawn in a gathering twilight when Daniel came down the driveway, shotgun slung over his shoulder. "If you're going to tell me we have to walk back," Daniel said, "then… please don't tell me we're going to have to walk back."
"Nope, we're good," Jack said cheerily. "Just waiting for a tiebreaker."
Carter's expression, which had already been less than cheerful, sank even farther into Pissed. "We're having a disagreement on which boat to take."
"Okay, so…" Daniel let the shotgun slide through his hand to the ground, leaning on it while he craned his head around to look at the marina. "What are my choices?"
Jack opened his mouth, but Carter got there first. "Number one, we have the nice little green motorboat on the end there. It's small, it looks pretty new, and it won't burn a lot of gas."
Daniel shifted his gaze to Jack. "What's number two?"
Jack let the smile hit his face, annoyed Carter or no annoyed Carter. "There's a houseboat. Which has--you had your turn, Carter, now it's mine--bed space for all, a flush toilet, a TV and VCR, and a VHS collection which includes, among other things, what appears to be the complete oeuvre of that noted artiste Jean-Claude Van Damme. He's French, you know."
"He was Belgian," Carter said, sounding a little snappish. "And I still can't believe you're seriously considering taking that thing."
"Why the hell not? You'll forgive me if the idea of a few creature comforts is appealing."
"Yes, I get that it's appealing, but is it smart? Come on, be realistic."
"Does it run, Jack?" Daniel interjected. He was frowning, but at least he was frowning at Jack, which was definitely a good sign.
"Haven't tried yet. Don't see any reason why it'd be any less likely to than any of the others, though." Jack tried on his most winning smile, which he was pretty sure wasn't a patch on Carter's, but hey, you do what you can with what you've got. "Did I mention the potential for a hot shower?"
"Well, now you have." Daniel was suppressing the smile, but Jack could see in his eyes that he'd won. "Sorry, Sam. Jack's got my vote. Assuming--" he held up one hand--"that it runs."
"Fine." Still grumpy, Jack thought. Damn. Well, so long as nothing went wrong she'd get over it quickly enough. "When we run out of gas, you two are going to get more and I'm staying in bed." She broke out That Tone when she muttered "stupid" under her breath a few moments later, but Jack ignored it. He liked being magnanimous in victory.
Jack had to admit that a houseboat wasn't really the most practical option, and he'd always thought of himself as a practical kind of guy. But that'd been back when he didn't have to be practical if he didn't want to, and these days if the universe was going to give him the chance to use a microwave and watch a crappy movie or two he was damn well going to take it. Plus, his back would thank him for the bed, which would improve his mood, which would make the whole trip much better for everyone. So really, it was all in his team's best interest.
He hadn't thought of them as his team in a while, come to think of it. Something about going on the road with the two of them, probably. It was... kind of nice, really. Familiar, except for the Teal'c-shaped hole in the world to his right. An easy little salvage milk run, there and back again, no muss no fuss no need to make a daring run to the Stargate for backup. Hopefully, anyway, since that was gonna be a hell of a trip if they had to try it.
It was really too late to be fooling around with engines unless you were in a much bigger rush than they were, so they bedded down on the boat, well-bundled against the hint of winter in the air. Not that it was a real winter, the kind they had in Minnesota or Chicago or Colorado Springs, but Jack wasn't really feeling the need to prove his manliness by pointing that out. Carter and Daniel took the larger bed in the back; Jack took the single tucked away right behind the front console, which was still neatly made with musty-smelling bedding that reminded Jack vaguely of track suits from the 1980s. Older than the boat, almost certainly, and if you were going to buy a whole big houseboat wouldn't you buy new bedding to go with it? Jack thought he would have, or if he'd still been married--and why would he have bought a houseboat if he hadn't been?--Sara would have insisted.
Sara had liked flannel sheets, and had always wanted a down comforter, except she was allergic and so that was off the menu. And why was Sara on his mind again? She'd been doing that a lot recently, popping up in his thoughts more than she had in years. Something about the weird domesticity of the house in Brewster, maybe; Sara had been the last person he'd really shared a home with before moving in with Carter and Daniel.
They hadn't bothered to pull the sliding wall all the way closed, and he could listen to if not understand their murmured voices, hear the rustling of blankets and the creak of the mattress as someone turned over. That'd be a noisy bed to have sex in, Jack thought. Even if they tried to be quiet, he'd be able to hear them, guess what they were...
Crap. Dammit. No. No, he was not getting hard just from thinking about listening to his two best friends having sex. Definitely not. And he certainly wasn't picturing the way Carter looked when she came, or wishing he'd paid more attention to what she and Daniel were like together that one time he'd had the chance to watch.
Not at all.
***
It was Carter who woke him the next morning. More specifically, it was the clatter of a panel being removed with gusto and without consideration for anyone who might be sleeping six feet away. Jack grunted and lifted his head up off the pillow, squinting blearily in Carter's direction. She smiled, and if there was malice in her heart he couldn't tell by looking at her face. Her chipper "I know you like to get going early, so I figured I'd get started," was kind of a giveaway, though. Well, whatever. The boat was going to be worth it. She'd see.
Daniel joined him on shore, shamelessly ransacking the house while Carter handled the travel arrangements. They hit the kitchen first, emptying the pantry of everything that hadn't been devoured by the goddamn bugs that got into everything down here. Whoever had lived here before--Jack had made a point of not looking for their name--obviously hadn't been much into cooking from scratch, but they had a wide selection of everything from macaroni and cheese to several kinds of Hamburger Helper, and a stash of spices that was small in the grand scheme of things but made Daniel crow with delight anyway.
Frankly, Jack thought Daniel would've started prying fixtures out of the walls if Jack had let him. Everyone was kind of a packrat these days, and combined with what Jack would never, ever have described as Daniel's natural instinct for grave-robbing, well. Daniel'd had a squeamish side once too, Jack was sure he remembered that, but if so it was gone now.
They were debating the cost-benefit ratio of finding a place for the mountain bike when they heard a crystal-clear "Go, you bastard!" followed by the sound of an engine starting. The engine had died by the time they got outside, but Carter seemed cheery enough as she came up the lawn. "Well, it'll run," she said. "I had to switch out the battery, but I found an equivalent, so we should be all right. Are you done up here?"
"No," Daniel said, in concert with Jack saying "Depends on whether you want to open a Wal-Mart."
"Jack--"
"Daniel, we already have furniture of our very own back at the house, and if we overload ourselves we will sink the boat."
"Well, we're not talking about furniture, are we? We're talking about the bike, which is not all that heavy. Besides, we can offload in Brewster. We're going to go right past the house, for God's sake."
"I don't care about the damn bike, I just don't want you dragging the lawnmower onboard--"
"I didn't say anything about the lawnmower--"
"Hey!" Carter said sharply. "Is there an actual point to any of this, or are you just arguing for fun?"
Daniel crossed his arms against his chest, irritated. "We have…"
"…philosophical differences," Jack finished with him.
Carter stared them down for a moment, then sighed. "Look. I'm going to pull another spare battery if I can find it, and then I need to figure out how to run the gas pump off of the boat so we've got some backup supply in case we can't find more. Please, just… work it out, will you? Without bruises, if possible. And once you have, I'd appreciate a hand." She forced a smile, turned on her heel, and went back down to the river, following the path Jack and Daniel had beaten down that morning.
And well, okay, it was just a bike, and making Carter wait was a bad idea, and when had he become such a pushover, anyway?
In the end, Jack had to admit that the haul was pretty reasonable. He did one last walkthrough of the house before they took off, confirming that Daniel had managed to resist whatever urge to collect tchochkes he might've been feeling. It was funny, the things Jack did and didn't feel good about taking. Anything from the public areas of the house, fine; clothes, okay; jewelry, no, though he knew Daniel had gotten over that one and he had to admit it was probably just as well. People still valued sparkly stuff, and Jack didn't mind taking advantage of that, not even a little bit.
There was an overlooked stash of pens in the daughter's bedroom; he took them, along with the notebooks in what had presumably been her backpack, though only after he tore out the used pages and left them on her stripped bed. He briefly thought that he ought to look for something for Taylor, but it looked like the room's inhabitant had gotten the chance to grow out of dolls before she died. Or didn't die, the Daniel in his head said, but then the Daniel in his head was a hopeless optimist. More so than the real one, come to think of it. Huh.
Carter was easing the boat away from the dock about ten seconds after Jack's boots hit the deck--funny, how she got itchy when it was her schedule at stake. He tossed his prizes onto Daniel and Carter's bed, walking backwards for a few steps to make sure they all stayed where he'd thrown them before going on up to the front. A couple of minor, if noisy, scrapes later--it was a big boat, after all--they moved out into the middle of the river, with the engines going just fast enough to let them steer. It was actually Jack who'd reminded the other two about the whole concept of a current, and yes, he'd enjoyed the what an excellent point! look on Carter's face and the oh for fuck's sake, of course look on Daniel's very much, thank you.
"Should've done this when it was still hot out," Jack said, watching Monroe slide by. "Little barbecue on the deck, little swimming... we could've made a regular summer vacation of it."
Carter flashed him a smile. "But Jack, I thought you liked Texas."
"Hey, I liked Texas fine. I'm just saying, there was a distinct lack of barbecue and swimming. And frying eggs on the hood of the car doesn't count."
Daniel looked up from the pile of booty he was sorting through, a pair of kneesocks dangling from his hands. "Did you really--"
"No, of course not. We didn't have any eggs." Carter raised up off the seat a little so she could see the way ahead a little better, than sank back down, apparently satisfied. "Hey, we should get some in Brewster for the trip. The range does work, doesn't it?"
"Carter, have I been in here alone since you got this thing running? How would I know?"
"Well, you could always check," Daniel said innocently. "Since Sam's driving, and I'm kind of buried right now..."
Jack stared at Daniel. Daniel stared right back, straight-faced, not even an eyebrow twitch.
"Fine," Jack said. "Fine. You win. But I'm checking the TV first, and I'm calling dibs on the shower."
***
The shower was fucking fabulous. Carter had volunteered to go last, probably out of pure self-preservation, since she'd been in there for half an hour and showed no signs of emerging. She was even singing--badly, but singing, all the same.
"You know, if you'd told me three years ago that canned turkey existed, I probably wouldn't have believed you," Daniel said, poking at the pot on the stove. Jack wasn't entirely sure how he felt about what he'd seen going into that pot; sometimes Daniel got creative when it was his night to cook. But, hey, Jack was tough. Well-trained, iron stomach. Plus, Midwestern, so the dried soup packets hadn't thrown him.
"Six years of MREs and you're surprised by canned turkey?"
Daniel shrugged and poked at his creation again. His hair, still a little damp, was sticking up in back, and Jack had been resisting the urge to smooth it down since Daniel had emerged from the bathroom, warm and relaxed and smelling faintly of soap. "People don't buy MREs at the store. I don't know, canned poultry, it's kind of fifties bomb shelter, isn't it?"
"Who's laughing now on that one, huh?"
"Good point." Daniel switched off the burner and moved the pot over, slapping a plate on top in lieu of a cover, then flopped down next to Jack on the couch. "Brewster tomorrow sometime, I guess? So we'll have to offload all of..." He waved one hand at the stuff piled around the boat. They were more organized piles than they'd been when they'd pushed off, but still, piles. Moving sucked.
"Yeah. Midday maybe." There was still a faint strip of color along the horizon off to the west, but as of that moment the lights they had on were the brightest thing to be seen from one end of the river to the other. That was a weird combination of comforting and alarming; it was an old pleasure, having easy light to keep the dark at bay, but Jack wasn't entirely thrilled about being the brightest thing for miles. Not that he had any reason to expect trouble, but... but. Paranoia had never hurt anyone. Okay, it had rarely hurt people as badly as being insufficiently paranoid and thus shot had. "So, your... thing is ready?"
"Turkey tetrazzini," Daniel says, and Jack was fairly certain that classic turkey tetrazzini wasn't made with ramen noodles, but oh well. "Yeah. Shouldn't she be out of hot water by now?"
"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" Jack stared at the closed bathroom door, willing the shower to shut off. It didn't. "Think she'll mope if we eat without her?"
"Well, I'm not sure 'mope' is really the word I would use." Daniel paused. "You, uh... you want me to try to get her out of there, don't you."
Jack smiled a little. "Better you than me, buddy."
Part 2