FIC: Look To The Heavens And Number The Stars [SG-1, Ensemble gen, R]
Back to Part 1.
The day the klaxons went off and Claire's world shifted decidedly to the left, she spilled coffee on her shirt while she was driving to the Mountain, and dropped a brick on her foot trying to move it from one table to another.
Word spread fast in the Mountain -- partly because it had to, in case of crazy alien infectious diseases, and partly because it was a tiny closed society. Nobody had anything better to do than gossip. Claire had never thought she was good with people -- she was good with books, that's why she was a cataloger and not a reference librarian -- and she'd never thought that she could read intent and meaning into behavior -- that's why she was single, plus the job hours sucked -- but sitting in the library, nursing her bruised toes and staring out into the hallway instead of working, she could hear the tone of voice that was being passed around.
Low, serious, scared -- not the sort of voice that gleefully passed around the news that SG-1 had come back from off-world without their pants, or the sort that flew into the library to tell her that SG-4 had gotten mixed up in some ceremony than left them all married to each other.
Claire didn't get mission briefings. She knew if a team was going off-world only if someone mentioned it to her in passing, and she didn't keep up with even that schedule all that well. Some librarians might have worried if their regulars hadn't come in for a few days; Claire just assumed that those regulars were up to their asses in mud somewhere else in the galaxy.
She knew that SG-1 was going off-world to some highly developed planet because Jackson had told her so. He had brought his coffee by that morning, ostensibly to check on something in one of the reference books she'd started refusing to let out of her sight, but mostly, she had thought at the time, because he wanted to talk to someone about the mission and Colonel O'Neill was tired of listening to him. He'd brought her a list of call numbers, things he wanted her to pull from the archives, and he'd brought her a cup of coffee to go with his own.
She'd been happy to see him.
Two and a half years, and Claire knew her role in the operations of the SGC: she did her job and she enjoyed it, both the cataloging and even the parts where she had to do reference work for people, which had surprised her. She liked some of her coworkers and didn't like others, normal for any job. And she -- even more than Janet Fraiser or MacKenzie, the on-base shrink, and she only knew this because Janet told her, and then laughed at Claire's surprised, unhappy face -- was the designated listener for the entire Mountain.
Claire had never thought of herself as quiet, but when she stopped and thought about it, she supposed she was quieter than half the scientists in the place -- certainly quieter than Jackson.
Two and a half years, and she'd gotten to like Jackson -- gotten to think of him almost as a friend. He talked to her like she was an equal, like he didn't have a million more degrees than she did, like what he got up and did everyday wasn't more important than what she did. It was, and she knew it. Claire's self-esteem was pretty good, but she knew that she cataloged books, and he fought on the front lines for the defense of Earth.
"They're close to the development of Earth in the '40s," he had said to her. "We don't know much more than that, but the place has energy signals that Sam says are through the roof. She's pretty excited."
"What about you?" Claire had said. She didn't ask him questions very often, because she didn't need to. He told her everything she wanted to know, and sometimes more.
Jackson shrugged and smiled. "I won't know until I get there."
"Isn't that the way it always is?" Claire had said.
Jackson had smiled again, and slid off his stool and picked up his coffee mug. "It is," he said, and then, "I'll see you tomorrow, Claire. Can you pull those records for me before then?"
"Sure, Dr. Jackson," Claire said.
"Daniel," he said.
"Daniel," she said, and he'd ambled out of the room and she'd dropped a brick on her foot and then the klaxons had gone off.
No one had come into the library yet. The gossip was still happening in the hallways, too low for Claire to hear clearly, but she'd heard Jackson's name more than once, and she'd heard radiation poisoning more than once.
Sometimes Claire got up from her table and went out into the hallway to ask what was going on, and the Marines always told her happily.
This time, she stayed sitting down. Didn't move. Didn't want to hear the news that was whistling through the corridors like the sort of wind that came down from Canada before St. Paul was covered in two feet of snow.
No one stepped into the library and hissed the gossip at her. Claire spent the whole day flexing her bare, bruised toes, trying not to picture worst cases, and listening to the cadence of the whispers outside her door.
Janet Fraiser came and told Claire what had happened, her face streaked with tears; basic facts, the fact that Jackson was gone. Later, Jacobs came and told her the details. That it was gory, and awful; that Jackson had been a hero, and in pain; that the hissing gossip floating through the hallways said that something had happened, at the end.
That O'Neill, before he had unearthed a bottle of gin at the bottom of Jackson's desk and gotten stinking, knee-meltingly drunk and broken down in the gate room, had said that Daniel wasn't dead -- gone, but not dead. Jacobs said that O'Neill said Ascended. Claire knew the word -- knew the word in the context of the Ancients, knew the context of the word within the SGC.
It made no sense.
She didn't cry, because it made no sense.
Jacobs patted her awkwardly on the arm, and left Claire and her bruised toes to the quiet of the library. It was late -- past midnight, according to the clock on her laptop, but even past midnight the SGC bustled with activity. The Marines on the night shift were as noisy as the ones on the day shifts, and the scientists kept no hours that could be called routine.
But that night, it was quiet and still, no conversations in the hallway outside her door. Claire worked. She picked up the pile of things she'd saved to ask Jackson about when he had the time to answer her questions, and started at the top and worked her way through them.
Even if she was wrong, the only person who would have known was Jackson -- and he wasn't there to check her work anymore.
Claire left the Mountain at 4 in the morning; when she drove out into the air, stopped at the check point and signed herself out, it was almost dawn. The horizon was pink at the edges, and the moon was still hanging high in the sky.
The trouble with her job was that she didn't know who to call to talk about this. No one she talked to on a regular basis could help -- she could say, a friend died, and get sympathy, but there wasn't a single person outside of the Mountain she could talk to about the horror of it, the fear that only a place like the SGC could infuse in whispered gossip, the way the reality was worse than anything that she'd heard half-whispered during the day.
Claire was so tired, and lonely. She thought of Jacobs saying that O'Neill had gotten quietly drunk and then less quietly raged in the gate room until he had worn himself out; how General Hammond had let him. She thought of Janet Fraiser standing in the library, grey with grief but doing what she thought of as her duty, telling Claire about the death of a friend, and she thought of Sam Carter, standing behind Janet, face drawn shut and arms wrapped around herself as though she was freezing cold.
She drove down from the Mountain by herself, radio off and windows rolled down, and she listened to the silence of 4 in the morning. Claire had gotten advice from everyone on the Mountain, on subjects from how best to handle potentially explosive artifacts to what to do in case of alien attack, advice from A to Z to letters of alien alphabets that Claire couldn't pronounce but certainly appreciated the advice spelled with them.
Nobody had given her any advice about what to do when they lost someone in the line of duty.
She'd coped with Kirkpatrick's death; poorly, maybe, but Jackson had come by the library every day, sometimes twice a day, for two weeks after Kirkpatrick died, so she'd had someone to talk to about it. But she couldn't call Sam Carter, or Jack O'Neill, and Teal'c was sweetly gentle, someone she liked a great deal, but not someone she called a friend. She drove home on auto-pilot, and sat in her car in the parking lot of her apartment building thinking, her brain on over-drive, until she was thinking such ridiculous things that she couldn't do anything but laugh.
Claire sat in the parking lot, behind the wheel of her car, and laughed until she started to cry, and then she put her head down on the steering wheel and wept for a very long time.
*
Claire's fourth year in the Mountain was hard. Jonas had only been with SG-1 for two weeks when he stepped into the library (effectively clearing the place; Claire couldn't deny that people were taking their time to warm to Jonas Quinn, and she knew that it had almost 100% to do with Daniel Jackson). He sat down across the table from Claire and looked at her carefully for a moment; she could feel his gaze on the top of her head, even as she kept her eyes focused on the fiddly amulets that SG-3 had brought her the day before.
If she didn't look up, it was almost like having Jackson back -- the even gaze, the quiet. She'd heard, from base gossip, that he was nothing like Jackson at all, except for the brains, but his quiet in the library was something that felt so much like Jackson that Claire's stomach clenched. "You don't like me very much," Jonas said.
"I don't know you," Claire said. The amulets were something like jade, and the writing on them was unfamiliar -- she still thought, I'll ask Jackson to help me with this, and then she remembered that she couldn't, and she looked up at Jonas.
"You liked Jackson a great deal," Jonas said.
"He was my friend," Claire said, and Jack O'Neill was walking around the place like a ghost, or worse -- like someone haunted. She went home every night and felt like she didn't have the right to mourn Daniel Jackson, not the way that SG-1 was mourning him, not the way that General Hammond and the rest of them who had been there since the beginning were mourning him.
Jonas was kind, and Claire had done nothing but avoid him since he'd left Kelowna and come through the gate to the SGC, to SG-1 who had a spot to fill, a scientist, a diplomat that they needed. She thought Jonas deserved better than the stiff, muted politeness that was all she could offer him, but she wasn't sure what else to offer. Jackson was the reason she had this job, and she felt bad that she thought this -- but Jonas Quinn seemed like a poor replacement. He was as gentle as Jackson, and smart.
He was someone Claire would have liked, if she hadn't resented him, and she had no good reason why she resented him.
Every time she looked at Jonas, she hated him, a little, and every time she hated him, a little, Claire felt like a terrible person.
She thought about the kindness everyone had shown her. About the grief she'd shared with every person in the Mountain, at one time or another, and about the way that Jonas had done nothing but try and fix the terrible wrongs that had happened to Daniel -- to SG-1.
Jonas said, "I understand that he was the friend of many people. I would have liked it if he had been mine."
"We miss him," Claire said. It sounded pedantic, a statement of the obvious, on her lips. She didn't know what else to say. She didn't know how to move past her grief. She didn't know how to verbalize her grief, so she could move past it.
And all she knew was that it wasn't fair to Jonas Quinn that she couldn't manage to like him.
"I am not trying to replace him," Jonas said.
"I know," Claire said. "I'm sorry. I can't -- I'm sorry."
It was the most words that Claire had said to anyone all at once since Jackson had died -- ascended -- disappeared out of their lives. It was like an awkward conversation with a boyfriend she was trying to break up with; it's not you, it's me.
"It's all right," Jonas said. "I understand."
He stayed with them a year, and he was always kind to Claire, even when all she could see in his face was a lack of Jackson. She hid for months, spending her time in the closets they called stacks, called storage space, and she watched everyone who passed through her space carefully. SG-1 wore calm, fierce faces when they came to see her, and Janet Fraiser prodded Claire, slowly, into seeing a psychiatrist.
Claire talked to Jonas every time he stepped into the library, because it was nothing he had done, nothing she could pin on him, and she slowly, slowly let go of her grief. He was as impossible to get books back from as Jackson had been -- he was slyly funny, and the word she always wanted to use when she thought of him was gentle.
She asked Janet, once, how anyone survived a life like this. It wasn't something that academia taught you; wasn't something that a cloistered life in libraries could explain. A year and unmitigated grief hung heavy in the air; it caught her by surprise sometimes, on quiet afternoons and early mornings, and it tasted bitter at the back of her throat.
Janet smiled at Claire, and said, "It's what we're trained to do. It's what the SGC does -- there's always a sacrifice that can and will be made. Daniel made more than his fair share. It's what he did."
The galaxy was infinite; a place full of infinite wonders, and infinite treasures, and infinite grief. It was never easy -- anyone who stood up was knocked back down as soon as they rose, unsteady, to their feet in any kind of triumph, or happiness.
The trick was to keep rising up.
*
Her fifth year was harder.
A month before Colonel O'Neill had the Ancient database downloaded into his brain again -- downloaded it into his brain on purpose, so Jackson wouldn't, if gossip turned to truth -- Claire was sitting in the mess with Janet Fraiser when she heard a Marine say, "What I can't figure out is why it always happens to SG-1."
Janet smiled into her cup of coffee, and Claire, who still got up some mornings and felt like she was going to work on a completely different planet, smiled with her. It had been a hard year. She had made some friends the year that Jackson was gone -- Janet Fraiser, one of the social scientists in Jackson's (she never got over thinking of the department as Jackson's) department, Major Jacobs, who had kept visiting her and never once hitting on her, which Claire appreciated -- and the Mountain had slowly, slowly grown scar tissue over the hole that Jackson had left.
And then SG-1 had found him, with no memories of anything that had happened, before or during or even after, and brought him home, freaked out and skittish like a wounded animal, and it felt like all the open wounds were bleeding freely again.
And there was O'Neill's clone, which had been weirdly hardest on Jackson, from what Claire heard, and three days after Janet had whispered, sotto voce, "That one must be new," to Claire in the mess, she was dead.
Sam Carter came to tell Claire what had happened, and then she had put a hand under Claire's arm and helped her out of her chair and driven her home. Claire didn't remember much of it -- remembered Carter standing in her living room, asking if Claire was going to be okay, remembered turning the tap on to run a bath but not forgetting that she'd done it until the bathroom flooded -- but what stayed in her mind, most clear, was that Carter's face stayed calm the whole time.
Claire remembered saying to her, "I don't know how you can stand it."
Carter had smiled, a tiny sad little smile, and said, "Most days, you don't." She'd hugged Claire -- uncharacteristic for Carter, Claire had thought -- and let herself out the front door.
Claire had wondered, then, why it always happened to SG-1. She felt as much in the dark as the Marine in the mess who had been promptly educated by six other Marines who had suffered through far worse -- far funnier, far stranger, far more we-don't-talk-this-ever -- things than a clone of Jack O'Neill.
It seemed like cause and effect, later, after the dog fight in Antarctica and O'Neill with the Asgard -- a Marine asks why things always happen to SG-1, and they lose Janet Fraiser, who never worked in the field unless she had to, and then they almost lose O'Neill.
Claire couldn't comprehend the grief that all four members of SG-1 must be carrying. In the weeks between Janet's death and the Ancient database, she watched Jackson carefully when he moved around the library. She looked for the cracks -- she sat at her worktable and felt like she was about to shatter, and she knew everything that Jackson had withstood.
She waited, quietly, for something to pull everything that SG-1 had built the last seven years to pieces, and nothing did.
The Ancient database in Colonel O'Neill's head was the first crisis Claire didn't just watch. She'd handed references to Jackson plenty of times while the klaxons cried out emergency around them, and apparently she'd done extensive research for O'Neill and Teal'c when they were stuck in the time loop three years earlier, but Jackson came to her, when they came back from the planet where O'Neill had taken the database. He had questions but no answers, and Jackson's face was as open and terrified as Claire had ever seen it when he stood in front of her and asked for help.
"I can't read Ancient," Claire said.
"But you can search," Jackson said, and Claire could do that. Half the things she'd needed to learn to do this job had been things no one even contemplated teaching in library school, but the other half were second nature after two years of school and seven years of working.
She searched, and Jackson read everything she brought him. Twenty-four hours in -- Claire had caught a catnap in the infirmary, missing Janet terribly while Colonel O'Neill's mind disintegrated and no one knew what to do -- Jackson looked up at her from his desk, surrounded by books that had been useless, and pieces of technology that had made things worse before they made them better, and he smiled at her, tired and sad at the eyes. Jackson said, "Thank you," and Claire had almost dropped the books in her arms, because after five years, it was the first time that anyone had said that to her.
She'd never felt unappreciated, not once in the whole time she was at the SGC, but at the end of that awful, heartbreaking year, Jackson vocalized his appreciation, and Claire had spent five years feeling like an alien lost somewhere in the galaxy and suddenly it was as if she had a map home through the stars.
They got O'Neill back, mostly whole, weeks later, and the tiny pieces of the dogfight she saw were enough to turn her stomach. There were days and weeks when Claire forgot that she was working for the military, working in the military, and tiny moments when she could never scrub away the images burned into her mind. The dogfight was one of the latter, and Claire dreamed about it for months -- for years -- afterwards.
The whole base went on stand-down after Antarctica, and Claire stomached two days alone in her apartment before she drove herself back to the Mountain and started sorting through the search results that her days with Jackson had produced. She had, by now, come to like the Mountain quiet, quiet as it was in the weeks after Antarctica. Everyone was in mourning, reeling from weeks of punches to the gut, and she worked in silence and solitude for almost eight hours before her stomach rumbled ominously.
She was stretching, cracking her back and rolling her head between her hands, thinking about maybe going to get some food and maybe just trying to piece more of this Ancient technology story together, when Jackson appeared in her doorway and paused. "Jackson," Claire said. "I didn't know you were around."
Jackson looked awkward, trapped in the doorway like he was caught in a magnetic field, and he cleared his throat and said, "I hope -- I hope I didn't say anything unforgivable while we were working together."
Claire blinked, because Jackson had said far from that -- he'd said almost nothing, except to thank her. "No," Claire said. "Not at -- you said thank you, and that was about it."
"Well," Jackson said. "It was -- thank you again. For everything you've done. For Jack."
"It's just my job," Claire said.
Jackson smiled, tiny and tight but true. "It's all our jobs," he said. "I think Jack would even be the first to admit that. Thank you again."
Claire shrugged. "I can't make heads or tails of the results I got you."
"That's all right," Jackson said. "It's enough that you got them." Claire heard, It's enough that we got Jack back. "Come on, we'll get a cup of coffee and you can tell me what you think we have."
The Mountain was quiet, and Jackson was quiet. The commissary was quiet. Claire held her coffee in her hands and thought about the fragility of human life, the infinite nature of the universe.
It was a very hard year.
*
She had heard, before the Air Force hired her to catalog almost 10 years' worth of highly classified scientific papers that were jammed, unrecorded and unorganized, into a closet-sized lab at Area 51, that once upon a time the whole place had gotten caught in a time loop for something like six months straight, the same 14 hours over and over again. Dr. McKay, and a Marine who'd been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time in some lab, had been the ones to break them out of it, and only because McKay violated about 14 laws of physics that wouldn't be changed until the whole experiment was declassified.
Claire had been stuck in a dead-end cataloging job at a community college when the Air Force came calling for her, mostly because someone had found a paper she'd written for a class she'd forgotten about, about the problems of cataloging foreign languages in English language catalogs.
It was far stranger when an MP brought her the tape that they'd recovered in Egypt, and far stranger when Dr. McKay -- who had told her loud and long that librarians were people who couldn't get real Masters' degrees -- sat down next to her for the first time ever, in her time at the Area 51, to explain what it meant.
She'd only been at Area 51 for a year when they found the tape in Egypt. McKay explained that they had to get these people -- a team called SG-1, that traveled through the galaxy making contact with alien cultures -- back. "You mean," she said, because physics had never been Claire's strong point in school, which was only part of why she'd gone into history and then into library science, not that she'd tell McKay that. "You mean, somewhere else, some other Claire Carson -- some other me has a better life?"
McKay snorted, and snatched the tape out of the VCR Claire had fought tooth-and-nail to get installed in the library; Area 51 thought it wanted a librarian, but really it wanted a trained monkey who could write Library of Congress call numbers on the spines of irrelevant books. The L of C subject headings weren't even useful to her, because the work the scientists were doing was so far beyond anything anyone thought existed, but she didn't know how to get anything better.
"You could say that," McKay said nastily. "But it's probably just as pathetic as your life is here."
McKay didn't come by the library often, which was a good thing because he usually left Claire crying when he did. She thought about the tape, and how she'd have to catalog it when McKay and Hammond finally gave it up -- personal memoir, maybe, or alternate timelines, or time travel, or things that shouldn't exist but do. There weren't enough sub-categories in the world to catalog this.
McKay had given her the details, because -- she supposed -- someone had made him. Her name wasn't on the tape anywhere, and it made her sad, because maybe she wasn't at the SGC in the other world. Maybe she was still stuck in an awful job somewhere she hated. Maybe she was dead. Claire mined the gossip network for the rest of the details; people who couldn't believe that Jack O'Neill -- O'Neill, that drunk, in charge of the whole place -- looked as good as he did, and people who didn't believe in any of it, except that it was real and laid out there on technology they recognized, but shouldn't have been buried in Egypt. There were a million things that Claire had never believed in before she'd started working at Area 51, and both time travel and the power of gossip had been among them.
When she got home -- early, because it was clear that no one was going to ask for her help, and that was no surprise at all -- she opened a bottle of wine, sat on the couch, and pondered the wonders of the galaxy. She made up ways her life might have been different, might have been more significant, might have changed, and she fell asleep with the bottle in her hand and her face buried in the couch.
When she woke up the next day, she was hungover and she'd glued her face to the couch with drool. The bottle of wine was still clutched in her hand, and the sun through the windows hurt her eyes. She put her face back in the couch, because no one was going to look for her at work, because she was inconsequential and tiny in the space of the universe, and Claire went back to sleep and tried not to dream of better lives than this.
Because it was SG-1, things went almost back to normal, after. O'Neill reported to anyone who would listen that there were fish in his pond, it was true, but they weren't a threat to the fabric of the universe. "Daniel is, maybe," he said to Claire off-hand while they stood in line for pie together, "but the fish are nothing but a nice little gift, as a thank you for saving everything again."
Mostly nothing changed at the SGC, and then it did.
Lt. Colonel Cameron Mitchell came into the library the first day he was in the Mountain. Claire had spent two weeks retrieving books, and papers, and artifacts -- so much that she eventually had to call a couple of Marines to help her move it, and she'd said to Jackson, Jesus, Jackson, where'd you keep all this in that office, and Jackson had just shrugged and grinned -- from Jackson's office, and from Carter's labs.
Like collecting pieces of a life, and returning them to their proper places, but Claire knew better than to think that life was as neat and organized as her library (before a Jackson-shaped whirlwind off on a crazy tangent came through). Every piece she picked up from somewhere it didn't belong, and every piece she put back into what the catalog said was its proper place, it felt wrong. O'Neill was already gone; he'd been gone a couple of weeks, to D.C., and General Landry was a great guy, but the Mountain felt like an alien planet again.
Claire almost just left everything that had strayed from her library wherever it had strayed to; it seemed, to her, that all those things had probably found better homes than she could find for them, and every item she shelved just made her sad.
People left the SGC all the time -- retirement, or injury, or ... death. Claire had been there going on 7 years, and she knew that just because you smiled at a cute airman in the commissary one afternoon didn't mean he'd be there the next afternoon to smile at again.
The scientists shifted out to Area 51; half the Marines she knew had gone through the wormhole to the Pegasus Galaxy.
Plenty of things changed every day, and Claire had gotten used to that -- but she hadn't gotten used to Teal'c being gone, or Carter being gone, or O'Neill being gone, or Jackson getting ready to leave. Things could change without things Changing. Claire wasn't ready for things to change with that capital C sound at the beginning of it.
She wasn't ready to have to get used to something else; she'd spent six years getting used to "just one more thing", just "something else", every single day, and after six years she thought she deserved a break.
She definitely wasn't going to get used to Cameron Mitchell, no matter how charming and friendly he was -- mostly because he was charming, and friendly, and smiled at her in a way that she would have thought was flirty, if she hadn't seen him smile that at everybody in the whole damn Mountain. Everybody knew that Cam Mitchell was coming to take over SG-1 -- the gossip tree never failed.
Nobody had mentioned the cute, charming, flirty thing, which made Cameron Mitchell just about as different from General O'Neill as somebody could be.
Claire was set to hate Mitchell on sight -- because after six years, she'd gotten used to O'Neill's crabby charm, and she'd gotten used to the way he lurked around behind Jackson like Jackson would get into trouble if O'Neill let Jackson out of his sight. Cameron Mitchell was like an overgrown puppy, and General O'Neill was like ... well, something else.
Claire was carrying a heap of dictionaries (representing eight different languages and two different Chinese dialects) down the hall from Jackson's office, wondering how her brain had gotten stuck comparing people to dogs when she hadn't even met Mitchell yet. She was trying not to hang up on the fact that everything was changing (everything changes every day, she said to herself, and then she said back to herself, but this is a different kind of change) and so maybe she was thinking a little wildly.
Outside of the box, she heard O'Neill say at the back of her head. It's the only way Daniel thinks, we kinda got used to it.
Mitchell took the dictionaries out of her hands the minute she walked through the door. "Let me get those," he said, with that sweet little indefinable Southern accent that half the women on base were whispering about.
"You must be Mitchell," Claire said, and this was what it had come down to: Claire was the old hand here.
Mitchell was the puppy. She knew he was coming to lead SG-1, and she wondered, briefly, loading his arms down with dictionaries, if he was going to be the first person since Major (now Lt. Col.) Jacobs to ask her to go off-world.
"I sure am," Mitchell said. "Fresh meat joining SG-1. And you're Dr. Carson, the librarian."
Claire laughed. "Who's perpetuating the Ph.D. myth? I should find that out. I'm just Claire, Colonel."
She thought, if he asks me, I might say yes.
She hadn't thought about going off-world since she'd been taking Vicodin for her broken ribs and Jacobs had offered her the standing spot. He asked her, once in a while, with half started sentences -- SG-4 is going to P4Z on Thursday ... -- in the commissary, and Claire would have thought she was hitting on her and not just respecting her professionally, if she hadn't met his wife, and his kids, and adored them all as much as she adored Jacobs.
Or if he'd ever called her anything other than Carson, and she'd ever called him anything other than Jacobs.
Six years and Claire had a short list of things that still surprised her about the SGC: item one was everything ever, and item two was that more people didn't end up sleeping together. In six years, only Kirkpatrick had ever asked her on a date -- and most days, Jacobs hinting that Claire should go off-world seemed more normal than Jacobs asking her to go out with him.
"Well, then," he said, "I'm just Cam."
"No can do," Claire said, because she didn't call any of the military personnel by their first names and she'd stuck to that for six years; a slow-voiced, bright-eyed Southern boy wasn't going to change that. He was changing enough, without changing her habits. "But you can be Mitchell, if that's better than your rank."
He laughed, threw his head back and howled, and pounded on the table, sliding the Mandarin dictionary down onto the table beside the Arabic dictionary. "Jackson said you were funny," Mitchell said.
Claire raised her eyebrows and stuck her hands into a box that Carter had dropped off two weeks ago, that Claire was only now getting around to looking at.
"Well, okay," Mitchell said. "Jackson said you were the person to talk to, because everybody on SG-1 should make your acquaintance. So here I am, acquainting."
"Well, it's nice to meet you," Claire said.
"Nice to meet you, too," Mitchell said. "I guess this'll be more Jackson's territory than mine, but it's good to know where things are if I need them. Still gotta hope that I can get the band back together."
Claire blinked at him. Everyone in the Mountain knew that Jackson was leaving for Atlantis on the next Daedalus run -- otherwise, Claire would never have been in the position to retrieve all the best dictionaries in the whole Mountain. She looked at the dictionaries and then back up at Mitchell, who smiled at her curiously and didn't say anything.
Change happened. Gossip kept going. Somebody would straighten Mitchell out, or maybe Jackson had changed his plans. If he had, Claire would hear about it in the commissary, or she'd know because the dictionaries disappeared back to Jackson's office. "Sure," Claire said. "It always has been."
"He's the guy for research," Mitchell said cheerfully. "Can't have SG-1 without him."
"I didn't think so," Claire said, and that was at least true. When Daniel was gone, the Marines called the team and Jonas "SG-1, mark two," and she'd already heard "Mitchell's SG-1" and "SG-1, mark three" whispered in the hallways of the Mountain. SG-1 was SG-1: O'Neill's carefully cultivated crankiness; Carter's enthusiasm and ready smile; Jackson's brains and passion; Teal'c's unflappable calm. Claire felt bad for Mitchell in that moment -- he was smiling earnestly at her, and everyone in the Mountain said Mitchell was coming to lead SG-1, but Mitchell had said that he was joining SG-1.
She looked at him carefully, his fresh uniform and his bright smile. Claire wondered what he really wanted -- she wondered what he needed, from her. No one came to see her unless they needed answers to something.
Claire didn't want to go off-world, and that wasn't the question Mitchell was asking her.
Six years, and she'd gotten pretty good at reading the people who came into the library. People liked librarians -- librarians had answers, and half the time people didn't want answers that could be found in books. Mitchell needed some answer from her, but she wasn't sure what the question was.
"Jackson's pretty good people," Mitchell said.
"Everyone here is," Claire said, because after six years of watching other people save the world, she knew that much. Everyone here was good people, because you had to be.
Mitchell seemed like pretty good people.
"You'll be okay," Claire said. "It gets less weird."
Mitchell grinned again, wide. "That's what I heard," he said. He patted her on the back, and left the lab. Claire stacked the dictionaries carefully on the table, next to Jackson's personal copy of Budge (savaged in the margins, and bequeathed to Claire because the writing and the broken spine and the dog-eared pages made her cringe so fiercely), and went back down the hall to get another load.
*
author's notes: this is for ln, with a great deal of love and affection, on her birthday. she started this, back in september, when she asked me for the top five cataloging and/or classification problems faced by the sgc librarian. as much as i tore my hair out over this story, it was always, always, a labor of love. happy birthday, ln. i adore you.
t. shouldered well over half the burden for this one; not only did she do standard beta duty, but she force-fed me episodes, fixed my physics, listened not only patiently but cheerfully while i threw horribly childish temper tantrums on im, in her living room, and while driving, and she kept me from flinging myself off the top of the carolina library in despair about 14 different times. i owe her a million times over. love, otp.
The day the klaxons went off and Claire's world shifted decidedly to the left, she spilled coffee on her shirt while she was driving to the Mountain, and dropped a brick on her foot trying to move it from one table to another.
Word spread fast in the Mountain -- partly because it had to, in case of crazy alien infectious diseases, and partly because it was a tiny closed society. Nobody had anything better to do than gossip. Claire had never thought she was good with people -- she was good with books, that's why she was a cataloger and not a reference librarian -- and she'd never thought that she could read intent and meaning into behavior -- that's why she was single, plus the job hours sucked -- but sitting in the library, nursing her bruised toes and staring out into the hallway instead of working, she could hear the tone of voice that was being passed around.
Low, serious, scared -- not the sort of voice that gleefully passed around the news that SG-1 had come back from off-world without their pants, or the sort that flew into the library to tell her that SG-4 had gotten mixed up in some ceremony than left them all married to each other.
Claire didn't get mission briefings. She knew if a team was going off-world only if someone mentioned it to her in passing, and she didn't keep up with even that schedule all that well. Some librarians might have worried if their regulars hadn't come in for a few days; Claire just assumed that those regulars were up to their asses in mud somewhere else in the galaxy.
She knew that SG-1 was going off-world to some highly developed planet because Jackson had told her so. He had brought his coffee by that morning, ostensibly to check on something in one of the reference books she'd started refusing to let out of her sight, but mostly, she had thought at the time, because he wanted to talk to someone about the mission and Colonel O'Neill was tired of listening to him. He'd brought her a list of call numbers, things he wanted her to pull from the archives, and he'd brought her a cup of coffee to go with his own.
She'd been happy to see him.
Two and a half years, and Claire knew her role in the operations of the SGC: she did her job and she enjoyed it, both the cataloging and even the parts where she had to do reference work for people, which had surprised her. She liked some of her coworkers and didn't like others, normal for any job. And she -- even more than Janet Fraiser or MacKenzie, the on-base shrink, and she only knew this because Janet told her, and then laughed at Claire's surprised, unhappy face -- was the designated listener for the entire Mountain.
Claire had never thought of herself as quiet, but when she stopped and thought about it, she supposed she was quieter than half the scientists in the place -- certainly quieter than Jackson.
Two and a half years, and she'd gotten to like Jackson -- gotten to think of him almost as a friend. He talked to her like she was an equal, like he didn't have a million more degrees than she did, like what he got up and did everyday wasn't more important than what she did. It was, and she knew it. Claire's self-esteem was pretty good, but she knew that she cataloged books, and he fought on the front lines for the defense of Earth.
"They're close to the development of Earth in the '40s," he had said to her. "We don't know much more than that, but the place has energy signals that Sam says are through the roof. She's pretty excited."
"What about you?" Claire had said. She didn't ask him questions very often, because she didn't need to. He told her everything she wanted to know, and sometimes more.
Jackson shrugged and smiled. "I won't know until I get there."
"Isn't that the way it always is?" Claire had said.
Jackson had smiled again, and slid off his stool and picked up his coffee mug. "It is," he said, and then, "I'll see you tomorrow, Claire. Can you pull those records for me before then?"
"Sure, Dr. Jackson," Claire said.
"Daniel," he said.
"Daniel," she said, and he'd ambled out of the room and she'd dropped a brick on her foot and then the klaxons had gone off.
No one had come into the library yet. The gossip was still happening in the hallways, too low for Claire to hear clearly, but she'd heard Jackson's name more than once, and she'd heard radiation poisoning more than once.
Sometimes Claire got up from her table and went out into the hallway to ask what was going on, and the Marines always told her happily.
This time, she stayed sitting down. Didn't move. Didn't want to hear the news that was whistling through the corridors like the sort of wind that came down from Canada before St. Paul was covered in two feet of snow.
No one stepped into the library and hissed the gossip at her. Claire spent the whole day flexing her bare, bruised toes, trying not to picture worst cases, and listening to the cadence of the whispers outside her door.
Janet Fraiser came and told Claire what had happened, her face streaked with tears; basic facts, the fact that Jackson was gone. Later, Jacobs came and told her the details. That it was gory, and awful; that Jackson had been a hero, and in pain; that the hissing gossip floating through the hallways said that something had happened, at the end.
That O'Neill, before he had unearthed a bottle of gin at the bottom of Jackson's desk and gotten stinking, knee-meltingly drunk and broken down in the gate room, had said that Daniel wasn't dead -- gone, but not dead. Jacobs said that O'Neill said Ascended. Claire knew the word -- knew the word in the context of the Ancients, knew the context of the word within the SGC.
It made no sense.
She didn't cry, because it made no sense.
Jacobs patted her awkwardly on the arm, and left Claire and her bruised toes to the quiet of the library. It was late -- past midnight, according to the clock on her laptop, but even past midnight the SGC bustled with activity. The Marines on the night shift were as noisy as the ones on the day shifts, and the scientists kept no hours that could be called routine.
But that night, it was quiet and still, no conversations in the hallway outside her door. Claire worked. She picked up the pile of things she'd saved to ask Jackson about when he had the time to answer her questions, and started at the top and worked her way through them.
Even if she was wrong, the only person who would have known was Jackson -- and he wasn't there to check her work anymore.
Claire left the Mountain at 4 in the morning; when she drove out into the air, stopped at the check point and signed herself out, it was almost dawn. The horizon was pink at the edges, and the moon was still hanging high in the sky.
The trouble with her job was that she didn't know who to call to talk about this. No one she talked to on a regular basis could help -- she could say, a friend died, and get sympathy, but there wasn't a single person outside of the Mountain she could talk to about the horror of it, the fear that only a place like the SGC could infuse in whispered gossip, the way the reality was worse than anything that she'd heard half-whispered during the day.
Claire was so tired, and lonely. She thought of Jacobs saying that O'Neill had gotten quietly drunk and then less quietly raged in the gate room until he had worn himself out; how General Hammond had let him. She thought of Janet Fraiser standing in the library, grey with grief but doing what she thought of as her duty, telling Claire about the death of a friend, and she thought of Sam Carter, standing behind Janet, face drawn shut and arms wrapped around herself as though she was freezing cold.
She drove down from the Mountain by herself, radio off and windows rolled down, and she listened to the silence of 4 in the morning. Claire had gotten advice from everyone on the Mountain, on subjects from how best to handle potentially explosive artifacts to what to do in case of alien attack, advice from A to Z to letters of alien alphabets that Claire couldn't pronounce but certainly appreciated the advice spelled with them.
Nobody had given her any advice about what to do when they lost someone in the line of duty.
She'd coped with Kirkpatrick's death; poorly, maybe, but Jackson had come by the library every day, sometimes twice a day, for two weeks after Kirkpatrick died, so she'd had someone to talk to about it. But she couldn't call Sam Carter, or Jack O'Neill, and Teal'c was sweetly gentle, someone she liked a great deal, but not someone she called a friend. She drove home on auto-pilot, and sat in her car in the parking lot of her apartment building thinking, her brain on over-drive, until she was thinking such ridiculous things that she couldn't do anything but laugh.
Claire sat in the parking lot, behind the wheel of her car, and laughed until she started to cry, and then she put her head down on the steering wheel and wept for a very long time.
*
Claire's fourth year in the Mountain was hard. Jonas had only been with SG-1 for two weeks when he stepped into the library (effectively clearing the place; Claire couldn't deny that people were taking their time to warm to Jonas Quinn, and she knew that it had almost 100% to do with Daniel Jackson). He sat down across the table from Claire and looked at her carefully for a moment; she could feel his gaze on the top of her head, even as she kept her eyes focused on the fiddly amulets that SG-3 had brought her the day before.
If she didn't look up, it was almost like having Jackson back -- the even gaze, the quiet. She'd heard, from base gossip, that he was nothing like Jackson at all, except for the brains, but his quiet in the library was something that felt so much like Jackson that Claire's stomach clenched. "You don't like me very much," Jonas said.
"I don't know you," Claire said. The amulets were something like jade, and the writing on them was unfamiliar -- she still thought, I'll ask Jackson to help me with this, and then she remembered that she couldn't, and she looked up at Jonas.
"You liked Jackson a great deal," Jonas said.
"He was my friend," Claire said, and Jack O'Neill was walking around the place like a ghost, or worse -- like someone haunted. She went home every night and felt like she didn't have the right to mourn Daniel Jackson, not the way that SG-1 was mourning him, not the way that General Hammond and the rest of them who had been there since the beginning were mourning him.
Jonas was kind, and Claire had done nothing but avoid him since he'd left Kelowna and come through the gate to the SGC, to SG-1 who had a spot to fill, a scientist, a diplomat that they needed. She thought Jonas deserved better than the stiff, muted politeness that was all she could offer him, but she wasn't sure what else to offer. Jackson was the reason she had this job, and she felt bad that she thought this -- but Jonas Quinn seemed like a poor replacement. He was as gentle as Jackson, and smart.
He was someone Claire would have liked, if she hadn't resented him, and she had no good reason why she resented him.
Every time she looked at Jonas, she hated him, a little, and every time she hated him, a little, Claire felt like a terrible person.
She thought about the kindness everyone had shown her. About the grief she'd shared with every person in the Mountain, at one time or another, and about the way that Jonas had done nothing but try and fix the terrible wrongs that had happened to Daniel -- to SG-1.
Jonas said, "I understand that he was the friend of many people. I would have liked it if he had been mine."
"We miss him," Claire said. It sounded pedantic, a statement of the obvious, on her lips. She didn't know what else to say. She didn't know how to move past her grief. She didn't know how to verbalize her grief, so she could move past it.
And all she knew was that it wasn't fair to Jonas Quinn that she couldn't manage to like him.
"I am not trying to replace him," Jonas said.
"I know," Claire said. "I'm sorry. I can't -- I'm sorry."
It was the most words that Claire had said to anyone all at once since Jackson had died -- ascended -- disappeared out of their lives. It was like an awkward conversation with a boyfriend she was trying to break up with; it's not you, it's me.
"It's all right," Jonas said. "I understand."
He stayed with them a year, and he was always kind to Claire, even when all she could see in his face was a lack of Jackson. She hid for months, spending her time in the closets they called stacks, called storage space, and she watched everyone who passed through her space carefully. SG-1 wore calm, fierce faces when they came to see her, and Janet Fraiser prodded Claire, slowly, into seeing a psychiatrist.
Claire talked to Jonas every time he stepped into the library, because it was nothing he had done, nothing she could pin on him, and she slowly, slowly let go of her grief. He was as impossible to get books back from as Jackson had been -- he was slyly funny, and the word she always wanted to use when she thought of him was gentle.
She asked Janet, once, how anyone survived a life like this. It wasn't something that academia taught you; wasn't something that a cloistered life in libraries could explain. A year and unmitigated grief hung heavy in the air; it caught her by surprise sometimes, on quiet afternoons and early mornings, and it tasted bitter at the back of her throat.
Janet smiled at Claire, and said, "It's what we're trained to do. It's what the SGC does -- there's always a sacrifice that can and will be made. Daniel made more than his fair share. It's what he did."
The galaxy was infinite; a place full of infinite wonders, and infinite treasures, and infinite grief. It was never easy -- anyone who stood up was knocked back down as soon as they rose, unsteady, to their feet in any kind of triumph, or happiness.
The trick was to keep rising up.
*
Her fifth year was harder.
A month before Colonel O'Neill had the Ancient database downloaded into his brain again -- downloaded it into his brain on purpose, so Jackson wouldn't, if gossip turned to truth -- Claire was sitting in the mess with Janet Fraiser when she heard a Marine say, "What I can't figure out is why it always happens to SG-1."
Janet smiled into her cup of coffee, and Claire, who still got up some mornings and felt like she was going to work on a completely different planet, smiled with her. It had been a hard year. She had made some friends the year that Jackson was gone -- Janet Fraiser, one of the social scientists in Jackson's (she never got over thinking of the department as Jackson's) department, Major Jacobs, who had kept visiting her and never once hitting on her, which Claire appreciated -- and the Mountain had slowly, slowly grown scar tissue over the hole that Jackson had left.
And then SG-1 had found him, with no memories of anything that had happened, before or during or even after, and brought him home, freaked out and skittish like a wounded animal, and it felt like all the open wounds were bleeding freely again.
And there was O'Neill's clone, which had been weirdly hardest on Jackson, from what Claire heard, and three days after Janet had whispered, sotto voce, "That one must be new," to Claire in the mess, she was dead.
Sam Carter came to tell Claire what had happened, and then she had put a hand under Claire's arm and helped her out of her chair and driven her home. Claire didn't remember much of it -- remembered Carter standing in her living room, asking if Claire was going to be okay, remembered turning the tap on to run a bath but not forgetting that she'd done it until the bathroom flooded -- but what stayed in her mind, most clear, was that Carter's face stayed calm the whole time.
Claire remembered saying to her, "I don't know how you can stand it."
Carter had smiled, a tiny sad little smile, and said, "Most days, you don't." She'd hugged Claire -- uncharacteristic for Carter, Claire had thought -- and let herself out the front door.
Claire had wondered, then, why it always happened to SG-1. She felt as much in the dark as the Marine in the mess who had been promptly educated by six other Marines who had suffered through far worse -- far funnier, far stranger, far more we-don't-talk-this-ever -- things than a clone of Jack O'Neill.
It seemed like cause and effect, later, after the dog fight in Antarctica and O'Neill with the Asgard -- a Marine asks why things always happen to SG-1, and they lose Janet Fraiser, who never worked in the field unless she had to, and then they almost lose O'Neill.
Claire couldn't comprehend the grief that all four members of SG-1 must be carrying. In the weeks between Janet's death and the Ancient database, she watched Jackson carefully when he moved around the library. She looked for the cracks -- she sat at her worktable and felt like she was about to shatter, and she knew everything that Jackson had withstood.
She waited, quietly, for something to pull everything that SG-1 had built the last seven years to pieces, and nothing did.
The Ancient database in Colonel O'Neill's head was the first crisis Claire didn't just watch. She'd handed references to Jackson plenty of times while the klaxons cried out emergency around them, and apparently she'd done extensive research for O'Neill and Teal'c when they were stuck in the time loop three years earlier, but Jackson came to her, when they came back from the planet where O'Neill had taken the database. He had questions but no answers, and Jackson's face was as open and terrified as Claire had ever seen it when he stood in front of her and asked for help.
"I can't read Ancient," Claire said.
"But you can search," Jackson said, and Claire could do that. Half the things she'd needed to learn to do this job had been things no one even contemplated teaching in library school, but the other half were second nature after two years of school and seven years of working.
She searched, and Jackson read everything she brought him. Twenty-four hours in -- Claire had caught a catnap in the infirmary, missing Janet terribly while Colonel O'Neill's mind disintegrated and no one knew what to do -- Jackson looked up at her from his desk, surrounded by books that had been useless, and pieces of technology that had made things worse before they made them better, and he smiled at her, tired and sad at the eyes. Jackson said, "Thank you," and Claire had almost dropped the books in her arms, because after five years, it was the first time that anyone had said that to her.
She'd never felt unappreciated, not once in the whole time she was at the SGC, but at the end of that awful, heartbreaking year, Jackson vocalized his appreciation, and Claire had spent five years feeling like an alien lost somewhere in the galaxy and suddenly it was as if she had a map home through the stars.
They got O'Neill back, mostly whole, weeks later, and the tiny pieces of the dogfight she saw were enough to turn her stomach. There were days and weeks when Claire forgot that she was working for the military, working in the military, and tiny moments when she could never scrub away the images burned into her mind. The dogfight was one of the latter, and Claire dreamed about it for months -- for years -- afterwards.
The whole base went on stand-down after Antarctica, and Claire stomached two days alone in her apartment before she drove herself back to the Mountain and started sorting through the search results that her days with Jackson had produced. She had, by now, come to like the Mountain quiet, quiet as it was in the weeks after Antarctica. Everyone was in mourning, reeling from weeks of punches to the gut, and she worked in silence and solitude for almost eight hours before her stomach rumbled ominously.
She was stretching, cracking her back and rolling her head between her hands, thinking about maybe going to get some food and maybe just trying to piece more of this Ancient technology story together, when Jackson appeared in her doorway and paused. "Jackson," Claire said. "I didn't know you were around."
Jackson looked awkward, trapped in the doorway like he was caught in a magnetic field, and he cleared his throat and said, "I hope -- I hope I didn't say anything unforgivable while we were working together."
Claire blinked, because Jackson had said far from that -- he'd said almost nothing, except to thank her. "No," Claire said. "Not at -- you said thank you, and that was about it."
"Well," Jackson said. "It was -- thank you again. For everything you've done. For Jack."
"It's just my job," Claire said.
Jackson smiled, tiny and tight but true. "It's all our jobs," he said. "I think Jack would even be the first to admit that. Thank you again."
Claire shrugged. "I can't make heads or tails of the results I got you."
"That's all right," Jackson said. "It's enough that you got them." Claire heard, It's enough that we got Jack back. "Come on, we'll get a cup of coffee and you can tell me what you think we have."
The Mountain was quiet, and Jackson was quiet. The commissary was quiet. Claire held her coffee in her hands and thought about the fragility of human life, the infinite nature of the universe.
It was a very hard year.
*
She had heard, before the Air Force hired her to catalog almost 10 years' worth of highly classified scientific papers that were jammed, unrecorded and unorganized, into a closet-sized lab at Area 51, that once upon a time the whole place had gotten caught in a time loop for something like six months straight, the same 14 hours over and over again. Dr. McKay, and a Marine who'd been standing in the wrong place at the wrong time in some lab, had been the ones to break them out of it, and only because McKay violated about 14 laws of physics that wouldn't be changed until the whole experiment was declassified.
Claire had been stuck in a dead-end cataloging job at a community college when the Air Force came calling for her, mostly because someone had found a paper she'd written for a class she'd forgotten about, about the problems of cataloging foreign languages in English language catalogs.
It was far stranger when an MP brought her the tape that they'd recovered in Egypt, and far stranger when Dr. McKay -- who had told her loud and long that librarians were people who couldn't get real Masters' degrees -- sat down next to her for the first time ever, in her time at the Area 51, to explain what it meant.
She'd only been at Area 51 for a year when they found the tape in Egypt. McKay explained that they had to get these people -- a team called SG-1, that traveled through the galaxy making contact with alien cultures -- back. "You mean," she said, because physics had never been Claire's strong point in school, which was only part of why she'd gone into history and then into library science, not that she'd tell McKay that. "You mean, somewhere else, some other Claire Carson -- some other me has a better life?"
McKay snorted, and snatched the tape out of the VCR Claire had fought tooth-and-nail to get installed in the library; Area 51 thought it wanted a librarian, but really it wanted a trained monkey who could write Library of Congress call numbers on the spines of irrelevant books. The L of C subject headings weren't even useful to her, because the work the scientists were doing was so far beyond anything anyone thought existed, but she didn't know how to get anything better.
"You could say that," McKay said nastily. "But it's probably just as pathetic as your life is here."
McKay didn't come by the library often, which was a good thing because he usually left Claire crying when he did. She thought about the tape, and how she'd have to catalog it when McKay and Hammond finally gave it up -- personal memoir, maybe, or alternate timelines, or time travel, or things that shouldn't exist but do. There weren't enough sub-categories in the world to catalog this.
McKay had given her the details, because -- she supposed -- someone had made him. Her name wasn't on the tape anywhere, and it made her sad, because maybe she wasn't at the SGC in the other world. Maybe she was still stuck in an awful job somewhere she hated. Maybe she was dead. Claire mined the gossip network for the rest of the details; people who couldn't believe that Jack O'Neill -- O'Neill, that drunk, in charge of the whole place -- looked as good as he did, and people who didn't believe in any of it, except that it was real and laid out there on technology they recognized, but shouldn't have been buried in Egypt. There were a million things that Claire had never believed in before she'd started working at Area 51, and both time travel and the power of gossip had been among them.
When she got home -- early, because it was clear that no one was going to ask for her help, and that was no surprise at all -- she opened a bottle of wine, sat on the couch, and pondered the wonders of the galaxy. She made up ways her life might have been different, might have been more significant, might have changed, and she fell asleep with the bottle in her hand and her face buried in the couch.
When she woke up the next day, she was hungover and she'd glued her face to the couch with drool. The bottle of wine was still clutched in her hand, and the sun through the windows hurt her eyes. She put her face back in the couch, because no one was going to look for her at work, because she was inconsequential and tiny in the space of the universe, and Claire went back to sleep and tried not to dream of better lives than this.
Because it was SG-1, things went almost back to normal, after. O'Neill reported to anyone who would listen that there were fish in his pond, it was true, but they weren't a threat to the fabric of the universe. "Daniel is, maybe," he said to Claire off-hand while they stood in line for pie together, "but the fish are nothing but a nice little gift, as a thank you for saving everything again."
Mostly nothing changed at the SGC, and then it did.
Lt. Colonel Cameron Mitchell came into the library the first day he was in the Mountain. Claire had spent two weeks retrieving books, and papers, and artifacts -- so much that she eventually had to call a couple of Marines to help her move it, and she'd said to Jackson, Jesus, Jackson, where'd you keep all this in that office, and Jackson had just shrugged and grinned -- from Jackson's office, and from Carter's labs.
Like collecting pieces of a life, and returning them to their proper places, but Claire knew better than to think that life was as neat and organized as her library (before a Jackson-shaped whirlwind off on a crazy tangent came through). Every piece she picked up from somewhere it didn't belong, and every piece she put back into what the catalog said was its proper place, it felt wrong. O'Neill was already gone; he'd been gone a couple of weeks, to D.C., and General Landry was a great guy, but the Mountain felt like an alien planet again.
Claire almost just left everything that had strayed from her library wherever it had strayed to; it seemed, to her, that all those things had probably found better homes than she could find for them, and every item she shelved just made her sad.
People left the SGC all the time -- retirement, or injury, or ... death. Claire had been there going on 7 years, and she knew that just because you smiled at a cute airman in the commissary one afternoon didn't mean he'd be there the next afternoon to smile at again.
The scientists shifted out to Area 51; half the Marines she knew had gone through the wormhole to the Pegasus Galaxy.
Plenty of things changed every day, and Claire had gotten used to that -- but she hadn't gotten used to Teal'c being gone, or Carter being gone, or O'Neill being gone, or Jackson getting ready to leave. Things could change without things Changing. Claire wasn't ready for things to change with that capital C sound at the beginning of it.
She wasn't ready to have to get used to something else; she'd spent six years getting used to "just one more thing", just "something else", every single day, and after six years she thought she deserved a break.
She definitely wasn't going to get used to Cameron Mitchell, no matter how charming and friendly he was -- mostly because he was charming, and friendly, and smiled at her in a way that she would have thought was flirty, if she hadn't seen him smile that at everybody in the whole damn Mountain. Everybody knew that Cam Mitchell was coming to take over SG-1 -- the gossip tree never failed.
Nobody had mentioned the cute, charming, flirty thing, which made Cameron Mitchell just about as different from General O'Neill as somebody could be.
Claire was set to hate Mitchell on sight -- because after six years, she'd gotten used to O'Neill's crabby charm, and she'd gotten used to the way he lurked around behind Jackson like Jackson would get into trouble if O'Neill let Jackson out of his sight. Cameron Mitchell was like an overgrown puppy, and General O'Neill was like ... well, something else.
Claire was carrying a heap of dictionaries (representing eight different languages and two different Chinese dialects) down the hall from Jackson's office, wondering how her brain had gotten stuck comparing people to dogs when she hadn't even met Mitchell yet. She was trying not to hang up on the fact that everything was changing (everything changes every day, she said to herself, and then she said back to herself, but this is a different kind of change) and so maybe she was thinking a little wildly.
Outside of the box, she heard O'Neill say at the back of her head. It's the only way Daniel thinks, we kinda got used to it.
Mitchell took the dictionaries out of her hands the minute she walked through the door. "Let me get those," he said, with that sweet little indefinable Southern accent that half the women on base were whispering about.
"You must be Mitchell," Claire said, and this was what it had come down to: Claire was the old hand here.
Mitchell was the puppy. She knew he was coming to lead SG-1, and she wondered, briefly, loading his arms down with dictionaries, if he was going to be the first person since Major (now Lt. Col.) Jacobs to ask her to go off-world.
"I sure am," Mitchell said. "Fresh meat joining SG-1. And you're Dr. Carson, the librarian."
Claire laughed. "Who's perpetuating the Ph.D. myth? I should find that out. I'm just Claire, Colonel."
She thought, if he asks me, I might say yes.
She hadn't thought about going off-world since she'd been taking Vicodin for her broken ribs and Jacobs had offered her the standing spot. He asked her, once in a while, with half started sentences -- SG-4 is going to P4Z on Thursday ... -- in the commissary, and Claire would have thought she was hitting on her and not just respecting her professionally, if she hadn't met his wife, and his kids, and adored them all as much as she adored Jacobs.
Or if he'd ever called her anything other than Carson, and she'd ever called him anything other than Jacobs.
Six years and Claire had a short list of things that still surprised her about the SGC: item one was everything ever, and item two was that more people didn't end up sleeping together. In six years, only Kirkpatrick had ever asked her on a date -- and most days, Jacobs hinting that Claire should go off-world seemed more normal than Jacobs asking her to go out with him.
"Well, then," he said, "I'm just Cam."
"No can do," Claire said, because she didn't call any of the military personnel by their first names and she'd stuck to that for six years; a slow-voiced, bright-eyed Southern boy wasn't going to change that. He was changing enough, without changing her habits. "But you can be Mitchell, if that's better than your rank."
He laughed, threw his head back and howled, and pounded on the table, sliding the Mandarin dictionary down onto the table beside the Arabic dictionary. "Jackson said you were funny," Mitchell said.
Claire raised her eyebrows and stuck her hands into a box that Carter had dropped off two weeks ago, that Claire was only now getting around to looking at.
"Well, okay," Mitchell said. "Jackson said you were the person to talk to, because everybody on SG-1 should make your acquaintance. So here I am, acquainting."
"Well, it's nice to meet you," Claire said.
"Nice to meet you, too," Mitchell said. "I guess this'll be more Jackson's territory than mine, but it's good to know where things are if I need them. Still gotta hope that I can get the band back together."
Claire blinked at him. Everyone in the Mountain knew that Jackson was leaving for Atlantis on the next Daedalus run -- otherwise, Claire would never have been in the position to retrieve all the best dictionaries in the whole Mountain. She looked at the dictionaries and then back up at Mitchell, who smiled at her curiously and didn't say anything.
Change happened. Gossip kept going. Somebody would straighten Mitchell out, or maybe Jackson had changed his plans. If he had, Claire would hear about it in the commissary, or she'd know because the dictionaries disappeared back to Jackson's office. "Sure," Claire said. "It always has been."
"He's the guy for research," Mitchell said cheerfully. "Can't have SG-1 without him."
"I didn't think so," Claire said, and that was at least true. When Daniel was gone, the Marines called the team and Jonas "SG-1, mark two," and she'd already heard "Mitchell's SG-1" and "SG-1, mark three" whispered in the hallways of the Mountain. SG-1 was SG-1: O'Neill's carefully cultivated crankiness; Carter's enthusiasm and ready smile; Jackson's brains and passion; Teal'c's unflappable calm. Claire felt bad for Mitchell in that moment -- he was smiling earnestly at her, and everyone in the Mountain said Mitchell was coming to lead SG-1, but Mitchell had said that he was joining SG-1.
She looked at him carefully, his fresh uniform and his bright smile. Claire wondered what he really wanted -- she wondered what he needed, from her. No one came to see her unless they needed answers to something.
Claire didn't want to go off-world, and that wasn't the question Mitchell was asking her.
Six years, and she'd gotten pretty good at reading the people who came into the library. People liked librarians -- librarians had answers, and half the time people didn't want answers that could be found in books. Mitchell needed some answer from her, but she wasn't sure what the question was.
"Jackson's pretty good people," Mitchell said.
"Everyone here is," Claire said, because after six years of watching other people save the world, she knew that much. Everyone here was good people, because you had to be.
Mitchell seemed like pretty good people.
"You'll be okay," Claire said. "It gets less weird."
Mitchell grinned again, wide. "That's what I heard," he said. He patted her on the back, and left the lab. Claire stacked the dictionaries carefully on the table, next to Jackson's personal copy of Budge (savaged in the margins, and bequeathed to Claire because the writing and the broken spine and the dog-eared pages made her cringe so fiercely), and went back down the hall to get another load.
*
author's notes: this is for ln, with a great deal of love and affection, on her birthday. she started this, back in september, when she asked me for the top five cataloging and/or classification problems faced by the sgc librarian. as much as i tore my hair out over this story, it was always, always, a labor of love. happy birthday, ln. i adore you.
t. shouldered well over half the burden for this one; not only did she do standard beta duty, but she force-fed me episodes, fixed my physics, listened not only patiently but cheerfully while i threw horribly childish temper tantrums on im, in her living room, and while driving, and she kept me from flinging myself off the top of the carolina library in despair about 14 different times. i owe her a million times over. love, otp.