For Wynde (Patchwork Verse)

fullheader & part 1



Jack O'Neill stared at the three sent to convince him about this...this... the whole thing sounded goddamned nuts.

"We're...we're a team!" Dr Carter protested.

The other geek looked just as eager-upset.

"What you're not gonna try to convince me too?" he looked at the dark haired kid lounging against the rail of the boat.

"You don't go, those two don't. Not quite sure how that'd be a bad thing." the kid snorted.

Something flickered in the kid's eyes for a second.

"Get offa my boat! Go! I'm going fishing!" fishing for some goddamned answers Jack added silently.

That kid didn't walk. Hell, he didn't move normally. Sleek, performing constantly. It was subtle, but it was also deliberate as hell. Anyone who had the ability to move like that. A sensual saunter, glide, even just lounging the sprawl had been deliberate and boneless and subtley provactive.

It took practice, it took awareness of every muscle, every breath to move like that. The kid pinged every goddamn instinct Jack had spent the last two years trying to drown in the bottom of a bottle of Beam along with every memory, all the liquor in the world didn't stop him from waking up with his heart ready to slam out of his chest and the sound of his gun going off in Charlie's room ringing in his ears. It had, he thought, drowned everything else--reflexes, instinct, remembering the day of the week or when he'd last bothered to shower, about the only two things Jack had been certain he hadn't drank to oblivion were the memories of the day Charlie died and his liver. He was layin odds on his liver going long before the memory was ever drowned,

This kid...whatever the hell he was....set off warning sirens in Jack's head that were just to goddamn loud, especially when he hadn't drank away the hangover from yesterday yet. And it was goddamned annoying. He didn't want warning sirens in his head. He didn't want supposedly drowned instincts going off like fucking tomahawk missles striking targets. He didn't want to think. He didn't want to give a goddamn. That kid that sauntered looked way too young to...too hell the kid barely looked old enough to vote and moved like that.

NO. What the hell was he thinking. Forget the answers he didn't want to know. He was going fishing. He was forgetting the geeks and the kid. And try to drink away his hangover.

"Awww...fuck it." he groaned an hour later. The kid still preying on his mind.

He really really wasn't surprised when he got back to his house there was a guy in dress blues with an attache case handcuffed to his wrist. "So if you're here what were they?"

"Can we go inside, Colonel?"

"Uh huh--Major." Jack squinted at the guy's uniform. "Davis."

~*~

Jack ignored Davis for the most part as he paused and rewound the tape found in Giza. He studied the picture of Xander Harris held up to fill the camera's lens. The geeks. He could scarecely credit they were the same people. Other than the babbling part. Dr. Jackson and Major Carter covered almost everything with a few moment's of "Say something, Jack."

Yeah, that was him. Sober and still in shape, but him, and that was his team. The two geeks and the guy Teal'c. Those were his kids.

"You aren't giving me a choice on this one are you?" Jack sighed finally and looked at Major Davis sitting there.

"I'm sorry but no, sir, the implications of this are too extreme. The threats very real especially with the fact that the device was activated from an unknown location, hostiles came through the device and kidnapped Sgt. McClay."

Jack sighed and nodded. "That was me on that --that was my team."

Davis nodded.

Jack narrowed his eyes. "Where'd you see action?"

"Bosnia."

Jack nodded again. At least the little Pentagon pencil pusher had a clue or two. "What the hell exactly is the mission though?"

Davis sighed. "Locate and destroy the other Stargate?"

Jack snorted. "Didn't you hear them say that there was a whole network of them. Hundreds. Thousands."

"They want something done to prevent this from ever happening again."

"Oh, a miracle, sure, me and a couple geeks and a stripper'll pull one out of our collective asses," Jack snorted sarcastically. He liked this pencil-pusher. He was pretty sure what Davis was saying wasn't written on the official orders. He was also pretty goddamned sure this was going to be a one-way mission which he didn't mind but...damn.

"Sir, this is..."

"Insane," Jack supplied.

"The implications of altered timeline, altered reality. Alien technology--"

"Ah, there we go. Toys someone else has we don't and they can kick our asses with them."

Davis snorted. "This is a threat we need to address and find out how to deal with."

Jack couldn't argue with that one. He couldn't argue with the tape, at least as much as he'd been shown. "There's more?"

"Yes sir. And several discs worth of data. It will be made available to you--"

"When I sign on."

Davis didn't say anything in response to that. The answer was too obvious to need to be spoken.

He couldn't not sign on. He couldn't. Not the way that kid was preying on his mind. And not after seeing that tape.

"Where do I sign and what do you have for the data on you right now?"

"This is for you. It's password protected. It hasn't been cracked yet."

The disc was labeled "Jack"

"When do I report?"

"Three days."

"Can I keep this til then?"

Davis nodded.

Jack managed to hide his reaction. No doubt he was going to be watched every second and his phone already tapped., his house bugged and whatever the hell could be done to his computer to monitor that as well.

"Fine. I'll be there in three days. There's the door."

Davis looked like he'd swallowed a lemon but took the hint.

~
He considered his computer, dismissed it. He packed a couple changes of clothes, some basic essentials, his gun and hoped into his truck. First stop four hours later for gas, food and use of the men's room. The second was a mall with a smarmy little pimple-faced twerp rattling about sound cards and video cards. Jack finally just pointed to the cheapest laptop-- "Can that play CDs, DVDs, and does it have a basic word processing program loaded into it?"

"Yes"

"I want that one."

He grabbed a white noise-machine as well, that and the gloves from a couple of missions the gloves were thermal-sealed material that could disguise body heat from thermal detectors would do quite nicely.

His father's stroke. He'd hit the ground running with half his gear on or in his bag, changing en route to the hospital. His father had died two weeks and five strokes later. The gloves had somehow gotten buried in the back of the closet or something, unearthed three years later when Sara had been packing and emptying out the house.

Seven hours later it was a roadside dive of a no-tell motel he kind of hoped plugging the damn laptop into the wall wasn't going to short circuit the whole place. He waved at his tail as he headed into the room. They didn't look too happy at being made. They didn't look too happy at him. He didn't particularly care.

The TV cranked. The rattling window air conditioner on full blast. He stripped down to naked except the gloves and tossed all his clothes in the bathroom with the door shut and the cold water in the shower running full blast. Curtains closed tight he crawled under the covers with the white noise machine on full on the nightstand.

The gloves had been in the bottom of a box of crap that wouldn't have been hit. There really hadn't been enough time to bug much that thoroughly,

Password protected files. At least fifty of them...Seventy-three. Shit.

The first file wasn't password protected, in fact it was empty. It was named pain in the ass. Well, maybe his other self wasn't all that different at all. Pain in the ass. His cousin and the code they'd made as boys. It was a straight forward enough code, numbers assigned to each letter of the alphabet. "A", "An" and "the" all assigned an asterisk. The tricky part of the code was the language each letter of the alphabet was assigned. Latin, Gaelic, or English. And that changed by line. His cousin had been an ass who had to have things as complicated as possible to simply see what he could do. Only one other person alive could possibly know that code, if he remembered it--which knowing that ass he did. It was a long shot. He was certain he was right though. He set to reading.