Dulce Et Decorum Est
Apr. 1st, 2023 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stringertheoryTitle: Dulce Et Decorum Est
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Characters: Jennifer Hailey, Satterfield, Grogan
Word Count: 3990
Categories: gen
Spoilers: set shortly after “Last Stand” (5.16); spoilers for that episode and the previous one, “Summit” (5.15)
Warnings: canon minor character death, language
Summary: Hailey, Satterfield, and Grogan meet up to talk after Elliot is killed in action.
Good news traveled fast in the military. Hailey was convinced bad news traveled faster, edging toward defying the laws of physics in the way it swept through the grapevine. Maybe it was a kind of byproduct of the soldier survival instinct, the tuning of senses to the point that expecting the worst became a kind of anticipatory sixth sense, thereby speeding the transfer of information beyond its known limitations.
It was easily to believe in physical impossibilities when you’d experienced them yourself. Hailey swore her own body knew bad news was coming before it got to her, like she had some kind of built-in early warning system, some automatic defcon signal.
She’d woken up that morning with the warning bells already blaring, so she was prepared for the worst without knowing what worst it might be.
Then Major Carter called.
“Lieutenant Elliot has been killed in action.”
The major delivered the news without preamble, her voice steady and even. But Hailey heard the emotions hidden between the wavelengths of her flat tone. Swallowing against the sudden dryness in her throat, Hailey asked, “How?”
Even as the word came out of her mouth, she knew she shouldn’t have bothered. There was nothing Major Carter could tell her, whether she wanted to or not. Hailey had been given a lot of special privileges with regard to the SGC—all thanks to the major, in fact—but she technically wasn’t in the program yet. The major calling to tell her about Elliot’s death was a courtesy and, strictly speaking, not information Hailey was entitled to. Added to that was the fact that the major had called her on an unsecured phone line, eliminating the possibility of additional details being shared even if Hailey should have been privy to them.
But the query had been understandably reflexive, and Hailey appreciated it when Major Carter did what she could with a carefully worded response that provided just enough information to extrapolate from.
“He was on a mission.”
Which meant that he’d died off-world, somewhere out in the galaxy. Conflicting feelings welled up in Hailey at the knowledge. On the one hand, Elliot had only just secured his place at the SGC and now he was already dead. On the other, he’d at least gotten to go through the Gate, a privilege they’d all worked so hard to earn.
The callousness of that comparison—that going through the Gate, even just once, would ever be payment enough for death—struck her like a backhand across the face and Hailey grimaced, ashamed of herself. The ever-present hunger that she carried to get back through the Gate growled a little louder, but the memory of the taste she’d already gotten suddenly seemed sour.
Her friend had gone through that Gate, and her friend had died.
“Will there be a service?” she asked the major.
She knew that the SGC held private memorials for its fallen members that technically only base personnel were permitted to attend. But she thought they might let her and Satterfield and Grogan come to Elliot’s to say goodbye. They deserved that opportunity. He deserved that send off. He deserved more than just a room filled with strangers.
Or mostly strangers. The major’s tone wavered slightly for the first time as she answered. “Yes. Empty casket.”
Hailey’s stomach dropped. An empty casket meant Elliot hadn’t come home. He’d died, and he was still out there somewhere, never to return. It also meant that he’d been involved in something extraordinary, something that had kept them from bringing him home.
Or it meant that there hadn’t been anything of him left to bring home.
Her mind raced through the possible scenarios, each new one worse than the last, as Major Carter gave her the date and time of the service, along with instructions to call when she arrived so she could be escorted into the base. Then, with little more that needed to be said, they ended the call, the major sounding subdued and Hailey reeling.
As soon as she was able, she called Satterfield, who hadn’t heard the news yet, and then Grogan, who had. Both sounded as shocked as she felt, which oddly helped her feel less like she was just in a bad dream. They all made plans to meet up for drinks later that afternoon, and then Hailey tried to return to her work, though her mind was fixed firmly outside of her lab, somewhere dozen of stories below ground and millions of miles across the galaxy.
The rest of the day passed in a blur, time somehow moving both more quickly than she could register and so slowly it seemed to be at a standstill. She was still trying to wrap her brain around things when she found herself outside the bar where she was meeting the others.
It was one of the local spots that was frequented by cadets and officers alike. Hailey knew it well enough—all three of them did—and she knew that it was the kind of place where no one would bat an eye at the sight of three deeply morose-looking people sitting at a table and nursing beers at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday. They would be left alone, which meant that they would be able to talk with a little bit of freedom. It was that modicum of privacy that had led Hailey to suggest the place, more than any kind of morbid nostalgia.
She couldn’t avoid the nostalgia, though, morbid or otherwise. She spotted Satterfield and Grogan the second she walked inside, her eyes automatically finding the familiar table in the back corner where they were sitting. It was a table they’d sat at as a team before, back when there were four of them, and Hailey’s chest ached at the sight of Elliot’s vacant chair. Breathing around the pain, she ordered a beer and then took the seat across from Elliot’s, her eyes avoiding the empty space where he should have been while her mind was lost in what it symbolized.
Hailey still felt blindsided, not quite able to process that Elliot was actually gone. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to until she went to the memorial, until she had that ritual of closure to draw on to make it all seem real. But without a body to mourn over, even the memorial might not be enough to bring the loss home for her. She absently wondered if she might always feel like this, if Elliot’s death might always be this odd twinge in her life, a bated breath that would never be released.
Grogan, on the other hand, appeared to have processed the reality of Elliot’s death directly. Giving him a once-over, Hailey noted his red-rimmed eyes and the slight puffiness of his face, clear signs he’d been crying. He was hunched over the table as if it hurt too much to sit upright, and Hailey was pretty sure he was also already a bit drunk.
Anyone looking at Satterfield who didn’t know her might think she wasn’t as affected as the others were. She was staring across the bar with unseeing eyes and a generally relaxed expression. But Hailey could see the line between her eyebrows, and the tightness around her mouth, and knew better.
Hailey took a long drink, then let out a breath as she set her glass back down. “I got permission to attend the service,” she finally said. “Did you?”
Grogan just nodded, but Satterfield’s gaze cleared and moved to her face.
“Yeah, I’ll be there. I—” She paused, glancing around them; no one in the bar was within thirty feet of them, but Satterfield lowered her voice anyway. “I found out more about what happened.”
Hailey perked up. “Your linguistics contact?”
When Hailey had called to tell her the news, Satterfield had indicated that she was going to try to get more details from someone she’d become friends with who worked on the base. But Hailey hadn’t held out hope of them getting anything more until they were back there themselves for the service, when information could be shared more freely. She shouldn’t have so easily discounted Satterfield’s networking gifts, it seemed.
Satterfield was nodding in confirmation. “Yeah, she came through. She found out from someone in security who heard from one of the other SG teams that Elliot died on a mission to the Tok’ra world.”
Grogan frowned. “Aren’t they our allies?”
“They are,” Hailey murmured in response, her attention still on Satterfield. “What happened?”
“It was just supposed to be, like, a check-in mission, right?” Satterfield explained. “But while SG-1 and SG-17 were there, a Goa’uld attacked—apparently there was a spy or something?—and everyone was trapped. According to what I was told, Elliot got caught in a cave-in.”
“And they had to evacuate in a hurry, and that’s why they couldn’t retrieve his body.”
The words came out of Hailey reflexively, her relief at knowing why Elliot’s body hadn’t been recovered manifesting itself in the verbalization; it was something that had been bothering her more than she was willing to admit to herself. There being no other choice was one of the few acceptable reasons for anyone to be left behind, and it sounded like Elliot’s situation had been one of those cases.
But even as she finished speaking, Satterfield was shaking her head.
“No, that wasn’t it,” she said. “Elliot was in a room with his team leader, a Tok’ra, and Major Carter. The Tok’ra and his team leader died in the collapse, but Elliot survived. He was unconscious, though, and near death. The craziest part is that there had been a Tok’ra symbiote in that same room, being kept alive without a host. Its tank was damaged in the cave-in and in an attempt to save itself and Elliot, it went into him.”
“What?”
Hailey exchanged a stunned glance with Grogan before looking back at Satterfield, who had the same fascinated glaze to her expression that Hailey had seen her wear when they’d toured the SGC archaeology department. Hailey could understand the sentiment, at least a little: the whole concept of being a Tok’ra host was fascinating—from a clinical perspective. But she didn’t think that she would ever be able to bring herself to willingly become a host, if presented with the opportunity.
Elliot hadn’t been given a choice, though. She couldn’t help but wonder what it had been like for him, severely wounded and near death, to regain consciousness and discover that someone else had taken up residence in his body, in his mind. It had to have been a surreal and harrowing experience. It was a hell of a thing to go through, and a hell of a way to go out.
And Major Carter had been witness to it all. Hailey remembered the tremor in the major’s voice when they’d talked, and better understood it.
From what she knew of the Tok’ra, though, they could heal almost anything. Yet Elliot was still dead.
“How did he not survive, then?” she asked Satterfield, who frowned sadly.
“Apparently the symbiote was recovering from its own injuries,” she explained, “and Elliot’s were too severe for it to heal. He—they—chose to sacrifice themselves to give the others a chance to escape.”
“Sacrifice themselves?” Grogan tentatively echoed, almost as if he didn’t really want to know the details but felt the question was expected.
Satterfield’s smile was more of a grimace. “Drew a bunch of Jaffa to their position and then released a symbiote poison the Tok’ra had. It took out the Jaffa, clearing the way for the last of the survivors to escape.”
“It would’ve killed the symbiote in Elliot, too,” Hailey added in a quiet voice, a dark somberness falling over the table at her words.
Empty casket. No remains.
Hailey felt like she’d been kicked in the chest. Elliot hadn’t just died; he’d sacrificed himself. The fact that he wouldn’t have survived anyway didn’t matter a damn bit. At the end of the day, his final act in life had been to kill himself in a last ditch effort to save others. And because everything that happened off-world was classified, no one outside of the SGC would ever know about that act of heroism—not even his parents. They would get some vaguely-worded explanation about Elliot dying in the service of his country, and maybe they would be told that his actions had saved others, but they would never know exactly what their son had done or what it meant.
In the space of a heartbeat, Hailey found herself back in the Gate room, watching through slitted eyes as a grim-faced Elliot scooped her up from where she lay on the floor.
She had jokingly called him a hero then, after he’d braved death from non-existent radiation to rescue her.
It wasn’t supposed to have gone that way. Once she’d collapsed from her own faux-fatal exposure, she’d expected to just have to lie there in the Gate room for a while—maybe even sneak in a nap—until the scenario finished playing out elsewhere in the base, or somebody retrieved her. But to her surprise and amusement, Elliot had shown up.
From the fuzzy glimpses she had been able to get of his face while trying to maintain her cover of unconsciousness, she hadn’t been able to tell whether he’d figured out that it was all a set up or not. But she’d suspected that he would have behaved the same even if he had truly believed he was walking into certain death. He’d seemed the type.
So when her part in the test had been revealed, and his earnest, determined expression had melted into disbelief as she “woke up” in his arms, she hadn’t been able to hold back the quip.
Her lips quirked up in a bitter smile as she mused that the flippantly-given label appeared to have been thoroughly apt, because Elliot had wound up giving his life at the absolute first opportunity.
The heart-wrenching thought hit her that, with the Tok’ra inside him, Elliot at least hadn’t died alone.
Then she wondered if that were true. Had they died together, at the same time? Or had the poison killed the symbiote and left Elliot to follow it more slowly? And if so, how long had he lingered, broken and in pain, awash with the memories the Tok’ra had left behind, before he finally died?
“It was his first mission.”
Satterfield’s quiet voice, laced with disbelief, cut into Hailey’s morbid thoughts. She looked up to find Satterfield frowning at the scratched table top, her eyes troubled, one hand curled around the bottle Hailey had yet to see her take a drink from.
“I know,” Hailey replied on a sigh. And maybe that’s why this was so hard. Elliot had barely gotten to the SGC before he’d died. It seemed unfair, but more than that it was frightening.
Hailey expected that she knew what was out there better than any other SGC recruit, given the circumstances. She’d gotten to see firsthand just how dangerous going through the Gate could be, how unexpected dangers could pop up in the blink of an eye. And after she’d watched Colonel O’Neill weigh the options and risk his own life to save his people, she had thought she understood what she was getting into. She’d tried to mentally prepare herself for when she was called up, to be ready to face whatever happened, and that had included losing people. Yet Elliot’s death was hitting her hard, more than she would have anticipated, especially given that she was still struggling to fully accept that he was gone.
“It wasn’t even a combat mission,” Satterfield continued. “He was just supposed to meet the Tok’ra, get to know off-world procedure—you aren’t supposed to die during that kind of thing. That’s—that’s—”
“Fucking stupid,” Grogan offered.
Hailey’s gaze snapped to him. His expression was just short of miserable as he took another drink of his beer. She had been right about him being a bit drunk. He was also a bit uncoordinated with it, putting his glass back down a little too heavily, the thunk of it hitting the wooden tabletop loud in the otherwise quiet room.
Hailey sighed and looked away, frowning. “It’s definitely something.”
She lifted her own glass to take a drink, but froze with it halfway to her mouth at Grogan’s next words.
“I’m next.”
“What?” Satterfield asked in a wary tone.
Grogan stared at her for a moment before turning his slightly bleary gaze on Hailey. “I’ve been called up.”
Hailey acknowledged the flare of annoyance that Grogan had been picked over her, but quickly brushed it aside. Like Satterfield, she was in a specialized field; they’d both been told they would have to wait for positions requiring their particular skills to open up. Grogan, though, was more of a general foot solider type, meaning that there were plenty of openings on the roster that he could fill. She ruthlessly ignored the small, mean voice in the back of her mind that whispered cannon fodder and asked him when he’d found out about his placement.
“Today,” he replied.
Hailey could sense everything left unsaid in that single word. Grogan had already known about Elliot’s death when she’d called him, which meant he’d somehow gotten the news before she—who had a contact directly involved in the mission—had. That timing could only mean one thing. A feeling of trepidation came over Hailey, and she exchanged a worried glance with Satterfield.
“You aren’t taking his place, are you?” Satterfield hesitantly asked.
It would be cruel, replacing a dead recruit with his newly promoted teammate, but Hailey wouldn’t put it past anyone. It was an unfortunate reality that the SGC lost people all the time, and sometimes the only way to deal with that was with extreme pragmatism: if a team needed another body, then it would take the next one available.
But Grogan just let out a bitter bark of laughter. “No, all of SG-17 died,” he told them. “It’ll be a brand new team.”
“Do you know who else you’re getting?” Hailey curiously asked.
Grogan shook his head. “No. I have orientation the day after the memorial. I’m supposed to find out then.”
He didn’t sound particularly thrilled by the prospect, and Hailey wondered if he was having second thoughts. Of them all, Grogan had always been the most laidback, the one who just kind of went with the flow more than paddling against—or even with—the current. If any of them were to decide that the rigors of the SGC weren’t for them, Hailey thought it would be him. But she also thought it would be ridiculous to go through everything they’d gone through to get there and then decide that you didn’t want it after all.
So she sat up ramrod straight and gave him an assessing stare. Her voice was merely inquisitive, though, when she asked him, “Are you gonna do it?”
Grogan’s head snapped up and he surprised her with a glare. An ever-so-slightly unfocused glare, but a glare just the same.
“Of course I’m going to do it,” he loudly replied, before continuing in a quieter voice. “I owe it to Elliot. And to myself.”
Hailey gave him an approving look, but when she turned back to Satterfield, the look melted into a frown. Satterfield’s expression was conflicted, her eyes distant as her restless hands absentmindedly scratched at the edge of the label on her long-neck. It was some foreign brand Hailey didn’t recognize, and as she watched, Satterfield finally took a drink of it, almost as if to just have something to do. But she didn’t seem to actually taste it; it was clear her mind wasn’t on the drink.
“What about you?” Hailey asked her, suddenly having doubts about her commitment to the program.
Satterfield blinked, her eyes coming into focus. She looked at Hailey with a faint frown. “What?”
“When it’s your turn,” Hailey clarified, “are you going to accept the offer?”
Satterfield hesitated, and that alone was enough to raise Hailey’s flags. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest, giving Satterfield an incredulous stare.
“Don’t tell me you’re quitting.”
Satterfield’s gaze momentarily flicked her way before moving to the tabletop. “I’m not saying I’d quit, I’m just saying it’s a lot to absorb.”
And Hailey thought it said something if even the chance to work anywhere near Dr. Jackson wasn’t enough to keep Satterfield from having doubts. She leaned forward, staring Satterfield in the face even though she wouldn’t look up.
“There is nothing else for us, and you know it!” Hailey reminded her in a fierce whisper, throwing a short, sharp gesture between the two of them. “Outside of the SGC, the best we can hope for is transport runs. And that’s if we’re lucky! But anything outside of the SGC would be a waste of me and it damn well would be a waste of you!”
Hailey genuinely liked Satterfield. She would even consider her a close friend. But more than that, she liked knowing that there were more highly intelligent, highly motivated women going to the SGC.
There was nothing that would change Hailey’s mind about going; the SGC was everything she’d hoped for even before she had known that it existed. And she was positive the same was true for Satterfield, so she was going to make sure that they wound up there together. No backing out.
“We always knew what were were signing up for,” she pointed out. “This is the job.”
“Actually, I signed up to study stuff, not to risk my life,” Satterfield dryly replied.
The tone told Hailey that Satterfield had come around, and she held back a grin. “Could you really go back to boring old Earth stuff when you know there is so much more out there?”
Satterfield finally looked up and met her eyes with a steady gaze and a soft smile. “No.”
Hailey nodded once, verification. “Good.” She looked over to Grogan. “We’re going to get through this together, okay? But that doesn’t happen until we’ve all made it to the SGC and are busy kicking ass and saving the galaxy. So nobody quits. Not now. We need each other. We owe it to each other.”
Satterfield gave her an odd look. “Are you really giving us another version of your ‘We all make it through together’ speech?”
“That depends,” Hailey told her with a shrug. “Is it working?”
Satterfield smiled crookedly, but it was Grogan who answered.
“Elliot got us all through,” he said, words only slightly slurred. “He was our team leader and he got us through and we all got in and now he’s dead. So we don’t quit. He deserves better than that.”
Hailey blinked at him, a little surprised both by his words and by the conviction with which he’d delivered them. It was unclear which had affected him more—Elliot’s death, or the fact that he was being called up as a result of it—but either way, Grogan was showing more resolve in this moment than she had ever seen from him. She sized him up for a second, then raised her glass.
“We’re all in, then? For ourselves, for each other, and for Elliot?”
Satterfield gave a sharp, decisive nod and raised her bottle. “For ourselves,” she echoed.
“For each other,” Hailey added, before looking to Grogan.
His gaze moved between her and Satterfield for a moment, before he raised his glass. “For Elliot.”
Lightly clinking bottle and glasses together, they all drank to their fallen friend, and to their own futures. Hailey gave a subtle toast to the empty chair and the missing hero who’d sat it in, then went to buy the next round.
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Characters: Jennifer Hailey, Satterfield, Grogan
Word Count: 3990
Categories: gen
Spoilers: set shortly after “Last Stand” (5.16); spoilers for that episode and the previous one, “Summit” (5.15)
Warnings: canon minor character death, language
Summary: Hailey, Satterfield, and Grogan meet up to talk after Elliot is killed in action.
Good news traveled fast in the military. Hailey was convinced bad news traveled faster, edging toward defying the laws of physics in the way it swept through the grapevine. Maybe it was a kind of byproduct of the soldier survival instinct, the tuning of senses to the point that expecting the worst became a kind of anticipatory sixth sense, thereby speeding the transfer of information beyond its known limitations.
It was easily to believe in physical impossibilities when you’d experienced them yourself. Hailey swore her own body knew bad news was coming before it got to her, like she had some kind of built-in early warning system, some automatic defcon signal.
She’d woken up that morning with the warning bells already blaring, so she was prepared for the worst without knowing what worst it might be.
Then Major Carter called.
“Lieutenant Elliot has been killed in action.”
The major delivered the news without preamble, her voice steady and even. But Hailey heard the emotions hidden between the wavelengths of her flat tone. Swallowing against the sudden dryness in her throat, Hailey asked, “How?”
Even as the word came out of her mouth, she knew she shouldn’t have bothered. There was nothing Major Carter could tell her, whether she wanted to or not. Hailey had been given a lot of special privileges with regard to the SGC—all thanks to the major, in fact—but she technically wasn’t in the program yet. The major calling to tell her about Elliot’s death was a courtesy and, strictly speaking, not information Hailey was entitled to. Added to that was the fact that the major had called her on an unsecured phone line, eliminating the possibility of additional details being shared even if Hailey should have been privy to them.
But the query had been understandably reflexive, and Hailey appreciated it when Major Carter did what she could with a carefully worded response that provided just enough information to extrapolate from.
“He was on a mission.”
Which meant that he’d died off-world, somewhere out in the galaxy. Conflicting feelings welled up in Hailey at the knowledge. On the one hand, Elliot had only just secured his place at the SGC and now he was already dead. On the other, he’d at least gotten to go through the Gate, a privilege they’d all worked so hard to earn.
The callousness of that comparison—that going through the Gate, even just once, would ever be payment enough for death—struck her like a backhand across the face and Hailey grimaced, ashamed of herself. The ever-present hunger that she carried to get back through the Gate growled a little louder, but the memory of the taste she’d already gotten suddenly seemed sour.
Her friend had gone through that Gate, and her friend had died.
“Will there be a service?” she asked the major.
She knew that the SGC held private memorials for its fallen members that technically only base personnel were permitted to attend. But she thought they might let her and Satterfield and Grogan come to Elliot’s to say goodbye. They deserved that opportunity. He deserved that send off. He deserved more than just a room filled with strangers.
Or mostly strangers. The major’s tone wavered slightly for the first time as she answered. “Yes. Empty casket.”
Hailey’s stomach dropped. An empty casket meant Elliot hadn’t come home. He’d died, and he was still out there somewhere, never to return. It also meant that he’d been involved in something extraordinary, something that had kept them from bringing him home.
Or it meant that there hadn’t been anything of him left to bring home.
Her mind raced through the possible scenarios, each new one worse than the last, as Major Carter gave her the date and time of the service, along with instructions to call when she arrived so she could be escorted into the base. Then, with little more that needed to be said, they ended the call, the major sounding subdued and Hailey reeling.
As soon as she was able, she called Satterfield, who hadn’t heard the news yet, and then Grogan, who had. Both sounded as shocked as she felt, which oddly helped her feel less like she was just in a bad dream. They all made plans to meet up for drinks later that afternoon, and then Hailey tried to return to her work, though her mind was fixed firmly outside of her lab, somewhere dozen of stories below ground and millions of miles across the galaxy.
The rest of the day passed in a blur, time somehow moving both more quickly than she could register and so slowly it seemed to be at a standstill. She was still trying to wrap her brain around things when she found herself outside the bar where she was meeting the others.
It was one of the local spots that was frequented by cadets and officers alike. Hailey knew it well enough—all three of them did—and she knew that it was the kind of place where no one would bat an eye at the sight of three deeply morose-looking people sitting at a table and nursing beers at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday. They would be left alone, which meant that they would be able to talk with a little bit of freedom. It was that modicum of privacy that had led Hailey to suggest the place, more than any kind of morbid nostalgia.
She couldn’t avoid the nostalgia, though, morbid or otherwise. She spotted Satterfield and Grogan the second she walked inside, her eyes automatically finding the familiar table in the back corner where they were sitting. It was a table they’d sat at as a team before, back when there were four of them, and Hailey’s chest ached at the sight of Elliot’s vacant chair. Breathing around the pain, she ordered a beer and then took the seat across from Elliot’s, her eyes avoiding the empty space where he should have been while her mind was lost in what it symbolized.
Hailey still felt blindsided, not quite able to process that Elliot was actually gone. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to until she went to the memorial, until she had that ritual of closure to draw on to make it all seem real. But without a body to mourn over, even the memorial might not be enough to bring the loss home for her. She absently wondered if she might always feel like this, if Elliot’s death might always be this odd twinge in her life, a bated breath that would never be released.
Grogan, on the other hand, appeared to have processed the reality of Elliot’s death directly. Giving him a once-over, Hailey noted his red-rimmed eyes and the slight puffiness of his face, clear signs he’d been crying. He was hunched over the table as if it hurt too much to sit upright, and Hailey was pretty sure he was also already a bit drunk.
Anyone looking at Satterfield who didn’t know her might think she wasn’t as affected as the others were. She was staring across the bar with unseeing eyes and a generally relaxed expression. But Hailey could see the line between her eyebrows, and the tightness around her mouth, and knew better.
Hailey took a long drink, then let out a breath as she set her glass back down. “I got permission to attend the service,” she finally said. “Did you?”
Grogan just nodded, but Satterfield’s gaze cleared and moved to her face.
“Yeah, I’ll be there. I—” She paused, glancing around them; no one in the bar was within thirty feet of them, but Satterfield lowered her voice anyway. “I found out more about what happened.”
Hailey perked up. “Your linguistics contact?”
When Hailey had called to tell her the news, Satterfield had indicated that she was going to try to get more details from someone she’d become friends with who worked on the base. But Hailey hadn’t held out hope of them getting anything more until they were back there themselves for the service, when information could be shared more freely. She shouldn’t have so easily discounted Satterfield’s networking gifts, it seemed.
Satterfield was nodding in confirmation. “Yeah, she came through. She found out from someone in security who heard from one of the other SG teams that Elliot died on a mission to the Tok’ra world.”
Grogan frowned. “Aren’t they our allies?”
“They are,” Hailey murmured in response, her attention still on Satterfield. “What happened?”
“It was just supposed to be, like, a check-in mission, right?” Satterfield explained. “But while SG-1 and SG-17 were there, a Goa’uld attacked—apparently there was a spy or something?—and everyone was trapped. According to what I was told, Elliot got caught in a cave-in.”
“And they had to evacuate in a hurry, and that’s why they couldn’t retrieve his body.”
The words came out of Hailey reflexively, her relief at knowing why Elliot’s body hadn’t been recovered manifesting itself in the verbalization; it was something that had been bothering her more than she was willing to admit to herself. There being no other choice was one of the few acceptable reasons for anyone to be left behind, and it sounded like Elliot’s situation had been one of those cases.
But even as she finished speaking, Satterfield was shaking her head.
“No, that wasn’t it,” she said. “Elliot was in a room with his team leader, a Tok’ra, and Major Carter. The Tok’ra and his team leader died in the collapse, but Elliot survived. He was unconscious, though, and near death. The craziest part is that there had been a Tok’ra symbiote in that same room, being kept alive without a host. Its tank was damaged in the cave-in and in an attempt to save itself and Elliot, it went into him.”
“What?”
Hailey exchanged a stunned glance with Grogan before looking back at Satterfield, who had the same fascinated glaze to her expression that Hailey had seen her wear when they’d toured the SGC archaeology department. Hailey could understand the sentiment, at least a little: the whole concept of being a Tok’ra host was fascinating—from a clinical perspective. But she didn’t think that she would ever be able to bring herself to willingly become a host, if presented with the opportunity.
Elliot hadn’t been given a choice, though. She couldn’t help but wonder what it had been like for him, severely wounded and near death, to regain consciousness and discover that someone else had taken up residence in his body, in his mind. It had to have been a surreal and harrowing experience. It was a hell of a thing to go through, and a hell of a way to go out.
And Major Carter had been witness to it all. Hailey remembered the tremor in the major’s voice when they’d talked, and better understood it.
From what she knew of the Tok’ra, though, they could heal almost anything. Yet Elliot was still dead.
“How did he not survive, then?” she asked Satterfield, who frowned sadly.
“Apparently the symbiote was recovering from its own injuries,” she explained, “and Elliot’s were too severe for it to heal. He—they—chose to sacrifice themselves to give the others a chance to escape.”
“Sacrifice themselves?” Grogan tentatively echoed, almost as if he didn’t really want to know the details but felt the question was expected.
Satterfield’s smile was more of a grimace. “Drew a bunch of Jaffa to their position and then released a symbiote poison the Tok’ra had. It took out the Jaffa, clearing the way for the last of the survivors to escape.”
“It would’ve killed the symbiote in Elliot, too,” Hailey added in a quiet voice, a dark somberness falling over the table at her words.
Empty casket. No remains.
Hailey felt like she’d been kicked in the chest. Elliot hadn’t just died; he’d sacrificed himself. The fact that he wouldn’t have survived anyway didn’t matter a damn bit. At the end of the day, his final act in life had been to kill himself in a last ditch effort to save others. And because everything that happened off-world was classified, no one outside of the SGC would ever know about that act of heroism—not even his parents. They would get some vaguely-worded explanation about Elliot dying in the service of his country, and maybe they would be told that his actions had saved others, but they would never know exactly what their son had done or what it meant.
In the space of a heartbeat, Hailey found herself back in the Gate room, watching through slitted eyes as a grim-faced Elliot scooped her up from where she lay on the floor.
She had jokingly called him a hero then, after he’d braved death from non-existent radiation to rescue her.
It wasn’t supposed to have gone that way. Once she’d collapsed from her own faux-fatal exposure, she’d expected to just have to lie there in the Gate room for a while—maybe even sneak in a nap—until the scenario finished playing out elsewhere in the base, or somebody retrieved her. But to her surprise and amusement, Elliot had shown up.
From the fuzzy glimpses she had been able to get of his face while trying to maintain her cover of unconsciousness, she hadn’t been able to tell whether he’d figured out that it was all a set up or not. But she’d suspected that he would have behaved the same even if he had truly believed he was walking into certain death. He’d seemed the type.
So when her part in the test had been revealed, and his earnest, determined expression had melted into disbelief as she “woke up” in his arms, she hadn’t been able to hold back the quip.
Her lips quirked up in a bitter smile as she mused that the flippantly-given label appeared to have been thoroughly apt, because Elliot had wound up giving his life at the absolute first opportunity.
The heart-wrenching thought hit her that, with the Tok’ra inside him, Elliot at least hadn’t died alone.
Then she wondered if that were true. Had they died together, at the same time? Or had the poison killed the symbiote and left Elliot to follow it more slowly? And if so, how long had he lingered, broken and in pain, awash with the memories the Tok’ra had left behind, before he finally died?
“It was his first mission.”
Satterfield’s quiet voice, laced with disbelief, cut into Hailey’s morbid thoughts. She looked up to find Satterfield frowning at the scratched table top, her eyes troubled, one hand curled around the bottle Hailey had yet to see her take a drink from.
“I know,” Hailey replied on a sigh. And maybe that’s why this was so hard. Elliot had barely gotten to the SGC before he’d died. It seemed unfair, but more than that it was frightening.
Hailey expected that she knew what was out there better than any other SGC recruit, given the circumstances. She’d gotten to see firsthand just how dangerous going through the Gate could be, how unexpected dangers could pop up in the blink of an eye. And after she’d watched Colonel O’Neill weigh the options and risk his own life to save his people, she had thought she understood what she was getting into. She’d tried to mentally prepare herself for when she was called up, to be ready to face whatever happened, and that had included losing people. Yet Elliot’s death was hitting her hard, more than she would have anticipated, especially given that she was still struggling to fully accept that he was gone.
“It wasn’t even a combat mission,” Satterfield continued. “He was just supposed to meet the Tok’ra, get to know off-world procedure—you aren’t supposed to die during that kind of thing. That’s—that’s—”
“Fucking stupid,” Grogan offered.
Hailey’s gaze snapped to him. His expression was just short of miserable as he took another drink of his beer. She had been right about him being a bit drunk. He was also a bit uncoordinated with it, putting his glass back down a little too heavily, the thunk of it hitting the wooden tabletop loud in the otherwise quiet room.
Hailey sighed and looked away, frowning. “It’s definitely something.”
She lifted her own glass to take a drink, but froze with it halfway to her mouth at Grogan’s next words.
“I’m next.”
“What?” Satterfield asked in a wary tone.
Grogan stared at her for a moment before turning his slightly bleary gaze on Hailey. “I’ve been called up.”
Hailey acknowledged the flare of annoyance that Grogan had been picked over her, but quickly brushed it aside. Like Satterfield, she was in a specialized field; they’d both been told they would have to wait for positions requiring their particular skills to open up. Grogan, though, was more of a general foot solider type, meaning that there were plenty of openings on the roster that he could fill. She ruthlessly ignored the small, mean voice in the back of her mind that whispered cannon fodder and asked him when he’d found out about his placement.
“Today,” he replied.
Hailey could sense everything left unsaid in that single word. Grogan had already known about Elliot’s death when she’d called him, which meant he’d somehow gotten the news before she—who had a contact directly involved in the mission—had. That timing could only mean one thing. A feeling of trepidation came over Hailey, and she exchanged a worried glance with Satterfield.
“You aren’t taking his place, are you?” Satterfield hesitantly asked.
It would be cruel, replacing a dead recruit with his newly promoted teammate, but Hailey wouldn’t put it past anyone. It was an unfortunate reality that the SGC lost people all the time, and sometimes the only way to deal with that was with extreme pragmatism: if a team needed another body, then it would take the next one available.
But Grogan just let out a bitter bark of laughter. “No, all of SG-17 died,” he told them. “It’ll be a brand new team.”
“Do you know who else you’re getting?” Hailey curiously asked.
Grogan shook his head. “No. I have orientation the day after the memorial. I’m supposed to find out then.”
He didn’t sound particularly thrilled by the prospect, and Hailey wondered if he was having second thoughts. Of them all, Grogan had always been the most laidback, the one who just kind of went with the flow more than paddling against—or even with—the current. If any of them were to decide that the rigors of the SGC weren’t for them, Hailey thought it would be him. But she also thought it would be ridiculous to go through everything they’d gone through to get there and then decide that you didn’t want it after all.
So she sat up ramrod straight and gave him an assessing stare. Her voice was merely inquisitive, though, when she asked him, “Are you gonna do it?”
Grogan’s head snapped up and he surprised her with a glare. An ever-so-slightly unfocused glare, but a glare just the same.
“Of course I’m going to do it,” he loudly replied, before continuing in a quieter voice. “I owe it to Elliot. And to myself.”
Hailey gave him an approving look, but when she turned back to Satterfield, the look melted into a frown. Satterfield’s expression was conflicted, her eyes distant as her restless hands absentmindedly scratched at the edge of the label on her long-neck. It was some foreign brand Hailey didn’t recognize, and as she watched, Satterfield finally took a drink of it, almost as if to just have something to do. But she didn’t seem to actually taste it; it was clear her mind wasn’t on the drink.
“What about you?” Hailey asked her, suddenly having doubts about her commitment to the program.
Satterfield blinked, her eyes coming into focus. She looked at Hailey with a faint frown. “What?”
“When it’s your turn,” Hailey clarified, “are you going to accept the offer?”
Satterfield hesitated, and that alone was enough to raise Hailey’s flags. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest, giving Satterfield an incredulous stare.
“Don’t tell me you’re quitting.”
Satterfield’s gaze momentarily flicked her way before moving to the tabletop. “I’m not saying I’d quit, I’m just saying it’s a lot to absorb.”
And Hailey thought it said something if even the chance to work anywhere near Dr. Jackson wasn’t enough to keep Satterfield from having doubts. She leaned forward, staring Satterfield in the face even though she wouldn’t look up.
“There is nothing else for us, and you know it!” Hailey reminded her in a fierce whisper, throwing a short, sharp gesture between the two of them. “Outside of the SGC, the best we can hope for is transport runs. And that’s if we’re lucky! But anything outside of the SGC would be a waste of me and it damn well would be a waste of you!”
Hailey genuinely liked Satterfield. She would even consider her a close friend. But more than that, she liked knowing that there were more highly intelligent, highly motivated women going to the SGC.
There was nothing that would change Hailey’s mind about going; the SGC was everything she’d hoped for even before she had known that it existed. And she was positive the same was true for Satterfield, so she was going to make sure that they wound up there together. No backing out.
“We always knew what were were signing up for,” she pointed out. “This is the job.”
“Actually, I signed up to study stuff, not to risk my life,” Satterfield dryly replied.
The tone told Hailey that Satterfield had come around, and she held back a grin. “Could you really go back to boring old Earth stuff when you know there is so much more out there?”
Satterfield finally looked up and met her eyes with a steady gaze and a soft smile. “No.”
Hailey nodded once, verification. “Good.” She looked over to Grogan. “We’re going to get through this together, okay? But that doesn’t happen until we’ve all made it to the SGC and are busy kicking ass and saving the galaxy. So nobody quits. Not now. We need each other. We owe it to each other.”
Satterfield gave her an odd look. “Are you really giving us another version of your ‘We all make it through together’ speech?”
“That depends,” Hailey told her with a shrug. “Is it working?”
Satterfield smiled crookedly, but it was Grogan who answered.
“Elliot got us all through,” he said, words only slightly slurred. “He was our team leader and he got us through and we all got in and now he’s dead. So we don’t quit. He deserves better than that.”
Hailey blinked at him, a little surprised both by his words and by the conviction with which he’d delivered them. It was unclear which had affected him more—Elliot’s death, or the fact that he was being called up as a result of it—but either way, Grogan was showing more resolve in this moment than she had ever seen from him. She sized him up for a second, then raised her glass.
“We’re all in, then? For ourselves, for each other, and for Elliot?”
Satterfield gave a sharp, decisive nod and raised her bottle. “For ourselves,” she echoed.
“For each other,” Hailey added, before looking to Grogan.
His gaze moved between her and Satterfield for a moment, before he raised his glass. “For Elliot.”
Lightly clinking bottle and glasses together, they all drank to their fallen friend, and to their own futures. Hailey gave a subtle toast to the empty chair and the missing hero who’d sat it in, then went to buy the next round.