Hope in the Mirror
written by Tiffany May Harrsch

For warnings, spoilers, ratings, and other information, see Pt 0.

Daniel turned the dial again. It felt strange flipping through realities as if they were channels on a television set. It was certainly a relief to know what was going on before stepping through the looking glass this time. And it was nice to have some measure of control, even if it was in the dubious flip of a switch.

He was lucky that he had not accidentally turned off the remote the first time he touched the Mirror, back on ‘233. He might never have made it home if he had. And after being shot by that reality’s version of Teal’c, after knowing that Earth, even if it was not his, had been taken over by the Goa’uld, and knowing that the remaining people of the SGA sacrificed their last chance for him and his reality… Even if he had had the remote, he was not sure he would have been able to keep his cool long enough to figure out the reality channel stuff. Lucky, indeed.

He wondered if there was a him out there stuck on barren ‘233, alone? Or one who had never managed to convince the alternate Jack to let him go home? Or another him who was stuck wondering the realities, forever looking for home?

Daniel shook himself out of that line of thinking. Too dangerous, specially now when he was doing just that; looking for home.

He looked up at the new image and sighed with relief. It was Sam, waiting on the other side, just as she had promised.

________________________________________________________________________

Captain Samantha Carter heard the now familiar buzz of the Mirror activating. She and the guards sighted down their weapons, ready for whatever might come through.

The Mirror shimmered, flickered once, then solidified into an image of the storeroom.

Almost.

The room she saw was darkened, cluttered, and half demolished. It was a stark contrast to the well lit room she now stood in, occupied only by the Mirror, herself and the guards, and the sandbag barricade before the only entrance. There was something else in that reflection of the other reality. A shadowy figure standing before the Mirror, looking down at a device in its hands.

Sam cautiously approached the Mirror, gun up and ready should the figure pose a threat. She stopped only a few feet from it, stunned. The person looked up from the device, and smiled.

"Hold your fire!" she shouted over her shoulder. It would not do to get him back now only to have him shot by someone with a jumpy trigger finger. She lowered her own gun with a grin. It’s him.

He looks different, she thought inanely, noting the short hair. Well, of course he looks different, a little voice inside replied snidely. What did you expect in a year?

A year. God. A little over a year now since they lost Daniel on P3R233.

Sam frowned at the memory.

It was shortly after they had received the warning. It did not take long for Daniel to translate the verbal portion of the signal: Beware the Destroyers. They come from... And he had come to the conclusion that the numbers were a Stargate address minus the point of origin almost immediately after seeing there were six of them. It did not take much imagination to equate ‘Destroyers’ with Goa’uld. And the address to the Goa’uld homeworld, or even a base, was just the upper hand the SGC needed. Even though the message was centuries old, and even though the new address the computer provided happened to only be in the same general region of space that the message originated from, it was still the best chance they had.

Sam was not surprised to find P3R233 deserted. Half the planets they visited were. It was likely that either the inhabitants had abandoned it or died out. The Colonel thought it was a little of both, considering the damage. Damage, Teal’c pointed out, that was caused by Goa’uld weaponry, though not recently.

Daniel quickly worked out the glyphs. After handing them off to Sam, he expressed an interest in the rest of the facility. And the Colonel, obviously feeling generous, told him to take Sam and "go check it out". Sam tried to hide her grin at the Colonel’s rolled eyes when Daniel barely suppressed the urge to run into the next room.

They found a lab of some sort, filled with artifacts from various worlds, not all of them human made. Daniel, of course, was fascinated. He wondered around the room, picking pieces up and putting them down again, trying to touch everything, as if physical contact could make them reveal their secrets to him. This time, they did.

The Colonel came in and cut their visit short with the terse command to leave. Poor Daniel gave her a befuddled look at the abruptness and lack of explanation. Sam shrugged and shook her head sympathetically. She might not always like it, but she was military, and used to receiving orders without explanations. The last time she saw him, Daniel was looking morosely at the artifacts he would have to leave behind.

Sam joined the Colonel and Teal’c by the DHD. The Colonel splayed his flash light around the room one last time before ordering Sam to Dial them home. By the time the Stargate whooshed to life, Daniel still had not made an appearance.

"Daniel, come on. Time to go!" Sam hid her amusement at the look the Colonel directed heavenward. Only Daniel could exasperate the man like that.

There was no answer from the lab room, no sign that Daniel had heard him.

Colonel O’Neill sighed. "Captain..."

"Yes, sir." She knew exactly what he wanted. Sam went to fetch their reluctant scientist. She found only an empty room. "Daniel?" she asked. She circled the room, puzzlement quickly turning into worry. There was only the one doorway, and they would have noticed him leave by it.

When the import of what she saw, or rather, did not see, sank in, she rushed back out to the rest of her team. "Sir! Daniel’s gone."

"What do you mean, ‘gone’?"

"He’s not there."

They searched for hours. The Colonel even sent Teal’c back for help. Despite their combined efforts, they found nothing. No blood to indicate foul play. No bit of cloth or other items to show which way Daniel might have gone. No shouts. No noise save for those from the searchers. They tried every knob and depression, just incase there was a hidden door. If there was, it remained hidden. They looked through windows too small for a man to climb through, into every room in the complex, under every table and behind every strange object they came across. They came to only one conclusion. Daniel Jackson, along with several of the artifacts, had simply vanished.

After a while, the remaining members of SG1 converged back into the room where they had last seen Daniel. It was then that Sam finally noticed the strange mirror that reflected the room, but not the inhabitants. The slab of rock had been here before, she remembered, but not the image. They stood before the mirror that was not a mirror, trying to puzzle out the meaning and its connection to Daniel’s disappearance. They were interrupted midconversation by the shimmering of the image of the lab room. They watched, amazed, as the shimmering flickered once then blinked out of existence.

Sam came up with the theory of alternate universes. Although they could not find anything that might be a control device, she thought that Daniel had somehow activated and entered it. Teal’c accepted the theory with the simple suggestion that perhaps the Mirror’s version of the Dial Home Device was portable, and Daniel had it. The Colonel did not understood one word in ten, but grasped the idea like a drowning man. Sam knew that for him, accepting the notion of alternate universes, as impossible as it seemed, was preferable to the notion of leaving Daniel on a planet that would certainly kill him. They had been through his apparent death before. She did not think any of them could take it again. The General was a little harder to convince. Nevertheless, he allowed them to take the Mirror back to Earth, and pulled all the appropriate strings so that they could keep it on the SGC premises. Even though he did not really believe, he felt that "we owe it to Dr. Jackson to leave the light on for him."

Days passed. Sam spent all her time in the lab with Mirror. Despite her best efforts, all she could glean from the silent monolith was that, like the Stargate, it was made of Naquadah, and also some mineral she had never seen before. A mineral they have yet to encounter again.

Then the Stargate was threatened with a shut down. In a desperate attempt to prove their worth to the world, SG’s 1 and 2 used the coordinates the message and Daniel had given them to launch a preemptive assault on the Goa’uld.

The Mirror was moved to a storage closet, on guard 24/7, and hope slowly began to fade.

The first few months were the hardest. Even with the Goa’uld attack and the generally hectic life of the SGC, they all had time for worry, grief, and guilt.

There was no talk of retirement this time. Colonel O’Neill, of the them all, steadfastly refused to believe the worst. He believed that someone had to be there when, (it was always when, never if) Daniel finally came home. He fully intended to be that someone.

He protested bitterly when the General put Daniel on MIA status. They had left Daniel behind once before, and he was damned if he would let it happen again. Even though Daniel was missing, making it official seemed too much like giving up, somehow. In a moment of half drunk remorse, he told Sam about the guilt he felt. "If only I had told him about the radiation. Maybe, for once, he wouldn’t have touched anything and actually have done what I told him to."

Sam had her own share of guilt to deal with. She was the last one to have seen Daniel. She was the one who left him alone in that room. What if Daniel was waiting for her to figure out how to get the Mirror working again? Though she new intellectually that it was not her fault, that it was nobody’s fault, she could not quite convince herself emotionally. She still felt that she should have been able to do something to rectify the situation. But she could never figure out what.

Teal’c, she knew, took Daniel’s disappearance as hard as the rest of them. Even though he did not cry in public, blow up at people, shout at the general, kick the Mirror, get in peoples way, or bury himself in work hoping it would help him forget the missing presence. He spoke of Daniel only in the present tense, and seemed to speak of him often, as if to not let anyone forget his existence. Sam had caught him meditating in Daniel’s office on several occasions, even after it had been reassigned. Once, in an uncharacteristic display of emotion, Teal’c commented on how much he missed Daniel Jackson’s soliloquies and how quiet the bustling life of the SGC seemed to be without his presence.

But time moves on as inexorably as it ever does. So, too, do the people that had come together as team, had become friends, and learned to be a family.

They had their missions. Sam privately thought Daniel was lucky that he was not there when they followed the coordinates the warning gave. He was spared the pain of learning that Skaara had been inhabited by the son of Apophis. He did not have to be the cause of, nor witness to, the death of Skaara/Klorel. Daniel was fortunate that he was not with them when they returned home, only to learn that Klorel was to rendezvous with Apophis at Earth. Or see twenty-three cities destroyed in Apophis’ wrath before they finally managed to bring the pyramid ship down.

They had new team members. Three of them in all. All military and all good at their jobs. The first had died along with an assassin shortly after they met the Tok’Ra. The other two were still members of SG1, and good friends. But the team, as a whole, would never be as close as the original members had been.

They renewed old acquaintances. Sam was glad Daniel was not there to see the consequences of his actions on Cimmeria. He would have had a major guilt trip, she was sure, had he known that destroying the Hammer to free Teal’c allowed the Goa’uld to return.

And they kept old promises. Returning to Abydos had been hard. It was just the three of them, the Colonel, Teal’c and herself. To Sam it was a final token of farewell, to fulfill the promise to Daniel’s adopted people that he could not keep. God, that hurt, telling Kasuf that his family was gone. Daniel would never have survived Sha’re’s suicide.

Yes, Sam told herself, Daniel was the lucky one to not have been there for all of that. But still… Still, she would have preferred having Daniel back, even with all the grief he would surely have suffered. And here he was, on the other side of the Mirror, just as the Colonel said he would be.

The Mirror had remained silent, picturless. Until it activated six months ago. It was just for a moment. A buzz and a flicker, according to the guard on duty, before returning to its usually silence. The Colonel, when he heard the news, was ecstatic. He stayed in the room with the guards every chance he got, certain that the blip was Daniel, trying to find his way home. And Jack O’Neill was determined to make good on his promise to be there when it happened.

Sam avoided the storage closet as much as possible. When the Colonel asked once if she would sit with him, she politely declined, using an experiment she was running as an excuse. She did not have the heart to tell him that she secretly believed Daniel was dead.

The blip happened twice more after that. The Colonel said it was like someone flipping channels on the tv, going too quick for a picture to form. The Mirror went silent again. For five excruciating months, there was not a sound, not so much as a flicker. The Colonel fell into a black mood he has yet to fully shake. Some point soon after that, Teal’c started referring to Daniel in the past tense, when he spoke of him at all.

A month ago the Mirror become inexplicably active again. Sam found her scientific curiosity peaked at the inordinate amount of activity. They were mostly blips, as if someone were channel surfing. Twice, there were solid images.

The first time she and the Colonel were present. They saw Jaffa advancing on a storeroom reminiscent of a cluttered garage. The image disappeared before the guard had a chance to raise his weapon. Extra guards were posted after that, and Sam and the Colonel made sure they were armed whenever they visited the storage closet.

The second time, SG1 had been off planet. The guard who made the report, who had been at the SGC long before Daniel had been recruited, said he could have sworn he saw Major Kawalski and the Captain herself staring back at him. Flustered, he tried to explain seeing a ghost and an out of uniform, long haired Carter in the otherwise perfect reflection of the storage closet.

That was three days ago. Now it was happening again, and this time it was someone she had never expected to see again staring back her. It was Daniel, alive and well, with the familiar glasses and the unfamiliarly short hair, dressed in black, and waving shyly at her.

Sam beamed. Then frowned. Why wasn’t he coming through?

"Come on," she said, worriedly, motioning him over. Couldn’t he hear her?

She saw him squint at something on her side of the Mirror. Daniel frowned. Sam echoed the look. What was wrong?

Then the image shimmered, flickered once, and was gone.

Just like last time.

Sam stared at the blank slab of stone open mouthed. She could feel her eyes start to water.

No, she realized, a small smile playing on her lips. Not like last time. Now she knew. Now she was absolutely certain. Daniel was alive. They had not unknowingly left him on ‘233. They had not left him stuck behind some permanently inactive slab of rock.

Daniel was out there somewhere, trying to get home.

Although, for some reason, it did not work this time, she knew he would try again. Daniel never gave up easily.

Sam left the storage closet and the silent Mirror with a grin on her face and tears in her eyes. She had to go find Teal’c and the Colonel and tell them the great news. And next time, she silently promised Daniel, next time she would be there when he found his way home. They all would be there.

__________________________________________________________________

Daniel squinted at the name patch on Sam’s pocket. "Captain Carter," he muttered with a frown. Not his Sam. Daniel sighed. He hoped the people she was waiting for returned.

He forgot the fleeting thought as the other Sam disappeared with the flick of the switch. He continued searching the realities, looking for home.

~fin~

© 1999 The characters mentioned in this story are the property of Showtime and Gekko Film Corp. The Stargate, SG-I, the Goa’uld and all other characters who have appeared in the series STARGATE SG-1 together with the names, titles and backstory are the sole copyright property of MGM-UA Worldwide Television, Gekko Film Corp, Glassner/Wright Double Secret Productions and Stargate SG-I Prod. Ltd. Partnership. This fanfic is not intended as an infringement upon those rights and solely meant for entertainment. All other characters, the story idea and the story itself are the sole property of the author.

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