itsallovernow | Plotfree fic. Get yer plot free fic.

SG-1 S.10. G rated. Post Memento-Mori, Pre-The Quest.

You Come To Casablanca for the Waters

It's dark in the restaurant even though outside it's light and crisp, all smokey fallish air and bright leaves. They live between worlds. This dichotomy is easy.

Not a lot of folks in for an early dinner on a Thursday night, just one couple in the back who look young and new to each other, sitting very close, not sure how to eat with their fingers. The lady at the hostess stand asks them to take off their shoes and the pile of boots on the floor look vaguely sad, out of place. Vala's high heels, pink silk, incongruous, delicate and pretty on their own, rest on top. She's never worn them before and they hurt her feet. She sat in Mitchell's front seat and took them off halfway to the restaurant, holding them in her lap like something precious, walked barefoot from the parking lot. Teal'c scrunches his toes against the woven carpet and looks longingly at his trainers.

They follow the woman to a small semi-private alcove, stepping down into it to rest on the pillows surrounding the low table. It smells like lemon and spice with a heady dose of incense and there's music in the background, kind of mournful and atonal. Jackson sits down cross-legged on the pillows like he was born to it and Vala sort of sprawls herself amongst them, her shoulder brushing Cam's side, toes against Jackson's thigh. She looks decadent, all dark hair and wide eyes, looking around her at the things that gleamed and shone, at the silk hangings and the lush draperies.

"It's closing soon," Sam says, fiddling with the edge of the table, trying to find a comfortable way to sit upright. "Not enough customers." She peers through the curtains at the empty foyer. "They told me on the phone when I made the reservation."

Cam nods, catches Teal'c's eye. "Been here forever, I think. It's too bad."

The waiter comes by bearing a large tea pot filled with hot water and they know to put their hands in the middle of the bowl, to wash their skin with the scented water, to dry off with the towels. In some ways, this place is a natural fit. No wonder they've never been here.

They don't talk much until the waiter comes back with two bottles of Morrocan red and a bastilla. He uncorks the bottles, pours as Vala breaks off tiny pieces of the pastry, powdered sugar coating her lips.

"It's good," she says, catching crumbs in her fingers. She swallows hard, reaches for her wine.

"Tastes like home," Jackson says, sounding surprised at himself and gives Vala this vague, odd look like he understands something new.

Teal'c takes a tiny bite, the sugar falling onto his wrists, speckling his skin like snow, like salt. "We used game," he chews softly. "Not fowl. But it is… familiar."

Mitchell and Carter eat, less at ease without utensils, but it's not hard to adjust. The waiter continues to bring dishes, some less familiar, some sweet and vinegary and spiced. Vala reaches up to feed Mitchell a bit of something bright purple, beets maybe, and her fingers rest a little while against his mouth, his lips stained purple from the beet, from the wine. He looks at her, at her wide eyes and the sweep of her throat and doesn't feel guilty at the tiny shiver, doesn't feel guilty for her skin against his mouth. He doesn't look around, is grateful that this is Vala. Her actions are always simply her own.

"Does this remind you of Egypt, Daniel Jackson?" There's a collective look of surprise that the question would come from Teal'c and Vala pushes her foot against Jackson's thigh, turns away from Cam, but settles her back against him.

"No," Jackson says, too quickly. "Yes. Egypt isn't… like this." He pauses. "Morocco isn't really…either."

He drinks more wine and Vala sits up. "We've watched your History Channel. Teal'c and I read some of the books. So… what is it like?" The two of them exchange a glance and Cam feels far outside. He's been to Egypt. Well, he's been to the desert to do maneuvers. All he remembers is sand, heat, hot sweet tea and meat that he couldn't identify and women with dark eyes. That's not what they're asking about.

Sam's been a host, briefly. All of them have lived in that world, that culture that sprang out of the Nile delta thousands of years ago. Cam isn't sure he could put into words what they're asking of Jackson, but from the look on his face, they're asking more than he's willing to give. Cam could tell them about coffee houses and bodies that smell like kohl and opium and sweat and spice, could talk about sitting in the sun for hours, about the way heat bakes your brain, makes you see things in the air, about the way it's impossible to sleep through the muezzin until one day you do.

But they want fairy tales. And normally, Jackson would be the go to guy for that kind of story, but right now he looks mulish, heels digging in with refusal. It doesn't surprise Cam that he'd refuse Vala – that particular push pull tag catch release is still as much parlor game as intimate connection – but he is surprised that Jackson would refuse a query from Teal'c.

"It's my birthday," Vala says. "You have to do what I want."

Sam snorts, inhales her wine and Teal'c whacks her politely on the back until she stops coughing.

"It isn't really your birthday," Mitchell says, but she squirms against him a little and he puts his hand low on her back and knows it doesn't matter.

"It could be," she says, and tilts up her head to look at him. Her smile is lazy and hot and sweet as the incense, heady as the wine, tart on his tongue. She is still so very much trouble, even muted, even here. He wonders when he decided that it was fun. It was long before he pressed that patch to her shoulder. She was part of his team the day she stepped through the gate. She gave him Jackson, and Jackson gave him everything else.

So maybe that's his gift. Convincing Jackson to give her this.

"It was hot… when I was there," he says, offering an opening, and Sam looks at him, mouth open, then nods. Teal'c raises an eyebrow.

"Air Force," Cam says, shrugs. "And summer. A really winning combination. I drank hot tea all summer and sweated like a mother… I smelled like mint was seeping out of my pores." It had been the weirdest sensation, dirt and sweat and engine oil and that sweet minty scent like cannibis on his skin.

Jackson takes a deep breath. "I wanted…" and he stops, drinks some more wine as the silence stretches out. The waiter comes back, looks at them disapprovingly for not having eaten more of the salads. He puts a platter of lamb and couscous on the table, and pretends he doesn't hear Sam ask for silverware.

"Go on," Vala says, encouragingly. She picks the raisins out of the couscous until Teal'c makes a decidedly stop doing that noise and it finally strikes Cam how weird this all is. Sitting in this empty restaurant without his shoes, here with his team. How weird it isn't.

"I thought it would be like the language," he says. "That I'd be there, excavating and it would be like ancient Egyptian, all these layered symbols, these translucent phrases. Greece is Greek. There's no way to describe excess, no word for too much. I thought Egypt would be like that. It wasn't."

Cam's read the reports, and now, maybe he can understand them. He sees, finally, the way that those early reports are filled with this big, wide eyed wonder, this Egypt that Jackson finally saw in person, the one he hadn't found on this earth. He remembers, finally, that Jackson was an archaeologist, that he wanted to study the past, that he got a living present. That must have been amazing. That must have been terrifying.

"You expected something like Dakara?" Teal'c asked, "Or Abydos?"

Jackson gives him a sort of martyred half smile, a look of minor shame. "Yeah."

Sam pats his arm, maybe the only person who could do that right now.

"It's beautiful," he says, "in many ways…"

He stops because the music gets louder and a young woman with warm brown hair stands in the entrance to their alcove. She stretches up her arms, vibrates to the music and as it swells, begins to play the cymbals on her fingers. Her skin looks soft, looks like honeyed silk as she moves her hips. She looks bored, the white of the costume catching in the light, her belly bare, eyes flat. She starts to dance, and it's clear she's dancing for herself.

Vala watches her greedily, the play of muscle, the sparkle of the paste gems on the belt, the total dislocation, the way the girl stays inside of herself. She sways a little to the music and Cam can feel the play of skin along her back.

"We should tip her," Jackson says and Vala holds her palm out for the cash. They all dig into their wallets until she has a fistful of bills.

"Don't…" Jackson starts, but Vala gives him a kind look. "I know what to do," she says, and stands, moves towards the girl. For a moment, when Vala stands beside her, the girl stops playing and the quiet is almost a relief, and then Vala smiles at her moves a little, hips and body relaxed. The girl dances with her, hands at her cheek, ignoring the others. She flirts with Vala, beckons to her but instead of continuing to dance Vala fans the money over the girls head. The dancer pivots, ignoring the falling bills, and when Vala returns to her seat, when the music ends, the girl smiles, shy, discomfited. The waiter comes by and picks up the money.

"She wasn't very good," Daniel says, pulls away a chunk of lamb.

"It doesn't matter," Vala says. She steals a few more raisins from the opposite side of the dish, and Teal'c lets her. "I had dancing girls sometimes." She rarely refers to herself in the first person when talking of Quetesh. "When I was me," she clarifies and Cam breathes a little easier. "I liked to watch them. I used to wish I could go join them, drink wine and eat honeyed sweets and dance for their goddess. Sleep with the guards and get better cuts of meat." Her eyes darken and then she flashes a wicked smile. "They were very, very limber," she says and Cam tries to keep his pulse down.

"They outlawed belly dancing," Jackson says, like he's trying to make a point for her. "For awhile. In Egypt. We'd go to the cabarets sometimes, when the dancers would show up, dance anyway. I used to fall asleep sometimes, wake up to watch these women shimmying, shoes so high and beads on their skirts, defying orders from their god."

"So it wasn't all bad then," Vala says and looks back at Teal'c. He nods at her, takes his own share of raisins.

"You wanna know what it could have been," Jackson says, and that's when Cam knows he's drunk, or at the very least tipsy. "Who you could have been. But the Gou'ald were petty gods, tyrants in wolfs clothing and the Turks never conquered you and you never traded with the Greeks or the Romans, never were held up as the enemy, as the foreigner. Never discovered the asp, never sheltered the British, never watched your culture fall into something passed around in living rooms and featured on TV."

The waiter comes to take the lamb, clearing away all of the plates until the table is empty and silver and shining again. He pours hot tea into small glasses, arcing the pour in a practiced way. Vala eats the baklava, biting it off in sticky pieces and finishes her wine, fingers leaving smudges on the glass.

Cam feels that low buzz of arousal that comes with these sorts of dinners, the way that Sam looks at Daniel and knows that he can't really put into words the answers to anything his friends are really asking, that she can read him as well as she reads particles and quarks and leptons. It's a kind of love that Cam sort of knew was possible, knew from leading men into dogfights, but never understood how it could be this deep. That he could love the way that Teal'c is already forgiving Jackson for the lapse, and plotting to steal raisins at a later date, will have a whole pack of Sunmaid boxes that he will refuse to share with Vala until she begs. The way that Jackson could have solved all of this by just talking about something easy like sleeping in a tent and brushing dirt off old things because he should know that they crave moments of his life as much as they crave the potential of their own histories. The way that Vala will put her head on Cam's shoulder, slotting perfectly against his body and still watch Jackson like he's a sticky treat.

When they leave, Vala refuses to put her shoes on, carries them with her. Sam rides back to Colorado Springs with Daniel and Cam takes Teal'c and Vala back to the mountain. She kisses them both goodnight, a little tipsy herself, and she tastes like honey and walnuts and mint and Cam lets himself linger with his hand on her back and her tongue against his lips because she tastes cool and sweet and he's grateful and maybe somewhere it actually is her birthday.

Teal'c lets her take his arm, but won't carry her shoes and Cam watches them walk through security. He calls Jackson on the cell phone once the aliens disappear past the gate.

"She likes the shoes," he says, and Jackson snorts. "She picked them out, she'd better like them. Do you know how much they cost?"

Cam interrupts him. "It was a nice thing. The shoes. Taking her there. It was a nice thing to do, Jackson." He tries to figure out what to say next, how to convey that he gets the way disappointment is cloying, irrational. How when you're looking for God, it's worse than tragic to find only men. He figures even Jackson was young once.

"You ever go back," he asks instead. "These days?"

"No," Jackson says. "Not anymore. There's nothing left there for me."

"Yeah, well."

"Sam says good night," Jackson says, and then hangs up. Cam takes himself home, finds the tea leaves in the back of the pantry, brews them up and lets them sit on the kitchen bar so that his house smells like mint, dreams of sand and silk and lush mouths, bodies twined, of the sun hot and high in the sky over them as his team walks out of the desert. For once, he doesn't dream of the end of the world.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cofax7

::happy sigh::

I'll have to reread that; there's a lot going on with Daniel there that I'm not quite smart enough to pick up on today (gotta get out of the office, damnit). But it's really good, and rather melancholy but warm at the same time.

From:

I Don't Get Out Much, So I Read - Thea's Journal

Plotfree fic. Get yer plot free fic.

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