Chapter Text
~0~
under the darkness of an endless sky
~0~
The man before them isn’t young. By his own admission he’s forty-three-and-a-bit, and starting to feel it in his knees when he runs laps around the ship. There’s decent stubble on his face, some light greying at his temples – he wears his age well, but he’s not young.
With a start, Daniel realises there’s a year between them, and he’s the younger one, and he begins to hate time travel all over again.
“My name is Kieran Jackson, son of Daniel and Vala”, says the stranger. Kieran; meaning dark-haired, thinks Daniel, but doesn’t say it. “I can explain the time travel thing but it’s going to take a while, and probably Sam’s help”
Sam doesn’t flinch, but they can tell she wants to, just a little.
~0~
It’s a long limp back to where they need to be, even if they did avoid being blown to smithereens. It’s enough time to put this so-called Kieran Jackson in the hold and question the living daylights out of him, but Daniel isn’t truly suspicious – between the man’s stature and smirk it’s obvious he’s the perfect mix of him and Vala, and even if there is something else at play, that one irrefutable fact (at the very least) is not in question.
(Many other facts may be in question, but not that one.)
Short of any crew except themselves, Mitchell offers to interrogate him first, and the rest of them stand behind a monitor in the other room and watch a live feed, sickly curious. Kieran doesn’t put up a fight.
“Sorry for the third degree”
“I expected it. Though I’m a little nervous to be around other people when it’s not just you guys”
“From a small town?”
“One street. Corner shop. Singular… horse…”
If Cam seems surprised to hear his own speech cadence and unique brand of sarcasm flung back at him from a stranger, he does a good job not to show it. Kieran smirks at him just enough to seem friendly, but it’s clear he’s calling a bluff, adding to his story, demonstrating that he knows them as well as he claims to, and then some.
He was raised by SG1 on a ship far far away. They’re the ones playing catch-up.
Cam quirks his head and smirks. “Raised on a spaceship with horses?”
And Kieran smirks right back, accepting the truce. “My m-“, Goes to say mother, doesn’t. Corrects himself with a barely perceptible shake of his head. “Vala in my timeline, she used to tell me about them”
He’s old enough and wise enough to try, for their sakes, to use names instead of titles, but there is a brief moment where the air leaves the room and Daniel chances a look at Vala’s profile, catching the wince she can’t hide.
Another child she doesn’t know, speaking back at her as an adult.
It’s a small comfort that Kieran doesn’t want to take over any galaxies. Hopefully.
Daniel turns back to the screen and scrutinizes this man claiming to be his son. He’s tall, his face more angular than Daniel’s, his body not quite as built. His hair is almost black and cut short as though he belongs in the military, even though he clearly doesn’t. He runs laps, apparently, and he looks like it, and though they would have kept up some semblance of physical activity, being safely ensconced on a space ship there would have been no need to handle weapons, and supplies, and machinery with the same frequency as an SGC employee. Kieran is just shy of lanky, and Daniel wonders how much of that stature is inherited from his mother. He looks like a man raised military-adjacent, amongst bright minds and caged animals.
He’s a frightening look into what fifty years cooped up on ship must have been like.
~0~
“My first name is Kieran, but my second is Jake. I got called Jake more”
“Jake Jackson”, tests Mitchell, his arms crossed, his face almost smirking.
(Jacek, Jacob, Janet, Jack – all the various people he was probably named for, lost and now un-lost. Mostly.)
“Sounds like a Hanna-Barbera character, huh?”
For some reason the reference makes them all chuckle – such a normal, ordinary Earth thing to say, except this situation isn’t normal, and this man has never been to Earth, and at some point they’re going to have to reconcile everything he must know about them that he hasn’t admitted to yet.
“I’d prefer to be called Kieran now”
Absolutely nobody questions why.
~0~
Vala avoids him the entire trip home and not one of them – including their guest – questions that either.
~0~
The Asgard core has many useful functions, but without having studied it yet, Sam isn’t sure how to run the necessary tests to ensure Kieran isn’t an enemy infiltration. He knows how, apparently, but like hell are they letting him close to any functioning tech to show them.
In the end they settle for confining him to a comfortable room and they tell him it’s only until they can verify who he is. His family warned him they’d all be suspicious, mid-battle and mid-war.
He doesn’t tell them he knows how to break out of said room, but he also doesn’t try to.
His mother would be proud of his restraint.
~0~
“He’s definitely human, and he’s definitely your son”
Caroline delivers the news with her usual lack of hesitancy, eyeing first Vala and then Daniel, showing the results to General Landry by her shoulder. Back at the SGC they feel like they’re on firmer ground, but it’s also frightening arriving back with their addition, like he’s proof of this incredible story they haven’t lived but know must have happened.
It’s there in black and white; one perfectly normal human male, slight traces of naquadah in his system and elevated reactions to dust mites and some grasses, but otherwise healthy.
“What about the psych eval?” asks Landry.
“Well, who knows what kind of latent trauma could build up after forty years living on a ship, but as far as I can tell he’s friendly, incredibly intelligent, knows as much about Earth as you and I, and won’t stop flirting with Nurse Harris”
Vala leans towards Daniel, a quip on her tongue.
“Yes I know”, he says, pre-empting her. The rebuttal makes her grin, a distraction from the obvious.
(He gets that from me. But there are other, darker things he might have got too, and those she won’t say.)
They now have a fully grown Jackson to work into their lives, and no idea where to start.
~0~
After a week on the base and endless questioning about the timeline, the Asgard core, the combat training, Daniel finally decides to corner Kieran in his quarters and get personal – a deliberate choice that took him a long time building courage towards.
“You seem to be settling in okay”, he says.
There are scrolls of text around the room and notes on Goa’uld technology, and Daniel wishes he wasn’t so surprised by it all. They had fifty years with the knowledge of the Asgard and a child to raise and fill with their favourite things. Six adults and only one small outlet of hope between them, it’s any wonder his interests seem to be a perfect crackled mirror of all of them combined.
“I studied security tapes from when you were all younger”, says Kieran, getting right to the point of Daniel’s question.
Weird, a little creepy, but Daniel doesn’t say so.
“I know”, says Kieran, catching his face. “Weird. But I was preparing myself to meet… well, you, rather than the Daniel I knew, so I felt it might be… helpful”
Nothing about this situation feels right, feels good – they’ve gained this extra limb from the depths of a future that no longer exists, and while it’s strange to think he has a son – a grown son, staring back at him with Vala’s eyes – Daniel is also mindful that Kieran said goodbye to his family, his parents, knowing he’ll never see them again, knowing they’re dead while their ghosts sit and interrogate him across the table of an interview room.
“It’s taken me too long to say this, but… I’m sorry for your loss”
Kieran’s eyes fill with tears, unashamed to show that underneath his language skills, his fighting skills, his tinkering know-how, he is also an orphan; stranger in a strange land. Incredibly intelligent and well-adjusted, but equally clueless about living amongst anyone that isn’t SG1.
The parallels to Daniel when he first came to the SGC are striking and raw.
“I’m just lucky I got all the time I did”, he says, sniffing back his emotion. “My folks were all old by the end”
He takes a moment. Daniel stays still, and quiet, letting him think.
“I know you guys aren’t them”, he finally says, looking back at Daniel. “But it’s kind of nice to get a second chance to hang out”
Daniel tries not to picture it too hard – he and Vala, sat on the floor of the commissary with a toddler between them, teaching him to count in Ancient, in Greek, in Roman numerals. Teaching him itsy-bitsy-spider. Making him laugh with blurts on his belly and toes.
He thinks of Vala showing a tiny boy how to pick all the locks on the ship for fun, and laughing when he uses his skills to break into the cupboard with all the chocolate.
Basketball games where Teal’c lifts the boy to take his shot. Cam racing him through the ship. Landry…
God knows what Landry would have been like with a child, really.
(Hopeless but trying, probably.)
Kieran seems like a funny, clever, down to Earth guy, and Daniel would like to imagine that has more to do with some random other factors besides the six of them all pitching in to raise him, but he can’t. Kieran keeps looking at them all like he’s trying so hard not to make references they won’t understand, and Daniel is reminded of the visions he had, many years ago now, of the day his parents died. He tries to imagine how he would react to meeting them again as an adult, and he can’t.
He tries to think of a way to make this easier on Kieran, but he can’t do that either.
The old them had to leave one person behind with the crystal and an escape plan, and it was no choice at all who that would be.
“I look forward to getting to know you better”, offers Daniel, with his hand extended to shake. When Kieran takes it with a soft me too, they both smile at each other, and maybe they aren’t really father and son but there’s no reason they can’t be friends.
~0~
They let him out of his room so long as he stays on base, and he begs to see the Gateroom. Then he begs to go outside and see the stars.
Sam and Mitchell go with him, smile when he whistles at the Milky Way, and Sam places her hand on his back when he gets tears in his eyes.
It’s the first time he’s ever breathed in fresh atmosphere, ever been on the surface of a planet, and for all he knows about SG1 and the wonders of the universe, they have some things to teach him too.
“Holographs just don’t compare”, he whispers, a boy again. He looks like Daniel, back when Sam first met him.
They stand for a while and just watch, feeling the wind on their faces and seeking out constellations. They watch a military vehicle drive into the complex with its headlights on. Finally, it’s Mitchell who breaks the silence.
“Don’t suppose you know how to drive a stick-shift?”
Kieran looks at him with a smirk. “Don’t know how to drive at all”
They start meandering back to the entrance.
“What?” barks Mitchell, his tone still light. “What the hell was I doing all those years?”
“No cars on a spaceship”, says Kieran with a shrug. There’s something about his smirk that makes Sam think this isn’t the first time they’ve had this conversation.
“Well, I think I should talk to the General and have that fixed real quick”, says Cam.
It’s an olive branch of the kindest order – a real skill that he’ll need on Earth; a chance to get to know one another.
“You did build a flight simulator with the Asgard core and one of the 302s on board, and teach me how to fly jets”, says Kieran, walking forward without waiting to see Cam’s reaction, which is comical and stunned.
“So wait”, he says. Sam keeps up with Kieran and grins at the whole exchange, hearing Cam jog up behind them. “You’re telling me you can fly a Fighter in sim but you can’t drive stick?”
“Can’t be that hard, can it?”
Now she knows that Kieran is messing with them, and she sort of adores him for it. Cam coughs and splutters his way back into the mountain, and it’s only when they’re in the lift together that Kieran turns to Sam with his hands in his pockets, looking so much like his father it’s jarring, and says, “Did I mention you taught me how to ride motorbikes in the loading bay?”
Cam’s affected indignation at not having the honour makes Sam grin wide and true, and there’s a melancholy in Kieran’s face to see it. They walk back inside to get something to eat from the mess, and Sam tries not to think about the loss of her own parents, so many years apart, and all the things she still wishes they could teach her.
“I guess we’ll have to test your skills one day”, she promises. The idea of the three of them riding up through the mountains on a sunny day sounds like a lot of fun.
“You’re on”, he says back. “So long as you let me teach you cello”
He ignores the startled, confused, pleased look on Sam’s face, letting that tidbit hang in the air.
~0~
Daniel finds Vala pacing in her room like a caged tiger, her hair flapping behind her as she spins, and he can tell she’s almost hyperventilating as her mind goes racing.
“What the hell were we thinking?” she asks him, as he steps inside and closes the door.
Daniel puts his hands in his pockets and waits.
“Having a child on the ship like that. How selfish did we become?”
Ah. So that’s the train she’s on. She’s been avoiding Kieran completely, so it’s hard to keep track.
“We probably thought we’d get out of it sooner than we did”, he replies gently.
(Kieran mentioned in questioning that he was a happy accident, so Daniel wonders if they were thinking at all, but he doesn’t say so.)
He doesn’t step near the reality of them. Doesn’t ponder the love – the devotion – that must have blossomed enough for the two of them, broken and battered and with baggage to spare, knowingly entering a relationship so well-functioning they could raise the somewhat stable human down the hall.
“But we didn’t know that Daniel, we couldn’t have known that, and we went and condemned an entire person to a space prison for over forty years, who does that?”
And what she’s really asking is, what kind of mother does that make me, because her last attempt at motherhood was kyboshed before she even got to hold her baby, and Kieran’s life was nothing like that but it still feels wrong, somehow. Like they’ve let him down, even though he’s a grown man with a friendly smile and enough random knowledge from all over the place that Daniel knows exactly how he spent his free time.
“Kieran doesn’t seem to mind”, he replies, his tone soft. (I would mind, but he doesn’t.)
She stops in her tracks, her thoughts halted for a moment, and looks at him like she’s seeing him for the first time.
“He’s lovely, isn’t he?” she asks softly, searchingly, her voice cracking with all the lost opportunities she’ll never get back from Adria.
Daniel grins, just a little. Kieran has her eyes, and her cheekbones.
“We must’ve done something right”, he replies.
Vala almost smiles, looks away, and then decides to grin after all.
“He has your chin”, she says, and Daniel shakes his head and drops it to his chest with a smile and a sigh.
He has a son. He has a son with Vala. He has a son with Vala who is older than both of them.
(Time travel can go fuck itself.)
~0~
Teal’c doesn’t treat him like glass. Teal’c is impressed by his fighting skills and obvious level of training. Teal’c almost gets knocked on his ass when Kieran throws a punch right after asking, “So I take it Daniel and Vala haven’t got their shit together yet?”
Teal’c recovers quickly, but still catches the cheeky grin on Kieran’s face.
“Yet?”
Kieran grins wider and sets up his next stance. They aren’t training hard, but they’ve both broken a sweat and it’s a nice excuse to have a conversation. They continue to speak as they dance around each other, throwing small moves and punches.
“T, I don’t know how things are for you here, but let me tell you, two people don’t get together after only three months alone unless there’s something else going on underneath”
Teal’c doesn’t have a good answer to that, but it also feels too simplistic.
“And I know what I saw – what I was raised with”
And there’s nothing much to say to that, either.
“Daniel Jackson and Vala Mal Doran are many conversations away from having a true relationship”, he says instead. He might as well be honest with the product of their true relationship, after all.
Kieran stops for a moment, blinking wide.
“Does this surprise you, Kieran Jackson?”
“No”, he says, shaking out of it. “No, it’s just… it’s been a very long time since you’ve used their full names. For me. It’s been a long time for me”
Teal’c inclines his head but says nothing. Timelines confuse him a little.
“And my full name is Kieran Jake Mal Doran Jackson, just for the record. But you don’t have to use the whole thing”
And then he goes for the jugular and Teal’c is almost knocked on his ass again, and can’t help but think to himself that the damn kid had a damn good teacher.
~0~
When Vala does summon the courage to speak to him alone, Kieran is waiting for her patiently in the mess, away from everyone and eating pie. Something about it changing flavour every week delights him.
She sits down wordlessly across the table, lowering herself like she’s half prostrating, half ready to bolt. Kieran watches her with older eyes, but a young boy’s glee. His mother was always beautiful, but seeing her at an age before he was born is still fascinating to him.
“I’m sorry I’ve been avoiding you”, she says.
He shrugs. “I know it’s weird” (It’s weird for him too; his parents were over eighty last they spoke.)
“That’s no excuse”
“I know you have a deeper history than most people with this sort of thing”
Children. He means grown children. Grown children she can speak to and reason with, who she never held or comforted or sang to sleep. Vala looks down and away and then back at him, because she’s been building up her courage for days and it’s time that she stopped running. Again.
“I want to get to know you just as much as the others do”, she says firmly. “I’m just not sure how”
“How about I start with telling you when my birthday is, so you can plan me a surprise party, and we go from there?”
She laughs at him. She is so shocked and taken aback – so surprised that he knows her, even though logically she knows why he does – that she grins and she laughs.
He smiles, watching her. “It’s good to see you smile again”, he says.
He’s nothing like Adria, and she owes it to the both of them to remember that. She wants to ask him about her and Daniel, about how they managed it, how they were - together and with him – and what the hell she did to keep herself occupied for all those years. (She wants to ask him if she ever sang him to sleep with the songs her mother used to sing to her.) Instead she sidesteps the question and asks, “What was your favourite way to get into trouble as a child?”
Any other time he would tread gently with his answers, aware that his memories belong to the people who feature in them and not their doppelgangers in this timeline. But he also knows his mother, better than almost anyone, and knows from her stories and reflections and the few security recordings he watched, what she needs to hear and is afraid to hear.
“I used to tease my parents for kissing in any place that wasn’t our family quarters”, he says, and watches her reaction closely.
Her smile falls a bit, her eyes going wide. He has surprised her, and not entirely in a good way. She was going to stay on neutral ground and he pushed her right over enemy lines, and Vala hates nothing more than being trapped in a situation she can’t control. But he’s lived with his parents his entire life, and he’d hate for them to waste time now – time they may not have if the Ori have anything to say about it. He hates knowing how good they can be together and yet watch them dance around old hurts and misplaced mistrust, like those are reason enough not to take a chance at something good.
(There is something to be said for being older than your parents. Something about wisdom.)
There are so many questions in her eyes, and not one of them comes tumbling out, and so Kieran takes a deep breath and answers for her. “It wasn’t conventional, but my life has been great. And it’s because I had amazing parents, who loved me and each other to the ends of the Earth”
Vala’s eyes fill with tears and when one falls she promptly swipes it away. Nobody else notices.
Deciding to give her something else, something that is about him, he continues, “My mother taught me how to bake, and we used to make the most amazing cakes together”
Vala smiles, watery and glad.
“But she never could master bread. Always over-worked it”
Another sadder, heavier tear falls, a memory caught behind her eyes.
Kieran holds out his hand over the table as a gesture of comfort, and is surprised at the strength of her grip when she takes it without looking at him, fighting another flood of emotion from a place he doesn’t recognise.
(He thinks, maybe, he doesn’t really know these people half as well as he’d like.)