sga_flashfic | Other People's Monsters, by Merry (Villains challenge)

Title: Other People's Monsters
Author:

merryish
Spoilers: None
Characters: John Sheppard, Daniel Jackson (gen)
Word count: 420
Notes: One of the things I like best about Rising is thinking about all the plausible conversations that we missed. This is just a tiny piece of one.
Summary: Once upon a time, somewhere in the middle of the beginning...

Other People's Monsters
by Merry

~

In the lunatic days before takeoff, or gate-off, or whatever it was they called it, the days when he didn't really believe a word of it and was just waiting to get slammed with the best punchline of all time, John actually managed to pick up a lot of information. All it took was a tiny little hint of sane, human skepticism, and Daniel Jackson started talking. He talked like he'd been saving it up for years. O'Neill said Jackson was a linguist and John believed it, because he seemed to have a special knack for getting three words in where a normal guy could fit only one.

He liked Jackson, partly because he was smart and partly because he didn't seem to give a damn about anything but information. John could relate. He didn't give a damn about anything but flying. Jackson might not be a pilot, but when he started talking and his hands started waving around (and O'Neill started rolling his eyes), there was a look on Jackson's face John knew from the mirror.

The really cool thing about Daniel Jackson, though, was that he was surprisingly easy to get drunk. One beer, and the guy was gone; John imagined they didn't let him off base much. Anything the official, top secret, completely bullshit sci-fi anthology reports didn't tell him, Jackson was perfectly willing to spill under the influence of alcohol and an audience.

"So these...goold, things." John leaned back in his chair, and eyed Jackson across O'Neill's coffee table. "They're not really people, right?"

"Snakes," Jackson said, gesturing with his bottle. The motion had a vaguely sinuous, snaky curl to it that made John's skin crawl. "Snake-heads. They go in through your mouth, or the back of your neck, and wrap themselves around your spine like a string of Christmas lights. Burrow into your brain. Suppress your will and personality and set up housekeeping in your body." Jackson took another pull from his bottle, then set it down very carefully, very precisely, on the coffee table. "After that, they usually start trying to take over the galaxy."

John thought about that for a minute. "But... just this galaxy, right? Not the one I'm going to."

Jackson blinked at him, fish-eyed behind his glasses. "Probably not."

"Oh. Well. Good, then."

Jackson met John's eyes with a little too much sympathy to be comforting. "Not really."

"Oh?"

"When the Ancients fled Pegasus for this galaxy, they considered it a refuge."

John's eyes widened. "Oh."

Jackson smiled kindly, and nudged an unopened bottle across the table. "Whatever they were running from... it was probably a whole lot worse."

~

end.