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The kids sleep a lot of the ride.
Or they feign sleeping, at least, and it's hard to tell with his kids sometimes. There are days when everything Stiles and Lydia seem to do, everything they seem to say, feels scripted. Well-performed, well-memorized, but tailored to him, or to their teachers, or to any other adult they speak to.
It's only when they think that they're alone together that those scripts seem to fall away.
They're not together, he doesn't think, despite them sharing a room when they were trapped in the SGC a few months ago, despite the way that they sit with their heads tucked close, whispering in encoded half-speak.
Belts and suspenders, his kids.
He just hopes that here, away from all of the mess of DC and Homeworld Security and the secrets he needs to keep, they'll open up even a little.
They're twenty minutes from the cabin when he sees Stiles wake in his rearview mirror, and there's a half-second when he looks relaxed before his entire body freezes up. Jack can see, even in the mirror, the tension in him.
“Where exactly are we going?” Stiles asks.
Next to him, Lydia wakes.
Jack had told them it was a surprise, which in this moment he’s thinking was a mistake, because whatever issues his kids have, something about this drive seems to be setting off all of them. So, in an easy voice, he says, “I know I've mentioned my cabin. A little sun, some fishing—”
“And woods,” Lydia says. Her voice comes out oddly flat.
Jack is reminded, bizarrely, of when he first brought them to Sam's house. They asked if there were woods nearby, but they didn't want to go into them
Some kids are afraid of woods, though, especially coming from a more suburban area—they just don't know how to navigate them, how to survive them
“We'll do some wilderness survival while you're here,” he says. “And I promise I won't throw you into the deep end.”
Stiles chokes out a laugh that borders on hysterical, and okay, that was clearly the wrong tactic. “We know wilderness survival,” he says, and his tone of voice is wrong. “We just don't like the woods.”
Something must have happened, back in Beacon Hills. They have a forest preserve there.
Damn it, he wishes he knew more about their background. There are minefields here that he never expected to run into.
“Any particular reason?”
“The trees,” Lydia says, at the same time Stiles says, “There are things there, things with teeth.”
Jack is not sure which answer is worse, but somehow, despite everything, it feels like it might be Lydia's.
“Well,” Jack says, “you’re welcome to hang out and fish if you want. And Sam will be here tonight, and I'm sure she'll rope us into something educational and intellectual like Scrabble.”
In the rearview mirror, he sees Stiles show Lydia something on his phone.
Damn it, he fucked this up.
The rest of the drive is quiet–they’re too remote for his car radio to get anything coherent, and anything the kids are saying, they're not saying to him.
They unpack their stuff with minimal complaining, and Jack points them to the two guest rooms while he heads out back to turn on the water and the generator.
By the time he gets back and drops his own stuff in the master bedroom, both kids are congregated in one room, muttering furiously to each other. On the bed is a half-filled jar of what looks like dirt.
How the fuck is it that, of the kids he's taken care of who have reached this age, the alien was the normal one?
They notice him as soon as he stops in the doorway, their argument dropping away. From this close, it looks like Lydia picked this room, given that he can only see her stuff, and he's honestly at this point mostly just glad that they're not trying to share a room.
“Let's chat,” he says
They follow him into the main room, which serves as kitchen and dining room and living room all at once. Stiles sprawls out on the couch first, before Jack has to decide whether the couch or the table seems more like an intervention, and Lydia sits down next to him. Jack takes one of the armchairs.
“We're here for the week,” he tells them. They know that, but it can't hurt to repeat it. “There's no service or internet, but I have a landline and a couple of sat phones if we need them. I have a few rules for you while you're here.”
“I'll hide the cocaine,” Stiles mutters.
The only positive is that Jack is almost certain that he's kidding. For all their weirdness, there's no evidence that either of them are fucking with drugs or taking anything beyond Stiles’s Adderall and Lydia's birth control.
“If you can figure out how to throw a rager here,” he tells Stiles, “I will give you my full blessing.” Honestly, it would be the most normal thing they did. “My rules are this: show up for lunch and dinner, don't drown each other in the lake, tell me or Sam if you're going to head out into the forest, and, if something happens and you need to call for help, call the number I give you before you call 911.”
“Who does it call?” Lydia asks.
He thinks she knows the answer, given the challenge in her voice, but it's a good question regardless. “It's a line at Homeworld Security. It's manned 24/7, and they can have help here in less than five minutes.” Most of the time, for them, calling normal emergency services is the best option. Out here, if something happens, a response from local emergency services could take well over an hour.
Stiles glances at Lydia, checking in with her the way they do so often, then demands, “Why are we here, anyway? You can't have just decided that cloistering yourself in the middle of nowhere was how you wanted to spend a week.”
“That's what you think because you're not old yet,” Jack says, amused. “But I'm also hoping that you might be able to relax here.”
“In the middle of a forest?” Lydia scoffs. She sounds like he has just said that he hoped they could relax at the mouth of an active volcano.
“There is nobody here who will hurt you.”
“Do you know—”
“Lydia—”
“No, shut up,” Lydia snaps. “You really think it's so safe here? Everything you know, and you think it's safe here?”
This can't be about the SGC, because they were weird about the woods before they ever knew. “What do I know?”
“Lydia,” Stiles says again, warningly.
“Who are we protecting?” Lydia demands. It's clearly the continuation of an existing argument, picked up right where it left off. “What do you think he's going to do?”
“Do you think he can't send people to California?” Stiles demands.
California? Is something going on in that town of theirs?
Does it have anything to do with their parents dying? He hadn't thought much of the sinkhole, but now it has the feel of a cover story. Just weird enough that nobody would think anyone would make it up.
He's willing to bet that there was a sinkhole that night. He's just suddenly not so sure that Natalie and Stiles’s father died in it, or at least from it.
“If people are in danger—”
Stiles stands abruptly, and Jack can see his hands trembling a little. Not the shaking of an addict heading into withdrawal, but the trembling of someone who is desperately afraid. Without another word, he heads back towards the bedrooms.
Damn it.
“Whatever is going on,” Jack says, “I can help you.”
Behind him, he can hear Stiles rattling around in the cabin, opening what sounds like every door.
“We didn't ask for this,” Lydia says. She sounds tired. “I just—” She looks past him, to where Stiles is opening another door. “Chances are, we're both just being paranoid.”
One time he thought Sam was being paranoid, and it turned out she really did have an Ancient living in her house.
“I will believe you,” he tells her.
“Yeah,” she says, looking away. “That's the problem.”
She stands and heads past him towards Stiles.
Fuck.
–
Sam gets in late, after dinner, and Jack watches both kids track her from the moment her headlights come into view until she opens the door and steps across the threshold of the cabin.
They've both always had degrees of hypervigilance, but either he wasn't paying enough attention to it before, or it's worse here
But as soon as she's inside, they both relax almost in unison. Sam clearly notices, but she doesn't say anything, just drops her duffel bag on the table and heads over to say hi and give him a kiss.
And then she spots what Lydia is reading and asks, “Raychaudhuri?”
“By the time I can get access to all that math you're keeping classified, I'm damn well going to understand it.”
Please for the love of God let her not be planning on joining the SGC.
“I know Major Hailey walked you through some of it,” Sam says.
“She walked me through what was a Master's-level explanation at best, dumbed down as best as she could for a teenager. You can't possibly think that I would find out about the fact that there are functional wormholes that we have been sending human beings through for decades and not want to understand how they work.”
Jack, at least, certainly can think that, because despite his own Master's, he's always been more than satisfied with an understanding that is fifty-thousand feet at best. In fact, in his view, better not to understand all the nitty-gritty details of whatever happens to their bodies whenever they step through the Stargate.
But Sam, who has never been satisfied with knowing anything less than everything, says, “I can talk to our security officers about giving you access to some of the math, if you really want it. We'd have to figure out location—maybe the Pentagon or the SGC, probably not JBAB—but given what you've been cleared for….”
“Sanders is going to love that paperwork.”
He's their main security officer who deals with giving CIVs and CTRs access, and he's good at his job, but truly Jack has never met a man with a bigger hard-on for the letter of the law.
“We give scientists access,” Sam says. He can see her brilliant brain whirring behind those eyes of hers, even as she stands there next to his chair, still in her jacket. “Even ones who aren't SGC or Homeworld Security employees.”
Those are rare, though, and generally actual adults.
“I'll look into it,” Sam says to Lydia, refocusing on her. For a half-second there's a look of raw yearning on Lydia's face, before she packs it away behind that untouchable teenage girl mask she's so fond of. “No guarantees, but I'll try.”
“Thanks,” Lydia says. She looks back down at her book.
Sam touches Jack's shoulder, then grabs her bag and heads to their bedroom to drop it off.
“Are you planning to come work for us?” Jack asks.
Lydia glances at Stiles, but he's studiously ignoring them, staring pointedly at a book on what looks like North American folklore.
What weird kids he has.
He's not sure what he's expecting, but it's not the gut punch that comes when she asks, “How did Dr. Frasier's mom die?”
Even now, thinking about Janet is—
It's hard.
All of his losses, every one of his men and women who don't make it back, they're all hard. But Janet was his friend , was all of their friend, and she was the one that they didn't need to worry about, who didn't throw herself in front of danger every day. She was the one with a kid—a living kid—and a life on Earth, a real life. A life that she should have gotten to live.
“She died saving a life,” he says.
Lydia's lips thin. “I'm not interested in putting myself in harm's way,” she says, like it's a defiance and not the answer he would have given his left hand for.
The water runs in the bathroom. Jack looks Lydia in the eye and says, with all of the solemnity that he can manage, “I don’t want you to put yourself in harm’s way. Either of you,” he adds, because it needs to be said.
He does what he does to keep his family safe. His country, his planet, the human race, but truly, in the heart of it, his family.
He wakes up some days from dreams of Lydia with a bullet in her head. Of Stiles with his face covered in blood, the way that he’s seen it, but this time with eyes that won’t close, blank with death.
He’s been having those dreams of Cassie for years, since Janet’s death.
He dreams other things of Sam, of Daniel and Teal’c. Bodies that are never found, floating in the dead vacuum of space. Glowing eyes, his own hand on a zat. Freezing to death in Antarctica and Daniel stepping off a balcony and a grasping hand pulling the symbiote from Teal’c’s pouch even though he’s been on trenonin for well over a decade.
But children—children he always dreams of with a gun in their hand and a wound to their head.
“Would you be mad?” Stiles asks. “If we don’t join the Air Force?”
Jack blinks at him, coming back to himself. “What?”
Stiles grimaces. He looks a little like he didn’t want to ask that, maybe because it gives the impression that he cares whether Jack is mad at him. Jack has a feeling that, given the option, Stiles would pretend he doesn’t care what Jack thinks about him until they all die of old age.
He has a you’re not my dad mentality that Jack totally understands but that can be a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes.
Lydia doesn’t have that same sort of issue, probably because she didn’t go from being raised by a single father that she was apparently devoted to to being raised by a man she had never heard of before. Jack’s not taking Natalie’s place, and he’s gotten the impression she wasn’t too fond of her schmuck of a father.
“Isn’t that a thing that people in the military usually want? Their—whatever to enlist after them?”
There are some who want that. Jack’s never been into that whole idea of a family legacy of service. His own father served in Korea, but it was more about the GI Bill than anything else. Jack joined up because he didn’t know what else to do with his life, and flying seemed cool.
Maybe it would be different if Charlie had lived. But he wouldn’t be here if Charlie had lived.
“If either of you wanted to join the military,” he says, “I wouldn’t stop you.” He wouldn’t be Jacob. He wouldn’t meddle in his kids’ lives until they could barely stand to look at him. “But no, I don’t want you to enlist or commission. I want you to stay the hell away from anything that might get you shot.”
He’s been putting off making them go to the shooting range and practice until he can trust them with any gun they might come across, but he can’t get away with that indefinitely. He needs to get over his shit enough to get there.
Lydia laughs. It’s not a good sound.
He needs to know what the fuck is going on with his kids. It started as weird, but they passed that into worrisome a few months ago when Lydia knew that their people had died before anyone else did.
She has the ATA gene, but he’s never heard of anyone else having a presentation of it like that. If she’s somehow closer to ascension than she should be, or if people with the gene can sometimes do that, they need to know.
And if there’s something else going on with her, he needs to know.
“We can talk about it later,” Jack says, because it doesn’t seem like he’s going to get anything out of them right now. “Go back to reading your Ray Charles.”
“Raychaudhuri.”
“Like I said.”
She makes a face, but it’s the most normal expression he’s seen from her all day, so he’ll take it.
–
In the morning, Stiles heads out into the forest wearing a red hoodie. Lydia follows.