Title: A Place Where Christmas Didn’t Belong
Wordsmith: mor_tru
Email: mor_tru@yahoo.com
Category: GEN/Angst/Adventure
Archived: To our website.
Status: Complete
Pairings: None
Spoilers: None
Season/Sequel: O’Neill - The Early Years’ Special Ops series.
Ratings: PG13
Content Warning: A couple of moments of real language.
Summary: Jack remembers one Christmas Eve from his Special Op days.
Author’s Notes: Many thanks to the extraordinary beta’ing of BettaSue and Tru. And as always, a special thanks to my co-author. 8-)
Disclaimers: We all know there’s a real
fine line between what’s theirs and what’s ours, and although the characters
belong to them, it’s our imagination that makes this story ours.
Date: Updated 05/15/05.
**********************************************************************************************************
~~~~~oOo~~~~~
A Place
Where Christmas Didn’t Belong
mor_tru
~~~~~oOo~~~~~
It was the last breath of Christmas Eve,
only this year Lieutenant Jack O’Neill was some place else.
Maybe in this place the mountains stretched out before him like ragged scars of
rough rock. Their ominous silhouettes defined by sharp edged peaks that hurtled
upwards from the flat valley floor to linger like ancient echoes of their
primal birth. A place where he could sense Nature hovering aggressively in her
fight to overcome the blight of man and restore beauty to a land disfigured by
the ugliness of a thousand years of war. A place where he and the team lay
hidden beneath the silence of a clear cold night - waiting.
In the daylight, they hugged the ground concealed and motionless. Their senses
ramped tight as they quietly watched for hours, scanning the surface of the
earth for minute disruptions to the stillness. Sometimes a mountain goat would
snap O’Neill’s gaze as it leapt from rock to rock, surefooted and defiant of
the precipice only a misstep away. He’d track its
movements. Watch it halt mid-stride, balancing on the edge of nothingness to
stare vaguely in his direction and snort out a warning that vibrated the calm.
Through the intimacy of his riflescope, he could see the goat’s eye move as it
scanned the surrounding rocks for signs of danger. Then poised, it would sniff
at the wind and freeze, almost as though it could sense he was there - both of
them breathing shallow and strangely connected. A long moment would pass where
he and it remained static in the breeze. Until finally its instincts dismissed
him with a perfunctory kiss-this-ass flick of its tail as it leapt back into
its rock-colored camouflage while he and the team stayed securely hidden
beneath theirs.
Only at night did the team move under the cover of darkness, aware that the dangers
were more than just the threat of man. This place was unforgiving to the
careless step as they walked along paths just broad enough for the width of
their boots. O’Neill could feel the unevenness of the ground under his soles as
he eased his way carefully along ridges that snaked the rock surfaces in
razor-thin ribbons. Cautiously they navigated these ledges, secure in the
knowledge that no armored vehicles, cars or trucks could follow their trail
along these treacherous paths.
In the dark, the mountains breathed with the uncertain progress of life as
anonymous echoes broke the silence. Sometimes the night air would vibrate with
the sound of rocks scattering, jarring O’Neill’s instincts and sending him and
the team diving for cover, scouting down all the possibilities - a rock
dislodged by an unseen hoof or maybe by a careless man. And
in the ensuing quiet, he’d hear the signature swish of dry twigs scraping
against fur and know in his gut that it was just another predator pursuing its
startled prey through the brush. Then the night’s silence would erupt with the
panicked skittering of a flight for life and an abrupt squeal of death. And always, a pervasive hush followed, where even the blink
of his eyelid seemed to transgress the quiet of the ensuing solemnity.
Minutes would drag as he lay frozen within that vacuum
trying to figure out just what kind of predator it was and how much leeway he
and the team had to give the fucker to avoid disturbing it and its kill.
O’Neill knew if it took notice of them their cover would be blown and the night
would be disturbed with a different kind of fight, and not the one they were
there looking for either. So they blended, unmoving, sifting through the
pervasive empathy of the hushed witnesses, listening to one kind of predator
take down its prey while they waited in the lingering uncertainty for the
arrival of theirs and whatever was going to happen next.
On that particular night, their prey was a group of terrorists who would
eventually thread their way into the team’s crosshairs, unaware as they snaked
towards them in a convoy of trucks loaded down with stolen munitions.
Confidently this enemy moved with the dark, traveling in ease across these
rugged mountains. They remained unsuspecting and arrogantly secure as they
emerged from the security of their caves with one thought – death to all
challengers in the name of their God. But dying for
their cause had never been part of O’Neill’s plan. He and the team were there
for one reason - to protect the innocents by taking back weapons these
dangerous martyrs should never have had.
So there he lay in wait, looking down the Starlight mounted on the side of his
Barrett M82A1, watching a dark valley spread itself out beneath a canopy of
familiar stars.
“Eyes.” The sound of Momma broke the night as the team
leader’s voice crackled through O’Neill’s earpiece from across the distance.
“Check COM,” he ordered, and O’Neill pulled the satphone from his pack and
bounced the request for intel back to the guy sitting
console just a satellite and a ship away. A short minute went by and he passed
the update onto Momma that skyeyes had tagged the bad
guys and they were on the move and would be in their
sights in a couple of hours.
“Copy, Eyes,” Momma came back, and O’Neill made to sign-off but COM had more to
say because another string of code scrolled its way across the satphone screen.
[---- MRY XMS N GUD LUK]
‘Dang!’
O’Neill thought as the meaning of those words to set in. Then the cold
realization made him gut-react, “What the fuck’s
Christmas doin’ all the way out here?” Because man,
he really didn’t need to be reminded of home right
then.
“Eyes?” And suddenly Momma
was in his earpiece again, breaking into his thoughts. “Say again?” the team
leader asked, and it hit O’Neill that he’d sent his
words out into the night.
“COM sends love, kisses and Merry Xmas,” O’Neill shot back cryptically and
listened to the sound of Momma’s voice shutting down the rest of the team as
they all reacted to the message.
But to Jack O’Neill the meaning of those words just
stuck and would not move. The hearing of them sent his head spinning back to a
place where he really didn’t need to be thinking about
right then. Part of him figured COM was just trying to be a nice guy, just trying to remind them of who they were and where
they really belonged. The other part of O’Neill knew the truth within himself;
he couldn’t afford to think of home, not while he was
out there. He couldn’t let his mind stray outside the
mission, because staying focused meant staying sharp and staying sharp meant
getting his sorry ass home at the end of the day. Nevertheless, those words
haunted and nagged in his head as he pulled his concentration back to peer
through the scope and sweep night-eyes over the empty valley, checking once
again for signs of lights and movement. But everything
remained dark and quiet, so he stole a brief moment in the safety of that
continuing all-clear to glance up at the ceiling of stars.
‘It came upon a midnight clear’. A fragment of verse nudged its way out
of his memory and he rolled over onto his back and stared up at the heavens.
It was Christmas Eve sure enough, and out where he was, the constellations are known as ‘Al-buruj’. Up above,
in that night sky, Ursa Major stood out in a definitive
string of lights that punctuated the dense star-field in haunting familiarity.
In the east, they recognize that same formation as ‘the seven thrones’ – the ‘haaft orang’. Orion the hunter
was up there too; only he was known as ‘the soul of Osiris’, depicted with his legs and head chopped off and
wearing a belt with a tassel and an apron of stars. The east saw a sword in Osiris’ hand while the west saw a bow. Conflict was
everywhere that night. So it seemed only fitting that
the constellation of Cancer – ‘Klaria’ – was up there
too. Because those in the east called Klaria the
‘gate of heaven’ and they believed the heavens were so thin there that the
souls of men could easily pass through to the upper layers. High up in the
mountains that night O’Neill felt as though he was close enough to almost touch
that gate with his outstretched hand. He was laying patiently under one array
of lights waiting for a moment of inevitability to arrive when another array of
lights would appear on the ground. And like Orion, he
was hunting too, laying in wait for the hunted who had left the safety of their
lair and were heading his way.
It was Christmas Eve and he was under the gate of heaven, about to send up a
few more souls.
Long lay the world in sin and error, he thought, but on this hallowed Eve of
Christ’s coming goodwill to all men still remained elusive in this part of the
world not far from where it had all begun. O’Neill hummed Jerusalem1
and turned back to his stomach, leaving Orion to watch his six as he once again
swept the valley and the pass through the scope. Soon there would be points of
light on the ground that mirrored the ones in the sky, but the earth still
remained dark beneath his gaze and allowed him yet another breath of time. It
was a moment of gifted peace in the guarded tranquility to let his thoughts
drift a little in safety.
~~~
The team had been dropped into the chaos a long
week before. The powers that made these kinds of decisions had called and they
had responded. Their presence was needed in some far-off some-place-else where
the urgency of a situation had taken precedence over everything else in their
lives. Willingly and without question O’Neill had gone, leaving a part of whom
he was behind in the care of someone who understood. Someone who’d
wait patiently, holding close his memory in the belief that to do so would
always bring him safely home.
It happened in the middle of a quiet December evening. O’Neill was pulled from the warmth of a smoldering fire and from the
tenderness of his lover’s arms to be inserted on the other side of a porous
border. Intel had tracked the target and all he and the team had to do was get
to the right place at the right time to stop one specter of death from
delivering a package of inhumanity to another specter of death.
On the third night in O’Neill was running point and moving quietly over the
arid ground heading to the low hills that preceded the mountains. The sandy
rock-strewn terrain choked out sporadic tufts of coarse grass and stunted trees
that silhouetted like misshapen shadows of hunched trolls. At night, sometimes
those shapes could morph unexpectedly into men, come alive instantly with
weapons, and remind him just how hostile this land could be. The only sure way
to survive was to head upwards to the high rocks for cover – to hide out and
become one with the mountains themselves. He’d learned
early in his training to yield to this kind of environment, learned never to
fight the mountains because to do so was a guarantee to defeat. Many men had
fought there over the last hundred years and their vanquished souls lay in
silence beneath his boots, crashed upon these harsh rocks to die like so many
drops of water lost in the sand. They had come as invaders hoping to conquer
this land, but had died ignorant, never understanding that despite all their
machines and their vast numbers it was the mountains that had
beaten them just as surely as the men who lurked there. But O’Neill
believed in his heart that he was different, because he and the team weren’t
there to invade – they were there just quietly passing through, tracking down
some people who knew how to use the mountains too.
So there he was moving quietly near the top of a ridge in hyper-scan mode, when
without warning the air filled with a different sound.
‘Marri!’
O’Neill froze and dropped into the shadows of the rocks, the
silence and his safety suddenly shattered by that single word. It was
almost painful as the sharpness of it sliced through the quiet and cut into his
ear. He pushed flat against the rock, ignoring the sharp edges biting into his
ribs and spine as he squeezed the throat-mike - ‘Danger close.’ And his warning went out to the rest of the team who were
moving up behind about a quarter-click back.
He waited as that unexpected word trailed away into the night sky and he eased
his breathing almost to stillness. The air moved in closely around him,
sweeping up over the ridge and bringing with it fragments of whoever was on the
other side; the impatient snort of a horse, the sharp crackle of hot wood
spitting on a fire, and the unexpected distinction of spice.
O’Neill waited - then like liquid he smoothed his way to the edge of the ridge
and caught the name in the air again.
‘Marri!’
Through the scope the night world was turned green and he could see a group of
three about 200 feet away. The ghostly shapes from the signature of their body
heat glowed eerily white beneath the dark outcrop of rock where they had setup
their camp. He could make out a short round figure in flowing robes sitting
near to a fire pit. The man stood up in a blur of fast movement and beckoned
into the dark.
‘Marri!’
The pitch of the word drifted up towards O’Neill again, and though the man
mouthed other words, they stubbornly clung to the ground and remained a distant
bluntness. Of the three men in view, two others stood behind the fire, both
facing towards O’Neill. Each had AK47’s and banana-clips of ammo slung across
their chests. They carried their weapons hung casual, the barrels pointing down
their sides to the ground. There were four other rifles stacked against a rock,
and all within easy reach of the two who were standing. O’Neill saw no other
weapons or ammo in the immediate area, but he reckoned there had to be more
somewhere.
There was one tent – a yurt - square-topped and hanging heavy with carpets.
O’Neill knew it wasn’t a trivial structure to emplace because of the
complicated framework, so he assessed this to be a semi-permanent camp. Off to
the left of the yurt he could see a cloud of hazy white shapes - sheep –
clustered at the foot of the rock, confirming that this small
group of men were probably nomadic shepherds. The tent door – the haalga – faced south, and next to the opening was a string
of goats, tethered and milling around within the lengths of their roped
confinement. Off to the right of the fire pit there were four horses clustered
together and hobbled for the night. O’Neill scanned them for general condition
- sweat marks, signs of use – but they apppeared well rested and swished their
tails lazily in the shafts of firelight. He swept the camp again looking for
the whereabouts of the other rider, because four horses possibly meant four
people and the three in camp meant one could be out scouting around where he
was.
Then a shadowy figure emerged from the tent and moved fluidly across the window
of his scope. It was a young woman and she approached the fire pit and knelt
down. She reached out her hand and a glow of escaping warmth cradled her
fingers as she picked up a spoon and stirred at the contents of a pot. The
sight of her hand was a softness O’Neill could almost feel with his eyes - an
unexpected gentleness all the way out there in the cold hostility of the rugged
barrens. He watched her hand as she stirred and the spices that drifted his way
were warm and strangely reminiscent. Then the sound of Momma’s voice crackled
through his earpiece – “Eyes?” And the team leader’s
word pulled his gaze instantly away from her hand and he suppressed a brief
memory that was hesitantly there. He ducked away from the ridge and squeezed
his throat-mike to report – “Three doubtfuls. One innocent.
Seven weapons. Zero immediate threat.”
“Roger. Move on. Three, stay frosty.” Momma ordered and O’Neill took one last
look at the scene. The three men by the fire, the woman, the goats, horses and
sheep all framed in the green of his scope. For a brief moment, that image was
almost too sharp to be real. Then it blurred again, and the ghostly outline of
the woman stood up and the wisp of her hand slipped beneath the confines of her
dark robe just as O’Neill slipped back into the night. He left them unaware and
undisturbed by his watchful presence. They were relatively safe within their
camp, unknowing that the simplicity of their ordinary lives was a strangely
reassuring confirmation that there was more to this country than just violence
and hate. Then O’Neill eased away from the ridge and headed northward to the
pass, carrying with him the memory of a woman named Marri and the sight of her
hand - small and delicate, and hauntingly translucent in the glow of a fire.
Thirty-six hours later the pass the team was looking for was just where imagery
had said it would be.
They scouted the terrain, walking carefully up and down the ridges and rocks
while O’Neill examined the area carefully with his scope, trying to find the
perfect place to hide. Finally he found his on a high ridge looking down
through the pass, positioned between two chimneys of rock that sliced straight
upwards to give him a tight MOA – the ‘minute of angle’ was just the right
width to take out the target. So he settled in behind
an outcrop of rock and checked the pass, sweeping eyes down the long view of
the road that snaked out from behind the shoulder at the base of the mountain
and wound across the valley floor.
“Night Momma.” O’Neill sent the team leader his usual
check-in call, letting him know he was in position.
“Night Johnboy.” Came
through his earpiece as Boom, the demo guy, smartassed back, his comment
setting the rest of the team off on a fucking Walton moment that echoed around
in the dark until Momma finally shut everyone down with a string of cussing
that would’ve had Ma Walton shoving a bar of soap in his mouth.
O’Neill settled in and waited as the pitch dark surrendered to a blanket of
stars. He waited on a ridge not too far from the rest of the team, alone but
not alone. Because a hundred feet away, just down the slide of loose rock that
flowed to the edge of the cliff, someone else was waiting too.
It was a silhouette of a man sitting upright and propped up
against a rock, looking as if he was waiting for a pickup that had never come.
O’Neill had found him during his initial recon and had decided then that this
lonely individual had inadvertently found the perfect place where he needed to
be. O’Neill figured he was a just another downed pilot, but
not one of their own. The man’s skin, desiccated to crispness by the
high altitude desert air, had turned to black leather and shriveled his
features like a raisin. His flight cap had rotted off and he had just a few
strands of hair that lifted in the breeze now and then. His flight suit was
tattered except for the heavy webbing of his chute harness and the reinforced
thickness of the collar and cuffs. His boots were gone too and what used to be
his toes were now uneven knobs where something with sharp teeth had nibbled
them away. Now he sat all alone, a toeless solitary sentry staring out over
this ridge with his eyeless gaze, helping O’Neill watch for movement along the
valley floor.
O’Neill examined the pilot through his scope, thinking that the man’s whole sad story was sitting right there within the remnants
of his body. He had obviously ejected and maybe gotten hurt either in the eject or in the landing on the sharp rocks. But whatever had happened to him, this was as far as he had
gotten on that fateful day. Even if he hadn’t been hurt he was still trapped on
that ledge and confronted with nothing but a treacherous slip down to the cliff
edge and a drop a couple of hundred feet to the base of the pass. O’Neill
figured from where the guy was sitting he was pretty
much exposed, which would’ve made him real easy pickings for anyone passing by
with a thought for revenge against a downed enemy pilot. The man’s options had
obviously been severely limited at that point and none of them were good –
starvation, freezing, burning-up in the sun or worse, to be taken prisoner.
O’Neill could see the man’s right hand;
it was outstretched, palm up and lying open on his thigh. Some of his fingers
were gone, and there was one hell of a hole where his face
used to be. It was real easy to guess that his
hand had held his service revolver and he'd likely shot himself out of despair
or pain or terror. Who knows? But O’Neill sure could
respect his decision. Because out there in the hostile barrens where this man’s
odds of survival had been totally fucked, he had exercised the last bit of
control he was ever going to have over his life and that was when and how it
would end.
Maybe sometime later, someone had found him and felt it was worth the risk to
go down the slide to steal his boots and whatever else they
could find, including the gun he had used to take his own life. Maybe
they had stood over the empty shell of his body and yelled down the valley in
false triumph. Maybe they had been the ones to prop him up against the rock,
leaving him as a talisman, like a mummified scarecrow to ward off his pals. Who
would ever really know? It didn’t really matter
anyway, because who he was as a man had already left through that overhead gate
to heaven.
And strangely, having this dead guy as his companion
for the next few hours didn’t really bother O’Neill. The man didn't
say anything of interest but he was a real good listener. At a hundred feet
away, O’Neill knew his pal could hear almost every damn thing he had to say but
the guy was obviously exercising his option to ignore
him. Which was okay from O’Neill’s point of view, because he sure didn’t need another critic out there in the middle of the
rubble making comments about singing show-tunes under his breath. O’Neill
figured he couldn’t offend him anyway, him being dead an’
all. Nevertheless, he told him he was open to any special requests and fuck-him
if he chose not to speak up. The only upside to the guy’s silence was that he
didn’t heckle either, so in an odd way O’Neill really appreciated his presence,
because even dead, his pal was still the best damned audience he’d ever had.
Things were going along fine until Boom shot a verbal bird through the headset,
voicing his dislike of O’Neill’s latest choice of show-tune, “Oklahoma!?
Ferchrissake Eyes, hum somethin’ else!”
Man, don’t that beat all, thought O’Neill and shook
his head because it suddenly hit him how unbelievably absurd the whole scene
was. There he was out in the middle of the hostile barrens serenading a dead guy with friggin’ show-tunes.
That was until a terse “Shut it down both of you!” crackled in O’Neill’s
earpiece and Momma followed his grumpiness with the order to ‘Check COM’. Five
minutes later, O’Neill was reading that first string of code that said the bad guys were on their way and the good guy sitting COM then
decided to punctuate the intel update with a Christmas reminder.
~~~~
Now, in the dark of this night, with the cold ground hard beneath his belly,
O’Neill lay quietly watching for lights. Lights overhead or lights down below,
it didn't matter to him because he just wanted to see
any sign of activity. He inhaled the sharp night air and it was so clean that
breathing it in almost hurt. He could still see the ragged peaks and ridges
ahead, and below them, the flatiron of the valley. There was almost nothing to
look at and yet in contradiction to his vision, it felt like he could see every
minute detail for miles off. The air was so clear up there that any movement
even a mile away snapped his gaze instantly. Any faint sound, like a chopper
zippering across the valley, or a convoy negotiating up towards the pass, could
produce vibrations that hit the senses like a physical blow. Nature is never really silent. But up there, high
above the never-ending grumble of life, Nature could get real quiet. Sometimes
it was so quiet O’Neill could hear a rising breeze strum across the rocks from
a mile off or feel the slow turn of the earth shifting beneath his body.
So when the moon splashed its way over the distant
peaks, it was almost audible as its light flooded the valley like water washing
over a dam. It swept across the flat plain and within half an hour had traveled
from edge to edge. In that heartbeat, it transformed the valley floor from
black to silver and showed O’Neill just how beautiful the night could be in a
land filled with danger and death. Even his dead companion was
touched by its magic as his wrinkled shriveled mess of a head turned
silver-haired. Because there he was with the brass and steel
fittings on his chute harness gleaming like medals in the moonlight, suddenly
decorated for the occasion. For a moment, O’Neill could almost believe the
pilot had come dressed for a formal dinner. Hell, it was Christmas Eve after
all - even his dead companion had the right to look pretty on this one night
and dress up all that leathery ugliness he had to wear the rest of the year.
O’Neill was dressed all in black, right down to the black gloves. In the
moonlight, his hands were touched with silver too. He held up one hand in the
air, curving his black-clad fingers around the ball of the moon so that the
edges gilded - pretending for a moment that the moon setting up there was like
the silver ball in
"Go shadow," whispered Momma through the earpiece and O’Neill froze,
waiting for what was going to happen next.
Then a pile of low clouds moved in and smothered the moon, and suddenly the
night became dark and safe again. O’Neill checked his watch and Christmas Eve
had moved on into Christmas Day and the magic left with it. He watched the
silver pour out of the valley on its way to some place else. Thinking maybe it would be channeled into silver ribbons, or sheets of silver
wrapping paper or silver bells that hung on Christmas trees. But
on this night, it left silently, headed somewhere to the safety of the west
where O’Neill thought it would be appreciated. Because there, where he was, the
moon plating the land in silver was undeniably beautiful - but deadly.
It seemed that so much of what belonged in the west didn't
belong out there. O’Neill knew he didn’t belong out
there either, but for that short moment in time he did. At least part of him
did – the part that believed absolutely that what he was doing did make a
difference in keeping the innocents safe. And as he
looked at his dead companion, he thought - whatever reasons brought him here he
probably thought he never belonged either. Nevertheless, the man remained and
his remains, his leavings of who he once was, had now turned into staying and
all O’Neill could offer him was a few moments of his time to be his witness. To
acknowledge how beautiful he could be sitting all by himself on his lonely
cliff, stuck forever watching a valley he probably bombed right before he’d been shot down.
This Holy Christmas Day had come upon them all, slipping into the calm before
the violence, to visit beneath a whitewash of stars that hung across the sky
like a billion celebrations. This valley, doused with the magic of silvery
light, had been given a gift of half an hour of peace
in a place that had not known peace for a thousand years. It was just a few
moments of nice on the other side of the earth when the bright shiny silvery
stuff that always hung high in neutral observation reached down and gilded the
place where they were all waiting.
Then O’Neill’s scope took in the string of lights creeping into the distant
valley floor. “Locked and loaded. Target acquired. Waiting authorization,” he
mouthed, his head now fully focused as his throat-mike sent out the words to
Momma and the rest of the team.
And in that next instant the first yellow tracer stitched a line across the sky to light up the pass where good men chose to fight for Peace on Earth in a place where Christmas didn’t belong.
~~~~oOo~~~~
For Humpty, and a promise to write him as ‘real’.