Five in the morning and it's still dark in the cabin. Jack's got a flashlight dangling from his fingers, but he doesn't turn it on. Even if he weren't used to working with the tiniest cues of his night vision, he knows the dimensions of this space better than either his house in the Springs or his quarters under the mountain. Almost as well as the infirmary, Daniel would joke, if Daniel weren't fast asleep. Those other places, that's all surface knowledge, sedimentary. This goes way down. Water table. Bedrock.
Been a while since anyone shared it with him, added their comfortable human sounds to the other threads of not-silence—the night breeze tickling the window screens, the refrigerator's hum, the occasional faint chirp and scrabble of an animal outside. It should be jarring, he's so accustomed to each thread, except the additions are so familiar in their own right, so much the sounds of all-is-well in Jack's mind, that they fit together without a snag.
Carter's mild snores drift out of the tiny second bedroom. Daniel, long bones draped on the couch kitty-cornered with the fireplace, sleeps with his cheek mashed into his pillow, and snuffles accordingly. He doesn't even twitch as Jack catfoots past him. Good. Recorporealizing probably takes it right out of a guy. Teal'c, up in the loft, might as well be a church mouse for all the noise he contributes, but his quietude has presence in Jack's mind, steady and profoundly kind.
Jack collects his shoes and eases the porch door open. Out here, the sky is the velvety gray of moth wings, the woods smudged and shadowed. Jack prowls around to the shed, unlocks it with the loose key in his pocket.
He pushes aside folding chairs, rake and mower, tips the canoe out from the wall and tugs. It slides forward with a rattle of dislodged fishing gear. Jack props it up against his knees and leans over to peer at the hull, runs a finger across scuffed brown paint. Hairline crack. Still good for a morning spin, but he'll go rummaging in the back of the shed for some fibreglass, later, patch it up before he tries to put Daniel in the bow. He grabs bailer, paddle, life vest from the wall; the whistle attached to it jingles against his thigh. It's an old metal one with a cork pea, useless if it gets wet. He makes a mental note to pick up a fistful of Fox 40s next time he visits the tackle shop. He always forgets.
Jack hefts the canoe onto his shoulder and strides down to the shore. Sweeps the tops of the grass stalks with his foot, gives the frog he's startled up time to hop away. Sets the boat down and takes up the rope, slides it in past the reeds that hiss against the gunnels. Pulls it around the dock, tosses his gear, clambers in. Debates kneeling, huffs a sigh for lost youth and dodgy knees and sits his ass down on the bow seat, facing the stern. Shoves the vest under his knees.
Mist rises off the lake in thick ghost-shapes. As he pulls away from the dock, he imagines he can hear, in the cabin behind him, three heartbeats, easy and sleep-slow. Stowed safe.
He sets a swift, elegant j-stroke, coursing for the far shore, scattering the ghosts in the fog. His body settles easily into the motion: fluid slide of shoulder, press of palms on the paddle's weathered contours. Jack likes to complain about his aches and pains and impending geezerhood, but he's in good shape and grateful for it, considering the manifold disservices he's done his body over the years.
He uses the motion and milieu to realign himself. Body preoccupied, his thoughts slip their traces and drift for the first time in weeks. He's kept his focus bound up tight: lock it down, get it done. Bring them home. He tells himself it's just the latest crisis he's easing down from now, but as the muscles in his back and arms slowly untwist, and the detritus in his head takes his invitation to blow itself around, he wonders if he isn't headed for something bigger, longer in coming. Jack's caught himself dreaming these woods and sky more often, lately—not as a coping method, but trying to remember what had seemed most important to him before he ever needed coping methods. Before all the wars and scars and partitions in his head stamped CAVEAT INTRANS. Before unsought love and unexpected grace.
Passing the midpoint of the little lake, Jack cocks his paddle like a rudder and swings left, parallel with the main channel, just for the pleasure of feeling the water resist his stroke and the canoe strain to obey. He switches sides and keeps going, increasing his pace despite the extra concentration it takes to keep his left arm in line. After a moment, he slides down to one knee, proper racing form, extending his reach. Not a great canoe for racing—the fibreglass is too heavy—but its lines are good. Memory and muscle memory collide; Jack recalls racing with his cousins as a kid. Winning, because Allen was bigger, but Jack was just plain better with his body.
His heart rate's up. Cool air, soft with moisture, whisks past his ears and through his hair. Jack still goes through his paces at the gym, runs every other morning, but there's something flat about chrome equipment and suburban sidewalks and never a day of fieldwork. Like eating MREs for a year and thinking you'd kill for an apple.
The cabin is out of sight now, hidden by the tree-lined point at the mouth of his small bay. Shouldn't feel so freeing. He doubles his stroke again—it's impossible for him to work up a real sweat on this lake without turning around, but— six...eight...ten —and he lifts his paddle clean out of the water and sets it across the gunnels, braces his arms against it, hangs his head...and glides.
Time passes.
Jack realizes eventually that his eyes are squinched shut and his reflexes have set him on deep, slow breaths, as if he's coming down from a bad scare. Jack thinks about that for a minute, then scrunches the rest of his face up as tight as he can. Clenches his jaw, flexes his traps and delts, calls out the deepest lines around eyes and mouth that signal fury and terror and heartbreak. And then he relaxes. Stretches his face in the other direction, opens his mouth wide and sticks his tongue out like a yawning dog. Scoops water, scrubs, blinks. When he looks up and twists around to follow the ruddy trail of light to the rising sun, his face is open and mild.
The canoe drifts, the dripping paddle trailing a string of concentric ripples like a necklace with the clasp undone. The lake is silent.
The lake is honest in its silence. Dive with your eyes open, teach yourself to pay attention to the shapes and movements between the trees instead of the camouflaging colors, and it yields its secrets willingly enough.
Jack faces forward again. Ahead of him is untouched swamp and forest: tall oaks and pines looming over a skein of inlets chugging with muskrats and turtles. Decades ago, the land to the west escaped development by a paint manufacturer and slow death by lead poisoning thanks to Jack's own granny and her sisters. Jack wonders about the effects of lead on sporting fish versus other life, and about the fates of three little ladies who taught him some of what he knows about looking like you're no cause for alarm. He decides his job this week is to keep Carter from freaking out about timelines, and lets his speculations drift away.
He picks up his paddle, dipping slowly this time, and heads for the shoreline. He weaves for a while, among the water hyacinths, under the trunks of storm-tipped trees. Finds the new beaver lodge, but stays too far away to hear if there are kits inside. North of east, the violet clouds finally burst into gold-edged rose.
As Jack turns the boat back toward the cabin, a huge, sky blue and leaf green dragonfly the shape of an attack copter alights on the seat in front of him. Anax junius, lord of summer. These are things he knows. Things he has to come here to remember that he knows: palimpsest knowledge, written in the bones of a growing boy. He has every answer he needs.
Aunt Ida with her binoculars and braid, who illustrated field guides for a living after her husband divorced her, should have gone to college and been a botanist, points ghost-fog fingers and murmurs, "Two o'clock," before she's burned off by the sun, and Jack turns homeward and sees a figure sitting, straight-backed and cross-legged, on the end of Jack's dock.
"Morning," Jack breathes. Watches Teal'c's posture shift as he registers the word—not Jack's usual long distance hail, but a low curl of sound carried by the strange acoustics of the glassy lake. His head dips minutely, then he returns his gaze to the water, placid as a guardian at a shrine, as Jack brings himself home.
Daniel or Carter sitting on the end of the dock would have been a tacit rebuke: Why didn't you wake me? I would have come along. Jack has a lot of things he keeps to himself. Some things you have to keep for yourself. Teal'c, he thinks, would understand the difference.
Teal'c stays seated while Jack climbs out of the boat, watches with interest as his fingers deftly secure it to the dock: towline looped and pushed through the dock ring, second loop made from the loose end and pushed through the first, third for good measure, tug.
"Geek squad still asleep?"
"Indeed."
"Good. They deserve it."
"I believe we have all more than earned this respite, O'Neill."
For this, you can stay at my place. "So we have, T. I'm gonna tiptoe in and make coffee. You want a cup?"
They rise and turn together, to the house, to the two precious people inside. Behind them, the shuffle-splash of a pair of mallards landing breaks the silence on the water. The morning breeze lifts and the canoe slowly swings out on its line, away from the dock, until it's pointing toward the farther shore.