Every once in a while copies of Physics Today and Scientific American would make their way under the mountain. The space exploration special issues would get circulated in the mess and the labs like high school yearbooks, red pens clipped helpfully to their spines. By the time the latest made it to Cam, most of the lead stories were illegible, graffitied over with equations and snark and little cartoons of system lords offering math advice in between zat blasts. Cam, forking up bites of ravioli before the two o'clock debriefing, flipped past "Supersonic Pulse Power" and "Are Alien Cells Among Us?" and settled on "Windows on the Mind," an article about tiny, involuntary eye movements that give away one's secret thoughts.
So that's what he was thinking about when SG-1 met to discuss Daniel's de-Priorification, de-Merlinification and the probable itineraries of the seven Ori warships they'd recently watched vanish into fuck knows where.
The article, though amusing to think about from a sci-fi T.V. writer's point of view, wasn't anything to fret over. The gist was that our eyes are always in motion, and that even if we appear to be concentrating mostly on one thing -- say General Landry, harrumphing benignly at the head of the conference table -- those minute, untrackable-by-the-naked-eye flickers yield clues about where in the room our attention is really focused.
Key words being "untrackable-by-the-naked-eye." Actually collecting information this way would take gizmos and electrodes and computer analysis and all you'd get out of it at the end would be, "General O'Neill seems to be more interested in the guy on his left than the guy on his kitty-corner," which was really pretty boring for a million-dollar spy tech revelation.
The guy on O'Neill's left was pretty obviously focused on O'Neill. Jackson was peeved because the general was still pretending he thought Jackson was a freaky, freaky, unreliable man liable to break out in quotes from Malory at any moment. O'Neill managed to maintain a perfectly obnoxious serenity throughout, but Jackson's eyebrows were jumping all over the place, and at one point Cam was sure somebody's shins got kicked. Sam and Teal'c mostly watched General Landry, though Cam thought their small, twitching smiles weren't meant for him. Vala spent the whole debriefing staring saucer-eyed straight across the table.
They wrapped, and General O'Neill orchestrated plans for drinks that evening. Cam guessed he was in for some quizzing. He was philosophical; he owed the man.
But O'Neill off duty turned out to be surprisingly easy company. He ribbed his former team, but didn't let the conversation devolve into in-jokes. He checked in with each of them, one by one, without being conspicuous or condescending. He clearly thought Vala was magnificent. But there was only one in the crowd whose location O'Neill always seemed aware of, whose voice he waited for.
Million dollar spy tech wasn't worth beans, Cam reflected as he tipped into bed that night. It wouldn't yield a lick of scuttlebutt on the thing he'd been puzzle-piecing all day, deep in the back of his brain, the slow-cooker, where instinct and intuition did 95% of the work.
General O'Neill and his archaeologist had not spent the past twenty-four hours making moon eyes at each other. The opposite, if anything. There had been no subtle brushing of bodies as they slid around the pool table. If they'd been secretly rubbing thighs in the low-lit corner booth, nobody knew it but them.
Cam couldn't have explained what he'd seen if he'd tried. It was too fine a composite: a lazy blink, an angled head, a name spoken on a dropped semitone. Involuntary movements, or secret language. Cam played with his evidence for a while, tried to zoom in, rearrange, qualify it, but the more he analyzed, the more the picture slipped out of focus.
That was fine. Cam trusted his slow cooker. He knew, without pride, and without taking much credit for it, that he twigged things other folks missed -- because he was the new kid, because he gave a damn, because he didn't assume certain things other nice Southern boys often assumed. Because he'd figured out a while ago that SG-1 ran on Sam's red pen equations and Jackson's secret languages, but what it couldn't run without was love.
Cam wouldn't mess with that. His bemusement had already faded. He knew a bit about weird love and a bit more about safeguarding it. Cam wished the two men who had climbed into the same jeep earlier their favourite bliss, whatsoever it might entail. Not his business. Then he locked up his conjectures in a sheltered, quiet corner of his mind, and shut his eyes.
January 15, 2008
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