Teammates (a Stargate SG-1 fanfiction)

1: Lunch Buddies

I was recently assigned to join SG-1 for a mission as a consultant - a move personally requested by Dr. Daniel Jackson.

Before I was reassigned, he and I were already lunch buddies, exchanging notes on the different cultures we encountered. We would meet at the cafeteria once or twice a month in between his missions, whenever our schedules aligned. I worked with the SGC's cultural resource management and had no field experience. Yet.

I looked forward to these lunches because I enjoyed Dr. Jackson's company. He had something my colleagues didn't have: field experience. My friends and I were what you'd call armchair researchers. I longed to hear from someone who could actually connect the information and artifacts we were compiling in the office to the actual people were those came from. After I had made his acquaintance, Dr. Jackson eagerly shared all he could with me.

He had an amazing mind that could recall a plethora of ancient cultures and make connections between them and the alien peoples they met, with the cultural clues that the latter showed.

He would speak about their cultures and their Earth history with great enthusiasm, and I enjoyed listening to him. Most of the time they encountered human cultures, and we discussed our own theories about the factors of cultural change and how they evolved from their original Earth cultures, adapting to the alien terrain and developing innovations. These were of the factors that influenced their language.

He would also rattle on and on about their languages, and I would listen with rapt attention, as I had always wanted to focus on linguistics but I prioritized other studies over it. Now I had the benefit of coalescing with a linguist.

While he could be highly excited and nerd out about his fields of study, he otherwise had a gentle demeanor that contributed to his sensitivity and empathy for the cultures he had met and talked to me about.

When I first encountered him, I had no idea about this empathy of his.

My supervisor at the cultural resource management department had brought him over to our office that day as he was doing research and delivering some data to us. It was my first week at the job and I thought it lucky to get introduced to him then.

I'd known him before through our Stargate initiation briefings: he was the person who made the first official trip through the Stargate possible through his translations of the gate coordinates from the cartouche from Egypt. Heck, I remembered even reading a paper by him about the layout of Egyptian hieratic back in my PhD days (it was in the footnotes of one of the works I'd cited.) From the photos of his early involvement in Stargate, I also came to like his Beatles haircut. Very hip.

At our office, when I first saw him, he had a shorter haircut, which was saddening. He was taller than I expected, though. My supervisor was talking to him about the data he'd brought in when she looked in my direction, then introduced me.

"Oh, by the way, this is our new consultant, Dr. Petra Zaragoza," she said. He just smiled and shook my hand.

During the few times he visited our office after that, I tried to speak cordially with him and get to know him as I did my other colleagues. I was endlessly curious and eager to learn from anyone, from those in my humanities field to the military types and the engineers - it was just a matter of asking them the right questions. Anyways, although he was the Dr. Daniel Jackson and I was a little starstruck at first, I noticed that he was such a demure guy. He spoke with a gentle, young voice, and walked in with hands in his pockets, asking questions politely, but never saying more than what was needed.

So, of course, to be able to befriend him would be quite an achievement, as well as such an honor. After all, without him, we wouldn't have the Stargate program! But, even though he was younger than the other personnel - around my age - I saw him like I used to see my professors: someone greatly admired and accomplished, and someone always to keep a sort of distance from. That changed when he was the person next in line from me at the mess hall.