SG-1 fic: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, by kuonji (PG-13)
Title: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral aka Not A Transporter
Author: kuonji
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Characters: Jack O'Neill, Daniel Jackson, (Samantha Carter, Teal'c, Janet Frasier, George Hammond)
Pairings: Jack/Daniel
Category: Jack/Daniel first time, humor, transformation
Rating: PG-13
Challenge: Jack/Daniel Ficathon 2008 (sugarsbadhabit's request)
Spoilers: vague for "The Nox", "Maternal Instinct"
Words: ~3340
Summary: Later, Jack would blame the eye-roll.

A/N: This is for the 2008 J/D Ficathon, hosted by melayneseahawk .  My ficwritee was sugarsbadhabit , who requested transformation but not animal!fic.  This is what I came up with.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral aka Not A Transporter
by kuonji
 

Later, Jack would blame the eye-roll. If it hadn't have been for that half of a second delay, he probably would have gotten out of range before the neon alien space ray shot him in the ass.

The device they'd found on P47-878, the thing they'd thought to be a transporter, had started to glow and hum in an ominous frequency after they turned it on.

Carter's big eyes had grown bigger as she finally gave up on forestalling whatever the humming portended. "Sir, I think we should--"

"Jack, we'd better--"

"O'Neill, I suggest that we--"

Jack had rolled his eyes and said over all three members of his team, "Shut up and move it!"

Luckily, though, Jack hadn't felt a thing. One minute, he was running for the hills at his team's six, and the next, he was sitting on a lab table with a bit of a headache.

"Huh," he said, blinking around at the faces of Carter, Dr. Lee, Daniel, Teal'c, Frasier, and the General. "What happened?"

Frasier, of course, swooped in before anyone could tell him anything useful, and the next moment he found himself on a gurney losing blood, piss, and sanity to an army of medical personnel. Jack honestly wondered if he'd been hit by the space ray again, because he certainly didn't seem to remember traveling from the lab to the infirmary, yet here he was.

"How are you feeling, Colonel?" Frasier asked, while pumping up a vise-like cuff around his forearm.

"I'm fine. What happened?"

"Any dizziness, nausea, tingling or numbness, pain in any part of the body?"

"Uh..." A thermometer was popped into his mouth before he could answer, none of the above. A penlight blinded him. "Ergh!"

"Hold still, please." Turning to a nurse, she ordered, "Get that MRI prepped! I want it ready in five."

Jack plucked the thermometer out and waved his arms. "Whoa, hold it! Will somebody tell me what's going on here?"

Frasier's face grew perplexed. "We're not exactly sure, Colonel. That's what I'm attempting to find out. From the preliminary evidence, there doesn't seem to be any serious aftereffects. However, I'm of the opinion that safe is better than sorry."

Jack was all in agreement with that sentiment. But what he really wanted to know was, "Aftereffects of what? I don't remember a thing."

"Hm, I thought as much." Frasier marked something on her chart. "It's really quite amazing. Now, Colonel, please don't panic. It's really not that out there, considering what else you've been through over the years."

Jack proceeded to panic. "What happened to me?"

Frasier explained.

"I was what?" No way had he heard that correctly.

"It wasn't a transporter after all. I wouldn't have thought it possible, but you really were transformed into a rock." Trust his team to show up at just the opportune moment.

"Now, see, Carter, to me that makes absolutely no sense."

"Major Carter speaks the truth," Teal'c put in. "It has been nine days since we left the planet, during which time you were indeed a rock about the size of one's fist."

"Igneous, according to the geologists," Daniel helpfully supplied.

***

"Hey, Jack!" Lou's voice called from down the hall. Jack didn't even bother turning around. "What did the igneous rock say to the metamorphic rock?"

Jack's reply was snappy: "It said, you've been hanging out with the geeks too long if that's your idea of a funny joke."

Lou gave him a cheerful four-letter reply. Jack just grinned and waved.

A few minutes later, he swung around the doorway he was looking for and called out to the sole occupant. "Carter!"

"Colonel?"

Jack approached the wary-looking Major. "Just the person I wanted to see."

"Sir?"

"Listen, I know I've been out of the loop lately. I need your help. I had this bet going with Stucker upstairs and... Are you all right?"

Carter's lips were working. She cleared her throat. "Go on, sir." Her voice hitched suspiciously.

Jack sighed. "Get it out of your system now. I'll give you--" he tapped his watch, "--ten seconds."

"Sir?"

"All the bad puns and jokes you're just dying to let out. Dumb as a rock, boring as a rock, taking me for granite,... No need to pull your punches." He spread his arms out to present himself as a target.

Carter stared. "I would never--! That's not... Sir, you don't understand. We had to jury-rig the device and break Coulomb's law to get it started up again. I have no idea how it even worked. The density of that rock... the mass was only a fiftieth of your body's.

"It's not like the stargate. There was no buffer to hold you. And even if it could somehow reintegrate you out of existing molecules in the environment, there was no telling what that might do to the make-up of your brain. There's so little that we know about the physiology versus functionality of memory and thought. You could have come back as--"

"Whoa!" Jack signaled a desperate time-out. "What the hell does all that mean?"

Carter visibly got a hold of herself. "It means that we almost lost you, sir." Her voice went just a bit quivery at the end.

Jack took in the shining blue eyes, the resolutely firm chin, and the tight-pressed lips. He could tell she was seconds away from tears, and he couldn't help but respond. "Carter," he said. "What did the igneous rock say to the metamorphic rock?"

Gradually, the panicky look faded away. Carter shook her head and smiled. "I should get some work done, Colonel."

He was only too glad to take the hint and get out of there.

Especially since he didn't know the punch line.

***

"Yo, Teal'c!" Jack caught up to his favorite alien, his laden lunch tray in hand. (Apparently, being a rock worked up one's appetite.)

Teal'c inclined his head masterfully.

"How were things while I was away?"

"You were in fact never far from us, O'Neill. We transported your transfigured form back to the SGC immediately, and you never left the base thereafter."

"Ah, right." Jack searched amid his salad leaves for a suitable rejoinder. "So... I'll bet you never had that problem before, eh? Team leader turned into a rock for a week and a half?"

"Indeed. It was quite disturbing."

"It was?" Jack stopped with a crouton halfway to his mouth. He hadn't thought there was anything left in the universe that could faze Teal'c.

"We have experienced many things together on SG-1. We have slain gods. We have perished and been resurrected. We have seen the mythical temple of Kheb. And yet." Teal'c's expression was muted and brooding. "To have one's very self transformed into a cold, inert, soulless substance... Yes, O'Neill, it was disturbing indeed."

"Oh." Jack put his fork down, having somehow lost his appetite.

***

"I have just the thing for you, Colonel."

Jack took the proffered folder and looked it over with a grunt of satisfaction. He was eager to get back into the swing of things. Doc Frasier had given him a clean bill of health, and this survey mission that Jack had requested would hopefully be just the thing to get his team well-oiled and fine-tuned again.

"By the way, Jack."

"Sir?"

Hammond leaned forward on clasped hands. "I'm glad you made it back, son. Things wouldn't have been the same without you." Was that a gleam of emotion in the General's eye?

"Yessir," Jack replied, hoping the catch-all phrase would do. Hammond nodded, looking disturbingly paternal before getting back to business. "We'll do a pre-mission briefing tomorrow at 0900."

Jack gave his acknowledgement perfunctorily and left the room still stunned.

***

The next day, tramping through the undergrowth of yet another alien forest, Jack fell back abreast of his archaeologist. "What do you think will be there?" he queried.

Daniel rolled his eyes. "I don't know, Jack. Do you think maybe that's why General Hammond sent us to check it out?"

Jack grinned. Good old Daniel. He hadn't treated Jack differently at all. In fact, Jack had barely seen anything of him since he got back.

As far as Daniel seemed to be concerned, Jack had just been off on vacation -- instead of being lost in a scientifically unexplainable way, transformed into a soulless lump of rock, possibly never to return.

Good old Daniel. Yeah.

"Hey, Daniel."

"Hm?"

"While I was, you know, gone. Were you worried you wouldn't get me back?"

Daniel grimaced. He hitched his pack a little higher on his shoulder before answering. "Not really. Mostly, I was enjoying how quiet it suddenly got."

"Haha. Very funny." Jack grit his teeth, took a firmer grip on his P-90, and forged ahead.

It was two hours later, plus change, when there was a shout, a scrabble for cover, and a bright flash of light. In the ensuing silence, they realized two things: one, there were only three of them present, and two, where Daniel had stood, there was now a mid-sized, healthy-looking fern.

As everyone stared in horror, the fern, with bits of soil clinging to its exposed roots, toppled slowly as if itself confused, until with a soft 'splop', it collapsed to the temple ruins floor in a quivering heap.

***

"Are you sure you're giving him enough water?" Jack asked, examining one of the drooping fronds. "Looks a bit peckish, doesn't he?"

Dr. Brown, the botanist in charge of fern-sitting duties, adjusted his glasses carefully, his lips compressed in a thin line. "I assure you, Colonel, we're doing everything we can.

"It's actually very similar to a common household plant, one of the most hardy species we know. A bit temperamental, but give it a day or so to get used to its new habitat, and we should see marked improvement."

A bit temperamental, huh? Jack grinned. "Remember to talk to him," he suggested. "Major Carter swears by it."

In the meantime, he went to check on his 2IC's progress.

***

Five days later, Jack was feeling a little less sanguine as Carter reported yet another no-go. The device was like nothing she had ever encountered before, which made the damage that had been incurred a disastrous problem. The energy source he and Teal'c had found fifty klicks south of the stargate had turned out to be unsuitable.

Tomorrow, she was going to try a combination of a naquadah generator and two Asgard parts, the explanation of which made Jack's head swim.

"You think he can be allergic to himself?" Jack asked an impatient Dr. Brown, as he tried to while away the empty hours of inaction.

The fern seemed to bob one of its fronds in a disgusted manner, and Jack felt instantly better.

***

Carter's alien hybrid battery seemed to be a success. That same afternoon, Jack was able to swoop by Dr. Brown's lab to pick up their errant flora-fied team member for a jaunt through the gate.

"Not long now, Daniel," he said cheerfully, as he placed the fern on the spot of ground where they'd last seen Daniel standing -- and human. He gave Carter the thumbs up and jogged to the corner where she had constructed a shield of rock.

Jack held his breath as he watched her flip the switch.

There was a deep, resonant hum, followed by a flash of light. The fern on the ground disappeared, having transformed into...

"Oh, crap."

"Oh my god."

Jack cursed emphatically as he hurried towards where the plant had been moments before, the space now occupied by a single, brownish, fist-sized rock.

Carter reached it first, however, and she frowned as she knelt down next to it. Her face broke out into a smile of relief. "Sir, look at this."

She moved the rock aside and picked up what it had apparently been holding down. It was a plastic specimen bag. Within it was a piece of paper, torn from a field notebook. A note was printed across it in large, excited letters:

"I'M FINE. IT WAS A TRANSPORTER, AFTER ALL. AMAZING RUINS HERE. SEND SUPPLIES AND AN ANTHROPOLOGY/ENGINEERING TEAM."

***

Jack, being the self-sacrificing team leader that he was, volunteered to be the one to go drag Daniel's sorry ass back. With a sigh and a prayer, he stepped into the active area and waved the go-ahead. The next moment, he found himself in an open, dilapidated stone building. Weeds and rocks littered the earthen floor where he was standing.

Exiting through the only doorway, Jack whistled in surprise. The air was somewhat muggy but perfectly clear. He could see to the straggling green-white edges of the ruins that Daniel had written about, stretched out for at least fifty square miles.

Not too far away was a wispy-looking building, two of its tall spires still intact. Farther away, he could see a group of cloud-like structures, squat and round but somehow weightless to look at.

Jack clicked on his radio. "Daniel? Daniel, come in. Over."

Answering static was followed by a familiar voice. "Hi, Jack. I guess it's time to go, huh?" Daniel sounded tired. Worn out, really. A week alone in a city of ancient ruins could do that to a guy like Jack. But Daniel?

"You okay? Where are you?"

"Straight ahead. Follow the hill. There's a sort of gazebo at the top."

Jack squinted up the aforementioned hill and saw movement inside the structure at the top. Daniel was waving him up.

It wasn't until Jack was sweating under his pack three-quarters of the way up that he stopped to wonder why he was bothering. He was here to get Daniel back, after all, not to stick around himself. But he was almost there anyhow, and there was a breeze at this altitude that was pleasantly scented with wildflowers that were as yet invisible to him.

"I told Carter to give me an hour," he greeted Daniel, as he dropped to the grass beside his wayward archaeologist.

"Okay."

Jack stared out over the city, following Daniel's gaze. "Whatcha looking at?"

"Nothing."

Jack shrugged. He had fifty minutes to kill. He could stare at nothing for a while.

His minutes had shrunk to forty-five when Daniel said, "I'm thinking about leaving the team."

Jack frowned. He eased his pack off his shoulders to his side. He thought he'd probably need all forty-five minutes. "Why were you thinking about that?" he asked, careful to sound perfectly neutral.

Daniel frowned. Jack noticed that his glasses were folded in his breast pocket. "It's just something I think I need to do."

Jack thought about that. "You can take a few more missions with the science teams. We'll take a different guy out if we have a first contact mission come up that we can't schedule around."

Daniel turned to look at Jack for the first time. He had a sunglasses tan. His lips were chapped. His eyebrows were scrunched up. "What?"

"That's what you want, isn't it? More..." He waved expansively at the ancient city below them, with all its geeky secrets to be discovered. "Less crazy aliens who want to kill us."

"Oh. Right, of course."

It sounded like it had been news to him. It was Jack's turn to go scrunchy-eyed. "Why do you want to leave the team?"

"I can't explain it."

"Try."

Daniel let himself fall back on the grass. "We'd put a specimen tag on you," he said finally. "So you wouldn't get confused with other rocks just lying around."

Jack perked up his ears. No one had told him much about his time as a rock.

"It had your name on it. O'Neill, Jonathon. The geologists even labeled it: basalt igneous. It was unreal. It was like looking at your grave." Daniel put a hand over his eyes. "That's not how anyone should die."

Jack lay down next to his friend. "I wasn't aware of anything. Rocks don't have brains, you know. Or eyes."

"Yeah."

"There are worse ways to go."

"I know."

Jack stared up through the fallen latticework of the ruined gazebo. There weren't any birds, and the clouds were wind-raked into long, lonely strands.

He felt a little disappointed, he had to admit, even though it was unreasonable to be. Daniel was a civilian. And the members of SG-1 had seen more hell than any hardened officer ought to have to go through.

Jack had known plenty of men to crack who had seemed to be braver than the stubborn, overconfident archaeologist who'd foisted himself on Jack's team all those years ago. Jack sighed, determined to be supportive, but not too... encouraging. "I don't see you being happy with a desk job, though."

"No, I wouldn't be. Wait, what?" Daniel, up on his elbows, was staring at Jack with those perplexed eyebrows again. Jack propped himself up as well.

"What?"

"What?"

"What, what?"

"What are you talking about? I don't want a desk job. I was thinking maybe SG-3."

"With Jamison?"

"We get along. I've trained with his team a lot, and he told me once he'd be glad to have me."

When the hell had Daniel gotten to know the leader of another SG team so well? Jack would have to have a word with Hammond about the training rotations. "What the hell's so great about Jamison?"

"I don't know. We just click well, I guess."

"Well, then, what the hell's wrong with me?"

"Nothing."

"Then why are you leaving the team?"

"I didn't say I was. Not definitely. I was just thinking about it."

Jack snorted, feeling riled. He wanted to get up and beat the crap out of something. "I missed you," he said, petulant. Six days of trying to get Daniel back, and this was how he paid Jack back? Little back-stabbing weasel.

"I missed you, too." The rawness in Daniel's voice was unexpected.

Jack would be the first to admit that he was no connoisseur of human emotions. But he did have quite a good relation with the pantheon of hurt. He took a firm grip of the back of Daniel's neck, feeling the heat and the tiny tremors there. "I'm here," he said. "I'm here."

"I know. But you weren't. And I--"

Daniel didn't finish, but looking at his expression, it snapped into place for Jack like the last puzzle piece.

"Son of a bitch," he breathed. Daniel's eyes locked on his. There was shock and confusion and a heavy dose of panic, and then he was struggling to get away, trying to roll under Jack's arm. But Jack had a good grip to start with, and after only a brief struggle he had Daniel pinned down. "You...?" he asked, the smell of bruised grass heavy around them.

"I didn't know," Daniel answered, sounding defensive and a bit accusatory. "You were gone. You were a rock." He laughed, a little hysterically. "It was ridiculous. If Sam hadn't-- We were all going crazy. And I realized how I never--" He took a breath. "I have to leave the team, don't I?"

Jack wasn't so sure about the correct answer to that. But he did know the answer to what it had followed. He was trained to take advantage of strengths of position, after all.

Daniel seemed stunned by his first attempt. The second made him renew his struggles. The third melted his resistance away, and the fourth and fifth... were bliss.

And they still had half an hour.

It was twenty minutes later, dozing under an alien sun, when it suddenly occurred to Jack to ask, "By the way, Daniel. What did the igneous rock say to the metamorphic rock?"

Daniel groaned. "Who have you been hanging around?"

"No, really, what did it say? I don't know."

"It said," Daniel replied, with great patience, "I'm sure under a lot of pressure here."

Jack considered that. "I don't get it."

Daniel chuckled and threw an arm over Jack's chest. "Don't worry about it."

***

The next week, Teal'c was turned into an ostrich.

But by that time no one batted an eye.


 

END.

If you enjoyed this story, you might try these:
     A Different Sort of Command (Stargate SG-1), by kuonji
     Hold Your Breath (Stargate SG-1), by kuonji
     A Gerbil Story (Stargate Atlantis), by kuonji
     A Certain Troublemaker's Fault (Stargate SG-1), by starting_gate
     Used to It (Stargate SG-1), by Carolyn Claire
     Inanimate (Stargate Atlantis), by chelle