There's a battery-powered lamp about ten feet in from the doorway, sitting on the floor. It casts a net of light about knee-high, in which a handful of shadows are moving. It takes Harper a second to realize that they are actually ankles, the ankles of two people as they walk across the floor- slowly, oddly, and now backwards, and then forward and back again. It takes Harper another second to recognize that they are dancing.

Jackson took the ship from a dead man, not long after the first floods hit and it was only the two of them left.

“We won’t survive on this raft for long,” Jackson had said.

Cam had agreed. The boat was bigger--not huge--but there was just enough room for two men to sleep below deck. Still, he has to wonder if the man had been shot before or after Jackson found him.

Teal’c sits nearly backlit by orange candlelight that reminds her of energy pulses; what light wraps around him is absorbed into the gold brown of his skin, the black of his shirt, the curls of his hair. In the grey of the ship, Vala yearns for blues or greens or reds. She wonders if she can do any better than convincing Sam to wear something other than a uniform; wonders if the best Daniel can do is put on green BDUs for the day. It is not enough for her to wear a feather boa any longer; she cannot see her own appearance without adopting the more vain aspects of her former tenant. And Vala knows her shipmates do not notice whether her pigtails have ribbons or not. Pink or not. Vala does not wear gold. But clothes are a fleeting entertainment anyway. With the timescales she’s facing in this particular torture scheme, she needs a longer-term fun. A brighter color, that she can see; one that will have lasting effects. She is desperate.

Tony hovers in the dark, a hundred feet off the ground, watching a girl stand in the wreckage of the arc reactor. She doesn't move; after a while, tired of the view of the back of her head, he twitches his left palm and drifts slowly to a position that gi

Opening a sentence with 'Did I ever tell you about the time --?' becomes taboo, frowned upon after the first decade. Because, yes, the answer was always yes, always.

"Apparently not, no. What's the plan?" "Don't get killed on our fifth mission." "That's a plan?" "It's a fervent prayer."

"Seemed like a good idea at the time," Cam grumbled, and he heard Carter and Jackson laughing in the rain ahead of him.

"It always does, Mitchell," Carter said, and the smirk in her voice sounded affectionate to Cam's ears. "It always does."

Cam leans forward. It's creepy, yeah, but it's a puzzle, and Jackson's fascinating enough that he wants to take the time to figure the guy out. "You think," he says. "You don't remember?"

It was kind of like watching a re-enactment of the Birth of Aphrodite, Sam thought, except Cam-Mitchell-struggling-out-of-improbably-large-seed-pod wasn’t exactly Greek-goddess-floating-demurely-on-seashell.

Death wasn’t so much of a milestone for SG-1 anymore; Daniel alone had reduced it to more of a mile…pebble. But this, Jack had to admit, this was something new.