Chapter Three

They had one thing in common
They were good in bed
She said, ’faster, faster.
the lights are turning red.’
Life In The Fast Lane
The Eagles

Greenbrier, Colorado
June 21st

Dad was working, Nick moved out weeks ago, the house was silent—and messy, it was really starting to go to shit since Mom moved out-- as Colleen let herself in having skipped school for the day. She had bigger things on her mind than going through end-of-the-year bullshit with her classmates. Yeah, much bigger things on her mind. Colleen stopped at a drug store outside of town on her way home from driving around in her shiny new Saturn, she would rather have her family in tact for her birthday than a new car but then again you just couldn’t have everything now could you? Nope.

Slowly making her way up to her bathroom with the brown paper bag clutched under her arm she thought about calling Sandy and then thought better of it. She’d call when and if she knew anything. She’d really like to have her Mother here right now but that wasn’t possible either she was all the way across the country in the arms of one Andrew Hartley and didn’t have much time to bother with calling home—not when someone was here to talk to anyway.

Closing the bathroom door behind her, Colleen took out the contents of the bag and carefully read the instructions before opening the box. Oh God please don’t let it be true. Taking down her jeans and underwear she squatted over the toiled let out a little urine as described and then held the stick in the stream. Sixty seconds ticked by and the tip of the stick turned bright blue.

“Oh! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!” She screamed and tossed the pregnancy test across the bathroom. “No!” Mom and Dad are gonna kill me, Sandy’s gonna go ballistic! “Oh FUCK!” Still sitting on the toilet believing (and rightly so) that life as she knew it was once again over, Colleen started to cry. She couldn’t be pregnant she just couldn’t be pregnant she was going to college in September she had life ahead of her.

And now she had one inside of her as well.

Colleen spent the rest of the day curled up in a ball on her bed and crying. Where had her nice little life gone? Everything had been so normal and calm and easy, she had a loving family but that was all gone now. Nothing was normal, nothing was calm, and certainly not much had been easy these past few weeks especially not since Mom left. When Dad wasn’t at work or stopping off at O’Malley’s which he did a lot lately he just wandered around the house sad and lonely, usually with alcohol on his breath. Nick she hardly saw anymore except for school he hadn’t been back to the house since he left he was too angry with Dad to come back here. She was pretty pissed off at him too they hardly spoke to each other. Why couldn’t he understand what Mom did? Why was it so awful that she wanted to save his life? Why couldn’t he see how much she loved him? She didn’t want to be with Hartley she didn’t want to go to New York, Colleen hadn’t even seen her Mother just before she left and she knew that much! Mom only went because she felt she didn’t have another choice because Dad wouldn’t forgive her or even just ask her to stay and try to work it out.

Colleen wanted her nice little life back and she wanted it right now! That wasn’t going to happen, Mom was going to Switzerland in another day and she wouldn’t come back to the States for months. Hartley was keeping her busy and away from her family. Mom wouldn’t say what was so goddamn important in Switzerland only that it was ‘very important’ and she ‘had to go’.

**

Doctor Daniel Jackson headed off for work at 7:30am just like every morning but he didn’t go to the Base. Instead he called in from the road and said he wouldn’t be in today without giving an explanation. Jack wouldn’t need one when he got the message he knew what today was.

After driving around for a while Daniel found himself in Silver Springs and in no time at all standing at the front gate of 1313 Mockingbird Lane. The house was empty and there was a FOR SALE sign in the front yard. Daniel remembered the one he’d seen in Calla’s gallery window as he passed by the other day, he even stopped and pulled into the parking lot, he got out and looked in the window, the gallery was empty. Daniel supposed Calla felt she had nothing to come back here for so why not unload it?

Walking up to their old house he saw that the grass was overgrown and riddled with weeds Calla’s once lovely flower beds had gone untended for some time. She’d be disappointed to see that if she were here. Slowly he strolled up the driveway and opened the back gate.

This was where they were married 18 years ago, right over there where the lavender bushes grew. She’d planted them afterward the ceremony to mark the spot. Daniel remembered that day as if it were just yesterday it had been so bright and beautiful. All of their friends gathered around and some of Calla’s family, everyone wishing them well. They’d said ‘I do’ and promised each other to be together forever and he meant it when he said it, damn it, he knew he did. So did Calla. Where it all gone? Other than to say it went to Andrew Hartley he didn’t have a clue.

For three weeks he’d wrestled with his time in Bacchus’ kingdom, he’d talked with Jack, with Sam, with Teal’c and even one of the shrinks on the Base. He read his teammates reports and remembered the paintings Calla had made. While he knew it was all true he couldn’t remember it for himself, not all of it, just little bits and pieces. The wine, the chalice, some of the women’s faces he could remember but not their names and he doubted he ever knew those to begin with.

One of the questions he kept coming back to was; if Calla knew what was going on, which was evidenced by her paintings, why didn’t she tell General Thurmond? Why didn’t she inform him and have a team sent after them? Why had she waited for General Hammond to call her and tell her he was missing? Maybe it was the drugs Hartley fed her which kept the knowledge from really sinking through and it only made its way to the surface through her artwork. Maybe she was hoping it wasn’t true that it was the drugs making her think something was going on when it really wasn’t. Or maybe, maybe, she’d waited for confirmation because she knew it was all going to lead her to Father’s bed. Daniel had finally come to the honest conclusion that Colleen was telling the truth and being in Ares’ bed was something Calla took no pleasure in. She’d only done it so that Ares would give him the Red Ambrosia and so that Daniel would live. Certainly she’d never meant for him to find out about it.

Wandering around the backyard on the clear summer’s day, just as bright, brilliant and warm as they day he’d married her, Daniel thought about what Ares told him and that unfinished painting. It hadn’t happened the way it did in her picture. He didn’t walk in on them in the act and then join them. Daniel walked in and they were both sleeping. So why was it different in the painting? After all, she’d captured the rest of it so well and accurately so why not this?

He thought he remembered Calla holding onto him and knew he remembered seeing Ares’ cold stare as he looked down at him from over her shoulder. What he couldn’t remember was whether or not he was an active participant in that particular act. If he hadn’t been, how the hell did it even start?

That was what she’d screamed at her Father. He could hear it now ringing in his head as he lay motionless by the fire and he could feel the soft weight of her on his thighs. She’d been bathing him and discovered he had a hard-on. Ares was sleeping or she thought. Then that soft light weight was pushed down on to him by a massive force.

You’ll take us both. That’s what her Father said. Daniel heard it clear as a bell and he saw Ares’ cold-fire eyes staring down at him. Her arms were wrapped around his neck and she was holding on to him while Ares pumped and thrust into her ass sending her entire body moving up and down on Daniel’s hard shaft. She was whispering to him that she loved him she was begging him to wake up and to help her. Then she was gone, Ares was dragging her away. He roared at her from his bedroom about how much he loathed Daniel and that he wouldn’t suffer her to fuck him in his house. Calla screamed and he didn’t remember anything until he woke up and found them naked in each other’s arms. Shocked and horrified at the sight of them and not remembering the day or the night before, he’d run out.

Calla had known about the women he was fucking right down to the way they looked and she came to get him anyway. She caught him screwing Medea and she’d rescued them anyway. Why?

He smiled a sad smile at the sound of her voice in his head. Yeah, if that wasn’t Love then he didn’t know what was. God he was an asshole! He should have gotten down on his hands and knees and begged her to stay rather than just watching her walk out with Andrew Hartley. Daniel picked a few sprigs of lavender from the bush which marked the spot where they’d said their vows. The fragrance was light and sweet and reminded him of his wife.

Andrew Hartley was no prince. Daniel read the dossier, he was a cut-throat businessman with a heart of stone and a very checkered past. Hartley had been arrested several times in his younger days the charges ranged from simple shoplifting to petty theft to grand theft and had seven arrests for lewd and lascivious behavior, twice with minors. Those last two charges stemmed from a web site Andrew Hartley and his friend Reginald Mansfield built when they were young. That site and others like it were how Andrew Hartley made his money and got his foot in the door in the Art World. The first site he created with his buddy Reginald was your average pornography site and was put together from bits and pieces of crap they’d found already lying around on the Internet. It was cheap but profitable but not very flashy.

The next web site Andy and his friend built was a bit riskier. It featured virgins having their cherries popped by large and experienced men. That site was very popular and brought in a massive amount of capital. All those young girls were volunteers and they were paid a paltry sum of money to have their first sexual experience conducted via the web. Then they got the bright idea of allowing people to ‘order’ a virgin. They put up several photographs of young women in the area and for a price you could pick one and watch her get stuffed for the first time. Again very popular. And it led to Andrew Hartley’s first arrest. Hartley liked being in front of the camera so when one of the girls came back as being only 15 but already having gone out on the web, Andy got in a little hot water but he got himself out.

After that he and Reg went under ground with yet another bonzer idea for a website. A rape site. Taking the ‘to order’ concept to the height of disgusting, they posted several pictures of several women on their underground site and for the right price you could have any of them raped at your discretion. The money flowed like nobody’s business. They stalked the women, tied them up, tortured them, raped them, sodomized them, whatever the customer wanted and it was all brought to them and only them by a closed circuit camera. It wasn’t long before the men who frequented the site wanted to have women they knew tortured in this manner. Old girlfriends, old wives, old enemies, whoever. Again for the right price anything was possible. That led to Andy’s second arrest with a minor. He raped her all right, it was all caught on tape, but he pled down to the less serious charge of forced oral copulation and got a small fine and small probationary term. That site shut down soon after that but all in all the authorities figured Andrew Hartley and Reginald Mansfield managed to rake in upwards of a cool half million between all the sites. Then, for a while, Andrew Hartley disappeared and when he returned he had reinvented himself as an Art Broker and Agent. No mention of his previous pornographic exploits was ever made.

Many of the artists he represented ended up penniless even though he’d sold their work for thousands and thousands of dollars. All of which Andrew Hartley put in his own pocket. It was all nice legal because he’d charmed them all into signing his favorite contract. Hartley’s contract was, on the surface, fairly standard but if you got down into it then it actually said that Andrew Hartley and not the artist being represented owned absolutely everything said artist painted, sculpted or what-have-you for a term of 5 years. It further stated that he would advance money at the rousing cost of 28% interest which was compounded weekly, an amount most people could never pay even if he did fork over the cash. Daniel doubted very much if Calla knew what she’d gotten herself into with him. Daniel new his wife well enough to know that, for whatever reason, she trusted Andrew Hartley and she never even read the contract he’d had her sign. He knew he should warn her, he should tell her…he should say something!

TOOT-TOOT

The train was coming and he looked up as it passed by. He should get on that or a plane or in a car or on a Greyhound bus and get his ass to New York. He should march himself right up to that brownstone door and demand to see his wife. And he could because he knew where Hartley lived his address was in the dossier. Yes he could do all of that right now. But he wouldn’t. Daniel didn’t know if could forgive her for sleeping with Ares even though it didn’t sound like a pleasurable experience to him. Didn’t know if he could make love with her again because of it, the idea of being somewhere Ares had been just made his skin crawl. He didn’t know if he could forgive her for making him Immortal when he’d never asked for any such thing. Daniel always thought it was life’s fragility that made it so special.

Daniel Jackson was still having a damn hard time with Andrew Hartley and how easily she’d turned to him. He didn’t know if he could forgive her for that. She’d gone to Ares’ bed to save his life and Ares being Ares did what Ares would do under those circumstances, cruel and disgusting as it was. Hartley he wormed his way into her life and her body, Daniel couldn’t say for sure she was consensually sleeping with him before she left for New York but he was fairly certain she was doing ‘favors’ for him before that. Daniel just wasn’t sure he could get past that even if she asked for his forgiveness.

The other thing that kept him from going after her, of course, was those women he was guilty of indulging in. All of those women with their long dark hair, their big dark eyes and their tawny skin. Why did they all look like Sha’re? Was he subconsciously trying to hurt his wife even more? Sha’re had long been a thorn in Calla’s side Daniel knew that and he thought he understood why. If he hadn’t spent so many years looking for his Sha’re he might have found Calla a lot sooner, she might not have had to spend those seven extra years with Kanan if it hadn’t been for Sha’re. Other than that he supposed it simply came down to the fact that Sha’re had gotten to his heart first and Calla firmly believed she’d never get her out. To an extent she was right, he had loved Sha’re very much and was devastated when he lost her. Some part of him would always love her and maybe even wonder what their life together might have been like if he’d just stayed on Abydos rather than coming back to Earth all those years ago.

Did that mean that he didn’t really love Calla? That he’d never loved her? She was only a very pretty obligation or substitute? Christ he hoped not. Eighteen years married every minute of every second of every day couldn’t possibly have been a lie. It just couldn’t. Maybe it was and maybe Calla felt that way too. She’d been gone three weeks and hadn’t written to him or e-mailed him or called….well now that wasn’t true, Calla called a lot she blocked her number and some days he’d come home to find as many as 15 CALLER UNKNOWNs on the little display but no message. That had to be her, it just had to. At first Daniel didn’t understand why she didn’t say something anything to the machine but then Colleen filled him in on her habit of playing the message over and over when he was away. Calla was just calling to hear his voice, whether or not she had something she wanted to say was secondary to that. He thought about changing the message and having Colleen’s voice on the tape instead but then thought better of it. Let her call and listen when no one was home if she wanted to she wasn’t hurting anything except, maybe, herself.

One thing was for certain, he was getting damn tired of staying in this spot. He had to make a decision and soon. He was either going to go after her, throw himself at her mercy and beg her to come home or he was going to start divorce proceedings—he knew Calla would never do that not even if Hartley begged her to, they’d be up to him to start. Other than that they could end up married for eternity but never again seeing each other. That wasn’t a marriage in his blue eyes.

Looking up at the house Daniel was reminded of David and the things he’d done here. All those nasty things he’d done to Calla as himself and then made Daniel do. Even through that she still loved him. She still stood by his side and wouldn’t think of leaving him. This was the place where calliendanny.com had originally gotten its live feed. At least that site finally died he still see Jack blazing into his office to tell him that they’d found the server and that Daniel wasn’t going to believe it. The techies deleted the files which had been stored on the SGC server and poof….there went calliendanny.com. The geeks and techies spent days trying to find out how and when the servers had been hacked. Like other humans they were far too comfortable in their own superiority and felt certain it had to be an inside job, yes, someone from inside the SGC must have done it. Their firewall was foolproof. If either of them were still alive Daniel would swear that either David or Michael Blood had something to do with it but they were both cold and gone. Either way it didn’t matter to him the site was gone and wherever she was Daniel hoped Calla knew that. She’d be very relieved to know it died a quick quite death. In the back of his mind Daniel Jackson knew it didn’t take a genius to figure out who was responsible for the reappearance of that site after so many years. It just had to be Andrew Hartley and his good mate Reginald Mansfield.

Late one night Daniel, drunk, had gone through the cookies on his own computer and found that Calla had been on that site for hours and hours at a time, she’d watched every single file repeatedly but none more than the ones where David was fucking her. Daniel found himself following in her footsteps, he sat there drinking and getting drunker and watching the files and drinking some more. It was addictive seemed he couldn’t stop no matter how much he wanted to. Eventually he’d drunk himself into oblivion and pass out in the same place she often did. When he woke up the computer was off, Colleen must have come and shut it down while he was asleep.

Another good thing about the disappearance of calliendanny.com was that the press wasn’t around so much anymore. Then again, they seemed to take their leave when Calla did. They were probably chasing her in New York.

With the sun having passed its apex and being past the yardarm, Daniel let himself out of the fenced backyard and walked back to his car. It was a half-day at school today and Colleen would probably be home by now she’d done her best to be kind and sympathetic to him, Daddy always was her favorite Parent but still she was terribly disappointed by it all. Like Nick she’d taken to spending less and less time at home and more and more time with Terry or Sandy who was always coming by the house for her. That was starting to get on his nerves, Daniel didn’t like to see her getting so serious about one boy at such a young age, no more than he liked hearing Nicholas and Annie were engaged and his son was going to forego his college education. Daniel was damn sure Calla would hit the roof if she knew about any of that. Yes, they were grown, they were eighteen and starting lives of their own but Daniel was beginning to understand that his kids still needed their Folks around. Both he and Calla were failing them in that respect. It was so hard to believe she’d walked out on them as well. That she’d gone so incredibly far away from all of them, hell she never liked to leave the city limits if she could help it.

Colleen’s car was gone when he got home early. On the telephone stand was a note ‘Staying at Terry’s tonight see you at graduation tomorrow. Love, Cole.’

Graduation. Secretly he hoped that Calla would make it for that even if he did have to see her and talk to her—which might not be so bad. He wanted her to be there for the kids and if it was rough on him well he’d get through it but she wasn’t coming. Another thing that was incredibly hard to believe. She promised Nicholas she would come back for graduation and even asked Daniel if it was all right with him. What could be so important that it would keep her away? Keep her from keeping her word to her children. There just couldn’t be that much. In fact he couldn’t think of one damn thing that would mean so much to her she’d trade this for it. Hartley it had to be something to do with him. He probably just didn’t want her to come back and was filling her head with all kinds of lies. Without Daniel there to tell her they weren’t true she believed Hartley.

Well one thing was for certain, he didn’t want to stay here in this quiet empty house. Daniel trotted up the stairs to his bedroom, stripped off the SGC uniform and got into something more casual before taking off for O’Malley’s for the evening. Off to drown his sorrows in alcohol for another night. As he made his way down the winding streets toward the bar he thought of how unlike him this was. Daniel knew himself well enough to know that he wasn’t the type to engage in heavy drinking when he had a heavy problem but nothing else seemed to help right now. Nothing else seemed to shut up the voices in his head telling him what to do and where to go. Problem with those voices is they were always bickering and arguing with each other and him they couldn’t agree on a course of action. So he’d get drunk and remain inactive until something came along and kicked his ass into gear.

End of Chapter Three
Tarnished Heroes: Life in the Fast Lane--Calla's Story
Continue to
Chapter Four