Work Text:
Jyoti
by Bethiny
“Dr. Frasier has not reported into work today, Major… Someone needs to go check on her.” Hammond stated.
“I’m on it, sir!” Sam Carter replied, and was almost running down the corridor before Hammond could reply...
“Report back, Major!” Just for good measure.
Sam felt sick as her car pulled up outside Dr. Janet Frasier’s home. This is so unlike you, Janet! She thought, as she hurried out of her car, and down the path to the porch.
“SAM!!! Thank God, thank God!!!” Frasier’s voice called from the street.
Carter spun right round. “What’s happened, Janet?” She paused. The usually unflappable Dr. Frasier sped down the path toward her, and Sam caught her before momentum made her plough them both to the ground.
“Cassie!” Janet said simply.
Sam’s stomach lurched almightily.
“She’s gone… I can’t find her anywhere…” Frasier continued.
“Gone?” Carter asked. Given last year’s events concerning Cassandra, she wasn’t quite sure what Janet Frasier meant.
“She’s missing… She left me this note tacked to her bedroom door, asking me to take good care of Bijou!” Frasier spoke of the little dog that O’Neill had given to Cassie many years beforehand.
“Where could she have gone?” Sam asked, already considering the possibilities.
“I don’t know, Sam… I’ve spent the whole morning checking with her friends, and that ex boyfriend of hers, that nasty little piece of work, Lysander Guilder… I’ve even been down to the boating lake, looking for her… Remember that place?”
“Yeah…” Carter paused. “Alright, listen now, Janet… We’ll bring her back home! Hammond asked me to keep in touch. I’ll call in and ask him if the boys can come help us search for her… We can split up, and each look in a place for her…”
Jack O’Neill ran out of Cheyenne Mountain as soon as he heard the news. Daniel Jackson, Teal’c, and Jonas Quinn weren’t far behind him. This’ll be just like our Missions! He thought. This is a damn Misson! Search and Rescue… We’ve done this old chestnut a million times! It’s easy… He and Jackson got into his Corvette. Teal’c and Jonas took one of the unmarked vehicles from the Cheyenne Transport Compound…
“Right, whose looking where?” Sam Carter stood next to Janet Frasier, outside.
“It’s no use looking in all her usual haunts!” Janet stated. “I’ve done that already…”
“Teal’c and Jonas can go check again…” O’Neill said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Frasier asked icily.
“Just that she might not have been there earlier…” O’Neill put a hand on Frasier’s shoulder. “Daniel and me can go up to Minnesota lookin’ for her…”
Teal’c looked at him oddly.
“Cassie’s been up to the fishin’ hut with us all before… She knows it’s abandoned most of the year… She might have made it her first port of call…” He reasoned.
“A safe harbour?” Quinn thought aloud.
“What do I do? Just sit home and make the tea???” Frasier was losing it.
“Someone should be at home in case she calls…” Sam said. “She could even realise what a mistake she’s making & head back home before nightfall…”
“I’ve held a gun to someone’s head in the name of my daughter!” Frasier reminded them. “You expect me to be fine and dandy with sitting back on my haunches while she’s out there?!!!” Frasier pointed down the street angrily, illustrating her point with white hot fury, and fear… “She’ll think I don’t care!”
“Listen, Janet…” O’Neill said, withstanding her answering glare. “When Wenonah left home for the first time, I know for a fact I’d looked in some of the right places for her, and she was hidin’… She’s told me since she thought she didn’t deserve for me to find her…” He said, with difficulty. “She used to hide from me especially cos she knew I was hurtin’ so bad… So was she, and she wanted to find somewhere and someone else to give her a new start to life, so she didn’t have to feel like that anymore. She coped less with my pain cos she thought it was her who’d made me that way, than she did her own…”
“Are you saying she no longer wants to live with me? That I make her feel bad???” Frasier looked at him tearfully, but still seething.
“Jack’s saying that maybe she’ll let herself be found by someone else, and then, we can get her home to you, and you can help her through the rest of whatever it is that made her run away…” Sam said kindly.
Two hours later, Sam and Janet were sitting at the kitchen table in the Frasiers’ home, where a year ago, they had been, on her Birthday, the day they’d nearly lost her for the 2nd time in her 16 or so years…
“Well, she did ask me to take care of Bijou, I suppose…” Janet said anxiously, looking at the clock, and sipping yet more strong coffee. “She’s been such a good girl lately, Sam… Not an ounce of trouble! She’s been too quiet really, for Cassie…”
“Did it start after her encounter with Nirrti last year?” Sam asked patiently.
“The quiet spell started after a visit from one of her friends a couple of months ago…” Janet mused.
“Not that Lysander???” Carter thought.
“I’ll kill him if he’s done anything to her!” Janet said.
Carter put a hand on Janet’s own unsteady hands.
“But it wasn’t him, no…” She paused, recalling. “It was Sorcha!”
“Who’s she???” Sam sat forward in her chair, and leant her elbows on the table.
“A school friend… But the weird thing is, this all started because she was showing Cassie some photos of her baby niece, Jyoti…” Janet trailed off.
“You don’t think?… Do you?” Sam asked.
“Well, I can’t be sure, can I?” Janet paused. “But no. It wasn’t like that… And Cassie’s too frightened to have kids anyway… She thinks Nirrti’ll come back for them…”
“I hate that worm…!” Sam stated, pounding a fist on the wooden table.
“It was more like, I don’t know… Well, Jyoti’s a Hindi name. Sorcha said so… And it was like Cassie went all quiet, as if her stomach had turned at being reminded of Nirrti…”
“I don’t blame her! The Goddess of Darkness should be plunged into darkness herself, in my opinion…” Sam said coldly.
Jonas Quinn came out of the fourth café that he and Teal’c had checked out on this route already… “No.” He said, getting back into the car. “I can’t see her…”
“If she had seen you, it would be you by whom she would wish to be rescued…” Teal’c stated, pulling away from the curb.
“Are you saying…?” Jonas began to realise.
“Yes… Her reaction to you was immediate. When Dr. Frasier invited SG1 to her home, Cassandra Frasier did indeed seem to find you to her liking…”
“I hope I can rescue her…” Quinn said, scouring the sides of the motorway.
“We should go look in her room…” Sam stated.
“That’ll make me popular!” Frasier said, getting up from her chair. “Come on, then..!”
Janet Frasier lead Samantha Carter into Cassie’s room. They looked around them.
Janet spotted her daughter’s diary, and opened it immediately. A sheet of paper fell out of the back of it. Not a page from the diary itself… She stooped to pick it up, and unfolded it. “It looks like the end of a story…” She said, perching on Cassie’s bed.
Sam sat next to her. “One that Cassie wrote???”
“Yeah…” Frasier poured over the page. “And there it is…!” She paused, showing Sam the page. “Look!… She mentions the name Jyoti…”
“Why?” Sam peered at the page. “Hang on a minute, Janet… This looks like it’s a story… About you and Teal’c… And me… And Jack! See…?… You’re Jyoti… Fayre Jyoti. Teal’c’s called Thomas. I think I’m Shula, and Jack’s someone called Jared… She’s paired us all off with one another! Look, and she’s put herself with Jonas…”
“Why would she want to write a story like that, and what’s the significance of Jyoti?” Frasier puzzled.
“Look in her Diary, Janet… Look for a reference…” Sam still looked hard at the page.
“Yes… Here it is: The name Jyoti means Light. Fayre means beautiful…” Janet stopped, tears in her eyes, realising the message her daughter was trying to communicate through her writing…
“So,” Sam began. “You’re the beautiful light… In her life…”
“And Nirrti must be the darkness… I am her opposite.” Frasier paused for thought, wiping away a tear for her daughter.
“And this…” Sam realised. “This story is Cassie’s perfect world…”
“We all know she hasn’t experienced much of that world…” Janet looked to Sam. “She’s been through some real crap, Sam… Poor child. Darkness came and enveloped her own world, then I,… we,… took her away from that…”
“…Into the Light…” Sam thought aloud. “But it hasn’t been an easy light to walk into, has it? I mean, last year alone, she found the extent of just how violated she has been by Nirrti… She nearly transformed into a Power that maybe she thought could cope with all that… Perhaps, even get rid of the threat Nirrti represents in her life entirely… Then, that, too, gets taken from her… By the same being who ripped her innocent hopes apart before, when her biological parents were killed… She went with you to the Alpha Site last year, and the only thing, apart from you, that she thought she would be able to hold onto from this world was her dog… And Lysander Guilder certainly hasn’t helped matters!!!”
“She just wants some happiness, poor darling…” Frasier wiped yet more tears from her eyes, and her daughter’s pet dog wondered into the room, and leapt on her lap.
Jack turned on the radio, thinking that a report might even be on there about Cassie, though he doubted he would want to hear what it had to say even if such a report did exist. Delamitri’s “Nothing Changes” was playing…
“Do you really think she’s at the cabin, Jack?” Daniel asked, anxiety paining his every word.
“We haven’t heard from the others tellin’ us she’s somewhere else…” He kept looking at the road ahead. He turned off from it, and onto open grounds. His.
“Well, we’re here…” Daniel said.
“And she won’t be expectin’ us, so we’re gonna have to make sure we don’t scare the poor kid… I’m leavin’ the car here.” Jack said.
He and Daniel got out of the car.
“I’ll look round…” Daniel told O’Neill.
“I’ll go see if she’s inside…” He replied. Jack walked the path to his Fishing Cabin. “I’ll call you if I find her…”
“Then I can call home…” Daniel stated.
Jack opened the door to his holiday home. “Cassie… Cassie, Sweetheart… You about???” He called out. “Then, he spotted her, behind the sofa, the one that matched that he’d taken to the Base ages ago… He walked over. “It’s only Jack, Cassie… It’s gonna be OK!”
She wouldn’t come out from behind the sofa…
He walked around it, and hunkered down next to her. “Hey, Sweetheart…”
She looked up at him with doey eyes full of anguished and afraid tears. “Mom won’t be callin’ me that anymore… Will she???”
“Oh, God, Cass… Yes, she bloody well will!” He replied.
Cassie buried her face in his embrace, and sobbed her heart out.
“I’m gonna call home now, kid…” He said. “Is that OK with you?” He twisted in her desperately sad grasp, and looked at her beautiful face. “I gotta call Daniel, too…”
“Is Daniel here..?” She asked, still sobbing.
“Sure is..!” Jack assured her.
“He’s such a sweetheart…” She sniffed.
“Thank you…” Daniel said softly. He had just that moment returned to the cabin, and was now coming over to the sofa, where he bent down on his heels in front of Cassie, and held her hand.
“Where’s Jonas?” She asked him.
Daniel smiled. “Out looking for you!”
Her sweet face brightened. “Really???”
“Really and truly!” Daniel told her genuinely.
This seemed to make Cassie sob even more, and Jack held her close, stroking her head. Daniel still held her hand…
Janet Frasier put down the phone, and broke into wracking tears even before she could turn to Samantha. “S-she’s OK…!”
Sam ran to Janet and hugged her friend. The two stood their, shedding tears of relief that were more pure than any shed in the history of motherhood. “Who found her???”
“Jack, and Daniel…” Janet still cried. “Daniel’s on the other mobile, letting Teal’c and Jonas know…”
“I’ll call the General..!” Sam thought aloud. She stepped back from Janet only slightly, and still held onto her friend’s hand with one of her own, as she dialled the SGC with the shaky fingers of the other…
THE END…