Disclaimer: I don’t own Stargate or the Magnificent Seven and I haven’t gotten anything but personal satisfaction from morphing the two of them together this way. This is an OPEN AU, if you’re inspired to play with it PLEASE BE MY GUEST! Feel free to use the SG7 graphic as well.

Larabee looked up from the report he was working on and glanced around the common room that was the heart of the tiny seven-man Stargate base he was in charge of. Wilmington, Dunne and Tanner were watching the hockey playoffs on television, Jackson was playing chess with Sanchez, and Standish was sleeping on the couch. For the moment, everything was quiet. Normally he wouldn’t have expected things to stay quiet for long, but today…today his men were holding themselves in check, and Larabee was certain they would continue to do so as long as Lieutenant Standish remained asleep.

That was the part of the story that couldn’t go into any report, unfortunately - the part where Standish had saved not only Tanner’s life but also the use of his badly damaged arm. The weapons expert had come out of the close call without so much as a scar to show for it, but his teammate hadn’t been so lucky; using the Gou’ald technology came with a price, and this time Standish had paid it in spades. And Larabee couldn’t even put the Southern officer in for the commendation he so richly deserved without signing the man’s death warrant at the same time.

It seemed like it had been so much longer than six months ago that SG-7 had been put under his command, that they had been given charge of the second Stargate which had been reclaimed from NID…that they had been betrayed by NID agents within the Stargate program who were trying to take back control of the second Gate. Standish had saved them that time too, by doing something that no one knew could be done; he had fought the Gou’ald inside him and, just briefly, won. No one had known he was infected until that fateful day, including him - the Gou’ald had been blocking his memory of his forced implantation at the hands of NID’s ‘researchers’ - and once they had turned the tables on their attackers and dumped the bodies through the open Gate the man had begged his shocked commanding officer to kill him before the monster inside took over again.

And Larabee had refused. The look of horrified betrayal Standish had given him before succumbing to the Gou’ald’s control again had haunted the colonel for weeks, and even General Travis hadn’t been sure he’d done the right thing. But his team had stood behind him - behind both of them - and in the end Standish’s will to fight back had given them the edge they’d needed to free him from the alien parasite. The Southerner wore his hair a little longer than regulations liked these days to hide the six-inch long scar that ran down the back of his neck, and they would never be able to tell anyone about what had happened for fear of the man being taken from them to be the victim of even more unscrupulous scientific study…but he was alive, alive and still able to use the Gou’ald technology that had saved Tanner’s life and limb two days ago. And the price might be high, but Standish had never once hesitated to pay it for the sake of SG-7. Not all the SG commanders were so lucky, Larabee knew; Jack O’Neill’s 2IC had the same abilities Lieutenant Standish did resulting from a much less traumatic encounter with the Tokra, but Major Carter refused to use them to her team’s advantage. That disgusted Chris. Jack was a friend of his and the only person outside of the seven of them and General Travis that knew their secret, and from comparing notes with the other commander he knew that Carter suffered only minor discomfort after using a ribbon weapon or healing device as compared to the debilitating headaches that were sometimes so severe as to cause Standish to pass out from the pain. But in spite of that the stubborn Southerner still refused to go anywhere without his ribbon device hidden under the sleeve of his fatigue jacket, ready to be used at a moment’s notice, while Carter would not even utilize a healing device for one of her team members in an emergency.

Yes, Colonel Larabee knew he was lucky; he was lucky to have all of them, not just Lieutenant Ezra Standish, their enigmatic refugee from the ranks of the NID. There was also Lieutenant Vin Tanner, the weapons expert who could communicate with him without saying a word; Major ‘Buck’ Wilmington, Larabee’s own 2IC who had risen through the ranks with him and was one of the best friends he’d ever had; Lieutenant J.D. Dunne, so young he was frightening to the colonel but whose genius with both Terran and alien technology was without equal in the Stargate program; Captain/Doctor Nathan Jackson, a skilled surgeon and gifted scientist with a penchant for following rules and regulations to the letter but who had the common sense to know when to throw the rulebook out; and Dr. Josiah Sanchez, their civilian archaeologist/sociologist who’d been recommended by none other than Dr. Daniel Jackson himself and who never, ever seemed to be thrown by anything they encountered. In six months these men had grown from a mismatched, struggling team into a tightly-knit family that had given Chris Larabee a part of his soul back - the part he’d thought he’d buried when he buried his wife and son. That was another thing that couldn’t go into any report…but General Travis knew, and Larabee knew that the general would do everything in his power to keep SG-7 together.

Standish shifted and murmured something in his sleep and all activity in the room stopped, every eye going to the couch. When after a few moments it became apparent that the man wasn’t waking up, his teammates quietly returned to their various pursuits. Larabee went back to his report, smiling and shaking his head; keep them together like hell - he wouldn’t lay odds on the survival of the man, alien or government organization that tried to pull them apart.

-30-