by Jamie Duncan
“Yeah. I guess so.” Daniel looked about as disappointed as Sam would expect, but there was a faint tremor of relief in his voice.
“And no snake is running around with all that stuff either, or sucking people’s brains out of their heads.” The Colonel punched Daniel lightly on the shoulder with his good hand. “Consolation prize.”
Daniel nodded, but he still looked pained.
Sam contemplated the figures in the photograph. “Seems strange, though, to put up monuments to something like that. If it was so terrible.” Her eyes met Daniel’s long enough to see that “terrible” didn’t come close, and she looked away. The Colonel’s face betrayed nothing.
Teal’c grunted his agreement but added, “Perhaps it was a reminder, so that they would not be tempted to greet them again.”
Sam thought of that ribbon knotted under her ribs, the way it had dragged her forward, how much she’d wanted-whatever was at the other end of it. Her fingers kneaded her sternum restlessly as if she could untangle that tether. She caught herself, closed her hand into a fist and let it drop to bounce a few times on the top of the bed rail.
“Smart folks,” the Colonel said and tipped his chair back to look wistfully up at the ceiling. “In other news, I’m bored enough to eat Jell-o. Even green.”
Sam straightened. “Yes, sir.” Somehow it seemed like a tremendous relief to go on a quest for something as mundane as Jell-o. “Anything else?”
“I have some journals I need—”
“Shut up, Daniel,” the Colonel ordered.
“Or,” Daniel amended with as sidelong glance at him. “A chessboard.”
“Cards.”
“Or cards.”
“Or, Major…” Colonel O’Neill’s chair clanked down again. He leaned forward to scope out the room and the fierce doctor filling out charts at her desk by the door. “You could stage a jailbreak. You’re good at that. So Teal’c says.” He raised his eyebrows hopefully at her. “We could find steaks.”
A plan was already taking shape in Sam’s head when there was a pointed “ahem” from the corner and Janet impaled them each in turn with a glare.
Sam looked from Janet to her CO. “Yeah, sir, but those were only Jaffa.”
“Wuss,” he muttered and sat back glumly.
Teal’c also leaned back against his pillows and resumed his perusal of the ceiling. Sam grinned at his quiet, “Indeed.”
No matter how hard he tried, Daniel wasn’t able to look at his reflection.
He washed his hands without casting his eyes up to the mirror over the sink, because he was afraid of what might be there, or might be missing. He knew it was irrational in the extreme, but that made no difference at all.
There was no one to tell, no one who might understand. At least, no one on whom he wanted to inflict the pain of remembering what being taken as a host was like. Sam had endured Jolinar’s memories for so long now that he was sure she could happily live the rest of her life without ever thinking of Jolinar again. Jack… well, he was a closed book on the subject of blending. It had happened to him twice now, and he’d never wanted to talk about any aspect of it. Daniel felt awkward, knowing they shared that horror and couldn’t speak of it. That left Dr. MacKenzie, the program shrink, and Daniel had nothing to say to him. Some things needed to be dealt with privately.
He gripped the edges of the sink, overcome with a feeling of vertigo so strong he could barely stand upright.
His throat was still sore. When he thought about why, nausea built in the pit of his stomach and bile welled up, ready to spill over. With an effort, he controlled his retching until the urge to vomit had passed. He splashed water on his face, cool enough to take the sting of sweat away, and toweled off slowly. Eventually, he was going to have to get some sleep, but not yet. There was work to do; his sketches of the glyphs from Atropos were scattered across the desk and worktables of his office. He could make the work last all night, and many nights to come.
By the time he’d wandered back down the deserted corridor—even the diehard workaholics were home by two in the morning—Jack was sitting in Daniel’s office, swiveling slowly around in Daniel’s desk chair and stopping once each revolution to glance at the sketches. He looked up when Daniel came in and nodded to him.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Daniel replied, gathering up the piles of sketches as he crossed the office.
“It’s 0230,” Jack said, watching him.
“Yep.” Daniel kept his eyes on his own hands. “Which begs the question: why are you still here?”
“Mission report’s due at 0800,” Jack said. “They don’t write themselves, you know.”
“Believe me, I know.” He’d finished up his own frustratingly vague report around midnight. Once in a while, Daniel had secretly thought that if Jack could outsource writing all his own reports, he’d probably do it in a heartbeat. It would have saved Jack from many late nights hunched over a keyboard, procrastinating by interrupting various members of his team who were trying to write their own late reports.
Daniel went to the desk and began straightening up the messy stacks of paper and sketches. Stray pieces fluttered from the pile. Jack caught one crinkled bit before it hit the ground. “I would’ve thought you’d be sick of staring at these,” Jack said, turning the paper right side up, then upside down again, before handing it back to Daniel.
“I wanted to draw out as many of the glyphs as I could,” Daniel said. “Before 1 forget it all.”
“Sometimes forgetting’s not a bad thing,” Jack said. He fished a couple of pencils out of Daniel’s desk drawer and began toying with them.
“There’s not that much left to forget,” Daniel said. He set down his stack of sketches, then leaned back against the counter and folded his arms over his chest. “I don’t remember any of the things I was trying to pry out of Sebek. Most of the trip down into the library is fuzzy, too. It’s like… it’s like I can almost get to it. But not quite.” He stared at the naked fluorescent lights overhead for a moment. “It feels like it did when I first descended. There are pieces missing, and I can’t reach them. I don’t know where to find them.”
“Then stop looking.” Tap, tap. Jack rapped the pencils together in an uneven rhythm.
Daniel shook his head. “That’s fine for you. But I hate this… this…” He held a hand up to his head and made a hooking motion. “These gaps in my brain.”
“Listen, Daniel. Some things aren’t meant to be remembered.” The pencils stilled. “Shifu knew it. Oma must’ve known it. Who really wants to know what a snake thinks?” The grimace of disgust on Jack’s face said it all. He was perfectly content to leave some things buried as far down in his subconscious as they could be shoved, and that was fine for him, but the desire to access knowledge—Sebek’s knowledge, the library, even his own ascended memories—was a compulsion for Daniel. Jack didn’t understand.
Compulsion. The thought sent a shiver of memory down Daniel’s spine. That was one thing he wouldn’t mind forgetting, but he didn’t have the choice of which memories he could touch and examine and which were hidden from him now. He couldn’t articulate any of this to Jack, though, so he picked up one of his sketches and traced the figure with his finger. “I’ve been comparing this to the rongo rongo on Easter Island. Looking for connections. Patterns. Maybe there are remnants of that technology somewhere else. It could be important, if we found it and learned to use it.”
“Maybe you’ll find something,” The way Jack said it suggested other unspoken words behind it: There’s nothing there, Daniel. Forget it.
For a moment, Daniel’s finger continued around the curving edges of the small figure, following a cold trail. Around and around, slower, and then he stopped. “Maybe.”
“Memory is tricky.” Jack dropped the pencils on the desk and stood up. Hands shoved in his pockets, he said, “The way I see it, it’s a good thing you have those gaps.”
Daniel met Jack’s eyes. They’d known each other for
a long time; Jack didn’t need to spell it out. The knowledge he was missing was what could have been acquired and used by the thing in that library—worst case, he could have been the instrument to harm or kill millions. A shiver gathered at the base of his spine, curving through him. He took a deep breath, let it out, and the chill in his skin dissipated.
Although Daniel hadn’t said anything, Jack nodded, as if in response to his unspoken agreement. “Go home, Daniel. Get some sleep.”
“Jack.” Daniel’s voice stopped Jack in the doorway. The harsh light sharpened the lines of fatigue on Jack’s face. “Are you able to forget?”
“Forget what?” Jack smiled briefly at Daniel as he rounded the corner and headed home. Which, Daniel had to admit, sounded like a good idea. He was ready for some uninterrupted sleep. There were mirrors everywhere in his new house, but he could avoid those until he was ready to recognize himself in them. Maybe it wouldn’t take as long as he’d feared.
Scanning, formatting and basic
proofing by Undead.
