[fic][SG1] After Every War
Dec. 2nd, 2013 01:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magibrainTitle: After Every War
Author: magistrate
Rating: T.
Genre: Character study, offworld culture fun times
Beta: The ever-excellentfignewton helped me get this fic in order, both as it was in progress and after it was done in draft.
Continuity: Veers AU around Homecoming.
Prerequisites: Seasons 6 and 7, mostly.
Summary: History can be a lot of things, but it's rarely if ever straightforward.
Disclaimer: I'm trying to make a joke here about experiencing a sense of ownership over SG-1 due to it being a part of our common culture, but it's just not coming together. The opinions expressed herein are the properties of the characters and generally not of Wisława Szymborska. Watch your step. Questions, comments and cooked grains can be left in replies or directed to magistrata(at)gmail(dot)com. Thank you for reading!
Author's Note: This started out as a fill for the 2013 SG-1 Friendship Ficathon's prompt #20: "Daniel and Jonas. AU in which Jonas stays on SG-1 after Daniel's return." I then proceeded to breeze past every deadline in the Ficathon, so I now present this work sans that context, and with a bunch more screentime for characters who are not them.
It was in the thirty-second year of godlessness that six hunters came to Natasu's door, dragging with them two pale men.
-
Jonas kept his pace up as much as he could, though his stride was a little off considering that he was being rushed along and his balance was thrown by having his wrists tied behind his back. That, and he kept catching his toe on rough patches on the ground, given that his attention kept drifting off the ground, and onto Dr. Jackson.
Dr. Jackson was not nearly as upright as Jonas was. He was all but being dragged, like a particularly large and meaty scarecrow.
Talking had so far not helped their situation, so Jonas had put most of his energies toward trying to work out how their escorts were picking their way through the countryside. They kept making sudden changes in direction and odd, indirect loops, which would seem erratic if it weren't for two things: one, all of them made them without any apparent hesitation, nor direction from their leader; and two, Dr. Jackson had already discovered the pitfalls of trusting that one patch of ground was just as good as any others.
A literal pit, actually. And a literal fall.
And Jonas had to keep reminding himself that it should have been Daniel, not Dr. Jackson – Dr. Jackson had said so, enough times – but sometimes Jonas found it hard to be familiar with the man who he'd gotten killed, and who came back from death and Ascension to live in a vulnerable human form again. Who got injured, again, where Jonas should have acted a little faster to prevent it.
-
Saha kept her pace up, tracing her way through the patterns of weeds that grew only where tainted earth had been laid in. It was a subtle distinction in the vegetation of the land, too much so for most who ventured in. Too much, apparently, for these new intruders.
Still, even hauling their prisoners, she and her women made quick time toward the village.
They were stopped even before the houses had become distinguishable from the hills surrounding them, two guards armed with fire-sticks stepping from the brush. Saha motioned her hunters to stand at ready, and slipped away from them to speak. The larger of the guards was known to her: a cousin.
"These people aren't of our village. How could you bring them here?" he asked.
"To be questioned," Saha said. "It was our spies, as much as our warriors, who won the war. If these are invaders, we should learn what they know."
Her cousin looked over at them. "They don't look Goa'uld."
"And you would know?" Saha raised her eyebrow. "Slaves, then." She kept her voice low, inaudible to the prisoners and her hunters as well. "They traveled with a man who had the glint of gold on his forehead. Remember the stories."
He raked his eyes across the prisoners, as though they were a terrain he could read. "Their livery doesn't look Goa'uld."
"We've only ever seen the livery of Dumuzid," Saha said. "And that, from years ago. There are more gods in the sky than him."
Her cousin didn't look convinced, but relented anyway. "Where do you plan on keeping them?"
"Natasu's cellar can be barred," Saha said. "And it must be running toward empty by this season. I don't suspect we'll keep them through the harvest."
The guard turned to his companion, and then stepped aside, letting her pass on the safe ground. "Well, welcome back, hunter," he said. "Though I wish you had brought us a roebuck."
-
The world, what he was aware of, moved from light to dark, and went still.
Daniel's real awareness floated somewhere below that change, clogged up with the smell of something sweet and vegetal and caved-in under a heap of aches and pounding pains. It was an odd, disconnected feeling, as though his mind hadn't quite gotten used to being held in the confines of its body again.
But he'd never had that feeling on Vis Uban, before he'd re-learned about the SGC and SG-1 and his own ascension, so it was probably – what? Psychosomatic. That was the word.
"Easy," said a voice above him. Daniel could feel his body being resettled on the floor. (Bodies and pain – he had to wonder, and thought he would always wonder, what had made him trade his ascended life for this one. What had been the choice, there?)
He told his eyes to blink, but wasn't sure they were open.
"Well, they seem to have left us here, at least," the voice said, above him. For a moment, it was difficult to place. The tone was familiar, the cadence – not as much. The tone was, well, this just happened. Again. The cadence–
Should Jack be here?
He tried to get his body working well enough to move. It just lay there, close in contact with the cool floor below him, like it was part of the ground and he was of no consequence to it.
Should Sam be here? Should Teal'c?
"Can you hear me, Dr. Jackson?" the voice asked, and another little fragment of his unsought history went slotting into place.
Oh, he thought, and managed a quiet "Mm."
-
Out under the wide expanse of a early-evening alien sky, several elements of that history moved through the world, looking for him.
Jack had Carter at his elbow and at least Teal'c was answering his radio, but the rest of his team had gone missing, and the terrain here seemed to lie. You could go twenty steps and it'd seem like the gentle slope of the hills wouldn't be enough to hide you from view, but suddenly you'd look around and the world would say What? What do you mean you can't see your friends? I'm pretty sure you came here alone.
He wished he'd realized that slightly before Daniel had seen something and wandered a few meters off, and Jonas had not-that-casually trailed after.
Beside him, Carter was clicking her radio, expression pensive as she scanned the terrain. Hadn't picked up any energy readings, any signs of Goa'uld involvement, not that Goa'uld were the only things to be worried about, out here. After a point, though, you couldn't anticipate everything, and one of SG-1's primary modes of learning was to walk into something face-first.
Then: "Colonel O'Neill!" came Teal'c's voice, booming over the deceptively near horizon.
"Well," Jack groused. "Hopefully he's found something."
They picked their way in his direction. Teal'c had walked halfway down a nearby hill, and crouched low to the ground to examine something. "Be mindful of your path," he called, as he saw them.
Jack paused, then felt his way forward. "What's up?"
"Uh, Colonel," Carter said, and stopped beside him, nodding to the ground. He paused, then moved a few feet toward her side, and the telltale brown of broken earth came into view. It had been completely invisible from his angle.
Teal'c was crouching at the edge of a pit or a sinkhole of some kind, with a trail of scree and broken plants leading down one side. The kind of scree that might indicate where, say, just as a hypothetical, two scientists had gone for a tumble.
"I feel like this should have shown up on the topography reports," Jack called back.
Teal'c crouched, using the butt of his staff weapon to prod the ground. "I do not believe so," he said, and then picked up a handful of something or other. Green. Moss, maybe, though it was netted like a root network. "This appears torn. I believe it stretched over the aperture. It would have appeared as solid ground."
"Well, that would explain why nobody's answering their radios." Jack sighed. "Jonas and Daniel aren't in there, I take it? Because I imagine that would have been the first thing you said."
"They are not," Teal'c agreed.
Jack turned to scan the landscape. This was what getting used to Goa'uld tactics got you: these days, most of his carefully-cultivated situational awareness was tuned to marking out old ruins, things that looked like alien technology, and angry Jaffa with staff weapons and grenades. He hadn't been tuning himself in to the mottling of the landscape.
That sort of slip could have gotten him killed, at more times in his life than he'd like to recall.
"Think there are more of these?" he asked.
"It would be unwise to assume otherwise," Teal'c said, and Jack seconded that assessment. If a place was going to throw you a little trouble, odds were it was going to throw you a lot. He glanced to Carter, who was scanning the landscape with a similar kind of learned suspicion.
"Right. Here's what's going to happen." He turned back to Teal'c. "Teal'c, you're going to use that staff weapon of yours to find a way over to that stand of trees, and you're going to come back here with a couple of walking sticks for the two of us. And then we're going to act under the assumption that if they made it out under their own power they would have radioed to warn us about the punji pits, and we're going to see if we can pick up the trail of whoever did drag them out. Trying not to fall into any of these on our way."
Teal'c nodded, and straightened up. "I shall do so."
-
Teal'c had not seen many traps of this sort, in his time. Traps were frowned upon by the Jaffa: they were time-consuming and dishonorable, and the land they trapped one day might be land they were attempting to reclaim the next. Traps were used by human hunters, and the Tok'ra – predictably – made great use of ambush tactics, but this did not have the feel of a hunt or an ambush. It was, as the SGC would class it, anti-personnel.
And yet the network of moss and root matter was carefully designed, thick enough to hold the water that could sustain vegetation which would otherwise grow in soil, but not thick enough to support a human weight. Not something that could be grown in the frenzy of war. Rather, it spoke to seasons of careful cultivation.
Nor did the world around them have the feel of a warzone: the grass grew untrampled and unbloodied, and no birds had sent up shrills of warning when SG-1 walked by. This land did not expect violence.
Strange.
He picked his way into the trees, testing each step, and three times the base of his staff weapon found the edge of another pit. But the last stretch toward the treeline was clear, or he had the fortune of picking a path that didn't bring him in contact with more. He moved the staff weapon to his weaker hand, and pulled the knife from his belt to whittle off a branch or two.
He had just selected the first – straight, strong, and not so thick as to be unwieldy – when he sensed another presence in the grove with him. He slid his knife back into place and took up a grip on his staff weapon.
There – through the trees, movement, and there, again. More than one presence. Their stealth was commendable; he couldn't ascertain their number.
They were, however, clearly moving to surround him.
He kept his grip ready, but didn't lower the staff weapon to firing position. "I am Teal'c of the Tau'ri," he called – of Chulak, of the people of Bra'tac, of the Free Jaffa, but the sounds in the trees had the sounds and subtlety of humans, and he knew how infrequently humans had cause to trust the Jaffa. "We come in the spirit of peace."
And knowing we do not always find it. He kept his grip ready, and waited for a response.
-
Natasu waited until the sun had moved a finger-width in the sky, then threw the last of last season's wheat into a pot to boil. He was in no danger of going hungry – roots and other grains would keep him for a long time – but toward the end of the provisions, waiting for the wild fields to grow heavy with the food that heralded the promise of a new year, the sweet red grain began to taste more and more like a delicacy. For all that it was dry and old.
Still. His curiosity was piqued, and he might as well make an occasion of it.
He struck a shard off the block of salt in his cupboard, and added that. A handful of the garlic scapes his neighbor had brought in, and some of the peppery flowers that grew yellow on the vines overgrowing his door. Then he ladled the grain into bowls, stacked and bound them as though he was taking them out to workers in the field, took his threshing flail from its spot at the wall, and ventured down into the cellars where the prisoners were.
-
Daniel was sitting up a little, which was good. Blinking. Jonas had moved the room's lantern past his eyes and had been rewarded with a flinch, for which he'd apologized. And Daniel didn't seem to have a contact rash or anything broken or anything bleeding, which cut down on what Jonas could really do. So he was just waiting for him to come around enough to discuss the situation when the heavy wooden door to the cellar they'd been thrown in opened, and in limped a man with a twisted foot and a a stack of bowls.
"Welcome home," the man said.
Jonas blinked.
The man maneuvered down the stairs, and set the bowls down. "My name is Natasu," he said. "Eat?"
"Thank you," Jonas said, taking a bowl for himself and glancing down into it. It didn't look poisoned or drugged or inedible, though he didn't think this was a thing you could generally tell by looking. He turned back to Natasu. "What did you mean, welcome home?"
-
The groves that dotted the landscape weren't Saha's preferred hunting grounds. The best game was plains game, and the best approach a clear shot over open ground. But this is where they had seen the enemy go, so this was where they had the enemy surrounded.
Her heart ran hard in her chest.
She had never seen a Jaffa, but her history was full of stories. Some of heroics, some of atrocities. Jaffa were in all of them disdainful of humans: one story concerned spies who went to the palace of Dumuzid and saw legions of Jaffa, some among them beast-headed, fighting Dumuzid's army but otherwise indistinguishable from them. Much the same armor, much the same manner. Some of the spies sent to Dumuzid's palace had approached Dumuzid's enemies; those had never come home.
So, Saha was not overeager to trust this man with the gold emblem on his forehead, holding a weapon like the fire-sticks her people had scavenged.
She had cords and javelins, and could take a hart at forty paces. But a javelin through the heart wouldn't yield her answers.
She aimed for the leg instead.
-
There was enough sound for Teal'c to know something: the absence of birdsong, the furtive rustle of the underbrush. He followed the wisdom given to him by Bra'tac ages ago – Instinct sees clearly where certainty is blind.
Instinct told him when to step aside and swing his staff weapon, which connected with the javelin a handsbreadth before it bit into his thigh.
The one who had thrown it had risen from cover in order to throw, and he turned back along the javelin's trajectory to meet her eyes as she drew another spear from her back. He could bring his staff weapon to bear and fire before she could loose another, but he had heard more humans than her in the surrounding trees, and yet she was the only one attacking now. A test, he thought. But of her or him?
He laid his weapon between them on the ground. If she threw, he could duck and retrieve it, but it allowed him to show her both palms, open and unarmed. "I have not come to be your enemy," he said.
Her fingers tightened as her features did, face holding anger while her hand gripped the weapon. Her voice, when she spoke, was high and clear like a ceremonial horn. "We will not serve your master," she said. "Whoever he might be."
"My master is the ideal of freedom," Teal'c responded. "Were you once slaves of the Goa'uld?"
"It was the Jaffa who slaughtered our mothers and fathers."
"It was humans who mined the Naqahdah to build weapons for us to slaughter each other, and brought the grain to feed our wars," Teal'c said. "We have all been slaves."
"We will not be slaves again," she told him.
Teal'c felt a smile waiting at the edges of his lips, asking for permission to be seen. "Nor shall I."
-
Someone handed Daniel a bowl.
Clay. Earthen, with heat pouring through the curved walls. His hands curled around it as they had with any sort of artefact, any manufactured thing – functional, historical, cultural, strategic, or familiar as home. Traced the story of its construction in the patterns at the pads of his fingers. He breathed, and took in the smell of simple food, peasant food, basic-agriculture food, a story of hot sun and carried water and harvest, season by season.
"It will help with the ikozi," a voice said, and this one stayed un-recognized. "The vines entangle and confuse."
Then, Jonas again: "Appreciated."
A pause.
"It was the most important thing that could ever be said," the other voice explained. "When someone came back from the fields or the mines or Dumuzid's palace. Welcome home. You are still alive. Even when their home had burned down, it was important to be heard. So that is how we greet each other, even when our young people understand no more than you. Welcome home."
Daniel's mind was still slow and tangled, but he raised the bowl to his face and took a deep breath. Hot sun and carried water. Welcome home.
There was always a welcome home. Hidden in every This is your home, now, every unfamiliar place that waited for its chance to become familiar to him. That displacement was fading; on good days he remembered enough that Earth didn't surprise him, and enough that Abydos throbbed like a phantom limb.
One hand shook, and all his fingers tightened on the bowl. At his side, Jonas shifted, his tone concerned.
"You got that?"
Daniel muttered something like "I think so," and managed not to spill anything down his shirt.
-
Natasu watched the strangers, his eyes flicking over them. He, unlike many in the village – unlike Saha, who'd grown up angry at stories – had seen the Jaffa, fought them, felt the fire of their weapons shriveling his foot and burning through his friends. He had given his own children, three of them, to the war – might they be looked after, by whatever true god might exist for them.
He, unlike many, could look at these two and see the difference between the wariness of the always-embattled and the wariness of the uncertain; see the way the injured one groped for purchase in his mind; see the way the lucid one watched over his friend, body angled to get between him and Natasu if necessary, protective as an older brother and deferential as a younger.
He could see the edges of a history, if not their content.
Likely, Natasu thought, that they had their own stories to tell.
-
"We're not your enemies," Jonas said, because it was usually the reason they got locked up somewhere. Though, honestly, it usually wasn't somewhere where an old man was their apparent jailkeeper, and brought them food, and sat to eat with them. "We travel through the Stargate hoping to meet people, learn about their culture, their history – maybe find new allies in the fight against the Goa'uld."
Natasu tilted his head, but his expression remained guarded.
"We're from a place called Earth," Jonas said, and thought Well, for certain values of the word 'from'.
"What god have you overthrown?" Natasu asked.
"Er." Jonas glanced at Daniel. "It's a little complicated. Earth overthrew Ra several thousands of years ago – it's developed without Goa'uld influence until just recently, in its planetary history." And then he paused, trying to work out how to put Langara's tangled history into words, into context.
Learning quickly, remembering everything – they didn't always help when the problem had more to do with meaning. When he had to rationalize his existence as a gun-carrying expatriate alien explorer, working with a country he'd betrayed his own for, working with a teammate who'd given his life for the planet which turned its back on both of them, fighting in a war that was still his own – him with his ethics background and everything.
Nothing made that make sense.
"Ra," Natasu said. "Your world overthrew Ra."
"Yes," Jonas said. "And – a few other Goa'uld, too. Apophis, Hathor–"
"Anubis," Daniel said, and Jonas twisted around to see him speaking, lucid, aware of the world around him. To some extent. He was staring down into the thin broth, watching the lanternlight play across it, wrestling his tongue into the shapes of speech. "Who we're fighting now, anyway."
-
And they'd always be fighting someone, wouldn't they? So long as there was a home to come home to.
Daniel shook his head, sending a half-dozen ideas bouncing from one side of his skull to the other. He raised the bowl, and drank.
"I take it that you overthrew the local Goa'uld here," Jonas said. "Dumuzid? Ah – shepherd god, consigned to the underworld to free Innana–"
"Yes," Natasu interrupted, with fine shades of long-held anger around the edges of his tone. "I was a younger man in the war."
Daniel felt a brief stab of something, at that – anger, sympathy, empathy – and thought Aren't we all.
It was hard to remember a time when he hadn't been a bit jaded around the edges, and not all of that was due to the lingering difficulty he had remembering any times at all. But what he did remember, what he was remembering more and more every day, was how much more tired he felt with every year the galactic war rambled on.
Every once in a while, he thought he caught Jonas giving him a look, like You're not the person I met, a year ago.
Were any of them.
"Well, as I said," Jonas said. "We'd love to learn your history."
"History," Natasu pronounced, "is something we have a surfeit of."
-
When Natasu was a boy, they had not hidden their houses.
But then, when he was a boy, they had been slaves.
Natasu shifted his leg, digging the knuckle of one thumb into the knots of scars on his foot. It still burned, sometimes, for all that decades had passed. "What history can I tell you?" he asked. "The history of the fields we tended and their yields? The history of our people who went to serve Dumuzid and came back broken, when they returned at all? The history of Dumuzid's arrival, back in the times when we peasants had kings? Or the history of the war?"
"I think you'll find," said the one who'd been dragged out of the ikozi pit, every word careful like a brick in its place, "that everything is ultimately the history of the war."
-
This, Saha thought, was not a part of the stories. She thought this, and it felt like sacrilege.
The history she knew was shattered like an old stone wall, pieces of it strewn across the countryside. There had been slavery, in which there was no history – or so it felt, in any case, one generation bowing under the same yoke as the other ones, without change, without progress, without anything to tell their children except that which they would come to know regardless. The history of slavery was the history of one person's suffering being, in the large part, the same as the others.
We work the fields. We break our backs. We worship Dumuzid. We suffer his wrath.
The history before that was hearsay and rumor. Whispered in the homes of slaves and distorted, as all myths became distorted, with the telling. It was no unchanging record but a living thing: living, as the beasts of the pastures had, to serve their people.
Don't cry, my child, that your mother is gone. Let me tell you a story of when our people had kings and plenty, and let me say this king's mother had died, so you may bury your sorrows in the tale.
But the stories of the war were true. Their fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles, their elders who had no blood family left: they had fought in the war, they had seen the things they'd seen, and those who had known the letters of accounting had inscribed the record of the war. In a people who had never been allowed to know themselves, they had chosen to know and remember this.
And now here was this Jaffa, here to challenge what they had learned with blood and the bodies of a generation.
"Many humans, and many Jaffa, are rising up against the false gods," the Jaffa said. "By coming together, we may overthrow them all."
"We have won our war," Saha said.
"But you still fear the Goa'uld's return." The Jaffa gestured out toward the plains. "The war is larger than you know."
Rage sprung up in Saha like a plains fire, and her hand ached to throw the javelin. The war had been their world. The war had been every part of their life. And this Jaffa, still bearing the mark of the enemy, dared to call it small?
"Nothing," Saha hissed, "is larger than the war."
-
Natasu met the speaker's eyes, but they did not meet him. He was not seeing Natasu. He was seeing some other time, some other place, as Natasu had for many years. When the war against Dumuzid had ended there had at once come other wars: the war against the rubble that trapped families in their homes, the war against the craters burned into the fields where the ikozi pits now waited, the war against the first harvest after so many harvesting hands had died, the war against the howling of the wind at night, against empty beds and absent sleep ringed with nightmares. The war against memories that came like nightmares to the waking mind. The war against the prayers they'd learned as children that came unbidden to their lips.
Oh Dumuzid of the fair-spoken mouth, of the ever-kind eyes, hast thou seen thyne supplicants?
But no, Natasu wanted to tell him. Last season they had gone to the wild fields, where nature took on the task of agriculture for them. They scythed the wild grass and threshed the grain and sang songs that could not have come from battle.
Not everything was the history of the war.
The man's friend shifted, concern in his every motion. "Dr. Jackson?" he asked, and Natasu looked between them again. The man hadn't the look of a doctor. And his friend had the look of a man who saw that there were demons about, but didn't know which they were or from whence precisely they came.
But after a moment, the apparent doctor blinked and seemed to rouse himself from something, and looked to Natasu. His gaze was even and not unfriendly, but his eyes themselves seemed cold. As though they'd been chipped from something which had yet to thaw out, no matter how warm the human body was around them.
"Thank you for this," he said, indicating the bowl. "I'm... feeling better, I think. Is this an antidote? To the vines growing in the pit traps?"
Natasu shrugged. "The salt, the heat. The water. And time. What other antidotes would there be?"
"Are we your prisoners?" the doctor asked.
Natasu bared his teeth, then sealed his lips again. "Saha believes so. She and her hunters are what we have for generals these days. For a very long time our only visitors were enemies," he said.
"Does your village have a leader?" the other one asked. "Someone to speak for you?"
"Whichever of us wins the argument at hand," Natasu said. "Saha is frequently the winner."
"What about you?" Dr. Jackson asked.
Natasu turned to study him again. There were edges and edges to him, as well; less like the younger people in the village, angry without memory of the target of their anger, and more like himself, the fading old guard. It didn't make Natasu like him any more, or trust him, but there was a sense of brotherhood there regardless. Shared scars.
"I'm of another time," he said. "My arguments must give way to those who live in this new world, and those who will continue to."
"But you wanted to see us," the doctor said. "You wanted to know who we were."
Natasu showed one palm.
"Saha – is she the one who brought us in?"
Natasu nodded.
"Seems like she still believes the war is going on."
"It's the heat of the young to make their meaning where they can," Natasu said. "But I'm an old man. For my own peace, I must believe the war has faded away."
For a moment they were silent, and the silence was a restless thing, like a gate about to open or a branch about to snap.
-
Teal'c knew pride. He had seen it in all its incarnations: youthful, wounded, desperate, hard-earned. And he could see it in this human standing before him.
Still. There was a certain amount of truth to her words, if not the only truth. He knew how easily war became one's world, so for the sake of diplomacy he showed his palms again and answered, "As you say."
While the war endured, one's first duty was to the war. Every Jaffa was taught this. But it was strange to see this young human woman with her javelin in hand, whose duty was to a war she called won.
-
Saha narrowed her eyes at the Jaffa, and felt again the disquieting sense that their stories had been like the net moss over the ikozi pits: something having the illusion of solid ground, but failing when tested. He should not look at her as her older cousins looked at her, or as Natasu did. He should not stand here and speak in measured tones and solicitous words. He should not so defy the order of things.
One of her hunters coughed, low in his throat, and Saha turned part of her attention to the wider world. There were more footsteps approaching the trees, and she took her eyes off the Jaffa they had at bay and looked toward the plains.
"Hey!"
That voice had none of the Jaffa's careful politeness. He arched an eyebrow. "They are friends," he offered.
"Hey!"
She tossed her javelin from hand to hand, and strode toward the edge of the grove. Two more figures were approaching, careful enough that they surely knew of the traps. Neither of them bore the mark of the Jaffa upon their foreheads.
She stepped into their line of sight as they found their way into the trees.
Both of them stopped, and looked at her. They were dressed as the Jaffa was dressed, and as the two she'd taken to Natasu had been dressed. Of a kind, then. One was younger, hair like the wild wheat, unlike that of any of Saha's people. The other had with a wary expression and grey in his hair, like the war heroes who still lived in the village.
"Evening," he said.
Saha said nothing.
They held the silence between them, for a moment, then he cleared his throat and looked past her, to the Jaffa.
"Staying out of trouble, Teal'c?", he asked with a pointed look to the javelin at his feet.
The Jaffa – Teal'c, if that was his name – inclined his head. "Our conversation has been most cordial."
"You pass on protected ground. Why have you come here?" Saha snapped.
The grey one turned to her.
"We're looking for our friends," he said. "Have you seen them?"
-
This was the sort of situation that didn't play to one of Sam's strengths. Generally, she was fine with letting Daniel or Jonas or Colonel O'Neill take the lead on negotiations, Daniel and Jonas having the diplomacy down and Colonel O'Neill having a sort of blunt cut-the-Gordian-knot style that apparently at least some people offworld found perfectly natural to do business with. She was generally content to take a moment to observe. Throw in her observations if she thought they'd be helpful, but otherwise make sure she wasn't about to step into any traps.
One way or another, most of the societies they ran into weren't terribly clandestine about their treatment of women – which varied from culture to culture more than most of her history books would have had her believe. This one seemed to be more sanguine than most, if the hunter snapping questions at them was any indication.
(San wished she could have seen what would have come of these cultures, evolved into what she'd consider the present day. But instead they'd been transplanted here and there and their progress arrested, frozen in place by Goa'uld who feared and reviled change.)
Still, the fact that this girl – probably not older than eighteen, not that youth meant much on Goa'uld worlds – was here, thinking that she held all of them at bay with a short spear, was notable. So was the deference with which the rest of her party, some of whom might have been closing on thirty, treated her.
And without saying anything to Colonel O'Neill, the girl turned and walked back to her team, head moving as though saying something too low for the rest of them to hear.
"I did not expect you to follow," Teal'c said, though he didn't take the opportunity to approach. That was another trap they had to be aware of – some of the planets they went to might look askance at her as a woman, and some might be openly hostile, but it was rare to find a place where a Jaffa was welcome.
"Well, buddy, you kinda went into the trees and didn't come out again," Colonel O'Neill was saying. "Carter and I got worried."
"You were able to navigate the terrain?"
"We stepped carefully."
The girl with the spear turned back to them. "This one has made claims," she said, jerking her chin toward Teal'c. The Colonel turned back to her.
"What, the whole sort of 'we come in peace' thing?" he asked. "Those would be correct."
"And I should believe you?" the girl asked.
"What's your name?" Sam asked her.
The girl turned to her, and looked her up and down with open challenge. "Saha, daughter of Enru, who died at the hands of Dumuzid, and of Kisana, who slew three Jaffa and survived the war."
The name Dumuzid rolled through her mind until it clinked against something buried long ago with Jolinar, but the knowledge was faint, like an afterimage. The name of a Goa'uld; that was what she could grasp. "My father fights the Goa'uld," she said. "So do we."
-
Saha's people had precious little by way of foreigners.
There were other villages, yes, scattered here and there as the land permitted, growing this beautiful or that intoxicating herb. In the time of Dumuzid they'd bring their tributes to this village, Saha's village, to be handed over to Dumuzid's priests and sent through the Great Circle to his palace. And some of those far-scattered villages, yes, had joined in the war. Others had not, hunkering low and hoping the storm would pass and either their countrymen would not turn on them as cowards or their god would not smite them for their tacit neutrality.
Saha's opinion of those people was cold, her opinion of their cross-Circle enemies hot with the flames of learned anger. But she had never expected visitors from beyond the Circle who also fought the gods.
"And what do you know of them?" she asked.
The older one raised his eyebrows. "Oh, plenty," he said. "We could tell you stories, believe me."
-
The uneasy ikozi-fueled darkness gave another furtive rustle at the back of Daniel's brain, and part of him wanted to drop his gaze down to his bowl and no longer meet Natasu's eyes. He resisted that part of himself.
But what he saw in Natasu, that hard-edged resolve two steps away from censure, he had also seen in Sha're and Skaara and Kasuf – a poise which seemed to come without thinking, for them. They had looked at the world which had been freed from Ra, and seen the people to be buried and the faith to be changed and the laws to be established and the struggles to be had, and thought, Well, let's get to it; tomorrow is greater than today.
It didn't come without thinking, to Daniel. It took a bit more thinking every day.
A quiet, bitter part of him thought that maybe there was some advantage in growing up a slave, small consolation that it might be. When the Goa'uld were overthrown, the world opened up. It grew harder but kinder. Whereas him, with all his freedom... he'd gone into the universe thinking he knew history and war, having dug around unexploded shells in archaeological sites, able to name the bloodiest battles of ancient history, and hardly ignorant of current events or atrocities. But some part of him had still been lulled into believing in the relative safety and surety of life.
Life had not recently been supporting that pleasant illusion.
"Well, from what little I've seen of your village," Jonas said, beside him, "you've done an excellent job of rebuilding."
It occurred to Daniel that what he was feeling was either resentment or shame.
-
"Hm," Natasu said, and a smile Jonas couldn't interpret played across his expression. "We've built, in any case. You should have seen our village years ago: it was more beautiful, to my mind. But what we have now will protect us." He shrugged. "So it goes, does it not?"
Jonas paused on that. There was a familiarity to Natasu's tone that Jonas wasn't sure was warranted – like Natasu expected them to have some commonality of experience to draw on.
"I'm not sure what you mean," he said.
Natasu regarded him evenly, then let out a breath. "We never rebuilt," he said. "We tore down our houses, the damaged and the whole, brick by brick; we moved our homes beneath the hills and let the fields grow wild. What we have now is not what we had before, but it sustains us. Our children think nothing of it. Their children will build new homes under new hills because it has always been that way."
"Oh," Jonas said, and breathed that in.
Suddenly, he wanted to tell Natasu about how Earth had caught him when Kelowna tossed him out: about naquahdriah and the wounded suspicion of the scientific council when they looked at him, about the quiet political sentencing that branded him traitor, defector, never to return home. (Oh, politely, of course, because in the end they couldn't ignore that Kelowna had needed Earth's support – or that without Jonas's actions, Earth would not have been so kindly disposed toward them as a nation. But they had no need for an ethics consultant whose ethics led him away from them.)
But that wasn't the conversation they were having, even if it was.
He turned to look at Daniel, who'd been quiet for some time, and whose gaze had drifted to an anonymous patch of dirt wall. Something twanged in his awareness, like a premonition of danger or a lingering guilt.
Nothing he could do about that, either. He could ask after Daniel by name, but didn't have the words to go deeper than that. Jonas never had a chance to get to know him as well as he'd liked, either before the accident which had killed him or after he'd returned, memory gone, scrambling for footing. Now, there was something distant about him that Jonas hadn't found a way to bridge.
Problem was, Daniel was like an ancient Kelownan religious figure – complete with sacrifice and resurrection and, at the end of it, unknowability.
Except that Jonas resisted the notion of unknowability, especially when it came to the psychology of his fellow man. Kelownan or not.
He let out a breath, and turned back to Natasu.
-
Natasu watched him, and offered another smile – to his visitor, to his memories, to the changed state of things. "When I was a child, I looked at the stones of my house and never imagined that they would one day go missing," he said. "The thought itself would never have occurred to me. Had you asked me, 'will your house always be here,' the question would have had no meaning – you may as well have questioned the integrity of the sky. But I have seen changes which that child could not have understood. And now it comes that I meet strangers from lives which I can not imagine."
He raised his bowl.
"Saha tells me you travel with a Jaffa."
"A Jaffa who fought against his gods," the doctor said, swift and hard. "The Jaffa are slaves, just like you were."
"We have only ever known the Jaffa as masters and enemies," Natasu said. "And I had never thought to question that."
A silence; then the other one spoke. "Give us a chance to prove that we can be friends."
Natasu showed his palm. "We have not had an occasion to learn trust outside our own communities," he said. "But I believe that if you defend each other and trust each other, if you weep for lost comrades and pray for their safe return, there is something in you which can be trusted. Our blood is not so different."
There came a pounding at the door above.
"Natasu, friend," Saha's voice called, floating down into the cellar. "Visitors have come; give us leave to enter."
Natasu filled his lungs, and called back "I give you leave," with a voice that had once directed workers over the fields. Saha would come, and if there was an argument to be had, well, he felt he knew these new arrivals better than she.
He reached for his flail and pulled himself upward.
-
"Hold here," Saha told them, and put her fist to Natasu's door.
She was expecting him to come greet her in person, but wasn't surprised when his voice came up from a distance. She grimaced. The old fool – but he had stone for bones, that one, and as much as they disagreed, she never forgot the stories they told about him, either. Of course a man like him wouldn't simply bar the cellar door.
She pushed open the entrance, and stepped inside. The air smelled of pottage, and there were footsteps and voices from the cellar. A part of her shuddered. Trying to shed the anger of the grove and the tension of the hunt. Recognizing, at some deep instinctual level, a sense of home.
-
It was in the thirty-second year of godlessness that two men were delivered to Natasu's door. The thirty-third year of childlessness, perhaps the twentieth or twenty-first of passable wholeness.
It was in the second week of homecoming, of reunion. The third month of descension. The first year of living in this particular configuration of things greater than the sum of its parts.
The beginning of the second year of living with exile in the gut, the second week of living with words like We think it would be better for the confidence of the Kelownan nation if you were not to return home in the ears.
It was the end of one long day and the beginning of another when Saha led their visitors in, and Natasu, leaning heavily on his thresher's flail, led his own visitors up from the cellar. They came silently, with the weight of history upon them.
But standing.
-
Jack had to admit that he was impressed – he'd started seeing well-worn paths as Saha had led them into the village, but even having a suspicion of where to look, he hadn't been able to identify as many homes as he suspected were hidden beneath the rolling hills. Between those and the pit traps, these people must have been terrors to fight on their home turf.
Which was probably great for them, but something of a mixed blessing when it came to people showing up unannounced and hoping to make friends.
This Natasu fellow was old and bent, with skin the color of the torn roots in the pit's moss cover and eyes that apparently hadn't dulled from age. Behind him, Jonas had the kind of one-fifth-pensive curious energy that Jonas always seemed to have, and Daniel–
Well. Jack opened his mouth to ask why Daniel was looking a little rough around the edges, but Daniel turned to him and said "Natasu's been very hospitable" in a tone that suggested nothing but truth, with a look that said And I dare you to disagree.
Jack gave him a look right back, like saying that sometimes he wasn't sure where he'd misplaced the Daniel Jackson who'd died on Jonas' watch. Then he looked to Natasu. "Thanks for taking care of them," he said.
"It was no burden," Natasu said. "Please. Come inside."
-
Natasu's home had not been built in the anticipation of a large family or many visitors, but elbow-to-elbow they all more or less fit in the kitchen, and he personally was not one to object to the closeness of other living beings. Introductions were made and Natasu limped to the wall near the stove, where he could let it take some of the weight from his aching foot.
He turned to look at the Jaffa – Teal'c. Teal'c met his gaze, then arched an eyebrow and gave a shallow bow; all that was allowed by the close confines. Natasu nodded back, and took in the sight of him: led by quarrelsome Saha, standing at ease in the hut of one who would no longer be a slave.
What we have now is not what we had before.
"It is late," he said to all of them. "I would offer you hospitality for the night entire, but my home is small, and would cause you discomfort. Share a pot of tea with me, and be welcome again in the morning."
They agreed, and he ladled water into the kettle and stoked the fire.
They were many warm bodies, clustered at his table: hunters and historians, soldiers and ex-slaves, drinking from the same clay and of the same waters. Enough for one more day of change, and another night of peace.
The sun had fallen below the horizon when Natasu made his way outside to pour the rest of the tea on the earth, no longer to thank Dumuzid but to thank the long thread of his life for not fraying and breaking yet. Their visitors gathered their things, and Saha lingered at the table, waiting to discuss the day's events.
As the rest of them filed out of his home and into the star-blanketed night, Jonas paused, and turned to Natasu. "You say 'welcome home' when you meet someone," he said.
Natasu nodded.
"What do you say for goodbye?"
Natasu studied him and reached out to take both Jonas' hands in his. Pot and flail caught between knuckles and palms, history to history and skin to skin.
"May your future bring you home again," he said.
- END -
Author: magistrate
Rating: T.
Genre: Character study, offworld culture fun times
Beta: The ever-excellent
fignewton helped me get this fic in order, both as it was in progress and after it was done in draft.Continuity: Veers AU around Homecoming.
Prerequisites: Seasons 6 and 7, mostly.
Summary: History can be a lot of things, but it's rarely if ever straightforward.
Disclaimer: I'm trying to make a joke here about experiencing a sense of ownership over SG-1 due to it being a part of our common culture, but it's just not coming together. The opinions expressed herein are the properties of the characters and generally not of Wisława Szymborska. Watch your step. Questions, comments and cooked grains can be left in replies or directed to magistrata(at)gmail(dot)com. Thank you for reading!
Author's Note: This started out as a fill for the 2013 SG-1 Friendship Ficathon's prompt #20: "Daniel and Jonas. AU in which Jonas stays on SG-1 after Daniel's return." I then proceeded to breeze past every deadline in the Ficathon, so I now present this work sans that context, and with a bunch more screentime for characters who are not them.
It was in the thirty-second year of godlessness that six hunters came to Natasu's door, dragging with them two pale men.
-
Jonas kept his pace up as much as he could, though his stride was a little off considering that he was being rushed along and his balance was thrown by having his wrists tied behind his back. That, and he kept catching his toe on rough patches on the ground, given that his attention kept drifting off the ground, and onto Dr. Jackson.
Dr. Jackson was not nearly as upright as Jonas was. He was all but being dragged, like a particularly large and meaty scarecrow.
Talking had so far not helped their situation, so Jonas had put most of his energies toward trying to work out how their escorts were picking their way through the countryside. They kept making sudden changes in direction and odd, indirect loops, which would seem erratic if it weren't for two things: one, all of them made them without any apparent hesitation, nor direction from their leader; and two, Dr. Jackson had already discovered the pitfalls of trusting that one patch of ground was just as good as any others.
A literal pit, actually. And a literal fall.
And Jonas had to keep reminding himself that it should have been Daniel, not Dr. Jackson – Dr. Jackson had said so, enough times – but sometimes Jonas found it hard to be familiar with the man who he'd gotten killed, and who came back from death and Ascension to live in a vulnerable human form again. Who got injured, again, where Jonas should have acted a little faster to prevent it.
-
Saha kept her pace up, tracing her way through the patterns of weeds that grew only where tainted earth had been laid in. It was a subtle distinction in the vegetation of the land, too much so for most who ventured in. Too much, apparently, for these new intruders.
Still, even hauling their prisoners, she and her women made quick time toward the village.
They were stopped even before the houses had become distinguishable from the hills surrounding them, two guards armed with fire-sticks stepping from the brush. Saha motioned her hunters to stand at ready, and slipped away from them to speak. The larger of the guards was known to her: a cousin.
"These people aren't of our village. How could you bring them here?" he asked.
"To be questioned," Saha said. "It was our spies, as much as our warriors, who won the war. If these are invaders, we should learn what they know."
Her cousin looked over at them. "They don't look Goa'uld."
"And you would know?" Saha raised her eyebrow. "Slaves, then." She kept her voice low, inaudible to the prisoners and her hunters as well. "They traveled with a man who had the glint of gold on his forehead. Remember the stories."
He raked his eyes across the prisoners, as though they were a terrain he could read. "Their livery doesn't look Goa'uld."
"We've only ever seen the livery of Dumuzid," Saha said. "And that, from years ago. There are more gods in the sky than him."
Her cousin didn't look convinced, but relented anyway. "Where do you plan on keeping them?"
"Natasu's cellar can be barred," Saha said. "And it must be running toward empty by this season. I don't suspect we'll keep them through the harvest."
The guard turned to his companion, and then stepped aside, letting her pass on the safe ground. "Well, welcome back, hunter," he said. "Though I wish you had brought us a roebuck."
-
The world, what he was aware of, moved from light to dark, and went still.
Daniel's real awareness floated somewhere below that change, clogged up with the smell of something sweet and vegetal and caved-in under a heap of aches and pounding pains. It was an odd, disconnected feeling, as though his mind hadn't quite gotten used to being held in the confines of its body again.
But he'd never had that feeling on Vis Uban, before he'd re-learned about the SGC and SG-1 and his own ascension, so it was probably – what? Psychosomatic. That was the word.
"Easy," said a voice above him. Daniel could feel his body being resettled on the floor. (Bodies and pain – he had to wonder, and thought he would always wonder, what had made him trade his ascended life for this one. What had been the choice, there?)
He told his eyes to blink, but wasn't sure they were open.
"Well, they seem to have left us here, at least," the voice said, above him. For a moment, it was difficult to place. The tone was familiar, the cadence – not as much. The tone was, well, this just happened. Again. The cadence–
Should Jack be here?
He tried to get his body working well enough to move. It just lay there, close in contact with the cool floor below him, like it was part of the ground and he was of no consequence to it.
Should Sam be here? Should Teal'c?
"Can you hear me, Dr. Jackson?" the voice asked, and another little fragment of his unsought history went slotting into place.
Oh, he thought, and managed a quiet "Mm."
-
Out under the wide expanse of a early-evening alien sky, several elements of that history moved through the world, looking for him.
Jack had Carter at his elbow and at least Teal'c was answering his radio, but the rest of his team had gone missing, and the terrain here seemed to lie. You could go twenty steps and it'd seem like the gentle slope of the hills wouldn't be enough to hide you from view, but suddenly you'd look around and the world would say What? What do you mean you can't see your friends? I'm pretty sure you came here alone.
He wished he'd realized that slightly before Daniel had seen something and wandered a few meters off, and Jonas had not-that-casually trailed after.
Beside him, Carter was clicking her radio, expression pensive as she scanned the terrain. Hadn't picked up any energy readings, any signs of Goa'uld involvement, not that Goa'uld were the only things to be worried about, out here. After a point, though, you couldn't anticipate everything, and one of SG-1's primary modes of learning was to walk into something face-first.
Then: "Colonel O'Neill!" came Teal'c's voice, booming over the deceptively near horizon.
"Well," Jack groused. "Hopefully he's found something."
They picked their way in his direction. Teal'c had walked halfway down a nearby hill, and crouched low to the ground to examine something. "Be mindful of your path," he called, as he saw them.
Jack paused, then felt his way forward. "What's up?"
"Uh, Colonel," Carter said, and stopped beside him, nodding to the ground. He paused, then moved a few feet toward her side, and the telltale brown of broken earth came into view. It had been completely invisible from his angle.
Teal'c was crouching at the edge of a pit or a sinkhole of some kind, with a trail of scree and broken plants leading down one side. The kind of scree that might indicate where, say, just as a hypothetical, two scientists had gone for a tumble.
"I feel like this should have shown up on the topography reports," Jack called back.
Teal'c crouched, using the butt of his staff weapon to prod the ground. "I do not believe so," he said, and then picked up a handful of something or other. Green. Moss, maybe, though it was netted like a root network. "This appears torn. I believe it stretched over the aperture. It would have appeared as solid ground."
"Well, that would explain why nobody's answering their radios." Jack sighed. "Jonas and Daniel aren't in there, I take it? Because I imagine that would have been the first thing you said."
"They are not," Teal'c agreed.
Jack turned to scan the landscape. This was what getting used to Goa'uld tactics got you: these days, most of his carefully-cultivated situational awareness was tuned to marking out old ruins, things that looked like alien technology, and angry Jaffa with staff weapons and grenades. He hadn't been tuning himself in to the mottling of the landscape.
That sort of slip could have gotten him killed, at more times in his life than he'd like to recall.
"Think there are more of these?" he asked.
"It would be unwise to assume otherwise," Teal'c said, and Jack seconded that assessment. If a place was going to throw you a little trouble, odds were it was going to throw you a lot. He glanced to Carter, who was scanning the landscape with a similar kind of learned suspicion.
"Right. Here's what's going to happen." He turned back to Teal'c. "Teal'c, you're going to use that staff weapon of yours to find a way over to that stand of trees, and you're going to come back here with a couple of walking sticks for the two of us. And then we're going to act under the assumption that if they made it out under their own power they would have radioed to warn us about the punji pits, and we're going to see if we can pick up the trail of whoever did drag them out. Trying not to fall into any of these on our way."
Teal'c nodded, and straightened up. "I shall do so."
-
Teal'c had not seen many traps of this sort, in his time. Traps were frowned upon by the Jaffa: they were time-consuming and dishonorable, and the land they trapped one day might be land they were attempting to reclaim the next. Traps were used by human hunters, and the Tok'ra – predictably – made great use of ambush tactics, but this did not have the feel of a hunt or an ambush. It was, as the SGC would class it, anti-personnel.
And yet the network of moss and root matter was carefully designed, thick enough to hold the water that could sustain vegetation which would otherwise grow in soil, but not thick enough to support a human weight. Not something that could be grown in the frenzy of war. Rather, it spoke to seasons of careful cultivation.
Nor did the world around them have the feel of a warzone: the grass grew untrampled and unbloodied, and no birds had sent up shrills of warning when SG-1 walked by. This land did not expect violence.
Strange.
He picked his way into the trees, testing each step, and three times the base of his staff weapon found the edge of another pit. But the last stretch toward the treeline was clear, or he had the fortune of picking a path that didn't bring him in contact with more. He moved the staff weapon to his weaker hand, and pulled the knife from his belt to whittle off a branch or two.
He had just selected the first – straight, strong, and not so thick as to be unwieldy – when he sensed another presence in the grove with him. He slid his knife back into place and took up a grip on his staff weapon.
There – through the trees, movement, and there, again. More than one presence. Their stealth was commendable; he couldn't ascertain their number.
They were, however, clearly moving to surround him.
He kept his grip ready, but didn't lower the staff weapon to firing position. "I am Teal'c of the Tau'ri," he called – of Chulak, of the people of Bra'tac, of the Free Jaffa, but the sounds in the trees had the sounds and subtlety of humans, and he knew how infrequently humans had cause to trust the Jaffa. "We come in the spirit of peace."
And knowing we do not always find it. He kept his grip ready, and waited for a response.
-
Natasu waited until the sun had moved a finger-width in the sky, then threw the last of last season's wheat into a pot to boil. He was in no danger of going hungry – roots and other grains would keep him for a long time – but toward the end of the provisions, waiting for the wild fields to grow heavy with the food that heralded the promise of a new year, the sweet red grain began to taste more and more like a delicacy. For all that it was dry and old.
Still. His curiosity was piqued, and he might as well make an occasion of it.
He struck a shard off the block of salt in his cupboard, and added that. A handful of the garlic scapes his neighbor had brought in, and some of the peppery flowers that grew yellow on the vines overgrowing his door. Then he ladled the grain into bowls, stacked and bound them as though he was taking them out to workers in the field, took his threshing flail from its spot at the wall, and ventured down into the cellars where the prisoners were.
-
Daniel was sitting up a little, which was good. Blinking. Jonas had moved the room's lantern past his eyes and had been rewarded with a flinch, for which he'd apologized. And Daniel didn't seem to have a contact rash or anything broken or anything bleeding, which cut down on what Jonas could really do. So he was just waiting for him to come around enough to discuss the situation when the heavy wooden door to the cellar they'd been thrown in opened, and in limped a man with a twisted foot and a a stack of bowls.
"Welcome home," the man said.
Jonas blinked.
The man maneuvered down the stairs, and set the bowls down. "My name is Natasu," he said. "Eat?"
"Thank you," Jonas said, taking a bowl for himself and glancing down into it. It didn't look poisoned or drugged or inedible, though he didn't think this was a thing you could generally tell by looking. He turned back to Natasu. "What did you mean, welcome home?"
-
The groves that dotted the landscape weren't Saha's preferred hunting grounds. The best game was plains game, and the best approach a clear shot over open ground. But this is where they had seen the enemy go, so this was where they had the enemy surrounded.
Her heart ran hard in her chest.
She had never seen a Jaffa, but her history was full of stories. Some of heroics, some of atrocities. Jaffa were in all of them disdainful of humans: one story concerned spies who went to the palace of Dumuzid and saw legions of Jaffa, some among them beast-headed, fighting Dumuzid's army but otherwise indistinguishable from them. Much the same armor, much the same manner. Some of the spies sent to Dumuzid's palace had approached Dumuzid's enemies; those had never come home.
So, Saha was not overeager to trust this man with the gold emblem on his forehead, holding a weapon like the fire-sticks her people had scavenged.
She had cords and javelins, and could take a hart at forty paces. But a javelin through the heart wouldn't yield her answers.
She aimed for the leg instead.
-
There was enough sound for Teal'c to know something: the absence of birdsong, the furtive rustle of the underbrush. He followed the wisdom given to him by Bra'tac ages ago – Instinct sees clearly where certainty is blind.
Instinct told him when to step aside and swing his staff weapon, which connected with the javelin a handsbreadth before it bit into his thigh.
The one who had thrown it had risen from cover in order to throw, and he turned back along the javelin's trajectory to meet her eyes as she drew another spear from her back. He could bring his staff weapon to bear and fire before she could loose another, but he had heard more humans than her in the surrounding trees, and yet she was the only one attacking now. A test, he thought. But of her or him?
He laid his weapon between them on the ground. If she threw, he could duck and retrieve it, but it allowed him to show her both palms, open and unarmed. "I have not come to be your enemy," he said.
Her fingers tightened as her features did, face holding anger while her hand gripped the weapon. Her voice, when she spoke, was high and clear like a ceremonial horn. "We will not serve your master," she said. "Whoever he might be."
"My master is the ideal of freedom," Teal'c responded. "Were you once slaves of the Goa'uld?"
"It was the Jaffa who slaughtered our mothers and fathers."
"It was humans who mined the Naqahdah to build weapons for us to slaughter each other, and brought the grain to feed our wars," Teal'c said. "We have all been slaves."
"We will not be slaves again," she told him.
Teal'c felt a smile waiting at the edges of his lips, asking for permission to be seen. "Nor shall I."
-
Someone handed Daniel a bowl.
Clay. Earthen, with heat pouring through the curved walls. His hands curled around it as they had with any sort of artefact, any manufactured thing – functional, historical, cultural, strategic, or familiar as home. Traced the story of its construction in the patterns at the pads of his fingers. He breathed, and took in the smell of simple food, peasant food, basic-agriculture food, a story of hot sun and carried water and harvest, season by season.
"It will help with the ikozi," a voice said, and this one stayed un-recognized. "The vines entangle and confuse."
Then, Jonas again: "Appreciated."
A pause.
"It was the most important thing that could ever be said," the other voice explained. "When someone came back from the fields or the mines or Dumuzid's palace. Welcome home. You are still alive. Even when their home had burned down, it was important to be heard. So that is how we greet each other, even when our young people understand no more than you. Welcome home."
Daniel's mind was still slow and tangled, but he raised the bowl to his face and took a deep breath. Hot sun and carried water. Welcome home.
There was always a welcome home. Hidden in every This is your home, now, every unfamiliar place that waited for its chance to become familiar to him. That displacement was fading; on good days he remembered enough that Earth didn't surprise him, and enough that Abydos throbbed like a phantom limb.
One hand shook, and all his fingers tightened on the bowl. At his side, Jonas shifted, his tone concerned.
"You got that?"
Daniel muttered something like "I think so," and managed not to spill anything down his shirt.
-
Natasu watched the strangers, his eyes flicking over them. He, unlike many in the village – unlike Saha, who'd grown up angry at stories – had seen the Jaffa, fought them, felt the fire of their weapons shriveling his foot and burning through his friends. He had given his own children, three of them, to the war – might they be looked after, by whatever true god might exist for them.
He, unlike many, could look at these two and see the difference between the wariness of the always-embattled and the wariness of the uncertain; see the way the injured one groped for purchase in his mind; see the way the lucid one watched over his friend, body angled to get between him and Natasu if necessary, protective as an older brother and deferential as a younger.
He could see the edges of a history, if not their content.
Likely, Natasu thought, that they had their own stories to tell.
-
"We're not your enemies," Jonas said, because it was usually the reason they got locked up somewhere. Though, honestly, it usually wasn't somewhere where an old man was their apparent jailkeeper, and brought them food, and sat to eat with them. "We travel through the Stargate hoping to meet people, learn about their culture, their history – maybe find new allies in the fight against the Goa'uld."
Natasu tilted his head, but his expression remained guarded.
"We're from a place called Earth," Jonas said, and thought Well, for certain values of the word 'from'.
"What god have you overthrown?" Natasu asked.
"Er." Jonas glanced at Daniel. "It's a little complicated. Earth overthrew Ra several thousands of years ago – it's developed without Goa'uld influence until just recently, in its planetary history." And then he paused, trying to work out how to put Langara's tangled history into words, into context.
Learning quickly, remembering everything – they didn't always help when the problem had more to do with meaning. When he had to rationalize his existence as a gun-carrying expatriate alien explorer, working with a country he'd betrayed his own for, working with a teammate who'd given his life for the planet which turned its back on both of them, fighting in a war that was still his own – him with his ethics background and everything.
Nothing made that make sense.
"Ra," Natasu said. "Your world overthrew Ra."
"Yes," Jonas said. "And – a few other Goa'uld, too. Apophis, Hathor–"
"Anubis," Daniel said, and Jonas twisted around to see him speaking, lucid, aware of the world around him. To some extent. He was staring down into the thin broth, watching the lanternlight play across it, wrestling his tongue into the shapes of speech. "Who we're fighting now, anyway."
-
And they'd always be fighting someone, wouldn't they? So long as there was a home to come home to.
Daniel shook his head, sending a half-dozen ideas bouncing from one side of his skull to the other. He raised the bowl, and drank.
"I take it that you overthrew the local Goa'uld here," Jonas said. "Dumuzid? Ah – shepherd god, consigned to the underworld to free Innana–"
"Yes," Natasu interrupted, with fine shades of long-held anger around the edges of his tone. "I was a younger man in the war."
Daniel felt a brief stab of something, at that – anger, sympathy, empathy – and thought Aren't we all.
It was hard to remember a time when he hadn't been a bit jaded around the edges, and not all of that was due to the lingering difficulty he had remembering any times at all. But what he did remember, what he was remembering more and more every day, was how much more tired he felt with every year the galactic war rambled on.
Every once in a while, he thought he caught Jonas giving him a look, like You're not the person I met, a year ago.
Were any of them.
"Well, as I said," Jonas said. "We'd love to learn your history."
"History," Natasu pronounced, "is something we have a surfeit of."
-
When Natasu was a boy, they had not hidden their houses.
But then, when he was a boy, they had been slaves.
Natasu shifted his leg, digging the knuckle of one thumb into the knots of scars on his foot. It still burned, sometimes, for all that decades had passed. "What history can I tell you?" he asked. "The history of the fields we tended and their yields? The history of our people who went to serve Dumuzid and came back broken, when they returned at all? The history of Dumuzid's arrival, back in the times when we peasants had kings? Or the history of the war?"
"I think you'll find," said the one who'd been dragged out of the ikozi pit, every word careful like a brick in its place, "that everything is ultimately the history of the war."
-
This, Saha thought, was not a part of the stories. She thought this, and it felt like sacrilege.
The history she knew was shattered like an old stone wall, pieces of it strewn across the countryside. There had been slavery, in which there was no history – or so it felt, in any case, one generation bowing under the same yoke as the other ones, without change, without progress, without anything to tell their children except that which they would come to know regardless. The history of slavery was the history of one person's suffering being, in the large part, the same as the others.
We work the fields. We break our backs. We worship Dumuzid. We suffer his wrath.
The history before that was hearsay and rumor. Whispered in the homes of slaves and distorted, as all myths became distorted, with the telling. It was no unchanging record but a living thing: living, as the beasts of the pastures had, to serve their people.
Don't cry, my child, that your mother is gone. Let me tell you a story of when our people had kings and plenty, and let me say this king's mother had died, so you may bury your sorrows in the tale.
But the stories of the war were true. Their fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles, their elders who had no blood family left: they had fought in the war, they had seen the things they'd seen, and those who had known the letters of accounting had inscribed the record of the war. In a people who had never been allowed to know themselves, they had chosen to know and remember this.
And now here was this Jaffa, here to challenge what they had learned with blood and the bodies of a generation.
"Many humans, and many Jaffa, are rising up against the false gods," the Jaffa said. "By coming together, we may overthrow them all."
"We have won our war," Saha said.
"But you still fear the Goa'uld's return." The Jaffa gestured out toward the plains. "The war is larger than you know."
Rage sprung up in Saha like a plains fire, and her hand ached to throw the javelin. The war had been their world. The war had been every part of their life. And this Jaffa, still bearing the mark of the enemy, dared to call it small?
"Nothing," Saha hissed, "is larger than the war."
-
Natasu met the speaker's eyes, but they did not meet him. He was not seeing Natasu. He was seeing some other time, some other place, as Natasu had for many years. When the war against Dumuzid had ended there had at once come other wars: the war against the rubble that trapped families in their homes, the war against the craters burned into the fields where the ikozi pits now waited, the war against the first harvest after so many harvesting hands had died, the war against the howling of the wind at night, against empty beds and absent sleep ringed with nightmares. The war against memories that came like nightmares to the waking mind. The war against the prayers they'd learned as children that came unbidden to their lips.
Oh Dumuzid of the fair-spoken mouth, of the ever-kind eyes, hast thou seen thyne supplicants?
But no, Natasu wanted to tell him. Last season they had gone to the wild fields, where nature took on the task of agriculture for them. They scythed the wild grass and threshed the grain and sang songs that could not have come from battle.
Not everything was the history of the war.
The man's friend shifted, concern in his every motion. "Dr. Jackson?" he asked, and Natasu looked between them again. The man hadn't the look of a doctor. And his friend had the look of a man who saw that there were demons about, but didn't know which they were or from whence precisely they came.
But after a moment, the apparent doctor blinked and seemed to rouse himself from something, and looked to Natasu. His gaze was even and not unfriendly, but his eyes themselves seemed cold. As though they'd been chipped from something which had yet to thaw out, no matter how warm the human body was around them.
"Thank you for this," he said, indicating the bowl. "I'm... feeling better, I think. Is this an antidote? To the vines growing in the pit traps?"
Natasu shrugged. "The salt, the heat. The water. And time. What other antidotes would there be?"
"Are we your prisoners?" the doctor asked.
Natasu bared his teeth, then sealed his lips again. "Saha believes so. She and her hunters are what we have for generals these days. For a very long time our only visitors were enemies," he said.
"Does your village have a leader?" the other one asked. "Someone to speak for you?"
"Whichever of us wins the argument at hand," Natasu said. "Saha is frequently the winner."
"What about you?" Dr. Jackson asked.
Natasu turned to study him again. There were edges and edges to him, as well; less like the younger people in the village, angry without memory of the target of their anger, and more like himself, the fading old guard. It didn't make Natasu like him any more, or trust him, but there was a sense of brotherhood there regardless. Shared scars.
"I'm of another time," he said. "My arguments must give way to those who live in this new world, and those who will continue to."
"But you wanted to see us," the doctor said. "You wanted to know who we were."
Natasu showed one palm.
"Saha – is she the one who brought us in?"
Natasu nodded.
"Seems like she still believes the war is going on."
"It's the heat of the young to make their meaning where they can," Natasu said. "But I'm an old man. For my own peace, I must believe the war has faded away."
For a moment they were silent, and the silence was a restless thing, like a gate about to open or a branch about to snap.
-
Teal'c knew pride. He had seen it in all its incarnations: youthful, wounded, desperate, hard-earned. And he could see it in this human standing before him.
Still. There was a certain amount of truth to her words, if not the only truth. He knew how easily war became one's world, so for the sake of diplomacy he showed his palms again and answered, "As you say."
While the war endured, one's first duty was to the war. Every Jaffa was taught this. But it was strange to see this young human woman with her javelin in hand, whose duty was to a war she called won.
-
Saha narrowed her eyes at the Jaffa, and felt again the disquieting sense that their stories had been like the net moss over the ikozi pits: something having the illusion of solid ground, but failing when tested. He should not look at her as her older cousins looked at her, or as Natasu did. He should not stand here and speak in measured tones and solicitous words. He should not so defy the order of things.
One of her hunters coughed, low in his throat, and Saha turned part of her attention to the wider world. There were more footsteps approaching the trees, and she took her eyes off the Jaffa they had at bay and looked toward the plains.
"Hey!"
That voice had none of the Jaffa's careful politeness. He arched an eyebrow. "They are friends," he offered.
"Hey!"
She tossed her javelin from hand to hand, and strode toward the edge of the grove. Two more figures were approaching, careful enough that they surely knew of the traps. Neither of them bore the mark of the Jaffa upon their foreheads.
She stepped into their line of sight as they found their way into the trees.
Both of them stopped, and looked at her. They were dressed as the Jaffa was dressed, and as the two she'd taken to Natasu had been dressed. Of a kind, then. One was younger, hair like the wild wheat, unlike that of any of Saha's people. The other had with a wary expression and grey in his hair, like the war heroes who still lived in the village.
"Evening," he said.
Saha said nothing.
They held the silence between them, for a moment, then he cleared his throat and looked past her, to the Jaffa.
"Staying out of trouble, Teal'c?", he asked with a pointed look to the javelin at his feet.
The Jaffa – Teal'c, if that was his name – inclined his head. "Our conversation has been most cordial."
"You pass on protected ground. Why have you come here?" Saha snapped.
The grey one turned to her.
"We're looking for our friends," he said. "Have you seen them?"
-
This was the sort of situation that didn't play to one of Sam's strengths. Generally, she was fine with letting Daniel or Jonas or Colonel O'Neill take the lead on negotiations, Daniel and Jonas having the diplomacy down and Colonel O'Neill having a sort of blunt cut-the-Gordian-knot style that apparently at least some people offworld found perfectly natural to do business with. She was generally content to take a moment to observe. Throw in her observations if she thought they'd be helpful, but otherwise make sure she wasn't about to step into any traps.
One way or another, most of the societies they ran into weren't terribly clandestine about their treatment of women – which varied from culture to culture more than most of her history books would have had her believe. This one seemed to be more sanguine than most, if the hunter snapping questions at them was any indication.
(San wished she could have seen what would have come of these cultures, evolved into what she'd consider the present day. But instead they'd been transplanted here and there and their progress arrested, frozen in place by Goa'uld who feared and reviled change.)
Still, the fact that this girl – probably not older than eighteen, not that youth meant much on Goa'uld worlds – was here, thinking that she held all of them at bay with a short spear, was notable. So was the deference with which the rest of her party, some of whom might have been closing on thirty, treated her.
And without saying anything to Colonel O'Neill, the girl turned and walked back to her team, head moving as though saying something too low for the rest of them to hear.
"I did not expect you to follow," Teal'c said, though he didn't take the opportunity to approach. That was another trap they had to be aware of – some of the planets they went to might look askance at her as a woman, and some might be openly hostile, but it was rare to find a place where a Jaffa was welcome.
"Well, buddy, you kinda went into the trees and didn't come out again," Colonel O'Neill was saying. "Carter and I got worried."
"You were able to navigate the terrain?"
"We stepped carefully."
The girl with the spear turned back to them. "This one has made claims," she said, jerking her chin toward Teal'c. The Colonel turned back to her.
"What, the whole sort of 'we come in peace' thing?" he asked. "Those would be correct."
"And I should believe you?" the girl asked.
"What's your name?" Sam asked her.
The girl turned to her, and looked her up and down with open challenge. "Saha, daughter of Enru, who died at the hands of Dumuzid, and of Kisana, who slew three Jaffa and survived the war."
The name Dumuzid rolled through her mind until it clinked against something buried long ago with Jolinar, but the knowledge was faint, like an afterimage. The name of a Goa'uld; that was what she could grasp. "My father fights the Goa'uld," she said. "So do we."
-
Saha's people had precious little by way of foreigners.
There were other villages, yes, scattered here and there as the land permitted, growing this beautiful or that intoxicating herb. In the time of Dumuzid they'd bring their tributes to this village, Saha's village, to be handed over to Dumuzid's priests and sent through the Great Circle to his palace. And some of those far-scattered villages, yes, had joined in the war. Others had not, hunkering low and hoping the storm would pass and either their countrymen would not turn on them as cowards or their god would not smite them for their tacit neutrality.
Saha's opinion of those people was cold, her opinion of their cross-Circle enemies hot with the flames of learned anger. But she had never expected visitors from beyond the Circle who also fought the gods.
"And what do you know of them?" she asked.
The older one raised his eyebrows. "Oh, plenty," he said. "We could tell you stories, believe me."
-
The uneasy ikozi-fueled darkness gave another furtive rustle at the back of Daniel's brain, and part of him wanted to drop his gaze down to his bowl and no longer meet Natasu's eyes. He resisted that part of himself.
But what he saw in Natasu, that hard-edged resolve two steps away from censure, he had also seen in Sha're and Skaara and Kasuf – a poise which seemed to come without thinking, for them. They had looked at the world which had been freed from Ra, and seen the people to be buried and the faith to be changed and the laws to be established and the struggles to be had, and thought, Well, let's get to it; tomorrow is greater than today.
It didn't come without thinking, to Daniel. It took a bit more thinking every day.
A quiet, bitter part of him thought that maybe there was some advantage in growing up a slave, small consolation that it might be. When the Goa'uld were overthrown, the world opened up. It grew harder but kinder. Whereas him, with all his freedom... he'd gone into the universe thinking he knew history and war, having dug around unexploded shells in archaeological sites, able to name the bloodiest battles of ancient history, and hardly ignorant of current events or atrocities. But some part of him had still been lulled into believing in the relative safety and surety of life.
Life had not recently been supporting that pleasant illusion.
"Well, from what little I've seen of your village," Jonas said, beside him, "you've done an excellent job of rebuilding."
It occurred to Daniel that what he was feeling was either resentment or shame.
-
"Hm," Natasu said, and a smile Jonas couldn't interpret played across his expression. "We've built, in any case. You should have seen our village years ago: it was more beautiful, to my mind. But what we have now will protect us." He shrugged. "So it goes, does it not?"
Jonas paused on that. There was a familiarity to Natasu's tone that Jonas wasn't sure was warranted – like Natasu expected them to have some commonality of experience to draw on.
"I'm not sure what you mean," he said.
Natasu regarded him evenly, then let out a breath. "We never rebuilt," he said. "We tore down our houses, the damaged and the whole, brick by brick; we moved our homes beneath the hills and let the fields grow wild. What we have now is not what we had before, but it sustains us. Our children think nothing of it. Their children will build new homes under new hills because it has always been that way."
"Oh," Jonas said, and breathed that in.
Suddenly, he wanted to tell Natasu about how Earth had caught him when Kelowna tossed him out: about naquahdriah and the wounded suspicion of the scientific council when they looked at him, about the quiet political sentencing that branded him traitor, defector, never to return home. (Oh, politely, of course, because in the end they couldn't ignore that Kelowna had needed Earth's support – or that without Jonas's actions, Earth would not have been so kindly disposed toward them as a nation. But they had no need for an ethics consultant whose ethics led him away from them.)
But that wasn't the conversation they were having, even if it was.
He turned to look at Daniel, who'd been quiet for some time, and whose gaze had drifted to an anonymous patch of dirt wall. Something twanged in his awareness, like a premonition of danger or a lingering guilt.
Nothing he could do about that, either. He could ask after Daniel by name, but didn't have the words to go deeper than that. Jonas never had a chance to get to know him as well as he'd liked, either before the accident which had killed him or after he'd returned, memory gone, scrambling for footing. Now, there was something distant about him that Jonas hadn't found a way to bridge.
Problem was, Daniel was like an ancient Kelownan religious figure – complete with sacrifice and resurrection and, at the end of it, unknowability.
Except that Jonas resisted the notion of unknowability, especially when it came to the psychology of his fellow man. Kelownan or not.
He let out a breath, and turned back to Natasu.
-
Natasu watched him, and offered another smile – to his visitor, to his memories, to the changed state of things. "When I was a child, I looked at the stones of my house and never imagined that they would one day go missing," he said. "The thought itself would never have occurred to me. Had you asked me, 'will your house always be here,' the question would have had no meaning – you may as well have questioned the integrity of the sky. But I have seen changes which that child could not have understood. And now it comes that I meet strangers from lives which I can not imagine."
He raised his bowl.
"Saha tells me you travel with a Jaffa."
"A Jaffa who fought against his gods," the doctor said, swift and hard. "The Jaffa are slaves, just like you were."
"We have only ever known the Jaffa as masters and enemies," Natasu said. "And I had never thought to question that."
A silence; then the other one spoke. "Give us a chance to prove that we can be friends."
Natasu showed his palm. "We have not had an occasion to learn trust outside our own communities," he said. "But I believe that if you defend each other and trust each other, if you weep for lost comrades and pray for their safe return, there is something in you which can be trusted. Our blood is not so different."
There came a pounding at the door above.
"Natasu, friend," Saha's voice called, floating down into the cellar. "Visitors have come; give us leave to enter."
Natasu filled his lungs, and called back "I give you leave," with a voice that had once directed workers over the fields. Saha would come, and if there was an argument to be had, well, he felt he knew these new arrivals better than she.
He reached for his flail and pulled himself upward.
-
"Hold here," Saha told them, and put her fist to Natasu's door.
She was expecting him to come greet her in person, but wasn't surprised when his voice came up from a distance. She grimaced. The old fool – but he had stone for bones, that one, and as much as they disagreed, she never forgot the stories they told about him, either. Of course a man like him wouldn't simply bar the cellar door.
She pushed open the entrance, and stepped inside. The air smelled of pottage, and there were footsteps and voices from the cellar. A part of her shuddered. Trying to shed the anger of the grove and the tension of the hunt. Recognizing, at some deep instinctual level, a sense of home.
-
It was in the thirty-second year of godlessness that two men were delivered to Natasu's door. The thirty-third year of childlessness, perhaps the twentieth or twenty-first of passable wholeness.
It was in the second week of homecoming, of reunion. The third month of descension. The first year of living in this particular configuration of things greater than the sum of its parts.
The beginning of the second year of living with exile in the gut, the second week of living with words like We think it would be better for the confidence of the Kelownan nation if you were not to return home in the ears.
It was the end of one long day and the beginning of another when Saha led their visitors in, and Natasu, leaning heavily on his thresher's flail, led his own visitors up from the cellar. They came silently, with the weight of history upon them.
But standing.
-
Jack had to admit that he was impressed – he'd started seeing well-worn paths as Saha had led them into the village, but even having a suspicion of where to look, he hadn't been able to identify as many homes as he suspected were hidden beneath the rolling hills. Between those and the pit traps, these people must have been terrors to fight on their home turf.
Which was probably great for them, but something of a mixed blessing when it came to people showing up unannounced and hoping to make friends.
This Natasu fellow was old and bent, with skin the color of the torn roots in the pit's moss cover and eyes that apparently hadn't dulled from age. Behind him, Jonas had the kind of one-fifth-pensive curious energy that Jonas always seemed to have, and Daniel–
Well. Jack opened his mouth to ask why Daniel was looking a little rough around the edges, but Daniel turned to him and said "Natasu's been very hospitable" in a tone that suggested nothing but truth, with a look that said And I dare you to disagree.
Jack gave him a look right back, like saying that sometimes he wasn't sure where he'd misplaced the Daniel Jackson who'd died on Jonas' watch. Then he looked to Natasu. "Thanks for taking care of them," he said.
"It was no burden," Natasu said. "Please. Come inside."
-
Natasu's home had not been built in the anticipation of a large family or many visitors, but elbow-to-elbow they all more or less fit in the kitchen, and he personally was not one to object to the closeness of other living beings. Introductions were made and Natasu limped to the wall near the stove, where he could let it take some of the weight from his aching foot.
He turned to look at the Jaffa – Teal'c. Teal'c met his gaze, then arched an eyebrow and gave a shallow bow; all that was allowed by the close confines. Natasu nodded back, and took in the sight of him: led by quarrelsome Saha, standing at ease in the hut of one who would no longer be a slave.
What we have now is not what we had before.
"It is late," he said to all of them. "I would offer you hospitality for the night entire, but my home is small, and would cause you discomfort. Share a pot of tea with me, and be welcome again in the morning."
They agreed, and he ladled water into the kettle and stoked the fire.
They were many warm bodies, clustered at his table: hunters and historians, soldiers and ex-slaves, drinking from the same clay and of the same waters. Enough for one more day of change, and another night of peace.
The sun had fallen below the horizon when Natasu made his way outside to pour the rest of the tea on the earth, no longer to thank Dumuzid but to thank the long thread of his life for not fraying and breaking yet. Their visitors gathered their things, and Saha lingered at the table, waiting to discuss the day's events.
As the rest of them filed out of his home and into the star-blanketed night, Jonas paused, and turned to Natasu. "You say 'welcome home' when you meet someone," he said.
Natasu nodded.
"What do you say for goodbye?"
Natasu studied him and reached out to take both Jonas' hands in his. Pot and flail caught between knuckles and palms, history to history and skin to skin.
"May your future bring you home again," he said.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-31 04:57 am (UTC)And poor Daniel. His life is... just not interested in treating him or his worldviews well.