Adaption
Kwayera
spoilers: Moebius, part one.
summary: "She wonders when she adapted, tries to pinpoint the moment – but she finds she cannot, and that it doesn't really matter anyway."
For a moment, as they settle into the course sand and stretch legs aching from the constant inclines and declines of endless sand dunes, they believe that they will find a way back. It's as easy to believe as it is to be utterly certain that the sun, now setting wearily below an orange-bathed horizon, will rise again, phoenix-like, the next morning. As they rise with bone-creaking tiredness – both from the strain of walking on sinking sand and still remaining upright, and from the exhaustion of contemplating just how far away they are from reality – and construct the two small tents, it occurs to her to fasten the lines just that little bit tighter than normal (she knows that they'll be here a while). It also occurs to her, removing slack sticks amongst curious glances that the fire didn't really need to be that big, and that they should really save those slack sticks for some other chilly night.
It hasn't really occurred to everyone else, however, that she anchors the tents with sturdy sandstone (she knows there'll be sandstorms to survive) and requests that Daniel dig the latrine (it is his turn, after all) further away and deeper than usual, and that the fact that her daily hunt for edible items (they always spiced their pre-packaged mush with exotic flora, when possible) in the barren desert grows longer and less profitable. Even O'Neill doesn't seem to notice her discouraged glances; or maybe he does, and simply pretends not to (she's not yet sure).
She remembers sombrely burying the camera, remembers the bizarre way they ringed the Canopic jar as if honouring a coffin; and it confuses her to contemplate whether it represents their current selves or a possible incarnation of some ancient, impossible future. Their trek into the deep desert, where they can do the least damage, marked, she thinks, the beginning of their journey of acceptance or denial (again, she isn't entirely sure which). They still don't yet realise, save she, that they will never again understand the world around them as they had – and she stocks up, from every caravan passing their off-the-beaten-track camp, on what passes for candy in Middle Kingdom Egypt (she realises that they'll need sugar highs to fend off at least some of their deep depression). She swears quietly to herself and buys small bundles of rolled-up, rough cotton – personal sanitation had not been particularly high on her packing priority on what she had assumed to be a two-way journey.
She soaks some of her precious fabric in their rare water every now and again, bathing Teal'c's fevered brow (and only at night, that maybe the coolness would last a little longer). He is slow to heal after their clumsy attempt to replace his non-existent Tretonin supply with something infinitely worse, and every night she wonders that if he had had a choice, he would have instead chosen to perish. She remembers the night she and O'Neill crept up on a hapless Horus guard, silently slitting his throat and extracting the wriggling symbiont messily from its pouch and scooping the blood and humours from the pouch with a precious glass jar and shoving the parasite inside. She remembers filling Teal'c's own dormant pouch with those bloody fluids and then the hated symbiont, praying that he wouldn't contract disease and praying the symbiont was old enough to heal his depleted body (he'd survived as long as he could without supplement before succumbing to coma, she remembers). He eventually does recover, to some extent, but he is not the same
It is almost two months into their exile before she notices that her eyes empty of brightness, dulling as if her intellect had been blunted along with her personality (she still has her tiny mirror, even if what she sees is a lie). Everything she does is automatic, and he hates the way she has retreated into herself. They are all blunt, speaking as if they have forgotten what to say and moving like they do not have to think about it; perhaps they don't, and they remember far too much of the featureless landscape to need to interact mentally with great precision. Teal'c is the most dead of them all, and he spends his days seated on the crest of a distant sand dune contemplating what he had lost and, infinitely, what he has now gained. Daniel tries desperately to care about the wonders of this ancient life and yet, now, immersed in it, it overwhelms him: he remains in the past/present/future, translating documents and tablets that were written countless ages ago/a millennia into the future. O'Neill tries to save her, in his odd way – touches her, kisses her, hurts her with betrayed eyes when she stiffens and turns away. She hides her fear of them, of disappointing what she has so long waited for, under endless calculations and mathematical speculation; endless, tedious drudgery that distracts her from the truth that they might as well indulge in what is no longer forbidden (who will slap handcuffs on them, five hundred centuries before they have been invented?).
He forgives her, sitting beside her in those chilly nights when she cannot leave the extinct fire and tear her gaze from the unfamiliar sky and smiling with understanding that he should not have; and she grips his hand as if she would never let go as their team-mates (companions in exile) slumber lifelessly beyond.
She wonders when she adapted, tries to pinpoint the moment – but she finds she cannot, and that it doesn't really matter anyway.
Fin.