"Dust to Dust" by ellijay
Summary: The events of "Serpent's Song" prompt Daniel to return to Egypt.
Author's Notes: This is an old story, written back when SG-1 was new and shiny. I'm reposting it now mainly to have all of my fic in one place, but also in the hopes that it finds new readers or maybe makes its way back to previous readers who might want to reminisce. This story was originally published under another name, but I'm still me, many years of life experience notwithstanding, and the title and contents of the story are the same.
(Original Author's Notes: A special thank-you to OzK, whose constructive comments helped to make this a much better piece than it originally was. Thank you to sg1scribe and Dee Tervo, as well, for harassing – er, encouraging me to get the dang thing finished.)
Chapter 1
It was warm and dark, just warm enough to be comfortable and just dark enough for sleep, but then the cold crept in, under the blanket, brushing across warm skin. Daniel tried to ignore it, but it refused to go away. He scooted over, closer to Sha're, and tugged at the covers. Blanket hog. Even after a year, she was no more accustomed to sharing her bed than he was. Not that either one of them would have it any other way, but lifelong habits were hard to break. So she hogged the covers and he retaliated by yanking them back. Sometimes, though, she would roll over onto the edge of the blanket, and he wouldn't be able to pull it back without waking her up. Then, like now, he would just curl up next to her, letting the warmth of her body make amends for her theft. She was his own little Ayers Rock, giving back heat long after the Abydos suns had left the sky.
He had almost drifted back to sleep when she slipped out from under his arm. Aha! The blanket was his now, along with the warm spot where her body had been - and her pillow, that smelled of her hair, something like lavender and cloves from a native herb that she put into the rinse water. Bliss, plain and simple. Yes, that was exactly the word for it. Bliss. He grudgingly opened one eye, though, just to make sure she was all right. Light from one of the moons filtered in through the half-open shutters, making a blurred little moon of her face as she stood by the bed, looking down at him.
"Come back to bed, Sha're." He closed his eyes and burrowed further into the pillow.
"I can't."
Her response didn't register for a moment, but then he opened his eyes. Can't? She had never refused that invitation before, even when the first sun was already rising. He raised himself up on one elbow and squinted at her as she took her robe down from the hook next to the bed and wrapped it around her body. Something was definitely wrong. It was nowhere near morning, and Sha're guarded every precious moment of sleep as jealously as he did. He fumbled for his glasses on the bedside table and slipped them on.
She knelt down next to him and laid a hand to the side of his face – so very warm, her skin much warmer than his. Her mouth was smiling, but her eyes were sad, reminding him of the day after their wedding night, when he still hadn't realized they were married – when she had explained to him that she didn't tell the others that he didn't want her. Nothing could be further from the truth.
"I must go now."
"Go? Go where? What's wrong?" He was beginning to be seriously worried now. There was something niggling at the back of his mind, not a memory exactly. Or was it? She had said that to him before. Exactly those words. When had it been? Or had he just imagined it, or maybe feared it?
"It's all right, my Daniel. I am free now. You set me free. But I can't stay. I'm not really here."
"What? What are you talking about?" Set her free? From what? He swallowed hard, his throat suddenly dry. She was right. She wasn't really here. Neither was he. This was a dream, but knowing that didn't bring it to an end. He couldn't stop what came next.
The something that wasn't a memory, but may as well have been for as many times as he had relived it, snapped back into place. Amonet. Cimmeria. Thor's Hammer. The light engulfing them, nothing more than light to him, but pain to her, pain for Amonet. Necessary pain. Cutting out the diseased flesh and sealing the wound with fire.
He managed to hold onto her as her body twisted and convulsed, her eyes wide and staring, like some poor animal hit by a car and dying by the side of the road. She screamed, a horrible sound that went on longer than he thought she'd have the breath for, and her eyes flashed with golden light. Gold like the sun. A merciless Abydan sun. Damn the sun. Damn Amonet. And damn Apophis. Damn them both to the deepest depths of the darkest hell ever imagined.
She screamed again, but this time, there was a subtle difference. This was a human scream, a raw but oh-so-human voice, without the deep echo of a Goa'uld. This was Sha're. He knew that scream, so much like her screams when she gave birth to her son. This time, though, she was giving birth to herself. Or so he hoped. She twitched one last time. He held his breath, waiting. She was still and silent. Waiting. He'd waited so long for this.
"Sha're?" No answer. Her eyes were fixed, unblinking, staring past his shoulder as if he weren't there. He reached up and gently brushed a strand of hair off of her face. "Sha're."
She blinked once, then again. Slowly, her eyes turned towards him and centered on his face. "Daniel?" The name came out half strangled, but no sound could've possibly been more beautiful to him.
"Yes, Sha're. It's me. I'm here. You're going to be all right. You're free now." Freedom. So precious, taken for granted until taken away. Tears stung his eyes, but he fought then back, meeting with only partial success.
"Free…" She breathed the word so quietly he almost didn't hear her, but the light in her eyes was unmistakable – a natural, human light.
He pulled her close to him, burying his face in her hair. It was still there – the faint scent of something like cloves and lavender. And she was warm, so warm. He couldn't hold the tears back any longer, and he let them flow, tears of joy and sorrow mixed together, joy for the future, sorrow for what had been taken from them. That didn't matter, though. All that mattered now was that she was here, with him, and they both were free. He simply held onto her, listening to the sound of her ragged breathing, feeling the warmth of it against his neck, life rushing in and out. Sha're's breath, the breath of freedom.
There was a sudden silence. Breath stopped – first hers, then his in response. God, no. He pulled back, his eyes darting across her face. "Sha're? What is it?"
"Oh, my Daniel," she whispered. "I must go now."
"What? Sha're! What are you talking about? You're not going anywhere. You're staying right here with me." No, no, no, no, no – silent refusal repeated like a drumbeat, pounding in the center of his chest, making it ache.
"I'm sorry, Daniel." She looked right at him for a long moment, and he wanted to turn away from what he saw there. I love you. Goodbye. So plain, so simple, so beautiful, so painful. His eyes must've said I love you back to her because she smiled before all the words were gone, her eyes sliding slowly shut as she went limp in his arms.
"Sha're. Sha're!" He shook her, but all that succeeded in doing was jarring her eyelids back open. No light there now. None at all. Where there's a will, there's a way. Where there's life, there's hope. Things his mother used to say to him. But what about when there's no life? What then? He laid his hand on Sha're's cheek and called her name again. He would've taken even the golden light now, anything but this. "No." The word didn't change anything, but he said it again. "No." And then he threw his head back and screamed his denial.
"Noooo," Sam groaned. "Would you please just shut up?" She groped for a pillow and clamped it over her head. What a rat hole. Her grandmother would've called it "a den of iniquity." Prostitutes being pawed by drunken men out front, impromptu gambling in the lobby, hallways hazy with smoke, not all of it from tobacco. And the noise – traffic in the street, a dog barking, a bottle being smashed, slurred singing that she wouldn't have been able to understand even if it had been in English, and the occasional wordless shout or scream. And no air conditioning, not even a fan, so she had the choice of putting up with the noise or sweltering in an airless room. She just couldn't tune out sounds like that, though – damned soldier's instincts. She finally gave up, rolled herself out of the twisted sheets, flipped on the lamp and slammed the window shut.
That muffled the noise from outside, but it finally dawned on her that the sound that had disturbed her sleep this time was coming from the adjacent room – something halfway between a moan and a scream. Goosebumps prickled along her arms despite the heat in the room. She hadn't heard that sound in a long time, not since the first few missions, so soon after Sha're had been abducted. She knew he hadn't put it behind him and never would until his wife was free or he was dead, but he had learned to cope well enough that he could usually get a good night's sleep. That is, until they'd captured Apophis and had seen firsthand that the host not only survives, but is aware of what has happened, even thousands of years of a waking nightmare.
And now this sound that came from a nightmare. What could she do? She couldn't take that kind of pain away. But she couldn't turn her back on it, either. And she certainly couldn't try to go back to sleep. But she also didn't want to step on any toes. Sometimes it was hard to tell what would embarrass Daniel. He'd do the craziest things sometimes – flapping his arms and squawking like a chicken (she wished she could've seen that one firsthand), steepling his fingers to imitate the roof of a building, gesturing and making faces and scribbling in the dirt – anything in the name of communication. Other times, though, just a simple question or a few teasing words could make him blush right up to his ears.
She walked over to the door between the two rooms, her hand on the knob. She could hear him more clearly now, but she still wasn't sure if she should wake him up or leave him alone and let him fall back to sleep on his own. When the moan changed over completely to a scream, though, she couldn't stop herself from throwing the door open. She could turn a deaf ear to that kind of sound in combat if she had to, but she couldn't do it here and now.
"Daniel! Daniel, wake up!" She grabbed his arm and shook him, but he only thrashed away from her, kicking the sheets away and onto the floor. She dimly noted that he was wearing a t-shirt and shorts, which took her aback for a moment because it had never occurred to her to wonder what he normally slept in at night. In some ways, this felt like a mission to her, like she should be alert and ready for anything, so she hadn't even bothered packing pajamas. She'd resorted to gym shorts and a t-shirt, and was glad she'd brought at least that much along. The thought of sleeping fully clothed was decidedly unappealing, even though she'd done it numerous times on missions in places as hot as this.
Daniel hadn't responded to her initial urging to wake up, but was still tossing fitfully, although a bit less so than when she'd first entered the room. She was beginning to regret her impetuous decision to run into the room, and was now hoping he wouldn't wake up, but would settle back into sleep. Then his eyes snapped open and he abruptly sat up, his hands flailing wildly around him. She grabbed his shoulder, and he reached up and latched onto her hand, gripping it tightly.
"Sha're?"
She flinched at the plaintive note in his voice. No one had ever said her name quite like that. Not because she didn't know what love was, as a Daniel who wasn't really Daniel had once told her, but because she'd never seen it reflected back to her to that degree and in quite that way. She was inclined to lie to him, to let him believe for a moment that his wife was here with him, but he would know in a matter of moments that it wasn't real. He wasn't dying like Jack had been in Antarctica. "No, Daniel. It's me. Sam."
He blinked. "Sam?"
"Yes. You were having a nightmare." Simple fact. Keep to the facts, Sam. Don't push him. Don't ask him what it was about. You know already anyway. If he wants to talk, then talk. If not, not.
"Where are we?" His eyes swept about the room, which was only dimly illuminated by the light shining in through the open doorway to her room.
It was hot as hell in here. Daniel had either shut his window a long time before she did or else he had never opened it at all. He was drenched in sweat, the t-shirt under her hand damp, his hair plastered to the sides of his face. "In Egypt," she said softly, fighting the urge to brush the hair away from his eyes. "Remember?"
He swallowed hard and nodded, then looked down at her hand on his shoulder. He just sat there, staring at her hand, but she couldn't bring herself to take it away. She just held her breath, not knowing what to say. It was almost a relief when he very gently twisted himself away, swinging his legs out of the bed on the other side. He sat there for a moment, facing the wall while she stared at the back of his head. He finally drew in a deep breath and stood up, saying in a voice struggling to sound normal, "God, it's hot in here."
OK, good. Facts. You can deal with facts, Sam. "Well, you shouldn't have kept your window shut."
He shuffled over to the sink in the corner and leaned on the edge of the countertop, his shoulders hunched and his head bowed. She wanted to go over to him, but she had a feeling that he would rebuff any physical contact. There was something about him lately, something cold and distant that sent shivers up her spine just as surely as that scream had done. It wasn't always there. Just sometimes. Moments of silence like right now. It was as if the Daniel she had known was gone, or just carefully packed away until he could safely come out again. Or maybe packed away for good, that version of himself outgrown. Or maybe lost, never to be found again. She felt that loss very keenly and sincerely wished at times that the Daniel she had first met still existed, even if it meant that he had never left Abydos and she had never gotten to know him.
He finally grabbed the faucet handle and twisted it on, leaning over to splash the water onto his face. It couldn't be very cold – the sink in her room only produced lukewarm water regardless of whether she turned the hot or cold knob – but he splashed his face repeatedly before shutting off the tap and fumbling for a towel – on the wrong side of the sink. Something else she could deal with. She walked around the foot of the bed and pulled a towel off the bar. She put her hand back on his shoulder, ignoring the startled jump that he made, and pressed the towel to the middle of his chest. He simply muttered a thank-you and buried his face in the towel.
She couldn't look at that. She had to give him a moment to pull himself together, so she turned around and opened the window. The air that came in was warm, but cooler than the room itself. She closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath through her nose. It was even relatively quiet for the moment. Everyone had to sleep sometime, after all. There was a sweet scent in the air, something a little like lavender but vaguely spicy. A pot of some kind of night-blooming plant brimming with white flowers was sitting on the ledge of the window below.
She heard the creak of the bedsprings as he sat back down and was beginning to think she should make an excuse to go back to her room when he said, almost sounding like himself, "You know, I think we've been spending way too much time together. We're even starting to dress alike off duty." She turned around and looked a bit more closely at him, then chuckled. It was obvious that the shorts and t-shirts they were both wearing were Army issue, but he was also wearing a pair of white socks, definitely not Army issue, one of them half pulled off of his left foot.
"What's with the socks? Your feet couldn't possibly be cold."
"Oh," he said, sounding like he'd just noticed he was wearing them. He reached down and pulled the left one back up. "Sha're was always complaining that my feet were cold, so I'd wear my socks to bed. She even tried to make me some new ones when the ones I'd brought with me wore out. They were awful and itched like crazy, but I wore them for her. That was one of the first things I bought when I came back here – some real socks. I know it sounds weird, but I just feel naked without them."
She hesitated for a moment, wondering if this meant he wanted to talk or wanted her to go away so he could be alone with his memories. She hesitated to make calls like this, all whim and intuition, no substance to back them up. Once upon a time, she would've plowed right ahead, but growing up in Jacob Carter's house had made her a bit more circumspect. She decided she had to at least test the waters. Daniel liked to talk things out, whether it was a scientific theory or a personal problem. The former was safe territory, but the latter… Well, she tended to keep things a little bottled up at times. Not as bad as Jack, but still, she was military, too, and the military generally frowned on its members being touchy-feely. But Daniel wasn't military and never would be, not even if he never wore anything but fatigues for the rest of his life.
She sat down next to him on the bed, keeping a careful distance between them in case she had misjudged. She liked to think she knew him pretty well by now, but she wasn't about to fool herself into thinking that she knew him inside and out. She doubted anyone could know another person that well, except maybe a Tok'Ra and its host. "Are you all right?" It was a stupid question, but it was all she could think of to say.
"I've been better." He was silent for a moment, and she was desperately fishing for something else she could say when he added, "Maybe we shouldn't have come here. I mean, are we really doing any good? Maybe Jack was right. Maybe this is all just smoke and mirrors. Maybe that really is just a lump of clay." He pointed to his backpack in the corner, carrying its precious cargo of the Egyptian funerary statue that held the dying breath of the poor scribe who had suffered imprisonment in his own body for thousands of years as the unwilling host of Apophis.
Religion and the nature of the soul. She'd taken a few philosophy courses, and her grandmother had been just one step short of a zealot, but Sam had never been comfortable discussing things like this. Maybe she should just try to keep him talking. "Do you really believe that?"
"Oh, God, Sam, I don't know." He snorted. "Oh, that's good. 'Oh, God.' I say that enough, but it's just words. I've spent so much time studying other cultures, trying to get inside other people's heads, trying to understand their beliefs, that I'm not really sure what I believe any more. It doesn't help that I know most of those people were led astray in the religion department. Sometimes it's hard to believe in anything at all."
"I know."
"Do you? I mean, what do you think, Sam? Is this a fool's errand?"
That caught her off guard. Here she was trying to tip-toe around the religion subject, and she left the door wide open for him to turn the tables on her. If that shrewdness had a military bent, he'd probably be wearing as many citations as Jack. But she also knew that Daniel wasn't intentionally trying to back her into a corner. He was simply curious. She paused a moment to collect her thoughts. "If you're asking me if I believe there's life after death, then yes, I think there is. Consciousness, individuality, sentient thought – none of that can be explained by atoms or chemical reactions. There has to be something more to the equation."
"There speaks the mathematician." Someone else might've meant that as an insult, but not Daniel.
She was annoyed with herself nonetheless. Why did it always have to boil down to an equation, action/reaction, theories based on evidence, even if the evidence was sketchy at best? She laughed and nodded, though, admitting he was right. She was a mathematician, but right now, he was looking for something so completely removed from science that it was silly to put it in scientific terms. She changed her tack. "My grandmother used to tell me that the reason they called it faith was because you have to believe without any proof other than what your own heart is telling you. That poor scribe believed that he was finally going to find some peace. Nothing else really matters."
Daniel nodded and looked down at his hands, carefully folded in his lap. There was more that she could've said, other reasons to be here. They both knew what it was like to be trapped in a prison of flesh, she because of Jolinar and he because of Machello. Different situations, true, but they had both been helpless to do anything about it. There was precious little that could be done for the victim of Apophis, but she intended to do whatever she possibly could, even if it was nothing more than some kind of symbolic gesture.
And then there was Sha're. Maybe Daniel was here simply because he couldn't do anything for Sha're. Maybe he was looking for a proxy. It was obvious that the events of the last week had dredged up unpleasant thoughts that he normally kept tucked away, but she just couldn't bring herself to go poking around in any of those wounds right now. They both needed to sleep.
"Get some rest," she told him, reaching out to gently squeeze his shoulder. "We've got a long day ahead of us tomorrow." She turned and left the room, closing the door quietly behind her. She leaned against it for a moment, then sighed and crawled back into bed and turned out the light. It was a long time before she heard the creak of bedsprings in the next room that told her Daniel was finally lying down to sleep. Or at least lying down, even if he didn't sleep.
