Title: Sun
Rating: PG-13 for violence
Words: 1614
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Pairing: none
Summary: On a world oppressed by the Goa'uld, a girl tells of the freeing of her people
Notes: I didn't know where I was going with this for the first, oh, four paragraphs. Then it evolved into…this.

It was always cold here. It had been cold for a long time. The legends spoke of something that few still alive could imagine: a sun. The legends spoke of warmth more than fires could provide. But those who spoke of the legends soon found themselves residing with the heroes of lore: in the Otherworld, dead.

Our oppressors said that the light would come back and warm us when we were truly faithful to them. They said that our infidelity caused the sterile whiteness and the numbing cold. They said that reverence would return our sun.

Most of us knew the meaning of warmth, the meaning of heat. A fire was warm, burned if you got too close. Bodies let off heat. But we did not know the true meaning of day, or of light. What we had was a pale imitation, torches and candles and the sterile light our captors sometimes gave us when they were sated.

They came and went as they wished. They called themselves Gods. They shot us down with the light of the heavens if we became rowdy. They kept us in line and bade us work and live or laze and die.

That changed the day that the Great Circle—the Chappa'ai—opened and what stepped through were not the Gods but two human men and one human woman, and one Jaffa. A Jaffa who had disobeyed his God and lived.

People called them blasphemers and waited for the Gods to strike them down.

They lived.

Soon, people began to listen. The outsiders spoke oddly, fast and rough. They were not numbed by ice, not indifferent to suffering but that of themselves like us.

Then the soft one spoke of sun. Spoke of warmth. Spoke of rain, and flowers, and forests, and great plains of something fine like snow but yellow, called sand. His eyes lit with a blue sparkling light like that of the not-water of the Great Circle as he spoke of humped animals called camels, and great cities full of people not ruddy-cheeked from cold or shackled by Gods.

People called them traitors and waited for the God's wrath.

Still they lived.

Long into the night the outsiders regaled us with stories, the soft one describing scents and images so vividly I could almost close my eyes and image them. He spoke of freedom and I could taste it.

The Jaffa spoke little, but when he did they listened, reluctantly. Children crowded him, clambering as none had heard them before to touch his mark of servitude. His mark of freedom. Parents tried to shush them, but they would not be still. In silent bemusement, he let the younglings clamber over him and hang off of him. Little Tetti fell asleep in his lap as he stroked her hair.

The tall one spoke harshly about the Gods. He spoke passionately, inelegantly. He spoke of wild ideas. He spoke of freedom and sun. He told stories of a cabin in Minnesota, of playing "baseball" with his son. Parents looked horrified, but the eldlings demanded he show them. He spent the rest of the night teaching the eldlings to play baseball.

The woman was a bright thing, ready to laugh and to smile and she told stories of her father, and her mother, and she spoke of things like the sky like it was nothing. She said that the Gods were not gods, that what was magic to us was really very advanced technology. She spoke of science. Blasphemy. That night she spent explaining to the curious minds what science was.

The elders looked down their noses and scorned them. People waited for the Gods to come and rain fire, kill them like the infidels they were.

And yet, they lived.

I stayed with the circle of midlings, those not yet old enough to be eldlings and those not young enough to be younglings, and listened to the soft one.

That night, we tasted freedom.

The next morning, Jaffa arrived from Tir Nan. That morning, the outsiders showed their worth. That morning, we burned the bodies of our Gods' Jaffa for the first time.

People no longer called them blasphemers. Now, people called them our only hope for freedom.

Later, days later, the outsiders were recalled back to their world, their Earth. Their planet of glistening waterfalls not frozen mid-fall, of endless plains of sand and tall grass. I watched them go, heard their promise that others would come back. I wanted to go with them.

The next day, more outsiders came. They were severe, barking out orders and expecting them to be followed. They were not like the other outsiders. Yet, their clothes smelled of Earth, and they walked like they knew freedom. We followed their orders.

During the next weeks, over which many more outsiders came and went, I aged many years. I fought, even when they told me to stay behind. I saw death as I had never seen, and I learned what it meant to be free. It meant blood, and tears, and cowering not from Gods but from other people. It meant the right to choose for yourself, even if that choice was to die. It meant I would never see young Jelden again, and it meant that the Gods would never demand tithes again. It meant the bitter taste of vomit after seeing arms ripped from shoulders and heads ripped from necks, and it meant the sweet taste of victory.

I yearned for freedom even more in those weeks.

Then the Gods withdrew their Jaffa. Then the outsiders left. They told us to bury the Chappa'ai.

Before they left, I asked about the sun. The outsider squatted down in front of me, looking me in the eyes. He said they'd do what they could.

They went back to their Earth, and we buried the Great Circle like they said, with a block of iced rock in the middle. They went back to their sun and their trees.

A week passed and nothing happened. I clung to the promise of the outsider and the sincerity in his eyes. Many had no such hope. Many railed against what we'd done. Many prayed to the Gods to return, that they would never again hold such traitorous thoughts as those of living free. That they'd serve forever and beyond if they could only have the sun.

Then, one day, a great, yellow disk rose from the east. Anyone who looked at it couldn't, because the brightness of it scorched the eyes.

None knew what it was. But it was warm; true warmth. It bathed everything in a gentle yellow light, reflecting off of the snow blindingly but it was beautiful.

Mid-morning—and one could tell it was morning, now, because the disk was a quarter through it's journey in the suddenly blue sky—a cargo ship landed. I was among those that ringed it with weapons, some being the zat'nik'atels and staff-weapons of our old oppressors, some being the left-behind P-90s and MP-5s and Berettas of the outsiders. From the cargo ship came four.

Two were human men. One was a human woman. And one was a Jaffa bearing the mark of the serpent on his forehead.

The people greeted them as if they were old friends. We had not seen them since those first days, when they had spoke of sun. The soft one laughed and asked if we liked ours. We looked at each other and the tall one motioned to the bright disk in the sky. With a teasing smile, he said slowly, enunciating, "Sun."

A roar of sound rose behind the ring of us with weapons, and quieted almost as quickly.

I took a hesitant step forward and asked the quiet one why he was here, and how had he restored the sun to us? The tall one answered my second question with the enigmatic statement that someone owed them. The soft one answered my first question by motioning to the sky.

As one, our heads turned to the bright blue to see a great monster of steel descending. The woman said, proudly, that it was a ship they built on Earth, called the Prometheus, and it came bearing things to help us build a thriving civilization on our new sun-bathed world.

When the Prometheus landed, the outsiders said that they had to go. The tall one was now in charge of the Chappa'ai on Earth and they would be missing him. Then they boarded the cargo ship and lifted from the ground. It hovered for the moment, then flew into the sky. It rushed over us, as if the outsiders were saying good-bye and good luck. It disappeared into space, what the woman had said was beyond the sky.

More outsiders came from the Prometheus, hauling crates and boxes. A severe man with soft eyes said they were here to help. Another man was beside him, and he presented a list of goods to the leader of our village of Tir Rath. He was the same man who said to me that they would do what they could to restore our sun.

The leader of our village said to the scribe to go and send messages to the other villages that the outsiders had come back, bearing gifts.

Gifts. Proof of our freedom.

The sun shone brightly that mid-morning when Tir Rath became something more than it had been. The sun was warm; the sun was more than the legends told of it. The sun bathed us in its glow.

The snow was melting.

And I thought, looking at the towering Prometheus, shining silver in our new sun, that we were free. We were finally free.