drabbles: Qui Habitat: Empty Places
hjpatience asked for "5 things that happened to everyone else (i.e. the rest of the SGC) in the Qui Habitat 'verse," but she gets only three because, well, I've sort of covered a lot of people already.
Qui Habitat: overview | series cover page
One
One of the things that bothers her most -- apart from 'the whole thing,' which goes unstated -- is that she loses her sense of the monumental. The galaxy is being taken over, Earth itself is being invaded, life as she'd always known it in all of its wondrous glory is gone forever, and she is losing the ability to keep track of each bitter milestone.
Once upon a time, people knew exactly where they were during certain events. The moon walk, the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion, 9/11 -- everyone above the age of reason during those moments could tell you with clarity and precision exactly where they'd been and what they'd been thinking and doing when everything they'd known had shifted.
For most people now, it's the attacks on Beijing and Dhaka and the President's press conference announcing the existence of the Ori. But Sam's known about the Ori all along, known aliens far more intimately than almost anyone else, and these aren't watershed events in her life. They are game-changers, absolutely, but not paradigm-shifters in the Kuhnian sense.
Her life has become a series of minor scientific successes and major military setbacks accompanied by the bitter harmony of death and loss. Colleagues old and new come and go, some transfer to other facilities, some perish, and many simply pass out of her consciousness because she doesn't see them or read their project update summaries on account of her crazy hours and crazier traveling and the fugue of exhaustion that overtakes her before she realizes that she's been up for most of the last 96 hours and still for none of them.
When Jonas arrived with his band of refugees from Langara, she'd had time and compassion and sympathy for him. She is horrified by what has happened to him, how he has been changed and hardened by his experiences, and chagrined that he's so willing to continue on unto death when there is still so much value in his own life. By the time they rescue him a year later, however, she is herself so changed that all she can see is the victory of getting him back at all. She apologizes to him in her own way for having been so naive.
Teal'c's death on Chulak still has the power to shake her profoundly, however. She never doubted their mortality, but after more than a decade of fighting by Teal'c's side, she had such profound faith in his ability to survive anything that his failure to do so stunned her. They sit around in their little private wake, telling stories of a great man gone too soon.
She shows up at Jack's that night and he does not tell her to go home. They haven't, ever, until this point because even with the galaxy going to hell, there are still fraternization regs and to give up on those feels like a concession that things are so far gone that the rules, the system that has governed their lives up until now, are no longer valid. The death of a friend is an excuse to bend the rules for one night. Even if it turns out to not be one night.
Teal'c is not the first in the long and always growing list of friends she loses to the Ori -- loses for real, not the way they lost Jonas and the way they thought they lost Daniel until they failed to find either him or his remains. And what breaks Sam is not the gradual stripping away of everything good in her life, but that that it stops being remarkable. She has no idea where she was or what she was doing when she found out that Vala had been captured by the Ori. She doesn't find out about the obliteration of Colorado Springs until days later and while she mutters a heartfelt 'fuck' at the loss of both life and resources -- half a dozen military installations, civilians, the (abandoned) SGC command center, her home for the last dozen years -- she doesn't even stop what she's doing. She has to be reminded that, yes, the death toll for Earth has surpassed the 200 million mark. She remembers the 500 million mark no better; the numbers have long ceased to impact her in a lasting way because they are all so large and because death, in one way or another, is omnipresent. Stalin might have been right about the death of one being a tragedy, but the death of millions being only statistics.
Jack's death is a tragedy to her, to them all because he was their leader in this fight and with him lost -- and Hank Landry, and so many others -- and without him, without them, they are much less able to carry on the fight as it descends from defense to resistance. She doesn't have time to grieve, though, not with the chaos that results from the head of their body cut off, and by the time she does have the time, she lacks the energy. She had known this was coming, Jack had known this was coming, and so after the shock fades, there is no surprise to react to. Instead, she puts her effort into organizing what resources they have left into some semblance of productive use, leaving herself too busy to dwell on the ache of absence.
Two
It begins in a temple on Abydos and it ends in a temple in Paraguay. What it was, those dozen years, Daniel is not sure. Freedom, validation, adventure, education, life-and-death-and-life again and again, love and loss. His love affair with the stars, tumultuous and all-encompassing, and everything that he was meant to be.
What he is now is a tool, a toy, a key to a lock the Ori cannot seem to figure out. He is a prisoner, a prophet, an apostate, and sometimes all of these at once. He is a puzzle to the Ori armies always, since they cannot comprehend his actions and motivations -- free will is and forever will be a mystery to those who only live to please a god they see in everything.
Sometimes he does random things just to screw with their heads and he thinks in those moments that if Jack had ever doubted his influence on him, he shouldn't.
They want him to betray his planet, want him to give them some formula that will allow them to translate what they want into terms that the Tau'ri will not only understand, but embrace. It's an impossible desire and he's told them more than once, but they don't believe him. Origin must triumph over all, so it will triumph over all.
It's like arguing logic with a golden retriever. It reminds him of TA-ing graduate school.
They try to appeal to his reason, his worldliness, his intellect, his ego. He lived and loved on a planet different from his own, he lived in the bosom of Origin, even, and this should make him see better than anyone else just how much better life is once The Light is accepted. But it isn't; it's sheltered and parochial and petty and boring and he wouldn't trade all of life's adventures and wonders for the certainty that comes with accepting Origin and its answers to everything.
You can't see very far on the horizon when you spend so much time on your knees in prostration.
He thinks of escaping, but he's not sure there's a point. The Ori are jealous children and would turn the galaxy upside down looking for him. They're turning it upside down anyway, but here, at least, he can work them from the inside. He lies well, he pretends better, he gives them hints that are useless and couches truths as lies. If they think he is going to be their shepherd, then he will indeed be their Moses, at least the part where he leads them wandering around in the desert for forty years.
He's not foolish enough to think that this won't be hard and, most likely, ultimately fatal. Or that staring into the abyss doesn't mean the abyss isn't getting an eyeful of him. He doesn't have any real ability to gauge how far he's fallen, how much he's let slip -- either secrets or his own sanity.
But this is where he's needed -- he's gotten competent with a gun, but he's no soldier. And so here he stays, waiting for either rescue or some sign that he's doing something besides playing Prospero in the rain.
Three
In the darkness -- the spiritual darkness as well as the old-fashioned middle-of-the-night lack of light -- Carolyn choses to focus on what she is grateful for. Because the alternatives are just fodder for nightmares.
She is grateful for having the chance to mend her relationship with her father and for helping her mother do the same. Having seen now, with adult eyes, how he'd lived and thought and acted and died, she is forever grateful that she was given that opportunity, to see and to stop hating because she could see, to be able to let him know that she was sorry and that she loved him and that she was proud of him, that he died and she goes on to whatever the future holds for her with peace and love and respect between them. With the world coming apart around her, she knows that that would have been too much to ask for, and so she is grateful that it was given to her anyway.
Not unrelated, she is also grateful for being where she is. Which is square in the danger zone and more than likely to get her killed, but she can say (now with pride) that she is very obviously Hank Landry's daughter and there's nowhere else she'd rather be if it's in her power to make a difference, to save a life. She's saved many, she knows this even as she also knows that she's been unable to save many more and it's the latter that sticks with her most. She's grateful for having been at the SGC from the beginning of the crisis and not dragged in like so many others once the shit started to really hit the fan; it gives her -- and thus everyone else -- an advantage in that she's one fewer person who needs to be brought up to speed, that she's already an expert when they have too few of the species. Back once upon a time, the choice had been between a job at Fort Detrick, a cushy spot at the CDC, and the mystery post that turned out to be the SGC. She'd turned down the CDC post because it had come with the understanding that it would be more administration than research and she'd chosen the mystery post over USAMRMC because... well, because she'd hated her father back then and figured the last place she'd want to be was in a tightly-run public military facility (as opposed to the secretive one, which usually meant less crazy military bureaucracy). At the time, irony had been a bitch. Now, well, irony's looking a little less doggy.
Slightly lower down on the list, she's grateful for being a doctor, for being someone charged with saving lives rather than ending them. Although, truth be told, it's lower down on the list because by the time the Ori are slaughtering the populations of Mecca and Jerusalem daily, she's not quite sure she'd be able to live up to 'first, do no harm.' She carries a gun now and knows how to use it, even though her first priority when running into danger is to heal wounds rather than cause them.
She's grateful for Cam, for whom she has profound affection if not necessarily love. He loves her, she suspects, but they don't talk of such things. It's more than an arrangement of convenience and comfort, less than a relationship that would have blossomed had there never been Ori. A couple of hundred years ago, they'd have made the marriage work easily, but here and now, they're not married and not even considering their futures, separately or together, because neither of them can even conceive of the 'afterward' of this existence. Both of them privately assume that they won't live to see it -- or not so privately, since Cam, when he's too exhausted to filter, will sometimes speak about a future in which she is still alive and he is not. When this happens, she will always tell him not to say things like that, but in her heart of hearts, she doesn't disagree. Not at the rate Cam either flings himself or is flung into harm's way.
Which perhaps makes it ironic that when death comes, it is for her first. And this is the final thing that she is grateful for -- that she will die with honor and with purpose, not on her knees and not crying out for mercy, not full of regrets and not wishing things had gone differently. Of course she'd rather be alive and she knows that there are people who will be hurt that she isn't, but she got everyone else out of the base safely and for a doctor, to die saving lives is something to be grateful for.
Qui Habitat: overview | series cover page
One
One of the things that bothers her most -- apart from 'the whole thing,' which goes unstated -- is that she loses her sense of the monumental. The galaxy is being taken over, Earth itself is being invaded, life as she'd always known it in all of its wondrous glory is gone forever, and she is losing the ability to keep track of each bitter milestone.
Once upon a time, people knew exactly where they were during certain events. The moon walk, the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion, 9/11 -- everyone above the age of reason during those moments could tell you with clarity and precision exactly where they'd been and what they'd been thinking and doing when everything they'd known had shifted.
For most people now, it's the attacks on Beijing and Dhaka and the President's press conference announcing the existence of the Ori. But Sam's known about the Ori all along, known aliens far more intimately than almost anyone else, and these aren't watershed events in her life. They are game-changers, absolutely, but not paradigm-shifters in the Kuhnian sense.
Her life has become a series of minor scientific successes and major military setbacks accompanied by the bitter harmony of death and loss. Colleagues old and new come and go, some transfer to other facilities, some perish, and many simply pass out of her consciousness because she doesn't see them or read their project update summaries on account of her crazy hours and crazier traveling and the fugue of exhaustion that overtakes her before she realizes that she's been up for most of the last 96 hours and still for none of them.
When Jonas arrived with his band of refugees from Langara, she'd had time and compassion and sympathy for him. She is horrified by what has happened to him, how he has been changed and hardened by his experiences, and chagrined that he's so willing to continue on unto death when there is still so much value in his own life. By the time they rescue him a year later, however, she is herself so changed that all she can see is the victory of getting him back at all. She apologizes to him in her own way for having been so naive.
Teal'c's death on Chulak still has the power to shake her profoundly, however. She never doubted their mortality, but after more than a decade of fighting by Teal'c's side, she had such profound faith in his ability to survive anything that his failure to do so stunned her. They sit around in their little private wake, telling stories of a great man gone too soon.
She shows up at Jack's that night and he does not tell her to go home. They haven't, ever, until this point because even with the galaxy going to hell, there are still fraternization regs and to give up on those feels like a concession that things are so far gone that the rules, the system that has governed their lives up until now, are no longer valid. The death of a friend is an excuse to bend the rules for one night. Even if it turns out to not be one night.
Teal'c is not the first in the long and always growing list of friends she loses to the Ori -- loses for real, not the way they lost Jonas and the way they thought they lost Daniel until they failed to find either him or his remains. And what breaks Sam is not the gradual stripping away of everything good in her life, but that that it stops being remarkable. She has no idea where she was or what she was doing when she found out that Vala had been captured by the Ori. She doesn't find out about the obliteration of Colorado Springs until days later and while she mutters a heartfelt 'fuck' at the loss of both life and resources -- half a dozen military installations, civilians, the (abandoned) SGC command center, her home for the last dozen years -- she doesn't even stop what she's doing. She has to be reminded that, yes, the death toll for Earth has surpassed the 200 million mark. She remembers the 500 million mark no better; the numbers have long ceased to impact her in a lasting way because they are all so large and because death, in one way or another, is omnipresent. Stalin might have been right about the death of one being a tragedy, but the death of millions being only statistics.
Jack's death is a tragedy to her, to them all because he was their leader in this fight and with him lost -- and Hank Landry, and so many others -- and without him, without them, they are much less able to carry on the fight as it descends from defense to resistance. She doesn't have time to grieve, though, not with the chaos that results from the head of their body cut off, and by the time she does have the time, she lacks the energy. She had known this was coming, Jack had known this was coming, and so after the shock fades, there is no surprise to react to. Instead, she puts her effort into organizing what resources they have left into some semblance of productive use, leaving herself too busy to dwell on the ache of absence.
Two
It begins in a temple on Abydos and it ends in a temple in Paraguay. What it was, those dozen years, Daniel is not sure. Freedom, validation, adventure, education, life-and-death-and-life again and again, love and loss. His love affair with the stars, tumultuous and all-encompassing, and everything that he was meant to be.
What he is now is a tool, a toy, a key to a lock the Ori cannot seem to figure out. He is a prisoner, a prophet, an apostate, and sometimes all of these at once. He is a puzzle to the Ori armies always, since they cannot comprehend his actions and motivations -- free will is and forever will be a mystery to those who only live to please a god they see in everything.
Sometimes he does random things just to screw with their heads and he thinks in those moments that if Jack had ever doubted his influence on him, he shouldn't.
They want him to betray his planet, want him to give them some formula that will allow them to translate what they want into terms that the Tau'ri will not only understand, but embrace. It's an impossible desire and he's told them more than once, but they don't believe him. Origin must triumph over all, so it will triumph over all.
It's like arguing logic with a golden retriever. It reminds him of TA-ing graduate school.
They try to appeal to his reason, his worldliness, his intellect, his ego. He lived and loved on a planet different from his own, he lived in the bosom of Origin, even, and this should make him see better than anyone else just how much better life is once The Light is accepted. But it isn't; it's sheltered and parochial and petty and boring and he wouldn't trade all of life's adventures and wonders for the certainty that comes with accepting Origin and its answers to everything.
You can't see very far on the horizon when you spend so much time on your knees in prostration.
He thinks of escaping, but he's not sure there's a point. The Ori are jealous children and would turn the galaxy upside down looking for him. They're turning it upside down anyway, but here, at least, he can work them from the inside. He lies well, he pretends better, he gives them hints that are useless and couches truths as lies. If they think he is going to be their shepherd, then he will indeed be their Moses, at least the part where he leads them wandering around in the desert for forty years.
He's not foolish enough to think that this won't be hard and, most likely, ultimately fatal. Or that staring into the abyss doesn't mean the abyss isn't getting an eyeful of him. He doesn't have any real ability to gauge how far he's fallen, how much he's let slip -- either secrets or his own sanity.
But this is where he's needed -- he's gotten competent with a gun, but he's no soldier. And so here he stays, waiting for either rescue or some sign that he's doing something besides playing Prospero in the rain.
Three
In the darkness -- the spiritual darkness as well as the old-fashioned middle-of-the-night lack of light -- Carolyn choses to focus on what she is grateful for. Because the alternatives are just fodder for nightmares.
She is grateful for having the chance to mend her relationship with her father and for helping her mother do the same. Having seen now, with adult eyes, how he'd lived and thought and acted and died, she is forever grateful that she was given that opportunity, to see and to stop hating because she could see, to be able to let him know that she was sorry and that she loved him and that she was proud of him, that he died and she goes on to whatever the future holds for her with peace and love and respect between them. With the world coming apart around her, she knows that that would have been too much to ask for, and so she is grateful that it was given to her anyway.
Not unrelated, she is also grateful for being where she is. Which is square in the danger zone and more than likely to get her killed, but she can say (now with pride) that she is very obviously Hank Landry's daughter and there's nowhere else she'd rather be if it's in her power to make a difference, to save a life. She's saved many, she knows this even as she also knows that she's been unable to save many more and it's the latter that sticks with her most. She's grateful for having been at the SGC from the beginning of the crisis and not dragged in like so many others once the shit started to really hit the fan; it gives her -- and thus everyone else -- an advantage in that she's one fewer person who needs to be brought up to speed, that she's already an expert when they have too few of the species. Back once upon a time, the choice had been between a job at Fort Detrick, a cushy spot at the CDC, and the mystery post that turned out to be the SGC. She'd turned down the CDC post because it had come with the understanding that it would be more administration than research and she'd chosen the mystery post over USAMRMC because... well, because she'd hated her father back then and figured the last place she'd want to be was in a tightly-run public military facility (as opposed to the secretive one, which usually meant less crazy military bureaucracy). At the time, irony had been a bitch. Now, well, irony's looking a little less doggy.
Slightly lower down on the list, she's grateful for being a doctor, for being someone charged with saving lives rather than ending them. Although, truth be told, it's lower down on the list because by the time the Ori are slaughtering the populations of Mecca and Jerusalem daily, she's not quite sure she'd be able to live up to 'first, do no harm.' She carries a gun now and knows how to use it, even though her first priority when running into danger is to heal wounds rather than cause them.
She's grateful for Cam, for whom she has profound affection if not necessarily love. He loves her, she suspects, but they don't talk of such things. It's more than an arrangement of convenience and comfort, less than a relationship that would have blossomed had there never been Ori. A couple of hundred years ago, they'd have made the marriage work easily, but here and now, they're not married and not even considering their futures, separately or together, because neither of them can even conceive of the 'afterward' of this existence. Both of them privately assume that they won't live to see it -- or not so privately, since Cam, when he's too exhausted to filter, will sometimes speak about a future in which she is still alive and he is not. When this happens, she will always tell him not to say things like that, but in her heart of hearts, she doesn't disagree. Not at the rate Cam either flings himself or is flung into harm's way.
Which perhaps makes it ironic that when death comes, it is for her first. And this is the final thing that she is grateful for -- that she will die with honor and with purpose, not on her knees and not crying out for mercy, not full of regrets and not wishing things had gone differently. Of course she'd rather be alive and she knows that there are people who will be hurt that she isn't, but she got everyone else out of the base safely and for a doctor, to die saving lives is something to be grateful for.