And Leaves the World to Darkness for drgemini24
Title: And Leaves the World to Darkness
Author: tarimanveri
Rating: PG for minor character death
Word Count: ~2500
Spoilers: General season 9 and season 10 pre-“Pegasus Project”
Recipient: Hasina Ghani (drgemini24)
Prompt: developing a bond while caring for a child
Author’s Note: Many, many apologies for my lateness! My only (bad) excuse is that end-of-semester stuff caught up with me and I didn’t have much time to write for a few weeks. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story, even though it turned out to be a lot more angsty than the prompt probably suggests it should have. Feel free to read in as much or as little romance as you want!
I took the title from Grey’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (I was desperate) and gleefully ripped borrowed the details of bad early medieval life from my advisor’s rocking lectures on material culture and demographics in 5th- and 6th century England.
And of course, beta by the fabulous amyheartssiroc.
And Leaves the World to Darkness
Sam sits back on her heels on the dirt floor and flings down her cold pack. The mission to P9H-474, a planet and a gate address Daniel found mentioned in connection with Merlin, was supposed to lead SG-1 to information about the Sangraal. It was not supposed to lead four hours down a rocky and uneven path to a tiny forest hamlet decimated by the Ori plague. Now the last of the hamlet’s inhabitants, a little girl who, Sam has to insist sternly to herself, looks nothing like Cassie, has slipped from delirious fever to unconsciousness under Sam’s aluminum survival blanket. The cold pack, far from bringing down the girl’s fever, is only making her shiver dangerously. The rapid and labored rasp of her breathing has worsened audibly in the last few minutes. It fills the hut. Sam rubs at her eyes with the back of her hand. She has been working in the dark for hours to treat the girl, with no success.
“Sam?” says Daniel, aiming the flashlight away from the child on the pallet to direct it at her. The darkness is stifling beyond the beam of light from the flashlight. For all Sam knows, the three of them are the last humans alive on the planet and morning is never going to come. She wants to be back on Earth in her lab. She wants her motorbike and hundreds of miles of sun-drenched highway in front of her. She wants never to have come here and seen what happened when these people met the Ori.
“Sam?” Daniel repeats. She can’t see his face, but she can hear his concern.
“Help me prop her up,” she says, gathering the thoughts she let scatter momentarily. “It might help her breathe.”
Sam slips an arm under the girl’s skinny shoulders and lifts her up. “I asked you how you were doing with this,” Daniel says, as he slides his pack into place behind the girl’s head and pats it into something approximately wedge-shaped. “Not so well, obviously,” he adds, unnecessarily.
“There’s nothing else either of us can do for her unless Cameron and Teal’c get back in time with the cure,” Sam snaps, settling the girl back down on the pallet and tucking the blanket in around her. Somehow, admitting it out loud actually makes her feel better, but she adds, “How do you think I feel?” for good measure.
“You know,” says Daniel conversationally, settling back down cross-legged on the ground, by the sound of it, “this could have happened anyway. On this planet, I mean. To these people.”
“What?” Sam pauses in the motion of once again checking the girl’s temperature - burning - and pulse - far too fast. She can usually follow his leaps of logic, but she’s completely missed this one. Wasn’t he just asking her if she was okay? That’s Daniel, she reminds herself. Sometimes he’s the sweetest guy imaginable. Other times, he’s about as sensitive as a sack of bricks to the head, and there’s no telling from moment to moment which it’s going to be.
“Sorry,” he says, and backtracks to explain. “What I mean is that this is such a marginal community, it wouldn’t take much to tip it over the edge. A bad harvest or two or some sick cattle and the result would be the same. It just happens that it was an Ori plague instead.”
The little girl - Sam can’t decide whether it makes it better or worse that they don’t know her name - is resting as peacefully as Sam can manage, her breathing marginally easier with her shoulders raised. Now that she understands where Daniel’s coming from, Sam falls gratefully into the conversation. “How do you know?”
“You just have to look around.” Daniel gestures into the darkness around them, indicating the little settlement in the clearing with its five ramshackle huts and wattle enclosure filled with bony cows. To Sam, it just seems vaguely medieval, like many of the planets they’ve visited recently. But Daniel goes on. “The buildings are all more or less the same size, which means there’s not much social differentiation, which means there’s no agricultural surplus for a lord or a chief to control and use to get power. There’s no furniture and I don’t see any storage containers or prepared flour, so they’ve been living pretty hand-to-mouth. And then…” he pauses.
“Yes?” Sam prompts, intrigued. Daniel rarely gets to put on his archaeologist hat these days, and it’s familiar, almost relaxing, to hear him in lecture mode. And if talking about what the village huts and their contents say about their inhabitants can help pass the time and take her mind off how little they can do for the sick girl, so much the better.
“Well,” he says, “I don’t know if you noticed, but the villagers…” he pauses again. When SG-1 arrived, they found most of the inhabitants of the little settlement already dead and lying side-by-side in a shallow trench at the edge of what looked like a wheat field, stones under their heads and hands folded in their laps. They gravedigger was curled up next to his wooden shovel where he, too, had succumbed to the plague. They’re still there, waiting to be buried.
“What about them?” Sam can’t repress a little shiver.
“They were mostly male,” Daniel says, almost apologetically, again drawing conclusions from something Sam didn’t notice. “And typically, in this kind of society,” he continues, “it’s the women who grind grain and make cloth, so the fact that there weren’t many women living in this settlement implies… well, two things. First, it implies that they weren’t surviving childbirth, probably because of poor nutrition and sanitation, and second, it implies that without wives and mothers, life wasn’t very good in this village even before the Ori came.”
“Oh.” Sam shivers again in the dark. It occurs to her to wonder whether the girl she’s trying to save would have had much chance of surviving to adulthood even without the plague, but more than that, she wonders angrily what the people barely scraping by on this planet ever did to deserve the Ori.
“And I guess the fact that they weren’t very healthy to begin with didn’t help them resist the plague when it came,” Daniel says. “That explains the mortality rate.”
Sam thinks back on the handful of planets she’s seen fall victim to the Ori plague so far. Daniel’s right, the mortality rate is much worse than usual on this one. Usually, the Ori return in time to convert the sick and the terrified. She takes a minute to hope they’re not on their way now.
“But really,” Daniel continues, “it could have been anything. It really seems like they were barely subsisting. It didn’t have to be the Ori. It could have been any of literally dozens of other minor disasters.”
In the loop back to his original argument, Sam catches what Daniel has just as good as said, underneath his lecture. He hasn’t just been lecturing. He’s been talking to himself as much as to her, and he’s been trying to convince himself of what he’s saying. He’s trying to make himself believe that he didn’t directly cause the deaths of the helpless people on this planet when he as good as walked up to the Doci - she’s read the report - and told him about their galaxy. And of course, he’s failing and completely blames himself for everything that’s happened, because that, too, is Daniel. Sam isn’t sure she has it in her to detangle it all for him, especially right now, but it’s Daniel and he’s obviously not doing as well with it as she thought he was, so she has to try.
“You can’t blame yourself for this, Daniel,” she says. She has enough experience of her own of unwittingly unleashing evil to know he won’t believe her, but she also has enough experience to suspect that he needs to hear it.
“Oh, but I think I can,” comes his reply out of the darkness, brittle and final.
She sighs and reaches out for him, finding him by touch at her side and scooting closer to him. “I’d have done the same.” She lays a hand across his back, rubs between his shoulder blades.
“You weren’t there.” His voice is choked. She’s not sure whether he’s trying to say that she would have acted differently in his place or whether he’s accusing her of not being there with him to share in his guilt.
“I know,” she says. Part of her is glad she wasn’t there and doesn’t share in the guilt, for once, because she doubts her presence would have made things happen any differently. But the fundamental truth, whether Daniel is willing to accept it or not, is that he acted in ignorance with good intentions. She keeps rubbing his back and says, “You couldn’t have known.”
“I should have known,” he insists. “They’d just burned Vala alive without a trial for a minor transgression. I should have known they were, I don’t know… evil. Or something.” He laughs hollowly. The sound falls heavily in the gloom.
“You couldn’t have known,” she repeats. She rubs some more. He doesn’t answer. The little girl’s breathing fills the silence in the hut once more. It’s weaker and less steady now, and Sam diverts her attention from Daniel to rack her brain and try to think of anything else she might be able to do to buy the child more time. Their medical supplies are limited. The girl is too far gone to take anything by mouth. Any attempt to cool her down makes her shiver and her temperature is too high for that to be safe. There’s nothing.
The first jagged sob takes her by surprise. Her mind whirls for a moment. It didn’t come from her - and that’s almost a surprise - and it’s not the little girl. It’s Daniel. A second sob follows, just as tortured, and then a third. Daniel’s entire body shakes. She feels him turn away from her. She can tell when he raises his arms to his face, can hear him trying to muffle his sobs in his hands.
Sam has been fighting false gods wherever she finds them for the last decade, and certainly that’s sometimes taken a toll on her faith in real ones. Usually she can convince herself that there must be something out there. But right now she’s finding it hard to believe that there’s any kind of cosmic keeping of accounts at all. For all Daniel has single-handedly done and suffered for humanity and for the galaxy, he doesn’t deserve also to be the person responsible for bringing them into the worst danger they have ever faced. He shouldn’t have to see his mistakes stamped out on innocent lives on a planet that posed a threat to no one.
Sam turns to face Daniel and wraps her arms around him, determined for the moment to set herself between him and the malevolent universe. She cushions his head on her shoulder and holds him while he cries.
~~~
In the morning, Sam and Daniel are burying the villagers when Sam’s radio crackles to life.
“We’ve got the cure,” comes Cameron’s voice over the radio, “but I’m guessing we’re too late. The hike to the ‘Gate took a while in the dark last night and getting permission to bring the cure back took a while longer. Seems these days the IOA is reluctant to lend a hand to planets with low strategic value.”
“The village is gone,” Sam replies, “but the path keeps going on the other side of the clearing. Can you get us a UAV? And another SG team as backup? Maybe there are other settlements on the planet we can still help.”
“You don’t want much, do you, Carter?” Cameron says, joking, Sam can tell, but not entirely joking. “I’ll see what I can do. Mitchell out.”
Daniel is still shoveling dirt into the grave, and Sam rejoins him, taking up the gravedigger’s clumsy shovel to bury the gravedigger along with the rest. Daniel hasn’t said much since dawn when they disentangled themselves from one another and stood up to face the day, but he carried the little girl’s body to the trench and arranged her like the others, with a stone for a pillow and her hands folded.
The soil smells damp and earthy as Sam and Daniel pile the last of it on the grave and cover it with the turf the gravedigger set aside as he opened it. The sun is overhead, the morning fog giving way to a warm afternoon. All around the clearing, the leafy trees tremble in the breeze and their late-spring blossoms. Sam sits down on the grass to wait for Teal’c and Cameron and beckons for Daniel to do the same.
He sits down next to her with his forearms on his knees and looks up at the sky. She waits. Some of the cows, which they released from their pen earlier, drift past, chewing. If they find another settlement with survivors, she thinks, they’ll have to tell them about the cows. Maybe a few extra small and thin cows will make the difference between survival and famine for another barely-subsisting community.
“Sam?” Daniel says at length.
She’s been leaning back on her hands, looking at the sky herself and getting sleepy, but she sits up and brushes the grass off her palms. She looks at her feet, then at the grave, and finally fixes her gaze on him.
“You’re fighting them, and that has to count for something, you know,” she says. “Tell yourself you’re going to keep fighting them with whatever you’ve got.”
“Until I’m gone or they are,” he says. “So much for retirement.”
Sam is too tired to think that far ahead. When she gets back to earth she’s going to hug Cassie extra hard for the little girl she couldn’t save, and she’ll think of the grave she and Daniel covered with grass in its green and quiet clearing, and she’ll appreciate the closure it’s given her. Then she’ll get on with the fight, whatever it brings.
“Maybe you shouldn’t set too many parameters on it,” she says lazily, looking up at the sky again. A puffy cloud is forming north-northwest, about five degrees off the location of the ‘Gate. Possibly there’s a lake there. The cloud is gradually taking on the shape of a cow. She may never move again even if it were to turn into every prior of the Ori ever spawned.
“I think the parameters have been set for me,” says Daniel. He’s not looking up any longer, but speaking into the ground. “Me or them,” he insists.
Sam reaches for his hand and squeezes it. “Then you don’t have to do it alone,” she says.
Author: tarimanveri
Rating: PG for minor character death
Word Count: ~2500
Spoilers: General season 9 and season 10 pre-“Pegasus Project”
Recipient: Hasina Ghani (drgemini24)
Prompt: developing a bond while caring for a child
Author’s Note: Many, many apologies for my lateness! My only (bad) excuse is that end-of-semester stuff caught up with me and I didn’t have much time to write for a few weeks. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the story, even though it turned out to be a lot more angsty than the prompt probably suggests it should have. Feel free to read in as much or as little romance as you want!
I took the title from Grey’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (I was desperate) and gleefully ripped borrowed the details of bad early medieval life from my advisor’s rocking lectures on material culture and demographics in 5th- and 6th century England.
And of course, beta by the fabulous amyheartssiroc.
And Leaves the World to Darkness
Sam sits back on her heels on the dirt floor and flings down her cold pack. The mission to P9H-474, a planet and a gate address Daniel found mentioned in connection with Merlin, was supposed to lead SG-1 to information about the Sangraal. It was not supposed to lead four hours down a rocky and uneven path to a tiny forest hamlet decimated by the Ori plague. Now the last of the hamlet’s inhabitants, a little girl who, Sam has to insist sternly to herself, looks nothing like Cassie, has slipped from delirious fever to unconsciousness under Sam’s aluminum survival blanket. The cold pack, far from bringing down the girl’s fever, is only making her shiver dangerously. The rapid and labored rasp of her breathing has worsened audibly in the last few minutes. It fills the hut. Sam rubs at her eyes with the back of her hand. She has been working in the dark for hours to treat the girl, with no success.
“Sam?” says Daniel, aiming the flashlight away from the child on the pallet to direct it at her. The darkness is stifling beyond the beam of light from the flashlight. For all Sam knows, the three of them are the last humans alive on the planet and morning is never going to come. She wants to be back on Earth in her lab. She wants her motorbike and hundreds of miles of sun-drenched highway in front of her. She wants never to have come here and seen what happened when these people met the Ori.
“Sam?” Daniel repeats. She can’t see his face, but she can hear his concern.
“Help me prop her up,” she says, gathering the thoughts she let scatter momentarily. “It might help her breathe.”
Sam slips an arm under the girl’s skinny shoulders and lifts her up. “I asked you how you were doing with this,” Daniel says, as he slides his pack into place behind the girl’s head and pats it into something approximately wedge-shaped. “Not so well, obviously,” he adds, unnecessarily.
“There’s nothing else either of us can do for her unless Cameron and Teal’c get back in time with the cure,” Sam snaps, settling the girl back down on the pallet and tucking the blanket in around her. Somehow, admitting it out loud actually makes her feel better, but she adds, “How do you think I feel?” for good measure.
“You know,” says Daniel conversationally, settling back down cross-legged on the ground, by the sound of it, “this could have happened anyway. On this planet, I mean. To these people.”
“What?” Sam pauses in the motion of once again checking the girl’s temperature - burning - and pulse - far too fast. She can usually follow his leaps of logic, but she’s completely missed this one. Wasn’t he just asking her if she was okay? That’s Daniel, she reminds herself. Sometimes he’s the sweetest guy imaginable. Other times, he’s about as sensitive as a sack of bricks to the head, and there’s no telling from moment to moment which it’s going to be.
“Sorry,” he says, and backtracks to explain. “What I mean is that this is such a marginal community, it wouldn’t take much to tip it over the edge. A bad harvest or two or some sick cattle and the result would be the same. It just happens that it was an Ori plague instead.”
The little girl - Sam can’t decide whether it makes it better or worse that they don’t know her name - is resting as peacefully as Sam can manage, her breathing marginally easier with her shoulders raised. Now that she understands where Daniel’s coming from, Sam falls gratefully into the conversation. “How do you know?”
“You just have to look around.” Daniel gestures into the darkness around them, indicating the little settlement in the clearing with its five ramshackle huts and wattle enclosure filled with bony cows. To Sam, it just seems vaguely medieval, like many of the planets they’ve visited recently. But Daniel goes on. “The buildings are all more or less the same size, which means there’s not much social differentiation, which means there’s no agricultural surplus for a lord or a chief to control and use to get power. There’s no furniture and I don’t see any storage containers or prepared flour, so they’ve been living pretty hand-to-mouth. And then…” he pauses.
“Yes?” Sam prompts, intrigued. Daniel rarely gets to put on his archaeologist hat these days, and it’s familiar, almost relaxing, to hear him in lecture mode. And if talking about what the village huts and their contents say about their inhabitants can help pass the time and take her mind off how little they can do for the sick girl, so much the better.
“Well,” he says, “I don’t know if you noticed, but the villagers…” he pauses again. When SG-1 arrived, they found most of the inhabitants of the little settlement already dead and lying side-by-side in a shallow trench at the edge of what looked like a wheat field, stones under their heads and hands folded in their laps. They gravedigger was curled up next to his wooden shovel where he, too, had succumbed to the plague. They’re still there, waiting to be buried.
“What about them?” Sam can’t repress a little shiver.
“They were mostly male,” Daniel says, almost apologetically, again drawing conclusions from something Sam didn’t notice. “And typically, in this kind of society,” he continues, “it’s the women who grind grain and make cloth, so the fact that there weren’t many women living in this settlement implies… well, two things. First, it implies that they weren’t surviving childbirth, probably because of poor nutrition and sanitation, and second, it implies that without wives and mothers, life wasn’t very good in this village even before the Ori came.”
“Oh.” Sam shivers again in the dark. It occurs to her to wonder whether the girl she’s trying to save would have had much chance of surviving to adulthood even without the plague, but more than that, she wonders angrily what the people barely scraping by on this planet ever did to deserve the Ori.
“And I guess the fact that they weren’t very healthy to begin with didn’t help them resist the plague when it came,” Daniel says. “That explains the mortality rate.”
Sam thinks back on the handful of planets she’s seen fall victim to the Ori plague so far. Daniel’s right, the mortality rate is much worse than usual on this one. Usually, the Ori return in time to convert the sick and the terrified. She takes a minute to hope they’re not on their way now.
“But really,” Daniel continues, “it could have been anything. It really seems like they were barely subsisting. It didn’t have to be the Ori. It could have been any of literally dozens of other minor disasters.”
In the loop back to his original argument, Sam catches what Daniel has just as good as said, underneath his lecture. He hasn’t just been lecturing. He’s been talking to himself as much as to her, and he’s been trying to convince himself of what he’s saying. He’s trying to make himself believe that he didn’t directly cause the deaths of the helpless people on this planet when he as good as walked up to the Doci - she’s read the report - and told him about their galaxy. And of course, he’s failing and completely blames himself for everything that’s happened, because that, too, is Daniel. Sam isn’t sure she has it in her to detangle it all for him, especially right now, but it’s Daniel and he’s obviously not doing as well with it as she thought he was, so she has to try.
“You can’t blame yourself for this, Daniel,” she says. She has enough experience of her own of unwittingly unleashing evil to know he won’t believe her, but she also has enough experience to suspect that he needs to hear it.
“Oh, but I think I can,” comes his reply out of the darkness, brittle and final.
She sighs and reaches out for him, finding him by touch at her side and scooting closer to him. “I’d have done the same.” She lays a hand across his back, rubs between his shoulder blades.
“You weren’t there.” His voice is choked. She’s not sure whether he’s trying to say that she would have acted differently in his place or whether he’s accusing her of not being there with him to share in his guilt.
“I know,” she says. Part of her is glad she wasn’t there and doesn’t share in the guilt, for once, because she doubts her presence would have made things happen any differently. But the fundamental truth, whether Daniel is willing to accept it or not, is that he acted in ignorance with good intentions. She keeps rubbing his back and says, “You couldn’t have known.”
“I should have known,” he insists. “They’d just burned Vala alive without a trial for a minor transgression. I should have known they were, I don’t know… evil. Or something.” He laughs hollowly. The sound falls heavily in the gloom.
“You couldn’t have known,” she repeats. She rubs some more. He doesn’t answer. The little girl’s breathing fills the silence in the hut once more. It’s weaker and less steady now, and Sam diverts her attention from Daniel to rack her brain and try to think of anything else she might be able to do to buy the child more time. Their medical supplies are limited. The girl is too far gone to take anything by mouth. Any attempt to cool her down makes her shiver and her temperature is too high for that to be safe. There’s nothing.
The first jagged sob takes her by surprise. Her mind whirls for a moment. It didn’t come from her - and that’s almost a surprise - and it’s not the little girl. It’s Daniel. A second sob follows, just as tortured, and then a third. Daniel’s entire body shakes. She feels him turn away from her. She can tell when he raises his arms to his face, can hear him trying to muffle his sobs in his hands.
Sam has been fighting false gods wherever she finds them for the last decade, and certainly that’s sometimes taken a toll on her faith in real ones. Usually she can convince herself that there must be something out there. But right now she’s finding it hard to believe that there’s any kind of cosmic keeping of accounts at all. For all Daniel has single-handedly done and suffered for humanity and for the galaxy, he doesn’t deserve also to be the person responsible for bringing them into the worst danger they have ever faced. He shouldn’t have to see his mistakes stamped out on innocent lives on a planet that posed a threat to no one.
Sam turns to face Daniel and wraps her arms around him, determined for the moment to set herself between him and the malevolent universe. She cushions his head on her shoulder and holds him while he cries.
~~~
In the morning, Sam and Daniel are burying the villagers when Sam’s radio crackles to life.
“We’ve got the cure,” comes Cameron’s voice over the radio, “but I’m guessing we’re too late. The hike to the ‘Gate took a while in the dark last night and getting permission to bring the cure back took a while longer. Seems these days the IOA is reluctant to lend a hand to planets with low strategic value.”
“The village is gone,” Sam replies, “but the path keeps going on the other side of the clearing. Can you get us a UAV? And another SG team as backup? Maybe there are other settlements on the planet we can still help.”
“You don’t want much, do you, Carter?” Cameron says, joking, Sam can tell, but not entirely joking. “I’ll see what I can do. Mitchell out.”
Daniel is still shoveling dirt into the grave, and Sam rejoins him, taking up the gravedigger’s clumsy shovel to bury the gravedigger along with the rest. Daniel hasn’t said much since dawn when they disentangled themselves from one another and stood up to face the day, but he carried the little girl’s body to the trench and arranged her like the others, with a stone for a pillow and her hands folded.
The soil smells damp and earthy as Sam and Daniel pile the last of it on the grave and cover it with the turf the gravedigger set aside as he opened it. The sun is overhead, the morning fog giving way to a warm afternoon. All around the clearing, the leafy trees tremble in the breeze and their late-spring blossoms. Sam sits down on the grass to wait for Teal’c and Cameron and beckons for Daniel to do the same.
He sits down next to her with his forearms on his knees and looks up at the sky. She waits. Some of the cows, which they released from their pen earlier, drift past, chewing. If they find another settlement with survivors, she thinks, they’ll have to tell them about the cows. Maybe a few extra small and thin cows will make the difference between survival and famine for another barely-subsisting community.
“Sam?” Daniel says at length.
She’s been leaning back on her hands, looking at the sky herself and getting sleepy, but she sits up and brushes the grass off her palms. She looks at her feet, then at the grave, and finally fixes her gaze on him.
“You’re fighting them, and that has to count for something, you know,” she says. “Tell yourself you’re going to keep fighting them with whatever you’ve got.”
“Until I’m gone or they are,” he says. “So much for retirement.”
Sam is too tired to think that far ahead. When she gets back to earth she’s going to hug Cassie extra hard for the little girl she couldn’t save, and she’ll think of the grave she and Daniel covered with grass in its green and quiet clearing, and she’ll appreciate the closure it’s given her. Then she’ll get on with the fight, whatever it brings.
“Maybe you shouldn’t set too many parameters on it,” she says lazily, looking up at the sky again. A puffy cloud is forming north-northwest, about five degrees off the location of the ‘Gate. Possibly there’s a lake there. The cloud is gradually taking on the shape of a cow. She may never move again even if it were to turn into every prior of the Ori ever spawned.
“I think the parameters have been set for me,” says Daniel. He’s not looking up any longer, but speaking into the ground. “Me or them,” he insists.
Sam reaches for his hand and squeezes it. “Then you don’t have to do it alone,” she says.