Hey you! Yeah, you, the one with the birthday!
Okay, I know it's tomorrow, your birthday, but SEF already broke the ice and I can't wait one more minute!
So! happy birthday!!!!
This here is your comm! *waves grandly at Birthday comm* Lookit all the fun stuff in here *pulls out packing materials and rummages in the box* Oooooh! Pretty! And... Ooooh! That's nice! And Oh, man, I like this thing. *holds it up to the light* Is that Elvis in there?
So, we should, while we're unpacking the cool stuff, thank
abbylee for her support of the terminally technologically impaired. Thank you Abbylee! If not for Abbylee there would be only a blank space where the comm banner should be. There would be blankness instead of Ennis. I have other banners that I will post for you anon.
So, Des, here is your birthday story.
Title: De Homine: The Windfall Light
Genre: Slash, J/D, angst (well, it's a birthday story for you from me, so that goes without saying, eh?)
Episodes/Spoilers: Meridian and... something else from early seasons.
Warnings: It's a birthday story from me to Des, so you know it ain't fluffy.
Notes: Thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis much grateful thanks to
paian whose beta is practically better than sex, and who will be the rather shocked recipient of toe-kissing should we ever meet in person.
De Homine, The Windfall Light
by Salieri
for Destina
"This new human type will not be as the old type imagines....and whatever he looks like he will above all look human."
(Bertolt Brecht)
What is inconceivable is the absence of pain.
Daniel remembers that even when pain was hidden behind the veil of morphine it was still there, like the moon making its daily passage across the other side of the planet, like Jack beside the bed, his forehead in his hand, waiting silently on the other side of Daniel's closed eyelids. The pain was there, in breathing, in the plodding stubbornness of Daniel's heart, in the curve of Jack's back. In the last fifteen hours--since Daniel jumped through the safety glass and saved a planet--life has become equivalent to pain.
He's feeling no pain. So if heaven is that which is inconceivable to the mortal mind, then maybe this is it.
He never expected it to be quite so damp, though. That said, he'd never actually expected heaven at all, so he's got no ground to stand on when it comes to being critical about the damp.
His fingers curl at his sides, painlessly.
Jack sat beside the bed while Daniel was dying. If Daniel had been able to make himself heard through the bandages and the ghostly sluicing sound of his own disintegration, he might've asked Jack what he was waiting for.
The answer is simple: Jack was waiting for Daniel to die. What that means isn't so simple. What Jack is in that equation isn't simple at all.
The hypotheses present themselves.
The corridor on level 18: Jack standing outside the open elevator, looking pointedly at his watch, tipping his head back and shouting, "Daniel, we gotta go!"
Except this time, after Kelowna, Jack isn't going with him, so the analogy is faulty. It's not about Daniel fumbling his books into his kit while he jogs down the corridor, and going back to root through his desk drawers two minutes before scheduled departure because Jack packs extra C4 in case of emergencies and Daniel packs extra HB pencils.
It's not about leaving efficiently, or catching up to Jack, who waits at the top of the ramp, hands folded across the butt of his P90, his exasperation softened by a grin he can pretend Daniel doesn't see.
Wrapped in gauze and morphine and lying still beneath the weight of Jack's waiting, Daniel waited, too, for a promised release into painlessness. But he couldn't think past the keening of his cells, so, while he had a word for it, the word floated unattached on the surface of nothing. It was a pure abstraction. And that, he supposes, is the definition of heaven.
His chest rises and falls, painlessly.
Somewhere far away a siren begins to wheeze, stutters, cuts out, and begins again. He listens to the echoes stumbling around in what must be a big space until the siren stops and the echoes wander away, dwindling with distance and taking the sense of crisis with them. He thinks maybe an angel fell. That this tragedy should be announced by a siren, and a lackluster one at that, reduces the cataclysm of broken wings and shattered light to scraped knees and crumpled tinsel. After five years of god-slaying, it seems fitting that his heaven should turn out to be so prosaic. The perverse wit of the cosmos makes him laugh out loud.
"Something funny?" Jack says, and Daniel's universe goes sideways.
November: the cold makes Daniel hesitate on Jack's doorstep. It's late and the neighbourhood sighs, bare branches sifting the wind. Without halos to soften them in the sharp, clear air, Christmas lights are bright lances against his eyes. The first breath makes Daniel cough as he stands at the threshold pulling on his gloves. Jack's hand on his back is warm.
He didn't ask Daniel to leave, but his eyes are tired so Daniel goes. Jack stands in the yellow rectangle of his doorway watching until Daniel gets the temperamental car started and backs down the driveway. When Daniel turns to wave through the passenger window, Jack is still there, hand raised.
Daniel drives, following his headlights between silent houses and closed storefronts, his fingers cold in his gloves and the warmth of Jack's palm fading between his shoulder blades.
Jack sat beside the bed with his forehead in his hand, waiting. He wasn't waiting for Daniel. He was waiting for Daniel to go on without him so that, alone, Jack could let himself fall.
Now, at the sound of Jack's voice, Daniel tenses, painlessly.
He can hear the rustle of cloth, the shuffle of boots against concrete. Not too far away, water is dripping, an even, rapid plink-plink-plink-plink that reminds him of a panicky heartbeat. Beyond that, there's a steady rumbling he can't quite place. He thinks of Hephaestus and his forge. But that puts him in the wrong mythology; the Greek gods were no strangers to pain, and he feels none.
Which is why Jack's voice is incongruous. Jack sat beside the bed, his head in his hand, waiting. Daniel was far gone by that point, but even then he tried hard not to flinch, because each flinch worked its way through Jack's body like the dragging of a barbed hook. If heaven is the absence of pain, then Jack and heaven are mutually exclusive. So, the sound of his voice in the painless place means either that this isn't heaven or that Daniel has to re-evaluate his definitions.
Daniel is reluctant to let go of this slim purchase on heaven--it's the closest he's ever come--but he can hear Jack breathing.
As the siren starts wheezing again, another voice comes muttering, closer, going past, fading.
Daniel opens his eyes.
Leaning into his field of vision, Jack smiles that goofy "Remember me?" smile. He says, "Hel-lo." His hands are in his pockets.
"Hey," Daniel answers. In the harsh glare of a distant overhead light, he can make out tangled ductwork snaking along the ceiling. The siren stops abruptly, another angel lost or saved. "I take it I'm not dead."
Jack shrugs.
"Good. Because I don't think heaven should be so damp."
"You don't believe in heaven," Jack reminds him.
Daniel closes his hands into tight fists, painlessly, opens them and holds them up in front of his face. They are whole and unscarred, no sign of radiation burns. "No, I suppose I don't." He looks between his fingers at Jack. "Sarcophagus?"
"No."
"Healing device?"
"Nope."
"The Nox?"
"Nuh-uh."
Jack's face is expressionless for a moment, and then his mouth twists up a bit on one side in that not-smile he gets when things go from bad to fucked.
"Then what?" Daniel imagines that his heart is racing, but he can't feel it. That's when the rumble of the place starts to seem familiar. His heart should really be racing now, in response to the avalanche in his head. "Jack."
Jack holds up his hands defensively. Beyond him is a doorway. Outside the doorway someone is coming, muttering excitedly, a fretful litany, and then Harlan turns the corner into the room. His face lighting up with joy at the sight of them, Harlan puts his palms together like prayer and pulls them apart in a circling, celebratory gesture.
"Kumbaya," Jack says.
Daniel sits up on the high table and punches him in the face.
^^^
Jack finds him standing at the bottom of an elevator shaft. One arm looped around a rusted, flaking rung of the ladder, Daniel shakes his hair out of his eyes and peers upward into the gloom. He can see a long way. The hair feels weird against the back of his neck, and must look that way, too, because Jack reaches across the threshold and gives the hair a tug.
"Yep. It's attached," Daniel says. Way, way up where the shaft narrows to a vanishing point there's a light burning.
"Blast from the past." Jack lets go and uses the hand to rub the welt on his jaw instead.
"New wine, old bottle." Daniel wonders why there's a light on up there, if nobody ever goes up to the surface. "Or maybe that's old wine, new bottle."
Harlan explained it, about how he had to use the original template because Daniel's body was too degraded from the radiation poisoning to serve as a model. The original template, stored in Harlan's dodgy computer system for years now, was slighter and had longer hair. Daniel shifts uncomfortably in his BDUs. He pictures Jack collecting them from his locker in the mountain, packing them in a bag as if Daniel's gone into the hospital for minor surgery. The shirt and jacket are too loose across the shoulders and the chest. The pants hang low on this narrower frame. He's avoided reflective surfaces, which isn't too hard in the dust-and-rust of Harlan's complex, so the differences between how he remembers himself and how he is now are all about the way he takes up space.
Daniel's aged backward a few years and now won't age forward at all, at least not in the usual way. Mostly it will be in his head. Or maybe not. Without a body that will decay, falling toward an end, maybe time passes differently. Maybe it doesn't mean anything at all. He should've asked Teal'c about that.
"Or maybe the wine and bottle metaphor isn't the one I'm looking for," he muses. "Does the shape of the bottle change the taste of the wine?"
"I'm more of a beer guy," Jack says. His hands are back in his pockets.
At his sides, Daniel makes fists and feels Jack shift away from him. When he punched Jack he felt something, not quite pain, but close enough to stand in for it, like an artist's rendition of pain. Harlan explained that, too, about the pain response. It's important, so he won't stress his systems beyond capacity. Cold, heat, pressure, torsion.... When Daniel walked away, Harlan was still listing all the things Daniel will feel.
He puts his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder. About five stories up there's a doorway, and another beyond that and another, on and on. Maybe this part of the building extends above ground. He could see a long way from up there. "Where are Sam and Teal'c?"
Jack displaces air when he moves into the elevator shaft with him. Sensors like nerves pick up the change in temperature and Daniel pretends his imaginary heart beats a little faster.
"Oh, you know. The Asgard got themselves in a pickle," Jack answers lightly. "Carter and Teal'c went to help them out."
Turning, Daniel finds Jack standing close, one hand out, almost reaching for him, but not quite. Daniel pulls himself up another rung and watches the hand move a fraction closer. "They went without you?"
Jack shrugs. "Nobody needed my brand of dumb, this time." Then he adds, like a consolation, "They wanted to be here. Carter and Teal'c, I mean."
"I know. Saving the galaxy et cetera." Daniel goes up two more rungs, pauses. The widening distance draws Jack's other hand out of his pocket. Two more rungs. Jack's not reaching for him, but there's a kind of yearning in the angle of his head, the set of his shoulders. Daniel climbs higher, dragging the weight of Jack's resistance after him.
"C'mon down from there."
"Why?"
"Because I'm getting a crick in my neck." Jack stretches up and Daniel feels a spark of triumph as Jack's fingers flick the bottom of his boot. "There's nothing up there. Toxic, remember?"
"Not to me."
At the reminder, Jack's hand falls, finds his pocket again, and the slight connection is broken.
There's a kind of surging feeling inside Daniel's chest, but he's not sure if that's just the machine performing some scheduled maintenance, or if it's not in his chest at all but only in his head. Probably the body is designed to respond to changes in the neural network that signal emotion, simulating the related physical responses. Rods and gears click and whir like anger. "Why'd you let them do it, Jack?"
"You saying you'd rather be dead?"
"If this was the only alternative?"
"Any alternative. The alternative to dead is not dead."
"That's the question. Am I dead or not dead?"
Daniel's pretty high up now, and Jack is looking at him. His cap has fallen off. He curses, a low hiss of frustrated breath. "You're irritating. And I didn't let them do it. For the record, I told them it was a terrible idea."
When Daniel lets go of the ladder, Jack lurches awkwardly, as though he's caught by a tripwire strung between opposing impulses: to jump forward to catch him, to get out of the way. But Daniel hits the ground sure-footed and straightens, grabbing Jack by the sleeve to steady him and stabbing him with a glare. The echoes of his falling careen up the shaft. "You told them to let me die?"
For a moment, Jack looks a bit dumbfounded, either at Daniel's athletics or at the accusation Daniel can't keep out of his voice. Then he frowns, indignant, and wags a finger under Daniel's nose. "Now, hang on just a minute. That is so not fair."
"I know--"
"You can't get me coming and going."
"I know."
"You don't get to knock my teeth out for letting it happen and then give me that face for being against the idea!"
Daniel closes his eyes. When he opens them, he finds his fingers adjusting glasses he doesn't have anymore. That makes Jack look away. "Just because I'm a machine doesn't mean I'm logical. Maybe you can cut me a little slack on account of existential crisis." He tries to keep the abrasive edge on his voice, but the soon-to-be bruise on Jack's jaw is tender-looking and swollen a little. "I didn't really knock your teeth out."
"Not for lack of trying."
"If I'd been trying I'd've caved your head in."
Again, there's that subtle shift in Jack's centre of gravity as he moves away without giving ground. Looking at his boots, he shakes his head. "What a fucking mess."
"Well, you can make it up to me by saying something nice at the funeral." The joke falls flat as Jack winces. "No funeral?"
Cocking his jaw, Jack looks at him shrewdly, risk assessing. "He--that is, you--fuck--Daniel--the other one--didn't actually--" He bobs his head from side to side, winces again, frowns, lets out a huffed laugh that's all irony and nihilism--"He didn't die, so much. He's, you know." He indicates Daniel, or rather Daniel's body, with a wave of the hand. "He's more like software." The waving hand flutters upward, away from them, their weight and solidity.
"Maybe I hit you harder than I thought I did."
"He ascended," Jack clarifies bluntly, somehow placing the emphasis just right so that the word sounds like a curse, or maybe the quick jab of a knife in the kidney. "I guess Oma came and got him." Another fluttering gesture.
Pain response, Harlan said. Important, so Daniel doesn't stress his systems beyond capacity. Torsion. Daniel's mind twists. The body gets confused by the rush of contradictory signals, freezes up. It takes a long time for him to blink his eyes--he knows precisely how long, to the nanosecond--and when he manages that, Jack is there, waiting. Daniel could hit him again, and Jack knows it.
"So he gets infinity and I get eternity." The sweeping gesture Daniel makes takes in both Harlan's complex, groaning under the weight of the dusty, crumbling eons, and the world above it, empty. In his head, time ticks away in measured increments, going nowhere. "Oh my god." That's not an appeal for help; it's just the words he has to hold onto the incomprehensible. He paces in the small space of the elevator shaft, around and around, until he finally comes back to stop in front of Jack. "Any other big heavies you want to lay on me? Like, oh, I don't know, maybe you're really my father?"
"Do I look like Darth Vader to you?"
"I don't know. Take off the fucking mask and we'll see."
Offworld: it's raining, drumming steadily on the roof of the shelter, and the rocky plain outside the crooked angle of the doorway is invisible behind the curtain of water. Silence inside, so heavy and still and palpable that it's as though it's the silence and not the roof that holds back the storm. It's like a space between cupped palms. Inside, something fluttering, wings beating, panic. Jack's breath, harsh, rasping, as desperate as his mouth is when it finds Daniel's in the grey-blue light. Daniel tastes Jack's sweat, the metallic tang of dried blood on Jack's lips. Jack's fingers are spread across the sides of Daniel's head, not gentle at all, but hanging on against the pull of an undertow. Breathing into Jack's mouth, Daniel says oh and god and other empty words filled with Daniel's own meaning, Daniel's wholly flesh-bound sense of awe, and his hands are gripping the front of Jack's vest, and Jack says nothing, except that Daniel hears it, anyway: Don't let go.
Coming home to the mountain, Jack walks ahead of Daniel down the ramp. He doesn't look back. The decision is made without discussion so it seems like consensus: that moment in the shelter never happened. It won't. It can't. But Daniel heard what Jack said in the silence under the drumming rain, what he said with his hands and his mouth if not his voice, and Daniel keeps his promise. Between them, the fine, invisible wire sings, the hooks embedded in their skin.
Jack sat beside the bed, his head in his hand, while Daniel was dying. He said nothing. And each tremour of pain that passed through Daniel was too big for one person, had to be carried by two.
For just a second, Jack's eyes are darkly clear in the dim light of the elevator shaft, fully readable, but he takes a step back toward the door. Daniel follows and Jack leans away inside himself. "When Carter gets back we'll send a team, work on the power supply issue, get you back Earthside."
Daniel nods, realizing that he has no idea how long it's been since Jack sat beside the bed to witness his death. Days? Months? Only hours? Sensors parse Jack's breath, which is shallow and hot, sour with fatigue and hunger. "Why?"
Jack looks at him like he's crazy. "Why?"
"Bury the gate. That's what you told the first set, the first duplicates. You didn't send a team. You didn't send anything. What's changed?"
"Well, for one thing, back then you were just a geek. Now you're a galactic hero. Gave the pointy-heads at Area 51 the leverage they needed to get their hands on this stuff." An aborted gesture tells Daniel what "this stuff" is. Jack's expression challenges him to argue that logic and it's all business and politics. But the pulse is fluttering in his neck, too fast. He takes another step back.
Daniel follows. "It's nice to know I'm so highly regarded."
Tilting his head, Daniel leans closer, so that his mouth hovers there, over that throbbing in Jack's neck, where the tendon jumps as Jack tenses for flight. Jack doesn't run. Instead, he gasps, barely audible even to Daniel's acute hearing. Pain response. Systems stressed beyond capacity. Jack, strung motionless between staying and going. Daniel's own heart should be thudding now. But he hasn't got one and that's why Daniel's lips don't touch Jack's skin. Because the breath that he lets out slowly isn't really breath; it's just nostalgia for a different kind of machine. Jack stands still now because of someone else, and the low sound he makes--anguish that will never resolve into words--is for someone else, someone this Daniel simulates well enough to keep Jack pinned here if he wants to.
Taking Daniel to the threshold, Jack sat by the bed, waiting to fall.
This Daniel will live ten thousand years. That's too long for Jack to have to wait, suspended between denial and yearning.
So, Daniel straightens and gives Jack his most earnest look. "Go home, Jack," he says.
"I can't." The whisper is the sound of wire snapping taut, hooks straining where they're anchored in bone. Daniel almost expects to see blood on Jack's lips.
"Sure you can," Daniel says gently, and points over Jack's shoulder at the complex where the Stargate is waiting. "It's that way." He starts to push Jack away, palm in the middle of his chest, but he pauses. "Listen, when he comes back, don't fuck it up this time."
In Jack's voice, grief lunges against a capstone of anger. "He's not coming back. He's got a whole universe--meaning of life stuff."
Daniel smiles. "Trust me on this one."
Then he turns and starts climbing. After a while, Jack shouts, "Daniel!" but Daniel keeps going, up through the echoes, toward the light. When he finally looks down, Jack is gone.
--the end--
The title is taken from Descartes and from Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill."
Happy Birthday, Des. *big hug*