Translations, by Night Spear (PG-13)
Rec Category: Daniel Jackson
Pairing: none
Categories: Daniel Jackson, gen, AU, kidfic, episode related, Jack and Daniel friendship, Teal'c and Daniel friendship, team
Warnings: WIP, minor character deaths
Author on LJ: night_spear1287
Author's Website: unknown
Link: Translations on LJ; later chapters available on FF.net
Why This Must Be Read: This is only the second kidfic I've ever recced, and it's certainly the first WIP I've ever recced. But Translations impresses me, and I think I can be optimistic that the story will continue to be as well-plotted and written as it has begun.
The premise of this AU is simple: move the events of the movie back to 1982. Captain Jack O'Neill is a member of the team that goes to Abydos - with Doctors Claire and Melburn Jackson. And when the Gate abruptly reopens in 1997 and Colonel Jack O'Neill leads the team to find out what happens, he meets a fourteen-year-old Daniel Jackson among the native Abydons. And when crisis strikes, and Daniel ends up back on Earth, with the Abydon Gate buried for a year... well, what happens next?
The answer to that is fascinating. This is no little kidfic; Daniel may be only fourteen, but he's nearly seventeen by Abydon standards, and he's been raised in a culture that confers adulthood at an early age. He's an intriguing mix of alien - he's more comfortable on the floor than a chair, for example, and his grasp of Ancient Egyptian is much better than his command of English - and the intelligent, determined Daniel we know and love. His encounters with Sam and Robert Rothman are a blend of unconscious arrogance of his abilities and his uncertainties and fears at the alienness of the SGC; his meetings with Teal'c ring especially true, as Daniel is fascinated and repulsed in turns at who Teal'c is and what he represents. And Jack - Jack is the man who knew his parents, the legend Daniel grew up knowing, and the only link Daniel still has to the world that's been torn away. Then there's Hammond, Janet, Ferretti... the gang's all here, and it's all well done.
The story is following the events of Seasons One and Two; so far, Night Spear is through The Enemy Within. I don't know where events will go from here, but I'm certainly eager to read along and find out!
ETA: The story is finished, and fantastic beyond words. Go and read this right now.
Daniel had held a fountain pen before, but the ink in that one had been dry for years, so he’d never actually used one. It felt a little odd in his hand, but he admitted freely that it was much easier to use than the reed or apid pens from home.
Paper was more familiar-sheets like the ones on the base had been in short supply back home, but all the Earth books and notebooks had been printed on paper. That had been precious on Abydos, the irreplaceable bits of the legendary world of their ancestors that he couldn’t allowed to be destroyed by sand or weather or carelessness. So paper was easy to get used to-even the sheets they had to make by hand back home worked the same way, even if they felt different against his fingers.
Of course, seeing how much around the base was printed on some kind of paper or another (he’d known, logically, that America and Earth were like this, but it still surprised him a little to see sheets and sheets actually spilling out of machines), it made sense that one empty book didn’t seem like much to anybody else.
“Don’t mention it,” Sam had said when he thanked her for the notebook she gave him. “It’s no big deal.”
It was, though. He’d grown up watching books being filled with notes about culture and new languages, and when the notebooks were full, there had been scrolls. He was the one in the alien culture now. He had to take notes, because...because it was better than...it was just better that way. Taking notes was something he knew how to do.