Consequence of Sounds
By: sorrel_rowan
CATEGORY: General
WARNINGS: None
SEASON/SPOILERS: Season 10. “Unending”.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: This has one spoiler for Atlantis Season 4 (cast changes) and it’s a bit odd.
AUTHOR’S WEBSITE:
http://www.fanfiction.net/~sorrelrowan
"They made a statue out of us,
And put it on a mountain top,
Let tourists come and stare at us,
...They'll name a city after us,
And later say it's all our fault,
And give us a talking to,
Because they've got years of experience,
Living in a den of theives,
Rumaging for answers in the pages,
...Our noses have begun to rust."
-
He told them. It's not something he meant to do, but it slipped out beyond his usually so well controlled-tongue. He happened to mention a story involving Christmas one year, involving a present, involving implying distantly that Daniel had taken more care to construct a gift for Vala than for anyone else. It wasn't that he explicitly told them - "You loved each other, you were together for decades" - but they hadn't saved the world with stupidity. They figured it out, staring at each other with wider eyes and a bite of food going cold on Vala's half-raised fork around a crowded dinner table, in a crowded cafeteria, with only Teal'c to bear witness to his subtle, treacherous, unintended slip of thrice-removed suggestion. Even that was just enough to let them piece it together, being as intelligent as they were, concerning as it did something that lay so very close to a thin surface anyway.
Watching them realise, Teal'c realised with a certainty he couldn't credit that it had happened too soon. Not too soon in the same way as when they had positively slunk into the mess hall aboard the Odyssey that never was, shooting glances across the table and crossing unspoken wires for the most awkward meal of Teal'c's long life (including various summits with Apophis' enemies). That had been awkward, yes, and too soon, yes, but in a pleasantly expected way. This was just, simply and completely, too soon and too much for a Vala still hurting from the strange and grey death of her possible-husband, and a Daniel who didn't know what to do about it.
They parted ways, and Teal'c worried.
A month of unspoken, unwritten, generally uncommunicated thoughts and feelings humming just beneath the surface later, Vala announced she was going on a date. The poor, unsuspecting soul dragged into a mess worthy of sitcoms was a perfectly decent and sweet scientist, like many in the SGC too smart to be too complicated. He dropped a pen in an elevator, carrying too many books and wearing a white coat with too-long sleeves. Vala picked it up with a bright smile and handed it to him, but then changed her mind and carefully slotted it behind his ear instead. He blushed and smiled cautiously, before Vala asked him why he handed asked her to go for a coffee yet. Stammering slightly, he replied that he didn't think she'd say yes. It turned out she did.
Daniel reacted quietly but decisively. Teal'c saw him sit across from Vala and Brett and smile cautiously. It was the slightest look, but Teal'c knew that web of tiny looks, glances and gestures could mean more than a ten minute rant with most of SG-1. Tirades and what was said could be retracted - could be literally written over and forgotten with apologies, but what was never said stayed just beneath that thin surface like a veil or lens that stood between better judgement and the world beyond. Brett made a poor pun - something involving jello and hello - when Daniel sat. Vala greeted Daniel and waved at him to sit down, then turned to Brett with a raised eyebrow and an amused smile before laughing. Teal'c, sitting next to Daniel, saw his expression of acute concentration, eyes focussed on the exact place where Vala's hand lay on Brett's wrist as she laughed, and saw him take a breath.
With their relationship drawn in lines of miscommunication and fireworks, it was expected that anything powerful enough to end that expectation and potential to be something so downright epic as that relationship that never was would be catastrophic. Anything strong enough to end that had to be fire, had to consume, had to burn them to the soul, so seared it was on Teal'c's conception of his friends' identities. He'd never expected that it would be something so very simple as it was in the superseding reality; Vala had had enough of complications and history, had settled with but not merely for someone steady, good and with whom her relationship was simple. She was happy, finally, totally and at last - because it had never been assumed they were the only options that they had, nor the easiest, just the one option that would set the very sky on fire. If that had been the assumption, Tomin's death would not have been such a diversion on the road as it had proved to be. Teal'c had thought anger, immaturity and carelessness when they were both so much more sensitive to the other than they realised would change the path if anything did, not that Daniel would see her happy and love her too much in too many ways to deny her it.
As Vala quietly got on with being a member of SG-1 and building a life on Earth around her career and Brett, Daniel found a love affair with his work that eventually took him to Atlantis. That Vala was with Brett isn't to say this didn't affect her - she cried, screamed, threw things, pouted, acted her British shoe size and told him she would never speak to him again. He argued back, but crucially, didn't say why he didn't mention that which Teal'c had accidentally dropped a year before but seemed to be a closed path for them now. She argued - they were friends, even when the fireworks had been muted to a fizz that never really burned.
Daniel left, and life went on. Earth's baptism of fire in
the universe seemed to have ended and the SGC gradually found a place in the
universe, building networks, alliances and trading. Teal'c left to lead the
It's not that I grudge you two not being here. It's just that we're being set up as the 'Magnificent Seven' (I don't know why this keeps being the headline, but oh well - and they've even given us a theme song, Daniel). Jack keeps vanishing to his cabin, and he's used his rank to declare it, and the fifty kilometres surrounding it I might add, a media-free area. They thought he was joking, being such a congenial character, until he threatened to give one of those reporters a very indepth look at the polar base-
The program had finally gone public, and Vala, contrary to expectations, could not quite be bothered with new-found celebrity. Teal'c stood quietly at the door, reading the data-burst email jointly addressed to Sam and Daniel.
- I am, however, and Sam, because I know Daniel won't care in the slightest, in fact I doubt he's bought new clothes in a decade or two - unless those presumed dead moments forced him to it - anyway, I am enjoying the sponsorship deals the Air Force bullied me into accepting. So long as I didn't give interviews, at least. I get paid to go into designer shops and choose things, which are then delivered to the house. I always said I was popular, and now I'm proving it by being paid merely to be seen places. It's nice. Brett's positively sick of answering the door to armfulls of shopping, I believe. But now Teal'c is standing behind me reading this, and leave details of my underwear sponsorship details for an email addressed solely to Sam.
Teal'c inclined his head with a small smile as she turned with a smirk, opening the door and allowing her to lead the way to lunch.
Teal'c returned to the base two years later, after the final
defeat of the stragglers of the armada for a memorial service to Jonas Quinn.
The Odyssey had made a survey round of occupied planets -
Children inevitably happened to them, as did marriages - or ceremonies that were close enough. Daniel found a kindred spirit on the expedition, Vala and Brett quietly got on with life as parents. Teal'c returned again to attend naming ceremonies, and then to celebrate the completely unexpected promotion of Vala to a team-leading diplomat, almost ten years after Tomin's death. She blamed it on lack of options and nice publicity, but having witnessed her fiery defense of new immigration laws allowing intergalactic refugees safe harbour, Teal'c remained unconvinced.
Years stretched between visits, between intergalactic messages, and more changed between them. Children grew, people grew older. Not much marked the passage of one year to the next - this was a pleasant, surprise-free existence, until slowly but painfully, people began to die. Teal'c saw these deaths - first Jack and Daniel within a week of each other, Jack of old age and Daniel of a friendly-fire bullet to the brain, then Cam, Sam and Brett, finally Vala, as painful in their own right but as a herald of his. He found he didn't mind so much, not having his existence stretched across generations but belonging utterly and completely to one so very exceptional.
Lying on his death-bed, he remembered that one pebble he'd placed in the river's path that had somehow, in quiet fashion, stopped Daniel and Vala and of all the things he hadn't said.
It had been a long day, the one at which he'd slipped. Kel no'reem was unnecessary but a welcome and familiar. Staring at the candles and their tiny flames, he thought of all the pebbles and possibilities he held in his memories. One slip he almost made at dinner could have resulted in that pleasant existence his mind had drifted along when supposed to be thinking of nothing at all. One slip amongst many that hovered on the edge of his tongue, every hour of every day, but for fear he didn't dare even imply at the third remove.
They rewrote the past when they turned back time, and now Teal'c lived with the possibilities he couldn't hasten. To tell them was to define them, to petrify them into stone statues whose moulds might no longer fit, so he held his tongue in the hope that rather than muting candles and unsurprising existences, they might finally set the sky on fire.
** The End **
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