AN: This story was written for the “Dan/Jan Ficathon” for fugaciouslove who wanted Off-World, team + Janet dealing with some custom of the natives of the planet.
She didn’t say which team…
Spoilers: This is written for season six, so spoilers up to that, but particularly for Meridian.
Disclaimer: Dude, so not mine.
Rating: Whatever it is we call G these days.
Summary:
The flames of sacred fire show you what you wish to see:
What was, what will, what might come true,
And what can never be.
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What Can Never Be
Janet Frasier did not get off world very often and when she did, it was usually for some type of emergency. In this case, an illness much like small pox had swept across the planet designated P3X-113, called by the locals Lacastra. The humans of Earth were immune, Janet wouldn’t let anyone through the ‘Gate who hadn’t had the chicken pox, and she had been able to come up with a vaccine based on the Earth small-pox vials, the anti-bodies in her team mates, and some dumb luck when she literally tripped over a plant in the forest that immediately cleared up the rash on her legs from an allergic reaction to the planet’s grass.
Still, thousands had died in the pandemic, and it would a while before the Lacastrians were able to resume normal every day operations. The SGC had sent through some disaster management teams, but right now, the focus was primarily on getting bodies into the ground. Fortunately, there was no taboo against burning the dead on Lacastra, in fact it was an option often taken, so Janet was not concerned with contamination.
Thus it was that SG-1 found itself at one of the larger memorials being held in a large field, seemingly for this purpose though not usually on this scale, outside the city of Laca. As the sun set, the families of the deceased placed upon the bodies of their loved ones flowers and plants, and the Lacastrian priests walked among the dead strewing incense and chanting prayers for the safe passage of souls.
At some unvoiced signal, everyone retreated from the field and withdrew to a safe distance. Then all at once the field was surrounded by little spots of light. Squinting, Janet could make out dozen of archers, each bearing a flaming arrow. There was a horn blast, which made her jump and Jonas place his hand upon her shoulder as reassurance, and then the arrows were loosed and the field before them burst into flame. More horns sounded, and then drums followed and somehow in time to the music, the fire spread across the ground in front of them.
As she stared at the massive pyre in front of her, Janet found herself slipping into a sort of trance. Somehow, she knew that this was what was supposed to happen, and that it was happening to everyone else who stares at the flames. They cracked and sparked and jumped higher and a part of her brain told her that there should be a terrible smell but there wasn’t and it was quickly silenced.
She was aware of shapes, foggy and unclear, in the fire but could not make them out. The harder she tried to focus on any one of them, the less clear it would become. Finally, she gave up and looked beyond the shapes, trying to see the town beyond the burning field.
And then he was in front of her.
He reached out a hand to her and she hesitated briefly before taking it, afraid of what she might find, but when she took it, it was warm from the fire. He pulled her close and she could feel his warmth surround her, though it was more like fire and less like a body, and though she could hear the drums, she couldn’t hear his heart beat.
His hands came to her waist, and she found that they were dancing. The other dancers swirled around them in time to the music, though she couldn’t really see anyone else. She was vaguely aware that Sam and the others, even Teal’c had been caught up in their own dances, but she couldn’t see them or who they partnered. It was all a mass of colour and light and music, but he was solid and whole in front of her, and she was in his arms.
As they danced, she was filled with an awareness of him; how he had chosen to leave the world, and how it was not her fault that he had. He knew that she would move Heaven and Earth to save him, and he was grateful for it, but the pain had been too much. He had chosen to move beyond, and leaving her had been the hardest part of going.
The dance grew faster all around them, but he stilled and held her from moving with the flow of spirits that surrounded them. He was different then the others, she realized, both more and less here, more and less real. She could not figure it out, and she wasn’t entirely sure that she wanted to. They were separate from the dance now, though it continued to whirl about them, and he pulled her close.
He raised her chin lightly with his fingers and she looked up at him. She had forgotten how much taller than she was he had been. He was smiling and he bent towards her and she found herself smiling too as his lips met hers. There was fire everywhere, inside and out, as he kissed her. The dance was in her blood, he was in her blood, and her heart pounded with a fury she hadn’t felt in months.
Since he had died.
And then the spell was broken and the dance fell out of step and out of time and ended, and she saw that the field had burnt to ash before her, and her friends were all around her. Everywhere, it seemed there was a mother, a father, a husband, a wife, a sibling, a child, all with tears on their faces and a light of wonder in their eyes. Janet could see it just as clearly in the faces of her team mates, and knew that it lit upon her as well.
The Lacastrians made their way back into the city in silence, and the teams from Earth went back to the Stargate, also silent in their awe. Jonas dialed the address, and just before she stepped through, Janet heard a voice on the edge of familiar sing.
The flames of sacred fire show you what you wish to see:
What was, what will, what might come true,
And what can never be.
AN: This was not supposed to be a series. And yet here I am. Janet’s story is still my favourite, so it is staying first and remaining the title of the story…but the others need to be heard as well.
Spoilers: This was written for season six, so spoilers up to that, but particularly for the movie, Cold Lazarus and The Devil You Know.
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What Was
Jack hadn’t slept in about thirty-six hours when Sam came to tell him that they’d all been asked to attend the funerals. The SG teams had spent a lot of the last two days carrying the bodies of the deceased out to the Burning Field. Though it made him feel vaguely guilty, Jack was glad the Lacastrians burned their dead. Digging several hundred holes was not a very appealing prospect to be facing in the morning. Fraiser told him that this way there would be less contamination and risk of secondary infection, and Jack was grateful for that too. He certainly never wanted to do this again.
He splashed some water from his canteen on his face as soon as he and Sam were outside the house. The owners had died before SG-13 made their initial contact with the suffering planet, but the med team cleared it of contaminants before the SGC teams moved in. There were many empty houses in Laca now, entire families having been wiped out by the disease, and still more orphaned children were relocated to surviving relatives. It would be a long time before the city was restored to the thriving marketplace it had once been.
As Jack and Sam made their way towards the city wall, Jonas and Teal’c joined them. No one said anything; even Jonas’ characteristic ebullience was quelled as they left the city. Before them, the Burning Field spread out, covered with the bodies of those who had died in the plague. Instinctively, Jack put his hand over his mouth and nose to block the smell, but then realized that there wasn’t any. The smell should have been overpowering; some of these people had been dead for five days, and it had been sunny and warm since SG-1’s arrival. He saw Sam whispering to Jonas and realized that his 2IC knew why there was no smell, that it must be some sort of technology. That was good enough for him.
SG-1 fell into line with Fraiser and the other SGC teams. Unconsciously, all the officers straightened to attention and when Janet wavered, Jonas put his hand on her shoulder. Jack watched as the Lacastrians walked among their dead, placing flowers on the shrouded bodies and then withdrew together to the safe distance. All around the field, there was music. First horns, then drums and then everywhere at once, there was fire.
Jack knew suddenly that he was not alone. Obviously, he was in a group of fellow officers, but he felt very separate from them, as though they were moving away from him to places he could not comprehend. It was another presence altogether that he felt beside him. One that was achingly familiar and painfully real. He knew, rationally, that the odds of the Lacastrian funeral dirge sounding anything like “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” were exceptionally high, yet the music was impossibly the same.
Jack looked down at the baseball glove that hadn’t been on his hand two seconds ago, and then back up into the smiling face of his son.
Charlie was laughing. Jack didn’t play with him very often, and Charlie was was always happy to the point of giddy when he did. Charlie had friends, of course, but he did love it when Jack came outside to play ball.
Sarah came out on to the porch to yell at her husband for leaving his gear all over the living room again. He had been gone for weeks and, though he couldn’t say where, there seemed to be a lot of sand in the seams of his military issue luggage that was now threatening to spill itself all over her floor. But she saw them laughing together and said nothing because they had so few times like this, when they were just a family that played baseball while dinner was on the barbeque.
Jack caught his laughing son under the arms and swung him up and around in the sky. Soon, Charlie would be too big for this…or Jack’s elbows would go the way of his knees. But these days were short-lived and Jack knew that. The setting sun bathed Charlie in a red light and for a second, Jack was so startled that he almost dropped in. He hadn’t seen the ruddy glow of sunset on his son’s face.
Somewhere, Sarah screamed.
And then the spell was broken and the backyard fell out of space and out of time and ended, and he saw that the field had burnt to ash before him, and his friends were all around him. Everywhere, it seemed, there was a mother, a father, a husband, a wife, a sibling, a child, all with tears on their faces and a light of wonder in their eyes. Jack could see it clearly in the faces of his team mates and knew that it lit upon him as well.
The Lacastrians made their way back into the city in silence, and the teams from Earth went back to the Stargate, also silent in their awe. Jonas dialed the address, and just before he stepped through, Jack heard a voice on the edge of familiar sing.
The flames of sacred fire show you what you wish to see:
What was, what will, what might come true,
And what can never be.
AN: And now it’s Sam’s turn! Spoilers: This was written for season six, so spoilers up to that.
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What Might Come True
Samantha Carter was not a biologist. Nor was she a chemist. She was a physicist. She dealt with numbers: pure and simple. Well, maybe simple wasn’t the best word, but she had always found them easy when others didn’t. Hers was a clean science.
She had spent the last few days in Janet’s make-shift field laboratory, cranking out dose after dose of the vaccine. It wasn’t science, the work she did here; it didn’t require her to think. It required only that she read the recipe in front of her and then duplicate it. Again and again and again, until all the vials they brought from Earth were full, and then some more when replacements were sent through the ‘Gate.
She was exhausted and she felt horrible for being so tired. She wasn’t tired because she had been carrying bodies. She wasn’t even tired because she had been helping to cure them. She was tired because she was hugely bored and hugely useless and hugely angry at herself for both.
After she’d gone up to Jack’s room to tell him that it was time for the funeral, Sam followed her CO through the streets of Laca in a daze. She could see signs of what had once been a bustling market; the roads were well marked with wheel ruts, and everywhere there were colourful signs hanging above boarded up windows. She was seized by a sudden desire to come back here when the city was alive again, to see it when everything was right.
At the wall, Sam and the Colonel met up with Jonas and Teal’c, and they walked out into the Burning Field as a team. She was struck by the sheer number of those they hadn’t been able to save. The field seemed to go on forever, and everywhere there were bodies. She watched the families of the deceased spread flowers and noticed that the priests who stood on the edge of the field seemed to be controlling some kind of air processor, but she didn’t really stop to think about the technology, even as she absently explained it to Jonas. Instead, her attention was wholly riveted on the bodies that lay before her. The people that she hadn’t been able to save.
SG-1 came to stand beside Janet, and Sam traded a brief smile with her friend. Janet was exhausted too, worn out from the lab and organizing all the vaccinations and finally, the disposal of the bodies. Every member of the SGC team had been quietly grateful when they found out that Lacastrians burned their dead, but Janet even more so, because she understood the risk of secondary infection. Sam wondered if that kind of practicality made them cold.
A loud noise jolted her out of her reverie. All around the field, there was the sound of horns and drums. Then fire streaked through the sky and spread across the field. Everywhere, the flames leapt higher and Sam watched them in fascination as they moved in front of her. She heard voices, right on the edge of awareness, and listened hard to make out the words. The music got louder, and the clarity of the loudspeaker increased.
She was standing on a dais, the Washington skyline in whites and blues behind her, surrounded by her teammates. The air was full of snapping flags and camera shutters and anticipation. When the President arrived, they were all getting medals for bravery and service to the planet Earth. Janet would accept Daniel’s and Catherine Langford was getting a special award for starting the whole process in the first place.
In the front row of the audience, her father sat with Mark and his family, the latter all looking slightly overwhelmed. Finding out that their sister and aunt was an interplanetary hero had been easy to accept. The revelation about Jacob’s dual citizenship was a little harder to swallow. Still, it had been a long time since they had all been together as a family, with nothing between them, and that made Sam the happiest of all.
On her left, closer to the podium, Jack shifted his weight from foot to foot. His knees had held out long enough to save the Galaxy, but only just. He was being promoted today, to General, and then he was bound for a desk job. He had selected the Alpha Site, which Sam expected was a way of slowly getting himself out of the centre of the action, and she completely understood.
Teal’c, on her right, remained as solid as ever. He would be leaving Earth soon, bound for the remnant Jaffa colonies. They were free, but their freedom had come at a great price and Teal’c hoped to put some of the pieces back together. Earth was to help where it could, but Teal’c had another long struggle in front of him.
All around her, Sam could feel the pride of the men and women she had worked with at the SGC. Their families were here today. Their families knew what they did. The Goa’uld were defeated and Earth had taken its place among the stars. The time of secrets had ended and a New Age was dawning on the planet Sam had fought so hard and so long for. She found herself grinning hugely as the world watched.
President Kinsey stepped on to the dais and the USAF band burst into “Hail to the Chief”.
And then the spell was broken and the Washington fell out of space and out of time and ended, and she saw that the field had burnt to ash before her, and her friends were all around her. Everywhere, it seemed, there was a mother, a father, a husband, a wife, a sibling, a child, all with tears on their faces and a light of wonder in their eyes. Sam could see it clearly in the faces of her team mates and knew that it lit upon her as well.
The Lacastrians made their way back into the city in silence, and the teams from Earth went back to the Stargate, also silent in their awe. Jonas dialed the address, and just before she stepped through, Sam heard a voice on the edge of familiar sing.
The flames of sacred fire show you what you wish to see:
What was, what will, what might come true,
And what can never be.
Spoilers: This was written for season six, so spoilers up to that, but also for Every Teal’c Episode ever, including The Reckoning.
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What Will
Teal’c had seen devastation many times before. He had been both devastation’s cause and devastation’s victim. Since allying himself with the Tau’ri, he had also been devastation’s cure, and of all three, this was the one he most preferred. In this case, however, Teal’c was helpless. He could not heal people, nor could he prevent them from becoming ill in the first place. In the city of Laca, for all his wisdom and strength as a warrior, he was good only for carrying bodies to the place where they would be burnt.
He had spent most of the day with Jonas Quinn and, to be perfectly honest, Teal’c was surprised that his teammate had lasted so long. They had made countless trips between the Houses of the Dead and the Burning Field, each time bearing a single body between them. The path between the two places was not long, but today it had been well traveled and the SG teams were tired and depressed and quickly forgetting why they had joined the SGC in the first place.
Lacastrian children moved among them, carrying water and dried ethek, a fruit that, though bitter, quickly restored strength to tired bones. Teal’c took his share gratefully and smiled down at the girl who bore it to him. She turned a deep shade of pink under his gaze and then ran away to her friends who giggled and made pointed faces at her. Hearing the laughter ring out, despite the gravity of the day’s work, Teal’c felt his heart lighten. Even now, there was life here. And where there is life, there is a reason to go on.
One of the village healers, haggard and drawn by his recent ordeal, came to Jonas Quinn and said something quietly in his ear. Jonas waved Teal’c over, and told him that the funeral was about to start, and that they had been requested to attend. The very last place in the universe that Teal’c wanted to be at this particular moment was at the mass funeral that was about to take place, but there was a duty to the dead, and he had been asked to pay it, so he nodded and followed Jonas towards the wall.
They fell in with Major Carter and O’Neill, and continued on in silence until they stood with Dr. Fraiser and the rest of the SGC team members who were also in attendance, and the Burning Field spread out in front of them. The Lacastrians moved slowly through the myriad of bodies on the field strewing flowers as they went and pausing when they reached a loved one. Teal’c saw suddenly a hundred other battlefields strewn with dead and the widows and orphans that searched, hoping in vain to find no one they found familiar.
So caught up was he in his memories, that Teal’c missed the signal that told the Lacastrians to withdraw from the field. What finally jolted him back to the present was the loud blast of a horn from somewhere behind them. The single note was quickly joined by others and then drums and then arrows of fired streaked through the air above him and the Burning Field burst into flame.
Teal’c heard a loud cry of victory and wondered what sort of funerary ritual involved such a cheer. There was fire in the sky above him still, but these were no longer arrows. Instead, they were ships, great ships on fire falling out of the sky as their defeat was made absolute.
Beside him, Bra’tac gave voice to one last war-cry in defiance of the Goa’uld.
Teal’c stood on the mountain top and looked down over Dakara. It was the centre of his faith, the centre of his Universe, and now it was free. More than that, his people were free. In the valley below, he could hear music and dancing as the Jaffa celebrated their victory and their newfound freedom from the false gods.
The ground was littered with silver. From his height, Teal’c couldn’t tell what it was, but it shone in the fire and made the valley too bright to look at. The glare brought tears to his eyes, but when he raised his hand to dash them, he realized that it wasn’t the light at all. His sacrifices had paid off. His work had not been in vain. His people were free.
He was free.
And then the spell was broken and Dakara fell out of orbit and out of time and ended, and he saw that the field had burnt to ash before him, and his friends were all around him. Everywhere, it seemed, there was a mother, a father, a husband, a wife, a sibling, a child, all with tears on their faces and a light of wonder in their eyes. Teal’c could see it clearly in the faces of his teammates and knew that it lit upon him as well.
The Lacastrians made their way back into the city in silence, and the teams from Earth went back to the Stargate, also silent in their awe. Jonas dialed the address, and just before he stepped through, Teal’c heard a voice on the edge of familiar sing.
The flames of sacred fire show you what you wish to see:
What was, what will, what might come true,
And what can never be.
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finis
GravityNotIncluded, October 22, 2006