Title: The Weight of A Shadow

Authors: mor_tru

Email: mor_tru@yahoo.com

Archived: On our website. Please ask before linking to the story.

Category: GEN/Angst

Pairings: None

Spoilers: None.

Season/Sequel: None

Rating: PG

Content Warning: None.

Summary: Jack shares a hard memory from his Special Ops days.

Author’s notes: Have you ever wondered why Jack O’Neill thinks the way he does? Wondered what happened to him before he came to the Stargate? These questions are the premise to the Jack –The Early Years series – to take a closer look at his ‘boots on the ground’ experiences, because those events shaped the Jack you see today and are responsible, in part, for his cynicism about life.

Author’s additional notes: Thank you, to my beta’s Irene, Katherine and Nancy – totally extraordinary and dedicated individuals. As for my co-author Tru... well, he just kicks ass! Read on. 8-)

Disclaimer: There’s a real fine line between what’s theirs and what’s ours, and although the characters are theirs, it’s our imagination that makes this story ours.

Date: Updated Feb 2005

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~~~~oOo~~~~

The Weight of A Shadow

mor_tru

~~~~~oOo~~~~~

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

Edmund Burke

~~~oOo~~~

Let’s say this is the saddest thing you ever saw.

Let’s say you're a stranger in a strange land, which isn’t unusual because that's part of the job. It’s what you do. It’s what you’ve been trained to do. And let’s say you're in this place that's been violently abused for many years, which again is not an unusual thing. It's just another one of those war-weary parts of the globe where basic human rights don’t exist and a normal life is far from the idea of western civilization and even further from the ideals of western morality.

It’s winter where you are, and this particular part of the country is barren, so finding any kind of cover is real tough. You’re running scout - at least half a day ahead of the team. You’re also on edge, because you’ve already endured several days of hard shelling. And besides all that, it’s just damn cold and you’re tired and thinking about food, sleep, and dry socks and how far you still have to go, so the prospect of finding shelter for an hour is worth taking a little risk.

Up ahead, sitting at the edge of the barrens, there’s this village. It’s a husk of echoes where the wind howls down deserted streets and any life there is a guarantee to be in hiding. On the outskirts stands a house - a lone gray structure on a gray landscape draped by an even grayer mourning sky. Only this house appears to be just another shell, an empty one, because it has already exploded. Its broken windows and half-roof representing just one more silent scream in a country whose national anthem morphed long ago into one endless silent scream.

However, something’s different about this one house. Something that makes it stand out from all the others. Because there’s a woman in what used to be the front yard. She’s alone in what was maybe her garden, but tanks and heavy trucks have turned it into another tumble of raw blocks. Their tracks and wide treads have compacted the clay into bricks that, from a vantage point above the earth, might’ve look zippered. But now all that’s left is a zigzag map of their callousness and one more life’s toil compressed beneath a mandate to cleanse away the innocent.

So you notice this woman – this innocence.

And you assess her for hidden threats, because your skills in observation have kept you alive on more than one occasion. You notice there are no weapons about her. She is without gloves and dirt is caked beneath her dark nails. On the back of her hand a streak of blood is visible, ‘maybe from a scratch’, you think. She wears tattered pieces of clothing - just an odd collection of rags hanging on her fragile frame. There are mud-covered scarves tied around her feet and they wrap up over her ankles and legs and disappear beneath a torn coat, which is many sizes too big. The coat appears to be military; a non-descript drab-olive with one pocket half-torn off. The flap of the pocket still clings by a thread and oddly, it waves to you with her movements. You notice that both she and it drag to the ground – ‘the coat’, because buttons are missing, ‘she’, because something fundamental is missing.

In the icy wind, her hair scatters around like a lifeless stringy canopy blowing unheeded across a seamless face that maybe once held beauty in someone’s eyes. She appears wraithlike in the cold breath of the moment, drowning you in her vulnerability. Who she had been is fading, because the ravages of this senseless and never-ending war have raped away her life. Now, she’s just one more transparency, ethereal beneath the weight of some unseen burden. And strangely, as you watch this whispering sorrow, you realize you feel everything, but know you should feel nothing.

So you notice her...

She’s focused and she doesn’t see you.

Maybe this is what you’re used to - not being seen. But you’re careful anyway, because not only does she not see you she doesn’t appear to see anything beyond what she’s doing. She’s kneeling down, building something, like a tiny house, ‘like a doghouse’, you think. She’s stacking pieces of her shattered home; what looks like boards from a splintered door, part of a window frame, perhaps half of a cabinet, and she’s singing too. You can hear her high voice - the sound of it drifts your way in the curl of the acrid smoke. You know her language because that’s part of what you do, part of how you can be there and blend in. So you know it’s a lullaby she’s singing and you think, ‘maybe she’s singing to whatever’s in that fractured shelter’. You’re just a little curious, because from your vantage point you’re still too far away to see whatever’s holding her focus.

Then you feel it in the soles of your boots. You feel the approaching vehicles before you actually hear them. It’s just another one of those tricks you’ve learned, one of those tricks that have kept you alive. So you feel them, that deep rumble that travels through the earth just below the surface, and at the same time you understand she isn’t right. You think maybe she’s seen too much of the world and whatever it is, there’s some vital part of her that’s no longer in the here and now, so she can’t protect herself. Moreover, you know in your gut she won’t even try, because you’ve seen that look a thousand times before.

Then suddenly she stands up and looks at what she’s done, and she frowns and darts away into the rubble of her house. You think, ‘good’, she understands the approaching danger and she's leaving. So you get up slowly and move through the yard because by then you can hear the heavy motors of the tanks and that means they’re too damned close and you really need to get moving yourself. You can’t be caught, not here, not now, because the mission is vital and completing it successfully is the prime directive. It could make the difference.

So you run lithely across the torn earth, your intent to move on, to remain unseen. Then you see her in the house as you steal your way quietly across her broken yard. She’s standing there - a blurred silhouette somberly framed through one of the yawning squares that used to be a window. She’s looking for something, still frowning in her concentration and you think, ‘damn’, she’s not leaving at all, is she. But still, you have to move on, because the tanks are getting much closer and your presence in this land isn’t sanctioned by anyone there.

Then you know for sure she’s never leaving when you cross the yard and you see what she’s been doing.

She’s building this shelter. She’s sheltering, because it’s sleeting and the mud is terrible. It freezes into crazy shapes, and you can tell from the depth of the frozen brick of tracks that the tanks and heavy tires have already gone through this yard many times before, tearing up her earth in their violent disregard. So you know instinctively she’s sheltering something valuable and is too focused to protect herself. Or maybe, you decide, she doesn't care about the approaching danger because there she is working out in the open, oblivious to the imminent threat and intent only on the shelter she’s compelled to stay and protect.

Then you see as you step closer - the footprints in the mud.

Tiny footprints of a child, and you guess it’s somewhere around two - old enough to walk, but just barely. You glance quickly around the yard, but there’s no child in sight and the realization hits you hard and you wished to hell you hadn’t looked at all because you know those footprints are all that are left.

Then a twig snaps loudly and you turn sharply to the sound. She’s come out of the house holding the back of a chair. And in that instant you realize she’ll never leave, because she’d just gone in to get more wood. When she sees you near her shelter, she raises the chair-back at you, vaguely, like it’s a weapon. But you stand calmly and non-threateningly and she lowers it slowly because you figure it’s probably worth much more to her as a building element anyway. Besides, maybe she’s had enough of weapons and there’s no weapon now that can hurt her more than she already hurts.

So you step back with your palms up a bit, offering her no threat and you remain there and watch as she places the back of the chair against her little shelter. Her little barrier against the tanks and the trucks that won’t care, because they’ll blow right over those pieces of wood. You figure she knows this, but this is all she has and all she can do is try to save those precious footprints. Because maybe those footprints are like the shadows on Plato’s cave, only for her they’re all that’s left of what used to be her life.

You know you can’t take her with you and even if you could you know she won’t come. Even though you know the language, your words are useless to her because there’s nothing you can possibly say. So you leave her. Leave her to sing softly to the echo of her child. Its innocent soul captured beneath the impression of those two tiny footprints - all that remain to support the weight of its lingering but slowly fading shadow. You leave her as the gray day edges into night, the shadows grow long, and all that is life here begins to submerge back into war-torn obscurity.

Then you become obscure too.

Knowing the tanks will be there soon. Knowing the tiny shelter will be wiped away and another life will disappear into the gray mud. Her hushed scream lost in a cacophony of deafening silence. Knowing she will join her child and all the other lost lives lurking beneath the cast of every unmoving shadow. Each wandering aimlessly in the quiet as they search for an answer to the madness that has brushed them away. And maybe that madness touches you too, because your conscience struggles constantly with the choices you’re forced to make in your fight against this inhumanity. Try as you might to comprehend the unbelievable senselessness of it all, sometimes you wonder if what you do will keep the tarnish of their immorality from dulling your soul.

So you move on...

Thinking this was what she really wanted because maybe you had no other choice but to move on, needing to slip back into the safety of your own fading shadow. You know your life doesn’t belong out there, but each time a small piece of you gets left behind. It’s there beneath your boots - the footprints of your conscience in the mud of their turmoil. A silent statement of absolute faith that your presence can and will make the difference.

Then much later, after you’ve found what you went there for and did what you were supposed to do, you came home.

But months pass with restless nights and her gray shadow haunting your mind. So you sit out on your porch watching the mist rise off the lake while she calls to you. You had wanted to tell someone about her, but there wasn’t anyone to tell because that moment had no strategic importance to the mission. It didn’t belong in a report and it felt too fragile to talk about face-to-face, like it might shatter beneath the weight of the spoken word. So no one knew about it and it weighed heavily on you.

Then someone appears in your life and touches your heart in a place that it’s never been touched before, and says to you – “Tell me Jack. You can trust me. I’m safe.”

So you do.

~~~~oOo~~~~

For Humpty, and a promise to write him as ‘real’.