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lotessethat such a dirty thing as charcoal can become so incandescent
Stargate SG1, Jack/Daniel, 2,303 words, PG-13. Set late in Season 3. Jack doesn't know how to be the family that Daniel's lost.
*
1.
Daniel had left Kheb behind without so much as a backward glance at its treasures, without so much as a sigh for the suspension of order and restriction that prevailed there, the endless teeming possibility of a world imbued with belief. He'd left the baby Harsesis, the last extant sign of Sha're's innocent whitefeather life, and returned to Earth with empty arms. He had, in point of fact, put down his burden. And now he didn't seem to know what to do with his hands.
Something inside him yearned, like an iron shaving brought too close to a magnet, for ascension. To shuffle loose the mortal coil and rise, weightless, substanceless. Griefless. Face it: there were a lot of things he wouldn't mind leaving behind.
The mystery of Kheb chased him like a hound. What was Oma Desala, and how did she connect with the Osiris/Set myths? Her monk had spoken in Zen koans, or something very like them, and Daniel found himself cracking his East Asian mystic texts again, looking to Tau'ri history for solutions to intergalactic problems.
In the cloistering darkness, he murmured the ancient words aloud, tasting them for truth: “the field and its knower. Spirit is the knower of the field; matter is the field. I unite these two. Know these two - my higher and lower natures - as the womb of all beings. Therefore, I am the source and dissolution of the whole universe. Apareyam itas tv anyam prakritim viddhi me param jiva-bhutam maha-baho yayedam dharyate jagat. Etad-yonini bhutani sarvanity upadharaya aham krtsnasya jagatah prabhavah pralayas tatha.”
The Sanskrit didn't feel like home in his mouth, not like Egyptian – Abydonian – but the solid syllables of the words felt rhythmic, good, familiar, and his spirit quieted at their imagined sound.
2.
Jack knew that Daniel needed an anchor. He just didn't know where to find the chain. Sha're possessed links by the score: her lips, her voice, her finger in the sand, the smell of her body. The breathing artifact of her skin, her language straight out of Daniel's work, Daniel's dreams. Egypt had been his home as a child, surrounded by love and care and the dusty remnants of history. Sha're – Abydos – was that home come again.
She'd laughed at him, Daniel'd said. Kept him from taking himself – and everything else – too seriously. Daniel did tend pretty inexorably toward the weighty; that kind of laughter must've been good for him, called answering smiles from his lips and smoothed away the worry-lines around his big blue eyes.
When Daniel pressed his own arms around himself, after her loss, Jack saw in the gesture the absence of the loving ropes she'd used to tie him to the warm earth.
Even when Sha're's body had grown cold and grey in death, she'd bound him with the hope and need of her baby. Earthy needs again – hunger, comfort, family, the milky scent of a sleeping child's breath. But now Shifu was gone as well, ascended, undergone a transmutation from earth to air, from simple concreteness to ineffable, inchoate mystery. And Daniel was adrift, aloof, never really quite there.
Jack didn't know how to be the family that Daniel had lost. He couldn't be Sha're's welcoming, heating, physical embrace, nor could he be the sweet potentiality of a child. He couldn't even be the father that Daniel had lost much longer ago – Jack had had his chance at fatherhood, and he'd blown it – literally.
When Jack stood in the corridor outside of Daniel's office, light spilled out from beneath the closed door, pooling in the dark. Not bothering to knock, he found Daniel hunched intently over his desk, an array of coffee mugs at one elbow, a teetering stack of books in front of him. He didn't look up, or move, or blink at the intrusion, but remained bent and attentive to whatever it was he was working at. A half-burnt candle flickered and guttered on the shelf beside him.
The light flared off of the lenses of his glasses, hiding his eyes from view, but the lines of his back and neck bespoke tension, and his face looked pale and lax and worn.
“Hey,” Jack said at last. Daniel blinked up at him abstractedly, eyelashes fluttering as he visibly worked to detach himself from his thoughts.
“Jack,” he answered quietly. “... was there something you wanted?”
“Oh, just to know what the hell you're still doing here this late at night.”
“I'm busy,” Daniel said, eyes softening and going distant again. “Just doing some reading.”
Leaning over Daniel's shoulder, Jack peered at the characters falling down the open page. “What language?”
“Sanskrit. The Bhagavad-Gita.”
Jack was close enough to Daniel, physically speaking, to feel the small rise and fall of his breath, to sense the radiant heat of his body rising, but Daniel was closed up tight and giving nothing voluntarily.
“This for a mission?” Jack asked, knowing already the negatory answer.
Daniel's brow furrowed, his lips compressing so that his teeth could catch and worry the lower one. “No, just my own interest,” he said at last. “I haven't actually read the Gita for a very long time, and I thought – maybe I should remind myself what the words said, not just what language they were written in.”
Jack paused, silent, uncertain, afraid. At last he said, “So what does it say? Because this sounds pretty meaningless to me.” He'd had a friend who was into Zen, back in the sixties, but he hadn't paid much attention to books as a teenager, and certainly not to books of philosophy. His life had been simpler – he hadn't needed to.
Daniel let his glasses slip down his nose, and pressed his fingertips hard into his eye sockets. “I guess I'm trying to understand maya,” he said.
“Do you mean like those people in South America – or is this a girl's name?”
“Neither,” Daniel answered, and this time Jack caught a weak smile playing at the corners of his lips. “It's a Hindu doctrine – basically, that the world is illusory, that matter exists through the influence of spirit. Um. I think. It's a little complicated,” he said, and flashed his teeth. “This kind of philosophy has this way of totally overturning even the most basic of my assumptions, so I can have a hard time with it. S'why I generally stick to languages.”
“Not sure I much like the idea of none of this-” Jack waved a hand at their surroundings - “being real. Feels real enough.”
“Someone on the path would tell you that you only feel it to be so, and that your feeling comes from your cit, your consciousness and your sat, body, not from your ananda. 'The joy without which all existence is meaningless.' It's not actually that different from quantum physics – Sam'd tell you that the only reason why you can't put your hand through walls is that you're made of the same amount of nothingness that they are.”
The big words, foreign syllables, slipped down to sit uneasily in Jack's gut. Every instinct he had was screaming at him that this wasn't good – that Daniel really shouldn't be sitting here alone, in this small dark room, reading about how he was essentially nothing, about how life wasn't real. It really wasn't good. And now there was no one left to care for Daniel but him, so he'd have to do what he could.
“It's a bit late for that much philosophizing,” he said lightly. “Come on – you up for some late night takeout? Keep an old Colonel company for a while?”
Daniel's brow wrinkled, but he followed Jack obediently up, out of the mouth of the mountain.
3.
teeth lips heat opening motion salt take me now please oh god
yes right there oh yes oh oh oh
4.
Jack's mouth tasted of hops and yeast – Jack had got him as close to drunk as he could, considering Daniel's dislike of beer, and now he could smell the fermentation heavy on his friend's breath as he pulled him into a loose curl around his own body.
“Jack,” Daniel sighed, and pressed his face into Jack's ribs. The only time Daniel allowed himself to crave physical contact was in the aftermath of sex, and then he was like a man starved for it. Jack's large, rough-skinned hand petted absently through his hair, and Daniel could feel the flutter of his own lashes against Jack's skin.
He felt the weight of the words they weren't saying – the words he wasn't saying. I love you. You are my only one. Don't leave me. Don't let me leave you. They'd never spoken like that. This wasn't even a regular thing, not like a relationship. They just came together sometimes, in the aftermath of anything particularly good, especially bad. When one of them grew hungry enough for connection to reach out to the other.
He didn't know what had prompted it this time – nothing particularly terrible had happened to Jack of late, but he'd been insistent, corralling Daniel up out of the mountain, plying him with drink and long hot glances. There'd been no question as to what Jack had wanted. He'd been happy enough to oblige; Jack was nothing if not a generous and enjoyable partner in bed.
Maybe, Daniel thought, eyes closed against the dark, he wanted it to be more.
But he didn't know how to ask Jack for that – love had never been offered, not that kind of love anyway, just sex, simple. No strings to pull them into greater intimacy. Maybe this was all Jack wanted – a warrior's ritual, brothers in arms taking solely physical solace in one another in the absence of more proper partners. Nothing more than fucking, than being fucked. Not even a breach of heteronormative behavior, not really.
Jack's sleepy voice vibrated through him, rumbling against his cheekbones. “Daniel? You still awake?”
Not knowing what answer to give to that, he settled for a noncommittal “Mmm.”
Jack didn't say anything back, just wrapped Daniel in his arms more tightly, and soon his breathing grew level with sleep.
The sutras were turning over in Daniel's mind, and out of habit more than anything else he reached into them for a solution to love, to having. No suffering, origin, cessation, or path, his mind cast up to him. Na duhkha samudaya nirdoha margajna.
In possession is suffering. Through the surrender of attachments, peace. But, his mind protested, he'd laid down his burden on Kheb, he'd surrendered everything, and now he was lost without attachments. It didn't feel like peace.
But he had to believe, having left the child with Oma, having given up so much already, that there was something worthwhile at then end – along? - this path. It had to mean something. The alternative was too terrible to contemplate – it would mean that he'd truly failed.
He lay awake for a long time, thinking. Trying to not be distracted by the sounds of Jack's breathing beside him.
5.
Jack woke in the still, washed out early morning. Daniel was sleeping curled up on the far side of the bed, absolutely still. He felt a brief twinge of disappointment that Daniel hadn't slept closer, hadn't maintained their embrace through the night, but he suppressed it ruthlessly. Let the kid do as he liked – Jack had never made him make any promises, nor made any in return.
Getting up quietly, he began the small tasks of the day: bathroom, shave, coffeepot on, newspaper. He had to push aside several of Daniel's books, and something that looked like a scroll, before he had room at the table to spread his paper out – why Daniel couldn't leave work at work like a normal human being, he'd never understand – and as he picked up the stack he looked at the open text on top. The lefthand side was covered in Chinese characters, unintelligible to him as chicken scratch. The right was transliteration and translation. Why was Daniel working on anything in Chinese? It wasn't involved in any of the current SG missions, as far as Jack could remember.
He glanced back up at the stairs toward the bedroom as if he could somehow see Daniel sleeping through the space and matter between them, as if he could extract the answers from Daniel's quiet mind. He looked down at the open page: “Dao ke dao, fei chang dao; ming ke ming, fei chang ming. Wu, ming tian di zhi shi; you, ming wan wu zhi mu. Gu chang wu, yu yi guan qi miao, chang you, yu yi guan qi jiao. Ci liang zhe, tong chu er yi ming. Tong wei zhi xuan, xuan zhi you xuan, zhong miao zhi men. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.”
The words fell into the pit of his stomach like iron or steel, heavy and foreboding and impossible to ignore or shift away. He knew, in that breathless instant, that the books weren't for anything related to the 'Gate. This was Kheb-style talk, and Daniel was reading it just for fun. Not good. Not good at all. His heart was gnawed with worry, like a worm consuming at a piece of ripe fruit.
God. Daniel needed an anchor, but he didn't know how to be one for him.
Stargate SG1, Jack/Daniel, 2,303 words, PG-13. Set late in Season 3. Jack doesn't know how to be the family that Daniel's lost.
*
1.
Daniel had left Kheb behind without so much as a backward glance at its treasures, without so much as a sigh for the suspension of order and restriction that prevailed there, the endless teeming possibility of a world imbued with belief. He'd left the baby Harsesis, the last extant sign of Sha're's innocent whitefeather life, and returned to Earth with empty arms. He had, in point of fact, put down his burden. And now he didn't seem to know what to do with his hands.
Something inside him yearned, like an iron shaving brought too close to a magnet, for ascension. To shuffle loose the mortal coil and rise, weightless, substanceless. Griefless. Face it: there were a lot of things he wouldn't mind leaving behind.
The mystery of Kheb chased him like a hound. What was Oma Desala, and how did she connect with the Osiris/Set myths? Her monk had spoken in Zen koans, or something very like them, and Daniel found himself cracking his East Asian mystic texts again, looking to Tau'ri history for solutions to intergalactic problems.
In the cloistering darkness, he murmured the ancient words aloud, tasting them for truth: “the field and its knower. Spirit is the knower of the field; matter is the field. I unite these two. Know these two - my higher and lower natures - as the womb of all beings. Therefore, I am the source and dissolution of the whole universe. Apareyam itas tv anyam prakritim viddhi me param jiva-bhutam maha-baho yayedam dharyate jagat. Etad-yonini bhutani sarvanity upadharaya aham krtsnasya jagatah prabhavah pralayas tatha.”
The Sanskrit didn't feel like home in his mouth, not like Egyptian – Abydonian – but the solid syllables of the words felt rhythmic, good, familiar, and his spirit quieted at their imagined sound.
2.
Jack knew that Daniel needed an anchor. He just didn't know where to find the chain. Sha're possessed links by the score: her lips, her voice, her finger in the sand, the smell of her body. The breathing artifact of her skin, her language straight out of Daniel's work, Daniel's dreams. Egypt had been his home as a child, surrounded by love and care and the dusty remnants of history. Sha're – Abydos – was that home come again.
She'd laughed at him, Daniel'd said. Kept him from taking himself – and everything else – too seriously. Daniel did tend pretty inexorably toward the weighty; that kind of laughter must've been good for him, called answering smiles from his lips and smoothed away the worry-lines around his big blue eyes.
When Daniel pressed his own arms around himself, after her loss, Jack saw in the gesture the absence of the loving ropes she'd used to tie him to the warm earth.
Even when Sha're's body had grown cold and grey in death, she'd bound him with the hope and need of her baby. Earthy needs again – hunger, comfort, family, the milky scent of a sleeping child's breath. But now Shifu was gone as well, ascended, undergone a transmutation from earth to air, from simple concreteness to ineffable, inchoate mystery. And Daniel was adrift, aloof, never really quite there.
Jack didn't know how to be the family that Daniel had lost. He couldn't be Sha're's welcoming, heating, physical embrace, nor could he be the sweet potentiality of a child. He couldn't even be the father that Daniel had lost much longer ago – Jack had had his chance at fatherhood, and he'd blown it – literally.
When Jack stood in the corridor outside of Daniel's office, light spilled out from beneath the closed door, pooling in the dark. Not bothering to knock, he found Daniel hunched intently over his desk, an array of coffee mugs at one elbow, a teetering stack of books in front of him. He didn't look up, or move, or blink at the intrusion, but remained bent and attentive to whatever it was he was working at. A half-burnt candle flickered and guttered on the shelf beside him.
The light flared off of the lenses of his glasses, hiding his eyes from view, but the lines of his back and neck bespoke tension, and his face looked pale and lax and worn.
“Hey,” Jack said at last. Daniel blinked up at him abstractedly, eyelashes fluttering as he visibly worked to detach himself from his thoughts.
“Jack,” he answered quietly. “... was there something you wanted?”
“Oh, just to know what the hell you're still doing here this late at night.”
“I'm busy,” Daniel said, eyes softening and going distant again. “Just doing some reading.”
Leaning over Daniel's shoulder, Jack peered at the characters falling down the open page. “What language?”
“Sanskrit. The Bhagavad-Gita.”
Jack was close enough to Daniel, physically speaking, to feel the small rise and fall of his breath, to sense the radiant heat of his body rising, but Daniel was closed up tight and giving nothing voluntarily.
“This for a mission?” Jack asked, knowing already the negatory answer.
Daniel's brow furrowed, his lips compressing so that his teeth could catch and worry the lower one. “No, just my own interest,” he said at last. “I haven't actually read the Gita for a very long time, and I thought – maybe I should remind myself what the words said, not just what language they were written in.”
Jack paused, silent, uncertain, afraid. At last he said, “So what does it say? Because this sounds pretty meaningless to me.” He'd had a friend who was into Zen, back in the sixties, but he hadn't paid much attention to books as a teenager, and certainly not to books of philosophy. His life had been simpler – he hadn't needed to.
Daniel let his glasses slip down his nose, and pressed his fingertips hard into his eye sockets. “I guess I'm trying to understand maya,” he said.
“Do you mean like those people in South America – or is this a girl's name?”
“Neither,” Daniel answered, and this time Jack caught a weak smile playing at the corners of his lips. “It's a Hindu doctrine – basically, that the world is illusory, that matter exists through the influence of spirit. Um. I think. It's a little complicated,” he said, and flashed his teeth. “This kind of philosophy has this way of totally overturning even the most basic of my assumptions, so I can have a hard time with it. S'why I generally stick to languages.”
“Not sure I much like the idea of none of this-” Jack waved a hand at their surroundings - “being real. Feels real enough.”
“Someone on the path would tell you that you only feel it to be so, and that your feeling comes from your cit, your consciousness and your sat, body, not from your ananda. 'The joy without which all existence is meaningless.' It's not actually that different from quantum physics – Sam'd tell you that the only reason why you can't put your hand through walls is that you're made of the same amount of nothingness that they are.”
The big words, foreign syllables, slipped down to sit uneasily in Jack's gut. Every instinct he had was screaming at him that this wasn't good – that Daniel really shouldn't be sitting here alone, in this small dark room, reading about how he was essentially nothing, about how life wasn't real. It really wasn't good. And now there was no one left to care for Daniel but him, so he'd have to do what he could.
“It's a bit late for that much philosophizing,” he said lightly. “Come on – you up for some late night takeout? Keep an old Colonel company for a while?”
Daniel's brow wrinkled, but he followed Jack obediently up, out of the mouth of the mountain.
3.
teeth lips heat opening motion salt take me now please oh god
yes right there oh yes oh oh oh
4.
Jack's mouth tasted of hops and yeast – Jack had got him as close to drunk as he could, considering Daniel's dislike of beer, and now he could smell the fermentation heavy on his friend's breath as he pulled him into a loose curl around his own body.
“Jack,” Daniel sighed, and pressed his face into Jack's ribs. The only time Daniel allowed himself to crave physical contact was in the aftermath of sex, and then he was like a man starved for it. Jack's large, rough-skinned hand petted absently through his hair, and Daniel could feel the flutter of his own lashes against Jack's skin.
He felt the weight of the words they weren't saying – the words he wasn't saying. I love you. You are my only one. Don't leave me. Don't let me leave you. They'd never spoken like that. This wasn't even a regular thing, not like a relationship. They just came together sometimes, in the aftermath of anything particularly good, especially bad. When one of them grew hungry enough for connection to reach out to the other.
He didn't know what had prompted it this time – nothing particularly terrible had happened to Jack of late, but he'd been insistent, corralling Daniel up out of the mountain, plying him with drink and long hot glances. There'd been no question as to what Jack had wanted. He'd been happy enough to oblige; Jack was nothing if not a generous and enjoyable partner in bed.
Maybe, Daniel thought, eyes closed against the dark, he wanted it to be more.
But he didn't know how to ask Jack for that – love had never been offered, not that kind of love anyway, just sex, simple. No strings to pull them into greater intimacy. Maybe this was all Jack wanted – a warrior's ritual, brothers in arms taking solely physical solace in one another in the absence of more proper partners. Nothing more than fucking, than being fucked. Not even a breach of heteronormative behavior, not really.
Jack's sleepy voice vibrated through him, rumbling against his cheekbones. “Daniel? You still awake?”
Not knowing what answer to give to that, he settled for a noncommittal “Mmm.”
Jack didn't say anything back, just wrapped Daniel in his arms more tightly, and soon his breathing grew level with sleep.
The sutras were turning over in Daniel's mind, and out of habit more than anything else he reached into them for a solution to love, to having. No suffering, origin, cessation, or path, his mind cast up to him. Na duhkha samudaya nirdoha margajna.
In possession is suffering. Through the surrender of attachments, peace. But, his mind protested, he'd laid down his burden on Kheb, he'd surrendered everything, and now he was lost without attachments. It didn't feel like peace.
But he had to believe, having left the child with Oma, having given up so much already, that there was something worthwhile at then end – along? - this path. It had to mean something. The alternative was too terrible to contemplate – it would mean that he'd truly failed.
He lay awake for a long time, thinking. Trying to not be distracted by the sounds of Jack's breathing beside him.
5.
Jack woke in the still, washed out early morning. Daniel was sleeping curled up on the far side of the bed, absolutely still. He felt a brief twinge of disappointment that Daniel hadn't slept closer, hadn't maintained their embrace through the night, but he suppressed it ruthlessly. Let the kid do as he liked – Jack had never made him make any promises, nor made any in return.
Getting up quietly, he began the small tasks of the day: bathroom, shave, coffeepot on, newspaper. He had to push aside several of Daniel's books, and something that looked like a scroll, before he had room at the table to spread his paper out – why Daniel couldn't leave work at work like a normal human being, he'd never understand – and as he picked up the stack he looked at the open text on top. The lefthand side was covered in Chinese characters, unintelligible to him as chicken scratch. The right was transliteration and translation. Why was Daniel working on anything in Chinese? It wasn't involved in any of the current SG missions, as far as Jack could remember.
He glanced back up at the stairs toward the bedroom as if he could somehow see Daniel sleeping through the space and matter between them, as if he could extract the answers from Daniel's quiet mind. He looked down at the open page: “Dao ke dao, fei chang dao; ming ke ming, fei chang ming. Wu, ming tian di zhi shi; you, ming wan wu zhi mu. Gu chang wu, yu yi guan qi miao, chang you, yu yi guan qi jiao. Ci liang zhe, tong chu er yi ming. Tong wei zhi xuan, xuan zhi you xuan, zhong miao zhi men. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.”
The words fell into the pit of his stomach like iron or steel, heavy and foreboding and impossible to ignore or shift away. He knew, in that breathless instant, that the books weren't for anything related to the 'Gate. This was Kheb-style talk, and Daniel was reading it just for fun. Not good. Not good at all. His heart was gnawed with worry, like a worm consuming at a piece of ripe fruit.
God. Daniel needed an anchor, but he didn't know how to be one for him.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-30 02:08 am (UTC)Loved the characterization, and will be thinking about this for a good long while. Thanks for posting it.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-30 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-30 04:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-30 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-30 10:06 am (UTC)Very well written! :)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-30 03:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-30 12:12 pm (UTC)Thank you. :-)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-30 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-30 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-30 05:04 pm (UTC)Gita
Date: 2010-04-30 07:04 pm (UTC)http://www.YogaVidya.com/gita.html
Re: Gita
Date: 2010-04-30 07:51 pm (UTC)thanks for the recommendation - I'll check it out!
no subject
Date: 2010-05-01 11:54 am (UTC)i love its leisurely pace and i love the meditative language.
you make it hurt so good. thank you.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-01 02:35 pm (UTC)that such a dirty thing...
Date: 2010-05-23 07:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-11 04:00 am (UTC)Beautiful writing.