Speak the Living
by Komos


In the cave of his quarters, his private chamber lined with the memory of stone, he speaks a word: hor'ac.

It means "first," or "beginning."

The serene candles cast primeval shadows -- each its own, so that the walls are populated with shadows, a conflict of shades, a striving of darkness. After more than ninety Terran years he barely remembers the world of his birth, but he remembers the two suns of Chulak, and the dual shadows they cast.

He remembers.

The youth had the largest eyes he had ever seen. Dark and limpid, they were a dog's eyes, Teal'c thought, not a man's. Not a warrior's. But dogs could be trained to hunt, to attack, to kill upon command. Every dog, from cowed mongrel to cosseted pet, bore the memory of its wolven forebears in its bones. He would train this one, just as he had been trained. He had had harder masters than Bra'tac before he came under the First Prime's tutelage. On anvils of discipline and brutality they had forged of him the iron Bra'tac wrought into a successor. If all went as planned, he would soon be First Prime of Apophis, and comrades such as Fro'tak and Va'lar -- men he had trained with, men who had been his peers since they were all this youth's age -- would be commanding phalanxes of their own as his subordinates. He would need men who were uniquely bonded to him alone. He would require more than loyalty and something very different from friendship. He would require terror, and love, and complete submission.

"Your name, dog," he demanded of the raw recruit.

Resentment flared in the limpid eyes, the glint of promise in a deep, dark pool. "Hor'ac," he said. "But I am no dog."

"You are," Teal'c told him, and inside he smiled at that spark of truculent defiance, a spark he would fan into a warrior's flame. Hor'ac meant "first"; it was the name given to an eldest son. It also meant "beginning." Appropriate, he thought "From this point forward, you are whatever I decree you to be. You are a dog, Hor'ac. But I will make of you a wolf."

And then, he thought, you will be again a dog, as I am a dog, as all Jaffa are dogs, brought to heel by our dubious gods, made to fight each other in pits. As the craven, drooling Jackal Guard are, so are we all.

Hor'ac was a watchful apprentice, intelligent and fearless. His flaw was judgment: he could never gauge where to best focus his efforts. It was not that he was easily distracted, it was that he made the wrong choices.

"You must learn your name," Teal'c would say. "You must learn where to strike first."

"That fortification is stronger," Hor'ac would say, as they analyzed the battlefield drawn with sticks in the dirt, rocks for emplacements, pebbles for ground troops. "It has more powerful weaponry. It will take more concentrated firepower to bring it down."

"And meanwhile the lone staff cannon on this hill has raked through your forces and depleted your strength by half, and you no longer have enough to take the fortification." Teal'c reached over to the twig that represented that isolated cannon, and snapped it with the fingers of one hand.

"If we take it fast enough," Hor'ac would argue, or "If we conceal ourselves under cover over here," or this, or that -- he always had an answer, and it was never the right one.

But his impassioned arguing endeared him to Teal'c, and he did not have to understand the reason for commands in order to follow them, and as the months passed they forged a bond of loyalty that Teal'c believed would be unbreakable.

Hor'ac was his beginning, the first of his six, and a worthy choice. But he never did learn to judge which enemy was the most dangerous. He never understood that it was Teal'c himself.

The offices and dwellings of Colonel O'Neill, Major Carter, and Daniel Jackson are filled with framed photographs of their families, their history, themselves. There are no photographs in Teal'c's quarters -- not even of Rya'c. The Goa'uld commissioned portraits and artistic holographs, which for those who inhabited the bodies of others had seemed a curious vanity to Teal'c until he had seen several base-resident airmen taking snapshots of each other before a banquet they were going to attend, and he understood that the Goa'uld wore bodies like fine clothing they could not resist showing off and wished to chronicle. The Jaffa chronicled nothing -- in images or song or writing. Theirs was an oral tradition, a spoken tradition, a dynamic tradition; a legacy of deeds and the competence to do them. Only the highest among them learned to read and write; the rest were what the Tau'ri might call "cannon fodder," and no resources were wasted on their finer education. No resources were wasted on images of anyone.

Teal'c has no photo, no painting of his wife, and he has acquired nothing with which to decorate his walls during his time on Earth. Only light adorns them, and shadows, and the images memory conjures on their rough grey surfaces.

"Ger'toc," he says, softly, and "Rok'el."

He could hear them at their end of the barracks -- low moans of pleasure, the creak of the bunk. He could not help but find the sounds arousing, but he made no move to assert his right to be serviced by them as their master, and he made no move to give himself relief. He had not taken his pleasure in that way since he was a youth himself; it had been a joyful thing then, and he envied them that now. Now he used such activity only to bind them more closely to him. To punish, sometimes; to assert dominance when they failed to take the lesson of his superior strength and skill in the field; most often to make them love him. A gentle touch was profoundly effective after hours of drilling them to the point of despair or rage. They worked hard to earn his sexual favor.

He loved them in return, his three, and that was as it should be. But he loved his new wife as well, and he made love to her, and sought her counsel when he was troubled and her comfort when he was suffering. Such feelings of dedication and affection as he had for her were more than frowned upon. Coupling among warriors was a weapon, a form of bonding, a necessary release, a means of control; coupling with women was to make more Jaffa. Falling in love with the woman he was meant to impregnate, the woman he had taken to wed in order to assert his legal paternity over all offspring, was, he believed, his first rebellion, though he recognized it only when he began to have glimmers of what the third might be. She had not yet come with child, and he had not forsaken her as bidden for a more fertile womb; that was his second rebellion. Putting loyalty to his mate before his responsibility to provide Apophis with more warriors.

His long absences, away at war or here training in the citadel of warriors, did not help matters. He did not know what would happen if she did not conceive before the turn of the coming year. He did not know what would happen if she bore him only females. To fulfill Bra'tac's aspirations for him and become First Prime, he should show himself capable of seeding many sons in her. He had started late as it was, deeply enamored of the temple priestess Shaun'auc, whom he could never have; resistant to the overtures of many marriageable women. Drey'auc had been a light in the darkness.

She was also a vulnerability. If it was ever discovered that he was more attached to her than he ought to be, she could be easily used against him. She was a fine Jaffa woman, proud and lithe and strong and capable, but her warrior training had not gone well; she would be of little help defending Chulak should another System Lord attack while the bulk of Apophis's forces were elsewhere. She needed defending; she needed protecting. She needed a strong husband of high station. She needed him -- and he needed her to, and that was a weakness too.

Worst of all, he did not think she loved him back. She believed in their people with all her heart, and believed that she should serve him, bear him children, make a home for him when his responsibilities permitted him to bide there. She believed that his strongest passions should be reserved for his warrior brethren. His ardor disturbed her as much as it satisfied her. After he pleasured her, she sometimes thanked him, with a surprise that repetition never attenuated, for exceeding the requirements of the marriage bed. He told her much, expressed many thoughts to her that could find voice nowhere else, but he was never able to tell her how deeply that gratitude hurt him.

He lay in his hard bunk, separate from the rest and raised up where it was warmer, and listened to the sounds of night drills without and the sounds of passion within, and thought, Three more. Three more and he would have his six, and then he could begin to consider what to do about the doubts that plagued his mind, and examine the thoughts of Tazek'sur that haunted it, and entertain the glimmers of a third rebellion.

He sits on the hard floor of his quarters, the chill of stone seeping through the plain carpet and into his tailbone, his ankles, his groin. On this planet they believe in ghosts, cold spectral revenants whose ectoplasmic touch is an icy smear. It would not be difficult to believe that such chill spirits infest his heart. His body feels like a miniature of the stone chamber in which he dwells, itself a miniature of the hollow mountain in which it was carved.

He has lived inside a rock for nearly eight years.

He has lived inside a stony shell his entire life.

He says the word "cha'nor," which means "loved."

Cha'nor's reflexes were slow. He was a mountain of a man, meaty and large-boned, and he excelled in the ancient form of wrestling called mast'ak'abai, in which opponents of vast weight were matched one against another. Frequently he could muscle his way to victory, but with sticks or blades he was hopelessly outmatched by the smaller and more agile. Though an extraordinary marksman, he was far too heavy to climb up and into the places from which sharpshooters were best employed, and he was always slow to fire. He was equally slow to anger, and always of good humor, and he quickly became the favorite of the barracks.

Affection made Teal'c go no easier on him in his training. Over months of hard drilling and the weeks of gruelling campaigning that followed, Cha'nor's excess weight melted away and his heavy muscle strung tight and strong as steel. His heart also hardened, and his good humor dried up into a gritty bitterness. He could sometimes be vindictive, in his slow way, exacting vengeance days or weeks after a slight or altercation.

They were hard men living among hard men, in a hard way of life, under the rule of a cruel and capricious lord. Teal'c had seen such changes in the warriors around him before, as they began to realize they were not fighting for honor or right, but at the whim of a god who cared nothing for them. In Cha'nor he took it as a hopeful sign: perhaps Cha'nor shared some of his own growing doubts, and could be approached with notions that Teal'c had not yet felt at ease to venture even with Bra'tac.

But there was always another battle, always another war, always another call to arms. As the months passed and he got to know his four better, there was less and less time to entertain notions, or ideals. They fought for their lives and they fought for each other. They no longer knew why they were fighting for their god, except that there had never been any choice.

In the seven, nearly eight years in which he has served with the Tau'ri, Teal'c has approached many Jaffa in an attempt to persuade them to throw off the shackles of their oppression and repudiate their false gods. Some of them have listened, and many more have tried to kill him.

He will never know what his three, his four, his five, his six would have done.

He will never know which way they would have stepped, when they found themselves on the knife edge between loyalty to him and fear and worship of Apophis. He will never know who would have won the battle for their allegiance.

"Kalach," he says softly.

Soul.

Kalach fought him every step of the way. He was fierce in his beliefs, fierce in his struggles with Teal'c for supremacy, fierce in his attempts to usurp Teal'c's position, fierce in his passions, fierce in the dark dreams that plagued his sleep.

With fierce Kalach at his side, with Kalach as his fifth and as his second-in-command, Teal'c was certain that they would be victorious in whatever he called upon them to do. His five were unsurpassed. His pride in them was boundless.

Teal'c watched Kalach in battle, the deceptive laziness with which he moved, the beautiful fluidity as he invited his opponents to underestimate him and then slipped them the killing blow. Teal'c thought, I made you. You are mine. He watched them all -- wolfish Hor'ac a blur of savagery, Ger'toc and Rok'el in deadly synchrony, Cha'nor unerring and inexorable, Kalach magnificent -- and loved them all with a ferocity that burned.

With all his soul he wished for a better victory to lead them to.

Many of the shadows the candles cast take the shape of the mementos scattered about his quarters, small items that remind him of his culture if not so much of anywhere that he would call home, now, or ever had called home. The house he shared with Drey'auc, where they lived with Rya'c when he was small, had been built for them by Apophis, and belonged to Apophis. Drey'auc and Rya'c had been his home, not the house; but Drey'auc is dead now and Rya'c off learning to be a man, and home is gone.

It used to be said by the Jaffa that home was not where one was born, or where one found oneself after being bought or traded or won by Goa'uld masters, but where one went after the final battle. Home was death, and what lay beyond it; to die was to go home at last.

Then they found Kheb. Their dream of the afterlife turned out to be very much a part of the living universe. Where, now, is home to be? Where will the Jaffa seek to go, when they go home? What reward will they strive to be worthy of?

Where should he hope that his dead have gone?

"You could adopt Valhalla," Daniel Jackson suggested to him once. "I'm sure the Asgard would be OK with that." Taking him seriously, as he did at times in those days, Teal'c researched it, but it didn't seem suitable to his purpose. Sto'Vo'Kor would suit him better, he thinks, or Gre'thor; those are as much an invention of storytellers as Valhalla, but at times he believes that all faith and all fictions have origins as real as Kheb, as the Asgard. He would like to meet a Klingon. Among Jaffa, a roar of challenge and heartbreak upon the death of a warrior brother would be unseemly, but it is a cry he would have liked to loose to the heavens all too many times. It is a cry he can feel bursting to be free of him, a pressure he sometimes thinks will crack his chest.

Klavel ha, klavel ha, klavel ha. Too late. Too late. Too late.

He says the word aloud: "Kla'vel." The root word means "late." In its inflected form, it can mean either "shy" or "stubborn." It is a name often given to a child who tarried in leaving the womb. It is a name a mother gives.

Kla'vel was the most naturally talented fighter Teal'c had ever seen. He also had a gift with weaponry -- an intuitive understanding of technology that they were raised to believe was the magic of the gods. He had only to look at a thing to see how it could be fixed if it was broken, made more efficient if it was not. Kla'vel was also a reticent speaker, owing to a bad stutter. He sent a great many apprentices and not a few veteran warriors to the healers before the mockery stopped, but stop it did. Still, he rarely spoke. And he was stubborn. Kla'vel never surrendered; it was said of him that he never took a backwards step.

Teal'c loved him for his steadfastness and for the serenity of his company. They would sit for long hours honing and oiling their weapons, buffing their armor, repairing their gear, and say never a word, and Teal'c would emerge as refreshed and stimulated as from a night of carousing with their more boisterous fellows.

The word "kla'vel" still hanging in the room, Teal'c looks down at himself, his powerful limbs arranged cross-legged and cross-armed, a position from which he may not rise easily to take up arms, a posture of peace. His flesh glows, candle-gilded. He has oiled it in an unguent of deathsbane, an ineradicable weed indigenous to Chulak; the sweet herbal scent is an aid to meditation, the oil's effect upon the senses is both invigorating and relaxing. He wears nothing but his skin.

He has been stripped of his rituals. The rituals of worship Apophis required were not demonstrations of faith but supplication of a false god's favor, appeasement of a false god's vanity. Many Jaffa traditions remain, and some few Jaffa rites -- the Rite of Mal'shuran, the Rite of Everlasting Union, the lighting of the funeral pyre -- but they hold less relevance for him as the years wear on, and some, such as the implantation of prim'ta, will soon be rendered obsolete. The sacred places of the Jaffa have been revealed as wish-fulfilling myth, or, worse, twisted by what Daniel Jackson would call propaganda: Kheb is no afterlife but merely a planet where one of the Ascended dwelled; the Temple of Dakara is a symbol not of Jaffa strength but of Goa'uld enslavement. The spiritual beliefs he held as a Jaffa are failing him. He has studied the religions of the Tau'ri, visited their places of worship, spoken to their holy men, but their faiths are of their world and none speak to him; he opened himself to their call and no call came.

He has made inquiries of the Tau'ri with whom he is closest. During a two-day quarantine not long after the foothold situation, when they were gathered in the common room of the isolation suite, he broached the subject with his three teammates.

"You mean religious affiliation?" Samantha Carter said, abstractedly, the keys of her notebook computer still clicking beneath her fingertips, her eyes still on the screen. "Episcopal, I guess. That's what my tags say, anyway. That's what my family's always been. Well, except for Aunt Agnes and the whole L. Ron Hubbard thing, but we don't talk about that."

"You do not share the faith of your forebears?"

She frowned, her fingers pausing on the keys. "I don't know. I go to Christmas and Easter services. My mother was a lay minister and my father was on the vestry -- that's a sort of guiding body of laypeople."

"I am familiar with the term."

"Oh, yeah." She smiled, looking away from her work and over at him for the first time. "I forgot that whole church-mosque-synagogue kick you were on for a while there." Her eye was caught by Daniel Jackson, whose facial expression apparently issued some kind of warning although by the time Teal'c followed her gaze he had smoothed his features back into mild interest. "Sorry, I don't mean to ... make light of your question. I have to confess that I'm really just not that observant. When I was growing up it was more of a social network, a community thing. The spiritual side of it I just ... I don't know, tuned out I guess."

"Oh, admit it, Carter," O'Neill said, head bowed over a portable game unit he plied with boyish intensity. "You only go for the pot-luck suppers."

"Hey, my cooking is not that bad," she said, and O'Neill replied, "I have two words for you: blackened tuna casserole," and Daniel Jackson pointed out that that was three words as Major Carter said "It was not blackened!," and debate continued for several minutes until Teal'c said, "And you, Daniel Jackson? Have you inherited no tradition of religious observance?"

Daniel Jackson stared at him, blinked, and then emitted a bark of laughter that startled O'Neill enough to disrupt his control of the game, resulting in a series of explosive sound effects and a string of muttered curses. Daniel Jackson, in an apologetic attempt to give genuine reply, said, "I'm an anthropologist, Teal'c. Religion is something I study, not something I ... practice."

"I was of the understanding that for many the two pursuits are the same," Teal'c said, quite seriously. "And that there are many scientists -- anthropologists and physicists among them -- for whom religious faith is not inimical to scientific inquiry and discovery."

Daniel sighed. "I respect faith," he said. "I respect it and I take it very seriously. Other people's faith. To answer your question, my parents' religion was archaeology, and it's mine too as far as that goes. My foster parents practiced Reform Judaism, which you know from that time I took you to temple. I admired their scholarship and I envied the strength of their belief, but I didn't share it. I went to Hebrew school to learn Hebrew and the Torah. They would have liked me to be bar mitzvahed and I wasn't comfortable with that and they didn't push. That was my last brush with organized religion. Unless, as I say, you count academia."

From his sprawl on the sofa, O'Neill said, "Don't even think about it, Teal'c," before Teal'c had even turned to him.

"His tags say Catholic," Major Carter supplied, perhaps in retaliation for the denigration of her famed casserole -- which, Teal'c vividly recalled, was indeed quite black on the surface, although he had found the interior fairly edible.

"Typo," O'Neill said. "Been tryin' to get that fixed for years. Once something's in the system, good luck. You know how it is."

"An incorrect supposition based on your ethnicity?" Teal'c ventured -- with care, because he was not unaware that this was a touchy subject for O'Neill.

"Oh, me and the Catholic Church go way back," O'Neill said. "Irish father, Italian mother. Believe me, that's all you want to know."

On the contrary, Teal'c thought. There is a great deal more I want to know. But you do not wish to tell me, and I believe I understand.

"Bet you made an adorable altar boy," Major Carter said, gaze on her screen, a twinkle in her eyes, keyboard clicking away.

"Yeah and that's as far as this goes," O'Neill said, his head coming up so sharply that the room stilled. They frequently forgot how formidable their leader was -- Teal'c as well, although less often than the others. But in the set of O'Neill's face he saw a mirror of his own, and he had his answer. The ritual that had framed O'Neill's life had been stripped from him more slowly -- a gradual, torturous flaying, Teal'c suspected, layer by agonizing layer -- but no less irrevocably than his own. Teal'c sought to replace what he had lost. O'Neill simply endured it.

Into the silence, after a long moment, Daniel Jackson said, "You know what I believe in?"

"Letting well enough alone?" O'Neill said significantly, and returned his focus to the handheld game.

"Actually, Jack, difficult as this may be for you to believe, what I was going to say has no bearing whatsoever on your personal issues with the -- "

"Budge? Frazer? Levi-Strauss?" Major Carter said, cutting him off quickly.

"Nooooo, what I was going to -- What? That's an odd assortment of sources to pull out of thin air. I mean, Levi-Strauss I can kind of see, except that it's more a catalogue and explication of structure than a theoretical -- "

Cutting him off in turn, Teal'c prompted quietly, "What do you believe in, Daniel Jackson?"

Just as quietly, and closing the book on his lap, after a pause that made the others look up from their electronic devices, he replied, "Us."

After a longer pause, O'Neill said, with light casualness, "That, I can get behind."

"Me too," Major Carter said. She smiled warmly at Daniel Jackson, then cocked her head at Teal'c as if to say, That work for you, Teal'c?

Indeed, Teal'c thought, and said.

Daniel Jackson went back to his book, O'Neill to his game, Major Carter to her calculations. They passed the remainder of the quarantine in good company with a minimum of bickering. He remembers those days with some fondness, as he remembers long afternoons in the barracks, long waits for battles to begin, long transports to distant star systems, and the camaraderie he found with his six. For all his mental anguish over rebellion and truth and gods, for all he loved his wife in defiance of custom, for all he feared would come to pass and all he feared would not, those were happy times. He loved his men, and he was happy there.

He took Kalach first, because he was the fastest, and the canniest, and the least trusting -- because Kalach would not waste one blink of an eye on stunned shock before killing the master who had turned to fire upon him. The Tau'ri leader took Kla'vel, who fired too late to stop him. Teal'c had lost precious seconds tossing his own weapon to the Tau'ri leader and acquiring Kalach's, but two of the remaining four were firing on the unarmed captives rather than on the armed attackers -- attempting to carry out Apophis's commannd rather than neutralize the opposition, a profound lapse of tactical judgment he had trained them for every moment he told them to put their duty, always, before their lives -- and Teal'c took Ger'toc and Rok'el in short order. The Tau'ri leader took Cha'nor as they fired on each other, but it was slower reflexes that killed Cha'nor, and if not this time would have killed him the next time, or the next. Teal'c should have replaced him long ago, but for one brief hateful moment he was glad he had not.

Hor'ac, who had been the first of them, Teal'c took last, as he was turning to fire on the Tau'ri leader. It was the last time Hor'ac would misjudge who his most dangerous enemy was.

The Jaffa beyond the portcullis scattered. Except that they were Jaffa, and Serpent Guard, they were not his men -- his hand-picked men, his hand-fed, hand-trained, handled men, terrorized and loved, dominated and nurtured. He felt both scorn and gratitude for their cowardice, and at the chappa'ai he fired upon them without compunction, for they were not his.

It was not his final betrayal -- later, captured and drugged and subjected repeatedly to the sarcophagus, he would turn again, upon his new comrades, back to trot at his false god's heel, and only Bra'tac's love and iron cruelty would break him of the leash -- but it was his worst betrayal, for he had made them, and he had loved them, and they were his.

It was the betrayal he had been destined for, the one he had to commit -- and the one he could not forgive himself.

Each year on the date of his insurrection as reckoned by the primary Tau'ri calendar, he performs this private, homemade rite of remembrance. Samantha Carter knows of it, and once asked him why he didn't celebrate instead. "This is the day you claimed your freedom," she said. "I know you said the Jaffa don't celebrate birthdays, but isn't this a kind of birthday? The birth of freedom?"

"Your association with Daniel Jackson is showing," he said, face warming with a contraction of muscle that felt the way he supposed a smile must feel, and that he knew she would read as a smile although it did not look like one to her. She smiled in return, but it faded as he gave more serious reply: "Jaffa celebrate nothing but victory."

Jaffa do not celebrate birthdays. Jaffa do not celebrate life. Jaffa do not even celebrate death; though they honor it, they do so in silence.

He is so sorely weary of silence.

"Hor'ac," he says, to the concrete and candle-shadow. "Cha'nor. Ger'toc. Rok'el. Kla'vel. Kalach."

He has spoken the names of the dead two times. When he has spoken them thrice -- once for each rebellion along his path to becoming shol'va, each betrayal of his place in the life he was born to -- his private ritual will be concluded.

Always before he has felt satisfaction at this point. The third speaking of the dead is merely for completion's sake. But this time it does not feel like enough.

The dead are dead. He cannot change their fate or take back his part in it, and he would not if he could. Given the chance, he would try to sway them instead, persuade them to his cause; one of them, he knew, would have embraced his ideal of freedom, and one other, he thought, might have come around to support his rebellion eventually, perhaps with Bra'tac's help. But there was no time for explanations or persuasions. The opportunity, and Teal'c's recognition of it, had come too suddenly. To contradict their god's orders, command them to let the captives go, would be to risk them turning on him. To appeal to them for understanding would give them time to fire on him. He could not be sure what they would choose and so he could not afford to offer choice. Quick action was of the essence; quick action untelegraphed, unexpected. He would act no differently if faced with the same circumstance today.

"I have done deeds for which I cannot forgive even myself," Bra'tac his master said to him once. "As will you. Men such as you and I have only the comfort of those times we make a difference."

He does not know why he cannot absolve himself of those six men, his six men. He does not know why the rituals he invents do less and less to comfort him.

Nevertheless, he will finish. His mouth is forming the word "hor'ac" for the third and final time when a hard knock at the door brings him awkwardly and not quickly enough to his feet.

"Enter," he says. He never locks his door.

It is an airman come to summon him because his phone and pager were switched off. SG-1 is required as emergency backup for SG-9 on P3X-666.

He does not waste time dressing only to undress again to change into battle uniform; he is out the door and running naked down the corridor, mindless of the Tau'ri's incomprehensible nudity taboos. Within ten minutes he is geared up and striding toward the embarkation room behind O'Neill, behind Major Carter and Daniel Jackson arguing about which of them is to blame for the situation. So different, he thinks; so different is O'Neill's command from his, so different are O'Neill's three from his six.

Then there is no more time for thinking. There is only action. The roar of weapons. A flanking maneuver he can see coming but cannot relay to O'Neill before O'Neill himself goes down, perhaps in trying to respond to the same realization. Major Carter runs to give the colonel aid; Colonel Dixon is pinned down. With the ease of decades in command of armies, Teal'c issues orders, clears a route to the gate for the evacuation of O'Neill, sends one medic and three Marines and the rest of SG-13 after him. Then he takes the other medic and the remaining member of SG-5 and goes in search of their missing personnel.

When he finds them, when he sees Janet Fraiser's body, when he understands at last the incomprehensible words that Daniel Jackson has been shouting over the radio, he lets out a howl to rock the very foundations of the earth. A howl he has held in for nearly a hundred years. A howl that will clear the way for the healer's spirit to safely enter the afterlife, with none to dare impede her.

He does not know how many Jaffa he kills that day, to clear their path back to the Tau'ri Marines and the gate they are holding open. He depletes three staff weapons, snatching up replacements from the hands of the dead as he goes, bearing the body of Doctor Fraiser on his shoulder. The Marine and the medic he brought with him bear the litter carrying the wounded Airman Wells. He believes that the Marine rigged some means, on the fly, of bearing his end of the load while also operating one of his weapons. It is a habit too old, too ingrained to be entirely suppressed: he is proud of that Marine. He is proud of the warriors he serves with.

Back at the SGC, there is contained chaos. There are debriefings. There is news that O'Neill will survive.

Then there is silence.

He returns to his quarters. He sits unmoving for many hours, staring at the memories and walls.

Eventually, he surfaces. He thinks to sleep but knows he cannot; sleep is still too new, still too unknown, a territory he dare not enter in a state such as this. He thinks to meditate, but knows that too will be impossible, and these past hours of shocked stillness were an approximation of it anyway.

At last, letting the thought come to him from where it has hovered at the edge of his awareness for some time, he thinks to begin his interrupted ritual again from the start. Not even a day has passed; it is still the anniversary. Of his killing of his men, of his freedom, and now of Janet Fraiser's death. He takes out the bottle of oil, unboxes the candles and arrays them around his quarters, readies the traditional Chulakian flaresticks with which he will light them. He is preparing to undress, to bare his sins to the light of memory, when his thoughts turn to Major Carter and what he knows she will be asked to do.

She will be asked to speak.

He leaves off his preparations. He sits down in the chair at his desk and thinks for a long time. Then he powers up his computer terminal. The screen casts an unearthly glow on the concrete walls. A blue glow far colder than the golden warmth of candles, but appropriate to his purpose.

It takes him several hours to compile the information he requires. When he has assembled it in light on the screen, he takes out a sheet of paper, the flesh and memory of trees, and with almost ritual solemnity sharpens a single pencil of wood and lead. For the next hour, he writes, in the alien longhand Daniel Jackson so laboriously taught him seven Terran years ago. He must write very small; there are many words to fit on the single sheet, but they represent the achievements of a single, indomitable soul, and he wishes to bestow them entire, a single leaf, fragile and precious as a human life and filled from edge to edge.

The words are names.

He has finished with his invented rituals, his poor substitutes for belief and for community. He is finished speaking the dead. He is finished speaking alone.

When it is time, when she is ready, he will pass this sheet to Samantha Carter. If she believes as he does, now, she will understand it, and embrace it.

Then he will stand with his friends, and together they will listen while she speaks the living.

end

Notes: Thanks to akaspeedo for last-minute lightning beta suggestions I wish I could have implemented better. Written for Mish! in the Teal'c ficathon. She requested team, Teal'c using knowledge from his experience as First Prime, and Teal'c getting naked as a bonus.

Email Komos
Back to Main Page