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domarzioneI was writing something more serious last night when the Chadwick Boseman news broke and it put a wet blanket on both my story and my baseball team having a day of ridiculous glory.
Today I am not yet ready to return to introspection, nor is my baseball team returning to glory, plus it is damp and gloomy out and so... more crossover silliness.
I got a prompt for The Old Guard in Atlantis and while I'm sure Andy versus the Wraith would be a battle, I went in a different direction:
Daniel Jackson’s theories about aliens and the pyramids at Giza aren’t theories because he was there. He saw it all with his own eyes and the knowledge has been burning a hole in his breast for millennia.
Lykon would have rolled his eyes at his need to tell the world the truth, but he’s been dead for centuries and Andromache is a different leader. She’s harder, more fearful of what might happen if their truth is known, and so she forces Daniel to keep the secrets buried within. Quynh – and later Nicolo and Yusuf – think his desire to share the true history of the world is amusing and he’s just asking to get killed (”repeatedly!”) for communing with dark forces. But none of them are interested in fighting Andromache over the matter.
Daniel doesn’t leave them because of this. He leaves because without Quynh Andromache’s hard edges have become diamond-tough and nobody can touch her without coming away bleeding. And all they do now is wage war against forces they cannot stop and Daniel’s tired of dying in pain for nothing. Yusuf and Nicolo have found a balance between bloodshed and bliss, able to put away their swords and find comfort in each other and in the arts, but Daniel can’t. He’s too old for this, he realizes. Andromache’s too old for this, too, but she’s too angry to realize that they are living out the tale of Sisyphus – which was created because of them in the first place. Life imitating art imitating life over millennia.
He sets up shop first in Heidelberg, teaching languages and history, and spends a few pleasant decades before he moves on. Oxford, Zadar, Besancon, Siena, a few other places in between frustrating stints as tutors. But as the speed of communication and travel grow faster, as print completely overtakes manuscript, it gets harder to disappear into a university’s walls and his breaks between become longer until they become permanent. He builds himself a manor with a library to rival Alexandria’s, abandoning it every so often to return as his own descendant. It’s a good life and he honestly regrets the way the world keeps speeding up around him and making him keep up.
He writes his books on Giza in the 1990s because he can, because it’s taken him a few hundred years to realize that Andromache won’t do anything – that she can’t do anything. The books are treated as the prating of a lunatic and the shunning it gets him is the modern equivalent of being accused of witchcraft. He doesn’t care. (He does, because the worst part of immortality is that he has to bear witness to humanity’s inability to learn from the past over and over again.) The others send him the reviews; envelopes stuffed with newspaper clips and also magazine ads for junk food because the idea of making chemicals taste like real food is ridiculous to them all. We are laughing at you but also with you, the envelopes (always in Nicky’s scrawl) say. We miss you, but we’re glad you are happy.
He accepts Catherine Langford’s invitation because she’s too old to be a prankster, not realizing what she has actually found until he’s faced with the stones themselves. The relief nearly makes him weep; the USAF’s intransigence and stupidity is what actually makes the tears flow.
He stays on Abydos because it’s a fight that means something and because Sha’re makes him feel in ways he hasn’t in centuries. That they won’t blink at his immortality is a bonus, although he doesn’t tell anyone that he did not need the sarcophagus to revive and found it cramped and smelly. He could stay on Abydos for centuries, he thinks, learning the way of the stars and the Stargate. He doesn’t get that, of course, and the cost of it is devastating, but he is glad for his choices.
Today I am not yet ready to return to introspection, nor is my baseball team returning to glory, plus it is damp and gloomy out and so... more crossover silliness.
I got a prompt for The Old Guard in Atlantis and while I'm sure Andy versus the Wraith would be a battle, I went in a different direction:
Daniel Jackson’s theories about aliens and the pyramids at Giza aren’t theories because he was there. He saw it all with his own eyes and the knowledge has been burning a hole in his breast for millennia.
Lykon would have rolled his eyes at his need to tell the world the truth, but he’s been dead for centuries and Andromache is a different leader. She’s harder, more fearful of what might happen if their truth is known, and so she forces Daniel to keep the secrets buried within. Quynh – and later Nicolo and Yusuf – think his desire to share the true history of the world is amusing and he’s just asking to get killed (”repeatedly!”) for communing with dark forces. But none of them are interested in fighting Andromache over the matter.
Daniel doesn’t leave them because of this. He leaves because without Quynh Andromache’s hard edges have become diamond-tough and nobody can touch her without coming away bleeding. And all they do now is wage war against forces they cannot stop and Daniel’s tired of dying in pain for nothing. Yusuf and Nicolo have found a balance between bloodshed and bliss, able to put away their swords and find comfort in each other and in the arts, but Daniel can’t. He’s too old for this, he realizes. Andromache’s too old for this, too, but she’s too angry to realize that they are living out the tale of Sisyphus – which was created because of them in the first place. Life imitating art imitating life over millennia.
He sets up shop first in Heidelberg, teaching languages and history, and spends a few pleasant decades before he moves on. Oxford, Zadar, Besancon, Siena, a few other places in between frustrating stints as tutors. But as the speed of communication and travel grow faster, as print completely overtakes manuscript, it gets harder to disappear into a university’s walls and his breaks between become longer until they become permanent. He builds himself a manor with a library to rival Alexandria’s, abandoning it every so often to return as his own descendant. It’s a good life and he honestly regrets the way the world keeps speeding up around him and making him keep up.
He writes his books on Giza in the 1990s because he can, because it’s taken him a few hundred years to realize that Andromache won’t do anything – that she can’t do anything. The books are treated as the prating of a lunatic and the shunning it gets him is the modern equivalent of being accused of witchcraft. He doesn’t care. (He does, because the worst part of immortality is that he has to bear witness to humanity’s inability to learn from the past over and over again.) The others send him the reviews; envelopes stuffed with newspaper clips and also magazine ads for junk food because the idea of making chemicals taste like real food is ridiculous to them all. We are laughing at you but also with you, the envelopes (always in Nicky’s scrawl) say. We miss you, but we’re glad you are happy.
He accepts Catherine Langford’s invitation because she’s too old to be a prankster, not realizing what she has actually found until he’s faced with the stones themselves. The relief nearly makes him weep; the USAF’s intransigence and stupidity is what actually makes the tears flow.
He stays on Abydos because it’s a fight that means something and because Sha’re makes him feel in ways he hasn’t in centuries. That they won’t blink at his immortality is a bonus, although he doesn’t tell anyone that he did not need the sarcophagus to revive and found it cramped and smelly. He could stay on Abydos for centuries, he thinks, learning the way of the stars and the Stargate. He doesn’t get that, of course, and the cost of it is devastating, but he is glad for his choices.
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Date: 2020-08-29 21:45 (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2020-08-30 01:03 (UTC)For sure - every other con/"plan" would involve him getting killed.
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Date: 2020-08-30 11:48 (UTC)Also, on slightly related note - TOG official (?) transcript showed on my flist yesterday, maybe you'll find it useful https://starwatcher-fic.dreamwidth.org/31010.html :).
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Date: 2020-09-03 16:20 (UTC)