Dream with both plot and visuals. Nice.
Oct. 10th, 2012 03:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethSo, I woke up at three in the morning and instead of getting back to sleep I'm writing down this dream.
Useful.
I dreamed I was part of SG1. That's actually one of my MarySue getting to sleep dreams, that I shared a brain with Daniel Jackson for five years and then we ascended and came back as separate people and I married Jack O'Neill and... I never wrote it down on account of clearly nobody wants to read all that. But that was how I was part of SG1, that accumulation of years of insomniac ramblings that make a really long story. I had my areas of expertise, religious and cultural, though obviously Daniel was more competent at everything ever. Teal'c was a solid and reliable friend. And the four of us had become stranded in a different galaxy, a new different galaxy with new different rules, including chanting monks with apparently magical powers and demon lawyers.
Angel crossovers on another planet: tricky.
I dreamed Lindsey MacDonald, looking ridiculously young (season one was a long time ago). His hair was grown out sort of half way between lawyer spiky and later long, and he couldn't really keep it out of his face, so he used it to hide his expression a lot. It was hard to get a read on him, what side he was on. ... actually it was easy: his side, population one. I dreamed us all playing field hockey so that was pretty literal. Just messing around practising, none of us having played since high school, just picking up sticks and knocking balls around.
Osiris was there and insisting it was a game already and she would win and then nobody wanted to be her team so we were just going around her and knocking balls at the goal painted on the wall over and over and driving her nuts.
Clearly this is a high stakes adventure. :eyeroll:
But it was part of the theme, that there was this pathetic petty false god, and we'd been dealing with false gods for so long, and now here were demons and magic, and faith had gone kind of... hollow. You could see what worked, but calling it good or evil or even religion just seemed like a lot of work. They were creepy snakes that made my head tingle, was all. The snakes were real and Eden... wasn't. At least around here.
Daniel and I understood each other on this one. We exchanged weary glances, he took the Saving Osiris-Sarah job, I wandered off after Lindsey.
The most distinctive thing about Lindsey in this dream was how he dressed for this hockey thing. I couldn't decide if it was schoolboy fetish or just modified office wear. Shirt and tie, sleeves rolled right up, tie loose, over very very very short shorts. Grey shorts of trouser material, not sport shorts. If he stood up straight they covered all the necessary, just. If he leant over even a little, say to get the stick on the ground even... oh the view improved immensely.
I do not know what he was wearing on his feet. My eyes never got down that low.
That is one very good looking man.
So even in the dream I had to stop and *facepalm* and bang my head against the wall because this is not my kink, I don't have a schoolboy thing, or a hockey thing, really! ... evidence of my own reactions aside ... He's standing there looking so good he's rewriting my preferences with a very distinct space set aside for this visual. That's... I don't even... And then I look up and he has this lazy confident smirk on his face like he knows exactly what he's doing to me, and how is that even fair? ... and I don't have a schoolboy thing, but oh do I ever have a Lindsey thing. That man is so cute it should be criminal. And he knows it.
So. Lindsey. Short shorts. Hockey sticks. I dreamed the texture on the hockey stick in a lot more detail than I've thought about it in years, the fuzzy cloth bit and the smooth bit, and the clack when wood met the ball, and how the flat and curve behave differently and flipping the stick over to keep the flat against the ball. Interesting somatic memories. All movement and muscle and texture as well as sight and sound.
I also dreamed getting really suggestive about handling this big stick.
Not subtle, but Lindsey noticed and did not look away.
So that was working.
Then the plot kicked in, and someone arrived with a message sheet covered in colorful swirls that represented a particular chant, and I quit playing around to go find Teal'c, because he and I had been the ones to learn what these things meant, and I didn't remember. Not all the words. And it seemed really quite urgent.
Emergency alarms assembled everyone in the library, which was the biggest space, multi layered and full of excellent cosy leather chairs. Well, leather-ish. School leather. ANYway, grand and complex space, multiple entrances and exits, some to a corridor, most to outside. People kept pouring in and I tried to get them organised. There were teenagers in ridiculous fashions, extreme like manga and impractical. Some came running, most were strolling, and sealing the perimeter was going to shut people out if we did it in any useful time at all. Most of the locals just did not know how to take emergencies seriously. So the library filled up lacadaisically and people milled around to find their friends with no real organisation, noisy and blocking each other, and it was getting on for chaos. There was also my team, SG1. Teal'c was up the far end on some steps, in his grey robes with his gold showing. I gave him the message scroll and he immediately started the chant. ... it was co-ordinates and vectors to the tune of Good King Wenceslas. No I don't even know, my brain, it is a strange, sad place.
So Teal'c was leading the chant, but the locals weren't joining in. If we were going to build a psychic defence at all, let alone a strong one, just the team wouldn't be enough. So I went around telling people to join in, getting more frustrated, snappy, eventually shouting. One teen girl with blue hair just flat refused to co-operate. Said it was against her beliefs. So I got furious frustrated, because her friends were nodding along and if this broke down we couldn't protect anyone, so I just grabbed her, got her in an arm lock, and marched her for the exit. She didn't want to help? Fine, she could leave.
We marched past the side exits, and we could see monks in yellow robes folded into weirdly neat origami, looking kind of like table decorations. People were running from them, properly running for shelter now, but when a monk caught up to them, all there was left of them was light. So the girl saw that and started struggling, didn't want to leave. Teal'c was by the main doors, up the stairs and big arched things, and I marched the girl to there. But Teal'c stopped her, put a hand out without stopping chanting, and took custody of her. By now the girl was fully motivated and joined the chant.
I didn't. Not strictly speaking. I couldn't remember all the words. ... everyone else was learning them, I could have re-learned. But instead I hummed along, numbers and angles and names, probably a route map, a planet, a haven place. I could logic it out, but I couldn't bring myself to quite join in.
I made a circuit around the room, saw Jack and grinned at him, saw Daniel and nodded, and then finally saw Lindsey, in actual trousers now, lying down with eyes closed and concentrating on the chant. My deep sigh of relief dropped my shoulders by inches, all the tension falling out, and my smile went all soft and basically everything was written on my face. And then I noticed Jack noticing. He didn't look upset though. Kind of smiled.
Then there were screams from the center door, and some of the monks had got in. I tried to get to them, but the whole room had started circling now, and snaking around between the chairs, like a shuffling chanting conga line, a walking meditation that threatened to dissolve into panic in places. But the chant was working, the monks were visibly held back at most doors, only the leader and his second breaking in in the center. They're yelling something about the original ones. Everyone else here is an exile, but they'd grabbed someone from a Marines team and called him an original. I made my way to them and grabbed and twisted, threw one into the other and knocked both towards the door, humming all the while and the chant rising around us. And their yellow robes turned blue white, and it was their turn to go up in lights. Like flash paper, gone.
Chanting turns to cheering: psychic attack, averted.
So I push back to the end of the room, the entrance from the corridor. There's a greenish chalk board and one of those high tables for demonstrations, all the lecturer stuff at this end. Daniel is back there, already sketching out where the chant starts and where the vectors head off to, trying to turn it into a gate address. He heard them talking original, was thinking Origin and Ori. It's possible they weren't all gone from this galaxy. He's grim about it. But I tell him I think these people are looking for the Tau'ri. He finishes the thought, as usual: the original evolution, as opposed to the exiles born on other planets. Yes, that would explain why / none of the surface features are the same. We bounce it back and forth and get quite an audience. We've been introducing ourselves as Tau'ri for a really long time, but nobody in this galaxy even knew what we meant. Now they do and it's sending ripples and shockwaves across the social order, beliefs reconfiguring while we speak.
Jack joins us, hears the theory, nods, and makes a random sounding pun. I look at him, and he makes a 'What?' sort of face, and jokes some more. I wonder sometimes if he's quite still with us. If he ever was. How much of the joking around is for morale and how much is just him skipping a track, losing it. I've feared for a long while now that he was losing bits. That we all were. But Jack seems worn. Sometimes it seems like we just remember how to be who we were, and we're just faking it in hope. Sometimes Jack seems more like Jack O'Neill's greatest hits, like an echo of himself. But then he waggles his eyebrows and makes a really terrible dirty pun, and I laugh and realise all over again I really love this man... But in a way where I'd have never asked to marry him if all I felt is this. He's my heart, but something has worn through. I'm going through the motions too. I've forgotten how to be his wife.
He smiles at me sadly. The trouble with more than ten years working together and near telepathic levels of communication is, we get to realise things together, even the hard ones. But he doesn't look hurt. He can live with this. He glances over at Lindsey, in the opposite corner checking out the exit door, and then looks back at me and smiles as warmly as he ever has.
"Go on," he says, and nods across at him. I take a breath and end up flapping my mouth, knowing what I should say and knowing he'll know what I really mean. "It's all good. Go to him. Just, one day, come home to me."
I look at him and love him all over again and wonder if I could wake that part up, because how do I deserve this beautiful man? But he just smiles gently and looks so tired, worn, silver verging on white and just plain old. He's a generation older than me, old enough to be my father, and across the room is a man with almost the opposite problem. I don't want to be the kind of person who trades someone in for a younger model, but I look at Jack and it seems like he's done, finished, waiting on retiring and mostly looking back on his life. Tired. I don't want that, not for him but certainly not for me. And I love him, I do, a constant warm presence I need in my life, like Daniel is my other half and Teal'c the strength at my back. But I look across at Lindsey and the fire in those feelings... and it's not just that the man is smoking hot. He's fascinating. Complex and difficult, prickly and proud and hard to get to know. Every way different from what I've already got. And while I'll look to Jack to lead and protect me every time, I don't want to always be the one protected. I can see Lindsey getting in over his head and never admitting it, never asking for the help I know I could offer. I want to be protecting him for once.
And all of that becomes clear in a moment, one quiet moment between me and my husband, who just told me to leave.
Then there's a hissing, spitting sort of noise, and a chemical smell in the air. Jack snaps to General immediately, barks orders to evacuate. The air fills with clouds of gas or smoke, and hysterical screams start, students streaming for the exits and a chaos muddle everywhere.
I stand frozen, for just a moment unable to decide who to run after, Jack or Lindsey.
And I have just a moment longer to realise this would be a metaphor of a moment, before there's a huge noise and the world dissolves into light.
Yes, I just got myself blown up because Lindsey looks too good in shorts.
That's... embarrassing.
So I wake up, confused, a little later. I recognise the corridor I'm in. It's on the way to the front halls where Lindsey waits to advise people a couple mornings a week.
(You do not want advice from a demon lawyer. Or at least, the times you know you do are usually several steps past when you really could have used it.)
A woman greets me and knows I'm looking for L, and leads me into the room. Then she gives me a weird look, a vicious look, sort of poisonous around a customer service smile, and glancing between me and him it turns triumphant. She sees me notice, holds her chin up, and leaves.
I shrug it off, and turn to look at L.
He doesn't notice me yet, so I get to watch him while he's just at work. There's none of the competitive edge I'm used to, nobody he's manipulating right now. He's just making some notes, head down, hair a curtain between him and the world. He's wearing a business suit today, but the jacket is off, and his sleeves rolled up again. Not expecting company, at least not serious clients.
He's calm, competent, and in his element.
I want him something fierce.
"Lindsey," I call over, voice full of smiles.
He looks up, smiling, to find me... then looks puzzled and the smile falters. He looks straight through me, then scans around.
I go cold.
He doesn't see me.
"Lindsey?"
He barely seems to hear me this time.
His face goes troubled, then the last traces of the smile crumble. He looks tired, now, stretched, and sad. He puts down his pen, rubs at his face, and turns his chair around. Like this, he'll have a moment to himself even if a client comes in.
I move around to see why he wants it.
He's just got his head in his hands, and every line of him is a picture of misery.
I reach out to spin the chair more so he'll face me, and my hand goes straight through the back.
"Oh, no." I say it quietly. It doesn't seem to reach L.
There was an explosion, and my friends are sad, and I can't touch anything.
If I was thinking SG1 I'd be thinking about other dimensions, but with all this demon lawyer stuff, things that seem to work around here, I have a rather nastier thought.
I think I'm dead.
Lindsey stays curled in on himself. I can't see his face, but I see him shaking, and trying to hide it.
I reach for his shoulder. I feel numb, cold, like touching fog, not flesh.
He shakes harder, and something falls from his eye. Not a tear, although it's gleaming. It falls and rolls into a fold of cloth, heading for the floor, and automatically I reach to catch it.
And I can.
I open my hand and stare, and I am holding a black pearl, set with gold dots around the sides.
I still can't feel the chair or desk, but this one precious thing I can hold in my hand.
Then another thing falls from his other other, and I catch that too. A matched set of pearls.
And then fall square specks, ones that grow as I touch them, become dice, just as dark and set with gold dots sometimes, but sometimes orange or red.
Pearls are tears and dice are chances, and I collect them up and feel quite sure Lindsey is thinking of me, and that for all his front he's thinking kind of the same things I am, that we should have took our chances, and all that's left is tears.
I run the back of my hand along the back of his, and he startles. So do I - now he feels warm. I realise, he's the only warmth here.
He looks around again, spins his chair and looks.
"Lindsey?" I say tentatively.
He mouths my name, then shakes his head, tries to shake something off. Wipes at his face.
"Lindsey, you're a demon lawyer, so I'm going to take a chance here. You can hear me." I look at my collection, almost more than I can keep a hold on. "L, I'm standing right here, and there's these things keep falling from you, dice and pearls. I think it's because you're thinking of me. Well they're making a difference. You make a difference. I can feel you." I reach out again, and this time touch his face.
He rubs against it like a cat, barely any pressure but trying to get more of me. He whispers something, could even be a prayer, and then he takes a breath and says, "I feel you too."
He gets up and tries to hold me, and it very nearly works. I feel so warm, and he's basking in it.
Joy! Happiness!
... very briefly. He, too, fears that logically I'm dead. I'm probably a ghost.
I complain. "Of course I knew I'd die, I even figured I'd die violently. I've been doing this a lot of years, I guess I'm due. But I thought I could live with that - metaphorically - live with just ending. I never thought I'd have to hang around and see it!"
He's sympathetic. The number of people who sign up with him, just because they don't believe there is that part of them to lose...
... he's a demon lawyer who sold not just his own but other people's souls. Remind me again why I'm all Feelings about him?
"Oh god, and Jack will think I left him."
"What? Why? He saw the bomb too."
"But he'd just told me to leave him. For you." I clutch my collection tight, watch Lindsey's face cycle through shock to something he clamps down on, controls, considers weak enough that it'll give him away.
He sits down again, pulls fresh paper out, and tries to be methodical.
"So you're incorporeal. There's a lot of ways that can happen. It can't be the yellow monks, the chant's protective..."
I look down, but this is his expertise, and he needs the right data.
"I didn't chant," I interrupt, and he looks up, shocked.
"What? Why?" I say nothing, and he goes on about effectiveness and danger and how the technique works reliably, and...
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me," I mumble, talking mostly to my closed hand and the impossibilities in it.
He hears me, and drops his head. Hair covers his reactions.
I explain, I didn't want to join what I'd been taught as a prayer. I'd tried to forget it even. "And the stupid thing is... the really stupid thing, even with the thing where I'd been yelling at the others about that exact same choice... it isn't really my belief. Not any more. My faith fell out, somewhere between goa'uld and Origin. It all went hollow. And so instead of faith I just had rules. And the rules was..."
"No other god. Did that chant even mention a god?"
I couldn't look at him. I shrugged, even knowing he couldn't see. I didn't answer.
He sighed, rubbed his face again, then pushed back his hair. He slid a hand along the desk in my direction, feeling for me. I met him in the middle. Held on. Tight.
He didn't feel like fog now. And he was the only thing.
He kept hold of me and pushed his chair back, made room to pull me into his lap. I curled in and made contact everywhere I could. He traced the lines of me, still not seeing, just mapping me out by touch. He got me lined up so we were in touch every place he could, skin to skin along his arms, brushing over mine and folding me in, and where his face tucked in next to mine.
He held me for a moment, then he reached for his pen.
He found my empty left hand, held it up, brushed it flat with his finger, and then started to write.
It turned out mostly-incorporeal clients were not unknown to him. He had advice, on the job market, on where to go and where not to, opportunities, threats, entire underground economies. He had bolt holes, things he'd set up ready, and he passed them on willingly. He poured out instructions in my ear, voice earnest and low, and all the while made notes along my hand. The notes changed color when he changed topic with no noticeable changes to the pen, and they stayed on my skin when I could barely feel anything that wasn't him.
"How are you doing this?" I had to ask.
He hesitated. Gestured with the pen and tapped the nib against me in a quick full stop. "It's my signing pen."
For signing in blood. He was using his own blood to write me a new life, even if it's an afterlife.
My hand was full of practicalities. I curled my hand around them, precious as the pearls.
He moved down, held my wrist, then held the pen to it.
He wrote three words, and then a signature.
I love you.
Lindsey MacDonald
With the pen he'd bind his soul with.
I woke up then. But that is a great setup. There's themes of faith and love and how there's different kinds and how you keep going when you can't feel either. Was dream me just punishing herself, falling for the demon lawyer? Did she think she deserved him? Or did she think, if she could save him, she'd be able to save herself?
She'd never had a doubt she'd keep Jack in her life. Even being told to leave him, she couldn't imagine not coming back. Could barely imagine leaving. But if what they've got isn't marriage love now, shouldn't she move on, and give him a chance to?
... especially since I tend to think it should be Daniel's turn.
The world of Stargate makes technology of all the gods and monsters. It acts like your soul isn't really at stake, then walks everyone into doing such terrible things... Adding some Angel logic to it, having people who live and die by demonstrable truths of soul bindings and demon pacts, that would make it all much darker. Consequences on the 'hero' would be focused on how much they lose themselves in what the wars demand of them. And trying to find hope and meaning when so much turns out so false.
But then, if L is right there is eternal torment waiting, which isn't so much hopeful. If it's all tech and mirrors, social control, if gods are false and so are demons, then what he signed isn't the end of him. Probably.
(Going cyberpunk with slaved uploads or following the Ori logic would fit Stargate too. It isn't simple, even if they can see all the lies.)
With the writing, I know where I'd go next. Back to Daniel, who'd rewrite me in languages as old as mankind, give me history and options, different perspectives, whole cultures worth of space.
I wouldn't stay invisible, I'd be outlined in text, remade wherever my loves marked me.
Jack... doesn't seem like he'd write much. Don't think he'd put it into words.
But the few he'd use would be important.
I'd tell Daniel I feared I'd given up my future, back when I didn't want it anyway. I knew Jack didn't want babies (or thought I did). I feared in choosing him I'd skip that part of life, catch up with him, end up caring for an old man and never creating.
(Daniel lost so much in that line too. I wouldn't want to hurt him, saying these things. But I'd have to say them somewhere, too full of words, they'd spill out.)
I'd tell him too I feared how much we'd lost. Feared he never truly remembered, just read his own life and learned to skate fast through it. Feared Jack had never quite come back from Ba'al. Feared brain damage.
I knew I'd loved Jack passionately once, and I'd lost that, so how much else of my essential parts had gone to dust along the way?
And how to pick up after?
On the one hand, none of these dream bunnies work as fanfic, because hello, me in the middle of the story.
But on the other, the cover very interesting ground. Faith and love and futures lost along the way. Ten years of giving everything for others. Sooner or later biology catches up and you realise that was it, there went your chances. There's got to be moments all the doubt catches up.
And now I've spent more than two hours writing this up. Writing dreams is the closest I get to writing story lately. And dream logic is rarely satisfying story logic, however compelling the parts.
Okay, back to attempting sleep.
Useful.
I dreamed I was part of SG1. That's actually one of my MarySue getting to sleep dreams, that I shared a brain with Daniel Jackson for five years and then we ascended and came back as separate people and I married Jack O'Neill and... I never wrote it down on account of clearly nobody wants to read all that. But that was how I was part of SG1, that accumulation of years of insomniac ramblings that make a really long story. I had my areas of expertise, religious and cultural, though obviously Daniel was more competent at everything ever. Teal'c was a solid and reliable friend. And the four of us had become stranded in a different galaxy, a new different galaxy with new different rules, including chanting monks with apparently magical powers and demon lawyers.
Angel crossovers on another planet: tricky.
I dreamed Lindsey MacDonald, looking ridiculously young (season one was a long time ago). His hair was grown out sort of half way between lawyer spiky and later long, and he couldn't really keep it out of his face, so he used it to hide his expression a lot. It was hard to get a read on him, what side he was on. ... actually it was easy: his side, population one. I dreamed us all playing field hockey so that was pretty literal. Just messing around practising, none of us having played since high school, just picking up sticks and knocking balls around.
Osiris was there and insisting it was a game already and she would win and then nobody wanted to be her team so we were just going around her and knocking balls at the goal painted on the wall over and over and driving her nuts.
Clearly this is a high stakes adventure. :eyeroll:
But it was part of the theme, that there was this pathetic petty false god, and we'd been dealing with false gods for so long, and now here were demons and magic, and faith had gone kind of... hollow. You could see what worked, but calling it good or evil or even religion just seemed like a lot of work. They were creepy snakes that made my head tingle, was all. The snakes were real and Eden... wasn't. At least around here.
Daniel and I understood each other on this one. We exchanged weary glances, he took the Saving Osiris-Sarah job, I wandered off after Lindsey.
The most distinctive thing about Lindsey in this dream was how he dressed for this hockey thing. I couldn't decide if it was schoolboy fetish or just modified office wear. Shirt and tie, sleeves rolled right up, tie loose, over very very very short shorts. Grey shorts of trouser material, not sport shorts. If he stood up straight they covered all the necessary, just. If he leant over even a little, say to get the stick on the ground even... oh the view improved immensely.
I do not know what he was wearing on his feet. My eyes never got down that low.
That is one very good looking man.
So even in the dream I had to stop and *facepalm* and bang my head against the wall because this is not my kink, I don't have a schoolboy thing, or a hockey thing, really! ... evidence of my own reactions aside ... He's standing there looking so good he's rewriting my preferences with a very distinct space set aside for this visual. That's... I don't even... And then I look up and he has this lazy confident smirk on his face like he knows exactly what he's doing to me, and how is that even fair? ... and I don't have a schoolboy thing, but oh do I ever have a Lindsey thing. That man is so cute it should be criminal. And he knows it.
So. Lindsey. Short shorts. Hockey sticks. I dreamed the texture on the hockey stick in a lot more detail than I've thought about it in years, the fuzzy cloth bit and the smooth bit, and the clack when wood met the ball, and how the flat and curve behave differently and flipping the stick over to keep the flat against the ball. Interesting somatic memories. All movement and muscle and texture as well as sight and sound.
I also dreamed getting really suggestive about handling this big stick.
Not subtle, but Lindsey noticed and did not look away.
So that was working.
Then the plot kicked in, and someone arrived with a message sheet covered in colorful swirls that represented a particular chant, and I quit playing around to go find Teal'c, because he and I had been the ones to learn what these things meant, and I didn't remember. Not all the words. And it seemed really quite urgent.
Emergency alarms assembled everyone in the library, which was the biggest space, multi layered and full of excellent cosy leather chairs. Well, leather-ish. School leather. ANYway, grand and complex space, multiple entrances and exits, some to a corridor, most to outside. People kept pouring in and I tried to get them organised. There were teenagers in ridiculous fashions, extreme like manga and impractical. Some came running, most were strolling, and sealing the perimeter was going to shut people out if we did it in any useful time at all. Most of the locals just did not know how to take emergencies seriously. So the library filled up lacadaisically and people milled around to find their friends with no real organisation, noisy and blocking each other, and it was getting on for chaos. There was also my team, SG1. Teal'c was up the far end on some steps, in his grey robes with his gold showing. I gave him the message scroll and he immediately started the chant. ... it was co-ordinates and vectors to the tune of Good King Wenceslas. No I don't even know, my brain, it is a strange, sad place.
So Teal'c was leading the chant, but the locals weren't joining in. If we were going to build a psychic defence at all, let alone a strong one, just the team wouldn't be enough. So I went around telling people to join in, getting more frustrated, snappy, eventually shouting. One teen girl with blue hair just flat refused to co-operate. Said it was against her beliefs. So I got furious frustrated, because her friends were nodding along and if this broke down we couldn't protect anyone, so I just grabbed her, got her in an arm lock, and marched her for the exit. She didn't want to help? Fine, she could leave.
We marched past the side exits, and we could see monks in yellow robes folded into weirdly neat origami, looking kind of like table decorations. People were running from them, properly running for shelter now, but when a monk caught up to them, all there was left of them was light. So the girl saw that and started struggling, didn't want to leave. Teal'c was by the main doors, up the stairs and big arched things, and I marched the girl to there. But Teal'c stopped her, put a hand out without stopping chanting, and took custody of her. By now the girl was fully motivated and joined the chant.
I didn't. Not strictly speaking. I couldn't remember all the words. ... everyone else was learning them, I could have re-learned. But instead I hummed along, numbers and angles and names, probably a route map, a planet, a haven place. I could logic it out, but I couldn't bring myself to quite join in.
I made a circuit around the room, saw Jack and grinned at him, saw Daniel and nodded, and then finally saw Lindsey, in actual trousers now, lying down with eyes closed and concentrating on the chant. My deep sigh of relief dropped my shoulders by inches, all the tension falling out, and my smile went all soft and basically everything was written on my face. And then I noticed Jack noticing. He didn't look upset though. Kind of smiled.
Then there were screams from the center door, and some of the monks had got in. I tried to get to them, but the whole room had started circling now, and snaking around between the chairs, like a shuffling chanting conga line, a walking meditation that threatened to dissolve into panic in places. But the chant was working, the monks were visibly held back at most doors, only the leader and his second breaking in in the center. They're yelling something about the original ones. Everyone else here is an exile, but they'd grabbed someone from a Marines team and called him an original. I made my way to them and grabbed and twisted, threw one into the other and knocked both towards the door, humming all the while and the chant rising around us. And their yellow robes turned blue white, and it was their turn to go up in lights. Like flash paper, gone.
Chanting turns to cheering: psychic attack, averted.
So I push back to the end of the room, the entrance from the corridor. There's a greenish chalk board and one of those high tables for demonstrations, all the lecturer stuff at this end. Daniel is back there, already sketching out where the chant starts and where the vectors head off to, trying to turn it into a gate address. He heard them talking original, was thinking Origin and Ori. It's possible they weren't all gone from this galaxy. He's grim about it. But I tell him I think these people are looking for the Tau'ri. He finishes the thought, as usual: the original evolution, as opposed to the exiles born on other planets. Yes, that would explain why / none of the surface features are the same. We bounce it back and forth and get quite an audience. We've been introducing ourselves as Tau'ri for a really long time, but nobody in this galaxy even knew what we meant. Now they do and it's sending ripples and shockwaves across the social order, beliefs reconfiguring while we speak.
Jack joins us, hears the theory, nods, and makes a random sounding pun. I look at him, and he makes a 'What?' sort of face, and jokes some more. I wonder sometimes if he's quite still with us. If he ever was. How much of the joking around is for morale and how much is just him skipping a track, losing it. I've feared for a long while now that he was losing bits. That we all were. But Jack seems worn. Sometimes it seems like we just remember how to be who we were, and we're just faking it in hope. Sometimes Jack seems more like Jack O'Neill's greatest hits, like an echo of himself. But then he waggles his eyebrows and makes a really terrible dirty pun, and I laugh and realise all over again I really love this man... But in a way where I'd have never asked to marry him if all I felt is this. He's my heart, but something has worn through. I'm going through the motions too. I've forgotten how to be his wife.
He smiles at me sadly. The trouble with more than ten years working together and near telepathic levels of communication is, we get to realise things together, even the hard ones. But he doesn't look hurt. He can live with this. He glances over at Lindsey, in the opposite corner checking out the exit door, and then looks back at me and smiles as warmly as he ever has.
"Go on," he says, and nods across at him. I take a breath and end up flapping my mouth, knowing what I should say and knowing he'll know what I really mean. "It's all good. Go to him. Just, one day, come home to me."
I look at him and love him all over again and wonder if I could wake that part up, because how do I deserve this beautiful man? But he just smiles gently and looks so tired, worn, silver verging on white and just plain old. He's a generation older than me, old enough to be my father, and across the room is a man with almost the opposite problem. I don't want to be the kind of person who trades someone in for a younger model, but I look at Jack and it seems like he's done, finished, waiting on retiring and mostly looking back on his life. Tired. I don't want that, not for him but certainly not for me. And I love him, I do, a constant warm presence I need in my life, like Daniel is my other half and Teal'c the strength at my back. But I look across at Lindsey and the fire in those feelings... and it's not just that the man is smoking hot. He's fascinating. Complex and difficult, prickly and proud and hard to get to know. Every way different from what I've already got. And while I'll look to Jack to lead and protect me every time, I don't want to always be the one protected. I can see Lindsey getting in over his head and never admitting it, never asking for the help I know I could offer. I want to be protecting him for once.
And all of that becomes clear in a moment, one quiet moment between me and my husband, who just told me to leave.
Then there's a hissing, spitting sort of noise, and a chemical smell in the air. Jack snaps to General immediately, barks orders to evacuate. The air fills with clouds of gas or smoke, and hysterical screams start, students streaming for the exits and a chaos muddle everywhere.
I stand frozen, for just a moment unable to decide who to run after, Jack or Lindsey.
And I have just a moment longer to realise this would be a metaphor of a moment, before there's a huge noise and the world dissolves into light.
Yes, I just got myself blown up because Lindsey looks too good in shorts.
That's... embarrassing.
So I wake up, confused, a little later. I recognise the corridor I'm in. It's on the way to the front halls where Lindsey waits to advise people a couple mornings a week.
(You do not want advice from a demon lawyer. Or at least, the times you know you do are usually several steps past when you really could have used it.)
A woman greets me and knows I'm looking for L, and leads me into the room. Then she gives me a weird look, a vicious look, sort of poisonous around a customer service smile, and glancing between me and him it turns triumphant. She sees me notice, holds her chin up, and leaves.
I shrug it off, and turn to look at L.
He doesn't notice me yet, so I get to watch him while he's just at work. There's none of the competitive edge I'm used to, nobody he's manipulating right now. He's just making some notes, head down, hair a curtain between him and the world. He's wearing a business suit today, but the jacket is off, and his sleeves rolled up again. Not expecting company, at least not serious clients.
He's calm, competent, and in his element.
I want him something fierce.
"Lindsey," I call over, voice full of smiles.
He looks up, smiling, to find me... then looks puzzled and the smile falters. He looks straight through me, then scans around.
I go cold.
He doesn't see me.
"Lindsey?"
He barely seems to hear me this time.
His face goes troubled, then the last traces of the smile crumble. He looks tired, now, stretched, and sad. He puts down his pen, rubs at his face, and turns his chair around. Like this, he'll have a moment to himself even if a client comes in.
I move around to see why he wants it.
He's just got his head in his hands, and every line of him is a picture of misery.
I reach out to spin the chair more so he'll face me, and my hand goes straight through the back.
"Oh, no." I say it quietly. It doesn't seem to reach L.
There was an explosion, and my friends are sad, and I can't touch anything.
If I was thinking SG1 I'd be thinking about other dimensions, but with all this demon lawyer stuff, things that seem to work around here, I have a rather nastier thought.
I think I'm dead.
Lindsey stays curled in on himself. I can't see his face, but I see him shaking, and trying to hide it.
I reach for his shoulder. I feel numb, cold, like touching fog, not flesh.
He shakes harder, and something falls from his eye. Not a tear, although it's gleaming. It falls and rolls into a fold of cloth, heading for the floor, and automatically I reach to catch it.
And I can.
I open my hand and stare, and I am holding a black pearl, set with gold dots around the sides.
I still can't feel the chair or desk, but this one precious thing I can hold in my hand.
Then another thing falls from his other other, and I catch that too. A matched set of pearls.
And then fall square specks, ones that grow as I touch them, become dice, just as dark and set with gold dots sometimes, but sometimes orange or red.
Pearls are tears and dice are chances, and I collect them up and feel quite sure Lindsey is thinking of me, and that for all his front he's thinking kind of the same things I am, that we should have took our chances, and all that's left is tears.
I run the back of my hand along the back of his, and he startles. So do I - now he feels warm. I realise, he's the only warmth here.
He looks around again, spins his chair and looks.
"Lindsey?" I say tentatively.
He mouths my name, then shakes his head, tries to shake something off. Wipes at his face.
"Lindsey, you're a demon lawyer, so I'm going to take a chance here. You can hear me." I look at my collection, almost more than I can keep a hold on. "L, I'm standing right here, and there's these things keep falling from you, dice and pearls. I think it's because you're thinking of me. Well they're making a difference. You make a difference. I can feel you." I reach out again, and this time touch his face.
He rubs against it like a cat, barely any pressure but trying to get more of me. He whispers something, could even be a prayer, and then he takes a breath and says, "I feel you too."
He gets up and tries to hold me, and it very nearly works. I feel so warm, and he's basking in it.
Joy! Happiness!
... very briefly. He, too, fears that logically I'm dead. I'm probably a ghost.
I complain. "Of course I knew I'd die, I even figured I'd die violently. I've been doing this a lot of years, I guess I'm due. But I thought I could live with that - metaphorically - live with just ending. I never thought I'd have to hang around and see it!"
He's sympathetic. The number of people who sign up with him, just because they don't believe there is that part of them to lose...
... he's a demon lawyer who sold not just his own but other people's souls. Remind me again why I'm all Feelings about him?
"Oh god, and Jack will think I left him."
"What? Why? He saw the bomb too."
"But he'd just told me to leave him. For you." I clutch my collection tight, watch Lindsey's face cycle through shock to something he clamps down on, controls, considers weak enough that it'll give him away.
He sits down again, pulls fresh paper out, and tries to be methodical.
"So you're incorporeal. There's a lot of ways that can happen. It can't be the yellow monks, the chant's protective..."
I look down, but this is his expertise, and he needs the right data.
"I didn't chant," I interrupt, and he looks up, shocked.
"What? Why?" I say nothing, and he goes on about effectiveness and danger and how the technique works reliably, and...
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me," I mumble, talking mostly to my closed hand and the impossibilities in it.
He hears me, and drops his head. Hair covers his reactions.
I explain, I didn't want to join what I'd been taught as a prayer. I'd tried to forget it even. "And the stupid thing is... the really stupid thing, even with the thing where I'd been yelling at the others about that exact same choice... it isn't really my belief. Not any more. My faith fell out, somewhere between goa'uld and Origin. It all went hollow. And so instead of faith I just had rules. And the rules was..."
"No other god. Did that chant even mention a god?"
I couldn't look at him. I shrugged, even knowing he couldn't see. I didn't answer.
He sighed, rubbed his face again, then pushed back his hair. He slid a hand along the desk in my direction, feeling for me. I met him in the middle. Held on. Tight.
He didn't feel like fog now. And he was the only thing.
He kept hold of me and pushed his chair back, made room to pull me into his lap. I curled in and made contact everywhere I could. He traced the lines of me, still not seeing, just mapping me out by touch. He got me lined up so we were in touch every place he could, skin to skin along his arms, brushing over mine and folding me in, and where his face tucked in next to mine.
He held me for a moment, then he reached for his pen.
He found my empty left hand, held it up, brushed it flat with his finger, and then started to write.
It turned out mostly-incorporeal clients were not unknown to him. He had advice, on the job market, on where to go and where not to, opportunities, threats, entire underground economies. He had bolt holes, things he'd set up ready, and he passed them on willingly. He poured out instructions in my ear, voice earnest and low, and all the while made notes along my hand. The notes changed color when he changed topic with no noticeable changes to the pen, and they stayed on my skin when I could barely feel anything that wasn't him.
"How are you doing this?" I had to ask.
He hesitated. Gestured with the pen and tapped the nib against me in a quick full stop. "It's my signing pen."
For signing in blood. He was using his own blood to write me a new life, even if it's an afterlife.
My hand was full of practicalities. I curled my hand around them, precious as the pearls.
He moved down, held my wrist, then held the pen to it.
He wrote three words, and then a signature.
I love you.
Lindsey MacDonald
With the pen he'd bind his soul with.
I woke up then. But that is a great setup. There's themes of faith and love and how there's different kinds and how you keep going when you can't feel either. Was dream me just punishing herself, falling for the demon lawyer? Did she think she deserved him? Or did she think, if she could save him, she'd be able to save herself?
She'd never had a doubt she'd keep Jack in her life. Even being told to leave him, she couldn't imagine not coming back. Could barely imagine leaving. But if what they've got isn't marriage love now, shouldn't she move on, and give him a chance to?
... especially since I tend to think it should be Daniel's turn.
The world of Stargate makes technology of all the gods and monsters. It acts like your soul isn't really at stake, then walks everyone into doing such terrible things... Adding some Angel logic to it, having people who live and die by demonstrable truths of soul bindings and demon pacts, that would make it all much darker. Consequences on the 'hero' would be focused on how much they lose themselves in what the wars demand of them. And trying to find hope and meaning when so much turns out so false.
But then, if L is right there is eternal torment waiting, which isn't so much hopeful. If it's all tech and mirrors, social control, if gods are false and so are demons, then what he signed isn't the end of him. Probably.
(Going cyberpunk with slaved uploads or following the Ori logic would fit Stargate too. It isn't simple, even if they can see all the lies.)
With the writing, I know where I'd go next. Back to Daniel, who'd rewrite me in languages as old as mankind, give me history and options, different perspectives, whole cultures worth of space.
I wouldn't stay invisible, I'd be outlined in text, remade wherever my loves marked me.
Jack... doesn't seem like he'd write much. Don't think he'd put it into words.
But the few he'd use would be important.
I'd tell Daniel I feared I'd given up my future, back when I didn't want it anyway. I knew Jack didn't want babies (or thought I did). I feared in choosing him I'd skip that part of life, catch up with him, end up caring for an old man and never creating.
(Daniel lost so much in that line too. I wouldn't want to hurt him, saying these things. But I'd have to say them somewhere, too full of words, they'd spill out.)
I'd tell him too I feared how much we'd lost. Feared he never truly remembered, just read his own life and learned to skate fast through it. Feared Jack had never quite come back from Ba'al. Feared brain damage.
I knew I'd loved Jack passionately once, and I'd lost that, so how much else of my essential parts had gone to dust along the way?
And how to pick up after?
On the one hand, none of these dream bunnies work as fanfic, because hello, me in the middle of the story.
But on the other, the cover very interesting ground. Faith and love and futures lost along the way. Ten years of giving everything for others. Sooner or later biology catches up and you realise that was it, there went your chances. There's got to be moments all the doubt catches up.
And now I've spent more than two hours writing this up. Writing dreams is the closest I get to writing story lately. And dream logic is rarely satisfying story logic, however compelling the parts.
Okay, back to attempting sleep.