applesaucedream | burn down my home, my memory's hardened in the brightest chrome [closed]

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burn down my home, my memory's hardened in the brightest chrome [closed]

He knows it is a dream when he opens his eyes and breathes the air, hot and dry and granular, and closes his eyes again to the blazing familiarity of the suns that shower him with photons in duplicate. He knows the spread of alien sand in its spectrum of oranges and yellows and golds, the watery white cast of the cloudless sky, the trails of dust that hiss over his clothes and his hands and his face and the unkempt fringe of his hair that is long like it was years ago, in every rush of arid wind.

He knows it is a dream because for the first time since Manhattan, Daniel dreams of Abydos.

The sand dunes are infinite in context; finite here, in the parts of his mind that haven’t been compartmentalized by quiet avoidance of unavoidable memories, an impulse shadowed by the inescapable nature of his old grief. Abydos exists as he best remembers it, appearing uniform but merging, seamless, from one sheen of melancholic gold-bronze to another.

Everything is bright here. The suns rebound their radiant energy off the sand’s receptive topology in vast, sweeping arcs. Even here, in the shaded slope of the pyramid’s entrance, Daniel can feel the thickness of the atmosphere in xeric acuity. He breathes it in with lungs that only exist for as long as this place does, which is objectively not very long at all. Dreams here are distorted, but their dissipation upon waking is axiom.

He doesn’t want to look behind him at the pyramid’s interior, nor does he want to see the smooth silvered arch of the ‘gate he knows lies within, imposing and inert with its chevrons that are dead, unlit. He doesn’t want to think of the doorway they thought they closed that he knows will open again with disastrous results before it swallows him back to Earth in a flare of vortical bright-blue, a dragging backwards slide away from everything. Away from home. His personal definition of the concept shouldn’t be so transient and dead, but here it is, in flat defiance of the typicalities.

Quiet footsteps solidify the ache of familiarity. He doesn't turn around. He doesn't. He knows who he'll see.

His eyes slide closed, and the pharyngeal constriction of grief is almost too much to bear.

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Lucifer has wrapped himself in an image that fits this dream, one that has been only too easy to pluck from Daniel's mind; he wears her face, the face of Daniel's beloved, like he did Jessica's when he spoke to Sam, like he did when he spoke to Nick. The remembered sun of Daniel's adopted world is scorching even in the shade that they stand in, and he can feel the intensity of it reflect off of sand and stone. The dream-memory is exquisitely detailed, down to the grittiness of the sand against his skin and between his teeth with each breath.

He had wanted to speak to Daniel, because the conversations have been so interesting before. He will stay because he wants to see.

Lucifer walks closer, his footsteps muffled by sand, until he is just behind Daniel who still refuses to look-- as though he is Orpheus and if he glances behind, his Eurydice will vanish back into the Underworld.

He lays a gentle hand on Daniel's arm.

Dreams aren't real. By definition, they aren't.

Why does the Rift have to make everything seem so real.

"Hi," says Daniel, says it in the broken Abydonian he hasn't spoken or had to speak in years, and the syllables fracture under the failed effort to speak them evenly. She taught him the word. Of course she did. She taught herself first, taught herself to read under an oppressive rule where scrawling lines in sand meant death, hopeful scratches on rocks warranted execution.

She orchestrated a revolution in writing, scripted the downfall of her unlawful god.

You aren't here, he says, or wants to, but instead he reaches, impulsively, reflexively, closing his hand over the one on his arm.

"Hello," he replies, the foreign Abydonian language coming off of his borrowed tongue as though it is native. The tone is patient, as it was when Sha're taught Daniel the vowel sounds those years ago, and Lucifer can feel the edges of those memories in Daniel's consciousness.

Daniel's hand is larger than Sha're's and covers it almost completely. Lucifer remembers something from Nick's memories, a gesture from those painful parts of his mind labeled Sarah, and shifts his hand; he twines his fingers through Daniel's, a simulacrum of intimacy.

"You are dreaming, Daniel," he says, and the name comes out strange, altered by the heavy vowels of the Abydonian language-- Dani-yull.

"Yeah." That word cracks too, embarrassingly. He looks at the fingers twined with his and the edges of his throat become rigid.

Why is his subconscious so intent on this, slogging him through a replay of what was transient and profound and crumbling. He lives with this. He does, he copes, he does what he does, he moves past simple existing and actively goes and does something with himself besides wallow in what happened years ago and what he couldn't have prevented then.

The weeks that followed -

The weeks that followed had been among the worst in his life. That's counting the necrotic tedium of death by radioactive bombardment. That's counting the the countless memories he can casually draw up regarding torture and the times he's been killed and the times he's been tortured and then killed and then dragged back from that brink to be tortured some more. Because mourning is singular. Memories of his deaths are many, absurd variations on a single theme, but grief is -

"I know," says Daniel, can he do this, can he just turn around, and his tone becomes pained. "You're not really here." Like before, how she wasn't, except when she was. Is this going to become a theme with him? Things that aren't there? People that aren't there? Things that have already happened? No, he tells his subconscious as sternly as he can, which is, characteristically, completely lacking in any detectable sternness. No. No thank you.

His subconscious, equally characteristically, chooses to ignore him.

"Yes, and no."

It is true; Sha're is not here. The woman that Daniel grieves for is long dead and gone, and not even Lucifer could change that fact. The pain of his loss is a heavy weight, though, pushing down on Daniel's shoulders along with all the other slings and arrows of his outrageous fortune. Lucifer pities him in the same way that he pitied Sam; his life has given him suffering in disproportionate measure.

But, sometimes, the dreams brought by the Rift are real. As real as anything.

"Daniel," he says, squeezing his hand gently, "just because this is a dream does not mean that it is not also real."

Is this the Rift's perception of her or his? Is this reconstruction of her even accurate?

Daniel laughs. It's too quiet, too high and too strained and not at all contained and verging on the edge of hysterical, because that seems an appropriate enough response to self-wrought emotional subluxation. It isn't, of course, but nothing is, so Daniel's in acceptance of that.

"I know." The repetition slips into English unintentionally but he doesn't correct the error. Sha're in and out of a dreamscape would know the words well enough, speaking that new language with far more finesse and careful enunciation than Daniel ever could with hers. "I'm sorry," he says, because that also seems appropriate. "God. I'm sorry."

He wishes to god he could turn around, but all the gods here are false. He can't remember how many he's killed but he remembers the first one, the first time he died, and he remembers it because it brought him here to this sand-strewn planet with the people who were spurred into revolution by the woman who was their catalyst, who broke faith in conquerors with carvings on a wall.

"I'm sorry."

"I know," he says, a wry little mimic of Daniel's repetitious answers.

In any other situation, Lucifer would have a set plan, a goal that he wants to achieve; the goal has been derailed now by Daniel's dreaming, and now that he's playing along with it, it would be difficult to change it to something more suitable without arousing suspicion. Daniel could boot him out of the dream before he even has a chance to accomplish anything.

So... now that he's here, he might as well make the best of it. Call it a recon mission.

Lucifer pulls on Daniel's arm to turn him so that he would face the image of his late wife.

"Between us, Daniel, there is nothing to forgive."

He lets himself be pulled around, unresisting, to face her. When he was cast back to mortality, scraped clean of his memories, her face was among the first he remembered. Hands skim the edges of her shoulders. He pulls her closer and drops his forehead against hers.

"There is," he says, though the agonized note has dropped into something quieter, less pained, soft and mournful. "I couldn't save you."

"Is it not my right to decide if an offense has been done?"

Daniel's skin against his borrowed flesh is sun-warm, and he smells like heat and sand and centuries-old dust. The sheer detail-- is it because of his Ascension that his dreams are so intricate, is there something in his mind now that makes it different from other humans?

He raises a hand to cup Daniel's unshaven cheek, rough against his palm from a day's worth of growth.

"I do not blame nor begrudge you for my death. There is no need for you to seek my forgiveness."

Is this his subconscious' way of communication? It shouldn't have picked this memory, so desperate and so painful. It shouldn't have keyed itself to her. He leans into the contact, unwilling to look away.

"There was so much more we could have done." His voice sounds younger here, like it did on Abydos. Not so broken. Not so jaded. He remembers when he could count his deaths on a hand and put a cleanly cut memory to each one. "I was going to show you so much."

He keeps having to dip into Nick's old memories, taking inspiration from his wife and combining it with the shadows of Daniel's that he can feel out. It isn't easy, pretending to be someone else's lover when you've never been anyone's lover before nor really knew much about the person you are pretending to be.

"Tell me," he says, stroking his thumb over Daniel's cheek. "Tell me what you would have shown me."

He smiles, brief and strained, and swallows her hand in his.

"Earth," he says. "First. I saw your world and you - should've seen mine." Wind whips faintly behind them, throwing thin streams of sand across the golden-yellow spill of landscape.

"And so much more. Planets, galaxies, thousands of cultures spread over a universe. Places where no goa'uld would have found us." What is Daniel when he's not the place where the universe deposits all its frustrations and loss? Is that simply his role? "You should see it now. We've fought back so many of them. The galaxy doesn't belong to the goa'uld anymore."

He smiles and it translates into bittersweet warmth and affection on Sha're's face; the tragedy of their star-crossed love would put Viennese nobles to shame, even more so because at least in the play, the two were united in death. Their vows were until death do they part-- and death has parted them.

"I am so proud of you."

Daniel has never reminded him of Sam more than he does in these moments, talking about the good he's done like Sam talked about hope.

"You've done so much, and for so many. You've given so much of yourself, Daniel... and there is still more work to be done. There will never be an end to it."

And she's right, and death did part them, and the utter cruelty of it - that Daniel should die and die and die again, because most people only have one death and he has had several, and none had the expected end result. Like he isn't allowed.

"I know." Even the smiles he tries to offer back are too riven with his own regret to be fully recognizable. "It's just that things are so - different now, they're so, so complicated. I'm not even sure I'm where I'm supposed to be anymore."

Where once he could make a difference in galaxies upon galaxies he's been trapped in a city on an island in a universe that isn't even his.

"I still miss you." It sounds childish the instant he says it, stupid and small and childish. He misses her.

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burn down my home, my memory's hardened in the brightest chrome [closed]

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