applesaucedream | 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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"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.

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

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