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ravenLast night, Hannah and I got to discussing a subject I've often wondered about: specifically, why do we remember things we have absolutely no need to remember and take up valuable mental disk space? For no reason whatsover, I know nearly all the Stargate episode titles and the lyrics to Barbie Girl, and yet can't remember the oxidation states of cobalt or the fact I have three fic commentaries lurking on my hard disk, written and ready to post. This is the first one, for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gamesiplay:
“And concurrent with another academic’s theories some years ago, it is a clear and obvious conclusion that the Egyptians did not build the pyramids.”
I never wanted to write a Pegasus B story. In fact, I never wanted to write Stargate fic again, let alone Atlantis. But I was reading throughtroyswann's pilot, and it just grabbed my attention. I started writing this story in bits and pieces, a paragraph here and a paragraph there, shelved it for a fortnight and then finished it off in one night. Definitely one of the ones that go in the "grew organically" category.
This device, of using something in quotes at the beginning of each section, also grew organically. I realised I was doing it late on, went back and made a conscious effort to make it consistent.
No, Daniel thought, pushing his glasses back up his nose; what is a clear and obvious conclusion is that you are a fuckwit, Mr. Lee. Was that the student’s name? He wrote it down anyway. “What is a clear and obvious conclusion, Mr. Lee…”
He stared for a moment at his scrawling, red-pen professor’s handwriting. Then he wrote the sentence out again in French, with perfectly rendered accents and circumflexes. Then Spanish. He sighed, but his pen didn’t stop moving. With only the faintest of reservations, he wrote it out in Dutch, and then with a flick of the nib, in Italian. He paused then, before turning to the curving Cyrillic alphabet, angular Devanagari, and in a moment of memory, in Arabic.
This is Daniel's version of automatic writing. He's tired, bored and frustrated, and doing this is an attempt at catharsis. It doesn't work.
“Fuckwit” didn’t translate in Japanese, nor Latin, and he was reaching the end of the page now anyway, the lower part of the paper a mess of garbled communication.
He stood up. Let the pen drop, the chair knock backwards, and walked slowly and carefully to the bathroom. “Dr. Jackson?” he said.
His reflection stared out of the mirror, long hair pushed back and straggly, eyes wide and startled. Yes?
“What is a clear and obvious conclusion,” Daniel continued, “is that you, my friend, are going insane.”
There was nothing his reflection had to add. The next day he bought a plane ticket.
He's still got his sense of humour, no matter how twisted it's become; he's aware that there is a funny side to this impending insanity, and he's playing on it a bit by actually talking to his reflection.
“Rodney? Yeah, it’s me. Daniel. I’m, uh, I’ve just realised something. I’ve got to go. I mean you might not be hearing from me for a while. Um. Goodbye.”
When I first wrote this, I think I had the vague idea that Rodney would actually be in the story at some point.
Egypt didn’t change. Muezzins called, hawkers spat, small children ran barefoot through the streets, people yelled and shouted; but at the same time the noise the people made was undercut by the deep sonorous silence of the desert in the same way Daniel remembered. He had last been here shortly after the Lecture, the one that acquired the capital letter and dropped it again to match his mood, and the country, horizon-to-horizon sand, hadn’t altered in the slightest. Maybe it was Daniel who changed, a scholar but a mere human as well, who changed and grew old while Egypt never did. It was old already. Egypt had been old at the dawn of time.
And we're in a different place. Daniel has literally stood up and left, and the abrupt transition of the narrative reflects how suddenly he's run. And running is what he's doing, clearly - he's just trying, mindlessly, to get away.
Some parts of the text from here onwards have been taken from another fic I tried to write about two years ago. It was a short, heavy-on-description-sans-plot affair, about Daniel's parents in Egypt and Daniel as a very young child. While I never really managed to finish it, I've rescued some of the good bits and reused them here.
Maybe not, Daniel thought. Once the pyramids had been new, with gleaming marble caps. Maybe. Maybe not. Like pulling petals off a daisy, his insanity was following him.
That sentence makes absolutely no sense at all. Insanity, yeah?
Still, it was better here. He’d left the papers to grade at home and he could breathe now.
It was the influence of the desert. He’d come here after the Lecture simply because it was thousands of miles away from California; Siberia would have done as well, as would Mali or Madagascar, but it was reflex to reach an airport and ask for a ticket to Cairo. He’d dreamed about doing it when he was younger. The desert had been the promised land, then; the place he’d played in when his parents were alive, and even before that day in New York, he’d never quite understood why the Israelites wanted to leave. That was a long time ago, and perhaps life had been easier as a child prodigy than an adult one.
Throughout this, Daniel is seen to be thinking about people and events long past. This happens whenever I write from his POV, but it seemed particularly appropriate here. Daniel is an archaeologist and can't help but think of things in terms of the past, but it's his own past he's trying to ignore.
The muezzin was calling, now, and his lips moved to follow the words. When the prayers were over, he bought postcards.
Dear Rodney,
Am in Egypt. Don’t know when this will reach you. Don’t worry. Just got a bit antsy.
Daniel
The postcards are my favourite bits of the story. This one not so much, as there had to be one approaching-normal one before Daniel got onto really expressing himself, but in general, I really like the way they bring Rodney into the story. That said, they're addressed to Rodney, but in the canon universe they could have been addressed to Jack, or Sam, or anyone. Daniel doesn't write them to send. He just writes them so what he's thinking becomes concrete.
He had a vocabulary of millions of words, but only “antsy” seemed to fit the bill. Good words (quinquereme. lissome. alkanet.) were wasted on Rodney (fuck. you. Daniel.) anyway.
How do you spell "quiquereme"? I don't know.gamesiplay, davechicken and I all disagree, as do the American and British versions of Word. I think I gave up because I was becoming dangerously fixated.
The Lecture had been another waste of words. Speaking of which, the pyramids were at the edge of his vision. Strange, when he’d been trying not to think about them for years. He reached down, picking up a pinch of sand in his fingers and letting it drop. He’d go out to visit them later. Today, even. They loomed over urban Cairo and he wouldn’t be able to help himself.
He stopped by a stall selling trinkets and picked up an ankh on a chain, light and delicate in his hands. It felt much like one he’d wear himself, if he weren’t trying to forget where he came from. The stall-holder looked up as he held it, eyebrows raised in enquiry, and after a pause, Daniel nodded.
Once the haggling was over, and a price arrived at that would preserve both the seller’s and his own honour, he pocketed it. Rodney thought jewellery on men made them look gay.
Perfect.
Dear Rodney,
This postcard has been well-soaked in the juice of three lemons. You’ll be dead in seconds.
Just kidding.
Daniel
Danvers called this "aptly bitter", and that's exactly what I was going for. It's dark humour, similar to the dialogue with his reflection earlier, and Daniel doesn't care how the postcard could be interpreted.
The tourists were being hounded by beggars and souvenir-hawkers, but they avoided Daniel somehow, and that suited him fine. Besides, he’d learnt how to deal with them when following his mother round these same bazaars.
Once upon a time, you’d been able to climb the sides of the pyramids. Not once upon a time as in when they were new, but as in about twenty years ago, before too many people started falling off. They’d finally stopped it when a five-year-old child fell thirty feet. Daniel still had the scar, but he didn’t remember falling. Only the afterwards-time, when people came running and there were stars coming out overhead and he was lifted, silent and broken, placed over a camel and rushed to a doctor.
Leigh suggested I should perhaps move the sentence that begins "Daniel still had..." to a new paragraph, but I kept the original placement on purpose. I wanted the reader to do a double-take, take a mental moment to process that yes, it was Daniel who fell. In the privacy of his own head, he doesn't make necessarily connect all the points; his thoughts jump from one to another.
Had there really been a camel? Or was that just his imagination working overtime, the rosy glow of childhood magnified ten or twelve times?
I think there was a camel. But everything that's happened since has rather obscured that.
Didn’t matter. Of course, it didn’t matter now. He reached a point where the sun and the apex were straight overhead, and sat down with a thump in the sand. In 200 BC, Erastothenes had measured the circumference of the earth this way; the sun was directly overhead in Syrene because it reflected in the water at the base of a well, but not in Alexandria, where it cast a distinct shadow. A calculation later and he’d changed the world.
Later in life he went blind and starved himself to death.
This is true, of course. I was looking up the name of the city - I wanted to call it Syracuse for some reason - and stumbled across that final piece of information. It seemed perfectly morbid for a story that is rather morbid, so in it went.
Dear Rodney,
When I was five I fell off a pyramid and nearly died. Next time I’ll try harder.
Don’t worry.
Daniel
He's so passive-aggressive. He says something that's blatantly suicidal, and then adds "Don't worry" as a little aside, like I'm not important so please don't trouble yourself. It's no wonder he drives Rodney insane. As to whether he's actually suicidal, I don't think so. Committing suicide would take energy he doesn't have.
There had been whispered words in the newspapers before he left, and a double-page spread in the National Enquirer. Strange happenings in the sky, strange blips on deep-space radar telemetry.
Canon reference, obviously - deep-space radar telemetry is the cover-story for what happens in the lower levels of Cheyenne Mountain.
Daniel wasn’t interested. There were strange things enough on earth without having to go and look for them elsewhere; and besides, he couldn’t quite bear the reminder just yet. Did aliens build the pyramids, Dr. Jackson?
Maybe, he answered himself. It was as good an explanation as any. Losing the sense of human achievement wasn’t such a hard price to pay when you considered the spared lives of thousands of slaves, labouring in the baking desert heat to raise solid stone blocks hundreds of feet in the air. For a pharaoh’s hubris. Think of the inhumanity.
But maybe the aliens had slaves, too.
I've always wondered about this. So the Goa'uld were on Earth and forced their slaves to build their pyramids - does that mean any human ruler doing the same thing would be just as bad as them?
Dear Rodney,
Enough about me, I’m self-obsessed. How’s deep-space telemetry treating you?
Daniel
Passive-aggression again! He's making an obvious point about the fact Rodney hasn't attempted to respond to any of these postcards. Also, the second sentence is intended to imply that Daniel, like so many in the canon universe, doubts the cover story is anything but a cover story.
The pyramids swallowed time. Time was not an arrow; it was a landscape, a wilderness, a bleak expanse where he walked aimlessly, tracing circles in white sand with index finger. Days drifted by while he roamed the streets of the old city, the gardens where he grew up, drawn to the strange places where the sand mixed with mortar and the desert was slowly reclaiming its land.
The first sentence is an unconscious reference to Terry Pratchett's Pyramids, a Discworld novel I must re-read - in that, the pyramids actually do swallow time. The kingdom of Djeylibeybi is a century behind the rest of the Disc, which is why they're in the Century of the Cobra while in Ankh-Morpork they're in the Century of the Fruitbat. But I digress. The paragraph that follows is just meant to quickly get rid of a lot of time. I didn't specify how long Daniel is in Egypt for, but it's at least a month and probably more.
Erastothenes had been right about one thing, Daniel decided. The sun was close here. That immeasurable brightness gave his childhood its golden-syrup glow, whereas now it merely worked its way into his heart and soul and made him wonder if he could ever stand darkness again.
He's afraid of going back.
The Hajj was coming; the pilgrims were moving. Briefly, he considered following them, covering his head and his eyes and defiling the holy city with his atheist touch. Then Jerusalem, maybe; add his tears to the Wailing Wall and fall down at its base before the weight of history. Cross into Europe at Constantinople, no, Istanbul, through into the northern lands with their Latinate roots, and if he went far enough he would come to the Atlantic shore, sea-smoothed and a different kind of sand.
Or he could stay here, and drift. There was that, as well.
Again, organic. I wrote this bit without thinking about a word of it - which is what makes commentaries so difficult, in hindsight - and edited it only slightly. Daniel is crushed beneath the weight of history, both his own and that of the world in general, and from that we see the slip where he gives Istanbul its old name and not the modern one.
And then we see his lack of energy. He could stay here and drift, and he knew all along that's all he was going to do.
Dear Rodney,
Thirty-three languages, and I can’t say I love you.
Daniel
Um. This is a continuity glitch. As of the episode 1969, Daniel spoke thirty-three languages. But that includes Abydonian and Ancient script and who knows how many more he's learned during his time with the Stargate Programme. The figure given here should be lower.
And, yes, the irony! The one postcard that really communicates something, without small talk, black jokes or passive-aggression, is the one that gets ruined.
The postcard dropped into a puddle of slickly running water, blurring immediately. “Shit.”
“Oh my god.” The voice was female and American. “You speak English?”
Daniel turned. “Yes, sometimes,” he answered, and heard the faintest trace of an old accent in his voice.
As he is a linguist, it seems a fair assumption that Daniel absorbs the speech patterns of those around him, and he's been here long enough now for his English to be tinged with the Arabic he's been using exclusively since he arrived.
The girl stared at him as though he were a scruffy, long-haired, blue-eyed angel.
Daniel, bless him, has not realised that scruffy, long-haired, blue-eyed could easily apply to an Old Testament angel.
“Can you help me get out of here? I’m so lost, and I couldn’t ask anyone, and, and, maybe I’m not cut out for backpacking.”
He gave her directions solemnly, embarrassed by the gratitude in her eyes. Before she left, she asked, “Are you from round here, then?”
Holding the postcard, he stood and looked, and thought suddenly of the Old Testament angels of brimstone and flame, who were the lights in the darkness and the messengers in the desert. He didn’t know what to say.
He's helped someone. It's an amazing thing because he believes so deeply that he is fundamentally useless, so much so that he's left his life behind, run off to Egypt and no-one has so much as noticed. But this girl is grateful for his help, and the way Daniel's mind works is to draw a comparison between this and the ancient example of the angels acting as guides in biblical times. I wrote it without thinking about it, but on reflection I like how it fits in thematically. As seen before, Daniel thinks of things in terms of the past, and he's in Egypt, a fine biblical setting, and it fits. Even the name "Daniel" has Old Testament connotations, which I am chilidishly pleased with.
Dear Rodney,
Ignore the other cards, I was stoned. Wish you were here.
Daniel
He might be kidding, he might not. A reference to the druggie!Daniel beloved of myself and Taf. "Wish you were here" is used by Rodney to sign his postcards in Stella Maris, but I wrote it here independently. We are telepathic and never knew. :)
The first time he left Egypt, he’d never seen a Christmas tree nor ever eaten a peanut butter sandwich nor sung “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This time he could only wish back that innocence; home and hearth and heart were mute before customs officials.
It was dark and he didn’t have to look at the sun, only the dozens of flickering naked flames like a jewelled carpet beneath a soaring aircraft. The harsh cold air was painful to breathe, and the scratchy airline blanket the briefest of comforts below his head. But the reading light let him write, and the sound of his moving nib accompanied him across the thousands of miles of night.
If it can be believed, this paragraph originally had thousands more adjectives. Looking back, I would have removed all of them and put a bare minimum back in.
It was getting light in California when he let himself softly into his apartment. His journals, filled with new scribblings, were placed reverently on his desk; everything else went on the floor.
A fairly transparent look at Daniel's priorities. The written word is the most important thing to him - there's nothing else he really cares about now.
He pulled off his boots, noticing the sand rushing out, and pressed the button on the answering-machine. The red light continued flashing on and off.
“Daniel. Daniel, it’s me. Pick up. I got your message. Have you lost your fucking mind? If I moved to Russia you’d never even know about it and if you don’t pick up I’m coming over there. I mean it. Fuck it! ”
This shows us that the PegB continuity isn't perfect - according to Stella Maris, Rodney never contacted Daniel in any way apart from the postcards, but I hadn't read that story when writing this. I'm kind of glad, because I don't think this would have worked well as a postcard. I wanted to show Rodney, angry and exasperated but genuinely concerned about Daniel, and we had to hear his voice at some point to firmly establish the fact it is him, and not some faceless entity Daniel just happens to be sending postcards to.
Moving to Russia is a reference to canon - 48 Hours - when Rodney actually is sent to Russia because he's so annoying.
Daniel walked to his front door and checked the locks. They were still there. He switched the answering-machine off.
That's the tragic part. Rodney threatens to come and break the locks, knowing that it's not a serious threat - it's illegal, Daniel's an adult and able to take care of himself, and Rodney is most likely hundreds of miles away anyway - but Daniel, freshly back in a place he hates, interprets it as Rodney not caring enough to come and check on him. The evidence is clear - the locks are still there.
The term paper was also still there, right where he’d left it, red ink fading from the sunlight that had fallen through the window.
Nothing changes for Daniel. He's had a respite from his dreary life, but it's waiting for him when he comes back.
He ignored it. Sitting at his desk, he drew a new sheet of paper towards him, wrote Rodney McKay is a fuckwit fourteen times and fell into an exhausted sleep.
A little black humour. Just to emphasise the fact he's back in the same place, physically and emotionally, as he was in the beginning, he even uses the same phrase.
Next year he’d walk barefoot to Palestine. It was something to do, after all.
"Walk barefoot to Palestine" - I don't come up with phrases as poetic as that by myself. It's from Othello, Act IV scene 3, where Emilia, talking about Gratiano, says: "I knew a lady would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip." Entirely different context, of course. While Emilia's friend would have done it for love, and others would do it for religion (obviously, there are religious connotations with Palestine), Daniel would do it for no reason other than boredom or frustration. He's no longer driven by passion as he once was. He's just there, existing, going on day by day because he doesn't know what else to do.
I'll do the Love Story commentary next, but first Biology. An essay to write (The Role of ATP in Living Organisms, yay) before Rice-Oxley kills me. Sigh.
gamesiplay:“And concurrent with another academic’s theories some years ago, it is a clear and obvious conclusion that the Egyptians did not build the pyramids.”
I never wanted to write a Pegasus B story. In fact, I never wanted to write Stargate fic again, let alone Atlantis. But I was reading through
troyswann's pilot, and it just grabbed my attention. I started writing this story in bits and pieces, a paragraph here and a paragraph there, shelved it for a fortnight and then finished it off in one night. Definitely one of the ones that go in the "grew organically" category.This device, of using something in quotes at the beginning of each section, also grew organically. I realised I was doing it late on, went back and made a conscious effort to make it consistent.
No, Daniel thought, pushing his glasses back up his nose; what is a clear and obvious conclusion is that you are a fuckwit, Mr. Lee. Was that the student’s name? He wrote it down anyway. “What is a clear and obvious conclusion, Mr. Lee…”
He stared for a moment at his scrawling, red-pen professor’s handwriting. Then he wrote the sentence out again in French, with perfectly rendered accents and circumflexes. Then Spanish. He sighed, but his pen didn’t stop moving. With only the faintest of reservations, he wrote it out in Dutch, and then with a flick of the nib, in Italian. He paused then, before turning to the curving Cyrillic alphabet, angular Devanagari, and in a moment of memory, in Arabic.
This is Daniel's version of automatic writing. He's tired, bored and frustrated, and doing this is an attempt at catharsis. It doesn't work.
“Fuckwit” didn’t translate in Japanese, nor Latin, and he was reaching the end of the page now anyway, the lower part of the paper a mess of garbled communication.
He stood up. Let the pen drop, the chair knock backwards, and walked slowly and carefully to the bathroom. “Dr. Jackson?” he said.
His reflection stared out of the mirror, long hair pushed back and straggly, eyes wide and startled. Yes?
“What is a clear and obvious conclusion,” Daniel continued, “is that you, my friend, are going insane.”
There was nothing his reflection had to add. The next day he bought a plane ticket.
He's still got his sense of humour, no matter how twisted it's become; he's aware that there is a funny side to this impending insanity, and he's playing on it a bit by actually talking to his reflection.
“Rodney? Yeah, it’s me. Daniel. I’m, uh, I’ve just realised something. I’ve got to go. I mean you might not be hearing from me for a while. Um. Goodbye.”
When I first wrote this, I think I had the vague idea that Rodney would actually be in the story at some point.
Egypt didn’t change. Muezzins called, hawkers spat, small children ran barefoot through the streets, people yelled and shouted; but at the same time the noise the people made was undercut by the deep sonorous silence of the desert in the same way Daniel remembered. He had last been here shortly after the Lecture, the one that acquired the capital letter and dropped it again to match his mood, and the country, horizon-to-horizon sand, hadn’t altered in the slightest. Maybe it was Daniel who changed, a scholar but a mere human as well, who changed and grew old while Egypt never did. It was old already. Egypt had been old at the dawn of time.
And we're in a different place. Daniel has literally stood up and left, and the abrupt transition of the narrative reflects how suddenly he's run. And running is what he's doing, clearly - he's just trying, mindlessly, to get away.
Some parts of the text from here onwards have been taken from another fic I tried to write about two years ago. It was a short, heavy-on-description-sans-plot affair, about Daniel's parents in Egypt and Daniel as a very young child. While I never really managed to finish it, I've rescued some of the good bits and reused them here.
Maybe not, Daniel thought. Once the pyramids had been new, with gleaming marble caps. Maybe. Maybe not. Like pulling petals off a daisy, his insanity was following him.
That sentence makes absolutely no sense at all. Insanity, yeah?
Still, it was better here. He’d left the papers to grade at home and he could breathe now.
It was the influence of the desert. He’d come here after the Lecture simply because it was thousands of miles away from California; Siberia would have done as well, as would Mali or Madagascar, but it was reflex to reach an airport and ask for a ticket to Cairo. He’d dreamed about doing it when he was younger. The desert had been the promised land, then; the place he’d played in when his parents were alive, and even before that day in New York, he’d never quite understood why the Israelites wanted to leave. That was a long time ago, and perhaps life had been easier as a child prodigy than an adult one.
Throughout this, Daniel is seen to be thinking about people and events long past. This happens whenever I write from his POV, but it seemed particularly appropriate here. Daniel is an archaeologist and can't help but think of things in terms of the past, but it's his own past he's trying to ignore.
The muezzin was calling, now, and his lips moved to follow the words. When the prayers were over, he bought postcards.
Dear Rodney,
Am in Egypt. Don’t know when this will reach you. Don’t worry. Just got a bit antsy.
Daniel
The postcards are my favourite bits of the story. This one not so much, as there had to be one approaching-normal one before Daniel got onto really expressing himself, but in general, I really like the way they bring Rodney into the story. That said, they're addressed to Rodney, but in the canon universe they could have been addressed to Jack, or Sam, or anyone. Daniel doesn't write them to send. He just writes them so what he's thinking becomes concrete.
He had a vocabulary of millions of words, but only “antsy” seemed to fit the bill. Good words (quinquereme. lissome. alkanet.) were wasted on Rodney (fuck. you. Daniel.) anyway.
How do you spell "quiquereme"? I don't know.
gamesiplay, davechicken and I all disagree, as do the American and British versions of Word. I think I gave up because I was becoming dangerously fixated.The Lecture had been another waste of words. Speaking of which, the pyramids were at the edge of his vision. Strange, when he’d been trying not to think about them for years. He reached down, picking up a pinch of sand in his fingers and letting it drop. He’d go out to visit them later. Today, even. They loomed over urban Cairo and he wouldn’t be able to help himself.
He stopped by a stall selling trinkets and picked up an ankh on a chain, light and delicate in his hands. It felt much like one he’d wear himself, if he weren’t trying to forget where he came from. The stall-holder looked up as he held it, eyebrows raised in enquiry, and after a pause, Daniel nodded.
Once the haggling was over, and a price arrived at that would preserve both the seller’s and his own honour, he pocketed it. Rodney thought jewellery on men made them look gay.
Perfect.
Dear Rodney,
This postcard has been well-soaked in the juice of three lemons. You’ll be dead in seconds.
Just kidding.
Daniel
Danvers called this "aptly bitter", and that's exactly what I was going for. It's dark humour, similar to the dialogue with his reflection earlier, and Daniel doesn't care how the postcard could be interpreted.
The tourists were being hounded by beggars and souvenir-hawkers, but they avoided Daniel somehow, and that suited him fine. Besides, he’d learnt how to deal with them when following his mother round these same bazaars.
Once upon a time, you’d been able to climb the sides of the pyramids. Not once upon a time as in when they were new, but as in about twenty years ago, before too many people started falling off. They’d finally stopped it when a five-year-old child fell thirty feet. Daniel still had the scar, but he didn’t remember falling. Only the afterwards-time, when people came running and there were stars coming out overhead and he was lifted, silent and broken, placed over a camel and rushed to a doctor.
Leigh suggested I should perhaps move the sentence that begins "Daniel still had..." to a new paragraph, but I kept the original placement on purpose. I wanted the reader to do a double-take, take a mental moment to process that yes, it was Daniel who fell. In the privacy of his own head, he doesn't make necessarily connect all the points; his thoughts jump from one to another.
Had there really been a camel? Or was that just his imagination working overtime, the rosy glow of childhood magnified ten or twelve times?
I think there was a camel. But everything that's happened since has rather obscured that.
Didn’t matter. Of course, it didn’t matter now. He reached a point where the sun and the apex were straight overhead, and sat down with a thump in the sand. In 200 BC, Erastothenes had measured the circumference of the earth this way; the sun was directly overhead in Syrene because it reflected in the water at the base of a well, but not in Alexandria, where it cast a distinct shadow. A calculation later and he’d changed the world.
Later in life he went blind and starved himself to death.
This is true, of course. I was looking up the name of the city - I wanted to call it Syracuse for some reason - and stumbled across that final piece of information. It seemed perfectly morbid for a story that is rather morbid, so in it went.
Dear Rodney,
When I was five I fell off a pyramid and nearly died. Next time I’ll try harder.
Don’t worry.
Daniel
He's so passive-aggressive. He says something that's blatantly suicidal, and then adds "Don't worry" as a little aside, like I'm not important so please don't trouble yourself. It's no wonder he drives Rodney insane. As to whether he's actually suicidal, I don't think so. Committing suicide would take energy he doesn't have.
There had been whispered words in the newspapers before he left, and a double-page spread in the National Enquirer. Strange happenings in the sky, strange blips on deep-space radar telemetry.
Canon reference, obviously - deep-space radar telemetry is the cover-story for what happens in the lower levels of Cheyenne Mountain.
Daniel wasn’t interested. There were strange things enough on earth without having to go and look for them elsewhere; and besides, he couldn’t quite bear the reminder just yet. Did aliens build the pyramids, Dr. Jackson?
Maybe, he answered himself. It was as good an explanation as any. Losing the sense of human achievement wasn’t such a hard price to pay when you considered the spared lives of thousands of slaves, labouring in the baking desert heat to raise solid stone blocks hundreds of feet in the air. For a pharaoh’s hubris. Think of the inhumanity.
But maybe the aliens had slaves, too.
I've always wondered about this. So the Goa'uld were on Earth and forced their slaves to build their pyramids - does that mean any human ruler doing the same thing would be just as bad as them?
Dear Rodney,
Enough about me, I’m self-obsessed. How’s deep-space telemetry treating you?
Daniel
Passive-aggression again! He's making an obvious point about the fact Rodney hasn't attempted to respond to any of these postcards. Also, the second sentence is intended to imply that Daniel, like so many in the canon universe, doubts the cover story is anything but a cover story.
The pyramids swallowed time. Time was not an arrow; it was a landscape, a wilderness, a bleak expanse where he walked aimlessly, tracing circles in white sand with index finger. Days drifted by while he roamed the streets of the old city, the gardens where he grew up, drawn to the strange places where the sand mixed with mortar and the desert was slowly reclaiming its land.
The first sentence is an unconscious reference to Terry Pratchett's Pyramids, a Discworld novel I must re-read - in that, the pyramids actually do swallow time. The kingdom of Djeylibeybi is a century behind the rest of the Disc, which is why they're in the Century of the Cobra while in Ankh-Morpork they're in the Century of the Fruitbat. But I digress. The paragraph that follows is just meant to quickly get rid of a lot of time. I didn't specify how long Daniel is in Egypt for, but it's at least a month and probably more.
Erastothenes had been right about one thing, Daniel decided. The sun was close here. That immeasurable brightness gave his childhood its golden-syrup glow, whereas now it merely worked its way into his heart and soul and made him wonder if he could ever stand darkness again.
He's afraid of going back.
The Hajj was coming; the pilgrims were moving. Briefly, he considered following them, covering his head and his eyes and defiling the holy city with his atheist touch. Then Jerusalem, maybe; add his tears to the Wailing Wall and fall down at its base before the weight of history. Cross into Europe at Constantinople, no, Istanbul, through into the northern lands with their Latinate roots, and if he went far enough he would come to the Atlantic shore, sea-smoothed and a different kind of sand.
Or he could stay here, and drift. There was that, as well.
Again, organic. I wrote this bit without thinking about a word of it - which is what makes commentaries so difficult, in hindsight - and edited it only slightly. Daniel is crushed beneath the weight of history, both his own and that of the world in general, and from that we see the slip where he gives Istanbul its old name and not the modern one.
And then we see his lack of energy. He could stay here and drift, and he knew all along that's all he was going to do.
Dear Rodney,
Thirty-three languages, and I can’t say I love you.
Daniel
Um. This is a continuity glitch. As of the episode 1969, Daniel spoke thirty-three languages. But that includes Abydonian and Ancient script and who knows how many more he's learned during his time with the Stargate Programme. The figure given here should be lower.
And, yes, the irony! The one postcard that really communicates something, without small talk, black jokes or passive-aggression, is the one that gets ruined.
The postcard dropped into a puddle of slickly running water, blurring immediately. “Shit.”
“Oh my god.” The voice was female and American. “You speak English?”
Daniel turned. “Yes, sometimes,” he answered, and heard the faintest trace of an old accent in his voice.
As he is a linguist, it seems a fair assumption that Daniel absorbs the speech patterns of those around him, and he's been here long enough now for his English to be tinged with the Arabic he's been using exclusively since he arrived.
The girl stared at him as though he were a scruffy, long-haired, blue-eyed angel.
Daniel, bless him, has not realised that scruffy, long-haired, blue-eyed could easily apply to an Old Testament angel.
“Can you help me get out of here? I’m so lost, and I couldn’t ask anyone, and, and, maybe I’m not cut out for backpacking.”
He gave her directions solemnly, embarrassed by the gratitude in her eyes. Before she left, she asked, “Are you from round here, then?”
Holding the postcard, he stood and looked, and thought suddenly of the Old Testament angels of brimstone and flame, who were the lights in the darkness and the messengers in the desert. He didn’t know what to say.
He's helped someone. It's an amazing thing because he believes so deeply that he is fundamentally useless, so much so that he's left his life behind, run off to Egypt and no-one has so much as noticed. But this girl is grateful for his help, and the way Daniel's mind works is to draw a comparison between this and the ancient example of the angels acting as guides in biblical times. I wrote it without thinking about it, but on reflection I like how it fits in thematically. As seen before, Daniel thinks of things in terms of the past, and he's in Egypt, a fine biblical setting, and it fits. Even the name "Daniel" has Old Testament connotations, which I am chilidishly pleased with.
Dear Rodney,
Ignore the other cards, I was stoned. Wish you were here.
Daniel
He might be kidding, he might not. A reference to the druggie!Daniel beloved of myself and Taf. "Wish you were here" is used by Rodney to sign his postcards in Stella Maris, but I wrote it here independently. We are telepathic and never knew. :)
The first time he left Egypt, he’d never seen a Christmas tree nor ever eaten a peanut butter sandwich nor sung “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This time he could only wish back that innocence; home and hearth and heart were mute before customs officials.
It was dark and he didn’t have to look at the sun, only the dozens of flickering naked flames like a jewelled carpet beneath a soaring aircraft. The harsh cold air was painful to breathe, and the scratchy airline blanket the briefest of comforts below his head. But the reading light let him write, and the sound of his moving nib accompanied him across the thousands of miles of night.
If it can be believed, this paragraph originally had thousands more adjectives. Looking back, I would have removed all of them and put a bare minimum back in.
It was getting light in California when he let himself softly into his apartment. His journals, filled with new scribblings, were placed reverently on his desk; everything else went on the floor.
A fairly transparent look at Daniel's priorities. The written word is the most important thing to him - there's nothing else he really cares about now.
He pulled off his boots, noticing the sand rushing out, and pressed the button on the answering-machine. The red light continued flashing on and off.
“Daniel. Daniel, it’s me. Pick up. I got your message. Have you lost your fucking mind? If I moved to Russia you’d never even know about it and if you don’t pick up I’m coming over there. I mean it. Fuck it! ”
This shows us that the PegB continuity isn't perfect - according to Stella Maris, Rodney never contacted Daniel in any way apart from the postcards, but I hadn't read that story when writing this. I'm kind of glad, because I don't think this would have worked well as a postcard. I wanted to show Rodney, angry and exasperated but genuinely concerned about Daniel, and we had to hear his voice at some point to firmly establish the fact it is him, and not some faceless entity Daniel just happens to be sending postcards to.
Moving to Russia is a reference to canon - 48 Hours - when Rodney actually is sent to Russia because he's so annoying.
Daniel walked to his front door and checked the locks. They were still there. He switched the answering-machine off.
That's the tragic part. Rodney threatens to come and break the locks, knowing that it's not a serious threat - it's illegal, Daniel's an adult and able to take care of himself, and Rodney is most likely hundreds of miles away anyway - but Daniel, freshly back in a place he hates, interprets it as Rodney not caring enough to come and check on him. The evidence is clear - the locks are still there.
The term paper was also still there, right where he’d left it, red ink fading from the sunlight that had fallen through the window.
Nothing changes for Daniel. He's had a respite from his dreary life, but it's waiting for him when he comes back.
He ignored it. Sitting at his desk, he drew a new sheet of paper towards him, wrote Rodney McKay is a fuckwit fourteen times and fell into an exhausted sleep.
A little black humour. Just to emphasise the fact he's back in the same place, physically and emotionally, as he was in the beginning, he even uses the same phrase.
Next year he’d walk barefoot to Palestine. It was something to do, after all.
"Walk barefoot to Palestine" - I don't come up with phrases as poetic as that by myself. It's from Othello, Act IV scene 3, where Emilia, talking about Gratiano, says: "I knew a lady would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip." Entirely different context, of course. While Emilia's friend would have done it for love, and others would do it for religion (obviously, there are religious connotations with Palestine), Daniel would do it for no reason other than boredom or frustration. He's no longer driven by passion as he once was. He's just there, existing, going on day by day because he doesn't know what else to do.
I'll do the Love Story commentary next, but first Biology. An essay to write (The Role of ATP in Living Organisms, yay) before Rice-Oxley kills me. Sigh.
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on 2005-03-13 05:14 pm (UTC)I know exactly what you mean, I can remember the word to Rakkasalu in finnish but I can't remember my german. Very weird
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on 2005-03-13 06:23 pm (UTC)And personally? I *like* the idea that Rodney got so worried about Daniel that he broke government-imposed radio silence to call him.
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on 2005-03-14 06:52 pm (UTC)I think I like that idea, too. And Daniel, bless his paranoid heart, has no idea about the lengths Rodney went to to speak with him.
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on 2005-03-13 06:35 pm (UTC)You're a brilliant writer.
:)
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on 2005-03-14 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-03-13 07:18 pm (UTC)And, yes, the irony! The one postcard that really communicates something, without small talk, black jokes or passive-aggression, is the one that gets ruined.
That was one of my favorite postcards. I really loved it.
He's so passive-aggressive. He says something that's blatantly suicidal, and then adds "Don't worry" as a little aside, like I'm not important so please don't trouble yourself. It's no wonder he drives Rodney insane. As to whether he's actually suicidal, I don't think so. Committing suicide would take energy he doesn't have.
That was my other favorite postcard. I think if anything else doesn't, this would make you sympathise with Rodney a little more ;-)
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on 2005-03-14 06:55 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-03-14 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-03-14 08:50 pm (UTC)On a completely unrelated note, today I was in a restaurant and, out of the blue, Keane's "This is the Last Time" came on over the speakers. (For some reason, they play music constantly in this restaurant.) It made me smile.
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on 2005-03-15 07:09 am (UTC)no subject
on 2005-03-15 03:00 am (UTC)I am totally exhausted and can't seem to be able to read, but whatever made it into my mind was great! And as a random observation, Jack likes to stare at naked SG-1 crew members!
*runs off, giggling madly*
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on 2005-03-15 09:49 am (UTC)