stringertheory | Between Two Waves of the Sea

Title: Between Two Waves of the Sea
Rating: PG
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Characters: Samantha Carter, Teal'c, Daniel Jackson, Jack O'Neill
Word Count: 908
Categories: angst, drama, character study
Spoilers/Warnings: None.
Summary: They have lived more days than they remember. They have lived many lives.
Note: Many gracious thanks to

lolmac for the beta.

"...The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea."
-"Little Gidding", T.S. Eliot

They have lived through more days than they remember. They have lived many lives.

Alternate timelines and alternate realities; time loops, time travel, and time dilation fields; being other people—it adds up. They have been between times, out of space, and on other planes. They have been everywhere and nowhere. They have not escaped unaffected.

For every touch of another time, of another place, something was left behind, some indelible trace that makes them more attractive to—and attracted by—the other. Like a type of spatiotemporal radioactivity, they carry an invisible marker that makes them glow in the place between time and space. It connects them to the places they have been where they didn't belong and to where they belong but haven't been.

Suddenly Daniel feels sand blowing across his skin and he squints in sunlight that isn't there, a faintly familiar laugh fading in the air. But the sensation is gone before he can give it name, only a tingle across his scalp remaining. He drains the last of his coffee and returns to work.

The silence hits him like a physical force, and Jack pauses on the threshold. He shakes himself before he can come to a complete stop and continues through the doorway, unsure why he expected to be greeted in his own empty house.

Sam toes the door closed and shuffles through a dark house to find the answering machine blinking at her. Her mind is too tired for thought, but her heart expects to hear her mother's voice, a gentle chastisement of too much time spent at work and a playful hint at a potential date, as always. But when she plays the message, it is only the colonel letting her know about the morning's briefing. She can't understand why she is so thrown, so confused at hearing his voice, as if she expected someone else. The feeling passes before she can fully grasp it, lost in the haze of her weariness, and by the time the colonel finishes speaking, she has forgotten it entirely.

Teal'c shifts under the heavy weight of his armor as he stands in line, the soft clank of metal on metal accompanying the movement. He subtly wrinkles his nose as the greasy tang of the oil lamps envelops him. Then there is the press of a hand against his back, warm through his shirt, and the greasy smell of french fries from his tray. He is not burdened by the armor he threw off long ago, and he allows his temporary confusion and the disturbance it causes him to slide off him like water.

Phantom quantum entanglement—the quantum equivalent of a phantom limb remembering a grasp that is no longer there. There is something in them, something in their very atoms, that recalls who they never were.

It is deja vu of the subconscious, an echo of lives they have not lived but that remember their shape. A breath of what might have been, of what may be in some other place or time, quivers in their cells like a memory. It calls to them in a voice no one else could hear, in a language no one else could understand. They hear without listening and respond without thought.

His own reflection startles Teal'c for a moment, the shine of gold on his forehead sending a shock down his spine. He hastily wipes the remaining condensation from the mirror and studies his reflection with a frown. Everything is as it should be, including the symbol of his slavery. He turns away to finish dressing.

There is a flutter under her skin and Sam stops dead, a hand flying to her stomach. She is surprised to find it flat and still under her touch. She waits for another heartbeat, but the colonel has noticed her absence at his side. When he stops and looks around and asks if she is okay, she smiles and casually slides the hand on her stomach down into her pocket. She joins him again with a swiftly murmured assertion that she is fine. In her pocket, the hand is balled into a fist.

Sometimes, Jack gets the very distinct feeling that he shouldn't be alive.

Daniel pulls himself to his feet with a sigh. He stumbles slightly as the memory of icy pain shoots through his leg, come and gone faster than he can gasp. He frowns down at the limb, turning it this way and that, staring at it as if it belongs to a stranger.

Their own ghosts whisper in their ears. The people they have not been and will be and are clamor in the distance, and the possibilities tingle just outside of reality.

The echo of voices down hallways they have never walked, the touch of hands never known, the weight of choices never made drift over their souls like mist. A few wisps get caught on the uneven edges of their beings, the parts affected by their dance across the fabric of the universe. Those parts remember what the mind does not, and hold on to the things that have never been.

They feel the resonance of themselves through time and space. And each reverberation contains them in every possible form. But they can only live the one life, broken periodically by echoes of what might have been. It is the steady current of a sea carrying a phantom siren song.