Dust to Dust, by Ellen Caldera (PG)

[sg-fignewton.livejournal.com]

Rec Category: Daniel Jackson

Pairing: none, although there's lots of talk of Sha're
Category:  Daniel Jackson, gen, episode related, angst, team, friendship
Warnings: reference to canon minor character deaths
Author on LJ: unknown
Author's Website: Ellen Caldera at The Tablet
Link to Story: Dust to Dust

Why This Must Be Read:  I was quite surprised to see that this achingly beautiful story wasn't yet recced in the Daniel Jackson category. Ellen seizes on one of the best Daniel moments of S2 and gives us a bittersweet episode tag to Serpent's Song that the reader will remember for a long time to come.

When faced with a dying Apophis, we were treated to the two extremes of Daniel's personality: the sheer ruthlessness he could bring when dealing with the Goa'uld ("If you don't tell me where she is, I'll kill you right here") and his astonishing compassion for the host that wears the face of his most hated enemy, when he offered the dying scribe the final rites to give the man a smidgen of comfort. In this moving fic, Ellen takes us with Daniel to Egypt, where he's gone to bury the funeral statue as he promised.

Horrific nightmares are hardly unexpected, considering that now Daniel is all too aware of how much Sha're must be suffering. Then there's the question of faith, and wondering if the promise he'd made is of any use to the poor scribe under the circumstances. Luckily for Daniel, he's got first Sam, and then the rest of the team, to offer him support and some hope for the future.

Dust to Dust is a lovely, thoughtful, heartbreaking story, and a fitting tag to Daniel at his best.

"I mean, what do you think, Sam? Is this a fool's errand?"

That caught her off guard. Here she was trying to tip-toe around the religion subject, and she left the door wide open for him to turn the tables on her. If that shrewdness had a military bent, he'd probably be wearing as many citations as Jack. But she also knew that Daniel wasn't intentionally trying to back her into a corner. He was simply curious. She paused a moment to collect her thoughts. "If you're asking me if I believe there's life after death, then yes, I think there is. Consciousness, individuality, sentient thought - none of that can be explained by atoms or chemical reactions. There has to be something more to the equation."

"There speaks the mathematician." Someone else might've meant that as an insult, but not Daniel.

She was annoyed with herself nonetheless. Why did it always have to boil down to an equation, action/reaction, theories based on evidence, even if the evidence was sketchy at best? She laughed and nodded, though, admitting he was right. She was a mathematician, but right now, he was looking for something so completely removed from science that it was silly to put it in scientific terms. She changed her tack. "My grandmother used to tell me that the reason they called it faith was because you have to believe without any proof other than what your own heart is telling you. That poor scribe believed that he was finally going to find some peace. Nothing else really matters."

Daniel nodded and looked down at his hands, carefully folded in his lap. There was more that she could've said, other reasons to be here. They both knew what it was like to be trapped in a prison of flesh, she because of Jolinar and he because of Machello. Different situations, true, but they had both been helpless to do anything about it. There was precious little that could be done for the victim of Apophis, but she intended to do whatever she possibly could, even if it was nothing more than some kind of symbolic gesture. And then there was Sha're. Maybe Daniel was here simply because he couldn't do anything for Sha're. Maybe he was looking for a proxy. It was obvious that the events of the last week had dredged up unpleasant thoughts that he normally kept tucked away, but she just couldn't bring herself to go poking around in any of those wounds right now. They both needed to sleep. "Get some rest," she told him, reaching out to gently squeeze his shoulder. "We've got a long day ahead of us tomorrow." She turned and left the room, closing the door quietly behind her. She leaned against it for a moment, then sighed and crawled back into bed and turned out the light. It was a long time before she heard the creak of bedsprings in the next room that told her Daniel was finally lying down to sleep. Or at least lying down, even if he didn't sleep.