Look to the Heavens and Number the Stars (R) & The Silent Language of the Star (PG-13) by Minervacat

[abyssinia4077.livejournal.com]

Rec Category: Original Character
Pairing: none
Category: gen, original character, Jack O'Neill, Daniel Jackson, Janet Fraiser, Sam Carter, Jonas Quinn, Cameron Mitchell, episode related, Vala Mal Doran, team
Warning: reference to canon character deaths
Author on LJ minervacat
Author's Website: When the Floods Roll Back
Link: Look to the Heavens and Number the Stars, The Silent Language of the Star

Why This Must Be Read:
Meet Claire Carson, the poor soul roped into being librarian and cataloger for the SGC. Claire is a wonderful character in her own right, but also provides us a great outside perspective on SG-1 and SGC as a whole and just how crazy everyone's job is. minervacat had me sold on her from her first impression of Jack, when he shows up in her office to offer her the job.

Claire's an outsider at the facility - mostly keeping to herself while she manages the books and artifacts - not on a 'gate team and near the end of the gossip chain. But over the years (the stories span from around season 2 to 9) she develops friendships with many of her co-workers, some of whom are familiar to us and some of whom are original characters in their own right. In "Look to the Heavens and Number the Stars" we learn how Claire gets the job, and why the sheer nature of it (cataloging things no system was developed to deal with, Daniel's tendency to wander off with books and never return them) is enough to drive her crazy. We see her exasperated fondness for Jack, her wonderful bond with Daniel (whom she accidentally knocks unconscious with a heavy volume of Sappho's poetry), and the friendship she develops with Janet, who keeps her in the gossip chain. The sequel, "The Silent Language of the Star," follows Claire's experience during four specific episodes, giving us a wonderful new perspective on the stories.

Through Claire you fall in love with many of these characters all over again, laugh with them and grieve for them, all while getting a new perspective on who they are and what exactly it means to be a part of SGC.




Her second day underneath the Mountain, she was sitting in her office trying to make sense of a stack of scrolls that looked pre-Egyptian, except they were too real to be forgeries and too new to be from the era they should have been from, and a distracted looking man drifted through the door and made a couple of circuits of the junk they'd brought Claire to catalog before looking up and noticing her.

"Hi," he said cheerfully. "How would you classify the Stargate, if you had to?"

Claire stared at him.

"Library of Congress or Dewey, either's fine," the man said.

Claire said, "What the hell is a Stargate?"

The man blinked at her, and then grabbed her wrist and tugged Claire out of her seat and out of the office. In the elevator down, he chatted casually about the stuff she'd been struggling with when he'd barged in (it was, apparently, Abydonian, and Claire was going to need a good encyclopedia to do this job, she thought), then he lead her into a control room of some kind, big glass windows looking out over a cavern of a room.

At the center was an enormous circle, set upright and plugged into what looked like a million electrical generators. The man said, "Hi, Walter," and then, "This is Claire Carson, the new librarian," and then, to Claire, "That's the Stargate."

"Oh," Claire said. "What does it do?"

He walked her through all of it -- the glyphs on outer rim, the dialing sequence that someone named Sam Carter had programmed, the way the wormholes worked. Claire stared at him and then said, "You mean -- other planets?"

"Yes," he said.

"Oh," Claire said. "Then, I guess, Travel, sub class Intergalactic, sub class Theoretical."

"Theoretical?" he said.

"It's required by the Library of Congress," Claire said. No one on the planet was writing books about actual intergalactic travel.

"But it's not theoretical," the man said.

"But L of C says," Claire said, and Colonel O'Neill -- "Call me Jack, please," even if Claire couldn't bring her to actually do that -- wandered up behind Claire's antagonist. Claire bit off her sentence, and smiled weakly at Colonel O'Neill, who assessed her expression and turned sternly to the man beside him.

"Don't harass the help, Danny," O'Neill said.

The man spluttered, "Danny?"

Claire said, "The help?"

O'Neill said, "Claire Carson, meet Daniel Jackson, MS, PhD, PhD. Daniel, Claire Carson, MA, MS."

"We don't always introduce people with their letters," Dr. Jackson said, extending a hand. "I'm sorry I forgot to introduce myself. It's just such a pleasure to have a cataloger on staff, finally. If you couldn't tell -- we're a little swamped with stuff."

"Yes," Claire said. "You are."

O'Neill snorted. Jackson cast a reprimanding, amused look at O'Neill and said, "Your paper about cataloging the Cyrillic languages made the rounds in the linguistics communities, you know. That's how we found you."

"Uh," Claire said.

"You picked a good one, Daniel," O'Neill said, elbowing Jackson in the side. "She's as speechless as you are talkative."

Claire said, "I think somebody needs to explain a lot of things to me." Jackson's eyebrows went up. "Honestly, I mean -- who are you people?"

Comments

[abyssinia4077.livejournal.com]

You're very, very welcome. All the thanks I ask is that you keep writing :)

(sg_fignewton and I actually had a little friendly battle going over who would get to rec these stories first)

These stories deserve all the publicity they can get.