stargateficrec | Son of Endless Sky, by Rydra Wong (PG-13) (Reply)

Greetings! I'll be reccing Original Character this month! Hope you all enjoy the recs. :)

Rec Category: Original Character

Pairing: none, really (but see below)

Categories: original character, Daniel Jackson, Jack O’Neill, episode related, character study

Warnings: spoilers through Homecoming

Author's Website: Fics here.

Why This Must Be Read: Rydra Wong gives us one of the most beautifully rendered original characters I’ve ever read in Son of Endless Sky.

Shortly after Daniel’s decension, the team meets a group of native traders who recognize that he has died and come back to life. They maintain that he is dangerous, belonging to neither earth nor sky; and they insist that Daniel allows them to provide him with a literal grounding, to keep his spirit safely within his unmarked body that was once nothing more than light.

You will be charmed by the one-paragraph complete story of little Bao, and Daniel’s quiet, gracious acceptance of what the natives ask. You will be moved by the profundity of the artist’s insights into SG-1, and the inherent beauty and pain in what he senses about Daniel’s past and how he writes that essence on Daniel’s body. Most of all, you will come away from this enchanting, haunting story with a sense of conviction that the traders are right – and that ephemeral Daniel does, indeed, require tangibility to keep himself anchored in our world.

(Regarding pairings: The fic is essentially gen; although the unnamed narrator observes the close relationship between Jack and Daniel and wonders about its nature, subtext is left up to the reader. The fic is a remix of brainofck’s Pervasive Local Obsidian, though, which is Jack/Daniel, so the fic is officially labeled as “Jack/Daniel implied/UST.”)

I am not spirit-chosen; it is too dangerous for one who is to be a tattooist. But one need not be so, to learn to read from flesh the marks within, the symbols needing to be inscribed, to pierce flesh so that it may speak with many mouths, so that the story of the body is not kept from the stories of the world.

When I touched him, I could feel it. His skin was warm as human skin, but there was wrongness in it, like a story retold by someone who does not understand the words.

I recoiled, and found the leader looking at me, his face serious and more open than I had ever seen it before, and knew that I only saw it because the other’s eyes were shut. I brought my fingertips back to his skin again.

His flesh was mute, a sealed vessel trapping the spirit. When it spoke at all, it protested, telling of scars that should be present and were not: a spray of little cuts across his face, as if he had been scratched by thorns – no, marked by something shattering, like pottery, many shards and edges.

My hand fell, without my willing it, and I took his hand, as Tsai had done. It told me of burning, touching something hotter than fire, searing to the marrow, and I shuddered. I have seen the marks that flame leaves behind; I could not imagine the scar from such a burning, and I knew, touching his smooth, false, unmarred skin, that it had left no scar because he had not survived it.

When I released his hand, my eyes were full of tears.