you take the blue paian

A response to Prompt 89.02 at sg1_five_things. Written fast in the comment window over there; couple of sentences added for re-posting here.


Five Ways Arrom Left Vis Uban Before SG-1 Showed Up

He left on long, struggling mental forays to construct scenarios that would explain his situation. It was like moving rocks whose shape he couldn't make out well enough to get hold of, whose weight he couldn't gauge well enough to lift, whose substance he couldn't qualify. He moved real rocks during the day, helping the nomadic people build storage structures for the caches of goods they'd deposit here and come back for in the next cycle of seasons. The phrase 'squirreling away' came to his mind, and he didn't know what 'squirl' was, beyond a synonym for 'tuck' or 'store.' He had concepts and no context, words and no referents, a head full of rocks that once fit tightly, seamlessly -- a head full of rubble. He listened to the stories the tribesfolk told around the fire at night, and tried to make stories out of the shreds and remnants in his head. He tried to devise quests that would leave him lying naked and rubble-headed in a field. He tried to backfill the story from the ending. But he couldn't move the rocks, couldn't see them to fit them together. He didn't really know the ending to the story, and he couldn't make a story that explained how the middle of it was ... this.

He left on a hike of three days. The word in his mind was 'walkabout,' the concept that drove him was of a people like these people, ancient and peaceful and restless and wise, who journeyed into the wilderness to find spiritual knowledge. He found only sere grass and thirst, mile upon mile of ground that was sun-baked and merciless by day, bone-chilling cold by night, and the suspicion that he had been on walkabout, and if recapitulating it didn't bring it back to him, then it wasn't ended yet, and he might as well go on where there was water and fire and shelter and food, and work to do to earn it. He returned empty-handed, and picked up the rocks he could move, and moved them.

He left in his dreams, troubled, incomprehensible tumbles of images and associationless feelings, glimpses of places and faces that made no sense, sounds that were meaningless babble. He woke falling, falling, sick with vertigo and the gut-clenching certainty of death, longing for the rocky ground to rear up and smash him, just so long as the falling ended.

Unbeknownst to him, he left in unconsciousness, tranquilized and beamed out of his tent by adversaries he wouldn't have recognized or even fought if they'd taken him waking, rescued and returned by gentle beings he wouldn't have known as friends.

He left in his heart, yearning and striving for some other life he loved as much as he feared, craven and ungrateful but unable to make himself stay. He came to love these people he worked beside, ate beside, slept among, but in his heart he was always leaving them, seduced by the concept of an identity he might never regain. How could he be more devoted to the fantasy of a life he knew nothing of than to the good life he could reach right out and touch? Was the person he had been the kind of person who could betray and abandon proven friendship for a wisp of a dream? He looked around at the faces of those he loved, streaming and laughing in joy when the rains came, flushed and beaming in firelight as food and drink and tales were shared, streaked and sweaty and dripping and golden in sunlight while they worked to reorganize the rubble of this ancient stronghold into useful structures, and his heart broke into rubble more jagged and painful than the rubble around him or the rubble in his mind, because they loved him, and he loved them, but in his heart he was already gone.



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Timestamp coda (unrequited Daniel/Jack) here