Eating Angel Cake
Title:
Eating Angel Cake
Author:
livlovesyou
Disclaimer: MGM, World Gekko Corp and
Double Secret Productions own them.
Spoilers:
Anything up to Season 7, including Season 7. I don't really know anymore. Starts
in 5. Ends in 7 - but AU. I guess.
Summary:
"Then this isn't really about taste"
I think Pam owns me. Thank you a zillion, honey. For C, Pam, and my girl.
Eating Angel Cake
An Introduction To Confusion, or Eating Angel Cake.
Jack O'Neill is screwing Samantha Carter. Daniel Jackson has connected the dots and drawn a mess, vainly swallowed forget-me pills to erase stubborn situations and choked on something like chaos. He'd like to know when this happened, recognizes he's missed a lesson in chemistry and rubs Jack's ego in a way Sam never could.
End Foreword.
---
Daniel Jackson flips down a screen and waits for the audience's undivided attention.
---
About three years ago Jack O'Neill realized his world tasted different from everyone else's.
Where his tongue found zat, staff weapon, snake and scientist, others lived with football practice, backyard, Oreo and PTA. He used to view his ability to reduce things - life, planets with trees, planets of gas - to the sum of their flavour as a midlife crisis, but he doesn't anymore.
Sometimes he likes his world, and its taste, but this isn't an always thing. When he wants it, other tastes can be found in malls, in parks, or in the noises drifting from the house next door. He wonders dimly how people, physically so close, know so little about a war straight out of the realms of science fiction, where badly dressed aliens send battleships and other problems to little old terra firma and your favourite superheroes save the day at the same time each week.
He feels that it has been written all over him; that people are sightless.
Most of all, Jack O'Neill is tired.
---
These days his dreams need guns, gods, his truck, and a stargate before they are interesting. Occasionally he gets Carter, too. Some sick promotional offer: buy one get one free. He'll dream about fucking Fraiser in the gate room, and that's one push too far.
---
At times, the other taste is delivered in a brown cardboard pizza box to the third house on his street, a taste that has nothing to do with mozzarella, tomato, and extra thin crust. This taste, the one that catches in the back of his throat, is found in all those times a front door is opened and someone else's life spills out onto the street.
There are times when it dances in the light between the curtains of the house next to Carter's. He watches from her bed, the room illuminated grey, then blue, then yellow back to grey again, and knows that the TV is playing to people asleep. She finds her own brand of unaware, unconsciously foetal in REM dream.
---
When he can't sleep he lists the things he knows for sure.
He can't sleep. He knows this: taste isn't always in the mouth.
---
Daniel Jackson's presentation was sadly interrupted. Please refer to your lecture notes.
--
He goes to work. He kills evil things, not people. He comes home.
He watched the person die today, not the evil thing. He was sick. Then he came home, remembered that the wrong thing dying was nothing new, and put off being dead to the world, for a while.
---
Somewhere you can buy forgetfulness in bottles, once you admit that this is the neighbours' life (taste) you're trying to live (grab devour swallow). He's addicted, needs unfamiliarity, and keeps the feel of it in his gut for the days he's a superhero and the badly dressed aliens want to play.
Then he files away the tastes of the unaware, the sightless, the oblivious, in a grey cabinet at the back of his mind, slotting them in the file named "needed".
The tastes in his file (briefcase breakfast tablecloth) belong to metallic (cold hard cold trigger) and electric (entrance spine pain skin exit) coupled with everything he cannot have (briefcase breakfast tablecloth), because, maybe, he needs pain as much as comfort, and then this isn't really about taste available in all shades of normality (backyard Oreo PTA).
This is about Carter; he doesn't want her anywhere near his file named "needed".
Rewind twenty years and he'd be driving forever, to places he'd never wanted to be, ordering coffee he'd never wanted to drink, taking comfort in the way caffeine feels different when your back's pressed up against the booth of a diner and the waitress doesn't call you by your real name. A temporary fix.
He grew out of this.
Now, it's about anonymity purchased with a one-way ticket to anywhere, everywhere, and all the places in between. He's so, so tired. Realises dimly that this fight isn't stopping any time soon and sleeps with Carter because it's the closest he can get to feeling real.
---
He writes her jokes; pins them to her fridge. He's not sure if she sees them.
How many Goa'uld does it take to change a lightbulb?
One, they just hold it and wait for the world to revolve around them..
He knows the jokes are bad. He'd laugh if she'd written it; stuck it to the fridge. He'd see it.
Some days she chooses to be blind.
---
This game, he doesn't like it the way he used to.
He'll go down on her and there'll be a thousand and one new tastes every time, but nothing he craves, lamely excusing the lack of love with a stronger need. They don't talk much, he's noticed. One day he'll tell her about the way he thinks the world would taste if he didn't know all the things he knows, but he probably won't. They don't talk much; she's not interested in his words.
---
Something's wrong, he realises too late. She's desperate, seemingly younger, seemingly older. Clashing. She's losing her control. He thinks, bitterly, that she'll laugh at his jokes as she finishes a bottle of Chilean red. She doesn't. It's been a long time; whether she smiles or not stopped being his business the day she invited him into her bed and kicked him out of her life.
---
One. Two. Three.
He's feeling reckless, drunk-oh-so-drunk. Four.
He's stacking beer caps. Five.
Then he's playing games; games with guns and gods and a taste that exists with two point four children and barbeques on patios. This taste ceases to exist when a child pulls a trigger and your molecules glide past stars and cosmic dust every other week. He is still learning this.
Five high and he can't make it work; it's going to fall now.
---
Daniel Jackson, dearly departed, left behind a diary full of meetings.
---
Maybe she's late this morning. Her face looks grey and her eyes are dull. She drives faster than she should, doesn't care about rules - thinks she forfeited the luxury a while back - swerves to miss a child and doesn't stop to collect herself. She knows tears are a safety hazard, so she doesn't cry much. In the elevator she drums her fingers up against the metal, then runs down the corridor.
Even if she were late they would wait for her. It's easier to pretend she's late. Moving like she could save the world today isn't something she's above.
---
Promises made out of indelible ink, from behind force fields and in rooms full of water, can be folded away and saved for later, or earlier. He can't remember which one he's running from: days in the future or nights in the past.
---
Logistics and dust motes race each other. Ready. Dust through light and ideas through a mind. Steady.
He stands by the long wardrobe in the corner of the room. If he stares hard enough he'll see through wood and then he'll see the suitcase pressed up against the backing of the cupboard and then maybe he'll look right through to Narnia and back because he's not going mad.
He wants to believe he can slip away and never be found. He can be the guy they don't notice when they cross the road. He could drive in circles for hours, double back, and follow a route to a place he doesn't want to be. Leave his car; take a plane down south, to a place with a nice name, run to the town next door. Just to be safe.
He is free and a thousand other pretty clichés all come included. Go.
---
Jack O'Neill pushes his finger into a pool of coffee and pulls patterns all over the tabletop.
---
Then he became Ed Remnick and taste didn't matter.
It was too easy, so completely easy. Carter wasn't the only one who could fake it.
---
He'll tell you about Ed Remnick.
Ed Remnick has a wife and a kid. Their house has a patio, but they have their barbeques in the yard.
Janie was undemanding, tasting of apple pie and something too young. And if he doesn't think, he likes this, so he tries not to, but there are times when the rain hits the ground so hard, when the puddles of water become gateways to space, that he just can't stop himself.
She talks too much, but sometimes he thinks he likes that, too.
---
Now that his world tastes like everyone else's, he's picturing telling Carter about it. She sits in the passenger seat as he runs errands for Janie; traces names on the dashboard. His daydream Carter, a patchwork of real life, smiles in all the right places.
---
He'll explain about the kid.
The kid isn't his. Janie's known a lot of people; so she's not so young, and they were all just passing through - she pours your coffee and fries up grits like she's been yours forever.
He watches her lips as words tumble over, and then he'll kiss her goodbye on his way to work like he was hers forever, too. Sometimes he's just passing through and she knows it.
---
Daniel Jackson would like to pick up where he left off. We will resume in 15 minutes.
---
Conclusion.
He plays with the taste of the oblivious like it was never something he couldn't have ("I need a break, Sir" "Jack, this is a war we're fighting. We can't afford for you not to be here right now"). And then he got a phone call and a man at their front door ("Sir" "Retired" "With all due respect, sir, you're AWOL not retired" "Janie, go wait in the kitchen") and he had to give back his borrowed time, because it had never really been his ("Ed? What's happening" "Jack, Janie, my name is Jack").
But he was oblivious, too, if taste is all in the mouth. If oblivious was falling out of love with a woman you used to know ("Sir" "Carter" "Sir, you can't just walk away like that" "Watch me, Carter, things have changed") then he'd managed to seize the ungraspable, after all.
---
He'd like to dream about giving speeches naked, or flying, or his teeth falling out. Those are the dreams that have answers.
He dreams, instead, not of taste but of glowing chevrons, headlights, flashing eyes, falling bullets, and a scientist who talks to other people in her own polysyllabic language.
Perhaps these mean one day he'll run off with Carter, in his truck, through the Stargate, with a gun to the head of the nearest false god. He's not sure yet.
---
Daniel Jackson would like to say a few words to conclude. Jack O'Neill would rather he didn't.
-end-
constructive criticism is always welcome.
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