PRELUDE

Doctor Daniel Jackson stood staring at the glass Universe before him.  He had often watched the little arm move across the screen as it tracked the probe for a new mission.  There was something still awe inspiring about the fact that this little arm indicated millions of light years of travel — in only a few seconds! Everyone else in the facility had long forgotten this technical piece of equipment when tracking the probes. He was grateful that in their rush to automate everything, making everything available at the tips of the Technician’s fingers, they’d forgotten to disable this piece of machinery.  It was now on the screens before them at the desk, but Daniel still stood and watched, still enjoyed the thought that he was watching something speed its way across the vast universe, still found wonder in that one little action. 

It reminded him of the beginning, and of a mysterious gray-haired lady who came to him one rainy afternoon and offered him the opportunity of his lifetime.  He recalled standing in this exact spot as he watched the arm sweep across this glass Universe when they first opened the gate — how strange and new it all was then, yet now, everyone had become a little jaded somehow, blasé about the incredible nature of the large round rings that stood majestically a few meters away in the next room. Not Daniel though. To him it felt as fresh and new and awe inspiring as it did that first time he watched it.  When the probe had stopped on its fateful first journey, reaching a world on the other side of the known universe, a world they came to know as Abydos, it also opened up a whole new family to him.  For it was there, on Abydos, that he met and married Sha’re, the only woman he would ever truly love. 

However, the ring and that little automated arm that reached across the galaxy didn’t just bring new friends and new allies, but dangerous aliens as well, the worst being the Goa’ulds — fearsome enemies who pillaged worlds, stealing what they wanted and leaving no survivors.   They were always a threat, to earth and to Daniel, forever out there, in the pattern of the stars, waiting and planning their attack.  They stole his wife, abused, raped and kept her as their slave, tearing her from his arms more brutally than anything he’d ever known before and leaving in their wake a man who was gutted and bereft, a soul lost and doomed to search for his companion throughout the stars. 

To do that, Daniel had to give up his home in Abydos and returned to earth to assist in the search for her, hoping to one day find his missing soul mate, fill his own void and restore himself to a full person once more.  That wasn’t to be, though.  A little more than a month ago the SGC answered a distress call from Kasuf, and while the rest of SG-1 battled an army of Goa’ulds Daniel followed Sha’re into a tent where Ammonet tried to kill him.  If not for the fast actions of his teammate, Teal’c, the scientist knew he would be the one dead these past four weeks, not his beautiful wife. Somehow knowing that didn’t dull the pain though.

For the first week after the heartbreaking face-off Daniel didn’t know how to mourn.  He missed her but no more than he had constantly missed her over the years, and he had to remind himself, at times, that she was really, actually gone, never to return.  Sometimes, when he woke in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, her name on his parched lips, that recollection brought relief to his troubled mind and sometimes it brought a flood of tears so violent in nature that his throat was hoarse for the rest of the long day. 

He noticed how the others, especially Teal’c, pulled back from him, gave him room to grieve and allowed him moments of solitude whilst on missions or at the base.  But Daniel still felt lost, and it was perhaps the withdrawal of those around him, people he’d risked his life for, and who risked their life for him in return, people he’d spent longer time with than he had with his own wife and family, which made him felt so aloof and so lost.  He was confused about his loyalties; Was he missing her or was he glad that she was finally at peace? Was he happy that he was now free to pursue his other life, and, perhaps, find another soul mate in the process, without guilt?  Or did her death mean his reason for being on this team had expired and, if so, would the others wonder what was keeping him there now?

After a week of mourning on Earth he put in a request to go to Abydos, to spend time with Kasuf so that he could learn more about his wife from his father-in-law, and so that he could move amongst those that knew and loved Sha’re.  Here he sorted through the tattered remains of the life he once shared with the Leader’s daughter and came to terms with his grief.  When he picked up a battered old titanium dish from a lost probe, sent to the world during his first stay to ‘ensure’ the gate was destroyed by Jack’s bomb, tears of pain and, for the first time since her death, laughter had mixed and spilled down Daniel’s dusty cheeks.  As he stood holding the battered dish in his shaking hands he recalled, faintly, the surprise in his wife’s beautiful eyes the first night he showed her how to cook with it. Yet, mingled with that warmth was another warmth, of the look on Jack’s face when he had discovered what the dish was being used for that day he and Sam Carter had come to ask him about the Ra-like alien, known to them all now as Apophis.  Perhaps the memory of the day she was ripped from his arms should have brought more tears of sadness but the memory of Jack just brought him a certain reassurance.  He knew why, but he didn’t want to think about it. It was inappropriate to think about as he mourned his wife.

So he’d put down that probe, stepped out of the chamber that he’d lived in with Sha’re and climbed to the crest of the largest dune beside his ‘home’.   He stood there on the shifting sands and he realized something as he watched the embers of the day dull across the sky in scars of reds and orange before it faded out completely.  It was something that brought calm to his harried heart and eased the thoughts that throbbed at his temples.  That was, that his life with Sha’re was like a ‘day’.  Bright at the time, warm, happy, life-giving, but then she was taken and the scars were slashed deep into his soul, and then came the darkness in which Sha’re dwelled inside that monster. Her death allowed the stars to come out, to shine down upon him from afar, and await a new day to dawn.

A warm breeze had ruffled his cropped hair at that moment of that epiphany and he shivered as he looked up at the night sky at a particularly bright star. In his soul, he knew, it was Sha’re’s way of telling him that a new day would dawn for him and that, whilst never fully gone, she would never intrude on his new ‘day’. 

It was a reticent Jack O’Neill who arrived early the next morning, almost five days after Daniel had left.  His eyes were darker than Daniel remembered, like he, too, was grieving.  Jack spent half the day with him, allowing Daniel to give him a more complete tour of Abydos than he was able to on his last visit, listened to him recount events and incidents involving Sha’re, and followed him through the town he once called home.

After a large meal, which was not the party it had been when Jack came last time but a subdued meal, respectfully quiet and lacking the ‘happiness’ that Sha’re seemed to exude, Jack quietly inform Daniel that he was needed back on base, if he felt he could manage it.  Daniel had looked deeply into Jack’s eyes and sensed that it wasn’t so much the SGC that needed him, but that SG-1 needed him – maybe even Jack himself.

So Daniel packed up what few mementos he intended to treasure from his time with Sha’re, bided farewell to his father-in-law, promised him he would continue to search for the baby as well as for Skaara, and stood with Jack on the sandstone dais before the Stargate.  That was when the older man turned to him and asked him if he was going to be okay?  Daniel had searched the eyes again, noted that they seemed brighter now, and told his good friend that he was going to be okay.  Shoulder-to-shoulder, they stepped through the mercurial wall, leaving Abydos behind.

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