Rigel (n) : awesomesaucery

Title: "Dust In The Wind"
Author: Rigel
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Disclaimer: Not mine (alas!) Don't sue!
Rating: G
Wordcount: 554
Categories: Daniel Jackson, Episode Related, Angst
A/N: I've had this snippet on my harddrive for a while, it was cut from another "Moebius" WIP but I couldn't quite bear to just delete it.

Nothing lasts forever but the earth and sky...


Sand is a constant presence in his life now. It works its way into the folds of his robes, trapped in the loosening weave of the cloth, only to rain down in a soft shirring spill as he moves. He feels its gritty presence beneath his nails and tastes its dry and dusty tang on the wind.

Daniel sits on the crest of a dune and watches it spill down the lee side, falling in rippling patterns that are erased and renewed over time. It scatters across the heaped mounds below, where he has buried his team, inexorably covering the fresh scar upon the Earth until only the memory of the place will remain.

Their bones will endure.

He had scraped the shallow graves himself, shifting sand until his fingers cracked and bled and he wept at the pain of it all. His tears were stolen by the sun before they fell; another fault to heap on the head of Ra.

Memories press around him, as though he were seeing double. Remnants from his past echo oddly with his present. He has been here before, and yet he will be here again. The paradox is unsettling.

A shudder passes through his body.

He remembers a dig on the Giza plateau. His sophomore year and he had jumped at the chance to spend a summer in the shadows of the Great Pyramids. His mind had slipped comfortably into the polyglot argot of the site, picking out the mingled threads of Sa’idi and Bedawi Arabic with ease as he argued theories and history with fervor.

For days, from dawn until the last light of dusk, he had toiled. Hunched over a pegged out grid in the shifting sand, he had brushed the granules away with a careful hand.

Fragments of skull were slowly revealed beneath the surface. The careful strokes of his brush uncovered the dark hollows of the occipital cavity and then the jutting curve of the mandible bone of the jaw.

Excitement had coursed through his veins at the thought of discovery and his hands had trembled slightly as he eased the bones loose from the sand.

He still recalls the crushing disappointment when a bright glint among the debris caught his eye. An amalgam filling, knocked loose from a tooth and irrefutable proof that this grave was not the final resting place of a man who had lived 5000 years in the past.

But now he wonders what he might have missed, had he looked further.

The embossed print on the tags held clenched in his fist is as familiar to him now, as the texts he had studied. Each letter is committed to memory, its imprint read by touch alone. Names and numbers; in a cipher that will not be seen for thousands of years.

A profound weariness settles over him, dulling the edges of his bitter thoughts, but not preventing them. The universe has sent them back to him. A quirk of fate or maybe the luck of the last of his nine lives had called them to him through space and time, knowing he could not endure alone.

He has lain awake at night, keyed in to murmured conversations and the unmistakable sounds of passion from across the tent. They wear the faces of those he has lost, but they are not the same.