Fic: Five children never born to members of SG-1 (archive)
Repost time! So, what started out as a five things list for a prompt I loved turned into a 2300 word exercise in POV that totally ran away from me. Meep! It was fun playing with the kids, though.
Pentagular Gate 26.05: Five children that were never born to members of SG-1
5. When Ben wakes up, he’s in the car. It’s really dark, and he’s still in his pajamas, and he can’t remember getting out of bed. He rubs hard at his eyes and asks, “Where’re we going?”
It’s his mommy in the wheel seat. Usually Ben can’t see her in the car unless she turns all the way around because she always sits in the other seat, the one in front of his, but now he can, even in the dark. He likes it better. She says, “Hey baby, when’d you wake up?”
“Now. Where’re we going?”
“Uncle Mark’s,” Mommy says. “But we had to leave really early so we’ll get there in time for pancakes.”
That wakes Ben up a little. He almost never gets to have pancakes at home, Dad doesn’t like them. He tries to look at the clock in the front seat, but can’t see it. “It is really really early?”
“Really really. We have a long way to go, so you can go back to sleep for a while longer if you want.”
Ben yawns, but he doesn’t want to go to sleep again yet. He’s gone to sleep in the car and woken up in his bed lots of times before, but not the other way around, ever, he doesn’t think. “How long’re we going for?”
Mommy doesn’t answer right away, and then she says, “Well, actually I was thinking we might stay for a while. Maybe we’ll stay until summer, and then we can go to the beach.”
“Really?” Ben hasn’t even been to the beach to go swimming, but he’s seen it on TV sometimes. “How long is it until summer?”
“A few months,” says Mommy.
“But I have to go to school!”
“They have schools in California.”
Ben is quiet for a minute. He wants to ask a question, but sometimes when he asks too many or he asks bad ones he gets in trouble, but he really wants to ask, and usually if someone gets mad it’s Dad and not Mommy and Dad’s not here and that’s the question, and finally he just asks. “How come Dad’s not here?”
Mommy stops smiling. “He’s staying at home,” she says. And then, “He has to work.” And then, “We’ll talk about it later.”
That kind of makes sense. Dad’s in the Air Force, which is kind of like the Army except way better and sometimes they get to jump out of planes, too. Mommy was too, once, except then she had Ben and you’re not allowed to be in the Air Force and have a baby and so she doesn’t go anymore. She gets to stay home with Ben, so he doesn’t mind, even thought it’d be pretty cool if she was still allowed to go fly the planes because Ben bets she would take him, sometimes.
Dad doesn’t have to stay home because he’s the Dad and it’s different, and he goes to work all the time. Sometimes he goes to whole other countries. But they don’t go on trips without Dad usually, not even to Uncle Mark’s, and Dad wasn’t even home this week, he was on a trip for working and was gonna be back on Thursday, and that’s only a couple days away so Ben isn’t sure why they couldn’t have waited for him. “But -”
Mommy says, “Oooh, look how big that truck is. We should count how many we see, there are lots more out when it’s dark.”
The truck is giant, biggest Ben thinks he’s ever seen, and there’s another one almost as big right after, and he counts almost all the way to thirty before he falls asleep again.
7. The night before the festival, Masi goes with his uncle to the tallest watchtower in the city, the big one above the front gate. Only the men are allowed up here, and his mother would not like him to climb so high in the dark, but his uncle knows all these things and takes him anyway. The men who are there greet his uncle and say nothing of Masi, and he thinks that maybe, just this once, he will not tell his mother what he’s done.
It’s a clear night, and Masi can just see the dark outline of the old temple far out over the dunes. He sits with his uncle on a low wall and is very quiet; he has learned from his honored grandfather that to not speak is to hear much more, and Masi very much wants to hear this.
His uncle is quiet too, for a time that feels endlessly long, and then he turns to Masi and asks, “What sort of name do you wish for, tomorrow?”
“Something brave.” Masi does not even need to think about it. “Like the god killer. A brave name so that I can be brave like him.”
“Not a wise name?”
Masi, who is called Masi but it is not his name, does not answer right away. Almost all of the boys who are to be named at the festival tomorrow, like him - and there are many, more children born in the year of his birth than since before the year of his honored grandfather - say they wish for names that are wise, so that they may be wise like Masi’s father. Masi’s father is very wise, but sometimes he is also very strange. The other boys know this a little, for everyone knows it a little, but not the way that Masi does.
Finally he says, “No. I want a name like the god killer’s.”
His uncle looks at him slyly from the side of his eye, as if he thinks Masi may be telling a joke. “Your father is also the god killer.”
“But he’s my father,” says Masi, stubbornly. “I wish a name like Oneer’s so that people will know I am brave like him.”
And then his uncle smiles, although Masi does not know at what. “I think you will have a brave name,” he says, and reaches into his pocket. When he shows Masi his hand, he is holding Oneer’s fire maker, which Masi has begged to see many, many times. “And when you are a man I will give you this as Oneer gave it to me.”
They talk some more, but Masi almost does not hear the words, and when his uncle walks him back home, it feels almost as if Masi’s feet do not touch the sand and stone beneath them. His mother is so displeased that Masi had disappeared without saying where he was going that she scolds him, and then his uncle, so fiercely the baby wakes up and begins to cry. His father goes to her cradle, and Masi’s mother sends him straight to bed, and then scolds his uncle some more, outside.
He knows he will not sleep that night, for all of his eagerness. When he goes to bed next he will have his adult name, no longer called Masi-which-means-firstborn, and he will be as brave as Oneer the God Killer and everyone will know.
9. “...but I guess your dad isn’t coming.”
“He’s coming.”
Everybody giggles. “Why? It’s not like he can play.”
“Shut up about my dad.”
“Wheeling around the bases -”
“I said shut up - ”
The principal gives Anne three days suspension for fighting - one more than Laney, ‘cause Laney didn’t start it, he says. But Laney still gets two, since she hit back, even though she can’t fight for nothing and Anne only has a couple scratches after, and Laney’s got a big bruise on her face. And after their moms show up and Anne tells hers what happened, Anne’s mom yells at Laney’s in the principal’s office for almost the whole rest of the period, loud enough that Anne can hear it out by the secretary’s desk. Anne likes that.
She also yells at Anne the whole way home, which Anne likes less. It’s mostly stuff about how it’s not okay to solve things with your fists (“Or your feet,” her mom snaps, and Anne wasn’t going to say anything, but she’d been thinking it.) and how Anne knows better. But also about how sometimes people are going to say mean things about Anne’s dad because sometimes people are just mean, and how Anne has to learn to ignore them. No way, Anne thinks, but she’s already grounded for a week, so she slouches lower in the seat and keeps her mouth shut.
That night, after he gets home, Anne’s dad doesn’t say anything for so long that Anne starts to think maybe her mom didn’t tell him. But then, when they’re working on Anne’s math homework, he leans over. “You know, Laney’s dad is terrible at baseball, and both his legs work just fine.”
“Cameron,” Anne’s mom says from the next room, with the kind of voice that usually means that they’re out somewhere and so Anne’s gonna get away with whatever she just did, but only until they get home, and then she’s in big trouble.
“Hey! Multiplication!” says Anne’s dad, loudly, and winks across the table.
Anne decides family field day is stupid anyway, and that a week’s grounding was worth it. She’s not sorry at all.
12. When Claire’s father comes, he always brings her a gift from wherever he’s been since he’s seen her last. Usually, it goes like this: he comes to her house on a Friday night and talks to her mom for a few minutes through the open passenger side window, and Claire grabs her things and runs to the car. Then they get dinner and see a movie or something, and she stays with him at his hotel for the weekend. At the end, right before he drives her home on Sunday night, he gives her her present.
In her room, Claire has beautifully colored scarves from India, and little stone animals from Peru, some masks from China and a silk painted fan from Japan, bangle bracelets from a market in Cairo and a beaded necklace from somewhere in Central America (she can’t remember where), a carved wooden hippopotamus from Johannesburg, prayer flags from Nepal strung across her window. She’s got a box full of all the letters he’s sent her for the last several years, and a whole shelf on her bookcase for the books he’s written and the magazines that have done articles about him, and a set of tapes under her bed of all the History and Discovery Channel specials on projects of his.
It’s a fantastic collection; sometimes Claire feels like she’s a world traveler herself -- or that maybe she’d like to be one, once she’s done with school. Maybe she could go with him on some of his trips.
(But sometime she feels like, maybe, if her collection was a little smaller, but he could come home for longer than a weekend every couple of months, that would be okay, too. Sometimes she feels like, maybe, she would trade.)
15. Emma stares at the two tubes of lip gloss like they’re part of a test, or something. “I dunno, Summer Berry or Pink Crush?”
“Definitely Summer Berry. Pink Crush is way too glittery.”
“I wear Pink Crush all the time.”
“I know.” Jamie rolls her eyes. “And, listen, it’s not for day wear, okay? It’s, like, date gloss. Although…well, actually, wear it, I guess.”
“Oh my God, you guys, ew,” Nora snaps. “I’m sitting right here.”
“And?”
Nora stares at them. “And gross. He’s old and he’s not that cute.”
Jamie sighs. “Oh, yes, he is.”
“Yup,” Emma agrees. “Sorry, Nora.”
Nora huffs a breath and scuffs at the dirt below the bench with the toe of her sneaker. It’s an okay day out, and five miles isn’t that far. She shoulda just walked.
“There he is, there he is!” Emma says, only a couple of minutes later, and they both straighten on the bench. Jamie flips her hair back just as the black Chevy truck turns into the parking lot. “God, that car is so cool.”
“It’s a piece of crap,” says Nora, and scoops her backpack up off the ground.
“He told me once that he did, like, all this work on the engine himself.”
“Piece of crap,” Nora agrees.
The truck pulls to a stop a few feet away, and Nora crosses to it in a few long steps; she throws her bag back into the bed, pulls open the door, climbs up into the cab, and the second she swings the door shut again, Emma and Jamie appear at the open window, all wide, white smiles and glittery lip gloss. “Hi Charlie.”
He grins at them from the driver’s side, peers at them over the tops of his sunglasses. (Nora rolls her eyes. It’s not even that bright out.) “Hey, girls. How’s it going?”
“Good.”
“Fine.”
“Great! You need rides?”
“No,” Nora says, fast, before either of them can jump in. “Emma’s mom is getting them.”
Emma gives her a dirty look, but Jamie just shrugs and flashes her dimples, which, Nora has never realized before but clearly sees now, are totally stupid and annoying. “Thanks a lot, though.”
Charlie shrugs. “Any time.”
“Well, bye guys,” Nora says, but she’s looking at Charlie when she says it. Emma and Jamie reluctantly step away from the truck.
“See you ladies around,” Charlie says, and revs the engine unnecessarily as they pull away. Nora watches Emma and Jamie giggle in the side-view mirror and then turns to scowl at him. “What?”
“You are such a jerk. You totally do that on purpose!”
He grins sideways at her. “Just to see your smiling face afterwards.”
Nora resists the impulse to stick her tongue out, and instead folds her arms across her chest and scowls out the window. “I hate you.”
“You love me,” says Charlie.
“Whatever,” Nora says, and reaches over to flip the radio to the pop station that she doesn't even like that much, but he really hates.
This whole ‘living close to home’ thing Charlie’s doing is so not working out, she thinks. He needs to get another job. Somewhere else. Far away. And if he could never pick her up from school again, ever, that’d be great too.
Pentagular Gate 26.05: Five children that were never born to members of SG-1
5. When Ben wakes up, he’s in the car. It’s really dark, and he’s still in his pajamas, and he can’t remember getting out of bed. He rubs hard at his eyes and asks, “Where’re we going?”
It’s his mommy in the wheel seat. Usually Ben can’t see her in the car unless she turns all the way around because she always sits in the other seat, the one in front of his, but now he can, even in the dark. He likes it better. She says, “Hey baby, when’d you wake up?”
“Now. Where’re we going?”
“Uncle Mark’s,” Mommy says. “But we had to leave really early so we’ll get there in time for pancakes.”
That wakes Ben up a little. He almost never gets to have pancakes at home, Dad doesn’t like them. He tries to look at the clock in the front seat, but can’t see it. “It is really really early?”
“Really really. We have a long way to go, so you can go back to sleep for a while longer if you want.”
Ben yawns, but he doesn’t want to go to sleep again yet. He’s gone to sleep in the car and woken up in his bed lots of times before, but not the other way around, ever, he doesn’t think. “How long’re we going for?”
Mommy doesn’t answer right away, and then she says, “Well, actually I was thinking we might stay for a while. Maybe we’ll stay until summer, and then we can go to the beach.”
“Really?” Ben hasn’t even been to the beach to go swimming, but he’s seen it on TV sometimes. “How long is it until summer?”
“A few months,” says Mommy.
“But I have to go to school!”
“They have schools in California.”
Ben is quiet for a minute. He wants to ask a question, but sometimes when he asks too many or he asks bad ones he gets in trouble, but he really wants to ask, and usually if someone gets mad it’s Dad and not Mommy and Dad’s not here and that’s the question, and finally he just asks. “How come Dad’s not here?”
Mommy stops smiling. “He’s staying at home,” she says. And then, “He has to work.” And then, “We’ll talk about it later.”
That kind of makes sense. Dad’s in the Air Force, which is kind of like the Army except way better and sometimes they get to jump out of planes, too. Mommy was too, once, except then she had Ben and you’re not allowed to be in the Air Force and have a baby and so she doesn’t go anymore. She gets to stay home with Ben, so he doesn’t mind, even thought it’d be pretty cool if she was still allowed to go fly the planes because Ben bets she would take him, sometimes.
Dad doesn’t have to stay home because he’s the Dad and it’s different, and he goes to work all the time. Sometimes he goes to whole other countries. But they don’t go on trips without Dad usually, not even to Uncle Mark’s, and Dad wasn’t even home this week, he was on a trip for working and was gonna be back on Thursday, and that’s only a couple days away so Ben isn’t sure why they couldn’t have waited for him. “But -”
Mommy says, “Oooh, look how big that truck is. We should count how many we see, there are lots more out when it’s dark.”
The truck is giant, biggest Ben thinks he’s ever seen, and there’s another one almost as big right after, and he counts almost all the way to thirty before he falls asleep again.
7. The night before the festival, Masi goes with his uncle to the tallest watchtower in the city, the big one above the front gate. Only the men are allowed up here, and his mother would not like him to climb so high in the dark, but his uncle knows all these things and takes him anyway. The men who are there greet his uncle and say nothing of Masi, and he thinks that maybe, just this once, he will not tell his mother what he’s done.
It’s a clear night, and Masi can just see the dark outline of the old temple far out over the dunes. He sits with his uncle on a low wall and is very quiet; he has learned from his honored grandfather that to not speak is to hear much more, and Masi very much wants to hear this.
His uncle is quiet too, for a time that feels endlessly long, and then he turns to Masi and asks, “What sort of name do you wish for, tomorrow?”
“Something brave.” Masi does not even need to think about it. “Like the god killer. A brave name so that I can be brave like him.”
“Not a wise name?”
Masi, who is called Masi but it is not his name, does not answer right away. Almost all of the boys who are to be named at the festival tomorrow, like him - and there are many, more children born in the year of his birth than since before the year of his honored grandfather - say they wish for names that are wise, so that they may be wise like Masi’s father. Masi’s father is very wise, but sometimes he is also very strange. The other boys know this a little, for everyone knows it a little, but not the way that Masi does.
Finally he says, “No. I want a name like the god killer’s.”
His uncle looks at him slyly from the side of his eye, as if he thinks Masi may be telling a joke. “Your father is also the god killer.”
“But he’s my father,” says Masi, stubbornly. “I wish a name like Oneer’s so that people will know I am brave like him.”
And then his uncle smiles, although Masi does not know at what. “I think you will have a brave name,” he says, and reaches into his pocket. When he shows Masi his hand, he is holding Oneer’s fire maker, which Masi has begged to see many, many times. “And when you are a man I will give you this as Oneer gave it to me.”
They talk some more, but Masi almost does not hear the words, and when his uncle walks him back home, it feels almost as if Masi’s feet do not touch the sand and stone beneath them. His mother is so displeased that Masi had disappeared without saying where he was going that she scolds him, and then his uncle, so fiercely the baby wakes up and begins to cry. His father goes to her cradle, and Masi’s mother sends him straight to bed, and then scolds his uncle some more, outside.
He knows he will not sleep that night, for all of his eagerness. When he goes to bed next he will have his adult name, no longer called Masi-which-means-firstborn, and he will be as brave as Oneer the God Killer and everyone will know.
9. “...but I guess your dad isn’t coming.”
“He’s coming.”
Everybody giggles. “Why? It’s not like he can play.”
“Shut up about my dad.”
“Wheeling around the bases -”
“I said shut up - ”
The principal gives Anne three days suspension for fighting - one more than Laney, ‘cause Laney didn’t start it, he says. But Laney still gets two, since she hit back, even though she can’t fight for nothing and Anne only has a couple scratches after, and Laney’s got a big bruise on her face. And after their moms show up and Anne tells hers what happened, Anne’s mom yells at Laney’s in the principal’s office for almost the whole rest of the period, loud enough that Anne can hear it out by the secretary’s desk. Anne likes that.
She also yells at Anne the whole way home, which Anne likes less. It’s mostly stuff about how it’s not okay to solve things with your fists (“Or your feet,” her mom snaps, and Anne wasn’t going to say anything, but she’d been thinking it.) and how Anne knows better. But also about how sometimes people are going to say mean things about Anne’s dad because sometimes people are just mean, and how Anne has to learn to ignore them. No way, Anne thinks, but she’s already grounded for a week, so she slouches lower in the seat and keeps her mouth shut.
That night, after he gets home, Anne’s dad doesn’t say anything for so long that Anne starts to think maybe her mom didn’t tell him. But then, when they’re working on Anne’s math homework, he leans over. “You know, Laney’s dad is terrible at baseball, and both his legs work just fine.”
“Cameron,” Anne’s mom says from the next room, with the kind of voice that usually means that they’re out somewhere and so Anne’s gonna get away with whatever she just did, but only until they get home, and then she’s in big trouble.
“Hey! Multiplication!” says Anne’s dad, loudly, and winks across the table.
Anne decides family field day is stupid anyway, and that a week’s grounding was worth it. She’s not sorry at all.
12. When Claire’s father comes, he always brings her a gift from wherever he’s been since he’s seen her last. Usually, it goes like this: he comes to her house on a Friday night and talks to her mom for a few minutes through the open passenger side window, and Claire grabs her things and runs to the car. Then they get dinner and see a movie or something, and she stays with him at his hotel for the weekend. At the end, right before he drives her home on Sunday night, he gives her her present.
In her room, Claire has beautifully colored scarves from India, and little stone animals from Peru, some masks from China and a silk painted fan from Japan, bangle bracelets from a market in Cairo and a beaded necklace from somewhere in Central America (she can’t remember where), a carved wooden hippopotamus from Johannesburg, prayer flags from Nepal strung across her window. She’s got a box full of all the letters he’s sent her for the last several years, and a whole shelf on her bookcase for the books he’s written and the magazines that have done articles about him, and a set of tapes under her bed of all the History and Discovery Channel specials on projects of his.
It’s a fantastic collection; sometimes Claire feels like she’s a world traveler herself -- or that maybe she’d like to be one, once she’s done with school. Maybe she could go with him on some of his trips.
(But sometime she feels like, maybe, if her collection was a little smaller, but he could come home for longer than a weekend every couple of months, that would be okay, too. Sometimes she feels like, maybe, she would trade.)
15. Emma stares at the two tubes of lip gloss like they’re part of a test, or something. “I dunno, Summer Berry or Pink Crush?”
“Definitely Summer Berry. Pink Crush is way too glittery.”
“I wear Pink Crush all the time.”
“I know.” Jamie rolls her eyes. “And, listen, it’s not for day wear, okay? It’s, like, date gloss. Although…well, actually, wear it, I guess.”
“Oh my God, you guys, ew,” Nora snaps. “I’m sitting right here.”
“And?”
Nora stares at them. “And gross. He’s old and he’s not that cute.”
Jamie sighs. “Oh, yes, he is.”
“Yup,” Emma agrees. “Sorry, Nora.”
Nora huffs a breath and scuffs at the dirt below the bench with the toe of her sneaker. It’s an okay day out, and five miles isn’t that far. She shoulda just walked.
“There he is, there he is!” Emma says, only a couple of minutes later, and they both straighten on the bench. Jamie flips her hair back just as the black Chevy truck turns into the parking lot. “God, that car is so cool.”
“It’s a piece of crap,” says Nora, and scoops her backpack up off the ground.
“He told me once that he did, like, all this work on the engine himself.”
“Piece of crap,” Nora agrees.
The truck pulls to a stop a few feet away, and Nora crosses to it in a few long steps; she throws her bag back into the bed, pulls open the door, climbs up into the cab, and the second she swings the door shut again, Emma and Jamie appear at the open window, all wide, white smiles and glittery lip gloss. “Hi Charlie.”
He grins at them from the driver’s side, peers at them over the tops of his sunglasses. (Nora rolls her eyes. It’s not even that bright out.) “Hey, girls. How’s it going?”
“Good.”
“Fine.”
“Great! You need rides?”
“No,” Nora says, fast, before either of them can jump in. “Emma’s mom is getting them.”
Emma gives her a dirty look, but Jamie just shrugs and flashes her dimples, which, Nora has never realized before but clearly sees now, are totally stupid and annoying. “Thanks a lot, though.”
Charlie shrugs. “Any time.”
“Well, bye guys,” Nora says, but she’s looking at Charlie when she says it. Emma and Jamie reluctantly step away from the truck.
“See you ladies around,” Charlie says, and revs the engine unnecessarily as they pull away. Nora watches Emma and Jamie giggle in the side-view mirror and then turns to scowl at him. “What?”
“You are such a jerk. You totally do that on purpose!”
He grins sideways at her. “Just to see your smiling face afterwards.”
Nora resists the impulse to stick her tongue out, and instead folds her arms across her chest and scowls out the window. “I hate you.”
“You love me,” says Charlie.
“Whatever,” Nora says, and reaches over to flip the radio to the pop station that she doesn't even like that much, but he really hates.
This whole ‘living close to home’ thing Charlie’s doing is so not working out, she thinks. He needs to get another job. Somewhere else. Far away. And if he could never pick her up from school again, ever, that’d be great too.