the clawing of the truth
the clawing of the truth
by kitty
Summary: when she wakes she feels desperately bereft of something, something that she thinks she held in her dreams, someone that she never really had a firm hold of in the first place
Category: Angst, Missing Scene/Epilogue
Episode Related: 818 Threads
Season: Season 8
Pairing: Jack/Sam, Sam/Pete
Rating: FAM
Warnings: none
Disclaimer: Stargate SG-1 and its characters are the property of Showtime/Viacom, MGM/UA, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Productions. This story was created for entertainment purposes only. No copyright infringement is intended. The original characters, situations, and story are the property of the author(s).
Archived on: 08/20/05
The Clawing of the Truth
when she wakes she feels desperately bereft of something, something that she thinks she held in her dreams, someone that she never really had a firm hold of in the first place
by kitty
She doesn't know of what she dreams most nights, only that when she wakes there is a hard, cold fist enclosing her heart and she fights to breathe.
The nameless things of her dreams claw at the edges of her memory, and torment her from the elusive dark corners where her vision cannot reach. Their substance crumbles under her fingers when she tries to draw them towards her into the light of consciousness, and even their whispers slither away each time she focuses her senses upon them; like trying to follow the tendrils of her grandfather's cigar smoke when she was a child; or reaching for the clear, rainbow bubbles that were tugged away from her little hands by a summer breeze; or, much later, the way her own words evaporated as they left her lips on the freezing DC morning when she stood in a park with Jonas and told him she was leaving.
But she senses that these things which evade her grasp during her night-time terrors are darker, much darker, than balloons over a tree-line and toy boats on a pond. Tonight, as in other nights, they will remain nameless, and the disquiet possibilities of her dreams haunt her long after she thinks the knowledge of their true content ever would. She thinks too much. However, she no longer needs the vivid imagination of her childhood to supply monsters and witches and demons and inescapable following forces; her waking life provides ample nourishment for nightmares. But these are phantasms that she can retain, name, explain. She can pick out the mechanical whine of a dull metallic spider before it leaps at her face with determined purpose and acid. She can sense the presence of monsters in the dark, the blood boiling in her veins even before their eyes glow white-hot. She can track an enemy over any terrain; track him with or without the help of the many technologies that she can bend to her will. She has killed, to protect both herself and others, with words, with the push of buttons, with bullets and knives, with missiles and her bare hands and, once, with the expanding corona of an exploding sun. She has done these things and she can do them again. These tangible threats she can neutralise. But the secret torments of her heart, that manifest themselves in her dreams as faceless shapes and wake her in sweat and paralysis and panic, she cannot conquer.
If she could just name these fears she could surely combat them. She learnt long ago that identification precedes explanation and resolution. But dreams defy her faith in the reach of the omnipotent hand of science, denying her the opportunity to name and to thereby understand. Somehow she knows that there are no words for this in any case.
The next night, when the images once more float away from her on a disdainful tide that pulls them beyond tenability, Pete is there and she can slide an arm over his chest and bury her head in his shoulder. He shifts unconsciously in his sleep to accommodate her body to his own, but his heat does not warm her cold limbs and her arms feel empty despite her embrace of him. She feels desperately bereft of something, something that she thinks she held in her dreams.
After a week, the sand that streams through her fingers when she wakes finally solidifies but slips away still, leaving a ghost in her arms that she knows has no place in bed with her and Pete. Whilst the spiders and the snakes and the blazing eyes and the screams from her waking life are all sown together by her imagination into a Frankenstein for her nightmares, the most unsettling fear comes from the silhouette of a man on the back of her eyelids just before she lets in the light. Slowly, as she lies there, words reach her from her dream, drifting towards her on a breeze from a world that seems so far away from this bedroom. "Come here," he says, his voice sounding as frail as she had looked when he had wrapped himself around her and they had mourned together. This is the secret that reveals itself as a tantalisingly elusive truth in her dreams and trickles away from her in the morning - the someone that she never really had a firm hold of in the first place.
She turns away from Pete again. Today he bought a house for them. A yard, a dog, a baby, a future.
But tomorrow her father will die, she will see Kerry Johnson in the general's backyard with a salad bowl in her hands, and she will know with painful clarity that in her dreams it is not Pete's silver hair from which she picks drying yellow kitchen paint.
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