After Daniel's spirit fled infinity to settle back within the normal dimensions of flesh and bone, he struggled with memory for a long time.
It wasn't just the amnesia, although that was troubling enough in all its embarrassing exposure. His friends' disturbed reactions to those initial gaps and lapses stopped him from ever telling them the deeper, more frightening confusion of a memory that wasn't just fragmented, but couldn't be trusted. A failure to remember was nothing in comparison to the terror of remembering too much.
It was unnerving to realize that time and mind had been cast adrift so many times before. But as he faced the tangled, criss-crossed webs of his own brain, Daniel had no choice but to accept that Oma was only the last in a long line of people who had tampered with the threads of his life, twisting memories along different realities or false pasts.
Before his Ascension, Daniel's mortal thoughts had managed to slot the multiple layers of self and space into relatively tidy niches. Now, though, Daniel struggled to reconcile a decade lived twice -- once under the Aschen, once in respooled time. He tried to ignore his mind's insistence that he had been a child of four and a man of thirty at one and the same time in 1969. His identity screamed soundlessly under the weight of so many contradictions: he was simultaneously Daniel and Carlin, a ravening Touched and an arrogant princeling, mindless beloved and nishta-soaked acolyte, haunted schizophrenic and suicidal addict, doctor of archeology and doctor of psychology. He remembered saving Sha're and watching her die as equal truths. He had to examine his files to learn whether or not he had actually quit his job at the SGC after Sha're had been killed. Moscow loomed in his nightmares, insisting it wasn't really there. Trying to assimilate some 300 repetitions of the same ten hours in a single plane of existence nearly drove him insane.
It took over a year for Daniel to carefully restructure the strata of memory, spacetime, and reality. The occasional slip or stumble -- sometimes literally, when he forgot that he wasn't really out of phase and couldn't just wander through the closest wall -- raised an occasional eyebrow, but he managed to avoid revealing the truth. Once or twice, he found himself speculating that it might be better to learn how to be his multiple selves in all their iterations. But then he decided that he'd already dropped Ascension once, and didn't need to try it again on a more human scale.
Then he did end up trying Ascension again, courtesy of the human form replicator that wore the face of one of his best friends. When he returned to himself that second time, he was grateful to discover that his memories weren't as relentlessly confused as they'd been on the first occasion. He still retained flashes of other pasts and realities, but it was more dream-like and didn't threaten to overwhelm his mortal senses. If he'd had to deal with reconciling the identities of twelve different people after his experience on the Stromos...
Now time and space had twisted on their axes again, even if their confusion wasn't locked within the confines of his mind. As they readied to send the different SG-1 teams back to their own realities, Daniel stepped forward to give a final goodbye to the woman he'd missed so dearly since her irrevocable death three years before.
He wrapped his arms around her slight frame and hugged her tightly, allowing himself the guilty pleasure of inhaling the scent of her hair. Janet Frasier -- physically here. Breathing. Alive. Well. Whole.
"It was good to see you again," he breathed.
She smiled up at him, brown eyes alight. "You, too," she said.
But as he returned the smile and stepped back from her, his mind flashed on two other goodbye hugs he had shared in a time that didn't really exist. Then, he'd said his goodbyes to Sam and Jack when he left the SGC after Sha're died. And with a sudden rush of anguish, Daniel knew that for all that it might feel otherwise, this embrace with Janet was every bit as much of a false mirage.
***
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
-- To His Coy Mistress, by Andrew Martell
Heliopolis Main Archive
A Stargate: SG-1 Fanfiction Site
Tidbits
by Fig NewtonKapitel Bemerkung:
In the wake of Descension, Daniel considers the nature of memories, with an extra dose of angst. Centered around S7, but assume spoilers for anything from the beginning of the show through Ripple Effect in S9.Site Navigation
Support Heliopolis