Work Text:
Alone
by kaly
Each night after the air had cooled and the noise of the village faded, Daniel would lay awake in his tent. How it had come to pass that he was stranded five thousand years in the past... alone?
Unsurprisingly, he had adjusted to living among the ancient people far more quickly than the others. He learned to live without coffee and had given up on the single pair of contacts he had worn. In time he became accustomed to his friends and the world around him being a blur. But it wasn't until after they were gone that he learned what it truly meant to live in a world without clarity.
He had been angry when Jack and Teal'c had grown impatient and pushed for their insurrection to move faster than planned although he understood their impatience even as he yelled and fought. In the end, however, he couldn't contain Jack once his mind was made up and because of that, in the end, it was as much his failure as theirs. After all, it was his fault they'd traveled back in time in the first place.
During the day such unproductive thoughts were buried, there was too much to do. But late at night with no distractions there was far too much time to remember.
Nothing more than dumb luck had spared his life when the others fell. It was an irony that Jack would have found amusing had he lived to see it. And Daniel had long grown used to the bitterness the thought brought.
Initially after the others were lost he had tracked the passage of time. He had salvaged what scraps of paper he could find in their things and filled them with his observations and thoughts. All the while hoping it might one day prove useful.
He stayed busy - sane - by helping plot their next attempt to overthrow Ra. His team might be gone but he was determined to see their goal achieved. The timeline had to be preserved; it was what drove him onward.
After that was done... Daniel wasn't sure what might come afterward or how much he cared. Endless treasures surrounded him: new, vibrant and not yet the artifacts they were destined to become. Even these failed to capture his mind when there was so little remaining to lighten his heart. The weight of being orphaned yet again sat heavy on his shoulders; however he would persevere. Survive. He always did.
And so he helped plan and plot and they waited. Eventually the right time would come. He could only hope that everything would happen the way it was meant to so that their sacrifices might mean something.
Only then, they came.
He scarcely believed it when they ran up to him, insisting he follow. Entering the tent, Daniel saw them - alive and whole - and for a moment he couldn't breathe. They were blurry, as was everything, but he could never mistake those three figures.
The four of them standing there together was so familiar that Daniel felt something long buried flare with hope. And while he knew their arrival meant the timeline had been adversely altered, for a moment he was glad. For that moment he was again a part of something larger than himself - this team.
At least until they began to speak and he realized that while they might share faces and names, these were not his friends. This wasn't the family he'd become a part of. Jack especially looked at him differently, as if he were being judged and found wanting. Daniel felt the weight of loss sparking anew each time the familiar-but-not brown eyes settled on him.
He did his best to ignore it as they debated and discussed, plotting begun anew, but the nagging thought persisted. In a perverse way he had been granted the thing he longed for most: to have Jack, Sam and Teal'c at his side.
And as the sun faded on yet another day, the others secreted away where the Jaffa wouldn't find them, he lay in bed unable to sleep. Staring at the tent, imaging the stars beyond, Daniel couldn't help wondering what was worse: to be alone amongst strangers or to be a stranger amongst friends.
end