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Five experiences Daniel had while Descending.
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Participation is open to all. If this is your own prompt, you're free to write to it (please do!). Post your list as a comment to this post, adding additional comments if you exceed the character limit. It's OK to post as Anonymous, then come out later or not as you choose. Responses will be screened until midday U.S. Pacific time December 24 to see what people come up with independently. You can still respond to the prompt after the unveiling, but December 24 is the official due date.
General info and a place to ask questions: the comm 'welcome' post.
Technical-support questions: tech help.
Suggestions: the suggestion box.
To supply a new prompt: the open call for prompts.
Subject-line spoiler warnings for new SGA eps and the SG-1 movies, thanks!
If you're posting a response after the unveiling announcement, please copy the link to your comment, click on the 'set 34' tag, and reply to the post 'Set 34 Unscreened' with the link to your new comment-response. That helps people find and read and comment on responses that weren't there when they cruised through right after the reveal. :-)
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All at once.
It was absolutely terrifying. He didn’t know what was happening. Didn’t know who – or what – he was. His perceptions of the world made no sense. He had no way of understanding the sensations coming to him from his eyes, his ears, or his skin. The words that came to him were meaningless in their multitude. Even as his mind began to organize and simplify, the languages baffled him.
Every time he conceived a thing – an object, a thought, a body part – he had dozens of ways to name it. There was no way to tell which one was right. In as much as he knew he was human – again – he thought he was going crazy. Every time an idea crystallized in his mind, it fragmented into thousands of pieces. He knew he had once known how to describe these things, how to understand the world around him in all of the ways. But now there were too many, and he couldn’t distinguish between them.
It calmed him to decide they were all correct. And while he may have once had a mother tongue, it was no longer dominant. Whatever word solidified first and rang the truest in his head became what he called these new sensations and experiences, this new body.
From any other perspective, it was crazy. He was crazy. Daniel spent his first days back in the human sphere babbling in over 20 languages, never using the same one consecutively within a sentence. Then, gradually, the words organized themselves. It was miraculous, and so beautiful he no longer wanted to kill himself to stop the chaos. His entire lexicon bloomed in his mind, becoming almost corporeal, like a living – no, evolving – thing within his head.
He would have been content to spend the rest of his life just following the ways connections jointed it, how it could be deconstructed and rebuilt, how nearly every part of it could be altered and reformed to do just about anything.
When his mind came back completely, he wasn’t surprised to find out he had a Ph.D in philology.
2. He relearned his body.
The most overwhelming sensation Daniel associates with Descending was pain. He knows that logically, it didn’t hurt. That Oma dropped him into the corporeal sphere as lightly as a feather – a naked feather, but lightly all the same.
But he’d forgotten what – and this sounds dumb and he knows it – feeling felt like. He’d forgotten what having skin was like. What having eyes and eyelids was like, that you had to open your mouth sometimes to breathe, that sounds only traveled finite distances.
He had to relearn how to blink – and how often. His eyes were dry and painful for days, because he kept looking at the sun. Because it was bright and beautiful, even though it made him cry.
More quickly, he learned about the vulnerability of having skin again. His feet started bleeding immediately and he got a dozen splinters (because he was naked – thanks, Oma). Ascertaining what would puncture his skin was both a challenge and almost exciting. Bleeding was actually somewhat fascinating.
He was clumsy for weeks after returning. Standing and walking came automatically, but navigation didn’t. He walked into solid things – trees, doors, other people, small animals – repeatedly. Though he remembered nothing of either living or Ascending at the time, he did know that this was a new problem, and that no matter how hard he tried he could no longer move through solid matter.
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As he began to understand that he was human and manage the requirements of living again, he also realized that he was missing a enormous part of himself. Eventually, he could walk and talk (sort of) like the other humans on the planet. He learned to eat their food when his body exhibited signs of hunger or thirst. He knew to take shelter from storms, to wear protective fabric on the bottoms of his feet when outdoors, and to wear the garments the villagers had provided because going without at any time alarmed the others.
He learned to interact with these people, something that came surprisingly easy given how hard the fundamentals of breathing and talking had been to come back. Later, he would credit his anthropological background to taking to their lifestyle so quickly, but he also suspected that a disguised Ascended had remained with him to ensure his survival.
Thus he was fed, clothed, provided lodging. All the essentials, and yet missing something equally vital. He saw the villagers around him, who had names they called themselves. They had families who had named them, spouses who accompanied them, and identities that were established from their very birth.
Daniel was nameless, alone, and he had no idea who he was or had been.
4. He relearned fear.
In coming to understand how strange he was, in realizing that he was the only person on the planet – and perhaps in the entire universe – to be reborn in this way, it dawned on Daniel how dangerous this was.
He was sure he had been protected by the Ascended, then. It was the only reason the community in which he’d landed hadn’t murdered him for acting like a demon. Daniel was a stranger, with no kin connections here. That made him a foreigner, who acted as if he couldn’t control his own body (for a while, he couldn’t) and for a long time would only speak is panicked gibberish. He saw that the villagers feared him, even as they made sure he could live safely among them.
At the same time, he sporadically remembered events from when he was a normal person, who he hoped had lived somewhere with a name and with companions. But he didn’t get those memories.
He got terrifying images of violence and cruelty, of explosions and chaos. They were only flashes, but they scared him. He didn’t understand the visions of humans with glowing eyes, who could throw light. The novelty of bleeding wore off when he got images of being surrounded by dead and wounded – of being wounded himself. He was sure something terrible had happened to him to wipe his memory away, leaving only these nightmarish remnants.
Sometimes he wondered if it was him who had done the terrible thing.
5. He relearned love.
And it was what helped him come home, to the people who knew his name.
He was afraid of these strangers and their weapons, who claimed to be a part of his former life. He knew fear, now, knew that he could be hurt in many ways. He was afraid they would hurt him, afraid that they were a part of the explosions that rang in his head. And he was afraid that if he tried to stay, tried to stay the anonymous peasant in this peaceful village, that they would hurt the others that he now lived with.
He understood affection and kindness, now, in as much as he had seen it with his caretakers, then with his neighbors, and the way the villagers interacted with people who had names. So, he was deliberately cold to these strangers that wanted him to leave. And he saw the hurt in their eyes. It was shocking, because no one in this village ever reacted to him like that. They were afraid, annoyed, and frequently confused by the amnesiac in their midst, but his plight got little more than tolerance and sympathy. He recognized confusion in these strangers, but beneath that was undisguised horror when he rejected them. Joy at finding him, and horror that he did not return their emotion.
This frightened him, too, because he had no idea what came after this. He didn’t know if he wanted to go back to the life that had been so bad it had to have been completely erased. But the way these people looked at him made him hope. He wished that it meant his previous life had perhaps had family, friends, and love.
So he let them take him and give him back his name.
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I'm glad he could recognize the effect he had on SG-1. You can't hurt someone who doesn't care about you. *nods*
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