The Gods’ Punishment

 

Story Notes:

Rating: PG

Type: Angst, Missing Scene

Season/Spoilers: companion piece to Season 7’s “Fallen.” 

References Stargate the Movie, Children of the Gods, The Serpent’s Lair,

Meridian, Full Circle, and Fallen

 

             The villagers called him “Arrom, the Naked One” because that’s how they had found him, naked and shivering on the hard ground.  It wasn’t even a name, just a description, like calling a baby “Baby.”  It proved more than fitting, however, when they discovered his mind was just as naked as his body had been.  He couldn’t tell them who he was or where he was from or how he arrived in their field.  He was Arrom.  He accepted the description because he had nothing else.

             Some things about the village seemed familiar.  The robes they gave him to wear.  The communal food.  The covert glances of women who offered drink before sidling away.  At one point during his first meal with the village elders, he caught a flash of dark hair and laughing beauty, but when he turned to see the girl more fully, he realized she was just another villager, a stranger like all the others.  He felt bereft and didn’t know why.

             He watched and listened, saying nothing unless spoken to directly, while the elders debated the wisdom of allowing him to remain among them.  They worried he had committed some terrible crime and the gods had punished him by removing his memory.  He feared they were right.  An undefined guilt, a sense of something left unfinished and horribly wrong, made his heart clench.

             Perhaps because he was not among those arguing or perhaps because he was seated closest to the eldest man, he was the first to see Shamda’s eyes bulge and his fingers scrabble frantically at his throat.  Certainly he was the first to act.  He pulled the elder upright, grabbed him from behind, and plunged his fisted hands upward.  He was rewarded with a small popping sound as a date launched itself from Shamda’s mouth, followed by the welcome sound of Shamda’s gasping.

             Thank you, Heimlich, he thought fleetingly, before he became aware of the angry crowd that surrounded him, their eating knives pricking his skin.  He drew his arms carefully away from Shamda and held them aloft, level with his chest.

             “No, no!” Shamda cried, waving the other elders back as he struggled to recover his breath.

             Arrom waited motionless while Shamda explained how the newcomer’s actions had loosed the date caught in his throat.  Knives were lowered, and the elders grudgingly agreed with Shamda’s declaration that Arrom had earned the right to stay.

             For the first moon, he tried to make the village his home.  The villagers were kind but distant.  The tasks they gave him were simple and unimportant.  With the exception of Shamda, who relished a new audience for his many stories, no one sought Arrom out or invited his confidence.  They didn’t want his questions or his interest into their lives.  Each day increased the certainty within him that he did not belong.  The village was an ill fit that chafed at him like a too-small robe.

             Restless, he began wandering farther and farther from the village.  He didn’t know what he was seeking.  Shamda had smiled indulgently when Arrom made that confession one night.

             “You are like the mouse who searches for the proper home.  You remember that story?”  When Arrom insisted that he remembered, Shamda shrugged and for once, did not retell it.  “So, like the mouse, when you find what you seek, you will know it, and you will leave us.”

             “I don’t want to leave.”  The mere thought was staggering.  He could scarcely breathe for considering it.

             “Then don’t.  Find your place here in the village.”

             But when morning came, Arrom couldn’t stay.  He needed to explore.  He felt stifled by the village and driven to discover the world outside it.  This curiosity, this passion to reach for more, was comfortable.  He recognized it for a long-ago friend and realized it was the first time he had identified something of his life before he had become Arrom.

             The ruins far from the village brought him a sense of peace.  He lost himself in their allure, tracing spidery lines of a forgotten language and again feeling the tug of familiarity.  When he unearthed a piece of broken pottery, he had a sense of rightness, a sort of belonging, as if the ruins too were a long-ago friend.

             On other days, he couldn’t stand the ruins and their reminder that everyone had a past, when he did not.  On those days he wandered again, and loneliness clung to him with a crushing weight.  Something was missing.  He should be sharing this walk with friends, but none of the villagers would accompany him.

             His ramblings eventually led him to the stone circle.  He gazed at it for several minutes, awestruck at its size and its peculiar presence in the middle of an empty field.  He brushed his hand over the glyphs that covered the pedestal beside the circle, and when he saw the same glyphs on the circle itself, he wondered at their purpose.

             It was then he had the first vision.

             The vision filled his mind completely.  Instead of a stone circle in a field, he saw a similar circle inside a metal room.  It was blurry and distant as if he viewed it from far away through a cloudy partition.  A woman’s voice spoke near his ear, “That’s your Stargate.”

             As suddenly as the vision had come, it left.  He was on his knees, breathing hard.  His heart hammered against the walls of his chest.  His head hurt.  He waited for his body to calm and then staggered to his feet, using the pedestal for support.  Finally he took a deep breath and lifted his gaze to the circle.

             Nothing happened.

             Disappointment engulfed him.  He had thought the vision meant his memory was returning.

             He stayed at the circle until the approach of night forced him to return to the village.  No more visions came.  He had studied the glyphs on both the circle and the pedestal, but the meaning behind their patterns eluded him.  If the circle had a purpose, he hadn’t been able to determine it.  Stargate was just an empty word, a wild hope.

             His frustration grew as the evening progressed.  He stirred a finger through his rice, unable to eat.  Beside him, Shamda leaned closer.  “The food is not to your liking?”

             Arrom sighed and set down the bowl.  “I’m just not hungry.”

             Shamda nodded.  “Uneasy in mind, uneasy in stomach.  Like the man--”

             “Whose dog was missing.  I know.”  Usually he didn’t mind Shamda’s stories or his tendency to repeat them, but tonight, the circle dominated his thoughts.  “Shamda, have you ever seen the stone circle that stands upright?”

             “Of course.  The chappa’ai.”

             “Chappa’ai.”  The word rolled easily off Arrom’s tongue but sparked no recognition in his mind.

             “It is said that travelers would come through the chappa’ai and trade with us or wish to settle near us.  Sometimes men called Jaffa with marks on their foreheads would come and steal from us.”  Shamda shrugged.  “We have never seen these travelers or these Jaffa.  Maybe they are only stories.  But within every story is a seed of truth.”

             “Where were the travelers from?” he asked, but what he meant was, Am I from that place?

             Shamda patted his knee.  “I don’t know, Arrom.”

             Again and again, Arrom returned to the chappa’ai.  His Stargate.  He wanted to recapture that one moment, the clarity brought by a single vision.  He tried to remember, tried to imagine who he might have been.  He saw nothing.

             Days later, when he had abandoned hope and stopped trying, he began to experience more visions, and after that, they came regularly, sometimes several in one day.  They were never as strong or intense as the first one and were always accompanied by nausea, dizziness, or headaches.  Arrom willingly endured the discomfort.  He thought he would pay any price to know who he was.  But the visions he saw now were mere wisps, like ghosts that drifted out of his mind before he knew they were there.  The harder he tried to remember, the more insubstantial the memories became, leaving him with nothing but feeling.

             He had no context for the feelings.  With little warning, he would be floundering in some inexplicable emotion.  The worst and strongest was the sense of failure.  Because he had tried to do something and failed, something he loved was gone.  The despair of that thought made him edgy and ill-tempered.  He began leaving the village earlier in the mornings and returning later in the evenings.  The village was too small.  Sometimes, his body felt too small.

             One night Shamda was waiting in Arrom’s tent.  “Are you still searching?” the elder asked.  “Or are you running?”

             “Both, I think.”  Arrom hugged his arms over his chest.  “I just want to know what happened to me.”

             “Do you?”

             Arrom looked away.  Sometimes Shamda saw right through him.

             “How can you find the answers if you fear them, Arrom?”

             “Are there answers?”

             “As long as there are questions, there will be answers.”

             Arrom sighed.  “I’m tired of asking.”

             “Then stop.  The moral of the wolf with the mangy coat is that the troubles of the present are enough.  Do not borrow more from the past.  Be content with who you are, Arrom.”

             That night, Arrom dreamed of a woman with short, blonde hair.  They were standing in a cave, and he saw glyphs from the Stargate carved into the rock walls.  The woman grinned at him and said, “I knew I’d like you!”

             When the dream woke him, gasping for air and shivering, he stared at the ceiling of his tent and thought, I don’t want to be Arrom for the rest of my life.  He had to keep looking for answers.  Past or present, Arrom or someone else, he knew it was his tenacity in asking questions that defined him.

             The next morning, as he stepped off the forest track that led to his Stargate, he met strangers.  When he saw them, his heart thudded.  Were they travelers who had come through the chappa’ai?  Would they tell him of other places, of a place he might belong?

             The four men stared at him as if he were an apparition.  Perhaps they didn’t know the village was inhabited.

             “Greetings,” he said softly.  They had lowered their weapons, but he didn’t want to startle them.

             One of the men swallowed and stepped closer.  “Doctor Jackson?  Does Colonel O’Neill know you’re here?”

             Arrom lifted one shoulder in a shrug.  “I don’t know these people you speak of.  Perhaps they’re at the village.  Would you like me to take you there?”

             “Um, yeah, sure.  That’d be great.”  He signaled to the other men, who fell in step behind Arrom and the first man.  “Um, do you know who I am?”

             “You’re a traveler.”

             “Um, right.  Pierce is my name.”  He paused and glanced at Arrom expectantly.  Arrom shook his head.  He had nothing to give this man.

             “Did you come through the chappa’ai?” Arrom asked.

             “The chappa--?  Oh, the Stargate!  Yes.  Yes, we did.  How did—how did you get here?”

             “I don’t know.  I was just here.”  Arrom’s skin prickled.  Stargate.  This stranger knew Arrom’s secret name for the chappa’ai.  “This place you come from, what’s it called?  What’s it like?”

             “Look, Doc—um, I think you’ll have to ask Colonel O’Neill your questions.”

             “Is he one of your elders?”

             The men behind them snickered.  Pierce smoothed a smirk off his own face and then tossed a look over his shoulder, silencing the others’ laughter.

             “He’s our leader, so yeah, I guess you could call him an elder.”

             They walked the rest of the way in silence.  Pierce was making Arrom feel skittish.  He kept peeking at Arrom as if he thought Arrom might flee like a frightened rabbit.  Arrom was glad when they reached the village.

             Arrom could hear Shamda reciting the moral to one of his stories.  “Enemies’ promises were made to be broken.”

             Another voice replied, “And yet, honesty is the best policy.”

             Arrom’s head roared, blocking the sound of the continuing conversation.  He knew that voice, remembered that tongue-in-cheek humor.  The shock of recognition stunned him.  He halted where he was, trembling.  Pierce and two of the other men strode into the lead, and he sensed their eagerness, as if they anticipated a reward for being led to the village.  Then the voice itself was pulling Arrom forward.

             “It has to do with flocking…and togetherness…and…to be honest, I’m not that familiar with the particulars myself.  The point is, we’re not your enemy.  Give us a chance to prove it.”

             “Colonel!” Pierce called.  “We found something you might want to see.” 

 

 

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Disclaimer:  The Stargate characters all belong to Gekko Film Company, Glassner/Wright Double Secret Productions, MGM-UA Worldwide Television, Showtime, Sci Fi Channel, and Stargate SG-1 Prod. Ltd. Partnership.  This fanfic is not intended to infringe on any of those rights and is meant solely for the purpose of entertainment.  All other characters, the story idea, and the story itself are the sole property of the author.