The Price of Knowledge

 

Story Notes:

See Chapter One

Chapter Sixteen

Answering the Questions

 

             The ascended Abydonians watched Danyel.  They could not protect him as Shifu did, with illusions and misdirections that prevented the Others from noticing Danyel’s awakening knowledge.  But to watch, even if they did nothing else, was a great honor.  He was family.  As long as he lived, so did Abydos.

             O’Neill, too, was part of Abydos.  When he asked for help, they could not deny him.  It was dangerous for one of them to cross the threshold and concentrate enough energy to create a physical form.  They didn’t have Shifu’s skill or his many years among the Others.  But O’Neill had called.

             Skaara demanded the risk, and he too could not be denied.  He was Danyel’s brother and the keeper of O’Neill’s fire-maker.  The demon who had once possessed him had given him insight into the worlds that were not Abydos, so he understood the strange sights that others of his kind could not imagine.  He had also visited the physical realm  once before, though with Oma’s help, so he could tell O’Neill and his team that the Abydos they knew was gone.  The Abydonians gave Skaara their blessing.

             Skaara walked on spongy grass and marveled at it.  Klorel, the demon, had brought him to many worlds but none as green as this one.  The warm evening breeze spoke of summer.  It brought a smell of cooking meat and a sound of laughter.  He rounded a corner.  There, O’Neill stood on a platform of wood, sipping from a bronze-colored bottle, standing guard over a metal box that smoked and sizzled.  Danyel, so small that the sight of him would have moved Skaara to tears if his eyes were real, was laughing, held high in the air by the Jaffa called Teal’c.  Teal’c sprinted across the yard, with Danyel like a bird above him, while the ones called Carter and Jonas gave chase.

             Skaara stepped onto the wooden platform, and because his physical form lacked substance, he made no sound that O’Neill could detect.  He called the man’s name.  O’Neill spun.  The wariness in his eyes changed to welcome.

             “Skaara!”  O’Neill closed the distance between them, intent on an embrace that Skaara could not allow.  His grasp on the physical was too shaky.  If he lost hold of his energy here, he might not find the threshold again.

             He deflected O’Neill’s purpose with a raised hand.  “Please, my friend.  Do not touch me.”

             O’Neill backed off and looked with eyes that saw deeply.  “You all right, buddy?”

             “The physical form is hard to maintain.  I will be well, O’Neill.”  He smiled wide because he could not help it.  “It is very good to see you, O’Neill.”

             O’Neill lifted his bottle in a salute.  “Back atcha, kid.  So…  This a social visit?”

             “I came to answer your questions.”

             “Ah.”  Shadows of worry lurked in O’Neill’s eyes.  He tipped the bottle toward his mouth and took a swallow from it.  “It’s not that I’m complaining here, but Daniel…  Well, he’s doing some strange things.”

             “When your heart beats, is it strange, O’Neill?  When you breathe, do you call it odd?”

             “What is it with you people and the riddles?”

             Skaara nodded at the frustration evident in O’Neill’s voice.  “It is no riddle, O’Neill.  What Danyel does is as natural to him as breathing.  He cannot stop himself any more than you can stop your heart and still live.”

             “Natural, huh?  I seem to recall asking Shifu if Daniel was human, and I hate to break it to you, Skaara, but this is not natural for us lowly humans.”

             “Danyel is a human with the knowledge of the Ancients.  He chose this.”

             O’Neill looked pointedly at the child in his yard and then back at Skaara with a raised eyebrow.

             “Gahk.  I am explaining badly,” Skaara said.  “It is true we chose the physical body for him.  But Danyel himself chose the memories with which he wanted to return.  He knew what the Others sought, but he kept it from them.  Instead, he gave them pieces of who he was while he preserved what he wished to bring home to you.  He deemed the knowledge and the language of the Ancients more important than his personal identity.”

             “Well, that sounds like a typical Daniel decision.  He’s always had a fucked-up sense of his own self-worth.”

             Skaara could not disagree.  The story of Danyel’s ascension was legend among the Abydonians.  How Danyel had found fault with himself, how he could not see his own importance to the fight because the fight itself had overwhelmed him, how he had perceived only failure and guilt instead of the great good he had done.  Oma herself had told the Abydonians how she feared Danyel would not release his burdens before death took him irrevocably from the path of ascension.

             “So you’re telling me the glowy thing is normal for Daniel now,” O’Neill said.

             “The exercise of his knowledge, yes.  He will not, as you put it, glow all the time, just as a child who is learning to walk does not always stumble.”

             “Oy, you lost me.  Walking?  Glowing?”  He spread his arms as if to balance the two concepts against each other.

             “Learning to walk, O’Neill,” Skaara repeated, emphasizing his point.  “Or in Danyel’s case, relearning.  He is rediscovering what he can do.”

             “And sometimes he glows because…”  O’Neill elongated the word and looked to Skaara for the reason.

             “To act on the Ancients’ knowledge requires energy.  When he glows, Danyel is pulling energy from an outside source.  From the earth, perhaps, or from the electricity in the air.  Possibly from the ethereal plane itself.  At other times, those in which you have seen no glow, Danyel manipulates his own energy.  As he grows comfortable in his power, he will use his own energy more often and only draw from outside himself when the need is great.”

             O’Neill pondered this, taking the time to drink from his bottle.  He poked at the meat pieces cooking inside the metal box, flipped two, and nudged the others in new positions.  In the yard, Danyel was now running after the three adults, chasing one and then veering off to chase another.  Finally he caught up to Jonas, slapped the man’s leg, and yelled, “Tag!  You’re it!”  Then he raced away, squealing when Jonas pretended to lunge after him.

             O’Neill finished with the meat and focused on Skaara again.  “Why now?  We’ve had him a month.  Why didn’t he do all this stuff when he first came back?”

             “His fear of the Others blocked the knowledge from awakening.  That has changed.”

             O’Neill’s lips tightened into a thin line.  “Because he threw Rosenberg against the wall.”

             Skaara shook his head.  “No.  He reacted then to emotion.  It was accidental and uncontrolled.  Now he uses the knowledge deliberately and manipulates his energy with intent.”

             “You just said it was automatic, like breathing or something.”

             “When you walk, you do not consider how you walk.  You merely make the decision to walk.”

             O’Neill drank from his bottle again.  The confusion was still visible on his face, and Skaara wished for Shifu, who was wiser in the ways of the ascended ones.

             “Okay, you’re still not answering my question here, Skaara.  Why now?  When he came back, he was pretty adamant about not using any of the knowledge.  He was terrified the Others would find out.”

             “We believe he has learned something that outweighs his fear.”

             “What?”

             Skaara rolled his shoulders uncomfortably, feeling the strain of holding this physical form.  “He will not tell us.”

             “But if he keeps it up, the Others’ll find him, won’t they?”

             “It is inevitable, O’Neill.”  He paused and then confessed a truth, “It was always inevitable.  We have known since we descended Danyel that the Others would find him eventually.”

             O’Neill stared, his eyes dark with some indefinable emotion.  “What was the point then?  Why bring him back into my—our lives if the Others are just going to steal him away?”

             “Danyel is wise.  He understands many things that we do not.  We believed if we gave him time, he would find a way to protect himself.”

             “Has he?”

             “We do not know,” Skaara admitted.

             O’Neill threw his hands in the air.  Liquid sloshed out of the bottle he held.  “I don’t believe you people.  Either you’re spouting nonsense or you can’t tell me anything.”

             “Forgive me, O’Neill.  Danyel says very little to us.”

             “He’s probably afraid of being overheard,” O’Neill grumbled and turned to check the meat again.

             The statement startled Skaara.  No one had considered the possibility that their communication with Danyel might be overheard.  In one simple statement, O’Neill proved the point Skaara had been trying to make.  Danyel, even if he was six years old and still recovering from his ordeal among the Others, had a more intuitive grasp on the dangers of his situation than all the Abydonians together.

             O’Neill glanced over his shoulder, raised an eyebrow, and turned fully to face Skaara.  “Hey, you’re flickering.”

             Skaara firmed his hold on the physical form.  “I must go soon.”

             “Time for one more question?”

             Skaara nodded.

             “Okay, this glowy thing where he reads my mind--”

             “I do not understand.  Is not reading for books?”

             “He knows what I’m thinking,” O’Neill clarified.

             Skaara laughed.  “That is not a ‘glowy thing,’ O’Neill!  It is a thing of the soul that has always existed.  Even before I could speak this English, I saw this soul-bond between you and Danyel.  Remember, in the cave after we freed you from Ra?  He spoke to you.  I did not understand the words, but I knew he opened something in your heart.  I always wondered what he said.”

             “He said you all wanted to live,” O’Neill said quietly, gazing into the past as if he had forgotten Skaara’s presence, “and it was a shame I was in a hurry to die.  If anyone else had said it, I’d have hit him.  But Daniel…  I owed him.”  After a pause, O’Neill added, “It was weird.  I didn’t know how much I wanted to live until that moment when he died instead.”

             “I have seen you and Danyel speak without no words,” Skaara said softly.  “I have seen you speak harsh words and still remain friends.  I have seen you do this thing where you read each other’s minds.  It is not a new thing, O’Neill, and not a ‘glowy thing,’ as you would call it.  Perhaps Danyel has strengthened it somehow, but the soul-bond has always been.”

             His physical form wavered again.  At the threshold, Kasuf urged his son back to the ethereal plane.

             “O’Neill, I must go now.  Be strong for Danyel.  When the Others come, he will need you.”

             “Need me for what?  I can’t fight on your level,” O’Neill groused.

             But Skaara was unable to reassure him.  He had lost hold of the physical form and disappeared from O’Neill’s sight.  He hurried to the threshold and the anxious Abydonians who awaited him there.  Before he passed into the ethereal, he glanced back to see O’Neill watching Danyel with a look of fierce protection.  Skaara had no doubt whatever Danyel needed from O’Neill, whatever the price, O’Neill would do it.

 

 

Back to Chapter 15                                                                    Chapter 16, cont>>

Back to Little Danny Home                                                     

 

 

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.