[Stargate SG-1] Not Just a Footnote
Title: Not Just a Footnote
Author: telepathicpixie
Rating: PG
Character: Sha’re
Word Count: 872
Notes: 100_women prompt #46 - write. AU; takes place sometime after “Full Circle.”
Summary: When Sha’re first arrived on Earth and began to walk around in their world, the casual attitude towards the written word stunned her.


When Sha’re first arrived on Earth and began to walk around in their world, the casual attitude towards the written word stunned her. The Tau’ri thought absolutely nothing of it; language was everywhere—piled in books on shelves, scribbled on sticky-notes stuck to doorways, and transmitted electronically to little devices that beeped and twittered.

Three years later, she found herself carelessly moving a stack of magazines out of the way so she could sit down, completely unconcerned about all the writing contained within. Once, she had felt an uncertain thrill every time she picked up a pen, constantly stifling the urge to look over her shoulder and make sure there were no Jaffa waiting to haul her away for defying her (false) god; once, she had flipped through every book and magazine that came to hand, just to look at the words. What would Ra think to see her now, one of his ignorant slaves bordered on one side by glossy fashion and science magazines, on the other by thick physics books, and a stack of notebooks in front of her, stuffed full with her own scrawled writing?

He would have been furious and the thought made her smile, because he was dead and she continued to defy him every day of her life—made all the more satisfying because it no longer felt like defiance; it felt normal.

She had precious little to smile about, as of late. The entire last year had been one of constant emotional upheavals, beginning with the death of her husband and ending with the destruction of her homeworld. She had elected to remain on Earth when Daniel had died. They had asked, initially, if she wanted to go back to Abydos and assured her nobody would think the less of her for it, but on Abydos she would have been a widow and a former demon-god and, while she had always been too smart for her own good and for her people’s comfort, she now would have been too smart and in possession of knowledge enough to back it up. On Earth, she was simply Sha’re Jackson—still a widow, but the widowhood was incidental and only a portion of the greater whole.

Besides, she had come to the conclusion that, after a certain point, one could not go home again; there was a time when knowledge of the universe became too much to return to the solace of ignorance.

Instead, she had moved in with Samantha and tried to think about moving on. For a time, she had actually thought moving on would be possible, until she learned that Daniel had appeared to O’Neill and Teal’c—but not to herself or Samantha—and then to Skaara, until Anubis destroyed Abydos, until Oma Desala had saved her people the same way she had saved her husband—by taking them away from her.

She was happy they had survived, in a fashion; she was bitter about being left behind.

The bitterness was obvious, at least; beyond that, Sha’re could not decide if she was angry or upset or both in regards to the twists things had taken, so she lied and said “yes” whenever Samantha asked if she was all right. It might have helped to talk about it, but whenever she tried to find the words, Sha’re realized she was not as fluent in English as she would have liked to think. There might have been words in her native tongue to express the pain, but anyone who would have understood those words was gone.

Teal’c might have known her language, but Sha’re could not get past the resentment that Daniel had come to him and not to her and so could not consider speaking to him.

Instead, she wrote it down in her notebooks, where it did not matter if her thoughts were a chaotic tangle of languages. At some point, her emotions had turned into recollections; it was, perhaps, fitting, given she was the only one left. In the future, someone might wonder about the people of Abydos, if she and her people managed to become even a footnote in the history of the galaxy, and there should be some written record of them—of their hopes and dreams and struggles and victories, of the way they had made their clothes and baked their bread and found water and life in the desert. Her homesickness poured itself out onto her pages and she was able to bite back the bitter knowledge that she had only become truly, heart-wrenchingly homesick once there was no longer a home to return to.

Samantha came into the living room with two steaming mugs of tea, setting one down on the coffee table next to Sha’re’s stack of notebooks. She looked at the book on Sha’re’s lap, at the pencil Sha’re had stilled when Samantha had walked into the room, and asked the question that had obviously been on her mind for the last several weeks, while she had been helping to supply Sha’re with fresh notebooks and pencil sharpeners.

“What are you writing?”

Sha’re looked down at the curled page in front of her and across at the stack by her feet. “Everything,” she said at last, truthfully, with a faint, sad smile.


Revised/rewritten June 14, 2009.


Table here.