It’s not the screams within Michael’s nightmares that wake him. That’s what everyone assumes, because that’s the part he mentions. Doctor Kate spends hours with him discussing the monsters in his dreams, the terror he sees in the mirror.
“It’s normal,” she reassures him. “It’s to be expected, you’ve been through a terrible ordeal.”
His third night in isolation (Hell, as far as he can remember it could very well be his third night alive), he lies awake and tries not to slip back into the dreams. He wonders if he should be worried. Because there are screams in his nightmares, he hadn’t lied about that, but they don’t come from him – sounds of pain, sounds of fear, and even sounds of death. He is frightened to realize that he knows, somehow, how to sense death in a man’s scream. He wonders how he learned such a thing, but it’s not something he can ask.
He remembers death, both in his dreams and in his waking mind. It, unlike so many things, seems an old and familiar friend; one whom he has known for as long as he can remember. He has vague memories of legends told about the bringers of death, the givers of life, and how a great god melded them together into a form capable of walking among the stars. In these stories, whispered in the corners of his mind, there is always something missing. It is the same something that is missing from his dreams, although far less tangible.
He wants to ask, but he’s afraid. Because he can hear fear in the voices around him; it’s an instinctive knowledge as sure as he would recognize the sound of death. So he keeps the question close, buries it just a little more every time he talks to Doctor Kate so that she won’t hear the lie in his voice. She’d probably just think he was crazy, anyway, and he doesn’t want to have to leave. He’s not sure he’d do any better anywhere else, and at least here people hide their fear.
Every day that he’s awake, things get a little bit better, and he feels a little bit more at home. But he can’t help but wonder, just the littlest bit…
If normal people dream in screams, in terrors and chaos, then why does he dream in silence? That is what it is, a great yawning emptiness where sound should be; where instead there is but the hollow feeling of screams as they echo off his skin, but never in his ears.
When he wakes in the camp, he knows he is in a strange place. He alone is conscious, though he is surrounded by sleeping men and a strange soundless buzzing. He recognizes none of them, though they appear strangely similar to one another - all with long white hair and pale, pale skin. He touches his own hair, curious if he is one of them, but it is short. So he is a foreigner, in a white room filled with nameless men, and he has no idea where he is or why he is there. There is sound outside the walls, not the indescribable buzz but real sound – voices and footsteps and laughter. It is that which drives him to leave his bed and the room full of sleeping ghosts, the noise and its inherent promise of answers.
Standing, or rather, movement at all, is a slow process filled with pins and needles; the feeling is familiar, at least, and reassuring for being so. He opens the door at the end of the room and realizes that he is in a tent, for he steps outside onto grass. Each identification of his surroundings, each name that feels good and solid within his mind, eases his mind, though his own name lies just out of reach. He looks up from studying the grass, and sees a face familiar in a way nothing else has been. She is dark, where the men in the tent had been white, and while he cannot summon specific memories she brings to the surface feelings; they are almost as good. When she is close, a name appears in his mind and he smiles, because it seems the right thing to do. “Teyla.”
She pauses, eyes widening before she recovers and gives him a gentle smile. Her pause worries him, and he wonders what exactly is wrong with him that he ended up in that white room with the white men and the buzz that won’t go away. Her voice, when she speaks, is reassuring in its tone and volume, but he hears a hint of fear underneath it all. “Michael. We did not expect you to wake so soon; are you well?”
He nods, and tentatively reaches to touch her shoulders. She tenses, then lowers her head in what he belatedly processes as a greeting. The touch comforts him, settles him. “I do not know.”
She pulls back, concern now the only thing visible in her eyes. “What is wrong?”
Hands slip into pockets in a way that speaks of long practice, though he cannot remember having performed the action before. “I don’t know where I am, why I’m here. I know you, but I don’t know the men I was placed with. They’re different than me. Everything I remember is… I think the word is hazy. Nothing makes sense.”
She sighs, and takes his arm, leading him to another tent and speaking as she walks. “Doctor Beckett was concerned that you might experience some memory loss. The vessel you were on was struck by a plague; it killed all of the women, and we were barely able to save the rest. I do not know the details; I am sure Doctor Beckett can inform you should you wish it.” As happened when he first saw Teyla, the name brings emotions as opposed to memories – a well meaning man, full of fault and sympathy and guilt. Those are the impressions the name Beckett brings to his mind. Teyla pauses as they enter the tent decorated with a large red cross, and calls a greeting.
“Doctor, your first patient is awake.” She grasps Michael’s arm, and guides him inside, squeezing gently before she lets go. “He is a good man, he will do for you what he can.”
She is gone before he can think to question her need to reassure him, and Doctor Beckett has set about explaining the details of the plague to which he was exposed. His ‘memories’ were correct, the man before him reeks of subtle guilt; he wonders what it is the doctor has done that is so wrong.
* * *
Over the next two days, the buzzing grows stronger. On the evening of his second day in the camp, the white ones wake. They are confused and weak, helpless in a way that he was not, and he wonders again what happened on that ship and why he was there. He is obviously not one of them, not like Lathan or Kinar, despite the words of the others tending the camp. The white ones follow blindly, questioning that which bears no relevance to their current situation and ignoring the important things. Their nights are filled with quiet sleep, unlike his own. They do not wake sweating, ears filled with screams that are not their own; he knows, because he has asked.
They fear him, the white ones, because he is strange and different in a way that the expedition members are not – he carries some of the paleness of the plague, yet is visibly too different to be one of them. He almost wishes he were, though he despises their quiet and petty infighting.
The other oddity is that they do not know Teyla, or Sheppard, or Beckett. This frightens him in ways that he will not tell the doctors or even Teyla, because he remembers. He remembers living in the city, Teyla’s city; he remembers walking its halls and speaking to others in the uniforms Sheppard wears – they treated him with courtesy and a hint of underlying fear. He was one of them, he is as sure of this as he is of anything. The need to belong is strong within him; the more he thinks about it, the more he knows he is not truly one of the white ones.
What he cannot understand, is why the expedition has not simply told him of his past and welcomed him back into the fold. Is the plague so deadly that he must forever be exiled? Beckett is a smart man, and Michael cannot believe that the problem is impossible. He attempts to ask, but no one will answer. Sheppard will shift uncomfortably and find somewhere else to be; Teyla will change the topic and say some things are better left unsaid. Beckett grows disturbed, and Michael has no wish to do that to a man who is clearly trying to help him.
But every night, the dreams grow stronger, and the fear that his own people have rejected him becomes more pervasive. If the expedition will not take him back, then all he has left are the survivors. After four days of a carefully hidden, but no less present, rising panic he knows what he must do. The white ones are scared, looking for a leader. So he will lead.
~ Finis ~