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ETA: The default blue text shows up worse on black than I thought, now that I'm not staring at crappy laptop screen. Changed to a less stupid color. Apologies.
Title: Legion
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ultranos
Rating/Warning: PG, immediately post-"Gemini", s08 SG-1
Notes: Thanks toshanghairain for the quick once-over editing job. If it sucks, it's my fault, not his. Also, abyssinia4077? This one's for you.
Summary: "'What is your name?' 'My name is Legion," he replied, "for we are many.'" (Mark 5:9)
So, I suppose I should come clean about some of the inspiration for this fic. A few months eariler, I had finished reading a long Hellsing fic that included a reference to the demon Legion, along with the relevant Biblical quote. Ever since, that quotation had stuck in my brain.
Eventually, as things are wont to do in my head, during a conversation about Sam and RepliCarter and "why 'Gemini' is the most underrated episode of Stargate ever", the two converged. I know I wanted to explore the war in Sam's head after "Gemini", how much it haunted her, and the Biblical allusion just snapped into place.
The summary is just the quotation. To this day, I'm not sure if it works or doesn't. I couldn't think of a good actual summary for the fic, beyond "Sam angsts after 'Gemini".
I think the quote works better.
She didn't break until she got home.
She would not accept the awkward absolution that the General and Teal'c offered her. Right away, I'm jumping into the slightly religious imagery and word choice, in case the summary quote wasn't clear enough. I chose the word "absolution" specifically for the connotation that Sam feels she's done something wrong and needs to accept/fix it. She stayed in her lab until she couldn't take concrete walls and metal lab benches anymore and fled the mountain for the safety of the outside world. Someplace where nanotechnology was still mostly theoretical and couldn't walk up to you and throw you across the room.
Stone and metal are cold and unfeeling. Sam's in a weird place: she can't stand human contact right now (because it makes her feel guilty or they offer platitudes that she doesn't want to hear), and her normal solace of hiding away in her lab isn't comforting. The irony is that the "outside world", where most people run away from, is what Sam needs to run away to.
All she wanted was to get into the shower and scrub it all away. Scrub until it hurt. Pain. The harder she scrubbed, the more it would hurt. Cause and effect. Quantitative results, reproducible under the correct conditions. Here, things obeyed physical laws, and maybe Sam could convince herself that the other was not her.
I wanted harsh, punctuated statements to reflect that Sam's looking for the cold hard facts as solace. She takes refuge in Science. Science requires Facts and follows very, very rigorous and methodical ways of taking in and dealing with information. Even if its self-destructive, I'm trying to show her grasping for that rock to rest her feet upon.
She made the mistake of turning around.
Staring out from the other side of the sink was her. The other. Her double, crafted out of infinitesimal robots to take the form of her image. The other, who knew Sam better than anyone else, who knew all the lies Sam told herself, all the little secrets she kept hidden away.
And here we introduce the second major image of the fic: a mirror.
She stared at the image, searching that familiar face for anything that could be different. And found nothing. Almost of its own volition, her hand reached out and touched the face in front of her. Actually, this particular sequence (of Sam trying to touch the mirror and subconsciously expecting not to find glass) was heavily inspired by a page out of the comic Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez. Basically, the protagonist monologues about trying something similar. The effect was haunting enough on me as a 17-year-old (when I read the comic) that I make a nod to it here. Her fingers hit the coolness of the glass, so reminiscent of metal that she immediately flinched and withdrew her hand.
Scared of her own reflection.
Angles and numbers floated in her mind, physical laws of the behavior of light, for once not offering comfort in their explanations. Light and its confounding dual nature, pieces and a whole, showing her that which she did not wish to see in a smooth sheet of glass. Daniel had once told her that people used to believe that mirrors reflected the soul, so that breaking one was tantamount to fracturing your soul.
I kind of like this paragraph. It goes from the Science and blends into something more spiritual, less emperical. Light's an interesting phenomenon, being both a particle and a wave. It ties back into the idea of a mirror, using reflection, and at the same time, the "pieces and a whole" line can very easily mean RepliCarter. It's here that I'm trying to hammer home the point that Science is Not Sam's Refuge in this case.
Once upon a time, her mother made sure both her children attended Mass every Sunday. She remembered very little from those hours sitting in a church. She stopped going when her mother died.
So if Science doesn't work, Sam's going back to her childhood safety blanket. They say "there's no faith like that of a child". I tend to see Sam as someone who moved away from Faith (in this situation, I have her as a Roman Catholic. This is also the point in which I might be most guilty of projecting my own biases), and now relies on Science and human effort. But when bad things happen and our current coping methods don't work, we humans have a tendency to go looking for things that comforted us as children. That's what Sam's doing now.
In her mind, bound by the pain of the hand in her head, the Replicator had smirked.
My name is Legion, for we are many.
The echoes of the priest from her childhood whispered from the artificial lips of her double, mocking, all around her. In this place, there was no God, there was nothing to drive this demon from her.
Except it doesn't work as solace. RepliCarter is some part of Sam, her dark side. Sam's demon is herself, and right now, she's confronted with it. There's no place to run. Both Science and her half-dead Faith have led her to this inescapable conclusion.
And it hurts.
Because she was the demon and the demon was she. She could lie to herself, others would offer false platitudes, but the lies echoed in her brain. The only one who could lie to Sam Carter was Sam Carter. Sam's not the best at bluffing. However, it's also really hard to lie to her. Analytical people think too much, examine facts and come to conclusions so that it can be pretty obvious when something doesn't add up. At the same time, Sam lies to herself every day. All the little lies we tell ourselves to get through the day. Considering what she does for a living, Sam probably tells herself big, huge lies just to be able to sleep at night. And now, not even then. Her double had ripped the blinders away, and now all she could see was the truth, stark, bright, and cold: there was nothing to the copy that wasn't in the original, somewhere. Intertwined and inseparable, now and forever.
It's a recurring character interpretation of mine that Sam and RepliCarter are not opposites. They are reflections of each other. They know each other. The reason, to me, that "Gemini" went the way it did is because RepliCarter knows what makes Sam tick, because she is Sam, at some level, and could play Sam like a drum. And Sam, on some level, knows this, and ignored that aspect of herself to try to believe that her replicator double was still good and noble.
This interpretation has the effect of both absolving and condemning Sam for "Gemini" at the same time. It absolves her in that of course RepliCarter would know just how to manipulate Sam, and it's not Sam's fault entirely. It also condemns her because RepliCarter is the way she is because she's born of Sam's dark side, and Sam willingly lied about that possibility in herself and denied the truth.
I never said it was a nice interpretation.
My name is Legion, for we are many. The repetition as an echo.
Jolinar stole her body. The replicator stole her soul.
My name is Legion.
What part was left that was still Sam Carter? Every time she walked through the 'gate, her molecules got rearranged and spat back out. Even that stole tiny parts of her. What was left, what else could they take?
This is the core. Sam's raw and hurting and after 8.5 years of this gig, she's not even sure what she is anymore. The universe has been taking and taking and she's worn down. She doesn't even know who she is anymore.
Her double stared back at her.
My name is--
Internally, Sam's brain is screaming "Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!" But actions speak louder than words.
Sam's fist impacted with the mirror. The sound of shattering glass drowned out the soft splats of blood dripping onto the floor.
This is not absolution. This is not condemnation. At this point, she's broken, shattered, hurting, and she's not asking anyone for help. She can't trust herself, she can't trust anyone else, and she can't trust her own brain, which has never failed her before.
But in smashing the mirror, she's rejecting that she's the same as RepliCarter. She still bleeds. It's the one bit of control, this physical lashing out, that she has left. And it's the one that's going to be the cold solace she needs.
Title: Legion
Author:
ultranosRating/Warning: PG, immediately post-"Gemini", s08 SG-1
Notes: Thanks to
shanghairain for the quick once-over editing job. If it sucks, it's my fault, not his. Also, abyssinia4077? This one's for you.Summary: "'What is your name?' 'My name is Legion," he replied, "for we are many.'" (Mark 5:9)
So, I suppose I should come clean about some of the inspiration for this fic. A few months eariler, I had finished reading a long Hellsing fic that included a reference to the demon Legion, along with the relevant Biblical quote. Ever since, that quotation had stuck in my brain.
Eventually, as things are wont to do in my head, during a conversation about Sam and RepliCarter and "why 'Gemini' is the most underrated episode of Stargate ever", the two converged. I know I wanted to explore the war in Sam's head after "Gemini", how much it haunted her, and the Biblical allusion just snapped into place.
The summary is just the quotation. To this day, I'm not sure if it works or doesn't. I couldn't think of a good actual summary for the fic, beyond "Sam angsts after 'Gemini".
I think the quote works better.
She didn't break until she got home.
She would not accept the awkward absolution that the General and Teal'c offered her. Right away, I'm jumping into the slightly religious imagery and word choice, in case the summary quote wasn't clear enough. I chose the word "absolution" specifically for the connotation that Sam feels she's done something wrong and needs to accept/fix it. She stayed in her lab until she couldn't take concrete walls and metal lab benches anymore and fled the mountain for the safety of the outside world. Someplace where nanotechnology was still mostly theoretical and couldn't walk up to you and throw you across the room.
Stone and metal are cold and unfeeling. Sam's in a weird place: she can't stand human contact right now (because it makes her feel guilty or they offer platitudes that she doesn't want to hear), and her normal solace of hiding away in her lab isn't comforting. The irony is that the "outside world", where most people run away from, is what Sam needs to run away to.
All she wanted was to get into the shower and scrub it all away. Scrub until it hurt. Pain. The harder she scrubbed, the more it would hurt. Cause and effect. Quantitative results, reproducible under the correct conditions. Here, things obeyed physical laws, and maybe Sam could convince herself that the other was not her.
I wanted harsh, punctuated statements to reflect that Sam's looking for the cold hard facts as solace. She takes refuge in Science. Science requires Facts and follows very, very rigorous and methodical ways of taking in and dealing with information. Even if its self-destructive, I'm trying to show her grasping for that rock to rest her feet upon.
She made the mistake of turning around.
Staring out from the other side of the sink was her. The other. Her double, crafted out of infinitesimal robots to take the form of her image. The other, who knew Sam better than anyone else, who knew all the lies Sam told herself, all the little secrets she kept hidden away.
And here we introduce the second major image of the fic: a mirror.
She stared at the image, searching that familiar face for anything that could be different. And found nothing. Almost of its own volition, her hand reached out and touched the face in front of her. Actually, this particular sequence (of Sam trying to touch the mirror and subconsciously expecting not to find glass) was heavily inspired by a page out of the comic Johnny the Homicidal Maniac by Jhonen Vasquez. Basically, the protagonist monologues about trying something similar. The effect was haunting enough on me as a 17-year-old (when I read the comic) that I make a nod to it here. Her fingers hit the coolness of the glass, so reminiscent of metal that she immediately flinched and withdrew her hand.
Scared of her own reflection.
Angles and numbers floated in her mind, physical laws of the behavior of light, for once not offering comfort in their explanations. Light and its confounding dual nature, pieces and a whole, showing her that which she did not wish to see in a smooth sheet of glass. Daniel had once told her that people used to believe that mirrors reflected the soul, so that breaking one was tantamount to fracturing your soul.
I kind of like this paragraph. It goes from the Science and blends into something more spiritual, less emperical. Light's an interesting phenomenon, being both a particle and a wave. It ties back into the idea of a mirror, using reflection, and at the same time, the "pieces and a whole" line can very easily mean RepliCarter. It's here that I'm trying to hammer home the point that Science is Not Sam's Refuge in this case.
Once upon a time, her mother made sure both her children attended Mass every Sunday. She remembered very little from those hours sitting in a church. She stopped going when her mother died.
So if Science doesn't work, Sam's going back to her childhood safety blanket. They say "there's no faith like that of a child". I tend to see Sam as someone who moved away from Faith (in this situation, I have her as a Roman Catholic. This is also the point in which I might be most guilty of projecting my own biases), and now relies on Science and human effort. But when bad things happen and our current coping methods don't work, we humans have a tendency to go looking for things that comforted us as children. That's what Sam's doing now.
In her mind, bound by the pain of the hand in her head, the Replicator had smirked.
My name is Legion, for we are many.
The echoes of the priest from her childhood whispered from the artificial lips of her double, mocking, all around her. In this place, there was no God, there was nothing to drive this demon from her.
Except it doesn't work as solace. RepliCarter is some part of Sam, her dark side. Sam's demon is herself, and right now, she's confronted with it. There's no place to run. Both Science and her half-dead Faith have led her to this inescapable conclusion.
And it hurts.
Because she was the demon and the demon was she. She could lie to herself, others would offer false platitudes, but the lies echoed in her brain. The only one who could lie to Sam Carter was Sam Carter. Sam's not the best at bluffing. However, it's also really hard to lie to her. Analytical people think too much, examine facts and come to conclusions so that it can be pretty obvious when something doesn't add up. At the same time, Sam lies to herself every day. All the little lies we tell ourselves to get through the day. Considering what she does for a living, Sam probably tells herself big, huge lies just to be able to sleep at night. And now, not even then. Her double had ripped the blinders away, and now all she could see was the truth, stark, bright, and cold: there was nothing to the copy that wasn't in the original, somewhere. Intertwined and inseparable, now and forever.
It's a recurring character interpretation of mine that Sam and RepliCarter are not opposites. They are reflections of each other. They know each other. The reason, to me, that "Gemini" went the way it did is because RepliCarter knows what makes Sam tick, because she is Sam, at some level, and could play Sam like a drum. And Sam, on some level, knows this, and ignored that aspect of herself to try to believe that her replicator double was still good and noble.
This interpretation has the effect of both absolving and condemning Sam for "Gemini" at the same time. It absolves her in that of course RepliCarter would know just how to manipulate Sam, and it's not Sam's fault entirely. It also condemns her because RepliCarter is the way she is because she's born of Sam's dark side, and Sam willingly lied about that possibility in herself and denied the truth.
I never said it was a nice interpretation.
My name is Legion, for we are many. The repetition as an echo.
Jolinar stole her body. The replicator stole her soul.
My name is Legion.
What part was left that was still Sam Carter? Every time she walked through the 'gate, her molecules got rearranged and spat back out. Even that stole tiny parts of her. What was left, what else could they take?
This is the core. Sam's raw and hurting and after 8.5 years of this gig, she's not even sure what she is anymore. The universe has been taking and taking and she's worn down. She doesn't even know who she is anymore.
Her double stared back at her.
My name is--
Internally, Sam's brain is screaming "Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!" But actions speak louder than words.
Sam's fist impacted with the mirror. The sound of shattering glass drowned out the soft splats of blood dripping onto the floor.
This is not absolution. This is not condemnation. At this point, she's broken, shattered, hurting, and she's not asking anyone for help. She can't trust herself, she can't trust anyone else, and she can't trust her own brain, which has never failed her before.
But in smashing the mirror, she's rejecting that she's the same as RepliCarter. She still bleeds. It's the one bit of control, this physical lashing out, that she has left. And it's the one that's going to be the cold solace she needs.
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