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“-. March 4, 1995 .-“
“How the hell did we win?”
Coming from who might just be the smartest man in the world, that question struck everyone quite hard.
“No, seriously, how?” Charlie Gordon demanded as he waved angrily at Harry’s memory of Washington being eradicated in orbital bombardment, which hung frozen around them in the Room of Requirement’s Pensieve space. “If they can do this to the whole world – in one day – how the hell were the Goa’uld kicked off Earth in the first place? For that matter, why didn’t they come back to put us in our place afterwards? They've had spaceships capable of this all along, didn’t they? They didn’t just invent them in the last few years.”
That was correct. Well, except for what minor improvements in efficiency or rate of fire they crawled through over the last ten millennia. Harry had extensive memories as Evan Lorne to confirm it, and not just the ones in that last life where the whole Earth ended in fire. He recalled another life, a different version of that same life during which he served as a member of Stargate Command, and later in the Atlantis Expedition.
In that version of history, on that same uncanny version of Earth where magic didn’t exist, the Americans had been visiting other planets through the Ancient artificial wormhole device since 1945. Well, since 1997 technically, but 1945 was the first time the Stargate was used successfully, by Ernest Littlefield. Then there was another trip in 1996 which was arguably the most important of all, since it was the one that set the whole galaxy on fire by killing Ra.
Evan Lorne had been very passionate about reading all the SG1 reports, he considered them better entertainment than television.
“Clearly, the answer must be ‘Magic,’” Sirius said when no one else felt like playing devil’s advocate.
“No, that can’t be the case because that’s down to SG-1 going back in time to do the rebellion themselves,” Charlie grumbled. “It might not have even been just the once, according to what Harry remembers reading about in that life.”
“It can still be, depending on how far back the timeline split,” Dumbledore took his turn challenging Charlie this time. “Since the Giza stargate was destroyed here, then it stands to reason that at least the conclusion of that conflict isn’t the one read by Evan Lorne.”
“No, no tangents,” Charlie insisted. “Why did the Goa’uld not just use orbital bombardment, before or after? Especially after. I do not like it when the only silver lining is that they still had to come as ‘close’ as low orbit to do it. Does Magic even reach that far? Do we know?”
They didn’t know. Not even Nicolas. Unlike the normals, no wizard had ever been to space. Not in their physical bodies, anyway.
“I refuse to believe there wasn’t at least one spaceship in the system back when they ruled the planet. I refuse twice over to believe more weren’t mustered after the first shots were fired. Especially over however many years the rebellion took. More likely decades, global coordination in a time without power lines or telephones or vehicles is no laughing matter. I can buy that here, because of Tesla pyramids and magic messaging, or whatever else the magicals had back then. Especially since there wasn’t segregation between them and the normals. But, somehow, it worked out over there in No Magic Land too. Within the span of a single lifetime, or time-traveling SG-1 wouldn’t have been so pivotal to the events.”
Harry cleared his throat awkwardly.
“Go on, Harry,” urged Nicolas.
“I – Lorne assumed Egeria was the one that did it. SG-1 turned her to their side, somehow, and the Tok’ra did the rest. Somehow.”
“Internal treachery goes without saying,” Charlie groused, not convinced. “But Ra caught her, so that clearly didn’t happen cleanly either.”
“Our myths are hardly clean themselves,” countered Dumbledore. “There is plenty of strife among the gods, both in heaven and the underworld, killing each other, eating one another, with or without creating or destroying stars. And there are ground-side legends as well, weapons of great might that ended the lives of men by the thousands and poisoned the earth. Then, too, the Asgard seem to have played a pivotal role in that reality. Harry, what of the myths in that other Earth? Did you spot any significant variations?”
“No,” Harry replied. “But it wasn’t Lorne’s thing, he didn’t actually read that deep into them like other people, never mind someone like Daniel Jackson, so I can’t categorically rule anything out. He was more interested in modern conspiracies, and the gods he was fighting in the present. Reading about the mythic ones would’ve just made it feel even more disappointing, that’s how he – how I felt about it.”
Harry had reservations about automatically attributing myths to the Goa’uld, instead of the real gods. Most of the stories dated much further back than the time they were written down.
“Fantastic,” Charlie rubbed his face in frustration. “All this and we still understand jack and shit.”
Harry looked down. He knew it hadn’t been aimed at him, but the more the talk went on the more he felt like this too. He’d boasted that he’d finally get some answers, but in the end he hadn’t even managed to do that. Instead, he fell into a coma he couldn’t wake up from for five months.
Since it happened literally the same day as his stunt with the Goblet, one didn’t need to be a genius to imagine what the rest of the world must think about it. Harry had managed to dodge any updates about that, since he woke up in the middle of the night and immediately got himself spirited away to the Room of Requirement. But the more he did that, the more he dreaded Hermione’s newspaper clippings.
Charlie had calculated Harry’s time unconscious to be the equivalent of one day for every year lived as Evan Lorne. It added up to well beyond a whole human lifespan, which was not just down to Ba’al changing time (except not really because time didn’t work that way without a lot of deliberate meddling). It was still within the expectancy of a powerful wizard, but only when you excluded the overlap.
There was a lot of overlap. Evan Lorne had also lived a bunch of alternate timelines, and parallel realities and whatever else SGI stumbled into. Like those months spent in a time loop that only Jack O’Neill and Teal’c remembered, because of that one man playing with the ancient time loop device. For love.
Ugh.
One year equals one day of the gods, Harry thought darkly, automatically thinking of the Ascended Ancients every time that word entered his mind now. How callous would that make someone, towards the short-lived ants scurrying under their feet?
Since Oma Desala and Morgana were the rare exceptions, the answer seemed to be somewhere around ‘very.’
They earned a lot of goodwill for shielding the Milky Way from the Ori, however they did it, but that only goes so far when the home you’re defending is run like a prison.
Maybe I’m biased, Harry thought glumly. Shit, I hope I am.
“So,” Sirius said when the quiet stretched on too long. “What’s it going to be? Are we going to use any of this information or not?”
“Like how?” Charlie asked.
“Like going to Antarctica to see if the other stargate is there.”
…. They could do that now, couldn’t they? Harry knew where it was.
He knew a bunch of stargate addresses too. Including the one for a certain desert planet where they could find a cartouche with many more. They wouldn’t even need to calculate stellar drift for a bunch of them, though Charlie surely could do that. Even random dialling would work better than it did for the Americans in that other reality, since they already knew the point of origin.
Should they, though? That was the big question, wasn’t it?
“We shouldn’t,” Charlie said, despite being the one among them ‘least into waffling’ in his own words. “Not yet. Not without going through the rest of what Harry has for us, and – no, Harry, we aren’t going to pull anything more out of your head.”
Harry closed his mouth, having been about to offer that very thing. For selfish reasons, he thought guiltily.
“Trauma is one thing, and I maintain that it’s not healthy to remove memories overlong even then. We should put these ones back in as soon as possible, as it is. But the rest is, what? Several lifetimes’ worth of memories? Even accounting for the extensive overlap, it rounds up to over one hundred and fifty years compared to your fourteen. No, it’s way too much. You’ll have to do like the regular Joe and write all that stuff down.”
“Or we can meet up regularly and temporarily extract memories in shorter bits and pieces chronologically,” Sirius shrugged. He seemed to be the only grownup now that wasn’t treating Harry like he was made of glass.
“Or we can do that,” Charlie grudgingly assented, disliking any meddling with the mind on pure principle. Which, Harry was forced to admit, was fair too. Especially from him. “But not today. Today… I need to think. Cross-reference some things. Maybe concoct a model.”
“Of what?” Dumbledore asked.
“Messing with time on a galactic scale.”
Nicolas, who was nominally the leader of their little conspiracy, nodded in agreement and set about collecting the memories back in their vials, and from there back into Harry’s brain. Harry might have felt more conflicted about their return, if what had happened right after that wasn’t so much worse. Almost much worse, since the – it cut off before… any of it could happen.
Thank God.
Well, whichever of them was real. And still around and watching over him, if any. Maybe that ‘master’ the bartender mentioned, assuming he wasn’t talking out of his ass because he didn’t actually know anything either. Which… actually wasn’t that unlikely. Lorne had lived through a lot of the events, but for what happened in that diner… The only thing he could weigh that bartender’s actions against was that same man’s word.
Considering what all he did – and the Others – versus what Harry strongly suspected them of having done – namely make Ba’al’s time travel machine work to begin with, time did not work that way – he was not inclined to take him at his word at all. On anything.
Of course, the bartender had been in his head and could have decided the truth would be the best thing to use in that situation, even for a habitual liar. Work on Harry. Or against him? There was clearly no love lost…
Is this what he wanted? Harry quietly fumed. To make me think myself in circles wondering what was true or not? What was even the point? And then that thing he made me remember – relive-
No. Don’t think about it.
I’m burning dad’s old magazines when I get to my room, Harry thought waveringly. Just in case.
To Harry’s guilty relief, his friends weren’t waiting for him. Well, they were, but they were asleep in the anteroom the Room made for them while the adults worked in the pensieve room. They’d tried to stay up waiting for him, but ended up falling asleep where they sat. They’d finally crashed now that they weren’t staying up in shifts to watch over him.
Harry dreaded the next morning, when he couldn’t avoid them anymore, but at least he could hide from them a little longer.
Harry wished he could hide from everyone else too, but Nicolas wouldn’t have it because he was responsible like that.
Harry went through the motions as Nicolas took him back home – the Flamel’s home – and even managed to enjoy the meal Perenelle had prepared while they were gone. Harry refused to let the actions of that – those creeps ruin the rest of his life. After all, they hadn’t managed to make Harry live through… all that. Again. They’d failed.
Hadn’t they?
To Harry’s horror, however, when he did make his excuses and got back to his room in the Pottery, he couldn’t find the magazines.
Oh god, he thought in dread. Did he – that creep, did he manage to – oh god, he was here? They were – they’re here, in this timel-
“Looking for these?”
Harry whirled around.
Nicolas Flamel stood in the doorway, holding up James Potter’s old magazines.
Harry didn’t know if he was more relieved or mortified.
Nicolas showed very little in comparison, which was… not the best sign in itself. For such an old immortal, he tended to be pretty open with his feelings. Which still made most of his displays look subtle, he didn’t feel strongly about most things anymore because of sheer experience with everything under the sun. But it also made his moments of deliberate restraint that much more obvious, like now.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Nicolas rolled up the magazines and shoved them in one of his many magic pockets. “Come with me.”
Harry didn’t want to, he wanted to hide under his bed until everything went away.
Nicolas led him down to the den, then through the floo back to his home. There, tea and scones were waiting for them in the kitchen, along with a fountain pen and inkpot next to a stack of fifteen empty notebooks bound in hardcover.
“This way, even if your friends wake up early they won’t be able to interrupt us,” Nicolas explained as he pulled a chair for Harry to sit on, then took one for himself. The one to Harry’s left, not too close to seem overbearing, but also not across the table like some judge. “Charlie won’t be around to port them over either, if they go through Raptor Mountain again. He’s gone home to spend time with his wife. Says it always gives him inspiration when he’s otherwise lacking.”
For a while, the only movement in the room, besides Nicolas slowly stirring his tea, were the shadows of the hearth fire on the walls.
“How did you know?” Harry finally asked when the silence was too much. “When did I give it away?” He was sure he gave no hint-
“You didn’t.”
“But then-?”
“Harry,” Nicolas gently chided. “Who’s been teaching you divination?”
“Oh.” Harry’s face started burning. “Right.”
“I didn’t see anything you went through over there, or any talks we might have on the topic since that’s too much my future. But I saw you burning these magazines with incendio, not letting the spell lapse even as you began to choke. Once they were ash, you didn’t immediately freshen the air either. You stood in that smoke, coughing tearfully like some twisted penance.”
Harry hadn’t actually planned that far ahead but… it sounded like something he might have ended up doing. Right now.
“Clearly something… obscene occurred.” Nicolas took the first blank tome and pushed it across to Harry, along with the fountain pen on top. “I won’t demand a confession. But I advise you write everything down. In order, if possible. Facing trauma tends to seem much less daunting when viewed in its complete, broad context. Also, any new activity will make older experiences feel more remote, especially when accompanied by intense thought. About other things.”
My trauma wasn’t mixed in with any of the other stuff, Harry wanted to say but wasn’t brave enough. It came after the end.
He took the notebook and pen and began to write.
Since Nicolas had couched this as therapy, Harry decided to start with Evan Lorne’s early life.
He exhausted that topic before he was even fifteen pages through the first notebook. He… didn’t really feel bad about it. About how unexciting it had all been. Living as your average Joe was what he’d always wanted, and now he had it. Evan Lorne had been a normal kid who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Before it… went to complete crap by the 2020s. Literally. Apparently. Ugh.
His dad was a car mechanic, his mother was an art teacher, and he himself picked up the hobby of painting as a regular weekend activity. He had one older sister. She married and had two sons by the time he joined the military.
Henry Evan Lorne loved ice cream, put aside his painting when he joined the Air Force, didn’t become estranged from his family even after all the NDAs he signed upon joining Stargate Command, and was ‘blessed’ with involvement in some of the more pivotal events after that. Beginning with the Unas mission and culminating in a different galaxy, after he joined the Atlantis Expedition.
Evan Lorne also used to sleepwalk when he was a kid, which was when his life as Harry Potter… almost resurfaced. He was prone to indulging conspiracy theories a tad bit too much because of that, but that was understandable. After all, on this side all of them except the simulation were all real. Come to think of it, many of them weren’t inaccurate over there either. Little grey men, the government hid the existence of aliens, alternate realities intersected with the main one on the regular, even the Trust didn’t come out of nowhere.
Honestly, it was harder to believe that the Trust were taken out. It said something that Stargate Command needed a spaceship with borderline magical teleport capabilities to do it, and even so the world’s aspiring shadow leaders still almost stole the spaceship later.
But he was getting ahead of himself.
Harry did a Hermione and wrote ‘see volume _, page(s) _ to _” before moving on to a new section. That way he’d be able to fill in the reference later, after he actually wrote that stuff down.
It would take weeks to cover everything if he went at things in detailed and chronological order. Which he would. Nicolas Flamel didn’t raise no scatterbrain. But what remained of the night should be enough to summarise the highlights. It was a good thing that Evan Lorne had such abundant experience writing reports.
Broader context, Harry thought. That’s what Nicolas said right?
The first major ‘context’ was the first journey to Abydos of course. Catherine Langford recruits Daniel Jackson to crack the code of the Stargate, which he does. This allows for a successful activation of the wormhole, which Major General West orders Colonel Jonathan “Jack” O’Neill to lead a team of special forces through. And a nuclear bomb too, because the scars of the Cold War era ran deep and long. Things happened, including… some really convenient decisions on Ra’s part, culminating in a slave rebellion and the destruction of Ra and his spaceship via point-blank nuclear detonation.
The second major context was the guerilla war against the Goa’uld system lords. One year after Ra’s death, Apophis is exploring Ra’s old territory and coincidentally stumbles on Earth. He and his jaffa attack the mothballed SGC military base, and kidnap one of the female airmen to use as a host for his wife. The institution of Stargate Command and the subsequent failed rescue attempt result in the miraculous defection of Apophis’ right-hand man to Earth’s side.
With the stargate revealed to be part of an interplanetary network of countless worlds, multiple teams of airforce soldiers are established. Their role is to explore the galaxy in the hopes of securing technology and allies against the Goa’uld, whose interstellar pyramid warships and vast armies of enslaved walking incubators promise a swift end to Earth and his denizens. Just as soon as Apophis isn’t too busy fighting the total war that broke out between all the Goa’uld when Ra was killed.
The flagship team, SG-1, is composed of a Colonel Jack O’Neill with newly revealed jester tendencies, a Daniel Jackson returned to Earth in a bid to rescue his Abydonian wife from Goa’uld possession, the aforementioned defector Teal’c, and Captain Samantha Carter of… suspiciously implausible accolades now that Harry thought about it. She seemed to be that reality’s Jeannie M. Leavitt, the first female fighter pilot, but… there was no way she could have clocked all those flight hours at the same time as creating the stargate dialling computer. She also somehow managed to get multiple PhDs at the same time as flying missions in the Gulf War. Supposedly.
Harry didn’t care how smart Samantha Carter was, there weren’t enough hours in the day for half of all she did, and not enough energy in a single human for a fifth of it all. Her alternate reality version where she was just a civilian astrophysicist at least had a background that made sense.
I smell shenanigans.
Moving on, SG-1 successfully form several connections across the galaxy –Tok’ra, Tollan, Nox, Asgard – but only the first and last of those actually provide help, and the price for that help becomes progressively higher as time goes on. Tragically, the Asgard end up out-doing the Tok’ra in that regard, with the addition of the replicators to Earth’s problems.
Meanwhile, Earth itself becomes its own worst enemy by way of the NID, which repeatedly attempt to take control of the Stargate and other alien technology. Even succeed, at a number of turns.
Eventually, Apophis is handed a final defeat, only for an even bigger and badder Goa’uld to arise in Anubis. He has bigger ships than all the other Goa’uld, better technology than the Asgard, and invulnerable Kull warriors that can take out entire armies by themselves.
It turns out that Anubis is half-ascended because Oma Desala made a bad judgment of character, and the Others decided that galactic genocide and slavery at his hands was a fair price to pay to teach her a lesson. To the point where they prevented her and other ascended, like Daniel Jackson, from vanquishing him. Conversely, they did nothing to stop Anubis from using Ancient technology, claiming non-interference. Because cleaning up after yourself is somehow a bad thing, apparently.
Maybe Daniel Jackson was wrong and the Others would have intervened if Oma didn’t enter eternal combat with Anubis to stop him… but with his new personal experience, Harry would sooner expect them to break time instead of anything sane.
Omniscient morality licence is a croc of shit, Harry echoed words he’d once thought as Evan Lorne, in that alternate life where he’d lived long enough to see the internet at its best.
How Earth managed to build its own interstellar warships amidst all that, never mind while still keeping the Stargate program a secret… Evan Lorne himself called bullshit on that one, so Harry Potter definitely had no idea.
As for the Merlin and Ori thing… Harry didn’t much like where his thoughts were going about that. The universe switches from Egyptian to Arthurian bent, a new SG-1 is formed which includes a woman of impossible stunts and leeway – no way would George Hammond and the entire crew of a starship just be taken out by a random woman with a single zat, Kull armor or not. Said woman ends up becoming a twisted version of Christianity’s Saint Mary for an evil(er) version of the Ascended over in a different galaxy. Which is the original home galaxy of the Ancients, and thus humanity. Apparently.
So much ridiculous stuff happened after the Goa’uld and replicators were vanquished, but Harry was wondering more about other things. He strongly suspected either time shenanigans or mind manipulation were involved again, potentially way back in that reality’s history. Everyone including Morgana acted as if they’d just walked out of that completely made-up French nonsense about Arthurian Britain, instead of what really happened in the past. Why? What was the point?
It wasn’t a case of events being different over there than here, the authors and writings were exactly the same in both worlds.
In the end, it falls once again to SG-1 – Daniel Jackson in particular – to create the Sangraal and send a working version to the Ori galaxy. Somehow, no Ori manifests to freeze time or otherwise prevent the device from activating on the other side of the supergate, and they are all destroyed. Unfortunately, Vala’s daughter ascends right after that, and all the faith energy from the Origin religion goes to her.
SG-1 therefore has to go to the Ori galaxy and find the Arc of Truth that is suddenly a thing, a supposed ‘brainwashing’ machine which had just been lying around the place for the last billion years, or whatever the time frame was.
The Priors, whose mind-connected staves are conveniently all linked together, are ‘brainwashed’ all at once to stop worshipping the Ori, which apparently weakens Adria just enough that an eternal battle between Morgan and her becomes feasible. Thus was the day saved from ancient malice and negligence by an ancient miracle. How that worked when the priors were a handful amidst untold billions worshipping the Ori directly… that could only be down to Ascended space-time shenanigans again, no doubt.
Then Ba’Al managed to use the ridiculous ‘wormhole through solar flare’ method that should in no way result in anything but time loops, in order to go back in time and make it so the Earth never had a stargate program. Which also allowed him to build a proper time machine which enabled him to conquer the whole galaxy like Ra once did. At the end of which he finally came to Earth and got his plans to annex it fatally derailed by his frustrated queen.
Why couldn’t Qetesh have put the galaxy out of his misery sooner?
Trying to distract himself, Harry began to make a list of what gate addresses he remembered, which were few. They’d need the pensieve to get the full collection of addresses Lorne had seen. Harry found it hard to care either way.
If Lorne hadn’t finally died in that timeline, would Harry ever have remembered his past life? Would he have ever made it back from that reality? Or would he have looped… however many times the Others changed time, again and again, while his body here aged and wasted away? The only reason he wasn’t an atrophied mess was because Nicolas gave him Elixir again.
Harry was both glad and not that Lorne hadn’t had much directly to do with any of the Ori ridiculousness, having long since gone over to the Pegasus galaxy to deal with an entirely different mess of problems. Because Preston B. Whitmore’s Atlantis either wasn’t where the man thought it was, or it wasn’t the first city to bear that name. Maybe it didn’t exist at all, over there.
Don’t even get Harry started on the Wraith. Especially on top of everything else. Almost all of which were problems left behind by precursors. Neglectful. Abusive.
Brain-stealing scavenger parasites, inherited slavery under a feudal galactic tyranny, a galactic-scale genocidal tyrant that didn’t think that all was evil enough, an unstoppable tide of AI bug monsters bend on devouring all technology, an insatiable race of humanoid bug monsters bent on eating all life, the even worse faction of the same precursors hellbent on intergalactic jihad, degenerative brain damage any time you used an ancient repository because there was nowhere else to look for a solution to these inherited problems…
If this was the price of the Ancient’s legacy, Harry didn’t think it was worth it.
The Alteran leftover that came with the fewest strings attached was the weapon at Dakara, which was the only reason the human form replicators were defeated. But then it turned out there was a whole planet of those things in the Pegasus galaxy, because of course the Ancients had to be the origin of that mess as well.
I’m more biased than Lorne ever was, Harry thought darkly. But can anyone blame me? After…
Harry shook his head, looked outside to see that dawn was breaking, and turned back to read everything he’d written so far.
Even having lived through it, even being the one who wrote it down just now, even being part of a secret society of magicians that was actually in control of the world… reading the history of Stargate Command felt fantastical. Evan Lorne hadn’t thought that much about it, busy as he was running missions and what else. But there had been… a lot of miracles.
Contrived coincidences all over the place, enemy defections when even those weren’t enough, language non-barriers as convenience demanded, technologies so magical that nobody sane would have just left them behind, never mind lying around undiscovered until SG-1 needed them. Some for hundreds of millions of years, like the Arc of Truth. That thing just laid there in the dark, in a galaxy full of enemy gods or whatever the Ascended and Ori were. All of them with a vested interest in not allowing such a thing to exist, and who had full knowledge of where the Alterans had fled from. Not one of them looked through those ruins? Nobody?
Then… there were a lot of things disguised as failure that were also miracles in hindsight.
The USA decided to mothball the stargate after Ernest Littlefield proved it worked, instead of continuing to use it during the Second World War. The Pentagon subsequently lost track of the files, which delayed the first military expedition to after said war and the Cold War that followed. This, in turn, delayed the creation of Stargate Command to when Earth had actually narrowed the technological gap enough that the opposition to the Goa’uld wasn’t entirely hopeless.
Also, nobody thought to look at the footage of that same Littlefield test, to find the seventh symbol before Daniel Jackson came into the picture. General West didn’t know about it at all. Then, when they managed to successfully lock in six symbols for the Abydos planet, it occurred to nobody to just… try all the 39 symbols in order until the right one worked on position seven? They didn’t need Jackson at all…
But the abject incompetence meant that they did have him later, as translator and accidental prophet on Abydos which proved most pivotal to events.
‘Someone’ had messed with people’s minds. Or time. Or both. A lot. Nothing else was enough to explain all of that.
I – Lorne thought the same thing when he read the report, Harry remembered. But he dismissed it as false information deliberately inserted in place of whatever the real events were, for opsec. He thought he lacked clearance for the real report. He considered Ra’s description as a quasi-energy being to be obvious fabrication proving his assumption. Was it really, though?
And then Lorne never thought about it again. Like it just didn’t matter. Even though he got hung up on a lot of much less blatant censorship, that was why he was into conspiracies to begin with. Those were just few in a long string of contrivances too, it should have called to him like a bloodhound.
‘Ascended may not intervene in the lower planes,’ Harry thought disdainfully. The ‘Others’ were lying through their teeth the whole time, weren’t they?
Maybe it was unfair, maybe Harry was just being biased, but he didn’t feel inclined to give any benefit of the doubt after what that creep did to him.
Were… the Ascended the gods? Was that where the gods went, an alternate reality? They made a separate reality for themselves and abandoned the rest of them? A cluster of alternate realities and parallel timelines all revolving around the same plot? And if that was the case, then…
Where the gods evil? The real ones, not just the Goa’uld?
Not just the Ori either…
“You can take a break any time you like,” Nicolas’ voice came from… not at the table. “I won’t tell you to sleep, since that’s all your body has done for five months. But this is still supposed to be for your sake, not ours.”
Harry looked up. Nicolas stood in the door with a tray of early breakfast. Harry had become so absorbed in writing that he didn’t notice him get up and leave.
He watched the man walk over and begin spreading out the food. Thankfully, Harry somehow didn’t suffer from appetite problems, at least as long as he didn’t think about – what he almost lived through. Dreamed through.
Remembered.
Thankfully, Nicolas didn’t begin reading his notes immediately. They instead enjoyed an early, peaceful breakfast where Harry could fool himself into thinking it was just one of those early days after Nicolas took him in, when Harry was still coming to terms with how much his life had changed.
Unfortunately, this time the change hadn’t been for the better.