In Memoriam
A scribble in answer to the challenge ‘In memory’
By Gumnut
12 Sep 2004

His feet caught on the tangle of weeds poking through the long overgrown, crumbling pavement and he almost stumbled. He didn’t say anything, words long ago taken from his lips, but a single exasperated breath was exhaled into the air, only to fog and coil in the cold, a slight mist enveloping his face.

He had had to come.

Despite her denials, despite her desperation for his happiness, he came every year to this place.

And now her pleas were forever silenced, he felt the urge to come even more.

To keep the memory alive.

This had once been a place of activity. Of people, trade, commerce. The stark stone ring a window to a world he had never seen. Now it lay derelict, deserted, and alone.

Forgotten.

By all but him.

The land was the same it had always been, the great circular bowl of the devastation still surrounding the gate of elegant rock, its silhouette standing tall, imposing, an announcement of itself and what it could provide.

And deny.

His mother had told him many a time of the events that had led to and then followed its brilliant display of water-filled energy. He even remembered it in action a few times himself, from way back when he was very young, hiding behind her skirts.

She had come then, almost religiously. Hope had been a tactile entity clawing at her, waving a tantalising possibility before her that would never be realised.

He kicked the stones at his feet, once again caressed by the possibility of a return.

The human mind could be a heinous thing. There was a fine line between tease and torture.

He had never returned.

Never answered her hopes.

Never answered his own.

The empty ring gaped mockery at him.

No one came through the gate now. No one, much less him. And now his mother was dead, he was only left to wonder, to create his own answers to questions he would never be able to pose to the one man he would want to ask them of.

The stargate stood in memoriam. Of a time. Of a possibility.

Of Jack O’Neill.

Colonel from another world.

Of a man who would be his father.

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FIN.