Unfamiliar by Claira

UNFAMILIAR.

* * *

You almost miss it. It is stuck to your monitor, fourteen words, black on a yellow post-it note. Fourteen words that stop your heart from beating as efficiently as the staff weapon earlier that day.

You don't remember being dead. You didn't see him beg and trade until the natives brought you back to life using a process you don't understand. Your mind jumps those thirty minutes, but even it can't reconcile the gap between running through trees and noticing the sweat beading on his forehead as he bent over you.

You really didn't know what hit you.

But you do remember feeling his gaze on your back during the walk to the 'gate - you liked the way it made your cheeks flush and your blood move through your veins just a little faster.

It made you feel alive.

You fold the note again and again until it's a tiny square and then you stuff it deep into your pocket - but your fingers keep finding it there as you walk to the commissary.

You sit down and your team watches you eat. You only have half of your blue jello left when you say something to him, because Daniel is talking to Teal'c and won't hear you.

"Have you ever heard of - Hsueh-Feng?" You stumble slightly over the unfamiliar pronunciation. You don't look up, but you feel his sudden stillness. There is a long pause.

"No," he finally says.

You shrug. It hurts, like sucking oxygen deep into your lungs after they had been still for thirty minutes. It's necessary pain.

"Neither have I," you say, but he doesn't catch it because Daniel did hear you after all and has begun a lecture about Hsueh-Feng.

Your fingers drift along the creases of the note in your pocket.

* * *

"The whole world is you.
Yet you keep thinking
there is something else."
~ Hsueh-Feng

* * *

~finis~

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