Title: Rosemary for Remembrance
Rating: Teen
Pairing: Daniel Jackson/Vala Mal Doran
Timeline: Post-Continuum.
Summary: It comes every morning, relentless and remorseless, hovering just at the point where sleeping meets waking. A moment of temptation when, if she wants, she can use her senses as if they were still her own. Vala after the events of Continuum.

A/N: For the five-year anniversary of Continuum. Thanks to a-loquita for the super-fast beta!

Vala clings to sleep, but to no avail. The threads of consciousness begin to slip again through her mind and body, deceptive, as always, in their gentleness, their tender stroke bringing with it that elusive glimpse of what life ought to be.

It comes every morning, relentless and remorseless, hovering just at the point where sleeping meets waking. A moment of temptation when, if she wants, she can use her senses as if they were still her own. Feel the slip-satin of the sheets and smell the spiced scent in her hair; hear the thrum of the ship and taste the bitterness of last night's wine which ought to have been too much. Even, for the briefest of seconds, see the dull gleaming of torch-lit gold on the walls that might look palatial, but are only the outer guard of her prison.

As the host, she wakes first, and for an instant she can observe the world without her perceptions being intercepted and warped by the other that rules her mind. She's trained herself ruthlessly to resist the allure.

Now, full consciousness waits only heartbeats away, and she blocks out the sensations assaulting her body and mind. The sunlight falling on her face makes her wince and squeeze her eyes shut tighter; she can't quite recall why they went to sleep in the open, but then again, the memories aren't truly hers anyway. Her confusion's not all that unusual.

When she was still young and new, she reveled in these moments, and they gave her hope. But in a world where eternity hangs by instants, it turns out that remembering what it was to be free is the fastest path to madness.

Vala needs an enemy; she's always been at her best when fighting. Now, she thinks, should be when hers awakes and asserts itself, claiming all Vala's senses, all her thoughts and impulses and desires as its own for one more day. She braces herself for the assault.

But it doesn't come. And when her eyes snap open, she finds herself staring at a plain white ceiling in a room lit by sunlight streaming through the windows.

The memory returns sluggishly. They'd been a bit distracted and hadn't thought to close the drapes last night. This is Daniel's home, and Daniel's bedroom, and it's Daniel who's turning over and groaning as he flings an arm over his eyes to block out the morning a little longer.

There's no enemy to fight today.

Irrationally, Vala's heart speeds up when it should slow down, and she can hear the growing harshness of her own breathing. Beside her, Daniel mumbles something, probably asking what's wrong, and she reaches out, fumbling, to squeeze his arm as she untangles to free herself from the sheets wound around her legs. Cotton, she thinks, rough against her skin and not at all like satin.

Daniel doesn't protest when she finally rises from the bed and heads for the bathroom, so she assumes he's either suitably reassured or still asleep. She pushes the door closed behind her and flips on the dimmest of the lights – the third switch down, the one that illuminates the shower stall, away from the vanity and the mirror. The room's still dark compared to the morning-lit bedroom, but as Vala surveys her own reflection, she's glad she hadn't opted to chase her ghosts away by turning on every light in the room.

Somehow it's still a bit too much Qetesh and too little Vala staring back at her today.

She pushes her hair off her face and splashes cold water onto her skin, cheeks and eyelids and forehead. Without looking, she tugs a towel from the rack on the wall and presses it to her face, not bothering to pull it away when she hears the light knock on the door behind her.

"You decent?" Daniel asks, the hinges creaking as he cracks the door open.

Vala makes a face into the terrycloth, then gathers herself and fixes a smirk across her face, lowering the towel at last and turning toward the door. "Decent? Hmm." She flips the cloth back onto the rack and rests a hand on her hip. "Am I ever?"

Daniel shoulders the door the rest of the way open and fixes her with a long, hard look. She stares back at him, the smirk fading into something she's sure is much less friendly. Her muscles still remember that life, she assumes, and every one of Qetesh's deadly glares.

But Daniel never does relent, even in the face of the worst the Goa'uld can bring. Vala on her own has never stood much of a chance. She breaks the deadlock with a toss of her head, reaching back over her shoulders to gather up her hair and twist it into a messy knot.

"Bad dream?" Daniel asks, his sympathy as always annoyingly evident in the kindness of his voice and the softness around his eyes.

"Oh, the Tok'ra and their lovely ceremonies." Vala gives her hair a final tug and hops up to perch on the vanity counter. "The singing alone is enough to give anyone bad dreams."

Daniel leans back against the wall, his arms crossed on his chest and an eyebrow lifting in query. "You're not just anyone, though."

Vala snorts. "Well, I should hope not, Daniel. After all, you are sleeping with me."

The sound he lets out in reply is one part the laugh she was hoping for, and three parts the sheer frustration she'd been expecting. "You don't have to do this, you know," he says, the kindness and the patience ebbing a bit.

"I'm not doing anything. I'm sitting here in the bathroom waiting for a little privacy."

"I meant," and he pauses, she assumes for dramatic effect. Grandiose verbal gestures, mind-numbing rhetorical devices, Daniel's bread and butter. She leans back on her hands and studies the ceiling above her, waiting for the rest of the lecture.

But the silence stretches out, and eventually she looks back down, meeting his eyes. "Meant what?"

"Vala, it's me. You don't have to pretend there's nothing wrong."

That unflagging kindness and his misguided assumption that he understands are too much. Vala hops down from the counter and pushes past him, back into the bedroom. "I'm not pretending for you," she calls back over her shoulder as she grabs his robe from the hook on his closet door. She wraps it around herself and walks out the bedroom door.

-x-

Vala hears the shower start while she's fighting with Daniel's far-too-fancy coffee maker, the running water rushing through the pipes with a sound that's reassuringly unlike the continuous, monotonous hum of a Goa'uld mothership. She fishes around in the fridge and comes up with a box of pastries she remembers seeing in Daniel's office two days ago, dumps it on the table, and fixes her coffee. By the time the sound of the water cuts off, she's already finished drinking the first cup and started in on one of the fruit-and-sugar concoctions in the carton.

She waves her apple turnover in Daniel's direction when he finally enters the kitchen. "These are from that place Teal'c likes," she says, more by way of controlling the conversation than any real need to talk. From the look he shoots her as he pulls a mug from the cabinet, she suspects he knows exactly what she's doing.

"Marie's," he answers as he pours his coffee.

Vala shrugs, then takes another bite as he drops into the seat across from hers. "Not bad, I suppose, for a bunch of twenty-something Tau'ri," she muses, her mouth still half-full, "but once upon a time, I went to a market on a planet called –"

"Vala."

"No, not Vala. Though naming a planet after me? That is an idea I can get behind."

Daniel sighs his old, long-suffering sigh. "Can we not do this?"

"Do what?"

"This …" he waves his hand in the air between them. "This."

"Very descriptive, Daniel. I've always envied your way with words."

"All right." Daniel sips his coffee and closes his eyes. "You can do this, but you're on your own."

Vala tosses her pastry onto the table and leans forward. "He didn't even remember his name," she says, the words harsh and far too real in the silence of the room.

Daniel's eyes snap open. "Who didn't –" He breaks off, and she sees the realization dawn across his face, one muscle at a time. "Oh."

"Oh. Yes."

"The host."

"The Tok'ra said it might be the cloning. Of course, it seems the cloning's also the only reason his body didn't age several millennia the instant the symbiote was removed. So I suppose, on balance, having no idea who he is or where he came from isn't really all that bad."

"He was Baal's host for a very long time, Vala."

"I'm going for a walk."

-x-

She walks for a long time, down sidewalks and along wide, clean suburban streets. The sun beats down hot out of a clear, blue, cloudless sky, and the wind sweeps hard and dry out of the plains on its way on its way up to the mountains.

This is about as far from Qetesh's palace as Vala can get, surrounded by pretty, well-tended gardens and watching little Tau'ri children race by on their bicycles, laughing and shouting their way down the street. This place ought to make Goa'uld ships and Jaffa armor seem like a bizarre fiction dreamed up by an unquiet mind. But somehow even out here in the open, free to go wherever she wants, Vala feels closed in. Like fear, like adrenaline, like waiting for the enemy to show herself, it vibrates under her skin if she closes her eyes. The thrum of a Ha'tak. The pulse of the Pel'tak's console under Qetesh's hand.

Vala wrenches her eyes open and stares out at the park across the street. The playground and fields are dotted with children and their parents, but her gaze fixes on a single one, a little boy throwing a Frisbee to his dog, over and over again, like a cycle that will never break.

It happens when she stays in one place too long; one village, one planet. One street. Like her feet are stuck to the ground, mired down in a trance or a dream. Like maybe Vala herself is the memory and not Qetesh after all.

Vala shakes her head to dispel the cloud within. She tips her face back to bask in the heat of the sun for a long moment, then she turns away to head back to Daniel's place.

-x-

A fast-oncoming storm chases her in the door, the clouds gathering from nothing as she makes her way from here to there. Vala thinks maybe that's a good metaphor for her life so far.

Daniel's lying stretched out on the sofa, one of those dry old books he's always saying he needs more time to read draped across his face as his chest rises and falls gently. In the battle between sheer exhaustion and intellectual curiosity, sleep always gets its way eventually.

Vala toes off her barely-damp shoes beside the door and stretches her arms above her head. She's not good at this, at downtime and domesticity. SG-1's not scheduled to go off-world again for three days, and she's already feeling itchy. When Daniel wakes up, she decides, she'll have him take her back to the base. She'll be far better off antagonizing Teal'c or Siler or Sergeant Harriman. Better off sleeping alone in her own bed tonight.

She's walking past the entry to the living room toward the rest of the house when she hears him speak.

"I know your name," Daniel says, his voice muffled by the book on his face.

Vala turns back to face the living room.

Daniel pulls the book away and sets it on the coffee table. He pushes up to sit on the couch and runs his hands over his hair, then rubs at the sleep in the corner of his eye. "More to the point, Vala, so do you."

Vala takes one step closer, then two. She leans against the doorjamb, folding her arms across her chest. "I know hers, too. And it's not as though I'll forget it anytime soon."

"Would you want to?"

"Daniel …" She clenches her teeth together and tries to find the right words. She hates having to find the right words. It's so much easier when all she needs is for the words to be weapons. "Sometimes," she says at last, "I wake up, and I don't know where I am. Who I am."

"So? Sometimes when I wake up, I think I'm still on Abydos."

Vala flinches, and Daniel groans in frustration and pinches the bridge of his nose. Then he stands up and closes the distance between them with a few quick strides.

"Okay, that was dumb," he says, and he seems unfazed when all he gets in return is a shrug and a roll of her eyes. He reaches out and touches her chin with one finger, then her cheek with his whole hand, looking all the while like he's afraid she'll bolt again.

He's probably not wrong to wonder.

"She made me what I am," Vala says, defiant.

"No," he says with a little shake of his head, "she didn't. She's just a thing that happened to you. A very, very bad thing."

"And it's that simple?"

He didn't answer; instead he slipped his hand from her cheek back into her hair, drawing her close and pulling her hair free from the knot she'd tied it in earlier with a single tug.

"It's not that simple," she says, but she returns the embrace anyway.

"No, it's not."

It isn't simple at all, but at least she's found people who can understand. And as long as they're going through the gate and Vala's got new enemies to fight, she doesn't have to think about it too hard.

"Did you eat all those pastries?" she asks into Daniel's shoulder.

He laughs, almost silently, his back shaking under her hands. "No. I'm not that dumb."

"Lucky for you," she says, pushing back and looking up at him. "Because I'm still hungry."

She can't quite say it, but she tries to put the thank you into her eyes. She holds his gaze until he nods, satisfied. "Okay. Me too."