Mathématique: The Lotus and the Snake

Vala Mal Doran prays for luck to the dead false god who’d stolen her life and lived in her spine.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Panic attacks. Memory loss. Violence.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

The Lotus and the Snake

Vala opens her eyes to gold. Familiar. Unfocused.

Her eyes slide shut.

“—and tomorrow,” her stepmother says, “tell me what you’ll do.” She drags a coarse brush through Vala’s fine, dark hair.

Vala looks into the fire. “I’ll follow the stream down to the water.” She tenses her neck against a sharp tug as the brush hits a snag. “Out of the village, to the base of the hill.”

“And there?” Her stepmother, unseen, sits behind her. “What will you look for?”

“I’ll look for the place where the leaves form a curtain. Where the water becomes still.”

“And what else?”

“I’ll look for the flowers. The white ones, tipped with rose, that float on the water.”

“The Cups of Q’tesh.”

Vala wraps her arms around her knees and resists the drag of the brush.

“What will you do when you see the Cups?”

“I’ll step into the water,” Vala answers. “I’ll kneel before the statue of the goddess and ask for permission to marry.”

Her stepmother, quick and practiced, braids small white shells into Vala’s hair.

A cold line snakes across the back of Vala’s hand.

She opens her eyes, looks at her hand, and sees a needle. A tube. Full of cold liquid.

She twists her wrist, grabs the line, and pinches the tubing shut.

For now, it’s all she can do.

Questions, like branching rivers, lead to far-apart places in her mind.

“You’ve forgotten something,” her stepmother says.

“The prayer,” Vala replies, abashed. “I won’t forget tomorrow.”

“You’d better not.” Her stepmother tugs on a braid. “Say it now.”

“Mistress of the unwearying stars,

Anat, Astarte, most vaunted Q’tesh,

My mouth is given that I may speak

Of you, oh Beloved of Ptah.

River Charmer, Shell Weaver,

Let me come ever in supplication.

Let your love fall like stars

Bright and swift and lotus-caught

On a mirror of still water.

Her eyes open and stay that way.

The kink she’s put in the IV tubing has stopped the drug flowing into the back of her hand.

She sits.

The room is spare, and cold, and gold.

Someone’s beside her, lying on a hard pallet identical to her own. His white shirt, his jeans, his glasses don’t belong in this Cargo Room of the Gods.

Vala grasps for his name. Finds it.

She perches next to him, precarious and effortless on a sliver of couch. “Hello gorgeous.” She gives him a wink and twists the top off a bottle of pale green Gatorade. “I hear this stuff cures every terrestrial illness.”

He looks at her with a disoriented skepticism.

“Vala.” She extends a hand. “Vala Mal Doran.”

“Nicholas Rush,” he replies, and their palms meet.

Nicholas Rush. As soon as she has his name, she loses it. The memory slithers away like a serpent in the reeds.

She recalls only that this man is important. That Daniel cares about him.

Vala releases a shuddery breath and props herself on her elbows.

She’s dressed in a shirt the color of sapphire. Denim jeans, tight to her legs. Tau’ri clothes. She’d chosen the clothes, spent a long time choosing them, asked other people, all because she’d been going out with Daniel, where is Daniel, she was with him, she—

She scans the room. It’s just her and the Tau’ri man whose name she can’t recall.

She gasps for air, fast and shallow. Her heart pounds.

In possession of nothing, nothing can be lost.

She must possess worlds, to be so afraid.

She studies the walls, where golden cartouches are defaced with black pigment. A blasphemy against Hathor, her sister. Her former sister.

This ship belongs to the Lucian Alliance.

Vala rips the needle out of her hand, lurches to her feet, staggers a few graceless steps, and falls into the man’s pallet. She catches herself, banging her thighs, clutching with her fingers. Her feet beneath her, she rips the IV from his hand.

“Gorgeous,” she whispers, surprising herself.

He doesn’t respond.

She looks him over. His forearm is scraped raw. His shirt is torn. The dark denim of his jeans is abraded.

“Gorgeous.” Again, she shakes him, but this time, the word feels foreign in her mouth.

She creeps to the doorway that connects the cargo hold to the rest of the ship.

Vala spreads her fingers and wipes her hands over the black denim of her jeans. She removes her belt, twining each end around her palms.

If there are two guards on the other side of the door, her attempt will be finished. If there’s one guard, she has a chance.

She flips open the panel and keys in the Golden Ratio, a universal override code, known only to System Lords. 1-6-1-8-0-3-4. The door hisses open to reveal a man, leather-clad and startled.

She knees him in the groin. Hard.

He exhales, bends double.

Before he draws breath to shout, her hands, connected by their makeshift garrote, bracket his neck. She pulls.

He struggles, clawing at her belt, fighting for air.

She turns her head, clamps her jaw, and hangs on until she’s certain he’s dead.

She drags him back into the room she’d left, then creeps along the quiet hallway.

“After the prayer,” her stepmother prompts, “what will you do?”

“I will ask Q’tesh for the favor of choosing my beloved,” she replies.

She hears voices on the bridge: a woman and two men. One of the men sounds familiar, but she can’t place him.

“If you hadn’t blown your cover,” the woman says, her English accented with a touch of native Goa’uld, “we’d have had time to prepare.”

“If I hadn’t taken the opportunity, we might’ve never gotten him.”

“We’re due to deliver Mal Doran to Athena in less than six hours. I don’t want The Trust knowing we have Rush as well.”

Athena. Silver hair. Pitiless eyes. One hand gloved in linear gold, as hers had been. As Q’tesh’s had been.

Vala presses a hand to her chest, breathless, as a gemstone betrayal bursts and fades in her mind, leaving nothing but a glittering cloud.

What had they given her through that needle?

What was flowing in her blood?

What was it taking?

“I thought we didn’t do deals with Goa’uld,” the familiar man hisses.

The crack of a slap echoes off metal walls.

“The Trust is of the Tau’ri,” the woman snarls, cold and commanding, as if saying the words makes them so.

“Let Mal Doran go,” the familiar man argues. She can almost picture him: dark hair, darker eyes, tall.

She is— She is Mal Doran. Vala Mal Doran.

Isn’t she?

Vala shuts her eyes, one hand pressed to her mouth.

They’re experimenting with cognition, the Alliance. Always and forever searching for a way around the chemical enslavement of a well-seated symbiote. Liberation blended with subterfuge and sabotage, fermented over centuries, makes them what they are: wronged and vengeful, ossifying with spite and fear.

What—what had she been thinking of?

She’s—

She’s on a ship.

She’s on a ship, and she must get off it?

“The Trust is of the System Lords,” the familiar man says, and she can almost place his voice, she can almost—

Daniel looks out his window in the light of early morning. His sweater is gold and his hair is gold and the rims of his glasses are gold and even his blue eyes find gold flecks to offer the rising day. An Osiris of the Tau’ri, she thinks, though he doesn’t now and will never know it.

“Why not let Colonel Telford handle it?” she asks.

“I don’t trust him,” Daniel replies.

“Darling,” Vala says, made serious by the ominous color of the light, “you shouldn’t trust anyone.”

“You can’t mean that.” Daniel turns to her. His smile is so small. “No one can live that way.”

“Some people do,” she replies. “Some people always have.”

“Yeah, but it’s not really living, is it?” He looks back at the rising sun.

Her eyes burn, hot and wet, but no tears fall.

She must get back to Daniel.

To Daniel.

What’s she doing?

She hears raised voices beyond the narrow door that leads to the flight controls. She can’t place any of them. They expect her to be unconscious, held in chemical oblivion. Was it the naquadah in her blood that freed her? That woke her early?

She remembers the naquadah. It’d come with Q’tesh.

She creeps backward. There’s something she needs in the room she came from. She can’t remember what it is.

She slips off her—

“Holy Hannah,” Sam says. “Vala. Vala, look at these.”

Vala turns.

Sam holds up a shoe, sling-backed, peep-toed.

“I don’t know,” Vala says. “They look a bit retro to me, beautiful.”

—off her shoes.

Why is she wearing something so impractical? She gathers them in one hand and runs silently along the cold metal deck plates.

When she re-enters the cargo bay, she remembers the man as soon as she sees him. Not his name. Not anything about him. Only that he’d been the reason she’d come back to this room.

What have they given her?

What are they taking away?

Kneeling between shelves, she reaches for the book. Just before she touches the cover, she pulls back, balling her hands into fists, as if the book might burn her. She relaxes. Tries again. This time, she touches the cover. Runs a fingertip over the word “Algebra.”

Out of memory, Q’tesh screams a dead echo of warning. Of rage.

Such things are not for river girls. For shell counters.

“Hey.” She shakes the man. “Wake up.”

There’s no response. Looking closer, she discovers two small devices at his temples, almost hidden beneath his hair. She runs her fingers over them, decides not to pry them free.

She makes a fist and presses her knuckles into his chest, her full weight behind them. She rubs up and down.

Nothing. 

She’ll have to leave him.

“Very dashing, gorgeous,” Vala says into his ear as he carries her away from Young. “Very well executed. If I ever have to make a break off this planet, remind me to take you with me.”

He raises his eyebrows at her. “Was there a point to this?” he asks, pitching his voice low. “Or are you just amusing yourself?”

The memory takes itself with itself as it goes.

All she can hold onto is: he’s hers, somehow. He’s hers.

She gives the man a frustrated shake. No response.

She stands. She backs up, groping for facts, for ideas, for a plan.

There’s something important behind her, but she doesn’t know what.

She turns to look.

It’s a door. The way out.

There are people and images in her thoughts, a concept, a patch on a jacket, blurs of yellow and blue and gold and green and black, a place and a way she wants to spend the last of her days, the days before she’s forced to wander again, before Adria finds her.

The memory of her daughter takes her, plays itself out, implodes in grief and loss and the idea she must have left so many people so many times.

She won’t leave this man in a rumpled white shirt.

She can’t leave this one.

Her hands come up, dynamic and symmetrical. She yanks him up by his shoulders, bends one knee, and staggers into the Lift for the Fallen she’d learned from her father. The Fireman’s Carry she’d practiced with a Tau’ri man, strong and ice-eyed, with a jaw like Daniel’s.

She’s chosen them. She’s chosen this. She must have.

She widens her stance and shifts her head to free a portion of her trapped hair.

She turns back to the open door. Her bare feet are silent, but she can’t move quickly.

Let me come ever in supplication. Vala Mal Doran prays for luck to the dead false god who’d stolen her life and lived in her spine. Let your love fall like stars. Let MY love fall like stars.

She passes into the hall. She hears shouting from the closed door to the bridge, but doesn’t recognize any of the voices.

“Athena offers resources,” a woman snarls.

“Athena is Goa’uld,” a man shouts.

“She offers access to the infrastructure of the Tau’ri, because she’s OF THE TAU’RI.”

“SO DO I,” the man shouts. “I offer that same access!”

She’s too afraid to draw a deep breath.

She’s alone in her mind. Is she supposed to be this way? There’d been someone else, there’d been—

She steps into the pool. Leaves and lotus petals brush her shins. When she draws back the hanging branches, a living woman stands before the statue of Q’tesh. There are flowers in her hair, and her eyes glow gold. Vala’s fear rises like the river in a storm, deep and wide and powerful. She trembles, fighting the urge to run.

There’s a room on the ship that isn’t the bridge or the cargo bay. She tries to think what’s in that room, and why she must go there, and why she must be so, so quiet, but she can’t.

She can’t remember.

But she is quiet.

She comes to her knees in the water. The shells in her hair click against one another. Her dress pools around her. Flower petals and shorn leaves touch her arms. She keeps her eyes downcast. She doesn’t look at the goddess.

The man she carries is heavy. She shifts his weight, frees her hand, and keys the command to open the door. 

It hisses open.

Down the hall, the conversation stops.

Vala steps through the open doorframe, then whirls awkwardly, her arms and shoulders burning.

“Daniel talked to Landry for you,” Mitchell says.

She doesn’t know what to say. It’s all she can do to keep the surprise from her face.

“Don’t let ‘im down.” His voice is hard, his eyes are clear and ice blue.

She will, she knows she will, she always does, but for a while, for just a little while, she can— She can pretend. She can pretend this will be her life. She can pretend Daniel will be her friend. That they all, all of them, will be her friends. That they’ll come for her when she’s in trouble. That she’ll do the same for them. That the reason she won’t show her grief to them is because it would hurt them, and not because they’d hurt her with it.

Vala closes the door and bridges a circuit to seal it.

She’s running out of time. She’s not sure why, or for what, but her heart beats frantically in her chest.

In the hall, a woman says, “Where’s Simeon?”

She deposits the man she carries in the center of the transport rings and moves to the nearest console. She hears the quiet chirp of the door, denying entry to someone on the other side.

Her hands shake.

She can activate the rings and hope the nearest platform isn’t controlled by the Trust or the Alliance, hope for the luck and the wit to get herself and her—friend? Her—charge? This man? To a safe harbor.

Her mind, sparking and failing, drives her to keep going. There’s something else. Something more. Beaming technology she knows they’ve stolen because that’s what they do. 

They steal things, the Alliance. They’ve stolen her.

They’ve stolen the man in the white shirt.

"Gorgeous,” she says, “even if they take you, which is not a given, despite the tactless machinating of the American political establishment, we would never leave you with them.”

“We would never leave you.” She speaks the words aloud, clinging to the memory, trying to keep it from leaving, even as she loses the idea of “we” because there’s no one left in her thoughts but Daniel. Daniel, whom she’ll hold to, whom she will not forget, whom she’ll never never never let go until the hour of her death.

Her fingers fly over screens with the speed of memory she can’t access.

“Mistress of the unwearying stars,” she begins, her voice trembling with fear, “Anat, Astarte, most vaunted Q’tesh—”

The goddess interrupts her prayer. “You are a beautiful one.”

She keeps her head low. She’s never heard of such a thing as this. She’s never known anyone to look upon the goddess and live, not even in stories.

“What would you ask of Q’tesh, daughter?”

“For your leave,” Vala whispers, head bowed, body shaking, “to choose my beloved.”

“Tell me of him.” Q’tesh walks through the sacred pool.

“He’s a weaver.” Vala doesn’t look up. She watches the ripples in the water, created by the steps of her goddess.

 A hand passes into her field of vision, and Vala takes it.

Q’tesh draws her to her feet. 

“I do not grant you leave.” The goddess’s eyes are human now, not gold, but the green of shallow water. She draws Vala deeper into the pool. 

The water rises, soaking and lifting her gown.

She’s trembling.

A block of Tau’ri characters jumps out from the scrolling Goa’uld—this is what she’s been looking for.

The door chirps, and the silence on the other side frightens her more than any sound of violence.

She must act quickly. She must select coordinates they won’t suspect, and she must destroy the evidence of his passage.

After they’ve killed her, or traded her to someone who will, they mustn’t be able to find him.

It’s what they would do. The brilliant woman with the yellow hair. The stoic Jaffa statesman. The brown-haired man who snaps between kindness and hardness.

What Daniel might do remains unknown. The ways open to Daniel aren’t open to others.

“Do you know what to say,” Q’tesh asks gently, “when your goddess denies you?”

“I offer my life,” Vala whispers, “by ritual and by rote. I ask for your blessing for those I love.”

“I offer my life,” Vala whispers, as Zat blasts dissipate against the door and the knowledge of who she is tries to leave her. “I grant my blessing to those I love.”

“That they may find the happiness I find,” she says, her voice wavering, “in service of my goddess.”

“That they may find the happiness I find,” she says, selecting a city on the coast of the continent below her, searching for a river, narrowing the coordinates as she scans for somewhere to send him. “In service—”

She stops herself before she speaks the words aloud.

“Q’tesh has heard your prayer, child,” the goddess says, “and will release you from the fate that awaits the wife of a weaver.”

A tear escapes Vala’s eye as Q’tesh steps closer.

Vala looks at the man who’s hers to save, and slams her hand down on the console. He vanishes in a blaze of blue light.

He’ll wake alone beside a river. There are worse fates.

Q’tesh twines an arm around her waist. The goddess’s fingers tangle in her hair. Little shells click and scrape together. “Don’t weep, pretty one,” Q’tesh says, alien and beautiful, adorned with jewels and gold. “We’ll do great things together.”

Vala erases the coordinates.

She trembles. The eyes of the goddess flare a supernatural gold.

She trembles, looking at the door, trying to remember what she’s frightened of.

Q’tesh dips her beneath the water, the movement smooth and sure and without violence. Vala struggles, she can’t help it, her blood roars in her ears.

The door bursts open, blasted out of its frame in a shower of sparks and a veil of smoke. They enter: a leather-clad triad with death in their eyes.

“Telford,” Vala breathes, and the name leaves her.

She breathes in the water of the sacred pool and something alien passes her lips, invasive and thick and long. She tries to scream. Above her, she sees the underside of lotus leaves, riding the ripples of her drowning. There’s a sharp pain at the back of her throat, and then—

And then—

Her limbs aren’t her own. Her struggles cease, despite the panic in her thoughts. Someone stands, and water sluices from Vala’s body in a glittering rain.

Vala pounds at the doors of her own mind.

Q’tesh smiles.

Vala smiles.

“You will not find him,” she says in Goa’uld, claiming what may be the last victory of Vala Mal Doran in the style of Q’tesh.

Q’tesh the snake in her head.

Q’tesh the dead god.

Q’tesh the dead false god.

Q’tesh who she’d known would haunt her.

All the days of her life.

But even Q’tesh is leaving her now.

Perhaps her life is over.

Three people stand in front of her. Their expressions don’t change when she speaks in Goa’uld, but their eyes turn murderous.

The dark-haired woman, their leader, spits at Vala’s feet. “You dare speak that language here?”

She must have been someone special, someone important, to inspire such hatred. But she can’t recall who she is, where she is, why she’s here.

Her name flows away on a river of departing memory. She’d just known it. Seconds ago. Lost now.

Daniel, she thinks. A small smile, strong arms. He’d lifted her from the ash of her own burnt corpse and carried her into a demon city of golden fire. Daniel, I could have told you—

The woman brings her weapon up and fires.