Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

1. Two moons

The Art therapy class is Janet’s idea and Cassie just loves it. She enjoys painting with bright colours; vibrant greens, loud reds and splashy blues. Her pictures are often of Hanka; the open fields, the small village, her mother and father, brother and sister…the world she has lost. She paints without thinking which is how two moons appear in the night sky on her canvas. Her teacher questions it and Cassie hurriedly covers by stating; ‘We had two moons in Toronto.’ It’s only later when Sam picks her up from class and explains that the Earth only ever has one moon that Cassie understands she’s slipped up anyway.

2. Clowns

Cassie’s best friend Emma holds a birthday party six months after Cassie’s arrival on Earth. Music fills the air; shouting children; bustling adults. It’s a riot of sound and sights. It’s new and exciting and Cassie loves it. When the clown arrives she’s enthralled by his painted face, huge shoes and big red nose. Emma complains when Cassie follows him around and Cassie tries to explain that they didn’t have clowns in Toronto. Emma doesn’t believe her, calls her liar and runs away in tears. Cassie sobs on Janet’s shoulder all the way home and decides she really doesn’t like clowns.

3. Dating

Emma likes Matthew Keegan and Cassie’s got her eye on Matt’s best friend, Dominic; she thinks he’s cute. Emma suggests a double date. On Hanka there was a strict code about how a couple became paired and while Cassie knows it’s different on Earth, she remembers enough that she hesitates and before she can stop herself questions whether they should take a chaperone. Emma gives her the look; the one Cassie has come to interpret as meaning ‘don’t make this a Toronto thing.’ Cassie blushes and suggests they should ask their Moms if it’s OK at least. Emma nods sagely but Cassie knows she knows. She wonders whether one day she’ll be able to tell Emma the truth.

4. Prayer for the Dead

Cassie doesn’t cry when Sam breaks the news of her mother’s death. She doesn’t cry at all and wonders if it’s truly the shock as Daniel assures her or whether she used up all her tears over Hanka. The day of Janet’s burial, she stands proudly in the small chapel and pays tribute to her mother with a dry-eyed stoicism a Jaffa warrior would envy.

There is a prayer she remembers from her childhood and she recites it in her eulogy ignoring Sam’s wince, Teal’c’s raised eyebrow, and the way Jack and Daniel exchange a worried look. Margaret Fraiser, Janet’s formidable mother, approaches her after and questions the origins of the unusual prayer. Cassie can’t lie to Grandma Maggie, not that day. She struggles and can feel SG1 about to step forward and rescue her when Maggie wraps her arms around her and tells her it really doesn’t matter; that she doesn’t care where Cassie comes from, the only truth is that Cassie is a Fraiser and family. And suddenly, Cassie finds she can cry after all.

5. Two Moons Revisited

She’s old and the exploits of SG1 and her mother are all but forgotten as Earth had closed its Stargate to the rest of the Universe without revealing the truth to the world some years before. Cassie doesn’t understand why; only that nobody could stop it. Jack and Sam had been lost in a battle with one alien, Teal’c in another, and Daniel simply lost in another galaxy or plane of existence – she forgets which.

Cassie doesn’t see the point of telling her children nor her grandchildren that she’s from another world. But she enjoys telling tales from her childhood; of her friends and how they ran over open fields and gazed up at the night sky with its blanket of stars and two moons. Her grand-daughter protests strongly and reminds Cassie that there’s only one moon. She sounds so like Sam. Cassie blinks hard for a moment before she smiles and murmurs softly that she’ll always believe that there are two moons in Toronto.

fin.