Disclaimer: All the characters from the "Magnificent Seven" T.V. series are property of Trilogy Entertainment, The Mirisch Group, MGM Worldwide. Stargate SG-1 and its characters are the property of MGM, Gekko, Double Secret Productions.
Isis never really left Alexandra Styles.
Even though the physical existence of her had been removed from the mortal plane, something with a mind as long lived as the goddess of all still lingered inside the receptacle of her mind. Dwelling there like the ghosts left behind to occupy an old house, its essence having seeped into the walls of her memory, leaving an indelible mark for all time. She tried hard to deny they existed mostly because being reminded usually produced a fear so stark and intense that she could scarcely breathe. As it was, she had disciplined herself to never look back upon the dark days when Alex Styles had vanished and for a time been replaced by she who was called Isis.
She tried not to remember that there were worlds beyond this one or the fact that humans could travel to them utilizing a portal that lay buried in the desert not far out of town. She did not think about how she had been taken by an alien creature that had robbed her of everything she was in an instant of pain and would have sentenced her to a nightmare she would never have escaped alive. Alex had forced herself to never recall the day when she had stood in front of Vin Tanner, captured his lips in what he had believed to be a kiss of passion, before she broke his neck with her bare hands. The look of betrayal and surprise in his eyes as the light faded out of them was something that burned into her memory, no matter what she might tell herself later.
While she enforced such thoughts from surfacing inside her during her waking hours, there was little or no protection when she closed her eyes to sleep. During the first few weeks following their return home from that alien world, Vin and the rest of the seven had delivered her and Mary from, Alex woke almost every night screaming. In her sleep, there was no carefully padded version of the truth that her mind could accept but rather the stark brutality of events as they transpired, unfolding before her eyes like a terrible mosaic she did not wish to see completed.
It was bad enough that she had the memories of what she had done when Isis had inhabited her body but when the images of other lives. Lives who were stolen just as surely as hers had been though she counted herself lucky for she had only suffered days of incarceration, while their hell had lasted centuries. She tried to imagine what it was like to be trapped endlessly in one's own mind, watching one's body commit acts of utter barbarity with no power to stop it. The horror of it was beyond comprehension.
When she slept, she dreamed she was the Queen of Egypt, where slaves bowed at her feet and she sent people to die on whim. She saw images both tantalising and terrifying about the life Isis had led, the power she had commanded and the children she had spawned. Children like Sekhmet who was nothing like the creature that had taken Chris Larabee. What Alex was allowed to see through Isis eyes was a different Sekhmet, the one worshipped as the warrior goddess until a thousand years being entombed had driven her insane. Sekhmet who had been worshipped in her time as Kali and Artemis had once been a warrior who hunted fairly, who enjoyed the games played by prey and predator and was nothing like the insidious creature that emerged from the stargate to wreak such destruction upon the seven. However, whatever Sekhmet might have been, she was still Goa'uld and like all members of the species, she had the blood of many on her hands.
There were moments however, when the memories that surfaced were not entirely bad. Isis had been in her lifetime, a great intellect who knew more about herbal remedies and human physiology than anyone on Earth even in this day and age. True, she had used most of her knowledge to subjugate humanity indiscriminately but a fragment of all that knowledge remained inside of her and Alex knew that despite her denial, she was coming to use more and more of that knowledge. When Chris Larabee had become addicted to the substance known as Venom, Alex had lied about how she was able to understand the drug so well. She had used words like theoretical even though the apparatus to detect half of what she knew about the drug was nowhere in existence. In truth, she was able to take Venom apart because Isis knew how.
Alex consoled herself in these instances with the fact that it was time that the wealth of knowledge abused in the pursuit of power ought to be rightly used to save lives instead of taking it. Still, she could not keep that shudder of fear from running through her spine each time she was forced to refer to the cache of memories that Isis had left inside her mind. Vin had promised her that Isis was gone, that he had seen the symbiote ejected from her body and watched it die in front of him on that alien world where the device called Thor's Hammer protected its people from Isis and others like her. However, Alex could still feel Isis inside.
She had never spoken of what Isis had done to her or the remnants left behind, not to Vin, not even to Mary. Mary who had fortunately remembered nothing of her experiences, thanks to a byproduct of Sekhmet's insanity could not share her anxiety because the lady had nothing to recount that would frighten her. In all truth, Alex did not wish to speak to Mary for other reasons as well, the most prolific being the fact that she had seen what Mary had done to Ezra Standish as Sekhmet. Had it not been for the Goa'uld sarcophagus, a healing device capable of repairing all forms of human injuries, even to the point of resurrecting one from death, Ezra would have died from Mary's assault. Ezra had not spoken about that day to anyone although Julia did tell him that like herself, the gambler had his share of nightmares following the episode with Isis and Sekhmet.
However, Ezra had his secrets about Isis too.
There were still nights after she had returned when she thought deeply about what had happened between Isis and Ezra. Alex knew that Ezra had not a choice to do what he had done. If he had not cooperated with Isis, she would have had no reason to keep him alive and would have given him to Sekhmet to dispose of at her sadistic leisure. As it was, he had barely survived when Sekhmet had chosen to vent her frustrations upon him when Isis had selected him as her consort. Her pharaoh as Isis had called him.
There was a part of Alex that still wondered how much of Isis' attachment had really been the goddess of all and not Alexandra Styles' own affections. Although she loved Vin Tanner and could not imagine being with anyone else, there had been a time when Ezra had been her love and though she ought to know better, she could not help wondering if perhaps it was no so much Isis that cared for Ezra but her. Despite how she debated the situation, there was no denying the fact that she had made love to him and there was a point during their passion when the voice that had called out his name in ecstasy was not Isis but hers. Alex did not understand it but it weighed heavily in her mind and though both of them had tried to get past it, there was an underlying awkwardness that had not really dissipated no matter how much time passed.
It was a situation that neither discussed out loud though it was apparent in the stolen glances and the embarrassment that sometimes came out of nowhere at the most inconvenient moments. Both lived in fear of Julia and Vin learning the truth, unable to imagine how they would be able to tell it to anyone in a way that made what they did remotely explainable. She knew that what happened between them would always remain where it was, a specter upon their friendship that was never quite the same again after the stolen moment when neither had belonged to themselves.
Of course while Ezra while had never been able to look at Alex the same way again, she also noticed how he looked at Mary sometimes, particularly in the months immediately following their return of Netjer. It was a look that did not escape her attention only but all of the seven. It had not happened often and a heavy drinking session usually followed it by the gambler in the tavern, a practice that even Julia's presence could not stop. Alex had remembered the wounds on him. The burns, the rips in flesh, the ugly bruises and the evidence of a more intimate assault. He tried desperately to hide it from Mary because despite his intense revulsion at what had been done to him, Alex knew that he did not want to lose Mary because she was a dear friend.
Eventually the shadow of Netjer faded from memory and though it still lingered, tendrils having grown into their psyche that could not be extracted no matter how much time had lengthened the day of its happening to the present, Alex found she could live with Isis inside her mind. After awhile, Isis had become somewhat familiar and Alex began listening to the other things that Isis had to say and found that the while the personality of the lady was quiet odious, the knowledge she held was something else altogether. Alex wanted to ask if Mary had come away with such knowledge but never did because they did not speak of these things.
To speak of these things was to relieve them and Alex would spare Mary the bloodier aspects of her time as Sekhmet, having remembered a point in time where she had stood in a room on Netjer and surrounded by corpses of bodies Sekhmet had killed and tortured. While the warrior goddess giggled like a schoolgirl covered in their blood, thoroughly reveling in the carnage resulting from her bloody play. Even Isis had conceded then that Sekhmet had gone totally insane and like any mother, had been forced to take steps to discipline her errant child.
Alex would spare Mary those memories.