Calling the SGC was a necessary, tedious fascination. It never failed to imbue a thrill in seeing the wormhole activate, connecting to another galaxy with a reconstructed bridge in real time for the sole mundanity of giving weekly status updates.
He connected his screen to SGC, tapping his comm to link it up. This week it was Colonel Carter greeting him, and he offered her a congenial smile.
"Good evening, Colonel," He said, keeping an eye on the notification bar that indicated the data upload to SGC. It was mostly emails and other reports, a compressed status update of the expedition and sundry letters to the outside world, as few connections as many expedition members would have.
Carter had her own eyes on a monitor in the operations room, nodding in real time as the data was received on her end. It consistently amazed him what technology the SGC and Atlantis had, and he waited to hear the reverb of a ping on her end to acknowledge a transmission two galaxies-wide.
"obi-wan loved anakin and tried his best for him" and "obi-wan took on anakin out of a sense of duty to qui-gon rather than actually wanting him" are two statements that can and should co-exist.
He remembered when Anakin became his Padawan, and he remembered when Anakin became his padawan.
The cutting of his braid had been grave, perfunctory. Master Windu had given him a long, long look after it had been cut, the smell of burning hair barely noticeable over the conflicted hum of the other's saber, both winking out of existence with the extinguishing of the saber and the careful, warm embrace Windu folded him into.
It hadn't stopped the tears, necessarily, but it was gentle, the wound in his mind from Qui-Gon's death - just slow enough for a battle and some last words - stemmed of a mental bleed by the parental presence of another Master cocooning the hurt. He could easily admit that he soaked up the comfort, just for a moment, breathing in the scent of Temple-washed wool and the perpetual ozone that followed a Jedi's lightsaber.
Surrendering from Master Windu's care to Master Yoda's was as simple as the way he dropped to his knees for the older Jedi, the hand atop his head as comforting as it had been when he was a youngling. He clung to his great-grandmaster's presence in the Force with the same strength as he did his elder's cloak, the keening grief echoed between them of a life taken far too soon.
Eventually, he pieced himself back together, with a funeral and a knighting in between, making himself presentable so that he could take Anakin on as a Padawan, just the way he had promised Qui-Gon. It had been a fortunate mercy that he wouldn't need to leave the Order for a third time, as prepared as he had been to step right over that particular precipice once more.
The handmaidens had been gracious, accepting the role of crèche masters and clan therein - Anakin looked scarcely different from the way he had in the clothes his mother had given him, but his bearing was straighter, freshly-cut hair a faint glow around the child's head. He couldn't help the twitch of a smile as Anakin immediately sought him out, chattering away about his time with the handmaidens, hand slipping into his with barely a thought.
He was accustomed to the weight of speculative gazes, those belonging to others with presuppositions in their minds. But what he hadn't expected was the easy way he and Anakin bonded when they declared themselves as Master and Padawan before the two representatives of the High Council - how light it was, burnishing his grief.
Anakin had few expectations of him, other than the resounding thought that he was "wizard" - and that he wanted to be "wizard", himself. His mother yet lived, and it left him feeling unbalanced, as if he had stepped into a situation that had far more debt on his scales than the one he was now responsible for.
But. Nevertheless. He needed to focus on the present.
They had made it back to Coruscant, the familiarity of the Temple haunted with the ghost of his memories. Weeks passed in a whirlwhind, the abruptness of taking on a Padawan with little experience under his belt as a Knight requiring an exponential acquisition of knowledge not dissimilar to a field mission.
He had slept little, and unfortunately, so had Anakin. The boy was charming, in one of those ways he knew from experience would need tempering, but so incredibly earnest that he was easy to forgive.
(It did make the growing, scattered collection of droid parts more conciliatory to manage.)
But although he had been granted permission to call Anakin "Ani", the nickname didn't truly stick.
Not, at least, until one night, an easy, exciting day of touring one of the friendlier parts of Coruscant - the neighborhoods that were safe to take a new Padawan to with little fear.
Perhaps that had been the reason, and it took him much time in retrospect to use it - although Qui-Gon easily accustomed himself to using Anakin's chosen nickname, to him it felt like an intrusion: to what was Qui-Gon's rightful place as Anakin's Master, to the fact that this child had a full childhood, replete with mother and years, summarily taken away from him.
But the sound of confused wailing from his Padwan's room, after a full and pleasant day with an equally peaceful retirement to bed, had him bolting out of his room with naught but panic, sleep-clothes, and his saber, sleep barely dashed from his eyes when he shouted, "Ani!"
It was only luck that had his finger off the ignition of his saber, his usual surefootedness capitulating to fear for his padawan, and he nearly tripped over the receding door, reaching his padawan's bed in time to see a tear-streaked face and arms instinctively stretching out to him.
And it wasn't his mother he called for, nor Qui-Gon.
"'bi-Wan-" His padawan was struggling to untangle himself from his blankets, and would have tumbled off the bed if he hadn't darted forward, catching Ani and wrapping him up in his arms.
They clung to each other, their training bond having difficulty in quelling the feedback loop of panic. He shushed his padwan, holding Ani tightly and trying, with difficulty, to slow his own breathing, to collect his own thoughts.
The terrified sobbing took an aching amount of time to soothe, the familiar, miserable feeling of failure clenching around his heart at the tears soaking into his robes. "I'm here, I'm here," He repeated, trying to remember his teachings to unwind both his own grief and another's fear, rocking them back and forth, "Shh, Ani, it's okay. I'm here, I'm here."
He couldn't say how long it took until both of them were calmed down, at least enough to unclench their death grips from each other. The tightness of his own face reminded him of tears to wipe from his own eyes, which he did with an absent smudging wipe of his sleeve before pressing his forehead to the top of his padawan's head.
"Are you alright?" He asked, having resumed the soothing stroking of his thumb upon Ani's temple without his explicit recollection.
Little hands clenched and unclenched in his robes, Ani's head nodding against his chest. His padawan was quiet when he spoke, drained and almost shy, "Yeah."
He exhaled carefully, "Better?"
A more confident nod, "Better."
The lull of subsequent silence soon tempered them into sleeping where they found themselves, exhausted from the bout of nerves.
When he woke, later, his padawan had flung an arm over his face, snoring contentedly and sprawling across the bed. It was calm, their bond peaceful, and he was made content by it, slowly pulling the hand that was knotted into his hair into his own.
He fell back into a doze, himself between his padawan and the door, a small hand wrapped around his fingers. Nothing bad would happen to his padawan - he wouldn't let it.
Please imagine Evil Grandpa Dooku who keeps trying to get Obi-Wan to join him but ultimately fails each time getting so frustrated that his backup plan is naming Obi-Wan his heir as Count of Serenno. There are many reasons for his mad scheme of varying plausibility, including:
A. He knows Obi-Wan will actually do what's best for the planet instead of leaving it to the idiot government in charge to deal with
B. He is making a dramatic Statement about not being able to escape the lineage you come from even in death
C. He is aware of the non-zero chance of being betrayed by Sidious, so he makes it that upon Dooku's death the New Count of Serenno and leader of the CIS is given all of his Very Important Documents Describing the Sith Lord Immediately
And most importantly:
D. No matter how distant or cruel he may be, Dooku is after all part of the disaster lineage and is not above fucking with his grand-padawan from beyond the grave solely because the idea amuses him.
Anyway long story short Obi-Wan has a Very Interesting Time after Anakin kills Dooku aboard the Invisible Hand, starting with being declared the new leader of the CIS. It snowballs from there.
He stares at the handwritten letter in his hand. So does everyone else in the room, frankly, but he is more absorbed with his sheer bewilderment of the fine, frequently-held vellum, very obviously from the ducal stock by how it curled around his fingers like a wisp of a trailing cloud, only the weight of the ink seemingly keeping it in his grasp.
The ink itself, some velvety-smooth blend of minerals and binders that made the words applied by his grandmaster's hand starker in their meaning. He scarcely felt the cool slip of ribbon in his grasp, the weight of the wax seal - perfumed, faintly, from both the apiary it hailed from and the scent of a real fire - tugging it slowly ever downward.
Blankly, he almost wanted to sit there, sit down at all, really, and just marvel over the craftsmanship. The sheaf of papers took time to make; this was no idle decision of Yan Dooku, and the faint yellowing of the will was a testament to how long it had been stowed away.
"Are you gonna accept?" Ahsoka asks, glancing warily between him and the missive.
He blinks, slowly, his thoughts a muddied pit instead of their usual habit-sharpened edge, and says with faint distance, "I would need to prove incompetency."
Someone snorted. It was probably Anakin, though it could easily have been any of the troopers on the bridge, or even Mace, who had hand-delivered it. Why it had not been Yoda, he could fathom at a later date.
"Hmm." Privately, he could agree with the sentiment, but actively voicing the thought louder than a noncommittal hum would likely form. Something. Ideally not a binding agreement.
Raising his head, he looked at Mace, who had only risen a patient eyebrow.
"I don't suppose I could assign someone else to the job?"
Mace's eyebrow rose higher, "I suppose you could make such a supposition, if you desired."
Which was a damnable lack of opinion, and he sighed, the umpteenth one in the hour. Tracing a finger over his grandmaster's signature, catching a faint whiff of warmth and care from the man's residual Force signature, he dropped his shoulders in resignation.
"I haven't the slightest idea how I'm going to manage Serenno on top of, well, everything else," He murmured.
Currently, the rest of the House of Serenno was managing affairs, and the slow-moving morass of bureaucracy was at least inhibiting a complete standstill in terms of politics and economics. He had time, theoretically, to decide.
But if this were indeed a trap - something he was increasingly reluctant to claim - then he would need to decide quickly.
Sighing, again, he carefully rolled the will back up, tying it in a close approximation of the bow that it came with. It was rather similar to the ones the younglings learned in the crèche, and he put that thought aside with the heap of others that required a long meditation.
"I'll be needing to borrow one of Master Nu's legal assistants," He decided, turning to Cody, "Commander, please inform Scrapes that I need him to create a physical copy of the will. Master Nu will likely be wanting several of them, though I believe flimsi will suffice for the moment."
Cody, Force look kindly upon him, didn't hesitate to nod, "No digital copies, boss?"
He tucked the will into an inner pocket of his robes, feeling the weight of its importance - and the way the Force tangled itself around it - sink into the fabric, tugging at his heart the way it was. "No," He decided, "Not just yet. I'm afraid even the encryptions wouldn't hold fast, this time."
Not with the hemorrhaging of information they dealt with on a regular basis. He raised an eyebrow in Anakin's direction, his padawan's mouth slowly closing on whatever offer he was about to make, "And no, Anakin, not even to R2."
Glancing once more at the strategy map that had been temporarily abandoned by Mace's arrival upon the Negotiator, he took a note of the time and saved the simulation, "We'll reconvene on this tomorrow morning, at the same time. For now, Commander, tell the others that today can be allocated to lighter duties."
"Of course, boss," Cody was typing something into his vambrace, having already falling into his usual spot by his shoulder, Mace taking up the other free space - butting out Anakin and Ahsoka, who both let out simultaneous groans.
It was enough to twitch a smile on his face, a lessening of the doubt clutching at the edges of his mind. "And Anakin, you and Ahsoka should also meditate - there's plenty of time for it today," He said mildly, the slowly accumulating entourage following in his steps, "Ahsoka, your homework for gravitational physics is due in a week."
"But you're the one teaching that!" His grandpadawan whined, "Can't I get an extension?"
He tsked, thankful that he was walking in the front, the others unable to directly see his grin, "Another one, dear?"
"... Fine."
The padawans eventually split off to another part of the ship, and Mace hummed, "You've no dearth of experience."
Cody was suspiciously silent at his other shoulder, and he rolled his eyes, "Not the both of you. It's an entire system, this is hardly a simple task."
"When you put it like that," Cody finally says, so dry that the irony in the man's tone was the only thing left to observe.
"Tch," He rolled his shoulders back, "Terrible, the both of you."
He didn't need to look back to see the matching smug looks on Mace and Cody's face.
Bad Fenton parents reveal but instead of the usual Trope of going to Gotham he goes to Bludhaven just a few months before Nightwings first appearance.
Danny accidentally stumbles into information breaking mostly because he's Gathering all of his information himself by accidentally stumbling into back alley deals, he is not supposed to find and then turning intangible so he doesn't get shot at.
Danny isn't really Nightwings priority when he first gets there and he definitely uses his services as he's cut off from his main source of information.
The two of them end up having a very good relationship as the two of them are bouncing quips off of one another by their second meeting. Danny brings out the side that is mostly tucked away at the time from Nightwing as he is still in his angsty just left home phase.
Nightwing doesn't tell the bat family about Danny originally because he is estranged but eventually it becomes Danny being only his team. Gotham has all of the bat family and Nightwing has Danny. It will take years before anyone meets Danny.
Danny was never actually seen. People only know about him because of a funny coincidence. Basically, Danny was really REALLY hungry. He hadn’t eaten in…was it a week now? Whose counting? So he was chilling in an alleyway invisible when this thug came over for a smoke break and dropped a hotdog down on a nearby bin. Was that sanitary? Probbaly not. But food was food. And then another guy came over to call the thug away. He rushed out of the alleyway And left the hotdog behind. And well…why waste a perfectly good hotdog? So naturally Danny stuffed it into his mouth and was very happy with the situation….only for the thug to come back a few minutes later.
He was clearly looking for his hotdog.
And Danny felt really bad because he had essentially just stolen this guy’s lunch and for a thug, he looked pretty stressed out, probbaly because his gang was in the middle of a gang war at the moment and they were loosing. And the lower ranked goons were taking the brunt of the bosses’ ire and sent to do more dangerous tasks. Not to mention getting jumped every other day by the rival gang. And worst of all, this thug had been in charge of a recent shipment of weapons and money but the rival gang stole them. (The thug complained a lot during his smoke break).
And that’s when Danny got an idea. He had recently heard some useful information about the rival gang and where they were moving said shipment. Danny was sure the guy would appreciate that more than a hotdog anyways. In fact, he’ll bet the guy forgets all about his stolen food. So Danny quickly got a napkin from a nearby food stand (ironically, it was a hotdog stand) and quickly scribbled down the info along with a tiny ghost in the corner.
Armando is taking the shipment of weapons to the northern docs at 2pm this Friday. There will be 15 men stationed there with 10 guarding the cargo and 5 monitoring the nearby rooftops.
P.S. sorry for taking your hotdog. 👻
Then Danny left. So yeah, a one time thing. Only he came across that thug again later on. The guy had brought food and was calling out in the alleyway with some of his friends. He was asking for help with something but Danny was very familiar with the whole stranger danger thing. Plus, the guy was a known thug. So obviously he remained invisible.
Even if the smell of the food was really…really tempting. Eventually the guy just left the food and walked away with his friends teasing him. And well…if the food was just left there and clearly meant for him, why not take it?
Later Danny dropped a sticky not with the info the guy wanted in his hideout where he would find it.
And this continued. Rumors about the Ghost of Bloodhaven spread. And other gangs started using him too. The rules to get the ghost’s attention was simple. First, find one of the designated ‘checkpoints’. This was the hardest part. These places were where the ghost was most likely to respond. (These are basically just Danny’s hangout spots.) It is possible to get his attention elsewhere but not as likely. And these checkpoints are a closely guarded secret to prevent any eavesdroppers or to keep anyone else from using the ghost’s network as it was very useful. The second step is to bring an offering. Food works for casual information but if you want something more valuable you have to bring something more valuable. Cold cash and trades of other things will also work. Leave the offering along with what you want (or possibly a sticky note of your ask.) Taking an offering is a good way to get on the ghost’s bad side and leak very private information about you for free so DO NOT touch other offerings. If the offering is gone the next day, then it was accepted. If not, then either the request was refused or you do not have a good enough offering (typically the ghost might send a sticky note telling you of their asking price if that is the case). The ghost never accepts any task that will end with someone dying. So they will know if you are assassinating a person or if you have a criminal record (although being a criminal isn’t a problem as long as you don’t use the information to kill). Once an offering is accepted, the information will be delivered on a sticky note. Sometimes the ghost will help for free if there is an object they really want. They will take it and then provide information that is very important and useful. Sometimes valuable information that the person didn’t know was useful like someone setting up a trap for them, or a robbery that would happen at their workplace. Something to take note of is that the ghost never takes anything the original owner really cares about (Danny checks first) and always pays a price of equal or greater value. This is a rare occurrence though. Finally…no one has ever seen the ghost’s face. They don’t know who they are or how they know these things or even if there is more than one, but everyone knows that their information is always, without a doubt….100% accurate (Helps when Danny can feel emotions so can feel when someone is lying.)
Danny has been doing pretty good for himself. He got a job…kinda, and now has plenty of food and even a roof over his head. He made his home in an old blocked off subway station that was completely cut off from the outside due to a tunnel collapse so only someone with intangibility could get in. And he was pretty happy with his current life. He managed to wire technology and electricity. He has a flatscreen TV, ALL the latest games and consoles (Tucker would be so jealous), internet, running water, even a full length shower he was able to hook up (along with an instruction manual on plumbing from one very confused common crook asking for info) and even a fully stocked medical cabinet. That’s right. A cabinet. Danny’s got all kinds of furniture including a king sized bed. If anything, he’s basically set. Has everything he could ever want.
Except…
it’s a bit…
lonely.
And then one day Nightwing walked into one of his alleyways with a box of donuts.
"Wait!" the goon cried as he dangled over the edge of the building. "Wait, I'll tell you something good!"
Dick hummed. "I'm listening."
"There's this ghost, see?"
Dick sighed and pulled out one of his sticks as he charged it up. "I don't have time for this," he said wearily.
"It's true! I swear it's true! We all use 'im!"
Hmm. Interesting. "'Use 'im'?" Dick asked. He turned the stick off and put it back on his belt. "For what?"
"Info! The ghost sells info! You wanna know who's behind the new drug, ask the ghost!"
"Oh?" Dick hummed. This might be a promising lead. "And what does this ghost take for info?"
"Food, cash, games," the goon said.
Games? "That's an odd list." Maybe a kid? No, how would a kid know anything that a bunch of gang goons wanted?
"They're offerings, yeah? Don't fuck with the offerings. And no killing," added the goon. "Ghost is very big on everyone living."
Well. Dick was just going to have to meet this ghost. He pulled the goon back over the rooftop. "Tell me more," he ordered.
*
Danny watched warily as Nightwing--Nightwing!--walked into the alley. He knew he was invisible, but pressed his back against the bricks anyway. He didn't want anything to do with any of the vigilantes.
But he was too curious to leave. He watched as Nightwing walked up to the shrine that the local gang members had made for him, and--
Hold up. Was that--was that the smell of fresh baked donuts? In the middle of the night? Where had the vigilante gotten those? It was only thanks to having eaten earlier that his stomach didn't rumble and give him away.
Nightwing stopped in front of the shrine. Then--he took pictures? What for? Why? What could he possibly need, or want, pictures of the shrine for? This was unnerving.
The box Nightwing was holding was placed on the shrine. A note was placed on top. Nightwing shot a grapple to take himself to the nearby roof. And waited.
Hah! Danny knew it was a trap! Too bad, Mr. Vigilante, but Danny used to play that game, and he was better at waiting! Much better. It didn't take too long before Nightwing left. Really left, not just pretended to leave.
Okay. Danny drifted towards the shrine, staying invisible and intangible, because he knew better than to trust the vigilante. It was--
Donuts. This close the smell was almost overpowering and Danny had to fight to keep his invisibility and intangibility. He let the tip of his finger go tangible just long enough to open the donut box. Six fresh donuts. And these weren't plain glazed, oh not. These were stuffed donuts, donuts with toppings, and--was that a Froot Loop donut? It was.
Well. What info did Nightwing want? Danny had to give it to him now. He looked at the note.
A lead into the new drug Hypnos.
Well. Danny could do better than that.
*
Dick was grappling between two buildings when a piece of paper smacked him in the face. He grabbed it, landed, and looked--at a an address? Huh. Oh, there was the little ghost doodle that he'd been told about. All right.
He was only kind of shocked that the address turned out to be the building where the drug was being manufactured.
Dick couldn't believe that Bruce hadn't told him that Jason had died. They had communication in space. Hell, he'd been on the Watchtower for almost a week writing mission reports, and no one could have told him that his little brother had died?
He knew he wasn't handling it well. He knew that going out on the streets and beating the shit out of scumbags wasn't handling it well, no matter what Bruce seemed to think. But he couldn't. Couldn't cope.
He dropped on a roof and began to cry, just remembering the little boy who thought that Robin was magic and how badly he'd been treated--by Bruce, and by Dick himself.
An arm wrapped around his shoulders. "It's all right, Nightwing," a voice said. "Let it all out. You're safe here."
It wasn't until much later that Dick realized the person that comforted him on that roof was the Bludhaven ghost.
Dick debated. The most amazing thing about Danny was that Danny knew almost everything he wanted to know. But that was all physical stuff, about drugs and stuff. What about this?
Dick got his ghost friend's favorite order of burger and fries and waited on the roof. It had taken way too long for the ghost to feel comfortable enough with Dick, or with Nightwing, to risk showing himself to the vigilante.
Dick's first clue that Ghost was there was a low, impressed whistle. "My favorite food," said Ghost. Dick turned to see the young man, around Dick's age and (despite all the food he seemed to get for his "offerings") far too skinny. Ghost grinned, teeth flashing white in the dim light. "To what do I owe this honor?"
The rules for Nightwing were different than the rules for the others who got Ghost's attention. The others could leave an offering at one of the shrines, but Nightwing got directly approached. The others had to revisit the shrine to see if their offering was accepted, Nightwing was asked, clearly and in no uncertain terms, what he wanted before Ghost would ever step close to the vigilante.
"I don't even know if you have info that can help," lamented Dick. "But I thought we could eat together either way."
Ghost relaxed slightly and walked across the roof to sit next to Dick. "Nice. So," he asked as he took the bag and pulled out his order--only his order, Ghost always knew when Dick also got food for himself and what that food was--out of the bag. "What's this info you'd like that I may or may not know?"
"You know I'm part of a superhero group," Dick started. Ghost tensed slightly. It was a thing. Ghost was wary of humans; Dick didn't know why. "One of my teammates is having trouble with her father, this demon named Trigon."
Ghost relaxed a little and barked out a laugh. "Trigon's a little bitch," he sneered. "Here." Ghost's hand moved through one of Dick's pouches, to the one where he kept paper in case he needed it on patrol, and pulled out a piece and a pen. Then he braced the paper against the roof and doodled on it. By the time Ghost handed the paper back to Dick, Dick was able to recognize that it was a summoning sigil of some kind. "Just put a drop of blood on this when Trigon comes around." Ghost snickered. "He's gonna love it."
"Trigon?"
Ghost's grin widened. "No. I'm keeping the pen, by the way. It's nice. Consider it payment for the sigil."
That was when Dick noticed that all of Ghost's food was gone.
*
Raven watched Nightwing nervously from the bubble of protection, trying to keep her emotions from flaring and interfering with her control. "Are you sure this will work?"
"I'm sure we don't have any other ideas," said Nightwing. He pulled out a summoning sigil and Raven stared at the paper. She could feel the power wafting off of it, and her eyes widened as Nightwing pricked a finger and let a single drop of blood fall onto the paper.
The paper flared with ghastly green light before it burned with green flame and opened a portal. The bubble of protection fell as Raven stared, with horror, at the armored creature that came out of it. As she backed away from this new threat the creature presented, it pulled a flaming sword from a sheath on its hip. "TRIGON!" the creature intoned, death power wafting with every movement and emanating from the sword. "THOU DAREST TO REFUSE TO SETTLE THOU'S DEBTS IN AN HONORABLE FASHION?"
"What's going on?" asked Raven as Trigon fled from the new presence--which followed still waving its sword.
"Sounds like Trigon owes money," said Nightwing wisely. His head tilted to the side for a moment. "Or, you know, whatever they use instead of money."
Raven stared at Nightwing. "Where did you even get that?" she asked.
Nightwing goes to say thank you to Ghost when he realizes that the other man is panicking when he pops out of nowhere.
"Oh my God, dude! I need you to follow me. There's a kid who was buried and he's trying to claw out of his grave. I can't do anything cause I'm worried it's illegal to help him dig out of their. I also left another child their who was asking for my help with something. Shit, I left a child to help dig out a child! Fuck me!"
"Wait- why would it be illegal to help a child? I don't under- that doesn't really matter, show me the way!"
He proceeds to chase after Ghost to a familiar grave yard.
"I didn't want to mess with his grave in case Wayne sent the Bat after me! If it's you who pulls the kid out, you won't get in trouble with that dude. Oh! He's already got his hands out of the grave! We can just pull him out. It seems Tim doesn't have the physical strength to do it. At least this should be easier than initially planned."
Dick is having a mental breakdown seeing his dead brother struggling to pull himself out of the dirt while his neighbor is desperately crying, trying to dig the other boy out.
He's looking from Nightwing to the grave, where some kid - Tim, apparently - was hellbent on digging out some other kid.
It didn't feel like the usual grave, was the problem. Not that he was around graves, or graveyards, very often. Maybe if Sam were here, or at least Tucker, to interpret the digitized grimoire Sam insisted they have a copy of.
But... no, this felt familiar. He drifted closer, putting a hand on Tim's shoulder, careful not to startle the kid, "Hey," He said gently, "Hey, I've got this. Why don't you go stand by Nightwing?"
Tim immediately tried to throw his hand off, and he went with the motion, disconcerted at the wisp that left his mouth when he was jostled closer to the grave - it didn't, yet, have any of the rustling motions of self-disturbed dirt, but the unease was getting stronger. Whomever this kid was, there was something... bad? Going on behind this.
Nightwing had stepped forward, wrestling Tim away from both the grave and him, "Tim! Tim, it's okay, it's okay. Let Ghost work, alright?"
And Nightwing was looking at him with the sort of panic he usually didn't see. Or, well, hadn't seen up until this news. When he nodded, kneeling in Tim's spot, grabbing the shovel and tossing it to the side, the others retreated a few steps away with the sort of tenseness that told him he needed to work fast.
He took an extra second to assess the grave, laying a hand on top of it. The feeling was eerily familiar, and were he in his human form, his heart probably would have skipped a beat. As it were, the remembered sensation of electricity ripping through him was enough, and he slammed his eyes shut, shoving an intangible arm through the grave.
Here goes nothing.
What he picked up - what he grabbed - was not a normal human. It almost made him lose his grip, but he grunted, curling his fingers around squirming cloth and yanking.
The grave dirt was, naturally, disturbed, but luckily he was already floating, and he ignored the shocked exclamations from behind him. Pulling the newly dead, the newly reanimated from their burial was more difficult than he was willing to inform Nightwing, or Tim, about.
Sam had speculated one time that graves functioned like nodes to the Ghost Zone. It made sense, if he was honest, and the three of them had spent a lot of time in various libraries researching myths and cultures about how the dead were tended to.
What made someone a ghost, really.
It helped him more than he had initially expected in the Ghost Zone - being a halfa ostracized him enough, and the conditions of his ghost form meant that the location of his grave was... debated upon. Clockwork hadn't helped much, outside riddles that would have made Mister Lancer proud, and Frostbite was a little more helpful, even when he needed to learn a lot more about what Frostbite was even referencing.
So when he pulled this newly-made halfa out of his grave, he knew enough from experience to crush the kid against himself, letting his core do the talking while he scratched a quick sigil on the grave.
Mostly it was just a door-lock, and he'd have to teach it to the kid later, but the last thing he wanted was yet another portal that he needed to catch ghosts from. Especially in Gotham. There simply wasn't enough thermoses for this city, and he wasn't particularly happy at the idea of risking a visit to Amityville for ghost-hunting supplies.
Whomever the kid was, they had no idea they were still intangible, and he thumped himself on the grass outside the grave, sighing as he shifted his arm - and the kid - out of intangibility. Nightwing and Tim... said or did something, but he currently had some bigger fish to fry.
He remembered the way Sam and Tucker had panicked, rousing him after they thought he had died despite - in retrospect - just needing a moment to become conscious again, and he let that memory help him, wrapping his arms around the other halfa in a crushing grip that would only come across as comforting.
"Hey, hey," He murmured, barely audible over the crying of the kid, the other kid, and the superhero kid. Exhaling carefully, he modulated his voice - not the scream, but the timber, an echo of his core that he could put into his speech, "Kid. C'mon. Everything's okay."
Nightwing and Tim flinched back, the humans unused to the haunting quality of one ghost speaking to another, but the kid he was holding did - thankfully - calm down, the grip on his suit less panicking and more orienting.
"That's it," He praised, running one hand through the kid's hair, making a note of the streak of white. This was a strong kid - a hard death, then, and he murmured wordlessly in sympathy. There would be time, later, to figure out how the kid died, see if there was anything he could do about it, "There we go, up and at 'em."
However much time it took, it didn't feel like enough, and Nightwing and Tim slowly approached, lingering at the edges of his vision. They were speaking, too, careful and soft - the same way Sam and Tucker did, when they realized they didn't need to panic.
Slowly, very slowly, he shifted, Nightwing catching on and kneeling next to him. The kid went with little fuss, trading the familiarity of another halfa to someone that was, blatantly, familiar before death. He kept a hand on the kid's back, anyway, raising a brow at Nightwing.
The superhero looked up at him, then away, the mask outlining his eyes hiding, for once, little of his emotions. He rocked back on his heels, letting the family re-acquaint themselves.
He turned his attention back to the grave. It reeked of something ghostly. And old, the kind of old he'd probably have to ask about when there was a bit of time.
As it were, he dug out his phone, happy for the case Tucker managed to mail him that kept his phone mostly functional in the Ghost Zone, because it let him use it in his ghost form. Sam's grimoire glitched a little in the opening, telling him that this was no usual resurrection, but he found the page on additional wardings with little issue.
The kid would probably come back to his grave, once he realized what it was, so even if he had any nails or salt on him, it'd be a dick move to use them. He settled for drawing with his finger, letting a little bit of energy from his core collect at the fingertip as he drew sigil after sigil, to better separate the memory of death from the person, to contain whatever this was, and to stabilize the portal before anyone could use it to rip open the Ghost Zone.
Again. He really hated dealing with that.
He watched Tim shuffle next to him, blatantly attempting to memorize the work, and tried not to smile. Maybe he could teach someone - maybe not in Gotham, this place weirded him out, but...
Hm. A thought for later.
Layers of seals finished, he clicked off his phone's screen, putting it back into his pocket and settling in to wait out everyone's reunion. He had some time, but not much - Bludhaven probably had some more requests of him, and he really, really, did not want to miss out on some hot fries.
"So," He said casually, slouching and putting his hands in his hoodie's pockets, getting everyone's attention as he smiled cheerfully at them, "Who died?"
Collaboration with @hylotelephiumfanfic! See their post here for their wonderful art!
[Dreamwidth] [SquidgeWorld]
-
As with most Ancient devices, it was something related to ascension. Something to do with phase states, he would assume later, based on the categorical, first-hand evidence of dying.
-
It was a small village. Not quite minuscule, but about average for a Pegasus planet. While he had already listened in on - and debated with others - the logistics of human civilizations further from the gate in conjunction with Wraith attacks, Elizabeth had not, yet, authorized some drones to scan multiple planets for habitation. He sighed, already seeing her frown in his mind's eye.
Ronon grunted beside him, and he grunted back dismissively, waving his LSD. So far they had yet to tramp through this week's planetary forest to this week's planetary village, and he was at most hoping whatever cultural détente a patient Teyla and smiling Sheppard smoothed over was small enough to get them back home for a late lunch.
He glanced back at his screen. Maybe a snack pile between lunch and dinner.
Restraining yet another sigh, he glanced up at his other team mates walking in front of them. It was long practice to only check that Teyla was in eyesight and doing well, but Ronon was a pal - and anyway, not paying nearly enough attention to him - so he let his eyes slide over Sheppard for a beat longer than usual. There were some benefits to taking up the team's six, buddy system or no.
Sheppard was, as usual, picturesque. He wore his uniform like he was made for it, or perhaps the clothes obligingly moulded themselves to what was probably a magazine-worthy frame. Frankly, he wouldn't know, too determined not to look in those infrequent opportunities in the group shower by the gear room, lest he reveal an expression that was, otherwise, carefully secreted away.
The life signs detector is only just starting to detect, and he switches his attention back to it, listening to the faint beeps as Teyla smoothly navigates them onto the correct deer path. With his attention thus re-occupied, he was better able to hear Teyla, her conversational, lecturing tone dropping his shoulders the longer he listened.
"We have not had many trades with the people on this planet," She was saying, gesturing casually, in what was probably the direction of the village, "Their representative comes to the surface irregularly, and most of their trade is knowledge of the Ancients."
Ronon made a grumbling noise next to him when Sheppard audibly raised a brow at Teyla, "They've got some good mushrooms, too."
What a curious thing to offer people, but then, if Teyla's information was correct - and it usually was, there could be some interesting things afoot. He blinked a couple times at his LSD, wondering how much attention to pay to the conversation before bald curiosity won out, "Medicinal or recreational?"
Edible was not a word he was going to use, not after the lengthy lecture he received from one of his newest scientists on vernacular. And it wasn't like he didn't already know what that particular iteration of slang meant - attending college in the eighties was reasonable enough exposure to the trends of the time, he thinks - but shrooms and mushrooms and marijuana were only vaguely overlapping Venn diagrams of drugs to him. Nevertheless, he glances up in time to see Teyla's grin, catching the lilt to it in time to roll his eyes.
Sheppard rolled his eyes back at him, despite not even being part of this bit, and he habitually tamped down on the urge to decide between sticking his tongue out and sighing fondly. Those were some definitively conflicting ideas, though, so happily for him they both canceled each other out and left him with looking back to Teyla with an expression of, 'Do you see what I put up with?'
Given that Teyla was Teyla, and not only also puts up with Sheppard, but also him and sometimes Ronon, he figured she had more weight to throw behind her laugh. He could almost see it in those fancy neon red letters Elizabeth swore to him one time really was visible to all women: Ah, men.
Teyla, being Athosian, probably didn't think in neon lighting, but he figured she's watched enough movies to pick it up. Leaving his thoughts to meander down the path of cultural transposition of Earth-based linguistics quirks and Wraithkin telepathy, he almost missed Teyla laughing and responding to him, "Food, mostly. I hear they have some delicacies which fetch a high price."
He knew before Sheppard even inhaled what the next sentence was going to be, so he quickly interrupted before they all devolved into an extremely funny, if headache-inducing, set of jokes, "I can't imagine they can farm truffles underground."
"I'm not sure," Teyla said, in that tone that he figured out meant 'I have no idea what you just said, but sure, let's go with that', but in that impeccably cordial way, "But they are often preserved in oil or salt. They are prone to spoilage, due to the moisture in the cave systems."
A beat of contemplative silence followed that, filled with the noise of their collective steps through the forest. He took in a breath to speak, and then Sheppard pounced on Teyla's statement with a marvellously charming grin that only warned of mischief, "So, like, pickled shrooms, right?"
His inhale devolved into an exasperated exhale, Sheppard laughing at his reaction, and he waved his arm around, momentarily forgetting he was holding the LSD until Ronon grabbed his wrist to keep it from flying out of his grip, "That is not-!" He wiggled his arm, Ronon amiably letting it go so he could gesture with it at Sheppard's smug face, "We are not bringing recreational drugs back to Atlantis! Do you have any idea how pissed Elizabeth would be?!"
"Oh, chill out," Sheppard said, confidently ignoring his extremely reasonable protests and plodding along despite Teyla's polite snickering and Ronon's amused aura, "I'm sure Carson can figure out something."
"I- I-," How on earth did Sheppard possibly even think that- "I am not signing off on that, thank you very much! Those voodoo practitioners get up to enough with their- their bacterial broths and retroviral studies! I am not adding hallucinogens to the mix!"
"Would calm you guys down some," Ronon muttered under his breath, raising an eyebrow when he gave him an affronted look, "What? It's not like any of you get laid."
He would have reflexively rebutted that plenty of his staff were, indeed, getting up to some astoundingly minky crap when they thought the security cameras wouldn't record them, but then that would mean divulging 1) how he knew that, and 2) that he wasn't getting any. Grumbling, he wagged his finger at Sheppard, anyway, not wanting to provoke any sort of discussions in that direction, thank you very much.
Nevertheless, Sheppard's ears were just the faintest tinge of pink. You know, if someone were paying attention to that sort of thing, which he wasn't. What he was paying attention to was Teyla's sublime smile, which instantly made him pause the multiple train tracks of his thoughts out of a sheer, basic hindbrain reaction to Teyla's 'I am displeased' sort of expression.
Her smile got a little nicer when she noticed that he noticed, and she raised a polite eyebrow at him, "Rodney, would you switch places with me? Just for the moment."
Bobbing his head and already shuffling around to do exactly that, he breathed a sigh of relief when Teyla patted his shoulder commiseratingly. He and Sheppard diligently took point in silence, both of them refusing to look backwards for the indeterminable amount of time it took Teyla to say something quieter than what he could hear.
Whatever it was, there was a quick whoomp of a bantos rod hitting Ronon's leather coat, and Ronon making a quietly aggrieved noise. Paying studious attention to the trees in front of them, he hid a grimace and raised an eyebrow at seeing Sheppard doing the same out of the corner of his eye. He didn't think either one of them really understood the nuances of Pegasus inter-planetary cultural… stuff, but thankfully in this instance neither Teyla nor Ronon required them to.
All of them then quietly - relatively - walked in silence. Whatever it was, Teyla seemed satisfied, and they had all learned to let her bask in the glow of it for a little bit. Sheppard made a face beside him, and he bit his tongue, completely unwilling to start laughing at it. They made faces at each other for a bit, neither one of them quite looking at each other, and it passed the time until the outlying border of the town rather well.
Teyla tapped him on the shoulder again, and both he and Sheppard parted to let her take point, watching as her posture shifted to that of "we come in peace" rather than "my friends are amusing but occasionally tiresome" that always managed to impress him. This was habit, too, for Sheppard to come second and he himself sandwiched between Sheppard and Ronon as they queued themselves up for what would ideally be a routine visit to introduce themselves.
He managed to hold his rifle in a somewhat friendlier manner when he noticed Sheppard's shoulders shifting to that relaxed slope that often distracted him. Ronon made a quiet noise behind him, but he was too busy following everyone else's lead to try and futilely kick Ronon in the shin, because that was a rude joke waiting for the right opportunity and Teyla was already making polite greetings to the people they were passing.
Sheppard cast a quick eyebrow over his shoulder and Ronon subsided, becoming a non-talking, looming shadow of dubious welcome in a blink. Well, it was a team member's worth of looming shadow, so he told his hackles to shut up and tried to look like he was paying attention between that and Sheppard smiling at strangers.
Luckily enough for him, he only needed to play point and shoot when Teyla or Sheppard wanted him to, and it was usually only contained to chattering about science on cue - easy enough, and easier still when they were here to trade food instead of technology. They broke for some guided wandering around soon after, and Ronon went with him and the local assigned to him because the other two members of their team were responsible for all the delicate maneuvering of trading. Sheppard couldn't possibly screw this up, or at the very least any screw-up involving Teyla was likely to be amusing rather than dangerous.
"I think I see why Teyla does meditation," Ronon leaned in to murmur, both of them able to hear her voice despite their guide also chattering on about local monuments that were made to venerate the Ancients. He gave a low hum in return, easily seeing his point; Teyla was really only quiet when eating or meditating, and all the meals here were likely going to be weighted with more cultural expectations.
Finally, their team mates were out of eye sight, and their guide - some teenager probably either trying to suck up to the leader of the villager or else was a jumping on a level of desperate opportunity that latched onto the first foreigners that looked truly novel - wandered off in his own conversation to go into detail about the statue in front of them. He blinked a few times, ignoring the way Ronon elbowed him, to drag his mind back to the present situation.
"As you can see," The kid said, pointing at the folded hands on the statue that reminded him vaguely of those Easter Island recreations Jackson's department emailed to them, "These are meant to guide meditation. This statue in particular represents Dorma, she who guides you through dreams."
He paused, swallowing his instinctive witticism and pulling out his LSD, instead, based on some currently-unknown niggling hunch. The statue had that deep blue, almost black hue to it that sucked the light in despite the polish, and Ronon grunted beside him, startling the teenager into talking further.
"Uh-um, Dorma is on the edge of the town because this is the start of the path we walk for our adulthood initiation," The kid was saying, and he made a puzzled 'go on' noise, approaching the statue as the LSD developed a faint heat signature in front of him. Maybe it was just because it was nearing afternoon, residual sunshine soaking up in the stone that would leave it feeling warm long after sunset, but maybe… he walked around the statue, making an interested murmur as he adjusted the sensor parameters.
"Find anything, McKay?" Ronon asked, unmoved from his current position.
"Maybe," He said distractedly, looking at their guide, "Tell me, where is this path, exactly?"
The kid perked up, eager to have a task assigned to him. He glanced at his LSD and then back up in time to see where the kid was pointing - to, of course, some lightly wooded part bordering the town. Of course. Sighing he raised an eyebrow at Ronon, "Feel like taking a walk?"
Ronon raised an eyebrow back at him, "Sure."
That settled, they both looked expectantly at their guide, who startled and brushed ahead of him with a confidence that spoke of having travelled this path before. Hmm. "And what's this, uh- Dorma person supposed to do? In your dreams?"
The kid grinned at him over one shoulder before continuing down the path, "Oh, easy! Dorma helps you find your heart's desire."
"Which I suppose means ascension," He sighed, listening to Ronon shuffle his coat in that manner he typically interpreted as exasperation. It was either that or reaching for his pistol. Same thing, really.
"It could be," The kid nodded, pushing back some branches and being nice enough not to let him get whacked in the stomach with them. Just beyond, the start of a trail was becoming visible, if only by the slight decrease in grass in a vaguely straight line, "But the last person to have ascended was generations ago. We have only the tale left to us, and that, too, is fading with time."
Ronon made a disapproving sound, "Trail's still being used, though."
Another nod, and they took a wide turn around a particularly old tree, "Most of us often travel here on the third full moon past the winter solstice, in order to discover if we'll marry the upcoming year. It is quite cold, then!" The kid laughed, shaking his head, "Only the bravest go, and often we carry a bag of hashka liquor with us."
"Does it taste good?" He asked, curious despite himself.
"Hah," The kid shook his head, "No. But no elder has passed judgment if we also bring with us honey and spices. Much of the bitterness goes away when it is thus seasoned over a fire."
The detail about the bitterness stuck out to him, and he was remembering some of his high school classmates that indulged in some Jägermeister. A lot of those classmates also ended up dropping out, and he wondered to himself if some nonsense was just what most teenagers got up to outside of supervision galaxies over. Behind him, Ronon was finding ways to walk past all the brush without making a sound, only the faint sound of his dreads hitting the man's leather coat acting as a clue that something other than a looming shadow was behind him.
He glanced again at his LSD when it beeped at him, the tone that of his newly-inputted parameters. Useful, if only so he can add multiple programs with their own, individual tones on top of the base program for general life signs. Resisting the urge to put up a hand to call for a stop, he simply stopped instead, making Ronon run into him and the kid look back to see the commotion.
Pointing in the closest approximation of forty-three degrees left of center, he said, "There's something matching the statue's signature that way."
Both Ronon and the kid looked where he pointed, the latter looking mystified, "So there is a shorter path to the cave."
"Wh-" His brain caught up with the implications of that statement, "Were you really going to make us walk in circles?!"
"No?"
Ronon growled, and he quickly shot a hand out to keep his team mate from advancing, feeling Ronon shift in distemper and hoping the other would keep his distance for the moment, "Look, let's just- is there anything stopping us from walking in a straight line? And don't say tradition."
The kid paused, glancing between the both of them, "I don't think anyone has ever done so."
He sighed, looking at a scowling Ronon, "So. Tradition."
"Yep," Ronon peered over his shoulder to get the heading, then proceeded to lead them in a straight line, "You said it was a cave?"
The kid was now behind them, sputtering and catching up to Ronon's ground-eating strides - only practice had him able to keep some sort of pace, even if he was dragging in his breaths to accomplish that. Ronon was mostly ignoring the both of them, lingering at dips in the new, self-chosen path, as well as any rocks that he kicked to the side. It gave them enough time to get back into Ronon's orbit, at least until the man had set off again.
In hindsight, this was at least much more entertaining than walking around in circles just because teenagers think it's a good idea. And for marriage on top of that. He swallowed a disgusted scoff, focusing on avoiding the branches that Ronon was pushing to the side. Probably all that alcohol the kids brought along did more to persuade someone to be a sweetheart than camping out in the woods overnight.
Ronon was on the verge of leaving both of them behind again, so he threw those meandering thoughts to the side to scramble over a nurse log - which looked interesting enough that he'd have to bring that mycologist he'd hired here later, even if he did accidentally scrape some hopefully non-lethal mushrooms off - before he lost sight of his team mate. Who was, in the end, waiting patiently by what was indubitably a cave entrance.
"Found it," Ronon smirked at them, leaning against the moss-covered stone and looking like he'd been waiting there a hell of a lot longer than a few minutes.
When the kid stumbled to a stop, arms out as if to push open the doors, they both lunged forward to stop him. "Uh-uh," He said firmly, yanking the kid back and shoving him at Ronon, "No. Experts only - and I don't care how many of your swooning, wine-addled friends have already been here."
Ronon snorted above the kid's protests, but he was done wagging his finger at the kid and already taking out his LSD. Sure enough, it had the same dispersion of energy as the statue, which was incredibly strange, given how many trees were shadowing the surrounding area. So, not the sunlight.
That meant a power source, and something associated with the Ancients was usually powered by some form of ZPM. Ordinarily that would excite him, but something about the promise of going through one's dreams sounded ominous, especially with what the anthropologists regularly sent him reports on just for findings in Atlantis. Pursing his lips, he picked his way in a careful circle around the lump of earth that looked too similar to grave sites he'd seen on other planets, carefully recording a map of energy fluctuations.
Sure enough, the readings were the strongest at the door, and curiously a close second was directly overhead. Ronon and the kid followed him when he walked back to the top of the mound, watching nearby as he took out another scanner for more mundane technology readings.
Whatever was going on in this place, it didn't make a lot of sense to him. The hertz readings were low, something he remembered from the few brain scans taken of him when he was shocked by that ascension device in Atlantis. Not quite, but… close.
"Are we gonna go in?" Ronon asked, eyes tracking him warily. The kid nearby was fidgeting, and oddly it brought up some fond reminiscing of some of his younger scientists, too awed by the grand disposition of Atlantis to really dig in and study it. Ronon caught the way he suppressed a smile, shaking his head at him despite the way he let the kid discretely huddle closer.
Thoughts like that preoccupying him, he compared the two scanners' outputs, trying to puzzle out the ambient noise from the ZPM readings. Was the ZPM inside hooked up to a machine that could imitate signals that easily mimicked neurological life-signs? Or something else, similar to the biological labs he and Carson had found in the beginning of the expedition's stay on Atlantis? Either way, it was discomfiting, and he wasn't inclined to poke the hornet's nest.
But those suppositions were dashed when the team radio buzzed in his ear, "McKay, Ronon, what's up?"
He exchanged a glance with Ronon, who shrugged and started walking off the small-ish hill, making both of them follow him back to the entrance. "Found a thing," Ronon said succinctly, "McKay's checking it out."
Sheppard's response was prompt, "Need any back-up?"
Which meant Sheppard and Teyla were already on their way there, and he rolled his eyes along with Ronon as he answered Sheppard's question, "Apparently the local courtship ritual involves getting drunk and walking in circles. There's something with ZPM signatures here, but we haven't entered the cave yet."
Ronon shushed the kid's protests so they could hear Sheppard respond, voice not as crisp as it would have been on Atlantis, boosted by the city's internal communications systems, "Stay by the entrance and get what readings you can. Me and Teyla are gonna be there in a minute."
He nodded along instinctively, remembering at the last minute to verbalize that, "Yes, yes, hurry up, this looks interesting."
Looking back at Ronon to see the suppressed snicker was pointless, so he focused instead on trying to read two screens at once. There didn't seem - yet - to be any pattern to the various signals, and he frowned to himself, slowly beginning to walk in circles around the mound again.
Whatever was there, the background radiation levels barely fluctuated, which meant that whatever was inside this, likely, Ancient-created cave was in incredibly good shape. He'd gotten worse readings on Atlantis itself, especially in the previously-damaged areas. There wasn't even any signs of the concerning radiation, or anything that would indicate cracked or otherwise broken circuitry or crystals.
Hm. At least not from out here. He looked up, scanning the trees and brush around them. Still no Sheppard.
"Do you think he got lost again?" He muttered, mostly to himself, even if he was gratified by Ronon's amused snort.
"Teyla's with him," Which, well, was accurate. And they also had a local guide - and Ronon deliberately cracking a few branches on the way here. Teyla would find them in a jiffy.
Fiddling with the sensors, he debated taking out a PowerBar while they waited. Ronon, meanwhile, had settled down on a conveniently-placed boulder a short distance from the cave entrance, which he figured was enough indication that they had some time to kill. The metallic crackling of the wrapper being torn open was a satisfying enough distraction, at least, and he made a pleased noise at the taste of chocolate and peanut butter.
Ordinarily, waiting was something he could deal with, especially when another member of his team was around when they were outside of Atlantis (and sometimes even within the city). He wouldn't tell them that, of course, overtly-inflated egos about their own craftiness… but having others around to keep watch was, on occasion, appreciated. Ronon glanced at him, and he pretended to be absorbed in PowerBar and scanners both, in case that mind-reading thing wasn't a Teyla exclusive.
They didn't have to wait long - only about one and a half PowerBars into their little break - when all of them looked up at the sound of Sheppard making his way to them, on the heels of Teyla and their group's guide. Charmingly handsome pilot Sheppard may be, stealthy the man was not. Exchanging looks with Teyla and Ronon at the way Sheppard cursed at a rock Ronon had upturned, they tacitly agreed to return to placid team member dynamics when the colonel looked back at them.
"Alright guys," Sheppard said, dusting his hands off with a couple good smacks on his thighs, "What do we have here?"
He looked at Ronon, and Ronon looked at him - decision made, Ronon shoved forward the kid to answer for them, who did so with only a little bit of a stink eye in their direction.
"Here is the shrine to Dorma," Their guide stated, puffing up and attempting grand gestures now that there was a new audience to impress, "She guides you through your dreams, that you may find what you're looking for."
Raising an eyebrow at the deliberate omission, he sighed when Sheppard made a curious face at him, "And also marriage."
Now both of Sheppard's eyebrows were up, and so were Teyla's as she stepped forward, "Do you mean that this is a traditional location for couples to marry?"
The kid looked a little abashed, which was understandable, because that was a lot of people's reactions when Teyla was focused on someone, "Uhm. No. Rather, uh- this is where you may dream under the watch of Dorma, and if you are meant to wed, then you shall see your beloved in your dreams. Many marry within a year."
He hadn't expected Teyla's expression to acquire that complicated little nuance he often associated with Troi or T'pol when they were meeting the society of the week, and he shifted uneasily at the sight, wondering what it was Teyla was about to say.
"And what of those that do not dream of their beloved?" Teyla asked, in a tone that wasn't quite censoring but also wasn't quite curious, "Or those that have already met their beloved?"
And there was something he could pick up on: Or lost their beloved? With how the Wraith were a common denominator in this galaxy, and how indiscriminately they tore apart families in order to feed, he was honestly surprised there wasn't more to this lore. But then again, the logs in Atlantis of this gate address were precisely why they were here - it wasn't quite like M7G-677, but evidence of some protective devices with undeniable strange energy signatures was worth checking out.
Perhaps if he found something useful here, he could find a way to better maintain the shield. Frowning to himself, he turned back to the entry way, shadowed as it was by the thin overhang of stone similar to the statue they had first found. No sense of doom overwhelmed him, which was about as sure as he could be that nothing was supposed to be amiss.
"Whatcha doin' there, McKay?" Sheppard called out.
"Hmm," He stretched a hand out, letting his fingers drift along the edges of the entry. It was noticeably warm to the touch, which he supposed would have been a welcome refuge for drunk teenagers in the middle of the night, and the LSD indicated a faint degree of radiation that would have translated as luminosity - maybe even faint enough to see, "Curious, mostly."
Everyone shuffled closer to him, which he could tell mostly by the reduction in sunlight and the vaguely looming quality of his team mates. Roundly ignoring it, he adjusted some parameters on his scanners, holding them up in an awkward grip so he could figure out where the opening mechanism of the door was. Either it opened down the middle, or off to one of the sides-
Or perhaps it was simply a strong hologram, as his hand slipped past the edge and a vaguely familiar sucking feeling pulled him through the entry. He barely had time to yelp, and the hands at his back could only slip across his tac vest as he stumbled into blinding darkness.
The breath he sucked in was loud, and he shut his eyes on instinct, curling the scanners closer and fumbling at the pockets of his vest for a torch. He couldn't hear anything, not even the static of an interrupted transmission from the teams' radios in his ear - it was that, more than anything else, which made dread settle icily in his gut.
Ohhhhhh no, He thought to himself, the bolt of fear that ran through him convincing him to be as silent as possible. What conclusions he could come up with were dour, ranging from teleportation to a broken lab from some Ancient to- to- to things he didn't want to think about.
Somehow or another, his numb fingers found the little torch everyone was issued with their field kit, and he clutched the scanners to his chest to turn the light on.
What he discovered shocked him enough that he almost wanted to turn it right back off. The same stone as the statue and the entryway, but smooth and all-encompassing, radiating a warmth he couldn't tell if it was artificial. It abruptly reminded him how obsessed Ancients were with ascending, and that tremble of fear he was attempting to suppress roared back, making the thin circle of light shake in his hand.
He whirled around in a circle, attempting to find the entry - or exit, rather. But while he could see the architectural markings of it, there was only a convex shaping of stone, with no indication of any mechanism whatsoever.
"Fuck," He whispered, voice echoing oddly in the silence. When he also realized that his voice was probably the last to be heard here since that long-ago person who ascended - because if teenagers regularly fell into here, the town would know something about this place - he swallowed dryly, echoing his sentiment, "Fuck."
Looking down, he could see no traps. Only an ordinary floor, one that wouldn't have looked out of place in some of the very abandoned places of Atlantis. It provided him with little in the way of creature comforts, especially with the lack of mentally-interactive components that all gene carriers had become accustomed to while living in the city, that gave them such comforts as opening doors and adjusting lights.
His heart tripped in his chest, and he sucked in a breath, flinching at the sound and the lack of appropriate echo in a chamber this well-shaped. Were it not for the situation, he would have loved to figure out how they constructed noise-dampening here, but as it were he could only focus on approaching the door.
The closer he got, the stronger the feeling of doom. He glanced up, wondering if the place was booby-trapped. How the hell did people get out of here? He wondered, finding nothing as he moved the torch in an arch to study the doorway, This can't possibly be a crypt, there would have been a- a podium, or something, here.
Dizziness crept over him, slowly making him aware of darkness spotting his vision outside the boundaries of his singular light source. He sucked in a breath, and then another, wondering with a muted sense of panic why it was so difficult to do.
When he looked back up at the keystone of the entry - and what a ridiculous thing, in Ancient architecture, he thought - the last thing he saw was some dark, round thing pounce upon his heart.
-
Consciousness filtered in bits and pieces, a bucket of water dredging sand up from beneath the waves. It was light, and that was unusual, but the exact reasons escaped him. He felt weightless, and that, too, escaped his attention on why such a detail was important to note.
Thus he drifted, one iota of information fed to him an eon at a time. It was, in a way, peaceful, but as he had nothing to compare it to, it was the most peaceful thing he could remember. As if he were wrapped up in some vaguely pleasant dream, caught between one scene and the next.
But the next thing-
The next thing he heard was a scream, heart-wrenching and sinking his heart back down to wherever his mind was.
-
He only knew something had occurred by the faint sense that he was missing something, and so attempted to peel his eyes open to see what it was he needed to know.
This was impossible, and frustrated him, and stoked a minuscule thread of fear into his heart - a feeling that didn't quite connect, which only made it stronger. He struggled against it, uncertain of how to proceed in this instinctive lashing of anger, and was propelled into sight.
What he observed shocked him. Mostly, though, that he was seeing without his eyes, and when he attempted to speak, he was likewise stalled on this ability. He swallowed - or believed it did - the ensuing panic down, and looked around.
Cold metal, familiar but not what he last remembered. What did he last remember? Hmm. Sunlight, and warmth. This- this room, it was anything but, as much as it assuaged some nuance of his current location. Steel. Yes, that sounded correct, and the following thought, We had that brought in on the Daedalus.
Easy to clean, was the next thought, and then, Sterile.
Yes, sterile he believed, sight catching on the multiple doors around him, an instinctive reaction he couldn't discern the source of. Most of them were square, and covering a wall, with large hooks - no, not hooks, latches - over them. A door handle.
That sounded right. He nodded, ignoring the disconnection of it for later assessment, and tried to move, wanting to reach one of the doors. But that didn't seem to work, so he looked down.
And saw himself. Or at least, he was reasonably certain it was himself. It looked familiar enough, the way he thought recognizing one's own body ought to be an instinctual sort of familiarity. There was- was a vest, with many pockets, which nearly blended into the black jacket and pants.
Now why would I wear that? He thought to himself, puzzled at the sight, Not enough colour in that at all.
Just as his mind was beginning to drift off into the vagaries of fashion, which somewhere in his mind sounded ridiculous and was pinned as a panic response, he heard a swoosh. Well. As much as he could hear a swoosh at all, given that he seemed to be temporarily - mostly? - divested from his body.
That particular little garden trail abruptly cut off at the sight of people filing into the strange, sterile, cold metal room. Some were garbed in a robe that looked dismally thin, some in the same black clothing he was in, and another- she looked important, and sad, and nodding in all the right places.
Elizabeth. A name, at least, he could pin.
Almost as if he had spoken aloud, this woman in her red shirt and red-accented jacket - something he found himself looking at with attentive interest for its distinctiveness - looked right at him.
Or close enough. She was looking at his body, lips pursed together and arms crossed. He had a vague sense memory of having done the same, but uncertain as to when, and wanted to mimic the posture despite… well, despite being inconvenienced of corporeality. Perhaps these people were here to fix this?
In which case, he needed to get their attention. How the bullocks he was going to accomplish this, he had no idea.
Regardless of this fact, he appeared - his body, again, rather - to be the center of attention, anyway, with everyone drifting closer at the cue of one of the robed people.
Hmm. The hat looked a little silly, he believed. What was the point of wearing a hat covering your face, if you just cut out a hole and stuck- stuck something in the middle? He made a disgruntled noise, and the main robed person flinched.
"C'mon," One of the others said, too tall to be believable but somehow also unaffected by the cold everyone seemed to be experiencing, squeezing the robed-person's shoulder, "We need to know."
"Right, right, yes," And that voice was also familiar. How many of these people did he know? All of a sudden, he wanted all of them to speak, to hear their voices, to reminisce over him. How did he know them? How did they know him? The urge to reach out was incredible, but out of the robed man's fear from a moment earlier, he settled down with intense curiosity.
The other robed person - a woman? He squinted, then nodded to himself. Blonde, but that was all he could tell, held up a… thing. Not for writing, but tapping, and colourful, bringing up images. Fascinating.
"As far as we can tell," The woman stated, voice warbled through the hat… hat thing? Irrelevant, he determined, listening more closely despite the continual shivers from the man, "When the device attached to his chest, he died instantly. The head injury was likely postmortem, given the sluggish rate of bleed and how cold the chamber was when you were able to retrieve him."
Huh? He blinked, But I'm right here!
If he were dead, certainly, wouldn't he have moved on? Or some such nonsense he was beginning to believe he never understood in the first place. Not this… this halfway mode of existence, tied to a body he couldn't use, able to see and hear but not reach or speak or touch.
That thought brought a heaviness onto his chest, and a feeling of dread underneath it. He blinked several times, looking away. It seemed to be the general reaction to those words, because when he was able to look back again, some still had their eyes closed, as if in pain.
"We, ah," The robed man said, "We havena, yet, found out why. Insofar as your reports from local investigation could concur, this seems to have been a complete happenstance. We canna even recognize the device, as it doesn't respond to our scanners, nor are we able to. Well. Remove it."
One of the men, in black, put a hand over his mouth. It didn't quite look like nausea, but he didn't think anger and nausea would mix, even if it settled so easily on this man's expression. A part of him felt muddled at the sight, the urge to reach out snapping at his thoughts.
Not that he would be able to soothe anyone in this state, much less himself. That bit of dread was lodged firmly over where his heart would be, pulsing as if alive the way he wasn't. Even the beat of it sounded woefully familiar, a rhythm he had heard his entire life if he could just place it.
"You're not cutting it off," The man in all-black said, firm and angry and somehow backed by so much miserable vulnerability that he understood, now, why the other had a hand over his mouth. Too many emotions at once, and fragile ones, "You're not, he- no."
"John," Someone said, and this was another woman, her expression soft and worried. He could only see comfort from this woman, a refuge of solidarity, and this was how she behaved, shoring up the leaking bits of this man - John! Finally, a name! - with a hand on his arm, "You are his emergency contact, but we may have little other choice if we must investigate the cause of his death."
He heard a strangled noise, and he was shocked to hear that it was from more than one person, seeing the robed man and another, that looked awfully familiar with those… glasses, yes, glasses and a frowning face.
"Do we not use another scanner for this?" That man asked, looking at all of them, eyes passing right over him, "I could, ah, we have Rodney's data from the scanners he brought with him, and it is still recording data. We have only plugged it into some computers to extract the information."
The man, John, turned to this man with a determined look on his face, "I think it would be best to review everything first, before-" John licked his lips, glancing at… well, his body, not him, before continuing to speak, "Before we, uh, investigate other avenues."
He thought, Just in case, and by the nodding of the others, he wasn't entirely certain if it was only him thinking that. At any rate, John seemed to be the one making decisions around here, at least for this, and it settled something in him that echoed with the strange noise he kept hearing in the background. The rapid th-thump was slowing to a regular, relaxed beat.
It seemed to be something that picked up on the spectacled man's radar - and that word didn't sound quite right, but close enough, because he looked down at whatever was in his hands and made a noise that had the others lurching toward him with concern on their faces.
He waved them off save one, gripping the forearm of the robed man with a white-knuckled grip. Both peered at the thing (and how irritating, he felt like he ought to know what it was!) and made those shaky, uncertain noises again. "Well, ah," The man said, leaning into the other, "It seems like… like we have an agreement to investigate the scanners first."
Everyone froze, even him, that persistent noise in the back of his mind speeding up in an irregular rhythm. It reminded him of anxious anticipation, and the man adjusted his glasses with rapidly blinking eyes, looking up around the room and settling somewhere where he - he him, not the body lying on the metal slab - was, "Rodney?"
Rodney. Yeah, that sounded like him.
It was too bad that was the last thing he remembered before succumbing to darkness again.
-
He didn't know what to think of all of this. Running a hand through his hair, he leaned against the wall, only a few steps outside of what Carson had quickly - unfortunately - established as the expedition's morgue.
Where Rodney laid, dead to the world save for some device suckered onto his chest like some horror movie monster and replicating his heartbeat as if it were the one live thing left of his friend. He pressed a hand against his mouth, unwilling to let what would assuredly be concerning noises leak out where everyone would be able to hear it.
If Radek hadn't suggested what he did… It didn't bear thinking about, his stomach roiling already. He had been involved in enough paperwork, long before Atlantis, of what to do with fallen soldiers and civilians. What doctors demanded and the reports they needed to make, even if the idea of an autopsy and all its clinical frills disgusted him on a visceral level. Maybe it was because it was Rodney, or that he couldn't shake the afterthought of an image out of his head that Rodney would simply wake up.
Either way, what he wanted didn't matter as much as finding out the cause of Rodney's death, nor the mysteries behind the device attached to his friend's body that was eerily good at mimicking a live, responsive heartbeat. At multiple times in his life, he had wished for nothing more than to hear just that, under his own ear, and it felt like a unique twist of cruelty now when Rodney didn't come with it.
He blinked rapidly, wanting heartily to press his hands over his eyes to stave off the tears, only the thought that someone would see him like that stopping him. If nothing else, his team - the rest of it - was easily as agonized as he was, if not more. Rodney was, despite his myriad faults, the most innocent of them, still a rookie with a firearm and nearly always coddled into the center of the team when they were in an unknown, potentially dangerous situation.
A civilian. Even if there were more and more days Rodney felt like a brother-in-arms, more creative with his technical expertise than his slowly-accumulating martial prowess. Accumulated, he corrected himself, the strict reminder to use the past tense stinging more than it ought. All of Rodney's skills - the man they had gotten to know - had reached an endpoint, a maximum.
The echo of Rodney's heartbeat reverberated in his ears, carried over by an unknown, likely Ancient mechanical device.
He swore, vehemently, to himself. It wasn't a sound that buried Rodney, and he wasn't sure he wanted it to.
-
The sensation of coming to was more familiar this time, if slightly off to one side, although if he took the time to make suppositions, the mentioned side would be rather above him. Or behind? He wasn't sure.
A lack of anything to ground himself made the border of sleep and wakefulness hazy, only circumstantial definitions available to his ken.
He wanted to groan, but wasn't sure how to do that, either, nor even a fixed interpretation of what groaning was. It was a vexing enough puzzle that his memories were slow to approach him, swimming around and out of order, uneager to settle where he could catch them.
John.
Now that, that was familiar. An image of something black - a lot of black, really, but first hair and then... then something broad, an expanse of space his mind lingered upon. The disjointed sight was nevertheless soothing, a sense of safety carried with it.
John?
John. That was a name, he could tell that now. A name to a... he felt irritation brew up, bubbling close to the surface. Name to a what?
Green-brown-... stone. No, not stone, but like it. Warm, sunlit, teasing. He felt a lurch, remembered that it came with a sound, and, oh, that was him, wasn't it? That pattering and unsteady rhythm, wobbling at this John and the sparse recollections of him.
But this seemed important, and he pushed against the pressure ahead of him, wanting to know more. Something sparking and sharp rebutted him, and he faltered, clinging to these faint images to bolster him.
Eventually, a crack was found, enough for him to find some leverage. He wasn't absolutely certain what to do after this, but the sense of urgency stayed with him, prodding him forward into picking something.
Momentum was difficult, and he doubled his efforts against whatever it was stalling him.
The sharpness returned, as strong as his efforts to proceed, reverberating out from the core of him with stinging pain that stole his determination from him. It almost unseated him, almost left him swirling alone in the eddies of mindlessness.
But something lingered, just different enough that it grew brighter in his awareness, hazy and indistinguishable from the shadows. Curiosity as much as a keenness to latch on to a distraction drove him forth, a cord of attention that was delicate and warming the nearer he was.
Such effort was draining, loosening his grip with washes of fatigue. The little stone of something different nevertheless remained, seeming stubborn to his blunted senses. It was difficult to grab it, but he tightened his grip, anyway.
Warmth permeated him, comfortable and soothing. It eased some of the last of his struggle, and he roused to wakefulness, coming to the sight of a lot of black and sombre green stone.
John. Near him, hands clasped. It didn't matter that John wasn't looking at him, only that he was nearby. Some of the residual fear leached away as he heard the noises around him more clearly. I found you. How are you?
Nobody heard him, as much as he tried to assuage the ache that it was merely a matter of effort, rather than some pervasive, inhibitory force. It didn't stop him from trying again, this time compelled by the internal pressure of desperation, something - anything - to confront the aching look on John's face that had him shoving against that invisible barrier he seemed to be wrapped up in.
Nothing seemed to help, and he watched wearily as John sighed, the hands clasped behind his back loosening their hold enough to soothe himself, thumb pressing against thumb in a repetitive, pensive manner. The sight struck something familiar in him, a deep-seated sort of pain that shook the foundations of his- his he didn't know, but it felt like an imprisonment, watching John squeeze his eyes shut as tightly as he squeezed at his own hands.
He could hardly bear witness to the ragged inhale, how it wavered wetly and stuttered on its exhale. Pain. Oh, and yes, a lot of it, nearly enough to be tangible. Pain at what, he wasn't entirely certain, only that his discomfort with the sight prickled at him. No, no no, please don't.
"Rodney," John said, electrifying despite the bereaved tone. He froze, wanting to twitch but knowing there was nothing to serve the instinct, no body nor threat to abide by, pinned in place only by the shock of hearing his name - one he so recently learned - re-learned? - from a person whose presence tugged at him by mere proximity, "Rodney, how could you?"
Guilt enveloped him, an accustomed weight he was unsurprised by, watching as John struggled for composure in front of his body, the other's hands covering his face. The sight reared up an echo, scratching at the underpinnings of his memory and ushering forward something looking nearly like this. He couldn't blink, not really, and the overlaid image of- of John looking a little different, less craggly and aged like he did now, hands over his face like now, curled over broken sobs driven by the grief of losing others.
Oh. A thin sliver of his mind acknowledged that they had, then, known each other for a while, long enough for time to slip in the cracks and show up on their skin, to reflect in their hair. The rest of him, that could rail against this invisible barrier, wanted nothing more than to reach out, to hush and shush, to thread fingers through John's hair and guard the grief that only showed itself on occasion.
A blipping noise pierced through the haze, startling John into dropping his hands from his now-reddened face. The man looked a little wild-eyed, tracking the source of the sound and drawing his attention along with the decisively pointed finger. It hurt a little, almost, to look at, like the sun. He pauses, digesting this information as John points emphatically to some strange, oval device, a pulsing red hue to its light that disconcerted him. A memory flitted past him, Show me the solar system.
It was almost too intangible to grasp, but the noise thumping in the background seemed also to be audible to John, whose face crumpled, aimlessly waving a finger at the thing, "And you- you have no right to sound like him. Dammit, none at all."
That- that didn't make any sense. And it stuck out, too, like waving a little- something, and he wanted to vent his frustration, the lack of context stealing sense from him. It, apparently, showed itself as a reverberation, no longer a background noise, but rather an extension of himself that was removed from his own reach. John stood stock still, the glittering of his eyes drying to something deeper, more cutting in its unknown depths of nuance.
John leaning forward, carefully and slowly, to speak over him, was only eclipsed by the lack of perspective. If he could figure out how to make John look at him- or, rather that he him and body him were one and the same - he would have assuredly done more than watch over John, the tufts of black hair bleeding into the black clothing as the man spoke to, well, him.
"You're going to let him go," John said, and the firm tone was nearly brittle, hands balled up so tightly he could see the whites on John's knuckles, "Let him go. He-"
Peering down at John, listening to the hitch of breath that almost blended into the thudding noise that picked up, minutely, pace, he watched as John composed himself into a rictus of authority, "He's not yours. Give him back to me."
He didn't get a response, but something seemed to reach out regardless, the tone of John's voice shifting to something softer as he continued speaking over the low noise that echoed back to both of them, "Rodney..." John brought a hand up, covering his mouth as his eyes slid shut, a furrow in the man's brow forming alongside the deepening creases at the edges of his eyes. A few tense, watchful moments later, John sighed, shaking his head as his hand fell back to his side, "You're- you were a good man, Rodney, don't- don't let anyone tell you otherwise."
The thumping noise seemed to exist in simultaneity with John's breathing, a nearly regular in-and-out that stuttered only a little bit. He watched, lost, as John stared at his body with an expression deadened into neutrality, before the man blinked a few times and then made an about-face.
John left, and left him there.
-
The air felt a little wobbly, or perhaps that was just him. It was only now that he could feel an encroaching numbness, still staring at the door John left through.
John didn't come back, nor did any of the precious few others that he had seen earlier. His thoughts ground to a stop, needing to process that, perhaps, he was alone. Another feeling followed, something his mind automatically labelled as "sour", with the flicker of an overlaid image following it, acrid misery that he hadn’t had a choice but to allow.
He turned around, wrenching himself away from the sight of the lone, unused door. The rest of the room - which wasn't much - was, outside of his body lying on something the same colour as everything else, bare and a little boring. What colour there was had dimmed after John left, everything a wash of monotone with only a few solitary lights at the edges of the room.
Only him, and grey, and what he was now speculating was a pervasive chill that settled upon every surface and lingering in the air.
Abruptly, the sourness rose up, overwhelming with its contrasting heat. The thumping noise grew more insistent, easily matching the tumultuous thoughts racing over him in a stampede of emotions.
He turned and turned, until he was dizzy with it. The dark, gloomy grey was his companion, now that John had left - and was likely not to come back. No, He thought, frantic, No no nonono-
But there was no "yes", nothing to affirm outside the easily confirmed. John- John, wait!
He struggled, beating against the edges of his cage, now urgent in his efforts to escape. Where was John? He didn't know, didn't know anything beyond this room, but John was not here, was outside, and the pressure of remaining as he was acted as an equal force upon him. It whispered, almost, grey fading at the edges into black, to fall down, to release his efforts unto the ether, where a thin, minuscule prick of light could be found.
But that light, as tempting as its promise was of certain blindness to his present circumstance, was not John. John brought his own light, a whole room's worth, and that was far more enticing than a slim chance of encompassing comfort.
The ills of John's pain, so deftly hidden by solitude, was worth the jagged edges, if it meant that there was John, near him. He braced himself, an action that stumbled the singular beat of noise pressing back at him, and threw himself against the darkness.
-
Waking was a pain, both literal and metaphorical. He groaned before he knew it was something he could do, an automatic action that had him also curling up on himself.
It was familiarly unfamiliar, long lines of achiness sparking in warning, something heavy on him that pulled and stuck. He swatted at it clumsily, a grasping slap that hurt his hand as much as his chest.
"Ow?" He muttered roughly, throat sticking dryly and making him cough. The next breath was a struggle, chest expanding as he hacked and wheezed.
His thoughts were sluggish, senses mainly preoccupied by controlling his lungs and cringing at the lack of feeling in his extremities. The protests of his body piled up, knees the loudest, and he shifted, only realizing that the surface he occupied had strict dimensions when he fell off of it.
That pain was much louder, easily shaking off the ones before it with a loud clang upon the ground. He clutched at his head, grimacing at the stickiness he felt. Whatever it was, it was unimportant, only the beating tattoo inside his head - matched, unfortunately, by the beating tattoo outside his head - going John, John, John of the only notable relevance.
It pushed him to his feet, as shaking as they were, and he clutched at that despicably grey thing that he had fallen off of, fingers sticking and skipping against the cold metal as he heaved himself up. His stomach roiled, and he gasped around it, the heaviness on his chest heavier around the incipient taste of acid. He swallowed, pressing a hand against his stomach in an urge to quell the sensation.
His heart clenched around a sharp pain, like needles perforating the centre of his chest resolving itself as quickly as it struck him, and a large weight fell, rather literally, off of his chest. It landed with a clatter on the cold metal before him, and with its descent came knowledge slamming into his mind, a full recollection of memories that almost threatened to completely overwrite what he had thus far- then far- experienced.
He groaned again, head thunking against the metal and letting the coolness evaporate some of the headache away, eyes squeezed tightly enough to see starbursts as the full depth of his life settled back into the grooves of his brain. The roiling nausea fluctuated, and he swallowed repeatedly, wishing for some water.
Blinking a couple of times, he remembered that the morgue did indeed have a functioning sink, replete with a working faucet, and as much as he wanted to grimace about using it, potable water of any kind was its own enchantment. He sucked in a breath, attempting to quell both the pain and the accoutrements of it, and stumbled to the nearby sink, clumsily turning on the faucet to bring handful after handful of water to his mouth.
His hand-eye coordination was still shot to hell, and a fair amount of water went down his chin. It was just as well, as he ran a wet hand over his face, reveling in the feeling despite the cold cutting through the pleasure of his renewed liveliness. Grappling blindly by the sink, he found the roll of paper towels that Carson kept nearby, getting most of the roll wet but managing a few sheets to dry his face off with.
Feeling a little more present after his impromptu ablution, he leaned against the sink, disjointed thoughts still dusted up in the vigour of his reawakening. They were taking too long to settle, but outside of the incessant, thumping need to find John, he had to sort out- sort out something, John was still too large of a priority to consider much else outside of it.
He shivered, and remembered clothing was something to do. To wear. Nodding to himself, he wondered how the hell he would do that, blinking wearily around the room. Right. Carson would- should have some scrubs around. Piece of cake.
Which, luckily for him when he made his way to the clothing locker, wasn't locked. He vaguely recalled some protocol around that, but dismissed it as an idle thumb-twiddling for later, grabbing an extra lab coat after dressing himself with frustratingly weakened hands and swaddling the device in it, setting it back down onto his assigned morgue table and sliding the tray back into the wall. A crude containment method, but insofar as he could recall, there probably wasn't even any dead bodies in here.
Outside of himself, of course, but given that he had to deal with such mortal concerns as the resumption of his bad back - not helped in the slightest by his temporary death - and the unpleasant lack of shoes, he concluded that he was probably alive. The real test would be to see if he could leave the room.
Swallowing in apprehension, he approached the door cautiously. The overlapping memory of John leaving through there without so much as a backwards glance was perturbing, so the door silently swooshing open like it usually did for him made his shoulders sag in relief.
Time to find John.
-
A great many people he found, while blatantly shocked at his appearance, were not John. He found this vexing, and ignored the various responses, from gap-mouthed shock to attempts to stop him, which he thwarted with irritated slaps of his hand as he found the nearest transporter. It was, unfortunately for his progress, rather a hazard of keeping the morgue close enough to a common through-way in the city, as they had need of the place more than once. There were other back-up rooms, he remembered grimly, for when they simply had too many dead.
His clearance must not have been pulled yet from the system, as he was able to reach the residential area with relative ease. The brief, compressive sense of vertigo, almost like a miniature wormhole, felt distinctly like home, if at the moment too similar to his experience with whatever device it was that had killed and then subsequently reanimated him. He quickly exited the transporter as soon as the doors opened, keeping up the same pace as he strode toward John's quarters.
The way had long ago been memorized, John leading him there when their conversations kept them up later than the rest of the expedition, or the rare quiet hours between simulations and observing the experiments of others. He counted the doors to John's silently, a sense of accomplishment settling over him as he waved his hand over the door latch, a quiet noise of acknowledgment coming from the door as he passed through its barrier.
It was dark - how dark, how long, that he didn't know, only that John was laid fast asleep in bed. The lump of a profile, only partly covered with a thin sheet, was still breathing deeply, and even pace granted from the room's lights remaining dark, allowing him to approach undisturbed. For a moment, he could only stare, John's sleep-slackened face still holding the edge of distress, an echo of what he had seen earlier.
More than anything, that was what had him reaching out, resting his hand as gently as he could manage over John's outstretched own, where it laid in a loose fist beside the pillow. It brought about a sense of peace, to feel that John was alive and only slumbering, unharmed outside of his grief. He hoped that it would, this time, abate enough for him to apologize and possibly slake just a touch of the guilt he felt for entering that temple without waiting for John's say-so.
His hand twitched over John's, and that was enough to rouse the other man, a full-body jerk that had John nearly sitting up in bed in an instinctive panic. The second they locked eyes was immediately apparent, even from the distance where he had shuffled away to in order to avoid John headbutting him on accident.
John's eyes were wide, even in the dim light of the city lights filtering through the window. For a tense moment, they just stared at each other, and when he cleared his throat to speak, John uttered, with the same devout fear as any hardline Catholic, "Jesus Christ."
What he then watched was John slumping back onto the bed out of shock, dead to the world as he was probably twenty minutes ago.
"Ah, hell," He sighed.
-
John waking up a second time, this time warily, as if he didn't trust his surroundings - a perfectly understandable sentiment, if he did say so himself - landed them in a synonym of a few moments earlier. He sighed as John tensed up again, hand automatically reaching for a pistol that had already been removed before bed.
"Hi," He said, raising an eyebrow from where he sat in the rolling chair appropriated from John's equally minuscule desk. It was still shit for his back, but it was better than standing around awkwardly and waiting to see if John would wake up in an appreciable amount of time.
The bewildered look was back, and he shook his head, waving at John. After a long beat, John didn't stop looking bewildered, but raised a hand of his own and waved back. He felt a rush of fondness at the ridiculousness, unable to stop the smile from stretching across his face.
Clearing his throat again, and waiting out the tense and release of John remembering he had passed out from shock, he raised a brow, "Were you really going to try and shoot a ghost?"
John's face, which had been shifting from 'what in damn hell is this' to cautious assessment, dropped into bereavement in two seconds flat, "So I'm hallucinating you, then. Great."
"Well," He glanced at the bedside clock. Three AM. Hm, "No. And I'm not a ghost. Or a revenant. Or whatever."
He got a raised eyebrow of John's own back, and he shrugged, eye twitching at the spasm of his back, "And I'm supposed to believe you."
Oh, for the love of- "Just don't pinch me," He complained, already anticipating that John would want some sort of physical proof and trying to deescalate from 'probably going to shoot me, anyway' to 'pinch me to see if I'm dreaming' to… something marginally less violent, "I bruise easily."
John did get out of his bed for that one, ignoring his shoes - and not tripping over them, curiously, for once - and keeping his eyes locked on him as he stalked forward. Like he was a mission, or something equally unflattering. But he tilted his head up, needing to keep looking at John as much as John seemed to need to do the same with him.
When John raised a hand, it was so slow, and so cautious, that he felt worry crawling up his throat, "Hey, are you-"
A thumb settled at the corner of his mouth, stealing the words out of his mouth with a feather-light touch. He inhaled sharply, John's hand firmly reflexively against his cheek, and then his head was being tilted further up, and he was leaning back - just a touch, John's space filling what he vacated - eyes sliding shut as John kissed him.
Oh. His hands came up to reciprocate, kneading at John's shoulders and the black shirt covering them, Well. I like this much better.
"Missed you," He murmured, when John gave him a sliver of room to breathe between kisses, the words caught against their lips.
"Missed you," John replied, stamping another kiss on his mouth before pressing a gentler one to his forehead, the warmth of the gesture sinking into him just as much as the proximity of John, "Don't ever do that again, understand?"
He nodded reflexively, curling his fingers in John's shirt, breathing the familiar, comforting scent in, vestiges of Aqua Velva clinging to the other man’s skin, "Okay."
John sucked in a breath, drawing him out of the chair and bundling him close, arms tight around him, "Okay. Okay."
-
Author's Notes
Shout-out to @hylotelephiumfanfic for illustrating this fic! You can find their work here.
"In thermodynamics, nucleation is the first step in the formation of either a new thermodynamic phase or structure via self-assembly or self-organization within a substance or mixture. Nucleation is typically defined to be the process that determines how long an observer has to wait before the new phase or self-organized structure appears.
[…]
Nucleation is a common mechanism which generates first-order phase transitions, and it is the start of the process of forming a new thermodynamic phase. In contrast, new phases at continuous phase transitions start to form immediately.
Nucleation is often very sensitive to impurities in the system. These impurities may be too small to be seen by the naked eye, but still can control the rate of nucleation. Because of this, it is often important to distinguish between heterogeneous nucleation and homogeneous nucleation. Heterogeneous nucleation occurs at nucleation sites on surfaces in the system.[1] Homogeneous nucleation occurs away from a surface."
- Nucleation, Wikipedia
See also: “Jet Pack Blues” by Fall Out Boy, from the album American Beauty/American Psycho.
Dorma’s name is taken from the Latin dormīre, which means “to sleep” but also figuratively “to rest, be at ease, be inactive, be idle” (Numen, the Latin Lexicon). Yes, it was meant as a place for ascension, but also as a graveyard – the architectural features mimicked the Celtic (and also broadly Eurasian) tumulus (Wikipedia). As is common with canon, this was originally built by the Ancients, and its purpose had shifted over time as people forgot what it was meant for. Within the background lore for the fic, though, Dorma is also the name of the Ancient buried there, and the inventor of the device that attached itself to Rodney, which utilizes some Replicator-type parts. The device was meant to assist those on the path to ascension by mimicking the state of death, because it’s rather common to be afraid of dying, and the device was intended as a “try before you buy” sort of thing. Did it work? No, probably not, hence the plot.
Additionally, hashka liquor was written with respect to the Mongolian Airag, a fermented milk that’s also known as Kumys (mongolfood.info), which does have a little bit of naturally-occurring ethanol in it due to its fermentation process. Waving the magic plot-fixing wand, we can pretend hashka is a stronger version of airag, and the usual process for sweetening any type of yogurt is honey and/or spices, so by that logic, so would hashka, heated up the same way one would schnapps to infuse the additional flavourings.
Regarding John’s grief, I have this headcanon that John and Rodney have probably had a few moments of grieving in the same space as each other, because there’s a lot of events that would support this idea (the various dangers on Atlantis the least of it, including the Wraith siege and the events of the episode Hot Zone, where I imagined quite a few people died in an already small expedition). What’s a break-down or three between friends, eh? They already display a canonical habit of hanging out in John’s room, I imagine canon wouldn’t elaborate further on any other shared experiences between the two of them (so I did, hah).
As this fic was created for ficwip’s Fairy Tale Bang, I sourced two particular fairy tales, both from D. L. Ashliman’s list of different types of fairy tales/folklore. The first is “Nightmares”, and the second is “Revived from Apparent Death by a Grave-Robber”.
@ficwip Fairy Tale Bang Preview - Stargate: Atlantis, McShep, "Nucleation Point"
Restraining yet another sigh, he glanced up at his other team mates walking in front of them. It was long practice to only check that Teyla was in eyesight and doing well, but Ronon was a pal - and anyway, not paying nearly enough attention to him - so he let his eyes slide over Sheppard for a beat longer than usual. There were some benefits to taking up the team's six, buddy system or no.
Sheppard was, as usual, picturesque. He wore his uniform like he was made for it, or perhaps the clothes obligingly moulded themselves to what was probably a magazine-worthy frame. Frankly, he wouldn't know, too determined not to look in those infrequent opportunities in the group shower by the gear room, lest he reveal an expression that was, otherwise, carefully secreted away.
The life signs detector is only just starting to detect, and he switches his attention back to it, listening to the faint beeps as Teyla smoothly navigates them onto the correct deer path. With his attention thus re-occupied, he was better able to hear Teyla, her conversational, lecturing tone dropping his shoulders the longer he listened.
I'll be posting the full work soon! It'll be here on tumblr, as well as SquidgeWorld and Dreamwidth - @hylotelephiumfanfic is working with me as an artist, so there's extra things to be excited about!
Find the word in any WIP and share the sentence containing it. Reply, reblog, stick it in the tags, tag us in a new post, or keep it private. All fandoms, all ships, all writers welcome.
Didn't have a WIP already for this, so wrote down a 3-sentence fic for it. Stargate Atlantis, McShep:
He woke up to the feeling of hair brushing against his neck, slow, even breaths swirling over his chest. The effect was soporific, and he struggled to open his eyes against the weight of peaceful comfort. But the weight shifted, stretched against the length of his body, settling down with a contented noise, "Morning, Rodney," John mumbled against his shoulder, "Five more minutes."
Remember, do with it what you will...take it at face value, twist it into the sublime or the ridiculous, look it up in a dictionary or thesaurus and use an uncommon definition. 100-1000 words. And, if you need them, you can find the rules and FAQ here.
Post your results to the AO3 Collection and submit them here if you want. (See pinned post for instructions on how to submit.)
This challenge does not close, but the intent is to be weekly, so mind your calendars, please.
His hands hesitated over the keys. Everything had been already categorized, and programmed, and downloaded - seeming eons of work stabilized into an array of crystals that would be easily hidden in the hologram room's control core.
Once he uploaded this last file, it would be done. A copy of himself, pre-filled with answers and suppositions and conversation that could be rearranged to suit Sheppard's input, that ideally would be realistic enough to assuage Sheppard and draw some of that inevitable distress from the man. Unhappy news he had to give, but it would be news, and solutions.
The memory of Teyla's face flashed across his mind's eye, and his head bowed under the weight of his last remembrance of her. She had deserved better, from all of them. Sheppard would be the uniting factor, the key in the web of timelines that would- would make everything better.
He was only… a placeholder. The lagoon of expectations, untraversable without a suitable bridge. He sighed, and hit enter, watching the code scroll across the Atlantean screen as he stitched the bones of himself into the city.
It was all up to Sheppard, now. The man could certainly do a better job than he.
Sleep, wakefulness. These were not concepts for it, only the endless series of maintenance cycles. It was these that had slowed, internal chronometer estimating many, many skipped maintenances.
The change log was growing, only looked at after the person – files stating Elizabeth Weir – exited the stasis chamber. A subroutine had been entered into its core systems before Elizabeth Weir had entered stasis, prioritizing the chamber’s maintenance above the rest of the city. Oxygen could be fed into the areas designated as maintenance zones, but all else laid dormant until further commands could be issued.
Rarely did this happen, energy levels conserved nearly to disuse. Only the shield was kept active, constant feeds of information being sent from its sensors. Many parts of the extending arms were damaged, a long, long list of repairs that would need to be completed when there were inhabitants again.
And there would be new inhabitants. This was a certainty, despite its communications arrays being shut down when the lighting protocols were also removed from the power structure. One single address, that did not come from any known gate system, remained in constant checks against its security protocols. Only one address would be permitted to open the gate, with its eight-symbol string of unknown constellations.
Elizabeth Weir had drawn the address into the database, using the manual terminal registered to inhabitant Janus. There was no other additional information, such as power transmission values or other encryption protocols. Only two notes attached to the address: an approximate dial-in time, and that one such member of this group would be a descendant of the current – past – inhabitants.
The shield would never close on an inhabitant, that was a firm boundary in its programming. Other security measures were in place outside of the gate, but those, too, had been powered down to conserve energy.
Monitoring the axial tilt as it sunk, an infinitesimally small amount at a time, further into the ocean bed, it logged the data onto its core servers. Only Elizabeth Weir had authorization, now, outside of any born inhabitant. Janus had been thorough in locking away many parts of the database, inclusive of shutting down the internal networks for sharing different user databases in the many labs and other chambers.
One other authorization was available, though it was lacking in information. There was a name, Rodney McKay, as entered by Elizabeth Weir. Much data had been entered on this newest user, some steps further down on the authorization ladder. This was not a superuser, granted councilor-level access to all databases and systems, only critical systems.
An engineer, based on the series of access granted to this user. Over time, as Elizabeth Weir added more information to this profile, when the potentiae were cycled in the power chamber, although the information was not comparable to any known language in its database. But its linguistic analytics program was likewise removed from priority, as was all but the most critical of security systems.
This set of decisions was unusual, and had last occurred during its building phase, when multiple arms were still being added from the core. No building was occurring at present, and as the internal clock registered a new slate of systems diagnostics, it sunk further more into the silt.
-
Author's Notes
- "drip-feed", Wiktionary
There's one Latin word in here (potentiae), but as it's a canonical word used in reference to ZPMs, I figure an A/N and context clues define that well enough.
He had a week before they all left. It wasn't a lot of time, not really.
Waking up was familiar and comfortable. This in itself was not upsetting, but the qualities of this familiarity and state of comfort had him frowning before he even opened his eyes. Shifting where he lay, the lumpiness underneath him was immediately apparent.
This isn’t my bed, He thought muzzily, turning on his side. It led to him immediately falling off his couch, which informed him rather succinctly where he was. A quiet meow by his head was additional information, and he grimaced at the radiating pain in his back, and shoulder, and, ow, knee.
A rough tongue licking a curl at the edge of his hair made him sigh, and he reached the less-hurting arm out to give his cat a gentle pat. The carpet smelled a little musty, but it didn’t need a vacuum yet, so he continued to lay there and ponder when his landlord would replace the underfloor and whether he still ought to do a direct deposit for his rent.
Flexing his hand in Tabby’s fur, he thought about all the paperwork he had signed before flying back home to his apartment. It didn’t have that persistent chill of the Antarctic site, or the somewhat claustrophobic dampness of the SGC – in point of fact, the sunshine peeking through the window blinds was pleasantly warm, even if it did highlight his need to dust the feet of his coffee table.
Going to Atlantis… now there was a trip. He could feel his heart skip a beat in instinctive excitement, giving Tabby a long pet when she meowed in concern at him. Feeling cat breath on his face, he scooped her up, managing to get himself upright against the couch as he cuddled her against his chest. She immediately pressed herself against his shoulder, and while it was the one that caught the floor, he just enjoyed the sound of purring reverberating against him.
“Morning,” He said softly, feeling his eyes slide shut from jet lag and the precious sight of Tabby relaxing. Pressing a kiss to the top of her head, he murmured, “Or at least I think it’s morning. How long have I been sleeping, anyway?”
The purring got louder, and he let himself have some uninterrupted time to pet his cat. His knee was still aching in protest at the way he crossed his legs, and he scooted a little further down, letting the edge of the couch cradle his neck as he stretched his legs out under the coffee table. Tabby remained a limp noodle on him, only noticeably awake by the comforting feel of her purring.
“What am I going to do, huh?” He said to himself, blinking tiredly at the water stain that marked the corner between wall and ceiling. Somehow he had forgotten about that, because the absolute mess it made of his kitchen had – at least at the time – been unforgettable. Good thing those neighbors moved out already. Tabby flexed her paws against him, claws catching in his shirt as she idly kneaded against him, “I’m gonna have to leave you here. They won’t let me take you with me.”
And she was a brilliant cat, blissfully unaware of anything he was saying. It was for the best, probably. If they even successfully connected the wormhole to Atlantis, there was no saying how stable anything would be when they got there. Tabby was young, and scarcely two years of owning her – a good year of that while he was in Antarctica, no less – wouldn’t be any amount of time compared to how long she would live.
Besides, the sound of the gate dialing would probably scare her. He pressed another kiss to the top of her head, smiling against her fur when her ears twitched at the gesture. It didn’t stop him from doing it again, a familiar game they played whenever he was able to be home. Tabby stretched against him, and he was shocked once more at how big she’d gotten, no longer the cute little fuzzball he had seen when he’d been reassigned. He’d neatly missed watching her grow, and now he’d miss watching her grow old.
Tabby seemed to catch that subsuming wave of grief falling over him, because she twisted around in his grasp, looking up at him with wide eyes and letting him pet the soft fur of her stomach. Her paws patted at his face, meowing at him again when he clutched her close.
“You be good for the neighbor, okay?” He asked his cat, feeling a little silly but wanting, somehow, to convey these words. It was important. To him, at least. When he had to fly back to Colorado, he wouldn’t have the time to say a proper goodbye. Barely a week of time to settle his affairs, and he really wasn’t looking forward to closing out all of his utilities. Whatever happened with the expedition, he wasn’t going to look back.
He felt another meow against his cheek, where Tabby had pressed her own face against his. Maybe she did understand, or understood something. It had to be enough for him, and he squeezed his eyes shut where nobody could see, taking in a deep breath.
Forcing some cheerfulness into his voice, he stumbled to his feet, careful not to let Tabby drop as he squished her close, “Let’s go get something to eat, how does that sound?”
-
Author's Notes
Title from the following meme/poem:
"Soft kitty, warm kitty,
little ball of fur,
happy kitty, sleepy kitty
purr, purr, purr"
I don't know the author of that, so if anyone does, please let me know! I'd like to properly attribute it.
I see a lot of ideas about what Rodney might name his cat, and this is my hat thrown into the ring on the subject. Why Tabby? Well, because it's a tabby cat. A background headcanon here is that Rodney got the cat while he was working in Russia - perhaps it was a stray, or a gift - but I don't know for sure the timeline of all of Rodney's SGC work, and the cat they show us in the pilot episode looks rather young at maybe a year or two old. I really doubt that cat was in Antarctica, either, given all the myriad restrictions already in place, just as there probably wasn't one in the SGC (otherwise Sam's cat Schroedinger might have been a glorified mascot for the base).
Rising did a good job illustrating a lot of our main cast in the glimpses we got of them before entering Atlantis, and I feel like Rodney probably really adored his cat and was probably rather upset about having to effectively give it up to his neighbor. As far as I can tell, he never got it back, either. Also, like... that was an enormously cheap and shitty apartment Rodney was living in before joining the expedition. In retrospect, Rodney's complaints to Daniel in First Contact and Lost Tribe about pay differences make more sense.
They weren't getting anywhere fast, not anytime soon.
-
At first, he wasn’t certain it was a good idea to have his back to a wraith. Scratch that – definitely a bad idea, and if he didn’t have that gnawing pit in his stomach that was simultaneously an itch for food and mortal terror about his sister, he might have insisted they take up different rooms for their work.
His stomach grumbled, and he felt vaguely guilty about it, pulling the sleeves of his sweatshirt further down over his hands. The SGC was on the cool side on a good day, even with all of the provisions included to make sure the energy flows for their gate were properly insulated, but the oncoming creep of a lowering blood sugar was making him clammy.
Glancing over at Todd, he didn’t see any sign of hunger, but then would any wraith divulge such a weakness to a human? Probably not, and Todd seemed less inclined than any other wraith he met. The other- well, man, yes, not just wraith, was typing idly at the keyboard in front of him, deftly analyzing data from the nanites Jeannie was infected with.
A part of him still couldn’t believe his attempt at persuasion worked. He would have liked to think it was because the cause was just, but it was more probable that Todd simply understood what it was like to lose a relative. Being Kolya’s and other Genii’s plaything for years on end didn’t help, he thought, and he glanced away before anyone but the guards could notice.
Sheppard knew more about this, knew- knew an incredible amount more about people, in those vague ways that made people make sense. Not the analytical way, breaking them down into parts, but intuiting those little social mores that had only baffled him with their circumspect nature. At some point in his life he had tried to do that, but one look at Rod assuaged him of any ideas to imitate the impeccably off-putting suaveness he likely would have become if he attempted to emulate Sheppard. Some things were best left to cool people and alternate universes, he decided.
Beside him, Todd made a quiet noise, shifting from one computer to another. They had multiple set up, a daisy-chain of laptops that had been retrofitted for simulating various programs in the nanites. While they both had some more detailed ideas about how the nanites were repairing cells – and what materials these nanites were even using, given their synthetic nature – the key components were evading both of them.
He looked at his own computers, with the hundreds of thousands of lines of programming for a single nanite, and its communication structures, and the close-up photographs they managed to acquire from Jeannie’s blood samples. Engineering he could do, and he was, but this… much as he was loathe to admit it, this was beyond his skillset. Todd had lived and breathed the threat of the Pegasus Replicators, and made leaps of intuition he never could have.
Todd ducked his head when his stomach grumbled again, and he felt his face warm in embarrassment. Fuck, He realized with self-reflective dread, He knew I was hungry the entire time, and didn’t say anything.
As if to highlight his own thoughts, Todd rumbled to himself, making all the guards around them stiffen in nervous anticipation. They were all roundly ignored, though, when Todd turned his head to look at him, “You should eat. We shall be working on this for a while, and there is still enough time to do so. It will do me no good if you collapse.”
Glancing at Todd, and then to the array of computers, it wasn’t difficult to calculate who was most likely to complete this work – and to do it accurately. Jeannie’s scared face when she agreed with him to be put into a hopefully-temporary coma while he worked on a solution echoed in his mind, and he sucked in a breath, clenching his hands around the sweaty cuffs of his sweatshirt.
“So, uh, about that,” He said, tilting his chin up. Todd turned to face him more fully, and he didn’t know if the gauntness was just how wraith looked, or that it was particular to Todd’s circumstances. He didn’t look away from the assessing gaze, and so was able to see the spark of recognition in the other man’s eyes at- at whatever he had observed, “I might just have a solution.”
-
Author's Notes
Title from Fall Out Boy's song Save Rock and Roll. Since this is tagged for suicidality, on SquidgeWorld I've followed the site's recommended guidelines and locked the work to users-only over there.
They had their differences, of course, even if he could see the multiplicities of similarities.
-
Jeannie was so, so curious. He had been, too - still was - but watching her marvel at Atlantis felt like entering the city for the first time again. Touching the door frames, or peering at the ceilings, or staring out the enormous windows to the ocean around them wasn't something she did often. As much as they they argued amongst themselves, his sister was still a scientist at heart and just as focused as he was on their problem of the day.
But still, he kept the glances to a minimum, letting her absorb the truth of the city's existence at her own speed. It was something they had discussed, when they were younger, before all of the things that had come between them. Neither of them could afford a telescope at the time, but they'd climb to the roof in the summer, cling to the edges of it and marvel at the stars while they speculated what those stars might look like and the planets revolving around them.
And here both of them were, not only far away from those summertime stars that kept them company at night, but in a different galaxy entirely, one far enough away even the best of household telescopes a child could get their hands on couldn't see. He ducked his head down, focusing on the figures his computer was telling him from the latest round of testing on the device, instead of listening to Jeannie marvel with Radek about how the city stayed afloat.
Wherever the other Rodney was, he at least wasn't soaking up all the attention of Jeannie and everyone else. Probably the other him was schmoozing his way through an untold amount of expedition members, shredding whatever reputability he had scrummaged up here - which wasn't much, but he had become accustomed to living here, and the idea of going back to Earth because everyone decided they liked an alternate universe version of him sucked.
Jeannie was listening intently to Radek as he described something to her. Whatever was in his hands was obscured by all the crap they left on the work tables, but it was probably a scanner because that was one of Radek's favourite things to show off to the new scientists. And, yeah, he could understand it, the way Radek was thrilled and Jeannie marvelling.
She was the first, and perhaps – at least in his lifetime – the only, person outside the program to know any of this existed. It left him with some complicated feelings he was sure their resident psychiatrist would love to chew on, chiefly of which was the spark of generosity he felt. If they had time, he would have loved to show his sister everything from their internal publishing house for their research, to meeting the Athosians, to seeing the wreckage of the hive ship they found so early in their time here.
But merely being on the Daedalus had terrified Jeannie, before the tentative curiosity had overlaid the edges of her fear, buffering it into awe. To meet a wraith, or at least the database holograms of it? The dangers that they still found within Atlantis, merely exploring storage areas or deserted labs, was enough for his throat to tighten in anxiety.
That was his only baby sister standing there on the other side of the lab. He had to get her out of the city as quickly as possible. Looking at his computer, and the figures that needed dissecting for analysis, he transferred it to his portable computer, intent on finding his alternate self.
Everyone needed a solution to this problem, and quickly.
-
Author's Notes
Fractal (Wikipedia):
In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set.[1][2][3][4] This exhibition of similar patterns at increasingly smaller scales is called self-similarity, also known as expanding symmetry or unfolding symmetry; if this replication is exactly the same at every scale, as in the Menger sponge, the shape is called affine self-similar.[5] Fractal geometry lies within the mathematical branch of measure theory.
Recursion (Wikipedia):
Recursion occurs when the definition of a concept or process depends on a simpler or previous version of itself.[1] Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathematics and computer science, where a function being defined is applied within its own definition. While this apparently defines an infinite number of instances (function values), it is often done in such a way that no infinite loop or infinite chain of references can occur.
A process that exhibits recursion is recursive. Video feedback displays recursive images, as does an infinity mirror.
For @ficwip's Genuary event! The minimum was 500 words, so I tried to stick to that for some short-form fic practice.
"So why Kote?" He asks, refitting the gloves over his hands. The artifact hadn't done anything other than vaguely waft some memories at him, so into the box it went.
The gold-painted visor tilted at him, equivalent to a shrug that somehow never equated to the shoulders. Probably something about the armor, Quinlan mused quietly. He could empathize, never gesturing the same bare-handed as when he did covered in the safe, protective leather of his gloves. Vulnerabilities had a bad habit of cropping up when you didn't want them.
"Wasn't my pick," The commander replied, entering data onto his wrist comm, "Someone thought it would be cool to try to tell my fortune."
"Yeah," He agreed, striding past where the crime scene was that the Council had assigned them, "I never liked that much, either."
this has been sitting in my inbox for a while and i honestly forgot to just post it but raaa i love this
They lowered their flashlights, a mesmerized stare on all of their faces as the cave entrance glittered back at them. Somewhere, probably, there were bioluminescent plants emanating the soft purple glow. "Well," Rodney murmured, sliding his P90 to the side and grabbing his LSD with one hand, eyes riveted to the gems crammed into every corner of the cave, "It looks like we stepped into a geode."
They didn't have pumpkins here, really, but they were round-ish and orange-ish and he considered that close enough. It seemed good enough to Elizabeth, too, when she came over to finalize the trade agreement, smiling at the assortment of gourds piled onto the decorative table. When they ended up lingering there long into the night, listening to her hash out the finer points of what they would be offering in return, he found himself pleasantly surprised at the fireflies illuminating the night sky in little twinkles of light, wrinkling his nose with a laugh when one of them flew close.
After that planet of sentient mist imbued them with bitter delusions of Earth, he was wary at walking through the low-hanging cloud of it, now. Sheppard drew to a stop, looking at him in brief concern before realization overtook it like the sun emerging from a cloud. When a hand was extended toward him with a reassuring smile, he realized that, perhaps, there were more fruitful thoughts to occupy himself with.
She had learned to be wary of phone numbers with unknown numbers, and this time was no exception despite the caller ID listing a Colorado number. Telling herself firmly that it could be anything, she picked up her phone, accepting the call the way her brother had instructed her for this particular line, "This is Jeannie."
The sigh at the other end told her who it was, "Mrs Miller, hello," Samantha Carter said, with that polished tone of professional distance that made dread creep up in her throat, "We're requesting your assistance with a similar matter as last time, and a car will be by to pick you up shortly."
