Fic: Three Fates 1a/36 [SGA]
Three Fates
Author: auburnnothenna & eretria (send mail to: auburnanderetria at gmail dot com)
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Size: ~161,700 (complete)
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: Rising, Before I Sleep, The Brotherhood, The Defiant One, Hot Zone, The Siege I, II & III, Trinity
Disclaimer: Not ours, not profiting, written for entertainment purposes alone.
Characters: Elizabeth Weir, Rodney McKay, John Sheppard, Atlantis
Genre: AU, polyamorous
Pairings: McKay/Sheppard, McKay/Sheppard/Atlantis, McKay/Weir/Sheppard, McKay/Weir, Sheppard/Atlantis
Summary: "Worst case scenario?"
"We tear a hole in the fabric of the universe."
Trinity
There was no rational way to handle this.
Atropos
Atlantis
Pegasus Galaxy
2005
"And you believe you can finish their work? You think you can solve something the Ancients failed at?"
"Yes! The Ancients weren't any smarter than us. They just knew more."
"But they couldn't make it wo - "
"Because they ran out of time!"
"Colonel?"
"I agree with McKay."
"Why?"
"Because if we can't beat what the Ancients did, we can't beat the Wraith."
"All right."
"You won't regret this. Trust me. All it will take is the Colonel and me -"
"And me. I'm coming with you."
"Elizabeth - "
"Colonel. Dr. McKay isn't military. He doesn't answer to you. He answers to me."
"Look, you won't be sorry, I swear."
Doranda System
Pegasus Galaxy
2005
The weapon wasn't firing anymore. Elizabeth dug her fingers into the back of the co-pilot's seat in the jumper and felt a moment of hope. That had to be a good sign. She refused to think about the alternative.
"Dial the gate," Sheppard told Rodney in a tight voice.
Rodney didn't look at him, just followed the order, and Elizabeth immediately knew something was still very, very wrong. The triangles with the Pegasus gate symbols lit a warm yellow beneath his hands. Hands that were shaking, and she'd never seen that; for all Rodney moved and used his hands constantly, they were always sure and steady.
Sheppard's expression was set and intent; he was completely focused on flying the jumper, no longer taking evasive action, just pushing its velocity to the maximum. They were arrowing toward the distant blue speck of the orbital stargate at a breakneck speed that would stress the inertial dampeners to their limits when they arrived in Atlantis.
Rodney's hands jittered over the co-pilot's controls, bringing up three different heads-up displays. Elizabeth couldn't make any sense of them. One showed a red-line spiking higher and higher, the graph frantically resizing itself to accommodate its continuous rise. The second showed a blue-white sphere expanding, swallowing lines that symbolized the orbits of planets, almost reaching the dot that was their jumper, and the stargate. The third was just a cascade of numbers. Sheppard's eyes lit on that one and he grimaced.
Elizabeth tightened her hand on the chair back again, alarmed as she actually felt the jumper buffeted through the dampeners. She realized Sheppard was struggling to keep them on a straight course. Rodney's hands were locked tight, white-knuckled, on the arms of the co-pilot's seat.
The red-line display topped out and an alarm began wailing through the jumper.
"Elizabeth," Sheppard said tonelessly, "radio Atlantis."
She reached up and activated the radio headset she wore as regularly as shoes, switching to the command channel. "Atlantis, this is Weir. Respond."
"Dr. Weir, this is Atlantis Control."
Edwards' voice was lighter than Grodin's had been. He'd moved into first shift smoothly and projected a similar air of competency, but she never stopped expecting to hear Peter.
"Disengage the shield," Elizabeth said with forced calm. The alarm still screamed through the jumper cockpit. "Jumper One is inbound. I don't think we have much time." She breathed deeply when she heard her voice edged higher with the terror she felt clawing its way inside of her and steeled it into a calm she didn't feel. "There was a problem with the second test. Dr. Zelenka appears to have been correct."
"I'm sure he'll be thrilled when he realizes exactly what being right means in this case," Rodney snarled under his breath. He was watching the second display. The blue sphere had turned sullen red and was rapidly collapsing back to Doranda. Faster than it had expanded.
"Shut up, McKay," Sheppard snapped.
"Jumper One is cleared through the stargate. Shield down."
The jumper angled over, lining up with the quicksilver blue of the open stargate.
Rodney's mouth opened, but no words followed. His eyes focused on the display and widened.
A stream of light traced across the display, an arm reaching from the Dorandan primary to the planet.
"What is that?" Elizabeth asked.
"Solar plasma," Rodney replied quietly.
"Rodney, what have you done?"
He raised his head.
"You didn't," Sheppard yelled. "You bastard, tell me you didn't!"
Rodney's mouth worked and his eyes were wide, blinded with something so horrible Elizabeth felt sick herself. It went beyond panic.
"Oh, God."
Fierce white light filled the jumper cockpit. Sheppard threw up his arm. Elizabeth lost her footing and fell back as the jumper seemed to lurch in space before sliding into the stargate.
Her last sight was of Rodney, his face bleached bone white, his mouth and eyes black holes full of absolute despair.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
It was the worst trip through a stargate Elizabeth had ever experienced, including stepping between the Milky Way and Pegasus the first time. Normal stargate travel didn't include awareness. She cupped her hand over her mouth, fighting the need to throw up. She'd always experienced the Pegasus Galaxy wormholes as a synesthetic roller coaster ride, an infinite green instant that was over even as she braced herself for it.
She had felt it this time. She'd been a tearing stream of dissociated atoms and consciousness ripped apart, shot through with searing plasma, crimson sparks flaring through a body that was so elongated it neither began nor ended.
She'd tasted time.
Still holding her hand over her mouth, trying to catch a breath that had never been lost, she looked up as the jumper wavered. Looked out the front port, expecting to see the gate room, the lit steps, the stained glass, the marines standing guard, Col. Caldwell, perhaps, glaring down from the control room level.
"What the hell - ?" John exclaimed. He looked green, lit by the jumper's interior lights. His hand shook on the stick, the only time Elizabeth had ever seen him less than sure in flight. He was staring out the front port, too.
Into the thick, cloying darkness of walls and caves and oceanic depths.
"McKay," John said, his voice gritty with anger.
Rodney had bowed over, a smooth curve of blue-clad back, his face buried in his hands. He raised his head and looked. "I don't understand," he whispered. "I dialed Atlantis. The effect shouldn't reach that far for days. Weeks."
Elizabeth swallowed hard and suggested, "All right, let's focus. The jumper has exterior lighting, right?"
"Yeah," John said.
The lights came on. All three of them caught their breaths.
They were in Atlantis. A sleeping Atlantis, without any sign of the expedition in the gate room. Elizabeth recognized the dust covers they'd swept off consoles when they first arrived.
"Where is everybody?" John murmured. His face had the dangerously set expression Elizabeth had only glimpsed a few times; notably, when he shot Acastus Kolya. Narrowed, dark eyes settled on Rodney.
Rodney just shook his head. "What? I have no idea. This is - this is - I don't know, Colonel. I do not know." He turned his eyes back to the front port.
John surveyed the darkened, empty gate room again. His hands moved over the jumper's controls, smooth and sure again, and it settled soundless to the floor. "Time to find out what's going on here," he said. He rose and settled the P90 lower on its sling, closer to his hand.
"I don't think you should go out there alone," Elizabeth said.
"And I don't think you or McKay are in any shape to come with me," John replied. His gaze moved over Rodney, who still looked blindly out the front port.
"I don't like it."
John's eyebrows went up, telegraphing wordless incredulity. "Uh huh."
"Then be careful," Elizabeth insisted. She followed him into the rear compartment.
"It's Atlantis," he said. He grinned at her. "What's going to happen?"
It was supposed to be that cocky grin, she knew, the one that had at times either infuriated or shored her up, but it was a terrible failure and it faded from his features fast. John was as rocked as she was, as Rodney was, and forcing himself forward anyway.
"Exactly," Elizabeth snapped. Because they both knew Atlantis had never been safe and certainly didn't appear to be now.
"Well, we can't stay in the jumper forever."
Elizabeth folded her arms. She couldn't stop him without marshaling better arguments and right now, she didn't have any, apart from the feeling of wrong, wrong, wrong that had settled in her stomach. John rummaged in an overhead compartment and pulled down a heavy case. He opened it and drew out a pistol. Took out the clip, checked the action, narrow fingers moving over it expertly. He loaded the clip again, checked the safety again, and offered it to her, grip first.
"John - "
"Just in case."
Reluctantly, she accepted the handgun, surprised by its weight as always, surprised that it didn't feel colder. She'd been a gun control supporter all her life. Just the feel of the Beretta made her ill at ease.
He nodded back toward Rodney, who had dropped his face into his hands again, and had begun to shake.
"He's in shock."
"I know."
He wiped at his face, just a thoughtless movement, but it betrayed for an instant all the fractures he kept hidden. "Just stay with him," he said quietly. "I won't go far."
"Okay."
John looked at her for another long moment, "Hey, no worries," and walked toward the back of the jumper. He switched the P90's targeting light on and raised it into ready position. The ramp dropped open with a clank that echoed.
Elizabeth retreated to the cabin of the jumper. She set the pistol in the pilot's seat, then set her hand on Rodney's broad shoulder, needing the contact with something human and alive as much as Rodney needed whatever comfort she could provide.
Outside, John quartered the gate room, searching for any threats, then started up the stairs.
Elizabeth caught her breath.
The step lit. It lit, and each one after it, as John walked up. It wasn't just the steps. Lights everywhere were coming up, blazing into life, a hundred times brighter than the first time they'd set foot in Atlantis.
"My God," she whispered.
Rodney looked up, blinked dazedly and said: "It knows him."
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
Home.
John paused at the first landing and turned in a slow circle. He raised his eyes to the window that dominated the stairs, the stained glass still dark, and pulled in a breath at the vista beyond.
Lights sparked to life in the towers and spires of the city, their brilliance shining off the shield domed above the city. Beyond the shield, shining like night's black mirror, was the deep.
They were underwater again.
He stared up, caught by the same wonder he'd felt the first time, amazed, feeling like he'd finally found his place when he'd been lost all his life. The rightness of it hummed through his veins and soothed his worries and suspicions. He thought he could almost hear the city whispering welcome, welcome.
The P90 dangled from its strap, half-forgotten.
The lights at one of the transporters brightened, calling to him, and he started toward the doors.
"John?"
The crackling transmission through his radio ear piece drew him up. He shook his head. He switched on his transmitter.
"I'm here."
"Are you all right?"
"Yeah," he said softly. He could still feel the humming rightness inside, lulling and promising, smoothing the edges of his worry and anger. Telling him he belonged here; he'd come home again. "Yeah, I'm good."
"Have you found anything?"
"Not yet. Looks like no one's home."
"See if you can access the control consoles," Rodney said.
"No laptop or translators here," John replied.
He loped up the second flight of stairs to the control room level anyway and swept a dust sheet off the main console.
"Play dumb some other time, Colonel," Rodney snapped. He almost sounded normal, but not. Still in shock, John knew, just like he was. "You've picked up more Ancient than anyone besides the linguists. You're looking for numbers anyway. The city has an internal dating system. It will indicate how long it has been powered down. There will be a log. It should offer some explanation of what has happened."
John brushed his hand over the console and it lit. The main screen behind him activated and swirled with color that resolved into numbers. He stared at them until something clicked behind his eyes and they made sense. He read them again to be sure. Such a long, lonely time in the dark, sleeping and waiting, but he'd finally come and there was life again.
He unsnapped the P90 and set it down. He needed both hands to work the console, shape the chords, so that the hum became music as he read the main city operations log.
"Sheppard? Sheppard!"
"What!?" he snapped, jolted by Rodney's shout in his ear.
"You've been quiet for twenty minutes, John," Elizabeth said.
He shook his head. It couldn't have been that long. He checked his watch. It had been.
"Yeah. Sorry. McKay? I think you need to get up here and look at this."
"What is it?"
"According to what I'm reading, the city's been shut down and underwater for about nine hundred sixty-three years."
"What? That's not possible. We left yester - " Rodney's voice had been rising toward hysteria, but it cut off. That meant he'd thought of something important enough to derail his usual doom and panic response. He came back on the radio sounding detached and strangely calm. "I'm coming up there."
"Good idea."
John picked up the P90, clipping it back onto the carry sling. He paused, frowning. What had possessed him to put it down in a potentially hostile situation? Nothing except his instinct that he was in no danger. Stupid. No use taking chances. He tapped his radio transmitter again.
"Elizabeth, you'd better stay with the jumper."
"And do what, John? Twiddle my thumbs? I'm coming with Rodney. I can at least translate."
He opened his mouth to protest and stopped. He didn't mind Rodney joining him, but he didn't want Elizabeth in the control room. It felt wrong. It made no sense.
"Okey-dokey," he said with forced casualness.
In the back of his head, he still felt it, the city singing, welcome, welcome, welcome.
Home.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
He looked at the data again. Incredible. He'd figured it out in the jumper, before he and Elizabeth had joined Sheppard in the control room, but he'd wanted to confirm it. It hadn't changed. Wasn't going to change, but he was still looking at the screen, because as long as he did that, he didn't have to look at Sheppard or Elizabeth. He wasn't sure he could survive what he'd see on their faces. Not once he told them.
It wasn't his own words that kept beating in his head. It was Sheppard's: You didn't. You didn't. You didn't. Tell me you didn't. Faster and faster, tell me you didn't, louder and louder, tell me you didn't, like a roller coaster ride to hell. Tell me, his heart raced, tell me, and his lungs couldn't pull in any air, you didn't, his palms were sweating, tell, but his skin was too cold, me, too tight, and his stomach dropped and twisted violently: you didn't, didn'tdidn'tdidn't. He was going to be sick right here in the control room if he didn't, didn'tdidn'tdidn't, stop it. He braced his hand against the edge of the console and concentrated on pulling in air that tasted of ozone and salt. Breathe, he told himself, don't think. The lighted crystals blurred and juddered through his watering eyes.
"Rodney?" Elizabeth managed to inject concern and a question both in just his name.
He waited but Sheppard didn't ask anything. Sheppard probably didn't care if he was all right, because Sheppard had figured it out. Oh God. No, if Sheppard had figured it out, he would have done something, said something. Rodney let his head drop forward.
Elizabeth said his name again, sharper. He jerked upright. His fingers left dark, sweaty marks on the console.
"What? What?"
You didn't. Tell me you didn't.
"Do you know what's happened?"
He forced himself to turn and look at her. He opened his mouth, but it was too dry to speak. He could barely swallow. He didn't know how he was going to explain. He tried again.
"I - yes. I know." It felt like his entire face was being dragged down. He wondered if he wasn't having a stroke. That would be ... He would deserve it.
Tell me you didn't.
"I - " He stopped and stared at Sheppard.
"Rodney?" Elizabeth prompted.
"Colonel?" he said quietly. Miserably.
Elizabeth turned and looked at Sheppard.
Sheppard wasn't even listening to them. He was leaning his hip against another console halfway across the control room, his head tipped to the side. He'd set his P90 down. His eyes were unfocused, half-closed.
Elizabeth crossed the room and touched his arm.
Sheppard's attention snapped back to them; he tensed and looked at them both warily. His hand moved to the P90. Rodney thought he'd infinitely preferred Sheppard's abstraction to this sharp-eyed attention. He wished he could look away.
"Still with us, Colonel?"
Like a rat in a cage, running and running on a wheel and going nowhere, play the role, pretend to be all right, sarcasm is always good, don't let them see you're not certain. Batter and insult and push, push, push, but don't think anymore about - you didn't, you didn't - because God, oh, God you did. Just don't think about it, concentrate on Sheppard, on Elizabeth, on now, and not the wild, wheezing panic of knowing. Because Elizabeth and Sheppard don't know yet, and you have to keep them at a distance, because when they do, they'll turn on you.
Sheppard's eyebrows rose. "Looks like it." He even sounded tired. Rodney could see him pulling himself back into the present from wherever his mind had strayed, drawing on energy that wasn't really there.
This had to be happening to someone else, not to Rodney McKay. This wasn't him, standing in the darkened control room of Atlantis of the past, and he could handle it if he just kept it like that. Far away, beyond thick, muffling glass walls and his old friend disdain. Weren't they stupid for not figuring it all out themselves? If only they never would ...
"You want to explain, McKay?"
"We're nine thousand years or so in our past."
Blurt it out and his voice was quavering. Don't think, just tell them. Concentrate on the little, tiny details. On the loose thread in the stitching of Sheppard's T-shirt collar, on the glint of Elizabeth's necklace - she always wore that, wonder who gave it to her? - on the blood pounding in his temples, a thump thump thump like the drum beat from the Dead March, Danny Deever. Oh God. Look at Sheppard, look at Elizabeth.
"I don't understand," Elizabeth said. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. "How could this happen?"
Don't look, look away, and it won't be real just yet. Not yet. Not until you've confessed all of what it means.
Sheppard noticed Elizabeth shivering, too. He shrugged off his tac vest, stripped off his jacket and handed it to Elizabeth. "Here."
Rodney winced. It wouldn't have occurred to him to give Elizabeth his jacket. He might have tried to readjust the environmental controls or complained for both of them, but the simple gentlemanly gesture always escaped him. He couldn't offer Sheppard his jacket either, though Sheppard was now in that thin black shirt he favored and Rodney knew from off-planet missions that Sheppard was miserable in the cold. He never complained, but Rodney had noticed.
"Thank you, John," Elizabeth said.
Sheppard nodded, looking distracted again. It softened the intent lines of his face, but it frightened Rodney. Sheppard's focus didn't normally drift. Rodney's didn't, either, but his mind kept skittering off on tangents.
The hum of the city, that Rodney had felt since he'd stepped out of the jumper, grew deeper. The ozone scent grew sharper. A warm draft of air swirled through the chilled control room. The city breathed. On the Daedalus, always aware of the thin skin between their lives and vacuum, Rodney had first understood that, listening to the fans and the re-circulators in the dark of his cramped cabin bed. Atlantis breathed, pushing air through ventilation shafts and filters, warming and cooling, balancing the atmosphere perfectly for them. Warming it because Sheppard was cold, he thought, and wondered if Sheppard even knew how closely they were entwined.
"So if we moseyed down to the stasis room, we'd find Elizabeth in one of those pods?"
"Right next to the DeLorean," Rodney snapped, but it lacked his usual venom. He scrubbed at his face. His heart was still racing out of control. He was going to lose this, too, the comfortable mockery, the way Sheppard deliberately set up the opportunities for a good insult and enjoyed the results. But he had to go on. "Of course not. We've created, albeit inadvertently, a third timeline, exactly as Elizabeth created a second one - ours - by extending the lifespan of the ZPMs and persuading the Ancients to set up a failsafe program to raise the city."
Sheppard frowned.
"We're using power right now, aren't we?"
"Yes."
"No failsafe, no one to maintain the ZPMs, the city's going to be in worse shape than when the first timeline's expedition arrived," Elizabeth said, voice distant as though marveling at a picture. For a brief moment, Rodney hated her for understanding what so many others wouldn't have grasped.
"We've doomed ourselves - ourselves in this future - this timeline's versions of us," Rodney added. "Just by being here. Now."
Elizabeth paled further. She knew, even if she didn't know the full extent. "What exactly happened?" she asked and he could see her fighting for control. The question was rhetorical. It held the terrible gentleness that asked him to admit what he'd done.
"But how did we ... what happened?" she asked again.
Rodney straightened his back. He squared his shoulders and laced his fingers together behind his back, where Sheppard and Elizabeth wouldn't see.
"According the SGC's records, a wormhole intersecting with a solar flare resulted in SG-1 returning to the stargate in 1969. Furthermore, in an attempt to return to our own time, SG-1 dialed home in coincidence with another solar flare only to arrive ten years into their future. They were able to return, obviously, but that isn't the point."
"Maybe you could get to the point," Sheppard said. "Sometime soon."
"Right. Right. When we - when I - lost control of Arcturus, it, well, it ripped a hole in our universe. It started a chain reaction that began expanding and at the same time pulling in matter. Including solar plasma from the Dorandan primary," Rodney explained.
Elizabeth looked at him blankly; Rodney couldn't guess if she grasped what he'd said or not. Sheppard's face showed he did understand.
"I believe when we dialed the gate, the wormhole was destabilized in a manner similar to what SG-1 experienced, on a vastly greater scale, resulting in our temporal dislocation."
Rodney licked his lips and waited.
"Then we could just as easily been tossed forward ten thousand years?" Elizabeth asked.
"Nine thousand thirty-seven," Sheppard said.
"And no," Rodney added.
Sheppard glared at him.
Elizabeth looked back and forth between them. "Why?"
Rodney raised his chin and answered. "Domino effect."
"There's no there then, in the future," Sheppard said. His hazel eyes never left Rodney. "There's no universe. That hole just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and smaller and smaller, until everything is gone, and there is no universe. Right, Rodney?" He drawled out Rodney's name with the same disdain that imbued his voice whenever he mentioned Kolya. It cut deep, just the way Rodney had known it would.
The panic went away. There was nothing left to panic over, he knew. All gone. All that was left was a scream boiling up from his soul, the litany of his personal blasphemy, an entreaty to a deity he never believed in. Oh God, oh God, but if such a God existed, that let one man destroy everything in creation, then there could never be mercy from that quarter.
"Right," he replied. His voice cracked. "I destroyed our universe."
"No one destroys the universe, Rodney," Elizabeth said, very reasonably.
"McKay does."
"You can't be serious." Elizabeth looked around the control room. "That isn't possible."
"It's possible," Rodney said.
"And you knew?"
He watched Elizabeth's hands curl into fists. Her mouth thinned furiously. Her voice would begin rising next, until it cut through the cloudy numbness Rodney had been holding around his thoughts. It would cut through and he would hear the hate and see the look in Sheppard's eyes and everything he was would just bleed out onto the floor.
Somehow, he answered anyway, keeping his voice flat and nearly normal. He twisted his fingers against each other, feeling bones threaten to crack inside his hands. "That the possibility - the infinitely small possibility - existed? Yes."
"Are you insane? How could you?" Elizabeth shouted. "What have you done?"
"The chance of what happened happening was so statistically improbable as to be nonexistent."
"But it existed!"
"Of course, it existed," Rodney said. "Elizabeth, it was in the briefing."
"Hidden inside a bunch of numbers you knew she wouldn't read," Sheppard said.
"Yes," he admitted.
"My God," Elizabeth said, shaking her head, "Everyone ... everything." She pressed her palm over her mouth, visibly, obviously, fighting nausea. She swayed and pressed her eyes shut, but then she seemed to get her bearings again, collect her emotions and put them away. Watching her grapple for control like that was frightening, because Elizabeth never lost control. He had always admired that. He still did, right then envying her ability to lock everything down, because he wanted to do that, too.
"If we hadn't been knocked into the past, we'd be in Atlantis, waiting for the end," Rodney stated. "Or gone already."
When she spoke again, her face was a façade of forced calm and determination. "How do we fix it?"
He looked Elizabeth helplessly. "We don't. We can't."
"That's not good enough, Rodney. We have to do something." When he didn't say anything, Elizabeth started toward him. Rodney waited where he was.
"Elizabeth," Sheppard said, his voice tight and angry. "Stop."
"No," she snapped and her hand came up, slapping Rodney's face with all her strength. The inside of his cheek caught against a tooth and he tasted blood.
"Elizabeth," Sheppard said again. He came across the room with deceptive speed and caught her arm before she could hit Rodney again.
"Let her," Rodney blurted.
Sheppard gave him a burning glance.
"Let go, John," Elizabeth said.
He released her wrist and stepped back. "Just ... stop."
Elizabeth turned away from them both.
"Elizabeth - "
Sheppard touched her shoulder tentatively, apparently as aware of the fractures in Elizabeth's usually so strong façade as Rodney was, but Elizabeth shrugged him away. "Don't touch me."
Rodney stared at the main display screen, probing the cut in his mouth with his tongue, focusing on the pain, bright and small and completely his.
Sheppard turned and looked at him. Rodney could see him shutting down, shutting everything and everyone out. He hadn't realized before, that he'd always been inside the walls Sheppard kept up around himself. Before.
Sheppard didn't say anything.
Rodney looked back at him, unblinking, but didn't let himself see more than a blur of pallor and darkness, colors bleeding into each other. He didn't let himself see the wounds behind Sheppard's eyes, because he was already breaking. His eyes began to burn, but he didn't close them until he heard Sheppard walk away.
Then there were just the sounds of Elizabeth breathing, and the city humming against his nerves, until Elizabeth went away, too. He glimpsed her face as she walked by him, despite himself, and it was set, hard and unforgiving as chiseled marble.
He didn't need them there. He could still hear them.
What have you done?
Over and over.
Tell me you didn't.
He didn't remember leaving the control room, but he stumbled to a stop on the stairs when his knees gave in to the quaking shudders running through his body. He sank down and stared at nothing. Nothing.
"Oh God."
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
She found him on the gate room steps, staring at the jumper still sitting in front of the ring, after she'd spent hours inside the jumper, trying to formulate some kind of plan.
She handed him a Powerbar from the jumper's emergency supplies and brusquely ordered him to eat it. He obeyed.
Rodney's eyes were almost dead, but the blue held a manic gleam, as though he wanted to do nothing more than laugh and laugh until it killed him. She didn't blame him and yet she did. She wanted to tell him to behave like a normal person, but couldn't find a single thing a normal person would have done under the circumstances. She hated him and worried at the same time. They had destroyed the universe. There was no rational way to handle that.
She remembered the look on his face: the horrified disbelief, the panic so deep that it had left him frozen and nearly wordless. There had been only that small, horror-struck: "Oh, God." The look on his face in the jumper, not in the control room when he told her and John - though that had been bad enough.
She tapped the radio transmitter on and called John. He didn't answer but the nearest transporter opened shortly and he appeared. He didn't speak and he didn't look at Rodney.
Elizabeth told them she thought they should use the same living quarters they'd occupied before. Rodney nodded. John shrugged. She couldn't think of anything else to say and stared at them both. After a while, John straightened up and boarded the jumper. He emptied all their supplies onto the floor and left them there. The ceiling above the gate room opened and the jumper rose into the bay, leaving the space before the gate bare except for that pitiful pile of gear and food.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
Elizabeth pretended to sleep, supine on her narrow bed, hands folded over her breastbone, laid out like a saint on a tomb, except her eyes were wide open. She had locked her door open, unable to bear the crypt-like darkness and silence of her room without the promise of escape. Buried under the sea, there wasn't even the lap of the waves to lull her, just the oppressive thrum of the shield. She imagined it failing, all of Atlantis drowning, the cold wash of water filling her lungs. She thought she was already drowning, helpless and adrift from her own time and place.
Feeling sorry for herself was what she was doing, she knew, but she couldn't summon the will to push away the fancies and the self-pity yet.
A wordless scream knifed through the silence and catapulted her upright.
The screaming brought Elizabeth to her feet and out the door, the sound rising and falling and echoing up and down the hollow corridors. She ran barefoot down the hall and saw John, pale and shirtless, disappear through the dim doorway into Rodney's room. She waited for the sound of his voice, but there was just that keening, awful sound from Rodney, that made her want to clap her hands over her ears.
She walked into the room, ready to do something, anything to make those screams stop, wondering why John wasn't saying anything. Three steps in, she stopped, feeling like an intruder. She watched him catch Rodney's wrists in his hands as Rodney clawed at something only he saw, holding them and pulling Rodney up against him, rocking wordlessly, until the keening just stopped, abruptly as it had begun.
It took a deep breath and curling her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms, to center herself, but she squared her shoulders and readied herself to speak. Rodney was still her responsibility. So was John. She couldn't indulge in tears. Still, any words caught in her throat.
John looked up and saw her, but said nothing. Elizabeth's feet were cold and she still felt the city looming, huge and heavy, making her nerves crawl. John's eyes were dark hollows and unreadable. She waited for him to nod, to speak, to gesture for her to join them, but he only stared until Elizabeth couldn't bear it.
"Is - "
Rodney reacted, flinching when she spoke. She would have touched his back, just lightly, as she'd done more than once before, but the memory of the slap lingered too strongly between them, in the way John angled himself into the space between them. Feeling painfully helpless, she watched as John pulled Rodney closer, warned away by his silent head shake.
She waited until Rodney sank into a miserable half-doze and retreated into the hall with John.
When she would have spoken to him, he held up his hand between them, and she gave up for the moment. Rodney might accept comfort. John never had or would. She would try to talk to him tomorrow.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
That first day, she felt paralyzed. Couldn't do anything but move mechanically and think, play everything over and over in her mind while the looming darkness of Atlantis and the knowledge of thousands of feet of water above her made her skin crawl.
The universe, everything, all the planets, all the stars, billions of lives - lost. So many cultures - gone.
Her family - gone. Her parents, her brother, her aunt Alison and her cousin Marguerite. Simon. Her house and the old rocking chair she had inherited from her grandmother. Her dog, Sedge.
Sunset over the mountains and fog in the valleys. Christmas. Chinese food. Flowers. Bach. Einstein. Kant. Michelangelo. Nothing left but what was in her own memory.
The Taj Mahal where Simon had first told her he loved her. The sinking sun had set the beautiful building and the lake before it on golden fire. She had laughed at his sentimentality, while Simon chided her for being unable to relax and be romantic instead of a hard-nosed diplomat, but he had laughed, too. They had kissed, still laughing. In memory, she could almost feel the humidity and relive the scent of flowers that had later filled their hotel room.
She had let him tell her he loved her, but she had never told him what he wanted to hear. Couldn't tell him now, because he had moved on. No more moving on now, and she mourned every lost opportunity, every wasted moment of her past.
Sorrow morphed into questions morphed into horror and disgust over what Rodney had done. What she hadn't stopped him from doing. But one look at him showed her that he didn't need disdain and resentment. Rodney knew what he'd done and what it had cost. Knew it better than anyone else ever would, including herself and John.
The worst knowledge was that of culpability. It was his fault - simple and complicated as that - his hand that had tipped the first stone in the chain. Her hand that hadn't stopped his. The truth was undeniable: the one not stopping the events was just as guilty as the one starting them. Maybe even more so because he had seen it coming. Every single wiped out existence was on their conscience.
If she sometimes believed she could hear the screams of her people on Atlantis as the darkness took them, it had to be a thousand times worse for Rodney. She wondered why he hadn't gone mad yet. She watched him carefully for the signs, seeing only some she recognized from Marguerite's breakdown in college. Marguerite had suffered from schizophrenia though, while Rodney was suffering from reality.
She wasn't ready to feel pity for him, because she had none for herself. Pity might come later, maybe one day even the need to comfort him and reach out and be reached out for, but not yet.
They all deserved to live with what they had done.
She was being cruel, she knew it, and it pained her. Elizabeth had been many things in her life: cold, calculating, stubborn, level-headed, dismissive - but never cruel. She didn't want to start now that her integrity was the only thing she had left.
She couldn't handle this like John and Rodney were - or rather, weren't. She wasn't going to give up. At least, one of them had to be strong if they didn't plan on dying here.
She recognized the signs of depression developing in John as well as Rodney as the days passed. Self-imposed isolation, a lack of appetite or care for appearance. Silence. He showered, but he hadn't shaved since their arrival. Rodney didn't do that much and she'd begun to think she'd have to make him clean up the way she made him eat. He couldn't be bothered to even brush his teeth and his breath smelled sick.
Elizabeth understood that reaction, even when all she could think of was getting clean. She stood under the shower sometimes for close to an hour, scrubbing at her skin like Lady MacBeth, until it was red and raw. It never made her feel clean, never washed away anything. She couldn't wash away the memories plaguing her. She tried, knowing it wouldn't work, hiding in the shower, in the comfort of warm water and steam and illusory safety. She wished she could just close her eyes and cry, but the tears wouldn't come. All her tears were gone, dried up by the desert inside.
There was too much in Atlantis that reminded her of every single mistake she had ever made. If she didn't find a way to handle the memories, they would eat her alive, slow and from the inside, send her down the same path Marguerite had gone: tortured by delusions until she couldn't stand it anymore and tried to kill herself. Her family had never spoken about it, but Elizabeth remembered watching her cousin change from a lively and beautiful young woman into a thin shell of who she used to be, tortured by paranoia, flinching whenever someone touched her or spoke to her. Marguerite had been haunted by the voices only she heard.
Marguerite had been so smart, she'd been aware of her own degeneration, but helpless to fight it. She couldn't shut the voices up, couldn't shut them out, even knowing they weren't real - until they became as real to her as the reality everyone else experienced. She'd seen Marguerite flinch and listen to what only she heard. Now she had to watch Rodney cringe, his eyes darting to and away from something Elizabeth couldn't see.
She could guess, though, with Rodney. She had no clue to John's demons. Whatever form they took, he kept to himself, pulling away from her and Rodney. That he was haunted too, she had no doubt.
She started searching the city for food supplies the next night, while John sat silently with Rodney, after the screaming.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
Onward to 1b/36
Author: auburnnothenna & eretria (send mail to: auburnanderetria at gmail dot com)
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Size: ~161,700 (complete)
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: Rising, Before I Sleep, The Brotherhood, The Defiant One, Hot Zone, The Siege I, II & III, Trinity
Disclaimer: Not ours, not profiting, written for entertainment purposes alone.
Characters: Elizabeth Weir, Rodney McKay, John Sheppard, Atlantis
Genre: AU, polyamorous
Pairings: McKay/Sheppard, McKay/Sheppard/Atlantis, McKay/Weir/Sheppard, McKay/Weir, Sheppard/Atlantis
Summary: "Worst case scenario?"
"We tear a hole in the fabric of the universe."
Trinity
There was no rational way to handle this.
Atropos
Atlantis
Pegasus Galaxy
2005
"And you believe you can finish their work? You think you can solve something the Ancients failed at?"
"Yes! The Ancients weren't any smarter than us. They just knew more."
"But they couldn't make it wo - "
"Because they ran out of time!"
"Colonel?"
"I agree with McKay."
"Why?"
"Because if we can't beat what the Ancients did, we can't beat the Wraith."
"All right."
"You won't regret this. Trust me. All it will take is the Colonel and me -"
"And me. I'm coming with you."
"Elizabeth - "
"Colonel. Dr. McKay isn't military. He doesn't answer to you. He answers to me."
"Look, you won't be sorry, I swear."
Doranda System
Pegasus Galaxy
2005
The weapon wasn't firing anymore. Elizabeth dug her fingers into the back of the co-pilot's seat in the jumper and felt a moment of hope. That had to be a good sign. She refused to think about the alternative.
"Dial the gate," Sheppard told Rodney in a tight voice.
Rodney didn't look at him, just followed the order, and Elizabeth immediately knew something was still very, very wrong. The triangles with the Pegasus gate symbols lit a warm yellow beneath his hands. Hands that were shaking, and she'd never seen that; for all Rodney moved and used his hands constantly, they were always sure and steady.
Sheppard's expression was set and intent; he was completely focused on flying the jumper, no longer taking evasive action, just pushing its velocity to the maximum. They were arrowing toward the distant blue speck of the orbital stargate at a breakneck speed that would stress the inertial dampeners to their limits when they arrived in Atlantis.
Rodney's hands jittered over the co-pilot's controls, bringing up three different heads-up displays. Elizabeth couldn't make any sense of them. One showed a red-line spiking higher and higher, the graph frantically resizing itself to accommodate its continuous rise. The second showed a blue-white sphere expanding, swallowing lines that symbolized the orbits of planets, almost reaching the dot that was their jumper, and the stargate. The third was just a cascade of numbers. Sheppard's eyes lit on that one and he grimaced.
Elizabeth tightened her hand on the chair back again, alarmed as she actually felt the jumper buffeted through the dampeners. She realized Sheppard was struggling to keep them on a straight course. Rodney's hands were locked tight, white-knuckled, on the arms of the co-pilot's seat.
The red-line display topped out and an alarm began wailing through the jumper.
"Elizabeth," Sheppard said tonelessly, "radio Atlantis."
She reached up and activated the radio headset she wore as regularly as shoes, switching to the command channel. "Atlantis, this is Weir. Respond."
"Dr. Weir, this is Atlantis Control."
Edwards' voice was lighter than Grodin's had been. He'd moved into first shift smoothly and projected a similar air of competency, but she never stopped expecting to hear Peter.
"Disengage the shield," Elizabeth said with forced calm. The alarm still screamed through the jumper cockpit. "Jumper One is inbound. I don't think we have much time." She breathed deeply when she heard her voice edged higher with the terror she felt clawing its way inside of her and steeled it into a calm she didn't feel. "There was a problem with the second test. Dr. Zelenka appears to have been correct."
"I'm sure he'll be thrilled when he realizes exactly what being right means in this case," Rodney snarled under his breath. He was watching the second display. The blue sphere had turned sullen red and was rapidly collapsing back to Doranda. Faster than it had expanded.
"Shut up, McKay," Sheppard snapped.
"Jumper One is cleared through the stargate. Shield down."
The jumper angled over, lining up with the quicksilver blue of the open stargate.
Rodney's mouth opened, but no words followed. His eyes focused on the display and widened.
A stream of light traced across the display, an arm reaching from the Dorandan primary to the planet.
"What is that?" Elizabeth asked.
"Solar plasma," Rodney replied quietly.
"Rodney, what have you done?"
He raised his head.
"You didn't," Sheppard yelled. "You bastard, tell me you didn't!"
Rodney's mouth worked and his eyes were wide, blinded with something so horrible Elizabeth felt sick herself. It went beyond panic.
"Oh, God."
Fierce white light filled the jumper cockpit. Sheppard threw up his arm. Elizabeth lost her footing and fell back as the jumper seemed to lurch in space before sliding into the stargate.
Her last sight was of Rodney, his face bleached bone white, his mouth and eyes black holes full of absolute despair.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
It was the worst trip through a stargate Elizabeth had ever experienced, including stepping between the Milky Way and Pegasus the first time. Normal stargate travel didn't include awareness. She cupped her hand over her mouth, fighting the need to throw up. She'd always experienced the Pegasus Galaxy wormholes as a synesthetic roller coaster ride, an infinite green instant that was over even as she braced herself for it.
She had felt it this time. She'd been a tearing stream of dissociated atoms and consciousness ripped apart, shot through with searing plasma, crimson sparks flaring through a body that was so elongated it neither began nor ended.
She'd tasted time.
Still holding her hand over her mouth, trying to catch a breath that had never been lost, she looked up as the jumper wavered. Looked out the front port, expecting to see the gate room, the lit steps, the stained glass, the marines standing guard, Col. Caldwell, perhaps, glaring down from the control room level.
"What the hell - ?" John exclaimed. He looked green, lit by the jumper's interior lights. His hand shook on the stick, the only time Elizabeth had ever seen him less than sure in flight. He was staring out the front port, too.
Into the thick, cloying darkness of walls and caves and oceanic depths.
"McKay," John said, his voice gritty with anger.
Rodney had bowed over, a smooth curve of blue-clad back, his face buried in his hands. He raised his head and looked. "I don't understand," he whispered. "I dialed Atlantis. The effect shouldn't reach that far for days. Weeks."
Elizabeth swallowed hard and suggested, "All right, let's focus. The jumper has exterior lighting, right?"
"Yeah," John said.
The lights came on. All three of them caught their breaths.
They were in Atlantis. A sleeping Atlantis, without any sign of the expedition in the gate room. Elizabeth recognized the dust covers they'd swept off consoles when they first arrived.
"Where is everybody?" John murmured. His face had the dangerously set expression Elizabeth had only glimpsed a few times; notably, when he shot Acastus Kolya. Narrowed, dark eyes settled on Rodney.
Rodney just shook his head. "What? I have no idea. This is - this is - I don't know, Colonel. I do not know." He turned his eyes back to the front port.
John surveyed the darkened, empty gate room again. His hands moved over the jumper's controls, smooth and sure again, and it settled soundless to the floor. "Time to find out what's going on here," he said. He rose and settled the P90 lower on its sling, closer to his hand.
"I don't think you should go out there alone," Elizabeth said.
"And I don't think you or McKay are in any shape to come with me," John replied. His gaze moved over Rodney, who still looked blindly out the front port.
"I don't like it."
John's eyebrows went up, telegraphing wordless incredulity. "Uh huh."
"Then be careful," Elizabeth insisted. She followed him into the rear compartment.
"It's Atlantis," he said. He grinned at her. "What's going to happen?"
It was supposed to be that cocky grin, she knew, the one that had at times either infuriated or shored her up, but it was a terrible failure and it faded from his features fast. John was as rocked as she was, as Rodney was, and forcing himself forward anyway.
"Exactly," Elizabeth snapped. Because they both knew Atlantis had never been safe and certainly didn't appear to be now.
"Well, we can't stay in the jumper forever."
Elizabeth folded her arms. She couldn't stop him without marshaling better arguments and right now, she didn't have any, apart from the feeling of wrong, wrong, wrong that had settled in her stomach. John rummaged in an overhead compartment and pulled down a heavy case. He opened it and drew out a pistol. Took out the clip, checked the action, narrow fingers moving over it expertly. He loaded the clip again, checked the safety again, and offered it to her, grip first.
"John - "
"Just in case."
Reluctantly, she accepted the handgun, surprised by its weight as always, surprised that it didn't feel colder. She'd been a gun control supporter all her life. Just the feel of the Beretta made her ill at ease.
He nodded back toward Rodney, who had dropped his face into his hands again, and had begun to shake.
"He's in shock."
"I know."
He wiped at his face, just a thoughtless movement, but it betrayed for an instant all the fractures he kept hidden. "Just stay with him," he said quietly. "I won't go far."
"Okay."
John looked at her for another long moment, "Hey, no worries," and walked toward the back of the jumper. He switched the P90's targeting light on and raised it into ready position. The ramp dropped open with a clank that echoed.
Elizabeth retreated to the cabin of the jumper. She set the pistol in the pilot's seat, then set her hand on Rodney's broad shoulder, needing the contact with something human and alive as much as Rodney needed whatever comfort she could provide.
Outside, John quartered the gate room, searching for any threats, then started up the stairs.
Elizabeth caught her breath.
The step lit. It lit, and each one after it, as John walked up. It wasn't just the steps. Lights everywhere were coming up, blazing into life, a hundred times brighter than the first time they'd set foot in Atlantis.
"My God," she whispered.
Rodney looked up, blinked dazedly and said: "It knows him."
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
Home.
John paused at the first landing and turned in a slow circle. He raised his eyes to the window that dominated the stairs, the stained glass still dark, and pulled in a breath at the vista beyond.
Lights sparked to life in the towers and spires of the city, their brilliance shining off the shield domed above the city. Beyond the shield, shining like night's black mirror, was the deep.
They were underwater again.
He stared up, caught by the same wonder he'd felt the first time, amazed, feeling like he'd finally found his place when he'd been lost all his life. The rightness of it hummed through his veins and soothed his worries and suspicions. He thought he could almost hear the city whispering welcome, welcome.
The P90 dangled from its strap, half-forgotten.
The lights at one of the transporters brightened, calling to him, and he started toward the doors.
"John?"
The crackling transmission through his radio ear piece drew him up. He shook his head. He switched on his transmitter.
"I'm here."
"Are you all right?"
"Yeah," he said softly. He could still feel the humming rightness inside, lulling and promising, smoothing the edges of his worry and anger. Telling him he belonged here; he'd come home again. "Yeah, I'm good."
"Have you found anything?"
"Not yet. Looks like no one's home."
"See if you can access the control consoles," Rodney said.
"No laptop or translators here," John replied.
He loped up the second flight of stairs to the control room level anyway and swept a dust sheet off the main console.
"Play dumb some other time, Colonel," Rodney snapped. He almost sounded normal, but not. Still in shock, John knew, just like he was. "You've picked up more Ancient than anyone besides the linguists. You're looking for numbers anyway. The city has an internal dating system. It will indicate how long it has been powered down. There will be a log. It should offer some explanation of what has happened."
John brushed his hand over the console and it lit. The main screen behind him activated and swirled with color that resolved into numbers. He stared at them until something clicked behind his eyes and they made sense. He read them again to be sure. Such a long, lonely time in the dark, sleeping and waiting, but he'd finally come and there was life again.
He unsnapped the P90 and set it down. He needed both hands to work the console, shape the chords, so that the hum became music as he read the main city operations log.
"Sheppard? Sheppard!"
"What!?" he snapped, jolted by Rodney's shout in his ear.
"You've been quiet for twenty minutes, John," Elizabeth said.
He shook his head. It couldn't have been that long. He checked his watch. It had been.
"Yeah. Sorry. McKay? I think you need to get up here and look at this."
"What is it?"
"According to what I'm reading, the city's been shut down and underwater for about nine hundred sixty-three years."
"What? That's not possible. We left yester - " Rodney's voice had been rising toward hysteria, but it cut off. That meant he'd thought of something important enough to derail his usual doom and panic response. He came back on the radio sounding detached and strangely calm. "I'm coming up there."
"Good idea."
John picked up the P90, clipping it back onto the carry sling. He paused, frowning. What had possessed him to put it down in a potentially hostile situation? Nothing except his instinct that he was in no danger. Stupid. No use taking chances. He tapped his radio transmitter again.
"Elizabeth, you'd better stay with the jumper."
"And do what, John? Twiddle my thumbs? I'm coming with Rodney. I can at least translate."
He opened his mouth to protest and stopped. He didn't mind Rodney joining him, but he didn't want Elizabeth in the control room. It felt wrong. It made no sense.
"Okey-dokey," he said with forced casualness.
In the back of his head, he still felt it, the city singing, welcome, welcome, welcome.
Home.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
He looked at the data again. Incredible. He'd figured it out in the jumper, before he and Elizabeth had joined Sheppard in the control room, but he'd wanted to confirm it. It hadn't changed. Wasn't going to change, but he was still looking at the screen, because as long as he did that, he didn't have to look at Sheppard or Elizabeth. He wasn't sure he could survive what he'd see on their faces. Not once he told them.
It wasn't his own words that kept beating in his head. It was Sheppard's: You didn't. You didn't. You didn't. Tell me you didn't. Faster and faster, tell me you didn't, louder and louder, tell me you didn't, like a roller coaster ride to hell. Tell me, his heart raced, tell me, and his lungs couldn't pull in any air, you didn't, his palms were sweating, tell, but his skin was too cold, me, too tight, and his stomach dropped and twisted violently: you didn't, didn'tdidn'tdidn't. He was going to be sick right here in the control room if he didn't, didn'tdidn'tdidn't, stop it. He braced his hand against the edge of the console and concentrated on pulling in air that tasted of ozone and salt. Breathe, he told himself, don't think. The lighted crystals blurred and juddered through his watering eyes.
"Rodney?" Elizabeth managed to inject concern and a question both in just his name.
He waited but Sheppard didn't ask anything. Sheppard probably didn't care if he was all right, because Sheppard had figured it out. Oh God. No, if Sheppard had figured it out, he would have done something, said something. Rodney let his head drop forward.
Elizabeth said his name again, sharper. He jerked upright. His fingers left dark, sweaty marks on the console.
"What? What?"
You didn't. Tell me you didn't.
"Do you know what's happened?"
He forced himself to turn and look at her. He opened his mouth, but it was too dry to speak. He could barely swallow. He didn't know how he was going to explain. He tried again.
"I - yes. I know." It felt like his entire face was being dragged down. He wondered if he wasn't having a stroke. That would be ... He would deserve it.
Tell me you didn't.
"I - " He stopped and stared at Sheppard.
"Rodney?" Elizabeth prompted.
"Colonel?" he said quietly. Miserably.
Elizabeth turned and looked at Sheppard.
Sheppard wasn't even listening to them. He was leaning his hip against another console halfway across the control room, his head tipped to the side. He'd set his P90 down. His eyes were unfocused, half-closed.
Elizabeth crossed the room and touched his arm.
Sheppard's attention snapped back to them; he tensed and looked at them both warily. His hand moved to the P90. Rodney thought he'd infinitely preferred Sheppard's abstraction to this sharp-eyed attention. He wished he could look away.
"Still with us, Colonel?"
Like a rat in a cage, running and running on a wheel and going nowhere, play the role, pretend to be all right, sarcasm is always good, don't let them see you're not certain. Batter and insult and push, push, push, but don't think anymore about - you didn't, you didn't - because God, oh, God you did. Just don't think about it, concentrate on Sheppard, on Elizabeth, on now, and not the wild, wheezing panic of knowing. Because Elizabeth and Sheppard don't know yet, and you have to keep them at a distance, because when they do, they'll turn on you.
Sheppard's eyebrows rose. "Looks like it." He even sounded tired. Rodney could see him pulling himself back into the present from wherever his mind had strayed, drawing on energy that wasn't really there.
This had to be happening to someone else, not to Rodney McKay. This wasn't him, standing in the darkened control room of Atlantis of the past, and he could handle it if he just kept it like that. Far away, beyond thick, muffling glass walls and his old friend disdain. Weren't they stupid for not figuring it all out themselves? If only they never would ...
"You want to explain, McKay?"
"We're nine thousand years or so in our past."
Blurt it out and his voice was quavering. Don't think, just tell them. Concentrate on the little, tiny details. On the loose thread in the stitching of Sheppard's T-shirt collar, on the glint of Elizabeth's necklace - she always wore that, wonder who gave it to her? - on the blood pounding in his temples, a thump thump thump like the drum beat from the Dead March, Danny Deever. Oh God. Look at Sheppard, look at Elizabeth.
"I don't understand," Elizabeth said. She wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. "How could this happen?"
Don't look, look away, and it won't be real just yet. Not yet. Not until you've confessed all of what it means.
Sheppard noticed Elizabeth shivering, too. He shrugged off his tac vest, stripped off his jacket and handed it to Elizabeth. "Here."
Rodney winced. It wouldn't have occurred to him to give Elizabeth his jacket. He might have tried to readjust the environmental controls or complained for both of them, but the simple gentlemanly gesture always escaped him. He couldn't offer Sheppard his jacket either, though Sheppard was now in that thin black shirt he favored and Rodney knew from off-planet missions that Sheppard was miserable in the cold. He never complained, but Rodney had noticed.
"Thank you, John," Elizabeth said.
Sheppard nodded, looking distracted again. It softened the intent lines of his face, but it frightened Rodney. Sheppard's focus didn't normally drift. Rodney's didn't, either, but his mind kept skittering off on tangents.
The hum of the city, that Rodney had felt since he'd stepped out of the jumper, grew deeper. The ozone scent grew sharper. A warm draft of air swirled through the chilled control room. The city breathed. On the Daedalus, always aware of the thin skin between their lives and vacuum, Rodney had first understood that, listening to the fans and the re-circulators in the dark of his cramped cabin bed. Atlantis breathed, pushing air through ventilation shafts and filters, warming and cooling, balancing the atmosphere perfectly for them. Warming it because Sheppard was cold, he thought, and wondered if Sheppard even knew how closely they were entwined.
"So if we moseyed down to the stasis room, we'd find Elizabeth in one of those pods?"
"Right next to the DeLorean," Rodney snapped, but it lacked his usual venom. He scrubbed at his face. His heart was still racing out of control. He was going to lose this, too, the comfortable mockery, the way Sheppard deliberately set up the opportunities for a good insult and enjoyed the results. But he had to go on. "Of course not. We've created, albeit inadvertently, a third timeline, exactly as Elizabeth created a second one - ours - by extending the lifespan of the ZPMs and persuading the Ancients to set up a failsafe program to raise the city."
Sheppard frowned.
"We're using power right now, aren't we?"
"Yes."
"No failsafe, no one to maintain the ZPMs, the city's going to be in worse shape than when the first timeline's expedition arrived," Elizabeth said, voice distant as though marveling at a picture. For a brief moment, Rodney hated her for understanding what so many others wouldn't have grasped.
"We've doomed ourselves - ourselves in this future - this timeline's versions of us," Rodney added. "Just by being here. Now."
Elizabeth paled further. She knew, even if she didn't know the full extent. "What exactly happened?" she asked and he could see her fighting for control. The question was rhetorical. It held the terrible gentleness that asked him to admit what he'd done.
"But how did we ... what happened?" she asked again.
Rodney straightened his back. He squared his shoulders and laced his fingers together behind his back, where Sheppard and Elizabeth wouldn't see.
"According the SGC's records, a wormhole intersecting with a solar flare resulted in SG-1 returning to the stargate in 1969. Furthermore, in an attempt to return to our own time, SG-1 dialed home in coincidence with another solar flare only to arrive ten years into their future. They were able to return, obviously, but that isn't the point."
"Maybe you could get to the point," Sheppard said. "Sometime soon."
"Right. Right. When we - when I - lost control of Arcturus, it, well, it ripped a hole in our universe. It started a chain reaction that began expanding and at the same time pulling in matter. Including solar plasma from the Dorandan primary," Rodney explained.
Elizabeth looked at him blankly; Rodney couldn't guess if she grasped what he'd said or not. Sheppard's face showed he did understand.
"I believe when we dialed the gate, the wormhole was destabilized in a manner similar to what SG-1 experienced, on a vastly greater scale, resulting in our temporal dislocation."
Rodney licked his lips and waited.
"Then we could just as easily been tossed forward ten thousand years?" Elizabeth asked.
"Nine thousand thirty-seven," Sheppard said.
"And no," Rodney added.
Sheppard glared at him.
Elizabeth looked back and forth between them. "Why?"
Rodney raised his chin and answered. "Domino effect."
"There's no there then, in the future," Sheppard said. His hazel eyes never left Rodney. "There's no universe. That hole just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and smaller and smaller, until everything is gone, and there is no universe. Right, Rodney?" He drawled out Rodney's name with the same disdain that imbued his voice whenever he mentioned Kolya. It cut deep, just the way Rodney had known it would.
The panic went away. There was nothing left to panic over, he knew. All gone. All that was left was a scream boiling up from his soul, the litany of his personal blasphemy, an entreaty to a deity he never believed in. Oh God, oh God, but if such a God existed, that let one man destroy everything in creation, then there could never be mercy from that quarter.
"Right," he replied. His voice cracked. "I destroyed our universe."
"No one destroys the universe, Rodney," Elizabeth said, very reasonably.
"McKay does."
"You can't be serious." Elizabeth looked around the control room. "That isn't possible."
"It's possible," Rodney said.
"And you knew?"
He watched Elizabeth's hands curl into fists. Her mouth thinned furiously. Her voice would begin rising next, until it cut through the cloudy numbness Rodney had been holding around his thoughts. It would cut through and he would hear the hate and see the look in Sheppard's eyes and everything he was would just bleed out onto the floor.
Somehow, he answered anyway, keeping his voice flat and nearly normal. He twisted his fingers against each other, feeling bones threaten to crack inside his hands. "That the possibility - the infinitely small possibility - existed? Yes."
"Are you insane? How could you?" Elizabeth shouted. "What have you done?"
"The chance of what happened happening was so statistically improbable as to be nonexistent."
"But it existed!"
"Of course, it existed," Rodney said. "Elizabeth, it was in the briefing."
"Hidden inside a bunch of numbers you knew she wouldn't read," Sheppard said.
"Yes," he admitted.
"My God," Elizabeth said, shaking her head, "Everyone ... everything." She pressed her palm over her mouth, visibly, obviously, fighting nausea. She swayed and pressed her eyes shut, but then she seemed to get her bearings again, collect her emotions and put them away. Watching her grapple for control like that was frightening, because Elizabeth never lost control. He had always admired that. He still did, right then envying her ability to lock everything down, because he wanted to do that, too.
"If we hadn't been knocked into the past, we'd be in Atlantis, waiting for the end," Rodney stated. "Or gone already."
When she spoke again, her face was a façade of forced calm and determination. "How do we fix it?"
He looked Elizabeth helplessly. "We don't. We can't."
"That's not good enough, Rodney. We have to do something." When he didn't say anything, Elizabeth started toward him. Rodney waited where he was.
"Elizabeth," Sheppard said, his voice tight and angry. "Stop."
"No," she snapped and her hand came up, slapping Rodney's face with all her strength. The inside of his cheek caught against a tooth and he tasted blood.
"Elizabeth," Sheppard said again. He came across the room with deceptive speed and caught her arm before she could hit Rodney again.
"Let her," Rodney blurted.
Sheppard gave him a burning glance.
"Let go, John," Elizabeth said.
He released her wrist and stepped back. "Just ... stop."
Elizabeth turned away from them both.
"Elizabeth - "
Sheppard touched her shoulder tentatively, apparently as aware of the fractures in Elizabeth's usually so strong façade as Rodney was, but Elizabeth shrugged him away. "Don't touch me."
Rodney stared at the main display screen, probing the cut in his mouth with his tongue, focusing on the pain, bright and small and completely his.
Sheppard turned and looked at him. Rodney could see him shutting down, shutting everything and everyone out. He hadn't realized before, that he'd always been inside the walls Sheppard kept up around himself. Before.
Sheppard didn't say anything.
Rodney looked back at him, unblinking, but didn't let himself see more than a blur of pallor and darkness, colors bleeding into each other. He didn't let himself see the wounds behind Sheppard's eyes, because he was already breaking. His eyes began to burn, but he didn't close them until he heard Sheppard walk away.
Then there were just the sounds of Elizabeth breathing, and the city humming against his nerves, until Elizabeth went away, too. He glimpsed her face as she walked by him, despite himself, and it was set, hard and unforgiving as chiseled marble.
He didn't need them there. He could still hear them.
What have you done?
Over and over.
Tell me you didn't.
He didn't remember leaving the control room, but he stumbled to a stop on the stairs when his knees gave in to the quaking shudders running through his body. He sank down and stared at nothing. Nothing.
"Oh God."
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
She found him on the gate room steps, staring at the jumper still sitting in front of the ring, after she'd spent hours inside the jumper, trying to formulate some kind of plan.
She handed him a Powerbar from the jumper's emergency supplies and brusquely ordered him to eat it. He obeyed.
Rodney's eyes were almost dead, but the blue held a manic gleam, as though he wanted to do nothing more than laugh and laugh until it killed him. She didn't blame him and yet she did. She wanted to tell him to behave like a normal person, but couldn't find a single thing a normal person would have done under the circumstances. She hated him and worried at the same time. They had destroyed the universe. There was no rational way to handle that.
She remembered the look on his face: the horrified disbelief, the panic so deep that it had left him frozen and nearly wordless. There had been only that small, horror-struck: "Oh, God." The look on his face in the jumper, not in the control room when he told her and John - though that had been bad enough.
She tapped the radio transmitter on and called John. He didn't answer but the nearest transporter opened shortly and he appeared. He didn't speak and he didn't look at Rodney.
Elizabeth told them she thought they should use the same living quarters they'd occupied before. Rodney nodded. John shrugged. She couldn't think of anything else to say and stared at them both. After a while, John straightened up and boarded the jumper. He emptied all their supplies onto the floor and left them there. The ceiling above the gate room opened and the jumper rose into the bay, leaving the space before the gate bare except for that pitiful pile of gear and food.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
Elizabeth pretended to sleep, supine on her narrow bed, hands folded over her breastbone, laid out like a saint on a tomb, except her eyes were wide open. She had locked her door open, unable to bear the crypt-like darkness and silence of her room without the promise of escape. Buried under the sea, there wasn't even the lap of the waves to lull her, just the oppressive thrum of the shield. She imagined it failing, all of Atlantis drowning, the cold wash of water filling her lungs. She thought she was already drowning, helpless and adrift from her own time and place.
Feeling sorry for herself was what she was doing, she knew, but she couldn't summon the will to push away the fancies and the self-pity yet.
A wordless scream knifed through the silence and catapulted her upright.
The screaming brought Elizabeth to her feet and out the door, the sound rising and falling and echoing up and down the hollow corridors. She ran barefoot down the hall and saw John, pale and shirtless, disappear through the dim doorway into Rodney's room. She waited for the sound of his voice, but there was just that keening, awful sound from Rodney, that made her want to clap her hands over her ears.
She walked into the room, ready to do something, anything to make those screams stop, wondering why John wasn't saying anything. Three steps in, she stopped, feeling like an intruder. She watched him catch Rodney's wrists in his hands as Rodney clawed at something only he saw, holding them and pulling Rodney up against him, rocking wordlessly, until the keening just stopped, abruptly as it had begun.
It took a deep breath and curling her hands into fists, digging her nails into her palms, to center herself, but she squared her shoulders and readied herself to speak. Rodney was still her responsibility. So was John. She couldn't indulge in tears. Still, any words caught in her throat.
John looked up and saw her, but said nothing. Elizabeth's feet were cold and she still felt the city looming, huge and heavy, making her nerves crawl. John's eyes were dark hollows and unreadable. She waited for him to nod, to speak, to gesture for her to join them, but he only stared until Elizabeth couldn't bear it.
"Is - "
Rodney reacted, flinching when she spoke. She would have touched his back, just lightly, as she'd done more than once before, but the memory of the slap lingered too strongly between them, in the way John angled himself into the space between them. Feeling painfully helpless, she watched as John pulled Rodney closer, warned away by his silent head shake.
She waited until Rodney sank into a miserable half-doze and retreated into the hall with John.
When she would have spoken to him, he held up his hand between them, and she gave up for the moment. Rodney might accept comfort. John never had or would. She would try to talk to him tomorrow.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
That first day, she felt paralyzed. Couldn't do anything but move mechanically and think, play everything over and over in her mind while the looming darkness of Atlantis and the knowledge of thousands of feet of water above her made her skin crawl.
The universe, everything, all the planets, all the stars, billions of lives - lost. So many cultures - gone.
Her family - gone. Her parents, her brother, her aunt Alison and her cousin Marguerite. Simon. Her house and the old rocking chair she had inherited from her grandmother. Her dog, Sedge.
Sunset over the mountains and fog in the valleys. Christmas. Chinese food. Flowers. Bach. Einstein. Kant. Michelangelo. Nothing left but what was in her own memory.
The Taj Mahal where Simon had first told her he loved her. The sinking sun had set the beautiful building and the lake before it on golden fire. She had laughed at his sentimentality, while Simon chided her for being unable to relax and be romantic instead of a hard-nosed diplomat, but he had laughed, too. They had kissed, still laughing. In memory, she could almost feel the humidity and relive the scent of flowers that had later filled their hotel room.
She had let him tell her he loved her, but she had never told him what he wanted to hear. Couldn't tell him now, because he had moved on. No more moving on now, and she mourned every lost opportunity, every wasted moment of her past.
Sorrow morphed into questions morphed into horror and disgust over what Rodney had done. What she hadn't stopped him from doing. But one look at him showed her that he didn't need disdain and resentment. Rodney knew what he'd done and what it had cost. Knew it better than anyone else ever would, including herself and John.
The worst knowledge was that of culpability. It was his fault - simple and complicated as that - his hand that had tipped the first stone in the chain. Her hand that hadn't stopped his. The truth was undeniable: the one not stopping the events was just as guilty as the one starting them. Maybe even more so because he had seen it coming. Every single wiped out existence was on their conscience.
If she sometimes believed she could hear the screams of her people on Atlantis as the darkness took them, it had to be a thousand times worse for Rodney. She wondered why he hadn't gone mad yet. She watched him carefully for the signs, seeing only some she recognized from Marguerite's breakdown in college. Marguerite had suffered from schizophrenia though, while Rodney was suffering from reality.
She wasn't ready to feel pity for him, because she had none for herself. Pity might come later, maybe one day even the need to comfort him and reach out and be reached out for, but not yet.
They all deserved to live with what they had done.
She was being cruel, she knew it, and it pained her. Elizabeth had been many things in her life: cold, calculating, stubborn, level-headed, dismissive - but never cruel. She didn't want to start now that her integrity was the only thing she had left.
She couldn't handle this like John and Rodney were - or rather, weren't. She wasn't going to give up. At least, one of them had to be strong if they didn't plan on dying here.
She recognized the signs of depression developing in John as well as Rodney as the days passed. Self-imposed isolation, a lack of appetite or care for appearance. Silence. He showered, but he hadn't shaved since their arrival. Rodney didn't do that much and she'd begun to think she'd have to make him clean up the way she made him eat. He couldn't be bothered to even brush his teeth and his breath smelled sick.
Elizabeth understood that reaction, even when all she could think of was getting clean. She stood under the shower sometimes for close to an hour, scrubbing at her skin like Lady MacBeth, until it was red and raw. It never made her feel clean, never washed away anything. She couldn't wash away the memories plaguing her. She tried, knowing it wouldn't work, hiding in the shower, in the comfort of warm water and steam and illusory safety. She wished she could just close her eyes and cry, but the tears wouldn't come. All her tears were gone, dried up by the desert inside.
There was too much in Atlantis that reminded her of every single mistake she had ever made. If she didn't find a way to handle the memories, they would eat her alive, slow and from the inside, send her down the same path Marguerite had gone: tortured by delusions until she couldn't stand it anymore and tried to kill herself. Her family had never spoken about it, but Elizabeth remembered watching her cousin change from a lively and beautiful young woman into a thin shell of who she used to be, tortured by paranoia, flinching whenever someone touched her or spoke to her. Marguerite had been haunted by the voices only she heard.
Marguerite had been so smart, she'd been aware of her own degeneration, but helpless to fight it. She couldn't shut the voices up, couldn't shut them out, even knowing they weren't real - until they became as real to her as the reality everyone else experienced. She'd seen Marguerite flinch and listen to what only she heard. Now she had to watch Rodney cringe, his eyes darting to and away from something Elizabeth couldn't see.
She could guess, though, with Rodney. She had no clue to John's demons. Whatever form they took, he kept to himself, pulling away from her and Rodney. That he was haunted too, she had no doubt.
She started searching the city for food supplies the next night, while John sat silently with Rodney, after the screaming.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
Onward to 1b/36