Fic: Litmus [1/1] [Merlin/SGA]
I'm slightly scared.
So lavvyan posted Destiny Revisited (Sheppard/McKay, Merlin/Arthur, PG13), quite possibly one of the best realised and most unlikely crossovers I've ever read, and I felt the need to beg permission to write a sort of prequel/missing scenes/how you broke my brain thing. lavvyan graciously allowed it and here it is- I only hope I do justice to the original fic. Thanks to hariboo_smirks for the beta and the hand holding!
Title: Litmus
Rating: Teen
Summary: Merlin/SGA. Elizabeth, Merlin/Arthur, McShep implied. He has to tell twenty stories to get to the one he ignored, and that's because he didn't think it mattered.
Words: 3981
Warnings: Language!
Spoilers: SGA through to season 4 Lifeline and Merlin through the entire first series (including finale).
*
Later:
When the latest bit of Hell is as done as they can make it or let it be right then, Merlin gets to the part where he kicks himself for not seeing it coming until it bit them all in the ass, for getting caught up in the present when they're supposed to be so much more, especially him. He's Rodney McKay this time around, which is enough reason to kick himself, but he's also supposed to be Merlin Emrys.
Even worse, it's the test, and he hates it but can't help feel relief at the result. It's such a bloody Arthur way of looking at it - red or blue, one or the other - but it's proof. Elizabeth is gone and that's red; it's all happening again.
But that's later (not the end, just later) and it's not how it happens.
*
Before:
It all starts in Antarctica, but damned if he knew that then.
"I could sit in that bloody chair all day long and nothing would happen," the man says, voice tense and getting up awkwardly, as if the chair should be as grateful as he is to end the near-torture and nearly bumping into the woman approaching as he flees. "Excuse me, Doctor Weir."
Merlin hasn't always had a stubborn streak a mile wide, but he has one now.
He turns to Elizabeth Weir, watching Carson's retreating back. "He's not even trying."
Gaius is Carson today, mainly because he's not doing what Rodney would really prefer him to be doing. While his own tone can be classified as whining, because really, it can't be called anything else, Merlin will blame the current incarnation of Rodney McKay. Of all the things he's discarded over thirty-two and a half lifetimes, that entire sub-routine of human behaviour where he whined, complained, lamented and despaired was one of the first to go.
And in the privacy of Rodney's head, it irks that Gaius has the ability to work this particular blend of science and magic and Merlin doesn't.
He continues talking with Elizabeth Weir about Gaius and his aversion to the chair. The cadences of full names help him to remember when he feels the need. Like all of the best poetry, it has five stresses and a reassuring weight. Elizabeth Weir has to be marked on a post-it and hung up in his head: the only people Merlin really acknowledges tend to be in his own context (Will, his blood and sister despite the kid and the English major, Gaius, Nimueh ending up as the sharp edge of Sam Carter's tongue). Elizabeth is entirely in Rodney's domain, and that's also irksome and new. It's an arrogance he'd have attributed to Arthur, but Arthur seems to have found somewhere else that none of the rest of them have been granted.
Carson will help with the research, Rodney knows, he's just going to need time for a fit of near-hysteria first. He's like a cat hissing at dinner, and he's always been like a cat hissing at dinner, even when it was magic and Gaius.
*
Then the word comes through, the symbols lining up and the last one drawn in to finish the incantation. Geoffrey (Daniel, still with the books and the narrowing eyes and the are-you-really-going-to-touch-that-because-I'll-want-to-hurt-you) paints in the last symbol and that's it, it's there, right there on the board.
Rodney is itching because part of him wants to say unreasonably 'in front of him?' with a sidelong glance at Jack O'Neill, another 'Rodney' post-it on existence, but one he's more willing to let blow away. The incarnations have this thing that Merlin identifies with, maybe causes, even when he's in the collective noun he hates: distrust of soldiers, military and all the things that burn horizons and aren't him.
Atlantis always did sound like Camelot to a lot of people and now Merlin's one of them, too, but for him it's because they're both suddenly, definitely real.
*
If he'd found Gaius annoying with the ATA gene, it was nothing to how John Sheppard made him feel as he sat down and started effortlessly shooting off sparks with his eyebrows in his ridiculous hair, oblivious and baffled like-
Like he was Merlin or something.
Or maybe Merlin was covering, just a little, just like always, for the way Arthur and everything about him hit him like a cannonball to a weak wall.
*
So they'd all filed in and taken places, and there's enough unfamiliar souls in this new old city that Rodney doesn't think twice about how the command table only has one of them. They find Morgana amongst the Athosians, and that explains why the ones he knew from before don't occur on Earth as often as he'd like: they're spread across the universe, not one blue planet. Merlin doesn't think about it for a damn long time, which is four years in this accelerated life full of impossibilities, and it turns about to be just long enough to hate himself when it comes.
*
After all, it's not like the signs weren't there. They just weren't important until he could look at them through that perfect scrying glass he always wants to smash: hindsight. Morgana's visions, then and now, have nothing on hindsight.
The first missed sign is in the siege. For a pre-medieval type, he should be used to seiges, but he still hates them.
Especially ones that show how attached Arthur is getting to Elizabeth Weir and the way that it's not one-sided. It's not sex, he's pretty sure, but Merlin's too wrapped up in ignoring what he himself wants from John Sheppard, who has no idea, and puts it down to jealousy. There's a burn from the tone he takes with himself, throwing things like 'not your boyfriend' and 'petulant' at his mind to stave off the heat time and again. Arthur's like that: Elizabeth Weir, the Nth girl on the Nth planet, even Morgana (but he shouldn't be surprised, because that was all there simmering under the hormones and the red dresses the first time).
And later it's more than that; it's more than the simple, arrogant feeling that he's waited long enough for Arthur and that should be plenty for fate, the universe(s) and everything else. It's the way that Camelot and the circle within it were forged in something unbreakable, something heavy and reactive that doesn't play well with the other children, but for Elizabeth Weir, Arthur is inconceivably opening membership again.
They've lost Owain, again. So Merlin thinks, John Sheppard sitting opposite him the day after the attacks and the city nearly falling down around their ears, again, and Arthur nearly throwing his life away, again, and watching Owain fall away from the city, again, when Ford vanished through the event horizon. The fact that these snatches stick in his head up there with some hug John Sheppard had every right to give Elizabeth Weir by the gate makes him feel like a prat, makes him disregard the way it's all a repeat, because there's still enough wild cards in the mix.
*
And then there's Ronon, and he always liked Lancelot. Fighting beside him is familiar, good, and he can't help slightly resenting that Elizabeth Weir is the one who gets to say whether Lancelot gets to stay with Arthur, Morgana and himself. Lancelot gets a room in the tower, it's a salve against Owain's lingering absence, and things are looking that bit better.
*
Project Arcturus gets filed firmly under what the fuck and let Arthur name things. And don't name things after Arthur if you're going to fuck seven eighths of it up.
*
But then it goes to Hell and he hasn't had an existence this eventful since the first, so why is he even surprised anymore?
Arthur is an idiot. This, he's aware, is a general fact and universal law, but seriously. Only an idiot could get mortally bitten twice. Merlin makes a mental note to hardwire poisonous teeth and their general relationship to Bad Things into Arthur's next reincarnation, which he's pretty sure he can find a way to do with the Ancient tech, but he's too busy worrying that the idiot is going to do something like die or worse to get round to it right then.
And he's also busy being surprised at Elizabeth Weir's courage, facing up to the wayward, over-strong John Sheppard and getting bruises along her neck in the shape of fingertips for her trouble.
*
Actually, that part where he's surprised at Elizabeth starts to happen a lot.
Rodney's been getting on with the business of making friends whether he likes it or not and Elizabeth Weir happens to be one of them. Merlin decides he should be catching up right about now.
And the part where Arthur's an idiot happens a lot, too. He's been precious about Arthur's existence until now, and he'll keep flailing and reeling whenever he disappears, gets shot, gets hooked into the wrong system or turned into a fruit cup. And yet, despite how it's all clearly insane and they're all clearly mental, it's starting to feel familiar.
*
He missed it and it was right there in front of him. Thinking back through it, he has to tell twenty stories to get to the one he ignored, and that's because he didn't think it mattered. It only grew in his perception when he looked back and strung it all together.
Nanites are the new plague but they only infect Elizabeth Weir. Too busy solving the nanite puzzle, wishing it were one of the ones that fixes itself if he hits it telekinetically until it tries harder, Merlin misses it. Maybe he's busy wondering what it is that makes Arthur trust this one, risk for this one (or whether that's just John Sheppard through and through). Or maybe he's busy being relieved that Elizabeth isn't dead, because she seems to be resurrecting that part of him that righteously claimed that unpleasant things would not be allowed to happen every three days back in Camelot.
And really, it's just one line in a transcript he only vaguely needs to listen to. Elizabeth, in the interests of complete reporting and before those sad cases at the IOA can demand it, transcribes what happened in her head while the nanites held her body. It's in the interests of trying to figure out exactly what the nanites are capable of, it's unhelpful as fuck since they're left with anything they goddamn want so long as there's juice, but still.
'General O'Neill visited. He tried to help.'
While not wondering how he missed it, Merlin wonders how he was supposed to see it coming.
*
Okay, she's good. She can bullshit grade A crap about World of Warcraft to get out of the SGC and back to Atlantis. Merlin has been pretending to a greater or lesser degree that he likes this unknown among them, but the line's been getting thinner and thinner. He's respected her for a long time at any rate.
Watching them in their new city, watching her on a bridge above a walkway with General O'Neill now they've reclaimed it, he understands her thing for the city. It's not even that it's theirs, or hers, the same way he never quite claimed Camelot. It's more that if the city is a collective noun, a title and a state of mind, then they're in it, of it and have it. It's the frame that holds them, the thing that these others are using to replace the desperate interpersonal disasters of Camelot before those are rebuilt, and Merlin's feeling it fall into place around him.
And yet, somewhere in that whole clusterfuck with the Replicators, he missed it again.
*
"Yeah, I don't think that's your call," he snaps at Ellis, distracted from the ongoing oh, hello, Guinivere, nice to see you that is every time he walks by Jennifer Keller by this new and latest disaster. Mixed up in there, in that thing he's not thinking about because he needs to be Rodney already and fix shit, is a pain that's gone on and on from the first and second times he saw Gaius die.
He'd said this would be a disaster and Holy Deadly Beam On The City, Batman, it was. For fuck's sake, he'd even used the phrase poking a sleeping dragon. Out loud and everything. In any world with any justice, Arthur would have nodded and agreed, overwhelmed by the common sense and past connection. Of all the people to chime in on his side, he found himself with Elizabeth fighting his corner, putting in calls all over the place, even to that officious prat Woolsey and General O'Neill. But then, as he always had been, he'd been taken along and swept up in it by Arthur and his naive love of doing something and acting on things.
It's an hour later and they're actually doing this.
"We are ready," he says triumphantly to Elizabeth, standing beside him and limbs taut.
"Good," she nods, glancing to Chuck, "give me city wide." Taking a breath, the same kind of breath Merlin takes before a spell he isn't sure about but needs to work, she taps her ear. "Attention all personnel. We are about to attempt to submerge the city. From what I understand, it could get a little bumpy, so this is your last chance to secure equipment and get to the designated safe areas."
Whatever her spell is, her ability to instill faith in them all for this heap of space dust they call a city, it infects him the same way Arthur's stupid enthusiasm always did. It grabs him, the possibility that this just might work, so much so that he grins up at her nervously and comments, "We've come full circle, eh?"
"Yeah," Elizabeth answers, "feels that way." She looks back and it tugs at something. Not the same way Arthur's odd looks do, not the same way Guinivere's still-timid set of the shoulders do, but it's - something. Something he doesn't have time for, but that definitely cries out to a set of names they don't wear on the outside.
There's a whole circle of looks between Elizabeth, Rodney and Radek before she nods. "Take us down."
He's high on reality that's right there and can be touched, high on being fully, completely who he is this time, high on saving their world and all of them again. "Aye, aye, captain." Rodney bites a grin and looks to Radek, "shall we?"
*
He'd thought it would work, but it doesn't and it doesn't buy them anything like enough time and he can't make anymore of that with anything he has to hand.
"Shouldn't you guys be bickering or something?"
Well, yes, prat, is Rodney's immediate thought, sitting opposite Radek in the lab and looking at John Sheppard in the doorway. His actual reply is, "We've got nothing to bicker about." But it's still Arthur, still in the doorway, and it's hardwired into him to give him what he wants on a level near instinct, so he says, "he's run out of bad ideas - finally."
After some more back and forths, John is leaning against the desk and looking like Merlin feels when he'd like to levitate the problem in mid-air and wring it like a rag until it bleeds a solution.
Then Radek goes and says, "There is nowhere on the face of this planet that that thing cannot kill us," and Rodney's not sure who he wants to kiss more. He looks at John and there's this spark that flies between them, both of them taking the statement and running in the opposite direction like the contrary bastards they are.
Nowhere on this planet.
*
There's a bit of ping pong with an asteroid and some things that go wrong in other ways, but this time, it actually works. And there's an awkward as Hell conversation with John Sheppard before it hits the fan where it's pretty much, so yeah, there might be death and eh, good luck, you can do this. But that's part of the other story with Arthur that Merlin thought was disconnected completely, and he wasn't paying attention, but it's getting closer to when he doesn't have that choice.
*
When he leans up from the control panel, there's death and blood everywhere like the cuts on his skin.
And there's Elizabeth lying on the ground, broken and tugging at his mind, and Arthur in his ear shouting for them, shouting about how they've done it, they're flying.
Just when he thinks it can't get any worse, they're lost and the power reserves are sinking.
*
"Yes, you need to-"
"Uh, I should-"
"Right, right-"
"I'm on it-"
Radek Zelenka isn't anyone he remembers, but if Atlantis has taught Merlin anything, it's a lesson all about how the Camelot set don't have an exact monopoly on teamwork. Radek and Rodney run between panels, keeping the city steady by the skin of its teeth.
"Wait, wait, wait," Sheppard is clamouring for an explanation, squinting and serious. "What's going on here?"
Merlin doesn't stop; he can't stop. There's always things it's given to each of them to know, and he's propping up some of the control room with his powers, ghosting across panels that even four hands can't get to in time. He looks up to meet Arthur's eyes for a second, hoping the eyes are the same colour they should be but really not caring. "Every second I waste, we’re draining more power. Just trust me, we’re doing the right thing here."
*
It's ridiculous, like everything else, and although there's a tug in the direction of the infirmary, he doesn't follow. He has a city's power grid to run and an Arthur who won't be put off from an explanation any longer, despite the way Rodney's still running around like a headless chicken.
So he tries to explain it simply while remembering how not actually stupid Arthur ended up being, but the leaky pipe analogy proves to be a step too far on the stupid side.
"If you dumb this down any more, you're gonna get hit," John informs him sharply, eyes flashing.
Rodney keeps on explaining, amping up the jargon enough that it doesn't hurt his own ears to be saying it, and Merlin clutches onto that sharp tone for sanity - even rootless in hyperspace, free of gravity and stuck in problems too huge for even his cheating, Arthur doesn't change.
*
He gets a hurried update on Elizabeth as they run to the control room to be informed of the asteroid situation: namely the belt of chunks of rock about to pound the city to a pulp as it flies through space haphazardly.
And then he's in a jumper, and it's Arthur's fault for thinking of an insane plan in the nick of time, and if he remembered what happened every time Merlin had ever picked up a sword, he would never be in a jumper. He tries to tell him that, but apparently once scoring zero at Asteroids in an arcade counts as experience, not grounds for disqualification.
*
Guinivere tracks him down in the nanosecond of non-spare time he has, running from giving Zelenka a pep talk to somewhere else, because there's always somewhere else right now.
He asks how Elizabeth is and the tug kicks in again, doubled in strength because Guinivere is right in front of him with eyes that are determined he'll help. He has time for a look; the intercom will summon him somewhere else soon enough. And also, Gwen's just said that there's nothing left they can do, and that is not acceptable.
*
Nanites.
It's looking at Jennifer Keller's laptop screen and hearing Guinivere's voice in his ear that it crashes in on him, layer after layer of it, image after image, file after file.
Nanites.
She'd be part-replicator for the rest of her life.
They should let her die. They should. Bargains with the devil-
Fuck, he's an idiot.
*
He argues with Arthur: another universal statement, yes, but this time because he has to. And because he can render the nanites harmless, yes, and because he can make sure they don't contact the others, yes, but also because fuck, he got her so wrong.
That line from that transcript pricks at Merlin and suddenly, it's there and shining: that image of Elizabeth and Jack O'Neill on the bridge above the city (because of course that man, Uther, walking wounded with a dead son and his Doing What Has To Be Done strut, would be the one to enable it all).
Elizabeth isn't external, she isn't the lone soul they don't know, and that's exactly why Merlin and Guinivere disregard Arthur's explicit order to leave it alone. He does it so Arthur can have his cake and eat it, leave no friend behind and shout at someone else for taking the step he can't take. Merlin knows he would: he said it once, standing on a rampart before running off to Ealdor again. They'd do anything for a mother, and there's no way he's watching Igraine die if he can stop it.
*
And of course, Igraine thinks it's a bad idea. But she's been born specifically to hold them in line, she's been born to negotiate between them, and she's been doing it so long that Merlin creates new insults for his own vast, unseeing intellect.
But seriously, how did he miss it? Her kinship to the Ancients and her entire life of statecraft. He never met Arthur's mother, but - and then no, he still doesn't have time for this.
Admittedly, his next Grand Plan to save them all isn't that much better, but Arthur likes it more, possibly because it involves ZPMs and shooting things. It also relies on Igraine throwing herself through a fire, but he knows Elizabeth is capable of that.
*
She ends up being better at it than he is, this manipulation lark, and that's galling. She also ends up being a repeat he can't ignore, buying their lives with her own. Once the dust settles, it makes Merlin wonder about the first time, whether Igraine knew what carrying Arthur would do to her: whether she knew it was a trade, not a boon.
Still, on every level, Merlin gets why John is a shell. Igraine's death did that the first time and he wasn't even alive enough to really see it; it just took longer. This one, he thinks, might take as long to sink in - John's working under the assumption she's still out there.
Merlin is pissed off and - yes, he's grieving. It's an injustice to the woman that he feels her more worthy of it now that he knows who she was. He tries to tell himself that he knew Elizabeth already, and if he'd never realised who she'd once been he'd know that he's still a good person, who grieves for people and not ghosts, but the truth is, he can't ever know.
He's pissed off with the universe and not only because it feels like it's abandoned them. Nimueh once died for a balance, Igraine died for a balance before that, but this-
If he really wanted to scratch it up to fate, Merlin would let himself think that Elizabeth died by the window and that any time given beyond is borrowed, but that's a fucked up kind of compromise, and if there's one thing he's truly rotten at, it's giving up people for compromises.
*
Later:
So they don't give up. Arthur doesn't and in this Merlin will let himself be led. Nimueh, hardened by service under Uther but not broken by it because this Uther is everything the first should have been, comes to them.
Still, it's the test. Igraine is gone; the test is red rather than blue. It's happening again, it's the same again, and maybe this time, it'll be the last time.
END.
So lavvyan posted Destiny Revisited (Sheppard/McKay, Merlin/Arthur, PG13), quite possibly one of the best realised and most unlikely crossovers I've ever read, and I felt the need to beg permission to write a sort of prequel/missing scenes/how you broke my brain thing. lavvyan graciously allowed it and here it is- I only hope I do justice to the original fic. Thanks to hariboo_smirks for the beta and the hand holding!
Title: Litmus
Rating: Teen
Summary: Merlin/SGA. Elizabeth, Merlin/Arthur, McShep implied. He has to tell twenty stories to get to the one he ignored, and that's because he didn't think it mattered.
Words: 3981
Warnings: Language!
Spoilers: SGA through to season 4 Lifeline and Merlin through the entire first series (including finale).
*
Later:
When the latest bit of Hell is as done as they can make it or let it be right then, Merlin gets to the part where he kicks himself for not seeing it coming until it bit them all in the ass, for getting caught up in the present when they're supposed to be so much more, especially him. He's Rodney McKay this time around, which is enough reason to kick himself, but he's also supposed to be Merlin Emrys.
Even worse, it's the test, and he hates it but can't help feel relief at the result. It's such a bloody Arthur way of looking at it - red or blue, one or the other - but it's proof. Elizabeth is gone and that's red; it's all happening again.
But that's later (not the end, just later) and it's not how it happens.
*
Before:
It all starts in Antarctica, but damned if he knew that then.
"I could sit in that bloody chair all day long and nothing would happen," the man says, voice tense and getting up awkwardly, as if the chair should be as grateful as he is to end the near-torture and nearly bumping into the woman approaching as he flees. "Excuse me, Doctor Weir."
Merlin hasn't always had a stubborn streak a mile wide, but he has one now.
He turns to Elizabeth Weir, watching Carson's retreating back. "He's not even trying."
Gaius is Carson today, mainly because he's not doing what Rodney would really prefer him to be doing. While his own tone can be classified as whining, because really, it can't be called anything else, Merlin will blame the current incarnation of Rodney McKay. Of all the things he's discarded over thirty-two and a half lifetimes, that entire sub-routine of human behaviour where he whined, complained, lamented and despaired was one of the first to go.
And in the privacy of Rodney's head, it irks that Gaius has the ability to work this particular blend of science and magic and Merlin doesn't.
He continues talking with Elizabeth Weir about Gaius and his aversion to the chair. The cadences of full names help him to remember when he feels the need. Like all of the best poetry, it has five stresses and a reassuring weight. Elizabeth Weir has to be marked on a post-it and hung up in his head: the only people Merlin really acknowledges tend to be in his own context (Will, his blood and sister despite the kid and the English major, Gaius, Nimueh ending up as the sharp edge of Sam Carter's tongue). Elizabeth is entirely in Rodney's domain, and that's also irksome and new. It's an arrogance he'd have attributed to Arthur, but Arthur seems to have found somewhere else that none of the rest of them have been granted.
Carson will help with the research, Rodney knows, he's just going to need time for a fit of near-hysteria first. He's like a cat hissing at dinner, and he's always been like a cat hissing at dinner, even when it was magic and Gaius.
*
Then the word comes through, the symbols lining up and the last one drawn in to finish the incantation. Geoffrey (Daniel, still with the books and the narrowing eyes and the are-you-really-going-to-touch-that-because-I'll-want-to-hurt-you) paints in the last symbol and that's it, it's there, right there on the board.
Rodney is itching because part of him wants to say unreasonably 'in front of him?' with a sidelong glance at Jack O'Neill, another 'Rodney' post-it on existence, but one he's more willing to let blow away. The incarnations have this thing that Merlin identifies with, maybe causes, even when he's in the collective noun he hates: distrust of soldiers, military and all the things that burn horizons and aren't him.
Atlantis always did sound like Camelot to a lot of people and now Merlin's one of them, too, but for him it's because they're both suddenly, definitely real.
*
If he'd found Gaius annoying with the ATA gene, it was nothing to how John Sheppard made him feel as he sat down and started effortlessly shooting off sparks with his eyebrows in his ridiculous hair, oblivious and baffled like-
Like he was Merlin or something.
Or maybe Merlin was covering, just a little, just like always, for the way Arthur and everything about him hit him like a cannonball to a weak wall.
*
So they'd all filed in and taken places, and there's enough unfamiliar souls in this new old city that Rodney doesn't think twice about how the command table only has one of them. They find Morgana amongst the Athosians, and that explains why the ones he knew from before don't occur on Earth as often as he'd like: they're spread across the universe, not one blue planet. Merlin doesn't think about it for a damn long time, which is four years in this accelerated life full of impossibilities, and it turns about to be just long enough to hate himself when it comes.
*
After all, it's not like the signs weren't there. They just weren't important until he could look at them through that perfect scrying glass he always wants to smash: hindsight. Morgana's visions, then and now, have nothing on hindsight.
The first missed sign is in the siege. For a pre-medieval type, he should be used to seiges, but he still hates them.
Especially ones that show how attached Arthur is getting to Elizabeth Weir and the way that it's not one-sided. It's not sex, he's pretty sure, but Merlin's too wrapped up in ignoring what he himself wants from John Sheppard, who has no idea, and puts it down to jealousy. There's a burn from the tone he takes with himself, throwing things like 'not your boyfriend' and 'petulant' at his mind to stave off the heat time and again. Arthur's like that: Elizabeth Weir, the Nth girl on the Nth planet, even Morgana (but he shouldn't be surprised, because that was all there simmering under the hormones and the red dresses the first time).
And later it's more than that; it's more than the simple, arrogant feeling that he's waited long enough for Arthur and that should be plenty for fate, the universe(s) and everything else. It's the way that Camelot and the circle within it were forged in something unbreakable, something heavy and reactive that doesn't play well with the other children, but for Elizabeth Weir, Arthur is inconceivably opening membership again.
They've lost Owain, again. So Merlin thinks, John Sheppard sitting opposite him the day after the attacks and the city nearly falling down around their ears, again, and Arthur nearly throwing his life away, again, and watching Owain fall away from the city, again, when Ford vanished through the event horizon. The fact that these snatches stick in his head up there with some hug John Sheppard had every right to give Elizabeth Weir by the gate makes him feel like a prat, makes him disregard the way it's all a repeat, because there's still enough wild cards in the mix.
*
And then there's Ronon, and he always liked Lancelot. Fighting beside him is familiar, good, and he can't help slightly resenting that Elizabeth Weir is the one who gets to say whether Lancelot gets to stay with Arthur, Morgana and himself. Lancelot gets a room in the tower, it's a salve against Owain's lingering absence, and things are looking that bit better.
*
Project Arcturus gets filed firmly under what the fuck and let Arthur name things. And don't name things after Arthur if you're going to fuck seven eighths of it up.
*
But then it goes to Hell and he hasn't had an existence this eventful since the first, so why is he even surprised anymore?
Arthur is an idiot. This, he's aware, is a general fact and universal law, but seriously. Only an idiot could get mortally bitten twice. Merlin makes a mental note to hardwire poisonous teeth and their general relationship to Bad Things into Arthur's next reincarnation, which he's pretty sure he can find a way to do with the Ancient tech, but he's too busy worrying that the idiot is going to do something like die or worse to get round to it right then.
And he's also busy being surprised at Elizabeth Weir's courage, facing up to the wayward, over-strong John Sheppard and getting bruises along her neck in the shape of fingertips for her trouble.
*
Actually, that part where he's surprised at Elizabeth starts to happen a lot.
Rodney's been getting on with the business of making friends whether he likes it or not and Elizabeth Weir happens to be one of them. Merlin decides he should be catching up right about now.
And the part where Arthur's an idiot happens a lot, too. He's been precious about Arthur's existence until now, and he'll keep flailing and reeling whenever he disappears, gets shot, gets hooked into the wrong system or turned into a fruit cup. And yet, despite how it's all clearly insane and they're all clearly mental, it's starting to feel familiar.
*
He missed it and it was right there in front of him. Thinking back through it, he has to tell twenty stories to get to the one he ignored, and that's because he didn't think it mattered. It only grew in his perception when he looked back and strung it all together.
Nanites are the new plague but they only infect Elizabeth Weir. Too busy solving the nanite puzzle, wishing it were one of the ones that fixes itself if he hits it telekinetically until it tries harder, Merlin misses it. Maybe he's busy wondering what it is that makes Arthur trust this one, risk for this one (or whether that's just John Sheppard through and through). Or maybe he's busy being relieved that Elizabeth isn't dead, because she seems to be resurrecting that part of him that righteously claimed that unpleasant things would not be allowed to happen every three days back in Camelot.
And really, it's just one line in a transcript he only vaguely needs to listen to. Elizabeth, in the interests of complete reporting and before those sad cases at the IOA can demand it, transcribes what happened in her head while the nanites held her body. It's in the interests of trying to figure out exactly what the nanites are capable of, it's unhelpful as fuck since they're left with anything they goddamn want so long as there's juice, but still.
'General O'Neill visited. He tried to help.'
While not wondering how he missed it, Merlin wonders how he was supposed to see it coming.
*
Okay, she's good. She can bullshit grade A crap about World of Warcraft to get out of the SGC and back to Atlantis. Merlin has been pretending to a greater or lesser degree that he likes this unknown among them, but the line's been getting thinner and thinner. He's respected her for a long time at any rate.
Watching them in their new city, watching her on a bridge above a walkway with General O'Neill now they've reclaimed it, he understands her thing for the city. It's not even that it's theirs, or hers, the same way he never quite claimed Camelot. It's more that if the city is a collective noun, a title and a state of mind, then they're in it, of it and have it. It's the frame that holds them, the thing that these others are using to replace the desperate interpersonal disasters of Camelot before those are rebuilt, and Merlin's feeling it fall into place around him.
And yet, somewhere in that whole clusterfuck with the Replicators, he missed it again.
*
"Yeah, I don't think that's your call," he snaps at Ellis, distracted from the ongoing oh, hello, Guinivere, nice to see you that is every time he walks by Jennifer Keller by this new and latest disaster. Mixed up in there, in that thing he's not thinking about because he needs to be Rodney already and fix shit, is a pain that's gone on and on from the first and second times he saw Gaius die.
He'd said this would be a disaster and Holy Deadly Beam On The City, Batman, it was. For fuck's sake, he'd even used the phrase poking a sleeping dragon. Out loud and everything. In any world with any justice, Arthur would have nodded and agreed, overwhelmed by the common sense and past connection. Of all the people to chime in on his side, he found himself with Elizabeth fighting his corner, putting in calls all over the place, even to that officious prat Woolsey and General O'Neill. But then, as he always had been, he'd been taken along and swept up in it by Arthur and his naive love of doing something and acting on things.
It's an hour later and they're actually doing this.
"We are ready," he says triumphantly to Elizabeth, standing beside him and limbs taut.
"Good," she nods, glancing to Chuck, "give me city wide." Taking a breath, the same kind of breath Merlin takes before a spell he isn't sure about but needs to work, she taps her ear. "Attention all personnel. We are about to attempt to submerge the city. From what I understand, it could get a little bumpy, so this is your last chance to secure equipment and get to the designated safe areas."
Whatever her spell is, her ability to instill faith in them all for this heap of space dust they call a city, it infects him the same way Arthur's stupid enthusiasm always did. It grabs him, the possibility that this just might work, so much so that he grins up at her nervously and comments, "We've come full circle, eh?"
"Yeah," Elizabeth answers, "feels that way." She looks back and it tugs at something. Not the same way Arthur's odd looks do, not the same way Guinivere's still-timid set of the shoulders do, but it's - something. Something he doesn't have time for, but that definitely cries out to a set of names they don't wear on the outside.
There's a whole circle of looks between Elizabeth, Rodney and Radek before she nods. "Take us down."
He's high on reality that's right there and can be touched, high on being fully, completely who he is this time, high on saving their world and all of them again. "Aye, aye, captain." Rodney bites a grin and looks to Radek, "shall we?"
*
He'd thought it would work, but it doesn't and it doesn't buy them anything like enough time and he can't make anymore of that with anything he has to hand.
"Shouldn't you guys be bickering or something?"
Well, yes, prat, is Rodney's immediate thought, sitting opposite Radek in the lab and looking at John Sheppard in the doorway. His actual reply is, "We've got nothing to bicker about." But it's still Arthur, still in the doorway, and it's hardwired into him to give him what he wants on a level near instinct, so he says, "he's run out of bad ideas - finally."
After some more back and forths, John is leaning against the desk and looking like Merlin feels when he'd like to levitate the problem in mid-air and wring it like a rag until it bleeds a solution.
Then Radek goes and says, "There is nowhere on the face of this planet that that thing cannot kill us," and Rodney's not sure who he wants to kiss more. He looks at John and there's this spark that flies between them, both of them taking the statement and running in the opposite direction like the contrary bastards they are.
Nowhere on this planet.
*
There's a bit of ping pong with an asteroid and some things that go wrong in other ways, but this time, it actually works. And there's an awkward as Hell conversation with John Sheppard before it hits the fan where it's pretty much, so yeah, there might be death and eh, good luck, you can do this. But that's part of the other story with Arthur that Merlin thought was disconnected completely, and he wasn't paying attention, but it's getting closer to when he doesn't have that choice.
*
When he leans up from the control panel, there's death and blood everywhere like the cuts on his skin.
And there's Elizabeth lying on the ground, broken and tugging at his mind, and Arthur in his ear shouting for them, shouting about how they've done it, they're flying.
Just when he thinks it can't get any worse, they're lost and the power reserves are sinking.
*
"Yes, you need to-"
"Uh, I should-"
"Right, right-"
"I'm on it-"
Radek Zelenka isn't anyone he remembers, but if Atlantis has taught Merlin anything, it's a lesson all about how the Camelot set don't have an exact monopoly on teamwork. Radek and Rodney run between panels, keeping the city steady by the skin of its teeth.
"Wait, wait, wait," Sheppard is clamouring for an explanation, squinting and serious. "What's going on here?"
Merlin doesn't stop; he can't stop. There's always things it's given to each of them to know, and he's propping up some of the control room with his powers, ghosting across panels that even four hands can't get to in time. He looks up to meet Arthur's eyes for a second, hoping the eyes are the same colour they should be but really not caring. "Every second I waste, we’re draining more power. Just trust me, we’re doing the right thing here."
*
It's ridiculous, like everything else, and although there's a tug in the direction of the infirmary, he doesn't follow. He has a city's power grid to run and an Arthur who won't be put off from an explanation any longer, despite the way Rodney's still running around like a headless chicken.
So he tries to explain it simply while remembering how not actually stupid Arthur ended up being, but the leaky pipe analogy proves to be a step too far on the stupid side.
"If you dumb this down any more, you're gonna get hit," John informs him sharply, eyes flashing.
Rodney keeps on explaining, amping up the jargon enough that it doesn't hurt his own ears to be saying it, and Merlin clutches onto that sharp tone for sanity - even rootless in hyperspace, free of gravity and stuck in problems too huge for even his cheating, Arthur doesn't change.
*
He gets a hurried update on Elizabeth as they run to the control room to be informed of the asteroid situation: namely the belt of chunks of rock about to pound the city to a pulp as it flies through space haphazardly.
And then he's in a jumper, and it's Arthur's fault for thinking of an insane plan in the nick of time, and if he remembered what happened every time Merlin had ever picked up a sword, he would never be in a jumper. He tries to tell him that, but apparently once scoring zero at Asteroids in an arcade counts as experience, not grounds for disqualification.
*
Guinivere tracks him down in the nanosecond of non-spare time he has, running from giving Zelenka a pep talk to somewhere else, because there's always somewhere else right now.
He asks how Elizabeth is and the tug kicks in again, doubled in strength because Guinivere is right in front of him with eyes that are determined he'll help. He has time for a look; the intercom will summon him somewhere else soon enough. And also, Gwen's just said that there's nothing left they can do, and that is not acceptable.
*
Nanites.
It's looking at Jennifer Keller's laptop screen and hearing Guinivere's voice in his ear that it crashes in on him, layer after layer of it, image after image, file after file.
Nanites.
She'd be part-replicator for the rest of her life.
They should let her die. They should. Bargains with the devil-
Fuck, he's an idiot.
*
He argues with Arthur: another universal statement, yes, but this time because he has to. And because he can render the nanites harmless, yes, and because he can make sure they don't contact the others, yes, but also because fuck, he got her so wrong.
That line from that transcript pricks at Merlin and suddenly, it's there and shining: that image of Elizabeth and Jack O'Neill on the bridge above the city (because of course that man, Uther, walking wounded with a dead son and his Doing What Has To Be Done strut, would be the one to enable it all).
Elizabeth isn't external, she isn't the lone soul they don't know, and that's exactly why Merlin and Guinivere disregard Arthur's explicit order to leave it alone. He does it so Arthur can have his cake and eat it, leave no friend behind and shout at someone else for taking the step he can't take. Merlin knows he would: he said it once, standing on a rampart before running off to Ealdor again. They'd do anything for a mother, and there's no way he's watching Igraine die if he can stop it.
*
And of course, Igraine thinks it's a bad idea. But she's been born specifically to hold them in line, she's been born to negotiate between them, and she's been doing it so long that Merlin creates new insults for his own vast, unseeing intellect.
But seriously, how did he miss it? Her kinship to the Ancients and her entire life of statecraft. He never met Arthur's mother, but - and then no, he still doesn't have time for this.
Admittedly, his next Grand Plan to save them all isn't that much better, but Arthur likes it more, possibly because it involves ZPMs and shooting things. It also relies on Igraine throwing herself through a fire, but he knows Elizabeth is capable of that.
*
She ends up being better at it than he is, this manipulation lark, and that's galling. She also ends up being a repeat he can't ignore, buying their lives with her own. Once the dust settles, it makes Merlin wonder about the first time, whether Igraine knew what carrying Arthur would do to her: whether she knew it was a trade, not a boon.
Still, on every level, Merlin gets why John is a shell. Igraine's death did that the first time and he wasn't even alive enough to really see it; it just took longer. This one, he thinks, might take as long to sink in - John's working under the assumption she's still out there.
Merlin is pissed off and - yes, he's grieving. It's an injustice to the woman that he feels her more worthy of it now that he knows who she was. He tries to tell himself that he knew Elizabeth already, and if he'd never realised who she'd once been he'd know that he's still a good person, who grieves for people and not ghosts, but the truth is, he can't ever know.
He's pissed off with the universe and not only because it feels like it's abandoned them. Nimueh once died for a balance, Igraine died for a balance before that, but this-
If he really wanted to scratch it up to fate, Merlin would let himself think that Elizabeth died by the window and that any time given beyond is borrowed, but that's a fucked up kind of compromise, and if there's one thing he's truly rotten at, it's giving up people for compromises.
*
Later:
So they don't give up. Arthur doesn't and in this Merlin will let himself be led. Nimueh, hardened by service under Uther but not broken by it because this Uther is everything the first should have been, comes to them.
Still, it's the test. Igraine is gone; the test is red rather than blue. It's happening again, it's the same again, and maybe this time, it'll be the last time.
END.