The WIP Project, 5
(If you're reading on DW, earlier entries are here.)
This story is called Bury the Survivors, and I'm just never gonna finish it. In my head, it's the dark mirror version of The House By the Beach; in retrospect, I don't actually remember why I think that. In the end, though, it was too dark; I have this secret love for really super dark stories, but writing one was tedious, and I kept finding myself riding the line between dark and so-dark-it's-funny.
So. It's virtually complete, enough that I don't think it needs additional notes. It is super dark, with murder, sexual manipulation, and (possible) suicide, so tread with caution.
Bury the Survivors
One day after breakfast, Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard shot Major Lorne in the face.
There is an inquiry, of course, in which Sheppard is cleared of any wrongdoing. An alien symbiote had been clinging to Lorne's brainstem at the time, after all. That Dr. Beckett figured out how to detach and kill the creature only moments later is noted, but ultimately not held against Sheppard; reading minds is well above his pay grade, after all.
They can't send Lorne's body back to Earth- the symbiote is still attached, after all, and no one is willing to risk it- so they send Colonel Sheppard instead. Sheppard insists on taking Dr. McKay with him, and he doesn't protest- no need to make any of this worse for Sheppard than it already is.
Rodney waits in the car that the SGC has provided them as Sheppard informs Lorne's mother of what has happened. It doesn't take as long as Rodney expects; within fifteen minutes, Sheppard is back at the door, shaking hands with a younger guy who must be Lorne's brother.
“Thank god that's over with,” Sheppard says when he climbs back into the driver's seat, his sunglasses already in place. “Let's get a beer.” It's so stereotypically Sheppard that Rodney almost laughs.
Rodney feels awful, later, lying next to Sheppard in their hotel room, Sheppard's head on his chest, his hand over his heart. He'd be lying if he said he hadn't seen something like this coming, but he can't shake the feeling that he's taken advantage of Sheppard's grief.
When they drop out of hyperspace over Atlantis, Colonel Caldwell is beamed into the vaccuum. No one sees it happen, and there's no malfunction in the system- except the monitoring systems for the beam's control room, which have been out of commission ever since they left Earth.
Sheppard puts his arm over the back of Rodney's chair
“You're embarassing me,” he says quietly, and he knows he must be blushing.
--
They're getting out of their gear after a mission, and Rodney can't find his multi-tool- the really nice one Jeannie bought him years ago, which is his favorite even if it does say “Dr. Meredith McKay” on the side. He recalls putting it on top of the console he'd been repairing, but it definitely hadn't been there when he'd finished.
“Did somebody pick up my Gerber?” Rodney asks the room at large. He looks up and realizes it's just him and Sheppard; they must be lagging behind.
“In my vest,” Sheppard tells him, nodding to where it's hanging.
It's not in either of the first two pockets he checks. As he opens the third, his fingers brush over something he doesn't recognize, something smooth and oblong that's wedged in, too big to really fit. He fumbles it out. It takes him a second to process what it is; he jerks his hand away from it instinctively, and it falls to the floor.
He looks up to find Sheppard smirking at him. “Just in case I ever need anything from you.”
Rodney stares at him, open mouthed.
Sheppard picks up the lemon, tossing it lightly into the air and catching it again. Nothing about his demeanor suggests that he's kidding.
--
He's reading a weird power drain from a room at the top of the northwest pier. It's some kind of lounge- they'd sealed it, though, because there was some kind of weird short in the lighting that had caused exactly this problem before.
It's late- Sheppard will be expecting him- but he goes to check it out anyway, and to possibly berate whoever's switched it on.
He hears the voices before he ever even gets there. Somebody is shouting; he almost calls for backup before he realizes what they're talking about.
They're talking about Sheppard and what to do about him.
Rodney can only hear half of it, can process even less. Dr. Heightmeyer is talking now, about PCL-R and C-PTSD and a bunch of other acronyms that Rodney is only halfway familiar with. He gets the gist, though.
He hears them mentioning his name; Lorne's replacement is insisting that he is compromised.
Rodney doesn't realize he's opened the door until they're already looking at him.
“The systems in here are malfunctioning and wasting power,” he says, keeping his voice bored and his face blank, like he hasn't heard them. “You should meet somewhere else.”
“Thank you, Rodney,” Elizabeth says, smiling at him like nothing's wrong. He nods at her and leaves, goes back to his own room, alone.
Sheppard is stretched out beside him when he wakes up.
The next night, lights come on in the basement of the west pier; he ignores them.
--
Teyla goes back to her people two days later, taking all of her belongings; Rodney isn't surprised when no one will tell him why.
--
Of course, it happens when SGA-2 is offworld. Rodney's in his lab with Radek when the klaxons start sounding.
“Security and Dr. McKay to the gateroom immediately,” a voice says over the PA. “Blue alert, I repeat, blue alert.”
Rodney didn't know that they even had a color-coded alert system, but he starts running anyway, Radek right behind him.
There's a small, silent crowd around the consoles; Rodney can see two Marines standing on this side of the walkway between the operations deck and Elizabeth's office. He pushes his way through to them, desperate to find out what's gone wrong.
“He's asking for you,” one of them says, giving Rodney a worried look as he taps his earpiece. “We're sending in Dr. McKay.” He listens to the response, nodding to his partner, and they both step aside.
All he can see is John's back. Someone- Carson?- is lying- unconscious, he desperately hopes- on the floor.
The walkway feels like it's about a thousand miles long.
Elizabeth is on her knees, facing him, her hands behind her head. Her face is completely calm, like this is nothing out of the ordinary, and she's not crying; but Rodney can read her tension in the rod-straight line of her back, the way her gaze stays resolutely in front of her.
Sheppard's arm is outstretched, and the muzzle of his gun is resting against her forehead.
“Afternoon, Rodney,” Sheppard drawls lazily. “Well, now that we're all here, we can get the party started.”
“Colonel,” Rodney says carefully, his heart beating out of his chest, “put the gun down and let's talk about this.”
“What's there to talk about?” he replies, not taking his attention off of Elizabeth.
“Anything,” he says quickly. “Puddlejumpers. Ferris wheels. MG7-677. Not shooting people.”
Sheppard laughs at him. “Don't worry, Rodney. You've done your part.”
“I don't even know what you're talking about,” Rodney babbles frantically. “Elizabeth, you have to believe me-”
“Quiet, Rodney,” Sheppard orders, the mirth going out of his voice. He stares down at the woman on the floor. “Give me control of the city, and I won't have to decorate my new office with your brain.”
Elizabeth swallows hard before she answers. “No.”
“Too bad,” he says, with a little sigh. “I always liked you, Elizabeth.”
“Please don't do this, John,” Rodney begs incoherently.
“Don't worry,” Sheppard tells him, pulling the hammer back. “I'll take care of you.”
Rodney screws his eyes shut, unable to move or think or scream. “Open your eyes, Rodney,” Sheppard drawls, and he can't, he just can't, he does, Sheppard is smiling at him, putting his finger against the trigger-
And, without warning, Sheppard disappears.
Rodney barely makes it to the wastebasket before he throws up.
--
Rodney isn't there when they find John. Technically speaking, Rodney's not under arrest; it's just that there are two soldiers outside who won't let him go anywhere alone.
Only Carson seems unconvinced that Rodney conspired to overthrow Atlantis; he brings Rodney's meals and eats with him, whether Rodney likes it or not, not content to let him wallow in his own self-loathing.
Before Rodney's ready to hear it, Carson tells him about how they found John, half-starved and wearing tattered clothing, in one of the auxillary labs. He'd been swapped for another John from an alternate universe- Carson doesn't describe it, but his face says Rodney should be grateful for the omission. He'd only gotten back because they'd been preparing to send their McKay through to help complete the takeover.
Rodney sometimes wishes they'd succeeded.
Rodney is dying to go back through the sensor logs for any anomaly that might tell him when and how this happened, but someone has taken his laptop, and he only gets a polite smile every time he asks for any equipment.
He searches his cabinets when Carson leaves, looking for something to calm him down, make him sleep, let him forget about the whole thing for a while. All he has is some kind of Athosian remedy Teyla had given him that he'd never bothered to try. He tips it back anyway, drinking it down without measuring it.
That's how he discovers he's also on suicide watch.
--
“They said you-”
“I didn't.” Rodney doesn't know what the end of that sentence sounds like, whether it's helped him or tried to off yourself; it works either way.
“We weren't looking for you.”
John looks lost. “What?”
“We didn't know you were gone.”
“I- he, that monster, killed seven people.”
“Nobody noticed,” John says finally, his face twisted into a horrible parody of a smile, laughing in forced little pants with the cadence of sobs. “Nobody realized it wasn't me.”
Rodney's seen a lot of truly bizarre shit, but until this moment he's never seen John hysterical, and he's so terrified he can hardly stop himself from screaming.
Something suggests that the nightmare has only just begun.
This entry was automagically crossposted from http://sabinetzin.dreamwidth.org/215197.html.
comments over there.
This story is called Bury the Survivors, and I'm just never gonna finish it. In my head, it's the dark mirror version of The House By the Beach; in retrospect, I don't actually remember why I think that. In the end, though, it was too dark; I have this secret love for really super dark stories, but writing one was tedious, and I kept finding myself riding the line between dark and so-dark-it's-funny.
So. It's virtually complete, enough that I don't think it needs additional notes. It is super dark, with murder, sexual manipulation, and (possible) suicide, so tread with caution.
Bury the Survivors
One day after breakfast, Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard shot Major Lorne in the face.
There is an inquiry, of course, in which Sheppard is cleared of any wrongdoing. An alien symbiote had been clinging to Lorne's brainstem at the time, after all. That Dr. Beckett figured out how to detach and kill the creature only moments later is noted, but ultimately not held against Sheppard; reading minds is well above his pay grade, after all.
They can't send Lorne's body back to Earth- the symbiote is still attached, after all, and no one is willing to risk it- so they send Colonel Sheppard instead. Sheppard insists on taking Dr. McKay with him, and he doesn't protest- no need to make any of this worse for Sheppard than it already is.
Rodney waits in the car that the SGC has provided them as Sheppard informs Lorne's mother of what has happened. It doesn't take as long as Rodney expects; within fifteen minutes, Sheppard is back at the door, shaking hands with a younger guy who must be Lorne's brother.
“Thank god that's over with,” Sheppard says when he climbs back into the driver's seat, his sunglasses already in place. “Let's get a beer.” It's so stereotypically Sheppard that Rodney almost laughs.
Rodney feels awful, later, lying next to Sheppard in their hotel room, Sheppard's head on his chest, his hand over his heart. He'd be lying if he said he hadn't seen something like this coming, but he can't shake the feeling that he's taken advantage of Sheppard's grief.
When they drop out of hyperspace over Atlantis, Colonel Caldwell is beamed into the vaccuum. No one sees it happen, and there's no malfunction in the system- except the monitoring systems for the beam's control room, which have been out of commission ever since they left Earth.
Sheppard puts his arm over the back of Rodney's chair
“You're embarassing me,” he says quietly, and he knows he must be blushing.
--
They're getting out of their gear after a mission, and Rodney can't find his multi-tool- the really nice one Jeannie bought him years ago, which is his favorite even if it does say “Dr. Meredith McKay” on the side. He recalls putting it on top of the console he'd been repairing, but it definitely hadn't been there when he'd finished.
“Did somebody pick up my Gerber?” Rodney asks the room at large. He looks up and realizes it's just him and Sheppard; they must be lagging behind.
“In my vest,” Sheppard tells him, nodding to where it's hanging.
It's not in either of the first two pockets he checks. As he opens the third, his fingers brush over something he doesn't recognize, something smooth and oblong that's wedged in, too big to really fit. He fumbles it out. It takes him a second to process what it is; he jerks his hand away from it instinctively, and it falls to the floor.
He looks up to find Sheppard smirking at him. “Just in case I ever need anything from you.”
Rodney stares at him, open mouthed.
Sheppard picks up the lemon, tossing it lightly into the air and catching it again. Nothing about his demeanor suggests that he's kidding.
--
He's reading a weird power drain from a room at the top of the northwest pier. It's some kind of lounge- they'd sealed it, though, because there was some kind of weird short in the lighting that had caused exactly this problem before.
It's late- Sheppard will be expecting him- but he goes to check it out anyway, and to possibly berate whoever's switched it on.
He hears the voices before he ever even gets there. Somebody is shouting; he almost calls for backup before he realizes what they're talking about.
They're talking about Sheppard and what to do about him.
Rodney can only hear half of it, can process even less. Dr. Heightmeyer is talking now, about PCL-R and C-PTSD and a bunch of other acronyms that Rodney is only halfway familiar with. He gets the gist, though.
He hears them mentioning his name; Lorne's replacement is insisting that he is compromised.
Rodney doesn't realize he's opened the door until they're already looking at him.
“The systems in here are malfunctioning and wasting power,” he says, keeping his voice bored and his face blank, like he hasn't heard them. “You should meet somewhere else.”
“Thank you, Rodney,” Elizabeth says, smiling at him like nothing's wrong. He nods at her and leaves, goes back to his own room, alone.
Sheppard is stretched out beside him when he wakes up.
The next night, lights come on in the basement of the west pier; he ignores them.
--
Teyla goes back to her people two days later, taking all of her belongings; Rodney isn't surprised when no one will tell him why.
--
Of course, it happens when SGA-2 is offworld. Rodney's in his lab with Radek when the klaxons start sounding.
“Security and Dr. McKay to the gateroom immediately,” a voice says over the PA. “Blue alert, I repeat, blue alert.”
Rodney didn't know that they even had a color-coded alert system, but he starts running anyway, Radek right behind him.
There's a small, silent crowd around the consoles; Rodney can see two Marines standing on this side of the walkway between the operations deck and Elizabeth's office. He pushes his way through to them, desperate to find out what's gone wrong.
“He's asking for you,” one of them says, giving Rodney a worried look as he taps his earpiece. “We're sending in Dr. McKay.” He listens to the response, nodding to his partner, and they both step aside.
All he can see is John's back. Someone- Carson?- is lying- unconscious, he desperately hopes- on the floor.
The walkway feels like it's about a thousand miles long.
Elizabeth is on her knees, facing him, her hands behind her head. Her face is completely calm, like this is nothing out of the ordinary, and she's not crying; but Rodney can read her tension in the rod-straight line of her back, the way her gaze stays resolutely in front of her.
Sheppard's arm is outstretched, and the muzzle of his gun is resting against her forehead.
“Afternoon, Rodney,” Sheppard drawls lazily. “Well, now that we're all here, we can get the party started.”
“Colonel,” Rodney says carefully, his heart beating out of his chest, “put the gun down and let's talk about this.”
“What's there to talk about?” he replies, not taking his attention off of Elizabeth.
“Anything,” he says quickly. “Puddlejumpers. Ferris wheels. MG7-677. Not shooting people.”
Sheppard laughs at him. “Don't worry, Rodney. You've done your part.”
“I don't even know what you're talking about,” Rodney babbles frantically. “Elizabeth, you have to believe me-”
“Quiet, Rodney,” Sheppard orders, the mirth going out of his voice. He stares down at the woman on the floor. “Give me control of the city, and I won't have to decorate my new office with your brain.”
Elizabeth swallows hard before she answers. “No.”
“Too bad,” he says, with a little sigh. “I always liked you, Elizabeth.”
“Please don't do this, John,” Rodney begs incoherently.
“Don't worry,” Sheppard tells him, pulling the hammer back. “I'll take care of you.”
Rodney screws his eyes shut, unable to move or think or scream. “Open your eyes, Rodney,” Sheppard drawls, and he can't, he just can't, he does, Sheppard is smiling at him, putting his finger against the trigger-
And, without warning, Sheppard disappears.
Rodney barely makes it to the wastebasket before he throws up.
--
Rodney isn't there when they find John. Technically speaking, Rodney's not under arrest; it's just that there are two soldiers outside who won't let him go anywhere alone.
Only Carson seems unconvinced that Rodney conspired to overthrow Atlantis; he brings Rodney's meals and eats with him, whether Rodney likes it or not, not content to let him wallow in his own self-loathing.
Before Rodney's ready to hear it, Carson tells him about how they found John, half-starved and wearing tattered clothing, in one of the auxillary labs. He'd been swapped for another John from an alternate universe- Carson doesn't describe it, but his face says Rodney should be grateful for the omission. He'd only gotten back because they'd been preparing to send their McKay through to help complete the takeover.
Rodney sometimes wishes they'd succeeded.
Rodney is dying to go back through the sensor logs for any anomaly that might tell him when and how this happened, but someone has taken his laptop, and he only gets a polite smile every time he asks for any equipment.
He searches his cabinets when Carson leaves, looking for something to calm him down, make him sleep, let him forget about the whole thing for a while. All he has is some kind of Athosian remedy Teyla had given him that he'd never bothered to try. He tips it back anyway, drinking it down without measuring it.
That's how he discovers he's also on suicide watch.
--
“They said you-”
“I didn't.” Rodney doesn't know what the end of that sentence sounds like, whether it's helped him or tried to off yourself; it works either way.
“We weren't looking for you.”
John looks lost. “What?”
“We didn't know you were gone.”
“I- he, that monster, killed seven people.”
“Nobody noticed,” John says finally, his face twisted into a horrible parody of a smile, laughing in forced little pants with the cadence of sobs. “Nobody realized it wasn't me.”
Rodney's seen a lot of truly bizarre shit, but until this moment he's never seen John hysterical, and he's so terrified he can hardly stop himself from screaming.
Something suggests that the nightmare has only just begun.
This entry was automagically crossposted from http://sabinetzin.dreamwidth.org/215197.html.
comments over there.