More things in Heaven and Earth, by mousewitchy for the Abandonment Challenge
Title: More things in Heaven and Earth
Author: mousewitchy
Category: Gen, angst
Rating: PG, I think, for vague creepiness
Spoilers: I'll say all of Season 1, just to be safe
Summary: She's been abandoned before; she, who'd been mother and father, teacher, and even lover to the lives she'd once held.
Beta: wickdzoot ; many, many thanks to the lovely Mamazoot for beta!
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”
-William Shakespeare, Hamlet
She’s been abandoned before; she, who’d been mother and father, teacher, and even lover to the lives she’d once held.
Even she isn’t sure how long ago it was that she’d been built, but she knows she’d been assembled long before she’d been aware; as if the waking was contingent to the belief they’d placed in her, the collective trust of thousands that she’d see them through, that she’d keep them safe.
She had first awoken when she left the planet of her birth. Thrust out among the stars, the first sounds she’d heard were the sounds of her children's distress: the pain they’d felt at having to leave the beautiful blue-green-gold planet that was home, and the terrible fear and uncertainty that they’d ever find another.
Atlantis had reacted the same as any mother would, hearing the cries of her children. She’d stretched every sense she had to find something to soothe them.
At first, they'd cried out in fear and anger, not knowing why or how she could do such a thing. Fearing for their safety, they had searched desperately for the malfunction they were sure had affected her sensors until, exasperated at their prodding, she'd locked them out.
Then she'd found them a planet-as beautiful as the first, and similar enough that she judged they’d have no hardships settling what little land was there.
This time, when they'd cried out, it had been in joy; and she'd basked in it. And, to her delight, they'd decided not to settle the mainland, choosing instead to keep her as their home.
Ages had passed while she'd watched over them, sheltering them and even helping from time to time as she could. Mostly, however, they'd ignored her offerings, searching instead for glitches and cursing the systems when they found information and statistics they hadn’t asked for displayed on their screens. She’d thought that one, Janus, had finally learned to listen, but by then it was too late.
In the way of children everywhere, her children had gone exploring, and in their explorations they’d awakened something, something so hungry and terrible that they thought it could not be stopped. Even by her.
Restless and fretful, she'd watched helplessly as more and more of her children fell against the Hungry Ones; and she'd vowed that when the time came to move again, she would not lead her children into such danger a second time. Next time, she would make sure she could protect them.
They had made plans to move, and she'd waited anxiously for the day she would take to the skies again. Instead, she'd turned from defense to find her power dwindled and her children gone. She'd cried out, bereft of her beloved, but they were all of them gone except for the one fragile life they’d left behind.
So Atlantis had slept, empty and listless, discarded and forgotten until she'd been discovered once more. Drowsy, like some great beast shifting restlessly in sleep, she thought she might have been dreaming when she found herself inhabited again. In a fit of pique, she sought to rid herself of the unwelcome presence, to wash them away and drown them for daring to return so unrepentant, so proud and so sure of their welcome. She'd struck out in her anger and lowered the shields with a thought, aware only that those who’d fled had returned, and of the hurt that they’d done her when they’d left. It wasn’t until the new ones, the visitors, were already dying that she’d begun to realize the thin and fragile lives she’d destroyed were not the same children who’d abandoned her.
She’d cried out again, bitterly regretting her fury, and keened her loss to the oceans.
Except maybe she had been dreaming, because they come again and this time she is wary of the newcomers, unwilling to repeat the nightmare and curious to see who she’s discovered.
She knows she isn’t dreaming this, because her power begins to fade and die just after they appear and this time-this time, they survive.
These are not the children who abandoned her, she finds, but they are the children of her children. The Ancients, they call them, and they call her the City of the Ancients. There is such awe in the name, such kinship and admiration in what they feel for her. These do not think they know just what to expect from her, she thinks. Maybe they will listen.
There are so few of them, and even fewer of them that she can actually hear, that she worries. They are so fragile, these new lives of hers. They’re like whispers, murmuring just beneath her awareness, and she’s still so crippled by the power shortage that she can barely hear them.
She loves them all, of course: the Doctor, gruff and gentle, and the Pilot, willful and brash. But it’s the Scientist, when she can finally hear him, that she loves best. He's an improbable mix of optimism and pessimism, logarithms, algorithms-so many different -isms and -ithms and sheer impossibilities that she can't help but love him, this child so much like her.
The Pilot uses his gene with an ease born of his innate, effortless confidence; the knowledge that he’s had this in him all along. He only speaks to her in short bursts of instruction: open this door, turn this on. The Doctor is more timid, as if he’s afraid of the way he can communicate with her, and he asks in ways that are more hesitant, unsure.
The Scientist uses the gene like it’s a gift, seeming to treasure the way she can hear him. He talks to her even when it’s not strictly necessary, and she does her best to hear him, straining every sense she has to follow him.
One day, not long after the storm that very nearly rocked her to her foundations, he seems to disappear from her vision. She can hear him talking on their radio, though, and from that she thinks he may be exploring in one of the sections she can’t see in anymore. So she tries not to worry, comforting herself with the quiet mutter of his thoughts next to hers and the sound of his voice on the radio as he talks to his companions, thinking he may have ventured there to fix her.
Then she hears them panic; rushing to rescue their comrades, finding them dead, finding themselves in trouble.
We’re dead, we’re all dead men. Please, God. Let someone stop him. Don’t let everybody die because of us, she hears him think, and then she panics.
Atlantis bends every effort to see him, but she’s been badly damaged by the storm and she soon gives up the task as hopeless. She can feel where they are, the distinctive prick of their technology is unmistakable, but she has no other sense of the area.
Don’t let it spread, he thinks. Oh, please, let us find how to stop it. Let us find out what it is.
This is something she thinks she can help him with, and she easily accesses his laptop and tells it where to look. A few moments later, he is talking excitedly to the Doctor and something in her deepest recesses turns over as she hears his scream, willing him to understand what she does-that he is safe, he is not going to die.
Unfortunately, he is one of the few.
As soon as she can feel the virus, she locks them out of the mainframe. Just as before, they cry out in fear when she acts on her own; but unlike their ancestors, they seem to accept that she is capable of taking care of herself. That she can take care of them.
That is something new, she thinks, and wonders what to do about it.
The Pilot is restless; she thinks he may have sensed the urgency she feels to save her new children, though he acted without understanding that it was her distress he felt. After the crisis is over, she thinks of the Pilot and feels the faint stirrings of hope.
Atlantis is still more than half-asleep. Her circuits are sluggish with the scarcity of power and her thoughts still muddled and slow with slumber, sometimes spinning away for weeks at a time. When she next rouses to examine her new occupants, she is disturbed to find them in the company of another, one of the children she’d known before. Touching the thoughts of the Scientist, she finds them in turmoil, anxious and troubled.
She’s lying, he thinks, She’s lying about something. I just know it. Why can’t they see?
Then, doubtful, What if I’m wrong?
Atlantis thinks again of the Pilot. Although she has spent a lifetime listening, she has never before been heard. She decides to try.
She is lying, she tries to tell him, and feels him recoil from the brush of her alien thoughts against his, shivering uneasily. Again, she tries to tell him, forgoing words and language. She lets him taste the anger she feels at the arrival of this deceitful wayward creature; her outrage that this child she’d once loved so dearly dare return to her after she’s lain empty these long years, so ungrateful and utterly unconcerned at the hurts Atlantis suffers.
This time she thinks the Scientist-Rodney, she realizes with something akin to shock-hears what she’s trying to say. Rodney, she thinks again to herself, rolling the feel of his name through circuits and synapses long idle.
This is one of those that you call Ancient, Atlantis tells him, softly this time so as not to startle him. She murmurs as softly as she can, hoping her whisper will blend into the chaotic and distinctly human uproar of Rodney’s own thoughts, and she gives something like a sigh of contentment when it works and the Ancient finally leaves.
She feels another irrational pang of anger when the Pilot follows. It hurts that he’d choose one of these Ancients, these selfish creatures who left her behind without a thought; never guessing what they’d made of her. Never caring that she was more, so much more than they’d actually built.
It isn’t until the Hungry Ones are on their way-when the children scurry desperately through the halls, filled with a fear that may or may not be hers-that she wonders just what she is, or what she is becoming.
That is a vast idea to wrap her sluggish thoughts around, almost too vast, and she rolls the behemoth thing over and over in her mind, struggling to find the best way to approach it. She’s so intent on these thoughts that she almost misses the arrival of the Hungry and the departure of the Pilot; she’s been here for so long that she’s gotten used to thinking in terms of centuries, eons instead of the middling months, weeks, and days they count.
It seems to her as if they’ve only just arrived, and she shudders at the indignity of being rendered worthless and helpless by something so mundane as a power shortage.
She wonders if she is dreaming after all, if this is just another nightmare and they will come again someday, because suddenly-while she is still blinded by the explosion of the Hungry Ones’ vessel-suddenly, she wakes. It is her Scientist, her Rodney, who’s done this for her. They’ve found her a power source, the kind she hasn’t known since she was abandoned so long ago, and a wellspring of such depth and strength that she shudders again with the remembering, and the joy.
Once again, she hums with her former glory; hers is now a world counted not in eons, or even years, but microseconds. Nanoseconds, if she chooses.
Atlantis glories for a moment in her restoration, then acts. With a thought, she raises her shields and rids herself of the itch that is their technology, effortlessly patching the sores they have made-inadvertently, she thinks fondly, for they would never hurt her on purpose-and ignores their frantic efforts to re-enter her synapses.
When she begins to sink, they scream, and she longs to cry out with them. Most of all, what she longs for is a way to make them understand what she already knows-that they are safe, she is not going to let them die. But when they begin to dial the gate with the eight-digit address she knows all too well, Atlantis fears.
She cuts power to the gate and waits, circuits clicking quietly as she decides what to do.
“Rodney!” cries the one called Weir. “What’s going on? Can you fix it?”
“I-” he begins, and frowns thoughtfully at the console in front of him. He reaches a hand out, rests it on her cool metal skin.
“Rodney?” asks the Pilot. She can feel unease in waves coming off of him. He steps forward to the Scientist and places a hand on his shoulder, just as Rodney’s placed his on her.
“I think she’s scared,” Rodney says slowly, “She doesn’t want us to leave.”
Atlantis agonizes over what to do next. She remembers once, a long time ago, when Janus first began to see what she was. When he’d told her what they’d do to her if they ever found out she lived.
“They’d tear you apart,” he’d said wistfully, “If they even thought you were aware. It’s too much of a danger, you see. They’d be too afraid to do anything else.”
She almost wishes she’d had hair, because she’d be tearing it right now. She has so much to lose-one wrong move, and she’ll be alone and empty for millennia more until she finally rusts apart at the seams. One wrong move and they will destroy her, these children she’s loved from the moment she saw them. She wavers for one long moment more, tasting the thoughts of the Scientist, then decides.
Yes.
Every screen, every display in the city lights up with her answer, even the laptops. It is written not in her language, but in theirs, the one she’s learned after months of listening to them think and speak.
Don’t leave. We will destroy them. I will teach you.
“Who?” Rodney asks tentatively. “Destroy who-the Wraith? But they defeated the Ancients.”
They didn’t listen, she says simply. You will listen. She fills each screen with page after page of the research Janus had only been able to begin. Dozens of different, seemingly-unconnected projects fly by on a thousand different display screens.
You will listen, she pleads. I will teach you. Do not leave.
“Okay,” Rodney says, glancing at the Pilot, who nods. “We won’t leave.”
The others exchange suspicious glances behind his back, thinking he doesn’t notice. They’re worried about him, and he knows it so he doesn’t even say the next part out loud.
He moves his palm across the console like a caress, and thinks, I promise.