Indelible, by Sophonisba

[saphanibaal]

-title- Indelible
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Crossover. I tried to write it so that no knowledge of the other fictons would be necessary, but given the difficulty of trying to act as if more ignorant than you are, I am uncertain of whether or not I succeeded. Mention of past relationships, nothing that couldn't have gotten past the Hays Code. Oh, and mentions of pornography, i.e., that it exists. That probably wouldn't have passed, but erotica isn't by definition illegal now, either. So I suppose it had best be rated PG, to be safe.
-disclaimer None of this is mine. Full disclaimer at end.
-spoilers- I don't think there are any that aren't general knowledge. For any of the fictons involved. Set in early first season.
-word count- 4158.


Indelible

"The lights are on," Sheppard remarked, apparently causing them to waken by leading the way down the corridor of the subterranean building, "but nobody's home."

"If you call this light," Rodney grumbled. Unlike Atlantis, the lights of Generic Outpost N On Random Moon appeared to combine Early Modern Blacklight with the flickering quality of old fluorescent tubes. providing barely enough light to see that the floor ahead of them was smooth and unobstructed. It threw their faces into sharp relief, emphasizing bones and exaggerating hollows and -- was that a bruise on Sheppard's cheek?

"Major?" Teyla sounded almost as disquieted as he felt. "Your face..."

"Is something on my face?" Sheppard asked, turning to face them.

It couldn't actually be blacklight after all. He could see the marks, faint and somewhat diffused, on Sheppard's face; the two lines slanting from above the eyebrows to the hairline without touching it or each other, the upward-pointing nested triangles on each cheekbone.

"You tattooed over them in flesh color," he said once he was sure he had his voice back.

"I -- yes. It was faster than laser treatments and I was due to ship out again in a few weeks."

"Wicked tattoos, sir," Ford commented. "Where'd you get them?" And why? hung in the air between them, unsaid.

"I don't actually recall," Sheppard said with the easy smile that never made it higher than -- well, than his cheek triangles. "I woke up one Thursday four years ago in a security forces holding cell for the base I was supposed to check into that day with a pounding headache, bright red marks on my face, and no memory of how I'd gotten either."

"And no memory of anything else before 2001, either," Rodney snapped. Ford jerked out of a sage nod so quickly he ought to have given himself whiplash.

Teyla blinked at all of them. Rodney wasn't up to deducing her expression in the uncertain light, particularly now.

"What makes you think that?" Sheppard asked. Quietly. Pleasantly. "So help me, McKay, if you hacked my file -- "

"A, because your sister told me. Screamed it at me, rather, as well as accusations of being a contributory cause to losing your memory, losing your position, and losing your good fortune. B, in a more general sense -- what's the first time you remember meeting me?"

"I was flying people and equipment to the secret base -- the one that turned out to be full of Ancient stuff." Doubtless according to some corollary of the theory of relativity, the perceivable world had shrunk to the two of them, face to face. "Some asshole sweating in too many layers and looking about five with his arms sticking out like that said 'Sheppard?' like he couldn't believe they were letting me fly so much as a freight 'copter. I said, in my best pleasant voice, 'Do I know you?' -- "

" -- And if my throat hadn't been hit just then with some delayed-onset reaction to, I don't know, mold in the air or something, I'd have said 'Yes, we've known each other on and off since, oh, 1991, most of it seemed to make some kind of sense at the time!'"

"... oh." Sheppard's face and voice were completely, utterly, and absolutely blank.

"Yes, oh. I'd have meant that, too -- if any one of the times you showed up and hung around or dragged me out, you'd said, 'By the way, McKay, I'm actually a sentient being descended from carnivores of a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, here doing some freelance writing for an interstellar publication,' I'd have entertained the possibility that you weren't lying."

"Oh," Sheppard said again. He sounded, maybe, pleased.

"It's from an Earth story," Ford explained to Teyla, who presumably had made some expression of inquiry.

"So," Sheppard eventually started walking again, "sister? A woman showed up and said she was my sister, but... "

"Blonde, big hair, stacked, face markings like yours only pointed the other way, dresses like a refugee from Madam Ursula's House of Leather?"

Sheppard nodded. "So, she is?"

"With all due respect," Ford asked, "how would you know?"

Rodney turned his head to address him. "He introduced her to me as his twin sister. They acted like it whenever she showed up." Satisfied that the younger member of his team was sufficiently quelled, he turned back to Sheppard. "You used to randomly drop in now and then and hang out or drag me out. Every now and then, she'd crash the party and complain to you about her job, some woman working for a rival firm who kept getting all the sales, some girl she had a thing for who may or may not have been the same as the rival, some former friend who'd unaccountably gone to work for the rival firm and who may or may not have been the one getting all the sales -- although I don't think the former friend was the one she had the thing for -- or maybe not, it's not like I was paying attention -- and that you were spending time hanging around someone like me instead of doing whatever she thought you ought to be doing."

"Do you remember the names of these people?" Teyla asked.

"Whatever for?"

"How did we meet?" Sheppard asked -- sounding amused, damnit.

"I -- you have to realize, Major, that I was really quite drunk at the time. Jeanie'd hung up on me after insisting that she was serious about some guy who was obviously going to break her heart and ruin her academic career -- I don't know why I thought she'd listen to me, she never listens to me about that stuff, she hadn't listened to me about the last guy and she didn't listen to me about the next -- and then the bar cut me off, and to the best of my recollection at one point I was in my apartment with you and some Asian girl in a Catholic school uniform explaining how stupid my sister was being. The Asian schoolgirl agreed that she was being foolish to believe in some dream of love and marriage, but she kept saying I shouldn't be upset about it -- but anyway, I'm fairly sure that you nagged me into doing something that got you out of something, and you said you owed me a favor for it."

"Got me out of what?" Sheppard said, bemused. Really, he could sound more interested; it was only his life they were discussing here.

"I -- it was a lot of beer and a martini or two, and I think someone spiked one of my drinks -- "

"McKay."

"... I have the vague idea that somehow I got you out of a porn flick containing no actual porn. I know, I know, no sense whatsoever, presumably if I'd been drunk enough to be hallucinating I'd have been too drunk to walk, hence the spike theory, although the human body has been known to have odd reactions -- "

"A porn movie without any porn? Wow, McKay, sounds like I really do owe you one."

"It was a hallucination."

"What is a porn movie?" Teyla asked.

"Er," said Rodney.

"Uh," said Sheppard.

"Um," said Ford.

"Ask one of the social so-called scientists when we get back, that's what they're there for," Rodney said.

"Ah," Teyla smiled.

Ford gave Rodney a thumbs-up as surreptitiously as he could manage.

"Anyway," Rodney hastily changed the subject back, "apparently you were pleasant enough company for a few hours that I announced that the universe owed me a friend like you when I really needed one, and you decided that was how you were going to work off your favor. You proceeded to bounce me awake the next morning -- and yes, I know that's more a Ford thing, you're Pooh, but you did -- and announced, to the accompaniment of a pounding migraine, that the Asian chick was a very charming underage sociopath who would entice me into a self-pitying, hollow, and ultimately destructive relationship, and so you were going to take her off my hands as long as you were taking my video back. Not that I'd been planning to date her anyway, since hello? Jailbait?

"Although she may not have actually been, seeing as she had the self-pitying, hollow, and ultimately destructive relationship a few years later with Kavanagh, and she looked about the same age."

"Kavanagh?" Sheppard blinked.

"Yeah, he always was inclined to think he knew best --"

Sheppard twitched. Ford coughed for some reason. Probably dust, or perhaps spores. Wonderful. At least he wasn't Daniel Jackson, thank goodness.

" --but he wasn't actually an asshat back when he started working at Area 51."

"Major Sheppard as Pooh?" Ford interrupted. "I'd think you'd be Pooh, Dr. McKay. Or maybe Eeyore."

"No, no, Eeyore is Bates. I'm Piglet," Rodney pointed out hastily. "And Teyla is Kanga, and Kavanagh is Rabbit, always minding everyone else's business all the time, and Elizabeth is probably Christopher Robin, what with the Fearless Leader thing, and Owl is Carson."

"Nah, Dr. Beckett's Piglet," Sheppard contradicted, "and you'd be Owl except for the part where you're totally Pooh, and Elizabeth's Kanga, so I guess Teyla and I will have to both be Christopher Robin, and maybe Dr. Zelenka's Owl."

"Zalenki? Yeah, I could see that, and Carson is Piglet, you're right, but you're undoubtedly Pooh."

"I'm really, really not -- but hey, I think Ford's more of a Roo than a Tigger anyway."

"Sir!" Ford protested.

"What?" Teyla said.

"They're these books that, uh," Sheppard began.

"We're talking about characters from a popular set of Earth children's stories," Ford amplified, like a good assistant.

"Sampson brought them as her personal item; I could see if she wants to go read them to the Athosian kids or something," Rodney put in.

"Thank you, Doctor McKay. That would be most appreciated."

"So I took off with the girl who may or may not have been underage?" Sheppard asked. The dimly-lit corridor seemed to stretch on in front of him forever. Rodney speculated that it might be slightly curved, winding or spiral.

"And then I went back to bed and woke back up and spent the next month wondering if I'd hallucinated the entire thing, until you leaned over my shoulder in the computer lab and pointed out a sentence fragment in my next dissertation that I'd been visually compensating for with what I meant to type and scared the crap out of me. You've always been kind of an asshole, very Light-in-the-Attic-ish; I'm sort of glad you haven't changed."

"Wow, thanks, McKay."

"No, really," Rodney grumbled. "But you had a knack of turning up exactly when I honest-to-goodness needed someone and sometimes when I didn't, and I could have used you when they sent me to Siberia, but you more than made up for it by finding us the way to Atlantis, not to mention saving all our lives."

"Yeah," Ford put in. "What he said."

"What else do you know about me?"

"You had the fire-engine-red face ink when I first met you. Also when I first met you and every time until Antarctica, you had the Lord King God of Mullets."

"I did not have one of those when I woke up in the cell."

"Just as well -- whenever I first saw you or your sister, it was always 'The '80s called, they want their hair back.' You had terrible taste in movies, although you could appreciate the good stuff. You had the strange sports obsession -- as well as football, you also liked polo, golf... "

"Hey, I like golf," Sheppard complained.

"Exactly. Honestly, you'd think you'd take having your memory wiped as a chance to install some good preferences. You liked watching archery, which honestly? Is about as interesting as watching paint dry, and you had this strange fondness for buggy racing, of all things. Buggy racing. The time you dragged me to the SCA thing, you tried to talk some of them into holding a chariot race."

"Cool," Sheppard said. "Did they?"

"Cool," Ford said, with the enthusiasm of one who has seen Ben-Hur on television multiple times.

"No, there weren't any chariots about."

"Aw..." both soldiers chorused.

"What is a chariot?" Teyla asked, shaping the unfamiliar words carefully. "Or buggy?"

"They're wheeled vehicles," the other two let Ford explain -- "you stand up in a chariot, a buggy has seats -- pulled by horses, and you steer the horses by long cords attached to their heads -- "

"A horse is an animal from fantastic tales," Teyla said, in the calm tone Rodney had learned as a sign that she was about to get very irritated very quickly.

"Uh -- maybe it's a translation error," Sheppard said after a pause. "Tell us what your people say about horses."

"A horse is a fantastic beast, known to the Ancestors," Teyla began obediently, "with the body of an ox, the back of a pig, and the legs and head and neck of a deer. It has neither horns nor antlers, but hair like a human, and more long hair all down its tail. Its walking nails are all one piece, like a slice out of a cup, and it has a cry like a girl's laughter. It is both fleet and strong, and its legs can smash the head of a fierce predator or bear several children away to safety faster than a man can run."

"That's a pretty fair description of a horse for someone who's never seen one," Sheppard agreed. "They're an animal from Earth; maybe the Ancients didn't bring any."

"Or they brought some and they all died out," Rodney suggested. "Dozens of species have become extinct in much less time. I'm surprised there's even a word for it in modern Gate-language; the linguists'll probably be excited about it or something."

"I think Private Stanislaski has a picture of one," Ford offered. "You could look at it before you ask Dr. Simpson about her book."

It was unsettling to see horse fever in the eyes of a woman Teyla's age, although Rodney supposed she had more wonder in it than Jeanie'd ever had.

"You have this weird compulsion to sing along with Christmas carols, especially secular ones, although you can substitute your own lyrics if you concentrate. Shopping in December must be hell -- oh, you've probably noticed that already."

"I have."

"Trying to get you to talk about something personal was always like pulling teeth. If your sister hadn't conducted half her arguments with you at earsplitting levels, I wouldn't know as much as I do. Your mother lives with a bunch of other people. I think she might be transgendered. I think your father's dead."

"The records say so," Sheppard gritted.

"Oh, good, I suck at breaking news like that to people. Um. You've got a cousin who likes the same girl your sister does, although he was the one doing the quiet devotion thing and your sister was the one pulling pigtails. I don't remember his name either."

"Pulling pigtails?" Teyla blinked.

"When boys are young and stupid -- or, well, immature and stupid," Ford began, "and they want somebody's attention but they don't really know what they'd do with it if they had it, they do stupid things to make someone mad and tease them because the boys know how to behave when someone's annoyed at them. If a girl is wearing her hair in pigtails," here Ford held a handful of Teyla's hair to demonstrate, "one of the traditional ways to tease is to yank on one of them and run away."

"Maybe we should put Ford in charge of Explaining Things To Teyla," Rodney whispered. "He seems to have a knack for it."

"Yeah, but he's better as rearguard," Sheppard hissed back.

"Ah!" Teyla said at the same time. "Snatching boots. I understand."

"So which one of them did Whatsherface end up with?" Sheppard asked.

"The second or third time your sister barged in, right before she got her figure -- I don't know whether she had cosmetic surgery, or whether your family are insanely late developers, or what -- she was livid about Whatsherface having not only happily shacked up with some Japanese guy, but completely and utterly failed to notice that all that pigtail-pulling was meant as a token of affection."

"Teyla? Are you all right?"

"I am well, thank you."

"And speaking of Whatsherface, I think your ex-girlfriend is a friend or a coworker of hers or something. She has facial tattoos, too, a blue triangle on her forehead and on each cheek. Maybe you all got them at the same time or something."

"My ex-girlfriend."

"Yeah. Um, if Teyla were a little taller, and had silver big hair, and the tattooes, and acted more like Madonna -- "

"Meaning, 'at all like Madonna,'" Ford put in.

"And acted rather like Madonna, that'd be what your ex-girlfriend was like. She showed up once at the bar we were out at, reminisced about people and places I've never heard of before or since, and went home with me." Rodney smiled a little. Really, that woman had been able to do the most amazing things with --

"You went home with Major Sheppard's ex-girlfriend?" Ford sounded scandalized. "You -- that's not, I dunno, buddies."

"Hey, if he didn't want her anymore -- besides, they'd been together in high school or something."

"How long do you have to wait until you can ask out a girl your friend was dating?" Sheppard asked. "I never quite got that."

"You don't -- you -- you just know, sir," Ford tried to explain.

Teyla might have looked amused, but in the violet light it was hard to tell.

"What was her name?" Sheppard asked.

"Er... Erda or Ooragh or something. I'm not sure, it was noisy in the bar, she could jangle her earrings with her toes. Oh! Earrings! You used to wear some."

"Earrings," Sheppard muttered, one hand automatically going to his ear.

"And unless you were dragging me somewhere public -- and sometimes even then -- your idea of casual wear was something that had apparently started life as an extra's costume on classic Star Trek paired with a leather jacket and combat boots. It was a big hit at the SCA for some reason -- between that, and the earrings, and the tattoos, and the mullet, although that may have been hair extensions, it's not as if I ever tried to pull it off -- "

There was a duplicated and distinctly human noise from behind Rodney.

"Oh, ha ha, very funny. But honestly, for all I really knew about where you went when you weren't bothering me or what you did your name might have been Shane instead of Sheppard."

"Huh?" Ford said.

"Kids these days," Sheppard muttered. Rodney privately agreed.

"It's one of the classic Westerns," Sheppard tried to explain and then gave up.

"And then your sister showed up with some coworker of hers and let me know you'd got amnesia by blaming me for it in the parking garage at Area 51. I don't know how she got in there. I don't know how nobody else managed to see her. Or hear her. Do you suppose you might be a descended Ancient by any chance?"

"I -- McKay. Seriously. WHAT?!"

"Well, your sister said that you'd lost your memory and lost some sort of position or job or something, and that both were directly related to hanging around with lower lifeforms, including, apparently, me. Now, she may have been speaking figuratively, but according to what I read about Daniel Jackson's experience, the former would also not be incompatible with having been kicked out of Ascension due to meddling. Now, granted, she also was going on about me having received luck that should have gone to you -- "

"My record shows every posting I've had since I joined the Air Force right out of high school."

"Well, yes, that would tend to argue against the hypothesis."

"Argue against? Not disprove?"

"Records have been known to be falsified. Seriously, how would you know?"

Sheppard opened and closed his mouth a few times. Apparently, that hair still sucked intelligence away from the brain, even with considerably less of it (or not that considerably, if it had been a weave).

"Exactly. I was so not surprised when the chair lit up for you."

"You expected that?"

"No, Major, if I'd expected it to happen, I'd have dragged you down there while you were refueling weeks if not months sooner. All I'm saying is, I'm not surprised.

"And anyway, as I was saying, she also believed that I'd somehow gotten your good luck and you'd taken my bad luck, according to some sort of Law of Conservation of Pain and Joy, and she arrived with an extremely annoying guy who claimed that he was going to change it back for her. Not that I believe in tangible luck, but in the week after that jeremiad my cat got sick, I impressed Sam Carter as an insensitive asshole, and I got sent to Siberia, and I'm certain your sister and that nut screeching about the Law of Conservation were responsible for it!"

Ford was managing to somehow radiate extreme disbelief without saying anything. Rodney decided to assign someone dispensible to observe the physics of that the next time one of them screwed up spectacularly.

"Law of Conservation?" Teyla asked.

"I've heard of that," Sheppard said. "Spider Robinson. Although, if E equals joy, and m equals pain, what does c equal?"

Rodney stopped dead.

"I knew that Sabe idiot was talking out his ass!" he burst in the first flush of epiphany. "Conservation, I knew that, I knew that, of course in a closed system one can be converted into the other! Of course, in my defense, I'd just had some very shocking news, and then I kept having shocks until that part of the week just slipped past my mind..."

Ford and Sheppard appeared to have been explaining the Law of Conservation of Matter and Energy to Teyla while Rodney's mind raced after a burst of glory until it trailed off into the decidedly squishy studies.

"...so there'd be some factor you'd multiply pain by twice over in order to know how much joy it would make if the pain were turned into joy," Sheppard said helpfully.

"Love and determination?" Teyla offered.

"No, no, it'd need to be a constant, not a set of completely intangible variables," Rodney pointed out. Graciously. He didn't yell at her. It wasn't Teyla's fault she'd grown up devoid of any semblance of a proper logical education, plus she could beat him with her sticks. Although really, that Sambo fellow had seemed to believe that the constant was 1, but he also hadn't seemed to believe in the possibility of pain conversion, and thus was not a reliable source for anything whatsoever.

"Is Major Sheppard an Ancestor?" Teyla asked a minute or so later.

"No," said Sheppard.

"Maybe?" said Ford.

"It's a hypothesis," Rodney said. "It needs to be tested before we decide whether to use it as a working theory, and none of the tests I can think of are reliable or, at the moment, feasible."

"How," Sheppard rolled his eyes, "were you thinking of testing a hypothesis like that?"

"Well, if your sister turned up again -- "

"We're in another galaxy!"

"Well, on the off-chance that she might be an upper-dimensional being -- or if your ex-girlfriend showed up again -- "

"What, in case she's an upper-dimensional being?"

"Goddess on her knees, I'm telling you -- that is, she very well might -- "

"In what, Porn Fantasy World?"

" -- or if we ever run into an Ancient, we could ask her. Or him. Of course, they might be lying."

"So there's really no way we could find out for sure at the moment?"

"That's what I just said, Lieutenant. Of course, this being Pegasus, we might find a Descended Being Detector at the end of this hallway, whenever we get there. Or not."

"My bet's on 'not,'" Sheppard said dryly.

"Yeah, it's never that easy. Except when it is," Rodney added conscientiously, because yeah, sometimes, it really was.

They walked on, the light casting their faces into sharp relief and bringing out Sheppard's facial markings (or their covering tattoos). It was satisfying, to know that they were still there, that they'd be evident the next time Sheppard sunburned himself (which, given the way he went clambering around, he probably would) or ate something that violently disagreed with him (which, honestly, wasn't that unlikely either). Probably they'd been apparent at earlier times, times when Rodney hadn't really been looking at Sheppard's face.

It would have been juvenile, short-sighted, and the worst sort of pathetic-fallacy-based illogic to be comforted by the notion that the marks of his previous life were still on Sheppard under the blank covering, so Rodney wasn't.

Much.

Disclaimer:
Stargate: Atlantis is owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer and United Artists.
The not!porn film and the Asian girl are the creations of Katsura Masakazu.
The face markings, sister, cousin, ex-girlfriend, coworker, Whatsherface, Whatsherface's Japanese boyfriend, and all appurtenances thereof belong to Fujishima Kousuke.
The World of Pooh and its characters belong to the late great A. A. Milne.
There are also references to The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the poems of Shel Silverstein, and a book by Jack Schaefer I used to think everybody had to read in ninth grade.