What The River Says by soapbox_solo38 (F**king Freezing Challenge)
“We’ll put them in cryo,” the old mechanic grunted as he hefted the woman’s legs higher, trying not to look at the blood that was turning her red shirt something closer to black.
“But-” The younger engineer started to protest, lines deepening on a face that was too young for them. He stopped when the ancient ship groaned, wearying in its fight against the vacuum. Instead, with a swallow, he threaded his way backwards through the tangle of wires and metal that snaked through the cramped space, wincing when one of the dying alien’s hands slithered up against a cable and ran down its length, like she was trying to hold onto it.
“Once the battle is over, we’ll figure out how to deactivate the chambers safely,” the mechanic told the silence, as much to reassure himself that they were doing the right thing as the other crew member. At that moment a warship screamed by outside, the whine of its weapons audible through the thin hull.
Neither of them voiced the thought, if we make it.
*
They declared the ship MIA; in reality, it was given up on as dead. There was simply too much debris at the battle site, too many twisted pieces of spaceships and bodies and souls floating in the black void. Any attempt to identify the remains of a small courier amidst the wreckage of the Quli’se flotilla and the Tartarian collection of battered shells they called a fleet would take months, years. To search for the body of one woman and her guard, even if she was the leader of a Tartarian ally, would take time they simply didn’t have- and that was assuming there was a body to be found.
Atlantis and her people heard the message, understood its meaning, forgave the Tartaris with smiles for being unable to protect the people they had been entrusted with, and ignored the next plea for help that was sent.
*
The screen beside Colonel Carter was filled with stars, each white dot representing a planet in Pegasus.
“Over the past months, some of the teams we’ve been able to send out have come back with puzzling reports. At first it seemed like a coincidence; then too many place were…” Their IOA-appointed leader paused, choosing her words carefully. “…telling similar tales.” A handful of worlds turned blue as she spoke, and then another handful, and another, until twenty-three blue dots glowed brightly.
“From what we’ve translated and pieced together, the locals around the Stargate - and occasionally farther out - have been placed under the protection of the Yrfse Joiul, the Ru-suw, the Hlaano Ine; simply put, the Lady of the Ice.” The star chart faded away, now replaced with a slideshow of images that were obviously taken on different planets. Some featured plants, some crumbling ruins, and some merely centered on rock formations near the Stargate. They all had one thing in common, though:
All of the objects were coated in an inch-thick layer of crystal clear ice.
Carter looked back at her audience, her expression telling them that even if she wasn’t admitting it, she was planning for the worst.
“We have no idea who this Lady is, or what she wants. At this point, she isn’t attempting to convert anyone, and as far as we can tell, she hasn’t killed anyone either. But the villages are adamant about the fact that, should they be attacked, their enemies will be punished.”
Ori, her haunted blue gaze whispered, and they shuddered under the weight of it.
*
The normally reserved adults greeted them with what Corporal Schneider later called “too much happiness, ma’am”, and led the Marines and anthropologist along their swaying rope walkways towards a central platform where the younger tree-dwellers were clustered.
At a sharp word from the village elder those immediately in front of the strangers parted, revealing someone who crouched in the knot of awed children, gently blowing on a tiny flower. Her breath crystallized in the air, as if it was winter, and settled over the blossom until it was covered in a thin layer of frost. She set it down and a tiny girl gingerly picked it up, babbling excitedly to her fellow admirers.
But it wasn’t the apparent magic trick that had SG-14 staring at the woman, nor was it the gloss of ice that lay over each dark curl and wrinkle in the old Atlantis uniform.
“Dr. Weir?” Melanie asked, leaning forward to touch the familiar shoulder. And even as she spoke out those brilliant green eyes flashed over and up to meet hers -
With a sound that wasn’t quite a “No!” and didn’t fit the definition of a scream, Elizabeth pushed off the wooden platform and flipped over the rope railing.
“Dr. Weir!” Braced for the sound and sight of bones breaking, of soft tissue hitting ground that was very far below, SG-14 made it down to the base of the huge tree in less time than it took to strip a P90 and reassemble it, racing to aid someone who would already be beyond help.
But she was pushing herself up, coughing as they neared, and her choked gasp of “Don’t touch me!” halted the team in their tracks. When she looked up at them, the sheen of ice covering her eyes could have easily been mistaken for tears.
“Don’t touch me,” their former leader repeated, softer. “Please.”
*
“It’s incredible!”
McKay!”
“I’m sorry, John - and you, Elizabeth - but we didn’t even know that the Tartaris had cryo capabilities!”
“They don’t.” She told them quietly, staring at her linked hands. When the two men glanced at her, McKay caught mid-thought, she closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them again.
“They didn’t make the technology they use on half those ships; we knew that. What they didn’t tell us, and what I should have guessed, was that they don’t always understand how to use what they cobble together. Some of their equipment is Ancient, or Wraith, but a good deal isn’t. They don’t care who came up with the idea as long as they can twist it for their own purposes.”
Elizabeth’s jaw clenched, relaxed; she remembered that her lungs needed air and appeared to regret that fact, knowing her visible breath unnerved them.
“The cryo chamber was supposed to save me.” She slid off the Infirmary bed and lifted the edge of the hospital top, revealing her left side. “It did what it was supposed to.”
John and Rodney stared at the curve of her waist, where someone had taken a knife and tried to carve out a fist-sized chunk of flesh. Beneath the glimmer of thick, almost clear ice, the white of bone and the hint of pink organs showed them more than they ever wanted to see.
*
“How old was he?” Teyla asked, trying to understand her own emotions as well as those that were hinted at beneath the cold façade. This was her close friend, her fellow leader, and a changed appearance did not mean the Weir she had understood and cared for was gone. Elizabeth blinked, startled.
“How could you…?”
“A guess,” the Athosian replied truthfully. “I know you well, by now.”
The flash of gratitude at her use of the present tense made her feel guilty.
“He…” She stopped. The raw suffering in Elizabeth’s face urged Teyla to react, and she did so without thinking, reaching out to -
Weir jerked back, yanked her arm out of reach and stared at her with a terror that wrenched at the other woman’s heart.
“I-”
“He was ten. Ten, and all he wanted to do was give me a hug. A hug, Teyla.” The ice-covered hands shook now. “They had to bury him in an adult coffin because they couldn’t close the lid on a smaller one.”
*
No one knew where she was for two hours, until Lorne looked out of a window and spotted her on one of the little-used balconies, shining like a diamond. When John walked through the door he saw her standing in nothing more than icy black underwear, face turned towards the sun.
“What are you doing?” He asked, unease running down his spine.
Elizabeth turned towards him, the pain and anguish and bitter smile on her frozen lips turning the unease into an unshakeable chill.
“Seeing if I’ll melt.”
*
“Heard you survived.”
Ronon’s impatience with longer sentence could be a blessing at times. She continued to stare at the ocean’s surface, watching the waves travel in from the horizon and break against the Ancient city; the Jumper currently attempting to fly in a straight line was mirrored in the glassy surface below as it dipped and swerved. As if against her will, the edges of her lips quirked.
“I suppose you could say that.”
“Heard Rodney muttering about alternate dimensions and phase shifts.”
“He was only muttering? I’m surprised.”
They were quiet for a long time, the Sateadan putting a handheld radio between them so they could listen to the Major’s cursing as he attempted to teach a geologist how to steer. The geologist kept protesting that he knew things didn’t stay up in the air, they fell because of gravity, and by logical conclusion he was going to fall too.
When their scheduled practice time was up, the Jumper itself seemed grateful to float on Autopilot down into the Bay.
“It’s lonely.”
She didn’t ask what he meant, because she had found her Wanderings were more like his Runnings than she would have imagined.
“You didn’t want to come back.”
“I didn’t think I had a home to come back to.”
He grunted in acknowledgement, and they watched the sun set.
*
“No, no, stop-” She was begging him, pleading in a broken voice that Elizabeth Weir never used, not for the Genii, not for the Ancients or the Wraith or the IOA. “-don’t do this, let me go, stop-”
John refused to loosen his grip on her hand, feeling the ice curve over his knuckles and slide up his wrists as he held her desperate eyes.
“You can’t be alone forever,” he told her.
And as the ice snaked up his forearms and wrapped around his uniform, he leaned in, breathed the freezing air of her supplications, and kissed her.
*
They say that if you wait long enough on the old hillside by the Gate, when the moons have risen and the sun is not far behind, the Gate will come to life.
You will not think you see anything, and for fifteen heartbeats (or so I’ve been told) you can stare at the blue circle before a cold breeze rushes over the land, tasting of frozen mornings and the clean water that drips from the trees after a snowstorm. If you tilt your head just right, and squint ever so slightly, you might be able to watch the Lady of the Ice and her Companion walk in the moonlight, glittering and beautiful and always in winter (although I once heard that they live in an eternal summer, and only appear that way because they wish to).
In the time honored ways of our fathers, and the fathers before them, and perhaps the fathers even before them (because they are spirits, and spirits are not “created”), the Lady and her Love will renew the Crown of Heaven and bless our village for the years to come, until the young grow old and the new sons have tilled the land. Then they will turn and pass by the hillside to vanish through the Gate, leaving only the Crown and their footprints to show that they were there.
How do I know this, you ask? Well - ah! The first moon is about to enter the sky, my dear son, and if I were you I’d hurry to that hillside. ‘Tis a sight that a man never forgets… or so I’ve heard.
“But-” The younger engineer started to protest, lines deepening on a face that was too young for them. He stopped when the ancient ship groaned, wearying in its fight against the vacuum. Instead, with a swallow, he threaded his way backwards through the tangle of wires and metal that snaked through the cramped space, wincing when one of the dying alien’s hands slithered up against a cable and ran down its length, like she was trying to hold onto it.
“Once the battle is over, we’ll figure out how to deactivate the chambers safely,” the mechanic told the silence, as much to reassure himself that they were doing the right thing as the other crew member. At that moment a warship screamed by outside, the whine of its weapons audible through the thin hull.
Neither of them voiced the thought, if we make it.
*
They declared the ship MIA; in reality, it was given up on as dead. There was simply too much debris at the battle site, too many twisted pieces of spaceships and bodies and souls floating in the black void. Any attempt to identify the remains of a small courier amidst the wreckage of the Quli’se flotilla and the Tartarian collection of battered shells they called a fleet would take months, years. To search for the body of one woman and her guard, even if she was the leader of a Tartarian ally, would take time they simply didn’t have- and that was assuming there was a body to be found.
Atlantis and her people heard the message, understood its meaning, forgave the Tartaris with smiles for being unable to protect the people they had been entrusted with, and ignored the next plea for help that was sent.
*
The screen beside Colonel Carter was filled with stars, each white dot representing a planet in Pegasus.
“Over the past months, some of the teams we’ve been able to send out have come back with puzzling reports. At first it seemed like a coincidence; then too many place were…” Their IOA-appointed leader paused, choosing her words carefully. “…telling similar tales.” A handful of worlds turned blue as she spoke, and then another handful, and another, until twenty-three blue dots glowed brightly.
“From what we’ve translated and pieced together, the locals around the Stargate - and occasionally farther out - have been placed under the protection of the Yrfse Joiul, the Ru-suw, the Hlaano Ine; simply put, the Lady of the Ice.” The star chart faded away, now replaced with a slideshow of images that were obviously taken on different planets. Some featured plants, some crumbling ruins, and some merely centered on rock formations near the Stargate. They all had one thing in common, though:
All of the objects were coated in an inch-thick layer of crystal clear ice.
Carter looked back at her audience, her expression telling them that even if she wasn’t admitting it, she was planning for the worst.
“We have no idea who this Lady is, or what she wants. At this point, she isn’t attempting to convert anyone, and as far as we can tell, she hasn’t killed anyone either. But the villages are adamant about the fact that, should they be attacked, their enemies will be punished.”
Ori, her haunted blue gaze whispered, and they shuddered under the weight of it.
*
The normally reserved adults greeted them with what Corporal Schneider later called “too much happiness, ma’am”, and led the Marines and anthropologist along their swaying rope walkways towards a central platform where the younger tree-dwellers were clustered.
At a sharp word from the village elder those immediately in front of the strangers parted, revealing someone who crouched in the knot of awed children, gently blowing on a tiny flower. Her breath crystallized in the air, as if it was winter, and settled over the blossom until it was covered in a thin layer of frost. She set it down and a tiny girl gingerly picked it up, babbling excitedly to her fellow admirers.
But it wasn’t the apparent magic trick that had SG-14 staring at the woman, nor was it the gloss of ice that lay over each dark curl and wrinkle in the old Atlantis uniform.
“Dr. Weir?” Melanie asked, leaning forward to touch the familiar shoulder. And even as she spoke out those brilliant green eyes flashed over and up to meet hers -
With a sound that wasn’t quite a “No!” and didn’t fit the definition of a scream, Elizabeth pushed off the wooden platform and flipped over the rope railing.
“Dr. Weir!” Braced for the sound and sight of bones breaking, of soft tissue hitting ground that was very far below, SG-14 made it down to the base of the huge tree in less time than it took to strip a P90 and reassemble it, racing to aid someone who would already be beyond help.
But she was pushing herself up, coughing as they neared, and her choked gasp of “Don’t touch me!” halted the team in their tracks. When she looked up at them, the sheen of ice covering her eyes could have easily been mistaken for tears.
“Don’t touch me,” their former leader repeated, softer. “Please.”
*
“It’s incredible!”
McKay!”
“I’m sorry, John - and you, Elizabeth - but we didn’t even know that the Tartaris had cryo capabilities!”
“They don’t.” She told them quietly, staring at her linked hands. When the two men glanced at her, McKay caught mid-thought, she closed her eyes for a moment and then opened them again.
“They didn’t make the technology they use on half those ships; we knew that. What they didn’t tell us, and what I should have guessed, was that they don’t always understand how to use what they cobble together. Some of their equipment is Ancient, or Wraith, but a good deal isn’t. They don’t care who came up with the idea as long as they can twist it for their own purposes.”
Elizabeth’s jaw clenched, relaxed; she remembered that her lungs needed air and appeared to regret that fact, knowing her visible breath unnerved them.
“The cryo chamber was supposed to save me.” She slid off the Infirmary bed and lifted the edge of the hospital top, revealing her left side. “It did what it was supposed to.”
John and Rodney stared at the curve of her waist, where someone had taken a knife and tried to carve out a fist-sized chunk of flesh. Beneath the glimmer of thick, almost clear ice, the white of bone and the hint of pink organs showed them more than they ever wanted to see.
*
“How old was he?” Teyla asked, trying to understand her own emotions as well as those that were hinted at beneath the cold façade. This was her close friend, her fellow leader, and a changed appearance did not mean the Weir she had understood and cared for was gone. Elizabeth blinked, startled.
“How could you…?”
“A guess,” the Athosian replied truthfully. “I know you well, by now.”
The flash of gratitude at her use of the present tense made her feel guilty.
“He…” She stopped. The raw suffering in Elizabeth’s face urged Teyla to react, and she did so without thinking, reaching out to -
Weir jerked back, yanked her arm out of reach and stared at her with a terror that wrenched at the other woman’s heart.
“I-”
“He was ten. Ten, and all he wanted to do was give me a hug. A hug, Teyla.” The ice-covered hands shook now. “They had to bury him in an adult coffin because they couldn’t close the lid on a smaller one.”
*
No one knew where she was for two hours, until Lorne looked out of a window and spotted her on one of the little-used balconies, shining like a diamond. When John walked through the door he saw her standing in nothing more than icy black underwear, face turned towards the sun.
“What are you doing?” He asked, unease running down his spine.
Elizabeth turned towards him, the pain and anguish and bitter smile on her frozen lips turning the unease into an unshakeable chill.
“Seeing if I’ll melt.”
*
“Heard you survived.”
Ronon’s impatience with longer sentence could be a blessing at times. She continued to stare at the ocean’s surface, watching the waves travel in from the horizon and break against the Ancient city; the Jumper currently attempting to fly in a straight line was mirrored in the glassy surface below as it dipped and swerved. As if against her will, the edges of her lips quirked.
“I suppose you could say that.”
“Heard Rodney muttering about alternate dimensions and phase shifts.”
“He was only muttering? I’m surprised.”
They were quiet for a long time, the Sateadan putting a handheld radio between them so they could listen to the Major’s cursing as he attempted to teach a geologist how to steer. The geologist kept protesting that he knew things didn’t stay up in the air, they fell because of gravity, and by logical conclusion he was going to fall too.
When their scheduled practice time was up, the Jumper itself seemed grateful to float on Autopilot down into the Bay.
“It’s lonely.”
She didn’t ask what he meant, because she had found her Wanderings were more like his Runnings than she would have imagined.
“You didn’t want to come back.”
“I didn’t think I had a home to come back to.”
He grunted in acknowledgement, and they watched the sun set.
*
“No, no, stop-” She was begging him, pleading in a broken voice that Elizabeth Weir never used, not for the Genii, not for the Ancients or the Wraith or the IOA. “-don’t do this, let me go, stop-”
John refused to loosen his grip on her hand, feeling the ice curve over his knuckles and slide up his wrists as he held her desperate eyes.
“You can’t be alone forever,” he told her.
And as the ice snaked up his forearms and wrapped around his uniform, he leaned in, breathed the freezing air of her supplications, and kissed her.
*
They say that if you wait long enough on the old hillside by the Gate, when the moons have risen and the sun is not far behind, the Gate will come to life.
You will not think you see anything, and for fifteen heartbeats (or so I’ve been told) you can stare at the blue circle before a cold breeze rushes over the land, tasting of frozen mornings and the clean water that drips from the trees after a snowstorm. If you tilt your head just right, and squint ever so slightly, you might be able to watch the Lady of the Ice and her Companion walk in the moonlight, glittering and beautiful and always in winter (although I once heard that they live in an eternal summer, and only appear that way because they wish to).
In the time honored ways of our fathers, and the fathers before them, and perhaps the fathers even before them (because they are spirits, and spirits are not “created”), the Lady and her Love will renew the Crown of Heaven and bless our village for the years to come, until the young grow old and the new sons have tilled the land. Then they will turn and pass by the hillside to vanish through the Gate, leaving only the Crown and their footprints to show that they were there.
How do I know this, you ask? Well - ah! The first moon is about to enter the sky, my dear son, and if I were you I’d hurry to that hillside. ‘Tis a sight that a man never forgets… or so I’ve heard.