Five (Open) Secrets Brought From Earth To Atlantis, by Sophonisba [five things challenge]
-title- Five (Open) Secrets Brought From Earth To Atlantis
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-ratings/warnings- Part of my pet asymptotic-to-canon AU. Some crossoveriness. Discussion of matter that may be disturbing.
-timeframe- From well before the show began to, oh, early in the fourth season.
-spoilers- Through the beginning of fourth season. Also for SG-1's "New Order" and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's "Graduation Day."
-characters- Ford, Elizabeth, Jeanie, Sam, Sheppard, Holland, Rodney, Kavanagh, Teyla, cameos
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Nor are any of the other sources herein referenced; they belong to Joss Whedon et al., Raymond Chandler, Ten Thirteen Productions, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, Dorothy L. Sayers, Joe Darion, Lee David Zlotoff et al., Manly Wade Wellman, and Gainax.
-word count- 4044
-summary- Pretty much what the title says. ^_^
Five (Open) Secrets Brought From Earth To Atlantis
-1- same shit, different galaxy
For half the Marines who came to Pegasus under Sumner, including one First Lieutenant Aiden Ford, Atlantis is a lot like high school. Closed society: check. Spending a lot of time in one place, instituting friendly competitions to keep from being bored out of their skulls (with mixed results): check. Perennial danger of devolving into a popularity contest: check (although Atlantis, so far, has had enough other ways to prove their worth -- even for Marines guarding civilians -- to keep them on the right side of that line, unlike high school). Continually learning new and different things: check. In near-constant danger from inhuman, ageless, known-physics-laws-defying predators who view mankind as a renewable easily-drained food source: check.
At least here in Pegasus, they actually talk about it. Acknowledge it. Plan ways to fight back as a general thing.
Ford had actually spent his high school years with his mother; the public schools in her new community (which also offered excellent prices, all sorts of work perquisites, phenomenal health care) boasted a far better quality of equipment, textbooks, and even teachers than the ones where his grandparents lived. They hadn't realized, then, that the many openings and lures to attract new citizens were caused by as many deaths and disappearances that were probably deaths, and he didn't think his grandparents or his mother would have thought the extra learning worth the level of risk to his life.
Nobody had known, before, that the Ancients who abandoned the Milky Way in Atlantis had then abandoned Atlantis for the Milky Way, or why. He was fairly sure, though, that if they had known, the scientists would still have thought what they could learn worth the risk of their lives. (Besides, they had the Marines with them, and most of the direct threats to an overeager scientist could be solved by such methods as "sit on them if necessary" and the ever-popular "See space vampire, kill space vampire.")
Here, too, they had the small yet beautiful woman who could defeat any one of them without breathing hard; and, once again, here in Atlantis Teyla Emmagan's abilities were well known and well respected. Several of the Marines and scientists trained routinely with her, including Ford, not to mention Major Sheppard. (Ford is sure that he'd have been a lot better off if he'd trained routinely with his small beautiful classmate, back in high school, but he kind of thinks that the Aiden of those days would have had too much tied up in teenage male pride to ask, even had he known.)
Also as in high school, and as at the SGC for that matter, while the Marines were by no means stupid -- even above and beyond their internalization of the Euclidean dictum that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points -- more often than not it was the geeks who saved the day, either through bits of obscure knowledge or by really impressive thinking on the fly.
And when it became fairly apparent that they were under the command of a man who was competent, skilled, and in many ways spectacularly dorky, Ford and his classmates found it familiar and rather comforting: no one in their right mind would ever have accused their first commander, who led them to undreamed-of victory in the Battle of Graduation Day, of undorkitude.
-2- who is not himself mean
Doctors Elizabeth Weir and Simon Wallace used to watch The X-Files together. They enjoyed the plot devices; they loved the banter; they agreed that Mulder and Scully were a perfect exemplar of the trope "We're Not Straight, We Just Love Each Other"; the intricate layers of conspiracy resonated with them; and it was partly because of that shared love that she lobbied so hard to get permission to tell him, albeit in a recording, exactly where she was going.
The first time she came back from Atlantis, after Simon told her of the other woman he was seeing and left her to her grief and pride, she stole his promotional posters, his soundtracks, his CD single of a song used in the Japanese dub of the third season, and his autographed videocassette. (There are no VCRs in Atlantis, but that's all right: the Stargate probably demagnetized it anyway.) It's not as if he doesn't deserve it: after all, he stole her dog. And her heart.
The cigarette-smoking man and his ilk had struck a chord with them because of Elizabeth's experience growing up in the bosom of what made itself the nucleus of the NID, raised to be their pawn at need and their independently-acting allied piece by default. Men were put off by her ties to the Department, or, worse, wanted her for them; Simon had loved her for surviving under their aegis, for enduring and growing tall and proud and unexpectedly pasting on a set of ethics, and she had never thought that someone as strong as he had repeatedly proved himself to be would fail at the last.
Elizabeth had played their game, little as she loved it, and tried to consider means as well as ends, and kept her secrets behind her smile; she had, she thought, not only managed not to laugh in Daniel's well-meaning face but hidden her impulse to honestly do so when he warned her of the System Lords' capacity for evil, believing her naive and unprepared.
Nervous at the scope, certainly, but -- Daniel always had been an idealist, even through all his study of cultures living and dead, even after the simulated future she had read of, and she hoped he never lost it. Never quite realized that for all their scope and for all their sociopathy, the Goa'uld themselves remained children -- children turned loose with terrible power, but simple and uncomplicated compared to the humans she had persuaded and cajoled and learned her trade under.
She, too, had taken perhaps undue pleasure in phrasing her report about Kinsey (Elizabeth sometimes wondered who had "suggested" that he use her in his takeover attempt, or how much he had known about her when he gave her his orders), in reporting that he had:
- allowed a personal vendetta against an internal rival to wilfully endanger the planet and risk exposure to at least some of the Trust;
- failed to adequately judge the situation;
- been unwilling to accept the discreet nudging of the hierarchy's on-site expert;
when all the while she knew that the Trust would prefer an innocent or an outright opponent in the vice-presidency to a loose cannon that knew where at least some bodies were buried.
Besides, even if his criminal incompetency on that occasion hadn't quite deserved the fate she heard of on her first return ("stroke," Lt. Col. Carter had said, trying not to gloat, and Elizabeth had run down the possibile causes of those symptoms in her mind), he had undoubtedly done enough else in the course of his career to have earned that and more.
But -- Atlantis. Where their reach did not extend. Where she did not have to fight and claw and keep constant vigilance over the little space (illusion) of freedom she had hollowed out for herself and Simon. Where she could, at last, be free to be whomever Elizabeth Weir might prove to be, and where if her mistakes redounded on the heads of those under her care, at least they had no help.
It was more difficult, now, playing the triple agent, letting the Trust think her still loyal against her will (shackled by the values they had tried to instill in her) but hampered by her cover from acting visibly; she had pointed out, in ciphered code, that she really couldn't have protected whomever-in-Caldwell without knowing who it was she ought to protect.
(She's flirted more with Steven Caldwell since then, guilt sharpening the selfish desire to prove that at least some men find her a desirable woman.)
Elizabeth hopes the day will be long to come (but knows it will come all too soon) when she will have to -- not choose, for her choices were made long before, but to make her choice plain in the open light of day.
She wonders what they will try to do to her, when they know. Thallium, perhaps. Decaying isotopes. The chemistry that can create a thyroid supplement can almost certainly conceive a drug that impedes the function of the thyroid -- she read too many mysteries in her youth, and drew what her guardians would consider all the wrong lessons from them. Elizabeth hopes they won't be able to get to her, knows there's an even chance, and has learned that to make her plans as if the Trust will reach her in the end is to invite self-fulfilment of the prophecy.
And still she knows (and knows that Heightmeyer only tells her not to blame herself because Elizabeth's the only one with all the facts), to her self-loathing, that even had she known that it would cost her the man she loved as she will never love another, more than life itself, she would still have chosen Atlantis.
-3- hickory dickory dock, biological clock
Jeanie and Kaleb Miller plan to have several children -- maybe even five -- at reasonable intervals.
There are a few obstacles to this plan. Children take time to raise correctly, and Jeanie has been thinking about going back to school -- part-time, most likely -- when her children start. Raising children is expensive: even with Kaleb's salary and her inheritances and his and their mutual funds, they want to build up a financial cushion (and if Jeanie gets a job, that too speaks to the first point).
Kaleb has known since he was sixteen, when his cousin's issues led to the entire family undergoing medical testing, that he was sterile.
(He told Jeanie, trying for wryness and sliding into near-whining, that his cousin's condition, while perhaps similar in the most general sense, turned out to leave him fertile with modern surgical methods, never mind that Jeffrey's interest in being a father was somewhere below his interest in undergoing a root canal without anaesthesia. Jeanie hugged him and agreed that life generally wasn't fair; she herself could recall plenty of instances in addition to her own memories.)
But now -- they had planned, if her proof were to be published, that it was time to start planning for a second child, maybe a little boy with Jeanie's blonde not-curls, or a little girl with the McKay nose. Now, given SGC consulting fees, they decided that she would start looking into it while she was gone, in between her calculations.
Indeed, one of the things Col. Carter mentioned -- after she and Mer between them had guilted Jeanie into reprioritizing her principles and taking on secret-keeping as the lesser of two evils, leading her down the slippery slope of absorbingly fascinating theoretical physics -- was that Stargate Command kept an opt-in genetic database for all the members of their offworld teams, extra copies to be used at SGC discretion, and that now that Ancient medical technology made it much easier for women than donating an entire ovary, more and more of them too were contributing to this archive of research materials and hopes and second chances: would she, Jean Miller, care to add her own genes to their number?
-- Not that Jeanie's mentioned their situation to anyone, but if this works and she can start cashing in the favors the Colonel had promised... scores if not hundreds of the best and brightest of Earth, and here where she is now she can put faces to the names and see them in action, note that this one has gentle hands, that one an exuberant smile, this other one kind eyes.
She feels, sometimes, as if her search is stamped on her cheekbones and across her nose, her dull realization that even if she makes a choice she will still have to find the words to ask distorting her eyebrows.
And anyway there are other things to worry about here and now, and everything seems put on hold while she waits. When she gets home, after she hugs her family and listens to Madison talk herself out, Jeanie will ask Kaleb whether this was what it was like for him, back when he was sure with a stubborn illogical certainty that he would not live to be older than his father had been.
It would be easier if she could just ask Mer: it would minimize the risk of her child inheriting dominant unfamiliar traits that the academic harpies could seize on and use to hurt Kaleb and the child (she had thought, in the innocence of her girlhood, that a university department would be like Shrewsbury College, and found it to instead bear a strong resemblance to a party thrown by Lord Peter's harridan sister-in-law; sometimes she suspects that academic politics are the real reason Mer chose to go into classified government research), and she thinks it might help draw the two of them closer together, to relearn how to act as family. But Jeanie's run the statistical probabilities of thus inheriting her predisposition to epilepsy or Mer's allergies or both -- with or without other known McKay health issues -- and she doesn't think it's selfish for a mother to want better health for her child than she'd had.
And anyway, speaking of which, it seems that the gene sequence known as the "ATA gene" would provide several useful benefits.
-4- I have sought thee, sung thee, dreamed thee
Sam Carter used to have the world's most ginormous crush on MacGyver. In many ways, she still does.
This secret is somewhat less open than some of the others, as she is never letting Jack O'Neill know about this, EVER. (Her life had been a lot easier when she still thought they were nothing alike.)
-5- silver bright and pure
The strings have been in John Sheppard's family -- according to one definition of family, at least -- for a long, long time.
Holland heard him cursing once, angrily and heartfeltly and without a trace of blasphemy, and came out to find his comrade bent over a rock with the blowtorch from the hangar.
"What are you doing?" he asked Sheppard, with a few profanities thrown in by way of emphasis.
"When I wasn't in Damascus chauffeuring someone who wasn't there and probably doesn't exist," Major Sheppard drawled with awful sarcasm, "one of my guitar strings snapped, and I'm trying to mend it."
"With a blowtorch?"
"It's a silver string, so if I melt the ends, I can sort of stick them together. Like a weld or something."
Holland stared at him for a moment.
"Leaving aside the question of whether that'll even work -- "
"It has in the past. Now and then. The trick is not to stick it to the rock once it's hot enough to stick to itself. And to pick the right kind of rock, one that won't start melting."
"I think you have it up too high -- and seriously, you could order silver strings, there's this awesome invention these days called the Internet."
"These are heirlooms," Sheppard grumbled.
"... you're nucking futz, you know." Holland went back inside, where, if it should not actually be cooler, it maintained the threadbare illusion of so being.
"So," Holland said a week later, when the impromptu 'country and western and folksong and songs-in-pop-culture-long-enough-to-practically-be-folksong' concert had finished and the guys who'd performed the music were starting to wander off, "heirloom silver guitar strings?"
Sheppard shrugged, tilting his hips out of the way as the guitar on a shoulder-strap swung. "They've been in the family a while."
"Still seems kind of silly."
"Well, they've held out better than the guitars they're on -- the one before Helva here got smashed in Montenegro, but the strings were okay."
"They can't be that old, though," Lieutenant Martin said, noticing the conversation. "I mean -- strings. Even silver ones."
Sheppard sighed. (He looked, Holland thought suddenly, older than even they were all looking these days. Old and tired.) "I ran into a guy once who'd melted down a quarter -- an old one, back before they started making them out of nickel-copper-whatever with a silver coat -- and drawn his own strings; he had a guitar like mine and was into country folk music, too, so we played together a bit and traded songs. His strings had a different sound, so these must have something in them that's kept them strong... and also a bitch and a half to melt enough to weld.
"The first Sheppard to come to America -- well, okay, it's not like it's a strange and unique name, but the one all my family census records stem out from -- had them in his pocket when he wound up in Anaheim in nineteen-thirteen, and they were supposed to be old then."
"Anaheim isn't a port, is it?" Holland said. "Why not when he got off the boat, or whatever?"
"Is that the earliest solid record you have of your, uh... sir?" Martin wondered.
Sheppard rolled his eyes, heading for his guitar case. "According to family history -- as passed down by word of mouth -- to the best of his recollection, he'd been running down an alleyway somewhere in Europe and then suddenly he was flat on his back in an orange grove at night in what's now Anaheim, with no more idea than my left nut where the time in between'd gotten to. So he made the best of things, and changed his name to 'Sheppard' when the Great War rolled around, and wound up founding a bunch of family lines or whatever they're called."
"So you've got, what, in-laws around somewhere?"
"Wouldn't they be cousins, sir?" Martin corrected Holland nervously.
"We don't talk." Sheppard fished his guitar case out and began unbuckling it.
"Why not?" Holland kept his voice light, incurious.
"Some of them are Marines, and some of them are loaded."
Holland shouted with laughter.
"Guess that'd do it," another of the pilots snorted, putting away his own ukelele.
A few years later, at the first 'hey, despite the tribulations, the Atlantis Expedition will continue and some of us got officially promoted' party -- which, sadly, was to become an annual-or-more tradition after the expedition's second year -- Dr. Elizabeth Weir, escaping to the food-table from the knot of people with something to say and shamelessly leaving Teyla with all their petitions, noticed that her new-made lieutenant colonel had a guitar with shimmering strings slung across his shoulder.
"I see you brought back a souvenir from our recent trip," she told him lightly.
"Huh?" Sheppard said.
Elizabeth sighed, a little, and smiled gently at him. "I meant your guitar, John."
"Uh, actually, I've had -- I mean, I brought my guitar with me first year. You really didn't see it before?"
"He did," Dr. Rodney McKay agreed, pausing next to them to collect a baked apple. "With those strings. Are you sure I didn't tell you about them? I know I told someone about them... "
"Again and again and again," Dr. John Kavanagh snorted, making his own way down the refreshment table. "Should you be standing so close to the Key lime pie?"
"I'm not there yet, thank goodness, but be safe and don't breathe on me if you're eating it. And I know I told someone who wasn't there at the time, maybe it was Carson... "
"Is there something I need to know about the guitar?" Elizabeth cut him off with the grace of long practice.
"The guitar, no. It's a reasonably good if somewhat battered instrument, doesn't have too bad a tone."
"Oh."
Sheppard sighed, letting it roll down from his shoulders to his tilted hips.
"The guitar's strings," Rodney announced, "on the other hand, are made of near-pure naquadah."
"Naquadah?" Elizabeth said blankly. She stared at the guitar, reaching out a finger to tap one of the strings. It made a soft, faint sound like the ghost of a note while Sheppard stiffened as if she'd touched one of his short hairs.
So. Naquadah. "Where in the world did you get them?" she asked sharply.
"Apparently, they're 'family heirlooms,'" Kavanagh snorted.
"They've been in my family for well over a hundred years," Sheppard shrugged, "longer than any of the guitars we've put them on. I'm afraid I don't know how we wound up with them in the first place."
"Which is exactly what's so frustrating!" Rodney threw up his hands. "I mean, it's not as if they could have fallen out of the sky like that, or risen up out of the earth, or been made by some friendly technologically advanced alien who happens to like giving guitar strings to humans -- at least, not without the humans noticing it and remembering it, you should hear my family sound off about their alleged encounter with the remnants of an... ancient... civilization -- " His jaw worked for a moment as his hands grew still before furiously pointing at Sheppard. "You! Did you happen to have a great-great-grandmother named Electra? Plus or minus a great," he added conscientiously.
"Strangely enough, I don't actually remember all my great-great-grandparents' names offhand." Sheppard rolled his eyes. "Besides, we might have been given them by a friendly Ancient dropping in in disguise, that's actually as reasonable an explanation as any and better than some."
"What, your entire family were pushovers for Ancients? I suppose they wrote 'for a good time, call Sheppard' on the Crab Nebula or something? No wonder you can do so much with your ATA gene."
"Your family could just as well have been visited by sort-of-ascended Ancients, too," Sheppard pointed out. "If they weren't looking for it, how would you know?"
"I wonder whether some of the folktales about strange visitors... " Elizabeth said thoughtfully to herself.
At the same time, Kavanagh rolled his eyes and said "Yes, and for all we know we could have ascended Ancients in disguise all over the place. The SGC could be full of them, even, and nobody would know unless they were as paranoid as McKay."
Rodney, clearly torn between tearing a strip off his subordinate and puffing up with pride, settled for giving Kavanagh a dirty look while he tried to work out whether his remarks added up to a compliment.
"I take it you play the guitar, then," Elizabeth said quickly, shifting attention from the two scientists. "Were you planning to give us a song?"
"Oh, sure," Sheppard said, and stepped forward a little, readjusting his guitar. A few of the other expedition members saw him and nudged each other, until the conversational noise had died to a dull roar.
"Uh," Sheppard said eloquently. "I've tried to teach myself some songs that were written in the last fifty years by listening to them, but most of the stuff I can play is actually kind of old. Feel free to join in if you know the words."
And he began to sing, fast English words in what, oddly enough, appeared to be a Southern accent, set to a jaunty tune.
I had been in Georgia
Not a many more weeks than three,
When I fell in love with a pretty fair girl,
And she fell in love with me.
Her lips were red as red could be,
Her eyes were brown as brown,
Her hair was like the thundercloud
Before the rain comes down.
"He's singing in his speaking voice," Rodney grumbled.
Teyla, finally free of people with something they just had to say and drifting over towards her teammates, raised her eyebrows. "Was it not you who remarked on the cacophony of Major Sheppard's laugh?"
"Colonel," Rodney absently corrected her, handing her a stick of roasted fowl pieces. The two of them moved towards each other, unthinking, watching as Sheppard switched to a song about connecting dry bones and three or four people joined in, a little nervously but with much more melodious voices.
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-ratings/warnings- Part of my pet asymptotic-to-canon AU. Some crossoveriness. Discussion of matter that may be disturbing.
-timeframe- From well before the show began to, oh, early in the fourth season.
-spoilers- Through the beginning of fourth season. Also for SG-1's "New Order" and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's "Graduation Day."
-characters- Ford, Elizabeth, Jeanie, Sam, Sheppard, Holland, Rodney, Kavanagh, Teyla, cameos
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. Nor are any of the other sources herein referenced; they belong to Joss Whedon et al., Raymond Chandler, Ten Thirteen Productions, Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer, Dorothy L. Sayers, Joe Darion, Lee David Zlotoff et al., Manly Wade Wellman, and Gainax.
-word count- 4044
-summary- Pretty much what the title says. ^_^
Five (Open) Secrets Brought From Earth To Atlantis
-1- same shit, different galaxy
For half the Marines who came to Pegasus under Sumner, including one First Lieutenant Aiden Ford, Atlantis is a lot like high school. Closed society: check. Spending a lot of time in one place, instituting friendly competitions to keep from being bored out of their skulls (with mixed results): check. Perennial danger of devolving into a popularity contest: check (although Atlantis, so far, has had enough other ways to prove their worth -- even for Marines guarding civilians -- to keep them on the right side of that line, unlike high school). Continually learning new and different things: check. In near-constant danger from inhuman, ageless, known-physics-laws-defying predators who view mankind as a renewable easily-drained food source: check.
At least here in Pegasus, they actually talk about it. Acknowledge it. Plan ways to fight back as a general thing.
Ford had actually spent his high school years with his mother; the public schools in her new community (which also offered excellent prices, all sorts of work perquisites, phenomenal health care) boasted a far better quality of equipment, textbooks, and even teachers than the ones where his grandparents lived. They hadn't realized, then, that the many openings and lures to attract new citizens were caused by as many deaths and disappearances that were probably deaths, and he didn't think his grandparents or his mother would have thought the extra learning worth the level of risk to his life.
Nobody had known, before, that the Ancients who abandoned the Milky Way in Atlantis had then abandoned Atlantis for the Milky Way, or why. He was fairly sure, though, that if they had known, the scientists would still have thought what they could learn worth the risk of their lives. (Besides, they had the Marines with them, and most of the direct threats to an overeager scientist could be solved by such methods as "sit on them if necessary" and the ever-popular "See space vampire, kill space vampire.")
Here, too, they had the small yet beautiful woman who could defeat any one of them without breathing hard; and, once again, here in Atlantis Teyla Emmagan's abilities were well known and well respected. Several of the Marines and scientists trained routinely with her, including Ford, not to mention Major Sheppard. (Ford is sure that he'd have been a lot better off if he'd trained routinely with his small beautiful classmate, back in high school, but he kind of thinks that the Aiden of those days would have had too much tied up in teenage male pride to ask, even had he known.)
Also as in high school, and as at the SGC for that matter, while the Marines were by no means stupid -- even above and beyond their internalization of the Euclidean dictum that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points -- more often than not it was the geeks who saved the day, either through bits of obscure knowledge or by really impressive thinking on the fly.
And when it became fairly apparent that they were under the command of a man who was competent, skilled, and in many ways spectacularly dorky, Ford and his classmates found it familiar and rather comforting: no one in their right mind would ever have accused their first commander, who led them to undreamed-of victory in the Battle of Graduation Day, of undorkitude.
-2- who is not himself mean
Doctors Elizabeth Weir and Simon Wallace used to watch The X-Files together. They enjoyed the plot devices; they loved the banter; they agreed that Mulder and Scully were a perfect exemplar of the trope "We're Not Straight, We Just Love Each Other"; the intricate layers of conspiracy resonated with them; and it was partly because of that shared love that she lobbied so hard to get permission to tell him, albeit in a recording, exactly where she was going.
The first time she came back from Atlantis, after Simon told her of the other woman he was seeing and left her to her grief and pride, she stole his promotional posters, his soundtracks, his CD single of a song used in the Japanese dub of the third season, and his autographed videocassette. (There are no VCRs in Atlantis, but that's all right: the Stargate probably demagnetized it anyway.) It's not as if he doesn't deserve it: after all, he stole her dog. And her heart.
The cigarette-smoking man and his ilk had struck a chord with them because of Elizabeth's experience growing up in the bosom of what made itself the nucleus of the NID, raised to be their pawn at need and their independently-acting allied piece by default. Men were put off by her ties to the Department, or, worse, wanted her for them; Simon had loved her for surviving under their aegis, for enduring and growing tall and proud and unexpectedly pasting on a set of ethics, and she had never thought that someone as strong as he had repeatedly proved himself to be would fail at the last.
Elizabeth had played their game, little as she loved it, and tried to consider means as well as ends, and kept her secrets behind her smile; she had, she thought, not only managed not to laugh in Daniel's well-meaning face but hidden her impulse to honestly do so when he warned her of the System Lords' capacity for evil, believing her naive and unprepared.
Nervous at the scope, certainly, but -- Daniel always had been an idealist, even through all his study of cultures living and dead, even after the simulated future she had read of, and she hoped he never lost it. Never quite realized that for all their scope and for all their sociopathy, the Goa'uld themselves remained children -- children turned loose with terrible power, but simple and uncomplicated compared to the humans she had persuaded and cajoled and learned her trade under.
She, too, had taken perhaps undue pleasure in phrasing her report about Kinsey (Elizabeth sometimes wondered who had "suggested" that he use her in his takeover attempt, or how much he had known about her when he gave her his orders), in reporting that he had:
- allowed a personal vendetta against an internal rival to wilfully endanger the planet and risk exposure to at least some of the Trust;
- failed to adequately judge the situation;
- been unwilling to accept the discreet nudging of the hierarchy's on-site expert;
when all the while she knew that the Trust would prefer an innocent or an outright opponent in the vice-presidency to a loose cannon that knew where at least some bodies were buried.
Besides, even if his criminal incompetency on that occasion hadn't quite deserved the fate she heard of on her first return ("stroke," Lt. Col. Carter had said, trying not to gloat, and Elizabeth had run down the possibile causes of those symptoms in her mind), he had undoubtedly done enough else in the course of his career to have earned that and more.
But -- Atlantis. Where their reach did not extend. Where she did not have to fight and claw and keep constant vigilance over the little space (illusion) of freedom she had hollowed out for herself and Simon. Where she could, at last, be free to be whomever Elizabeth Weir might prove to be, and where if her mistakes redounded on the heads of those under her care, at least they had no help.
It was more difficult, now, playing the triple agent, letting the Trust think her still loyal against her will (shackled by the values they had tried to instill in her) but hampered by her cover from acting visibly; she had pointed out, in ciphered code, that she really couldn't have protected whomever-in-Caldwell without knowing who it was she ought to protect.
(She's flirted more with Steven Caldwell since then, guilt sharpening the selfish desire to prove that at least some men find her a desirable woman.)
Elizabeth hopes the day will be long to come (but knows it will come all too soon) when she will have to -- not choose, for her choices were made long before, but to make her choice plain in the open light of day.
She wonders what they will try to do to her, when they know. Thallium, perhaps. Decaying isotopes. The chemistry that can create a thyroid supplement can almost certainly conceive a drug that impedes the function of the thyroid -- she read too many mysteries in her youth, and drew what her guardians would consider all the wrong lessons from them. Elizabeth hopes they won't be able to get to her, knows there's an even chance, and has learned that to make her plans as if the Trust will reach her in the end is to invite self-fulfilment of the prophecy.
And still she knows (and knows that Heightmeyer only tells her not to blame herself because Elizabeth's the only one with all the facts), to her self-loathing, that even had she known that it would cost her the man she loved as she will never love another, more than life itself, she would still have chosen Atlantis.
-3- hickory dickory dock, biological clock
Jeanie and Kaleb Miller plan to have several children -- maybe even five -- at reasonable intervals.
There are a few obstacles to this plan. Children take time to raise correctly, and Jeanie has been thinking about going back to school -- part-time, most likely -- when her children start. Raising children is expensive: even with Kaleb's salary and her inheritances and his and their mutual funds, they want to build up a financial cushion (and if Jeanie gets a job, that too speaks to the first point).
Kaleb has known since he was sixteen, when his cousin's issues led to the entire family undergoing medical testing, that he was sterile.
(He told Jeanie, trying for wryness and sliding into near-whining, that his cousin's condition, while perhaps similar in the most general sense, turned out to leave him fertile with modern surgical methods, never mind that Jeffrey's interest in being a father was somewhere below his interest in undergoing a root canal without anaesthesia. Jeanie hugged him and agreed that life generally wasn't fair; she herself could recall plenty of instances in addition to her own memories.)
But now -- they had planned, if her proof were to be published, that it was time to start planning for a second child, maybe a little boy with Jeanie's blonde not-curls, or a little girl with the McKay nose. Now, given SGC consulting fees, they decided that she would start looking into it while she was gone, in between her calculations.
Indeed, one of the things Col. Carter mentioned -- after she and Mer between them had guilted Jeanie into reprioritizing her principles and taking on secret-keeping as the lesser of two evils, leading her down the slippery slope of absorbingly fascinating theoretical physics -- was that Stargate Command kept an opt-in genetic database for all the members of their offworld teams, extra copies to be used at SGC discretion, and that now that Ancient medical technology made it much easier for women than donating an entire ovary, more and more of them too were contributing to this archive of research materials and hopes and second chances: would she, Jean Miller, care to add her own genes to their number?
-- Not that Jeanie's mentioned their situation to anyone, but if this works and she can start cashing in the favors the Colonel had promised... scores if not hundreds of the best and brightest of Earth, and here where she is now she can put faces to the names and see them in action, note that this one has gentle hands, that one an exuberant smile, this other one kind eyes.
She feels, sometimes, as if her search is stamped on her cheekbones and across her nose, her dull realization that even if she makes a choice she will still have to find the words to ask distorting her eyebrows.
And anyway there are other things to worry about here and now, and everything seems put on hold while she waits. When she gets home, after she hugs her family and listens to Madison talk herself out, Jeanie will ask Kaleb whether this was what it was like for him, back when he was sure with a stubborn illogical certainty that he would not live to be older than his father had been.
It would be easier if she could just ask Mer: it would minimize the risk of her child inheriting dominant unfamiliar traits that the academic harpies could seize on and use to hurt Kaleb and the child (she had thought, in the innocence of her girlhood, that a university department would be like Shrewsbury College, and found it to instead bear a strong resemblance to a party thrown by Lord Peter's harridan sister-in-law; sometimes she suspects that academic politics are the real reason Mer chose to go into classified government research), and she thinks it might help draw the two of them closer together, to relearn how to act as family. But Jeanie's run the statistical probabilities of thus inheriting her predisposition to epilepsy or Mer's allergies or both -- with or without other known McKay health issues -- and she doesn't think it's selfish for a mother to want better health for her child than she'd had.
And anyway, speaking of which, it seems that the gene sequence known as the "ATA gene" would provide several useful benefits.
-4- I have sought thee, sung thee, dreamed thee
Sam Carter used to have the world's most ginormous crush on MacGyver. In many ways, she still does.
This secret is somewhat less open than some of the others, as she is never letting Jack O'Neill know about this, EVER. (Her life had been a lot easier when she still thought they were nothing alike.)
-5- silver bright and pure
The strings have been in John Sheppard's family -- according to one definition of family, at least -- for a long, long time.
Holland heard him cursing once, angrily and heartfeltly and without a trace of blasphemy, and came out to find his comrade bent over a rock with the blowtorch from the hangar.
"What are you doing?" he asked Sheppard, with a few profanities thrown in by way of emphasis.
"When I wasn't in Damascus chauffeuring someone who wasn't there and probably doesn't exist," Major Sheppard drawled with awful sarcasm, "one of my guitar strings snapped, and I'm trying to mend it."
"With a blowtorch?"
"It's a silver string, so if I melt the ends, I can sort of stick them together. Like a weld or something."
Holland stared at him for a moment.
"Leaving aside the question of whether that'll even work -- "
"It has in the past. Now and then. The trick is not to stick it to the rock once it's hot enough to stick to itself. And to pick the right kind of rock, one that won't start melting."
"I think you have it up too high -- and seriously, you could order silver strings, there's this awesome invention these days called the Internet."
"These are heirlooms," Sheppard grumbled.
"... you're nucking futz, you know." Holland went back inside, where, if it should not actually be cooler, it maintained the threadbare illusion of so being.
"So," Holland said a week later, when the impromptu 'country and western and folksong and songs-in-pop-culture-long-enough-to-practically-be-folksong' concert had finished and the guys who'd performed the music were starting to wander off, "heirloom silver guitar strings?"
Sheppard shrugged, tilting his hips out of the way as the guitar on a shoulder-strap swung. "They've been in the family a while."
"Still seems kind of silly."
"Well, they've held out better than the guitars they're on -- the one before Helva here got smashed in Montenegro, but the strings were okay."
"They can't be that old, though," Lieutenant Martin said, noticing the conversation. "I mean -- strings. Even silver ones."
Sheppard sighed. (He looked, Holland thought suddenly, older than even they were all looking these days. Old and tired.) "I ran into a guy once who'd melted down a quarter -- an old one, back before they started making them out of nickel-copper-whatever with a silver coat -- and drawn his own strings; he had a guitar like mine and was into country folk music, too, so we played together a bit and traded songs. His strings had a different sound, so these must have something in them that's kept them strong... and also a bitch and a half to melt enough to weld.
"The first Sheppard to come to America -- well, okay, it's not like it's a strange and unique name, but the one all my family census records stem out from -- had them in his pocket when he wound up in Anaheim in nineteen-thirteen, and they were supposed to be old then."
"Anaheim isn't a port, is it?" Holland said. "Why not when he got off the boat, or whatever?"
"Is that the earliest solid record you have of your, uh... sir?" Martin wondered.
Sheppard rolled his eyes, heading for his guitar case. "According to family history -- as passed down by word of mouth -- to the best of his recollection, he'd been running down an alleyway somewhere in Europe and then suddenly he was flat on his back in an orange grove at night in what's now Anaheim, with no more idea than my left nut where the time in between'd gotten to. So he made the best of things, and changed his name to 'Sheppard' when the Great War rolled around, and wound up founding a bunch of family lines or whatever they're called."
"So you've got, what, in-laws around somewhere?"
"Wouldn't they be cousins, sir?" Martin corrected Holland nervously.
"We don't talk." Sheppard fished his guitar case out and began unbuckling it.
"Why not?" Holland kept his voice light, incurious.
"Some of them are Marines, and some of them are loaded."
Holland shouted with laughter.
"Guess that'd do it," another of the pilots snorted, putting away his own ukelele.
A few years later, at the first 'hey, despite the tribulations, the Atlantis Expedition will continue and some of us got officially promoted' party -- which, sadly, was to become an annual-or-more tradition after the expedition's second year -- Dr. Elizabeth Weir, escaping to the food-table from the knot of people with something to say and shamelessly leaving Teyla with all their petitions, noticed that her new-made lieutenant colonel had a guitar with shimmering strings slung across his shoulder.
"I see you brought back a souvenir from our recent trip," she told him lightly.
"Huh?" Sheppard said.
Elizabeth sighed, a little, and smiled gently at him. "I meant your guitar, John."
"Uh, actually, I've had -- I mean, I brought my guitar with me first year. You really didn't see it before?"
"He did," Dr. Rodney McKay agreed, pausing next to them to collect a baked apple. "With those strings. Are you sure I didn't tell you about them? I know I told someone about them... "
"Again and again and again," Dr. John Kavanagh snorted, making his own way down the refreshment table. "Should you be standing so close to the Key lime pie?"
"I'm not there yet, thank goodness, but be safe and don't breathe on me if you're eating it. And I know I told someone who wasn't there at the time, maybe it was Carson... "
"Is there something I need to know about the guitar?" Elizabeth cut him off with the grace of long practice.
"The guitar, no. It's a reasonably good if somewhat battered instrument, doesn't have too bad a tone."
"Oh."
Sheppard sighed, letting it roll down from his shoulders to his tilted hips.
"The guitar's strings," Rodney announced, "on the other hand, are made of near-pure naquadah."
"Naquadah?" Elizabeth said blankly. She stared at the guitar, reaching out a finger to tap one of the strings. It made a soft, faint sound like the ghost of a note while Sheppard stiffened as if she'd touched one of his short hairs.
So. Naquadah. "Where in the world did you get them?" she asked sharply.
"Apparently, they're 'family heirlooms,'" Kavanagh snorted.
"They've been in my family for well over a hundred years," Sheppard shrugged, "longer than any of the guitars we've put them on. I'm afraid I don't know how we wound up with them in the first place."
"Which is exactly what's so frustrating!" Rodney threw up his hands. "I mean, it's not as if they could have fallen out of the sky like that, or risen up out of the earth, or been made by some friendly technologically advanced alien who happens to like giving guitar strings to humans -- at least, not without the humans noticing it and remembering it, you should hear my family sound off about their alleged encounter with the remnants of an... ancient... civilization -- " His jaw worked for a moment as his hands grew still before furiously pointing at Sheppard. "You! Did you happen to have a great-great-grandmother named Electra? Plus or minus a great," he added conscientiously.
"Strangely enough, I don't actually remember all my great-great-grandparents' names offhand." Sheppard rolled his eyes. "Besides, we might have been given them by a friendly Ancient dropping in in disguise, that's actually as reasonable an explanation as any and better than some."
"What, your entire family were pushovers for Ancients? I suppose they wrote 'for a good time, call Sheppard' on the Crab Nebula or something? No wonder you can do so much with your ATA gene."
"Your family could just as well have been visited by sort-of-ascended Ancients, too," Sheppard pointed out. "If they weren't looking for it, how would you know?"
"I wonder whether some of the folktales about strange visitors... " Elizabeth said thoughtfully to herself.
At the same time, Kavanagh rolled his eyes and said "Yes, and for all we know we could have ascended Ancients in disguise all over the place. The SGC could be full of them, even, and nobody would know unless they were as paranoid as McKay."
Rodney, clearly torn between tearing a strip off his subordinate and puffing up with pride, settled for giving Kavanagh a dirty look while he tried to work out whether his remarks added up to a compliment.
"I take it you play the guitar, then," Elizabeth said quickly, shifting attention from the two scientists. "Were you planning to give us a song?"
"Oh, sure," Sheppard said, and stepped forward a little, readjusting his guitar. A few of the other expedition members saw him and nudged each other, until the conversational noise had died to a dull roar.
"Uh," Sheppard said eloquently. "I've tried to teach myself some songs that were written in the last fifty years by listening to them, but most of the stuff I can play is actually kind of old. Feel free to join in if you know the words."
And he began to sing, fast English words in what, oddly enough, appeared to be a Southern accent, set to a jaunty tune.
I had been in Georgia
Not a many more weeks than three,
When I fell in love with a pretty fair girl,
And she fell in love with me.
Her lips were red as red could be,
Her eyes were brown as brown,
Her hair was like the thundercloud
Before the rain comes down.
"He's singing in his speaking voice," Rodney grumbled.
Teyla, finally free of people with something they just had to say and drifting over towards her teammates, raised her eyebrows. "Was it not you who remarked on the cacophony of Major Sheppard's laugh?"
"Colonel," Rodney absently corrected her, handing her a stick of roasted fowl pieces. The two of them moved towards each other, unthinking, watching as Sheppard switched to a song about connecting dry bones and three or four people joined in, a little nervously but with much more melodious voices.