Into the Dark by Mad Maudlin (Amnesty 08, Not Dead Yet)
Title: Into the Dark
Author: mad_maudlin
Genre: Gen, though you could take it as preslash if you want.
Rating: PG for one little word
Spoilers: Vaguely for First Contact/Lost Tribe
Summary: "We don't leave our people behind."
A/N: I had two or three things I thought I could sneak in under the deadline, but this is the only one presentable before my bedtime. I have successfully resisted the urge to more directly quote Death Cab for Cutie. Can be thought of as a sequel to another fic I wrote, which is not very good, but I'll link it anyway: Dialogue on the Individuality of Consciousness (The Mega-Mall at the End of the Universe). Speed beta, so pointing out typos would be welcome.
There was a moment of white-out nothingness and sound, and when John came back to himself he was dimly aware of the ribbons of pain sweeping his body. For a few moments he held himself still as he could, groping for a handle on the situation, but his head was foggy and his memory seemed to skip around like a scratched CD or a badly-spliced strip of film. He couldn't catch his breath, like someone was squeezing his chest down, and the air in his mouth tasted like chemicals and smoke. It wasn't until he heard McKay moan somewhere off behind him that it came together-
"-our one chance to take them out before they start taking on the rest of the galaxy. Do you really think we can win a fair fight against Asgard?"
"-creates a black hole, basically, the same thing we tried to do to the Replicators only on a much bigger scale and, um, it works-"
"-not this time! There are suicide missions and there are suicide missions and unless you think you can break the laws of physics, Colonel, don't you dare say 'So long, McKay.' Not this time. Now close the damn the hatch and let's go."
"-device is away-"
Rodney moaned again, trailing off into a gasp; John made one concerted effort to turn, but his body wasn't having any of it; multiple fractured ribs, he decided, concussion, whiplash, maybe even a cracked pelvis. His nose felt broken and one of his front teeth had gone AWOL. And he'd been sitting when the shock wave hit.
"McKay?" he tired to say, but it came out in a cough, agonizing and tasting of blood.
After a few moments, he heard a weak, hoarse, familiar voice, "Oh, my god, you did break the laws of physics."
"How bad are you hurt?" John asked, because his head was all fuzzy but he could still focus, maybe, focus on the big things, one step at a time. If McKay was in one piece-or, well, a couple big pieces at least-and if the jumper wasn't too badly broken…
McKay coughed and whimpered again. "Um. Um. Badly. Very badly." There was a pause that should've been filled with a catalogue of injuries great and small; instead, the frame of the jumper made an alarming creaking noise. "What about you?"
"What about the jumper?" John asked. "Do we have engines?"
"Do we-Jesus, John, open your eyes! Look out the goddamn window!"
John managed to swallow. Even that hurt. "Rodney, my eyes are open."
There was a long pause, and then McKay broke up into hysterical giggles punctuated by coughs. "Oh my god," he gasped. "Oh my god, this is insane."
In the darkness-his personal darkness-John could only vaguely imagine Rodney's face, because in all their years on Atlantis he'd never known McKay to giggle in the face of danger. And John wasn't moving, and John couldn't see, and this was the absolute worst timing in the universe. "Rodney, stay with me here."
"We are inside the event horizon of a black hole," Rodney said between giggles, "but we must've-the angles, the momentum must've been just right, because we're not crashing, we're spiraling inwards, we've got to be spiraling. And you, you must've hit your head when the shockwave hit, hit so hard you detached both your retinas, and I'm-I-oh god." The giggling melting into a series of gasps, punctuated by another metallic groan. "We're spiraling. Spiraling!"
"So how do we fix it?" John demanded, even thought it cost him another bloody coughing fit. Little white sparks flashed in his eyes, but not the interior of the jumper, not the nightmare view from the window McKay was talking about.
"Don't you get it? We don't!" Rodney fell silent, wheezing for a bit. "Look, it is a miracle-and I don't throw this word around lightly, a miracle-that we weren't ripped apart by the shockwave. Somehow we managed to fall into a wide orbit around the singularity instead of falling straight into it, but it's a decaying orbit-a spiral-not a stable one. And we're within the event horizon, which means not even light can get out, let alone us, even if we had a million ZPMs and a working jumper."
"What about the Daedalus?" John asked. "Could they, I don't know, give us a tow?"
"The Daedalus can't even see us," Rodney said. "No light past the event horizon, remember? And we can't communicate with them. And even if they could, or we could…how long were we unconscious, John?"
John said, "You're asking the man with the detached retinas over here."
They both paused for a sharp sudden popping sound from the jumper. "My point is," Rodney said, "we're close enough to the singularity to experience time dilation. Say we were out for a few minutes, a few seconds. That for us could be hours…even days…the Daedalus is probably already gone."
John couldn't really sigh, or hold his breath, in his state, but he felt something drain out of him anyway, some last shred of hope. "I hate time dilation."
"Yeah." Rodney had gone from hysterics to a dull calm way too fast, and John heard a rustling sound like movement, a heaving dragging, a series of grunts and whimpers. He wished like hell that he could move, that he could see, anything, but his body remained broken and his vision dark.
He tried to keep concentrating anyway. "We're still alive, though," he said. "That counts for something, right?"
"No," Rodney said. "Because if you weren't paying attention, Concussion Boy, we are spiraling into a black hole and we have no power and we're both probably bleeding internally. Even if you could see, even if I could-could stand, it's just a race to see whether we die from oxygen deprivation before the tidal forces of the singularity finish tearing the jumper apart. We lived just long enough to die in an even more unpleasant manner than we originally anticipated."
There was a long pause, a creak, and more of that rustle-whimper-drag noise, coming closer. John licked his lips, tasting the bloody foam on them from the last round of coughing. "Any regrets?" he found himself asking.
A pregnant silence, and then McKay said, closer than before, "Well, I never did get the Nobel."
"I never got to fly the X-309." John said. "Mitchell said they're gonna be awesome and I'll never get to take one out."
"Didn't get to say goodbye to Jeannie, either," McKay added.
John let his head fall back against the rest, since holding it upright hurt too much. "She knows, though."
"Yeah…I think so." He suddenly felt a hand on his leg, McKay's hand, and it pawed around near his holster for a terrifying moment before finding John's hand and squeezing; it was sticky from blood and gritty with what were probably bits of cracked crystal. "I just," Rodney said. "Look, I just wanted to, you know, I don't normally say it out loud…"
"Hey," John said. "We're not dead yet." He made a half-hearted attempt to shake Rodney's hand off, but it hurt too much and really, it was better than sitting alone in the dark.
"But we're going to be, unless you've got another miracle on tap," Rodney said. "So for once just quit interrupting me during the emotional part, all right? It's not easy for me."
"Me neither," John said, and he wanted to add and you don't have to say it. Instead he said, "But don't miracles always come in threes?"
"Right," Rodney said. "Because this is a Hallmark special."
"Hope springs eternal," John managed to get out before the next round of coughing.
Rodney snorted softly. "Maybe for some people."
Rodney's hand dropped away while John coughed, and afterwards there was silence, silence that rippled with their labored breathing and the jumper's groaning and the ringing in John's ears. He knew he should probably lay still so he didn't make things worse, or at least so he wouldn't hurt as badly, but he realized that against his will he was doing a sort of slow-motion writhe-muscles clenching and unclenching from the feet up, following the pain in a gradual wave that made cracked bones shift and grind in ways they shouldn't. He wondered if McKay was in any state to get to the medical kit-if they even still had a medical kit-because there was more than enough morphine in there for the both of them. Hell, John's sidearm had more than enough bullets for the both of them. Gave a whole new definition to the term suicide mission, of course, but was it really any worse than sitting here in pain and (for him) in the dark, waiting to die? Was it really worse than that the long sleep his pounding head was calling for?
No, he thought, though he couldn't have quiet said what he was negating. Only that he had survived too much-they had overcome too much-to lie down and quit in the face of something dumb like general relativity. They had known this wasn't the usual kind of suicide mission from the start, but John had no intention of going gently into that good night. If nothing else, Rodney didn't deserve to die alone. Nothing else, but it suddenly meant everything.
"John," Rodney said, weak and throaty, still located somewhere just behind John's right elbow.
And then the cabin of the jumper filled with light.
John blinked, shocked by the return of vision and the scene it gave him: the interior of the jumper was dead, burnt out, the dark controls smeared with his own blood. Outside was a mind-bending view, weirdly twisted stripes of boiling plasma falling away into pure, absolute blackness, their colors shifting down to a hellish red as they went. And seated in the copilot's chair, wreathed in the thick rafts of hanging smoke, was a dark haired woman who shouldn't have taken as long to place as she did. The glowing kind of gave it away in the end, though.
"Teer?" John asked. He figured he could blame it on the concussion.
"Are you kidding me?" Rodney blurted, sounding distinctly less wheezy. He was sprawled on the floor just behind the pilot's chair, and John managed to turn his head enough to see him. And wished he hadn't: McKay was burned, badly, with dark wet patches of blistered skin showing through where his uniform had burned away and black areas where the acrylic in his underwear had melted to his thighs. One of his feet was not facing the right direction, and by the way his legs were twisted up behind him John was positive they were paralyzed. His jaw still seemed to work pretty well, though. "You wait until now to show up? Not, you know, when we were feeding you lines about Hallmark specials? Just when I was about to-I mean, seriously?"
Teer smiled benevolently. "Hello, John. Hello. Dr. McKay."
John managed to turn his body, just a bit, so he was facing her properly; though the pain seemed to be receding somehow, just like his retinas had magically re-attached themselves or whatever had just happened. "I have a feeling I know why you're here."
"I'm sure you do," she said. "I've come to offer you a choice."
"Let me guess, Ascend or die?" Rodney asked. "Funny, that sounds familiar for some reason."
"You're both capable of it," Teer said. "If you expend the effort."
"Any particular reason why you're bringing this up now?" John asked. If he angled his head right, he could see his own reflection in the dark parts of the windshield-he didn't really want to, because it was obvious who'd won the face vs. console fight, but he could. Teer didn't reflect anything, like a vampire or a ghost. Matter and light kept bending back into the darkness.
She reached out and took John's hand. "You once called us foolish because we sought to give up life on this plane without truly living it. But you have lived your lives, and now their course is run." She looked down, letting Rodney in on her smile. "You would not be here now if you had not already laid your burdens down."
Rodney snorted. "Really. So you waited around until your boyfriend here finally found a mission he couldn't walk away from? Would it have killed you to just boost us above the event horizon altogether so we could be rescued?"
"McKay," John said, "be nice to the lady who is offering to save our lives."
And that laid it out. Teer dropped his hand and looked at them both for a long moment; even the jumper was quiet now. "You know that we do not interfere on this plane. But I can help you, both of you, if Ascension is what you wish. If not…here, in this singularity, isolated from the rest of the universe…no one will stop me from easing your pain."
"Ascend or die," Rodney muttered, and lowered his head to the deck.
John breathed deeply, his first deep breath since he regained consciousness, the first breath that didn't taste like blood and smoke. "So, just out of curiosity, if we do Ascend, what happens next? 'Cause I know the kind of punishments that the Ascended like to hand out, and I'm not really all that good at following rules."
"You would be free to do as you wish," Teer said. "So long as you did not interfere with life on this plane beyond the abilities of any mortal. You could even return to corporeal form, if you wish."
"Just like that?" John asked. "It doesn't offend anybody if we're using the Ascended Plane like a Get Out Of Death Free card?"
Teer's enigmatic smile returned. "If, once you Ascend, you truly wish to return to this form, no one will stop you. But just as you once encouraged us to experience mortal life, so I would encourage you not to cast aside your Ascension rashly."
"You didn't actually take my advice though," John pointed out.
"Nor do I expect you to take mine," she said serenely. "But you are an extraordinary man, John, and I believe your death here would be a waste."
John shut his eyes for a moment, but it was too much like blindness, so he stared into the absolute black of the singularity. Spaghettification, they called it, when matter got sucked in and pulled apart. But Teer said she could make it painless. Or Ascension…he'd never seen the point of having power like that if you weren't going to use it. And he sure as hell didn't trust that they could come and go that quickly, without any horrible consequences. But it was a way out, any way out, and if there was the slimmest chance…
"I'll go if you go," Rodney suddenly blurted.
John managed to twist, pain-free, to look at him straight on. "Come again?"
"She's right, this is stupid," he said fiercely. "The odds that we would be here, now, in this condition…to survive everything else and then get stuck here, to be alive and be helpless…I don't know about you, but I still have a lot of things I could do, you know, if we actually get out of here. There's still a lot of other bad guys to go fling yourself at. I could get the Nobel."
"What about existence without the individuality of consciousness?" John asked. "Thought it didn't appeal to you."
"Well, it's not like we have a lot of alternatives here!"
John looked at Teer, but she was silent, watching them with no particular expression. He turned back to Rodney. "So you're going," he said.
"Only if you go," Rodney said quickly, looking down again for the moment.
John almost broke into his own giggle-fit at that. "What's the matter, Rodney, you scared?"
"Of course not!" He still couldn't quite meet John's eyes when he said it. "But…we don't leave our people behind."
John's breath caught, not because of the broken ribs or the blood in his lungs, but something almost as painful. He wanted to say something, anything at all, but the words didn't come. They never did. There was, however, something he could do. He braced his hands on the sides of the chair, braced his feet, and tried to stand. Both legs crumpled under him-what do you know, the angle of the shockwave fucked up his knees, too-and catching himself made his ribs and back and collarbone sing with pain. He didn't fall on top of McKay, though, that was the important part; he let one arm collapse before the other, so he fell onto his side, then his back, and waited for the jumper to stop spinning.
"John?" Rodney squawked. "What the hell?"
"John?" Teer asked nervously.
He turned his head; he and Rodney were just about eye level, their arms pressed carelessly together by the way John had landed. "Clear blue skies, remember?"
And Rodney's clear blue eyes went wide, and then he grinned a little, despite the wide blisters on his face. "Yeah, I…I think I got it."
Above them both, Teer leaned forward. "Then you are ready?"
"Sure," John said. "Let's get this show on the road." He made himself shut his eyes again, but this time there was no blackness. Only the clear blue skies of a summer's day, and he was climbing, climbing, up from the reach of gravity and everything else. The blue never darkened, never gave way to indigo and then the blackness of space; instead everything got lighter and brighter, and then there was a moment of white-out nothingness and sound.
Author: mad_maudlin
Genre: Gen, though you could take it as preslash if you want.
Rating: PG for one little word
Spoilers: Vaguely for First Contact/Lost Tribe
Summary: "We don't leave our people behind."
A/N: I had two or three things I thought I could sneak in under the deadline, but this is the only one presentable before my bedtime. I have successfully resisted the urge to more directly quote Death Cab for Cutie. Can be thought of as a sequel to another fic I wrote, which is not very good, but I'll link it anyway: Dialogue on the Individuality of Consciousness (The Mega-Mall at the End of the Universe). Speed beta, so pointing out typos would be welcome.
There was a moment of white-out nothingness and sound, and when John came back to himself he was dimly aware of the ribbons of pain sweeping his body. For a few moments he held himself still as he could, groping for a handle on the situation, but his head was foggy and his memory seemed to skip around like a scratched CD or a badly-spliced strip of film. He couldn't catch his breath, like someone was squeezing his chest down, and the air in his mouth tasted like chemicals and smoke. It wasn't until he heard McKay moan somewhere off behind him that it came together-
"-our one chance to take them out before they start taking on the rest of the galaxy. Do you really think we can win a fair fight against Asgard?"
"-creates a black hole, basically, the same thing we tried to do to the Replicators only on a much bigger scale and, um, it works-"
"-not this time! There are suicide missions and there are suicide missions and unless you think you can break the laws of physics, Colonel, don't you dare say 'So long, McKay.' Not this time. Now close the damn the hatch and let's go."
"-device is away-"
Rodney moaned again, trailing off into a gasp; John made one concerted effort to turn, but his body wasn't having any of it; multiple fractured ribs, he decided, concussion, whiplash, maybe even a cracked pelvis. His nose felt broken and one of his front teeth had gone AWOL. And he'd been sitting when the shock wave hit.
"McKay?" he tired to say, but it came out in a cough, agonizing and tasting of blood.
After a few moments, he heard a weak, hoarse, familiar voice, "Oh, my god, you did break the laws of physics."
"How bad are you hurt?" John asked, because his head was all fuzzy but he could still focus, maybe, focus on the big things, one step at a time. If McKay was in one piece-or, well, a couple big pieces at least-and if the jumper wasn't too badly broken…
McKay coughed and whimpered again. "Um. Um. Badly. Very badly." There was a pause that should've been filled with a catalogue of injuries great and small; instead, the frame of the jumper made an alarming creaking noise. "What about you?"
"What about the jumper?" John asked. "Do we have engines?"
"Do we-Jesus, John, open your eyes! Look out the goddamn window!"
John managed to swallow. Even that hurt. "Rodney, my eyes are open."
There was a long pause, and then McKay broke up into hysterical giggles punctuated by coughs. "Oh my god," he gasped. "Oh my god, this is insane."
In the darkness-his personal darkness-John could only vaguely imagine Rodney's face, because in all their years on Atlantis he'd never known McKay to giggle in the face of danger. And John wasn't moving, and John couldn't see, and this was the absolute worst timing in the universe. "Rodney, stay with me here."
"We are inside the event horizon of a black hole," Rodney said between giggles, "but we must've-the angles, the momentum must've been just right, because we're not crashing, we're spiraling inwards, we've got to be spiraling. And you, you must've hit your head when the shockwave hit, hit so hard you detached both your retinas, and I'm-I-oh god." The giggling melting into a series of gasps, punctuated by another metallic groan. "We're spiraling. Spiraling!"
"So how do we fix it?" John demanded, even thought it cost him another bloody coughing fit. Little white sparks flashed in his eyes, but not the interior of the jumper, not the nightmare view from the window McKay was talking about.
"Don't you get it? We don't!" Rodney fell silent, wheezing for a bit. "Look, it is a miracle-and I don't throw this word around lightly, a miracle-that we weren't ripped apart by the shockwave. Somehow we managed to fall into a wide orbit around the singularity instead of falling straight into it, but it's a decaying orbit-a spiral-not a stable one. And we're within the event horizon, which means not even light can get out, let alone us, even if we had a million ZPMs and a working jumper."
"What about the Daedalus?" John asked. "Could they, I don't know, give us a tow?"
"The Daedalus can't even see us," Rodney said. "No light past the event horizon, remember? And we can't communicate with them. And even if they could, or we could…how long were we unconscious, John?"
John said, "You're asking the man with the detached retinas over here."
They both paused for a sharp sudden popping sound from the jumper. "My point is," Rodney said, "we're close enough to the singularity to experience time dilation. Say we were out for a few minutes, a few seconds. That for us could be hours…even days…the Daedalus is probably already gone."
John couldn't really sigh, or hold his breath, in his state, but he felt something drain out of him anyway, some last shred of hope. "I hate time dilation."
"Yeah." Rodney had gone from hysterics to a dull calm way too fast, and John heard a rustling sound like movement, a heaving dragging, a series of grunts and whimpers. He wished like hell that he could move, that he could see, anything, but his body remained broken and his vision dark.
He tried to keep concentrating anyway. "We're still alive, though," he said. "That counts for something, right?"
"No," Rodney said. "Because if you weren't paying attention, Concussion Boy, we are spiraling into a black hole and we have no power and we're both probably bleeding internally. Even if you could see, even if I could-could stand, it's just a race to see whether we die from oxygen deprivation before the tidal forces of the singularity finish tearing the jumper apart. We lived just long enough to die in an even more unpleasant manner than we originally anticipated."
There was a long pause, a creak, and more of that rustle-whimper-drag noise, coming closer. John licked his lips, tasting the bloody foam on them from the last round of coughing. "Any regrets?" he found himself asking.
A pregnant silence, and then McKay said, closer than before, "Well, I never did get the Nobel."
"I never got to fly the X-309." John said. "Mitchell said they're gonna be awesome and I'll never get to take one out."
"Didn't get to say goodbye to Jeannie, either," McKay added.
John let his head fall back against the rest, since holding it upright hurt too much. "She knows, though."
"Yeah…I think so." He suddenly felt a hand on his leg, McKay's hand, and it pawed around near his holster for a terrifying moment before finding John's hand and squeezing; it was sticky from blood and gritty with what were probably bits of cracked crystal. "I just," Rodney said. "Look, I just wanted to, you know, I don't normally say it out loud…"
"Hey," John said. "We're not dead yet." He made a half-hearted attempt to shake Rodney's hand off, but it hurt too much and really, it was better than sitting alone in the dark.
"But we're going to be, unless you've got another miracle on tap," Rodney said. "So for once just quit interrupting me during the emotional part, all right? It's not easy for me."
"Me neither," John said, and he wanted to add and you don't have to say it. Instead he said, "But don't miracles always come in threes?"
"Right," Rodney said. "Because this is a Hallmark special."
"Hope springs eternal," John managed to get out before the next round of coughing.
Rodney snorted softly. "Maybe for some people."
Rodney's hand dropped away while John coughed, and afterwards there was silence, silence that rippled with their labored breathing and the jumper's groaning and the ringing in John's ears. He knew he should probably lay still so he didn't make things worse, or at least so he wouldn't hurt as badly, but he realized that against his will he was doing a sort of slow-motion writhe-muscles clenching and unclenching from the feet up, following the pain in a gradual wave that made cracked bones shift and grind in ways they shouldn't. He wondered if McKay was in any state to get to the medical kit-if they even still had a medical kit-because there was more than enough morphine in there for the both of them. Hell, John's sidearm had more than enough bullets for the both of them. Gave a whole new definition to the term suicide mission, of course, but was it really any worse than sitting here in pain and (for him) in the dark, waiting to die? Was it really worse than that the long sleep his pounding head was calling for?
No, he thought, though he couldn't have quiet said what he was negating. Only that he had survived too much-they had overcome too much-to lie down and quit in the face of something dumb like general relativity. They had known this wasn't the usual kind of suicide mission from the start, but John had no intention of going gently into that good night. If nothing else, Rodney didn't deserve to die alone. Nothing else, but it suddenly meant everything.
"John," Rodney said, weak and throaty, still located somewhere just behind John's right elbow.
And then the cabin of the jumper filled with light.
John blinked, shocked by the return of vision and the scene it gave him: the interior of the jumper was dead, burnt out, the dark controls smeared with his own blood. Outside was a mind-bending view, weirdly twisted stripes of boiling plasma falling away into pure, absolute blackness, their colors shifting down to a hellish red as they went. And seated in the copilot's chair, wreathed in the thick rafts of hanging smoke, was a dark haired woman who shouldn't have taken as long to place as she did. The glowing kind of gave it away in the end, though.
"Teer?" John asked. He figured he could blame it on the concussion.
"Are you kidding me?" Rodney blurted, sounding distinctly less wheezy. He was sprawled on the floor just behind the pilot's chair, and John managed to turn his head enough to see him. And wished he hadn't: McKay was burned, badly, with dark wet patches of blistered skin showing through where his uniform had burned away and black areas where the acrylic in his underwear had melted to his thighs. One of his feet was not facing the right direction, and by the way his legs were twisted up behind him John was positive they were paralyzed. His jaw still seemed to work pretty well, though. "You wait until now to show up? Not, you know, when we were feeding you lines about Hallmark specials? Just when I was about to-I mean, seriously?"
Teer smiled benevolently. "Hello, John. Hello. Dr. McKay."
John managed to turn his body, just a bit, so he was facing her properly; though the pain seemed to be receding somehow, just like his retinas had magically re-attached themselves or whatever had just happened. "I have a feeling I know why you're here."
"I'm sure you do," she said. "I've come to offer you a choice."
"Let me guess, Ascend or die?" Rodney asked. "Funny, that sounds familiar for some reason."
"You're both capable of it," Teer said. "If you expend the effort."
"Any particular reason why you're bringing this up now?" John asked. If he angled his head right, he could see his own reflection in the dark parts of the windshield-he didn't really want to, because it was obvious who'd won the face vs. console fight, but he could. Teer didn't reflect anything, like a vampire or a ghost. Matter and light kept bending back into the darkness.
She reached out and took John's hand. "You once called us foolish because we sought to give up life on this plane without truly living it. But you have lived your lives, and now their course is run." She looked down, letting Rodney in on her smile. "You would not be here now if you had not already laid your burdens down."
Rodney snorted. "Really. So you waited around until your boyfriend here finally found a mission he couldn't walk away from? Would it have killed you to just boost us above the event horizon altogether so we could be rescued?"
"McKay," John said, "be nice to the lady who is offering to save our lives."
And that laid it out. Teer dropped his hand and looked at them both for a long moment; even the jumper was quiet now. "You know that we do not interfere on this plane. But I can help you, both of you, if Ascension is what you wish. If not…here, in this singularity, isolated from the rest of the universe…no one will stop me from easing your pain."
"Ascend or die," Rodney muttered, and lowered his head to the deck.
John breathed deeply, his first deep breath since he regained consciousness, the first breath that didn't taste like blood and smoke. "So, just out of curiosity, if we do Ascend, what happens next? 'Cause I know the kind of punishments that the Ascended like to hand out, and I'm not really all that good at following rules."
"You would be free to do as you wish," Teer said. "So long as you did not interfere with life on this plane beyond the abilities of any mortal. You could even return to corporeal form, if you wish."
"Just like that?" John asked. "It doesn't offend anybody if we're using the Ascended Plane like a Get Out Of Death Free card?"
Teer's enigmatic smile returned. "If, once you Ascend, you truly wish to return to this form, no one will stop you. But just as you once encouraged us to experience mortal life, so I would encourage you not to cast aside your Ascension rashly."
"You didn't actually take my advice though," John pointed out.
"Nor do I expect you to take mine," she said serenely. "But you are an extraordinary man, John, and I believe your death here would be a waste."
John shut his eyes for a moment, but it was too much like blindness, so he stared into the absolute black of the singularity. Spaghettification, they called it, when matter got sucked in and pulled apart. But Teer said she could make it painless. Or Ascension…he'd never seen the point of having power like that if you weren't going to use it. And he sure as hell didn't trust that they could come and go that quickly, without any horrible consequences. But it was a way out, any way out, and if there was the slimmest chance…
"I'll go if you go," Rodney suddenly blurted.
John managed to twist, pain-free, to look at him straight on. "Come again?"
"She's right, this is stupid," he said fiercely. "The odds that we would be here, now, in this condition…to survive everything else and then get stuck here, to be alive and be helpless…I don't know about you, but I still have a lot of things I could do, you know, if we actually get out of here. There's still a lot of other bad guys to go fling yourself at. I could get the Nobel."
"What about existence without the individuality of consciousness?" John asked. "Thought it didn't appeal to you."
"Well, it's not like we have a lot of alternatives here!"
John looked at Teer, but she was silent, watching them with no particular expression. He turned back to Rodney. "So you're going," he said.
"Only if you go," Rodney said quickly, looking down again for the moment.
John almost broke into his own giggle-fit at that. "What's the matter, Rodney, you scared?"
"Of course not!" He still couldn't quite meet John's eyes when he said it. "But…we don't leave our people behind."
John's breath caught, not because of the broken ribs or the blood in his lungs, but something almost as painful. He wanted to say something, anything at all, but the words didn't come. They never did. There was, however, something he could do. He braced his hands on the sides of the chair, braced his feet, and tried to stand. Both legs crumpled under him-what do you know, the angle of the shockwave fucked up his knees, too-and catching himself made his ribs and back and collarbone sing with pain. He didn't fall on top of McKay, though, that was the important part; he let one arm collapse before the other, so he fell onto his side, then his back, and waited for the jumper to stop spinning.
"John?" Rodney squawked. "What the hell?"
"John?" Teer asked nervously.
He turned his head; he and Rodney were just about eye level, their arms pressed carelessly together by the way John had landed. "Clear blue skies, remember?"
And Rodney's clear blue eyes went wide, and then he grinned a little, despite the wide blisters on his face. "Yeah, I…I think I got it."
Above them both, Teer leaned forward. "Then you are ready?"
"Sure," John said. "Let's get this show on the road." He made himself shut his eyes again, but this time there was no blackness. Only the clear blue skies of a summer's day, and he was climbing, climbing, up from the reach of gravity and everything else. The blue never darkened, never gave way to indigo and then the blackness of space; instead everything got lighter and brighter, and then there was a moment of white-out nothingness and sound.