The Human Condition for sga_flashfic
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Title: The Human Condition
Challenge: sga_flashfic Slave Challenge
Author: Alizarin_nyc
Archive: Yes
Theme: Drama
Rating: R-ish
Characters: Sheppard, McKay, Weir, Teyla, Ford, Beckett
Pairings: Sheppard/McKay
Summary: The enslaved Atlantis team will have to work for their enlightenment.
Disclaimer: No real SGA characters were harmed in the making of this fic
Notes: It was supposed to be oh-so-much shorter.
It was a better fate than becoming food for the Wraith. Living as part of the slave population for the inhabitants of Testron was no picnic, but they were alive.
The entire Atlantis team was now living in a subterranean dormitory, tight metal collars around each of their necks. At the rise of any negative emotion, such as desperation, anger, sadness, or resentment, the collar released a painful electric shock that put the wearer in agony. As long as the wearer continued to experience the emotion, the collar would continue to emit shocks, until the wearer lost consciousness.
John Sheppard and Teyla handled it pretty well. The others did not.
The toughest members of the rest of the population handled their captivity with a seemingly superficial happiness and pursued every means available to experience pleasure of any kind. They laughed together, patted each other’s backs, complimented each other, hugged, told jokes, and fondled each other in inappropriate ways. Then, there were others that existed in a state of catatonia, drooling on their thin garments and staring blankly at their surroundings. The life had been shocked out of them. But no one was exempt from work. Miles of farmland stretched out far into the distance, the slaves were housed underneath the soil, and there was no way to escape. The collars delivered a lethal snap of electricity to anyone who stepped outside the border.
Not that the Atlantis team had ever seen the borders. But they heard about the various and fatal escape attempts from other prisoners, who informed them dully that their hyperactive hope of prevailing was utterly futile.
After the first few weeks, Rodney could see how things were going to play out. He gave up on escape. He gave up on Stargate Command coming to the rescue. No one knew where they were, or would likely ever know. They were safe from the Wraith, but that was the only ray of sunshine in a very dark place.
Elizabeth was the worst off. She had always been an emotionally charged woman. She was prone to quick flashes of extreme temper and the shocks rendered her helpless for days on end. She felt responsible for all of them, stuck here in this place until the end of days, and her depression and desperation mounted. Finally, she slipped a gear and sat in a state of near-catatonia on the floor of their room. Sheppard brought her food and made her eat, but that was all that could be done. She was never coming back.
Rodney discovered some very unusual things about himself while in captivity. He shared a small room with Elizabeth, Teyla, Ford, Dr. Beckett and Sheppard, as they had instinctively set up a sort of command center at the beginning. As hope wore away, Rodney found that the least painful place for him to be was at Sheppard’s side. This made a kind of sense; John Sheppard was the man with a mission, the man you could trust.
Unfortunately, Rodney found that everyone else thought so too. Teyla hovered near him, as did Ford and of course, Elizabeth, in the beginning. Elizabeth realized quickly that Sheppard could not match her need. Dr. Beckett became wide-eyed with constant fear and became obsessed with caring for Elizabeth, the only doctorly thing he could do under the circumstances. Teyla soon found that Sheppard was not going to get them out of this situation, and she began to tire of talking about it. Rodney was happy to notice that Teyla and Ford began one day to sneak off on their own for private conversations. He thought that it wouldn’t be bad either if they did things other than talk.
After three months, Rodney was beginning to feel the beginnings of a stirring frustration that he could not name. Days of back-breaking work was no cure for the insomnia he had and the strange sensations that occurred whenever he was near - too near - to John. He tried to talk to John about it, but the words didn’t come out right and John shook his head so fiercely that his hair, which had grown rather long, whipped around his face.
“No, no, no, Rodney, what you’re saying is all wrong.”
“Listen, John, I’ve seen the others, I know how they survive. But they’ve given up on escape, don’t you see that?”
“So you’re saying we ought to give up too.”
“No, I’m saying we dig in our heels and give it right back to these, these… what are our captors called anyway?”
“Testrons.” John set his mouth in a flat, grim line.
“Okay, well I thought maybe Testronites, maybe Testroneans, maybe Testosterones.” Oh God, he did not just say that, did he? Talk about Freudian slip.
John didn’t even smirk.
“Testrons. And we’ve seen only a handful of them, from a distance. We have no Intel to go on here, none at all.”
“Again, you’re missing my point.”
John sighed. “What is your point, assuming that you suddenly tripped over one?” He turned away from Rodney and began shoveling dirt furiously, his back flexing with the strain.
Rodney had certainly noticed that John’s already muscular build was leaner, tanner and rugged in a way that he hadn’t thought he ought to appreciate. He was suddenly thankful that he, too, had lost a lot of weight and was using muscles he was sure had entered their own ice age.
He removed his shirt so they’d both be shirtless and then moved to shovel to the left of John, but slightly forward. He was preening, so what?
“What I am actually saying, is that we need to learn from the shiny, happy people and find ways to enjoy ourselves,” Rodney said. “Serotonin to the brain, endorphins, blood pumping - all things that would contribute to our survival. We need to find a way to live.”
“We are surviving. That’s all that matters.”
“But we ought to do more than survive. Don’t you see? We need to start a sort of… a kind of…” Rodney found himself trailing off. What did he really want to say, here? Hey John? We need to have a meaningful relationship!
“Again, Rodney, I say keep digging and maybe you’ll find your point buried somewhere in this field.”
They dug in silence for several long minutes.
Rodney was first to break the silence. “They watch us, you know.”
“Sorry?” John stopped digging and faced Rodney, his face creased with confusion.
“The Testrailians, or whatever. The guards.”
“What are you talking about; they never get close to us.”
“If you look carefully, you’ll see that they have binoculars and they watch us through them.”
“Well, they are our guards,” John said and ran his blistered hand over the handle of his shovel. Rodney noticed his nails were long and encrusted with dirt, sort of like a reverse French manicure.
“They are observing us. I think -- if you’ll bear with me for a second --” he paused, and a look of resignation crossed John’s face, but Rodney pressed on. “I think they watch us, observe our behavior. I think we’re not only a large labor force but a giant ant colony of sorts. We’re an experiment in human behavior.”
“Uh huh. And this helps us, how?”
“I think that the answer is to show them human compassion, human love, you know, what it means to be human.” Rodney was seriously beating around the bush, but also, he felt he was getting to some core truth that he really, really needed to know.
“And they will be so impressed with that, that they will turn around and just let us go.” John now looked severely annoyed and Rodney felt a twinge of disappointment at his apparent inability to communicate.
“That’s not what I’m saying, John.”
“Well, Rodney, what the hell are you saying?” John looked seriously pissed off, but he was obviously holding it in check as the collar remained dormant.
“I’m saying, John, that what separates us from these beings is something special, something that they will never have. They ought to be jealous of us. We ought to be showing them every day in every way possible that they can never own us. They can never break our spirit.” Rodney suddenly felt the urgency of his conviction. “They don’t care about the catatonic ones, the ones who have no life; they only look at the ones who are living, the ones who are smiling.” His voice began to crack with emotion.
“And you arrived at this very astute observation because you haven’t been eating enough, perhaps?” John leveled his gaze straight at Rodney and Rodney felt his stomach flail. God, but John was a good-looking man. He knew what was going on. He was falling for John Sheppard. Okay, had already fallen, but didn’t understand it fully until maybe right now. Standing in a field, covered in dirt. It wasn’t the most romantic thing ever, but there it was.
And the fact of it was, John certainly did not feel the same way.
“John,” Rodney said in a small voice. His eyes stung and he rubbed a grimy hand over his eyes. Perhaps he hadn’t had enough to eat and in fact, the sun was burning hotly against the back of his neck. He felt suddenly dizzy. And overwhelmed.
The collar went off, delivering a blinding shot of pain and Rodney was rocked back on his heels. His shovel dropped to the ground.
“Rodney,” John’s voice was a warning. “Think of something else.”
But there was nothing else to think about. There was only thinking about John, about all the possibilities and how if he couldn’t have those possibilities, then there was nothing. The collar zapped him again and he rocked forward this time and fell to his knees. There was nothing. But God, yes, there was pain.
Suddenly John was on his knees in front of Rodney, gripping him by the shoulders. “Look at me,” he instructed. Rodney looked. And he could feel that his face was naked, that his desire was laid bare. The pain had stripped him of his defenses. “I get you,” John said. “Hey. Man, I get you. I want to live, and I know you do too. Come on, man.” Rodney had never felt so vulnerable in his entire life, and the collar kept snapping, knocking his brain around with ruthless precision.
“John,” he gasped. He could feel the air around him start to swim and the sky behind John’s head got grey around the edges.
John looked deeply upset, and he tried to steady his breathing, but soon he’d feel the snap himself. When Elizabeth began to garble her sentences, he spent many hours cursing his captors and got stunned into unconsciousness for his troubles. His emotions were like steel, but he couldn’t watch Rodney do this. Not like this.
Running his thumb over Rodney’s crude collar, John whispered, “Don’t hurt yourself, Rodney, please, don’t hurt yourself.” His hand slipped over the metal and to the back of Rodney’s neck and he pulled him in and kissed him gently on the lips. Rodney was instantly still, his breath caught in his ribcage, every atom of his being completely immobilized. John kept kissing him until Rodney began to respond, tentative with surprise.
The pleasure seemed to act as an eraser on the marks of pain and Rodney felt a rush of relief as the pain ceased. He felt a rush of something else, and slipped his arms around John. John curled both his hands around Rodney’s face and kissed him until he felt Rodney’s body relax, and was sure that no more shocks were forthcoming.
“We will show them,” John said, “That we belong to each other and not to them.”
“Now you tell me,” Rodney said, a little put out that he’d spent so much time trying to convince John of something John appeared to already know. “Now you tell me.”
“Now I tell you,” John affirmed, and wrapped his arms around Rodney.
Off in the distance, the eyes behind the binoculars slowly blinked.
Title: The Human Condition
Challenge: sga_flashfic Slave Challenge
Author: Alizarin_nyc
Archive: Yes
Theme: Drama
Rating: R-ish
Characters: Sheppard, McKay, Weir, Teyla, Ford, Beckett
Pairings: Sheppard/McKay
Summary: The enslaved Atlantis team will have to work for their enlightenment.
Disclaimer: No real SGA characters were harmed in the making of this fic
Notes: It was supposed to be oh-so-much shorter.
It was a better fate than becoming food for the Wraith. Living as part of the slave population for the inhabitants of Testron was no picnic, but they were alive.
The entire Atlantis team was now living in a subterranean dormitory, tight metal collars around each of their necks. At the rise of any negative emotion, such as desperation, anger, sadness, or resentment, the collar released a painful electric shock that put the wearer in agony. As long as the wearer continued to experience the emotion, the collar would continue to emit shocks, until the wearer lost consciousness.
John Sheppard and Teyla handled it pretty well. The others did not.
The toughest members of the rest of the population handled their captivity with a seemingly superficial happiness and pursued every means available to experience pleasure of any kind. They laughed together, patted each other’s backs, complimented each other, hugged, told jokes, and fondled each other in inappropriate ways. Then, there were others that existed in a state of catatonia, drooling on their thin garments and staring blankly at their surroundings. The life had been shocked out of them. But no one was exempt from work. Miles of farmland stretched out far into the distance, the slaves were housed underneath the soil, and there was no way to escape. The collars delivered a lethal snap of electricity to anyone who stepped outside the border.
Not that the Atlantis team had ever seen the borders. But they heard about the various and fatal escape attempts from other prisoners, who informed them dully that their hyperactive hope of prevailing was utterly futile.
After the first few weeks, Rodney could see how things were going to play out. He gave up on escape. He gave up on Stargate Command coming to the rescue. No one knew where they were, or would likely ever know. They were safe from the Wraith, but that was the only ray of sunshine in a very dark place.
Elizabeth was the worst off. She had always been an emotionally charged woman. She was prone to quick flashes of extreme temper and the shocks rendered her helpless for days on end. She felt responsible for all of them, stuck here in this place until the end of days, and her depression and desperation mounted. Finally, she slipped a gear and sat in a state of near-catatonia on the floor of their room. Sheppard brought her food and made her eat, but that was all that could be done. She was never coming back.
Rodney discovered some very unusual things about himself while in captivity. He shared a small room with Elizabeth, Teyla, Ford, Dr. Beckett and Sheppard, as they had instinctively set up a sort of command center at the beginning. As hope wore away, Rodney found that the least painful place for him to be was at Sheppard’s side. This made a kind of sense; John Sheppard was the man with a mission, the man you could trust.
Unfortunately, Rodney found that everyone else thought so too. Teyla hovered near him, as did Ford and of course, Elizabeth, in the beginning. Elizabeth realized quickly that Sheppard could not match her need. Dr. Beckett became wide-eyed with constant fear and became obsessed with caring for Elizabeth, the only doctorly thing he could do under the circumstances. Teyla soon found that Sheppard was not going to get them out of this situation, and she began to tire of talking about it. Rodney was happy to notice that Teyla and Ford began one day to sneak off on their own for private conversations. He thought that it wouldn’t be bad either if they did things other than talk.
After three months, Rodney was beginning to feel the beginnings of a stirring frustration that he could not name. Days of back-breaking work was no cure for the insomnia he had and the strange sensations that occurred whenever he was near - too near - to John. He tried to talk to John about it, but the words didn’t come out right and John shook his head so fiercely that his hair, which had grown rather long, whipped around his face.
“No, no, no, Rodney, what you’re saying is all wrong.”
“Listen, John, I’ve seen the others, I know how they survive. But they’ve given up on escape, don’t you see that?”
“So you’re saying we ought to give up too.”
“No, I’m saying we dig in our heels and give it right back to these, these… what are our captors called anyway?”
“Testrons.” John set his mouth in a flat, grim line.
“Okay, well I thought maybe Testronites, maybe Testroneans, maybe Testosterones.” Oh God, he did not just say that, did he? Talk about Freudian slip.
John didn’t even smirk.
“Testrons. And we’ve seen only a handful of them, from a distance. We have no Intel to go on here, none at all.”
“Again, you’re missing my point.”
John sighed. “What is your point, assuming that you suddenly tripped over one?” He turned away from Rodney and began shoveling dirt furiously, his back flexing with the strain.
Rodney had certainly noticed that John’s already muscular build was leaner, tanner and rugged in a way that he hadn’t thought he ought to appreciate. He was suddenly thankful that he, too, had lost a lot of weight and was using muscles he was sure had entered their own ice age.
He removed his shirt so they’d both be shirtless and then moved to shovel to the left of John, but slightly forward. He was preening, so what?
“What I am actually saying, is that we need to learn from the shiny, happy people and find ways to enjoy ourselves,” Rodney said. “Serotonin to the brain, endorphins, blood pumping - all things that would contribute to our survival. We need to find a way to live.”
“We are surviving. That’s all that matters.”
“But we ought to do more than survive. Don’t you see? We need to start a sort of… a kind of…” Rodney found himself trailing off. What did he really want to say, here? Hey John? We need to have a meaningful relationship!
“Again, Rodney, I say keep digging and maybe you’ll find your point buried somewhere in this field.”
They dug in silence for several long minutes.
Rodney was first to break the silence. “They watch us, you know.”
“Sorry?” John stopped digging and faced Rodney, his face creased with confusion.
“The Testrailians, or whatever. The guards.”
“What are you talking about; they never get close to us.”
“If you look carefully, you’ll see that they have binoculars and they watch us through them.”
“Well, they are our guards,” John said and ran his blistered hand over the handle of his shovel. Rodney noticed his nails were long and encrusted with dirt, sort of like a reverse French manicure.
“They are observing us. I think -- if you’ll bear with me for a second --” he paused, and a look of resignation crossed John’s face, but Rodney pressed on. “I think they watch us, observe our behavior. I think we’re not only a large labor force but a giant ant colony of sorts. We’re an experiment in human behavior.”
“Uh huh. And this helps us, how?”
“I think that the answer is to show them human compassion, human love, you know, what it means to be human.” Rodney was seriously beating around the bush, but also, he felt he was getting to some core truth that he really, really needed to know.
“And they will be so impressed with that, that they will turn around and just let us go.” John now looked severely annoyed and Rodney felt a twinge of disappointment at his apparent inability to communicate.
“That’s not what I’m saying, John.”
“Well, Rodney, what the hell are you saying?” John looked seriously pissed off, but he was obviously holding it in check as the collar remained dormant.
“I’m saying, John, that what separates us from these beings is something special, something that they will never have. They ought to be jealous of us. We ought to be showing them every day in every way possible that they can never own us. They can never break our spirit.” Rodney suddenly felt the urgency of his conviction. “They don’t care about the catatonic ones, the ones who have no life; they only look at the ones who are living, the ones who are smiling.” His voice began to crack with emotion.
“And you arrived at this very astute observation because you haven’t been eating enough, perhaps?” John leveled his gaze straight at Rodney and Rodney felt his stomach flail. God, but John was a good-looking man. He knew what was going on. He was falling for John Sheppard. Okay, had already fallen, but didn’t understand it fully until maybe right now. Standing in a field, covered in dirt. It wasn’t the most romantic thing ever, but there it was.
And the fact of it was, John certainly did not feel the same way.
“John,” Rodney said in a small voice. His eyes stung and he rubbed a grimy hand over his eyes. Perhaps he hadn’t had enough to eat and in fact, the sun was burning hotly against the back of his neck. He felt suddenly dizzy. And overwhelmed.
The collar went off, delivering a blinding shot of pain and Rodney was rocked back on his heels. His shovel dropped to the ground.
“Rodney,” John’s voice was a warning. “Think of something else.”
But there was nothing else to think about. There was only thinking about John, about all the possibilities and how if he couldn’t have those possibilities, then there was nothing. The collar zapped him again and he rocked forward this time and fell to his knees. There was nothing. But God, yes, there was pain.
Suddenly John was on his knees in front of Rodney, gripping him by the shoulders. “Look at me,” he instructed. Rodney looked. And he could feel that his face was naked, that his desire was laid bare. The pain had stripped him of his defenses. “I get you,” John said. “Hey. Man, I get you. I want to live, and I know you do too. Come on, man.” Rodney had never felt so vulnerable in his entire life, and the collar kept snapping, knocking his brain around with ruthless precision.
“John,” he gasped. He could feel the air around him start to swim and the sky behind John’s head got grey around the edges.
John looked deeply upset, and he tried to steady his breathing, but soon he’d feel the snap himself. When Elizabeth began to garble her sentences, he spent many hours cursing his captors and got stunned into unconsciousness for his troubles. His emotions were like steel, but he couldn’t watch Rodney do this. Not like this.
Running his thumb over Rodney’s crude collar, John whispered, “Don’t hurt yourself, Rodney, please, don’t hurt yourself.” His hand slipped over the metal and to the back of Rodney’s neck and he pulled him in and kissed him gently on the lips. Rodney was instantly still, his breath caught in his ribcage, every atom of his being completely immobilized. John kept kissing him until Rodney began to respond, tentative with surprise.
The pleasure seemed to act as an eraser on the marks of pain and Rodney felt a rush of relief as the pain ceased. He felt a rush of something else, and slipped his arms around John. John curled both his hands around Rodney’s face and kissed him until he felt Rodney’s body relax, and was sure that no more shocks were forthcoming.
“We will show them,” John said, “That we belong to each other and not to them.”
“Now you tell me,” Rodney said, a little put out that he’d spent so much time trying to convince John of something John appeared to already know. “Now you tell me.”
“Now I tell you,” John affirmed, and wrapped his arms around Rodney.
Off in the distance, the eyes behind the binoculars slowly blinked.