I've been looking for this for 2 years and I still can't find it
Hi
I'm looking for a Stargate Atlantis Fanfic I read sometime between Jan 17 2022 and Sept 28 2022 on ao3, which has since then been deleted.
Unfortunately I can remember neither the author nor the name and the parts of the plot I do recall are all very vague, so I'm not too hopeful that this will work.
I'm relatively sure that the fic was a stand-alone one-shot with a medium wordcount (something between 5.000 and 25.000 words), I don't think there were any pairings as the focus was on the team (John, Teyla, Ronon?, Rodney) and their dynamic as a whole.
The fic was written from John's POV (if I remember correctly quite a big part of his internal monologue was about looking out for his team and how far they'd all collectively come since they started working together).
About the Plot:
The Team was on a planet (may or may not have been abandoned) and they were looking for the remnants of an ancient race (maybe Furlings but not sure) and the library where they stored the entirety of their knowledge (Teyla had heard about this library as it was some sort of pegasus galaxy myth/legend). They find the entrance to an undergroung chamber(?), down there they split up to look for anything useful. John is quite frankly mother-henning and tries to keep an ear out for approaching danger and frets about what could happen when his team mates are out of his sightlines. In the background he listens to Rodney muttering about hopefully finding a ZPM, when Rodney remarks upon a strange energy signature he get's briefly worried but quickly relaxes again because as he learned on their many trips through the gates any situation is salvageable as long as Rodney can complain, it only get's life-threatening when he stops talking. After some time Rodney manages to locate the origin of the energy signature. It turns out to be some kind of key for a portal. In the meantime Teyla managed to find a recollection of what happened to the ancient race. In there it says that they left because of the war of the ancients with the wraith and they feared for their knowledge(?), because it was known in the galaxy that they had amassed a huge amount of information and they believed it would make them a target. With the key Rodney found they opened up some hole in the ground(?) where they find two skeletons and a portal(?) with an inscribtion that details that the destination of the gate is the new homeworld of the ancient race and that any stragglers are welcome to go through and that there were two people who voluntarily stayed behind as sentinels to guard the way.
The next part is pure guesswork on my part. I just hobbled together some of the (unrelated) pieces I remembered:
- one thing I remember most vivdly is John always trying to put himself in the line of fire for his team ("John always went first" is the only thing I know with absolute certainty was part of the fic, everything is just a guess)
- open ending (either because it was left open or because there was supposed to be another chapter, but I don't think so)
- they go through the portal
- the Genii either appear or are mentioned
=> with that my more or less educated guess what happens next is: The Genii show up, the team is boxed in with no means of escape, Kolya taunts Sheppard, they decide to fuck around and find out (because the possibility of death at the hands of an ancient (maybe extinct) civilization and the traps they may or may not have left behind is always better than the Genii) and step through the portal/gate. John goes first (because he won't expect anything he isn't willing to do himself and when he just condemned his team to death because he made a decision you better believe he's going to be right by their side) and on the other side they either find the ancient race or the main library they were originally looking for.
I realise that this is not only a lot of text to read but also an incredibly vague ask so thanks for sacrificing time of your day to help me :)