Fic: All Of This And Nothing (SGA)
Title: All Of This And Nothing
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Gen; Sheppard, McKay, Ronon, Beckett, Zelenka
Warnings: Character death, spoilers through seasons 1&2
Disclaimer: I own nothing
Summary: Five times 100% wasn't enough
Notes: Written for sg1_five_things
~*~
~1~
It's deathly quiet on the sleeping Wraith ship. It's unnerving. Even at rest a machnine that size should show some signs of life. The low hum of idling technology, vibration in the floor under his feet, something. Not mausoleum silence, eerily pregnant as though this disconcertingly organic ship itself is aware of his every move.
He drops into a crouch as the silence is broken ahead, and lower still to peer cautiously down into the hall below, onto a tableau he knows he'll have nightmares about.
The rescue was perfect. Textbook, if there was any textbook anywhere which included life-sucking alien space vampires. But there are some things you don't come home from. Some things you wouldn't want to come home from even if you could. There are fates worse than death, and he knows that right now he's looking at one.
Sorry sir, John thinks, and puts a bullet in Sumner's heart.
~2~
He'd almost forgotten. In the utter chaos of the seige, the second wave, the hours turning into days turning into god-knows-how-long running on nothing but barely contained panic and industrial grade amphetamines, it had all but slipped his mind entirely. He's staving off the come-down with truly monumental quantities of coffee and whatever stimulants he can bully the infirmary staff into giving him when Carson is otherwise occupied, entirely too wired to do as everyone's telling him to and go sleep for a week. There's too much to be done.
He's storming into Elizabeth's office with a detoxing and utterly miserable Zelenka on his heels, the city still half in ruins around them, when the haggard expression on her face cuts him off mid-rant. And she looks up from her laptop and blinks slowly and says almost apologetically that she's in the middle of writing a letter to Peter Grodin's parents.
Really, enough people had died that one death in particular shouldn't have so very much of an impact. But somehow that's what brings the full horror of the past week crashing down on him. He feels the blood drain from his face, and distantly he's aware of Elizabeth rising to her feet.
"I'm so sorry," she's saying; "It wasn't your fault, Rodney, you did everything you could..."
Part of him wants to shout, to rave, to demand to know why that makes failure any more acceptable. To make her understand how badly it doesn't help to know that he did his best and gave everything he had and more and Grodin still died.
"If you had saved him, we would all be dead," Zelenka says quietly, later, in the wreckage of what had been Lab Three. "He would not have wanted that." There's an odd, stilted quality to his words which makes it clear that he's having trouble finding English.
Rodney tries not to hate him for being right.
~3~
He knows what the Wraith are capable of. He's seen it on dozens of worlds, hundreds, too many to count. But he also knows what his own people are capable of; he knows how hard they worked, how hard they trained, how hard they tried to be prepared. They were nowhere near on a par with the Wraith technologically, but the Satedan military was still a force to be reckoned with.
The battle had been beyond imagination, and even now, seven years on, the sheer scale of destruction beggars belief. Twisted metal and rubble fills the streets, the last remnants of shattered buildings. In places even the dirt on the ground has fused into glass. Here a burnt-out dart, there a long-dead drone, there the stark white carcass of lone cruiser.
We fought with everything we had, Ronon thinks, standing in the control room of Atlantis and trying not to look so very young and alone as he suddenly feels. Right to the end, we went down fighting.
It helps. Not much, but it helps.
~4~
Physically, there's no sign left that the whole mess ever even happened. At least that was something he was able to do right. Funny how little it eases the guilt.
On a purely intellectual level, he knows it wasn't his fault. He'd known the retrovirus wasn't ready, had been working every free moment he had to perfect it; there was no accounting for unexpected circumstances. No accounting for a frightened child taking what she thought was her only chance at a normal life.
He'll do what he has to do make it right. The retrovirus isn't a failure - it's simply incomplete. He'll do what he has to do to perfect it. Too late to help Ellia. But hopefully not too late for the rest of Pegasus.
~5~
They're watching him.
He can feel the hopeful eyes on his back, the unspoken miasma of hope tinged with desperation hanging in the air like a cloying mist. He wants to scream.
Maybe it's what he gets for being who he is all these years, for making the impossible possible and bending or outright breaking the laws of physics as required. Maybe it's what he gets for spending most of his adult life saying something can't be done and then turning around and doing it. Maybe he deserves to go out like this, the basic laws of the universe taking their revenge in one final act of cosmic karma.
He looks up and meets Radek's eyes over the sparking mess that used to be a hyperdrive, sees his own despair mirrored there. They're still working even though they both know it's futile. He doesn't have it in him to shatter the faith and hope in the eyes on his back. The oxygen is running out...an hour at best, haemhorraging atmosphere from the ravaged hull, the section that housed life support utterly obliterated. The Apollo is three hours away at least.
He can't do it. He can't fix it. He can't pull off the last-minute miracle, not this time. He can't repair a ship that'll never fly again with tools he doesn't have. He can't turn this smoking heap of slag into a functioning engine.
He can't save them.
~fin~
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Gen; Sheppard, McKay, Ronon, Beckett, Zelenka
Warnings: Character death, spoilers through seasons 1&2
Disclaimer: I own nothing
Summary: Five times 100% wasn't enough
Notes: Written for sg1_five_things
~*~
~1~
It's deathly quiet on the sleeping Wraith ship. It's unnerving. Even at rest a machnine that size should show some signs of life. The low hum of idling technology, vibration in the floor under his feet, something. Not mausoleum silence, eerily pregnant as though this disconcertingly organic ship itself is aware of his every move.
He drops into a crouch as the silence is broken ahead, and lower still to peer cautiously down into the hall below, onto a tableau he knows he'll have nightmares about.
The rescue was perfect. Textbook, if there was any textbook anywhere which included life-sucking alien space vampires. But there are some things you don't come home from. Some things you wouldn't want to come home from even if you could. There are fates worse than death, and he knows that right now he's looking at one.
Sorry sir, John thinks, and puts a bullet in Sumner's heart.
~2~
He'd almost forgotten. In the utter chaos of the seige, the second wave, the hours turning into days turning into god-knows-how-long running on nothing but barely contained panic and industrial grade amphetamines, it had all but slipped his mind entirely. He's staving off the come-down with truly monumental quantities of coffee and whatever stimulants he can bully the infirmary staff into giving him when Carson is otherwise occupied, entirely too wired to do as everyone's telling him to and go sleep for a week. There's too much to be done.
He's storming into Elizabeth's office with a detoxing and utterly miserable Zelenka on his heels, the city still half in ruins around them, when the haggard expression on her face cuts him off mid-rant. And she looks up from her laptop and blinks slowly and says almost apologetically that she's in the middle of writing a letter to Peter Grodin's parents.
Really, enough people had died that one death in particular shouldn't have so very much of an impact. But somehow that's what brings the full horror of the past week crashing down on him. He feels the blood drain from his face, and distantly he's aware of Elizabeth rising to her feet.
"I'm so sorry," she's saying; "It wasn't your fault, Rodney, you did everything you could..."
Part of him wants to shout, to rave, to demand to know why that makes failure any more acceptable. To make her understand how badly it doesn't help to know that he did his best and gave everything he had and more and Grodin still died.
"If you had saved him, we would all be dead," Zelenka says quietly, later, in the wreckage of what had been Lab Three. "He would not have wanted that." There's an odd, stilted quality to his words which makes it clear that he's having trouble finding English.
Rodney tries not to hate him for being right.
~3~
He knows what the Wraith are capable of. He's seen it on dozens of worlds, hundreds, too many to count. But he also knows what his own people are capable of; he knows how hard they worked, how hard they trained, how hard they tried to be prepared. They were nowhere near on a par with the Wraith technologically, but the Satedan military was still a force to be reckoned with.
The battle had been beyond imagination, and even now, seven years on, the sheer scale of destruction beggars belief. Twisted metal and rubble fills the streets, the last remnants of shattered buildings. In places even the dirt on the ground has fused into glass. Here a burnt-out dart, there a long-dead drone, there the stark white carcass of lone cruiser.
We fought with everything we had, Ronon thinks, standing in the control room of Atlantis and trying not to look so very young and alone as he suddenly feels. Right to the end, we went down fighting.
It helps. Not much, but it helps.
~4~
Physically, there's no sign left that the whole mess ever even happened. At least that was something he was able to do right. Funny how little it eases the guilt.
On a purely intellectual level, he knows it wasn't his fault. He'd known the retrovirus wasn't ready, had been working every free moment he had to perfect it; there was no accounting for unexpected circumstances. No accounting for a frightened child taking what she thought was her only chance at a normal life.
He'll do what he has to do make it right. The retrovirus isn't a failure - it's simply incomplete. He'll do what he has to do to perfect it. Too late to help Ellia. But hopefully not too late for the rest of Pegasus.
~5~
They're watching him.
He can feel the hopeful eyes on his back, the unspoken miasma of hope tinged with desperation hanging in the air like a cloying mist. He wants to scream.
Maybe it's what he gets for being who he is all these years, for making the impossible possible and bending or outright breaking the laws of physics as required. Maybe it's what he gets for spending most of his adult life saying something can't be done and then turning around and doing it. Maybe he deserves to go out like this, the basic laws of the universe taking their revenge in one final act of cosmic karma.
He looks up and meets Radek's eyes over the sparking mess that used to be a hyperdrive, sees his own despair mirrored there. They're still working even though they both know it's futile. He doesn't have it in him to shatter the faith and hope in the eyes on his back. The oxygen is running out...an hour at best, haemhorraging atmosphere from the ravaged hull, the section that housed life support utterly obliterated. The Apollo is three hours away at least.
He can't do it. He can't fix it. He can't pull off the last-minute miracle, not this time. He can't repair a ship that'll never fly again with tools he doesn't have. He can't turn this smoking heap of slag into a functioning engine.
He can't save them.
~fin~