Three Fates, 29/36
Three Fates, 29/36
~ 4854 words
Details/disclaimers: here.
Previous post: 28/36
Elizabeth wakes to the realization that it's time. This is her last chance to do something about Atenë, while she's still in hibernation. While Elizabeth is the only one awake and alive in Atlantis. The three of them survived for a purpose, John to wake the AI, Rodney to recreate the ZPMs, and her to finish it.
She climbs out of the pod and hesitates, catching her balance, shivering, before going to the niche holding John's pack. Takes his gun from it and thumbs off the safety. She heads for the memory core vault. John showed her how to use a gun, even though she already knew. No one in the SGC didn't. She had refused to carry a gun out of principles not ignorance. He would be horrified at what she means to do with this gun now. His gun.
She's going to kill her cheating lover's mistress with his own gun. She imagines the AI screaming and begging. That's what John and Rodney will think. It isn't that. She's eliminating a threat to the expedition, specifically to all the ATA gene carriers, the ones who would be sucked into the interface, addicted to using the control chair, added onto - modified - the way John has been. She isn't going to see the expedition split down the middle, those without the gene becoming cripples in comparison.
It has to be done. That's all.
"I have to," she says out loud.
She makes her way across the city, moving through dark corridors and up stairways, along catwalks she memorized in her wanderings. She doesn't need the lights that would come to life for John. The city didn't respond to her before, either.
The vault holding the memory core doesn't require the ATA gene to open. There are no locks. The Ancients didn't want their AI to be able to lock itself away from them. The Ancients must have felt some of the same fears Elizabeth does. Why not trust Atenë, otherwise?
She palms the door sensor and stands before the door, waiting as it slides open. Sweat slicks the butt of the pistol in her hand. She bites the inside of her lip and steps inside the vault.
The banks of crystals glimmer blue-white. She raises the pistol and empties the clip into them. The sound of each bullet hitting, the shattering, ringing rain of crystal, hurts her ears. Flying pieces of it pepper her hands and face, cutting her open. She ignores the sting.
The empty cartridges clatter to the floor, shiny brass-jacketed cylinders amid white, powdered-crystal dust.
Silence follows.
God, she's done it. The shield still holds above the city. Her teeth want to chatter, she's that cold from the shock of finally having done it.
No more Atenë. She doesn't know what this will do to John, but Rodney will be there for him.
Elizabeth walks away, still clutching the pistol.
The rest of it is easy, too. So easy. That's the worst part of it. She knew she was going to do this when Rodney explained how to maintain the stasis pods, how to rotate the ZPMs, because everything Rodney did is tainted. The ZPMs need to go, they changed the timeline too much. She gates them into empty space in orbit around MB3478, a planet that still seethed with volcanic activity when the Atlantis teams took a jumper through its gate millennia from now. The ZPMs will eventually fall through its sulfuric atmosphere and either melt in its magma seas or release their pent up energy in an explosion that will destroy the entire planet.
She feels a stab of guilt at that, but what is one planet compared to a universe?
"Please, forgive me."
Elizabeth isn't sure whether she means the dead or the living, Rodney and John, or the expedition that will come to a powerless, helpless city once again. In the end, she's only talking to herself.
From the gate room, she hurries back to the lab with their stasis pods.
She's going through the checklist on her own pod, watching the lights flash from red to amber to green, when something in the corner of her eye makes her head jerk up. She snaps around and stares at Rodney's pod. At the brilliant red lights denoting its status. Everything around seems to ripple, until she remembers to breathe again. Her hands still rest on the console next to her pod. She's pressing down so hard her fingers have gone numb.
It's a physical effort to force herself to cross to room to red-lit pod. She uses the lessons Rodney gave them to call up a status readout.
"Oh," she whispers, converting the Ancient text into English automatically. "Oh God."
Oh God. This was what Rodney felt like when everything was spiraling out of control on Doranda. This empty horror that settles like poison through her system.
Little, bright-red lights.
Stasis field failed, sleeping gas still in effect, no oxygen, just the build up of carbon dioxide from Rodney's own exhalations.
Blood runs down her chin from the lip she's biting. It drops with a soundless splat against the lid of the stasis pod and runs down the curving glass. Inside, Rodney looks at peace, his eyes still closed, his lips turned up in a small, pleased-with-himself smile. His skin is flushed pink.
Atenë was tied directly to the stasis pod programming. She doesn't know what most of the readout means, but that much she can figure out just from the timestamps in the pod's log. The stasis field failed catastrophically a little more than an hour ago, while Elizabeth was gating out the ZPMs.
Rodney died while she was destroying his work. While John slept.
She whimpers.
The status light on her empty stasis pod is still green, but John's flickers amber, faster and faster, and Rodney's is still red.
She should be screaming. She wants to. She can hear it in her head, rising and rising. Her throat's too tight. She can barely speak through the ache.
"I'm sorry, Rodney." She presses her left hand against the cold glass. An alarm klaxons loudly and she turns, calmly, aiming John's gun at the main terminal. One shot, and the alarm dies with a hiss. Red light flickers across Rodney's face.
She thinks it warms him, like the soft glow of a fire, caressing his still form. The life-signs-detector on the outside of the pod is dark and then everything is silent around her.
Elizabeth sinks to her knees in front of the pod, leaning her forehead against it. The pistol falls to the floor, unnoticed.
"You have to understand," she whispers, breath fogging up the glass. "It had to be done. I never meant for this to happen. Of anyone, you must understand that."
The scream in her head is gone. All gone, leaving emptiness behind, blissful peace that seems appreciative of this sacrifice. He didn't suffer.
In the hollow the screaming filled, she can think again.
Tears well up, scalding her eyes and rolling down her cheeks in a hot rush. It was the right thing to do. It was. There was no other option. But she never guessed this would the consequence.
And John, oh John ...
She's killed them. Killed Rodney. Killed John too ... The lights on his pod are already amber, flickering wildly. The alarm would be ringing through the room if she hadn't shot it. There is no blood, but Elizabeth can feel it on her hands, staining them crimson. She puts her fingers to her mouth, wanting to feel it, the last connection, the very last way of being close to them, of taking them into her.
But there is nothing. She presses her lips to the glass, instead, tries to remember the feel and taste of Rodney's lips.
No, Rodney's just asleep. See, his eyes are closed. He'll wake up and fix things soon. Look how flushed he is, like he has a fever. He'll fix her. She had to stop the future the AI would have shaped. She had to protect everyone. She was in charge. That was her job.
John will be angry, she knows, but Rodney will understand. She heard him all those nights. She only did what had to be done. Carbon monoxide is kind compared to the deaths they cheated.
She's crying, heaving, ugly, painful sobs that she can't stop. Her face feels twisted, her body not like her own. Not everything is done. She's still here. She finds John's gun on the floor and picks it up. It's cool against her palm. She curls her fingers around it, clutching its comfort.
She could use it. She should use it. She looks at the amber lights on John's pod and feels too paralyzed to do anything.
"I'm so sorry, John."
She crawls back to her pod and reaches up, pulling herself up and into it, throwing the gun with her. She'll need it if she wakes.
Her eyes slide back to their bodies in the pods.
"We never should have survived."
When the gas floods the chamber, it doesn't taste of poison, but it's there. Merciful sleep beckons.
She doesn't feel death when it claims her.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
Sleep doesn't want him to open his eyes. He almost sinks back into quicksand darkness. It is heavy and quiet; it wants to pull him down.
Red shows through his eyelids. It won't let him let go. There's something about red. Something ...
John jolts awake, fumbling for the release that opens his pod. He is choking, gasping, the air in the pod too thin, poisoned with his own exhalations, and his fingers feel thick, slow, and numb. The emergency release feels stiff. He pushes his hand against the pad, thinking through a growing haze, Open, out, let me out, let me - and it does, the lid sliding back.
He rolls onto his side and sucks in clean air, feeling his head clear. The red emergency light is still glaring against the back of his eyelids.
"Jesus," he gasps and claws at the edge of the pod, drawing himself up, looking around the room. Everything is familiar after waking twice before to check the city's status and rotate the ZPMs; familiar enough that he can see something is wrong immediately. It's hard to think. Coming out of stasis isn't easy, his knees are weak for hours each time, but his head never pounded like this before.
He's staring at Rodney's stasis pod when it hits him: the life-sign read-out is dark.
"No, no, no," he whispers. It takes two tries to coordinate himself enough to crawl out of the pod. He ends up on the floor, slicing his hand open on the shards of something. He leaves streaks of blood behind him when he pushes himself to his feet and lurches over to Rodney's pod. His head is taking forever to clear, it's pounding unmercifully, like his brain is contracting and expanding against the inside of his skull. All he can see is the dark read-out and the solid red status light above it.
He thinks there should be an alarm sounding, but all he can hear is his own breathing, his own heartbeat, and broken pieces of a shattered light column scraping under his hands and knees.
He braces himself against the lid when he reaches the pod. It's still running, the stasis field is operating, but the body inside no longer registers as alive. John stares at the read-out, trying to make sense of it. With trembling, clumsy fingers, he calls up the command log, reading the transcript of a program crash that interrupted the stasis field for almost two hours.
He has to turn to the side and vomit whatever bile is left in his stomach.
It has to be a mistake, or a lie.
When there's nothing left, he just holds on to the edge of the pod and shakes. The lid is slick and cold and his hand slips over it, curling into a fist he beats against the unforgiving glass over and over, until the skin covering his knuckles tears and bones crack and he's leaving smears of crimson behind with each blow. Sharp white pain runs up John's arm, but he doesn't stop until he runs out of the strength to lift his arm.
Rodney isn't going to take him to the infirmary this time.
He won't let himself look at Elizabeth's pod yet. He closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the pod. How could this happen, how could Rodney be gone and never coming back?
Dully, with little hope, John reaches for Atenë through the interface with his mind.
For the first time there's no answer. There's hollow space in his head, an echo instead of her voice. The space around him feels deadened. The city is an empty shell without her presence. There's a hole inside of him that's stealing his voice, expanding with each breath, and her absence just gnaws away another piece of him.
"Please," John says in the silence. "Please." He doesn't know who he's appealing to. He wipes at his mouth, rubbing the sour saliva away, the taste of bile still sharp and raw.
Atenë is gone. Rodney - he squeezes his broken hand into a fist again and gasps with the pain - Rodney is gone. Gone. He doesn't want to, but he has to look at the other pod in the room.
The status light on Elizabeth's pod is fading into amber from green. John draws in a harsh breath, letting out a soft keening sound when he exhales. He doesn't know what he wants. He should get her out, but he's already realized what must have happened. Rodney's pod failed because Atenë is gone. Elizabeth was out of stasis. It isn't hard to put it together. Rodney is a collateral casualty. Thinking about that is unbearable. He tries to push it aside and decide what to do next, but can't quite. The life-sign detector still registers her. He pushes himself away from Rodney's pod - from Rodney - and staggers to Elizabeth's pod. He lets himself look, because she's there, there inside, she's still alive. He doesn't know what that means now or what he will do.
Her hair is tangled, he sees. Tears still glisten, caught and preserved for as long as stasis lasts, on her face.
His hands go to the control that will wake her ahead of schedule, get her out of the malfunctioning pod, but he stops, staring down through the glass.
She's curled on her side, the heel of one hand pressed to her lips, and there, just beneath her other hand, half hidden in her hair, he sees the gleam of dark metal. He knows those straight lines, those angles, from a thousand nights spent cleaning and oiling it. John lifts his head and sees the contents of his pack, left in his own stasis container the last time he went back into hibernation, strewn across the floor. That's his pistol in the stasis pod with Elizabeth. He knows it, knows the spot along the side of the barrel where his holster rubbed the dark, non-reflective finish away to bare metal.
His pistol.
The light column was shot out with his pistol. Another look around the room shows him bullet scars and a darkened console, where the alarm was shot out, too.
Feeling dull and stupid, he turns back to Elizabeth's pod and activates the command log. Last authorization, last command given by Elizabeth, less than a day ago. The same problem is affecting her pod that killed Rodney's, only slower: no oxygen is coming in. Only in this pod, with the stasis left on, the carbon dioxide is infiltrating Elizabeth's system slowly. It will take months, maybe even years to ultimately smother her. She'll never know, never wake up, never suffer.
John pulls himself upright and catalogues what he sees: Rodney's stasis pod, active, Rodney, dead; Elizabeth's stasis pod, active, Elizabeth, alive, slowly dying inside; alarm, deactivated; lights, damaged; Atenë, gone. Himself, awake, but barely functional. Why is he awake? He wasn't scheduled to come out of stasis again until the expedition arrived and activated the city, raising it to the surface, or a thousand years passed after Elizabeth's rotation.
He checks the date. It's a thousand years too soon for him. This is Elizabeth's rotation. A day ago she came out of stasis on schedule. He can't - doesn't want to - believe it.
John forces himself back to his own pod and checks it. Small wonder he barely woke up. His pod was filling with carbon dioxide, too. A back-up failsafe linked to Rodney and Elizabeth's pods made the pod wake him ahead of schedule. When Rodney's life-signs failed, John's pod began bringing him around. If Rodney hadn't died fast, John would have died slow, too.
He slams his hand down on it, almost passing out from the pain, hanging against the pod until the physical agony passes, and by then the anger that might sustain him has drained away. He lifts his head and tries to think through what could have happened. He hates Elizabeth for not making sure he died too, for letting him wake up, for not making it a clean kill at least.
Why? he wants to yell. Why? Why did he have to wake to this? Did she want him to suffer this?
He can't look at Rodney's stasis pod. He can't. He can't let himself feel this yet.
Everything reminds him. Even the wall in front of him. It is patterned with angular decorations the Ancients favored. The metal is a shade between gray and bronze, the markings more like red ochre. Those markings all meant something to the Ancients. They were intended to lend each room its proper balance, to enhance the mental well-being of those within. That didn't work. Atenë could have told him what each decoration symbolized. Atenë is dead, too. John concentrates on breathing, filling his lungs with air that isn't tainted, and stares blindly. There is no balance, no balance at all, and the walls are just walls with meaningless marks.
Rodney will never grumble and pull John back into bed because it's too early for anything but sleep or sex. He won't rub his thumb against the inside of John's wrist or steal the last fried cake from John's plate and share it with Elizabeth or finish his Grand Unified Theory or get drunk on Veneti wine and tell stories about the outrageous liberties Sam Carter took with gate protocols.
Thoughts beat inside him, beat like wings, breaking themselves against the glass wall he's made around them. Elizabeth, Atenë, Rodney. Atenë, Rodney, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, Atenë, Rodney. Rodney, Atenë. Rodney. Rodney.
Breathing hurts. His hand hurts, curled into a fist. The wall blurs and he remembers to blink, his eyes dry and burning, his throat closed tight and aching. There's blood running down his chin from his lip. His teeth are still biting down on it, still biting back a howl of fury and despair.
Another shuddering breath and he pushes away from the pod. He walks out of the room. He can't help himself, at the door, he looks back. He knows better, but he looks back, and his heart turns to salt. If he doesn't look at the pod's status display, then Rodney could be sleeping, still be waiting to wake up. He won't see those eyes open again.
The door shuts, blocking John's vision. He forces himself to move again. His legs are steadier now, but he braces himself against the wall sometimes, leaving more smears of blood.
The city still responds to his gene, automated sensors processing his presence and lighting his way, but it's sluggish compared to Atenë's responses. It's rote, a zombie shambling and fumbling at things that once meant something to its dead brain. John's head throbs, the pain mixing with the hollowness. Maybe it's him; he can barely remember why he's still moving.
The command chair is in one piece. John leans against the door jamb, staring, but there's no pull to sit down in it. There's nothing left there but a tool for controlling the city's active weapons systems. He turns away and keeps walking, not looking back this time.
A transporter takes him to a stubby tower halfway across the city. He knows what he'll find before he steps out into a single room once filled from floor to ceiling with columns of crystal matrix: shattered pieces of Atenë's mind. Dulled, broken pieces, soapy white particles finer than sand, blue-tinged chunks bigger than his head, raw scars on the walls, and scattered on the floor, copper jacketed, empty cartridges from his own weapon. His boot scuffs against an empty clip dropped on the floor and left.
John backs into the wall and slides down it. Particles of crystal puff up into the air, disturbed by his movements, and drift down, pale and glittering, onto his boots and his pant legs. He rubs his good hand over them and they slice through his skin like ground glass. When he wipes his hand against his shirt, it just drives the crystal dust in deeper.
He's completely alone in his head again.
He stays there. He stays there until his muscles are stiff and protest. The cold seeps into him. The blood on his good hand is dried, flaking away when he flexes his fingers. Little pieces of him raining down to join the pieces of Atenë. His other hand is swollen, broken wreckage. He could go to the infirmary. He isn't going to.
She did a thorough job, Elizabeth, he thinks. If he knew why, he might guess what else she's done. The city hasn't flooded, so the shield's still operating. Maybe she sabotaged the stargate or the jumpers. Maybe she didn't bother, because without Rodney and him, no one's going anywhere.
He doesn't understand why.
He checks the power room next and finds himself staring again. The three ZPMs that maintain the city and the shield are still there; all but one, the one they retrieved from Dagan, faded to low power yellow. But the others, the cache of new ZPMs Rodney built, are gone.
"Got to give you credit," he says out loud, "you were thorough." His own voice startles him, raw as though he's been screaming.
There's no use to wondering what she did with the ZPMs, vented them to the sea bottom, gated them into vacuum or something he can't even imagine. They're gone, too. All of Rodney's work, all the hope they thought they'd found to leave for the expedition, is gone. Like she killed Rodney twice. Killed what they all made together, killed what John felt for her, too.
John has never been so tired.
It was all useless. Everything they tried to do. What a fucking joke. Time has some terrible inertia, dragging itself back onto the same course, no matter how they have tried to divert it. This timeline will destroy itself, too. There will be some other Ancient superweapon, some different enemy, it will all come to nothing in the end. They're all dust.
There's no redemption.
He doesn't bother with the gate room.
Like the compass needle returning to the north, he turns his steps back to the stasis chamber. He cleans up the mess Elizabeth left behind. He shoves everything from his pack back in except the gun. That's in Elizabeth's pod with her. He doesn't touch that. As he's setting the pack in the storage niche, his hand brushes the memory recorder.
He stares at the innocuous little device, then picks it up with shaking fingers. It's untouched and lights under his touch. There in the case with it are three finger-length crystals, one for Elizabeth, one for John and one for Rodney. For Rodney.
John runs his finger up and down that crystal.
"Just so someone will know," he says out loud.
He works swiftly, despite being restricted to one hand. Last time Rodney was with him as he did this, but he remembers the steps. He slips the crystal that holds his memories back into the recorder, holds it up to his face and thinks, Copy. It comes to life, wrapping around his face, blinding him. His entire existence snaps through him in a rush. He relives his life, breath by breath, heartbeat after heartbeat, every thought, every event, every emotion and sensation he ever experienced pouring from him into the crystal.
His first solo flight, his first time, the blue ripple of the stargate, Rodney's mouth and arms and back, the white expanse of Antarctica, the red stone gorges of Afghanistan, Bosnia, heat rippling across the landing strips at Beale, the planes shimmering in the mirage effect, the yellow enamel of the refrigerator door in that little house outside Lackland, the thrill of coming home he felt the first time he set foot in Atlantis, Teyla's slow smile, the moment when he made the decision to shoot Sumner, the last time he touched Rodney.
Everything goes white.
He wakes hours later, aching and cold, on the floor. When he brushes his bad hand against the floor, he cries out despite himself.
When he can move again, he stores the crystals with the player that will download the contents into someone else's brain.
He thinks about reprogramming Elizabeth's pod. Rodney could do it. Rodney would do it. Rodney was never a killer. John was and is. He presses his eyes closed. He never thought Elizabeth was.
How could she do it? She loved Rodney. She loved them both. How could it end like this?
He remembers loving her.
He can't do it. He can't open the pod and ask her why. He can't face that.
Even thinking of Elizabeth isn't enough to keep the rest of what's lost at bay any longer. He can't stop it. He can't bury it or deny it. He can't smother it any longer because he has to keep going - there's nothing left to do.
The grief that he's kept on the other side of his own shield, is too close now, too strong. It breaks through him again, rushes in like dark, icy water, drowning him. John curls himself next to Rodney's stasis pod and lets the pain finally drag him under.
"Rodney," he gasps. "Rodney."
All the time in the world and they still ran out.
When he can move again, he forces himself to finish a last task, reprogramming his pod, but he knows he's being careless. It may work or it may not. There's no one to tell if he's made a mistake.
He leaves Elizabeth's pod alone. It's like watching himself through the wrong end of a telescope.
When he's finished, John finally lets himself look into Rodney's pod.
All the hurt floods back. He thinks there was a way once, a path they could have taken that wouldn't have led to here. But there's no way home now.
He presses his entire body against the stasis pod, arms spread wide, trying to see through the semi-opaque lid. He can't make out more than a shadow in the pod and can't bring himself to open it. He is dry-eyed. Beyond Rodney's pod, the lights on Elizabeth's flicker orange, then red. John turns his face away, pressing his cheek against the cold material of Rodney's pod. The pod is still chilled, will stay icy and inert as long as it still has power, and it leaches John's warmth away. His pod still stands open. The lights playing across it remind him of fire.
The lights on Elizabeth's pod stop flickering and stay red. Like the telltales on Rodney's pod.
All he can hear are his own hitching breaths.
Atlantis is silent. Cored-out, the way John is.
"You were all I could see," he says softly. He knows that there is no one left to hear. No one to answer him if he confides all his secrets or makes promises he's already broken. He can't say it, though, even now. He hopes Rodney knew anyway. "All I could see."
He pushes away from Rodney's pod with a last caress, gliding his fingers over the glass in good-bye. The updated memory recording is waiting for whoever finds them. John thinks about erasing it, but he doesn't. He can't destroy Rodney's and he wants whoever finds these to know the things he never said to anyone. Especially the things he wanted to tell Rodney.
His body feels too heavy, worn and strangely distant. All he wants now is to sleep. His mind is filled with echoes and hollows, empty spaces where the link with Atenë existed.
He lets himself settle back in the pod. The lid closes over his face automatically. A hiss fills the pod: sleeping gas and oxygen, unless his reprogramming didn't take. He doesn't know what will happen when the stasis field engages. The gas smells like ice-blue and high notes. It won't let him dream.
John breathes deeply.
Continue to next post: 30/36
I'll be answering comments this afternoon, Berlin time. Deepest apologies for the delay, but I'm moving house, so I don't have the time before. - eretria
~ 4854 words
Details/disclaimers: here.
Previous post: 28/36
Elizabeth wakes to the realization that it's time. This is her last chance to do something about Atenë, while she's still in hibernation. While Elizabeth is the only one awake and alive in Atlantis. The three of them survived for a purpose, John to wake the AI, Rodney to recreate the ZPMs, and her to finish it.
She climbs out of the pod and hesitates, catching her balance, shivering, before going to the niche holding John's pack. Takes his gun from it and thumbs off the safety. She heads for the memory core vault. John showed her how to use a gun, even though she already knew. No one in the SGC didn't. She had refused to carry a gun out of principles not ignorance. He would be horrified at what she means to do with this gun now. His gun.
She's going to kill her cheating lover's mistress with his own gun. She imagines the AI screaming and begging. That's what John and Rodney will think. It isn't that. She's eliminating a threat to the expedition, specifically to all the ATA gene carriers, the ones who would be sucked into the interface, addicted to using the control chair, added onto - modified - the way John has been. She isn't going to see the expedition split down the middle, those without the gene becoming cripples in comparison.
It has to be done. That's all.
"I have to," she says out loud.
She makes her way across the city, moving through dark corridors and up stairways, along catwalks she memorized in her wanderings. She doesn't need the lights that would come to life for John. The city didn't respond to her before, either.
The vault holding the memory core doesn't require the ATA gene to open. There are no locks. The Ancients didn't want their AI to be able to lock itself away from them. The Ancients must have felt some of the same fears Elizabeth does. Why not trust Atenë, otherwise?
She palms the door sensor and stands before the door, waiting as it slides open. Sweat slicks the butt of the pistol in her hand. She bites the inside of her lip and steps inside the vault.
The banks of crystals glimmer blue-white. She raises the pistol and empties the clip into them. The sound of each bullet hitting, the shattering, ringing rain of crystal, hurts her ears. Flying pieces of it pepper her hands and face, cutting her open. She ignores the sting.
The empty cartridges clatter to the floor, shiny brass-jacketed cylinders amid white, powdered-crystal dust.
Silence follows.
God, she's done it. The shield still holds above the city. Her teeth want to chatter, she's that cold from the shock of finally having done it.
No more Atenë. She doesn't know what this will do to John, but Rodney will be there for him.
Elizabeth walks away, still clutching the pistol.
The rest of it is easy, too. So easy. That's the worst part of it. She knew she was going to do this when Rodney explained how to maintain the stasis pods, how to rotate the ZPMs, because everything Rodney did is tainted. The ZPMs need to go, they changed the timeline too much. She gates them into empty space in orbit around MB3478, a planet that still seethed with volcanic activity when the Atlantis teams took a jumper through its gate millennia from now. The ZPMs will eventually fall through its sulfuric atmosphere and either melt in its magma seas or release their pent up energy in an explosion that will destroy the entire planet.
She feels a stab of guilt at that, but what is one planet compared to a universe?
"Please, forgive me."
Elizabeth isn't sure whether she means the dead or the living, Rodney and John, or the expedition that will come to a powerless, helpless city once again. In the end, she's only talking to herself.
From the gate room, she hurries back to the lab with their stasis pods.
She's going through the checklist on her own pod, watching the lights flash from red to amber to green, when something in the corner of her eye makes her head jerk up. She snaps around and stares at Rodney's pod. At the brilliant red lights denoting its status. Everything around seems to ripple, until she remembers to breathe again. Her hands still rest on the console next to her pod. She's pressing down so hard her fingers have gone numb.
It's a physical effort to force herself to cross to room to red-lit pod. She uses the lessons Rodney gave them to call up a status readout.
"Oh," she whispers, converting the Ancient text into English automatically. "Oh God."
Oh God. This was what Rodney felt like when everything was spiraling out of control on Doranda. This empty horror that settles like poison through her system.
Little, bright-red lights.
Stasis field failed, sleeping gas still in effect, no oxygen, just the build up of carbon dioxide from Rodney's own exhalations.
Blood runs down her chin from the lip she's biting. It drops with a soundless splat against the lid of the stasis pod and runs down the curving glass. Inside, Rodney looks at peace, his eyes still closed, his lips turned up in a small, pleased-with-himself smile. His skin is flushed pink.
Atenë was tied directly to the stasis pod programming. She doesn't know what most of the readout means, but that much she can figure out just from the timestamps in the pod's log. The stasis field failed catastrophically a little more than an hour ago, while Elizabeth was gating out the ZPMs.
Rodney died while she was destroying his work. While John slept.
She whimpers.
The status light on her empty stasis pod is still green, but John's flickers amber, faster and faster, and Rodney's is still red.
She should be screaming. She wants to. She can hear it in her head, rising and rising. Her throat's too tight. She can barely speak through the ache.
"I'm sorry, Rodney." She presses her left hand against the cold glass. An alarm klaxons loudly and she turns, calmly, aiming John's gun at the main terminal. One shot, and the alarm dies with a hiss. Red light flickers across Rodney's face.
She thinks it warms him, like the soft glow of a fire, caressing his still form. The life-signs-detector on the outside of the pod is dark and then everything is silent around her.
Elizabeth sinks to her knees in front of the pod, leaning her forehead against it. The pistol falls to the floor, unnoticed.
"You have to understand," she whispers, breath fogging up the glass. "It had to be done. I never meant for this to happen. Of anyone, you must understand that."
The scream in her head is gone. All gone, leaving emptiness behind, blissful peace that seems appreciative of this sacrifice. He didn't suffer.
In the hollow the screaming filled, she can think again.
Tears well up, scalding her eyes and rolling down her cheeks in a hot rush. It was the right thing to do. It was. There was no other option. But she never guessed this would the consequence.
And John, oh John ...
She's killed them. Killed Rodney. Killed John too ... The lights on his pod are already amber, flickering wildly. The alarm would be ringing through the room if she hadn't shot it. There is no blood, but Elizabeth can feel it on her hands, staining them crimson. She puts her fingers to her mouth, wanting to feel it, the last connection, the very last way of being close to them, of taking them into her.
But there is nothing. She presses her lips to the glass, instead, tries to remember the feel and taste of Rodney's lips.
No, Rodney's just asleep. See, his eyes are closed. He'll wake up and fix things soon. Look how flushed he is, like he has a fever. He'll fix her. She had to stop the future the AI would have shaped. She had to protect everyone. She was in charge. That was her job.
John will be angry, she knows, but Rodney will understand. She heard him all those nights. She only did what had to be done. Carbon monoxide is kind compared to the deaths they cheated.
She's crying, heaving, ugly, painful sobs that she can't stop. Her face feels twisted, her body not like her own. Not everything is done. She's still here. She finds John's gun on the floor and picks it up. It's cool against her palm. She curls her fingers around it, clutching its comfort.
She could use it. She should use it. She looks at the amber lights on John's pod and feels too paralyzed to do anything.
"I'm so sorry, John."
She crawls back to her pod and reaches up, pulling herself up and into it, throwing the gun with her. She'll need it if she wakes.
Her eyes slide back to their bodies in the pods.
"We never should have survived."
When the gas floods the chamber, it doesn't taste of poison, but it's there. Merciful sleep beckons.
She doesn't feel death when it claims her.
¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦~¦
Sleep doesn't want him to open his eyes. He almost sinks back into quicksand darkness. It is heavy and quiet; it wants to pull him down.
Red shows through his eyelids. It won't let him let go. There's something about red. Something ...
John jolts awake, fumbling for the release that opens his pod. He is choking, gasping, the air in the pod too thin, poisoned with his own exhalations, and his fingers feel thick, slow, and numb. The emergency release feels stiff. He pushes his hand against the pad, thinking through a growing haze, Open, out, let me out, let me - and it does, the lid sliding back.
He rolls onto his side and sucks in clean air, feeling his head clear. The red emergency light is still glaring against the back of his eyelids.
"Jesus," he gasps and claws at the edge of the pod, drawing himself up, looking around the room. Everything is familiar after waking twice before to check the city's status and rotate the ZPMs; familiar enough that he can see something is wrong immediately. It's hard to think. Coming out of stasis isn't easy, his knees are weak for hours each time, but his head never pounded like this before.
He's staring at Rodney's stasis pod when it hits him: the life-sign read-out is dark.
"No, no, no," he whispers. It takes two tries to coordinate himself enough to crawl out of the pod. He ends up on the floor, slicing his hand open on the shards of something. He leaves streaks of blood behind him when he pushes himself to his feet and lurches over to Rodney's pod. His head is taking forever to clear, it's pounding unmercifully, like his brain is contracting and expanding against the inside of his skull. All he can see is the dark read-out and the solid red status light above it.
He thinks there should be an alarm sounding, but all he can hear is his own breathing, his own heartbeat, and broken pieces of a shattered light column scraping under his hands and knees.
He braces himself against the lid when he reaches the pod. It's still running, the stasis field is operating, but the body inside no longer registers as alive. John stares at the read-out, trying to make sense of it. With trembling, clumsy fingers, he calls up the command log, reading the transcript of a program crash that interrupted the stasis field for almost two hours.
He has to turn to the side and vomit whatever bile is left in his stomach.
It has to be a mistake, or a lie.
When there's nothing left, he just holds on to the edge of the pod and shakes. The lid is slick and cold and his hand slips over it, curling into a fist he beats against the unforgiving glass over and over, until the skin covering his knuckles tears and bones crack and he's leaving smears of crimson behind with each blow. Sharp white pain runs up John's arm, but he doesn't stop until he runs out of the strength to lift his arm.
Rodney isn't going to take him to the infirmary this time.
He won't let himself look at Elizabeth's pod yet. He closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the pod. How could this happen, how could Rodney be gone and never coming back?
Dully, with little hope, John reaches for Atenë through the interface with his mind.
For the first time there's no answer. There's hollow space in his head, an echo instead of her voice. The space around him feels deadened. The city is an empty shell without her presence. There's a hole inside of him that's stealing his voice, expanding with each breath, and her absence just gnaws away another piece of him.
"Please," John says in the silence. "Please." He doesn't know who he's appealing to. He wipes at his mouth, rubbing the sour saliva away, the taste of bile still sharp and raw.
Atenë is gone. Rodney - he squeezes his broken hand into a fist again and gasps with the pain - Rodney is gone. Gone. He doesn't want to, but he has to look at the other pod in the room.
The status light on Elizabeth's pod is fading into amber from green. John draws in a harsh breath, letting out a soft keening sound when he exhales. He doesn't know what he wants. He should get her out, but he's already realized what must have happened. Rodney's pod failed because Atenë is gone. Elizabeth was out of stasis. It isn't hard to put it together. Rodney is a collateral casualty. Thinking about that is unbearable. He tries to push it aside and decide what to do next, but can't quite. The life-sign detector still registers her. He pushes himself away from Rodney's pod - from Rodney - and staggers to Elizabeth's pod. He lets himself look, because she's there, there inside, she's still alive. He doesn't know what that means now or what he will do.
Her hair is tangled, he sees. Tears still glisten, caught and preserved for as long as stasis lasts, on her face.
His hands go to the control that will wake her ahead of schedule, get her out of the malfunctioning pod, but he stops, staring down through the glass.
She's curled on her side, the heel of one hand pressed to her lips, and there, just beneath her other hand, half hidden in her hair, he sees the gleam of dark metal. He knows those straight lines, those angles, from a thousand nights spent cleaning and oiling it. John lifts his head and sees the contents of his pack, left in his own stasis container the last time he went back into hibernation, strewn across the floor. That's his pistol in the stasis pod with Elizabeth. He knows it, knows the spot along the side of the barrel where his holster rubbed the dark, non-reflective finish away to bare metal.
His pistol.
The light column was shot out with his pistol. Another look around the room shows him bullet scars and a darkened console, where the alarm was shot out, too.
Feeling dull and stupid, he turns back to Elizabeth's pod and activates the command log. Last authorization, last command given by Elizabeth, less than a day ago. The same problem is affecting her pod that killed Rodney's, only slower: no oxygen is coming in. Only in this pod, with the stasis left on, the carbon dioxide is infiltrating Elizabeth's system slowly. It will take months, maybe even years to ultimately smother her. She'll never know, never wake up, never suffer.
John pulls himself upright and catalogues what he sees: Rodney's stasis pod, active, Rodney, dead; Elizabeth's stasis pod, active, Elizabeth, alive, slowly dying inside; alarm, deactivated; lights, damaged; Atenë, gone. Himself, awake, but barely functional. Why is he awake? He wasn't scheduled to come out of stasis again until the expedition arrived and activated the city, raising it to the surface, or a thousand years passed after Elizabeth's rotation.
He checks the date. It's a thousand years too soon for him. This is Elizabeth's rotation. A day ago she came out of stasis on schedule. He can't - doesn't want to - believe it.
John forces himself back to his own pod and checks it. Small wonder he barely woke up. His pod was filling with carbon dioxide, too. A back-up failsafe linked to Rodney and Elizabeth's pods made the pod wake him ahead of schedule. When Rodney's life-signs failed, John's pod began bringing him around. If Rodney hadn't died fast, John would have died slow, too.
He slams his hand down on it, almost passing out from the pain, hanging against the pod until the physical agony passes, and by then the anger that might sustain him has drained away. He lifts his head and tries to think through what could have happened. He hates Elizabeth for not making sure he died too, for letting him wake up, for not making it a clean kill at least.
Why? he wants to yell. Why? Why did he have to wake to this? Did she want him to suffer this?
He can't look at Rodney's stasis pod. He can't. He can't let himself feel this yet.
Everything reminds him. Even the wall in front of him. It is patterned with angular decorations the Ancients favored. The metal is a shade between gray and bronze, the markings more like red ochre. Those markings all meant something to the Ancients. They were intended to lend each room its proper balance, to enhance the mental well-being of those within. That didn't work. Atenë could have told him what each decoration symbolized. Atenë is dead, too. John concentrates on breathing, filling his lungs with air that isn't tainted, and stares blindly. There is no balance, no balance at all, and the walls are just walls with meaningless marks.
Rodney will never grumble and pull John back into bed because it's too early for anything but sleep or sex. He won't rub his thumb against the inside of John's wrist or steal the last fried cake from John's plate and share it with Elizabeth or finish his Grand Unified Theory or get drunk on Veneti wine and tell stories about the outrageous liberties Sam Carter took with gate protocols.
Thoughts beat inside him, beat like wings, breaking themselves against the glass wall he's made around them. Elizabeth, Atenë, Rodney. Atenë, Rodney, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, Atenë, Rodney. Rodney, Atenë. Rodney. Rodney.
Breathing hurts. His hand hurts, curled into a fist. The wall blurs and he remembers to blink, his eyes dry and burning, his throat closed tight and aching. There's blood running down his chin from his lip. His teeth are still biting down on it, still biting back a howl of fury and despair.
Another shuddering breath and he pushes away from the pod. He walks out of the room. He can't help himself, at the door, he looks back. He knows better, but he looks back, and his heart turns to salt. If he doesn't look at the pod's status display, then Rodney could be sleeping, still be waiting to wake up. He won't see those eyes open again.
The door shuts, blocking John's vision. He forces himself to move again. His legs are steadier now, but he braces himself against the wall sometimes, leaving more smears of blood.
The city still responds to his gene, automated sensors processing his presence and lighting his way, but it's sluggish compared to Atenë's responses. It's rote, a zombie shambling and fumbling at things that once meant something to its dead brain. John's head throbs, the pain mixing with the hollowness. Maybe it's him; he can barely remember why he's still moving.
The command chair is in one piece. John leans against the door jamb, staring, but there's no pull to sit down in it. There's nothing left there but a tool for controlling the city's active weapons systems. He turns away and keeps walking, not looking back this time.
A transporter takes him to a stubby tower halfway across the city. He knows what he'll find before he steps out into a single room once filled from floor to ceiling with columns of crystal matrix: shattered pieces of Atenë's mind. Dulled, broken pieces, soapy white particles finer than sand, blue-tinged chunks bigger than his head, raw scars on the walls, and scattered on the floor, copper jacketed, empty cartridges from his own weapon. His boot scuffs against an empty clip dropped on the floor and left.
John backs into the wall and slides down it. Particles of crystal puff up into the air, disturbed by his movements, and drift down, pale and glittering, onto his boots and his pant legs. He rubs his good hand over them and they slice through his skin like ground glass. When he wipes his hand against his shirt, it just drives the crystal dust in deeper.
He's completely alone in his head again.
He stays there. He stays there until his muscles are stiff and protest. The cold seeps into him. The blood on his good hand is dried, flaking away when he flexes his fingers. Little pieces of him raining down to join the pieces of Atenë. His other hand is swollen, broken wreckage. He could go to the infirmary. He isn't going to.
She did a thorough job, Elizabeth, he thinks. If he knew why, he might guess what else she's done. The city hasn't flooded, so the shield's still operating. Maybe she sabotaged the stargate or the jumpers. Maybe she didn't bother, because without Rodney and him, no one's going anywhere.
He doesn't understand why.
He checks the power room next and finds himself staring again. The three ZPMs that maintain the city and the shield are still there; all but one, the one they retrieved from Dagan, faded to low power yellow. But the others, the cache of new ZPMs Rodney built, are gone.
"Got to give you credit," he says out loud, "you were thorough." His own voice startles him, raw as though he's been screaming.
There's no use to wondering what she did with the ZPMs, vented them to the sea bottom, gated them into vacuum or something he can't even imagine. They're gone, too. All of Rodney's work, all the hope they thought they'd found to leave for the expedition, is gone. Like she killed Rodney twice. Killed what they all made together, killed what John felt for her, too.
John has never been so tired.
It was all useless. Everything they tried to do. What a fucking joke. Time has some terrible inertia, dragging itself back onto the same course, no matter how they have tried to divert it. This timeline will destroy itself, too. There will be some other Ancient superweapon, some different enemy, it will all come to nothing in the end. They're all dust.
There's no redemption.
He doesn't bother with the gate room.
Like the compass needle returning to the north, he turns his steps back to the stasis chamber. He cleans up the mess Elizabeth left behind. He shoves everything from his pack back in except the gun. That's in Elizabeth's pod with her. He doesn't touch that. As he's setting the pack in the storage niche, his hand brushes the memory recorder.
He stares at the innocuous little device, then picks it up with shaking fingers. It's untouched and lights under his touch. There in the case with it are three finger-length crystals, one for Elizabeth, one for John and one for Rodney. For Rodney.
John runs his finger up and down that crystal.
"Just so someone will know," he says out loud.
He works swiftly, despite being restricted to one hand. Last time Rodney was with him as he did this, but he remembers the steps. He slips the crystal that holds his memories back into the recorder, holds it up to his face and thinks, Copy. It comes to life, wrapping around his face, blinding him. His entire existence snaps through him in a rush. He relives his life, breath by breath, heartbeat after heartbeat, every thought, every event, every emotion and sensation he ever experienced pouring from him into the crystal.
His first solo flight, his first time, the blue ripple of the stargate, Rodney's mouth and arms and back, the white expanse of Antarctica, the red stone gorges of Afghanistan, Bosnia, heat rippling across the landing strips at Beale, the planes shimmering in the mirage effect, the yellow enamel of the refrigerator door in that little house outside Lackland, the thrill of coming home he felt the first time he set foot in Atlantis, Teyla's slow smile, the moment when he made the decision to shoot Sumner, the last time he touched Rodney.
Everything goes white.
He wakes hours later, aching and cold, on the floor. When he brushes his bad hand against the floor, he cries out despite himself.
When he can move again, he stores the crystals with the player that will download the contents into someone else's brain.
He thinks about reprogramming Elizabeth's pod. Rodney could do it. Rodney would do it. Rodney was never a killer. John was and is. He presses his eyes closed. He never thought Elizabeth was.
How could she do it? She loved Rodney. She loved them both. How could it end like this?
He remembers loving her.
He can't do it. He can't open the pod and ask her why. He can't face that.
Even thinking of Elizabeth isn't enough to keep the rest of what's lost at bay any longer. He can't stop it. He can't bury it or deny it. He can't smother it any longer because he has to keep going - there's nothing left to do.
The grief that he's kept on the other side of his own shield, is too close now, too strong. It breaks through him again, rushes in like dark, icy water, drowning him. John curls himself next to Rodney's stasis pod and lets the pain finally drag him under.
"Rodney," he gasps. "Rodney."
All the time in the world and they still ran out.
When he can move again, he forces himself to finish a last task, reprogramming his pod, but he knows he's being careless. It may work or it may not. There's no one to tell if he's made a mistake.
He leaves Elizabeth's pod alone. It's like watching himself through the wrong end of a telescope.
When he's finished, John finally lets himself look into Rodney's pod.
All the hurt floods back. He thinks there was a way once, a path they could have taken that wouldn't have led to here. But there's no way home now.
He presses his entire body against the stasis pod, arms spread wide, trying to see through the semi-opaque lid. He can't make out more than a shadow in the pod and can't bring himself to open it. He is dry-eyed. Beyond Rodney's pod, the lights on Elizabeth's flicker orange, then red. John turns his face away, pressing his cheek against the cold material of Rodney's pod. The pod is still chilled, will stay icy and inert as long as it still has power, and it leaches John's warmth away. His pod still stands open. The lights playing across it remind him of fire.
The lights on Elizabeth's pod stop flickering and stay red. Like the telltales on Rodney's pod.
All he can hear are his own hitching breaths.
Atlantis is silent. Cored-out, the way John is.
"You were all I could see," he says softly. He knows that there is no one left to hear. No one to answer him if he confides all his secrets or makes promises he's already broken. He can't say it, though, even now. He hopes Rodney knew anyway. "All I could see."
He pushes away from Rodney's pod with a last caress, gliding his fingers over the glass in good-bye. The updated memory recording is waiting for whoever finds them. John thinks about erasing it, but he doesn't. He can't destroy Rodney's and he wants whoever finds these to know the things he never said to anyone. Especially the things he wanted to tell Rodney.
His body feels too heavy, worn and strangely distant. All he wants now is to sleep. His mind is filled with echoes and hollows, empty spaces where the link with Atenë existed.
He lets himself settle back in the pod. The lid closes over his face automatically. A hiss fills the pod: sleeping gas and oxygen, unless his reprogramming didn't take. He doesn't know what will happen when the stasis field engages. The gas smells like ice-blue and high notes. It won't let him dream.
John breathes deeply.
Continue to next post: 30/36
I'll be answering comments this afternoon, Berlin time. Deepest apologies for the delay, but I'm moving house, so I don't have the time before. - eretria