Fic: Broccoli Trees (Stargate: Universe)
Pairing: Everett Young/Nicholas Rush
Rating: R
Spoilers: ...through the first four episodes?
Warnings: None
Word Count: ~4700
Notes: So I was sick the last couple of days, and decided to use the ol' rusty fanfic skills. Hopefully this is all coherent. Unbeta'ed.
Summary: Young and Rush are stranded on an alien planet. One-shot; complete.
~*~
Young can’t follow what it is that Rush is thinking. Doesn’t understand half of the symbols he scratches out on the rock of the cave wall, nor the rough sketches of stars, trajectories.
He does follow the cold, triumphant glint in Rush’s eye as he steps back from his handiwork, fist clenched by his side.
“We can make it,” he says, and Young breathes a shuddered sigh of relief.
~*~
“Hold the Gate open!”
Colonel Everett Young’s shout, to one of the retreating scientists, is swallowed in the rush of the wind and rain. He can barely see the Stargate’s shimmer, the glow against the darkness that might have been evening, dawn, or just eternal hurricane.
He hates this planet.
There’s a strangled cry, from behind him -
Rush.
~*~
The trees trill at them, now, with a mix of protectiveness/joy/apprehension/excitement that reminds Young, somehow, of a mother sending her child out into the world for the first time.
Dangerous, he knows, to project human emotion on creatures as alien as this.
“They want us to go to sleep,” says Rush, a hint of a question in his voice.
A leaf presses, playfully, against Young’s palm.
“Yeah,” says Young. It lines up with his impressions.
Rush settles down, onto his back, over one of the long, flattened tree roots. And Young pauses.
“Colonel?” asks Rush.
Young glances up to the sky. Stars obscured by heavy cloud cover.
“Yeah,” he says, “I’m ready.”
~*~
Young skids to a halt, in the mud, and turns back. Three steps and Young grabs Rush, throwing him bodily as far away as he can. Just in time, because one of those scaly creatures smashes the ground between them, uprooting two of the broccoli-trees and cracking a third.
Young can’t spare a second to look back to the stargate. He fumbles for his handgun - and the creature pulls back, with one of those subsonic roars that he more felt than heard.
Young’s radio crackles, the voice on it incomprehensible.
Young darts under the creature’s outstretched claws and hauls Rush to his feet. Doesn’t bother to waste his breath shouting - just shoves Rush along, urging him to a higher speed. And they’re running, fast as they can towards the Gate.
Another one of those roars, and he puts on a new burst of speed.
Young can’t see the river from here. But it’s been raining the entire time they were here, and maybe it was for a long time before that, and mudslides and flash-floods are fairly high on Young’s list of pressing concerns.
~*~
It’s not exactly sleep. He still has sensation, still a trickle of consciousness. A bare awareness of Rush’s presence beside him, as well as the slow growth of the spaceship around them both.
Dirt slowly firms into a cushion of something resembling cellulose, under his back; gradually, the ship takes form. Until, finally -
The link is open and flooding with information, from external atmosphere to internal atmosphere to life support to system status to possible trajectories.
How in hell did he think he was going to think straight enough to fly this?
“Starting launch sequence.”
Young focuses on Rush’s voice, focuses on opening his eyes. The screens ahead, the controls aren’t built intuitively - at least, not intuitively for humans - but the link is still active. Like the communing they did with the trees at first, only a thousand times more refined and accurate.
Ready, he thinks, and slips his mind into the link, trying to call up the countdown.
“All right,” says Rush. “In thirty seconds.”
And Young wonders, because he’s pretty sure he didn’t ask that one out loud.
~*~
Young catches Rush, on a stumble, before he can slip and go down completely in the mud. Behind them, the creature crashes full-on into one of the bigger broccoli trees.
Clumsy.
Clumsy but huge.
And hungry.
Or angry.
They gain speed on the curves. Faster at dodging obstacles than this thing is - so when they’re twisting around trees, over the mini-hills, they gain distance. Get twenty or so extra meters this way, and Young palms his handgun, drawing it.
And Rush, ahead of him, stops dead, just short of the pathway down to the Gate.
“The river!” he shouts, and Young sees it. The river has to be at least thirty feet higher than it was before. Fast-moving, and it’s flooded the steps up to the stargate. As he watches, one of the last scientists pulls another through.
Their hesitation is all the creature needs; it charges at them, footsteps churning the mud, its roar vibrating the ground beneath them.
“Shoot it!” shouts Rush, but Young pauses.
Five bullets, have to make them count.
One more step, another, and Young aims, careful, and squeezes the trigger, once.
BANG.
The creature thuds to the ground in front of them, landing heavily on the edge of a ridge.
…and the rumble from its roar doesn’t stop.
Mudslide.
~*~
It’s hours after they leave atmosphere before Young withdraws, gingerly, from his mental entanglement with the living spacecraft. And he sags back into the seat, fighting a growing headache from the sheer amount of mental power it takes to fly her.
“Colonel?” comes Rush’s voice, almost immediately.
“I know, one hour to FTL,” says Young. “I’m just taking a break.”
There’re a few minutes of silence, in which he watches Rush try trajectory after trajectory, calculating the ideal place to try and intercept the Destiny.
“Trying to figure out where they’ll come out of hyperspace?” asks Young, finally.
And Rush pauses.
“How did you guess?” asks Rush.
“Rush, I can see exactly what you’re doing,” says Young, and then he belatedly realizes that the screens in front of him are dark.
Another pause.
“Colonel,” says Rush, “are we communicating telepathically?”
“Yeah, let’s stop that.”
“Agreed.”
~*~
It happens too fast for reaction, really; one moment the other side of the valley is awash in wind and rain, the next it’s collapsing on itself, rough-and-tumble in a slide of rocks and earth and vegetation.
They never even had enough time to try to get to the stargate.
Rush throws himself at the path down the ridge, and Young is barely fast enough to catch him, before he gets far enough to fall and drown in the swollen river.
“The gate could still be open!” snarls Rush, struggling against Young’s hold. “We have to get to it!”
“If it’s open, it’s flooding the gate room.” Young drags Rush back, his strength against Rush’s desperate, focused panic. “Rush, it’s not open!”
“The ship is leaving!” counters Rush, “do you I’m going to stay here? No! We have one chance!” He finally manages to struggle out of Young’s grasp, twisting around to deck Young across the jaw.
And if Young hadn’t been distracted by the damn hurricane, he would have seen that coming.
This time, Young shoves Rush face-first into one of the trees, pinning him. “Rush,” he snaps, “the ship’s gone. No one could have held the gate open for us under that.” Not unless they were killed in the process.
And Young hopes that didn’t happen.
He almost doesn’t hear Rush’s response, it’s so low:
“I know.”
~*~
“So,” says Young, “how long until we know for sure that we’ll die out here?”
Rush takes an even breath, a long pause before answering. “We’ll stop recycling oxygen in another forty-nine hours,” he says. “If the Destiny doesn’t stop here by then, we’ll be dead.”
Wasn’t exactly what Young was asking, but Young doesn’t pursue it.
~*~
It quickly becomes apparent that the half-light of the storm was, in fact, afternoon or evening; it gets darker, fast, and they find shelter under a set of the broccoli trees, trees where the dome tops seem to actually have interlaced, grown together. A kind of natural roof.
As the sun goes down, the rain slows to a drizzle, but the roar from the river doesn’t stop. Still swollen; still flooded.
Rush is silent, for a long time, and what is there, really, to say? Their situation has changed. It’s no longer about time limits and fixing the Destiny and surviving in space; suddenly, it’s surviving on a planet, with giant scaled creatures and no food and a gun with four bullets left in it.
“This shouldn’t have happened,” says Rush, breaking the silence as evening turns to night.
“No kidding, Rush.”
“We shouldn’t have been the last people through,” Rush insists. “If I was there and someone else was stranded, I’d have at least a chance of getting them back.”
“I’m aware of that.” And he doubts that would have been on the top of Rush’s concerns. There wouldn’t have been any good reason to risk the entire Icarus team on the fleeting possibility of retrieving two crewmembers.
Young shifts, moving to rub the leg that still twinges, from time to time. Mostly-healed, healed enough for him to head up one of the three teams this time around, but he doubts it’ll ever work as well as it used to.
“How can you be so calm?” Rush’s voice is rising in pitch. “You do realize that we’re going to die? That because I’m going to die, the rest of this expedition is going to die? Who do you think is going to pull them together, up there? Eli?”
~*~
“I’m gonna get some sleep, Rush,” exhales Young, after a good twelve hours of watching the empty starfield around them. Thirty hours in the ship already, and his muscles have long since started complaining about the lack of mobility.
Small price to pay for being rescued. And he’d rather die out here than live on that planet forever.
He feels Rush’s assent through the link, more than he senses the man’s nod. No matter what they do, the connection’s growing more acute.
“The brain’s a very adaptable thing,” says Rush. “It figures that the link would be easier to use over time.”
“Rush,” says Young, half-irritated, a warning. Stop it.
And there’s silence, for a moment.
“Thank you,” says Rush, finally.
“For what?”
“Making sure I didn’t stop trying.”
Considering that Young’s survival depended on Rush thinking his way out of their situation on that planet, Young is pretty sure that it wasn’t a big deal.
“Still,” says Rush. “Though, believe me, that's the only time you'll hear it. I won’t be saying it again.”
Young half-laughs.
~*~
“There’s no reason this planet will have adequate nutrients,” Rush points out, as they trek across the edge of the valley, skirting the flooded areas. “We evolved not only on a different planet but in a different galaxy. Any of this is likely to be so foreign that our bodies simply cannot handle it.”
“Considering we have enough food for a day,” says Young, “I think we should probably still give it a try.”
They gather a variety of the native plant life, barely avoiding a herd of the giant, scaley creatures - small animals, ground plants, roots, things that could have been berries, if the imagination were stretched.
On their return, the trees above them are spotted with the beginnings of small fruits. Fruits that look unlike any of the rest of the natural vegetation.
“And how are we supposed to tell if it’ll kill us?” asks Rush. “Eat it and find out?”
“Trust your taste buds,” Young says, “there’s a-” and he flinches away from a falling piece of fruit, barely dodging it. Looks straight up, and he could have sworn that that particular piece fell at an angle, almost like it was -
No, it couldn’t have been thrown.
“Well,” says Rush, “why don’t we start with that one,” and he picks it up, and takes a bite.
~*~
Forty hours.
Young can feel the pain of their home-grown ship as it struggles to keep up with the oxygen demand.
“You realize I’ll be much less impressed with your brilliance if we die out here,” says Young.
“I’ll be broken-up about that, I’m sure,” returns Rush. The biting sarcasm in his voice is lazy now, though. Reflex, not genuine dislike.
Young wonders when that changed.
He closes his eyes, drifting. Through memories that half-are and half-aren’t his, he thinks, unless his fevered imagination produces a snowstorm he never lived through, a photograph of someone he never knew.
~*~
Most of the native vegetation induces vomiting, cold sweats, stomach pains.
But the fruit grown from the trees above them doesn’t.
“Tastes like a fresh orange-flavored steak dinner,” says Rush.
Young agrees.
~*~
The flash of light from Destiny’s FTL drive snaps Young out of his half-sleep, melting away the remnants of dreams clinging to his conscious mind.
Right in front of them, he thinks - means the Destiny must have detected their presence, must have altered course to come find them.
No, that wasn’t Young’s thought, was it? It was Rush’s.
Young switches on his radio, still intact after weeks on the planet’s surface. It fizzes, with static, then crackles on.
“Unknown ship, please identify yourself.”
Young recognizes the voice.
“This is Colonel Young,” says Young, “with Doctor Rush. And boy are we glad to see you.”
~*~
Young is on watch almost every night, gun on the ground next to him, listening for any movement in the trees.
And it’s one of the early nights (orbital cycle of about twenty-eight hours, long enough that it clearly doesn’t line up with a natural sleep cycle), only a few days in, when he’s nearly started out of his skin by Rush letting out what could only be described as an undignified yelp.
“Rush!” calls Young, in alarm, digging for his flashlight. Switches it on to find a vine, an outgrowth from one of the trees, wrapped around Rush’s wrist.
“Get it off!”
Rush flails at it, the vine digging hard into the flesh of his wrist - but the second the flashlight’s beam shines on it, it flinches away, retreating back to a crack in the broccoli tree’s bark.
“What in the hell was that?” asks Young.
~*~
Young wakes up in the makeshift infirmary, still dizzy, bleary. And when he tries to move, he finds that the palm of his right hand is bandaged.
“Colonel?”
Young blinks, heavily, and focuses.
It’s TJ. A TJ that is completely unable to hide her relief and satisfaction at finding him awake.
And next to her, Scott, similarly relieved.
Young turns his head - and there’s Rush, unconscious on the next bed. “Rush?” he asks, trying to shift up, his voice hoarse, throat dry.
“He’s fine,” says TJ, moving to help Young sit up, palm supporting the small of his back. “The ship you were in - we never saw anything like it. You both were unconscious. We had to cut you out.”
Young is glad he can’t remember that. It probably hurt.
“Sir,” says Scott, “what happened to you two?”
Young shakes his head. “It’s a long story,” is all he can say.
~*~
“It’s an unforeseen possibility,” explains Rush, “but we may have to consider that the trees themselves are sentient.”
Young holds up a hand. “Sentient broccoli?”
“Eli’s naming methods notwithstanding, they’re more like cauliflower, considering the uniformity of color and shade-”
“Rush.” Young struggles to process this. “Are you saying communication might be possible?”
“I’m saying it may have already happened,” says Rush. “I’d mention that we still haven’t found any edible foods anywhere else on the explored part of the planet.”
There are explanations. That maybe the fruit is rare (which doesn’t explain why it appeared after their arrival), or that the trees are like Venus flytraps, trying to snare in Rush as a possible food source -
“So you think you can talk with them?” asks Young.
“We’ll see in a few hours,” says Rush, with a little hint of the old arrogance.
Young can use that.
~*~
“Let me in!”
Young increases his pace, at the sound of Rush’s voice. Around the bend in the hallway, and there Rush is, arguing, heated, with Greer.
“Lieutenant Scott says this ship is quarantined,” says Greer, through clenched teeth. “That means not you, not anyone.”
“Excuse me, Sergeant,” says Young, and Rush turns to him.
“Finally, someone with an ounce of sense,” and Rush looks back to Greer, though still addressing Young. “Tell him to let me into the ship.”
Well, why not. “Let him in,” orders Young.
He follows Rush into the hold, where the ship is awkwardly braced on one of its wings. Curved, organic design doesn’t work so well with the Icarus’ metal floors.
Rush is at the ship immediately, assessing the damage, picking out the organic linkups.
“What’re you doing, Rush?” asks Young, in a tone that demands a response.
“You felt what it was like,” says Rush, not even pausing in his work. “The ship’s calculating power added to your own, the extra computing ability. It’s an enhancement that we can’t ignore.”
~*~
By nightfall, Young is forced to conclude that Rush was, in fact, right. About the trees’ sentience.
Rush starts out tapping on the bark, in simple sequences: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Mathematics is theoretically the universal language, and Young watches, with restrained interest. Eventually, the vine starts tapping too, parroting Rush.
Could be coincidence, could be simple imitation - the trees don’t seem to understand prime numbers, but then there’s addition, and subtraction, and that’s a little too much to ignore.
~*~
A day later, and Rush is haggard, frustrated. He can’t get the ship to activate again. There are systems on the Destiny that need fixing, things that require Rush’s attention, and he won’t let go of the ship that saved his life.
“Rush,” calls Young. “Rush.”
“Quiet,” snaps Rush, surfacing, for a moment, from his examination of the ship’s systems. “I should have paid more attention.”
TJ steps up next to Young. “Sir,” she says, just as an astrophysicist next to Rush starts to say, “Maybe if we,” and as another one of the group’s scientists tries to look over Rush’s shoulder, and apparently this is the last straw.
Rush shoves one of them away, and screams, “OUT!”
They pause, for a moment -
“Out!” insists Rush. “Both of you, and you, and you, all of you out.”
They look to Young, but Young just crosses his arms, eyes fixed on Rush. They file out, one by one - even TJ, last, lingering for a second before letting the doors shut behind her.
“You want me to go?” asks Young.
“No, you,” says Rush, “you can stay.”
Young is surprised by that, surprised enough that it’s a moment or two before he speaks. “I can’t allow you to keep doing this.”
“I know,” mutters Rush, ducking under the ship again.
“Get back to working on the Destiny today,” says Young. “By the end of the day.” He doesn’t have a threat to follow that up with, and undoubtedly Rush knows, but Young is hoping -
“Fine,” says Rush.
~*~
After a day or so, the triumphant rush of communicating with a completely alien race is gone, replaced by frustration. There’s no way to communicate more complex ideas. Every attempt is met with apparent confusion, on the part of the trees.
And to make things more aggravating, every time Young comes close to one of them, vines keep trying to touch his hands. Leaves, pressing against his palm.
He snatches his hand away, for the fourth or fifth time in an hour, and Rush frowns, sitting back on his heels. “Colonel,” says Rush.
“What?”
“Let them.”
“Let them what?”
“Have your hand, let them have your hand.”
Cautiously, Young reaches out his hand.
The trees rustle, overhead; a leaf lays flat against his palm and then slices, fast and sure. Young tries to jerk his hand away again, but another vine is tight around his wrist, holding him in place.
Then, as he watches, a stem touches the blood welling on his palm, and slips inside the cut.
~*~
Evening that day Rush finds Young in the gateroom, takes him, drags him back to the shuttle bay. “I understand now,” says Rush. “It needs both of us. It was made for us, not for me.”
Young hisses out a breath. “Fine,” he says. “What do you need me to do?”
And Rush is right. Days apart from the ship mean that Young has forgotten how intense the linkup is, how he can drift in the overflow of information.
He feels Rush’s triumph, through the link. Half-smiles, at it.
~*~
“It’s fascinating,” says Rush. “An entirely alien mindset.”
He rubs the cut on his own palm, the way the aliens linked to him, after they tried Young first.
“Did you notice they have no personal concept of movement?” asks Rush. “Movement is something that happens to other people.”
Young rubs his eyes. He has -
~*~
“…a headache.”
TJ looks worried. “Sir,” she says, “Dr. Rush has been in and out asking for painkillers for a headache he has.”
And it doesn’t take a genius to determine a common cause.
Young can’t deny the increase in productivity, though. Can’t deny that Rush has worked twice as fast as usual, more accurately, leaving the rest of the ship’s scientists far, far behind him. Hadn’t taken Rush long to come up with a way to keep the link activated, even if they were on opposite sides of the ship.
And if it meant that they occasionally caught a spare thought or two, well, that didn’t really matter, did it?
“You have to consider the possibility that this technology wasn’t meant for extended use,” says TJ, after checking the responsiveness of his pupils. “Or that the aliens just didn’t understand human neurology enough to build something precisely suited for it.”
“We’ll put a hold on that concern for now,” says Young. “If it persists, we’ll address it then.”
He can ignore a headache.
~*~
They settle into a rhythm, now. A twenty-eight hour rhythm, of commun(icat)ing with the trees, catching a few hours of sleep here and there. Rush doesn’t ignore Young any longer, and doesn’t blame him anymore, either.
~*~
The headache gets worse.
Soon, it’s headache and dizziness. Blurred vision. Trembling. With Rush, it’s mood swings, too.
This, Young can’t ignore.
And, perversely, it seems that the pain gets worse the more time Young spends with the link switched off.
“Rush,” he says, as Rush hits a pause, a natural gap between equations.
“The headaches, I know,” says Rush. “Neural damage.”
And he should have known that Rush would leap to his own conclusions already.
“We can’t keep doing this.”
“We have to.” Rush’s voice is broken. Too intent. “Don’t you understand?” - He lifts his eyes to Young. “If the damage has already been done, then stopping means I’m not what I used to be. It means I’m less. I can’t have that.”
“The alternative is killing yourself.”
“You don’t know that!” Rush insists, one finger upraised in objection. “You don’t know that, and until you do, this is my decision.”
~*~
“Rush,” says Young, one day, “do these trees know anything about spaceflight?”
~*~
Rush and Young argue until reasons devolve into raised voices devolve into shouts, and until Young deactivates his part of the link, calling in Greer and Scott to physically remove Rush from the bay.
Mist, then, a shower to wash away the stress, to help him forget the fresh headache pounding away behind his eyes.
“It doesn’t fit the evidence,” comes Rush’s voice.
Young’s head snaps up.
“Rush, what the hell are you doing here?”
“It doesn’t,” repeats Rush. “They knew our biology well enough to create food for us, from day one. There’s no way that they made a ship that would overstress and destroy the human brain. There must be something we’re overlooking.”
Young leans back against the shower wall, half-facing away from Rush. “Get out of here,” he says, irate.
“Those trees were interlinked,” says Rush, taking a step closer. “Their entire existence was interlinked. And they made the ship for both of us. What if they assumed that we were linked too?”
“We’re not linked.”
“What if proper functioning depends on it?” persists Rush. “Maybe we’re not having medical problems because we’re linked to the ship, but because we’re not linked enough to each other?”
“And what do you propose we do about that?”
As soon as the words are out of Young’s mouth, he knows.
“Turn on the link,” says Rush, pulling off his shirt.
“I’m not going to,” says Young.
“You are,” says Rush, and he keys open the door.
Young stops him, physically, a hand on Rush’s chest. But there’s nothing to say, is there? Nothing that comes to mind. Like Young is struck silent, just by the thought of it.
Rush reaches up and drags Young into a kiss, brusque and insistent. Goal-oriented, thinks Young. Always goal-oriented.
He shoves Rush away, back a foot or so. “We can’t do this.” And he says it remarkably evenly, low and matter-of-fact.
“Why not?”
“I have a wife.”
“An estranged wife,” points out Rush, and Young would really like to know how Rush knows that. “Spare me the heteronormative issues. We’re better together than we ever will be apart.”
Young almost laughs at that. “You never would have said that before any of this.”
“Doesn’t matter now.”
The next kiss is just a brush, barely a touch at all. Light enough that Young can’t quite seem to breathe. Then another, and it’s deeper, rougher, tangled with an edge of desire that can’t be easily explained away.
Young urges Rush back against the shower wall, ever-closer, until Rush’s skin is slick against his, Rush’s hand tight on the back of his neck.
“Turn on the link,” Rush murmurs, against Young’s neck, and Young pauses, for a second, thinking it on.
The usual rush of information from the ship, yes, but this time he shuts it down, impatiently, skimming over the data, searching for the strains of thought in Rush’s own mind. Clings to them, when he finds them, with a voraciousness that surprises him.
Rush gasps, a little, head tilting back. And Young’s palm skims up narrow hipbones, the very slight curve of Rush’s waist. The headache is forgotten, in the thrill of Rush’s body, the shocking intimacy of the link.
“What are you waiting for?” asks Rush, roughly.
There’s absolutely no apprehension, that Young can sense. Rush is certain that this is the right path. More certain, every second that Young is this close.
That certainty is so close that Young could just reach out and take it.
So he does.
~*~
“Even if they do have space flight,” says Rush, “the odds that we could find and intercept the Destiny are miniscule - and they don’t! They don’t even have a word for ‘movement’.”
“Then we make one,” says Young. “Then we make them invent spaceflight. And then we go try to find Destiny.”
“You never give up, do you?”
“You’re one to talk, Rush.”
Rush shudders, and covers his eyes with his hand. It’s a long moment before he speaks again.
“Fine,” he says. “You win.”
~*~
“Hey,” says Young, as Rush settles the pack on his back. "Come back."
“For you?” asks Rush, dubiously.
Young shoots Rush a look.
“I’ll come back,” Rush promises.
And Young watches the light blue glow of the stargate swallow up Rush’s form.
Rating: R
Spoilers: ...through the first four episodes?
Warnings: None
Word Count: ~4700
Notes: So I was sick the last couple of days, and decided to use the ol' rusty fanfic skills. Hopefully this is all coherent. Unbeta'ed.
Summary: Young and Rush are stranded on an alien planet. One-shot; complete.
~*~
Young can’t follow what it is that Rush is thinking. Doesn’t understand half of the symbols he scratches out on the rock of the cave wall, nor the rough sketches of stars, trajectories.
He does follow the cold, triumphant glint in Rush’s eye as he steps back from his handiwork, fist clenched by his side.
“We can make it,” he says, and Young breathes a shuddered sigh of relief.
~*~
“Hold the Gate open!”
Colonel Everett Young’s shout, to one of the retreating scientists, is swallowed in the rush of the wind and rain. He can barely see the Stargate’s shimmer, the glow against the darkness that might have been evening, dawn, or just eternal hurricane.
He hates this planet.
There’s a strangled cry, from behind him -
Rush.
~*~
The trees trill at them, now, with a mix of protectiveness/joy/apprehension/excitement that reminds Young, somehow, of a mother sending her child out into the world for the first time.
Dangerous, he knows, to project human emotion on creatures as alien as this.
“They want us to go to sleep,” says Rush, a hint of a question in his voice.
A leaf presses, playfully, against Young’s palm.
“Yeah,” says Young. It lines up with his impressions.
Rush settles down, onto his back, over one of the long, flattened tree roots. And Young pauses.
“Colonel?” asks Rush.
Young glances up to the sky. Stars obscured by heavy cloud cover.
“Yeah,” he says, “I’m ready.”
~*~
Young skids to a halt, in the mud, and turns back. Three steps and Young grabs Rush, throwing him bodily as far away as he can. Just in time, because one of those scaly creatures smashes the ground between them, uprooting two of the broccoli-trees and cracking a third.
Young can’t spare a second to look back to the stargate. He fumbles for his handgun - and the creature pulls back, with one of those subsonic roars that he more felt than heard.
Young’s radio crackles, the voice on it incomprehensible.
Young darts under the creature’s outstretched claws and hauls Rush to his feet. Doesn’t bother to waste his breath shouting - just shoves Rush along, urging him to a higher speed. And they’re running, fast as they can towards the Gate.
Another one of those roars, and he puts on a new burst of speed.
Young can’t see the river from here. But it’s been raining the entire time they were here, and maybe it was for a long time before that, and mudslides and flash-floods are fairly high on Young’s list of pressing concerns.
~*~
It’s not exactly sleep. He still has sensation, still a trickle of consciousness. A bare awareness of Rush’s presence beside him, as well as the slow growth of the spaceship around them both.
Dirt slowly firms into a cushion of something resembling cellulose, under his back; gradually, the ship takes form. Until, finally -
The link is open and flooding with information, from external atmosphere to internal atmosphere to life support to system status to possible trajectories.
How in hell did he think he was going to think straight enough to fly this?
“Starting launch sequence.”
Young focuses on Rush’s voice, focuses on opening his eyes. The screens ahead, the controls aren’t built intuitively - at least, not intuitively for humans - but the link is still active. Like the communing they did with the trees at first, only a thousand times more refined and accurate.
Ready, he thinks, and slips his mind into the link, trying to call up the countdown.
“All right,” says Rush. “In thirty seconds.”
And Young wonders, because he’s pretty sure he didn’t ask that one out loud.
~*~
Young catches Rush, on a stumble, before he can slip and go down completely in the mud. Behind them, the creature crashes full-on into one of the bigger broccoli trees.
Clumsy.
Clumsy but huge.
And hungry.
Or angry.
They gain speed on the curves. Faster at dodging obstacles than this thing is - so when they’re twisting around trees, over the mini-hills, they gain distance. Get twenty or so extra meters this way, and Young palms his handgun, drawing it.
And Rush, ahead of him, stops dead, just short of the pathway down to the Gate.
“The river!” he shouts, and Young sees it. The river has to be at least thirty feet higher than it was before. Fast-moving, and it’s flooded the steps up to the stargate. As he watches, one of the last scientists pulls another through.
Their hesitation is all the creature needs; it charges at them, footsteps churning the mud, its roar vibrating the ground beneath them.
“Shoot it!” shouts Rush, but Young pauses.
Five bullets, have to make them count.
One more step, another, and Young aims, careful, and squeezes the trigger, once.
BANG.
The creature thuds to the ground in front of them, landing heavily on the edge of a ridge.
…and the rumble from its roar doesn’t stop.
Mudslide.
~*~
It’s hours after they leave atmosphere before Young withdraws, gingerly, from his mental entanglement with the living spacecraft. And he sags back into the seat, fighting a growing headache from the sheer amount of mental power it takes to fly her.
“Colonel?” comes Rush’s voice, almost immediately.
“I know, one hour to FTL,” says Young. “I’m just taking a break.”
There’re a few minutes of silence, in which he watches Rush try trajectory after trajectory, calculating the ideal place to try and intercept the Destiny.
“Trying to figure out where they’ll come out of hyperspace?” asks Young, finally.
And Rush pauses.
“How did you guess?” asks Rush.
“Rush, I can see exactly what you’re doing,” says Young, and then he belatedly realizes that the screens in front of him are dark.
Another pause.
“Colonel,” says Rush, “are we communicating telepathically?”
“Yeah, let’s stop that.”
“Agreed.”
~*~
It happens too fast for reaction, really; one moment the other side of the valley is awash in wind and rain, the next it’s collapsing on itself, rough-and-tumble in a slide of rocks and earth and vegetation.
They never even had enough time to try to get to the stargate.
Rush throws himself at the path down the ridge, and Young is barely fast enough to catch him, before he gets far enough to fall and drown in the swollen river.
“The gate could still be open!” snarls Rush, struggling against Young’s hold. “We have to get to it!”
“If it’s open, it’s flooding the gate room.” Young drags Rush back, his strength against Rush’s desperate, focused panic. “Rush, it’s not open!”
“The ship is leaving!” counters Rush, “do you I’m going to stay here? No! We have one chance!” He finally manages to struggle out of Young’s grasp, twisting around to deck Young across the jaw.
And if Young hadn’t been distracted by the damn hurricane, he would have seen that coming.
This time, Young shoves Rush face-first into one of the trees, pinning him. “Rush,” he snaps, “the ship’s gone. No one could have held the gate open for us under that.” Not unless they were killed in the process.
And Young hopes that didn’t happen.
He almost doesn’t hear Rush’s response, it’s so low:
“I know.”
~*~
“So,” says Young, “how long until we know for sure that we’ll die out here?”
Rush takes an even breath, a long pause before answering. “We’ll stop recycling oxygen in another forty-nine hours,” he says. “If the Destiny doesn’t stop here by then, we’ll be dead.”
Wasn’t exactly what Young was asking, but Young doesn’t pursue it.
~*~
It quickly becomes apparent that the half-light of the storm was, in fact, afternoon or evening; it gets darker, fast, and they find shelter under a set of the broccoli trees, trees where the dome tops seem to actually have interlaced, grown together. A kind of natural roof.
As the sun goes down, the rain slows to a drizzle, but the roar from the river doesn’t stop. Still swollen; still flooded.
Rush is silent, for a long time, and what is there, really, to say? Their situation has changed. It’s no longer about time limits and fixing the Destiny and surviving in space; suddenly, it’s surviving on a planet, with giant scaled creatures and no food and a gun with four bullets left in it.
“This shouldn’t have happened,” says Rush, breaking the silence as evening turns to night.
“No kidding, Rush.”
“We shouldn’t have been the last people through,” Rush insists. “If I was there and someone else was stranded, I’d have at least a chance of getting them back.”
“I’m aware of that.” And he doubts that would have been on the top of Rush’s concerns. There wouldn’t have been any good reason to risk the entire Icarus team on the fleeting possibility of retrieving two crewmembers.
Young shifts, moving to rub the leg that still twinges, from time to time. Mostly-healed, healed enough for him to head up one of the three teams this time around, but he doubts it’ll ever work as well as it used to.
“How can you be so calm?” Rush’s voice is rising in pitch. “You do realize that we’re going to die? That because I’m going to die, the rest of this expedition is going to die? Who do you think is going to pull them together, up there? Eli?”
~*~
“I’m gonna get some sleep, Rush,” exhales Young, after a good twelve hours of watching the empty starfield around them. Thirty hours in the ship already, and his muscles have long since started complaining about the lack of mobility.
Small price to pay for being rescued. And he’d rather die out here than live on that planet forever.
He feels Rush’s assent through the link, more than he senses the man’s nod. No matter what they do, the connection’s growing more acute.
“The brain’s a very adaptable thing,” says Rush. “It figures that the link would be easier to use over time.”
“Rush,” says Young, half-irritated, a warning. Stop it.
And there’s silence, for a moment.
“Thank you,” says Rush, finally.
“For what?”
“Making sure I didn’t stop trying.”
Considering that Young’s survival depended on Rush thinking his way out of their situation on that planet, Young is pretty sure that it wasn’t a big deal.
“Still,” says Rush. “Though, believe me, that's the only time you'll hear it. I won’t be saying it again.”
Young half-laughs.
~*~
“There’s no reason this planet will have adequate nutrients,” Rush points out, as they trek across the edge of the valley, skirting the flooded areas. “We evolved not only on a different planet but in a different galaxy. Any of this is likely to be so foreign that our bodies simply cannot handle it.”
“Considering we have enough food for a day,” says Young, “I think we should probably still give it a try.”
They gather a variety of the native plant life, barely avoiding a herd of the giant, scaley creatures - small animals, ground plants, roots, things that could have been berries, if the imagination were stretched.
On their return, the trees above them are spotted with the beginnings of small fruits. Fruits that look unlike any of the rest of the natural vegetation.
“And how are we supposed to tell if it’ll kill us?” asks Rush. “Eat it and find out?”
“Trust your taste buds,” Young says, “there’s a-” and he flinches away from a falling piece of fruit, barely dodging it. Looks straight up, and he could have sworn that that particular piece fell at an angle, almost like it was -
No, it couldn’t have been thrown.
“Well,” says Rush, “why don’t we start with that one,” and he picks it up, and takes a bite.
~*~
Forty hours.
Young can feel the pain of their home-grown ship as it struggles to keep up with the oxygen demand.
“You realize I’ll be much less impressed with your brilliance if we die out here,” says Young.
“I’ll be broken-up about that, I’m sure,” returns Rush. The biting sarcasm in his voice is lazy now, though. Reflex, not genuine dislike.
Young wonders when that changed.
He closes his eyes, drifting. Through memories that half-are and half-aren’t his, he thinks, unless his fevered imagination produces a snowstorm he never lived through, a photograph of someone he never knew.
~*~
Most of the native vegetation induces vomiting, cold sweats, stomach pains.
But the fruit grown from the trees above them doesn’t.
“Tastes like a fresh orange-flavored steak dinner,” says Rush.
Young agrees.
~*~
The flash of light from Destiny’s FTL drive snaps Young out of his half-sleep, melting away the remnants of dreams clinging to his conscious mind.
Right in front of them, he thinks - means the Destiny must have detected their presence, must have altered course to come find them.
No, that wasn’t Young’s thought, was it? It was Rush’s.
Young switches on his radio, still intact after weeks on the planet’s surface. It fizzes, with static, then crackles on.
“Unknown ship, please identify yourself.”
Young recognizes the voice.
“This is Colonel Young,” says Young, “with Doctor Rush. And boy are we glad to see you.”
~*~
Young is on watch almost every night, gun on the ground next to him, listening for any movement in the trees.
And it’s one of the early nights (orbital cycle of about twenty-eight hours, long enough that it clearly doesn’t line up with a natural sleep cycle), only a few days in, when he’s nearly started out of his skin by Rush letting out what could only be described as an undignified yelp.
“Rush!” calls Young, in alarm, digging for his flashlight. Switches it on to find a vine, an outgrowth from one of the trees, wrapped around Rush’s wrist.
“Get it off!”
Rush flails at it, the vine digging hard into the flesh of his wrist - but the second the flashlight’s beam shines on it, it flinches away, retreating back to a crack in the broccoli tree’s bark.
“What in the hell was that?” asks Young.
~*~
Young wakes up in the makeshift infirmary, still dizzy, bleary. And when he tries to move, he finds that the palm of his right hand is bandaged.
“Colonel?”
Young blinks, heavily, and focuses.
It’s TJ. A TJ that is completely unable to hide her relief and satisfaction at finding him awake.
And next to her, Scott, similarly relieved.
Young turns his head - and there’s Rush, unconscious on the next bed. “Rush?” he asks, trying to shift up, his voice hoarse, throat dry.
“He’s fine,” says TJ, moving to help Young sit up, palm supporting the small of his back. “The ship you were in - we never saw anything like it. You both were unconscious. We had to cut you out.”
Young is glad he can’t remember that. It probably hurt.
“Sir,” says Scott, “what happened to you two?”
Young shakes his head. “It’s a long story,” is all he can say.
~*~
“It’s an unforeseen possibility,” explains Rush, “but we may have to consider that the trees themselves are sentient.”
Young holds up a hand. “Sentient broccoli?”
“Eli’s naming methods notwithstanding, they’re more like cauliflower, considering the uniformity of color and shade-”
“Rush.” Young struggles to process this. “Are you saying communication might be possible?”
“I’m saying it may have already happened,” says Rush. “I’d mention that we still haven’t found any edible foods anywhere else on the explored part of the planet.”
There are explanations. That maybe the fruit is rare (which doesn’t explain why it appeared after their arrival), or that the trees are like Venus flytraps, trying to snare in Rush as a possible food source -
“So you think you can talk with them?” asks Young.
“We’ll see in a few hours,” says Rush, with a little hint of the old arrogance.
Young can use that.
~*~
“Let me in!”
Young increases his pace, at the sound of Rush’s voice. Around the bend in the hallway, and there Rush is, arguing, heated, with Greer.
“Lieutenant Scott says this ship is quarantined,” says Greer, through clenched teeth. “That means not you, not anyone.”
“Excuse me, Sergeant,” says Young, and Rush turns to him.
“Finally, someone with an ounce of sense,” and Rush looks back to Greer, though still addressing Young. “Tell him to let me into the ship.”
Well, why not. “Let him in,” orders Young.
He follows Rush into the hold, where the ship is awkwardly braced on one of its wings. Curved, organic design doesn’t work so well with the Icarus’ metal floors.
Rush is at the ship immediately, assessing the damage, picking out the organic linkups.
“What’re you doing, Rush?” asks Young, in a tone that demands a response.
“You felt what it was like,” says Rush, not even pausing in his work. “The ship’s calculating power added to your own, the extra computing ability. It’s an enhancement that we can’t ignore.”
~*~
By nightfall, Young is forced to conclude that Rush was, in fact, right. About the trees’ sentience.
Rush starts out tapping on the bark, in simple sequences: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Mathematics is theoretically the universal language, and Young watches, with restrained interest. Eventually, the vine starts tapping too, parroting Rush.
Could be coincidence, could be simple imitation - the trees don’t seem to understand prime numbers, but then there’s addition, and subtraction, and that’s a little too much to ignore.
~*~
A day later, and Rush is haggard, frustrated. He can’t get the ship to activate again. There are systems on the Destiny that need fixing, things that require Rush’s attention, and he won’t let go of the ship that saved his life.
“Rush,” calls Young. “Rush.”
“Quiet,” snaps Rush, surfacing, for a moment, from his examination of the ship’s systems. “I should have paid more attention.”
TJ steps up next to Young. “Sir,” she says, just as an astrophysicist next to Rush starts to say, “Maybe if we,” and as another one of the group’s scientists tries to look over Rush’s shoulder, and apparently this is the last straw.
Rush shoves one of them away, and screams, “OUT!”
They pause, for a moment -
“Out!” insists Rush. “Both of you, and you, and you, all of you out.”
They look to Young, but Young just crosses his arms, eyes fixed on Rush. They file out, one by one - even TJ, last, lingering for a second before letting the doors shut behind her.
“You want me to go?” asks Young.
“No, you,” says Rush, “you can stay.”
Young is surprised by that, surprised enough that it’s a moment or two before he speaks. “I can’t allow you to keep doing this.”
“I know,” mutters Rush, ducking under the ship again.
“Get back to working on the Destiny today,” says Young. “By the end of the day.” He doesn’t have a threat to follow that up with, and undoubtedly Rush knows, but Young is hoping -
“Fine,” says Rush.
~*~
After a day or so, the triumphant rush of communicating with a completely alien race is gone, replaced by frustration. There’s no way to communicate more complex ideas. Every attempt is met with apparent confusion, on the part of the trees.
And to make things more aggravating, every time Young comes close to one of them, vines keep trying to touch his hands. Leaves, pressing against his palm.
He snatches his hand away, for the fourth or fifth time in an hour, and Rush frowns, sitting back on his heels. “Colonel,” says Rush.
“What?”
“Let them.”
“Let them what?”
“Have your hand, let them have your hand.”
Cautiously, Young reaches out his hand.
The trees rustle, overhead; a leaf lays flat against his palm and then slices, fast and sure. Young tries to jerk his hand away again, but another vine is tight around his wrist, holding him in place.
Then, as he watches, a stem touches the blood welling on his palm, and slips inside the cut.
~*~
Evening that day Rush finds Young in the gateroom, takes him, drags him back to the shuttle bay. “I understand now,” says Rush. “It needs both of us. It was made for us, not for me.”
Young hisses out a breath. “Fine,” he says. “What do you need me to do?”
And Rush is right. Days apart from the ship mean that Young has forgotten how intense the linkup is, how he can drift in the overflow of information.
He feels Rush’s triumph, through the link. Half-smiles, at it.
~*~
“It’s fascinating,” says Rush. “An entirely alien mindset.”
He rubs the cut on his own palm, the way the aliens linked to him, after they tried Young first.
“Did you notice they have no personal concept of movement?” asks Rush. “Movement is something that happens to other people.”
Young rubs his eyes. He has -
~*~
“…a headache.”
TJ looks worried. “Sir,” she says, “Dr. Rush has been in and out asking for painkillers for a headache he has.”
And it doesn’t take a genius to determine a common cause.
Young can’t deny the increase in productivity, though. Can’t deny that Rush has worked twice as fast as usual, more accurately, leaving the rest of the ship’s scientists far, far behind him. Hadn’t taken Rush long to come up with a way to keep the link activated, even if they were on opposite sides of the ship.
And if it meant that they occasionally caught a spare thought or two, well, that didn’t really matter, did it?
“You have to consider the possibility that this technology wasn’t meant for extended use,” says TJ, after checking the responsiveness of his pupils. “Or that the aliens just didn’t understand human neurology enough to build something precisely suited for it.”
“We’ll put a hold on that concern for now,” says Young. “If it persists, we’ll address it then.”
He can ignore a headache.
~*~
They settle into a rhythm, now. A twenty-eight hour rhythm, of commun(icat)ing with the trees, catching a few hours of sleep here and there. Rush doesn’t ignore Young any longer, and doesn’t blame him anymore, either.
~*~
The headache gets worse.
Soon, it’s headache and dizziness. Blurred vision. Trembling. With Rush, it’s mood swings, too.
This, Young can’t ignore.
And, perversely, it seems that the pain gets worse the more time Young spends with the link switched off.
“Rush,” he says, as Rush hits a pause, a natural gap between equations.
“The headaches, I know,” says Rush. “Neural damage.”
And he should have known that Rush would leap to his own conclusions already.
“We can’t keep doing this.”
“We have to.” Rush’s voice is broken. Too intent. “Don’t you understand?” - He lifts his eyes to Young. “If the damage has already been done, then stopping means I’m not what I used to be. It means I’m less. I can’t have that.”
“The alternative is killing yourself.”
“You don’t know that!” Rush insists, one finger upraised in objection. “You don’t know that, and until you do, this is my decision.”
~*~
“Rush,” says Young, one day, “do these trees know anything about spaceflight?”
~*~
Rush and Young argue until reasons devolve into raised voices devolve into shouts, and until Young deactivates his part of the link, calling in Greer and Scott to physically remove Rush from the bay.
Mist, then, a shower to wash away the stress, to help him forget the fresh headache pounding away behind his eyes.
“It doesn’t fit the evidence,” comes Rush’s voice.
Young’s head snaps up.
“Rush, what the hell are you doing here?”
“It doesn’t,” repeats Rush. “They knew our biology well enough to create food for us, from day one. There’s no way that they made a ship that would overstress and destroy the human brain. There must be something we’re overlooking.”
Young leans back against the shower wall, half-facing away from Rush. “Get out of here,” he says, irate.
“Those trees were interlinked,” says Rush, taking a step closer. “Their entire existence was interlinked. And they made the ship for both of us. What if they assumed that we were linked too?”
“We’re not linked.”
“What if proper functioning depends on it?” persists Rush. “Maybe we’re not having medical problems because we’re linked to the ship, but because we’re not linked enough to each other?”
“And what do you propose we do about that?”
As soon as the words are out of Young’s mouth, he knows.
“Turn on the link,” says Rush, pulling off his shirt.
“I’m not going to,” says Young.
“You are,” says Rush, and he keys open the door.
Young stops him, physically, a hand on Rush’s chest. But there’s nothing to say, is there? Nothing that comes to mind. Like Young is struck silent, just by the thought of it.
Rush reaches up and drags Young into a kiss, brusque and insistent. Goal-oriented, thinks Young. Always goal-oriented.
He shoves Rush away, back a foot or so. “We can’t do this.” And he says it remarkably evenly, low and matter-of-fact.
“Why not?”
“I have a wife.”
“An estranged wife,” points out Rush, and Young would really like to know how Rush knows that. “Spare me the heteronormative issues. We’re better together than we ever will be apart.”
Young almost laughs at that. “You never would have said that before any of this.”
“Doesn’t matter now.”
The next kiss is just a brush, barely a touch at all. Light enough that Young can’t quite seem to breathe. Then another, and it’s deeper, rougher, tangled with an edge of desire that can’t be easily explained away.
Young urges Rush back against the shower wall, ever-closer, until Rush’s skin is slick against his, Rush’s hand tight on the back of his neck.
“Turn on the link,” Rush murmurs, against Young’s neck, and Young pauses, for a second, thinking it on.
The usual rush of information from the ship, yes, but this time he shuts it down, impatiently, skimming over the data, searching for the strains of thought in Rush’s own mind. Clings to them, when he finds them, with a voraciousness that surprises him.
Rush gasps, a little, head tilting back. And Young’s palm skims up narrow hipbones, the very slight curve of Rush’s waist. The headache is forgotten, in the thrill of Rush’s body, the shocking intimacy of the link.
“What are you waiting for?” asks Rush, roughly.
There’s absolutely no apprehension, that Young can sense. Rush is certain that this is the right path. More certain, every second that Young is this close.
That certainty is so close that Young could just reach out and take it.
So he does.
~*~
“Even if they do have space flight,” says Rush, “the odds that we could find and intercept the Destiny are miniscule - and they don’t! They don’t even have a word for ‘movement’.”
“Then we make one,” says Young. “Then we make them invent spaceflight. And then we go try to find Destiny.”
“You never give up, do you?”
“You’re one to talk, Rush.”
Rush shudders, and covers his eyes with his hand. It’s a long moment before he speaks again.
“Fine,” he says. “You win.”
~*~
“Hey,” says Young, as Rush settles the pack on his back. "Come back."
“For you?” asks Rush, dubiously.
Young shoots Rush a look.
“I’ll come back,” Rush promises.
And Young watches the light blue glow of the stargate swallow up Rush’s form.