Qui Habitat
I don't even know what happened. I got asked a question about Qui Habitat (Hi, Lizbet0!) that I'd punted on in probably 2012 and now answered... to the tune of 2500 words and what is essentially the first part of Chapter 19 of the story.
*giant handflail*
Cam reread the email again, as if he could have possibly misread two sentences straightforward in their construction.
“Corporal,” he called over to Waterman, who was doing something at her computer. She typed faster with one damaged hand on her modified keyboard than he did with two good hands on a standard one. “Is there anything peculiar rumored to be going on in the city? Say, pertaining to our people?”
As a rule, Cam didn’t go to command staff meetings unless there was a crisis of some kind, so getting an invite from Weir to attend the next one was a little weird and not necessarily in the good way.
“You’re going to have to narrow it down, sir,” Waterman replied without looking up or stopping what she was doing. “Our scales of peculiar are not commensurate.”
“I’ve got an invite to the main conference room at 0930 tomorrow from Doctor Weir,” he explained. “There’s not much I’m needed for that wouldn’t go through Lorne or Sheppard first and Mister Quinn was not copied on the message, so odds are it’s not anything to do with our home galaxy. Teyla wasn’t mentioned at all, so it’s nothing to do with the refugees.”
That got Waterman to pause with a final stump-tap to her mouse. She tilted her head thoughtfully. “Still could be about the refugees, sir. You’re doing plenty that Teyla’s not really involved with. But maybe there’s some sort of rearranging going on on the civilian side of the house that’s going to affect the SFs? Doctor Weir might want someone there to represent them against the Battalion because she knows they’ve got no chance if the discussion happens in Oz.”
Cam thought that that was both absolute truth - Lorne’s office was USMC territory no matter what service the man himself belonged to - and absolutely overstating Weir’s interest in the inter-service pissing matches that occasionally spilled outside of Little Tripoli. He was sure she was aware of them but provided they didn’t turn into a problem for the rest of the city, she let them go without comment. Or, why there’d been no top-level discussion about last month’s civil defense evolution.
“I guess there’s one way to find out,” he mused rather than say any of that. “But since I’ll be there, is there anything else going on that I have been blissfully ignorant of and shouldn’t have been?”
Waterman grinned at him. “We don’t have time for that list, sir, it’s already 1750.”
He debated asking Lorne if he’d heard anything, but ultimately decided that he could live with the mystery until tomorrow morning. Instead, he decided to try out the new ‘restaurant’ for dinner, a recent addition to the bazaar over in D-9. The original commissary hadn’t been built for the population that currently inhabited the city and they also had more culinarily-talented refugees than could be given meaningful employment there, so alternate eating arrangements were always being tried out. Cam had been part of the project to clear out and secure an outdoor courtyard that was slowly becoming a food court in addition to a place where the refugees who lived and worked in the city could maybe recreate a little bit of home. There were stalls for crafts and clothes and impromptu musical performances on instruments nobody from Earth had ever seen, but most of the stalls were for food, each dedicated to a couple of dishes from a planet that had fallen to the Ori or, occasionally, the Wraith. The foods on offer were usually either hard to scale up to commissary-sized portions or just too unusual to be offered to the masses and Cam wasn’t always interested in eating food he couldn’t easily identify - he did that enough off-world. But he’d spent a fair bit of time on Selenis during the fight against the Ori and the new spot not only promised the kebabs he’d enjoyed there, but also the not-really-papaya salad and he was kind of curious what they were going to use for that here in Pegasus.
The bazaar was still mostly visited by the refugee population, but the Atlantis ‘natives’ were going out there more frequently and so Cam wasn’t surprised to wind up sitting next to a table of biomedical engineers raving about the Wargolian couscous and raving in an entirely different fashion about Volnik.
The answer to the papaya question, it turned out, was that the Seleni were using a kind of Pegasus fruit that Atlantis traded for to use as a meat substitute by cooking it to death. Raw, it was close enough to green papaya, especially if marinated in lemon juice.
The answer to the conference room question, on the other hand, made a lot less sense. Or, first a lot more and then a lot less.
“This is a matter that has been punted down the line enough times to qualify as a football,” Weir said after she’d informed the assembled - the division principals and their deputies, plus Cam and Teyla - that she wanted to talk about the leadership succession. “I had plenty of time to regret the delay during the recent summit with the Genii, although that was but the latest reminder. There are Ori armies in Pegasus, lady and gentlemen, and we can no longer pretend that keeping me in Atlantis will keep me safe. There must be a plan for if the worst happens. I have no illusions about my personal importance, but the office must be filled by someone and we should all agree who that someone will be.
“I have considered what I feel are the essential pre-requisites for candidacy,” she went on after a bit of murmuring because while this sort of planning for ‘after I’m dead’ was morbid, it was also necessary - and complicated by politics and personalities. “First and foremost, they must be a civilian. Atlantis has and will continue to fall under military control in times of crisis, but I strongly believe that something essential will be lost if that state were to become permanent.
“Secondly, the candidate should nonetheless have a strong working relationship with the military. We must acknowledge reality and the reality is that we are at war. Colonel Sheppard and I have established mutual trust and respect over years of shared experiences and my successor won’t have that grace period to build that relationship ex nihilo. It’s why I haven’t gone over to G-2 and plucked out a few social scientists to serve their apprenticeships.”
Muted laughter around the table at the joke, which wasn’t really a joke under the circumstances but funny nonetheless because it was the redheaded stepchildren of Atlantis getting picked on once more.
“Thirdly, it has to be someone who already has a grasp of how the city works, how the SGC worked, and what the ‘normal’ we left behind used to look like. Which is why the candidates I’ve chosen are all in this room.”
Cam looked around, as did everyone else. He was merely curious, but Safir and Zelenka were looking at each other in abject horror.
“My three proposed candidates are Teyla, Doctor Safir, and, with the caveat that he resign his commission before assuming control of the city, Colonel Mitchell,” Weir said and the room exploded around Cam, who in turn just sat there surprised and confused because he’d assumed himself present as a courtesy after ‘must be a civilian.’
He looked over to Sheppard, sitting on his right, and Sheppard just shrugged. “Could do worse,” he said, sounding completely unbothered and unsurprised by the choices and Cam wondered if he’d already known. Of course, this was still Sheppard, who was opaque on the best of days and he could be absolutely pissed and Cam wasn’t sure he’d be able to tell.
“I made these choices not to spite anyone not chosen,” Weir went on, voice raised until there was no competition. “But with the larger picture in mind: the candidate’s elevation necessarily would leave a hole in their division and if that hole would be greater than the one caused by my absence…” she trailed off, looking at Lorne and Zelenka meaningfully.
Everyone in the room knew that Science and Little Tripoli would collapse into the black hole either of Lorne or Zelenka would leave through promotion or death. Cam, on the other hand, knew he was a supernumerary and it had been a struggle to find something for him to do, so him not doing it anymore wouldn’t matter much. Teyla and Safir, on the other hand…
“Elizabeth,” Beckett began, one hand on Safir’s breast to keep him from either leaping out of his seat or, more likely, saying something everyone would regret. “I don’t-”
“I’m not downplaying your work, Jonathan,” Weir cut him off and spoke directly to Safir. “Your efforts with the prior plague are a blessing upon two galaxies and you have kept this city safe since the first day with the contagion protocols. But I am, perhaps, downplaying your role in the administration of the Medical Division. Your work as an epidemiologist is irreplaceable, but your work as DCMO is not.”
Safir sat stone-faced even as Beckett moved his hand to Safir’s shoulder and squeezed.
“I appreciate that this is a burden none of you want,” Weir went on when Safir’s silence continued. “The three of you are being asked to allow the possibility of having to set aside what you feel you are best at, what is an essential part of who you are.”
She looked around the room at everyone and Cam could appreciate how she’d thrived as a diplomat and then as the head of the SGC: she could read a room and engage them like a magician.
“But I will also remind you that this is a worst-case scenario and, unless I am felled by choking on a cherry pit in the commissary, the worst case will be at hand. We will be in survival
mode, lady and gentlemen, and who we want to be will not matter if the alternative is to not be at all.”
Weir had more to say, about this and about other possible candidates and what the time frame was for anyone having anything to say about her proposals, but Cam accepted that he wasn’t quite listening and would have to get the actual details from Lorne. Something was crawling under his skin - not literally, thank the Lord - but something about this, about this surprise candidacy for a job he hoped would never be open, was not okay and he couldn’t quite place it. Or maybe he could, but he couldn’t figure out how much it was distressing him.
Maybe it was ego, maybe it was the months he’d spent as the effective leader of the resistance along with Sam and then, after Sam disappeared, on his own, but he was comfortable with the idea of leadership. He’d trained for it for years; he’d performed it well first in Big Air Force and then with his F-302 squadron in the SGC before he’d even had to take nominal charge of SG-1 and real charge of the remnant of the SGC. He knew he could do it. But the idea of doing it as a civilian… it bothered him more than he thought it would. He’d been Air Force for half his life and he’d never really considered life as Mister Mitchell. Before, he always thought he’d be that retiree at the BX passing judgment on the young airmen as he mooched free samples. Now, he’d spent the last couple of years prepared to die with his boots on and the awareness of the likelihood of that had obliterated any fantasy civilian scenarios.
The meeting ended and Cam left, feeling a little unmoored and a bit lonely. Safir was being corralled by Beckett and Lorne and Teyla had made a beeline for Sheppard, but Cam had nobody to check in on him and so he headed off. His first thinking was that he’d go to his office and then, not really up for either paperwork or Waterman giving him crap about not wanting to do paperwork, he looked at the transporter map and poked an illuminated spot not near Little Tripoli.
He wound up in one of the gardens that had been created by the refugees from Julait, a weird spot that was somehow both absolutely chaotic and extraordinarily peaceful. It was full of trees and plants and flowers that were all grown high and wide, some leaning against trellises and most moving freely in the breeze. He chose a low stone bench, a beanbag-shaped thing with a seat carved in, that sat under a set of woody vines that had been woven together and were growing into a canopy of light orange flowers that looked like daffodils.
It wasn’t actually the civilian thing, he decided. Which was indeed weirding him out but not what was ultimately making him uncomfortable in his own skin. It was the fact that he was so inessential to everything that reassigning him had no impact on anything. It was being confronted with this redundancy in a room full of Atlantis’s most important people after having spent so long being one of the important people. It was hard on his ego, yes, but it was harder on whatever part of him had been driven to join the service in the first place. He had joined up to give and to do and to serve and he wasn’t doing any of that right now. Weir thought he could be the most important person in Atlantis, which was the most important person in the last bastion of freedom that the Milky Way understood to exist, but right now he was nothing. His home was occupied, his family and friends either dead or missing or worshiping false gods, and he wasn’t doing anything about it. He was probably the last surviving member of SG-1 and the head-in-exile of the SGC itself and for what?
Or maybe, the voice in his head that still sounded like Daniel Jackson, it was the survivor’s guilt talking really loudly again.
Also posted at DW.
*giant handflail*
Cam reread the email again, as if he could have possibly misread two sentences straightforward in their construction.
“Corporal,” he called over to Waterman, who was doing something at her computer. She typed faster with one damaged hand on her modified keyboard than he did with two good hands on a standard one. “Is there anything peculiar rumored to be going on in the city? Say, pertaining to our people?”
As a rule, Cam didn’t go to command staff meetings unless there was a crisis of some kind, so getting an invite from Weir to attend the next one was a little weird and not necessarily in the good way.
“You’re going to have to narrow it down, sir,” Waterman replied without looking up or stopping what she was doing. “Our scales of peculiar are not commensurate.”
“I’ve got an invite to the main conference room at 0930 tomorrow from Doctor Weir,” he explained. “There’s not much I’m needed for that wouldn’t go through Lorne or Sheppard first and Mister Quinn was not copied on the message, so odds are it’s not anything to do with our home galaxy. Teyla wasn’t mentioned at all, so it’s nothing to do with the refugees.”
That got Waterman to pause with a final stump-tap to her mouse. She tilted her head thoughtfully. “Still could be about the refugees, sir. You’re doing plenty that Teyla’s not really involved with. But maybe there’s some sort of rearranging going on on the civilian side of the house that’s going to affect the SFs? Doctor Weir might want someone there to represent them against the Battalion because she knows they’ve got no chance if the discussion happens in Oz.”
Cam thought that that was both absolute truth - Lorne’s office was USMC territory no matter what service the man himself belonged to - and absolutely overstating Weir’s interest in the inter-service pissing matches that occasionally spilled outside of Little Tripoli. He was sure she was aware of them but provided they didn’t turn into a problem for the rest of the city, she let them go without comment. Or, why there’d been no top-level discussion about last month’s civil defense evolution.
“I guess there’s one way to find out,” he mused rather than say any of that. “But since I’ll be there, is there anything else going on that I have been blissfully ignorant of and shouldn’t have been?”
Waterman grinned at him. “We don’t have time for that list, sir, it’s already 1750.”
He debated asking Lorne if he’d heard anything, but ultimately decided that he could live with the mystery until tomorrow morning. Instead, he decided to try out the new ‘restaurant’ for dinner, a recent addition to the bazaar over in D-9. The original commissary hadn’t been built for the population that currently inhabited the city and they also had more culinarily-talented refugees than could be given meaningful employment there, so alternate eating arrangements were always being tried out. Cam had been part of the project to clear out and secure an outdoor courtyard that was slowly becoming a food court in addition to a place where the refugees who lived and worked in the city could maybe recreate a little bit of home. There were stalls for crafts and clothes and impromptu musical performances on instruments nobody from Earth had ever seen, but most of the stalls were for food, each dedicated to a couple of dishes from a planet that had fallen to the Ori or, occasionally, the Wraith. The foods on offer were usually either hard to scale up to commissary-sized portions or just too unusual to be offered to the masses and Cam wasn’t always interested in eating food he couldn’t easily identify - he did that enough off-world. But he’d spent a fair bit of time on Selenis during the fight against the Ori and the new spot not only promised the kebabs he’d enjoyed there, but also the not-really-papaya salad and he was kind of curious what they were going to use for that here in Pegasus.
The bazaar was still mostly visited by the refugee population, but the Atlantis ‘natives’ were going out there more frequently and so Cam wasn’t surprised to wind up sitting next to a table of biomedical engineers raving about the Wargolian couscous and raving in an entirely different fashion about Volnik.
The answer to the papaya question, it turned out, was that the Seleni were using a kind of Pegasus fruit that Atlantis traded for to use as a meat substitute by cooking it to death. Raw, it was close enough to green papaya, especially if marinated in lemon juice.
The answer to the conference room question, on the other hand, made a lot less sense. Or, first a lot more and then a lot less.
“This is a matter that has been punted down the line enough times to qualify as a football,” Weir said after she’d informed the assembled - the division principals and their deputies, plus Cam and Teyla - that she wanted to talk about the leadership succession. “I had plenty of time to regret the delay during the recent summit with the Genii, although that was but the latest reminder. There are Ori armies in Pegasus, lady and gentlemen, and we can no longer pretend that keeping me in Atlantis will keep me safe. There must be a plan for if the worst happens. I have no illusions about my personal importance, but the office must be filled by someone and we should all agree who that someone will be.
“I have considered what I feel are the essential pre-requisites for candidacy,” she went on after a bit of murmuring because while this sort of planning for ‘after I’m dead’ was morbid, it was also necessary - and complicated by politics and personalities. “First and foremost, they must be a civilian. Atlantis has and will continue to fall under military control in times of crisis, but I strongly believe that something essential will be lost if that state were to become permanent.
“Secondly, the candidate should nonetheless have a strong working relationship with the military. We must acknowledge reality and the reality is that we are at war. Colonel Sheppard and I have established mutual trust and respect over years of shared experiences and my successor won’t have that grace period to build that relationship ex nihilo. It’s why I haven’t gone over to G-2 and plucked out a few social scientists to serve their apprenticeships.”
Muted laughter around the table at the joke, which wasn’t really a joke under the circumstances but funny nonetheless because it was the redheaded stepchildren of Atlantis getting picked on once more.
“Thirdly, it has to be someone who already has a grasp of how the city works, how the SGC worked, and what the ‘normal’ we left behind used to look like. Which is why the candidates I’ve chosen are all in this room.”
Cam looked around, as did everyone else. He was merely curious, but Safir and Zelenka were looking at each other in abject horror.
“My three proposed candidates are Teyla, Doctor Safir, and, with the caveat that he resign his commission before assuming control of the city, Colonel Mitchell,” Weir said and the room exploded around Cam, who in turn just sat there surprised and confused because he’d assumed himself present as a courtesy after ‘must be a civilian.’
He looked over to Sheppard, sitting on his right, and Sheppard just shrugged. “Could do worse,” he said, sounding completely unbothered and unsurprised by the choices and Cam wondered if he’d already known. Of course, this was still Sheppard, who was opaque on the best of days and he could be absolutely pissed and Cam wasn’t sure he’d be able to tell.
“I made these choices not to spite anyone not chosen,” Weir went on, voice raised until there was no competition. “But with the larger picture in mind: the candidate’s elevation necessarily would leave a hole in their division and if that hole would be greater than the one caused by my absence…” she trailed off, looking at Lorne and Zelenka meaningfully.
Everyone in the room knew that Science and Little Tripoli would collapse into the black hole either of Lorne or Zelenka would leave through promotion or death. Cam, on the other hand, knew he was a supernumerary and it had been a struggle to find something for him to do, so him not doing it anymore wouldn’t matter much. Teyla and Safir, on the other hand…
“Elizabeth,” Beckett began, one hand on Safir’s breast to keep him from either leaping out of his seat or, more likely, saying something everyone would regret. “I don’t-”
“I’m not downplaying your work, Jonathan,” Weir cut him off and spoke directly to Safir. “Your efforts with the prior plague are a blessing upon two galaxies and you have kept this city safe since the first day with the contagion protocols. But I am, perhaps, downplaying your role in the administration of the Medical Division. Your work as an epidemiologist is irreplaceable, but your work as DCMO is not.”
Safir sat stone-faced even as Beckett moved his hand to Safir’s shoulder and squeezed.
“I appreciate that this is a burden none of you want,” Weir went on when Safir’s silence continued. “The three of you are being asked to allow the possibility of having to set aside what you feel you are best at, what is an essential part of who you are.”
She looked around the room at everyone and Cam could appreciate how she’d thrived as a diplomat and then as the head of the SGC: she could read a room and engage them like a magician.
“But I will also remind you that this is a worst-case scenario and, unless I am felled by choking on a cherry pit in the commissary, the worst case will be at hand. We will be in survival
mode, lady and gentlemen, and who we want to be will not matter if the alternative is to not be at all.”
Weir had more to say, about this and about other possible candidates and what the time frame was for anyone having anything to say about her proposals, but Cam accepted that he wasn’t quite listening and would have to get the actual details from Lorne. Something was crawling under his skin - not literally, thank the Lord - but something about this, about this surprise candidacy for a job he hoped would never be open, was not okay and he couldn’t quite place it. Or maybe he could, but he couldn’t figure out how much it was distressing him.
Maybe it was ego, maybe it was the months he’d spent as the effective leader of the resistance along with Sam and then, after Sam disappeared, on his own, but he was comfortable with the idea of leadership. He’d trained for it for years; he’d performed it well first in Big Air Force and then with his F-302 squadron in the SGC before he’d even had to take nominal charge of SG-1 and real charge of the remnant of the SGC. He knew he could do it. But the idea of doing it as a civilian… it bothered him more than he thought it would. He’d been Air Force for half his life and he’d never really considered life as Mister Mitchell. Before, he always thought he’d be that retiree at the BX passing judgment on the young airmen as he mooched free samples. Now, he’d spent the last couple of years prepared to die with his boots on and the awareness of the likelihood of that had obliterated any fantasy civilian scenarios.
The meeting ended and Cam left, feeling a little unmoored and a bit lonely. Safir was being corralled by Beckett and Lorne and Teyla had made a beeline for Sheppard, but Cam had nobody to check in on him and so he headed off. His first thinking was that he’d go to his office and then, not really up for either paperwork or Waterman giving him crap about not wanting to do paperwork, he looked at the transporter map and poked an illuminated spot not near Little Tripoli.
He wound up in one of the gardens that had been created by the refugees from Julait, a weird spot that was somehow both absolutely chaotic and extraordinarily peaceful. It was full of trees and plants and flowers that were all grown high and wide, some leaning against trellises and most moving freely in the breeze. He chose a low stone bench, a beanbag-shaped thing with a seat carved in, that sat under a set of woody vines that had been woven together and were growing into a canopy of light orange flowers that looked like daffodils.
It wasn’t actually the civilian thing, he decided. Which was indeed weirding him out but not what was ultimately making him uncomfortable in his own skin. It was the fact that he was so inessential to everything that reassigning him had no impact on anything. It was being confronted with this redundancy in a room full of Atlantis’s most important people after having spent so long being one of the important people. It was hard on his ego, yes, but it was harder on whatever part of him had been driven to join the service in the first place. He had joined up to give and to do and to serve and he wasn’t doing any of that right now. Weir thought he could be the most important person in Atlantis, which was the most important person in the last bastion of freedom that the Milky Way understood to exist, but right now he was nothing. His home was occupied, his family and friends either dead or missing or worshiping false gods, and he wasn’t doing anything about it. He was probably the last surviving member of SG-1 and the head-in-exile of the SGC itself and for what?
Or maybe, the voice in his head that still sounded like Daniel Jackson, it was the survivor’s guilt talking really loudly again.
Also posted at DW.