SGA ficlets: Lacing, Hike
Snippets:
1. Actually a sequel to Nothing at All to Do with Henry VII. It's also another story started to get to a scene with a specific costume. Not that I'm going to get to that scene, ever.
Lacing
People kept offering them food and drink, thinking they must have walked the three days from the gate. John tried to breathe as shallowly as possible, listening to Rodney shout above his head. Heat soaked through his shirt from the sun, making life almost bearable.
“No, thank you. We are refreshed,” Teyla said. John heard footsteps and whispering cloth of someone leaving with what smelled like hot, spiced tea. John wanted her to come back and pour that thing between his shoulder blades, still steaming. Another spasm knotted the muscles up and down his spine, and John could only grit his teeth through it and stare at the grass under his face.
Ronon came over and sat down next to them, a glimpse of sun-dappled leather in the corner of John’s vision. He bent forward, unzipping something.
“They say we can keep the pelt,” he said.
“This--fucking--” John closed his fingers blind around the first thing he found--the toe of Teyla’s boot. Her hand kept moving in slow circles on his back, above the scar. He couldn’t get his breathing to slow down.
“I do not think we have the time--” she said.
“They’ll prepare it,” Ronon said. He was still rummaging through something. John hoped it was the first aid kit from the jumper.
“Prepare it? They’re having a picnic.” Rodney was suddenly there. “And--god, are those teeth?”
“What?” John said.
“Wraith teeth,” Ronon said appreciatively.
“Don’t even. Your accessories are already--” Rodney cut himself off, moving away to start a conversation with a male voice John didn’t recognize, their words muffled by wind and wide open space. A truck engine rumbled off to the left, starting up. That all the movement sounded a good dozen yards away didn’t make John feel any less sick about lying there.
He put a hand over his face and hit his head against the ground a few times. “Someone tell me you got the kit from the jumper.”
“Yeah,” Ronon said. The rummaging sound shifted to a pill bottle rattling over John’s head, and Teyla’s hand left his back, reappearing to put two white pills into his hand, smoothing his hair away from his forehead. She held a mug of the spicy tea to his lips so he could sip it without lifting his head.
“Teyla,” Rodney called, frustrated, “They want me to--come help me with this,” and Teyla got up, leaving John alone with Ronon sitting stiffly against a tree. John closed his eyes and tried to sink into the ground.
After a moment, Ronon said, “You--that wasn’t bad. You didn’t fuck up.”
Another sharp pain cut through his back. “Yeah, okay,” John said.
“You okay?” Ronon sounded hesitant.
When John glared at him, he crossed his arms over his chest and turned away to watch the farmers and their truck. John drifted awhile as the muscle relaxants started to work and his back started to calm down.
Rodney and Teyla came back a little while later. John opened his eyes and realized he’d been asleep. He saw Ronon’s boots pacing by the tree.
“Ok, look, they want to give us a ride." Fingers snapping. "Hey, come on, are you awake?”
“I’m not getting on that truck,” John slurred.
Teyla crouched by his head, reaching out to touch a hand to his hair. John gave his head a tiny shake, like there was a fly on it. She said, “There is a house not far from here which--”
“I’m not getting on that truck. I’m getting back in the jumper and we’re going back to Atlantis.”
“Thank you for laying out the plan,” Rodney said, “but in between sections A and B of your proposal, I assume there’s going to be a long, unexciting section titled ‘McKay fixes the jumper.’”
“The jumper isn’t broken,” John muttered. Consciousness was like a weight on his head.
“Right, I must have gotten confused by the part where it won’t fly.”
“We are not going to--we’re not doing a first contact if I can’t walk.” Teyla was watching him with a half-lidded gaze, hands on her knees.
“What?” Rodney said. “Speak up.”
“He believes that his health is an encumbrance to us,” Teyla said and wow, something had changed there.
“Of course his health is a hazard! I told him he wasn’t ready for off-world travel.”
John did his best to glare at Rodney backwards at the same time Teyla said evenly, “Then I must have heard someone else asking Dr. Beckett to clear the Colonel earlier than he had planned.”
Now John really did turn his head to stare at Rodney, who was looking at Teyla gape-mouthed.
“That was not--that was completely different! At no point was I thinking, ‘Oh well, this is a slow day, let’s wrestle alien bears.’”
“And yet,” Teyla said.
“Uh,” John said.
“This is not my fault--”
“It is no one’s fault,” Teyla said, “which is exactly why you must take seriously--”
“Oh right, because I was the one who couldn’t keep my hands off him when he was reliving Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Rodney snapped and John froze. Teyla was suddenly really obviously not touching him. John thought, Do I remember that? I don’t remember that.
“Dr. McKay,” Teyla started, and John said desperately, “If you all shut up, I’ll get on the damn truck.”
He couldn’t even tell if they were looking at him--Teyla had shifted subtly but too far to the right--but both of them shut up.
“I will get--” Teyla started, but Ronon was already coming back with three of the farmers and a kind of makeshift stretcher of canvas and farm tools, which they dropped next to John where he could see it. Ronon was giving him a challenging look like he expected to be in trouble. It just made him look like Rodney.
Once a while back, they’d sat down after movie night and agreed the chain of command went John, Teyla, Rodney, Ronon, unless it was a military situation in which case Rodney was out. When Rodney had complained, John just said “All disputes will be settled by ritual combat." Now it looked like Ronon had decided all three of them were unfit for command and taken over. John didn’t really blame him.
The drugs were still keeping John’s body one big puddle of muscle, so the shift to the truck wasn’t as bad as he’d been expecting. He kept trying to tense up and it turned out he just couldn’t. A lot of the farmers were hanging back around the bear carcass, and John thought he saw a fire pit being dug, so maybe they were serious about the picnic. On the truck, he couldn’t bear to lie face down with a bunch of people he didn’t know looming around him. He had to get Teyla to help him roll over. He tried to pat his sidearm just to double check and missed it completely.
“I’m... not really following,” he told Teyla, staring blearily at the white clouds against the sky. He could hear Rodney outside on the other side of the truck bed giving some lecture about chemicals in the truck’s exhaust.
“It is all right, John,” she said, staring out the back with her arms folded carefully in her lap. John missed her fingers smoothing away his headache, and then he fell asleep.
2. And his mother looks hot in plaid.
Hike
After three years, Rodney had gotten used to the fact that most Ancient toys still scattered around the galaxy were out of power, but the day he accidentally walked through a quantum mirror because the lights were off and nobody saw it, he got a little irritated.
The scanner started hiccupping frantically as soon as they stepped through and suddenly the lights were on. Then it turned out it wasn’t a quantum mirror at all because when they turned around there was an empty crate leaning against bare drywall and nothing else. The room was obviously not Atlantis.
“Oh god, where the hell are we,” Rodney said.
“Traveling with you is very heartening,” Zelenka said, looking over the other boxes left in what was obviously a storeroom.
Rodney frowned in concentration at the fluorescent ceiling lights--wherever they were the technology was about Earth normal--but didn’t get so much as a flicker. “Well, definitely not Atlantis anymore.”
Elizabeth was staring at the boxes. “No, Toto, I don’t think we are.”
Rodney looked away from the ceiling. The boxes had writing all over them in blocky type that said things like, “fragile” and “this side up” and “geology--mclintock--CAL 312” and most terrifyingly, “University of Texas at Austin”.
“Fuck,” Rodney said. When they got outside and saw the hairstyles and the bell bottoms, there was a lot more panicking.
“I didn’t think quantum mirrors transported people geographically,” Elizabeth said later, strained.
“Or in time,” Rodney said sarcastically, pulling a bargain bin Longhorn t-shirt over his expedition uniform. Elizabeth’s civilian clothes didn’t look any less bizarre, and they’d shoved Rodney’s sidearm into Zelenka’s laptop case along with the patches from their jackets. They had to keep the laptop in there too since it was apparently 1975 and PCs were new fangled technology. The only upside as far as Rodney could see was that Radek’s hair was suddenly fashionable. “And that part of the city was totally out of power anyway! This is impossible!”
Zelenka made that sound that meant he was choosing not to say anything, and he wanted Rodney to know it.
“But we’re on Earth.” Elizabeth spread her hands, taking in the the rows of burnt orange merchandise: Q.E.D. Across the store an obviously drunk boy threw up his hands and shouted, “Woohoo, aggies!” while his friends shushed him, giggling.
Zelenka wandered off between the racks, frowning and muttering. He had the scanner in an empty takeout box and was conspicuously pausing to peek inside it. A few college girls in long skirts were watching him and whispering to each other. With his hair and a flannel shirt they’d stolen from a professor’s office on the way out, the girls were probably trying to decide if Zelenka's crazy appearance belonged to a crazy homeless man or just a crazy professor.
“Yes," Rodney said, "I noticed that about the time we walked out of a university basement into a churning mass of orange cow shirts. Where’s the cash?”
Elizabeth showed him the two twenties she’d confessed to inexplicably keeping in her pocket at all times. Rodney smoothed them between his fingers. “Good, they’re not the new colored bills. If we need more, we’ll have to find someplace that accepts credit card numbers without the card or ID.”
“Luckily, we predate any of the electronic verification systems as I doubt any of us have credit cards active in ’75,” Elizabeth said dryly.
“Oh that, no, I wasn’t planning on--it’s possible that as a child, I might have memorized my mother’s MasterCard against the event of separation during alien invasion.” He looked up, lifting his chin defensively, but Elizabeth didn’t say a word, lips pressed together, eyes crinkling.
“Excuse me--I’m so sorry,” there was an old woman at his shoulder, pointing a wrinkled finger past his head, “could you reach that cap for me?”
“What me? Oh right, me. Yes, I--here.” He handed it over and herded Elizabeth away, searching for an empty part of the store.
“Way to be casual, Dr. McKay. Blend in with the populace,” Elizabeth murmured, walking down the aisle.
“Yes, well, it’d help if there weren’t so many of them.”
“It’s Saturday, Rodney. There’s probably a football game.”
Rodney tugged at the large t-shirt under his expedition jacket. He still looked wrong, but hopefully the silk screened letters would serve as some sort of visible, familiar pheromone to the undergraduate masses. “Does it occur to you that, right now, it’s not even a matter of fixing the device that got us here? That we have no device? As it is, our only working plan to get through the next 30 years is by living through them.”
“You’ll think of something,” Elizabeth whispered back and almost tripped over a kid hiding in a rack of football jersies.
“Oh, right,” Rodney said, snapping his fingers, “that’s what I was missing by avoiding Earth. Children.”
“Vroom,” said the boy and ran straight into Rodney’s knees. He held up a small wooden glider with a plastic weight on the end. His other hand was occupied constantly pushing his thick hair out of his face. He said, “Bzzz, bzzz, ima plane,” and then, “Hut hut hike,” and tried to throw a pass with the plane into Rodney’s crotch.
“What--what the hell!” Rodney grabbed the boy's--oh god, sticky--hand and stared into wide green eyes with a bit of a sleepy crust on the corner, the red nose, the tiny, tiny hands, and Elizabeth blurted, hands over her mouth: “Oh my god.”
**
eta: tardis80 drew the most perfect picture for the second story. Go look. *heart bursts*
1. Actually a sequel to Nothing at All to Do with Henry VII. It's also another story started to get to a scene with a specific costume. Not that I'm going to get to that scene, ever.
Lacing
People kept offering them food and drink, thinking they must have walked the three days from the gate. John tried to breathe as shallowly as possible, listening to Rodney shout above his head. Heat soaked through his shirt from the sun, making life almost bearable.
“No, thank you. We are refreshed,” Teyla said. John heard footsteps and whispering cloth of someone leaving with what smelled like hot, spiced tea. John wanted her to come back and pour that thing between his shoulder blades, still steaming. Another spasm knotted the muscles up and down his spine, and John could only grit his teeth through it and stare at the grass under his face.
Ronon came over and sat down next to them, a glimpse of sun-dappled leather in the corner of John’s vision. He bent forward, unzipping something.
“They say we can keep the pelt,” he said.
“This--fucking--” John closed his fingers blind around the first thing he found--the toe of Teyla’s boot. Her hand kept moving in slow circles on his back, above the scar. He couldn’t get his breathing to slow down.
“I do not think we have the time--” she said.
“They’ll prepare it,” Ronon said. He was still rummaging through something. John hoped it was the first aid kit from the jumper.
“Prepare it? They’re having a picnic.” Rodney was suddenly there. “And--god, are those teeth?”
“What?” John said.
“Wraith teeth,” Ronon said appreciatively.
“Don’t even. Your accessories are already--” Rodney cut himself off, moving away to start a conversation with a male voice John didn’t recognize, their words muffled by wind and wide open space. A truck engine rumbled off to the left, starting up. That all the movement sounded a good dozen yards away didn’t make John feel any less sick about lying there.
He put a hand over his face and hit his head against the ground a few times. “Someone tell me you got the kit from the jumper.”
“Yeah,” Ronon said. The rummaging sound shifted to a pill bottle rattling over John’s head, and Teyla’s hand left his back, reappearing to put two white pills into his hand, smoothing his hair away from his forehead. She held a mug of the spicy tea to his lips so he could sip it without lifting his head.
“Teyla,” Rodney called, frustrated, “They want me to--come help me with this,” and Teyla got up, leaving John alone with Ronon sitting stiffly against a tree. John closed his eyes and tried to sink into the ground.
After a moment, Ronon said, “You--that wasn’t bad. You didn’t fuck up.”
Another sharp pain cut through his back. “Yeah, okay,” John said.
“You okay?” Ronon sounded hesitant.
When John glared at him, he crossed his arms over his chest and turned away to watch the farmers and their truck. John drifted awhile as the muscle relaxants started to work and his back started to calm down.
Rodney and Teyla came back a little while later. John opened his eyes and realized he’d been asleep. He saw Ronon’s boots pacing by the tree.
“Ok, look, they want to give us a ride." Fingers snapping. "Hey, come on, are you awake?”
“I’m not getting on that truck,” John slurred.
Teyla crouched by his head, reaching out to touch a hand to his hair. John gave his head a tiny shake, like there was a fly on it. She said, “There is a house not far from here which--”
“I’m not getting on that truck. I’m getting back in the jumper and we’re going back to Atlantis.”
“Thank you for laying out the plan,” Rodney said, “but in between sections A and B of your proposal, I assume there’s going to be a long, unexciting section titled ‘McKay fixes the jumper.’”
“The jumper isn’t broken,” John muttered. Consciousness was like a weight on his head.
“Right, I must have gotten confused by the part where it won’t fly.”
“We are not going to--we’re not doing a first contact if I can’t walk.” Teyla was watching him with a half-lidded gaze, hands on her knees.
“What?” Rodney said. “Speak up.”
“He believes that his health is an encumbrance to us,” Teyla said and wow, something had changed there.
“Of course his health is a hazard! I told him he wasn’t ready for off-world travel.”
John did his best to glare at Rodney backwards at the same time Teyla said evenly, “Then I must have heard someone else asking Dr. Beckett to clear the Colonel earlier than he had planned.”
Now John really did turn his head to stare at Rodney, who was looking at Teyla gape-mouthed.
“That was not--that was completely different! At no point was I thinking, ‘Oh well, this is a slow day, let’s wrestle alien bears.’”
“And yet,” Teyla said.
“Uh,” John said.
“This is not my fault--”
“It is no one’s fault,” Teyla said, “which is exactly why you must take seriously--”
“Oh right, because I was the one who couldn’t keep my hands off him when he was reliving Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Rodney snapped and John froze. Teyla was suddenly really obviously not touching him. John thought, Do I remember that? I don’t remember that.
“Dr. McKay,” Teyla started, and John said desperately, “If you all shut up, I’ll get on the damn truck.”
He couldn’t even tell if they were looking at him--Teyla had shifted subtly but too far to the right--but both of them shut up.
“I will get--” Teyla started, but Ronon was already coming back with three of the farmers and a kind of makeshift stretcher of canvas and farm tools, which they dropped next to John where he could see it. Ronon was giving him a challenging look like he expected to be in trouble. It just made him look like Rodney.
Once a while back, they’d sat down after movie night and agreed the chain of command went John, Teyla, Rodney, Ronon, unless it was a military situation in which case Rodney was out. When Rodney had complained, John just said “All disputes will be settled by ritual combat." Now it looked like Ronon had decided all three of them were unfit for command and taken over. John didn’t really blame him.
The drugs were still keeping John’s body one big puddle of muscle, so the shift to the truck wasn’t as bad as he’d been expecting. He kept trying to tense up and it turned out he just couldn’t. A lot of the farmers were hanging back around the bear carcass, and John thought he saw a fire pit being dug, so maybe they were serious about the picnic. On the truck, he couldn’t bear to lie face down with a bunch of people he didn’t know looming around him. He had to get Teyla to help him roll over. He tried to pat his sidearm just to double check and missed it completely.
“I’m... not really following,” he told Teyla, staring blearily at the white clouds against the sky. He could hear Rodney outside on the other side of the truck bed giving some lecture about chemicals in the truck’s exhaust.
“It is all right, John,” she said, staring out the back with her arms folded carefully in her lap. John missed her fingers smoothing away his headache, and then he fell asleep.
2. And his mother looks hot in plaid.
Hike
After three years, Rodney had gotten used to the fact that most Ancient toys still scattered around the galaxy were out of power, but the day he accidentally walked through a quantum mirror because the lights were off and nobody saw it, he got a little irritated.
The scanner started hiccupping frantically as soon as they stepped through and suddenly the lights were on. Then it turned out it wasn’t a quantum mirror at all because when they turned around there was an empty crate leaning against bare drywall and nothing else. The room was obviously not Atlantis.
“Oh god, where the hell are we,” Rodney said.
“Traveling with you is very heartening,” Zelenka said, looking over the other boxes left in what was obviously a storeroom.
Rodney frowned in concentration at the fluorescent ceiling lights--wherever they were the technology was about Earth normal--but didn’t get so much as a flicker. “Well, definitely not Atlantis anymore.”
Elizabeth was staring at the boxes. “No, Toto, I don’t think we are.”
Rodney looked away from the ceiling. The boxes had writing all over them in blocky type that said things like, “fragile” and “this side up” and “geology--mclintock--CAL 312” and most terrifyingly, “University of Texas at Austin”.
“Fuck,” Rodney said. When they got outside and saw the hairstyles and the bell bottoms, there was a lot more panicking.
“I didn’t think quantum mirrors transported people geographically,” Elizabeth said later, strained.
“Or in time,” Rodney said sarcastically, pulling a bargain bin Longhorn t-shirt over his expedition uniform. Elizabeth’s civilian clothes didn’t look any less bizarre, and they’d shoved Rodney’s sidearm into Zelenka’s laptop case along with the patches from their jackets. They had to keep the laptop in there too since it was apparently 1975 and PCs were new fangled technology. The only upside as far as Rodney could see was that Radek’s hair was suddenly fashionable. “And that part of the city was totally out of power anyway! This is impossible!”
Zelenka made that sound that meant he was choosing not to say anything, and he wanted Rodney to know it.
“But we’re on Earth.” Elizabeth spread her hands, taking in the the rows of burnt orange merchandise: Q.E.D. Across the store an obviously drunk boy threw up his hands and shouted, “Woohoo, aggies!” while his friends shushed him, giggling.
Zelenka wandered off between the racks, frowning and muttering. He had the scanner in an empty takeout box and was conspicuously pausing to peek inside it. A few college girls in long skirts were watching him and whispering to each other. With his hair and a flannel shirt they’d stolen from a professor’s office on the way out, the girls were probably trying to decide if Zelenka's crazy appearance belonged to a crazy homeless man or just a crazy professor.
“Yes," Rodney said, "I noticed that about the time we walked out of a university basement into a churning mass of orange cow shirts. Where’s the cash?”
Elizabeth showed him the two twenties she’d confessed to inexplicably keeping in her pocket at all times. Rodney smoothed them between his fingers. “Good, they’re not the new colored bills. If we need more, we’ll have to find someplace that accepts credit card numbers without the card or ID.”
“Luckily, we predate any of the electronic verification systems as I doubt any of us have credit cards active in ’75,” Elizabeth said dryly.
“Oh that, no, I wasn’t planning on--it’s possible that as a child, I might have memorized my mother’s MasterCard against the event of separation during alien invasion.” He looked up, lifting his chin defensively, but Elizabeth didn’t say a word, lips pressed together, eyes crinkling.
“Excuse me--I’m so sorry,” there was an old woman at his shoulder, pointing a wrinkled finger past his head, “could you reach that cap for me?”
“What me? Oh right, me. Yes, I--here.” He handed it over and herded Elizabeth away, searching for an empty part of the store.
“Way to be casual, Dr. McKay. Blend in with the populace,” Elizabeth murmured, walking down the aisle.
“Yes, well, it’d help if there weren’t so many of them.”
“It’s Saturday, Rodney. There’s probably a football game.”
Rodney tugged at the large t-shirt under his expedition jacket. He still looked wrong, but hopefully the silk screened letters would serve as some sort of visible, familiar pheromone to the undergraduate masses. “Does it occur to you that, right now, it’s not even a matter of fixing the device that got us here? That we have no device? As it is, our only working plan to get through the next 30 years is by living through them.”
“You’ll think of something,” Elizabeth whispered back and almost tripped over a kid hiding in a rack of football jersies.
“Oh, right,” Rodney said, snapping his fingers, “that’s what I was missing by avoiding Earth. Children.”
“Vroom,” said the boy and ran straight into Rodney’s knees. He held up a small wooden glider with a plastic weight on the end. His other hand was occupied constantly pushing his thick hair out of his face. He said, “Bzzz, bzzz, ima plane,” and then, “Hut hut hike,” and tried to throw a pass with the plane into Rodney’s crotch.
“What--what the hell!” Rodney grabbed the boy's--oh god, sticky--hand and stared into wide green eyes with a bit of a sleepy crust on the corner, the red nose, the tiny, tiny hands, and Elizabeth blurted, hands over her mouth: “Oh my god.”
**
eta: tardis80 drew the most perfect picture for the second story. Go look. *heart bursts*