The New Atlantean Dictionary of Literary Terms: A Complete Reference in Four Volumes
Pairings: John/Rodney, Teyla/Heightmeyer, and others.
Rating: NC-17
Words: ~19 000
Warnings: 1) Some readers may find this fic educational (my sincere apologies). 2) I make fun of Colin Baker (for which I refuse to apologise).
With special thanks to: apple_pi for her serious and thoughtful critique of my Artistic Method (and plus for telling me that Kate Heightmeyer’s eyes are green, among other useful things), and to umbo for fixing the big structural problem that I didn’t even know was there, along with a bunch of little problems that I didn’t want to admit were there. Seriously, both of you were amazingly helpful, and made a huge difference in the final product: thank you. Also, thanks to eruthros for listening to me talk about this thing a lot, because I went on about it quite a bit for a while there - like, there was this one time we were swimming in a waterfall, and I was still talking about this fic. So thanks to her for patience, and also for suggesting topothesia.
The New Atlantean Dictionary of Literary Terms: A Complete Reference in Four Volumes
Volume I
A-G
Anthropomorphism
The attribution of uniquely human characteristics and qualities to nonhuman beings, inanimate objects, or natural or supernatural phenomena.
There’s something compelling in the way Sheppard braces one hand against the flat bulkhead of the jumper as he asks it to perform impossible stunts. Dodging Wraith darts, navigating asteroid fields, maintaining invisibility in the face of the Replicators’ latest scanning equipment - Rodney notices Sheppard as he takes his left hand from the controls and allows his palm to flatten against the cool metal, notices the way he mutters under his breath, sometimes, a near-incomprehensible litany of c’mon-babys and you-can-do-its. Probably it’s a long habit, hard-won in the years that Sheppard has spent suspended above the ground in too-fragile aircraft, but maybe it’s something more: Rodney sees something more in it, something that comes from the city itself, from the way they occupy the city, suspended above the water, precious and delicate.
After some time in Atlantis, Rodney starts doing it, too, in the jumpers, under the control consoles, up to his elbows in command-chair wiring and desperate, helpless, muttering something that’s almost a prayer and almost a threat, bargaining, begging, bitching until the circuits heave and push and give him what he wants.
One time, Rodney is in the pilot’s seat and Sheppard’s beside him, riding shotgun. Sheppard’s left hand isn’t pressed to the machine, but rather to his abdomen, which is bleeding with frightening speed, red spilling over Sheppard’s legs and down to the floor below. In glimpses, Rodney can see something that he thinks are Sheppard’s intestines, glistening wet and white through his fingers.
Rodney’s right hand is on the controls. His left hand has taken up Sheppard’s usual position on the bulkhead without his realising it, pressing against the cool metal, fingernails scrabbling at the smooth surface. He hears himself muttering under his breath, Sheppard’s usual I-love-you-baby-don’t-do-this and c’mon-you-can-you-can-you-can-hold-on, over and over again as he clumsily dodges through enemy fire, preserved by luck if not by grace.
Finally, they’re at the gate, away from danger, and just before they hit the wormhole Rodney dares another glance at Sheppard, expecting to see him passed out, dead, collapsed in his chair.
Instead, Sheppard seems to be smiling a wan little smile, his eyes lingering on Rodney’s hand where it presses to the bulkhead and Rodney’s fingers on the controls. As they approach the wormhole, Sheppard reaches out with his right hand - the one not holding in his guts - and sets it on the starboard bulkhead, mirroring Rodney’s position on the other side of the jumper. Rodney feels time slow, lost in this moment of perfect connection, perfect understanding. His long fingers pressed to the ship’s skin, Sheppard holds Rodney’s gaze while the jumper cruises through the gate.
Then they are bathed in blue, and then they are in Atlantis, and then Sheppard is on his way to surgery and Rodney’s done, he did it.
A week later, after visiting the Colonel in the infirmary, Rodney swings by the jumper bay to run some standard maintenance. In one of the jumpers, on the bulkhead next to the copilot’s chair, John’s fingerprints are marked in blood. Rodney touches the stains with his fingers, almost reverently, before finding a rag and wiping them away.
Bildungsroman
A German term meaning “formation novel.” Literally an “upbringing” or “education” novel: an account of the youthful development of a hero or heroine. It describes the processes by which maturity is achieved through the various ups and downs of life.
John never learned how to do this. He didn’t learn it from his dad, who left, and he didn’t learn it from his mom, who only spoke in silences, and no one else stepped in to teach him. So he finds himself overwhelmed by the new worlds that break open in front of him as he lies in his hospital bed: Elizabeth’s heartfelt we were worried about you and Lorne’s glad you’re all right, sir and Teyla’s we need you back, you must get well soon. Even Biro’s meaningless chatter as she fixes his IV or checks his bandages seems to carry an intimate fondness that strikes him at odd times.
Someone told Ronon about Earth hospital customs, but didn’t tell him quite enough, which means that he shows up at John’s door on the day he wakes up after the surgery with a bundle of fresh flowers in his hands. The sincerity of the gesture is absurdly touching, all these people who want him to know how they feel about him. John can’t stop looking at the bright yellow and red blossoms in the makeshift vase next to his bed, physical proof of easy affection.
Rodney comes by every day, and those visits are an education in themselves: Rodney talks about anything and everything, but his eyes flicker too often to John’s abdomen, bound by white gauze and medical tape. Rodney’s gaze on him is blatant, obvious, announcing itself in the same infuriating, incomprehensible way that Rodney always announces himself.
It’s almost as if - John thinks - it’s almost as if Rodney doesn’t mind that John can see his worry, or his fear, or his care.
Caesura
From the Latin, “a cutting.” An audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. In most cases, caesura is indicated by punctuation marks which cause a pause in speech, and which may indicate a pause for breath: a comma, a semicolon, a full stop, an ellipsis, a dash, etc.
A few weeks later, and John doesn’t care how many earnest well-wishers want to tell him that they love him: he wants out. His wound itches, but the itch goes down deeper than that: he would give anything to get back to his life. The fear of pulling his stitches, though (as he just might have done a week before), gives him pause, binds him to the hospital bed and forces him still. He tries to breathe through it.
He still sleeps a lot, which is one of the ways they can tell that he’s not better yet, along with the gaping wound in his side. He wakes one morning, or maybe one afternoon, to find McKay by his bedside, which isn’t unusual except for two things. First, McKay’s asleep, slumped over in his chair like he’s been waiting a long time for John to wake up.
And second, McKay is holding his hand. Not a lot, just his fingers curled loosely around John’s index and middle fingers where they rest on the sheet, but it’s enough. He pulls his hand back without thinking about it, which wakes McKay up.
McKay looks at his hand where it still rests on the edge of the bed, his expression sleepy and confused.
“McKay, I don’t think . . .” John doesn’t know how to say it; hell, he doesn’t even know what the thing is that he doesn’t know how to say.
McKay nods at him, then stands. “I’ll see you later, Colonel,” he says, as he leaves. He sounds calm, normal, and John wonders if he was overthinking it. Maybe McKay didn’t see what John saw in those loosely curled fingers.
John breathes out. “Sounds good. Don’t forget you owe me a chess game,” he replies to McKay’s departing back. He gets a dismissive wave as Rodney shuffles out the door, just like always.
From there, things go on as usual, and John does his best to forget it.
Not too long after that, John’s released from the infirmary.
Not too long after that, everything changes.
Deus Ex Machina
Translated from the Latin, “god out of the machine.” In Greek drama a god was lowered onto the stage by a mechane so that he could get the hero out of difficulties or untangle the plot. Today this phrase is applied to any unanticipated intervener who resolves a difficult situation.
When Rodney first found out about the Stargate and the aliens and so on, he assumed he was in for a life of science-fiction heroism, and he was, to some extent, correct. But he pictured himself as the guy who saves the day in all his favourite stories by Asimov, Wyndham, Zelazny - or, at worst, as Geordi in TNG. If he’d known that the Stargate program was strictly B-level scifi, he might’ve thought twice before signing up. It’s not until he’s spent a lot of time on Atlantis that he realises that he’s not Tom Baker in Logopolis: he’s Colin Baker in Terror of the Vervoids, doomed to fight his heroic fight against the Pegasus galaxy’s equivalent of unconvincing stuntmen in duct-taped foam suits.
He comes to this realisation one day while the City is under attack from sentient vegetables from outer space.
If Sheppard makes one, even one, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes joke, Rodney is going to kill him dead.
But the problem is that, when you’re trapped in B-movie scifi, you have no choice but to take it seriously, because the people around you are real people who are really going to get real dead if you don’t take seriously the threat of, yes, killer cucumbers from beyond the stars.
The botanists, finally given their moment to shine, don’t think they could come up with a proper herbicide without three weeks’ debate and a lot more computer power. The jumper pilots, doing their best to keep the enemy tendrils from the city spires, are finding themselves seriously outmaneuvered by the little bio-ships, which all work organically in perfect concert. And, even if Brown and Parrish could come up with something that would do real damage to the deadly flora, Rodney and Zelenka have no way of engineering a delivery system without knowing a lot more about the way the drones function.
When Rodney breaks these problems down into their basic components, he comes up with: processing power, response time, knowledge. So he runs for the chair room, Zelenka keeping pace just behind him.
“Rodney, it has never been tested, we do not even really know what it does - ” Zelenka protests, when he sees the systems Rodney’s trying to access.
“It’s this, or we get eaten alive by spinach, Radek, and if you have a better plan I would love to hear it,” Rodney snarls back, his fingers flying over the controls.
Zelenka pauses. “I’ll get Colonel Sheppard,” he says finally, and runs off.
Sheppard, who had been machete-ing his way through the corridors with Ronon, Teyla, and Elizabeth in an attempt to regain control of the gate room, shows up sweaty, covered in scratches, and under protest. By then, Rodney’s finished entering the commands into the system: he’s got it online and it looks as ready as it’ll ever be. All they need is someone to initialize them.
“Get in the chair,” Rodney instructs him brusquely, “And think about local area networks.”
“What? McKay, I don’t have time for this!” But Zelenka pushes him down into the control chair. It lights up, and the system takes over as Rodney’s programmed it to do. Sheppard blinks, then closes his eyes and then Rodney can feel it, Sheppard, Atlantis, whispering into his mind and over his thoughts. The look on Radek’s face says that he can feel it too, but Rodney didn’t need to look at Radek’s face to know that.
He doesn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t this: wasn’t this feeling of snapping suddenly into place, connections flooding into his mind. He can’t see them, but he knows what Ronon and Teyla are doing, where Elizabeth is, what kind of attack run Evan’s making in the jumper, the biochemical compounds that Katie’s trying to duplicate in her lab. And everyone else, the people he doesn’t know, they’re in his mind equally, or he’s in theirs: Marines and bacteriologists and medical technicians and everyone.
Then John takes control, and Rodney sighs, relieved: John starts allocating resources, having picked up the function of this network from Rodney and Radek. The botanists confer, and with hundreds of brains tied into the Atlantis mainframe, the solution is arrived at quickly. The Marines concentrate their hack-and-slash efforts on the greenhouses, taking back the resources they’ll need to create the weapon, and as Rodney and Radek absorb information on the drones, the theoretical model of a delivery system that they construct in their minds is instantly made reality by Sarah and Miko down in the engineering labs.
Outside, Evan’s jumper squadron is suddenly in perfect synchrony, weakening the one point on the main bio-ship that Katie has identified as the place to deliver their weapon.
For six hours, long enough to manufacture the weapon, deliver it, and clean up the mess afterwards, they stay like that, their united purpose and direction singing under Rodney’s skin. Rodney doesn’t know why they’d ever go back, except that the console in the chair room starts beeping at him, something about dangerous levels of physical and mental stress, and Elizabeth makes him shut it down.
He feared - many of them had feared - that they would feel lonely, afterwards, but he feels anything but: he doesn’t remember people’s secrets or their thoughts or even - unfortunately - their first names, but he does remember the them of them all, their pettiness and love and their dedication to their city. For a solid week after their miraculous last-minute rescue, Rodney has to viciously squash the urge to hug everyone he passes in the corridors. Instead, he smiles at them, and they smile back, everyone grinning at each other like lunatics who got into the good medication.
“I think the city needs a cigarette,” John drawls, unable like the rest of them to keep from grinning with recognition. It looks good on him.
Sometimes, maybe it is Logopolis, after all.
Ekphrasis
The intense pictorial description of physical reality (an object, scene, or person). This very broad term has been limited by some to the description of art-objects, and even to the self-description of “speaking” art-objects.
After the battle with the plant life-forms, Teyla watches as the people on Atlantis become suddenly closer. There’s a feeling of easiness in the city, a trust and a comfort of which Teyla approves - it reminds her of her community on Athos - but she finds herself less comfortable with certain other repercussions of what John calls their “mind-meld.” Leaving out the rather egregious acts of public lewdness that she witnessed accidentally in the first few days after the incident - and she will have to tell Elizabeth and Radek that the conference room is not soundproofed - Teyla is simply touched more often. Elizabeth stands closer to her, bumping their shoulders companionably as they walk; Ronon is more likely to wrap her up in those exuberant embraces of his; even John’s fingers will occasionally find her arm or hand, will brush against her in the field or at lunch.
Perhaps as a result of this, she spends more time with Kate. Kate, Teyla knows, has been trained in schooling her body and voice to project empathy without encouraging intimacy.
“Would you like to get some lunch?” Teyla asks, popping her head into Kate’s open office door.
Kate smiles - Kate always smiles - and puts down the computer tablet she was working on. “I would love some lunch, Teyla, thank you.” Kate always uses her name.
At the table in the mess hall, they fall into their usual topics of conversation - the silliest aspects of Teyla’s off-world missions, Kate’s stories about her schooling on Earth, their shared worries about Atlantis morale, the latest Wraith or Replicator threat. But, as has been happening more and more often during their meetings, Teyla begins to drift a little. One part of her remains in the conversation, but the other keeps pausing to notice the way that Kate’s hair falls over one shoulder, or her smooth palms and fingertips (she talks with her hands), or the soft line of her collarbone where it disappears into her shirt. Kate’s body is as artfully crafted as her manner, as her empathy. Her eyes, warm and green, express no more or less than she intends from beneath her sculptured eyebrows; her soft, painted lips remain firmly closed as she chews carefully, and seem to smile independently of her eyes; her clothing is pressed and neat, covering the curves of her breasts and hips as if with armor.
Sometimes, Teyla feels as if Kate ought to be messed up a bit, that she ought to get her hands on that lush, warm body and rub it till it reddens just a little. Sometimes, Teyla imagines that Kate is crying out for touch, from behind her sculpted beauty.
“Are you all right?” Kate asks, concerned. “You seem lost in thought.”
Teyla smiles reassuringly. “I was; I apologise. My mind has been elsewhere lately.”
Mostly, Teyla is content to look from across the distance, to catalogue Kate’s body in her mind as if creating a map for a land she’ll never travel, and to discuss, calmly, the state of Atlantis morale.
Frame-Tale
A story which contains either another tale, a story within a story, or a series of stories.
There’s no point in going back. Ronon won’t get any more hunting done on this trip than on the last, with Zelenka’s equipment scaring everything away. But Atlantis is a lot of people - he grew up in a city of hundreds of thousands, but Atlantis is a lot of people - and when Zelenka asks, tentatively, the itch under Ronon’s skin answers yes. He’d rather be alone, but Zelenka’s busy with his scans, so he doesn’t bug Ronon too much.
He has John drop him off on the other side of the little island from the science equipment, and spends most of the day hiking back. He already spends a lot of time hiking through forests on off-world missions, but this is different. He feels more himself, alone.
At night, when the equipment is turned off and the island is quiet, it’s nice. When Ronon gets to camp, Zelenka has already set up the tent and piled sticks and tinder for the fire.
“You’re pretty good at that,” Ronon remarks as he breaks from the treeline.
Zelenka jumps a little. Ronon snickers.
“Yes, yes, you’re quite frightening.” Zelenka frowns at the little ring of stones beside his knees. “I built many fires when I was young.”
“No electricity?”
“Not everyone comes from rich countries like Colonel Sheppard’s.”
Ronon sits himself down on a rock across from Zelenka. After a moment, the fire is blazing up, breaching the oncoming darkness.
“Did you kill anything that we can eat?” Zelenka looks up at him hopefully as he sits crosslegged on the other side of the fire. Ronon just glares at him.
“Okay, sorry, I did not run the equipment as loudly this time.”
Ronon snorts.
“Why did you come, if you knew I would be here?” Zelenka asks finally.
“S’good to get away.” Ronon pulls two MREs out of his pack and hands one to Zelenka.
After a while, Zelenka speaks again. “You know, when I was young, my father used to tell stories by the fire.”
Ronon looks up from his meal and grins sharply before taking another bite. “Yeah, mine too,” he says around a mouthful of food.
“Really? What kind?”
“Usual stuff. Old stories about the Ancestors, or about the Ring.”
“Ronon, I did not grow up in your galaxy; I have never heard any of these old stories.” Zelenka gestures impatiently with a fork.
Ronon shrugs. “I could tell you one.”
Zelenka nods his approval. “Please.”
“Okay.” Ronon tries to remember the best stories that his father had told. “Well, there was this one, about an Ancestor.”
They say there was this Ancestor who got tired of living in their city, so he left and came through the Ring to Sateda.
But he didn’t want anyone to know that he was an Ancestor, because then everyone on Sateda would want him to use his power to help them with their problems, and this guy was sick of listening to everyone’s problems all the time. That’s why he left the city.
So he decided not to chance it, and lived in the forest by himself. And he liked it, and he lived there a long time, just living in the forest where it’s quiet.
“Hey, I said I was sorry,” Zelenka protests.
“Shhhh, Doc. This story isn’t about you.”
So the Ancestor lived in the forest a long time, because this is when the Wraith were sleeping, so it was pretty peaceful. And he was happy, but without any humans or other Ancestors for company, he got lonely. So one day he walked out into the forest and met a ritock, which is sort of like the animal in that episode of Buffy, what was it called? A bear. It was like a bear.
And it turned out that the ritock was pretty lonely too, because there was a plague that killed its family. They talked for a while, and eventually they went back to the ritock’s cave and had sex.
“He has sex with the bear.”
“The ritock,” Ronon corrects.
So the ritock said, hey, you should live here with me in this cave. And the Ancestor said, look, I can’t sleep in a cave all the time. So they compromised, and they ended up spending the winters in the Ancestor’s house in the woods, and the summers in the ritock’s cave by the stream. Which would’ve worked out fine, except the Ancestor never got around to telling the ritock that he was an Ancestor; he just let him assume that he was a human from Sateda.
But then one day the Wraith woke up, and came to Sateda, and the Ancestor didn’t know what to do. He liked living in the cave with the ritock, but he had a duty to his people now that the Wraith were awake again. So he made a machine that cast a shield over Sateda, so that nothing can come in or go out.
But this is also back in the days when there were spaceships on Sateda, so even though the shield protected the Ancestor and the ritock and all of the humans, it meant that no one could take the spaceships up to fight the Wraith. And none of the spaceships were small enough to go through the Ring. So even though the Satedan warriors heard terrible stories from people who came through the Ring, they couldn’t help.
“Couldn’t the Wraith send in darts through the gate?”
And the Wraith couldn’t send darts in through the gate because the Ancestor put a shield over that too, so that only people could come through. Anyway, the Satedan scientists figured out where the shield is coming from, and they tracked it down to the ritock’s cave. But the ritock wouldn’t let the scientists in, because he wanted to protect the Ancestor’s machine.
Just then, the Ancestor came by and found out what was going on. It turned out that the scientists had come to turn off the shield, because they wanted to be able to use their spaceships to fight the Wraith. In the end, though, the Ancestor got very mad - he said that the Satedans were dumb for wanting to throw their lives away like that. As they argued, the ritock got angrier and angrier, and eventually freaked out and killed all the Satedan scientists and ate them.
“I do not think I understand some of the literary themes in this story.”
“Shut up.”
The Ancestor was in despair, because he didn’t want any of the Satedans to die, but even with his force field, they were dying on the planet because of him. Also, he didn’t think he could live in the cave with the ritock anymore, now that it was eating people. So he came clean with the ritock, and told it that he was an Ancestor, not a Satedan, and that he’d used his machine to set up the shield. But the ritock felt so betrayed that it attacked the Ancestor, too. So the Ancestor killed the ritock, and buried it by the river where it had liked to sleep. Then he took the shield down, like the scientists wanted, and let the Satedans fight the Wraith.
Ronon pauses, then casts his eyes to the dirt. “My father used to end here by saying, and he stayed in the forest alone from then on, and still lives there to this day.”
Radek doesn’t speak for a long time. Then he clears his throat noisily.
“You know, this reminds me of a story we had about a woman who was forced to marry a basilisk.”
“What’s a basilisk?” Ronon asks.
“Well,” Radek says, before pausing thoughtfully, as if wondering where to begin.
It seems that, in the old days, there was a woman who had three daughters. One day, when she was going to the market, she promised to bring them each gifts. And the first two daughters asked for jewels and fine foods and new slippers and the latest books. But the third daughter asked only for three roses . . .
Georgic
A poem about rural life and husbandry, so called from the Greek word for “earth worker, farmer.” This is a form of didactic poetry and its principal purpose is to give instructions on how to do something.
Their first mission after John returns to field work is pretty much a milk run. John doesn’t mind, though, because P8N-2Z3 is all green and rolling fields lined with copses of wild trees and pools of bright flowers, as if it was terraformed by Tolkien. They’ve been here before and managed not to make a complete mess of it, so they’re greeted with cheerful smiles and waves and the kind of children who stick to your legs.
“You’ve arrived on our Harvest-day!” the leader, Mirla, explains, when she can finally be located. She’s covered in grain dust and there’s a smudge of dirt high on her cheek. Her salt and pepper hair is falling down from its loose bun in a way that makes John want to reach out and tuck the escaped strands behind her ear for her.
Teyla peels a toddler from her knees and steps forward. “Our apologies; we did not know. Shall we return for trade on another day?”
“No, no, no no no!” Mirla laughs, holding up her hands as if to hold them all in place. “Honestly, it’s wonderful that you’re here; we’re pretty short on able-bodied farmhands since we had that sickness last month. The new medications are working very well, by the way,” she answers John’s inquisitive look at the mention of the illness. “If you four pitch in, I’ll knock twenty percent off the price of the finished product.”
“That is . . . extremely generous,” Teyla says, impressed with this offer.
“Not at all! The crops are only good if you harvest while they bloom, and they only bloom two days of the year. Leave your gear in the guest house, there are sacks and scythes in the barn. Come find me when you’re ready.” Then, with her usual brusque energy, she hurries off to put some lollygagging teenagers back to work. Her cotton dress swirls around her ankles as she hops the short fence that surrounds the blooming field.
John blinks. “Okay, team, it sounds like we’re farmhands for the rest of the mission.” He shrugs. He half-expects McKay to start immediately bitching about allergies or manual labour, but that quarter is curiously silent. When he looks over, Rodney is sniffing the air curiously, as if completely surprised that the vast fields of purple flowers aren’t causing immediate issues relating to swelling and mucous.
“You gonna be okay with your injury?” Ronon asks, his eye catching the way that John still slightly favours his left side.
“I’m fine,” John scoffs.
“You’re not lifting anything heavy,” Ronon says. Teyla backs him up with a firm glare.
John holds up his hands in defeat. “Okay, okay, I’ll be the guy on the scythe.” At the guest house, they store their stuff, stripping down to t-shirts and trousers.
“Shouldn’t Ronon take the scythe? I mean, he’s the tallest.” Rodney’s got that light in his eyes that he gets when he’s being clever.
“Nah, I wear more black than he does,” John answers. “And I’ve named one of the puddlejumpers Binky.” Rodney laughs. His teeth and eyes are bright in the sunshine as they walk to the barn.
“What are you talking about?” Ronon seems unusually tolerant of their references to Earth-culture. Maybe he’s infected by the sunshine, too. He’s also got a little girl stuck to his calf that he either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care about; John debates telling him about it, but then decides that it’s too cute.
“Oh, on Earth, we sometimes personify Death as a tall, thin guy, dressed in black robes, carrying a scythe. He harvests people’s lives with it, see - ” Rodney takes a rather ill-advised swing with the scythe that he’s just picked up. Teyla ducks the blade and then takes it from him easily.
“That’s very interesting, but perhaps you could avoid a physical demonstration today, Rodney,” Teyla says, teasing. Rodney goes a little red, but Teyla pats him on the shoulder reassuringly.
“We have a story about Death on Sateda, too,” Ronon says. “Except it’s a little woman who creeps in windows and down chimneys at nighttime to steal the breath from your lungs and the memories from your eyes.”
“Creepy,” Rodney says, picking up a stack of burlap sacks.
“Sort of. She also fights the Wraith, in the stories.”
“Well, then, perhaps I should be the one to wield the scythe,” Teyla says, taking a few practice swings with it herself before stopping to frown at the blade. “Though it is not properly sharpened, I’m afraid.”
“Well, you’re not hacking through bone with it, Teyla,” John says, rolling his eyes. “Jeez. What a group of farmers we make.”
Turns out, though, that they do make a pretty good group of farmers. Rodney and Ronon haul the finished product and man the wheelbarrow while John and Teyla take turns scything and getting the plants into the sacks. Everything has to be properly sorted: the stalks will be ground down for flour, and the tuber-roots washed and stored in cool cellars, but the bright purple flowers and their thick, crunchy green leaves are apparently a delicacy, to be served at feasts for the next week; they get sorted into the wheelbarrows and taken directly to the kitchens. Mirla comes by a few times to see how they’re doing, surprised by their progress.
“For a group of bumbling off-worlders, you do pretty well,” she says, holding out a dipper of water to each of them in turn. When Rodney wipes his mouth with his sleeve, a little dirt migrates onto his cheek.
“We’re doing what we can,” John agrees amiably.
“Yes yes, but I don’t suppose you have anything to eat, do you? Since we’re expected to toil in the hot sun . . .” Teyla puts a warning hand on Rodney’s shoulder.
“Oh, help yourselves to the ylse flowers as you go!” Mirla answers. “We prepare them in many ways, as the elders are doing right now in the kitchens, but they’re pretty tasty raw.” She demonstrates, carefully tearing the petals and leaves away from the plant with her teeth.
Teyla squeezes Rodney’s shoulder again, preemptively.
Mirla is distracted, anyway, before Rodney can let her know what he thinks about eating flower petals for lunch.
“Oh, Tam, there you are,” she says, scooping up the girl who’d been attached to Ronon’s calf throughout the morning until she’d fallen off in the early afternoon (“Why didn’t you tell me that was there?” Ronon had asked. They’d all shrugged. “I didn’t notice,” John had lied).
Once Mirla’s wandered off, John tries one of the flowers. The petals are thick and juicy, like the leaves, and taste like . . .
“Cherries,” he says, thoughtfully. The leaves taste sort of minty.
“What? Gimme.” McKay snatches a flower from the bucket for himself.
Hours later, they’re all sticky and dirty, so accept gladly (or, in McKay’s case, grudgingly) the offer of fresh clothes before heading to the feast. Once there, they get set up very nicely at the head table, where they’re served delicate petal-tarts and rich tuber-stews and it’s all pretty great until the kissing starts.
John doesn’t get any warning, just Mirla’s lips suddenly on his, sweet with the juice from the tarts.
“Wha?” he says, intelligently, as she pulls away.
“You don’t have this custom? You have to pass it down the line.” Mirla points at Ronon, seated next to John. Mirla, at the head of the huge table, then turns the other way and kisses the woman on her right - soft lips, no tongue, as she kissed John - who kisses the next person, and so on.
“It’s good luck,” Mirla says. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t imply anything sexual.” John could swear that her eyes are fucking twinkling.
John half-turns to Ronon, as if to ask him to form a united anti-kissing front, but the guy just shrugs, puts his hands on either side of John’s face (surprisingly gentle) and plants one on him. It’s a little rough, but slower and wetter than John might have expected, had he been expected to expect such a thing in the first place. Ronon’s beard tickles. Then it’s over, and Ronon turns to Teyla, and John feels strangely disappointed.
Ronon’s kiss with Teyla is easy, even a little dirty, the two of them familiar with each other in a way that makes John wonder about them once again. Then Teyla pulls back, and smiles, and turns to Rodney, who’s been silent through the whole affair, and looks more than a little apprehensive.
Teyla just gets one hand on his neck and pulls him in, and John watches their lips as they slide together, watches the angle of Rodney’s jaw as he tilts his head to let Teyla’s tongue slip into his
mouth, just a little. John shifts in his seat, feels like a pervert but can’t stop watching.
Then Rodney turns to the person beside him, one of the farmers, a handsome, olive-skinned young man with hair bleached by the sun. Rodney darts in and pecks him on the lips. No - not pecks, really; smooches might be more accurate. Their mouths make a smacking sound that John can hear three seats away. McKay pulls back quickly, but the farmer grabs him by the collar and pulls him back in again for a fast kiss that looks much hotter than the last. Then the guy winks at McKay before spinning in his chair to the man on his other side.
Rodney blushes bright red, and, turning back in his chair, catches John looking at him. His blush fading, Rodney tilts his head and furrows his eyebrows at John in that way he does when he’s met a new piece of Ancient technology.
John goes back to his petal-tarts.
The night is spent in the village’s guest-house, which is like a cross between a military barracks and a country-house B&B; there are ten beds, lined against the walls in two neat rows of five, each covered in bright, fluffy quilts and big, soft pillows. John watches his team burrow under the covers, exhausted from the day’s labour in the warm sunshine, and is almost content.
In the bed next to his, Rodney’s done a face-plant into the pillow, barely beneath the covers before he falls asleep. His cheeks are pink from the sun.
-
The next day is much the same: cutting, and packing, and hauling, eating his fill of the crunchy, minty leaves and the warm bread that gets brought by at mid-day, and trying not to turn his back on Ronon when he has the wheelbarrow (the man’s a menace).
“I know I’m not usually much for this kind of thing, but I have to say, this is kind of nice,” Rodney says as they break for water in the midafternoon. “It reminds me of the summers on my uncle’s farm in Manitoba, when I was a kid.”
John raises an eyebrow. “Your parents shipped you off to a farm in the summers? And you liked it?”
“Oh hell no, are you kidding? I hated it. I ran away four times before I figured out that there was nowhere to run to. But looking back on it now, it doesn’t seem so bad.” Rodney smiles up into the rustling tree branches above them. Serenity isn’t a common look for Rodney, but it suits him in this moment, resting in the cool shade, the collar of his shirt damp with sweat, his face relaxed. When John takes the water bottle from Rodney’s hands and drinks, the spout is warm where Rodney’s lips were a moment ago.
-
They’re early to the feast that night, having finished their allotted field. Mirla is delighted with the progress they’ve made, and is chatting amiably with Rodney at the long table when John comes in to the feast hall. There are a few people seated here and there, scattered along the table, but no one at the head of the table except for Mirla and Rodney.
John doesn’t allow himself to stop and think about it. He just sits down in the chair next to Rodney’s and slouches comfortably, joining in the conversation.
Rodney looks surprised, but doesn’t say anything right away. When Mirla gets up to go check on the food preparations, he rubs his thumb against his index finger nervously.
“Uh. Are you sure you want to sit there?” he manages, finally.
John gives him his best innocent smile. “I’m good.” He takes it as a positive sign that Rodney doesn’t get up to change seats.
But it turns out that the kissing-custom is only on the first night of the feast; after the meal, no one initiates any ritualized makeout sessions at all. John is surprised by his own sense of relief. Rodney doesn’t meet his eyes on the way back to the guest house.
They head back to Atlantis the next day, fresh-scrubbed but in their rumpled uniforms, hauling their first installment of food in Ronon’s favourite wheelbarrow: tubers and flowers that they harvested themselves, with their own hands. The sun is warm on his shoulders, and his team is all around him, and John is almost content.
-
Volume II
Rating: NC-17
Words: ~19 000
Warnings: 1) Some readers may find this fic educational (my sincere apologies). 2) I make fun of Colin Baker (for which I refuse to apologise).
With special thanks to: apple_pi for her serious and thoughtful critique of my Artistic Method (and plus for telling me that Kate Heightmeyer’s eyes are green, among other useful things), and to umbo for fixing the big structural problem that I didn’t even know was there, along with a bunch of little problems that I didn’t want to admit were there. Seriously, both of you were amazingly helpful, and made a huge difference in the final product: thank you. Also, thanks to eruthros for listening to me talk about this thing a lot, because I went on about it quite a bit for a while there - like, there was this one time we were swimming in a waterfall, and I was still talking about this fic. So thanks to her for patience, and also for suggesting topothesia.
The New Atlantean Dictionary of Literary Terms: A Complete Reference in Four Volumes
Volume I
A-G
Anthropomorphism
The attribution of uniquely human characteristics and qualities to nonhuman beings, inanimate objects, or natural or supernatural phenomena.
There’s something compelling in the way Sheppard braces one hand against the flat bulkhead of the jumper as he asks it to perform impossible stunts. Dodging Wraith darts, navigating asteroid fields, maintaining invisibility in the face of the Replicators’ latest scanning equipment - Rodney notices Sheppard as he takes his left hand from the controls and allows his palm to flatten against the cool metal, notices the way he mutters under his breath, sometimes, a near-incomprehensible litany of c’mon-babys and you-can-do-its. Probably it’s a long habit, hard-won in the years that Sheppard has spent suspended above the ground in too-fragile aircraft, but maybe it’s something more: Rodney sees something more in it, something that comes from the city itself, from the way they occupy the city, suspended above the water, precious and delicate.
After some time in Atlantis, Rodney starts doing it, too, in the jumpers, under the control consoles, up to his elbows in command-chair wiring and desperate, helpless, muttering something that’s almost a prayer and almost a threat, bargaining, begging, bitching until the circuits heave and push and give him what he wants.
One time, Rodney is in the pilot’s seat and Sheppard’s beside him, riding shotgun. Sheppard’s left hand isn’t pressed to the machine, but rather to his abdomen, which is bleeding with frightening speed, red spilling over Sheppard’s legs and down to the floor below. In glimpses, Rodney can see something that he thinks are Sheppard’s intestines, glistening wet and white through his fingers.
Rodney’s right hand is on the controls. His left hand has taken up Sheppard’s usual position on the bulkhead without his realising it, pressing against the cool metal, fingernails scrabbling at the smooth surface. He hears himself muttering under his breath, Sheppard’s usual I-love-you-baby-don’t-do-this and c’mon-you-can-you-can-you-can-hold-on, over and over again as he clumsily dodges through enemy fire, preserved by luck if not by grace.
Finally, they’re at the gate, away from danger, and just before they hit the wormhole Rodney dares another glance at Sheppard, expecting to see him passed out, dead, collapsed in his chair.
Instead, Sheppard seems to be smiling a wan little smile, his eyes lingering on Rodney’s hand where it presses to the bulkhead and Rodney’s fingers on the controls. As they approach the wormhole, Sheppard reaches out with his right hand - the one not holding in his guts - and sets it on the starboard bulkhead, mirroring Rodney’s position on the other side of the jumper. Rodney feels time slow, lost in this moment of perfect connection, perfect understanding. His long fingers pressed to the ship’s skin, Sheppard holds Rodney’s gaze while the jumper cruises through the gate.
Then they are bathed in blue, and then they are in Atlantis, and then Sheppard is on his way to surgery and Rodney’s done, he did it.
A week later, after visiting the Colonel in the infirmary, Rodney swings by the jumper bay to run some standard maintenance. In one of the jumpers, on the bulkhead next to the copilot’s chair, John’s fingerprints are marked in blood. Rodney touches the stains with his fingers, almost reverently, before finding a rag and wiping them away.
Bildungsroman
A German term meaning “formation novel.” Literally an “upbringing” or “education” novel: an account of the youthful development of a hero or heroine. It describes the processes by which maturity is achieved through the various ups and downs of life.
John never learned how to do this. He didn’t learn it from his dad, who left, and he didn’t learn it from his mom, who only spoke in silences, and no one else stepped in to teach him. So he finds himself overwhelmed by the new worlds that break open in front of him as he lies in his hospital bed: Elizabeth’s heartfelt we were worried about you and Lorne’s glad you’re all right, sir and Teyla’s we need you back, you must get well soon. Even Biro’s meaningless chatter as she fixes his IV or checks his bandages seems to carry an intimate fondness that strikes him at odd times.
Someone told Ronon about Earth hospital customs, but didn’t tell him quite enough, which means that he shows up at John’s door on the day he wakes up after the surgery with a bundle of fresh flowers in his hands. The sincerity of the gesture is absurdly touching, all these people who want him to know how they feel about him. John can’t stop looking at the bright yellow and red blossoms in the makeshift vase next to his bed, physical proof of easy affection.
Rodney comes by every day, and those visits are an education in themselves: Rodney talks about anything and everything, but his eyes flicker too often to John’s abdomen, bound by white gauze and medical tape. Rodney’s gaze on him is blatant, obvious, announcing itself in the same infuriating, incomprehensible way that Rodney always announces himself.
It’s almost as if - John thinks - it’s almost as if Rodney doesn’t mind that John can see his worry, or his fear, or his care.
Caesura
From the Latin, “a cutting.” An audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. In most cases, caesura is indicated by punctuation marks which cause a pause in speech, and which may indicate a pause for breath: a comma, a semicolon, a full stop, an ellipsis, a dash, etc.
A few weeks later, and John doesn’t care how many earnest well-wishers want to tell him that they love him: he wants out. His wound itches, but the itch goes down deeper than that: he would give anything to get back to his life. The fear of pulling his stitches, though (as he just might have done a week before), gives him pause, binds him to the hospital bed and forces him still. He tries to breathe through it.
He still sleeps a lot, which is one of the ways they can tell that he’s not better yet, along with the gaping wound in his side. He wakes one morning, or maybe one afternoon, to find McKay by his bedside, which isn’t unusual except for two things. First, McKay’s asleep, slumped over in his chair like he’s been waiting a long time for John to wake up.
And second, McKay is holding his hand. Not a lot, just his fingers curled loosely around John’s index and middle fingers where they rest on the sheet, but it’s enough. He pulls his hand back without thinking about it, which wakes McKay up.
McKay looks at his hand where it still rests on the edge of the bed, his expression sleepy and confused.
“McKay, I don’t think . . .” John doesn’t know how to say it; hell, he doesn’t even know what the thing is that he doesn’t know how to say.
McKay nods at him, then stands. “I’ll see you later, Colonel,” he says, as he leaves. He sounds calm, normal, and John wonders if he was overthinking it. Maybe McKay didn’t see what John saw in those loosely curled fingers.
John breathes out. “Sounds good. Don’t forget you owe me a chess game,” he replies to McKay’s departing back. He gets a dismissive wave as Rodney shuffles out the door, just like always.
From there, things go on as usual, and John does his best to forget it.
Not too long after that, John’s released from the infirmary.
Not too long after that, everything changes.
Deus Ex Machina
Translated from the Latin, “god out of the machine.” In Greek drama a god was lowered onto the stage by a mechane so that he could get the hero out of difficulties or untangle the plot. Today this phrase is applied to any unanticipated intervener who resolves a difficult situation.
When Rodney first found out about the Stargate and the aliens and so on, he assumed he was in for a life of science-fiction heroism, and he was, to some extent, correct. But he pictured himself as the guy who saves the day in all his favourite stories by Asimov, Wyndham, Zelazny - or, at worst, as Geordi in TNG. If he’d known that the Stargate program was strictly B-level scifi, he might’ve thought twice before signing up. It’s not until he’s spent a lot of time on Atlantis that he realises that he’s not Tom Baker in Logopolis: he’s Colin Baker in Terror of the Vervoids, doomed to fight his heroic fight against the Pegasus galaxy’s equivalent of unconvincing stuntmen in duct-taped foam suits.
He comes to this realisation one day while the City is under attack from sentient vegetables from outer space.
If Sheppard makes one, even one, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes joke, Rodney is going to kill him dead.
But the problem is that, when you’re trapped in B-movie scifi, you have no choice but to take it seriously, because the people around you are real people who are really going to get real dead if you don’t take seriously the threat of, yes, killer cucumbers from beyond the stars.
The botanists, finally given their moment to shine, don’t think they could come up with a proper herbicide without three weeks’ debate and a lot more computer power. The jumper pilots, doing their best to keep the enemy tendrils from the city spires, are finding themselves seriously outmaneuvered by the little bio-ships, which all work organically in perfect concert. And, even if Brown and Parrish could come up with something that would do real damage to the deadly flora, Rodney and Zelenka have no way of engineering a delivery system without knowing a lot more about the way the drones function.
When Rodney breaks these problems down into their basic components, he comes up with: processing power, response time, knowledge. So he runs for the chair room, Zelenka keeping pace just behind him.
“Rodney, it has never been tested, we do not even really know what it does - ” Zelenka protests, when he sees the systems Rodney’s trying to access.
“It’s this, or we get eaten alive by spinach, Radek, and if you have a better plan I would love to hear it,” Rodney snarls back, his fingers flying over the controls.
Zelenka pauses. “I’ll get Colonel Sheppard,” he says finally, and runs off.
Sheppard, who had been machete-ing his way through the corridors with Ronon, Teyla, and Elizabeth in an attempt to regain control of the gate room, shows up sweaty, covered in scratches, and under protest. By then, Rodney’s finished entering the commands into the system: he’s got it online and it looks as ready as it’ll ever be. All they need is someone to initialize them.
“Get in the chair,” Rodney instructs him brusquely, “And think about local area networks.”
“What? McKay, I don’t have time for this!” But Zelenka pushes him down into the control chair. It lights up, and the system takes over as Rodney’s programmed it to do. Sheppard blinks, then closes his eyes and then Rodney can feel it, Sheppard, Atlantis, whispering into his mind and over his thoughts. The look on Radek’s face says that he can feel it too, but Rodney didn’t need to look at Radek’s face to know that.
He doesn’t know what he expected, but it wasn’t this: wasn’t this feeling of snapping suddenly into place, connections flooding into his mind. He can’t see them, but he knows what Ronon and Teyla are doing, where Elizabeth is, what kind of attack run Evan’s making in the jumper, the biochemical compounds that Katie’s trying to duplicate in her lab. And everyone else, the people he doesn’t know, they’re in his mind equally, or he’s in theirs: Marines and bacteriologists and medical technicians and everyone.
Then John takes control, and Rodney sighs, relieved: John starts allocating resources, having picked up the function of this network from Rodney and Radek. The botanists confer, and with hundreds of brains tied into the Atlantis mainframe, the solution is arrived at quickly. The Marines concentrate their hack-and-slash efforts on the greenhouses, taking back the resources they’ll need to create the weapon, and as Rodney and Radek absorb information on the drones, the theoretical model of a delivery system that they construct in their minds is instantly made reality by Sarah and Miko down in the engineering labs.
Outside, Evan’s jumper squadron is suddenly in perfect synchrony, weakening the one point on the main bio-ship that Katie has identified as the place to deliver their weapon.
For six hours, long enough to manufacture the weapon, deliver it, and clean up the mess afterwards, they stay like that, their united purpose and direction singing under Rodney’s skin. Rodney doesn’t know why they’d ever go back, except that the console in the chair room starts beeping at him, something about dangerous levels of physical and mental stress, and Elizabeth makes him shut it down.
He feared - many of them had feared - that they would feel lonely, afterwards, but he feels anything but: he doesn’t remember people’s secrets or their thoughts or even - unfortunately - their first names, but he does remember the them of them all, their pettiness and love and their dedication to their city. For a solid week after their miraculous last-minute rescue, Rodney has to viciously squash the urge to hug everyone he passes in the corridors. Instead, he smiles at them, and they smile back, everyone grinning at each other like lunatics who got into the good medication.
“I think the city needs a cigarette,” John drawls, unable like the rest of them to keep from grinning with recognition. It looks good on him.
Sometimes, maybe it is Logopolis, after all.
Ekphrasis
The intense pictorial description of physical reality (an object, scene, or person). This very broad term has been limited by some to the description of art-objects, and even to the self-description of “speaking” art-objects.
After the battle with the plant life-forms, Teyla watches as the people on Atlantis become suddenly closer. There’s a feeling of easiness in the city, a trust and a comfort of which Teyla approves - it reminds her of her community on Athos - but she finds herself less comfortable with certain other repercussions of what John calls their “mind-meld.” Leaving out the rather egregious acts of public lewdness that she witnessed accidentally in the first few days after the incident - and she will have to tell Elizabeth and Radek that the conference room is not soundproofed - Teyla is simply touched more often. Elizabeth stands closer to her, bumping their shoulders companionably as they walk; Ronon is more likely to wrap her up in those exuberant embraces of his; even John’s fingers will occasionally find her arm or hand, will brush against her in the field or at lunch.
Perhaps as a result of this, she spends more time with Kate. Kate, Teyla knows, has been trained in schooling her body and voice to project empathy without encouraging intimacy.
“Would you like to get some lunch?” Teyla asks, popping her head into Kate’s open office door.
Kate smiles - Kate always smiles - and puts down the computer tablet she was working on. “I would love some lunch, Teyla, thank you.” Kate always uses her name.
At the table in the mess hall, they fall into their usual topics of conversation - the silliest aspects of Teyla’s off-world missions, Kate’s stories about her schooling on Earth, their shared worries about Atlantis morale, the latest Wraith or Replicator threat. But, as has been happening more and more often during their meetings, Teyla begins to drift a little. One part of her remains in the conversation, but the other keeps pausing to notice the way that Kate’s hair falls over one shoulder, or her smooth palms and fingertips (she talks with her hands), or the soft line of her collarbone where it disappears into her shirt. Kate’s body is as artfully crafted as her manner, as her empathy. Her eyes, warm and green, express no more or less than she intends from beneath her sculptured eyebrows; her soft, painted lips remain firmly closed as she chews carefully, and seem to smile independently of her eyes; her clothing is pressed and neat, covering the curves of her breasts and hips as if with armor.
Sometimes, Teyla feels as if Kate ought to be messed up a bit, that she ought to get her hands on that lush, warm body and rub it till it reddens just a little. Sometimes, Teyla imagines that Kate is crying out for touch, from behind her sculpted beauty.
“Are you all right?” Kate asks, concerned. “You seem lost in thought.”
Teyla smiles reassuringly. “I was; I apologise. My mind has been elsewhere lately.”
Mostly, Teyla is content to look from across the distance, to catalogue Kate’s body in her mind as if creating a map for a land she’ll never travel, and to discuss, calmly, the state of Atlantis morale.
Frame-Tale
A story which contains either another tale, a story within a story, or a series of stories.
There’s no point in going back. Ronon won’t get any more hunting done on this trip than on the last, with Zelenka’s equipment scaring everything away. But Atlantis is a lot of people - he grew up in a city of hundreds of thousands, but Atlantis is a lot of people - and when Zelenka asks, tentatively, the itch under Ronon’s skin answers yes. He’d rather be alone, but Zelenka’s busy with his scans, so he doesn’t bug Ronon too much.
He has John drop him off on the other side of the little island from the science equipment, and spends most of the day hiking back. He already spends a lot of time hiking through forests on off-world missions, but this is different. He feels more himself, alone.
At night, when the equipment is turned off and the island is quiet, it’s nice. When Ronon gets to camp, Zelenka has already set up the tent and piled sticks and tinder for the fire.
“You’re pretty good at that,” Ronon remarks as he breaks from the treeline.
Zelenka jumps a little. Ronon snickers.
“Yes, yes, you’re quite frightening.” Zelenka frowns at the little ring of stones beside his knees. “I built many fires when I was young.”
“No electricity?”
“Not everyone comes from rich countries like Colonel Sheppard’s.”
Ronon sits himself down on a rock across from Zelenka. After a moment, the fire is blazing up, breaching the oncoming darkness.
“Did you kill anything that we can eat?” Zelenka looks up at him hopefully as he sits crosslegged on the other side of the fire. Ronon just glares at him.
“Okay, sorry, I did not run the equipment as loudly this time.”
Ronon snorts.
“Why did you come, if you knew I would be here?” Zelenka asks finally.
“S’good to get away.” Ronon pulls two MREs out of his pack and hands one to Zelenka.
After a while, Zelenka speaks again. “You know, when I was young, my father used to tell stories by the fire.”
Ronon looks up from his meal and grins sharply before taking another bite. “Yeah, mine too,” he says around a mouthful of food.
“Really? What kind?”
“Usual stuff. Old stories about the Ancestors, or about the Ring.”
“Ronon, I did not grow up in your galaxy; I have never heard any of these old stories.” Zelenka gestures impatiently with a fork.
Ronon shrugs. “I could tell you one.”
Zelenka nods his approval. “Please.”
“Okay.” Ronon tries to remember the best stories that his father had told. “Well, there was this one, about an Ancestor.”
They say there was this Ancestor who got tired of living in their city, so he left and came through the Ring to Sateda.
But he didn’t want anyone to know that he was an Ancestor, because then everyone on Sateda would want him to use his power to help them with their problems, and this guy was sick of listening to everyone’s problems all the time. That’s why he left the city.
So he decided not to chance it, and lived in the forest by himself. And he liked it, and he lived there a long time, just living in the forest where it’s quiet.
“Hey, I said I was sorry,” Zelenka protests.
“Shhhh, Doc. This story isn’t about you.”
So the Ancestor lived in the forest a long time, because this is when the Wraith were sleeping, so it was pretty peaceful. And he was happy, but without any humans or other Ancestors for company, he got lonely. So one day he walked out into the forest and met a ritock, which is sort of like the animal in that episode of Buffy, what was it called? A bear. It was like a bear.
And it turned out that the ritock was pretty lonely too, because there was a plague that killed its family. They talked for a while, and eventually they went back to the ritock’s cave and had sex.
“He has sex with the bear.”
“The ritock,” Ronon corrects.
So the ritock said, hey, you should live here with me in this cave. And the Ancestor said, look, I can’t sleep in a cave all the time. So they compromised, and they ended up spending the winters in the Ancestor’s house in the woods, and the summers in the ritock’s cave by the stream. Which would’ve worked out fine, except the Ancestor never got around to telling the ritock that he was an Ancestor; he just let him assume that he was a human from Sateda.
But then one day the Wraith woke up, and came to Sateda, and the Ancestor didn’t know what to do. He liked living in the cave with the ritock, but he had a duty to his people now that the Wraith were awake again. So he made a machine that cast a shield over Sateda, so that nothing can come in or go out.
But this is also back in the days when there were spaceships on Sateda, so even though the shield protected the Ancestor and the ritock and all of the humans, it meant that no one could take the spaceships up to fight the Wraith. And none of the spaceships were small enough to go through the Ring. So even though the Satedan warriors heard terrible stories from people who came through the Ring, they couldn’t help.
“Couldn’t the Wraith send in darts through the gate?”
And the Wraith couldn’t send darts in through the gate because the Ancestor put a shield over that too, so that only people could come through. Anyway, the Satedan scientists figured out where the shield is coming from, and they tracked it down to the ritock’s cave. But the ritock wouldn’t let the scientists in, because he wanted to protect the Ancestor’s machine.
Just then, the Ancestor came by and found out what was going on. It turned out that the scientists had come to turn off the shield, because they wanted to be able to use their spaceships to fight the Wraith. In the end, though, the Ancestor got very mad - he said that the Satedans were dumb for wanting to throw their lives away like that. As they argued, the ritock got angrier and angrier, and eventually freaked out and killed all the Satedan scientists and ate them.
“I do not think I understand some of the literary themes in this story.”
“Shut up.”
The Ancestor was in despair, because he didn’t want any of the Satedans to die, but even with his force field, they were dying on the planet because of him. Also, he didn’t think he could live in the cave with the ritock anymore, now that it was eating people. So he came clean with the ritock, and told it that he was an Ancestor, not a Satedan, and that he’d used his machine to set up the shield. But the ritock felt so betrayed that it attacked the Ancestor, too. So the Ancestor killed the ritock, and buried it by the river where it had liked to sleep. Then he took the shield down, like the scientists wanted, and let the Satedans fight the Wraith.
Ronon pauses, then casts his eyes to the dirt. “My father used to end here by saying, and he stayed in the forest alone from then on, and still lives there to this day.”
Radek doesn’t speak for a long time. Then he clears his throat noisily.
“You know, this reminds me of a story we had about a woman who was forced to marry a basilisk.”
“What’s a basilisk?” Ronon asks.
“Well,” Radek says, before pausing thoughtfully, as if wondering where to begin.
It seems that, in the old days, there was a woman who had three daughters. One day, when she was going to the market, she promised to bring them each gifts. And the first two daughters asked for jewels and fine foods and new slippers and the latest books. But the third daughter asked only for three roses . . .
Georgic
A poem about rural life and husbandry, so called from the Greek word for “earth worker, farmer.” This is a form of didactic poetry and its principal purpose is to give instructions on how to do something.
Their first mission after John returns to field work is pretty much a milk run. John doesn’t mind, though, because P8N-2Z3 is all green and rolling fields lined with copses of wild trees and pools of bright flowers, as if it was terraformed by Tolkien. They’ve been here before and managed not to make a complete mess of it, so they’re greeted with cheerful smiles and waves and the kind of children who stick to your legs.
“You’ve arrived on our Harvest-day!” the leader, Mirla, explains, when she can finally be located. She’s covered in grain dust and there’s a smudge of dirt high on her cheek. Her salt and pepper hair is falling down from its loose bun in a way that makes John want to reach out and tuck the escaped strands behind her ear for her.
Teyla peels a toddler from her knees and steps forward. “Our apologies; we did not know. Shall we return for trade on another day?”
“No, no, no no no!” Mirla laughs, holding up her hands as if to hold them all in place. “Honestly, it’s wonderful that you’re here; we’re pretty short on able-bodied farmhands since we had that sickness last month. The new medications are working very well, by the way,” she answers John’s inquisitive look at the mention of the illness. “If you four pitch in, I’ll knock twenty percent off the price of the finished product.”
“That is . . . extremely generous,” Teyla says, impressed with this offer.
“Not at all! The crops are only good if you harvest while they bloom, and they only bloom two days of the year. Leave your gear in the guest house, there are sacks and scythes in the barn. Come find me when you’re ready.” Then, with her usual brusque energy, she hurries off to put some lollygagging teenagers back to work. Her cotton dress swirls around her ankles as she hops the short fence that surrounds the blooming field.
John blinks. “Okay, team, it sounds like we’re farmhands for the rest of the mission.” He shrugs. He half-expects McKay to start immediately bitching about allergies or manual labour, but that quarter is curiously silent. When he looks over, Rodney is sniffing the air curiously, as if completely surprised that the vast fields of purple flowers aren’t causing immediate issues relating to swelling and mucous.
“You gonna be okay with your injury?” Ronon asks, his eye catching the way that John still slightly favours his left side.
“I’m fine,” John scoffs.
“You’re not lifting anything heavy,” Ronon says. Teyla backs him up with a firm glare.
John holds up his hands in defeat. “Okay, okay, I’ll be the guy on the scythe.” At the guest house, they store their stuff, stripping down to t-shirts and trousers.
“Shouldn’t Ronon take the scythe? I mean, he’s the tallest.” Rodney’s got that light in his eyes that he gets when he’s being clever.
“Nah, I wear more black than he does,” John answers. “And I’ve named one of the puddlejumpers Binky.” Rodney laughs. His teeth and eyes are bright in the sunshine as they walk to the barn.
“What are you talking about?” Ronon seems unusually tolerant of their references to Earth-culture. Maybe he’s infected by the sunshine, too. He’s also got a little girl stuck to his calf that he either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care about; John debates telling him about it, but then decides that it’s too cute.
“Oh, on Earth, we sometimes personify Death as a tall, thin guy, dressed in black robes, carrying a scythe. He harvests people’s lives with it, see - ” Rodney takes a rather ill-advised swing with the scythe that he’s just picked up. Teyla ducks the blade and then takes it from him easily.
“That’s very interesting, but perhaps you could avoid a physical demonstration today, Rodney,” Teyla says, teasing. Rodney goes a little red, but Teyla pats him on the shoulder reassuringly.
“We have a story about Death on Sateda, too,” Ronon says. “Except it’s a little woman who creeps in windows and down chimneys at nighttime to steal the breath from your lungs and the memories from your eyes.”
“Creepy,” Rodney says, picking up a stack of burlap sacks.
“Sort of. She also fights the Wraith, in the stories.”
“Well, then, perhaps I should be the one to wield the scythe,” Teyla says, taking a few practice swings with it herself before stopping to frown at the blade. “Though it is not properly sharpened, I’m afraid.”
“Well, you’re not hacking through bone with it, Teyla,” John says, rolling his eyes. “Jeez. What a group of farmers we make.”
Turns out, though, that they do make a pretty good group of farmers. Rodney and Ronon haul the finished product and man the wheelbarrow while John and Teyla take turns scything and getting the plants into the sacks. Everything has to be properly sorted: the stalks will be ground down for flour, and the tuber-roots washed and stored in cool cellars, but the bright purple flowers and their thick, crunchy green leaves are apparently a delicacy, to be served at feasts for the next week; they get sorted into the wheelbarrows and taken directly to the kitchens. Mirla comes by a few times to see how they’re doing, surprised by their progress.
“For a group of bumbling off-worlders, you do pretty well,” she says, holding out a dipper of water to each of them in turn. When Rodney wipes his mouth with his sleeve, a little dirt migrates onto his cheek.
“We’re doing what we can,” John agrees amiably.
“Yes yes, but I don’t suppose you have anything to eat, do you? Since we’re expected to toil in the hot sun . . .” Teyla puts a warning hand on Rodney’s shoulder.
“Oh, help yourselves to the ylse flowers as you go!” Mirla answers. “We prepare them in many ways, as the elders are doing right now in the kitchens, but they’re pretty tasty raw.” She demonstrates, carefully tearing the petals and leaves away from the plant with her teeth.
Teyla squeezes Rodney’s shoulder again, preemptively.
Mirla is distracted, anyway, before Rodney can let her know what he thinks about eating flower petals for lunch.
“Oh, Tam, there you are,” she says, scooping up the girl who’d been attached to Ronon’s calf throughout the morning until she’d fallen off in the early afternoon (“Why didn’t you tell me that was there?” Ronon had asked. They’d all shrugged. “I didn’t notice,” John had lied).
Once Mirla’s wandered off, John tries one of the flowers. The petals are thick and juicy, like the leaves, and taste like . . .
“Cherries,” he says, thoughtfully. The leaves taste sort of minty.
“What? Gimme.” McKay snatches a flower from the bucket for himself.
Hours later, they’re all sticky and dirty, so accept gladly (or, in McKay’s case, grudgingly) the offer of fresh clothes before heading to the feast. Once there, they get set up very nicely at the head table, where they’re served delicate petal-tarts and rich tuber-stews and it’s all pretty great until the kissing starts.
John doesn’t get any warning, just Mirla’s lips suddenly on his, sweet with the juice from the tarts.
“Wha?” he says, intelligently, as she pulls away.
“You don’t have this custom? You have to pass it down the line.” Mirla points at Ronon, seated next to John. Mirla, at the head of the huge table, then turns the other way and kisses the woman on her right - soft lips, no tongue, as she kissed John - who kisses the next person, and so on.
“It’s good luck,” Mirla says. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t imply anything sexual.” John could swear that her eyes are fucking twinkling.
John half-turns to Ronon, as if to ask him to form a united anti-kissing front, but the guy just shrugs, puts his hands on either side of John’s face (surprisingly gentle) and plants one on him. It’s a little rough, but slower and wetter than John might have expected, had he been expected to expect such a thing in the first place. Ronon’s beard tickles. Then it’s over, and Ronon turns to Teyla, and John feels strangely disappointed.
Ronon’s kiss with Teyla is easy, even a little dirty, the two of them familiar with each other in a way that makes John wonder about them once again. Then Teyla pulls back, and smiles, and turns to Rodney, who’s been silent through the whole affair, and looks more than a little apprehensive.
Teyla just gets one hand on his neck and pulls him in, and John watches their lips as they slide together, watches the angle of Rodney’s jaw as he tilts his head to let Teyla’s tongue slip into his
mouth, just a little. John shifts in his seat, feels like a pervert but can’t stop watching.
Then Rodney turns to the person beside him, one of the farmers, a handsome, olive-skinned young man with hair bleached by the sun. Rodney darts in and pecks him on the lips. No - not pecks, really; smooches might be more accurate. Their mouths make a smacking sound that John can hear three seats away. McKay pulls back quickly, but the farmer grabs him by the collar and pulls him back in again for a fast kiss that looks much hotter than the last. Then the guy winks at McKay before spinning in his chair to the man on his other side.
Rodney blushes bright red, and, turning back in his chair, catches John looking at him. His blush fading, Rodney tilts his head and furrows his eyebrows at John in that way he does when he’s met a new piece of Ancient technology.
John goes back to his petal-tarts.
The night is spent in the village’s guest-house, which is like a cross between a military barracks and a country-house B&B; there are ten beds, lined against the walls in two neat rows of five, each covered in bright, fluffy quilts and big, soft pillows. John watches his team burrow under the covers, exhausted from the day’s labour in the warm sunshine, and is almost content.
In the bed next to his, Rodney’s done a face-plant into the pillow, barely beneath the covers before he falls asleep. His cheeks are pink from the sun.
-
The next day is much the same: cutting, and packing, and hauling, eating his fill of the crunchy, minty leaves and the warm bread that gets brought by at mid-day, and trying not to turn his back on Ronon when he has the wheelbarrow (the man’s a menace).
“I know I’m not usually much for this kind of thing, but I have to say, this is kind of nice,” Rodney says as they break for water in the midafternoon. “It reminds me of the summers on my uncle’s farm in Manitoba, when I was a kid.”
John raises an eyebrow. “Your parents shipped you off to a farm in the summers? And you liked it?”
“Oh hell no, are you kidding? I hated it. I ran away four times before I figured out that there was nowhere to run to. But looking back on it now, it doesn’t seem so bad.” Rodney smiles up into the rustling tree branches above them. Serenity isn’t a common look for Rodney, but it suits him in this moment, resting in the cool shade, the collar of his shirt damp with sweat, his face relaxed. When John takes the water bottle from Rodney’s hands and drinks, the spout is warm where Rodney’s lips were a moment ago.
-
They’re early to the feast that night, having finished their allotted field. Mirla is delighted with the progress they’ve made, and is chatting amiably with Rodney at the long table when John comes in to the feast hall. There are a few people seated here and there, scattered along the table, but no one at the head of the table except for Mirla and Rodney.
John doesn’t allow himself to stop and think about it. He just sits down in the chair next to Rodney’s and slouches comfortably, joining in the conversation.
Rodney looks surprised, but doesn’t say anything right away. When Mirla gets up to go check on the food preparations, he rubs his thumb against his index finger nervously.
“Uh. Are you sure you want to sit there?” he manages, finally.
John gives him his best innocent smile. “I’m good.” He takes it as a positive sign that Rodney doesn’t get up to change seats.
But it turns out that the kissing-custom is only on the first night of the feast; after the meal, no one initiates any ritualized makeout sessions at all. John is surprised by his own sense of relief. Rodney doesn’t meet his eyes on the way back to the guest house.
They head back to Atlantis the next day, fresh-scrubbed but in their rumpled uniforms, hauling their first installment of food in Ronon’s favourite wheelbarrow: tubers and flowers that they harvested themselves, with their own hands. The sun is warm on his shoulders, and his team is all around him, and John is almost content.
-
Volume II