Fractured
Alli Snow
John lives
most of his life now in stages, changing centuries as casually as some people
change their clothes, moving through the fabric of time and through walls and
through lives. The skips never last long
– a couple of hours at most – but they come in sequences, fast and furious, one
after another until he can hardly remember the taste of beer, or the cold bite
of Antarctic winds through his Gore-Tex jacket, or the low, steady hum of a jet
engine, or any of the other insignificant things that have suddenly become so
meaningful to his life.
It’s
always somewhere on the city. Past,
present and future, Atlantis has claimed him, or maybe she’s saving him,
keeping him chained to this place by a thin thread of sanity, fighting the
Wraith influence that’s run rampant through his body and his mind and the very
molecules that make up both.
Somewhere on the city. Control room, med
labs, far piers, areas that haven’t been built yet, areas that were built and
then destroyed and rebuilt in a completely different way.
John has
seen Atlantis’ birth, and its death.
He has
seen the faces of the first Ancients, and the faces of the expedition members,
and then their descendants, and ultimately the faces of the Wraith. He’s not sure exactly when the invasion
happens – he just knows that at some point in the future the humans lose, and
the Wraith win, except they weren’t expecting the last-ditch self-destruct to
be tied into the star drive. John
figures eventually he will skip into that penultimate moment, when the smug
superiority on the bastards’ faces fades into stunned horror, and then vanishes
in an all-consuming fire.
He wonders
if it’ll actually kill him.
When he
skips, he’s not really there. He’s a
ghost, a specter, walking through the familiar halls with no one any the
wiser. He sees the Atlantean
craftsmen installing the fine colored glass, laughing and talking in their
pride and enthusiasm, and then he skips ahead and sees a Wraith feeding on
someone, he doesn’t know who, a woman with dark skin and startlingly blue eyes,
and then he skips and the city is bright and clean again and there’s a bronze-skinned
young man standing on the balcony with a sheaf of papers in his hands, and then
he skips again and it’s only silent still darkness and he knows the only living
soul in the whole city is the other Elizabeth Weir, sealed up in the stasis pod
where she’ll spend the next several thousand years.
He’s out
of phase, out of sync. Isolated,
detached from all the horrors and beauties of the world, the past and future of
Atlantis spread out before him, and though the city herself has nothing to do
with this torture he can almost hear her silvery voice in his head. See
this. See me. See all that I was, all that I am, all that I will be.
And
sometimes he thinks he hears her asking him for help.
He’s in no
position to help anybody. The only
reason he’s alive is because sometimes he skips back to his own time, his own
universe, the existence that he originally came from. He knows that he’s home because the
dissonance that rings through his body during all the other shifts is absent,
and because everything around him suddenly seems a little bit clearer and
brighter, and also because he usually shifts back into existence near Teyla.
More often
than not, when he comes back he comes back within a few yards of her. Beckett and Rodney think it might have
something to do with her Wraith gene.
John doesn’t know, and most of the time he doesn’t care, because any
constant in his life – no matter how small – is welcome and blessed and when he
opens his eyes and sees her and realizes that she sees him it is probably the
only real happiness he ever feels anymore.
It’s the knowledge that, for at least a few hours, he isn’t alone
anymore, he isn’t a shadow walking across the graves of his friends, he’s home,
he’s home, until the next time.
***
These
brief return trips are the only times he has to eat and drink, as the food and
water in the other places are all as insubstantial as everything else. So the first thing he does is eat, and eat
and eat, and drink and then eat some more.
Sometimes he’s lucky enough to come back into the mess hall, which
scares the hell out of everyone else there, but before he can even wipe away a
stray tear of profound relief she’s there, with a sandwich or an apple or once
even Jello, because it was the closest thing, saying
“here, eat this”. And of course he’s
starved, and feeling helpless and scared and sorry for himself, so he sits and
eats and drinks his fill while somebody commandeers a backpack and fills it
with water bottles and nonperishable items – MREs
mostly, another facet of the punishment – in case his next series of skips
takes longer than a couple of real time days.
Then Elizabeth and Rodney and Beckett and Ronon
and the rest of the base seem to descend on him en masse, and he’s dragged to
the infirmary or the lab or some other bolt hole so someone can run more tests,
use this brief time to try and figure out what’s happening, how it happened,
how to stop it, what it’s doing to him.
Kate Heightmeyer attended the first dozen or so of these
impromptu meetings, trying to gauge his state of mind; now she doesn’t even
bother.
Eventually
he feels it, the tightening sensation of a rubber band being pulled to its
zenith, and then the world snaps back together and he shifts again.
***
This is
his life.
There is a
council of Atlanteans sitting around the conference
table, talking in serious tones, pointing to maps and diagrams, all intelligent
and thoughtful, all completely oblivious to John’s presence. He passes the time by looking over shoulders,
and eavesdropping on conversations, trying to learn something that could be of
use back in what he’s come to think of as the Real World. And sometimes he tries to catch some of the
cuter women while they’re in the shower, at least until his better angels get a
hold of him.
There is
only the sound of the city waiting in the darkness, settling around itself, sighing at the lightless rooms and empty halls. Atlantis has spent much of its time in
solitude, and so John does as well. He
always stays well away from the room where the stasis chamber is, and away from
the ZPMs that Weir will periodically cycle. He may be a ghost, he may be unable to affect
anything while he’s skipping, but there’s no point in risking it and screwing
up the past.
Or would
that be the future?
He’s on
the outskirts of the city. The central
spire is still being built. John looks
around, wondering at the impossible view.
Everyone is smiling and intense and dressed in neutrals, and John is
almost positive that none of them have ever heard of the Wraith, or even
imagined such a horror.
He’s in
the jumper bay. It’s dark and dismal,
and most of the jumpers are gone, and inside one is a Wraith. He’s trying to figure out how to fly it, John
expects, and he amuses himself by taunting the son of a bitch for his
ineptitude. But it hurts more than he
wants to admit to see them here, knowing they won, enjoying the spoils of their
long-sought victory.
He hasn’t
told anyone back in the real world about this part. He should, but he can’t. How could he?
How could he tell them that everything they’ve been struggling towards
will eventually all be for nothing, because the Wraith will come and they will win? He can’t expect them to accept that. He can barely accept it himself, and he’s
seen it over and over and over again.
A little
human girl trails after the Wraith in the jumper, carrying his equipment,
staring after the monster with loathing and fear in her wide, dark eyes. John knows that she’s a slave. He also knows that she’s the Wraith
equivalent of an MRE. He leaves the bay
and winds up alone in what had once been a science lab, shuddering, hugging his
knees to his chest, waiting out the rest of the skip
in painful solitude.
He’s
exhausted, he should sleep, since sleeping is one of the few things he can do in these out of phase stages, but
he can never sleep during the Wraith skips.
It’s stupid, but he keeps thinking that if he’s asleep, blissfully
unawares, they might be able to find him, and take him, and that would be the
end of it.
Sometimes
he wants it to end, but not at the hands of a Wraith.
John keeps
seeing the little girl: not much older than ten or eleven, painfully thin, her
young body not much more than a collection of points and angles, her dark hair
cropped short, her dark eyes watchful and weary. He knows – he’s sure; instinct still speaks
to him – that the Wraith have been on Atlantis for at least ten years, maybe
even more than, hungry for the promised banquet on Earth but willing to take
the dissection of the city slowly. Wraith don’t know time as humans do. So where did the girl come from? Who is she, how did this happen to her, and
why?
It’s the
first time he’s really let himself wonder about the people in the other times,
as though they’re real, as though there’s something he can do to help
them. And of course there isn’t. He can’t even help himself. And if Rodney’s right about the physics – and
that seems a given – even if he brought a nuke back from the real world and put
it under the Wraith’s bed and set it off, nothing would happen. The explosion would be as out of phase as
John himself, and the only person incinerated would be him.
Sometimes
he wants it to end, but not in incineration.
***
He skips
on.
Silence
and darkness, as the city waits on the bottom of the ocean for the expedition
to revive it. He tries to sleep, but he
can’t.
He skips.
Atlanteans
crowd the control room, their normally-placid voices raised in alarm. The shield is failing,
we need backup power, if even one dart gets through… This, then, is the first siege. John knows how it ends.
He skips.
The mess
is almost empty; there are just a few people sitting at tables, eating quietly
as they read reports or essays or novels with questionable covers. One is the bronze-skinned young man that John
has seen on several occasions. As John
watches, the man looks up from his meal, staring into space with an annoyed,
almost challenging expression.
He skips.
Wraith again. They’ve turned one of the
larger conference rooms into their own mess.
Guards hold back a group of frightened humans, mostly young people, and
in fact as John looks closer he sees that none of them seem older than their
early twenties. A silver-haired Wraith
has one of them by the neck, a skinny young woman with thin dark hair who
struggles vainly in his grip, and John knows that it is the little girl from
the jumper.
The Wraith
drags the girl away.
John runs
after them.
He doesn’t
know what he intends to do. He can’t do
anything. He’s a ghost, a shadow, a
specter, and every blow aimed at the Wraith’s head passes through as though he
were made of so much smoke, and when he stands in front of the Wraith and its
captive they pass through him as though he isn’t there. Which of course he isn’t. Not as far as they’re concerned.
The Wraith
takes the young woman to a smaller room and throws her to the floor. He’s angry.
She hasn’t been breeding like she’s supposed to, and John realizes that
with a small select group of humans in the city of course the Wraith would want
them to make more humans, and maybe that’s the only way to stay alive. But the girl stares back defiantly and she
climbs to her feet, and even though she’s shaking she tells the Wraith in
colorful language where he can go, and what he can do with various parts of his
anatomy, and then she spits in his face.
John can’t help but feel pride.
A clawed,
hungry hand thrusts out, catching the young woman in the chest, driving her
backwards into the wall where she’s pinned.
She screams once as he begins to feed, and then falls silent.
John wants
to throw up, but there’s nothing in his stomach. He vomits anyway. When he’s done, the girl is a lifeless husk
on the intricately patterned floor, and the Wraith is gone.
He skips.
***
He shifts
into darkness, not the darkness of the abandoned city he’s come to recognize so
well but the darkness of a simple room dimmed for sleeping. This happens sometimes; he skips into
someone’s private quarters, during a private moment, and in certain
circumstances it can be pretty embarrassing and he’s almost happy to be
invisible. But this is the first time
it’s happened back in the real world, back in his own time, and he catches his
breath and freezes.
It doesn’t
matter. She always seems to have a
preternatural sense for when he’s shifted back, or maybe it’s just well-honed instinct letting her know that she’s no longer alone in this
room. Teyla
stirs and pushes herself up in bed, and by the starlight filtering in through
the window their eyes meet.
“Colonel,”
she whispers, throwing aside the blankets and swinging her legs to the
floor. John automatically averts his
eyes, more out of common decency than a lack of curiosity. But this is Teyla,
practical Teyla, and she’s dressed in a lavender
nightgown that falls almost to her knees, although her shoulders are left
bare. Her quick mind moves at once to
the necessities. “I do not have anything
to eat here, but-“
“I’m not
hungry,” he interrupts, his voice sounding dull and strange in his own
ears. He’s not hungry. He’s not even nauseous anymore, or
sleepy. He just feels tired, which is
completely different than wanting to sleep; he’s threadbare, fractured. It’s the stress, of course, and the trauma of
what he’s been forced to see, forced to endure, but he’s also starting to
suspect that these shifts are taking a more physical toll. The human body was never meant to move like
this – erratic, unstoppable – not even a body with the Ancient gene. And when Teyla
walks up and puts her hand against his roughened jaw, the better to lift his
head and look into his eyes, he struggles against the temptation to lean into
her touch, bury his face in her hair and feel the warmth and resiliency of her
body against his.
It seems
like a thousand years has passed since he’s felt anything.
Her
expression is solemn as she drops her hand to his shoulder, her dark eyes
liquid in the starlight. She seems to
know that something isn’t right – or more accurately that it’s even more wrong
than normal – and that he hasn’t been taking care of himself like he did at the
beginning. John hasn’t looked in a
mirror for weeks, it seems, and he already can tell that he’s lost weight. Like he’s leaving little
bits of himself behind every time he skips.
“I should
call Dr. Weir and Rodney,” says Teyla at last,
glancing over her shoulder at the headset resting on her bedside table, but she
doesn’t turn away from him. She just
looks up into his face with that quiet, growing concern. “John?”
“How long
has this been happening?” he asks her.
Her
expression is guarded, and she hesitates for a moment as though contemplating a
lie. “Almost four months,” she says at
last, and she’s probably not counting the two weeks he spent as a captive of
the Wraith. “This is the twenty-first
time you have come back.”
“And is
Rodney or anyone else even close to an explanation?”
She
swallows, drops her gaze. “He is
working. They all are. If they can piece together some of the
equipment that was damaged, perhaps-“
“It’s been
four months,” he says, more to himself than to her. “Rodney’s the best there is. If he can’t even figure out what happened to
me, then there’s no way to find a solution.
A cure, whatever. And I can’t do anything. I can’t help.
This is just how it’s going to be.”
“You
should not speak this way…”
But his
little speech was more exhausting than he would have thought possible and he
has no energy left to argue with her. He
stumbles a little as he walks to the bed and she’s
there next to him, helping him sit, one warm hand against his back, her face
tight and drawn. Suddenly he feels
guilty, incredibly guilty that when he comes back it’s usually to her, that he’s
become such a burden in her life, and again he thinks about ending it.
Yet it
seems like a shame after hanging on this long.
“If you
will not eat,” says Teyla softly, “and if you will
not let me call the others, then you must let me take care of you.”
He looks
up, curious despite himself. “Meaning?”
“A hot
shower,” she says decidedly, and she stands, taking his hand and pulling him
up.
***
He feels
like an invalid, a child, as she leads him into the water room and passes her
palm over the sensor, activating a fall of steaming water. He undresses slowly, pulling the shirt over
his head, unbuckling his belt, stepping out of his pants and then under the
spray with no great enthusiasm. She closes
the stall door and leaves with the promise of a brief, discreet absence and a
prompt return. Like he
might try to drown himself in the standing water if she’s gone for long.
There is
soap, and shampoo, and even a razor that she probably wouldn’t kill him for
using just this once, but he finds that he can’t reach for any of them. He simply stands there, letting the water
fall down his body, down his nose and lips and chin, down his chest, his
abdomen, his back and groin, streaming down his legs, swirling away down the
drain, and when he closes his eyes he can see the dead girl, the man in the
mess hall, the Wraith in the jumper, the vacant, lonely city that calls out to
him to bear witness.
Not all of
the water in that city – which is a considerable amount, considering its
environment – can wash away all of it, wash away the helplessness that gnaws on
his bones.
The shower
stall door opens a crack; with a start John realizes that Teyla
has returned, that she’s been calling his name and he hasn’t answered. “I’m fine,” he says halfheartedly as she
peeks in, her eyes focused firmly on his face.
“I brought
you fresh clothing,” she says, and then her gaze dips a little, not down his
body but at the untouched soaps and towels.
She frowns, purses her lips, and then she steps into the shower,
lavender nightgown and all, and closes the door behind her.
The hot
water falls directly from above, like rainfall, and she is almost instantly
drenched, her long hair dripping, the nightgown plastered to her body as she
pours soap onto a washcloth and confidently begins to scrub it across his
chest, his shoulders, his back and stomach.
A strong, clean smell wafts on the air, like herbs and sunlight, a scent
he only now realizes that he’s always associated with Teyla.
Her touch
is professional, her hands do not linger, and yet there is caring in the way
she caresses him and the simple human
contact is so strange and wonderful that he wants to sink to his knees with the
pleasure of it. When she lathers his
hair with shampoo he bows his head to allow an easier reach, and when she draws
the razor along his jawline he stands very still, his
eyes closed, concentrating on the sensation of her fingers light on his skin,
and the rasp of the blade, and the nearness of his naked body to her own.
When she
is done she does not loiter but passes her hand over the sensor again, stopping
the water. In a few seconds there is a
towel wrapped around his waist, and she leads him back out of the stall, still
dripping. “Your hair is getting long,”
she observes, as though she’s thinking of taking this to the next level and
giving him a haircut, and the notion is so logical and so absurd that he
actually smiles, and then the smile fades as she reaches up and brushes a
strand from his forehead. He reaches out
to touch the ends of her own hair, to make a comment of a similar nature, but
somehow his head instead falls to rest on her hip. The smell of the herbal soap still swirls
around them, warm and intoxicating.
***
In the
bedroom he loses the towel, she peels off the sodden nightgown and he covers
her cool body with his own. His kisses
are hard and demanding as he presses her down and he wonders if this is just a
pity screw, but in the end it doesn’t matter because he wants her, needs her,
needs the hands that clutch at his shoulders and the legs that hook over his
hips and the back that arches her body so perfectly against him. He needs the soft voice that gasps into his
ear when he takes her, and the way she moves, and the way she holds him when he
can’t move anymore, when every muscle tenses, tenses, and then his body falls
into that boneless stupor, and into trembling sleep.
They wake
together in the dawn and move again in that same harmony, more gently this time
but also with a new awareness of parting, and loss, and this time he makes sure
that she cries out before he does, he kisses her neck and her shoulder and
cradles her body against his as they ride to the top.
Afterwards
he dresses, and slips on the pack she filled with food and water the night
before. Teyla
pulls on a robe and sits next to him, her head resting lightly on his
shoulder. They do not talk. There’s not really anything to say. When the stretched feeling comes over him
again he makes sure he moves away, because his clothing and his back always
travel with him, so there’s so reason to assume that by touching someone he
would condemn them to this same hell.
Instead of holding her hand he holds her eyes, until they disappear in a
flash of invisible light and are replaced by something else.
***
He skips.
Early Atlantis. Maybe still on Earth. Hard to tell. Ancients move around him, beautiful and
serene and unaware of his plight, and even if they did knew
he can’t imagine that they’d care much.
Wraith-occupied Atlantis. He stays away from
any inhabited areas this time, but he can still feel their presence, a
violation of the city.
Somewhere in the middle. There is a man
sitting in what was once
Empty Atlantis. He is deposited in the darkened
Gate room, and after a moment of looking warily around
he sits and pulls out some of the protein bars that Teyla
packed for him so many eons ago. As he
eats he looks up into the still and silent recesses of the city that in
actuality aren’t so still and silent. He
can hear Atlantis whispering to him.
See this. See me.
See all that I was, all that I am, all that I
will be.
“Go to
hell,” he says aloud, surprised by the hurt in his voice. “You guys were so great,
you think I’m so special, why don’t you do something to help me?”
But we have.
Startled,
John drops his power bar. This is not
the voice of the city, and at the same time it is. “How?” he demands, wondering if he’s finally,
completely lost it.
You were held in captivity for two
weeks. The Wraith scientist put a great
deal of effort into manipulating your DNA.
Did you not think it strange that you were able to escape so easily?
“It wasn’t
easy,” he snaps, but now that he’s thinking about it he realizes that of course
it was. The ground had trembled, as
though with an earthquake, and with a very small
amount of finagling the doors had opened.
He’d made it out of the facility and to the surface, and then to the Stargate, and even though he hadn’t had an IDC something
had told him to go through anyway, and something had possessed Elizabeth not to
activate the shield, and he’d made it back alive.
Did you not wonder what prevented
the damage in your genes from manifesting until you were safe back in Atlantis?
“But
what’s the point?” he asks angrily, trying not to imagine the horror of
skipping, randomly, around some Wraith-infested planet, or around the galaxy at
large. “Even if you put it off, it still
happened. Why? Just so I could get an in-depth history
lesson?”
We want you to stop it.
“Stop
what?” he asks, but he knows. The invasion of the Wraith.
The despoiling of the Ancient’s prize jewel. “I can’t stop anything. I’m not really here. The only time I can even interact with people
is when I’m back home.
Are you saying I can stop it from there?”
No.
By the time of their coming, our children will not have fought the
Wraith in many decades. They will grow
complacent. They will believe the threat
defeated. They will not be prepared for
what comes. They will not heed the
warnings of their ancestors.
He thinks
about this. If they’d had more time to
explore Atlantis before venturing offworld – and they
had had more time, they just hadn’t known that the city would rise to the
surface of its own accord – they might have learned more details about the
Wraith early on. He might have realized
that killing the Keeper would be a bad idea.
They might have stopped the whole awakening before it ever
happened. “You mean I’m supposed to warn
the people in Atlantis about the invasion before it happens, but soon before it
happens so they take me seriously?” he asks scornfully. He’s pretty much figured out who he’s talking
to now, and he’s a little annoyed that the ascended Ancients will break their
own non-interference rules whenever it’s convenient for them.
You must pass on the information.
John
scrambles to his feet, almost falls as the room spins dizzily around him, but
stays upright. “Listen, geniuses, I
can’t pass on anything. No one can see me
when I move. Nobody knows I’m there!”
The voices
are silent for a moment, for several moments, for so many moments that he
starts to worry that he’s scared them away, and then he worries again that he’s
simply gone barking mad. But he can
still sense their presence with him, up there in the darkness, and at length
there is a reply.
Ask him who his parents are.
He
scowls. “Ask who?”
He cannot see you. But because of his lineage he is a strong
carrier, harboring both lines of genes, and he senses your presence. Even better than the girl.
“What
girl?”
But the
voices withdraw, leaving on the silent, plaintive cries of the city herself,
and he has nobody and nothing to rage against except for the darkness.
***
He is
standing in one of Atlantis’ hallways.
The sun streams in through the colored glass and he can hear faint
voices in the distance; he can almost convince himself that he is back in his
own time, but there is a wrongness about everything which dispels that
hope. He looks around, wondering if the
voices of the ascended will speak to him here as well, and that is when he sees
the girl.
She’s ten,
maybe eleven, dressed in the simple-yet-eclectic garb John has come to identify
with the Athosians.
Her long dark hair is pulled back in a ponytail, her dark eyes lively
with intelligence. It is not the girl he
has seen enslaved and later fed upon in the Wraith-infested future of the city,
but the resemblance is striking enough that he’s intrigued, and follows her
down the hall, through a door and out onto one of the western-facing balconies.
He finds
himself staring at Teyla.
It’s her,
but it’s not. The hair is still long and
glossy, but there’s a certain weariness that’s set in around her eyes. She’s older, although not by very much. Ten years, perhaps.
“Liaden,” she says, turning away from the view and sounding
surprised. “I thought you were going to
the mainland with Patrick?”
“I am,”
says the girl, Liaden, and she grins. “Andy said that if we’re good he’ll let the
two of us take turns flying a little once we’re out
over the water.”
Teyla
raises her eyebrows. “And does
“She won’t
if nobody tells her,” the child responds, the smile turning decidedly
mischievous. “I thought maybe you would
want to come.”
“No thank
you,” Teyla responds promptly, although her smile is
indulgent. “I plan on staying here where
it’s safe.”
Liaden makes
a little show of her mock outrage. “I
won’t lose control! Patrick might, but
Andy will be there and he’s such a natural he’ll probably be able to rescue us
at the very last second before we plunge into the water,” she says, with
obvious relish.
“Just what
every mother wants to hear,” says Teyla, shaking her
head. “Be careful, Liaden.”
“I will,”
says the girl breezily, and she spins on her heel and turns to go.
“Be
careful,” echoes John, feeling a strange sort of warmth spreading through his
body as he looks at the girl. Liaden.
The child stops
short. She turns back, looking
puzzled. Teyla
doesn’t seem to notice.
John catches
his breath. “Can you hear me?” he asks
the girl.
Frowning,
the girl looks around the balcony, and she bites her lip. Then she shrugs and continues on her way.
John
follows her to the jumper bay. Andy
proves to be a rugged, competent-looking Air Force captain that John has never
seen before, but he reasons that anyone Teyla would
trust with her daughter must be, well, exceedingly trustworthy.
Patrick, a
blonde boy about Liaden’s age, with clear blue eyes
and a conspicuous cowlick, arrives shortly thereafter with a ten-years-later
version of Laura Cadman. The captain is
taking the children with him on a trip to the mainland, John learns, to visit
some friends and also take some soil samples, and Cadman tells Patrick not to
crash into the ocean, and in his barely-accented voice the boy replies that
he’d never do something so completely lame as that which reminds John of Rodney’s near-miss and makes it all but
certain that this child is Cadman’s son.
They climb
in, and Laura waves a cheery goodbye, and John resists the urge to jump in
after the children because he doesn’t know what might happen if he shifts away
while not within the city.
And then,
as though thinking about it could make it happen, he skips.
***
The young
man with the bronze skin is sitting alone in one of the city’s many labs,
reading a thick novel with a red dust jacket.
He looks up and frowns, almost exactly the same frown as the girl Liaden, and John asks nervously, “Can you hear me?”
The man
slowly closes the novel, marking his place with his finger. John doesn’t have to glance at the cover to
recognize Tolstoy. “Not… exactly,” he says, his voice deeper and rougher than expected. “But I know when you’re there. And I can… I don’t know what you would call
it. I guess maybe it’s
hearing.”
John’s
mouth is suddenly dry, and he berates himself for never trying this before,
even though there was no reason to expect that it would work. His hands are clenched tightly at his side. “You don’t seem… you know,
worried.”
“I’ve felt
this a couple of times now,” says the man, glancing
idly around as though not sure exactly what part of the room to address. “Nothing bad ever happened. And you’re not a Wraith. If anything I’d suspect you were one of the
Ancestors.”
John steps
closer, very close, finding familiarity in the strong lines of the other man’s face, in the hazel eyes and tousled brown hair. “What’s your name?”
“Johnny
Beckett,” is the calm reply.
John
forces himself to breathe slowly. “Who
are your parents?”
“Why do
you want to know?” asks Johnny – no… easier to think of him as Beckett,
especially since he doesn’t have the accent – his lips twitching in a wry smile. “Gonna go back in
time and kill them so I’m never born?”
“You’ve
seen Terminator?” asks John, surprised.
The other
man looks startled for the first time. “You have?”
They lapse
briefly into silence.
“Patrick
and Liaden Beckett,” says Beckett at last. “They’re my parents. Still here on Atlantis, both of them.”
He cannot see you. But because of his lineage he is a strong
carrier, harboring both lines of genes, and he senses your presence. Even better than the girl.
John nods
to himself, understanding part of the riddle at last. Both of this man’s grandfathers were natural
carriers of the ATA gene, although the case could certainly made that one had
more of a natural flair with it than the other.
And his maternal grandmother had a small amount of Wraith DNA as
well. His lineage does in fact make him
special.
“Have you
ever seen a Wraith?”
Beckett frowns. “Not face to face, no. I saw one from far away, before another
member of my team killed him. There
aren’t many left.”
“That’s
not true,” says John quickly. “They’re
hiding out somewhere, waiting for you guys to become complacent and stop worrying,
but they’re not gone. I don’t know what
you think happened,” he hurries on when it looks like the other man is about to
interrupt, “and I’m not even sure I want to know, but they’re not that easy to
get rid of. They’re out there, just
biding their time, and… and… they come
through the Stargate, one time when you’re not being
careful enough, you think it’s somebody else but it’s them, a lot of them, and
they take the whole city.”
That part,
he knows didn’t come from him. Or not directly from him.
It came through him, like he’s a conduit, a radio, from the voices that
whisper behind the city’s darkness.
“They feed
on most of the people but they keep the ones alive who have the ATA gene
because they need someone to work certain parts of the city’s technology, and
they breed humans for the gene so they can figure out things like the star
drives and get to Earth. It doesn’t
work, because of measures that were put in place, but a lot of people die and
the city is destroyed.”
Beckett
gets to his feet; he looks startled, and for good reason. “How do you know this?” he demands, for the
first time appearing uncomfortable. “Are
you… from the future?”
“In a
manner of speaking,” says John wryly.
“I’ve been a lot of places. I
haven’t actually seen it, but…”
Take his hand, say the voices.
John
frowns. “I can’t.”
“Can’t
what?”
Do it, John.
The
stretched rubber band feeling begins to come over him – so soon, so quickly,
he’s about to shift again. He’s out of
phase, a ghost, a shadow, and he can’t believe that Beckett will be any more
insubstantial than anything else he’s tried to touch, even if they are
related. Besides, if it is true, what
right does he have to trap this man in the nightmare with him?
“Can’t
what?” asks Beckett again, sounding anxious.
He sets the book down on the counter.
“Listen, do you need help? Can I
do something?”
“You can
come with me,” says John, fighting at the pull of another time. “See it for yourself.”
The other
man hesitates. “Will I be able to come
back?”
Do it now.
“Yes,”
says John, hoping he won’t be made a liar, and as he skips away he grabs at
Beckett’s hand, which is real and warm and solid.
***
They’re in
the central tower, on the walkway which crosses from
John
ignores the question. “You can see me?”
Beckett
stares, which answers that question easily enough. “Yeah, I can… you… You’re John Sheppard.”
It’s not a
question, but before John can reply there is the sound of a wormhole engaging
in the room beneath them, and voices from the control room.
There was
someone in the glass-walled office, not
Beckett’s
silence has taken on a new level of profundity.
Curious, John prods him. “What is
it?”
The other
man swallows hard. “I think… I think
that’s Kyla.”
“Who?”
“My daughter.”
The family
tree is starting to become a little much for John’s overtaxed brain to handle;
it’s enough for right now to realize that the hazel-eyed woman is one of his
descendants.
“Radio
contact coming in from the Calbach,” says the man
seated at the controls.
“The Calbach?
We haven’t heard from them in a while,” says the woman lightly. “Maybe they’re ready to trade after all.”
The
technician listens closely to something only he can hear, then nods. “Just got a transmission
from their Prime Minister’s office, Dr. Channing. They say they want to come through and
discuss terms.”
Channing smiles.
“I thought they might come around,” she says. “Let them through.”
This, of
course, is the beginning of the end. It
is not a trade delegation from some world called Calbach
that comes through, it is the Wraith.
The same Wraith that have been hiding somewhere since before Johnny
Beckett’s day, perhaps biding their time, perhaps not, waiting until a day when
such simple tactics would succeed.
Perhaps they had spent all that time working on the technology that, as
soon as the bearer passes through the event horizon, temporarily paralyzes all
the Ancient machinery in the tower, including the shield controls, the
manual-off for the Stargate, and the programmable
self-destruct.
Communications
are left unimpeded, but it is obvious after only the first fifteen minutes that
the city will not be able to withstand this assault. Most of the tower staff are shot and rendered
unconscious, and some are simply fed upon where they lay. Kyla Channing is captured and held unharmed, for the time being,
and after the central area of the city is secure she is trundled off somewhere
to be held with the other expedition members who have the ATA gene.
Johnny
Beckett is pale and sweating. For
someone who has never seen a Wraith up close before, not to mention their
savagery and the destruction they leave behind, this is indeed a potent
warning.
“Calbach,” he murmurs when the carnage pauses and they have
a moment to think. He’s leaning down
with his head between his knees. “I’ve never… never even heard of them… obviously someone they meet
later on... and they betray us…”
“Maybe not
betray,” says John gently, trying to be comforting through his own pain and
disgust. “Maybe they were tortured for
the information. It doesn’t matter. Forget Calbach. They have to know to be more careful, have
more safeguards in place. Maybe just the
knowledge that the Wraith are still out there will help. Assuming,” he adds as an afterthought, “that
they believe you.”
“They’ll
believe me,” says Beckett faintly. “Stranger
things than this have happened in the Pegasus Galaxy. But I guess you know that, don’t you John?”
John
doesn’t answer. The shift feeling is
beginning to come over him again, and he takes his grandson’s hand, and prays.
Together,
they skip.
And at the
last minute, as though a giant hand has reached down and batted them to the
side, they change course, jerking somewhere else, back to the dark lab, and War and Peace, and an Asian woman who
was just crossing the threshold sees their reappearance – or maybe just
Beckett’s – and shrieks and jumps back out the door.
Beckett
laughs hollowly. “Now they’ll have to
believe me,” he mutters, and looks around the room. “Are you still here?”
“I’m
here,” says John. “Can’t see me
anymore?”
“No.” Beckett crosses his arms, brow furrowed. “I don’t… I don’t really know what to
say. It feels like I’m going crazy.”
“Join the
club.”
“But
you’re really John Sheppard, aren’t you?”
He laughs a little. “My, well, namesake. Hard to believe. Hard
to believe any of this, that I was just… that I saw… what I saw. And now it’s all on me to stop this from
happening, isn’t it?”
“As far as
the Ancients are concerned,” says John bitterly, “we’re just tools. Me, you… maybe even Teyla.”
Teyla.
He catches
himself.
Teyla.
She’d been a part of it too. The
Ancients had needed John’s lineage, his genes, to continue into the future so
there’d be someone he could communicate with, someone he could warn. They’d knowingly thrust him into her path
every time he’d skipped back into his own time, probably figuring that
eventually he’d turn to her like he had, that he would get her pregnant with Liaden, that Liaden would
conceive a child with Carson Beckett’s son, and that that child would have the just the right genetic mix.
It seems
like it would be a hell of a lot easier to just go back in time and prevent the
Wraith from ever being created. But then
again, that’s not how the ascended Ancients seem to work.
“Is Teyla still alive?” he asks, not sure if he wants to know.
Beckett’s
expression is hesitant. He glances
towards the open doorway, no doubt wondering about the frightened scientist,
before he answers. “I… I never met her.”
John’s gut
tightens. “She’s dead?” he asks, feeling
cold.
“Until
today, I would have said yes. But until
today, everyone supposed that you were dead too.” He pauses thoughtfully. “When my mother was about my age, the
expedition found a man… an Ancestor. He
was old, and sick; they put him in quarantine.
But from what I understand Teyla spent a great
deal of time with him. Brought his
meals, kept him company. And they
talked, although nobody ever knew just what they discussed. It’s a strange story. When Teyla wasn’t
with him she was alone in her room. Then
one day somebody turned off the cameras in the infirmary. When Grandfather Carson came into the room,
the Ancestor was gone. So was Teyla. No one ever
saw either of them again.”
John’s
mouth is dry, his head spinning. “She
just… just left her daughter?” Of
course, he had left his daughter too, before she’d even been born, but it
hadn’t been his choice.
“They
discussed it beforehand, my mom’s always told me. She just says that they both knew ‘it was the
only way’. That’s all she’ll say about
it. I know it’s painful for her, since
she never knew her fa—you,” he says awkwardly. “But there were many people here who loved
her and looked after her, even after she was married, and I know my mom
believes that Teyla made the right decision. Whatever it was.”
Without
warning, with absolutely the worst timing ever, John feels the world begin to
stretch away around him. He’s filled
with panic, the cold knowledge that this may be the closest thing to home he
ever sees again; why should the ascended take pains to redirect him back to
reality, now that the correct events have been set in motion?
They must
have been set in motion.
“I have to
go,” he tells Johnny Beckett. “Tell your
mom—“
***
For a long
time it seems as though nothing has changed.
His random stops are clustered together in the heyday of Atlantis, when
Ancients drifted through the halls confident in their superiority over all
other life, then scurried from building to building with their eyes trained on
the pristine skies, then prepared themselves for evacuation back to Earth
through the Stargate.
Once he even drops in on the expedition during their first arrival,
which is as novel as it is heart-wrenching: to see Sumner, and Ford, and
Rodney, and
Finally
his damaged, displaced DNA takes him somewhere he’s never been before: a little
house far away from the city center, near a manmade beach on the water’s edge,
where Kyla Channing plays
with her children: a hazel eyed boy barely out of his toddler years, and a
dark-haired girl with piercing eyes who in another life was enslaved and killed
by the Wraith.
There are no Wraith here.
There is no threat. They are
happy.
They are
John’s descendants, and the descendants of the Ancients, the Ancestors, and
they are home.
***
The
ascended work within their own rules, for they know that to break them outright would open the doors to complete anarchy. And when it comes to these beings, with the
power to not only move mountains, but also make it so they never existed in the
first place, anarchy could be synonymous with the end of life in the
universe.
Teyla
was but a cog in the machine they devised, the same as he was, but the ascended
are not completely without compassion. They
sent something of an emissary to help her on the path to enlightenment, which
was also the path to John.
If time is
different to the Wraith, it is a known quantity to the Ancients who still watch
over their city, and they manipulate it like running water. When he sees her standing there, a bright
shape in the darkness, he knows that it is her hand who has been guiding him
even as he has danced to someone else’s tune.
Confronted
with the scope of such immense power he feels a flush of panic, of the
helplessness that was ground into his bones, and he shies away. This cannot possibly still be the woman he
cared so much for, who taught him to fight with sticks and cared for him during
the bleakest of times and raised their daughter into a fine and beautiful
woman.
His body
is ailing, and if he remains he will die.
And yet ascension is not the answer either, not for him, because the
greatness of the power would be outweighed by the inability to do anything
worthwhile with him, and it would drive him crazy anyway.
Quickly, then, she says, smiling, while the others are pretending not to look.
This seems
to be a joke amongst the ascended, one he tries not to think too hard about.
“Okay,” he
says, ignoring the fear in his heart, closing his eyes.
There is a
great warm rush, like being submerged in bathwater, a rising up, a great peace,
a sense of rightness in his body that has not been there in a very long time, a
profound understanding, riding the winds, a welcoming.
Are you sure you do not wish to
stay?
It’s not Teyla asking; she already knows. It’s the others, and he has the sense that
they see this has a homecoming, the return of a great hero. But there is no place for heroes here, for
those who would ignore the way things have always been done, who would invite
anarchy and unrest. The others may not
understand this, but she does.
And so
they fall back home, back to the city, back to Atlantis.