sga_flashfic | A Final Awakening by Smitty (Post Secret)

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A Final Awakening
by Smitty

PG-13, Gen, 3,500 words (No canon characters were killed in the writing of this fic.)

Allusions to (and some dialogue from) Hide & Seek, Sanctuary, Siege 2, and Epiphany.

For

reccea's Post Secret Card although you may want to wait until the end of the fic to look at the card.

Many thanks to

miss_porcupine for a kickass (and ass-kicking) beta on shamefully short notice! Also thanks to

amothea,

control_freak80,

lilac_way, and

furina1975 for pre-audiencing. And most of all,

reccea for the concept which is entirely hers and for holding my hand through the whole thing.

A Final Awakening
by Smitty

Toward the end of his life, the dementia was so severe that nothing John's father said made the least bit of sense. Of course, most of the things John's father had said to him in the past decade hadn't made much sense, from John's way of thinking, and not much love was there to be lost. Colonel Sheppard had, however, instilled a strong sense of duty into his son and John could travel to DC and to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to see his father die.

John sat in his father's hospital room for five days, reading Crime and Punishment aloud and moving aside for the nurses to feed his father ice chips and adjust the IV lines. They brought John coffee and food, too, and cast sympathetic doe eyes at him.

A warrant officer stood silently in the corner, ready to clear the room if the colonel started mumbling classified information but in all the hours the man stood there, the colonel never spoke of war. He talked of many other things, his rusty voice grinding out memories of his own childhood, and snowstorms in Leningrad, a road trip through Pennsylvania he took in his youth, and of John's mother.

"…local university," he muttered one day, as John was starting part two, chapter six. "...math professor." John closed the book, not sorry for the interruption, and leaned closer.

"Are you talking about Mom?" he asked, trying to get his father's attention.

"So smart," his father murmured. "So smart. All she wanted to do was stay home and play with you."

"...they were able to rid themselves of their physical bodies and rise to a higher plane of existence. One in which they live as pure energy!"

Rodney had looked ready to bust something in his excitement over the Ancients' notes on the energy-sucking thing, and even Elizabeth had looked a little too fascinated, considering there didn't seem to be anything there that would actually help them get rid of it.

John had raised his eyebrows and lost any point he might have wanted to make against the unstoppable tide of Rodney's explanation. Really, Ancients 'ascending' shouldn't have been any more ridiculous than a circle of blue jello that took him to another galaxy or goth aliens who ate life energy through their hands, but it caught in his head. Even after they'd returned to the problem at hand, John hadn't forgotten.

Hours later, when they'd bribed the shadow creature through the gate and Rodney had been declared unlikely to die (that day), John was headed to bed and found himself in front of Rodney's quarters. Without more than a thought, he stopped and waved his hand over the chime.

Rodney popped out immediately and looked surprised to see him. "Major. This is an…unexpected -- Ah...why are you here?"

"I had a question," John said, rubbing his ear. "About that ascension thing?"

"Huh." Rodney tilted his head. "Oh, sure. Um. Do you want to come in?" He waved vaguely toward the inside of his room and John shook his head immediately.

"No," he said. "No, it's fine. I just -- it's kind of weird, isn't it? I mean, what does 'ascending' look like? Is it like -- is it like dying?"

Rodney's face shifted easily into professor mode and the words spilled from his mouth. "From what has been witnessed at the SGC -- I haven't seen it myself, mind you, but I'm sure that's far from a disqualification to discuss the matter -- death is not a prerequisite, although it has certainly been the catalyst for more than one experience. It looks like -- they kind of --" He stopped and made a face, his brain almost visible in its processing. John imagined he could see it integrating the day's findings of evolutionary research with what he'd previously known. "They just go glowy all over," he finally finished.

"But," John said, hopelessly mired in his own curiosity. "What happens to their bodies? Do they leave them behind? Or do they just -- are they just gone?"

"Not that we know of," Rodney said. "In every instance witnessed, the body has sort of...dematerialized, which, hey, maybe that ties into the demolecularization the stargate initiates but -- " Then he stopped, inexplicably and shrugged. "I mean there's nothing to say that a body couldn't be left behind. Our experience with ascension is limited, even with the help of Oma --"

"Who?" John interrupted.

"Oma," Rodney said. "She's sort of the Charon of the Ancients, if you will, helping them ascend. She's the one who 'guided'… to use someone else's term…Daniel Jackson when he ascended. He, of course, was dying at the time, and, well, the whole thing is kind of a long story, but the point is, sloughing off the mortal body and all that isn't as easy as it looks."

John smiled, aching a little inside. "But why would anyone want to leave their body, their life on Earth?"

"Well, think of the possibilities," Rodney said, and then his gaze turned speculative. "Really, Major, if anyone on this expedition had a chance of achieving Ascension...it would probably be you, what with the strength of your gene and your willingness to throw yourself in harm's way." Speculation turned to curiosity turned to excitement in the space of a few seconds and Rodney pointed to his quarters again. "Are you sure you don't want to come in?"

John hesitated, torn between acquisition of knowledge and the fear of revealing too much of himself.

John had never really mourned his mother. He supposed he must have felt her absence viscerally, that her loss left a hole somewhere in his soul, but he never really knew where or how.

His teachers and the women who flirted with his father -- and he never realized how grateful he was that none of them ever stuck around -- always said, "...growing up without a mother..." like it was a terrible thing. But it wasn't. John stayed with his father's sister or his grandmother, until she died, when his father was gone. John cried at his grandmother's funeral.

John's mother had done magic with numbers and built volcanoes out of baking soda and taken him on his first Ferris wheel. She'd had dark hair and deft hands that had made turkey sandwiches and smoothed down John's hair.

She was the last person who ever managed to make the cowlicks behave.

Rodney kept calling it, "The glowy ascended sex," with a sort of thirteen-year-old tentative leer, and John regretted telling him about the experience at all. It hadn't been sex, really. It had been intimacy. There had been no real excitement, no growing intensity, no crescendo. There had been openness and sharing and John had felt Chaya's love for her people, her sense of duty, her attraction to him. Like called to like. He felt like Atlantis to her, and she felt like home to him. He experienced her ascension through his skin, a warm golden swell and true meaning of enlightenment.

But he also felt the isolation, the austerity, the forsaking of mortality, and he knew that he could never want that. Chaya was lonely and ultimately impotent, unable to assist anyone beyond her chosen few. She had sacrificed for them and now bore the price.

John knew her then, as well as anyone ever could, and when he saw her, he saw himself. He knew that if he were in her place, he, too, would have been fated to fall by the same means, exiled to the protection of a select few, and regretting his choice every day. He knew that he would interfere, and continue to interfere, and damn himself by infinite degrees.

The thing he'll always remember about the jumper flight to the hiveship was the silence.

Rodney's bomb was strapped down quietly behind him and the lasers and bombs from the cruisers spun an eerily soundless lightshow in front of him. The darts, speeding their way toward Atlantis, flashed across the viewscreen of the jumper, but all the noise that should have accompanied them was lost to the vacuum of space.

It wasn't like warfare in the atmosphere, where his ears pounded with the roar of engines and the steady, intense pulse of the rotors, and the whine and rush of missiles breaking the horizon. All John heard were the sounds of his own existence -- his breath, steady but audible in the dead air of the jumper and the quiet thumping of his heart in his chest. He should have shed the tac vest before he took off, left it for someone for whom it would have done some good. It wasn't going to protect him now.

The inertial dampeners kept him from feeling the banking and maneuvering of the puddlejumper. It's the most extraordinary platform he'd ever flown and for an odd moment, he feels kind of honored. But it kept his stomach from dipping and clenching with the drastic moves, not that he's making any, and it seems sacrilegious to ride so comfortably to his own death.

He knew that he had lived a charmed life. He lived when he should have died, won when he should have lost, and succeeded when he should have failed. For years, he'd assumed that everyone had the kind of luck he did, but as he watched friend after friend die in bursts of fire and metal, he realized that there was something special about him. He never put much stock in guardian angels, but he knew he'd beaten the odds more times than history would have predicted.

He wondered, as the hiveship filled the viewscreen, if it would be fast, if he'd feel any pain, if he would close his eyes, or if he would face death head on.

He wondered if he would die at all. Every action he'd taken on during this expedition had been some kind of elaborate Hail Mary, even this one, and he wondered if this was it, if he was really going to die in an implosion of heat and radiation. Maybe he was Atlantis' Hail Mary, saved so many times so that he could be her last chance to survive.

Rodney's voice echoed in his head, as it so often did, reminding him that of everyone on Atlantis, he was the most likely to ascend. Most likely to ascend, he thought, the quiet desperation thrumming through his veins making the idea sound funnier than it was. Maybe he'd ascend before impact, he thought. Maybe, he thought, a little recklessly, the Ancients would save him, as they'd saved Daniel Jackson. (Rodney had more stories about things that happened to other people than things that happened to him, and he liked to share. John suspected that after this siege of days, the latter list might just overtake the former.)

He thought of Chaya, her memories of a quiet, peaceful, and ultimately welcome dissolution, and he wished she were here to help them. He wished she were there, even just for comfort, and really, that whole trick with the lightning wasn't half-bad, either.

"We're alike," she had said. "We're all human."

But she wasn't. She was more than human, and she'd lashed out with her mind to destroy the threat to her people.

Given the choice between the destruction of his friends and the sacrifice of his own mortality, John would rather ascend and risk eternity trapped in the same straits she suffered, if only for the chance to save Atlantis.

Everyone cried at John's mother's funeral. In between the crying, they whispered. A little about John's mother, a little more about John's father, but mostly about John himself.

Have you ever seen a little boy so composed? they asked.

His father says he hasn't even cried, they said behind cupped hands.

Poor little thing's just grieving his own way, someone else said, and John would have been happier if she hadn't called him 'little'.

John just tugged at his jacket and remembered not to put his hands in his pockets and stuck close to his father.

He doesn't realize, was another favorite and John almost said, "Yes, I do," so many times that he started keeping count on his fingers.

The funeral was on a Wednesday and John didn't have to go to school. Instead he rode with his father in the big black car to the church where the priest said a lot of things and shook something over the dark, glossy casket.

The lid was closed.

They rode in the same big black car to the cemetery, which was green and bright with white headstones and the smell of fresh dirt. They listened to the priest some more, and then people went up to say goodbye to his mother. When it was John's turn, he put his face up close to the casket and whispered, "Where did you go?"

She didn't answer. She wasn't there.

Everyone left until it was just John, and his grandmother, and his father. John's father stayed and put his hand on the casket and bowed his head and whispered, just like John had. John wondered if he was asking her where she had gone, but John's father hadn't believed him when he said she'd disappeared. John's father just said that she was dead.

John knew what dead meant. Dead was Scruffy the Salamander in his shoebox coffin and Lyle the Goldfish, dead-eyed and white as he was flushed down the toilet. John's mother wasn't dead.

"Come on," John's grandmother said, leading him away to the big black car. "Let's give your father a minute."

John let himself be led away, but he looked back, just for one second.

He saw his father, bent over the casket, face hidden. And just for that split second, he saw his mother, a glowing avatar in light, smiling at him and waving as she laid her hand on his father's back.

John's father died on the first day of December, just before dawn. Something woke John from his doze, sprawled in the most comfortable chair the hospital had to offer, and he crossed the room to his father's bedside.

Colonel Sheppard's face was turned toward the window as if seeking the breaking of the sun through the east-facing blinds. A single tear, the first John had ever seen leave his father's eyes, slipped slowly down his cheek. John took his father's nearest hand in both of his and smoothed his thumbs over the knobbly knuckles.

He thought of those hands teaching him to throw a football. They had clapped him on the back when he'd gotten into the Academy and they'd wielded the belt when John had come home drunk from a post-game kegger, back when he was fifteen. They'd written increasingly unhappy letters and, met with obstinate silence from a son who didn't want to listen, they'd eventually stopped.

"John...Johnny," the colonel murmured.

John hadn't been called Johnny since he was ten years old. "I'm here, Dad," he said.

Colonel Sheppard turned his head and looked John straight in the face. His eyes were clear. "You were right," he rasped, his words slurring and fading into the silence. "I saw it, too." He drew in half a breath, a terrible effort that rattled in his throat, and then he died.

John sat at his side for a long moment, his father's words burning in his chest, and then he reached over and closed his father's eyes with his fingertips. Then he got up to tell the nurse.

Ascension couldn't possibly be as cool as advertised. Nothing requiring so much meditation could. John spent more time calculating pi and rolling his neck than really concentrating on achieving inner peace.

He'd clung to his ideal of flesh and bone as long as possible, but after six months, he was starting to doubt that there was a way out of the sanctuary. If there was one, Rodney would have found it long ago, and Ronon would have beat down the door to get to him.

He had dreams where nothing seemed real, where his mother's body slipped through his fingers, and then Chaya's, and Ford's, and Teyla's, and Rodney, and sometimes even Elizabeth's. The dreams always ended the same. He always looked down and realized that they weren't incorporeal.

He was.

Teer's hands on his body, her mouth on his lips, told him otherwise, and he grabbed onto that feeling with both hands, held her tightly, took what she offered. He still couldn't see the Beast, still couldn't suffer from his wounds, but he could feel her and he knew she might be the last thing he ever felt.

Ascension might be his only chance of getting home.

John's mother died on a bright and sunny Saturday afternoon when he was ten. All in all, he'd rather have been outside playing kickball.

Instead, he had to sit in the hospital, swinging his feet, while his grandmother and his Aunt Linda petted him and gave him coloring books. He tried to tell them that he was too old for coloring books, but they kept crying and so he made paper airplanes out of the pages and marked up the noses and the wings with crayons they had given him.

"Johnny," his father said, standing in the doorway of the room where his mother had been taken. "Your mother wants to see you."

Now that was something John could get around, so he slid off the plastic chair and followed his father into the room. His mother lay in the hospital bed, her hair very dark against the white sheets and blankets. John watched his father kiss her forehead and then her mouth, and then he moved aside so John could go to her bedside.

"Hi," he whispered, because Aunt Linda said that hospitals were quiet places.

"Hi," his mother whispered back, smiling. She reached out and ran her fingers through his hair, smoothing down the cowlicks. John let her.

"Daddy says you're sick," he whispered.

"Daddy's right," she said softly. "But I'll always love you, Johnny."

John closed his eyes and pushed his face against her arm. Her skin was cool and soft, and no matter how close he pressed, seemed further and further away.

He opened his eyes, to see where she'd gone, but she was still smiling at him, bathed in a golden glow that sparkled around the edges. He pressed against the bed and reached for her, but his hand slipped right through and there was nothing left of her but gold sparkles and the whisper of a touch through his hair.

"Daddy," he said, turning and running out of the room. "Daddy, did you see? There was gold and sparkles, and then Mommy was...Mommy was...." He stared at his father, who was standing just outside the room with his face covered by one hand. "Daddy? Mommy's gone."

"I know," his father said, his voice barely above a whisper.

"Daddy?" John tugged on his pantsleg. "Daddy, she disappeared."

His father's head came up. "No, John. Your mother's -- she died, John." And he knelt and hugged John, even though John was ten years old and a big boy.

"No, she didn't," John insisted. "She disappeared. In the gold sparkles and -- "

"John." His father's voice was harsh but the arms around him stayed tight. "Shush."

John shushed and eventually his father stood up to hug Grandma and Aunt Linda. John peeked back in the room, but the bed was surrounded by a curtain on metal wheels.

Dr. Oma, the doctor taking care of his mother was there, writing on a chart. She looked up when he poked his head in, and she smiled at him and put one finger over her lips.

John looked at her for a long time, and then mirrored her gesture.

He kept his lips sealed for a long time.

"What is it with you and ascended women?" Rodney asked as John watched the last sparkles of what used to be Teer's body fade away.

John shrugged helplessly. All he knew was that he has always loved them and has always lost them, even before he knew the difference between ascension and death.

Fin

Death--the last sleep? No, it is the final awakening.
-- Walter Scott