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sga_flashfic-title- Chuang Chou menq tye
-author- Sophonisba (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
saphanibaal)
-warnings- Gen. AU, oh my, yes -- this is actually related to a larger AU that keeps rewriting bits of itself and includes many different things. Spoilers through "Runner"; suitable for general audiences
-characters- Sheppard, Rodney, Teyla, (Ronon)
-word count- 2772
-summary- In the second chapter of Chuang-tzyy (aka Chuang Tzu, Zhuang[1]zi[3]), there is a passage Watson translates as "Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly [...] Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou."
Chuang Chou menq tye
John Sheppard jerked awake, mouth clenched open as his breath gagged in his throat, the planet's overabundance of moonlight shining through the fabric of the tent.
"Colonel?" Rodney said, and John wanted to say 'That's right, Rodney, that's my spoken rank' but he couldn't seem to loosen his cheeks enough to close his jaws for the th.
"What's wrong?" he heard Rodney say more sharply, and finally, finally his throat unlocked enough for air to get down, Rodney's increasingly panicked questions ringing in his ears.
"What is it?" Teyla asked from where she stood on watch. Good Teyla. Fierce Teyla. Reliable Teyla. Reliable, solid Rodney, too, and John managed with difficulty to keep from hysterically giggling.
"Colonel Sheppard's having a... a seizure or something!"
"It's... just a nightmare," John panted.
"Some nightmare," Rodney grumbled.
Teyla poked her head in the tent. That is, she gracefully introduced her head, neck, shoulders, and arms through the tent flap, obviously balanced on hands and knees, but the net effect was much the same.
"It must have been a very fearsome dream," she said. "You are still shaking."
"It's nothing," John grumbled. "Just a stupid dream."
"You were thrashing around for minutes and I thought you were going to strangle yourself with your sleeping bag," Rodney snorted. "Hardly 'nothing.'"
"Look, it was... we lost Ford again. Several times. And then the last time, it was the Siege and the aftermath and the trip back to Earth, only it wasn't Ford who got the massive overdose of feeding enzyme, it was someone else. Ford had been with me helping try to talk him down, and then he was there to leave in charge of the Atlantis military."
"Ah," Teyla said. Wonderfully neutral expression, 'ah.' It went very well with her wonderfully neutral face.
"I've had that one, too," Rodney said. "Well, sometimes it turns into the one where I have five minutes to take something apart and put it back together before the earth-shattering kaboom, and the pieces keep rolling away down the floor. Or the one where I'm trying to shoot my gun, and it falls apart."
"I thought that one actually happened."
"Ha, ha, Colonel. Very funny."
"Who was the 'someone else'?" Teyla asked gently.
"Oh. You haven't met him. That anthropologist guy on Earth. Jackson."
"Archaeologist," Rodney absently corrected. "My God. It probably would have been, if he'd come. Everything always seems to hit him first or worst or only; I said we ought to study whether he was emitting the field himself, and if so, naturally or artificially, but O'Neill seemed to interpret that as some kind of threat-to-team. Honestly, some people have no conception of the proper importance of the scientific method."
"If it -- never mind," John corrected himself.
"It is natural," Teyla said gently, "to wish that it had been one from another family. It is not ill-wishing, nor is it unbelievable selfishness."
"Congratulations, you're human," Rodney added. "Besides, Daniel Jackson's got history with overcoming addictions."
"That's what she said," John said absently. "In the dream. And then he stole a puddlejumper and ran away because he didn't want to hurt anyone while he came back to himself."
"Exactly the sort of flawed logic I might expect from a brain the size of a planet made entirely of cottage cheese. Oh, and considering what SG-1 would have done if we'd sent them that report back, that is a nightmare -- I mean, a nightmare when you're asleep, not just when you wake up from it. I mean... "
"We know what you mean," Teyla said gently. John's sure she's had her share of dreams that were achingly right until she awoke to grim reality -- not that this last had even been all that right, what with the woman and --
"Huh," he remarked.
"Huh, what?" Rodney asked. Teyla was leaning out of the tent, calling Ronon to wakefulness in a quiet carrying voice.
"In the dream, there was this woman I didn't know yelling that she might have missed the Egyptian coffin thing but General O'Neill had filled her in. That is, I've -- I'd -- never seen her before in my life, but in the dream I knew she was Dr. Jackson's girlfriend or wife or mistress or something. Does he have one?"
"Not at the moment, no," Rodney said. "At least, he didn't when we left, and I don't remember hearing about any on our flying visit, although I suppose he could have been keeping it quiet -- oh, God, you don't suppose he's hooked up with Sam Carter, do you? Because she has a history of unscientific and doomed, and she might have decided to save him from his history with designing women, she's very noble that way -- "
"Rodney. Breathe," John finally interrupted the flow of words counterpointed by the low murmurs of Teyla and Ronon's conversation outside the tent.
"Yes, yes, but you don't understand -- it may, of course, be statistical variance, but given the number of other occurences, it's well within the bounds of probability that whatever it is around Daniel Jackson may be displacing onto anyone he's, uh, intimate with -- death, addiction, death, possession, death, torture, death, and did I perhaps mention death?"
"I believe so," Teyla remarked, crawling fully into the tent this time and sitting at Rodney's feet. "Ronon has taken the watch. Why death?"
"He's worried that Colonel Carter might start dating Dr. Jackson," John drawled.
Teyla blinked. "Colonel Carter is the woman Doctor McKay has often spoken of, who holds the same position on your world that he does here?"
"Well," Rodney said. "Not exactly the same... also, I'm smarter -- "
"And she's better with people," John said.
"And she's spent more of her time not focused on science," Rodney agreed.
"I thought that Doctor Weir had said that Colonel Carter was promised in marriage, according to customs of... " Teyla groped for a suitable word... "exclusivity."
"Well, yes, but she might have come to her senses and realized he'll never understand her. Oh my God. He can't understand her, no one who hasn't been there can, no one who hasn't -- do you realize all of our chances for finding, well, someone have dropped to a very small pool?"
"I kind of figured so about the time we all walked into a different galaxy." John rolled his eyes, bumping Teyla's knee through his sleeping bag, both (maybe all three -- if any human were capable of fully-MIMD conscious thought, it was undoubtedly Rodney McKay) pretending as hard as they could that they were helping Rodney lance his own insecurities just as they had so many times before, that the (exemplary) watch was being carried out by the accustomed person, that an activity for which whichever other two not standing watch had always sufficed was not now endlessly skipping over the newly-made gap where a fourth person might be.
Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard jerks awake, mouth clenched open as his breath gags in his throat, the planet's overabundance of moonlight shining through the fabric of the tent.
"Colonel?" Rodney says, and John wants to say 'That's right, Rodney, that's my spoken rank' but can't seem to loosen his cheeks enough to close his jaws for the th.
"What's wrong?" he hears Rodney say more sharply, and finally, finally his throat unlocks enough for air to get down, Rodney's increasingly panicked questions ringing in his ears.
"What is it?" Teyla asks from where she stands on watch. Good Teyla. Fierce Teyla. Reliable Teyla. Reliable, solid M-- Rodney, too, and that would set him hysterically giggling if it hadn't made him seize up again.
"Breathe!" Rodney demands, and, shit, pounds on his breastbone with a balled fist, knocking the breath out of John's throat in one long huff. "Colonel Sheppard's having a -- a reaction or a night terror or something, I think I've got -- " he breaks off to yank his own tac vest out of the pile between their not-exactly-pillows, ripping velcro pocket-fastenings open.
In one smooth motion, Teyla drops to her knees outside the tent and falls forward onto the palms she set within it, in time to catch John numbly shaking his head just as Rodney triumphantly holds up a short tube.
"No," John manages. Somehow. Of course McKay would carry his own autoinjector, and go for it first. It's not as if he'd have memorized which pocket John carried the adrenaline in -- well, maybe he would have, but one's own weapons first... wait, would he ever have known which pocket John's was in? It wasn't as if they'd ever actually had to use it.
"If you're sure. You are sure, aren't you? Because naturally I don't want to poison you, but I swear you wouldn't mention it if your spleen happened to fall out when you bent over..."
"Colonel Sheppard appears sure," Teyla says, and leans back out of the tent, quietly calling to Ronon where he sleeps by the banked fire.
"Night... mare..." John Sheppard eventually pants. Outside the tent, the low murmur of Teyla and Ronon's conversation rises and falls.
"You were thrashing around for minutes. I thought you were going to strangle yourself with your sleeping bag. You woke up the second time you stopped breathing," Rodney snorts. "Hardly 'nothing.'"
"I dreamed... " This, he wants to say, I dreamed this. But that would make it real, admit that they had --
Hadn't they?
Had they not?
He pastes the calm he doesn't feel onto his face, fishes his water bottle out of the pile of stuff and takes a careful drink, wishing for a long draught of cool bitter beer and instead getting a half-mouthful of lukewarm metallic-sour water.
"Ronon has taken the watch," Teyla announces, crawling back into the tent to sit on the foot of Rodney's sleeping bag. "What is it?"
"Apparently, nightmare." Rodney waves an arm expansively in Sheppard's direction, nearly knocking the tent down.
"It must have been a fearsome dream." Teyla's posture is open, nonthreatening and open and strong enough to bear the weight of a world, and for a crazy moment he wants to tell her, well, everything.
He doesn't, of course, but this one thing he has to know -- the possibility of false impression has been growing since he woke, but he needs to be sure, needs it now.
"I dreamed I woke up," Sheppard says, slowly, quietly. "I'd been dreaming of the Siege, and I woke up, and it was all wrong."
"Define 'wrong,'" Rodney tells him.
"I woke up, and I knew Daniel hadn't been there."
"Hadn't been there as in unexpectedly went poof, or hadn't been there as in died -- again -- or..."
"Had never been in Atlantis."
The two of them look at Sheppard and at each other, and he is manfully resisting the urge to demand "So, are those wow, we would have been so screwed or what are you talking about, Dr. Jackson never has been in Atlantis looks?" when Teyla finally speaks, puzzled.
"But... would there then have been less arguments between you and those of your people who came to relieve us, had Doctor Jackson not been there?"
"Well, at any rate," Rodney snorts, "he'd have been much less likely to discover the Wraith neurostimulant by receiving a massive overdose if he hadn't even been here."
"He... didn't." And despite everything, despite the very real respect and friendship he feels for Daniel Jackson, something atop his diaphragm that had been hard and knotted and painful since he jerked into wakefulness begins to open up.
"He did not?" Teyla repeats.
"He didn't," Sheppard nods. "Ford did. In my dream."
There is a moment of silence before both his teammates begin talking at once.
"Anxiety dream," Rodney says sagely. "Quite understandable. Most of mine jump me straight back to the Siege, too, although when it was going on I mostly had the one where I suddenly realized I'd been enrolled in a class all term without knowing it and now it was finals week and far too late to drop the one I'd never gone to."
"If you do not trust AR-2 to keep him as safe as we know we would," Teyla says at the same time, "perhaps he should remain with us, or they should join our team, if they do not want to court some other huntmaster."
And of course, of course he had set Ford to weld the active-duty remnants of their first year's AR-2 and AR-4 into something resembling a coherent team, giving them someone they could keep faith in when they had lost their teammates to death or illness, the one leader to incapacitating wounds, the other leader to what they called his curse, his adjutant to his needs, and most of their trust to the Wraith by one means or another.
"Teyla," Sheppard says firmly, the rhetoric coming as quick and sure as if he had spoken it time and time before, as indeed he had. "We've been over this. Ford deserves even a temporary command of his own, especially between his promotion and his relief as 2IC. He wants it, and AR-2-prime wants him if possible, and maybe it'll work out long-term... in which case, it'd be pretty selfish of us to hold him back because we'd miss him. Rodney, I know it must have been, but some of us can't shift paradigms at the drop of a hat."
Teyla's face settles into the dutiful acquiescence that her team has long since known to signal disapprobation.
"So," Rodney says too loudly, "if you dreamed Ford was the one sent off his head, was Elizabeth the one who made like Ronon was attacking her? Or Teyla?"
"No." Sheppard can no longer keep all the horror from his voice. "No one did. We never got him back."
Rodney makes a strangled noise. Teyla shudders, soundlessly, once, and then moves forward to take Sheppard's shoulders, pulling him into a forehead-meeting.
Her forehead is warm. Human, living blood beats beneath its skin, against the skin of Sheppard's forehead.
The air in the tent eddies, slightly, around Rodney as he chokes on a word that might be 'John' -- or 'Joan,' which makes rather less sense, or 'Djon,' which possibility Sheppard only brings up in his mind for statistical completeness. Colonel Sheppard thinks, not for the first time, that he really ought to wave the table he'd drawn up of possible correlations between ATA use and incidences of apparent mild psychokinesis under Rodney's nose -- either he'll follow up on it until the hypothesis is disproved or confirmed, most likely ranting all the way, or he'll be so incredulously horrified at the mere possibility of the incidents being statistically relevant that the entertainment value of his explosion will be more than worth all but the very worst fortnights Atlantis has had to offer.
"Shpprd," Rodney finally mumbles, and tentatively lays his large hand over Teyla's small one, keeping his fingers at least a millimeter above Sheppard's sleeve.
"We should offer a match to Ford and his... team," Teyla breathes, "of ribbon-snatch or slap-ball."
"That'll work once," Rodney argues. "Then Ronon the Postapocalyptic Warrior won't be a secret weapon anymore, and you already aren't one, and they'll have better sense than to take us up on it. At least, I hope they will. Ford at least listens to me when I try to explain the complete insanity of overvaluing boldness in comparison with planning, unlike some people."
"We should move this discussion outside," John realizes. "Ronon might have some ideas."
The three of them scramble out of the tent, the surreality of the dream fading and packing itself away into the back of his mind. Yes, he has lost promising subordinates to their own careers before, and yes, he has lost students to their graduation, and yes, he has lost family when the short separation of duty's call became unexpectedly final -- but the first is natural enough; the second necessary; and if he's only ever been able to loose his lost after dragging the fight out to the last of himself, he will hardly move to write any man off before losing him.
And hey. If that idea he was playing with about the activation gene allowing its possessors to exert their will on more than just the technology designed for it has any validity whatsoever -- well, even before he started thinking of himself as John, he's always been the stubbornest person he knows, and he has the honor to have made the acquaintace of some remarkably strong-willed people.
-author- Sophonisba (
saphanibaal)-warnings- Gen. AU, oh my, yes -- this is actually related to a larger AU that keeps rewriting bits of itself and includes many different things. Spoilers through "Runner"; suitable for general audiences
-characters- Sheppard, Rodney, Teyla, (Ronon)
-word count- 2772
-summary- In the second chapter of Chuang-tzyy (aka Chuang Tzu, Zhuang[1]zi[3]), there is a passage Watson translates as "Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly [...] Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou."
Chuang Chou menq tye
John Sheppard jerked awake, mouth clenched open as his breath gagged in his throat, the planet's overabundance of moonlight shining through the fabric of the tent.
"Colonel?" Rodney said, and John wanted to say 'That's right, Rodney, that's my spoken rank' but he couldn't seem to loosen his cheeks enough to close his jaws for the th.
"What's wrong?" he heard Rodney say more sharply, and finally, finally his throat unlocked enough for air to get down, Rodney's increasingly panicked questions ringing in his ears.
"What is it?" Teyla asked from where she stood on watch. Good Teyla. Fierce Teyla. Reliable Teyla. Reliable, solid Rodney, too, and John managed with difficulty to keep from hysterically giggling.
"Colonel Sheppard's having a... a seizure or something!"
"It's... just a nightmare," John panted.
"Some nightmare," Rodney grumbled.
Teyla poked her head in the tent. That is, she gracefully introduced her head, neck, shoulders, and arms through the tent flap, obviously balanced on hands and knees, but the net effect was much the same.
"It must have been a very fearsome dream," she said. "You are still shaking."
"It's nothing," John grumbled. "Just a stupid dream."
"You were thrashing around for minutes and I thought you were going to strangle yourself with your sleeping bag," Rodney snorted. "Hardly 'nothing.'"
"Look, it was... we lost Ford again. Several times. And then the last time, it was the Siege and the aftermath and the trip back to Earth, only it wasn't Ford who got the massive overdose of feeding enzyme, it was someone else. Ford had been with me helping try to talk him down, and then he was there to leave in charge of the Atlantis military."
"Ah," Teyla said. Wonderfully neutral expression, 'ah.' It went very well with her wonderfully neutral face.
"I've had that one, too," Rodney said. "Well, sometimes it turns into the one where I have five minutes to take something apart and put it back together before the earth-shattering kaboom, and the pieces keep rolling away down the floor. Or the one where I'm trying to shoot my gun, and it falls apart."
"I thought that one actually happened."
"Ha, ha, Colonel. Very funny."
"Who was the 'someone else'?" Teyla asked gently.
"Oh. You haven't met him. That anthropologist guy on Earth. Jackson."
"Archaeologist," Rodney absently corrected. "My God. It probably would have been, if he'd come. Everything always seems to hit him first or worst or only; I said we ought to study whether he was emitting the field himself, and if so, naturally or artificially, but O'Neill seemed to interpret that as some kind of threat-to-team. Honestly, some people have no conception of the proper importance of the scientific method."
"If it -- never mind," John corrected himself.
"It is natural," Teyla said gently, "to wish that it had been one from another family. It is not ill-wishing, nor is it unbelievable selfishness."
"Congratulations, you're human," Rodney added. "Besides, Daniel Jackson's got history with overcoming addictions."
"That's what she said," John said absently. "In the dream. And then he stole a puddlejumper and ran away because he didn't want to hurt anyone while he came back to himself."
"Exactly the sort of flawed logic I might expect from a brain the size of a planet made entirely of cottage cheese. Oh, and considering what SG-1 would have done if we'd sent them that report back, that is a nightmare -- I mean, a nightmare when you're asleep, not just when you wake up from it. I mean... "
"We know what you mean," Teyla said gently. John's sure she's had her share of dreams that were achingly right until she awoke to grim reality -- not that this last had even been all that right, what with the woman and --
"Huh," he remarked.
"Huh, what?" Rodney asked. Teyla was leaning out of the tent, calling Ronon to wakefulness in a quiet carrying voice.
"In the dream, there was this woman I didn't know yelling that she might have missed the Egyptian coffin thing but General O'Neill had filled her in. That is, I've -- I'd -- never seen her before in my life, but in the dream I knew she was Dr. Jackson's girlfriend or wife or mistress or something. Does he have one?"
"Not at the moment, no," Rodney said. "At least, he didn't when we left, and I don't remember hearing about any on our flying visit, although I suppose he could have been keeping it quiet -- oh, God, you don't suppose he's hooked up with Sam Carter, do you? Because she has a history of unscientific and doomed, and she might have decided to save him from his history with designing women, she's very noble that way -- "
"Rodney. Breathe," John finally interrupted the flow of words counterpointed by the low murmurs of Teyla and Ronon's conversation outside the tent.
"Yes, yes, but you don't understand -- it may, of course, be statistical variance, but given the number of other occurences, it's well within the bounds of probability that whatever it is around Daniel Jackson may be displacing onto anyone he's, uh, intimate with -- death, addiction, death, possession, death, torture, death, and did I perhaps mention death?"
"I believe so," Teyla remarked, crawling fully into the tent this time and sitting at Rodney's feet. "Ronon has taken the watch. Why death?"
"He's worried that Colonel Carter might start dating Dr. Jackson," John drawled.
Teyla blinked. "Colonel Carter is the woman Doctor McKay has often spoken of, who holds the same position on your world that he does here?"
"Well," Rodney said. "Not exactly the same... also, I'm smarter -- "
"And she's better with people," John said.
"And she's spent more of her time not focused on science," Rodney agreed.
"I thought that Doctor Weir had said that Colonel Carter was promised in marriage, according to customs of... " Teyla groped for a suitable word... "exclusivity."
"Well, yes, but she might have come to her senses and realized he'll never understand her. Oh my God. He can't understand her, no one who hasn't been there can, no one who hasn't -- do you realize all of our chances for finding, well, someone have dropped to a very small pool?"
"I kind of figured so about the time we all walked into a different galaxy." John rolled his eyes, bumping Teyla's knee through his sleeping bag, both (maybe all three -- if any human were capable of fully-MIMD conscious thought, it was undoubtedly Rodney McKay) pretending as hard as they could that they were helping Rodney lance his own insecurities just as they had so many times before, that the (exemplary) watch was being carried out by the accustomed person, that an activity for which whichever other two not standing watch had always sufficed was not now endlessly skipping over the newly-made gap where a fourth person might be.
Lieutenant Colonel Sheppard jerks awake, mouth clenched open as his breath gags in his throat, the planet's overabundance of moonlight shining through the fabric of the tent.
"Colonel?" Rodney says, and John wants to say 'That's right, Rodney, that's my spoken rank' but can't seem to loosen his cheeks enough to close his jaws for the th.
"What's wrong?" he hears Rodney say more sharply, and finally, finally his throat unlocks enough for air to get down, Rodney's increasingly panicked questions ringing in his ears.
"What is it?" Teyla asks from where she stands on watch. Good Teyla. Fierce Teyla. Reliable Teyla. Reliable, solid M-- Rodney, too, and that would set him hysterically giggling if it hadn't made him seize up again.
"Breathe!" Rodney demands, and, shit, pounds on his breastbone with a balled fist, knocking the breath out of John's throat in one long huff. "Colonel Sheppard's having a -- a reaction or a night terror or something, I think I've got -- " he breaks off to yank his own tac vest out of the pile between their not-exactly-pillows, ripping velcro pocket-fastenings open.
In one smooth motion, Teyla drops to her knees outside the tent and falls forward onto the palms she set within it, in time to catch John numbly shaking his head just as Rodney triumphantly holds up a short tube.
"No," John manages. Somehow. Of course McKay would carry his own autoinjector, and go for it first. It's not as if he'd have memorized which pocket John carried the adrenaline in -- well, maybe he would have, but one's own weapons first... wait, would he ever have known which pocket John's was in? It wasn't as if they'd ever actually had to use it.
"If you're sure. You are sure, aren't you? Because naturally I don't want to poison you, but I swear you wouldn't mention it if your spleen happened to fall out when you bent over..."
"Colonel Sheppard appears sure," Teyla says, and leans back out of the tent, quietly calling to Ronon where he sleeps by the banked fire.
"Night... mare..." John Sheppard eventually pants. Outside the tent, the low murmur of Teyla and Ronon's conversation rises and falls.
"You were thrashing around for minutes. I thought you were going to strangle yourself with your sleeping bag. You woke up the second time you stopped breathing," Rodney snorts. "Hardly 'nothing.'"
"I dreamed... " This, he wants to say, I dreamed this. But that would make it real, admit that they had --
Hadn't they?
Had they not?
He pastes the calm he doesn't feel onto his face, fishes his water bottle out of the pile of stuff and takes a careful drink, wishing for a long draught of cool bitter beer and instead getting a half-mouthful of lukewarm metallic-sour water.
"Ronon has taken the watch," Teyla announces, crawling back into the tent to sit on the foot of Rodney's sleeping bag. "What is it?"
"Apparently, nightmare." Rodney waves an arm expansively in Sheppard's direction, nearly knocking the tent down.
"It must have been a fearsome dream." Teyla's posture is open, nonthreatening and open and strong enough to bear the weight of a world, and for a crazy moment he wants to tell her, well, everything.
He doesn't, of course, but this one thing he has to know -- the possibility of false impression has been growing since he woke, but he needs to be sure, needs it now.
"I dreamed I woke up," Sheppard says, slowly, quietly. "I'd been dreaming of the Siege, and I woke up, and it was all wrong."
"Define 'wrong,'" Rodney tells him.
"I woke up, and I knew Daniel hadn't been there."
"Hadn't been there as in unexpectedly went poof, or hadn't been there as in died -- again -- or..."
"Had never been in Atlantis."
The two of them look at Sheppard and at each other, and he is manfully resisting the urge to demand "So, are those wow, we would have been so screwed or what are you talking about, Dr. Jackson never has been in Atlantis looks?" when Teyla finally speaks, puzzled.
"But... would there then have been less arguments between you and those of your people who came to relieve us, had Doctor Jackson not been there?"
"Well, at any rate," Rodney snorts, "he'd have been much less likely to discover the Wraith neurostimulant by receiving a massive overdose if he hadn't even been here."
"He... didn't." And despite everything, despite the very real respect and friendship he feels for Daniel Jackson, something atop his diaphragm that had been hard and knotted and painful since he jerked into wakefulness begins to open up.
"He did not?" Teyla repeats.
"He didn't," Sheppard nods. "Ford did. In my dream."
There is a moment of silence before both his teammates begin talking at once.
"Anxiety dream," Rodney says sagely. "Quite understandable. Most of mine jump me straight back to the Siege, too, although when it was going on I mostly had the one where I suddenly realized I'd been enrolled in a class all term without knowing it and now it was finals week and far too late to drop the one I'd never gone to."
"If you do not trust AR-2 to keep him as safe as we know we would," Teyla says at the same time, "perhaps he should remain with us, or they should join our team, if they do not want to court some other huntmaster."
And of course, of course he had set Ford to weld the active-duty remnants of their first year's AR-2 and AR-4 into something resembling a coherent team, giving them someone they could keep faith in when they had lost their teammates to death or illness, the one leader to incapacitating wounds, the other leader to what they called his curse, his adjutant to his needs, and most of their trust to the Wraith by one means or another.
"Teyla," Sheppard says firmly, the rhetoric coming as quick and sure as if he had spoken it time and time before, as indeed he had. "We've been over this. Ford deserves even a temporary command of his own, especially between his promotion and his relief as 2IC. He wants it, and AR-2-prime wants him if possible, and maybe it'll work out long-term... in which case, it'd be pretty selfish of us to hold him back because we'd miss him. Rodney, I know it must have been, but some of us can't shift paradigms at the drop of a hat."
Teyla's face settles into the dutiful acquiescence that her team has long since known to signal disapprobation.
"So," Rodney says too loudly, "if you dreamed Ford was the one sent off his head, was Elizabeth the one who made like Ronon was attacking her? Or Teyla?"
"No." Sheppard can no longer keep all the horror from his voice. "No one did. We never got him back."
Rodney makes a strangled noise. Teyla shudders, soundlessly, once, and then moves forward to take Sheppard's shoulders, pulling him into a forehead-meeting.
Her forehead is warm. Human, living blood beats beneath its skin, against the skin of Sheppard's forehead.
The air in the tent eddies, slightly, around Rodney as he chokes on a word that might be 'John' -- or 'Joan,' which makes rather less sense, or 'Djon,' which possibility Sheppard only brings up in his mind for statistical completeness. Colonel Sheppard thinks, not for the first time, that he really ought to wave the table he'd drawn up of possible correlations between ATA use and incidences of apparent mild psychokinesis under Rodney's nose -- either he'll follow up on it until the hypothesis is disproved or confirmed, most likely ranting all the way, or he'll be so incredulously horrified at the mere possibility of the incidents being statistically relevant that the entertainment value of his explosion will be more than worth all but the very worst fortnights Atlantis has had to offer.
"Shpprd," Rodney finally mumbles, and tentatively lays his large hand over Teyla's small one, keeping his fingers at least a millimeter above Sheppard's sleeve.
"We should offer a match to Ford and his... team," Teyla breathes, "of ribbon-snatch or slap-ball."
"That'll work once," Rodney argues. "Then Ronon the Postapocalyptic Warrior won't be a secret weapon anymore, and you already aren't one, and they'll have better sense than to take us up on it. At least, I hope they will. Ford at least listens to me when I try to explain the complete insanity of overvaluing boldness in comparison with planning, unlike some people."
"We should move this discussion outside," John realizes. "Ronon might have some ideas."
The three of them scramble out of the tent, the surreality of the dream fading and packing itself away into the back of his mind. Yes, he has lost promising subordinates to their own careers before, and yes, he has lost students to their graduation, and yes, he has lost family when the short separation of duty's call became unexpectedly final -- but the first is natural enough; the second necessary; and if he's only ever been able to loose his lost after dragging the fight out to the last of himself, he will hardly move to write any man off before losing him.
And hey. If that idea he was playing with about the activation gene allowing its possessors to exert their will on more than just the technology designed for it has any validity whatsoever -- well, even before he started thinking of himself as John, he's always been the stubbornest person he knows, and he has the honor to have made the acquaintace of some remarkably strong-willed people.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-16 03:36 am (UTC)Well done. I hope to see more of this AU soon.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-18 08:07 am (UTC)(I actually hadn't meant to imply that John might have created the reality, but... hmm... that really opens some interesting possibilities.)
I have a lot more of it in my head and scattered across five notebooks, but I have no idea when more of it will consent to be turned into a form fit for public consumption.
By the way, I like your username -- I think that's my favorite of Tey's mysteries.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-16 08:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-18 08:58 am (UTC)So this story is sort of about that, and sort of the logical extension of an AU I've been playing with off and on since the producers broke my OTP and jumped up and down on it with heavy spiky boots.
As for how Daniel's presence changed things... well, I will say that they certainly got a lot more translation done. ^_^