sga_flashfic | Fic: The Subterraneans [A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words Challenge]

vanitashaze.livejournal.com posting in

Title: the subterraneans
Rating: PG-13
Notes: Written on this gorgeous Arnold Pouteau photograph. Also, the concept of the word "Iirijjin" was borrowed from

auburnnothenna's fabulous The Water Grinds the Stone.

Summary: In a hundred years, they will be honored. An evolution of ghosts.

THE SUBTERRANEANS

In a hundred years, they will be honored. Pegasus peoples still walk warily through the Rings, but any traveler bearing the mark of the City is instantly welcomed, bedded in the best household, given the best drink - tea or koffe or, on occasion, funeral wine, bitter herbs and scent of grieving; the most beautiful men and women are sent to mingle with them. After all, why shouldn't they be given this? Why shouldn't a village bankrupt itself for a night of luxury? The Iirijjin are grateful to the City People. Pegasus has been sealed into a tower for so long and suddenly these outsiders have cut them a window. They jump. In a hundred years, they're still falling.

A few still weep over the seeded graves or speak bitterly of relatives killed by machines, but no one listens to them, not really. There has always been loss. Always been grief, and the whole galaxy rolls in the luxuriousness of it, to die and do whatever pleases with the body, afterwards. Sow it. Mummify it. Burn it, and feed nothing but the wind. A little bit of loss is acceptable for this. The City People call it "collateral damage", and this is a word that the Iirijjin do not know, but they understand; oh, how their bones crack with understanding, how they bend over backwards like a tree pushed by wind. They do not question this understanding, in a hundred years. Not yet.

*

In a thousand years, they will be celebrated. Each will have their own feast-day, their own day of rest, of activity, of worship. Sellers will hawk their wares and priests will chant and children will run shrieking underfoot, below the fog of incense and brazier-smoke, vehicles of prayers and scent of spitting popping fat-running-down meat; the sublime and mundane. Holy and profane. In a thousand years, the people will be loud and careless. They will buy masks with eerie white faces on them, sharkskin stretched over wooden hoops, and touch their crossed fingers to their children's foreheads to ward off the bad eye, the consuming hunger - o'ak, the eating thing - and their priests will paint eyes in their left palms, and the names of the Saviors in their right. Jhon Shepherd, Teyla Emmagen, Ronon Dex, Rhadne Mackeh, Lisabet We'r, Genfer Keller, Majorlourn, Carson Beckhet.

Distortions, bastardizations, but close enough, for gods.

*

In five thousand years, they will be forgotten. Pegasus thinks itself to be alone in the universe, once more, but some of the more adventurous scientists are hazarding that the Iirijjin are not the only galaxy, that there is at least one more, maybe several, star-clusters like spilled bin ink across the night sky, luminescent. Bin are nature's scavengers, they feed on things underneath, lichen and dead cave-dwellers and anything too stupid to get in their way. They're popular on many worlds for the light they give off, and now, the scientists are saying the Iirijjin should look for them in the sky, as if humans crawled blinking into the sun, only to realize the world was just another cave? Absurd. Disgusting. The idea is sacrilege on many worlds, and anyone mentioning it is sacrificed to Shep-herd and Dex, the warriors, and their celestial errand boy Majorlourn. Less and less, lately; more often just sacrificed, altar a piece of convenient dirt, deity unspecified. The Saviors have become anachronistic, hanging-on, the tales of old women. In many of the larger cities worship has gone out of fashion. The Saviors have no relevance, the Speakers for new religions argue; they didn't fight day-to-day battles, as the Iirijjin do now, wars over gates and money and Chancellors' daughters, but creatures so unimaginable - obviously made-up - as to be ridiculous. New heroes for new times. But every time the Saviors come to the brink of extinction, some new discovery is made - an antique bracelet in the Channa markets or a strange blaster dug up in Gen'ii ruins - that they claim belonged to the Saviors, and despite this obvious impossibility, it's enough to kick everyone into guiltily saying a few extra prayers. No one but the dementeds and the old biddies think they were real, of course. But it doesn't hurt.

As it is so writ in the Book of the Saviors (original title: Mi tar Handbo f r Pegas): Take ye of the C-4, just in case.

*

In ten thousand years, a scientist by the name of Sora do Ladem will prove the existence of a sister galaxy, far across the reaches of space. She will name it the Riadne Galaxy, for a god long dead. In her announcement, she also states that she thinks there is a good chance the new galaxy is hospitable to some kind of life, even though they have not been contacted already; after all, she says, it is a long, long ways away, and the extraterrestrial life they might find there will almost undoubtedly be less sophisticated than the Iirijjin. She will never say that she got the idea from her father, a man devout to a fault - owned a copy of the Book of the Saviors and read to her stories where gods traveled by jumping into nothingness, the void between things, and came from a place so far and strange that it was not even Iirijjin, it was somewhere else entirely.

A few years later, a colleague who she has been thinking of Joining - not in any serious way but a sort of passing fancy between experiments - goes even further to say that he thinks he knows how to get there. There's a gate they've just discovered on a sandstorm world, half-buried amidst the remnants of some creaky old city. The sand has worn away most of the symbols on the gate, but there is space for eight crystals when there should only be seven. An expedition is provisioned, and Sora do Ladem joins her colleague, but leaves him still twisted in her bedsheets, for the chance to travel across the vast cavern of space. She's twenty-eight cycles, and in the na shanen, the first wave. The Iirijjin are going to another galaxy.

*

In a year, they will be grieving. In a year, Ronon will put more Marines in the infirmary than he did in the last six; Keller will cry herself to sleep most nights; Torren will fuss for almost-peas and fuss to be put down and fuss to be picked up and not understand what all the other fuss is about, and most importantly, why no-one wants to play peek-a-boo with him. His innocence is refreshing to some and painful to others. He has not seen his godfather in weeks, because the last time John saw him, Torren laughed, and John grit his teeth and could picture hitting him so badly he thought for a moment that he did.

In a year, John will communicate mostly in vast silences, humor and appetite gone, like great swathes of territory gone missing overnight, land obscured in smoke from hidden fires burning. He's a heart lying complete and perfect and still on the operating table, devoid of beating. The spark is dead. The new psychiatrist that they shipped over on the Daedalus after Heightmeyer's death will prescribe Xanax and time to cope. In his file, she will write, resembles the walking dead. She's always had a gift for words. In her diary, she will write, the Colonel scares me.

Torren will wave bye-bye to the coffin as it goes through the wormhole. John will see this. In another year, he will forgive Torren's gesture for what it was, but for now his vision clamps and his stomach clamps and he wants to hit something and wants to be hit, wants to be pummeled into the floor, wants to be dead, and just. Doesn't. Think, anymore. Can't. He still cannot manage to read the eulogy, but gives it to Ronon, who can. Ronon's voice is rough as his hair is soft, cloud-like where he cut his dreads for mourning. He does a surprisingly good job, heartfelt and unsparing - refreshingly free of all the sheer bullshit that usually surrounds these things - but then again, he's had practice.

"The first time we met," he says, "I tried to shoot them."

*

They will tell stories.

In the end, they will all tell stories.

fin.

Current Music: Lustmord - Heresy, Part I

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From:

seticat.livejournal.com

They will tell stories.

In the end, they will all tell stories.

(Oh.... oh fuck. So well done.)

And as we do today. No matter how those stories may cheer us or tear at our hearts, we will all tell stories.

From now until the end of all things.

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