sga_flashfic | Achilles Heel by Sethoz [Slave Challenge]

Title: Achilles Heel
Author:

sethoz
Characters/Pairing: Gen, everyone, with a tiny, tiny hint of McKay/Sheppard
Rating: UK 12
Words: 1182
Genre: Angst/Drama - probally an AU as I created back stories for some of the characters.
Notes:

klo_the_hobbit was my beta as always. Set sometime in season one, near The Seige. This is not the story I wanted to write for this challenge, but oh well.

Summary: Everyone is a slave to something – a thought, an idea, a memory, harking back to an earlier part in your life...

Achilles Heel

Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day. - Charles Dickens

Radek Zelenka hasn't touched alcohol in nine years, five weeks, two days and twenty hours. Not that he's counting of course. Counting would just imply that he's hyper aware of the last time he drank. He doesn't want to drink, to be dragged back into that time. Life was hard for him and for his parents who remembered only too well the crimes that had been committed against them while they were just young children, the crimes against them and their nation. They drank too, because life was hard and dirty and alcohol was bright and cheap. He doesn't want that life any more, even when he knows the Wraith are coming to kill them all. He knows that one slip up will mean that even though the Nazi's lost sixty years ago, they will win him.

People think Rodney McKay is run by his work or his stomach. They don't know about the words etched into his soul, tugging and taunting him at every opportunity. How he always has the image of a woman staring at him, sneering along with the hateful words; 'You are about as far away from the stars as you can be!' She didn't understand, how he needed to touch the stars, to understand them, to feel their brightness on his face, burning away everything. At the time, he didn't know about Atlantis, the wonders he would see. He's a giant walking amongst the stars now, so he tries to push the words of his sister away.

Peter Grodin doesn't really think when he's working at his console. No time to think about anything but the work he's doing, the things he needs to do to keep the city afloat. He doesn't allow himself to think of the past, of a girl with red hair and a bright smile. Of the way she lit up his world simply by being in it. He doesn't think of the accident, of the way she lay so still even when he called her name. He doesn't think of the Ancient device that killed her by accident, of the way everyone had looked at him. And he really doesn't think about the fact that he is working with devices similar to that one, working on things that took her from him.

It would surprise everyone to learn that Carson Beckett hated the sight of blood. Too many lives lost, even though he tells himself that for every life he fails, he saves five more. He still remembers the way the dead seem devoid of blood – dead man don't bleed, so where does it all go, he remembers himself thinking when he was younger. He used to dread the thought of having to lose someone he knew – on Atlantis though, he knows everyone. The people in the beds aren't just faces, they have names, personalities now. He wishes he had the ability to build up real walls, like some of the others, instead of feeling everything as if it had happened to him.

Aiden Ford is always thought of as the young one, the little brother. He never tells anyone how he hates that, how he doesn't want to be the kid brother, the one everyone else watches out for and looks after. He wants to be able to stand on his own feet, which is why he joined up. Nobody's kid, nobody's responsibility. He realised too late that he was swapping one family for another, a family that demanded order, the ability to do as you were told, being the kid again. Some nights, when the sun is setting and everything is calm, he finds himself wishing he wasn't wearing his uniform, that he could just relax and be free.

In her office, Elizabeth Weir feels like the princess in her ivory tower. Cut off. Isolated. She reads all the reports and takes part in the meetings, leading them, but all the time she can feel the glass wall between her and everyone. It's safer this way of course, but she sometimes she wishes she was like everyone else, able to talk and relax without having to make the hard choices, knowing that other people were going to have to carry them out. It's easier she knows, to order something to close, rather than be the person to have to do it and hear the screams of those trapped inside. She can't allow herself to think like that, to focus on the sacrifice that may occur in the near future. So she asks for something to take the dreams away.

Teyla Emmagan is torn in two. She consoles herself with the thought that one day she will be whole again, proper and as she was before. That one day she and her people will return through the gate to their home or that the newcomers will return and she will be with her people again. She's learnt to ignore the way her chest tightens at that thought. She is the leader of her people first, and a person second, so she cannot allow herself to do as her heart tells her. She moves and fights and talks and lives, not accepting that she will never be whole again. At night she dreams of a forest, a river and a dark sky in a time before they came to her tent.

Unlike the others, John Sheppard doesn't deny himself his addiction, his master, his driving force. Flying rules him but he knows enough about life to accept it and live with it, instead of pretending he can control it and could stop any time he wants. He knows that if he can't fly, it would kill him, destroying the things that make him... him. But he does deny the voice that occasionally whispers in his mind of a different kind of flying he could experience, of flashes of memory that never happened – hands on skin, long fingers touching, a breathless, John! He just moves through the day as always, not even realising that he always watches his scientist.

He watches them all, interested by the small creatures that now inhabit his city. He was first, special, the creator of all, the builder or builders. When the younger ones had come to his level they had grown tired of the world and chose not to interfere or even watch.

He watches though.

Sees the way their hearts and souls soar, the way they work to make the city sing like it did in his time. He sees into them and knows their weaknesses, the thing that make them so very human, the struggle, the pain, the things that could destroy them if they let it, the brief flash of life they have before it gets snuffed out and they live no more. They are spared the endless life.

He misses it.

::fin::

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fleurrochard

Wow. That was - wow. *speechless*

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