The Things Which Are Caesar's by Wintertime [Reviews - 17]
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Category: General
Characters: Elizabeth Weir, John Sheppard, Other, Radek Zelenka, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex
Rating: PG-13
Genres: AU - Alternate Universe, Character Study, Drama
Warnings: Adult themes, Character death
Series: None
Word count: 2563; Completed: Yes
Summary: Five gods John Sheppard never worshipped.
Spoilers up to "The Lost Boys," with specific references to both "Trinity" and "Sanctuary." Mentions of the Goa'uld.
- - - - -
1.
The post at McMurdo gave John a head-start on the end of the world.
He never even had a chance to watch the emergency news bulletins fade into static, because at sunset, they were all herded out into the cold. His jacket was too thin for the weather and he wrapped his arms around himself. At least he had the gloves tucked into his pockets. The scientists were hardly better off. Their bright fleece pullovers might have been warm and uniform and meaningful in their labs, but John didn't miss the way their shoulders hunched against the cold, the way they turned their faces away from the wind that rushed forward to bite their bare faces. John looked at them, lambs being trotted out to the slaughter, because concentrating on the broken rainbow of those pullovers was a hell of a lot easier to think about than what was actually happening.
He tried to close his eyes when they brought Dr. Jackson up to the front of the crowd. John had shuffled him to the lab a few times and he had been nice, pleasantly distracted, and wholly uninterested in John's exile to Antarctica. He said something in Arabic right before his throat was cut.
From the way the whole crowd swayed backwards when the blood sprayed across the tundra, John guessed that they got the message. Dr. Jackson had held the place together until the end, until he had been neither nice nor pleasantly distracted, and that single cut of cold steel across the soft underside of his neck had silenced him - - and the crowd - - as effectively as possible. No alien weapons, no ultimate pain, no tricks. It was quick and efficient and when Dr. Jackson's body hit the ground, there was no question that it was effective.
One of the scientists in the front went to his knees and threw up, his fingers scrabbling to hold himself up and catching in the still-flowing blood.
They all knelt after that, one way or another. Some of the Marines assigned to the base had to be forced down, coaxed with ribbon devices and cruel promises. One woman, solitary and strong, stood until those around her were killed for her disobedience. Her knees protested their inevitable collapse against the ground and her hands grazed the bodies of her friends, but she didn't cry. Most of them did; whimpering or sobbing or weeping silently. Only a few dry faces were scattered through the assembly: John's wasn't one of them. Some of the blood had flown against his mouth.
Some of it was Dr. Jackson's.
John was the only one, at the end of it all, that hadn't knelt. His knees were still untouched by the snow sweeping across the ground, his head was still upright, and he hadn't looked away from the fallen, even if he had wanted to. Unbowed. Unbroken. And this was only the edge of the curve, the end of the world: there was so much more beyond it, whole civilizations ripe and swollen with prosperity.
John felt the cold fingertips prying him apart. Where? How? When? Demanding, but not desperate. Dryly humorous, even, because there was all the time in the world. His small struggles, his frantic thoughts of midways and speed, were nothing. It pressed on, deeper, more fully, until there was nothing left.
Dr. Jackson's blood slid off the knife and into the snow at John's feet. He walked down the shimmering roads with the kneeling worshippers, body strong and untouched, and in his head he knelt, wept, and gave up everything.
2.
McKay refused to apologize for pissing off the anthropologists. "They were going through the Ancient database looking for gods. This is a race of people that could turn into pure energy. Even if they had been created by some higher power, they probably threw it in stasis, poked at its DNA, and gave themselves the holy gene. On top of that, his entire argument is based on the fact that the city has steeples. Willis actually said that the steeples are wasteful if the Ancients didn't have gods. And all I said was that they were obviously anthropologists, not architects, and they aren't steeples, they're spires, and Willis - -"
"Rodney," Elizabeth said, "you threw tea in Dr. Wilson's face."
"Well, obviously, if we still had coffee, this wouldn't have happened. Talk about wasteful."
"Anyway, he didn't do it on purpose," John said. "Throwing tea on someone is less embarrassing than spilling tea on them because you got tangled up in your shoelaces."
"And also he deserved it," Rodney said, crossing his arms.
John silently agreed. Wilson had been one of the scientists shipped in on the Daedalus: he had never walked the sleeping city only to feel it wake up underneath his fingertips, underneath his clumsy footfalls. The gene therapy had never worked into his blood. The lights stayed uselessly dull above him and the console screens worked slowly, unwillingly. He couldn't understand that if the city had steeples, it had them for itself.
"It was an accident, Elizabeth," John said. "And Rodney here can admit that it was an accident. He doesn't have to apologize for the disagreement, right?"
He had the feeling that Elizabeth only agreed with him because she didn't want to deal with the ongoing feud between Rodney and pretty much everyone else in the city. John herded Rodney outside before he could make things worse for himself. The twilight on the balcony was cool and John could smell the saltwater from the sea. The balcony was warm as skin; alive. He stroked his thumb along the rail.
"Feel free to trip and spill more hot tea on people that annoy you," John said. "Consider yourself sanctioned. Just as long as it's never me."
"I didn't trip," Rodney said.
"I know."
"You lied to Elizabeth," Rodney said. He sounded relieved, but his relief was tinged with accusation. Still, even though his gene was secondhand, he must have felt something in the city. He must have seen the crystal stalactites on the east pier, the steeples that only pointed downwards. To the ocean. To the Ancients.
"Yeah," John said, "I lied."
He waited, in the stillness, for McKay to decide what he thought about that. The things they had done were small, and virtually harmless; but they were still there and John needed to know what Rodney would choose, in the end. But even before Rodney answered, John knew. Rodney touched the rail and the city responded, activating to warm his cold and chapped hands, and that was a small thing, too. But that was Atlantis, so damnably gratifying to resurrect. John wondered absently why they hadn't built it honestly: all mirrors and reversed steeples. If there had been a god in that woodwork once, John could only hope he never met it.
"Gods," Rodney said finally, scoffing at what Wilson had thought, and also - - "Gods."
"Yes," John said. The balcony was fully heated by now, just as he liked it, and the canopy had peeled back to show him the stars just coming in through the haze.
Yes.
3.
The summers on Proculus were lush. The last harvest of fruit was slowly turning overripe on the branches and by the end of the solstice, everyone's hands were stained red with the juice. In the silence of their shared quarters, John licked the cloying syrup from Chaya's palms. She held them out, laughing, and John kissed her wrists, her pulse, her arms. He felt content, smooth, polished. He could smell the rain-dampened wood through the windows, the burst and bountiful harvest on the ground, and there was a taste in the back of his throat like plums, dark violet on his tongue. Sweet. He almost broke his wrist trying to get away, then, with the silk smoothness of familiarity and home clinging to his skin, but then it was like being blinded: all sharp starlight splitting him apart. Then the taste of nothing, of Chaya, of blood-red juice painting his mouth.
4.
Elizabeth popped the cork on their last bottle of champagne at midnight and all of them guarded their glasses greedily, selfishly.
No one talked of what they were missing: Rodney two years dead and a hundred years old from the Wraith, Teyla on Athos again with a lieutenant stolen away from the Daedalus, and Ford always elsewhere and just out of John's reach. The expedition had been whittled down. Funding had been cut. There were always enough suicide missions in the Milky Way to keep the SGC occupied and the reinforcements sent to Atlantis were scarcer each year. The city moved sluggishly around them, bodies colliding with ghosts, but everyone that John could afford to care about stood around him and clenched the stem of their glass.
There had been another defection last week: Captain Pauley had taken the last puddlejumper through the Stargate and gone God only knew where. Their contacts had told them that Dr. Thomas Ergan, thought killed on a mission, had resurfaced on a hiveship, half-eaten but alive. Some chose that over complete death. A few years of your life to the Wraith and then silence, servitude, treachery.
If John heard, a month from now, that Pauley was running fake rescue operations off PX-4410, it would only be inevitable.
"No one has seen Major Lorne today," Zelenka said. His lips were wet with champagne, Atlantis's anniversary bounty. "There is talk that he has fled to the mainland. He has been your NCO for too long, Colonel. If he has left us for the Wraith - -"
"We can take care of it," John said shortly. He looked at Ronon. "Can't we?"
When they had sent McKay's body through the Stargate, Ronon had told John that the only difference was that now they were all runners and all setting their pace off the edge of a cliff. A week later, burning his clothes after the third try to wash Lt. Grady's blood away, John had known what he had meant. Still, they had no choice. Lorne had full access to the mainframe. If he had left them, something would have to be done to stop him from reaching the Wraith. It wasn't a task he could leave to Elizabeth or Zelenka, even though they were no longer strictly civilians. Elizabeth had started carrying a nine mil strapped to her hip and Zelenka kept himself awake on Beckett's stimulants during the worst of the nights.
"He won't make it to the Wraith, if that's where he's going," Ronon said. Like all of them, he sounded tired.
There were days when John thought of the enzyme and what it might do for them now, to turn the tide in the last days of the war. It was risky to harvest and hard to control, but if Ford came back now, young and invincible, they would no longer strap him to the bed to suffer through withdrawal. They would point him at the Wraith like a missile. His blood for theirs.
There were days when he thought about the enzyme and there were days when he toyed with the idea of defection for himself.
Soon enough, the Wraith would return, and all of the grace in the constructs of the city would not stop the culling beam from stabbing down to reach them. Looking around the room, at the only people left for him to die for, John thought that he might - - that he could - -
(Rodney had died choking on his own blood, ancient and fragile and shaking himself to pieces, and all John had been able to do was hold onto him and wish that it had been someone else. And now it was only them, the only real people left in the city, and there was all of Atlantis to be given away. And beyond that, a galaxy. A galaxy that had left them here. John wondered if, after all these years, the SGC would accept his IDC if he dialed in with the last of the power. If he finally gave them up. For Zelenka, for Elizabeth, for Ronon. For the sake of the fallen. To trade away worlds for them, to trade away years of his life, to bend his knees for the Wraith . . . there were days . . . )
- - but there was Lorne to look for in the morning, when the sullen acknowledgment of their anniversary here had come to a close.
And when John found him, he would look him in the eyes and see if Lorne died with the confidence of the righteous.
5.
They tested the Arcturus Project in the deserted Dorandan solar system and as the power in the weapon rose exponentially, John had a split second to imagine everything that would happen if the weapon could not be controlled. But Rodney had been right. Only the targeted debris orbiting the planet was broken apart when Rodney discharged the weapon and John radioed Elizabeth with Rodney yelling in his ear about Nobel prizes and success and how he had been right, right, right. The power source was safe. The weapon was theirs.
"Thank you," Rodney said on the way back home, when both of them were still twitching with excitement and relief. He sounded sincere. "They didn't trust me. You did."
"Well," John said casually, as if Rodney had not just handed them their salvation from the Wraith, "you have a habit of being right."
"I was right. I was so right." Rodney put his hands behind his head and smiled, wide and joyous. John couldn't help but grin back at him. He didn't mention the moment when he had thought the test run would fail, the unsteady sinking feeling of resentment that had come when he finally realized that he had could have let Rodney lead him to his own death. "This is going to mean everything. This is going to save us. I might even apologize to Radek - - if he apologizes first."
"A graceful victory from Rodney McKay," John said. "It's the end of the world as we know it." He retracted the engine pods as they reached the Stargate, his hands still shaky on the controls. As they came to a stop, he said, "Go on and greet your adoring public."
Rodney's eyes were bright, and hungry, and the exact color of the event horizon.
When the chaos outside swallowed both of them whole, John cocked his head to listen to the praise from all quarters, the murmured hallelujahs. His own voice was among them: I knew you could do it.
Rodney climbed the steps to meet Elizabeth and John followed him.
- Text Size +
Category: General
Characters: Elizabeth Weir, John Sheppard, Other, Radek Zelenka, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex
Rating: PG-13
Genres: AU - Alternate Universe, Character Study, Drama
Warnings: Adult themes, Character death
Series: None
Word count: 2563; Completed: Yes
Summary: Five gods John Sheppard never worshipped.
Spoilers up to "The Lost Boys," with specific references to both "Trinity" and "Sanctuary." Mentions of the Goa'uld.
- - - - -
1.
The post at McMurdo gave John a head-start on the end of the world.
He never even had a chance to watch the emergency news bulletins fade into static, because at sunset, they were all herded out into the cold. His jacket was too thin for the weather and he wrapped his arms around himself. At least he had the gloves tucked into his pockets. The scientists were hardly better off. Their bright fleece pullovers might have been warm and uniform and meaningful in their labs, but John didn't miss the way their shoulders hunched against the cold, the way they turned their faces away from the wind that rushed forward to bite their bare faces. John looked at them, lambs being trotted out to the slaughter, because concentrating on the broken rainbow of those pullovers was a hell of a lot easier to think about than what was actually happening.
He tried to close his eyes when they brought Dr. Jackson up to the front of the crowd. John had shuffled him to the lab a few times and he had been nice, pleasantly distracted, and wholly uninterested in John's exile to Antarctica. He said something in Arabic right before his throat was cut.
From the way the whole crowd swayed backwards when the blood sprayed across the tundra, John guessed that they got the message. Dr. Jackson had held the place together until the end, until he had been neither nice nor pleasantly distracted, and that single cut of cold steel across the soft underside of his neck had silenced him - - and the crowd - - as effectively as possible. No alien weapons, no ultimate pain, no tricks. It was quick and efficient and when Dr. Jackson's body hit the ground, there was no question that it was effective.
One of the scientists in the front went to his knees and threw up, his fingers scrabbling to hold himself up and catching in the still-flowing blood.
They all knelt after that, one way or another. Some of the Marines assigned to the base had to be forced down, coaxed with ribbon devices and cruel promises. One woman, solitary and strong, stood until those around her were killed for her disobedience. Her knees protested their inevitable collapse against the ground and her hands grazed the bodies of her friends, but she didn't cry. Most of them did; whimpering or sobbing or weeping silently. Only a few dry faces were scattered through the assembly: John's wasn't one of them. Some of the blood had flown against his mouth.
Some of it was Dr. Jackson's.
John was the only one, at the end of it all, that hadn't knelt. His knees were still untouched by the snow sweeping across the ground, his head was still upright, and he hadn't looked away from the fallen, even if he had wanted to. Unbowed. Unbroken. And this was only the edge of the curve, the end of the world: there was so much more beyond it, whole civilizations ripe and swollen with prosperity.
John felt the cold fingertips prying him apart. Where? How? When? Demanding, but not desperate. Dryly humorous, even, because there was all the time in the world. His small struggles, his frantic thoughts of midways and speed, were nothing. It pressed on, deeper, more fully, until there was nothing left.
Dr. Jackson's blood slid off the knife and into the snow at John's feet. He walked down the shimmering roads with the kneeling worshippers, body strong and untouched, and in his head he knelt, wept, and gave up everything.
2.
McKay refused to apologize for pissing off the anthropologists. "They were going through the Ancient database looking for gods. This is a race of people that could turn into pure energy. Even if they had been created by some higher power, they probably threw it in stasis, poked at its DNA, and gave themselves the holy gene. On top of that, his entire argument is based on the fact that the city has steeples. Willis actually said that the steeples are wasteful if the Ancients didn't have gods. And all I said was that they were obviously anthropologists, not architects, and they aren't steeples, they're spires, and Willis - -"
"Rodney," Elizabeth said, "you threw tea in Dr. Wilson's face."
"Well, obviously, if we still had coffee, this wouldn't have happened. Talk about wasteful."
"Anyway, he didn't do it on purpose," John said. "Throwing tea on someone is less embarrassing than spilling tea on them because you got tangled up in your shoelaces."
"And also he deserved it," Rodney said, crossing his arms.
John silently agreed. Wilson had been one of the scientists shipped in on the Daedalus: he had never walked the sleeping city only to feel it wake up underneath his fingertips, underneath his clumsy footfalls. The gene therapy had never worked into his blood. The lights stayed uselessly dull above him and the console screens worked slowly, unwillingly. He couldn't understand that if the city had steeples, it had them for itself.
"It was an accident, Elizabeth," John said. "And Rodney here can admit that it was an accident. He doesn't have to apologize for the disagreement, right?"
He had the feeling that Elizabeth only agreed with him because she didn't want to deal with the ongoing feud between Rodney and pretty much everyone else in the city. John herded Rodney outside before he could make things worse for himself. The twilight on the balcony was cool and John could smell the saltwater from the sea. The balcony was warm as skin; alive. He stroked his thumb along the rail.
"Feel free to trip and spill more hot tea on people that annoy you," John said. "Consider yourself sanctioned. Just as long as it's never me."
"I didn't trip," Rodney said.
"I know."
"You lied to Elizabeth," Rodney said. He sounded relieved, but his relief was tinged with accusation. Still, even though his gene was secondhand, he must have felt something in the city. He must have seen the crystal stalactites on the east pier, the steeples that only pointed downwards. To the ocean. To the Ancients.
"Yeah," John said, "I lied."
He waited, in the stillness, for McKay to decide what he thought about that. The things they had done were small, and virtually harmless; but they were still there and John needed to know what Rodney would choose, in the end. But even before Rodney answered, John knew. Rodney touched the rail and the city responded, activating to warm his cold and chapped hands, and that was a small thing, too. But that was Atlantis, so damnably gratifying to resurrect. John wondered absently why they hadn't built it honestly: all mirrors and reversed steeples. If there had been a god in that woodwork once, John could only hope he never met it.
"Gods," Rodney said finally, scoffing at what Wilson had thought, and also - - "Gods."
"Yes," John said. The balcony was fully heated by now, just as he liked it, and the canopy had peeled back to show him the stars just coming in through the haze.
Yes.
3.
The summers on Proculus were lush. The last harvest of fruit was slowly turning overripe on the branches and by the end of the solstice, everyone's hands were stained red with the juice. In the silence of their shared quarters, John licked the cloying syrup from Chaya's palms. She held them out, laughing, and John kissed her wrists, her pulse, her arms. He felt content, smooth, polished. He could smell the rain-dampened wood through the windows, the burst and bountiful harvest on the ground, and there was a taste in the back of his throat like plums, dark violet on his tongue. Sweet. He almost broke his wrist trying to get away, then, with the silk smoothness of familiarity and home clinging to his skin, but then it was like being blinded: all sharp starlight splitting him apart. Then the taste of nothing, of Chaya, of blood-red juice painting his mouth.
4.
Elizabeth popped the cork on their last bottle of champagne at midnight and all of them guarded their glasses greedily, selfishly.
No one talked of what they were missing: Rodney two years dead and a hundred years old from the Wraith, Teyla on Athos again with a lieutenant stolen away from the Daedalus, and Ford always elsewhere and just out of John's reach. The expedition had been whittled down. Funding had been cut. There were always enough suicide missions in the Milky Way to keep the SGC occupied and the reinforcements sent to Atlantis were scarcer each year. The city moved sluggishly around them, bodies colliding with ghosts, but everyone that John could afford to care about stood around him and clenched the stem of their glass.
There had been another defection last week: Captain Pauley had taken the last puddlejumper through the Stargate and gone God only knew where. Their contacts had told them that Dr. Thomas Ergan, thought killed on a mission, had resurfaced on a hiveship, half-eaten but alive. Some chose that over complete death. A few years of your life to the Wraith and then silence, servitude, treachery.
If John heard, a month from now, that Pauley was running fake rescue operations off PX-4410, it would only be inevitable.
"No one has seen Major Lorne today," Zelenka said. His lips were wet with champagne, Atlantis's anniversary bounty. "There is talk that he has fled to the mainland. He has been your NCO for too long, Colonel. If he has left us for the Wraith - -"
"We can take care of it," John said shortly. He looked at Ronon. "Can't we?"
When they had sent McKay's body through the Stargate, Ronon had told John that the only difference was that now they were all runners and all setting their pace off the edge of a cliff. A week later, burning his clothes after the third try to wash Lt. Grady's blood away, John had known what he had meant. Still, they had no choice. Lorne had full access to the mainframe. If he had left them, something would have to be done to stop him from reaching the Wraith. It wasn't a task he could leave to Elizabeth or Zelenka, even though they were no longer strictly civilians. Elizabeth had started carrying a nine mil strapped to her hip and Zelenka kept himself awake on Beckett's stimulants during the worst of the nights.
"He won't make it to the Wraith, if that's where he's going," Ronon said. Like all of them, he sounded tired.
There were days when John thought of the enzyme and what it might do for them now, to turn the tide in the last days of the war. It was risky to harvest and hard to control, but if Ford came back now, young and invincible, they would no longer strap him to the bed to suffer through withdrawal. They would point him at the Wraith like a missile. His blood for theirs.
There were days when he thought about the enzyme and there were days when he toyed with the idea of defection for himself.
Soon enough, the Wraith would return, and all of the grace in the constructs of the city would not stop the culling beam from stabbing down to reach them. Looking around the room, at the only people left for him to die for, John thought that he might - - that he could - -
(Rodney had died choking on his own blood, ancient and fragile and shaking himself to pieces, and all John had been able to do was hold onto him and wish that it had been someone else. And now it was only them, the only real people left in the city, and there was all of Atlantis to be given away. And beyond that, a galaxy. A galaxy that had left them here. John wondered if, after all these years, the SGC would accept his IDC if he dialed in with the last of the power. If he finally gave them up. For Zelenka, for Elizabeth, for Ronon. For the sake of the fallen. To trade away worlds for them, to trade away years of his life, to bend his knees for the Wraith . . . there were days . . . )
- - but there was Lorne to look for in the morning, when the sullen acknowledgment of their anniversary here had come to a close.
And when John found him, he would look him in the eyes and see if Lorne died with the confidence of the righteous.
5.
They tested the Arcturus Project in the deserted Dorandan solar system and as the power in the weapon rose exponentially, John had a split second to imagine everything that would happen if the weapon could not be controlled. But Rodney had been right. Only the targeted debris orbiting the planet was broken apart when Rodney discharged the weapon and John radioed Elizabeth with Rodney yelling in his ear about Nobel prizes and success and how he had been right, right, right. The power source was safe. The weapon was theirs.
"Thank you," Rodney said on the way back home, when both of them were still twitching with excitement and relief. He sounded sincere. "They didn't trust me. You did."
"Well," John said casually, as if Rodney had not just handed them their salvation from the Wraith, "you have a habit of being right."
"I was right. I was so right." Rodney put his hands behind his head and smiled, wide and joyous. John couldn't help but grin back at him. He didn't mention the moment when he had thought the test run would fail, the unsteady sinking feeling of resentment that had come when he finally realized that he had could have let Rodney lead him to his own death. "This is going to mean everything. This is going to save us. I might even apologize to Radek - - if he apologizes first."
"A graceful victory from Rodney McKay," John said. "It's the end of the world as we know it." He retracted the engine pods as they reached the Stargate, his hands still shaky on the controls. As they came to a stop, he said, "Go on and greet your adoring public."
Rodney's eyes were bright, and hungry, and the exact color of the event horizon.
When the chaos outside swallowed both of them whole, John cocked his head to listen to the praise from all quarters, the murmured hallelujahs. His own voice was among them: I knew you could do it.
Rodney climbed the steps to meet Elizabeth and John followed him.