Return: Part two Stargate Atlantis story
Oct. 23rd, 2009 03:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
scarlettdreamHere is the second part of this offering
in which there is much exposition, by McKay as usual,
and an uncertain conclusion
Overall the story is Adult in content and it is an AU
I mess with the timelines and the order of events a bit to fit this story as well.
Disclaimer
No infringement is intended, this is written for fun not for profit and not intended to detract from the writers, producers or the actors who created SGA. Please don’t sue me.
link to Return part one
Part two:
Remember Me
but death invades me,
death is now a welcome guest
From Dido's lament
Teyla spoke with Colonel Ellis on board the Phoenix, and shortly afterwards she and Ronon disappeared as white light transported them back to the ship. Then Rodney was alone, with the Sarcophagus gently thrumming as it worked it’s mysterious magic to revive John.
Rodney slid down until he was sitting on the floor, his back rested against the stone device. He scrubbed his hands over his face, leaving them cupped over his eyes, he pressed his fingers against his eyebrows hoping to relieve some of the pressure that was building into what promised to be a massive headache.
It had been a long year and it was hard to comprehend that he could finally rest. McKay was grateful the others had left him alone because he needed to think. He needed to figure out the right thing to do.
Because the sarcophagus changed everything.
When they first lost John it had been dreadful and completely simple. Kolya had taken him. He forced them to watch as he tortured Sheppard with his tame Wraith. But then, while they were negotiating with Kolya, and at the same time planning a rescue mission in case the talking failed, John and the Wraith escaped by themselves.
Then the Wraith double crossed John, but of course they didn't know that, then .
The last direct contact they had with Sheppard was when he dialled Atlantis and spoke to the gate controller, explaining that he’d escaped. Chuck had lowered the shield, but John never came through.
After an initial flurry of panic and other activities, the rescue mission went ahead as planned, but there was no trace of Sheppard or the Wraith. And Kolya melted away like smoke.
Things had to move on, once everyone had accepted they weren’t going to get Sheppard back easily. Major Lorne became acting military leader of Atlantis. And while it had to be business as usual in many respects, because Atlantis still had to survive, Lorne kept the search for Sheppard as his number one priority.
But the SGC and the IOC had seen it differently. Seen an opportunity. A chance to change the focus of the Atlantis Expedition. A chance to replace Elizabeth Weir. For some the search for a missing Air Force Colonel was secondary to filling the power vacuum created by his loss.
Rodney waited to see what would happen. He knew he wasn’t in with a chance to take over as expedition leader. He was savvy enough to recognize just how many bridges he had burned at the SGC. He was kind of surprised how glad he was when Sam Carter ended up with the job.
In the Pegasus Galaxy Rodney had finally learned one important lesson, not to react until the dust settled. Truthfully he had learned many things he’d never realized he didn’t know, and it had been a steep painful road to understanding. Most of it about loss as much as anything else. So he had a greater understanding of the value of Carter’s wisdom, now. Wisdom she had learned the hard way, through the wormhole. Rodney was surprised how much he trusted Sam to make the right choices, maybe more even, than he had ever trusted Elizabeth.
Caldwell had taken the post of Military leader , but strangely it didn’t seem to make that much difference, because Carter was military too, and she outranked him.
A day after she came through Sam had a private meeting with Rodney. They talked about John, and about the proposal Teyla and Ronon had already put to her.
They had come to tell Rodney the previous evening. They laid it all out for him. Belief that the formal structure of an Atlantis gate team would hinder the search for John Sheppard. Teyla believed her position as leader of the Athosian people gave her a unique authority out among the others in the galaxy. And because Athos had made it‘s treaty with Sheppard, the man, not with the Atlantis Expedition or the SGC, honour demanded that she could not rest until John was restored to them.
Ronon simply said he’d get answers easier as a free agent.
And Rodney had hated the idea. Hated that they were leaving him behind. Hated that he would be alone. The last of the team. On Atlantis waiting for John to come back. But the next day, when Sam had explained what she’d been told, he quietly agreed that team should be disbanded. Sam had been shocked, and she’d played Devil’s advocate, questioning the decision he had made.
But even though he felt like he was hollowing out his own soul to admit it, Rodney stuck to his guns. He simply said he believed his talents could best serve the search for Sheppard by staying on Atlantis. Collating the data, looking for patterns, looking for that one vital piece of information that would lead them to the man. And then he pointed out that the cold hard facts. No one could run the city like he could. Not even Zelenka had as much combined expertise with the city, with ZPM technology and with Ancient interfaces.
He said he already knew this meant that Caldwell, the SGC and the IOC would never permit him to leave for an indefinite period. Because the City would quite probably not survive without him. And he pointed out the redundancy of rescuing Sheppard if there was no city to bring him back to. He said it all so flatly, so matter-of-factly and without even one shred of his usual arrogance that astonished, Sam had agreed with him.
And strangely after that nothing much seemed to change.
Teyla and Ronon were gone, of course, but really only Rodney seemed to feel it deeply. None of the off-world teams were able to find out anything new about Sheppard’s location, but there were all the usual emergencies. Near- misses and fatal non-near-misses, rescue missions and the occasional outbreak of city-wide contagions that were the meat and drink of everyday life in a floating Ancient city in a far galaxy.
There was so much that kept him busy and Rodney found it was easy enough to go through the motions of living and working and getting things done. He hardly noticed that he no longer seemed to have a heart and soul to put into it any more. Whatever it was he still did have to put into it, his guts, his contrary nature, his general unwillingness to simply lay down and die, must have been enough because they were still there. They were still kicking the Wraith’s asses and getting a reputation in the Galaxy.
Then very slowly information began to trickle back to him. Just a thread of an idea here or a snippet of overheard conversation there. But it gave McKay enough to begin the database of information about Sheppard.
They found a Rebel Genii who told them he had seen John disappear in a culling beam just as he had been about to step thought the wormhole. Then there was more Intel from a Genii deserter. She had been a guard in the fortress where they had kept the Wraith, and later Sheppard. She told a story about the strange way the captive Wraith had acted, and also what she knew of how that particular Wraith had been caught.
By then Rodney had linked the database to a blog that most of the Atlantis staff trawled every day. Commenting on the latest ideas, speculating wildly on just what Colonel Sheppard might be doing now, and just occasionally it all fermented and percolated until someone had a good idea.
One day it all came together and they had their first real clue to finding John.
Teyla and Ronon came back for him then, and neither Sam nor Caldwell could withstand the brutal efficiency of the op that Rodney laid out before them. He provided them with evidence that he had been keeping up with his weapons training and his self-defence so they really had nothing to back up their refusal to let him go. As a fall back he even had a list of volunteers who had offered to go with them, if the objection was in sending just a team of three.
In the end they didn’t find Sheppard, but they found the next best thing, the Wraith who had taken him. He insisted they call him Todd, apparently this was the name that Sheppard had given him. When they found him he was sickened and weak. Ronon and Teyla took him to some caves deep on an abandoned planet they knew of. Rodney went back to Atlantis. It wasn’t hard to pursuade them to send a team through. Carson was frothing at the mouth in his eagerness to study a sick Wraith. To maybe finally discover the thing that would give them the edge, a weakness in the Wraith they could exploit.
Things became a little surreal after that.
Within three months most of the Wraith were either dying or dead. Those that weren’t had retreated to their hive ships, course set for the furthest reaches of the galaxy, while they went back into hibernation. It seems there was a strange kind of plague among them, a feeding sickness, the same one that Todd had been suffering from when they captured him. It had spread from one hive to the next. Strangely the one cure was the virus that Carson had created to turn the Wraith human, except it didn’t. Not quite.
Rodney pieced it together, and he could have wept at the irony of it all, because John never did see it coming.
It seemed that feeding on John was addictive. Todd had been forced to feed from him several times by Kolya, and then after they escaped John had offered himself again. They agreed that if Todd was at full strength he would be able to escape and find his dart. Once he had it he promised to come back for John and return his life-force to him. And Todd had done it, too.
But as he had watched Sheppard prepare to disappear through the Stargate he realised that he couldn’t let him go. That his blood was singing with the need to cycle again with Sheppard. To take from him until the last bittersweet gasp of his life was gone and then return it to him, a shimmering cascade of power arching between them. The need to taste John again and again was so powerful that he captured him in the culling beam of his dart.
Todd had been forced to gift his prize to his Queen, Krrr’meil, when he returned to his hive. And when she fed, whatever this property was, the unique desirable taste of John‘s life force, it seemed to intensify with every cycle of her feeding. But with each feeding she grew more and more lost to the sensation, more and more enthralled by the act of draining John, until she began to sicken and fade. And by then it was too late.
No one on Atlantis had truly grasped the symbiotic relationship between a Queen and her hive. But sickness spread from her throughout her hive, and Krrr’meil knew it. She understood that death was upon them, and with her dying breath she cursed her closest rival, Varusssh. She ordered Todd to take John and gift him to that Queen.
And then sickness spread through Varusssh’s hive too, and she in her turn cursed another hive before her death rattle.
Todd accounted for six hives that had been infected in this way. Then the contagion seemed reach a critical mass and it began to jump by itself. Spreading out from planet to planet, from hive to hive through the Wraith themselves.
Carson studied the illness. And finally he had some kind of answer. A unique reaction between John’s Uber-Ancient gene, the retrovirus and the Wriath feeding enzyme made him particularly addictive. But it was the Queen’s unique biology that had turned it toxic, and then spread it through the hive. Carson unwittingly found the cure too, he had been testing Todd’s susceptibility to the various components of the virus and when he tested a small sample of the retrovirus with Todd’s contaminated cells the results were remarkable.
They tested it on Todd and it worked. He was cured of his sickness and he was transformed, he was human, or so they thought. But like Michael they really hadn’t grasped that the difference between Human and Wraith was not in the end, merely physical. A few days after his cure Todd escaped.
Through it all Rodney kept on searching through the details. Kept on running the known facts through his computers. Plotting the courses that Hive ships had taken, working out how to identify each individual Hive. Creating models that could predict their course from a few known locations. Going over and over the descriptions that Todd had given them. Checking every awful detail of who had fed from John, and what they had done to him, until he felt he was going insane.
No one noticed, though. Rodney was just Rodney as far as Atlantis was concerned. Obsessive and obnoxious and always always working. The only people who might have spotted there was more to it were gone, one way or another. And the only one left that he might have talked to was burried 24/7 in his research labs, by order of Sam and Caldwell. But in truth Rodney probablay wouldn’t have said anything to Carson anyway, what would have been the point?
So he just buried those revelations about his feelings for John the same way he had boxed up Sheppard’s possessions, and piled them up in the back of his closet space.
Then something so off the wall happened that everyone was thrown. Caldwell turned out to be a Gou’ld, and suddenly there were rumours of a Gou’ld Wraith alliance. But Wraith and Gou’ld were not compatible in the end. Although one Wraith Queen apparently developed a taste for the symbiot.
It took another two months before they finally had the Intel that led them to Uhurrsein.
While he had been thinking the Sarcophagus continued it’s inexplicable processes. And truly Rodney had no idea if he was doing the right thing or not, but time was growing short. He had read the reports. And he had too much first hand knowledge now of how desperate people could simply ignore what was right in favour of what was expedient. How sometimes they gave in to temptation Hadn’t he done it himself more and more?
He placed the blocks of C4 around the stone device. He knew he had to do it quickly, otherwise he’d start to think, start to regret. The timers were set. He just needed to flick the control pannel to arm them and hit the button yo destroy the sarcophagus.
To Be Continued
link to Return part three
in which there is much exposition, by McKay as usual,
and an uncertain conclusion
Overall the story is Adult in content and it is an AU
I mess with the timelines and the order of events a bit to fit this story as well.
Disclaimer
No infringement is intended, this is written for fun not for profit and not intended to detract from the writers, producers or the actors who created SGA. Please don’t sue me.
link to Return part one
Part two:
Remember Me
but death invades me,
death is now a welcome guest
From Dido's lament
Teyla spoke with Colonel Ellis on board the Phoenix, and shortly afterwards she and Ronon disappeared as white light transported them back to the ship. Then Rodney was alone, with the Sarcophagus gently thrumming as it worked it’s mysterious magic to revive John.
Rodney slid down until he was sitting on the floor, his back rested against the stone device. He scrubbed his hands over his face, leaving them cupped over his eyes, he pressed his fingers against his eyebrows hoping to relieve some of the pressure that was building into what promised to be a massive headache.
It had been a long year and it was hard to comprehend that he could finally rest. McKay was grateful the others had left him alone because he needed to think. He needed to figure out the right thing to do.
Because the sarcophagus changed everything.
When they first lost John it had been dreadful and completely simple. Kolya had taken him. He forced them to watch as he tortured Sheppard with his tame Wraith. But then, while they were negotiating with Kolya, and at the same time planning a rescue mission in case the talking failed, John and the Wraith escaped by themselves.
Then the Wraith double crossed John, but of course they didn't know that, then .
The last direct contact they had with Sheppard was when he dialled Atlantis and spoke to the gate controller, explaining that he’d escaped. Chuck had lowered the shield, but John never came through.
After an initial flurry of panic and other activities, the rescue mission went ahead as planned, but there was no trace of Sheppard or the Wraith. And Kolya melted away like smoke.
Things had to move on, once everyone had accepted they weren’t going to get Sheppard back easily. Major Lorne became acting military leader of Atlantis. And while it had to be business as usual in many respects, because Atlantis still had to survive, Lorne kept the search for Sheppard as his number one priority.
But the SGC and the IOC had seen it differently. Seen an opportunity. A chance to change the focus of the Atlantis Expedition. A chance to replace Elizabeth Weir. For some the search for a missing Air Force Colonel was secondary to filling the power vacuum created by his loss.
Rodney waited to see what would happen. He knew he wasn’t in with a chance to take over as expedition leader. He was savvy enough to recognize just how many bridges he had burned at the SGC. He was kind of surprised how glad he was when Sam Carter ended up with the job.
In the Pegasus Galaxy Rodney had finally learned one important lesson, not to react until the dust settled. Truthfully he had learned many things he’d never realized he didn’t know, and it had been a steep painful road to understanding. Most of it about loss as much as anything else. So he had a greater understanding of the value of Carter’s wisdom, now. Wisdom she had learned the hard way, through the wormhole. Rodney was surprised how much he trusted Sam to make the right choices, maybe more even, than he had ever trusted Elizabeth.
Caldwell had taken the post of Military leader , but strangely it didn’t seem to make that much difference, because Carter was military too, and she outranked him.
A day after she came through Sam had a private meeting with Rodney. They talked about John, and about the proposal Teyla and Ronon had already put to her.
They had come to tell Rodney the previous evening. They laid it all out for him. Belief that the formal structure of an Atlantis gate team would hinder the search for John Sheppard. Teyla believed her position as leader of the Athosian people gave her a unique authority out among the others in the galaxy. And because Athos had made it‘s treaty with Sheppard, the man, not with the Atlantis Expedition or the SGC, honour demanded that she could not rest until John was restored to them.
Ronon simply said he’d get answers easier as a free agent.
And Rodney had hated the idea. Hated that they were leaving him behind. Hated that he would be alone. The last of the team. On Atlantis waiting for John to come back. But the next day, when Sam had explained what she’d been told, he quietly agreed that team should be disbanded. Sam had been shocked, and she’d played Devil’s advocate, questioning the decision he had made.
But even though he felt like he was hollowing out his own soul to admit it, Rodney stuck to his guns. He simply said he believed his talents could best serve the search for Sheppard by staying on Atlantis. Collating the data, looking for patterns, looking for that one vital piece of information that would lead them to the man. And then he pointed out that the cold hard facts. No one could run the city like he could. Not even Zelenka had as much combined expertise with the city, with ZPM technology and with Ancient interfaces.
He said he already knew this meant that Caldwell, the SGC and the IOC would never permit him to leave for an indefinite period. Because the City would quite probably not survive without him. And he pointed out the redundancy of rescuing Sheppard if there was no city to bring him back to. He said it all so flatly, so matter-of-factly and without even one shred of his usual arrogance that astonished, Sam had agreed with him.
And strangely after that nothing much seemed to change.
Teyla and Ronon were gone, of course, but really only Rodney seemed to feel it deeply. None of the off-world teams were able to find out anything new about Sheppard’s location, but there were all the usual emergencies. Near- misses and fatal non-near-misses, rescue missions and the occasional outbreak of city-wide contagions that were the meat and drink of everyday life in a floating Ancient city in a far galaxy.
There was so much that kept him busy and Rodney found it was easy enough to go through the motions of living and working and getting things done. He hardly noticed that he no longer seemed to have a heart and soul to put into it any more. Whatever it was he still did have to put into it, his guts, his contrary nature, his general unwillingness to simply lay down and die, must have been enough because they were still there. They were still kicking the Wraith’s asses and getting a reputation in the Galaxy.
Then very slowly information began to trickle back to him. Just a thread of an idea here or a snippet of overheard conversation there. But it gave McKay enough to begin the database of information about Sheppard.
They found a Rebel Genii who told them he had seen John disappear in a culling beam just as he had been about to step thought the wormhole. Then there was more Intel from a Genii deserter. She had been a guard in the fortress where they had kept the Wraith, and later Sheppard. She told a story about the strange way the captive Wraith had acted, and also what she knew of how that particular Wraith had been caught.
By then Rodney had linked the database to a blog that most of the Atlantis staff trawled every day. Commenting on the latest ideas, speculating wildly on just what Colonel Sheppard might be doing now, and just occasionally it all fermented and percolated until someone had a good idea.
One day it all came together and they had their first real clue to finding John.
Teyla and Ronon came back for him then, and neither Sam nor Caldwell could withstand the brutal efficiency of the op that Rodney laid out before them. He provided them with evidence that he had been keeping up with his weapons training and his self-defence so they really had nothing to back up their refusal to let him go. As a fall back he even had a list of volunteers who had offered to go with them, if the objection was in sending just a team of three.
In the end they didn’t find Sheppard, but they found the next best thing, the Wraith who had taken him. He insisted they call him Todd, apparently this was the name that Sheppard had given him. When they found him he was sickened and weak. Ronon and Teyla took him to some caves deep on an abandoned planet they knew of. Rodney went back to Atlantis. It wasn’t hard to pursuade them to send a team through. Carson was frothing at the mouth in his eagerness to study a sick Wraith. To maybe finally discover the thing that would give them the edge, a weakness in the Wraith they could exploit.
Things became a little surreal after that.
Within three months most of the Wraith were either dying or dead. Those that weren’t had retreated to their hive ships, course set for the furthest reaches of the galaxy, while they went back into hibernation. It seems there was a strange kind of plague among them, a feeding sickness, the same one that Todd had been suffering from when they captured him. It had spread from one hive to the next. Strangely the one cure was the virus that Carson had created to turn the Wraith human, except it didn’t. Not quite.
Rodney pieced it together, and he could have wept at the irony of it all, because John never did see it coming.
It seemed that feeding on John was addictive. Todd had been forced to feed from him several times by Kolya, and then after they escaped John had offered himself again. They agreed that if Todd was at full strength he would be able to escape and find his dart. Once he had it he promised to come back for John and return his life-force to him. And Todd had done it, too.
But as he had watched Sheppard prepare to disappear through the Stargate he realised that he couldn’t let him go. That his blood was singing with the need to cycle again with Sheppard. To take from him until the last bittersweet gasp of his life was gone and then return it to him, a shimmering cascade of power arching between them. The need to taste John again and again was so powerful that he captured him in the culling beam of his dart.
Todd had been forced to gift his prize to his Queen, Krrr’meil, when he returned to his hive. And when she fed, whatever this property was, the unique desirable taste of John‘s life force, it seemed to intensify with every cycle of her feeding. But with each feeding she grew more and more lost to the sensation, more and more enthralled by the act of draining John, until she began to sicken and fade. And by then it was too late.
No one on Atlantis had truly grasped the symbiotic relationship between a Queen and her hive. But sickness spread from her throughout her hive, and Krrr’meil knew it. She understood that death was upon them, and with her dying breath she cursed her closest rival, Varusssh. She ordered Todd to take John and gift him to that Queen.
And then sickness spread through Varusssh’s hive too, and she in her turn cursed another hive before her death rattle.
Todd accounted for six hives that had been infected in this way. Then the contagion seemed reach a critical mass and it began to jump by itself. Spreading out from planet to planet, from hive to hive through the Wraith themselves.
Carson studied the illness. And finally he had some kind of answer. A unique reaction between John’s Uber-Ancient gene, the retrovirus and the Wriath feeding enzyme made him particularly addictive. But it was the Queen’s unique biology that had turned it toxic, and then spread it through the hive. Carson unwittingly found the cure too, he had been testing Todd’s susceptibility to the various components of the virus and when he tested a small sample of the retrovirus with Todd’s contaminated cells the results were remarkable.
They tested it on Todd and it worked. He was cured of his sickness and he was transformed, he was human, or so they thought. But like Michael they really hadn’t grasped that the difference between Human and Wraith was not in the end, merely physical. A few days after his cure Todd escaped.
Through it all Rodney kept on searching through the details. Kept on running the known facts through his computers. Plotting the courses that Hive ships had taken, working out how to identify each individual Hive. Creating models that could predict their course from a few known locations. Going over and over the descriptions that Todd had given them. Checking every awful detail of who had fed from John, and what they had done to him, until he felt he was going insane.
No one noticed, though. Rodney was just Rodney as far as Atlantis was concerned. Obsessive and obnoxious and always always working. The only people who might have spotted there was more to it were gone, one way or another. And the only one left that he might have talked to was burried 24/7 in his research labs, by order of Sam and Caldwell. But in truth Rodney probablay wouldn’t have said anything to Carson anyway, what would have been the point?
So he just buried those revelations about his feelings for John the same way he had boxed up Sheppard’s possessions, and piled them up in the back of his closet space.
Then something so off the wall happened that everyone was thrown. Caldwell turned out to be a Gou’ld, and suddenly there were rumours of a Gou’ld Wraith alliance. But Wraith and Gou’ld were not compatible in the end. Although one Wraith Queen apparently developed a taste for the symbiot.
It took another two months before they finally had the Intel that led them to Uhurrsein.
While he had been thinking the Sarcophagus continued it’s inexplicable processes. And truly Rodney had no idea if he was doing the right thing or not, but time was growing short. He had read the reports. And he had too much first hand knowledge now of how desperate people could simply ignore what was right in favour of what was expedient. How sometimes they gave in to temptation Hadn’t he done it himself more and more?
He placed the blocks of C4 around the stone device. He knew he had to do it quickly, otherwise he’d start to think, start to regret. The timers were set. He just needed to flick the control pannel to arm them and hit the button yo destroy the sarcophagus.
To Be Continued
link to Return part three
