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EMAIL: HelenW
Teyla Emmagan was running before she fully knew she was awake, not slowing as gravel and roots dug into her feet. Past Halling's low wood dwelling, past Charin's bright, airy tent of fabrics she’d spent a lifetime trading to obtain. Past where her mother and father were buried. Out of the village and into the forest, taking the High Path.
She paused only when she heard the whir of an aircraft of some sort. That made no sense! There were no such craft on Athos; and she knew of none small enough to fit through the Ring of the Ancestors…
Then there were flashes of light - three, five, eight in rapid succession. The ground trembled and explosions echoed from the hills and she knew: The Wraith had come. Athos was being culled!
And, shamefully, she'd fled, in the middle of the night, not stopping to wake her people. Without a weapon, or even her shoes.
She needed to see!
She turned and ran up Rock Hill, to the granite outcrop that gave a partial view of the valley. There were flames rising from the village - individual fires from smaller dwellings, a larger conflagration which was almost certainly from the Long House. Thirty people slept there! But she could see nothing else: not even the attacking craft, though she could hear them, too many to distinguish.
Then, between one heartbeat and the next, she was somewhere else. Wet fibers held her inside a crevice; she couldn’t see much of the space beyond, but it seemed to be dimly lit by indirect, artificial light, and for a moment she thought this must be responsible for the vibration she sensed. But, no, the source of the vibration was deeper somehow. In the walls, not the air.
She pushed against the fibers, which tightened in response, so she stilled, and finally forced reason to override reaction. This must be a Wraith ship! How was it that she was still alive?
A grotesque caricature of a man entered her field of view. He (surprisingly) looked like the stories said, with the long, white, unkempt hair of an old woman framing a sharp-boned, ancient face. His gray skin seemed almost reptilian. "You are Wraith!" Teyla spat. "Free me now! Free my people!"
"YOUR people?" the wraith replied. "You ran! The only one to do so. Very strange. Why do you think you did that? Or are you going to tell me you were just night-hiking, without illumination of any sort?"
Her nightmares about the Wraith had never included poorly-executed attempts at witty banter.
"I felt your evil," she said, "Before I knew its source."
"How interesting!" said the Wraith. "Let's just see…"
He pressed his hand against the fibers just below her breasts, then quickly pulled back. "Fascinating! There is something different about you. Something stronger. I think… yes, a shame to make a meal out of you, when we were just now discussing how boring life as guardians has been becoming, simply waiting for your kind to increase in numbers enough to feed us properly, while the years crawl past."
Again Teyla lost awareness; then she was strapped face-down to a cold metal table, and her back was being sliced open…
Her vision clouded again, and then she was standing in the smoldering remains of her village; there was no sign that any of her people still lived. The Wraith from the ship was just forty paces away. "Run, little human, run!" he said, “That is what you now are: a Runner!” And then she knew that another legend was true. She turned and fled toward the Ring of the Ancestors.
- - - - -
Teyla transitioned through all the cold, barren worlds she knew as quickly as she could; enough to shake any pursuit, she was certain. And then she was on beautiful, grassy Feryl, in the middle of a warm summer day.
The Ferylans made village just beyond some low hills. Tall, copper-haired Haia Anjuli, with whom Teyla had played among the hills as a little girl, saw her before she’d walked very far.
"Teyla Emmagan! It's always a good day when you come!" Haia greeted her. Then, as she got closer, "Teyla, what's wrong? Where are your shoes? Your feet are bleeding!"
Teyla fell into her friend's arms. "Wraith," was all she could say.
Haia blew her yulk horn to summon help, which came quickly in the form of Haia’s brothers. Together they carried Teyla to Haia's house and wrapped her in blankets. A small boy, Haia’s nephew she soon learned, brought her broth, which she drank without tasting, while Haia's Aunt Kli washed and bandaged her feet.
"Now let us bathe the rest of you," Kli said.
"No!" The wound on her back - they must not know that the Wraith had made her a Runner!
Runners were hated and feared, with good reason. But she would not stay on Feryl long enough to bring the Wraith. Tomorrow she would leave for some other place, also for just a day or two. She knew many worlds, had many friends.
Still… it might be best if she slept outside the village. As dusk neared, she said, "Haia, you know my day is offset from yours, so I'm not yet tired enough for sleep. I think I'd like to go see the caves we used to play in."
"You’re exhausted! And you can barely walk!" Haia said, but Kli said, "Take her, child. Perhaps she'll feel safer."
Did Kli know what she had been made into? She couldn't! No, Kli thought she was simply afraid to spend the night in a dwelling so similar to her own.
Her uneasy smile was not forced. "Thank you, Kli, I think you are right."
With the help of Haia, and a decent stick, she managed the walk up to the caves, then settled in to watch the sun set, her head leaning against Haia's shoulder.
That's when they came. Two small craft, one swinging toward the village, one straight toward her. She turned and plunged deeper into the cave, as far as she could go, hoping that rock and soil would mask the signal from the thing in her back. Haia followed, clinging to her; Haia was no warrior.
When they came out, hours later, the Wraith were gone. The material damage was light, but three members of one family had been culled.
"One spoke to us," said Kli. "He was looking for you. We said you'd left. We have been given a device with which to contact him if you return. You will not force us to use it, will you?"
"No," she said, and ran.
- - - - - -
For two days, Teyla moved between barren worlds, spending only a few hours on each, eating roots and sleeping in whatever shelter there was. On the third day, Wraith found her. Her Wraith, she realized.
"You have not armed yourself!" he said. "Do you not wish to fight us?"
"With all my being, I do," she said.
"Then why no weapon?"
"I am a master of the bantos rods," she said. "I hadn't thought they'd be of use against your ships."
"There are plenty of worlds where you could obtain something more powerful. A gun of some sort, at least."
"And bring you to those worlds? No."
"I should just kill
you now," he said. "Shall I do that?"
"No," said Teyla, realizing she had an option she hadn't thought of. "Give me another chance. I will not disappoint you again."
- - - - - -
When the Wraith left, she went home.
She had not been a part of the explorations of the old city that the council, over her objection, had authorized. But she'd stayed current on what had been found; which included some relic weapons, but nothing that she would be able to learn to use quickly enough.
No, her path did not lie with the technology of the ancestors.
Instead, she went to the cave where the village firestart was stored. They'd recently replenished their supply through trade, in anticipation of the upcoming rainy season, so there was more than enough.
Teyla carried a sack of it back to what had been her home, then began spreading it. When her Wraith arrived, he found her sitting in the charred remains of what had been her grandmother's best chair.
"You disappoint me again!" he said.
"No, I don't think I have," she said. "Come closer."
When he was near enough, she stood, striking flint to steel with her heel. The world exploded…
- - - - -
"No!" she heard someone scream.
And… she was on board a jumper, sitting next to Ronon, behind John and Rodney.
Jumper Seven, Ronon’s favorite because it had a few inches more leg room, though it’d never mattered to her.
Of course she was. They'd been surveying a star system to determine whether any of its planets warranted the presence of the system's space gate. If the gate was determined to be superfluous, they would contract a Traveler ship to move it to a planet left gateless by the Great Disaster several years before.
It was a mission she felt uneasy about. She no longer viewed the Ancestors as she once had, and her reverence had never been as deep as, for example, Halling’s. But surely gates were located where they were for reasons, ones that might not be immediately obvious, or that were even beyond their understanding. Moving a gate should demand more consideration than being one of several agenda items at a semi-weekly staff meeting.
But that was the way things had always been for them. They never knew how much time they had before the next emergency, so decisions were made quickly, actions were performed in haste, and then they moved on.
Teyla wondered whether the intense feeling of having just lived the better part of a week in another version of her own skin counted as an emergency by Atlantis standards. Mostly, she was profoundly grateful it had been some sort of dream.
The shout that had awoken her, though… had that also been her imagination?
“Colonel, I have something odd to relate…” she began, then stopped. Something was very wrong, though there was no frenetic activity, no alarms sounding,
Instead, Ronon was bent forward, his face in his hands, while Rodney looked stricken and John, if anything, amused.
"My God, Teyla, how could you?" Rodney asked. "Think of your future! Think of Torren! Think of us! Sheppard, say something!"
"Good work with taking that Wraith down," said John. "But I'd have expected a higher body count."
"I am… sorry…" she managed. Did they have knowledge of her dream?
"Body count!" Rodney was shouting again. "Teyla just… and you're worried…"
"Shut up, Rodney, and think," said John. "What’s going on?"
"How should I know?" asked Rodney, but he shifted his focus from her to the shuttle's instrumentation. "All systems seem normal, but - Sheppard, we're essentially drifting."
"Yeah, I know," John replied. "Why?"
"I don't…" Rodney started, turning sideways in his chair. "What's wrong with Ronon?"
Teyla closed her eyes, suddenly understanding Ronon’s reaction. "I'm sorry," she whispered.
- - - - - - -
Ronon did not dare look at any of them.
Teyla, faced with the same terrible circumstances he’d had a decade before, had chosen to sacrifice herself. Without fear or hesitation. And he hadn't, knowing that his living would cost many human lives. Yeah, he'd killed Wraith when he could; but until he'd joined up with the Lanteans, how many had that actually been?
He'd always told himself he'd done the best he could with the options he’d had, but that was a lie.
If only everything had been different…
- - - - - - -
"Scholar Dex?"
Requests which started with anything but 'Ronon' were usually a pain in the ass, and took way more time than they were worth. And hadn’t his closed office door been sign enough that he was trying to get some work done?
With a sigh, he slid a thin piece of paper into the ancient textbook (or so the theory went) he was trying to decipher, then closed the book carefully and placed it outside the beam of sunlight that crossed his desk, before looking up. "Who wants to know?"
"I'm Gelinar Honn from the Chieftain's Board of Ancestral Objects."
"Nice to meet you, Gel. What do you want with me? I do real physics, not dead ends."
"I was told you also read ancestor script, the better to understand the science of our people before the last great culling."
Ronon nodded. "Enough. I spent three years trying to make sense out of - well, if you're looking me up, maybe you know all about it. A short pedestal-alter-thing dug up south of here. I was brought in to figure out how it was powered and what it was for; total waste of time."
"I don't think you'll be so dismissive now. There's been more exploration at that site, and something amazing has been found. Here."
Honn produced a folder from his grey hide satchel and spread three pictures across Ronon's desk. It took a moment for Ronon to get a sense of their scale (as nobody had thought to insert a graduate student into the scene): It was a ring, engraved with the same symbols as the pedestal bore.
"We're calling this a ring of the ancestors," said Honn
"You're what? So… you think this is, what, the fabled doorway to other worlds?"
"Maybe, maybe not," said Honn. "How about you tell us?"
- - - - -
Ronon had always liked teaching better than research; the ring project changed that. It took a few months, and a lot of working with other physicists (who were as annoying as his colleagues had always been) and linguists (who were usually pretty interesting) and a smattering of soldiers (decent to work with, once he'd sparred with them a bit), but they'd managed to establish what they thought was a connections to another world. Now they were ready to see what was on the other side.
He'd been the one to retrieve the address - they were sure the symbol combinations were addresses of some sort - of the last planet the device had hooked up to, and the one to figure out what symbols on the pedestal almost certainly corresponded to their own ring's address, so that they could get back.
Provided wherever they went worked the same. Wasn’t buried in rock, or beneath the sea. But what was life without risk?
He’d demanded, and was granted, the right to be the first through the ring.
"You're the happiest you've ever been," Melena’d said that morning, though Ronon could tell she was struggling to keep her worry from showing. "I think this is the life that you were meant to lead."
Without a backward glance, Ronon strode up the ramp and into the glistening ripples of blue…
- - - - -
Ronon shook his head, blinking. He was on the jumper; Teyla, John, and McKay were staring at him.
"You all see that?" he asked.
They nodded. "Just like with Teyla," said John. "Kind of out-of-body-y."
McKay made a face; he always got uptight when John made up words, even though he did it plenty himself. "You stepped through a gate without sending a MALP through?" he asked.
"I don't think a MALP's very Satedan," said John.
Ronon shrugged. "You know what I know." He paused. "Sateda does have a functional gate. Always has, as far as I know. I don't know what was up with me working to get it running like that."
"Just as I lived your fate for a while, I believe you were living Dr. McKay's," said Teyla. "I think you did rather well."
"That wasn't Colorado!" said McKay. "And I wasn’t involved with the Stargate program that early!"
"But you were involved in some way, correct?" asked Teyla. That’s what he and Teyla had always thought, at least. McKay confirmed her statement with a reluctant nod.
"No, that was definitely home," Ronon said, then swallowed. It had been ages since he'd called anything but Atlantis home; but the dream, vision, hallucination, WHATEVER had been so real!
"Well, it's not like you know enough about Earth, or the SGC, to imagine yourself there," said John.
"I wasn't imagining anything!"
"Calm down, I'm not accusing you of anything," said John. "Rodney, I bet we're going in a circle. Which means you get to be me next."
"Like that would be a challenge," said McKay.
- - - - - - -
The mission was impossible; it was the sort Rodney liked best.
Fortunately he'd just been finishing his latest augmentations to his Black Hawk when the call about Lt. Brussels had come in. Time to see if the past week's work had succeeded in pushing the state of the art in chopper blades a half-decade forward. Again.
"You're wasted flying these things, Major," some pilot Rodney had never bothered to learn the name of said as Rodney climbed aboard.
"It wouldn't feel right otherwise," Rodney said. "I pay attention to every detail, of course, but you never know..."
"You're just too valuable. Please, let me fly today."
"No, it's going to take top-notching flying to do this job… To rescue Belgium… no, I think it's Lt. Denmark I'm going after…"
- - - - -
Rodney blinked as the desert air base became the jumper, as the nameless Major became John Sheppard.
That had been disconcerting, to put it mildly. And kind of unfair. "I didn't even get to fly the mission!"
"That'd have been a laugh," said John, "Except for the part where you'd get both yourself and Holland killed. And, frankly, I could live without seeing that again - or seeing how you'd imagine it."
"I'd done great things to that heli," said Rodney. "It might have worked."
"YOU," said John, "did nothing. Are doing nothing. Come on, Rodney, what's going on?"
"Give me a minute! Let me focus!" said Rodney, rubbing his temples. "Sheppard, you have no clue what it's like! It feels as real as sitting right here does."
"Colonel, is that truly your most intense memory?" Teyla asked.
"One of them," said John. "It's kind of - maybe I'd call it foundational? Screwing up that mission changed everything."
"I would have thought you'd have been mined for another," said Teyla. “Something… more recent.”
Rodney had no idea what she was talking about, but clearly John did; and whatever it was, Teyla had to shut up about it right now, because John's expression had gone from amused annoyance to something much darker, much more broken.
John being John, an instant later he'd reschooled his features to slightly snide neutrality. "Well, I bet it's my turn next," he said. "I'm guessing I'll get to be Teyla."
- - - - -
The aliens came to town early on a Thursday evening, and John's first thought was that he was glad <i>Supernatural</i> was taking the week off, because there was no way this was all going to be settled by nine.
The aliens, who called themselves Satedans, had run into little Jim-Boy and Ben Walton first. They’d been running around in the woods playing 'Stargate Command and Goa'ulds'; the kids had had red LEDs taped to their foreheads for Goa'uld eyes, and almost gotten themselves shot by their guests because of it.
John, in his role as mayor (a post he had no clue how he'd gotten), escorted the visitors - a large guy with dreads who glowered a lot; a shifty, nervous guy who said he was an engineer; and their captain, a petite yet well-muscled woman named Commander Emmagan - to Ma's Diner, and got them some of Ma's coffee and cherry pie.
"So, what brings you here?" John finally asked, once he'd gotten a good start on his second piece of ginger rhubarb.
"We were passing through the system on our ship - we're peaceful explorers, let me assure you," said Emmagan, "when our oscillation overthruster started to get… Halling, what's the term?"
"Woozie," said the engineer.
"Woozie," Emmagan repeated, managing to make the term sound dignified. "We need some parts - parts you don't currently manufacture on your planet. But we noticed that you have what looks to be a spaceship nearby, and we were considering investigating it to appropriate parts."
"Oh, you mean the Goa'uld mothership that crashed out at the old MacDonald farm," said John. "Happened three, four years ago. We stay away from it."
"Why?" asked the guy with dreads.
"What's your name?" John asked.
"Dex. Ronon Dex."
"Well, DexRononDex, we've had a bit of trouble with the Goa'uld in these parts," said John. "Everything from mind-control to slavery - that's us being the slaves, not them - to threats of out-and-out obliteration. They've mostly been dealt with, but then, there's that ship, and who knows what might come crawling out."
"Do you have any sort of central government?" asked Emmagan. "Surely you have institutions equipped to handle alien invasions."
"Yeah, but Crazy Doc Zelenka's afraid the troops would find the still he keeps in the MacDonald’s old silo, and then where'd we be? So we leave the ship alone, and it leaves us alone."
"Well, we're heading out there; I'm sure it'll be fine," said DexRononDex. "Want to come with us? We'll let you fly our shuttle."
"Cool," said John, deciding that the DexRononDex's glower must be mostly for show.
Which John had known from the moment he'd met DexRononDex - no, RONON - years ago. What the hell?
"You seem unwell," said Ma, looking over from where she was noisily bussing a booth. "Would you like more pie?"
"Ask him how many digits he knows pi to," said Rodney, who was sitting where Halling had been. "Ask him. Like, 10. Madison knows it to 20."
"Big deal, that's like knowing three phone numbers; two, with area codes," said John. Then, "Rodney, why are you here?"
"Who's Rodney?" asked Halling, who'd phased back into existence.
"Okay," said John loudly, pushing his chair back. "Stop this now. This kind of shit doesn't work on me. If you're reading my mind, you know that."
- - - - - -
And then he was back in Jumper Seven, or has he liked to call it, <i>Archie</i>. "Thank you," he said.
<i>We cannot establish the suitability of the fate of the one called John. We are sorry. We will omit him from our consideration.</i>
"Did you hear that?" Rodney asked. "Does that mean we're done? Hello?"
<i>The one called Ronon succeeded at your fate, but the price the one called Teyla paid when assuming his was too high. We must continue to experiment.</i>
- - - - -
"Run, human, run," said the Wraith.
"What the hell?" said Rodney, standing outside the ruins of his main lab on Atlantis. Radek was dying, folding over an inches-deep scorch running from his right shoulder to his left hip. Miko was on the floor, drained of life, in front of the Keurig he'd just had sent from Earth. Next to a woman whose head was at the wrong angle. Svetlana Markov? They'd let their Russian pals come out to Atlantis? What the hell?? Stupid, stupid, stupid people, thinking a - a field trip to another galaxy would be fun.
As idiotic as the David-Bowie-wannabe Wraith aiming the big gun at him.
"What, you want to play <i>Predator</i>?" Rodney croaked. "Who thinks that's a good idea?"
"Run!"
"All right!" He looked again at Radek; no, there was nothing he could do, no point in trying to sling his friend (oh God!) over his shoulder, so he ran into the oddly-empty corridor and headed toward the closest transporter. His legs felt leaden; and though he knew he should've been able to keep up a decent pace for several miles, as he got closer to the transporter breathing got harder.
John's going to hate me for this, he thought, as the world grayed and he collapsed.
Above him, he sensed the Wraith.
"You're pitiful," the Wraith said, and Rodney couldn't disagree.
"I - can't - do - this," Rodney gasped. "Kill me - or use me! Yes, use me!"
"No, I think not," said the Wraith, aiming his weapon.
- - - - - -
"Rod-ney…" John whined from the pilot seat next to him.
Rodney hated it when John whined his name; John probably thought it was cute, and it so wasn't.
He folded his arms across his stomach leaned forward. None of that was real, none of that was real…
<i>Clearly Ronon is the only one of you is suited to unending combat</i> said That Voice that everyone seemed to be able to hear, thank their lucky stars. <i>And we see no advantage of switching the fates of you, Teyla Emmagen, and you, Rodney McKay.</i>
"Right, great, so why are we still here?" That was John, of course, speaking to the air.
<i>We shall release you soon,</i> said the voice, <i>But first, John Sheppard, a gift.</i>
"Don't feel like you have to," said John, "Seriously."
Unsurprisingly, that didn't seem to matter to their captors.
- - - - - -
Since long before Teyla's birth, the Old City had sat empty, an outsized counterpoint to her people's small, mobile village. And since she'd been very young, she'd felt its pull.
Since her teen years, she'd traveled as much as she could to other worlds, seeking to learn more about the Ancestors and their cities; the cities humans built on other worlds; and, also, about the Wraith. Were cities and the Wraith truly tied? Would learning too much about the one, becoming too strong, bring the other?
Of her own people, Toran thought so; so did Halling. But Charin, whose parents had grown up with stories of the last great culling, said that the Wraith simply came when they came; no human action summoned them, and to think otherwise was to unfairly blame people for their misfortunes.
Teyla's travels and study had not provided clear answers. Nothing she learned of, or saw, was of the scale of Athos's Old City; only one world was rumored to have a city that came close, and she had not been able to learn its address, only that it possessed a structure called the Tower, in which dwelled benevolent rulers who protected their people using the technology of the Ancestors.
"Who do they protect their people from?" Halling had asked. "What they do summons the Wraith!"
Teyla had countered, “Yet they *do* survive. We know that the Wraith will one day cull again; does it not make sense for us to be ready for them?"
And so today she was leading a party to the Old City: her true-friend Kanaan; young Marta, who followed her everywhere when she was on Athos; and Halling, to keep an eye on her, Teyla supposed.
Torches lit, they entered the caves which extended beneath the City. She'd have liked to have gone deeper, but Marta, who'd never been in the caves, was fascinated by the paintings the walls bore - images of great hand-to-hand battles between humans and Wraith, of ships streaming across the sky and falling to the ground in flames. Sooner than Teyla would have liked, Halling insisted they turn around.
They came out of the cave - and Teyla knew Wraith were here, on Athos. Had they somehow summoned them? They had done nothing more, gone no deeper, than she and Kanaan had as a child!! She ran toward her village as fast as she could - there had to be something she could do!
And then she was on a ship, bound by moist fibers, a Wraith drone breathing into her face through its mask.
"Let me go!" she said - and the Wraith raised its (his?) arm slightly. She'd done that! Now, focusing her entire will, she repeated, "Let me go!"
The Wraith was motionless for a moment; then, with agonizing slowness, began to pull away the cords binding her.
This couldn't be happening! Slowly, hope grew in her… And then an unmasked (higher order?) Wraith was there, and another, and - a woman Wraith? If Wraith were truly more insect than human, could this be their queen?
"You are no normal human," the woman Wraith said. "You are - unusually repellant. And yet this weak one obeys you. Why is that?"
Teyla, of course, said nothing; but felt more hate than she ever knew she could.
"Tell me!" The woman Wraith placed a hand on Teyla's neck - the only place exposed - but jerked it back as Teyla tried to land a bite.
"Release her," the woman Wraith ordered, and Teyla made herself stay still as one of the unmasked attendants began to cut her free with long, razor-sharp nails.
His movements were careful, almost gingerly. Could this odd hesitance mean that she had not been thoroughly searched upon capture? It hadn't occurred to her that her thigh blade could still be in place… yes, it was there! Her people did not routinely bear weapons when not hunting, but she'd made a habit of carrying the blade due to her frequent excursions offworld.
Once her torso was exposed, the woman Wraith ordered her to stay still, then raised a hand…
Teyla simultaneously pushed up against the remaining cords around her legs, reached and drew out her blade, and threw her head forward, impacting the woman Wraith's forehead so hard the world grayed around her. She didn't need to see to strike, though. As if removing fresh organs from a kill, she thrust her blade in below the Wraith's ribs and up and through and down.
The woman Wraith shrieked, "Fool! You do not know what you have done. Now they will awaken… all of them…"
- - - - -
And then, once again, she was on the jumper.
"Intense," said John. "Good work."
"Is that how it happened?" she asked. "How you killed the Queen, the day we met? She was a clear threat?"
"You make me look like a chump," he said. "I just rammed a spear through her. No finesse whatsoever."
"The consequences - were not obvious."
"No more for you than for me," said John. "I - never knew you held it against me."
"I didn't," she said. "But I always wondered."
"And you?" asked John, turning to Ronon.
"Never doubted you did what you had to do."
"I did," said John, softly.
"What, you think you're some sort of special snowflake, only you could screw up, kill the wrong Wraith?" McKay asked.
"Kind of figures, doesn't it?" Ronon asked, and Teyla smiled her gratitude at him. Yes, it was time to change the mood. There'd been enough honesty.
"Hey, we're moving!" Rodney suddenly exclaimed, and Teyla allowed herself to relax into her seat.
<i>Yes, we have determined you are beyond our help. But you may return to this space as you wish, if other fates interest you in the future,</i> spoke the voice.
"Yeah, sure, thanks for the invite," said John. He turned and mouthed, "Floor it" to Rodney.
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* * * THE END * * *
