Unreliable Things
by Bil!
T – JS, EW – Angst
Summary: Sheppard!Whumping, Sheppard/Weir friendship. He dreams of a city that whispers to him in the night and of a woman with dark hair and clear eyes who believed in him when he didn't believe in himself. Atlantis weeps in his dreams and Elizabeth smiles at him.
Season: 1.
Spoilers: One minor one for The Eye.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Which is probably fairly obvious.
A/N: Rating is for non-graphic torture and passing mention of rape. This was supposed to be a one-shot, but it grew...
Unreliable Things – A Man With A Sword
by Bil!
Part 1 of 3
The things that claw and the things that gore
Are unreliable things;
And so is a man with a sword in his hand,
And rivers, and women, and kings.
- Kings from the Panchatantra, translated by Arthur W. Ryder
John hears a city weeping in his dreams. Once, when he was an unbroken man in a bright city of alien technology, the sound came to him in the night when he was half awake so that he was never quite sure that the grief he felt was truly from another and not merely his own guilt and fear pressing down upon him.
But now he is not of the city any more and he no longer hears the sobs when he wakes in the middle of the night. They come to him only in his dreams, dreams of smiling faces and bright lights and the great blue whirlpool. And the city, weeping quietly in lonely sorrow.
He wakes, often, with damp cheeks.
This place is not a kind place. It is a place of bleak cells and angry guards and quiet, subtle tortures that are worse than the loud, violent ones. It's dark here, dark and grey and cold, and there is little light and no joy.
He remembers this place from another world, another galaxy, but there it was a part of his soul. Once he dwelt here in his mind, half dead while his body went on breathing, but someone gave him her hand and lifted him up into a brighter, better place. But that was long ago, before this place, and here there is no one who can lift him up and bring him back to what he was.
His cellmate has purple eyes, and for all she looks human he knows she isn't quite. All the prisoners here have cellmates – everyone is given a friend, someone to care for, someone to want to protect. It makes it easier for them to break you. He will not break. There's little left to him here, a few tattered shreds of the being he once was, but he still has that: He will not break. He and she watch each other's bodies being broken but neither of them will surrender.
He is Major here, his name and his entire being, for he answers to it but it tells them nothing, it means nothing to them. Her name is Markus. He remembers laughing (he hasn't laughed in a long time now) when she told him and saying, "Where I come from that's a guy's name."
"And where I come from majeer is a small biting insect," she tells him and they discuss for a while the vagaries of language.
When they first meet, when he is first thrown into her cell, she says, "I will not touch you." It takes him a while to work out that this is her planet's idiom for sex, like he would say 'I won't sleep with you'. It is one of the ways that prisoners bind themselves to each other here, for comfort at first but ultimately to their own destruction. Instead he and Markus find their comfort in keeping their distance and speaking to each other in quiet voices that are unnaturally calm amid the yells and shrieks of the prison cells.
He was captured on a mission; how long ago he has no way of knowing, for there is little difference between a week and eternity in this place. He tried to keep track of the days at first, but it was a fruitless effort. Now he just tries to exist until the next moment.
His captors are slave-traders, who swept out of the sky, snatched him up, and bore him away. He had no chance to fight, no time to warn his team. He thinks (hopes, prays) he was the only one of his team taken, though; the only one stupid enough to stroll around the edge of the village to where the slavers were waiting.
But he wasn't sold as were the others he was first herded in with. Instead of making him a slave (or the Wraith-bait that has let them be left alone so long) they decided somehow that he was more use as a subject for interrogation. Maybe it was because of his strange weapons, or perhaps it was the fact that he managed to kill half a dozen armed guards with a concealed knife and his bare hands. Whatever the reason, they've decided that he has valuable information they should pry out of him; that's why he's here in this place, locked up instead of shackled.
They're right, but he's never let them know that.
Naturally, they torture him. Sometimes he wonders if they even care about the information they're trying to extract from him; certainly they don't know what questions to ask, they don't know what information he can give them. John thinks it would be easier if they hated him, if they cared that they were doing terrible things to him.
Instead he is a specimen on which they may test their inventiveness and their cruelty. It's a job to them: they break him into a sobbing heap and then they go home to their happy families. It's hard to resist an enemy who has no interest in you. He isn't sure that most of them are even aware he has a name.
He cares about Markus more than he should in this place where emotions are nothing more than weaknesses to be used against him. They share their strength and determination and they watch each other's bodies be broken over and over again without giving in. He and she are both determined not to crumble, but John is no fool. He knows that sooner or later they will break.
Markus knows it too, but she doesn't let it touch her. The future will come of its own accord, she tells him. Now is all we can change.
So they hold on for just one more day, one more session, one more moment. Focus on the now and this time don't break. Every new time is this time.
He tells her stories in their dark, grim cell, stories of the people he knew, the places he's been. Little stories, just a joke someone told, a funny situation he found himself in, or a struggle he and his friends won. He gives no real names and he tells her nothing about the city or his home planet. He has no way of knowing who might be listening, and some of the prisoners here are not prisoners at all. He knows that Markus might be one of them.
He doesn't much care.
Other than the stories, he doesn't think too much about the life that's no longer his, for what he remembers he can be forced to tell. He remembers that they exist; the young man with eager, unclouded innocence and the alien woman with the strength to put her faith in him and the safety of her people in the hands of strangers. The older man with the odd accent and the kind, healer's hands; another man with an ego and an irascible personality who might just grow up to be a decent person.
He remembers they exist, but he's no longer sure who they are.
Markus likes to hear of them. In return she tells him about her husband and brother, shot down at her side when the slavers attacked; she doesn't talk about their deaths, only their lives. John likes them, these ghosts who watch over their cell with the shades of his half-remembered friends until it's hard to remember that the two groups never met.
He never tells Markus, though, about the woman who gave him a second chance he didn't deserve. He doesn't tell her about the city. Even to himself he scarcely admits their existence. But he dreams.
He dreams of a city that whispers to him in the dark of the night and of a woman with dark hair and clear eyes who believed in him when he didn't believe in himself. Atlantis weeps in his dreams and Elizabeth smiles at him.
Markus is strong. She wears her scars without shame and finds no embarrassment in weakness. John admires her for that and wishes he could be so brave. There is no strength left to him here, he's merely clinging to an old ideal and a song of tears and trust that weaves through his dreams. He has told so many lies he hardly knows what is the truth any more and somehow he can hide behind a fiction that he's well and whole. It is a poor fiction, but his captors believe it.
Even Markus half believes it.
Once, he asked her why she was here in this hateful place, wondering what secrets they could be trying to pull from her. "Because I am a coward," she said with simple honestly and he looked at her in silence and felt that he had never known anyone who was less of a coward.
He knows all about cowards, you see.
Markus isn't a coward. She's a hope in the darkness, holding on when all other hope is lost. She gives him hope. She believes in him.
In an unguarded moment, he tells her that she reminds him of Elizabeth.
She looks at him with those strange purple eyes that are the only indication of her inhuman origins. "Who?"
For a moment he hesitates, closing down and unwilling to reveal any more, then says, "He was my friend," back to half truths again. There is only one Elizabeth in this whole galaxy; no one here will know that the name is feminine.
He never tells Markus full truths.
He certainly never mentions the weeping city.
John wishes now that he'd sought the source of the weeping. Now that he knows it wasn't merely a dream phantom – and he thinks that maybe he could have helped the voice that grieves in the dark. It's important to help people. He's lost so many pieces of himself to the pain and the wretchedness of this place, but he still knows that. Sometimes – sometimes he wonders if Elizabeth wasn't right about him.
Markus grieves too in the dark times, for her husband and brother. John sits opposite her on the floor of their metallic cell and he leans his feet against hers and he lets her sob while the memory of his city's grief echoes in his skull. She doesn't want more from him than that quiet presence and he isn't sure he wants to give more. This slim contact is enough for her and if he held her he might find himself seeing a different face in front of him and three people's grief might overpower him. For he grieves for three: the city first, then Markus, and at the back, doleful and quiet, himself.
In Antarctica this wouldn't have mattered. In Antarctica he had frozen his heart in the great vastnesses of ice and rock and snow and let himself believe that there was nothing left to care about. That all he had left was his flying and a dead-end career. But someone decided to grant him a second chance and he found that there was more to him than cold, that there was somehow something in him that was worth saving. That he wasn't just a coward.
For he was a coward. He'd thought he wasn't once, he'd been proud of his strength and his bravery, but war had tried him and broken him and as punishment he'd gone out and defied orders and saved men who weren't cowards – and then he had found a worse thing in the eyes of his judges, steel-eyed generals with no sympathy for the coward he knew himself to be.
Once, in his bravery, he would have defied them, he would have broken with them and found himself a new life in the civilian world in defiance, in pride, in a whole-hearted courage that could flout them with impunity and not care for their sneers and disapproval. But that was in the past and he had found that he was a coward and so he gave in to them and let them send him to the ice land of Antarctica.
But a woman with intelligent eyes had looked at him and seen more than simply a gene and an attitude problem and he had found himself in a new place. A city which lulled him to sleep with its tears.
There he found friends, allies, family. He pushed himself to be the best because he knew that he wasn't but she believed that he was. He learned that the best bravery is born from fear.
Markus relies on him here as another woman did there. Relies on him to be better than he is, stronger than he is.
For them, John can do what he can't do for himself.
There is an extra way that their captors can torture a woman. They force him to watch and what he sees is blurred though tears. He hates them.
When she realises that she's pregnant, Markus looks across the cell at him and says, "Kill me."
He isn't sure how she knows he can kill with his bare hands and he isn't sure he can do it here, not to her.
"What do you think they can do to us with a baby?" she asks, her purple eyes firm and steady. "I do not think I can watch them torture a child." She rests her hands on her unnaturally curved belly and smiles at him. "I am not that strong."
Neither is he. John kneels before her and puts his hands around her starvation-thin neck, looking down into her eyes.
She smiles at him, her face lifted up towards his. "I have loved you, Major. You are my brother."
He loves her too. That's why he kills her.
They punish him when they come and find her with her broken neck. Pain and pain and pain, until he is screaming out the information they aren't asking for as if it will save him. But he has spent too long spinning lies in their torture chambers and they no longer know when he tells them the truth. Even he barely remembers the true names of those who were his friends. All he remembers is the weeping city and a woman with shielded eyes.
He whispers as his body breaks. "E-liz-a-beth."
The city weeps.
How long? An eternity, written in pain and despair. Markus joins the ghosts and shades in his cell, holding a baby in her arms. John drifts, barely connected any longer to the real world, to his body.
He should give in, give up, surrender – but two women believe in him and he doesn't quite know how to stop fighting for them any more. He doesn't know how to stop.
Light. Light instead of the grey dark. A silhouette stands outside his cell, not a guard. He doesn't – understand.
A gun is in his hands, its familiar weight bringing back the forgotten memory of how to kill. He hates them. He leaves his cell, leaves behind the almost physical hole of Markus's loss, and he hates them. He hates them so fiercely that his rescuers have to pry the gun from his fingers before he will stop shooting the dead, before he will stop hitting them over and over again for all the fear and pain and deep dark sorrow.
He hates them.
John wakes in a place that should be familiar and he doesn't understand what it is has happened.
"Easy, lad, you're safe now. It's all right, Major," says one of the voices he never expected to hear again and he almost shudders against the strange softness of an infirmary bed.
"It's not all right," he wants to say. It's not all right. Markus is dead and he is broken and he doesn't quite remember what it is he should remember.
It's not all right. He doesn't know if it ever can be.
The sound of a city weeping follows him down as he stumbles into sleep.
End Part 1.
A/N: Since I can't seem to work this information into the story, I just want to point out that John isn't a coward, he just thinks he is. In fact, he got a case of undiagnosed Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome so he was blaming himself for something he can't actually help.