Hanshin
By Vega
Standard disclaimers apply.
Sometimes, Doctor Elizabeth Weir takes it out of her desk and just holds it.
She turns it over slowly in the light of her table top lamp, watching the fluorescent reflection glide up the blue, blue handle, twinkle along the rounded edges of the stylized star. She'll run her fingers over the gold embossed emblem in the centre.
The symbol of a home long gone. Another marvellous city long dead.
Destroyed by those who sought to wipe out the last of the Ancients who fled to Atlantis. For a while they'd had peace. A millennium of it. But no peace lasts...
That'll make her think, because it always makes her think. She'll think about what it would be like to use it again, just one more time.
That leads to memories. Memories of a time when she did use it, frequently. Of her first real friendship, of the shock of meeting a verbose cat, of the rush of sensation that came with finally belonging somewhere. All her life, she had longed to belong. Her father was gone. Her mother was always working at the hospital. Providing for her, yes, in money. But never in time.
She never had anywhere to belong before this came into her life.
She used to study. She used to do nothing but study. The kids teased her and she hid behind books, because it was easier than listening to what they said. Everyone who ever wanted to speak to her, she shut out. She hid. And they went away.
All but one.
That one didn't take one look at the cover of the maths book and run to play soccer.
That one plucked the book out of her hand and gave her something else. That friend gave Elizabeth her hand, her heart, her trust. Her honesty.
And this.
Then Elizabeth's thoughts will turn to the past. Back to a time before she was called Elizabeth. She'll think of the battles fought, and mostly won. They'll turn to her first real boyfriend, a fellow student who could see the future. They'll linger on the gasping rush of her first transformation. The sudden sense of rightness when all the memories came rushing back along with the blue, blue, blue calmness of her soul.
She fought for the ranking officer's uniforms on Atlantis to be blue. She missed wearing blue. But the SGC wanted them red. Science got to wear blue. Medical in yellow.
Elizabeth remembers wanting to be a pediatrician when she was in high school.
But then things happened, so many things that Elizabeth could never talk about with anyone on Atlantis, because who would believe her? Those things made her want to be a diplomat instead. To solve problems before they became battles.
Because she had lived (and died) in enough battles.
Oh, what a surprise it had been, to be back in the Antarctic. "We're sending you somewhere cold," General Hammond had said, and Elizabeth didn't deign to tell him that no where could be as cold as the far side of the negamoon.
When she got to the Ancients base, the first thing Elizabeth did was close her eyes and reach out with the thing that made her what she was. Gone, gone. The blackness was dead, and this place was empty.
Though it made the corner of her lip curl upwards when McKay looked at the scorch mark on the ground where Kunzite had perished and then disintegrated and scuffed it with his toe and wondered what the hell the greasiness was.
Elizabeth'd had to put her hand over her mouth to stifle the giggle/scream that had threatened.
"It may come as a shock to you," someone had told her when she was being debriefed to take over for Hammond, "but there are aliens out there."
Elizabeth had smiled, and nodded, because she couldn't exactly say, "I know, I've fought a bunch of them. Oh, I'm one too, by the way. Or was, last reincarnation."
She had known back in junior high school, when she had first learned to make fog with a thought. All this time, she had thought that what she could do was magic. What all of them could do.
She didn't have the heart to tell the others.
Let them think it was still magic. Let them call it the power of the crystal, of their pure hearts. Elizabeth knew now that it was the ATA gene. And probably something, she theorized, in their blood that gave them this control over the elements. Nanites, possibly.
How many times had she been tempted to tell McKay?
He didn't have to keep searching Atlantis for Ancients. There was one among them. True, she was reborn, but that was the 'magic' of the silver crystal, wasn't it? The princesses, the rulers of the Time Long Ago, the Ancients on the Moon, were destined to be reborn, and reborn, and reborn again, warriors sent to protect the humans of Earth from evils far worse than the Wraith.
Evils that they had lost to in her first life. Evils that they had destroyed in her second. Evils that slumbered and waited until her third and her fourth, and all the ones that she vaguely knew about, which took place in a time when all of the Earth knew the technology of the Ancients and her best friend was the Queen of Crystal Tokyo.
The Princess in the Tower.
A world yet to find. To make.
That she was making, right here and now.
And when Elizabeth Weir was finished thinking about short skirts and knee boots and princesses and magic and evil monsters and powerful crystals, she would put it away in her desk drawer and go back to her game of solitaire on her laptop.
She's always tempted.
Tempted to send a message to her friends back in Tokyo – and who needs the Stargate or the Daedalus to do it when you're Elizabeth Weir? – and tell them of Atlantis. Even bring them here, maybe. See what they could turn on. Add them to the teams.
The Silver Milleneum could be reborn in this city. City on water, her place this time. A city so like the one on the moon, but in her element now.
But no, they deserved a rest. They had fought enough in this life, and who knew what was waiting in the next?
She was also tempted to sit Carson Beckett and Rodney McKay and John Sheppard down and tell them all about magical super heroines and transformation wands.
Instead, she glances in the mirror on her desk and checks to see if her roots need a touch up, just to make sure no blue appears (an unfortunate side effect of her heritage), and chews on her thumbnail for a moment, and sighs.
And then she'll offer up a small little prayer to her starseed that no situation becomes horrible enough on Atlantis that she's forced to use the thing in her drawer. That she's never so desperate that she becomes a weapon again, instead of a talker.
She'd love to feel the rush of power again, the command of ice and water.
The sense of rightness.
But she couldn't stand to think of McKay's whining when she'll refuse to let him dissect it.
"Stargate: Atlantis" and all related concepts and characters are copyright MGM. "SailorMoon" and all related concepts and characters are copyright Naoko Takeuchi, Kodansha, and DiC.
"Hanshin" translates roughly as "Transformation". A "himitsu" is a secret.