Disclaimer: I own nothing, no monetary gain, etc. Title is filched from Arthur Miller's work of the same name.

Setting/Season/Spoilers: Season Three, The Real World.

Notes: Feedback, as ever, is loved and appreciated.


Elizabeth, whispered a voice familiar and strange. It echoed and reverberated in her mind, and like everything else, was dissonant and wrong.

Elizabeth. It was nearly unintelligible, but when she began to sort it out from the echoes, low toned and husky, decidedly feminine. The E was long and unfamiliar on the tongue, the lizabeth flowing as softly and fluidly as a stream. Different from the lazy 'Lizabeth's and hurried 'Lizbeth's she'd grown used to (or, if one wanted technicality, the stiff and distant 'Dr. Weir's of this reality), it is a contrast, but no less familiar – simply a new familiar, an odd familiar.

Oh, she'd heard them in the daytime, the you have to get through this, the fight it, the Elizabeth, Lizabeth, Lizbeth, the science that spoke more quietly in the background in conglomerations of distinct and rumbling voices she tells herself she does not know, thrusting them away from her with her own pleas to leave me alone, to go away. And in the daytime, they did.

Alone in the dark, she'd started to let the frightening familiarities wash over her. A low mumble of voices in the background, a Scottish brogue, a seemingly frantic patter of words, a lazy and worried drawl. She allowed herself to identify them by name at night, when she convinced herself they weren't dreams, a drawn out manifestation of her mind that would only prove painful in the end; when she nearly talked herself out of taking her pills, getting out of bed and flushing them all quickly.

Teyla. Carson. Rodney. John. These were not schizophrenic delusions. These were people, colleagues, friends she could describe to a last detail, whom she could remember with unfailing accuracy, who, though she had maintained a fair distance from all of them, had pushed through her barriers with a need, like hers, for a certain camaraderie. These were people so different and yet so close, with whom she could slip from her outward stalwart mask of the fearless leader and become an Elizabeth; with whom she could sip an Athosian tea or play chess or lend books or laugh with in hallways leading toward the inevitably more serious; friends for and with whom she'd maintained several relentless vigils until duty called her away with a brush of a supportive hand, understanding eyes and a nod, and a resuming of a tense but companionable silence.

But in the day, she listened to reason; and reason dictated the opposite.

She stroked a sleeping Sedge's fur and let bolder and soothing reassurances and, more quietly, the odd hushed scientific word wash over her.

You must pull through this

Elizabeth

(Attacking the neurons)

(No no no that won't do it)

Carson is doing all he can

You have shown your strength of will many times before

(Lizabeth)

Do not let them take that away from you

(Designed to attack wraith cells, that's logic Carson)

(Aye)

For without it, all will be lost

(Lizbeth)

(Lizabeth)

Elizabeth

They faded as the first rays of light pushed relentlessly past her curtains and into her open eyes. She sat up, emboldened, unsure of what she was meant to do.

But as always, with her no-nonsense suits and an understated necklace adorning her throat, these too faded, disappearing with the last drink of water and two pills that slid down her throat.