Then And Now
Rodney
The summer before he started senior high, Harry Streatfield moved to a new neighbourhood.
He remembers the way the neighbours came out to see the moving truck, murmuring at the redwood dressing table and the rich brown velour of the couch. He remembers looking around at the neighbourhood, a sleepy suburb of Toronto. He remembers the little blonde girl across the road watching interestedly from the very edge of the street, and her darker-haired brother sitting grumpily on the steps behind with a book in his lap and paying no attention to the move at all.
Harry wandered over, not sure that he had anything in mind, just disbelieving that anyone would be reading on an afternoon like this. There were bikes to ride and roads to wander. There'd been this vacant lot with a tree that Harry was just itching to climb and make a treehouse in. And they'd passed this foresty-looking area that would probably make a great place to hide out.
So why was this guy reading a book instead of being out, playing?
"Shouldn't you be watching your sister?"
The boy looked up, and sharp blue eyes catalogued him, then flicked to the little girl.
"Jeannie!" He bellowed, scowling ferociously at his sister. "Come back! Mom said you're not to go on the street!"
"I'm not on the street, stupid!"
"You're on the kerb, which is the same thing as the street. And don't call me stupid!"
Jeannie rolled her eyes and flounced back into the yard, then sat down on the lawn with her legs out in front of her. "He's so bossy," she informed Harry.
The exchange made him grin. "My sister says that to me all the time," he said. "I think it's a brother thing."
"I'd rather have you as a brother," Jeannie told him in no uncertain terms. "Meredith's such a pain."
Meredith huffed. "Shut up, Jeannie!" He glared at Harry, pink to the tips of his ears. After a moment's silence, it burst out of him like an undammed river. "My name is Rodney, okay?"
"Okay." Harry shrugged.
Rodney stared. "You're not going to--?" He broke off.
"Do you want me to?"
"No!"
Harry grinned. The guy was funny. Nerdy, but funny. And after a moment, Rodney began to smile back.
It really was the start of a beautiful friendship.
As Harry Streatfield stands outside his new house in a new neighbourhood, he grins as he remembers dragging Rodney off to explore a neighbourhood the nerd had never bothered to venture into. He remembers learning about things like physics and astronomy that he would have disdained as boring before he met Rodney.
Maybe the guy wasn't his usual kind of friend, but the two of them learned to push each others' limits.
He wonders what happened to Rodney.
High school started that fall, and things changed. Harry's friends weren't too keen on the nerd factor; Rodney's friends distrusted Harry as a 'jock'. They drifted apart, driven by interests that had no common ground - not in the eighties.
It's no longer the eighties, and Harry's fourteen year-old daughter is sitting on the front stairs with the laptop in her lap so she can IM her friends who live just down the road, her sugar pop is slicking her lips cherry-red, like the lipgloss she wants her mom to buy so she'll fit in with the other girls in the gym team. And she wants to go into microcomputer processing - nanobots, if Harry believes what she's saying.
Of course, last week, she was going to be an astronaut and go into space.
Ah, the dreams of the young.
Harry's life is average, ordinary. He goes in to the office, he comes back home to his wife and kids. On weekends, he watches the hockey and washes his car. On clear nights, he takes out his telescope and looks at the stars.
And sometimes he remembers a summer's night sprawled out on the grass, staring up at a star-scattered sky listening to Rodney telling him that humanity hadn't explored even a fraction of the galaxy - let alone the universe. "So much to learn, so little time," he grumbled.
Harry hopes Rodney got his galaxy in the end, but he doubts he'll ever know.
--
John
Marie Anderson reads about Patrick Sheppard's death in the papers, and is transported back to her freshman math class.
At the desk beside hers, John Sheppard's pen scratched industriously at his open book, his hair just brushing his collar as he worked at the problems set out on the board with no trace of embarrassment at his academic prowess.
All the girls knew about John. He was the oldest son of Patrick Sheppard, his family were wealthy beyond belief, but he was a nice guy - not too high-and-mighty to associate with you if your parents' bank balance wasn't up to scratch. Harrison Ford with black hair and eyes that were almost green, declared Katie Hennessee. Cuteness personified, giggled Amy Jervis.
John was also Marie's major crush for most of freshman year.
This afternoon, she'd finally scraped together the courage to slip him a note. Mr. Dorin was droning on, and the class' attention had long since wandered off.
He glanced down at the note, probably expecting something flirty, and his eyebrows lifted. But he opened the note and his eyes widened.
She'd drawn a cartoon-style sketch of the class fast asleep at their desks, little Z's floating in the air above them as the teacher rambled on. His eyes darted over to her and he grinned - a wide, warm smile that set something fluttering in her chest. Then he scribbled on the spare space at the bottom of the sheet of paper, folded it up and passed it back.
Marie opened it up and nearly giggled out loud at the caption he'd put in.
Borin' Dorin.
They passed notes all class, a conspiracy of boredom, and when they sauntered out of the classroom, John hesitated before asking, "You do art? That's pretty good drawing."
She flushed, embarrassed by the praise. "Just a few sketches. Nothing much."
"That 'nothing much' is more than I can do," he said.
"What can you do?"
"Nothing," he said simply.
In the months that followed, Marie found that this was a blatant lie. John was brilliant at Math, although he didn't boast it and wasn't a nerd like some of the clever guys. He just knew what to do and how to do it, although she couldn't seem to understand his explanations.
He also knew just what he wanted to do with his life, too.
Contrary to his father's wishes, which were all about a solid, staid career in one of the many businesses that the Sheppards owned, John wanted to fly.
He loved planes and fast cars, but mostly planes. He could identify the plane types of commercial airline flights from the ground, and followed the space program with an interest that was almost but never quite nerdish. His mom had promised that he could start taking private flying lessons when he turned fifteen in January and he was counting the days, quite literally, in a cross-off calendar in his school folder.
Marie fell for him, hard. She thought he knew it - thought he liked her back. Sometimes she thought she caught him watching her when they were in a group, something in his gaze, but nothing ever came of it, and Marie wasn't as bold as some girls, to just ask a guy out. Call her old-fashioned, but she wanted a guy to ask her out.
And John never did.
Ken Miller did, though, right before the Hallowe'en Dance. Walked right up to Marie, ignoring John, and asked if she'd go to the Dance with him.
She looked from him to John. But John had his eyes averted, and his expression was...weird.
"I... Oh, is it already that time? I... Um..." Ken's eyes were blue and very long-lashed, and Marie's heart gave a little skip. "Okay."
The word was hardly out of her mouth when she wished she could take it back. Ken sauntered off, and John looked up.
"I didn't know you liked Miller."
Marie shrugged as though it was commonplace for guys to ask her out. "He's not bad," she said after a moment. "A nice guy."
John made a noise of agreement, but it was like a curtain had dropped between them, and the comfortable conversation they'd enjoyed before was gone.
A few weeks later, his mom died of breast cancer, and his family moved town.
Some twenty-seven years later, Marie spreads the wrinkles out of the newspaper, remembering a boy who wanted to fly, and wonders if John Sheppard ever found his wings.
--
Teyla
When his son brings the news that strangers are come through the Ring, Walin Sheeda puts away his tools for the day, thinking they have come to trade.
His life is simple, ordinary - a life that was crafted for him through the ages by generations of Tamramore. Visitors are unusual, but not extraordinary - not usually.
Today, there are six strangers - two men in uniforms, one bearing a weapon, one holding a small device in his hand, one man with a long coat and a rough-hewn look to him, and a woman whose face is familiar, but whose clothing has changed much in the years since he last saw her.
Walin stares, then smiles, and steps forward. "Teyla Emmagan of Athos."
Recognition flares in her gaze and she grants him the meeting of minds. "Walin of Tamramore. It has been many years."
Once the elders' trading was done on Sheven, it was not unknown for the adults to gather together in the watering houses, to drink roisterously to their success in the markets. The adolescents who accompanied them, the better to learn the give and take of bargaining and bartering, usually gathered elsewhere with less drink and more talk.
Walin slipped into the meeting space with his friend Marsi, and spaces were swiftly made for them in the benches. He nodded at the faces he recognised - Kirran and Trina of the Sodarth, Mali, Mardi, and Gavi of Banadi, and Halling of Athos.
There were three that he didn't know, though - two girls whose braided and beaded black hair turned their skin to fine porcelain clay, and a new girl with Halling of Athos, small and brown and with a steady, intense look about her.
"Walin Sheeda of the Tamramor."
"Vridon and Jhalon Nivara of Nisan," said the porcelain girls in harmonic unison.
"Teyla Emmagan, daughter of Tagan, of Athos," said the Athosian.
"The Osmantha are gone," Trina informed him as a cup of water was poured out from a waterskin. "Teyla was bringing us the news."
Walin stared at the girl, so small and self-possessed. "You were there? You survived?"
"I survived," she said. "We were trading hides for cloth when the Wraith came." She held herself still and proud, choosing to stand alone rather than draw closer to the lanky Halling for protection. "They...hungered. The Osmantha ran from them, but the Wraith had not been among them in many generations and they were unprepared." Her voice was soft and bitter.
"What could they have done to prepare?"
"Nothing," Halling said, interrupting Teyla with a warning glance.
Vridon of Nisan tilted her porcelain head at the Athosians so her braids swung loose from her shoulders. "You disagree, Teyla?"
The girl seemed to struggle with something. "Our peoples chose not to defy the Wraith long ago, hoping to pass beneath their notice. Our lives are simple and without the mastery of the Ancestors - our elders' elders made that decision. And yet we do not pass beneath their notice. We do not escape their cullings."
"But this is the way it's always been."
"Must it be the way it will always be?" Teyla challenged, her dark eyes shining. "There are legends of people who fought back--"
"Legends, Teyla," said Halling, his voice weary as though this argument was familiar and old. "Only legends."
"Legends," she argued, "not myths."
"We know what happens to those who try to master the Ancestor technologies," said Mardi, his voice cracking with fear and frustration. "They are culled and their settlements turned to dust."
"The Wraith do not know all. They can be deceived. And the Osmantha did not try to master the Ancestor technologies. Yet they died all the same." Her lips closed about the words, and her jaw clenched. Her eyes veiled, as though to hide the horror of what she saw in that culling. "Perhaps, once, we might have escaped them for lack of challenge - but now we are merely herded to their hunger."
She looked at Walin, into his eyes. For a moment, he thought she might be seer, to view his soul and penetrate its darkest depths; then she smiled, briefly. "I apologise, Walin of Tamramor. As Halling is fond of reminding me, these are not places for such discussion."
He shrugged, feeling both the tug of inspiration and the drawing back from such passion. Such fiery belief would consume the soul if not carefully banked, and while such flames burned bright, they rarely burned long. "If not here, then where? I think you are right, Teyla of Athos," he said. "We settle for survival, for existence, under the shadow of the Wraith. But I do not know how we could fight back against them. The task is too great for such as us."
Teyla's eyes met his, and there was gratefulness in her gaze. "If not us, then who?"
Now, standing at the edge of the field of the Ring, Walin looks at Teyla and her companions, greets them, and invites them to return to the village and be guested there. These people - the Lanteans - have not come to trade but to explore, although Teyla says her people would be glad to resume trade with the Tamramore.
On the walk back, they speak of commonplaces and wonders - at least, Walin speaks of commonplaces and Teyla speaks of wonders.
Content though he is with his life, Walin envies her her fire.
- fin -