Standard disclaimers apply. No tava beans, locations to secret caches of ZPMs, or monetary renumeration were received for this story. All characters and situations herein belong not to me, but to the geekboys at Bridge Studios, who have sold their souls to MGM and Skiffy.
Betagratitudes to iamrighthere and aslowhite, for midwifery and jiggery-pokery.
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Nothing breaks the silence that follows the muffled boom.
Painted windows and abalone walls cease shivering almost before they begin. Radek's hand shoots out to grasp the quivering laptop in front of him, and then there is nothing but the intensity of their listening, small bubbles of hope fighting for cohesion against amberlit silence.
Elbows braced against the burnished metal worktable, Ronon stills, too familiar with this sudden echoing absence to struggle. Radek simply closes his eyes and lets his chin sink down to his chest, one hand still resting on his laptop as he, too, surrenders to the thickening silence.
John hunches over the worktable, his eyes locked on the computer in front of him. Carson's defiance, once limned in red, is now a tiny, splattered, glowing thing on his screen. John's lips and knuckles are white, his fist clenched and hovering in midair, as if caught and held out of time by the dead air in his earpiece. Small bubbles cluster along creaking fractures, as if to prevent the solidity of Atlantis from splintering away beneath their feet.
There is no air where Rodney stands. He is frozen in amber, mouth open, eyes wild already with the curse of knowing, knowledge that will not allow him denial, will not forgive, not even if heathen lips spilled the numberless lies shaped as prayers he'd never confess. Science is a god, his god--makes him god. Science bends before him, gives him answers, fixes, solutions to everything under and around and beneath and within the suns of two galaxies--and possibly two universes. It is his job, and his calling to save the day, every day.
In this day's silence, golden, refracted like sunlight-stained glass, his magic fingers twitch: once, twice--fail him when they conjure nothing from his science, no miracle to reverse the accumulating seconds and seconds and more seconds of dead air, their slow, golden crawl a total lack of Carson's voice.
Damn it, Carson knows the script; they all do, can play it on repeat. He knew he was--knows he is--supposed to be shouting by now, shouts they can't breathe until they hear, so where is he? Air is important: oxygen, nitrogen, brain cells. Snap! Snap! Snap!
But Rodney's magic fingers are sluggards, his calling and his godhood impotent against this relentless solidification of air into nothing nothing nothing...
With one will they seek to conjure voices--one voice--out of this ever thickening press of amber silence, to pull Carson from this noiseless suffocation. He would be--is, he is--yelling for assistance, for the teams he'd so recently locked out of the Operating Suite to get in there--now!-- and John's men--who'd surely run in to help when they'd heard the explosion--to either get out of his way or help: Step back now, let me in, and oh, there you are, good. Here--take that, pick this up--gently, now, gently--All right, let's go! Let's move!
But nobody moves as the creeping flow slows, solidifies, traps them forever beneath its airless caul. Frozen, they can run the script eternally in their heads; flecks and ash and debris of Carson shouting, taking charge, stepping up, putting forth his hands to begin the mending and set in motion the healing and the making-right-of-everything. But no matter how they will the actual sound of their friend's voice to disintegrate this breathless, bone-crushing weight of amber silence, no matter how they seek to force the noiseless air to give it up, to give Carson up--
Nothing breaks the silence that follows the muffled boom.
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Anbernen: Amber. From an Ancient Belgian term meaning "to burn."