Season/Episode: "Before I Sleep"

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Disclaimer: Stargate:Atlantis does not belong to me and I make no material profit from this story.

Spoilers: Rising 1 & 2, Before I Sleep

Summary: The alternate universe Elizabeth Weir had to wake up twice in 10,000 years to rotate the ZPM's on Atlantis.

The first time she wakes, she's a little disoriented but calm. She made a decision, and there isn't any way to undo it. She knows that this will give her – give the entire Atlantis Expedition team – the chance to live past their first few minutes in Atlantis. Even if it isn't her, personally, who will live this new, alternate life, it will still be her, still Elizabeth, and this first time she wakes, that's enough.

She switches the ZPM's and thinks about going back to the tiny closet-like chamber that will send her to sleep for another 33 centuries. She can't wrap her head around the concept that she's been sleeping that long, and after a moment stops trying. It's hard for her to let something go like that, but really, what good will it do her to dwell on it? So she makes herself push it out of her mind. Janus had told her that she could take a few hours to look around the city, stretch her legs, when she awoke, and that's what she's going to do.

Atlantis is dark: she doesn't have the gene, so it doesn't light up for her, and that's just as well because it would sap power from the ZPM. But there's just enough light, from tiny, dim spots on the walls that glow softly like fireflies, to see her way through the corridors. She makes her way to a window and looks out into the ocean. It's a little brighter here, sunlight filtering down through the clear water to show her one of the starfish arms of the city stretched out before her. She can see dim shapes flit gracefully between the towers, chasing each other with desultory flips of a strangely shaped fin or tail. As she watches them something luminous with long, trailing tendrils floating behind it wafts past the window and pauses in front of her. It's not quite like a jellyfish, and after a moment it startles her by shaping her own wide-eyed, face in the flexible oblong of it's body. She steps back from the window and the creature darts away. The uncanny mimicry of the thing unnerves her, and she leaves the window.

She wanders around a little longer, not wanting to go back to her extended sleep with the image of her face on the jellyfish, with longer hair and lines on her face that weren't there before.

She knows she dreamt during that sleep, not the vivid dreams of REM sleep, but vague impressions and memories: Zelenka, muttering urgently to himself as he examines the little shuttle in which they escaped the drowning city, the words tumbling out of his mouth so fast she can't even make out the little she knows of his language; Sheppard, eyes wide and dark and desperate, projecting the calm confidence she knows is completely fake, but that told her when they first met that he would be an asset to their mission despite the black mark on his record.

And she dreamed of Rodney, watching the cold water rise around him and snuff out the brightness of his eyes. She didn't actually see it, but it's the most vivid of her dreams. Seeing those eyes dim and close in the swirling water makes her shudder. She knows that he considered her a friend – that he trusted her, and that trust was seldom given – and despite his faults, being a friend of Rodney's was a privilege. He'd willingly, knowingly, sacrificed his own life to give others a chance, and it hurt to know that she was the only one who knew it.

And she thinks of Simon, and regrets leaving him behind more than anything else. He wouldn't have come with her – he's just not that kind of person, not the sort to gamble everything on one roll of the dice for an uncertain payoff. Once upon a time she would have said the same about herself, but somehow learning about the Stargate, the existence of aliens and humans on thousands of other worlds, seeing the incredible Ancient base in Antarctica, fired something deep in her soul that she'd never known existed. The moment it looked like the Atlantis Expedition would really happen, she'd known – without doubt, without fear – that she had to go. Even now, she knows she'd make the same choice again if given the opportunity. Now she is able to give herself that chance again.

But she still wishes that she could at least have told Simon goodbye in person – tried to explain to him what she couldn't even explain to herself. She misses his gentle smile, his easy acceptance of the job that took her to the far corners of the globe, often for weeks at a time, without jealousy or possessiveness.

And maybe that was why she'd been able to leave him, why he'd never proposed to her, why their relationship, never progressed beyond friendship and convenience. That she loved him, loves him still, she knows; but she was never in love with him. The vague anxiety she'd periodically felt over the years, as their relationship remained static, had always been eclipsed by the deep-felt certainty that anything more would make them both unhappy.

But thinking of Simon calms and comforts her, as it always has. So it is with Simon's smiling, understanding face in her mind's eye that she climbs back into the little cabinet and goes to sleep for another three thousand years.

TBC