This is a sequel to a story written by Madigirl entitled The City Within, available on It is necessary to read that story first to fully understand an element of this one, and beyond that, it's a beautiful little fic. (Go on, read it. I'll wait.) I'm grateful that she allowed me to continue that story here, and that she and historygirl graciously betaed for me in the manner to which I've become accustomed.
The city was quiet now. The night shift was well under way, and things were getting back to normal after quite a few tense hours.
Elizabeth was aware of pain in her muscles as she descended the stairs, crossed the control room, and headed for her office, feeling stiff and uncoordinated from a combination of exhaustion and too many hours spent waiting – for the return of Sheppard's team when they were overdue; for the results of Carson's examination of the team when they had finally "come in hot" through the gate, limping and weary; for the answers to the usual who-what-why questions resulting from the attack.
But no casual observer would have guessed from her carriage or expression that Elizabeth's neck felt permanently cricked, that the small of her back cried out for repose (and a massage by strong, firm hands), that her calves complained like Rodney in a lemon orchard with each and every step. Everyone knew she was human, and she'd never tried to portray herself otherwise. Nevertheless, being the leader brought certain unyielding responsibilities, and never showing the full depth of her anger, her fear, or her exhaustion was definitely among them.
With a smiling nod at the overnight gate tech who manned his post looking absurdly alert, Elizabeth entered her office and sank into her chair, grateful for the act of sitting if not for the chair itself, which while not uncomfortable, was a far cry from the easy chair her body craved.
No, what her body was craving was a bed, damn it. A bed with a thick mattress and plenty of room to stretch her limbs in every direction. A bed in a room where there was someone waiting and willing to give her that massage her lower back was whining for, that her neck and shoulders would sell her soul for. She wondered idly what sort of reaction she'd get if she approached someone, anyone really, and asked for a back rub. The thought elicited a soft snort of suppressed amusement and more than a hint of a blush.
Her hands had already started to cover for her mental indiscretion, busying themselves with her laptop, checking email. The slight smile she'd been wearing slid away like rain off clean glass. Had she so internalized the responsibilities of her position that she had to mask her private thoughts even from herself? Was the mantle of leadership so heavy that it should crush her personal needs, so necessarily encroaching that it should be allowed to strangle those parts of her that were merely Elizabeth to better fulfill the obligations of Dr. Weir?
She closed her eyes and thought, This is the exhaustion talking, the stress and the fear of the past few hours. She knew it was true, but she also knew that over the last three years, she'd gotten so proficient at maintaining her public leadership façade that she'd taken to keeping it up even in private. Probably an occupational hazard of living in an alien place where literally anything could happen at any time of day or night, and frequently did. It was hard to shrug off the Dr. Weir persona at the end of the day – especially when the "day" might last two or three days – and even harder to slip back into it on short notice when disaster struck in the middle of the night. The penalty for showing up to an emergency with her psychic buttons mismatched or her mental shoes untied could be lost lives, perhaps even the destruction of the city.
The city. Opening her eyes, Elizabeth didn't look around but turned her gaze inward, to her memory of how the city looked from the jumpers, all it lit up at night; a graceful, stunning gem in a setting of swirling ocean that should have dwarfed it but somehow couldn't. She'd been entrusted by human authority with the welfare of the expedition, but had acquired by human circumstance the responsibility for the welfare of their discovery, their refuge, perhaps even their birthright. Certainly, their home.
It was a trust she held sacred and took far more to heart emotionally than she could ever allow herself to show publicly. It was still important, even in this supposedly enlightened age, for a woman in a position of power to not appear ruled by emotion. Yet she was, in a way – she felt a connection to the builders of this incredible place, a thread that bound her to them down through the millennia; had felt it, quite honestly, long before they'd encountered her time-traveler self. This place, this city… it was more than just somewhere to live and work, more than a scientific and archeological find. Atlantis was, on some level, an entity, one which drew its life-force not from the ZPMs or naquadah generators, but from the people who made it their home.
Yes, Elizabeth's connection to this place had gradually severed her emotional bond to Earth. No longer did she think of her birth planet as home, and she doubted that she'd ever feel she belonged there again. Atlantis had seduced her, enveloped her, and replaced all she'd once felt attached to. And yet, this place was not hers, really, was it? She was in charge of the City of the Ancestors, but they were not truly her ancestors. She was in the bizarre position of running Atlantis without being able to command it. The people who lived here, worked here, served here – all were bound to do as she decreed. Yet the city itself responded only to the chosen few, and the few more on whom the gene therapy had succeeded.
She was not part of either group. If something wasn't tech they'd brought with them or activated by the wave of a hand, she needed a liaison to use it. At first she'd been very philosophical about it, thinking of it as a built-in preventative against self-importance, and she still projected that attitude to her staff. But lately, she'd begun to chafe at the restriction, to regard it almost as a kind of rejection. A personal rejection of her by the city she loved and did her very best to protect.
And how silly was that?
A yawn overtook her unexpectedly, and she covered her face with both hands, wiping them downward as it ran its course. Elizabeth leaned back in her comfortable-but-not-comfy chair, letting her head loll in an arc as she stretched her aching neck. The second time she rolled it to the right, she noticed the softly glowing orb. She watched for a few minutes as it flickered gently, harmlessly.
The harmlessness had been proven nominally, if not definitively, shortly before they became aware that Sheppard's team was in trouble. Right after seeing them through the gate, Elizabeth had found the object – which until then had been as dormant as any Earth-made paperweight – glowing, projecting images within itself.
Immediately, she'd radioed Zelenka, who brought a team to her office and whisked the orb to a lab. A lot of testing was compressed into a short time frame, because who knew how this thing had become activated or what it might do to the city, or the people who lived in it?
In the end, the science department had pronounced the orb to be about as lethal as a snow globe, and as useful, and it was returned to Elizabeth's desk. Radek had explained that it seemed to be a kind of Ancient video record of the city's history, but once Elizabeth had spent some time gazing into it, she came to believe that it was intended more as a montage of those who had peopled Atlantis down through the ages – a way of looking back to see who had lived and loved and meditated and studied and fought for it, who had made the city what it had once been. She liked being able to step into the past and see families at dinner, children in school, people at work in various jobs; back in the day, there had been more than just scientists and military folk in the city's population.
During the long hours she and the rest of them had spent waiting to hear word of Sheppard's team, she'd distracted herself by looking into the orb. She'd only been aiming for diversion, but the orb had proven to be informative as well. It had already shown her how the Ancients had used some of the areas the expedition was using for other purposes (what they now used as the gym had once been a place where children were instructed in meditation), as well as areas that they had yet to explore or even find. It gave her a sense of what Atlantis had really meant to the Ancients who'd lived there, and a blueprint for what it might be again someday.
There had been so much to the lives of the Ancients that could never have been guessed from their technology and the many failed experiments they'd found in the city and throughout Pegasus; so much that the contact Earth people had had with the Ascendants did not even hint at. From the globe, Elizabeth had learned that the Ancients had educated their young people in classrooms not too dissimilar from the ones back home. She'd learned that they had sporting events, although they had apparently not been segregated by gender or age group. She'd seen evidence that the Ancients lived as individual families, but seemed to band several families together for the daily care and raising of their children; she'd noticed children who lived with one pair of adults being taken on outings or being fed by other adults entirely.
The orb had given her a new perspective on the builders of this great city, one that only she seemed to appreciate. Radek had smiled somewhat indulgently at her excitement, stating that while it was certainly interesting, the globe's lack of repeatability or a search function rendered it more of a novelty than a viable tool for research. And she just knew that when Rodney was rested up from this latest harrowing mission, his interest in anything the globe could show him would be limited to trying to locate the labs and artifacts he saw being used by those long-ago residents. John, she was sure, would consider the whole thing "cool," but would be otherwise unimpressed, unless he was treated to a scene that took place in an unexplored part of the city that he thought they could make good use of.
Even Chuck had merely nodded and smiled when she'd shown him what the orb could do, his expression conveying that he was glad she'd found something to keep her mind occupied as they all worried about the fate of their missing team. She tried hard not to let her frustration with him creep into her voice.
She alone saw the orb not as a pleasant but useless decorative artifact or an alternative to Mindsweeper, but as a gift from the Ancients to those who would come after, a visual reminder of the vibrant legacy that was theirs to inherit, should they someday manage to balance the scientific and military aspects with the act of simply inhabiting Atlantis. This time, the irony of the situation – of being the only person to truly get the significance of what the orb had to offer while being unable to activate it herself – didn't make her angry, but only made her sigh, caught in the sadness of the unappreciated and under-rested.
"Hey, shouldn't you be in bed?"
She started at the voice, returning the slight smirk John was sending her way as he dropped himself into a chair on the other side of her desk. "Just catching up on some email before turning in."
"Email, huh?" John's eyebrows quirked as he looked pointedly at the orb in her hands. "Guess I'm due for a hardware upgrade." He frowned slightly, which emphasized the black eye he was sporting. "Isn't that… Didn't that used to... I always thought it was just a paperweight or something."
She told him how she'd found it mysteriously activated, that it had been tested by the science department and found to present no threat, and that it seemed to be full of scenes from the lives of the Ancients throughout the history of the city. Elizabeth held it out to him across the desk, and he took it, watching the images flickering within.
"Cool!" he said, looking up and asking, "What?" as she snickered. But Elizabeth only shook her head, unwilling to share.
John started to speak when the globe in his hand brightened for an instant before going dark, much like a light bulb suddenly burning out. He looked shocked, clearly worried that he'd done something to break it, and Elizabeth felt her heart clench at the loss of something only she had really cared about in the first place.
And then, before either of them could move or say anything, the orb glowed anew and resumed its gentle flickering. John grinned and handed it back to her. "Guess even the Ancients had glitches, huh?"
"Guess so," she admitted, fighting the urge to hug the orb to her chest protectively. "Now, I seem to remember Carson ordering you and your team to get some rest."
"Yeah, well," he said, as if that were a sentence, while he defied the laws of physics by somehow rising from the chair without using his arms or ever losing the slouch. "I think you might wanna take that advice yourself, unless you want me putting a bug in the doc's ear on my way back to my quarters."
"I'm just shutting down my computer now," she assured him, tapping the necessary keys. As the computer entered the shutdown routine, she flashed him a genuine smile. "Good night, John."
"Night." And with a little mock salute, he left her office.
Elizabeth leaned back in her chair, listening to the computer as it shut itself down, and gazed into the globe. Never had she seen the same scene twice, but she assumed that the number of images was finite. It had to be, didn't it? Of course, there was no telling just how much capacity the orb had, nor how many scenes were stored in it. She wondered if every minute of every day had been recorded, or if some sort of rotation had been employed, or if…
She caught her breath suddenly. She was almost certain that the globe had just shown Radek working on one of the jumpers, his hair wild and his nose and cheek streaked with something black. At least, she thought it was Radek. It had been so brief… but she could swear the figure had been wearing one of the light blue uniform shirts associated with the science department.
Unable to resist the impulse to confirm her sighting despite the knowledge that the scene was not likely to be repeated, Elizabeth continued staring into the globe, watching glimpse after glimpse of Ancient daily life, until a yawn reminded her that she was supposed to be going to bed. She was prepared to put the globe back on the desk when she found herself looking at one of the gate teams – led by a Marine whose name she couldn't quite remember – gearing up for a mission.
More scenes from the distant past… a couple playing a game in their quarters, levitating a ball in the air… Ancient scientists apparently testing the newly designed cloak on a jumper… A woman standing at the rail of a balcony, looking out at the ocean…
Blinking, she realized this last was an image of her. The recording device, wherever it was, had captured her – from behind and slightly to the right – in a moment of quiet reflection. A moment of relaxation, too, it seemed, since Elizabeth's body was largely free of tension. She watched as her image watched the ocean, turning her head slightly before turning around completely. She was joined by Major Lorne, who apparently was reporting something that wasn't dire or worrisome, because she was now leaning with her back against the rail, each arm resting atop it. She was saying something that caused them both to laugh, then Lorne nodded and turned to leave. And the image was suddenly replaced with a vision of Ancient workers building on one of the many of Atlantis' piers.
She wasn't sure how long she sat staring without seeing as the orb moved on and on. It wasn't until she heard herself sniffing wetly that she realized her eyes were tearing and felt the pleasant, aching fullness in her chest. In that moment, she felt silly and a little ashamed of her earlier angst. It didn't matter that she lacked the gene. So what if she couldn't work some of the technology? She had her place; she had a role, a role given her not by the SGC or the IOA, but by the city itself. A role only she was truly qualified to fill. And that, it seemed, was enough.
It was more than enough.
She had an impulse to bring the orb to her lips, but a mental vision of the action showing up on the orb someday brought a quick death to that impulse. Hugging the orb was out, as well, and surely it was the extreme sleep-deprivation that was dredging up these ridiculous emotional urges? She settled for squeezing the orb gently, which was a gesture that could only be felt and not seen, before placing it carefully back on its spot on her desk and leaving to seek the relief of sleep.
When she turned around on the stairs to come back and turn out the lights, however, she thought that it would have been nice to be able to just think "off."