Author's Note: Holy hip-hop, Batman! Has it really been fourteen years since I first started posting this fic!? Good gracious gravy, I WAS BARELY OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL! Now I'm old and ancient!
But what the heck, it's a pandemic and I have a bottle of wine, and I'm ready for some closure on this puppy. I don't know if there's anyone out there who started reading this back in the old days and, for some reason still has this on notice, but I'm tipping my glass to you.
That said, instead of 10-15 more chapters of perfectly paced, vintage SGA, the best I can offer is a long-winded summary of what I can recall of this story from the Neopets era of my brain. The notes are long gone, and despite several attempts to rewatch SGA, I just can't get back into it enough to summon back the muse I used to write the last 11 chapters with. Sorry, but hopefully this is better than nothing?
One minor thing: I did read back on the comments (YOU LIKED ME, YOU REALLY LIKED ME!) and I saw someone express disappointment at the implication that the South winning the Civil War would lead to this terrible state of things. All I can say is that wasn't my intention, though obviously it's how the story turned out. I'd just finished writing "Even in the Distance", which was a Sparky fic based on the love song of a dead Confederate soldier, so I guess the idea of John as part of the Confederacy just burned itself into my brain. It wasn't me trying to be a smarmy Northerner… even though I am a smarmy Northerner. But can you blame me? We don't have sweet tea up here. :'(
We'll start with what happened to the Alternate Atlantis long before our heroes accidentally arrived.
What AU!John said to Our!Lizzie was mostly true, if incomplete. The AU!Atlantis was nearly destroyed by the Wraith. While they did survive, they lost a lot of people and a lot of the city. They went to the Genii (still led by Cowen) out of sheer necessity. (I vaguely remember the timeline in this AU was a little different then ours… I don't think Kolya's attack on Atlantis happened in this version, so Kolya and Sheppard didn't have the blood feud that Our!Sheppard and Our!Kolya had.)
Anyway, their tentative alliance actually did some good and they got some early victories against the Wraith, leading to the inevitable discovery of the Wraith enzyme (henceforth referred to as "Wraith!Crack"). Maybe the Genii found it first and didn't recognize the downside, maybe the Atlantis team were simply too desperate to give it proper, Carson-approved trials, but by the time anyone in Atlantis realized how badly the Wraith!Crack affected the brain, many on both the Genii side and the expedition side of the alliance were already addicted to it, including Sheppard and Weir. (I feel like the Genii were taking it first, despite the downside, and consciously downplaying the side effects. Then some tragic event happened and Sheppard, Weir, and a bunch of the Atlantis team were injected with the Enzyme to save their lives, and by the time anyone on the expedition side realized what was going on, it was too late.)
So a good chunk of both the Genii and the Atlantis expedition ended up addicted to Wraith!Crack. The amped up alliance forces, plus Cowen's sheer bloodlust, actually led to many more underdog victories against the Wraith, though not without heavy losses.
Then the Daedalus arrived.
Again, the timeline in this AU is a little different from Our!Timeline, so the Daedalus didn't arrive dramatically during the siege, but it did arrive. However, despite AU!Sheppard and AU!Weir's best efforts to make a case for continuing the fight against the Wraith, the order came pretty quickly to uproot what was left of the expedition and go back to Earth. (If I recall, the war against the Ori in this AU wasn't going well.) Obviously Wraith!Cracked Sheppard and Weir flipped out at that and all hell broke loose. AU!Sheppard then tried to take the Daedalus by force, Caldwell was forced to flee with the Daedalus and whatever loyal personnel he could save.
Thus AU!Atlantis was left with a ton of angry, Wraith!Cracked personnel and a hodge-podge of non-addicted personnel who were forced to comply with AU!Sheppard and AU!Weir (or be jailed). The Athosians, unfortunately, ended up as little more than slaves working the land for food, though some remained in the city more or less as hostages to keep the others in line. However, a small resistance escaped into the dark, dead parts of the city where it was hard to track them with the city's sensors. These were made up of rogue expedition members, Athosians, and other refugees biding their time and doing what they could to survive.
With the Daedalus too damaged to make the return to Earth, Caldwell and the crew were forced to ground it while repairs were made. During this time, Caldwell reached a tentative alliance with Kolya and a team of elite Genii who claimed to disagree with Cowen's leadership because of his recklessness. Neither side particularly trusted each other, especially after their coordinated efforts were routinely sabotaged by an apparent mole in the organization who seemed to keep tipping Cowen or Atlantis off to their plans.
This is where Our!Team comes in.
So Our!Sheppard and his team accidentally end up in this alternate universe through a device similar to the Quantum Mirror SG-1 encountered (meaning if our heroes don't get home, eventually they will experience Entropic Cascade Failure.) The remnants of civilization they saw when they exited the device wasn't actually from the civilization they left, but from their AU counterparts, who were long, long gone. By sheer coincidence, Kolya had a base on this ice planet, and when Team Sheppard came out of the caves, they were immediately detected and attacked.
As we saw, Sheppard, Teyla and Elizabeth made it through the gate to Atlantis, while Rodney and Ronon were captured by the Genii. Our!Sheppard went on to escape from Atlantis, but was forced to leave Teyla and Elizabeth behind. Teyla and Elizabeth meet up with some of the aforementioned resistance living among the ruined parts of the city. (Yes, it's really Our!Teyla, and Our!Elizabeth.)
We'll start with Teyla and Elizabeth, since their story was unfortunately more of a B-plot. While Teyla and Elizabeth try to rest and recuperate among the resistance, a team headed by AU!Teyla comes looking for them. Through some coordinated efforts with non-addicts playing double agent in the city, the resistance is able to mostly foil AU!Teyla's attempts to capture the girls. Eventually, they are able to tire AU!Teyla out and trap her so that Our!Teyla can knock her out, safely lock her up with the resistance, and return to the city in the guise of her alternate self. With help from the resistance still in the expedition, she is able to pass as AU!Teyla. (Elizabeth remains safely in the care of the resistance camp.) Realizing that AU!Atlantis is about to launch a full-out attack, Teyla and the resistance try to get word out to Caldwell before sabotaging the city and AU!Sheppard's plans.
In some other part of the galaxy, Sheppard, Rodney and Ronon meet with Team Caldwell (Caldwell, Lorne, Zelenka, etc.) and Team Kolya (Kolya, Aren, and some nameless Genii). This was kind of the crux of the story for me and one of the reasons why I kinda gave up on updating for a while because everyone was on such thin ice with each other and there was SO MUCH TENSION I wanted to play out over several chapters, making the audience guess and shift their opinions from chapter to chapter as to who was really on the right side. But I'm just going to shoot it pretty straight here.
Okay, so obviously Team Sheppard has no idea who to trust. In Our!Timeline, Caldwell was a goa'uld and Sheppard doesn't want to lay all of his cards out if Caldwell is, well, evil. Then there is Kolya, who Sheppard has a massive blood feud with in Our!Timeline.
As for team Caldwell, as I said, I really wanted to play with the lenses and perceptions of him over many chapters before revealing (drumroll please) Caldwell is NOT a goa'uld. In fact, Caldwell is reasonably convinced that Sheppard and Team are who they are and mean what they say. While he really, really doesn't trust Kolya, he sees a logical advantage in maintaining a strategic relationship with him, and is just as interested in rooting out the suspected mole. Still he's not particularly interested in a head-on fight with Atlantis as the city still out-guns the Daedalus, nor does he see a large scale fight against the Wraith as a viable option for the embattled Stargate Command. Instead, he's mainly interested in fixing the Daedalus and securing safe passage home.
That leaves us with Kolya, Kolya, Kolya. Oh, and Aren. Can I just take a moment to apologize for her? I thought she was so badass when I was 20, but re-reading her now was… painful. Hopefully my other original characters in my other fics aged better than she did.
Anyway, again, I really wanted to dig in deep with all the tension of Team Sheppard having to work with Kolya instead of against him. Sheppard is predisposed to assume Kolya is playing them and is still in league with Cowen. But when Caldwell gets word through the resistance that AU!Sheppard is planning to attack, Kolya asks Sheppard to prove himself by assisting with a raid on a Genii arms stockpile in preparation for battle. Sheppard knows it is a trap of some kind, but sees no choice but to accept.
Of course, the raid goes very, very badly. Sheppard and Lorne end up separated from their group. Lorne is badly wounded and, while Sheppard tries to patch him up, both he and Lorne realize the wounds are fatal.
Problem is Lorne is the one carrying the goa'uld, and the snake tries to escape the dying Lorne and take over the healthy Sheppard. It is in fact Kolya who shows up in the nick of time to shoot the goa'uld dead before it can take Sheppard. Sheppard gets the impression the whole mission was designed to get a shot at Lorne, who Kolya secretly suspected was the mole. (Perhaps there was some intercepted or overheard message sent to Atlantis.) Sheppard realizes that the goa'uld, disguised as a sympathetic Lorne, could have been playing on AU!Weir and AU!Sheppard's desire to keep the expedition going; that he could eventually deliver the Daedalus to them, which they could use to fight the Wraith and prove to the SGC that Pegasus was worth fighting for, but all the while planning to destroy Atlantis so the Wraith couldn't come to Earth.
While Sheppard is shocked, heartbroken, and very angry over Lorne's death, he also accepts that Kolya doesn't understand what a goa'uld is, couldn't have known that Lorne himself was probably innocent, and that Kolya could have easily killed the both of them, but decided to protect Sheppard.
(This is one of the parts of the story that is fuzziest in my mind, but essentially Sheppard, Kolya, get a warning and realize AU!Atlantis is coming for them and it ends up leading to a watershed moment where this tentative alliance decides to start trusting each other and put all their cards on the table to avoid annihilation.)
Back at AU!Atlantis, while the resistance is able to sabotage and disrupt the city for a while, eventually AU!Sheppard and AU!Weir get wise and root out many of the members. Several of them fall on the proverbial sword to protect Teyla, though, and she is not discovered. When AU!Sheppard and AU!Weir resume their efforts to attack the Genii base and capture the device, Teyla is picked for AU!Sheppard's team.
Many jumpers, armed to the teeth, gate through to the Genii base, where we know Our!Team is waiting.
And apparently very, very prepared.
It turns out both sides of the Caldwell/Kolya alliance led the other to believe they were in far worse circumstances than they really were, so Atlantis was caught unprepared by some pretty bad intel.
First, Kolya's team had retrofitted EM field generators (like the one discovered in "Childhood's End") around the gate. When the jumpers came through, all he had to do was give the word and they fell out of the sky.
Caldwell and Hermiod had both kept the true state of the Daedalus under wraps, only revealing that it was completely flight worthy when it zoomed into battle overhead. With the jumpers downed, Hermiod could actually beam members of AU!Sheppard's forces directly into confinement aboard the Daedalus. Still, Hermiod can only beam so many at once, and some of AU!Sheppard's abandon their jumpers to continue the mission, including AU!Sheppard. But while AU!Sheppard is hopped up on the enzyme, a combination of effort from Team Sheppard, Ronon's blaster, and the inevitable reveal that Teyla is, well, Teyla is enough to take him down.
Teyla uses her link back to the city to feed them false information, telling them she is returning with AU!Sheppard and others from their team. Instead, she gates back to Atlantis with a strike team. Since AU!Sheppard's judgement was impaired by the wraith serum and he took everything he had into battle with him, the city is seriously underprotected, and with the help of the last remaining members of the resistance, the team is able to take back the city.
Our heroes, of course, are reunited and quickly returned to the device so they can get home before Entropic Cascade Failure sets in. They make a plea for mercy for their AU!Selves, again explaining the nasty side-effects of the Wraith Enzyme. Caldwell promises to do what he can.
For what it's worth, the SGC does grant a little grace and the addict team members are allowed to dry out. Eventually, the AU members of Team Sheppard start to resemble their true selves again, though they're removed from their duties. The SGC also largely abandons Pegasus, instead turning over command to Kolya, who turns out to be a better leader than his counterpart in Our!Timeline. (Ok, this is really just me fulfilling my own personal headcanon. While I loved Kolya as a villain, I held out hope for a long time that he would eventually become an anti-hero and tentative ally. JUST LET ME HAVE THIS ONE THING OKAY? I PROMISE I WON'T KILL ANY MORE SGA CHARACTERS.)
Aaaaand that's it! Probably not worth a fourteen year wait, I know. If you did read through this whole fic, especially if you picked it up back in the old days, I'm sending you a thousand thank yous. I hope this bizarre half-fic at least brought you a few laughs from that kooky old show we watched back in the day!
-Rey