Setting her alarm was a dumb idea. Kieran ends up spending the whole night tossing and turning, feeling too hot and too cold and too twitchy the entire time. Her consolation prize for being way too anxious to sleep is to watch the spectacular sunrise glittering off Lantea's ocean. Pretty, she decides, but ultimately not a great substitute for eight hours of restful sleep.
She's got a couple hours before John has to gate out and makes a few serious attempts to at least pretend to doze off. It pays off. She's slipping back under—
Just in time for just about the rudest awakening she's ever had, second only to her grandparents yanking her covers off for a morning workout. The alarm splits her head in half and sends Kieran diving for her nightstand. She misses spectacularly.
A rug, she thinks. Picking herself up from a crumpled heap on a metal floor and—ow. I need a rug. And a chiropractor.
She figures there's got to be a chiropractor somewhere in the city. Someone here must've picked it up for fun. You don't just willingly choose to leave Earth behind to work in another galaxy for fun. People like that tend to pick up weird hobbies.
Like chiropractic care. Or something.
Finally, finally Kieran shuts off the damn alarm clock, trips over the blanket she dragged down with her, and manages to shove her tired body into something resembling a passable outfit. Eh—everyone else is in a uniform, which makes her the most fashionable person by default.
She's having a positively fantastic start to her morning. She hopes it's not an omen for things to come.
But if John's luck is anything like hers—
She can't afford to think like that. Devoting energy to that train wreck of thought isn't going to help anyone. Least of all John.
John and his team don't have to leave until a little later in the morning, so hopefully she can marinate in anxiety with company instead alone. Thankfully, she finds them relatively quickly. Rodney, Teyla, and Ronon were trying to prod John with crumbs of conversation, but he looks about as great as Kieran feels—which, on the scale of "abysmal" to "peachy" looks like "yikes."
The man is three cups of coffee in with only half a bagel with a token helping of cream cheese to chase it.
Maybe a mega yikes is in order.
A not insignificant part of Kieran is relieved that John looks as freaked out as Kieran feels. It's immediately smothered by the fact that he looks like complete shit, and if he takes that kind of energy off-world, well—Kieran can't claim to be a prophet, but it sure doesn't bode well.
It would be on brand though.
Unfortunately, Kieran is terrible at pep talks and conversation with people she barely knows. Sarcastic in all the wrong ways at best. Silent at worst. She's arguably also terrible with people she knows well but that's coming from Ren. So really, jury's out. The most she gives John is a halting shoulder pat before he heads out to gear up and she's waiting for him to walk through the puddle. The gate. Whatever.
She must really be off her game because Elizabeth manages to sneak up on her despite wearing boots with the chunkiest heels ever on metal floors.
"Are you always this anxious when people go through the gate?" Kieran asks, fingers digging into the railing. Her knuckles are already straining a sharp white and the metal is biting into the meat of her palms. She's a little jealous of how put-together Dr. Weir looks—her short brown hair curling nicely around her ears, blue eyes focused and sharp. Kieran supposes it comes with the territory. "How bad's the paperwork?"
"The paperwork is one of my least favorite things about this job," Elizabeth admits. Kieran shudders. If Atlantis is anything like the SGC, the shitstorm of things that can happen are too insane to imagine. She wouldn't call it a toxic working environment. The stress isn't because of the people there (hopefully), but because of the space vampires and who knows what else floating in the dark corners of the Pegasus Galaxy. It's not as stressful as airport control. It absolutely blows it out of the water. "One of our lieutenants goes through explosives like a kid in an ice cream shop. The requisition forms are a lot."
That's not the direction Kieran was thinking of, but sure. Her eyes are fixed on the Stargate's active event horizon, and she's trying not to think about how the puddle rippling and undulating matches the stability of her stomach.
At this point, John and his team are fiddling with some last-minute checks. Well. It's really just John. He keeps checking the mag of his P-90, double-checking his tac vest pockets that Kieran watched him double-check already. He's . . . stalling? No, he's waiting.
They just met. They're not really at the hugging stage. At least Kieran doesn't think so.
"John!" Kieran calls from the catwalk. It echoes through the gateroom. All eyes are, unfortunately, on her. Maybe she should've thought things out more. " . . . Good luck?"
. . . So it didn't come out as a ringing endorsement. It's the thought that counts, right? John returns her thoughtful gesture with a tentative wave and one of those awkward smiles that are less of a smile and more of an awkward general upward twitch of the lips. It gets an Awwww out of everyone else, not unlike the reaction people have to newborn kittens. Chuck's eyes are threatening to pop out of his head in cartoonishly huge pink hearts. Kieran can see John flush red, serious as a heart attack. She can't blame him for practically scampering through the gate.
"Uh, I should get going," Kieran stammers. Why is she so hot? Oh god. Judging from the smile Elizabeth is diplomatically trying not to let show (and failing), her face probably matches John's. "Heightmeyer. I was going to talk to Dr. Heightmeyer kaythanksbye!"
Kieran has a lot to unpack. She knows this. She is actively cognizant of this. It's been floating between her subconscious mind and the edges of her conscious mind for a while now. It's not her fault her mom's side of the family is like that. Sure, they're entitled to their secrets. But her and Ren have no choice in inheriting those family secrets. And those secrets shaped their lives, her mom's life—
Not to mention that there's some other shadowy organization able to get under the SGC's nose and kill her mom—
Not to mention everything that happened last year in Tokyo.
It's a lot to unpack. Kieran gets the same feeling whenever she gets around to deep cleaning her room—the point where everything's in a messy pile on the floor. Like she pulled out everything and dumped it out. The point where everything is jumbled before she can even attempt to organize things into something resembling coherence. Where everything's worse before it gets better.
So that feeling. Except specifically for her brain.
Which brings her to fidgeting across from Dr. Kate Heightmeyer, one of many, many shrinks who must be a little off her rocker if she signed up to be the backbone of people's emotional stability here.
Kieran's first impression of Dr. Heightmeyer is that she looks kind, but in a genuine way. Maybe genuine isn't the right word, but there's nothing about her that strikes Kieran as particularly untrustworthy. She's pretty in that bland, nondescript Midwestern way—long blonde curls framing a round face with piercing blue eyes. They're not even that piercing! Dr. Heightmeyer is just staring, waiting patiently for Kieran to say something.
And she doesn't even know where to begin.
She's a complicated person! Things are complicated! She has layers—layers that are stupidly tangled together like Ariadne's tapestry from hell. And the tapestry is made of earphones that got shoved into a pocket. And the pocket is also hell.
Kieran's gaze is trained on her shoes. If she makes eye contact, she'll either say nothing or just burst into tears. And frankly she thinks that's something to be saved for the third or fifth or tenth session. Assuming the first session doesn't make Dr. Heightmeyer run away screaming and Kieran locked in a very white, cushy room.
Dr. Heightmeyer starts off with an easy ball: So tell me about yourself.
It's an easy question with easy answers. Her name is Kieran Matsunoki Amamiya. Up until recently, Kieran thought all her blood relatives, her cousin Ren and her grandparents, were in Japan. She's mostly a sophomore in high school since she attended Shujin Academy in Tokyo since last April. In fact, her mom died almost a week since she moved back to the States.
All of that is on her file that Dr. Heightmeyer has access to. It's a redundant question—as long as she provides a redundant answer.
"How about you tell me about yourself?" Kieran asks.
Dr. Heightmeyer blinks.
She doesn't answer right away. It's a little odd, sure, but it's not that far out of left field, is it? Yeah, Kieran needs help. No, she's not just going to start spilling her guts to a complete stranger. Not until she evens the playing field a bit.
"Okay," Dr. Heightmeyer agrees easily. "My name is Kate. I'm from North Carolina. Before I joined the expedition I was a couple's therapist."
Kieran laughs a bit before the situation catches up with her. She chokes mid-wheeze, clapping a hand to her mouth. "Sorry," she says. "That was . . . rude?"
"It's probably not the answer you expected," Dr. Heightmeyer says with a smile. "Twenty questions isn't a normal approach I take with my patients, but if this is what you're comfortable with—"
"I don't trust you," Kieran says bluntly.
Talk about an unexpected answer. Dr. Heightmeyer blinks for a second. You could get the same look on her face if you slapped her with a freshly caught fish. But it's perfectly logical, from Kieran's point of view anyways. Even if Dr. Heightmeyer believes everything Kieran says, takes every story at face-value, Kieran would be unearthing a lot of secrets. Family secrets. Her friends' secrets. They're her secrets too, but they're not hers. Not completely.
That's the crux of the matter. Kieran wants to get help. She needs it. It is a goddamn miracle that she hasn't snapped or lost her mind. There are adults out there who could walk a mile in her shoes and crumble under the pressure.
But getting better means dissecting parts of herself and her childhood that—that are uncomfortable to talk about. She grew up differently, that much is true. The idea of introspection makes her skin crawl. Her heart races at the thought of what lies underneath of what makes her Kieran. She's just . . . not ready for that kind of dissection. She'd almost rather get literally dissected.
Kieran doesn't trust Dr. Heightmeyer. Not yet, at least. And she needs Dr. Heightmeyer to trust her. As much as she might want to help Kieran, she might not trust Kieran. Not where it matters. Not if they ever start digging into the heart of everything.
To put it simply, Kieran's relationship with her family is complicated. She needs to trust that Dr. Heightmeyer won't lock her away in a white cushy room. Dr. Heightmeyer needs to trust that Kieran hasn't made anything up as some form of self-defense mechanism or that she's absolutely lost it.
"I'm okay with the twenty questions," Kieran says. "But if I'm not comfortable . . ."
"Of course," Dr. Heightmeyer agrees. "You don't have to talk about anything that you're not ready to. What are your goals for therapy?"
That's an easy question. "I have things to unpack," Kieran says. "It gets messy. Can you guess why I don't trust you?"
"I can take a few guesses. The most obvious being that I'm a stranger."
"Well. Yes. It's not just that." Kieran hesitates, worrying the hem of her shirt between her thumb and index finger. For a moment, she's sitting in a chair just like this wearing Shujin Academy's school uniform instead. "I've tried the therapy thing before. Kind of."
"Kind of?"
It's fine. This is a story she can tell. It makes a perfectly normal, mundane amount of sense even after leaving out her involvement in how everything went down.
"Last spring, I attended Shujin Academy in Tokyo as a foreign exchange student. I got a huge scholarship and everything. My cousin was attending too and we're in the same year so we were hoping we'd get to hang out. That's not the point." Kieran clenches her fists. "The school's volleyball coach. He was an Olympic medalist. He brought the school so much acclaim. And he liked to abuse the students. Especially the volleyball team. If he was in a bad mood he'd beat the shit out of the boys or he'd—" Kieran swallows. "He'd assault the girls."
Dr. Heightmeyer's eyes widen, but she doesn't dare interrupt.
"No one said anything. Administration swept everything under the rug because of reputation. He could say the word and he'd ruin kids' futures. He threatened to expel my br—my cousin and my friends with expulsion. He tried to pressure another friend of mine into having relations with him by threatening to kick one of her friends off the team. And when she refused . . ." Kieran's mouth twists. "No one knew about it. Not until one morning I just got to class and we just started home room, and then suddenly I was watching a girl I didn't really know try and jump to her death from the roof."
She remembers that morning too well, she thinks. She remembers sprinting with Ren, Ryuji, and Ann to get to the courtyard, pushing through a throng of kids who didn't do anything except get their fucking phones out. She remembers being a helpless sort of angry.
She could have killed that man, honestly.
"And administration still didn't do a damn thing. Not until their hands were forced." Kieran grins. "He confessed."
"Confessed?" Dr. Heightmeyer frowns, but not from doubting Kieran's story. "Just like that?"
"It took a bit. One day there was a notice posted from a group calling themselves the Phantom Thieves of Hearts. A calling card claiming they were going to steal his heart. And then he called himself out of work. Then one morning we were called in for an assembly and he just confessed just like that. To the whole school. That's the only reason we were able to get law enforcement involved."
"Vigilantes?" Dr. Heightmeyer asks. "Vigilantes got him to confess?"
"Yeah." Kieran hopes her grin isn't too wide.
There's another moment of silence that Kieran takes as her cue to keep going. "Administration hired a counselor. His name was Dr. Takuto Maruki. He had mostly good intentions. He uh—he had this philosophy that life was easier if we didn't suffer. If we didn't have problems." Kieran scrunches her nose. "Turns out he wasn't a qualified therapist at all. So yeah. That's why I don't—I'm not—" Kieran gestures loosely to Dr. Heightmeyer. "With all this. I want to. Trust you, I mean. I just don't know how."
"You trusted me with that story," Dr. Heightmeyer said. "And that's not insignificant. You were failed by a lot of the adults in your life. People that you should have been able to trust."
God. And doesn't she know it.
Kieran leaves her first therapy session ever feeling . . . better. She doesn't feel lighter or relieved. She doesn't even feel all that different.
What she does feel is grounded. She has a goal now.
Kieran's life has always operated under a layer of absurdity. In the grand scheme of things her abrupt move to the Pegasus galaxy, while still a jarring life change, doesn't feel more insane than some of her other life experiences.
It's still too early to tell if she can start telling Dr. Heightmeyer about the general insanity that Kieran's life has been so far, but honestly? It feels like a promising start.
Dr. Heightmeyer had brought up journaling as another way of processing events and emotions. And if there was anything specific Kieran wanted to bring up for next session, she'd have a private record of it. She figured she might as well give it a shot. It worked for Ren, who ended up keeping two separate journals: one as a requirement for his probation, and the other for his personal stuff.
What Kieran doesn't expect is how tired she feels after therapy. It's different than grief-exhaustion. Instead of feeling like she's just been wrung out, she feels like she's been stretched too thin. Like, instead of the world slamming more and more crap onto her plate, she's deliberately trying to pull apart her brain and rearrange things so that they fit together better.
So far, she's starting off with weekly sessions. Which means that she gets to look forward to putting her brain on a proverbial toffee pulling machine. Maybe she could permanently add a nap to her schedule . . . ?
Technically, Kieran could be doing schoolwork. She should be doing schoolwork. She already made a schedule with assignment deadlines and everything.
But also Kieran's in a city full of Ancient advanced technology in another city. She wants to explore.
(By explore she means look around at the places that were already cleared because frankly she's not sure she can handle the embarrassment of causing an infamous SGC-level defcon emergency on her first full day.)
Her tablet has a map, and she's got a few hours to kill before lunch. She figures she can beat the lunch rush and then head back to her room to start schoolwork. Worst case scenario, she just grabs something to-go and dips.
Kieran wanders through the corridor with the bulk of the science labs just for the sake of wandering past them. None of the scientists that pass her in the hallways or the military personnel standing post stop her. Instead, they give her the not-quite-a-smile anyone gives to a stranger they're passing on the street.
A few of the labs are just sitting open. A couple of them are unattended, which seems really insecure to Kieran, but also if the only people on Atlantis are expedition members, then it seems pretty safe. As long as nothing explodes, right? And what's OSHA going to do out here, anyways?
Most of them are closed, but Kieran can hear welding, beeping, and sometimes yelling. Yelling seems counterintuitive to the scientific method, but Kieran's mom always said something about how no one ever said that scientific discussion never had to be polite. Kieran's never had to deal with having samples caught in customs or getting stonewalled looking for data sets that should be open access, but if she had—
Well. There's no way that people who choose to be academics for the rest of their life are one-hundred percent sane. No way.
And that's not even considering the ones who chose to continue their scientific pursuits in another galaxy full of actual literal space vampires. They jumped straight into the deep end, decided to tread water there without water wings . . . or whatever.
Kieran has to wonder whether Dr. Weir extended an invitation to her mom to join the expedition. Officially, her mom was a geneticist, and considering how important the ATA is . . . maybe in another life she would be here, wearing one of those yellow medical-coded jackets.
Kieran's body twitches, like a mild convulsion. She probably wouldn't be around in that other life, if her mother was here instead.
Kieran's mom also dabbled a lot in a lot of different things. It's something she said was an Amamiya family trait that straddled the line between tradition and survival. After she got her degree and moved back to Japan, she dabbled in studying the brain, consciousness, and its perceptions.
Not that Kieran was aware of all that. Not until last year, anyways.
Kieran's screws her face up as she wrenches herself out of that wonderful train of thought.
The thing Kieran forgot about exploring a city is that there's a lot of walking involved with exploring. Walking around after just moving to a new place is basically running a marathon. The same thing happened after she moved to her dorm in Tokyo, so she really should have seen feeling hungry enough to digest her own stomach coming from a mile away.
Kieran winds her way around the central tower, making her way back to the cafeteria. It's early enough that she beat the lunch rush, catching the tail-end of brunch territory. There's plenty of grab-and-go options: soups, salads, sandwiches, some Lunchables-adjacent looking things on a table for people really in a rush. Otherwise, Kieran could grab a to-go container and fill it up with whatever's available in the line. Maybe she can eat on her balcony or somewhere with an ocean view.
Hm. She wonders if there's a way to book the kitchen. She can't possibly be the only homesick person on base. Maybe she'd feel better if she was able to whip up some katsu curry or . . . something. She's not as good of a cook as Ren is, but she's not a disaster in the kitchen either.
"Ah, excuse me." Someone politely taps her shoulder. "Kieran, yes?"
The guy who got her attention is wearing science blue. Blue eyes sparkle intelligently behind round wire frame glasses, and wispy silvery hair sticks up in tuffs. Kind of Albert Einstein-adjacent, definitely the image of a scientist.
Behind him is a young woman a few years older than Kieran—early twenties at the most. Her hair is bright, fiery red (orange really). She's wearing standard expedition Eddie Bauer-looking pants and a plain t-shirt. She smiles the uncertain not-smile Kieran's only seen when she passes by people on the sidewalk or grocery store, eyes darting to some people as they walk by. She gives Kieran the impression of someone who doesn't really belong there. Her curiosity is piqued—if she's not an expedition member, who is she? More importantly, why is she here?
"Uh yep," Kieran replies. "That's me. Unless there's other sixteen-year-olds running around that I don't know about."
Mr. Science Man chuckles a little. "I am Radek Zelenka, and this is Sora Tyrus. We were on our way to repair jumpers if you would like to join."
Kieran blinks. "What's a Jumper?"
Jumper, Kieran learns, is short for Puddle Jumper. Coined by John, apparently. She shouldn't be surprised to learn that a city that's all advanced technology has a whole hanger of ships at its disposal.
"Dr. McKay wanted to call them gate ships," Radek said. "Colonel Sheppard thought Puddle Jumper was better."
"It's catchier," Kieran says. "Like objectively it's a better name. But you said something about fixing them up? What does that look like? Also, when can I fly one?"
Radek beams, ushering Kieran and Sora to the far side of the hangar. The room is circular, with Jumpers sitting in a concentric pattern, even up the walls. If she had to guess, they were near the top of the central tower, maybe at the top of it. The roof kind of looks like a hatch, but it's hard to tell when it's easily twenty stories above her. The jumpers themselves are all silver and cylindrical with geometric shapes jutting out of the sides in the neat, crisp angles that resemble the Atlantis skyline. The windshield is at an aggressive aerodynamic slant backwards. If someone rammed a Jumper into something, it could probably do a lot of damage.
"I'm about to show you the fixing," Radek says. "As for the flying, you'll have to ask Colonel Sheppard."
"Darn."
The boarding ramp to the nearest jumper is already lowered. For advanced spacecraft, Kieran isn't too impressed with the backend of a jumper. It's long leather benches along the walls with expedition supplies in plastic cases in the overhead nets or sitting under the benches. Now the cockpit—
The dashboard is plain, other than what Kieran can guess is a steering mechanism on the left-hand side: two knob things sticking out. The center console is full of symbols carved into triangular slabs of glass or super-strong Ancient-brand plastic—symbols that match the ones on the ring of the Stargate.
"Please don't touch anything!" Radek grabs Kieran by the arm in a panic, letting her go just as quickly when she nearly rams her elbow into his esophagus. It's a reflex, really. Oops. "You have the ATA, yes? I don't want you activating anything, and I really don't want to explain to my superiors or your father why we went on an unauthorized joyride."
"Aw man." Kieran tries not to sound too disappointed. She doesn't think she does a very good job.
"Ah, here we are!" Radek grins as he opens a control panel in the back.
The guts resemble the Asgard control crystal systems on the Daedalus—kind of. Kieran can clock that they're based on similar principles: data is stored on a crystal. That's about it. The crystals on the Daedalus had the vague, natural shape of quartz growths in caves. They glow a hot, blazing white. And they're about as thick as a state fair corn dog.
And while Asgard tech is undoubtedly super advanced, they look unrefined next to Ancient control crystals. Asgard crystals are as long as her forearm, and Ancient crystals just about the size of her palm. They computer chip adjacent with tiny veins grouped in neat branching lines like circuits. They glow a cooler, colder blue. The way they hum when they're in the console is quieter, smoother. It's like comparing old Nokias to smartphones.
Once he gets going, Radek is the definition of enthusiasm. He's kind to Sora. He doesn't scoff at any of Kieran's questions. He's patient. She feels extremely sorry that he has to work under Rodney McKay. Before she knows it, she has a tablet in her hands and is working with Sora a couple jumpers down.
Sora's nice. Mostly. Probably? It's a bit of an awkward silence, Kieran thinks, but that's mostly because she can't tell if Sora is annoyed to be here or annoyed to be with Kieran. Assuming she's annoyed at all.
"Sooooo . . ." Kieran begins. "Where are you from? I figure not from Earth, and not from Teyla's people. Or Ronon's."
Sora raises a single, unimpressed eyebrow. "Astute observation. That's correct."
"Then why are you . . ."
"I was a prisoner," Sora says, but there's not enough heat for be angry. Tired maybe. "Now I'm just a guest. My people are the Genii. There was a—" Sora's mouth curls with distaste, like she bit into a particularly bitter root. "An altercation between my people and Atlantis. I was left behind, and I wasn't taken back."
"Oh." Kieran blinks dumbly. She knows a sanitized, barebones version of a story when she hears one. Still. "Sorry."
"Hm." Sora checks the next control crystal, and Kieran scans to make sure all the subroutines and power levels are what they should be. "Why are you here? I didn't even know Colonel Sheppard had children."
That gets a nervous laugh out of Kieran. "Not children! Just child! Like the singular. I'm the only one." She clears her throat. "People are trying to kill me."
"Oh," Sora says. "You're taking that pretty well."
Kieran shrugs. "It's kind of lost its novelty, you know?"
Sora furrows her brow. "Sure. Whatever you say."
"You can go to the next crystal now," Kieran says hastily.
Conversation veers away from anything too personal. Sora's willing to indulge Kieran's questions about the Genii. To travelers and traders, they're simple farmers. The reality is that they're more advanced than that, living underground. Every Genii child is born with a military rank, starting with the lowest of the low and fight their way up. They train their entire lives to kill the Wraith, and it wasn't until recently that they would've even had the chance to encounter one.
"What's a Wraith?" Kieran asks.
Sora's fingers still immediately, and she turns to Kieran with an absolutely incredulous look on her face. "You were sent to this galaxy, and you weren't even told?"
"They're bad news then," Kieran says.
"Yes. Very. I can't believe—" Sora takes a breath, eyes rolling skyward like she's saying a very sarcastic prayer. "Every child in this galaxy knows of the Wraith. They are the monsters hiding under beds and hiding in shadows. They're terrible creatures that feed by stealing the life from you. They sleep for centuries and wake up when their human herd is large enough to cull. Only now all of them are away and now your father have woken all of them out. Wraith hive ships are fighting for their precious feeding grounds as we speak."
Kieran's stomach drops. "John did that?" A whole galaxy of people . . . billions? Trillions? All those people—
"It was an accident, of course." Sora says, not quite bitter but not quite over it either.
Okay. An accident. Accidents happen. Of course the IOA would never allow someone who purposefully unleashed a galaxy-wide threat to stay as the Chief Military Officer for the expedition. Okay. Cool. She can deal with that.
The Trust was not the first people to gun for Kieran. Generally speaking, Kieran likes to know who might be coming after her. It's almost a relief to know that the Wraith aren't discriminating with who they . . . feed on . . . but god. She'd sure like to know how to kill one if it came to that. She was on a ship for three weeks headed to a galaxy full of space vampires getting into actual literal turf wars and no one bothered to tell her a single goddamn thing about them?
Her headset crackles in her ear.
"Kieran, this is Dr. Weir."
She practically jumps to her feet, heart hammering. "Yeah? What is it? Is everything okay?"
"Your father's back. We're rushing him to the infirmary."
Kieran doesn't even get the chance to be angry as panic carries her to the infirmary.
Updates are probably going to slow down from here on out, but I'm not planning on abandoning this story! I have a lot to tell, and we've only started scratching the surface.
As always, please feel free to leave a review or find me superwrites on tumblr!