To Ascend or not to Ascend
He couldn't believe it!
He was dying!
It hurt. Oh Lord how it hurt, but it seemed numb…
When he was with her… it all seemed so unreal. Like watching someone else die.
"Rodney, you cannot hold back the tide with only the flickering light."
Great!
He was hallucinating!
Where did Elizabeth go?
"Who are you looking for?"
"Gee, I don't know… the love of my life, the meaning of life, a zpm… all such tempting options," Rodney shot back at her bitingly. "And yet, what I'd really like here is to stop. Me. From. Dying!"
"The knife cannot cut the light," she smiled at him with what could only be amusement, "despite how hard you try to reach the source."
He shook his head and threw his hands up in the air, "great! I've gone insane."
This time she laughed.
"You know what I'm saying, you do understand, but you have to let yourself be free."
Something clicked.
"Oh GOD! You want me to ascend!"
The Ancient woman smiled and nodded her head, "you are a quick study."
Rodney was almost giddy with excitement.
"This is wonderful, I can finally find all the answers to everything!"
She raised an eyebrow but quickly covered her surprise before the exhilarated scientists noticed. "You will be more than that, Rodney."
"Yeah, the whole white ball of energy… how does that happen, really?"
"You need to embrace the light…"
"I suppose that it would require a matrix of inequalities within the carbon structure to conjoin with another and the kinetic energy and potential energy to revert the intertransporal dimatriculation…"
"Open you mind to the complete and wholeness of the universe…"
"On a biological level it seems impossible, but physics says otherwise… lucky me! If the dark energy creature was any indication, there must have been considerable experimentation with ascension…"
"Let go the physical, allow yourself to move on…"
"And if those experiments were held here, then the Atlantis Ancients must have learned how to ascend before the ones that stayed on earth…"
"Are you listening to me?"
"Hm? What? Am I getting this right – your people returned to Earth and taught them to Ascend and, well, that's what you did after a few millennia hiding out…"
"You aren't listening to me, Rodney. Rodney? RODNEY!"
"So there must be some sort of time dilation between Pegasus and other galaxies…"
"FORGET IT! You're hopeless!"
"Hm?"
Carson breathed a sigh of relief as McKay's vital signs registered with that wonderful, steady beep beep beep… They'd almost lost the annoying bastard there!
Rodney groaned and opened an eye. Elizabeth, Sheppard, Teyla, Cason and the rest of the gang stood around him with worried looks on their faces.
"Hi… I thought I'm supposed to be dead."
They exchanged glances.
"No, really! There was an Ancient here telling me to open my mind and everything…"
Carson smiled and nodded, patting the astrophysicist on the shoulder.
"Of course, Rodney. Of course."
Rodney's jaw dropped. They thought he was nuts!
"I'm being serious! She was all white light and floaty, spouting gibberish about candles and tides and knives!"
Everyone smiled, nodded, and backed away slowly with little reassurances that everything was okay and he was going to be fine.
Dammit, he thought, I almost had the whole thing figured out, too!