Thank you to the wonderful elynross for the beta. No money made, no harm intended. All mistakes are my own.

Gravesite

No people who turn their backs on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact which encourages its people to live.

-- A Pattern Language , Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein

Elizabeth made the trek from the central control room to the park they had found when they opened up more living space. They knew the Ancients had ascended, and so they had somehow assumed that there were no bones to find, no physical remnants of the past beyond their technology.

Then they opened the door to this place, the stillness of it washing over the team. Elizabeth could still hear the hushed voices as they stared around the place, markers of light and energy in a dusty and forgotten forest, where the water was silent and the trees lay ten thousand years dead. They'd seen the little memorial lights before, but hadn't recognized what they were; this room explained them and what this place was -- an Ancient gravesite.

The Ancients had believed that it was best to place the cities of the dead near rooms for the living, memorials as natural as winter before spring. Each memorial was personal, an outgrowth of the individual, perhaps, some alone, others in groups. Stone paths ran beside the graves, each one protected by crumbling low hedges and low walls so that it felt private, rather than the fields of headstones Elizabeth remembered from Earth.

There were so few memorial lights, and the gravesites so scattered throughout the explored sections of the city, that the anthropologists and archeologists felt that each light was intended to stand only for a limited time, and then be re-purposed, capturing the essence of the newly dead and celebrating their lives. It was an aid to the community of friends still alive, to help them process their grief, to reconcile themselves to death, to loss, to the essential knowledge that they, too, would die.

Perhaps this had been the driving force in the Ancients' pursuit of ascenscion.

Radek learned to reprogram the memorial lights, and Rodney figured out how to download the original data, saving it to be studied later. Now the dead of Atlantis, the newly arrived and those from its ancient past, lay together in the quiet spaces between the labs and the living quarters, near the puddle jumper bay and out on the piers. This place was her favorite, a place where nature had once been captured and enclosed, held tight in a city desperate for peace. Even dried up and forgotten, it was beautiful; the botanists wanted to bring in trees from the mainland to make it a living park once more, and Elizabeth though that would be fitting.

She sat on the bench in the quiet stillness of the room, and breathed deep. When she felt ready, she placed her hand on the activator, and watched Peter Grodin speak to her once more.

"All quiet, Dr. Weir."

Yes, Peter. All quiet once more.