NOTES: This is a five-part story, completely finished, and will be posted at the rate of one chapter every couple of days. It's gen, drama, team, and humour. Feedback is always welcome.
Genes In A Twist - Part One
Colonel Sheppard's team was four hours overdue returning from their planet.
Nothing unusual there, but as the wormhole established, Elizabeth felt a small ray of hope that this might be them. John and his team managed to get into so much trouble - a corollary of having four very remarkable individuals in the one place at the one time.
Right now, there was no other Atlantis team off-world except John's. They'd set out yesterday to look at a set of ruins within walking distance of the Stargate. From what the initial survey had found, the ruins were uninhabited and the structures seemed sound enough to go into. Rodney had promptly demanded they be allowed to go.
The blue glow of the event horizon flickered through the room, and she glanced at Sergeant Miller. The young Canadian tech looked back with a slight shrug. "No IDC, no-- Wait." He began typing. "We're getting a radio signal--"
"Atlantis?"
Elizabeth looked at Miller, who was also getting the signal. The voice wasn't anyone she recognised - a woman's voice, but not Teyla's.
"Atlantis come in. Elizabeth... Elizabeth Weir? Look, I know you're hearing this." Someone muttered something in the background. Then, softer, as though the woman had taken her mouth away from the radio, "Oh, they can hear us. Trust me on this. They're just not responding."
Astonished at the identification and the exchange, Elizabeth answered. "This is Dr. Weir."
"Elizabeth!" The strange woman's voice got louder again. "Look, we've got Teyla unconscious here, possibly injured. We need you to send the Doc out here right away."
Teyla unconscious, probably injured - and nothing about the three men who'd left with her yesterday. Elizabeth was instantly suspicious. "I'm sorry, who is this? Where are Colonel Sheppard, Dr. McKay and Ronon Dex?"
"This is--" A pause. "A friend." There was a muttered conference in the background. "And Teyla's the only one we've found." There was another pause, this time without the conference. When the woman came back on, she sounded slightly desperate. "Look, get Beckett here. You can add a group of marines if you like - Lorne by preference. But you have to get someone out here. We're--" The pauses were becoming annoying. "We'd like to believe this isn't happening to us right now, but... Elizabeth, just send the damned Doc out!"
On the other end of the transmission, Elizabeth was becoming freaked, too. The woman seemed to know entirely too much about Atlantis, and the planet hadn't shown any signs of occupation when the MALP went through.
A million scenarios ran through her head, from a Wraith attack that the men hadn't been able to escape to an underground culture like the Gennii, to an unexpected ambush, to... well, anything.
John really did know how to find trouble like no-one else. Elizabeth hesitated only a moment. Teyla was injured and might need Carson's help. Everything else was secondary to that.
"You understand that I won't be authorising anything that I think might endanger my people?"
"I wouldn't expect anything less," came the terse answer. "Just get them out here so they can fix this!"
Elizabeth had misgivings - dozens of them. She could manage them - as the leader of Atlantis, she had to. "We'll close the gate and dial out to you. Atlantis, out."
"S-- Okay. Out."
The wormhole shut down and she turned to Sergeant Miller who interrupted her neatly. "I've got Dr. Beckett on his way to the gateroom with emergency supplies. Major Lorne and his team are just gearing up, now."
Problem solvers. There were days when Elizabeth loved living in a city full of people who were instinctive problem solvers - they got things done.
"Thank you, Sergeant," she smiled briefly. "Please also call the probe techs to get one of the basic probes geared up for going through the Stargate. I'm not going to send anyone through without first being sure it's safe first." Whatever had gotten to John, Rodney, Ronon, and Teyla might still be around - and while she hated to be suspicious of the very concerned stranger, she had to be. More lives than just Teyla's rested on Elizabeth's shoulders.
"Dr. Weir?"
"Sergeant?"
"Wasn't the planet Colonel Sheppard's team went to uninhabited?"
She nodded, although her thoughts were elsewhere. The strange woman had known a lot about Atlantis - too much for a mere stranger - from Carson's name to the most likely officer to be sent off-world.
A roiling feeling began in the pit of her stomach. Something wasn't right.
"Elizabeth?" Carson crossed the control room, a medical carry-kit in his hand. "Teyla's injured?"
"That's the report we have," Elizabeth calmed herself and signalled for Miller to dial the gate.
Down on the gateroom floor, the probe was being readied by a couple of industrious techs. Lorne and his team strolled in a few minutes later. Lorne climbed the steps up to the control room, adjusting his earpiece.
"Ma'am. Colonel Sheppard in trouble again?"
She gave him a severe look for that bit of levity. "I hope not," she said. "We have Teyla injured on the planet and apparently no sign of the Colonel and the rest of his team. I'll be sending you in advance of Dr. Beckett - keep an eye out for trouble, and get them back here as soon as possible."
Even as she spoke, the probe was being trundled through the Stargate, and they turned their gazes to the screen where the signal was coming back.
There were three people visible on the screen - three women dressed in plain shifts cinched in at the waist by a leather-like belt, and wearing soft boots on their feet. Not anyone we've met before, Elizabeth thought. The style of dress were unfamiliar to her - and all three looked very uncomfortable as they stood with their hands away from their bodies trying to look harmless. The tall one wasn't succeeding very well - it was something about the way she held herself, tense and proud.
Teyla lay at the feet of the closest one, on her side in the recovery position, clearly unconscious. She seemed unhurt, although Carson leaned forwards, peering closer to try to determine her state.
The probe eye swivelled to check out the surrounding field. Nothing and no-one, just the three women and Teyla.
"See, we're not hiding anything," said the closest woman aggressively, taking a step towards the probe. "Send the Doc through!"
Carson started down the stairs without waiting for Elizabeth's permission. She nodded at the major who hurried down after the medic. Lorne and his men would precede Carson, make sure that the area was clear before giving the okay. Even the probe could miss things.
She watched on the screen as the Major and his team fanned out from the gate, their hands resting on their weapons.
"Nice to see you got here," came the familiar voice, slightly acid. "Where's Beckett?"
Carson walked through the Stargate at that moment, followed by one of his aides. As he appeared on the other side, Lorne spoke into his mouthpiece. "We'll report back in ten minutes, ma'am."
"Thank you, Major. Atlantis out."
The wormhole shut down.
In the next ten minutes, Elizabeth went into her office, typed up a quick report on the incident, and pondered what could have possibly happened to the three missing men. Between the three of them, they had more than enough resources to get out of most situations - with Teyla, the four of them were nigh-unstoppable; at least one reason why Elizabeth kept allowing them to put themselves in danger.
Sometimes, Elizabeth wanted to call up old General Hammond and tell him she knew exactly how he'd felt while supervising SG-1. Hopefully she wouldn't be bald by the time she was sixty, though.
The gate began dialling as she finished off the mini-report - nothing more than a notification, although given the absences of the Colonel, Rodney, and Ronon, she expected the final report to be considerably longer.
"Sergeant?"
"Atlantis, this is Major Lorne." There was a suspicious ebullience to Lorne's voice. In the background, she could hear someone muttering beneath his or her breath. Elizabeth turned to Sergeant Miller and mouthed 'Visuals?'
The visuals came up on the screen - Major Lorne standing, talking into his microphone, his team-mates a bit behind him, not-quite talking to the three women who were standing in a defensive cluster behind them. She could just see the edge of Carson's head as he tended to Teyla.
"Major? Report, please."
"Well, the Doc says there's nothing wrong with Teyla that he can find, but the three...uh...women are a little more difficult." Lorne glanced at the women, a smile playing on his lips. In the background, the shortest of the three women scowled.
A little more difficult? Elizabeth tried to work out what that might mean and came up blank. "Major?"
"The Doc wants to bring Teyla back through, and he thinks it's best that you talk to these...uh...women yourself."
There was a snigger somewhere in the background, then a cough. Lorne's face straightened, but he looked like he very badly wanted to laugh.
"Major?" She was beginning to get really worried by this. First the men of Colonel Sheppard's team vanished, leaving only Teyla, now Major Lorne was acting strange. "Are you sure everything's okay?"
"Ma'am, they are no danger to the city. I promise you that."
A muttered comment from behind him made him convulse, biting his lip to keep from laughing.
If she'd been worried before, she was becoming very worried now.
Unconvinced, Elizabeth went for more information. "Put Carson on."
Carson took up a radio. "They're fine, Elizabeth. Teyla's unconscious, but I don't think it's dangerous yet. There's no sign of brain trauma, but I'd like to get her back to Atlantis and run an MRI and a CAT scan on her, just in case."
"And the women?"
Again, she saw the glimmer of mirth in Carson's expression, although he contained it better than the major. "They're safe. I'm going to need to run some tests on them, too."
She wanted to ask who they were, but that might be overheard and construed as impolite. And those women might be their only chance of finding out where the missing three men were.
"And there's no sign of Colonel Sheppard, Rodney, or Ronon?"
"Oh, there are signs," Carson said with a twinkle in his eye, "but the Major's right. They aren't dangerous to the city, and they'll need to come to Atlantis to get it all sorted out."
She trusted Carson's estimation - even if that twinkle was worrying. "All right," Elizabeth said. "Bring them through now."
On the screen, she watched as the stretcher carrying Teyla was lifted to be taken through the open Stargate behind the probe. The three women followed, ushered in by Lorne and Lorne's team, and she headed down to the gateroom, to meet the group.
"Ladies, welcome to Atlantis..." Elizabeth began.
Lieutenant Mayhew choked on his laughter, and the shortest of the three women turned a sour, blue gaze on him.
"I think this can wait until we're in one of the private conference rooms," said the foremost woman, her expression set in the grim lines of someone who knew the joke was on them. And without a further word, she began up the stairs towards the main debriefing room.
Elizabeth later said she had a glimmer of comprehension right then, especially when the second woman - the tallest, with strong features, no more than thirty - followed the first, shooting Elizabeth an inscrutable look as she passed. She turned to the third one, who wore an expression of petulance on what had probably once been a fine-boned face before time and age softened the features. "We are never going to live this down, you know." The woman stumped off after the first two, her gait...odd.
"Major? Do you want to explain this?" Elizabeth was beginning to get very worried.
Lorne looked a little more serious now. "I think you'd better hear it from them, ma'am."
She walked into the room and paused before her seat. The three women were already seated, and as Carson came in behind Lorne's team, the leader pointed at the door controls. Carson touched it and the room sealed.
The third woman spoke almost as soon as the room was closed. "Before anyone says anything, I would like to emphasise that this is not my fault! I'm not the one who walked into the room and made everything light up!" He glared at the black-haired leader.
"And who was it who said, 'I'm sure it's okay to fiddle around with!'"
"It usually is! They're the Ancients - they don't make machines that...that do this sort of thing!"
"Well, evidently they do, because we weren't like this last night."
Oh. My. God.
"Enough!" Elizabeth cried into the conversation, overriding both women.
All eyes were on her as she looked at the three women, starting with the brown-haired woman whose long hair was tied back in dreadlocks and finishing with the hazel-eyed leader whose pleading expression Elizabeth was used to seeing on a considerably more masculine face.
This is not happening. No, really, it's not. It can't be, because it's impossible.
Sooner or later, Elizabeth thought, she was going to have to redefine the term 'impossible' - here in Pegasus, it never seemed to mean what it had meant on Earth.
"John?"
"Johanna," retorted the shortest of the three women.
"Shut up, Rhonda," snapped 'Johanna'. "Yes. It's us."
She felt for the edge of the table, lowered herself carefully into a chair. This was...scary. And weird. She glanced at them, then at the still-amused major and his team, then at Carson who looked like he was in deadly earnest. "Prove it."
The leader glared at her - a surprisingly direct glare. That in itself almost convinced her. Women were more tuned in to their emotions, but less direct at expressing them, particularly the negative ones. Then she - he? - huffed, eyes narrowed. "Thalen once told Phoebus exactly what he'd do to her if he had her at his mercy. It's one of the reasons why she hated him so much."
Elizabeth stiffened, eyes widening. Yes, she remembered that memory, distant and fading, not actually her own, but Phoebus' mockery of Thalen's leering comment had been in the kiss she planted on her hated enemy - and on Elizabeth's friend and colleague.
But that recollection was disturbing. She turned to the second 'woman'. "Rodney?"
He clicked his fingers several times, trying to think of something. "When Kolya had us during he storm, we were sitting out on the balcony trying to conserve body heat. You called me gentlemanly." It was more than a little eerie to see Rodney's smug expression on a woman's face, but it convinced Elizabeth.
That was a better memory, even through the long, cold, uncertain hours as they waited for news of John to come back. Her lips curved in a brief smile remembering the arm Rodney offered her. "You were," she answered, trying not to be disconcerted by the entirely feminine face looking back at her, "Then."
Ronon didn't wait for her to say his name. S/he smirked, knowingly. "Whipped cream and the preserves jar."
Everyone in the room did a double take at that, and Elizabeth fixed him with a brief glare before she met the wide eyes of the other men in the room. "It was a conversation," she said, her tone of voice warning them that they'd better not jump to the wrong conclusions, even if her complexion wasn't going to play ball.
Carson sat back, and Lorne's expression turned neutral, but the black-haired woman - it was definitely John's hair, anyway - arched a brow at Ronon, who shrugged, then winced, then kept smirking.
Elizabeth took a deep breath. They were who they were - at least in mind.
In body...
"You're..."
"Women, yes," said Rodney briskly. "Look, after we got through the gate yesterday, we went straight for the ruins and found an old man camping out there."
"A hobo," John added. "He was half-mad, rambling about crazy stuff."
"We tried getting some sense out of him, but..." Rodney shrugged.
"We wandered around the ruins, Rodney poked things." John shot a venomous glare at Rodney. At least some things hadn't changed. "There was a flash of light and when we woke up..."
"When we woke up, we were women," said Ronon. 'His' voice was disconcertingly alto, although it retained some aspects of the resonant quality of his masculine voice, it was definitely a woman's voice. Elizabeth glanced at him and was caught by the wry humour in the tanned features. Of the three once-men, it looked like Ronon was the most philosophical about it - at least for the moment. It was...weird, to say the least.
"In that clothing."
He shrugged.
Elizabeth looked at the others. "But Teyla was still...Teyla?"
"Well, of course she is," said the woman who'd once been Rodney. "She's always been a woman!"
It was definitely Rodney. Nobody else could try her patience like this. "I was suggesting that since you were changed into women, maybe Teyla was changed into a man."
The three not-women exchanged glances and shrugged as they turned back to Elizabeth. "She looked the same," Ronon said.
"We didn't check," John said, dry as any humorist.
Elizabeth nodded. The infirmary nurses would have contacted them if there'd been any issues with Teyla. Still, she looked at the erstwhile women sitting at the table before her and concluded that there was no delicate way to say this. "You're...quite sure you're women?" She got three very disgusted looks. "Okay." Pure practicality forced her to admit, "You know, this sounds..."
"Farfetched?" John said.
"Crazy," she returned, then looked at Carson helplessly. "Could they have been...transported into female bodies?"
The doctor shrugged, more serious than the soldiers who were still finding the situation funny with expressions that couldn't quite hide their amusement. "It's possible, but there's a...certain resemblance..."
Elizabeth had to admit it was true. The men - former men? - while retaining their minds, also seemed to have retained some basic genetic characteristics. Feminised, of course, but still...them.
"Look, we need to go back there," said John. "Whatever did this has to be able to undo it." And there, again, was the note of desperation in his - her voice.
Elizabeth looked from Rodney to John to Ronon. "And if it can't?"
"Don't even suggest that," Rodney said sharply. S/he sounded a little desperate as well.
Carson shrugged. "I'll have to run some tests on them," he said. "Mostly to see if these bodies are them just...female."
"Might it wear off?" Lorne offered. He seemed to have made it past the amusement stage, at least.
"Like a...a..."
Rodney snorted. "Like a spell?"
"Well, when was the last time you heard of people changing sex without surgery involved?"
Elizabeth saw John's hand twitch. Rodney was less controlled - his hand made it to the edge of the table before his mind remembered he no longer had the body part he was instinctively reaching for - and that no surgery had been involved. Judging by Ronon's slightly quizzical air, the Satedans had never made it to the 'sex change operation' stage in their civilisation.
"Go with Carson," she said, making the decision. They could argue this until the twelfth of never. "Get the tests run. We still haven't heard from Teyla."
"Get dressed in something that isn't so airy," Ronon murmured, shifting his...her legs.
This time, Elizabeth couldn't help the smile, although it vanished as John added "And we don't want the whole base to know."
"Or even half of it," said Rodney.
Which explained the conference room and the closed doors. "You do know the rumour mill will be working overtime on this?" Carson asked.
He would know, too. The infirmary was a hotbed of gossip gleaned from patients as they lay around to the tidbits that the nurses picked up as they went through the base. Gossip tended to collect at the infirmary - so much so that Carson had once exclaimed they should just call the place 'the grapevine' and have done with it.
John sat up and leaned forward. "Look," he said forcefully, "trust me on this, it's better that very few people know about this until after we're back to normal."
One of the soldiers looked disappointed.
"I agree," Elizabeth said, firmly. As a woman in a leadership position, she was very aware of the criticisms and denigrations that came her way - and Atlantis was chiefly a civilian expedition. A woman in John's position, in an organisation as male-shaped and male-dominated as the US Air Force... Never mind that John seemed exactly the same in his mindset; the soldiers he was supposed to be commanding would look at him and see a woman, and that would colour their perceptions immediately.
No, this incident was best kept behind closed doors - at least for the moment. Afterwards, well, it might be funny afterwards, but for the moment and for the good of the expedition, the fewer people that knew now, the better.
Elizabeth turned the full force of her authority on Lorne and his team. "I shouldn't need to tell you that these events aren't to be discussed around the base." Lorne nodded, then glanced at his team for their assurance. "As far as the rest of the expedition is concerned, you returned with three strangers who will be staying with us for a while."
"A very short while," muttered John, leaning on his forearms on the table. "I hope."
From the expressions on the faces of his now-female team-mates it looked like John wasn't the only one with that hope.
- TBC -
