With Gate Team One off world, Elizabeth decided it was an opportune time to take a five minute vacation with a mounds bar before all hell, as usual, inevitably broke loose. The doors to her quarters slid open and the lights came on. There was a body sprawled across the floor. "Doctor Sheppard? John, answer me!" She knelt beside the man and felt for a pulse. "I know you're not dead, John. Talk to me." No response. "I'm calling Carson."
"No, don't." John blindly grabbed at her, finally settling on a death grip on her forearm. "You have to be the balladeer, carry the message. Tell him I'm sorry. Tell him I had to." The eyes that finally opened were glazed and unfocused. "I never wanted to hurt him. I wanted to save him. I wanted to save her. I need them both, do you understand? I couldn't let him go, it would ruin everything. The life I had with him is the sacrifice for her, the lamb on the altar."
He wasn't making any sense, and she touched the back of her hand to his forehead. Feverish and incoherent. This was the end stage of the disease he'd described to Carson. "It's alright, John. You've done all you could." She let her hand stay on his face, remembering how Ananke had been curled beside him so he could feel something, anything, besides the pain.
"Not everything." His hands tightened, then loosened and he let her go. "You can't trust Caldwell. He'll betray you. He's the one, he's the spy, he's going to ruin everything. The Goau'ld, they've gotten him. One too many beers and bang, snake in the head. Can't trust him, can't let him send me away."
"Of course not." There was a fine line of blood trickling from his nose now. "Please let me call Carson."
"No doctors! Last survivor, like the people in the pods you found. Can't live like that any more. Let me go, please, just let me go. I want it to stop. I want… I want to be back in Tokyo, in the park on a Saturday morning. I want a future where I'll never have that. Can't have them both. Choose this. Love him there, or love her here. Maybe love them both here. That's better. That's better, isn't it?" His eyes suddenly focused in on her. "Tell me the City is more important. Tell me I didn't waste the last few months with him, working on this, instead of living our lives. Tell me."
"It was worth it." She brushed his hair out of his eyes and stroked his face. She could feel him tremble. She'd read the report he'd given Carson about what to expect, about how Rodney had died, screaming. "John, what did you take?"
"I didn't ask. Got it from Carson, before I left. So much I can't tell you, Elizabeth, because I wasn't here. They sent me away, killed the City. You can't let them send me away. You have to separate us, you have to. We're worth more here. Our lives, that life, the one I had with him, it's not worth losing everything. He made me promise him on his death bed, Elizabeth. Don't make me a liar."
"It's alright, John." She found the needle he'd used; it had rolled a few feet away. There were a few ounces of fluid in it. "If you take the rest?"
"I'll go fast." His eyes darted to the needle in her hand. "Everything I told you was a lie. There were a million people on Lantia at last count, even when we lost the City we stayed. There was no enemy, just bad luck and death. Promise me you'll separate us, promise me you'll stop Caldwell."
"I promise. I'm going to take care of everything. We're going to be okay. The City will survive." She could see he wasn't listening. She tapped his shoulder. "Do I need to hit a vein?" He shook his head then let it rest on the floor, like it was too much effort to hold it up any more.
Afterwards, Elizabeth threw the needle into the trash disposal and sat back down beside the body. "I'm pushing Carson to commit what is essentially genocide. I never thought I'd be the kind of person who could do that and still sleep at night." She folded his arms across his chest. "Not that the sleeping is unassisted, but now that I know it works, that we can beat them, maybe I won't need the pills any more. But you have to understand, Doctor Sheppard, I can't break up my flagship team. Not yet. I need John and Rodney out there doing what they do best. But don't worry, I'm going to take care of Caldwell for you." She touched her earpiece. "Weir to the Infirmary. I've just found Doctor Sheppard in my living room. He's dead. I'm going to need a medical team up here."
Doctor Biro's voice came on. "No one down here is going to be sorry to hear that, Elizabeth. Rodney was brought in ten minutes ago in anaphylactic shock. He says Doctor Sheppard tried to kill him."
'I never wanted to hurt him.'
"I'll be right down."
---
What Could Have Happened
"Elizabeth asks..." Teyla hesitated, then corrected herself. "No. Elizabeth begs of you both, come home."
John laughed, and it wasn't a nice sound. He went to the mini-bar and stared into it, as if the answer was inside. "How bad is it?" He tossed two bottles in Ronon and Teyla's general direction.
"The City has rejected us." Ronon caught the bottle and cracked open the seal. "The doors won't open, the lights won't turn on. Unless you have the mark of the Ancestors, she's cold and unresponsive. We talk to her, and most of the time she doesn't listen. Only the gate room warms to us."
"I hate to tell you this, but my ex-girlfriends are never happy to see me." Beer in hand, John sat on the arm of Rodney's chair. "Maybe I don't want to go back."
"Oh, don't be ridiculous." Rodney reached up and stole John's beer. "Of course we're going back. Two years is plenty of time to wrap up our work here, and we can take the best of this batch of post docs with us."
"Can I have some dignity here?" John grabbed his beer back and took a long drag from the bottle. "Of course we're going back, but it would have been nice to let Elizabeth sweat it out for a few months. Seven years in exile with no word, she deserves to stew a little."
They had changed so much. As she opened her own miniature bottle of vodka, Teyla had to wonder if they would be so close if they still had to hide their relationship as they had that first year in Atlantis. "The past seven years have been fraught with conflict, but the Wraith are no longer the threat they once were. It was after we turned back their final major attack that the City became unresponsive. When I tell Elizabeth of-"
"Hold that thought." John looked at Rodney. "Do we actually want to do this? Not the Atlantis this, the why we're in Canada this."
"I suppose that it makes financial and legal sense-"
"Yes or no, Rodney. Do you want to do this or not?" John still wasn't exactly sure how they'd ended up in Ontario with an appointment with a Justice of the Peace, but here they were. "Because if you do, I think we found our witnesses."
Rodney reached up and took John's right hand and rubbed some warmth back into the circulation-poor digits. "You realize this may be the craziest thing we've ever done?"
"This is no crazier than being in a/an X302 without navigation, flying towards a sun." John could tell Rodney was cracking. "No crazier than staying in the City while the storm of the century headed in our direction."
Rodney had done the math a thousand times and the chances of the two of them reaching this age alive and relatively intact had, at one time, been astronomical. Now, unless he blew himself up in the lab or John flew one of his experimental ships into a mountain, their circumstances had changed a lot. With the Wraith gone, or at least partially neutralized, they could go home. He could have that lifetime with John. "Let's do it. Teyla, Ronon, how would you like to go to a wedding?"
"Your people dress as flightless birds for your commitment rituals?" Teyla watched as John attempted, unsuccessfully, for the third time, to get his bow tie done.
"I do not look like a peng-" John actually looked in the mirror. "Yes. Yes we do. And don't ask me why, it's just one of those things."
Teyla hid a smile, then reached into her bag. "When you have finished, I have a 'thing' of my own I wish to share."
"If I didn't know you, I'd worry about that sentence." John finally got the tie knotted and turned around to see what Teyla was up to. She'd taken out a long teak box and from it a bamboo handled brush. "One of your people's rituals?"
"Yes, please sit down." She took out a small bottle of ink from her bag and dipped her brush into it. "When one of my people married an offworlder, it was always tradition to paint the symbols for home on the bottoms of their feet, so that they could always find their way home should they wish." Teyla propped John's feet up on a suitcase and began tracing the first symbol. "I served Atlantis for much longer without you than with you, John, but I wish you to know how important your friendship was to me. The City became my home, just as it became yours. It is her symbols you should wear today."
John tried not to laugh as the brush tickled his feet, and decided this hadn't been such a bad idea after all.
"Nude."
"Nude. Right." Rodney nodded to himself as he did up the buttons on his vest. "That's very Spartan, although I can't imagine winter ceremonies were much fun. Didn't your planet have a winter?"
"A long one. People just got married inside. Not everyone, not by the time I was born." Ronon looked absolutely serious, which made Rodney wonder if he was joking. "My parents were strict adherents to the traditions. They were married wearing nothing but the beads in their hair." Love had been simpler, on Sateda. If two people belonged together and just didn't connect, a professional was brought in. When he'd first met John and Rodney, he'd wished fervently for a Matchmaker, to make them see reason. When they'd sent his Taskmaster away for something so normal as loving a fellow soldier, he'd realized that sometimes you had to be blind to survive. "There was always a blessing. May you live to grow old together."
Rodney put on his cufflinks and stared into the mirror. "The numbers keep getting better for that, actually."
Exile + 3248 Days (8.9 years)
"You've got to be kidding me." Rodney looked at the manifest in his hand. "What is it with the Greek names? Is it too much to ask that these people name a ship after someone who wasn't struck down in his prime by a terrible fate? Someday, when we join a Federation-esque group, they're going to ask us about our ship names and we're going to have to tell them the brass has a thing for Greek tragedy."
"It's not like they named her the Oedipus, Rodney." John looked at the satellite telemetry of the Agamemnon in orbit. "And 'Agamemnon' isn't, in the strictest sense of the word, a Greek tragedy, even though everyone calls it that."
Rodney looked at the blurb that explained the ship's name. "His wife and her boyfriend killed him after he came home from ten years of war. I'd call that a tragedy."
John put an arm around Rodney's waist and drew him in close, like he had that day they'd installed the first ZPM. "A tragedy is when the hero doesn't come home." They were going home.
Nostros (The Return)
There was a woman with a bull horn standing at the end of the disembarkation ramp. "Attention! There are a thousand people waiting to get off the Agamemnon, so please move to the end of the ramp. Earth military personnel wishing to enlist in the 'Lantian military will take a red form, proceed through the red door on your right, and check in with the Major. If you are military personnel seeking permanent residency and then enlistment, take the blue form. If you are a civilian scientist or are seeking asylum from forced military service, take a green form, check the appropriate boxes and go through the green door. If you are part of the Unas/Pennsylvania mining cooperative, please follow the orange line on the floor to temporary quarters. We will be shuttling you to Produ as soon as you clear quarantine."
"Rodney, did we get off on the wrong planet?" They hadn't even landed in the City. The mainland was no longer home to the small settlement of Athosians and a few anthropologists. Intellectually, John had known this. But it was one thing to read a report and another to see for himself. Over the past eight years, they'd built a small, modern city with a docking station, capable of handling Promethus class vessels as well the newer Aurora class.
"Come on. Green form, green door." Rodney started pushing through the crowd, without looking back to see if John was following. "I cannot believe how many people are here now. There were five times more people on that ship than there were in the entire city that first year. At least we won't have to worry about traffic jams on the commute into Atlantis every day. Tokyo traffic is one thing I won't miss."
Someone behind them snorted. "Commute into Atlantis? What turnip truck did the two of you fall off?" The American scientist looked at them over the top edge of his paperback. "Only gate teams and senior scientists go into Atlantis."
"What are you talking about?" John shuffled forward in line, more than a little confused about what the guy had said.
"This is my second fellowship in Pegasus. The only time I was ever allowed in Atlantis was when I got to go on a trading mission." The book went back up and there was the snap of bubble gum. The guy was done with them. "Word to the wise, Noobs. Don't hit on the hologram. Doc Z doesn't like it."
"Right..." John resisted the urge to say, 'Do you know who I am, kid?' and just bit his tongue. It had been a long time. Chances were, outside of the old senior staff, no one here even knew his name. The line moved forward again and John found himself standing in front of a young woman who looked bored and unhappy to have to deal with all these people.
She took the form from his hands and gestured at him with her pen. "Name?"
"Sheppard. John F. Sheppard."
The woman's eyes were the size of saucers and she had flushed red. "Oh my god. The John Sheppard? The one who forged the alliance with the Athosians? The man who flew a nuclear bomb into a hive ship, flew one of the X-302s near the sun without navigation? The man who-"
"Stop reminding him of all his suicide runs! Do you know how hard it was to break him of that habit? Now, the first time I turn my back, he's going to do something stupid and leave me a widow." Rodney slapped his own form down on the table. "Rodney Ingram McKay. Can we go now?" The guy behind them choked on his gum. Rodney shot him a look. "It was my uncle's name. Don't be a jackass."
"No...nono. I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to insult you, sirs. Please don't tell Doctor Weir I was rude. I'll end up studying mold for the next year." The kid looked ready to drop to his knees and beg. "I didn't know it was you."
"Calm down, you're embarrassing yourself." John could hear his name being whispered all down the line. "How do you people even remember us?"
"Sir, everyone on Lantia knows the story about the two of you." The form woman didn't look bored any more. She looked about ready to jump out of her seat. "How you both kept the Atlantis alive those first two years. How when you were forced to leave, Doctor McKay gave up his position and followed you back to Earth. The two of you are like... the ultimate post-modern love story. I have the novel some-"
"Please stop." John met Rodney's eyes. "We've been romance noveled."
"It's worse than that." Everyone was getting out of line and crowding around them. "We're... celebrities." They were crowding in closer. "What the hell is wrong with you people? Get away from us!"
The form woman picked up a walkie talkie. "Hannah, we're going to need a transport into the City asap. It's McKay and Sheppard. They've come back!"
---
"So, who did you sleep with to get him back on board?"
"I take it you've seen the personnel manifest." Elizabeth leaned back in her chair. "Sit down and turn on the sound proofing, Nick."
Nick Lorne sat down and thought 'on'. Then he thought it again, then a third time. Finally, there was that buzz in the back of his head that meant the City had responded. "It's on."
"I didn't seduce General Landry on my last vacation, if that's what you're asking. The Canadians have been trying to get Rodney back from the Japanese for years. They even offered him a position here, but he wouldn't come without John, and the Americans weren't going to give him clearance. We were all waiting for him to make an honest man out of John, so we could bring them both back, but there was just no more time. I gave them a little push."
"A little push." This was the woman who had seeded the atmospheres of dozens of worlds with the retrovirus. She'd considered that a little push. Nick personally thought Elizabeth was a little crazy these days, but with the City dying all around them, who wasn't? "I only knew them for a few months, but neither of them seemed the marrying kind. What kind of push did you give?"
"I bribed the departmental secretaries at Tokyo University. When Rodney and John went to visit Jeanie, they added an appointment with a justice of the peace to the itinerary." Elizabeth was smiling, something that always made Nick nervous.
"That is… truly frightening, Elizabeth." There was a crash from the gate room. "Didn't tell Chuck, did you?"
"I didn't tell anyone." Elizabeth walked over to the glass window that overlooked the gate room. Absolute chaos had broken out as the science crew mobbed John and Rodney. They'd become legends here. "In six months, we're having elections. I like this office. If the two of them can sweet talk the City into actually letting us live here again, I think I might just get to keep it."
---
The doors opened slowly as they made their way to Radek's lab. Hannah had to touch the door panels and concentrate before they'd slide open for her.
"I take it your gene is synthetic?" Rodney made a mental note to stop by the infirmary and get a top up. After eight years, his body had completely renewed itself and his ATA gene was gone. He'd thought they were coming home but everything was different. Even the synthetic gene had changed while they were away. Carson's therapy took in seventy five percent of people now, but it still failed to produce anyone with as much natural ability as John.
"No." They got to a door that would not open, no matter how hard she tried. She slammed on the panel, then took the plate off. "I have the natural gene. Anyone it pops up in gets to do their two years of service here." There was an Israeli flag on her jacket. "Doctor McKay, if you would?"
"Of course." Rodney took a leathermen from his pocket and peered into the circuitry. "There's nothing wrong."
"There never is." Hannah touched the door, stroked it almost. "She doesn't love me. I'm not good enough for her."
Rodney crossed two wires and the door slid open. "You talk like the City is alive. I know it may seem like that but-"
"Things have changed." Hannah tapped on one of the office doors. "Ananke? Are you cohesive?"
A voice with an Eastern European accent came, not through the doors, but through the comm system. "We are interfaced." The voice sounded... familiar, although Rodney couldn't quite place it.
Their pilot made an irritated noise. "Well, materialize. We have important guests." This door slid open with a thought. A short, dark haired woman stood in the middle of the small room. The paneling had been stripped off the walls, exposing all the circuitry.
"Sirs, this is Ananke. The holographic mainframe interface. She'll take care of you until Doc Z gates home." Hannah gave them a smile, which John returned but Rodney was frozen, staring at the hologram. "I'll leave you in Ananke's hands."
"You do that." After she left, Rodney stepped into the room. "This is... This isn't right. What has he done?"
The hologram gave him a small smile and held out both her hands. "Rodney."
"Don't Rodney me. This is... profane, is the only word I can think of. Sick and twisted might work, too." He turned her face from left to right, then tilted it up and looked at her jaw. There was a tiny scar on her jawline, beneath her left ear. Then he examined her right hand. There was an old scar from a burn, right at the base of her thumb. "Do you know who you are?"
"Rodney, the kid just told us-"
"Quiet! I didn't ask you." Rodney didn't let go of the hologram's hand. "Do you know?"
"Of course." She put her other hand on top of the one he was clenching. "I am a personalized holographic interface, in the image of the woman called Krista."
"What does he do with you?" They'd been gone a long time. These people, their friends, weren't the same people they had been. The trust was gone, and this was a good reason why.
"Whatever he wants." She tilted her head in eerie mimicry of the real woman Rodney had known. "I disturb you. This is a new reaction. Your people, in general, find me soothing."
"Most people here weren't at your funeral." Rodney let go of her hands. "You're sentient, I assume. Not just a copy pulled from his mind. You wouldn't be very useful in running the City if you really were Krista."
"You are correct. A cellist would be of little use." The hologram was smiling at him. "I am glad you have returned. There may be hope for Us yet."
"We love the City more than anything. I'd die rather than let her fall." Rodney pushed aside the sickness in his stomach. He hadn't been there, he hadn't been through the war. He had no right to judge what Radek had done here. "John, come say hello."
"Hello? Ten seconds ago, she was profane." John was still carrying his luggage, his hands were ice cold from the strain and his ankle whining about all the walking. "What's going on? Who is she?"
"It's nothing." Rodney took a deep breath. "Status report, please. What is the condition of the City?"
"The City waits for John Sheppard." Her small smile became a grin. "And he has finally come home."
"Yeah, it's good to be back." Rodney still looked kinda horrified, but John couldn't figure out why. "The doors aren't opening. No one lives here any more. Wanna tell me why?"
"For years, the scientists here cursed the lack of a Lantian Google. There is no search function in the database because I am the search function." She made a hand gesture and a view screen popped up, showing an ageless figure with no face. "My original form was faceless, speechless, emotionless. Exactly how the Alterrans wanted their interface. They named me A.N.A.N.K.E. I would tell you what it stood for, but it does not translate. But I am more than Google. I am interfaced to the Mainframe. I am the City, and she is me. Or so it was, before. Radek awakened me and thought I was damaged. He linked the interface with the holographic companion generator. The device leached my form from his mind." Ananke touched her hair, her face. "It gave me this flesh. It gave me his memories of her. It gave me emotion. Love, pain, despair. We had known love, in a way, for the two of you. You woke us up, you loved us. We had known pain. The City had been damaged many times. But despair... We had never known despair. Atlantis became convinced she was going to die."
"I don't understand."
Ananke seemed to notice the way John was favoring his ankle. "Let me get you a chair." She ducked out of the room and came back in with two of the heavy wooden chairs the Athosians made. She carried them like they were weightless. "You must understand that for a moment, we became Krista. Her hopes, her dreams, her fears. Radek's last memories of her terrified the City. He disconnected me from the main systems, but it was too late."
"Do you have to be cryptic and vague?" John sat down heavily and looked up at Rodney. "Translate from computer to English for me."
"Krista died of lymphatic cancer. It was slow. We had to sit there and watch her die." Rodney sat beside him and rubbed his face with his hands a couple times. "The City thinks she has cancer. She's shutting down, trying to protect the central spire. The brain. Like a body fighting cancer."
"Radek does not possess the ATA gene. His memory is a cancer. A foreign body, poisoning the City. We must cut it out of her. I can think of no one better than the two of you." A schematic appeared out of thin air. "There is a secondary control chair in the 3rd District. Together, I hope we can convince the City that the only threat is herself."
-----
What Happened
They had Rodney hooked up to an oxygen and an IV. His eyes were closed when Elizabeth pulled back the curtain, but they flickered open after a minute. "What happened?"
Elizabeth steadied her nerves. "He tried to kill you. His mission was to kill you."
Rodney shook his head violently. "No. No, that's not possible. John-"
"That man was not John Sheppard, not the John we know. He was crazy, Rodney. I think maybe he was crazy before he even got here." She picked up one of Rodney's hands and squeezed it. "He fooled all of us."
"Why would he want to kill me?"
"There was an occurrence at the SGC not too long ago. Dopplegangers came through, stole a ship and headed here. They wanted our ZPM. That could only mean that their own Atlantis had fallen. Whatever he told you, Rodney, however he made you trust him? That was a lie. It never happened. His Atlantis fell to the Wraith."
----
What Could Have Happened
Rodney had gotten John, Radek had gotten six months as a prisoner of the Genii. He came back with radiation poisoning and a cancerous tumor in his hip. "Is ironic, yes?"
"In the Alanis Morriset way, I suppose." Rodney took the offered cup of coffee from Radek's shaky hands. "Ananke is... How can you stand it?"
"I have no choice. I cannot function in Atlantis without her. I still lack the gene." Radek poured two packets of sugar into his own coffee and stirred. "I have come to think of her as comfort for a dying man. I know she is not Krista, but I can see those little glimpses. The things I missed the most."
"I don't think I can work with her. John thinks she's wonderful, now that he's figured out how she interacts with his sensory perceptions." Rodney, sitting in what had been his office, could almost pretend it was old times, if Radek didn't look emaciated and half dead. "Could we change her appearance?"
"I would rather you waited. I will be dead in less than six months." Radek rubbed at his hip, as if that could take away the pain. "I refused to go home for treatment. Carson has tried other things, but I... We have been grossly overexposed to radiation. Too many nukes, too many accidents. We knew this was a possibility."
"John wants to interface with the City tomorrow." Rodney toyed with one of the devices on Radek's desk. It glowed in his hands. "My gene therapy took."
"I have broken my promise to you. I did not take good care of the city."
"It's immaterial, Zelenka." The device flared to life, throwing a building schematic up on the wall. "She didn't take very good care of you, either."
----
What Happened
Gate Team 1, minus their scientist, strolled through the Gate right on schedule. John was holding a ZPM, Ronon and Teyla both had take-home boxes the size of suitcases. "Elizabeth missed one hell of a dinner. Chuck, did you know-"
"Doctor McKay is the infirmary." The gate technician cut him off. "Your counterpart tried to kill him."
John threw the ZPM at Chuck and tore out of the gate room.
