Disclaimer: We don't deserve to have anything, we've left this abandoned for so long!
Authors' Note: Exploded Pen takes almost full responsibility for the shocking lateness of this post as she started university and you know what? Turns out you actually have to do work! Something which The Libran Iniquity, in her final year, knows only all too well...
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Chapter Eight
"How can we be sure she's telling the truth?" Ford demanded. "I mean, McKay? Saving everyone else instead of himself – doesn't sound like him!"
"Well, according to this original Doctor Weir," Radek replied, trying not to grimace when he saw the 'present' Weir wince, "that is exactly what he did."
"Shouldn't be so quick to judge people, Lieutenant," Sheppard added, quietly but still pointedly. "McKay was the one who faced up against that fog thing a week into the expedition."
"With a shield," Ford replied, caustically.
"That he didn't know wouldn't last against something that fed on energy," Carson shot back.
"Please, gentlemen," Weir interrupted, holding a hand up, "colourful as this debate may be, it's doing nothing to help answer the question of how exactly this – 'original' Weir came to be in a stasis chamber in the heart of Atlantis."
Carson looked apologetic. "I'm sorry, Elizabeth," he said, "but she's not said much of anything coherent the few times she's been awake enough to talk. And my medical opinion would be not to introduce any kind of stimulant into her system – she's ten thousand years old, there's no telling what drugs would do to her."
Before Weir could reply, Rodney came into the briefing room from one of the far entrances – and quietly, not like his usual self at all, Radek noted – and even when he sat down, it was away from the others and with almost no verbal fanfare other than coughing slightly.
"Rodney," Weir smiled. "We were just talking about -"
"Yeah," Rodney interrupted, "the old lady, you in ten thousand years. Know all about it. I've finished analysing the readings and data from the laboratory she was found in, and surprisingly enough everything seems to back up the time travel theory."
"So, it's true, then?" Ford asked him, still in the same disbelieving tone as before.
Rodney blinked. "What's true?"
"Nothing that can't wait until the immediate matters have been dealt with," Weir interjected quickly. "Is there anything else, Rodney?"
"Uh, no. Not really," Rodney said. "All the details are in my report." There was a pause. "Alright then, if there's nothing else I'd… better go do something." He rose awkwardly from his seat and shuffled out the briefing room.
Sheppard glared at Ford for a moment before leaving himself.
Elizabeth blinked. "Dismissed."
o o o o o
Rodney watched apprehensively as Old Weir began to stir; looking around there were no handy medical personnel to take over, and he stopped and stared when he realised she was awake and looking at him.
"Hello, Rodney," she smiled.
Rodney blinked a couple of times. "Uh... hi," he replied lamely. He stepped closer to her bed. "You're... awake."
Old Weir smiled and nodded. "Wondering when I was going to see you," she told him.
"Really?" Rodney asked, and Old Weir nodded.
"Wanted to say thank you."
"Thank me? Thank me for what?" Rodney asked, frowning. "I haven't – done anything. Not since we found you anyway, I -" He stopped, faintly aware he was beginning to babble. Not good.
"Yes, you did," Old Weir told him. "The first time we came to Atlantis, the city began flooding. Some of us found these ships – Gateships – but we couldn't get out."
Rodney frowned again. "What do I have to do with that?"
"You stayed in the 'gate room, tried to open the doors to let us escape in the ships," Old Weir told him slowly. "Drowned trying to get us out of there."
Rodney shuddered remembering what had felt like before the failsafe had kicked in, when parts of the city were flooding and there was nothing he could to stop it. He shook the thoughts away. "I'm not the same Rodney – different timelines remember?"
Old Weir shook her head. "No, you're still the same person – you just don't know it yet."
Rodney thought back to Kolya, remembering the knife easing its way into his arm. "No. I'm really not."
Before Old Weir could reply Carson bustled into the room. He smiled broadly at both of them, then turned to the bed. "Elizabeth, seeing as you're awake would you like a tour of the city? We could get a wheelchair for you."
"That would be lovely," she replied. She glanced up at Rodney. "It was good to see you again, I've missed you." She smiled again. "Don't underestimate yourself, you're a good man."
"Uh, yes, well…I'd better, I mean, I uh…have some things to do," he said lamely before quickly leaving the infirmary, trying not to think about what Old Weir had told him. He wasn't the same person, he really wasn't. There was far too much evidence to the contrary.
o o o o o
Old Weir was dead. The one person in the place that had seemingly unshakeable faith in him. Typical. Rodney let out a quiet sigh and tried to peer over Zelenka's shoulder to see the piece of paper with 'gate addresses that the old woman had left behind. Of course it irked him that he was the one having to do the peering, after all he was head of science… even if he wasn't on the teams anymore some inclusion would have been nice.
Zelenka shifted a little to let Rodney get a closer look at the handwritten 'gate symbols. None of the addresses meant anything to him; they weren't places that had been visited by teams in the past, though one of them had shown up in the database, possibly scheduled for a mission in the near future.
"She claimed there was a ZPM at each address," Zelenka told him. "Doctor Weir has already scheduled a mission to visit the first address. It takes place tomorrow."
Rodney nodded briefly. "Right, I'll cover your work." He wasn't feeling jealous, nope, not in any way.
"I was going to take a closer look at the long range sensors," Zelenka informed him. "Pick up where Brendan left off…"
Rodney glanced at him. Resisted the urge to bitch about how he'd done most of the work anyway, Gaul decimating most of the technology in his path, but kept quiet. Gaul was dead, there was no point squabbling over who had done what now. "Then I guess I'll be getting right on that," he said snippily, wondering when exactly Zelenka had mutated into the department head and himself into the simpering minion.
Zelenka blinked and for a moment an expression of uncertainty passed across his face, before being replaced with something else. "Yes, thank you." He glanced at his watch and frowned. "I have a team meeting, I must go."
He hurried away, leaving Rodney staring after him and trying to ignore the suspiciously hollow feeling somewhere inside of him at the mention of the 'team meeting'. Before the feeling could take any real hold on him, however, he left the infirmary ward as well, heading in the opposite direction to Zelenka. He'd taken the 'gate addresses with him, meaning Rodney didn't have to think about all the missions to potential planets with ZPMs just waiting to be picked up by Atlantean field teams.
Not that there was any statistical chance of any of those ZPMs actually still being around after ten thousand years. The sheer logistics of a single module surviving intact and with power for even half that kind of time, let alone in one place? No, definitely not happening.
So then, why didn't that thought make him feel any better when he finally reached Laboratory One and grabbed Zelenka's laptop to hack into the files on the long range sensor array?
Damned if he could figure it out, or even would want to. Other fish to fry, or whatever the metaphor was.
o o o o o
The meeting concluded relatively quickly, and John hung back while Teyla, Ford and Zelenka left the briefing room. It was just an informal thing before the actual mission in the morning, so it had just been the four of them rather than Elizabeth sitting in as well, trying to oversee everything.
The moment everyone was out of sight, John left as well, slipping out onto the balcony behind the control room. Made sure he was alone out there, and mentally shut the door behind him before turning back out to stare at the ocean.
He knew he'd gotten lucky with the medical pass to go on the field mission after less than four days of being released from Beckett's domain. Though he felt alright in himself there was still something… off, something he couldn't quite put his finger on but it had been dogging him for a while now ever since the storm now he thought about it. A sense that something wasn't right, it seemed to get worse on missions leaving him perpetually uneasy every time he passed through the 'gate.
Hell, who was he kidding? He knew exactly what was wrong. Ever since the Genii had tried to take control of Atlantis, McKay had been acting like someone had left a virus on his favourite laptop. Almost like someone had scraped away the last redeemable part of his personality, and although John didn't want to follow that particular line of thought, he could still make an educated guess as to who that someone could have been. The only thing he really couldn't figure out – and wouldn't, as long as McKay continued to blank him – was not so much why the scientist had let whatever it was get to him the way it obviously had, but more why he hadn't shared this... whatever it was with Beckett, or even John. He still didn't know that he could call McKay a friend, but they'd been somewhere approaching that, until...
The storm again. Everything came back to the goddamn storm.
John leaned forward on the balcony railing. The sun was setting somewhere on the other side of the central tower, and he knew that there was no point in trying to track down, let alone talk to McKay tonight, lest he get a repeat of the previous rant on personal space and intrusions thereof. Then there was the mission to find a ZPM in the morning, and Sheppard would have made a crap military commander if he hadn't been harbouring doubts about that particular tangent, even if he hadn't brought any of them up during the official briefing with a clearly enthusiastic Doctor Weir. Besides he didn't think he could even explain some of his thoughts when he didn't fully understand them himself. There wasn't the same feeling of familiarity within the team anymore, Zelenka was pleasant enough but there were no moments of brilliance no eleventh hour plans that only McKay seemed able to come up with let alone pull off. The dynamic was off, everything seemed, well… samey. There was no excitement in what they did, it was just routine, even the unexpected just seemed routine a little faded around the edges like it had been done before and it was just a sub-standard remake.
No, something had to be done. John was going to track McKay down, pin him in a corner if he had to, but there would finally be some actual talking about what had been happening the past couple of months.
But it would have to wait till after the mission tomorrow.
000 We're working on the next chapter right now! We swear! It's half done! Honest! 000