Unreliable Things – The Missing
by Bil!

Part 2 of 3


For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal.
- Oscar Wilde, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"


There are some things that can't be undone, some wounds that don't heal. John lies in the infirmary in Atlantis, his body a little healed and his mind not at all. He is – lost. This isn't his cell: there is no hole here where Marcus should be, there aren't any guards; this isn't his cell but it almost might as well be.

His team, those half-remembered phantoms he forced himself to forget so that he couldn't betray them, they take turns to sit with him. They tell him stories or news or talk to him about their latest discoveries while he lies in the uncomfortably soft bed with his eyes closed and wonders when the nightmare stops. If the story doesn't end with his rescue, will he ever be more than broken?

Dimly he appreciates the effort his friends are making, but he can't find it in him to respond. He isn't here yet, he isn't safe yet – he's still back in the cell with the ghosts. Markus is dead and he is broken and the story isn't over yet.

His teammates sit with him and his sleep is fitful because their phantoms circled his cell and when he sleeps to the sound of their voices he thinks he's back there and wakes in terror, expecting to find his rescue was all a dream. Expecting to find Markus watching him, expecting to see the ghosts of Markus's husband and brother there too. And in the moment between waking and sleep he hears the sound of the city weeping.

But then Elizabeth comes – then he can sleep, because she didn't haunt him as the others did and when he feels her presence he knows it's safe to sleep.

She sits with him in the evenings, curled up in the chair beside his bed as she works on reports, reading the interesting parts out to him or posing him questions. He never answers, but she doesn't seem to mind. For him, it's enough to be here and almost safe. He isn't safe and he doesn't think he ever will be again, but she keeps him from toppling over the edge. With Elizabeth watching over him, with the quiet rustling of papers and the whisper of her voice, even Atlantis's sobs are quieter.

John grows stronger (physically, only physically) as the doctor (Beckett; he must remember names: Carson) puts him back together with gentle hands. The scientist (Rodney, McKay, Rodney) tries to interest him in little pieces of technology but John only remembers technology to hurt and to harm and he shies away. The young man (Ford? Aiden... Ford; he does remember sometimes) brings a pack of cards; John plays, but barely sees his cards. Too much darkness from the cells clings to him, even in this place of light and air.

Her name is Teyla, he has to remember that. He spent so long forcing himself to forget and now he must force himself to remember. She leads his stumbling steps through the aching long corridors of his weeping city so that he can see the sea, the water stretching out to the vast horizon. This place could never be the cells, not with that distance around it. The cells were about small, cramped spaces, not sweeping vistas of waves and sky.

John stares at the ocean for a long time, clutching at the railing. He remembers this – the sea and beaches and... He wishes Markus was here.

"Thank you," he says. He hasn't spoken in some time and his throat is dry and his voice hoarse. She looks away.

What happened to them? Teyla is thin and Carson is quiet and Elizabeth has dark circles under her eyes... John thinks to wonder what they went through while he was gone but he can't bring himself to ask. He can't handle the guilt as well, that he wasn't here for them when they needed him to be.

What did he lose? He is not who he once was.

John thinks, in the quiet night under the sound of Elizabeth's soft breath and the city's weeping, that his captors broke him despite his best efforts. Despite Markus's strength and Elizabeth's faith he has failed.

He is broken and he hasn't the strength to try to put himself back together.


Carson releases him from the infirmary so that he can recuperate in his room (strange, familiar place, too big and too small and too lonely), but John can't stand the four walls closing in around his solitude. It's too like his empty cell, filled only with the hole where Markus should be, so instead he follows Elizabeth to her office and dozes on her couch while she hold meetings and reads reports and keeps running the city that weeps as he falls asleep.

He hates the nights, alone in the dark, when he can barely remember that he isn't back in his cell. He sleeps fitfully, with the lights on as bright as his city can make them, waiting for morning when he can go to Elizabeth's office and sleep in safety.

Evenings, walking back through the corridors to his loneliness, he listens to the sounds of the city living around him, the controls which obey his thoughts, and he trails his fingers along the walls. Something is missing here. He can feel it, like the gap where Markus used to be, the hole where the missing part of him should fit. Their naquadah generators turn the lights on but there is something here which can't yet breathe.


He spars with Teyla and sometimes he wins, because he has leant about weaknesses now and because he knows that pain is just another rule to be ignored. He picks up a P-90 and tries firing it only to convulsively empty the clip into the targets because he can't stop seeing his torturers in those human silhouettes. When the gun is empty he hurls it at the nearest target, breaking its head off, and then collapses on the ground because in that moment he's back in his cell and he never ever wants to go back there. He refuses to go near the armoury again.

He eats with his team in the messhall, Rodney protesting at wasting time sitting down to eat when he could be doing some work as well, and forces himself to take each bite. There is no poison in this food, he tells himself, no drugs. No one is using this food to attack him. No one here wants to attack him. Sometimes Elizabeth sits with them and she and Teyla take it in turns to eat from his plate and reassure him that the food is okay and no one's tampered with it. He still has to force himself to swallow.

He doesn't like the messhall: there are too many people there. He doesn't like the others, the ones that aren't his team. Some of them look at him with pity or fear or disgust. Mostly pity. He doesn't like them looking at him, he doesn't like their presence, and he doesn't want to deal with them.

Instead he skitters around them, warding them off with an invisible shield, waiting for one of them to reveal herself to be one of his torturers. Some of them try to help, like the doctor who wants him to talk. She says it'll help him if he talks about what he's been through, but John watches the light bouncing off her blonde hair and remembers the woman with short blonde hair who took great pains to explain exactly how she was about to hurt him.

He doesn't want to talk about it. Talking would only make it worse and it's too bad already.

He wonders... He wonders what Markus named the baby.


He's brushing his teeth one night, as if everything is normal, as if he cares about tooth decay, and trying not to gag because the toothpaste tastes almost like the acid they made him eat—

A flicker of white in the mirror, like the skirt of a ghost's dream. He spins, dripping foam on the floor, but there's no one there. Another flicker – just in the mirror, not in the room. Eyeing the mirror warily, he hastily rinses his mouth so that he can back out of the room, never taking his eyes from the bland reflection.

The closed door makes him feel safer, the threat in there and not in here with him. He mentally orders the lights even brighter and doesn't sleep at all that night.

How does he know if he's going crazy?


Elizabeth smiles at him as he enters her office, making no complaint as he makes himself at home on her couch. At no point has she demanded that he explain himself or change his behaviour, and that simple acceptance eases his mind in her presence as no amount of talking could do. In response, the only response he can find to make, he willingly eats the alien apples she has left there in lieu of the breakfast he can never bring himself to eat.

Safe for the moment, he closes his eyes and lets the sound of Elizabeth's breathing chase away the demons as Markus's once did back in a dark and grimy cell. Here there is no need to remember the fearful dark of last night. John sleeps.

Mid-morning he is shaken out of sleep by McKay's boisterous entrance, but Elizabeth is in control and he drifts back again. The weeping of Atlantis crescendos into a keening wail of loss and despair.

"Make him stop crying!"

John wakes up so fast that he nearly knocks himself to the floor. Only as he catches himself does he realise it was he who spoke.

Elizabeth is beside him, her hand reaching out to his shoulder. He clutches at her fingers and tries to stop trembling. "Who?" she asks. "Who is crying?"

"I don't know," he says. "I have to find out."


Elizabeth has faith in him. One day, if he can find the words, he'll tell her what that means to him.

She gives him back his team to go and explore the city. She even decides to join them, though he doesn't know if it's because she's curious, to silence Rodney's protests at the waste of his precious time, or because John can't stop shaking.

His arm is threaded through hers for support, but he tries not to lean on her too heavily. His other hand traces along the wall, feeling the gap in the city systems, searching for the dead area, the hole that longs to be filled.

"Voodoo," McKay grumbles, but John barely hears, listening through his fingertips, seeking, hunting, searching...

They delve deep into the unexplored heart of Atlantis. McKay's complaints are silenced now because he's too busy cataloguing, looking, muttering. The others look around uncertainly, but John doesn't stop. He's close, he can feel it; he's so close—

MINE.

Terrified, he pulls Elizabeth away from the doorway a split second before a forcefield can slice her in two. On the other side his teammates hammer on the forcefield with no effect, mouthing silent shouts that don't reach through the walls. They don't matter: John clings desperately to Elizabeth because she's alive and he'd thought he was too late, he'd thought she was dead, he'd thought he'd failed again.

He can't stop trembling.

But she hugs him back, she's alive. Alive. He didn't kill her too, he didn't.

The tremors wracking his body lessen; almost convinced that she won't die if he lets go, he pulls away. She loops her arm through his in silent comfort and he holds on to the feeling of solid, living warmth. It gives him the strength to risk looking away.

This is the source of the gap, this is where the hole comes from. There's nothing outwardly strange about this room, nothing different to the rest of the city, but he knows it's unique. There's something unseen and unusual about this room, and it isn't the presence of one of the control chairs that allow fine manipulation of the Ancient systems. Something is different here, he knows it is. Here, even awake, he can hear the weeping.

"Can you hear it?" he asks, and he didn't mean for his voice to come out in a whisper. Beyond the forcefield Rodney is frowning into his instruments while Teyla and Ford mouth words at each other like a muted TV. Suddenly he's glad he can't hear them, as if he fears their voices would wake something up.

"Someone crying?" Elizabeth asks quietly and he nods. "No, I don't hear anything."

He steps warily towards the chair, tugging Elizabeth with him, uneasy but unable to stay away. There's something here, something that's needed to fill the gap he can feel throughout the city. Elizabeth follows him without a word, letting his hand slip down her arm so that he can thread his fingers through hers. He needs that contact, needs to know that he's not alone even if she can't hear the weeping.

The chair beckons to him and he sits in it, hesitant and unwilling but driven, needing, to do it. He refuses to let go of Elizabeth's hand, though. If he drops that contact for even a second he might be dragged away from his friends. He's not sure he could stand to lose them a second time.

He leans back.

Even without a ZPM to power it he can feel the soul of the city, the vast potential, the power and the knowledge and the grief. A city which has watched and waited and lost so much.

He's drowning in it, lost in the greatness of a mind he can't comprehend – but there's a voice, a voice calling him out of it, and he grips at Elizabeth's arm with relief and fear and awe, unashamed of the tears on his cheeks because he knows better now than to fear weakness.

"John," she repeats, worried and pleading. "John, are you all right?"

"No," he says. Because he can feel the power, the presence, and he clutches onto her jacket as if she can shield him from what is to come. It slept, grieving in its slumber. Now it is awake.

He stares at the spot in front of the chair, still desperately clinging to Elizabeth like a frightened child, and waits with breathless, terrified anticipation. She follows his gaze – even his teammates outside the forcefield stop their silent movements to wait and watch.

An androgynous figure blinks into existence in front of them, neither male nor female, just there. It flickers through faces, body shapes, skin colours, never holding the same form for more than a few seconds although it's always dressed in the same bland white tunic. Elizabeth's fingers tighten around his and he knows she can see it too.

Its eyes (black, blue, brown, black, green, grey) fix on them, focus on him. Its face becomes female, still constantly changing, and it develops feminine curves. They stare at each other and the changes slow. She decides on eye colour, skin colour, body shape... Her choice is beautiful, with black hair, golden skin, and black, almond-shaped eyes, like a cross between Amaterasu and Cleopatra.

She speaks: "I am here."

No one moves. John's fingers are cramping and he wants to look away but all anyone in the room can do is stare.

Then Elizabeth finally finds her voice. "Who are you?" she asks and it breaks the spell.

The woman looks at her with pity. "Have you forgotten so much?"

It is John who answers, John who whispers, "Atlantis."


End Part 2