Unexpected body swaps were always disorienting, but as Young had just discovered, making an abrupt, unplanned transition from one borrowed body into another borrowed body was about ten times worse. His initial spike of nausea was thankfully ebbing away now, but the disorientation lingered. His mind, which had grown accustomed to donning new skins as necessary, had not been prepared for this particular set of circumstances. He wondered absently if Rush was handling it any better than he was, and then realized that he had no idea what body Rush was currently wearing. His? It seemed odd to hope that that was the case, but none of the alternatives sounded good.
Nothing about this situation sounded good, actually, and Greer hadn't even started talking yet.
"Telford announced a few minutes ago that McKay was going to take Rush's place here on Destiny," Greer began.
Oh did he, now? Well, that was certainly news to Young. Nothing like that had come up while he was on earth, but to be fair, his meeting with General O'Neill had only just gotten past the preliminary stage when his consciousness had been so rudely yanked back to Destiny.
"So," Greer continued, "I come over here to see what McKay is up to, and I find him... tinkering.
He told Eli he was trying to make the connection between him and Rush permanent."
"And I said he had no idea what he was doing, because no one actually knows anything about how the stones work or even what they do, exactly," Eli cut in. "And there's really no telling what could have happened, because-"
"Okay," Young interrupted, "I don't need a play-by-play, just tell me what brought me back to the wrong body."
There was a brief, uncomfortable silence during which Greer and Eli exchanged glances, and then Eli said, "Well, we don't know, exactly. That's what I was trying to-"
"I deactivated the stones," Greer said.
"Yeah, but that was just the trigger," Eli said. "It was whatever McKay did that caused this. I'm just… not real sure what that was." He grimaced.
Young glanced over at the box containing the communication stones. They were all present and accounted for, and he felt vaguely mocked by their orderly presentation.
"The thing is," Eli said in that sort of slow, reluctant tone that never boded well, "the stones really are inactive now, and according to the data I'm looking at, you should be in the correct body."
Young thought he had a pretty good idea of where this was going. "He wanted to make the transfer of two consciousnesses permanent," he said wearily. He could feel his neck beginning to tense up with strain. When he reached back to massage the tight muscles, he was momentarily disconcerted by the feel of Rush's fine, soft hair under his fingertips. The same hair that was sweeping across his cheekbones, giving him the unsettling sensation of tiny insects crawling across his skin. Why the hell didn't the man get a hair cut? Was it vanity or sheer indifference?
"Well, not exactly," Eli replied. "He just wanted to make the connection unbreakable. But I'm not seeing any connection at all, here." Eli tapped at the screen in front of him.
Young squinted at him, fighting to organize his thoughts through his mounting headache. "So…?"
Eli scratched his chin thoughtfully. "So this is just a guess, but I think the next time we drop out of FTL, you won't switch back," he said, and it was clear from his eager tone that his scientific curiosity was overcoming his sense of the calamity which had just taken place. "You'll stay in that body, because it's pretty much home base for you now."
Young glanced at Greer, who had up to that point been maintaining a neutral expression. But at this announcement, his face twisted in evident disgust. "Excuse me sir, but that is fucked up."
Yeah, Young wasn't too thrilled at the prospect of this becoming permanent, either. For one thing, he had just aged by six years, and that didn't seem quite fair, somehow. For another… well, there were scores of reasons why it would be inconvenient to wear this underweight, under-trained body forever.
But at least he wouldn't have to live with long hair forever, if it came to that. Young tried out one of the little head tosses that Rush seemed to perform unconsciously. As he suspected, it was only a temporary fix; the displaced hair slid right back into his face within seconds. He sighed.
"Are we certain that Rush is actually in my body?" He asked, because that seemed like a vitally important fact to establish right about now.
"That's easy to find out, at least," Greer said, looking slightly relieved at the prospect of having something to do. Or perhaps he was feeling some twinges of guilt at the part he played in Young's current predicament. Young was going to have to figure out how to handle that later. Technically, Greer had disobeyed orders. But Young was grateful for his intervention, especially if the alternative had been that he and Rush had gotten stuck in the wrong bodies on Earth rather than on Destiny.
Young nodded at Greer, who turned and disappeared into the hallway. Young suspected he wouldn't have to go very far to find Rush, if it was in fact Rush in Young's body. Rush would be on his way to the stones room now, as eager to find out what the hell was going on as Young had been. How he would handle the news that his stay in Young's body was likely to be of extended duration, and possibly permanent, Young could only imagine.
"Whatever McKay did to those stones, you're going to figure out how to reverse it," he told Eli.
"Yeah, okay," Eli muttered, "I'll just start randomly experimenting on them too. I'm sure that won't have any horrific consequences. I mean, it turned out great for you guys, right?"
"Just fix it," Young growled. Somehow, it just didn't have quite the same menacing effect in Rush's voice as it would have in his own.
In his free time - such as it was, these days - Rush enjoyed working on the particle/wave theory of calamity. If he posited that luck was a force along the same lines as electromagnetism, with the opposing poles of good luck and bad, then it must be possible to isolate its causes and predict its effects to some degree. For example, in his experience the military were a prime example of a negative luck generator. When he had arrived on Earth for what had been billed as "just a simple check up. It'll take five minutes," and found himself surrounded by frowning men with guns and no access to O'Neill at all it had been immediately apparent that this was already a kilo-fiasco if not worse.
Since - contrary to the action of magnetism - bad luck attracted more bad luck, he couldn't say he was exactly surprised when, just as he was gearing up for a fight on earth, he found himself yanked from one body to another, opening his eyes to find everyone in the ship gathered below him in the gate room, glaring at him with hostile expressions. Someone had fucked up. Someone had fucked up as they were wont to do as soon as his back was turned, and now it would be up to him to put it right.
"I don't know what you lot are staring at," he said. "I didn't call you here."
His voice! It came from low in his abdomen. He could feel it rattling round his chest and throat like little stones. He didn't recognize it at first because he hadn't heard it from the inside before, but the sound and the feel of it prompted him to look down. Black boots, black trousers, the name "Young" embroidered on his shirt. He flexed his hands, feeling the stiffness of a broken finger, badly healed and aching.
Well now. Wasn't this a turn up for the books.
"Colonel Young?" A couple of steps down from him, Scott gave him a complicated look. Probably of hope.
He wondered if he should say 'yes.' But his experience with the Lucian Alliance proved that just being in the right vessel was not enough to convince. Humans were remarkably adept at spotting the consciousness inside it. Which made for an interesting existential question, but… not right now.
"That would be convenient," he said, dismissing the muttering crowd from his notice, turning to go. "And so not true."
"Doctor Rush?"
It was hardly rocket science, was it? He and Young had been sent to Earth, if it wasn't Young who had returned, who else could it have been? Honestly you'd have hoped Scott might have reached that conclusion five minutes ago and gone on to something of actual value.
Adjusting for the body's different centre of gravity and weight, he walked out of the room, and when he felt confident began to jog in the direction of the stones.
Scott caught up with him. "Doctor Rush, where are you going?"
And good God he didn't have time for this. "You are an officer of the United States Air Force, yes? So that means you must have had at least some kind of formal education. How about you try exercising your doubtless remarkable powers of observation and deduction to answer that question yourself?"
Infuriatingly, Scott gave him a sympathetic look and pressed the air down with his hands as though he was pressing down the barrel of an invisible shotgun. "Look, I can see you're upset, but-"
'Upset?' He wasn't 'upset.' It was simply clear that something untoward was going on, probably involving Telford. Telford could not be pried off the stones, had undoubtedly swapped with Young and immediately assembled the whole crew for an announcement. That had the flavour of what had been done to them during that first disastrous dial-home attempt. Telford had the clout to arrange for Rush to be held on Earth while someone else handled the scientific side of the affair.
One had to admire how the man learned from his mistakes. Rush had foiled him before, so this time he had been careful to replace Rush too.
God, anger felt solid in this body, supple and volcanic and sweet. He tasted it with pleasure and then let it go, careful not to be distracted. So far so typical. But then something had happened with the stones. Part of Telford's plan? It didn't seem likely.
Belatedly, he remembered Scott. Oh yes, he'd been having a conversation. "I'll give you a clue, shall I? There has clearly been a mix-up with the communication stones, so…"
"We're going to the stones room."
He made a gesture intended to convey the sentiment there you are! See what you can do when you exert yourself. Didn't feel he carried it off with quite his usual panache in this more clumsy form.
Scott grimaced for some reason. "You couldn't have just said that?"
I shouldn't have had to.
Greer skidded into view, running full tilt. Rush rolled his eyes to find himself flanked by the two of them. The Bill and Ben of Destiny, just what he needed.
"Sergeant Greer. Let me guess. There's been a malfunction on the stones. Young and I have returned to the wrong bodies and you've been sent to find me. So you can omit that part and tell me everything else. What has been happening here?"
Greer exchanged an oh, it's Rush alright look with Scott. "Some fucked up stuff, man. Let's get you all in the same room before we talk."
Which was efficient enough a suggestion that he complied.
The sight of… himself brought him to a halt in the doorway with a bark of laughter. He'd seen himself from the outside before, of course, during that incident when there had been two of him, and that had been disconcerting enough. But this, with his body and Young's mannerisms - what a mongrel creature it was.
Rush was taller than Young now. Only an inch or two, but what a difference it made, literally looking down on the man. He hadn't tested this body out to discover the limits of its strength, but he - oh, he had experiences enough to take an accurate guess, and this was glorious. The boot was literally on the other foot, and Young must be asking himself, at this very moment, what would happen if Rush took the opportunity for revenge.
He got close because he could, because it was fun to force Young to look up to meet his gaze. But he wasn't a savage - he didn't take it any further than that.
Young's mild, ironic smile looked unimpressed. Rush recognized the expression as one that meant I know what you're doing and it won't work. But Rush had inside information and he knew it would. It was a constant of human nature that no one liked being loomed over - that no one who was loomed over felt it without a certain twist of apprehension, of low, primal fear.
In that respect, Young had a lot of poetic justice due.
"I hear there's been another cock-up in my absence." Out of habit, Rush reached back to dig the heel of his hand into his aching neck muscles, only to realize that his ever present headache - so continual he had learned to disregard it entirely - had disappeared. His neck was fine too.
Had he really thought this was bad luck? On the contrary, it was delightful.
"Here's the situation as I understand it," said Young, attempting to hook Rush's hair back behind his ears. "Telford came on board with McKay. He told Scott and Greer that McKay was to replace you on Destiny permanently…"
He did what? Rush's amusement dived headfirst into liquid nitrogen. McKay? That lascivious buffoon? McKay who'd had the nerve to criticize his equations to all and sundry on Langara and then fail, utterly fail to make any kind of connection at all? McKay on his Destiny? Over his dead body.
Young was still talking. What was he saying?
"...investigations into your 'probity'. As a result, Telford was going to replace me for the duration of the hearings."
It was a fucking witch-hunt, that was what it was. Oh, they'd leave him alone to toil away in obscurity on some godforsaken little planetoid with the rest of their rejects, as long as he wasn't in any danger of actually succeeding. But now he'd found something good, something valuable of his own, they wanted to take it away. Of course they did. They always did. He should have known it from the start.
If he had been in his own body, he would be shaking now. He knew the texture of his own anger intimately, the fine tremor under the skin, the stir of hairs along the back of his neck and the heartbeat fluttering at the back of his tongue. The need to move itching down his limbs like spiders in the bone marrow. But this came out of silence, rising up out of darkness, sleek, full, burning like a bubble of lava, and it was so extraordinary, so all consuming that his mind recoiled from it as if scalded.
Wait one moment. He attempted to take a mental step back from this body and gather himself. The experience of the stones had never been like this before, never been quite so immediate, so visceral. But then he had been, as it were, remote piloting his host. Now, he was embedded, and it seemed the equipment ran its own subroutines when he wasn't looking. That might prove to be a problem.
Taking a deep breath, he unclenched his hands from around the table edge and attempted to think, still scattered, unsettled by the intimacy of his own physical reactions.
"I'm not going to let that happen, Rush."
Perched on the edge of the table where the stones sat smug in their box, Young managed to do a good impression of his usual stolidly reassuring tone, even using Rush's tenor voice. There was a moment, just a moment, when Rush wildly dared to believe it - remembered being tumbled out of a glass prison and into hope. He remembered reluctant confessions that had lead to astonishing alliances. With a choking ache that hurt too much to examine closely, he remembered that he had asked for help once, and Young had given it.
That had been a fluke though. It did not do to expect that kind of thing on a regular basis. Rush had learned very early in life not to set himself up for that kind of disappointment.
"And how exactly do you propose to stop it?"
Young shrugged, and it was odd to see his own limbs move so slow, as if they were moving through clear water… and he was dropping that metaphor right now.
"First we get this stones problem sorted out so you and I can go back to our own bodies." Young turned his head to give Eli a pointed look, half admonishing, half encouraging. So very him that Rush wanted to charge him rent for using Rush's poor innocent face like that.
"Then I send someone back to Earth, tell them that you stay and that's non-negotiable." Young shook his head, looked like he regretted it when it made his hair swing forward and into his eyes. He grimaced. "The brass want McKay on board, he can come on board as well - I got a dozen civilians who'd be happy to exchange with him full time. But they don't get to take you off unless you decide for yourself that's what you want."
Or to summarize - Young's plan was to get the stones working again and then hope he could change his superiors' minds by pleading with them. Pathetic and unworkable. Re-open their access to the ship, and they would send someone - O'Neill himself perhaps - whom none of the military would dare disobey. Then Rush would be forced at gun-point back to Earth to stand some kind of jumped up trial, and his work would be taken away.
Rush needed to be rational about this. He needed it especially now that his hands were shaking and he wanted to hit something with this body just because he could. He needed to be calm. In control. No one believed in the mission like he did, no one cared with the single minded passion it needed. It was up to Rush and Rush alone to make sure he got to keep this one thing. It had always been up to Rush alone.
He nodded slowly, as though he were considering Young's reassurance with the seriousness it deserved. His thoughts felt faintly slurred, sluggish, and his mood grim, but that was hardly surprising. Turning to Eli, who stood by his open laptop regarding both of them with a wide-eyed look, sympathetic and yet fascinated, he asked, "I assume you recorded what happened during the transfer?"
"Duh. Of course I did. But like I was telling the Colonel, the stones are inactive right now. This…" Eli held out both palms as if offering Rush to himself, "Is pretty much you. And while I don't want to be quoted on this, I'm thinking a system reset could solve everything else and give us contact with Earth again."
Which would be the worst of all worlds and could not be allowed.
"No, no, no, that would be much too dangerous," Rush's mind finally spun up to speed, he swung back into action with a feeling of relief. There had been a moment there when he was afraid his cognitive capacity had been affected.
"We don't know what the results might be of being hosted in someone else's body on a permanent basis. The pressure of a strange consciousness forcing the brain to rewire to adapt itself to profoundly new ways of thought? It could lead to psychosis, brain damage, stroke…" He shook his head, rather pleased with the spur of the moment rationalization. It sounded genuine enough to convince."We'll do as the Colonel suggests. Fix this problem first. Then worry about Earth."
Step One: get the military out of the room. That ought to be easy now they had been assured of prompt obedience, though perversely enough, Young did not look convinced. That long level stare of his was more hawk than lion, from Rush's eyes, but disconcerting nonetheless.
It gave him a twinge of cold under the heart to be suspected again after these last few months of trust, but he… he couldn't afford to think about that right now. "Show me your data, Eli. Gentlemen, this may take some time. We'll be sure to tell you when we have something worth reporting."
They didn't go immediately of course, because that would have been useful. Young lingered awkwardly, like he was trying to think of something to say. And if he didn't go soon, Rush would have to think about the way he kept sliding his hands through Rush's hair - and that was just a token of the way he must be gradually getting to know what being Rush felt like, just as Rush was gradually learning what it was to be him.
He didn't want to think about that either. He turned his back on the three of them, bent over the computer, caught the reflection of his face in the screen and shut his eyes for a heartbeat before he could waver.
Behind him Young sighed. Footsteps heralded the military's departure. Step One achieved.
Step Two: prevent Telford and McKay from ever coming back, and prevent himself from ever being forced to leave, by disabling the stones permanently. If that meant stranding him in a younger, stronger body, so be it, he could live with that.
He might never be able to look at this face again without thinking about what he had done to Young… But it wasn't as though he had done it. No need to be melodramatic. McKay and Greer had done it between them. Rush was as much a victim here as Young was. He must not lose sight of that fact.
Step Three: make sure nobody found out about Step Two.
In a moment of irresolution, he thought about the bridge, Eli's expression of utter betrayal, the anger that had pulsed from the whole crew, pervading the ship, in which he had had to breathe, eat and sleep for weeks afterwards. They would not take to this well either, being permanently cut off from their loved ones, being finally utterly on their own.
But it might focus their minds at last on what was important - on the mission. He could sell the mission to them as the only way of ever returning. It was high time that umbilical cord to Earth was cut and people began to accept that this was their home now. He was doing them a favour, really.
"Let's run a systems check on the base, and then on each stone individually." That would take seven hours, more than enough time for Eli to grow bored and wander off. At which point he could take out a few vital expressions from the code and the job would be done.
"So, 'probity' huh?" Eli gave him a friendly sideways grin. "Who do you reckon ratted on you to merit that one?"
The only one he could rule out was Young. For all his faults, Young was not the kind of man to sneak around behind anyone's back. He favored the straightforward, headlong attack. Rush appreciated that. Other than Young? "I don't know, Eli. It could have been anyone."
"Yeah, you've not really been flavor of the month for the past five years."
Rush laughed, startled by the growl of it. That was true enough. He was really rather surprised he hadn't yet been lynched. Hence the vital importance of Step Three.