A/N: Welcome back! A quick disclaimer: I foolishly have done the opposite of the Hemingway approach to writing and wrote sober, then edited tipsy... So if there are mistakes, blame Tipsy Chick...not Traveler's Chick.
I've gotten some interesting feedback about Emma's character, so I decided to write this chapter from her perspective so that we could get inside her head a bit.
Also, a quick thank you to all of my new followers and reviewers! I hope you're all enjoying so far. Thanks for your support. :)
"What about this word?"
"Council."
He pointed to another word. "And—and this one?"
"Consequences."
"Okay and, last one I swear, this one?"
"Destroy."
Emma and Dr. McKay huddled over a tablet together in the physicist's lab while Col. Sheppard, Teyla, and Ronon hovered close by. She felt a bit out of place, as though she were intruding on their infamous team dynamic, but McKay had specifically requested assistance from the base's foremost expert on Ancient and, as senior linguist, that meant her.
McKay nodded and then hesitated for a moment. "This one?"
"Are you sure you don't want me to translate the whole thing for you?" she offered, trying to take the tablet from him. "It won't take me that long."
"No," he said with a decisive tug of the tablet in his direction. "No, no. That's all I needed."
"Are you at least going to tell me what we're looking at?" she asked, raising an expectant eyebrow. "Knowing the context would definitely help me with the translation."
"Maybe later." He closed the window on his tablet and opened another one.
Emma frowned. "So…then…do you still need me here," she gestured over her shoulder, "or should I go?"
"Uh-huh," McKay replied, completely distracted by the new image on his screen.
Taking that as a dismissal, she got to her feet and started to head toward the door.
"You actually might want to stay," Sheppard called, bringing an end to his own conversation with Teyla and Ronon. "Eva's gonna be here any minute. Apparently, Rodney has a theory about how she got here."
She turned to look back at McKay. "Really?"
The physicist made no indication he had heard her.
"Rodney," Teyla prodded.
McKay glanced up at the group, his eyes shifting from face to face. "What?"
The gentleman he was, Sheppard pulled a stool back out for her. "Might be worth hearing," he shrugged.
From the back of the room, Emma heard Ronon clear his throat and watched as he momentarily turned his back to the group. As she took the seat offered to her by the colonel, Eva entered the lab, her two guards following close behind.
"You wanted to see me?" she asked.
After just a few nights of actual quality sleep and access to running water, she already looked better, Emma thought. The dark shadows under her eyes had lightened to reveal bright hazel irises – rimmed in light green with a brown center – eerily like Ronon's. Her dark brown hair, which she had partially braided, fell straight down her back, untangled, and free of forest debris. She wore a non-descript base uniform, the normally-colored chest patches zipped over with a gray panel to indicate she was a civilian and nothing more. It was a slight improvement over the shapeless jumpsuit she had worn the day before, and a vast improvement over the torn and baggy rags they had found her in. On her right arm, she wore the Atlantis patch, but no patch to denote her nationality on her left. Emma briefly wondered why she wasn't donning the stars and stripes but after a quick moment of thought it dawned on her; maybe because of Eva's father and her place of birth, she wasn't considered an American citizen.
What a concept that was. Ronon Dex, the hot-headed weapons specialist and resident badass, a father? Emma stole a furtive glance in the Satedan's general direction as her mind entertained the thought of him cradling a small pink bundle in his strong, tattooed arms. For just a second, his eyes met hers, her stomach lurched, and she quickly looked away.
"Hm?" McKay turned to face the girl. "Oh. Yes. I just had a few quick questions for you." He began tapping the screen of his tablet with the stylus.
Teyla gestured politely to another empty stool. Eva gave her a hesitant smile, sat down, and picked up an artifact from McKay's counter.
He snatched it out of her hands. "Yeah, no. Please don't touch that. Or anything," he scolded.
Eva rolled her eyes, sighed, and looked up at the ceiling. "What's your question, McKay?" Based on the way she spoke to him, it was evident the McKay from her time hadn't changed much from the McKay they all knew and tolerated.
"I listened to the recording of your interrogation with Major Lorne," he continued clicking around on his tablet, "and your description of the man on the Cruiser sounded familiar to me."
"You think you know who he is?" she asked, doubtful.
He rotated the tablet screen away from him, the image of a thin, middle-aged man with brown hair and beady blue eyes staring back at the rest of the group. "Is this him?"
Eva's gaze traveled from McKay's face to the image on the tablet. Her eyes grew. "Yes!" she exclaimed. "That's him! How did you find him? Do you know him?"
"All this talk of time travel got me thinking. So…I searched through some of the Atlantis archives until I found the disciplinary records I was looking for."
"Disciplinary records?" Eva repeated. "Did this guy work on Atlantis?"
"You could say that," McKay replied with a cryptic tilt of his head. "He used to live in this city…ten thousand years ago."
"What?"
"Just get to the point, McKay," Ronon urged.
"This," he pointed to the picture, "is Janus…the Ancient."
Sheppard took the tablet from McKay's hands and scrolled through the file. "Janus?" he echoed. "I thought he was a good guy."
"Chaotic good, is perhaps more accurate," McKay said.
"Was he not the one who helped program the city's failsafe mechanism?" Teyla asked.
"That's him," McKay confirmed.
"That doesn't make any sense, McKay," Ronon said, arms crossed. "What would one of the Ancestors be doing on a Cruiser helping the Wraith?"
"And how could he possibly still be alive?" Teyla added. "Eva, you claimed that he appeared to be in his forties."
Eva nodded. "But that's definitely him," she confirmed, gesturing with her chin toward the tablet in Sheppard's hands.
"Did you say he called the Wraith commander 'master?'" Sheppard asked.
Eva nodded once again.
He silently ruminated for a moment, staring at the tablet. "You guys remember when I was captured by the Genii and thrown in prison with Todd?"
McKay cocked his head. "You don't think…"
"It would make sense," Sheppard said.
Emma looked back and forth between the two men, unable to decipher their seemingly telepathic communication with one another. She shook her head. "What would?" she finally asked.
"We've learned not only can the Wraith can take away life, they can also give it," McKay explained. "They call it the Gift of Life."
Sheppard looked over to Emma and Eva. "After we escaped from the Genii prison, Todd fed on me till I was nearly dead; he needed the strength to take out the remaining soldiers. But, once they were…uh…neutralized, he returned my life to me."
McKay scoffed. "He came out of there looking younger than when he went in."
"He told me the gift was reserved for their brothers," he revealed, "and their most devout worshippers."
"You're saying Janus is a Wraith worshipper?" Ronon asked, making no attempt to conceal his disgust at the thought.
"Can the Gift of Life even extend one's life span that significantly?" Teyla inquired.
"Apparently so," McKay answered. "Couple that with a few intermittent stints in a stasis pod and the fact that Janus was known to have experimented with time travel…who knows how old he really is."
"Did Dr. Weir not tell us that Janus evacuated to Earth with the rest of the Ancients when they abandoned the city?" Teyla interjected.
"She did," McKay nodded. "He did. Who knows? Maybe he tried to travel back to Pegasus – to recover all of his research here – but never made it. It's possible the Wraith intercepted him."
"All right," Sheppard sighed, putting his hands on his hips. "Janus is a time traveling Wraith worshipper. How does this help us?"
"Well, we did discover Janus's secret lab a few months ago," McKay explained. "I could sift through his research, try to find a way to get Ronette here back to her own time."
"My name is Eva," she growled.
"Whatever," he muttered, brushing her objection away with a wave of his hand. "These two are your parents, right?" he asked, pointing to them.
It took every ounce of self-control for Emma to keep her eyes from once again wandering over to Ronon. The mere suggestion of them being together…it was surreal. Stomach-turning, heart-poundingly surreal.
"Well…" Eva hesitated. "My parents are like twenty years older, but yeah."
"From what they've told you about how they …you know…got together, did they ever mention anything about you coming back in time or about meeting you before you were born?"
She vigorously shook her head. "Definitely not."
A look of concern fell across his face. "Really? Are you sure?"
"Yeah, I'm sure," she said with confidence. "I feel like your teenage daughter traveling through space and time is something you bring up at some point."
"Can you think of any reason they may have hid something like that from you?"
She looked down and to the side and fidgeted with one of her fingers. Emma suspected there was something she wasn't sharing. After a moment, though, Eva gathered her conviction and looked back up at McKay. "I'm sure," she repeated. "When I was little, my dad once told me he was convinced I was going to be born a boy. I don't think he would have believed that if he had already met me before."
"Oh, this is bad," McKay groaned, shaking his head. "It was a bad idea for you to come here."
"I didn't have much say in the matter," she retorted.
"No, you don't understand. At first, I thought this was supposed to happen… that your traveling back in time was meant to ensure the future as you know it – like, like…"
"Back to the Future?" Sheppard supplied.
"Don't even get me started on that movie," McKay snapped, raising a finger in warning. "But that's not it." He turned back to Eva. "No, you have completely altered your own timeline, and now ours, by coming back here. This is very very bad."
"Give her a break, Rodney," Emma said. "She's just a kid."
"Causality should not be treated lightly! She could easily be jeopardizing her own existence by coming here." He rounded on Eva again. "No more mentioning the future, and no more fortune-telling stunts like the one you pulled with Lorne in the interrogation room!" he scolded.
"So I should have just given up?" Eva shouted. "I should have just let the Wraith take me and finish me off?!" She jumped off her stool and took a menacing step toward McKay. Out of the corner of her eye, Emma caught Eva's guards reach for their stunners. "I'm sorry my survival has inconvenienced the future you haven't even experienced yet."
"That's what I'm trying to tell you. It's not just my future, it's –"
"Rodney," Emma gently chided. "She's here now and there's nothing we can about it, so give her a break. What do we have to do to get her back home?"
He took in a short breath. "I need to start going through Janus's research lab," he answered.
"I'll stay and help you translate what you find," Emma offered.
"That really won't be necess—"
"McKay," Sheppard warned, "Dr. Jackson's not here to help you anymore. Let the linguist do her job."
Eva sighed deeply, bowed her head, and pressed the heels of her hands into her forehead. When she finally looked up, she gave her head a rough shake and blinked away her emotions. "Is that all?" she asked McKay.
"Well, I was also hoping that you could –"
"That's all."
Emma looked over her shoulder, surprised to see it was Ronon who had spoken. He harbored a stern expression on his face, silently warning McKay to lay off the girl.
"Cool," Eva swallowed, trying her best to contain herself as she made her way to the exit. "Then uh…I'm gonna get out of here. Simon, Garfunkel," she said to her guards, "let's go."
A/N: Thanks again for reading! Hope you liked this chapter.
Also, full disclosure, the "don't even get me started on that movie" line is definitely stolen from an actual SGA episode, though I don't remember which one.