A/N: Welcome back! Sorry it's been a while. Real life is busy! Anyway, hope you enjoy. Thought I'd add a little humor in this next chapter.
She pushed the tracker readouts to the edge of her desk. They had been at it for several hours now and all of this technical Wraith jargon was making her cross eyed. Her head fell limp and met the top of her back, the tiny bones in her neck making little popping sounds as they realigned themselves. Staring at the ceiling, she puffed her cheeks out and exhaled loudly.
After a few seconds, she straightened her neck and cast a surreptitious glance toward Alan before reaching for the thick stack of photos she had stashed under her Wraith lexicon. One by one, she went through them in an attempt to refresh her memory of the Temple of the Portunos on M5R-233. The first few depicted the exterior of the temple with its tall Roman arches and perfectly equal sides, perhaps of archaeological interest, but not linguistically significant. She flipped through them more quickly until Ronon's appearance in one of the photos, posed under a center arch, sent an unexpected jolt through her heart.
God, he was tall, wasn't he? Massive. Long legs, long arms, long torso… Maybe that was why she had woken up the way she had that morning. He took up so much room in the bed that sleeping on his chest had been unavoidable. It was either get cozy or fall off the edge.
A quiet cough from Alan's side of the lab stirred her from her thoughts; she convulsively forced the photo of Ronon to the bottom of the stack and carried on browsing through the rest, ignoring the heat on her cheeks. The next handful included shots of the grand statue of the Portunos and of the plaque at its feet. Emma laughed softly to herself as she mentally compared the statue to its real-life likeness. Bearded, muscular, and formidable, the effigy definitely shared more in common with someone like Ronon than it did with the gangly, comatose Ancient in the infirmary. Janus must have thought rather highly of himself at the time.
She placed a photo of the statue next to the closeup of the plaque and her concentration volleyed from the key in one stone hand, to the long cane in the other, and back again.
"Tempus fugit. Ottionam vostram facete," she read aloud.
"How you doin' over there, Emma?" Alan's eyes stayed fixed on his own work as he spoke. "Can I get you anything? Holy water? Crucifix? Donut?"
"Very funny," she replied. "You should know by now that I only perform exorcisms on Sundays…and that I much prefer croissants to donuts."
"I'll make sure to let my inner demons know." He peered over his glasses at the notebook in front of him, scribbled something down, and capped his pen with a definitive click. "My brain is soup," he groaned. "Wraith alphabet soup."
"I know the feeling."
Getting up from his desk, he stretched dramatically and headed toward the coffee pot.
"Inner demons need a fix?" she joked.
"Always." He lifted the pot in her direction. "You want any more?"
"No, thanks." She paused. "Actually…would you mind taking a look at something for me?"
"Mm," he agreed, taking a sip from his mug and walking to her desk.
She held up the two photographs in question for him to see.
Alan pushed his glasses up his nose and squinted at them. "These don't look like the data from Eva's tracking device." His tone was lightly admonitive, but he took them from her nonetheless.
"And you would be correct. They're photographs of the temple on M5R-233."
He took a long, loud slurp of his coffee. "I thought Woolsey didn't want us looking into that temple anymore."
Emma pressed on in spite of his protests. "How's your knowledge of Roman mythology?"
"Decent," he replied, still surveying the image. "Why?"
"That statue. What does it look like to you?"
He sighed. "It's a two-headed man. Not unlike the typical depiction of Janus in Roman culture."
"Look in his hands," she urged. "Look at what he's holding."
Alan squinted and brought the paper closer to his face. "A key and a cane...a scepter, maybe?"
"That's what I thought, too," she agreed. "Now look at the inscription underneath."
"Make your choice..." he paused. "Time flies? Time is fleeting?" He looked to Emma for confirmation.
She nodded eagerly. "That's what I got, too. I know this is the entrance to his lab. It has to be."
"And you think that choosing – whatever that means – either the scepter or the key will grant you access to it?"
"Why else would there be a temple dedicated to Janus on that particular planet? Why would you need to make a choice if that choice didn't have some sort of reward?"
"Maybe it's metaphorical."
"Or maybe it's just the simple choice between the key or the cane and boom – open sesame."
"It's the key, then," Alan stated. "Obviously. Janus was the god of doors, keys open doors."
Emma couldn't stop the smile forming on her lips. "Funny. That's what Ronon thought, too."
"So that's two votes for the key – one from me and one from your baby daddy." He dropped the photos on her desk and turned to go back to his work. "Case closed. Now back to our Wraith data."
Emma bit the inside of her cheek and clicked her pen, staring at the picture. "Hand me that Ancient lexicon."
"No. No, no, no. I am not going to get involved with this distraction of yours. These," he held up his half of the tracker data, "are our first priority. Woolsey made it very clear that everything else takes a backseat."
"Oh, just hand me the damn book," Emma said with an eyeroll. "It's not like I'm asking you to smuggle drugs across the border."
Shoulders slumped in protest, Alan handed her the heavy, layman bound book and made sure to add a reproachful glower for good measure along with it.
She flipped to the "K" section of the English side. "Write these on the board."
"Nope." He held up his hands. "I might be an accessory to this, but I will not be an accomplice."
"Come on! You really wanna translate electrical input and output fluctuations for the rest of the day?"
He let out a quiet growl of frustration. "No."
"Then indulge me for the next few minutes. It won't take that long."
He dragged his feet to the whiteboard and uncapped a dry-erase marker. "Go ahead," he sighed.
"Clavia...clavistrum...claustrum...clovistra...and cardo."
"Key," Alan observed.
"Every instance of the word 'key' that we've ever come across in Ancient." She flipped to the "S" section of the book. "Okay, now copy these down, please."
"Ready."
"Sceptrum," she tilted her head to the side, "makes sense... baculus, birga, hastile." She stood from her chair and made her way to Alan's side. They both stared at the board for a moment.
A whisper from Alan eventually broke the silence. "What are we looking for here?"
"No clue," she whispered back.
He took the lexicon from her hands. "Well, I think we can probably eliminate some of the more obscure terms. Cardo, for instance...looks like it can mean 'key,' but in more instances than not, it tends to mean 'lock.'" He flipped a few pages. "Same with hastile. It usually means 'walking stick' rather than 'scepter' or 'cane.'"
Emma nodded in agreement. "You're right. We'll eliminate them for now."
They erased the extraneous words and, once more, stared at the board occasionally squinting and tilting their heads to make sense of the terms littered across it.
"Let's decline all of them," Emma suggested.
"You got it, boss."
She approached the board, picked up a marker, and began working on the right half of the board while Alan got to work on the left. Recapping her marker, she took a step back, looking for any patterns.
Alan picked up the photograph from her desk and studied it for a second time, muttering under his breath. "Tempus fugit. Ottionam vostram facete."
"Tempus…" Emma yanked the cap off her marker so quickly it fell out of her fingers and rolled across the floor as she began to slash through characters on the board.
"What are you doing?"
"Crossing out all of the letters in the word tempus from every one of the words on the board," she explained, already crossing out the U and S characters in baculus.
"Wait a minute." Alan's eyes quickly widened. "Sceptrum."
"I know," she said, turning to him with excitement. She tapped on her earpiece. "This is Dr. Rogers, can I get McKay to come to the linguistics lab?"
At first, Eva had tried to find a table farther away from the one McKay was sharing with a small, redheaded woman who likely belonged to the botany department, judging by the slight smudge of dirt across her cheek. But it was the height of the lunch hour and choice of tables was limited, so she set her tray down and hoped he would be too distracted either by his meal or his company to notice her.
"I've actually never been able to keep a plant alive," McKay said through a mouthful of spaghetti. "Always forget about 'em until they end up dry and withered. I once even managed to kill a cactus. How does somebody do that, huh? Aren't they supposed to be almost unkillable?"
Oh God. Was McKay on a date?
"Plants are really just like humans," the woman said in a high, sweet voice. "With a little bit of attention and a little bit of love, you'd be surprised by how much they flourish."
It was like watching a car accident. Morbid, but you can't quite bring yourself to look away.
"Don't forget fertilizer," Rodney quipped. "Though that's more for the plants than for the humans, isn't it?"
No, McKay! Don't talk about shit on a date!
"You shouldn't feel too bad about killing that cactus." The woman laid her hand over McKay's and his eyes widened in surprise. "They require more care than you'd think."
Eva put down her forkful of pasta. Her appetite had suddenly disappeared.
"Yes, well," McKay cleared his throat, "maybe I should come down to the botany lab sometime…learn a few of your tips and tricks?"
"I'd like that," the woman smiled as she straightened in her chair. "How's the spaghetti?"
"Edible, I guess. Bit of a weird aftertaste, though."
"But the sauce? The sauce is good, isn't it?"
"I think that might be the root of the problem. Tastes like they used rotten tomatoes…"
A strained expression appeared on the woman's face.
"What? What is it?" McKay asked, a look of concern falling across his features. "Bad reaction to the rancid tomato sauce?"
"Those were the first batch of tomatoes grown here…in – in the botany lab," she admitted.
Eva brought a hand to her forehead and watched their interaction from between her fingers. This was painful. Actually, physically painful.
"Oh. That's – that's not what I meant. What I meant was –" McKay stopped mid-thought, distracted. "What do you mean the linguistics lab?"
Eva's ears perked up.
"No," he turned to the side and pressed his finger to his earpiece. "You two can come meet me in the physics lab. I am not schlepping it all the way to the linguistics lab just to hear another theory of yours."
Another theory? Regarding a joint project between linguistics and physics? It had to be related to her tracker. Maybe they had found something! She tried to lean closer without being obvious.
"Rodney?" his date asked.
"Yeah. Just one second." He lifted a finger to her. "No, I am not – yes, your last theory ended up being correct. And the one before – Fine. I'll be there in five minutes. But this better be good."
"What was that all about?" The woman watched as Rodney began cleaning up his meal.
"I'm sorry, Katie," he said, standing up. "I have to go. Rogers and Hirsch need me in the linguistics lab."
"But we haven't finished our lunch."
"Like I said, I'm really sorry. They said it was urgent."
Katie pursed her lips together and nodded. "I see. Good bye, Rodney."
McKay made moves to leave, but thought better of it and turned around to face Katie again. "I meant it when I said that I'd want to come visit you in your lab sometime. Say, Friday?"
The woman's face lit up with cautious optimism. "I'm free on Friday."
"Good," McKay nodded. "Good. Maybe I can even try one of those tomatoes…but fresh off the vine…before the cooks have a chance to mess them up."
Even Eva had to admit that it was a good save.
"I'll save you the best ones," she smiled.
McKay smiled back. "Friday, then."
"Friday."
Eva watched as he dropped his tray off in the bussing area and vanished down the long hallway. So as not to attract suspicion, she waited a few minutes before doing the same. With a last glance back at Katie, who now seemed more than content to sit and finish her lunch alone, she hung a right out of the commissary, hopped into the nearest transporter, and touched the image of the south pier. Something was going on and she intended to find out what.
Avoiding detection had been easy. Years of playing hide and seek in the vast city meant that she knew every column she could duck behind, every nook she could slip into should McKay have suspected he was being followed. And since she already knew his final destination, there was no need to track him at close range.
With quiet, cautious steps, she approached the linguistics lab. Several voices from inside carried into the hallway.
"They're very powerful birds, actually. In flight, they can reach speeds of up to 160 kilometers per hour for extended periods of time."
So McKay must have picked up Zelenka somewhere along the way.
"It's their breasts."
"Their what now?" Dr. Hirsch asked.
"They have massive breast muscles which can account for nearly one third of their body weight. Larger muscles mean greater flight power."
"Well that one on your screen there is very…cute," Emma said.
"Look, are we gonna talk about what you found in those tracker readouts or are we gonna talk about pigeons?" McKay asked. "Because I just put a very romantic lunch date with Katie Brown on hold so that I could be here."
Eva had to fight to stifle a snort and not reveal her location. This talk of pigeons was about as romantic as their "date" had been.
"We asked you to be here because think we've got a lead on Janus's lab," Emma said.
Curiosity piqued, Eva got as close to the door of the lab as she dared and peeked in.
McKay had his arms crossed and was looking dubiously at an Ancient-filled whiteboard. "I thought we weren't pursuing that anymore."
"It was something we discovered in our…" Hirsch glanced at Emma, "free time."
"Free time?" McKay repeated.
"Let's say it was something that came up during our lunch break," Emma shrugged.
Zelenka pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "But I thought Woolsey said –"
"Forget about Woolsey for a second," Emma said. "Just for a second. We really think we're onto something."
McKay took a step toward the whiteboard and gestured at it. "I assume it has something to do with these chicken scratches? Care to share with the class?"
Emma crossed the lab in a few paces and grabbed the pictures of the statue and the inscription underneath. She gave one to McKay and one to Zelenka. Eva wished that she, too, could take a look, but she didn't dare get any closer.
"This is the interior of the temple on M5R-233," she explained. "I think we can safely assume the large statue in the center represents the Portunos – or Janus."
"What is he holding?" Zelenka asked as he looked up from the photo.
"A key in one hand, a scepter in the other. And if you look at the inscription underneath, there's a set of directions."
"Almost like a riddle," Hirsch added.
"What does it say?" Zelenka asked.
Emma answered. "'Make your choice, time flies.'"
"Or 'time is fleeting.'"
"We assume the inscription refers to the choice between the key and the cane."
"And if you pull the secret lever, then some secret doorway will open?" McKay mocked.
"That's the thought," Emma replied. "Anyway, we amassed every Ancient term for both key and scepter and... this is what we came up with." She gestured to the jumble of words on the whiteboard.
Eva recognized a few of the hastily scribbled declinations and thought, a bit obtusely, that the board looked somewhat like past Ancient homework assignments she had thrown together minutes before turning them in.
"The chicken scratches," McKay supplied.
Emma ignored him. "The lab is supposedly dedicated to the research of time travel, right?"
McKay and Zelenka nodded.
"Well, we tried seeing which words, if any, shared the same characters as the word tempus."
"This whole tempus thing again?" McKay rolled his eyes.
"Hey!" she said defensively. "It worked the first time."
McKay shrugged. "Lightning doesn't strike twice."
"Actually," Zelenka interrupted, "it does. Multiple observations of the Empire State Building have shown –"
"It's a figure of speech!"
"Focus, y'all," she scolded. "It turns out that there is precisely one word out of all of these," she gestured to the board, "that in every single case contains all of the letters within the word tempus: sceptrum."
"So you think it's the scepter," Zelenka supplied. "The scepter will grant you entrance into the lab?"
"Yes," Emma and Hirsch both replied.
"But there are still characters left over," McKay observed.
"Right," Emma nodded. "The C and R characters. Does that mean anything to you?" she asked the two physicists.
"Crown Royal," McKay suggested.
"Czech Republic," Zelenka smiled.
Emma smiled back at him. "True. Thought I doubt that's it."
McKay narrowed his eyes and was quiet for a moment before eventually speaking. "Chromium."
"Chromium?" Hirsch repeated. "Is that...a metal?"
"It's one of the elements," he confirmed. "It's found in certain foods, computer circuit boards, a variety of gemstones, Canadian nickels..."
Emma grabbed the photos again and squinted hard, trying to see the details of the key and scepter. "You said gemstones?"
"That's right. And Canadian nickels."
"What kind of gemstones?"
"Take your pick." McKay shook his head. "Rubies, emeralds, jade, tourmaline, topaz…"
Hirsch turned to Emma. "My knowledge of scepters is fairly limited, but don't they usually have a bauble or something at the end?"
The image of an amulet, swinging across her field of vision as she lay strapped to a table flashed in Eva's mind. The center stone was dark red, the color of the blood trickling down her arm as the tracker was inserted into her back. And the amulet adorned the neck of none other than Janus himself.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think! :)