sga_saturday | Fic: There was still smoke in the sky. (Week 4: Orange) (Reply)

Title: There was still smoke in the sky.
Author:

lilyfarfalla
Words: 548
Pairing: Gen, with hints John/Rodney offscreen
Summary: …she refuses to be mesmerized by the death march of Wraith.
A/N: I was thinking this was Siege-land, but I couldn’t find the scene with John and Rodney watching the Wraith attack the shield in my DVDs (was that scene not at the end of season 1? Did I hallucinate it entirely??), so this is more an AU wraith attack than anything, I guess. (Also, no idea if this works. Yeahhh.)

The orange and red flashes against the shield are beautiful. Elizabeth can acknowledge that in the back of her mind, but she refuses to be mesmerized by the death march of Wraith tearing down their only defense.

Inside the control room, Radek is giving her an estimate of how long the shields will hold given the current rate of crashed darts per minute (five hours), if the darts ease off (eight to thirty hours, but not with enough power to withstand an attack from a full carrier), and if the darts accelerate their kamikaze runs (two to three hours, max.) Elizabeth carries the numbers in her head, laying the three clocks next to one another as she once kept time zones mapped out across the globe.

The shimmer of wormhole through the Stargate reflects off Radek’s glasses as he glances down to consult his notes, and Elizabeth wants to dive into that pool of water, wanted to grab hold of the spires of this city and rise up above the Wraith and tell them you cannot have this, this will not be yours.

John and Rodney are on the balcony just outside, staring up at the sky, at this hideously wrong fireworks display. Their faces are glowing in the unnatural light, and Elizabeth catches a glimpse of a memory—the way the windows of the city reflected the eerie blue of being hundreds of meters underwater onto their skin in those first few moments in the city.

In a minute, they will come inside and sit around a table with her and together they will form a plan that has little to no chance of working. Rodney will wave his hands around while his brain speeds in circles around them all, and John will lean back in his chair and clench his hands into fists under the table as he resolves to do what must be done.

Elizabeth will use them both; she will accept their self-sacrifices. And she will pull in all of the others: Teyla, who could have been a friend in another time and place, Ford, who is far too young to be so close to command, and Radek and Halling and all the rest who will give too much of themselves to save.

But briefly, Elizabeth wishes she could turn a lock in the door, or let time unspool so John and Rodney could stand on the balcony for hours or years, slowly letting their hands drift together until they find each other. In time they might, she thinks, but the Wraith have taken that time from her and she will be ruthless in taking it from all those around her so that Atlantis might live.

The clocks in her head are running down, precious seconds slipping away, and in a minute Elizabeth will radio her team to meet in conference room. But first she will turn her back away from windows of her city and breathe in the cool grey-blue of the control room. She will put her hands on millennia-old architecture and make a promise to protect this place and the people in it. She has died once for them both and will do it again, knowing that it is to this place and these people that she will return. Elizabeth breathes.