SGA fic: Travelers in the dark
Jan. 21st, 2008 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
auntiemeeshTitle: Travelers in the Dark
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Rating: PG
Word Count: approximately 2000
Spoilers: Through season three
Prompt:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
whtmtnwmn requested the main characters of SGA sitting around, drinking, discussing their favorite childood memories.
A/N: None of these guys are really sharing, chatty people, but I did the best I could.
John stretched out his legs, leaning back against a fallen log. The Athosians had settled into their new home nicely, he mused. The area around the gate was lightly forested, with smaller open fields than the Athosians were used to, which had proved challenging at first, according to Teyla. They’d just finished bringing in their first harvest, however, and they were in a mood to celebrate their survival and triumph over adversity, or some such shit. John didn’t really care, truth be told, exactly what the deeper purpose of the celebration was. He was just happy enough to have an excuse to kick back and relax with his friends.
(He’d learned long ago to not dwell too much on things past. The months spent back on Earth, doing grunt work with an incompetent team for the SGC had sucked in ways he’d never experienced before. It should have been a relief to know that the safety of everyone around him no longer rested so heavily on his shoulders, except that on Earth, the safety of everyone rested pretty much solely on the shoulders of SG-1. No one else need apply. And while the Ori were big and bad and decidedly scary, they seemed distant in a weird way – he couldn’t feel their menace while he was stuck babysitting inept scientists who made Rodney look like a master of field work and soldiers who were so wet behind the ears they left a dripping trail behind them. Mostly, he’d just sat in his office feeling pointless and bored. Grounded in the worst ways, family torn away from him, nothing to fly, spending days at a time underground without a glimpse of sky or fresh air. It had been close to intolerable. But it was behind him now, family back in place, responsibility firmly back on his shoulders, and there was no point in thinking about those months of exile.)
Ronon nudged his leg with one knee and when John gave the Satedan his attention, passed him the jug of wine. Well, it wasn’t exactly wine, not being made from anything even closely resembling grapes, and having a hell of a lot more alcohol in it, but wine was the way the Athosian term translated and that was good enough for him. He’d already had more than was probably good for him, but Lorne was back on Atlantis, in charge for another 43 hours and change, which provided him plenty of time to get drunk off his ass and recover from the resultant hangover before being required to be functional again.
Tipping his head back, he took a long drink and passed the jug on to Rodney, whose eyes were starting to look just a bit glazed. The three of them had settled down in a small glade just outside the village, just far enough from the main gathering to be able to talk quietly amongst themselves. Rodney had given Sheppard a little grief, wondering aloud why he wasn’t off being Kirk with all the pretty Athosian girls. Sheppard had ignored him. It was far too much bother explaining how much effort it took to deal with people, sometimes. It was much easier to simply sit here in silence with his team and let the wine flow through him.
It was some time later, how much time exactly Sheppard wasn’t sure, but the wine jug was empty and he had settled into a very comfortable slump, not entirely drunk off his ass but certainly close enough to count the evening as a success, when Teyla wandered over and settled gracefully onto the ground next to Ronon.
“It is a lovely evening, do you not agree?” she asked as she took in their somewhat bedraggled condition.
“It is, indeed,” Sheppard replied expansively. “A very lovely evening.” He didn’t quite know where to go with that particular conversational gambit, however, so he fumbled around awkwardly for a moment before hitting on something. “Used to have nights like this when I was a kid. My Grandma had a cabin up in the White Mountains, in New Hampshire. We’d go there sometimes, in the summer, and camp out in her backyard. Build a fire and watch the sparks drift up to the sky, join up with the stars. When I was really little, that’s where I thought the stars came from, all those sparks floating up to join their big brothers and sisters in the sky.” He drifted off, remembering those trips, usually just he and his brother once they were old enough to be trusted with the fire. They had a tent which they faithfully pitched each and every time, and they’d make s’mores and tell ghost stories, trying to out-scare each other. Most times, they ended up going back inside long before the night was over – scared because they’d heard a noise, too cold, or just plain tired of being outside, he supposed, although he couldn’t really remember the reasons now.
A hand on his shoulder brought him back to the present with a startled lurch. Okay, maybe he was pretty damn drunk. Turning his head carefully (rapid movement seemed unwise, for some reason, possibly to do with the unusual and slightly unpleasant tilt the world took on), he looked at the hand on his shoulder and followed the arm it was attached to up to Rodney.
“Oh, hey, Rodney,” he murmured, “how ya doing? D’you ever go camping when you were a kid?”
Rodney frowned, clearly not following Sheppard’s internal train of thought, but slowly nodded his head. “Um, yeah, coupla times,” he answered. “Hated it. All that nature.” He spat that word out as if it had personally offended him. “There was this one time, though,” he continued, “when our astronomy club took an overnight trip out away from the city into the mountains. The hike was awful, of course, and don’t even get me started on the facilities at the camp ground we stayed at, but once we got there, it, it was just amazing. First time I’d ever really got away from the city lights enough to actually see the stars. Up till then it had always been pretty abstract, you know. Look at star maps in books, go to the planetarium, but that night, looking up at all those stars just blinking and glowing – I could really see the Milky Way and everything just - shifted. It was great.” Rodney sighed happily and slumped a little lower against the log, tilting slightly until his head rested against Sheppard’s shoulder.
Sheppard stared at him for a moment, until his eyes threatened to go cross-eyed, and thought about shrugging him off, but then decided to let it go. He made a mental note, however, to prepare a lecture about personal space to deliver the next time he needed to get Rodney’s goat.
“I never went in much for stargazing,” Ronon rumbled from Sheppard’s other side. He was stretched out comfortably, arms and legs crossed. “Sateda was a lot like Earth, in some ways. Too much light for the stars to really show at night, at least in the city where I lived. And then, when I was running, there wasn’t much time for that sort of thing.” He looked serious for a long minute, eyes distant, and then a small smile crept over his features. “We had this festival, though. A celebration of the triumph of light over darkness, in the cold months after the nights started getting shorter again. On this one night, everyone would put out all their lights, so that the stars could be seen. My mother would spend the entire day beforehand cooking and preparing and then, once the lights were put out, we’d all go out into the streets and share a meal with our neighbors in the starlight.” His face softened some more. “That’s how I met Melena the first time. She was staying with cousins who lived on our street.” He didn’t say any more, face closing off again as he turned his gaze away from the stars.
There was a long moment of silence and Sheppard’s thoughts drifted as aimlessly as the sparks from those long ago campfires, until Teyla shifted slightly, drawing his attention to her. “Hey Teyla, what about you?”
“Yeah,” Rodney added, voice slightly slurred, “we’ve all shared some deeply, deeply meanful – meaningful moments with you. Now’s your turn.”
“Very well,” Teyla said thoughtfully. She smiled suddenly, a wide, happy look. “When I was still a young girl, my father occasionally took me with him on his trading trips. I remember, on one such trip we traveled to a world in which the days and nights were very long. The people of this world lived in caves, deep within the forests, where they could find shelter from the intense heat of the day during summer months and the intense cold of the nights in the winter. We visited in early autumn, during a harvest ceremony not all that different from ours. What made this visit stand out in my mind, however, was not the celebration. Their skies seemed not unlike our own, but as the sun set and the day turned to night, I saw something I had never seen before and have never seen again. The sky was lit up with streaks and bands of color. The people of that world called them spirits of the night and said that it was good luck for these spirits to visit them during their time of harvest. It was…beautiful. Strange and eerie, but possibly the most beautiful thing I had seen until I came to Atlantis.”
“Northern lights,” Rodney murmured, sounding more than half asleep. “Used to see ‘em alla time, back home.”
Ronon, who seemed to have collected himself during Teyla’s story, nodded. “I’ve heard of these lights, although I’ve never seen them myself. My people said they were harbingers of change.”
Sheppard thought back to his time in Antarctica, and the first time he’d seen the aurora australis. That shimmering, unearthly beauty had cut through him, making his breath catch in his throat. He wondered if their new planet had similar atmospheric conditions and reminded himself to ask Rodney, after they got back to Atlantis. They could take a jumper, he thought, and chase the lights all night. Of course, that depended on him remembering any part of this conversation come morning, which, he realized with a snort, was rather less than likely.
“Alright, guys,” he said with a groan as he stood up, wobbling slightly in place as the world tilted alarmingly. “There’s a nice, homey tent waiting for us just over there,” he gestured vaguely in the wrong direction. “It’s time for all good little soldiers and scientists to go to bed.”
Ronon stood as well, offering a hand to Teyla. The big guy looked disgustingly steady on his feet, considering how much of that wine he’d drunk. Rodney, on the other hand, was more than a little woozy, staggering into Sheppard with every other step, until Sheppard wrapped an arm around his shoulder and provided some slightly unsteady ballast to the drunken scientist. Ronon did the same on Rodney’s other side, and Teyla surprised Sheppard by slipping one arm around his waist, although he wasn’t really sure she would be able to do much if he started to go down.
They made it to their tent, somehow, and Sheppard lowered himself down onto his pallet gratefully. Rodney gave a little whining moan as Ronon settled him none to gently on his own pallet, and Sheppard guessed it wouldn’t be that long before Rodney was making a dash for the tent flap. Hell, judging by the way the room was spinning, he’d be making his own dash at some point. That would be later, though. For now, he was content to close his eyes and rest, listening to the sounds of his family as they all settled in to sleep.
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Rating: PG
Word Count: approximately 2000
Spoilers: Through season three
Prompt:
whtmtnwmn requested the main characters of SGA sitting around, drinking, discussing their favorite childood memories.A/N: None of these guys are really sharing, chatty people, but I did the best I could.
John stretched out his legs, leaning back against a fallen log. The Athosians had settled into their new home nicely, he mused. The area around the gate was lightly forested, with smaller open fields than the Athosians were used to, which had proved challenging at first, according to Teyla. They’d just finished bringing in their first harvest, however, and they were in a mood to celebrate their survival and triumph over adversity, or some such shit. John didn’t really care, truth be told, exactly what the deeper purpose of the celebration was. He was just happy enough to have an excuse to kick back and relax with his friends.
(He’d learned long ago to not dwell too much on things past. The months spent back on Earth, doing grunt work with an incompetent team for the SGC had sucked in ways he’d never experienced before. It should have been a relief to know that the safety of everyone around him no longer rested so heavily on his shoulders, except that on Earth, the safety of everyone rested pretty much solely on the shoulders of SG-1. No one else need apply. And while the Ori were big and bad and decidedly scary, they seemed distant in a weird way – he couldn’t feel their menace while he was stuck babysitting inept scientists who made Rodney look like a master of field work and soldiers who were so wet behind the ears they left a dripping trail behind them. Mostly, he’d just sat in his office feeling pointless and bored. Grounded in the worst ways, family torn away from him, nothing to fly, spending days at a time underground without a glimpse of sky or fresh air. It had been close to intolerable. But it was behind him now, family back in place, responsibility firmly back on his shoulders, and there was no point in thinking about those months of exile.)
Ronon nudged his leg with one knee and when John gave the Satedan his attention, passed him the jug of wine. Well, it wasn’t exactly wine, not being made from anything even closely resembling grapes, and having a hell of a lot more alcohol in it, but wine was the way the Athosian term translated and that was good enough for him. He’d already had more than was probably good for him, but Lorne was back on Atlantis, in charge for another 43 hours and change, which provided him plenty of time to get drunk off his ass and recover from the resultant hangover before being required to be functional again.
Tipping his head back, he took a long drink and passed the jug on to Rodney, whose eyes were starting to look just a bit glazed. The three of them had settled down in a small glade just outside the village, just far enough from the main gathering to be able to talk quietly amongst themselves. Rodney had given Sheppard a little grief, wondering aloud why he wasn’t off being Kirk with all the pretty Athosian girls. Sheppard had ignored him. It was far too much bother explaining how much effort it took to deal with people, sometimes. It was much easier to simply sit here in silence with his team and let the wine flow through him.
It was some time later, how much time exactly Sheppard wasn’t sure, but the wine jug was empty and he had settled into a very comfortable slump, not entirely drunk off his ass but certainly close enough to count the evening as a success, when Teyla wandered over and settled gracefully onto the ground next to Ronon.
“It is a lovely evening, do you not agree?” she asked as she took in their somewhat bedraggled condition.
“It is, indeed,” Sheppard replied expansively. “A very lovely evening.” He didn’t quite know where to go with that particular conversational gambit, however, so he fumbled around awkwardly for a moment before hitting on something. “Used to have nights like this when I was a kid. My Grandma had a cabin up in the White Mountains, in New Hampshire. We’d go there sometimes, in the summer, and camp out in her backyard. Build a fire and watch the sparks drift up to the sky, join up with the stars. When I was really little, that’s where I thought the stars came from, all those sparks floating up to join their big brothers and sisters in the sky.” He drifted off, remembering those trips, usually just he and his brother once they were old enough to be trusted with the fire. They had a tent which they faithfully pitched each and every time, and they’d make s’mores and tell ghost stories, trying to out-scare each other. Most times, they ended up going back inside long before the night was over – scared because they’d heard a noise, too cold, or just plain tired of being outside, he supposed, although he couldn’t really remember the reasons now.
A hand on his shoulder brought him back to the present with a startled lurch. Okay, maybe he was pretty damn drunk. Turning his head carefully (rapid movement seemed unwise, for some reason, possibly to do with the unusual and slightly unpleasant tilt the world took on), he looked at the hand on his shoulder and followed the arm it was attached to up to Rodney.
“Oh, hey, Rodney,” he murmured, “how ya doing? D’you ever go camping when you were a kid?”
Rodney frowned, clearly not following Sheppard’s internal train of thought, but slowly nodded his head. “Um, yeah, coupla times,” he answered. “Hated it. All that nature.” He spat that word out as if it had personally offended him. “There was this one time, though,” he continued, “when our astronomy club took an overnight trip out away from the city into the mountains. The hike was awful, of course, and don’t even get me started on the facilities at the camp ground we stayed at, but once we got there, it, it was just amazing. First time I’d ever really got away from the city lights enough to actually see the stars. Up till then it had always been pretty abstract, you know. Look at star maps in books, go to the planetarium, but that night, looking up at all those stars just blinking and glowing – I could really see the Milky Way and everything just - shifted. It was great.” Rodney sighed happily and slumped a little lower against the log, tilting slightly until his head rested against Sheppard’s shoulder.
Sheppard stared at him for a moment, until his eyes threatened to go cross-eyed, and thought about shrugging him off, but then decided to let it go. He made a mental note, however, to prepare a lecture about personal space to deliver the next time he needed to get Rodney’s goat.
“I never went in much for stargazing,” Ronon rumbled from Sheppard’s other side. He was stretched out comfortably, arms and legs crossed. “Sateda was a lot like Earth, in some ways. Too much light for the stars to really show at night, at least in the city where I lived. And then, when I was running, there wasn’t much time for that sort of thing.” He looked serious for a long minute, eyes distant, and then a small smile crept over his features. “We had this festival, though. A celebration of the triumph of light over darkness, in the cold months after the nights started getting shorter again. On this one night, everyone would put out all their lights, so that the stars could be seen. My mother would spend the entire day beforehand cooking and preparing and then, once the lights were put out, we’d all go out into the streets and share a meal with our neighbors in the starlight.” His face softened some more. “That’s how I met Melena the first time. She was staying with cousins who lived on our street.” He didn’t say any more, face closing off again as he turned his gaze away from the stars.
There was a long moment of silence and Sheppard’s thoughts drifted as aimlessly as the sparks from those long ago campfires, until Teyla shifted slightly, drawing his attention to her. “Hey Teyla, what about you?”
“Yeah,” Rodney added, voice slightly slurred, “we’ve all shared some deeply, deeply meanful – meaningful moments with you. Now’s your turn.”
“Very well,” Teyla said thoughtfully. She smiled suddenly, a wide, happy look. “When I was still a young girl, my father occasionally took me with him on his trading trips. I remember, on one such trip we traveled to a world in which the days and nights were very long. The people of this world lived in caves, deep within the forests, where they could find shelter from the intense heat of the day during summer months and the intense cold of the nights in the winter. We visited in early autumn, during a harvest ceremony not all that different from ours. What made this visit stand out in my mind, however, was not the celebration. Their skies seemed not unlike our own, but as the sun set and the day turned to night, I saw something I had never seen before and have never seen again. The sky was lit up with streaks and bands of color. The people of that world called them spirits of the night and said that it was good luck for these spirits to visit them during their time of harvest. It was…beautiful. Strange and eerie, but possibly the most beautiful thing I had seen until I came to Atlantis.”
“Northern lights,” Rodney murmured, sounding more than half asleep. “Used to see ‘em alla time, back home.”
Ronon, who seemed to have collected himself during Teyla’s story, nodded. “I’ve heard of these lights, although I’ve never seen them myself. My people said they were harbingers of change.”
Sheppard thought back to his time in Antarctica, and the first time he’d seen the aurora australis. That shimmering, unearthly beauty had cut through him, making his breath catch in his throat. He wondered if their new planet had similar atmospheric conditions and reminded himself to ask Rodney, after they got back to Atlantis. They could take a jumper, he thought, and chase the lights all night. Of course, that depended on him remembering any part of this conversation come morning, which, he realized with a snort, was rather less than likely.
“Alright, guys,” he said with a groan as he stood up, wobbling slightly in place as the world tilted alarmingly. “There’s a nice, homey tent waiting for us just over there,” he gestured vaguely in the wrong direction. “It’s time for all good little soldiers and scientists to go to bed.”
Ronon stood as well, offering a hand to Teyla. The big guy looked disgustingly steady on his feet, considering how much of that wine he’d drunk. Rodney, on the other hand, was more than a little woozy, staggering into Sheppard with every other step, until Sheppard wrapped an arm around his shoulder and provided some slightly unsteady ballast to the drunken scientist. Ronon did the same on Rodney’s other side, and Teyla surprised Sheppard by slipping one arm around his waist, although he wasn’t really sure she would be able to do much if he started to go down.
They made it to their tent, somehow, and Sheppard lowered himself down onto his pallet gratefully. Rodney gave a little whining moan as Ronon settled him none to gently on his own pallet, and Sheppard guessed it wouldn’t be that long before Rodney was making a dash for the tent flap. Hell, judging by the way the room was spinning, he’d be making his own dash at some point. That would be later, though. For now, he was content to close his eyes and rest, listening to the sounds of his family as they all settled in to sleep.
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