In a Clean White Room

Okay Kids,

With a little flourish, Nick plucks a white shell from nothingness

Every door he opens deepens the debt he owes.

Nick, finally, arrives in totality.

How far is he from darkness? How far has he ever been?

Beauty is no defense against evil.

“Hi. I’m Daniel Jackson, peaceful explorer.”

Sheppard shrugged. “You’re a musician; I kill people for a living.”

This little sidearm-stealing pianist was gonna be a fight to stay clear of.

“Hey,” Rodney McKay snaps, a real edge in his voice, because he believes this. He does. “Science, done with low blood sugar, ends lives.”

How terribly tragic life must be, for those who could remember it.

“The ring should be taken to Mordor,” Teal’c said, solemnly.  

“I’m extremely normal,” Rush informed Young.

“There was a day,” Young whispered, because this had to be true. It had to be. “There was a day that you woke alone, beside a river.”

 Sheppard, party of nine?

Volker’s bones speak in ice.

“Of course he’ll be able to go into the field, once we get his tech up and running,” McKay snapped. “What do we look like to you? Broken-down, burnt-out, worn-out shells of human beings who’ve spent half a decade battling soul-sucking monsters?”

Measure after measure, Beethoven called to Mozart. Across space and time. Through the medium of music.

“Unscheduled on-world activation?” the voice over the speakers said, slowly.

Rush ached for a piano in a way that he hadn’t ached for anything in his eight weeks of existence.

“Sorry, buddy,” Young whispered, dropping to his bad knee to get eye-level with Jackson. He put one hand on the archeologist’s shoulder. “You can’t save it. They already know."

“You feel like you know Mozart. Like, Mozart Mozart? Volfgahng Amadeus? The dead guy who you’ve definitely never met ever one time in your life. That Mozart.”

To leave, she will have to shoot him. He’s made that the price of the door.

“So—six days from now, I will get a burning cake?” Ginn asked.

“Ugh,” Eli said, zipping up his jacket and eyeing the sheeting rain, lit to orange in the glow of streetlights. “It’s like you’re the responsible straight man in the zany romantic comedy of your own life, dude, where your love interest is your past self!"

“Ah,” Jackson said. “Good to know that nearly killing you will get me apartment admittance, if not consistent first-name privileges.”

It doesn’t seem like October. Unfortunately, the main reason it doesn’t seem like October is that Mitchell has a hard time believing that he’s lived this long. That they all have.

Mid-September in Harvard Square was a terrible time to embark on a career as an aspiring, amnestic, hipster barista.

“Who’s going to volunteer ?” Jackson’s voice cracked, his answer already written on his face.

“You think I fantasize about helping impolite Scottish guys with their hair while my mom is working the night shift?”

“Damn it, hotshot,” Young whispered, looking up, as if he could see into low earth orbit. 

With a growing sense of horror, he tried to recall anything about himself.

It was fire season.

Let me come always in supplication, Vala thinks, praying for luck to the dead false god who had stolen her life and lived in her spine.

Telford gave Rush an appraising look. “No one will stop us if we walk out with confidence.”

“It’s not a date,” Jackson said sharply. “It’s a dinner meeting to discuss Vala’s cultural acclimatization.“

Relief is not a sentiment that Amanda Perry typically encounters. Generally, she creates logistical nightmares with her presence that are often, but not always, worth the insight she offers.

“A chair as a shell. A chair as a gateway. Not literal. Not like the stargate. But, a gateway all the same.”

Rodney hates the implementation of solutions that require destruction of any kind. It is, Zelenka thinks, a surprisingly poetic weakness in a physicist.

“Seriously?” Young said. “Beethoven?”

He was ignoring a chord progression.

“If it does not contain Doritos,” Teal’c says, “then it is not chel’mek.”

They sat together on the hood of Young’s car in the middle of Pike National Forest, at the same unnamed scenic overlook where Young had dressed Vala’s shoulder injury weeks before.

Grief should be reductive, like everything else.

“Pointless meeting? Check. Chess tutorial? Check. Fluid dynamics consult? Check.” Rush pulled Young’s sunglasses out of his bag. “Do you have cooking wine? I feel like lighting something on fire.”

Oh. Right then. There was an outstanding reason for doing what they were doing. This was a contingency plan. It must be. 

The Dodge Charger was a man’s car.

The tail end of any bell curve was a precarious place to live.

“There’s going to be like—math. Math and languages and crypto and the story and the graphics—ugh. It hurts me. My soul aches with how good it looks.”

“Did you just call me ‘gate bait’?” Rush asked.