In a Clean White Room

“Who said y'could call me Nick?” Rush asked.

They needed a star.  

Abducted by Nick Rush. Off his stairs. In his PJs. To go on space adventures.

Rush sighed. “As a custom cellulose matrix, created from scratch with very little in the way of either guidance or resources—it’s marvelous. Unfortunately, as paper goes, it’s terrible. Keep at it.”  

“Genius,” Young said. “Personal question.”   

“What the hell is ‘Destiny Bingo’?” Young asked.  

“Have I, um, ever told you about my mom?” Eli didn’t look at him.

Greer’s a real sucker for all the ways humans ride rockets.

“We remember you.” Chloe’s voice was slow and cold.

Rush had grounded the pair of them. Straight into whatever remained of Young’s split-open mind.

Young had misjudged the man. For years. Since day one. He’d known it for a while. But there was no denying it now.

“Bit of a hairpin turn, really,” Rush said.

Matt really doesn’t want to, but he adds Possible Mind Control to his running list of Things Dr. Rush Can Maybe Do.

“Contemporaneous reference frames for all!” Park lifted her cup, her voice loud and determined.

“Despite my best efforts to convince everyone I crawled straight out of hell,” Rush said dryly, “I did live a relatively normal life before joining the SGC.”

“And how long would it have lasted?” TJ whispered. “That dream? That life?”

“So, um, time loop?”

Their link would heal. It had to.

Velcro. How humane.

“It’s called a ghost story.”

Nothing was working.

“Fulmen micat,” Chloe whispers in the darkness.

“Are you refusing a direct order?” Young asked quietly.

Gloria again and again and again—the moment he cracked the code, on the bridge, in the control interface room, in the mess, in his quarters, in the infirmary—Gloria. Snippets of conversation. Of life. Of death. Of something after.

McKay’s watched enough Star Trek to know what happens next.

“Why him?” Young whispered to the empty room.

He didn’t see Rush’s right hook until it met his left eye. That focused them both.

It would be him, or it would be TJ.

“Huh. I mean, you leave a guy for dead one time—” Telford shrugged. “You’d think he’d be a little more professional about it.”

“Destiny likes him.”

Immediately before the bolts engage, he hears the roar of a distant sea.

It must begin somewhere.