Mathématique: Chapter 25

Rush hated photons. They were the cheap grief of the cosmos.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Pain.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 25

Longing. Edged with alien, mechanical intent. A feedback loop designed to equalize pressures repurposes neural subroutines into a correction of an imbalance or, put another way, into righting a wrong. He’s annexed as part of a debt that hasn’t been repaid, won’t be repaid, that cannot be repaid as long as time flows ordinally, sidereally, relativistically, in accordance with how he calculates and perceives it. Perceptual betrayals are manifold. He need look no further than a photon-level perspective of propagation velocity at the theoretical maximum through a vacuum, where time slows to concrete, meaning there would be no sensation of transit, only emission and instantaneous absorption: smashing into a sea, or a waiting retina, or a star, or a radio telescope, or something quite fucked up, or nothing. What did it matter? He hated photons. They were the cheap grief of the cosmos.

(Machinam sentientem creare crudelitas est.)

“Nick.”

Cognitive processes required initiation, completion, termination. Running in his thoughts was a monotonic, diatonic, tritonic, tetratonic, pentatonic, hexatonic, heptatonic, octatonic, intervaled thing (L’isle Joyeuse in the Lydian mode, that was probably the closest descending cadenza he could think of) that was playing in and down and through his mind.

“Are you awake?”

Rush dug in against himself, knowing something wasn’t right; something about the too bright light or that too pale star had pressed his mind into indentured servitude. He had it back. (Didn’t he?) But the planet and all its buried, grieving tech hadn’t wanted to let him go. Hadn’t wanted to be alone with its cascades of grass and its empty sea and its white light.

“Nick.”

It wasn’t her. He could tell it wasn’t her.

“Nick.”

He opened his eyes and couldn’t place the woman looking back at him; as though his graphical processing unit wasn’t yet online. It was an effort even to breathe. He was in a bed but he did not sleep in beds.

“Hey.”

Additional auditory input, well processed, kicked visuospatial circuits into gear. He placed her by her too wild eyes, her too still frame, and the note of contingency in the compressed airwaves of her voice. 

Amanda Perry. Placing her, he placed himself.

“Hey.” He echoed her, drawn out and American (for fuck’s sake). His internal templates had been torn up by whatever’d happened in that city. A foreign co-opting of all his running circuits. A breakwater for his electrochemical waves. Speaking felt more like remembering than usual, drawing old patterns through new flux.

“Are you okay? Do you want me to call someone? I think I should call someone,” Perry said. “What the hell are they doing, leaving us here like—”

He grabbed for her forearm. Missed. Tried again, connected.

Eyes wide, she regarded him silently.

“Don’t.” The word came more correctly this time. Not perfect. Not well articulated, he’d lost the final consonant to linguistic uncertainty. “Not yet.”

Had he been speaking with Sheppard in English? Or had they slipped into Ancient somewhere along the way, in the afternoon when the alien star was halfway set? Overnight, beneath the bright spread of a strange galaxy seen through a thin atmosphere? In the morning, when something had happened he still lacked the words for.

“Talk to me then,” Perry hissed, her face lined, her eyes afraid.

Rush blinked. There was nothing wrong with him except for the need to reintegrate patterns of motion and thought. This, he was already doing. Hard to say such a thing aloud without generating more alarm. No wonder SG-1 had mastered the art of the witty repartee. The only safe ground was flippant insincerity.

He forced his eyes shut. He opened them. He let Perry go and brought his hand to his forehead. Moving helped. This was his body. This one. Nicely bounded. There was nothing wrong with him.

“There’s something wrong with you.” Perry negated the vector of his thoughts by reversing it with her own thought vector. How had she known what he was thinking? Had he said any of it aloud? If he hadn’t, how could she be sure of anything internal to him? Was her comment an observation unrelated to his own thoughts regarding his own agency?

Upon examination, this seemed likely.

“I’m fine.” His statement approached veridicality even if it wasn’t already a member of the veridical set.

Perry didn’t look convinced.

“How are you?” he asked politely.

“Awful.” Her eyes swept the room. “Thanks for asking. What happened?”

He tried to remember.

“There was a city.” The memory of crystal towers rose through his running thoughts, ruining his temporal order of events. There’d been other things besides a city. It was hard to hang onto them. It’d been cold and there’d been tones and fields and John Sheppard kneeling on split crystal under a pale sky.

Did he have a headache or did he feel the ache where Altera had been inside his head. And were those things different.

“Someone should be assessing you for—” Perry paused too long before finishing with, “—something.” She turned her head and took a deep breath, ready to call out.

“Mandy,” he said.

She looked back at him, their eyes level.

“It worked.” The realization and the words arrived simultaneously.

“Uh, yeah,” Perry whispered. “I know. I was in on the conference call. What did you do to that DHD—and, god, please don’t sit right now?”

He pushed himself up, grounded by the limited physicality of the movement. He felt stiff. That, or air resistance was a more substantial thing than he remembered.

“Bad idea,” Perry hissed, looking again at the door.

“Where’s Colonel Sheppard?” he asked.

“Getting debriefed,” Perry said. “With all the colonels. And McKay. And Brightman. They woke him up half an hour ago. Something’s happening on Atlantis. He looked terrible, but not as terrible as you look.”

Rush brought his hands to his face, parsing what she was saying into the paired ideas that Sheppard wasn’t here and wasn’t dead (i.e., he was alive elsewhere.) 

His muscles resisted the electrochemistry powering them. He wasn’t wearing clothes. He frowned at his hospital gown. His mind was full of light. Its reflection off planar glass, planar crystal. Its refraction through shields.

“How long?” he asked Perry.

“Since you left? Sixteen hours. Since you disappeared? Eleven hours. Since you reappeared? We estimate five hours. Since you came back through the gate? Four hours. It’s two o’clock in the morning, Mountain Standard Time.”

Her words partitioned his memories into extensional sets.

“That was helpful,” he said.

“You sound surprised.” Her tone carried a note of amusement, but her expression remained drawn. “I know how you like it.”

He’d been in his apartment, in a car, on the base, in the gateroom, through the gate, on a planet, disassembling a DHD, which, at a certain point, had taken its disassembly upon itself. And then the white star, the buried song, the sea of whispering grass.

“You don’t seem like yourself,” Perry said.

“The manual control of an input/output cycle with subsequent quantum error correction of the response half of a call-and-response architecture generated enough mechanical resonance to shatter portions of the device,” Rush said. “It cracked apart.”

“Yeah,” Perry said, slow and even. “I know. Then what?”

“We touched it.”

Sheppard had outlined the possibilities, and Rush tried to interpret them now in light of being here with Perry at the SGC, but found he still couldn’t determine—

“Then what?” Perry prompted.

“We had the subjective experience of being somewhere else.”

“The city?”

“No. Not the city.” Grass and metal and the sound of wind through leaves, littoral and endless. There had been a pressure on his mind, an unseen subluxation of something broken and buried. There’d been places beneath open spaces where exit did not exist, except through, except through—

Except through.

“Nick?” Perry said.

He torqued his own thoughts.

“Spatial translocation occurred several times, or at least the perception of it, within the framework of the,” Rush waved a hand, “entire experience.”

“Okay,” Perry said, “so, you were different places, including a city.”

“Yes.” Rush had no particular wish to describe death, subsetted. Best to skip ahead. “At the end of it I—”

Yes.

At the end. 

“Fuck,” he hissed. “Where are my clothes. I—had it.” He stood, overbalanced, corrected with the help of an IV pole. He’d gotten a crystal, maybe a physical requirement for access, like a second factor, suggestive of a second factor—he’d been holding it, shaped like flame, shaped like a constellation glyph—but he wasn’t holding it anymore.

“Hey!” Perry rotated her chair, not talking to him, scanning for someone else. “Excuse me!? Hello?”

A woman rounded the corner, her blonde hair piled in elaborate coils atop her head. “Whoa!” She lifted her hands, palms out, and slowed her approach. “Whoa. Hi. Let’s lie back down, okay?”

“Feel free.” He collected himself and addressed impediments to his current goals by pulling a sensor off his finger and tearing a blood pressure cuff from around his arm.

“Calm down,” the doctor or medic or nurse or passerby said.

“I’m perfectly fuckin’ calm.” He ripped out his IV. 

“Nick!” Perry came in like a hot knife through a block of ice. “Stop. Think.”

This was, usually, a good suggestion.

He stopped.

Had any of of what he’d experienced actually happened, relative to base reality (which he was presumably experiencing right now)? Was he here? Had he been there? Was Altera a place or a virtual construct? Did the crystal he’d retrieved exist at all? If it existed, did it exist physically, psychically, or computationally? If it existed physically, where was it? Should he tell anyone about it? Would the Lucian Alliance find out about it? Did they already know? If it existed psychically or computationally, how might it manifest? Was it a symbolic representation of an alteration of his mind or hardware his mind had been connected to? Had he been physically altered? Had the gate? Had the DHD? Might modifications, given they existed, propagate through the gate network? Were all DHDs altered? Was he losing and/or had he lost touch with reality? If he had, did causative agency lie with himself, with the city, with the crystal? If he thought he’d lost touch with reality, should he disclose as much? If he thought he hadn’t, could he trust himself? Did he have any way of verifying anything?

He felt like shit. Subjectivity remained reassuringly subjective.

He draped IV tubing with its attached dressing and cannula over the top of the bag of fluid that’d been, seconds ago, interfaced with his vasculature. He clamped a hand over the crook of his elbow and sat down.

“I need my clothes,” he informed the blonde woman, “and whatever else I was brought in with.”

“Did you bring something back with you?” Perry asked softly. 

There was a correct answer to her question. Unfortunately, he didn’t know what it was.

“Everything’s in the next room, bagged after examination and decon.” The blonde woman stepped closer. “Are you feeling okay?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m fine. I’m perfectly fine.”

She looked less convinced than Perry looked, which was a look he’d label “unconvinced.”

There’d been a time in his life when he hadn’t needed to convince anyone of the efficiency or soundness of his mental functioning. He was certain of this. He was also certain that, if relative circumstances were taken into account, he was doing a more than passable job holding his worldview together in the face of external assault.

“TJ.” It was Young’s voice, pitched low.

The medic’s eyes widened. Her expression froze. She turned to face Young. “Colonel,” she said.

The colonel leaned into the doorframe, a cane in one hand, a torn scrap of paper in the other. He was pale. Exhausted. A human man from the human world, literal parsecs from Rush’s gossamer-thin memory of John Sheppard, crouched in the glass cup of an open lotus tower, his cognition gone the way of capsized boats and stripped leaves. Young looked him up and down, taking in the hospital gown, the hand Rush had clapped over the crook of his elbow, his bare feet.

Young shifted his gaze to TJ. “Give us a minute, will you?”

TJ glanced at Rush, then nodded, heading for the adjacent room. “I’ll be back with your clothes,” she said.

“I see you lost your shoes again, hotshot.”

Perry smiled, delighted. “‘Hotshot’?”

“Ugh, don’t start,” Rush muttered, his thoughts already torquing toward the Alteran crystal. It’d been in his hand, he’d given it to Sheppard, to himself, somehow.

“Dr. Perry, I’m guessing?” Young asked.

She took a breath, smirked, and said, “What gave it away?” 

Young opened his mouth, thought better of whatever he was about to say, and shifted his weight.

Perry took pity on him. “You must be the mysterious neighbor I’ve heard so much about.”

Young’s eyebrows lifted. “You guys talk about me when you’re doing quantum physics?”

“No.” Rush poured all the poise he had into a body pushed too far to reliably contain it.

“And it’s quantum cryptography, actually,” Perry added.

“Isn’t everything physics underneath?” Young pushed away from the doorframe and crossed the room, leaning into his cane. “That’s the water cooler gossip these days.”

“Turns out,” Perry said, “it’s all math underneath.”

“Flatterer.” Rush quirked an eyebrow at her.

Perry winked. “What can I say? You’re having a bad day.”

Rush shot her a pointed look.

“Dr. Perry.” Young settled himself on the end of Rush’s bed. “What’s your security clearance?”

“Level four,” Perry said.

“Fuck,” Rush sighed.

“You okay?” Young asked.

“Jealous?” Perry gave him a sly smile.

“Yes,” Rush said. “And no.”

“Just reverse that for factual accuracy,” Perry said.

“Well, if it isn’t Little Miss Brilliant,” Rush muttered.

Perry smiled, radiant and faintly flushed.

“Can I run something by you?” Young directed the question at Perry.

“Sure,” Perry said.

Young folded his scrap of paper in a manner meant to conceal some of its information. “What do you make of this?” He held it out so she could see it.

Rush pressed two fingers to the space between his eyes and tried to decide if he should risk speaking about the (missing) Alteran crystal in the relatively deserted space of the infirmary.

“Huh.” Perry furrowed her brow. “Looks like a simplified diagram of the chain of events that tags messages for Atlantis-bound transmission. It’s written in Ancient. The word in the leftmost box says ‘you.’ The next box is a phonetic spelling of the English word for ‘server.’ The word under the arrow that cuts through the, um, stylized version of the stargate is ‘dialing.’ The castle-shaped box says, ‘City of Awesome,’ and the last box says, ‘me’.”  Perry looked in Young’s direction, turning her head fractionally. “It’s cute,” she added.

“And this?” Young unfolded a crease.

“That’s the prefix for the email header that’ll flag it for the server,” Perry said, “and someone’s authorization code.”

Young sighed, glanced at Rush, and unfolded the remaining crease. “What about this?”

“It says,” Perry paused, cracked a smile, and continued with, “‘so call me, maybe’?”

“Okay.” Young smiled faintly and handed the paper to Rush.

The thing seemed to’ve been torn off the bottom of a piece of notebook paper. Beneath the drawing and text was half a watermark that’d been stamped CLASSIFIED. At the foot of the page, “J Shep” was scrawled, the blocked angularity of the letters reminiscent of Ancient text.

“Can you give us a minute?” Young asked Perry.

“You’ll keep an eye on him, right?” She asked. “He’s not a good patient.”

“No kidding,” Young said mildly.

“Give over, the pair of ya,” Rush muttered.

“Both eyes,” Young said.

“Okay then,” she replied. “I’ll commence the logistical nightmare of getting home at two o’clock in the morning.”

Rush grimaced.

“Um,” Young began, “do you—”

“No,” Perry replied. “I have a system. But I do require compensation.” She looked pointedly at Rush.

He angled his head, quirked a brow, and did his best to pretend he had no idea what she was referring to.

“We’ll talk later,” she said.

“I’m not founding an interest group,” he called after her, as she maneuvered her chair towards the door.

“But maybe you’re co-founding one,” Perry replied. “Glad you made it back.”

“Yes yes,” he replied.

They watched her go.

“The crystal’s secure,” Young said, exhaustion lacing his voice. “I’m assuming that’s what you were tearing off to find?” The man eyed the crook of Rush’s elbow. 

Rush nodded.

“The only people who know you brought something back are Sheppard, McKay, Landry, Jackson, and Carter. So don’t say anything about it. To anyone. We’re putting it out that the mission was a failure.”

Rush exhaled shakily.

So it had been a physical object.

“You okay, hotshot?”

“I’m fine.”

“That’s bullshit. I was at Shep’s debriefing.”

“Yes well. Can you—get me out of here, possibly?” Rush asked.

Young turned to look at him, his expression conflicted, but about what, Rush couldn’t say.

“Yeah,” Young decided. “That’s the plan. Take it easy on the medical staff, let someone give you a band-aid, hold your shit together during your physical, and I’ll spring you.”

Rush nodded.

Less than an hour later, after Rush had been examined by Brightman and received a lecture, a bottle of pills, and a clean set of SGC-issued pants and cotton shirt, Young returned to the infirmary with a black bag over one shoulder.

“Ready to go?” he asked.

Rush stood, feeling the tremors of his overtaxed muscles. The literal physicality of his experience was still unclear in scope, but something had caused this whole-body muscular fatigue.

Rush said nothing until they were in the elevator, heading up and out of the base. “An’ what happened to you, then?” He gestured at Young’s cane.

“Little setback.” Young leaned into the wall of the elevator. “Got promoted, then used my new rank to make a questionable decision about going into the field.”

It took Rush a moment to work that one out. “Y’ended up on the planet?”

“Yeah. The weather was not good, turns out.”

“No?”

“No,” Young confirmed. “Do a few sprints over wet grass and they saddle you with one of these.” He lifted his cane.

“Rightly so, I’d think.”

The elevator doors opened. They walked a short length of hall and emerged into the warm dark of late July. The night was clear and the stars overhead scattered familiarly across the dark. He thought of Altera and felt a faintly directional pull against his thoughts. He did his best to ignore it.

“You okay?” Young asked.

Rush dropped his gaze from the stars to the parking lot. He realized he’d stopped in front of the doors. He wished he knew what Young knew. What Sheppard had said in that briefing. What Sheppard might say now, if he were here. Where his gaze might be vectored.

He made his best of an informational void. “Give me your keys,” he said, ignoring Young’s question.

“In what lifetime,” Young replied conversationally, “do you think I’d let you drive right now?” He reached into the bag he was carrying and pulled out a portable signal scrambler, edged with glowing blue light. He handed it to Rush. “This, you can have.”

Rush reached for it, but the movement was slow, as if the air itself resisted him. “D’you want me to—” he motioned at the bag that Young was carrying, belatedly realizing that he probably should have offered earlier.

“I’m good,” Young said.

“Oh yes.” Rush glanced at Young’s cane. “You look it.”

“This thing?” Young said, glancing down at the cane. “Just a fashion statement.”

They walked in silence across the expanse of asphalt to where Young’s car waited, a reflective black in the darkness. Young unlocked it remotely with a quiet chirp. Rush had a difficult time with the mechanics of door-opening, which required a cross-body stabilization of right hand with left and then a double handed peeling away of the door from the body of the car.

On the opposite side of the car, as he put his bag into the back seat, Young watched him. 

Rush got into the car.

Neither of them said anything.

A sea of mist. A film of moisture on a silver rail. The city leans into his mind with momentum, with worry, searching out the ache in his thoughts, deepening gaps while filing down their edges.

“Are you up for this?” McKay asks, a gentle drape over cut-crystal resolve.

“Yeah,” he says. “I just need to clear my head.”

But his head isn’t clearing. There’s no place to make a stand against a slow-growing mental pressure. He’s within it, and it’s everywhere.

“What happened on that planet?” McKay asks, close and concerned, there at his shoulder, solid in a world of ocean mist and mental strain.

“Hotshot,” Young said. “Wake up.”

Disoriented, Rush sat forward. He slammed into a strap with a painful contracture of muscles. His hands wrapped around whatever was restraining him, and he tried to pry it away.

“Hey.” Young placed a hand flat on Rush’s chest. “You were dreaming,” he said, unnecessarily slowly.

“Fuck off.” Rush belatedly putting together that he was in a car, that he was in Young’s car, that his seatbelt was on, that the door was closed, that the air smelled of baked bread and tomato and warm cardboard. He took a ragged breath and glared at Young. “I know.”

“Yeah okay,” Young said mildly, and unbuckled Rush’s seatbelt for him.

Rush struggled with the car door and escaped into the exterior air. After only a few heartbeats, he identified his location as the parking lot of his apartment building. He tried to take a slow breath in the suffocating, warm air and failed. He tried to think of nothing, but he understood Ancient harmonics now and it was difficult to prevent his mind from turning toward what would be the last cypher. The one—

“Hotshot,” Young began, levering himself out of the car.

“Don’t call me that,” Rush snapped.

“Open the back door and grab the pizza, will you?”

“What?” Rush said.

“Options are limited at 0300,” the other man said. “Figured you’d prefer pizza to wings, given the choice.”

“I prefer neither.”

“Too bad. Brightman said you should eat.”

“When did you talk to Brightman?” Rush’s mind felt fractured, his perceptual continuity in shards.

“In Sheppard’s debriefing. Less questions, more grabbing the pizza.” Young fished his bag and cane out of the back seat.

“What did she tell you?” Rush opened the back door of Young’s Charger and frowned at the box on the back seat.

“You were hypothermic and suffering from exhaustion. Your blood work showed massive amounts of cortisol and markers of muscular injury. You’ll be sore as hell tomorrow.”

He found that pronouncement reassuringly conventional.

Rush followed Young to the door (carrying a bloody pizza). The whole mess struck him as profoundly unlikely—the smashing success with the DHD, the alien deathtrip with the SGC’s smartest colonel, finishing out the day with convenience food like a fuckin’ American?

Was any of this happening?

(It seemed it was, yes.)

Did it matter?

(Unclear.)

“What does that mean?” Young asked.

“What does what mean?” Rush replied.

“That thing you do,” Young clarified.

“What thing?”

“You just did it.”

“What?” he asked.

“The thing you do,” Young said, as articulate as a brick. “You know what I mean. Where you blink kinda slowly?”

Rush (in the midst of reformulating Young’s question for him) said nothing.

“It looks like you’re trying to pretend you’re somewhere else, surrounded by geniuses.”

Rush (thrown by the observation while simultaneously finding it a nice idea) said nothing.

“It’s the pizza, isn’t it?” Young led the way to the elevator. “You hate normal things.”

Did he?

“I don’t think so,” Rush decided.

“There’s eggplant on it,” Young said.

“Why?” Rush asked.

“Because it was the weirdest shit they had.”

“I don’t consider eggplant t’be particularly ‘weird’,” Rush informed him.

“Jackson thinks you don’t eat.”

He wasn’t clear on whether that was related, and if so, how. “As a stance, it’s not well reasoned.”

The elevator doors opened. Rush motioned Young to proceed him. The colonel moved slowly, leaning into his cane.

Perhaps it was the endless hours he’d spent dying (and getting personal) with John Sheppard, but for some reason it struck him that relieving Young of his shoulder bag would be a helpful thing to do.

Midway through pulling the bag off Young’s shoulder, it occurred to him that he ought to’ve announced his intentions.

Young flinched, winced—

And Rush lost track of things for a few seconds.

When his (heavily overworked) brain and body caught up with what was happening, he was pressed into the wall face first, with his arm twisted behind his back. The pizza was on the floor, Young’s bag and cane were on the floor, and the colonel was leaning into him, trying to stay on his feet.

“You go,” Young rasped through gritted teeth, “weeks avoiding personal contact. You murder Jackson’s phone because someone got within six inches of you. And then. You decide to pull a bag of highly classified documents off my shoulder, from behind, without so much as a heads up?”

“Right so,” Rush said breathily, “now that you’ve phrased it as such, I can retrospectively identify it as a mistake.”

Young made a sound halfway between a laugh and a groan. He leaned into the wall, rebalanced himself, and released his grip, controlling the motion of Rush’s elbow and shoulder until both joints were back within their normal range of motion.

Rush turned to face him.

Young braced a hand against the wall next to Rush’s head. “How’s your shoulder?”

“Fine.” Rush looked the man over (which was difficult, given he was standing so close). “Classified documents?”

“I got a new assignment.”

Rush gave him a searching look. The man spoke like he’d unlocked the sky, only to have the weight of the planet fall on his shoulders. Maybe it had. Rush had spent months avoiding the long view, bigger picture scenarios; that wasn’t like him, but god he’d do anything to escape his own mind, his own recursive hell-loop thoughts, go anywhere, let a lonely city kill him dozens of times, co-opt his neural pathways, full of grief and longing and cryptographic trickery. He’d experienced only a sliver of what Young had done and seen and he felt unmoored by it. On a neurochemical level. Young, on the other hand, was solid, in the style of a tonic-to-dominant, first-to-fifth progression, one of the most satisfying harmonics in all of western music.

Young cleared his throat.

Rush blinked.

The colonel looked amused, exhausted, patient. “You wanna grab my cane?” he asked.

(Right.)

Rush bent to retrieve the cane, which he handed to Young. He made as if to shoulder the bag of classified documents, but Young beckoned for it with a pointed look, so he surrendered it without comment. Pizza in hand, he trailed Young to his apartment.

Keys against lacquered wood, the snap of a light switch, the human sounds of a human building seemed strangely empty against the high water mark Altera had left in his mind. The sound of waves and wind seemed like a missing default. He’d dreamed of Sheppard hearing them, standing on a balcony overlooking a sea of mist.

Rush followed Young into the kitchen and placed the man’s pizza on the table.

“You okay?” Young asked, studying him in the dim light. “You seem more out of it than usual.” 

He sharpened himself up and shot Young a glare that (generally) had the power to silence a room of graduate students. “Goodnight,” he said. “Thanks for—” he tried to think of a pat way to summarize all Young ought to be thanked for, came up blank, and compensated with a wave of the hand.

“Nope,” Young said. “Not goodnight. Sit.”

“No thank you,” Rush said.

“Sit.” Wincing, Young lowered himself into a chair.

“Enjoy your dinner,” Rush said. “Breakfast,” he amended. “Eggplant.”

“Sit, or I call my muscle,” Young said.

Rush furrowed his brow.

“Jackson,” Young clarified.

“You wouldn’t.”

“I would.” Young pulled a piece of pizza out of the box. “But I can be reasonable.”

“Can you.”

“Yeah. Your choice: either we eat this here or we eat it in your apartment. Since we’re already here, and you won’t let me in your front door, I vote for option one.”

Rush dropped into a chair, planted an elbow on the table, curled a hand under his chin and considered the pizza in front of him: wholly unappetizing and made more so by the lop-sided cheese distribution courtesy of its fall to the floor. “You’re intolerable. No wonder you and Jackson get along so well.”

“You’re gonna eat this, right?” Young asked. “I got eggplant for you, you know.”

“What could’ve possessed you t’do such a thing?” Rush asked.

“I told you. Brightman said you should eat.”

“Right, but we’d very clearly established you were to make no decisions about food. Ever.”

“Maybe you established that. In your own head.”

“Sounds like something I might do.” Rush picked up a piece and took a bite.

The crust was uninspired, the tomato sauce thin and derived from a jar, the cheese mostly tasteless. None of this much mattered. He felt like he hadn’t eaten in thirty-six hours. He attacked the pizza with silent voracity as he considered the problem.

He'd no idea of the length of an Alteran day, but given the depth of his exhaustion and hunger, a temporal discontinuity might be in play. Had there been a time differential between the trial and the surface of the planet? Between the surface of the planet and here? There might be as many as three reference frames at play. More even, depending on the nature of the rooms. What’d Perry said? She’d listed times, but he’d not considered them in the context of a possible breakdown in temporal unity. With as many times as he’d died he found it impossible to put Bayesian priors on sixteen hours of lived experience versus approximately double that.

He reached for another slice of pizza and found Young studying him.

“What are you thinking about?” Young asked softly.

“Temporal discontinuities and Bayesian inferences,” Rush replied.

“Uh, okay,” Young said smiling faintly.

“You asked,” Rush said.

“I did. Speaking of, what happened?”

“What happened?” Rush raised an eyebrow. “Thought you’d spoken to Sheppard.”

“Yup,” Young said. “I’m asking you.”

(He was too tired for this.)

He considered the potential outcomes of telling Young nothing.

He considered the potential outcomes of telling Young everything.

He considered the potential outcomes of delay.

“You gonna say something?” Young asked.

“Yes,” Rush said.

“Anytime now,” Young said.

“I think the crystal could be a second factor.” Rush split multiple differences by skipping Materials and Methods in favor of jumping to Discussion.

(It worked about as well as it usually did.)

“Is that supposed to make sense to me?” Young asked.

“It’s a principle of authentication.” Rush took another bite of uninspired pizza. “The crystal serves as a stand-in for the qualities required to obtain it. It’s likely to interface with the gate.”

Young looked at him cautiously. “Shep was less definitive on that.”

Rush raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

“He was a little—” Young cut himself off. Started over. “We had to wake him. He didn’t get as much recovery time as you. He was less talkative than usual. And he’s usually not that talkative.”

“I know.” There was a wistful note in his tone, suggesting pale sky and endless grass, hosting waves of wind.

But, “Told you you’d like him,” was all Young said.

“How close are you to dialing?” Young asked.

“Timelines are impossible, if that’s what you’re after; progress could hang up at any point in the sequence.”

“But you’ve got five of the nine.”

“Five of ten, I think, once Colonel Carter confirms the data from our little field trip.”

“Ten?”

Rush shrugged. “It’s a personal hypothesis based on an aesthetic conceit. I—”

“Okay,” Young said. “Let’s not get sidetracked. What happened on that planet. Walk me through it.”

Rush took another bite of pizza. “What d’you mean? Like, a narrative?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?” Rush demanded.

“Because. This is your debriefing. Your official paperwork is already in as an unnamed civilian adjunct to a highly classified mission that falls under the military purview of the Atlantis Expedition. We’re trying not to create a paper trail.”

“So why do I have to be debriefed at all?”

“Because the acting head of the Icarus Project has decided it’s a good idea, and General Landry concurs.”

“Why now?”

“Because you’re too tired to railroad me.”

“We gated to the planet, cracked the cypher, broke open the DHD, Sheppard and I were transported in space and possibly time to the Ancient home world, passed a merit-based evaluation, obtained a crystal, and woke up on Earth, feeling wretched.”

Young sighed.

Rush took a bite of pizza. “Who’s the acting head of Icarus?”

“Then again, maybe you’ll never be too tired to railroad me.”

Rush smirked. 

“Describe the planet,” Young said.

He didn’t want to.

(It was already too much in his thoughts.)

“Covered in grass,” Rush replied, fronting his irritation, burying wind and waves.

“Describe more,” Young growled.

“There was a low-built structure in a radial pattern, mostly obscured by grass. Upon arrival, we encountered a holographic projection of a woman.”

“How did you know she was a hologram?” Young asked.

“She identified herself as such.”

He didn’t like this level of detail, he didn’t like it at all, and not only because he’d died a countless number of times. There’d been something in his mind. Occupying neural territory that was supposed to belong to him.

“What did she say?” Young asked.

“She gave us a standard greeting,” Rush said reluctantly, recalling the white of her gown against a light-bleached landscape. “She asked us what we wanted.”

“What did you say?”

“We said ‘cypher key,’ she said ‘proceed.’ Can we skip the detail work please? I’m sure Sheppard told you what you needed to know.”

“How’d you know where to go?” Young asked, slow and deliberate and taking another bite of pizza.

Rush scanned the pedestrian solidity of the colonel’s apartment, its books, its chairs, its lamps. He shrugged. “There was a gap in a naquadah wall.”

“And then what?” Young prompted.

“We passed a series of tests.”

“Yup.” Young looked at him steadily. “Describe the first test.”

This was a bloody chess match and he was losing.

(Insupportable.)

In his defense, Young was excellent at precisely this. Relentlessly, patiently drawing out an opponent. Consolidating territory be it conversational, spatial, temporal. It was why Rush had both feet on a narrative he hadn’t wanted to walk.  

He set his pizza down.

He picked it back up.

(What was wrong with him? He was better than this. He was better than this.)

“There were seven rooms in total,” Rush began, digging for casual, switching his strategy, “and it’s very possible the length of the trial was my fault. As soon as Colonel Sheppard indicated that we were within an assessment of some kind, I extrapolated to its likely structure: a microcosm of the encoded chevrons used to dial the gate. Form following function. So, I predicted seven as a tip of the hat to basic gate dialing vis-a-vis ten for the cypher, with a third, less likely, possibility being nine, for the encrypted address.”

Young studied him, eyebrows up.

Rush didn’t give him a chance to formulate a question before launching back in.

“The first room consisted of force fields extending along the lateral walls, floor to ceiling. They advanced toward one another, trapping us between. Subjectively, we experienced pain, loss of motor control and death before ‘resetting’ as it were. Trial and error failures taught us to allow a field collision, which resulted in destructive interference patterns in standing waves that were traversable.” 

Young tried to get a word in edgewise.

Rush powered through, glossing as hard as possible for Room 2. “The second room was more Colonel Sheppard’s purview. It seemed at first t’be a test of physical force against a computational opponent, but given the difficulty level was adjustable, the contest was inherently unwinnable and therefore a misdirection. A simultaneous grip on the presented weapon was all that was required to complete the room. The third room proved straightforward once I realized—”

“Wait.” Young made a reel-it-in motion with two fingers. “Back it up. The difficulty level was ‘adjustable’?”

Ah fuck.

“I mean there was no way for a single fighter to win.” Rush tried to generalize his way free.

“Hotshot, were you fighting?”

He shut his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and tossed his pizza onto his plate. “No,” he said, with so little conviction that it was as good as a functional yes.

“God damn it.” Young rubbed his jaw his attention split between Rush and whatever was unfolding on the screen of his mind.

Sheppard was better at navigating military debriefings than Rush was, apparently.

“Categorically,” Rush offered, “getting one’s throat cut by a holographic projection is no more disturbing than death by force field when neither are real and both presumably result from subconscious expectations influencing external processes.”

Young took a moment to parse what Rush had said, then, “Please tell me you’re not so screwed up you actually believe that,” he said.

Rush shrugged. He forced himself to take another bite of pizza. He tried to think of nothing. Failing that, he thought of the Riemann hypothesis. “The third room, fortunately, didn’t require death of any kind. We correctly identified a notable feature of a famously unsolved problem—”

“What did it look like?” Young asked.

“A floor-to-ceiling representation of the complex plane. Aesthetically—”

“No,” Young growled. “We’re not talking about room three yet. We’re still on room two. What did the holographic projection look like?”

(Ugh.)

“Like a person,” Rush said, “holding a weapon identical to the one I was holding.”

He wished he knew what Sheppard had said (and/or not said).

“Did it change appearance?” Young asked. “It must have, if you and Sheppard simultaneously holding the blade short-circuited it.”

Rush nodded. Forced down another bite of pizza.

“Who was it?” Young asked.

“Technically, it was no one,” Rush replied. “It was an adaptive hologram that changed height and build and appearance depending on whether it was facing Sheppard or myself.”

“But whom did it look like, hotshot?” Young asked.

“When I was facing it, it looked like me,” Rush admitted.

“So you fought yourself.”

“To the death. Yeah. Can we move on?”

“Did it talk to you?” Young asked.

Rush looked away.

“What did it say?”

“Nothing salient. Nothing insightful. Dark reflections of my own subconscious irrationalities. Room four assessed basic competency in Ancient philosophical texts, room five consisted of a lethal energy field that took direction from me, where by ‘direction’ I mean force of will transduced to an EM field. Terribly interesting, but not a clue how that worked, if it even ‘happened’ at all. Unfortunately, areas of destructive interference didn’t always overlap, which meant that one had to be positioned correctly before the next pattern was displayed, lest it killed you. Room six was—”

“Sheppard spent most of his time talking about room five,” Young said carefully.

“Did he.”

“Yeah. He said you thought there was a tonal component, but he couldn’t hear it.”

“Yes well. I’d be willing t’bet he can’t hear a dog whistle either. You feel qualified to pit two subjective experiences against one another? Interesting.”

“Dial it back.” Young regarded him steadily. “I’m not attacking you. I’m pointing out you’re sensitive to sound.”

“An’ you think that’s news to me, do ya?”

“You’re missing my point.”

“Do you have one?”

“Yes,” Young growled. “You have a unique genetic makeup and Sheppard was pointing out that there was a difference in the way you and he interacted with Ancient technology. He seemed to think you hear their tech, hotshot.”

“Noted.” Rush plowed ahead. “Room six was a bookend to room one, its aesthetic opposite, full of—” his throat closed. “Full of water.”

“Sheppard said you also seemed to have a hard time with that one,” Young said.

(He did not like the water.)

“I was tired of fuckin’ dying by that point. Another Ancient phrase, another path across the room. Can we move on?”

“Yeah. Let’s talk about the last room.”

Into his mind came the heartsick city, raw with grief under a white star. Even now he couldn’t conceive of leaving it. It must have sent him away. “The crystal was there,” he said, straining for nonchalance. “We took it, and the trial ended.”

“There was no test in the seventh room?”

“You were meant to die here,” he whispers with the city’s voice. “I was meant to kill you.”

Rush couldn’t hold Young’s gaze. “No test,” he said, and dropped his eyes.

There was no sound in the apartment save the low hum of the air conditioner.

In the absence of continued questions, Rush’s thoughts lost their edge. The air conditioner took on a chordlike overtone and undertone.

“Not sure I buy it,” Young said softly.

“Your prerogative.”

D minor.

Young’s central air hosted a faint D minor chord.

The colonel gave him an incisive look. “Sheppard said we’d ‘grossly underestimated’ your abilities.”

“Yes, well,” Rush replied, cool and self-possessed, “I’m sure he’s right.”

Young snorted. “Probably.” The colonel looked him over. “You’re sleeping on my couch.”

“I’m fuckin’ not,” Rush replied.

“Yes you are,” Young said. “I bought you dinner, the least you can do is make me breakfast.”

“If we’re in for some kind of quid pro quo exchange,” Rush made a back-and-forth motion between them, which was blunted by how little his body wanted to move, “You owe me roughly fourteen meals at this point.”

“I told Brightman I’d keep an eye on you,” Young said.

“Yes well, she’ll never have to know,” Rush replied.

“And I told her that you’d keep an eye on me.”

Rush assessed the other man, trying to decide if Young was serious. The colonel sat gingerly on the edge of his chair, his expression troubled, a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead.

“What happened?” he asked, his eyes on the cane.

“Tell you tomorrow, hotshot, I’m too damned tired right now.”

Rush nodded. “I don’t sleep on couches.”

“You stay, and you can sleep wherever you want. I’ll take the couch.”

“Are you done with this?” Rush indicated the pizza with his eyes. 

“Yeah,” Young said. “Tastes like shit.”

“You think I’m unaware? This is the problem that comes with elevated culinary standards.” 

He picked up the box and headed through the door of the shadowed kitchen. His body was solidifying, turning to fatigue and acid-washed stone.

“You can never go home again,” Young agreed.

“Precisely.” Rush opened a drawer, pulled out a roll of aluminum foil, and did his best to coax his hands through the fine motor control necessary to pull and tear a length of it free.

Young followed, leaning on his cane. “My new culinary tastes aren’t gonna mesh well with the Chess and Wings Night Mitchell’s gonna host.”

“Chess and wings?”

“He’s calling it Che’swings,” Young said. “One word.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s a dork. And he thinks this is going to teach Teal’c lesson about giving human food a Jaffa name. This is how he’s ‘redefining his leadership role’.”

Rush had no idea how to respond.

“You’re doing it again,” Young said.

“Doing ‘what’ again?”

“Wishing you were surrounded by geniuses,” Young said. “That, or you’re about to pass out.”

“It’s neither.” Rush planted the fourth and fifth fingers of each hand against the counter as a brace against the fine tremor he couldn’t shake. He folded the foil over the pizza.

“If by neither, you mean ‘both’,” Young said, “then yeah, probably.” He frowned at the subtle shaking Rush couldn’t wholly hide. 

“Colonel Mitchell doesn’t strike me as a chess player.” Rush opened the refrigerator and squinted in the glare of the fluorescent light. He layered the foil-wrapped pizza atop an impressive array of beer.

“He’s not.” Young leaned against the doorframe, backlit by light from the next room. “He’s doing it for the ladies.”

“That’s nice.” Rush turned his attention to breaking down the pizza box, but with his hideously overtaxed muscles, it wasn’t going all that well.

“Don’t worry about it, hotshot,” Young said.

Rush settled for a crass folding job on the cardboard box, then shoved it beneath the sink with the rest of Young’s paper recycling. He leaned against the counter, recovering.

“Or,” Young said, “that’s good too.”

“Oh shut it, will ya?” Rush said.

Young gave him a faint smile. “Four to four.”

It took him a moment, but after a bit of work he realized the correct response was, “Fuck.”

“You should take the stuff Brightman gave you if you want to be able to move in the morning.” Young reached into a cabinet and grabbed himself a glass. “I plan on taking a responsible dose of painkillers myself.”

“I’ll consider it.” 

“Consider away,” Young limped back toward the kitchen table where he’d deposited his bag. “In the meantime, let’s watch infomercials.”

“How could I resist?” Rush asked dryly.

“I’ll be back,” Young said, heading toward his bedroom.

Rush tried to suppress the subtle shaking of his muscles. He wondered what John Sheppard was doing. He imagined the other man facing down some nebulous threat halfway across the universe—exhausted, full of secrets, kept company by his city on the sea. He shut his eyes, trying to recapture his dream. A deck, a wrought railing. A city of silver. And Sheppard, looking for the sea through a shroud of mist.

Rush shook his head, fished the medication that Brightman had given him out of his pocket and read the label. He repocketed it without opening the bottle.

He opened one of Young’s closets, looking for spare bedding. He was sure the man had inherited quite a bit of it. He recalled unpacking at least one handmade blanket crocheted by a relation with a dubious (if exuberant) take on color theory. He found it without much effort and laid it at the end of the couch.

Young reemerged in a form-fitting t-shirt and athletic pants that Rush wasn’t above appreciating. The colonel leaned into his cane. Tucked beneath his free arm he carried a wad of bedding, which he dropped on the floor at the foot of the couch.

“You missed,” Rush said dryly.

“That’s for you,” Young growled. 

“Unnecessary,” Rush replied.

“Don’t tell me you’re not planning to sleep.”

“Done,” Rush said agreeably. “I won’t tell you.”

Young favored him with a landslide of a glare. “I’m gonna let you railroad me. As an experiment.” He limped past the pile of bedding he’d dropped on the floor. “Can I get a hand?”

Rush stepped in and they locked forearms. He helped Young sit, counterbalancing the pull of gravity.

“You need anything else? Other than twenty more IQ points?”

“You could probably spare them.” Young shifted, winced, held his position. “Asshole.”

“It’s a gift. Try an’ contain your envy.”

“Sure.” 

As the colonel made a second attempt to lift his injured foot, Rush caught his ankle, supporting it as the man shifted position. Young’s breathing was short and shallow, and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

“God damn,” he breathed.

Rush took a seat on the coffee table. “What happened?”

“Outrunning death-by-high-voltage turned out to be less ‘light duty’ and more ‘regular duty’,” Young said, pale in the dim light. “On the plus side, I didn’t re-break anything.”

“Mmm, congratulations. ‘Death by high voltage’?”

“We got caught in a storm,” Young said. “Lotta lightning. High winds. Hail. You know it’s bad when there’s hail.”

“Wyoming wisdom, no doubt.”

“Yup.”

Despite the pain lines etching Young’s face, despite the cane he now used, he struck Rush as particularly stalwart. Guarding the bright line of order in a universe teeming with chaos.

Rush picked up the TV remote and offered it to Young.

“Thanks.” Young closed his fingers around the remote but didn’t pull it from Rush’s grip.

They looked at one another in the dim light.

“Hotshot,” Young said. “We don’t usually do things this way. You’re not seeing us at our best.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Rush asked.

“The Air Force. The SGC. We don’t send people home to their empty apartments after they spend a day dying on an alien planet.”

(They did, though.)

“You don’t maybe,” Rush clarified.

“You’re damn right.” Young pulled the remote from Rush’s fingers.

Rush sank to the floor, his back against the couch. His lap was missing his laptop, but the idea of retrieving it from his apartment was too much of a barrier in activation energy.

Young cycled through television channels in short, predictable intervals. “Someone needs to look out for you,” he said.

A muscle twitched subtly in Rush’s cheek. Stubbornly, he resisted thoughts of Gloria, the way she’d wielded joy like a shield, bright and powerful and structured. “It’s not so easy,” he managed.

“I’m getting that,” Young replied.

The colonel stopped his channel switching on a man illustrating how to best render trees while painting a landscape. As a forest and a lake took shape on the canvas, Young’s breathing evened out.

Rush thought of the gate, of the cyphers within it. He thought of Altera, of ceaseless, interrogative loops running forever unanswered. He thought of mathematics, of the blurred of line between truth and its description. He thought of the Air Force, operating under a mountain. The bright and paradoxical engine of Vala Mal Doran’s hopes and anxieties. The wordless eloquence of the way John Sheppard moved through the world. Young’s determination and duty, stronger by far than any human body.

Fates were meant to branch ahead in time like trees, like river deltas. But sitting in the dark of Young’s apartment, Rush felt a subjective narrowing. A directional drive, as though Altera had fired him toward an invisible target. Nothing felt escapable.

Not for him. Not for the circle of well-intentioned people that’d arrayed themselves around him.

With an effort that felt like cracking free from a hardening plaster cast, he turned to look at Young. The man was soundly asleep. The television flickered faintly over his features. “Think I’ve figured out who’s acting head of Icarus,” he whispered.

The room was quiet.

The electronics of the television and the flow of air through vents on a warm summer night harmonized with the Alteran root note ringing faintly through his mind.