Mathématique: Lantean Dream Team: Part One

“Hey,” Sheppard says, warm and slow, like death isn’t seconds away. “Close your eyes, touch the floor, and ask the fields to stop, maybe.” He gives Rush the smile that’ll never come when he poses for pictures.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Grief. Physical injuries. Mental health challenges. Pain. TRAUMA. Hardcore violence. Looped death scenes. Death wishes. Oblique references to childhood trauma. Drowning.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: Uh, not sure what happened here. I said to my brain “let’s drive into this Sheppard characterization with full commitment,” and you can now read my subsequent out-of-body experience. Maths makes me question my sanity. Check out those revised chapter warnings.

Lantean Dream Team

“Welcome home.”

John Sheppard sweeps a hand through his hair. Spikes it up. Smooths it down. Spikes it up.

The projection of the woman flickers, pale against shifting pastels of land and sky. Her hair is a washed-out approximation of darkness, her hands open.

Long grass bends in turbulent eddies around the irregular gleam of low-set metal, mostly hidden by the windswept stalks. The sky, the gray of exposed rock, the leaves of grass—all of it’s bleached. The light falls hard, stripping color as it comes. His shadow’s a deeper, crisper black than usual.

“State the nature of your requirement,” the woman says, a little more impatient than other holograms Sheppard’s met.

“I require you to state your nature.” Nick Rush takes the lead, not looking to Sheppard for guidance or for clearance or for advice, just putting a wry twist on a deft turn of phrase like it’s all in a day’s work.

The hologram’s expression lightens, almost imperceptibly.

Almost.

And though Sheppard loves the cut and thrust of naked intellect, he steps in, closes his hand around the mathematician’s elbow, and says, “Careful.”

Nick Rush doesn’t like to be touched. His whole body tenses up.

“I’m not sure this is what it looks like,” Sheppard warns, and lets him go.

“I am an adaptive recording,” the woman says.

“Are you, though?” Sheppard murmurs.

“State the nature of your requirement,” the woman says. She’s dressed in white. There’s an asymmetric sheen to her gown that suggests crystal embroidery.

Rush, sharp as an obsidian blade, locks eyes with Sheppard.

The wind hisses through the grass.

Sheppard clears his throat. “What did you mean when you said ‘welcome home’?”

“‘Welcome home’ is a default greeting. State the nature of your requirement.”

“Uh huh.”

Sheppard aches for McKay. He’d feel worlds better, worlds safer, worlds more himself if Rodney were here, swinging a conversational wrecking ball at architectures of bullshit, bringing the house down while Sheppard slips through back doors with unsheathed blades and a silenced sidearm.

“Where are we?” he tries.

“This is Altera.” The woman offers the word like a gift.

It hits like one.

The sound of the syllables carries a feeling of rightness and oneness and wholeness. A sense of belonging. A sense of home. He fights against it. It’s a lie. It has to be. Because his home is California, where the sun is gold rather than white, and where the only thing that presses against the mind is the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

Altera. 

The name rings through the air and through his thoughts like something to be warded off.

This is the Ancient homeworld. Even if he hadn’t known from his dips into the vast Lantean database that Rodney parses, searches, reads in the evenings—he’d know by the feel of the word itself. It contains, somehow, the irradiating light, the deep shadows, seas of water and of grass.

Rush, beside him, is so still.

If Sheppard were to guess, he’d bet Nick Rush has the genetics to pull extrasensory input from the ghosts of EM fields that vibrate in and around sights and smells and sounds. Textures and taste. Aside from Carson Beckett, Sheppard has never met a strong natural positive.

Nick Rush could be the reason they’re standing on Altera.

Or.

It could be Sheppard’s own fault. There’d been something else in his mind beneath his polite request for the cypher key.

He wants to go home.

He’d been thinking of Atlantis, the shine of sun on wrought naquadah spires, the pastel glow of living crystal on a bright day, light piled on light piled on light. It’d been an unformulated ache to return to the first and only place he’s ever known that’s capable of love.

His animal heart just wants.

Ancient tech has a way of picking that up.

“Nice place,” Sheppard says, a casual drape over a lonely inner howl, “kinda underdeveloped.”

“State the nature of your requirement,” the woman says, with a trace of gentleness this time.

The wind hisses in the grass.

A low-grade vibration he associates with Atlantis thrums through the world, the air, through his mind and through the man next to him. It would only take a half-turn of Sheppard’s thoughts to bring him into a supernatural alignment he’s always resisted but only just. He wants to communicate something of this to Rush, who already seems part of the planet, part of its wind and sky, but no words come with which he might verbalize a warning.

“We require a key,” Rush says, “to the cypher that brought us here.” There’s a resonance between the mathematician’s voice and the planet itself, a balls to bone vibration Sheppard can’t ignore. He looks to Rush. Wants to touch him. Doesn’t. Pulls the eyeteeth from the impulse before it can take hold.

“Then proceed,” the woman says.

“Proceed where?” Sheppard asks.

“You have missed seeing,” she replies.

Silence falls as they consider her words. The wind dies. The grass around them stills.

They look at one another.

Nick Rush has eyes like matter changing form. Smoked quartz. Air trapped in amber. The slick of water over slate. Complicated and impure. It’s impossible to say what color they are under Altera’s strong, pale star.

“Ancient koans aside,” Sheppard says, “it’s best to start with what we know. Wanna take a look at the DHD?”

Rush nods.

Sheppard shifts his attention to the woman in white.

She divides her attention between Sheppard in Rush in a way that feels organic, mostly meeting Sheppard’s even regard with a cool neutrality, then slowly shifting her attention to Rush, as though she finds his study of the DHD more interesting than Sheppard’s confrontational silence.

Sheppard, not made of stone, glances over his shoulder to see Rush passing his hands over metal and circuitry with a delicate drag-and-sweep that’s intimate, musical, proprietary, and difficult to watch. The bones of his own hands ache with longing for the metallic grades and curves of Lantean controls in a physical manifestation of an incompleteness of soul.

There are times that he—

No.

There are never those times.

Nick Rush, though. There’s a better, safer, human want.

In a moment of ache and loneliness, he tries to lock it in.

Rodney McKay, with his eyes like the sea and his mind like crystal bottled vacuum energy, will never coax John Sheppard into stable electrostatic patterns the way he soothes and powers and opens Atlantis.

For months, for years, Sheppard’s tried to kill a hope that won’t die.

But Nick Rush is a spear. The kind that brings down leviathans.

He imagines the man in the charcoal cut of Lantean Expedition gear, his musician’s hands hovering over a glass display, his phase-transition eyes stealing undersea hues from the architecture around him and feels a sea change in the quality of his own desires. He imagines the arc and the crack and the clean lines of a well-constructed golf swing on a sea-level pier as the sun goes down. He imagines what it might feel like to be taken apart and put back together by a mathematician rather than a physicist: more precision in the shear planes, more theory and more artistry, the way concept overpowers strength. And Nick Rush moves and speaks like he’s already figured out the shatter-lines that’ll break the world.

Destroy me, Sheppard wants to whisper. It’s always time for me to go.

“They’re gonna think I abducted you,” he says instead, the words as slow and dry as he can make them. He closes his fingers on his rifle strap because he can’t close them on anything else.

“Did you?” Rush speaks without looking at him.

“Only a little.” Sheppard tests the man with a curl of truth, shaved off the top of the block in his chest. “This is my fault.”

“Y’think so, do you?” Absent. Predatory. Dismissive. Arrogant. The frames of Rush’s glasses gleam in the pale light and John Sheppard wants even a fraction of the man’s chisel-key attention applied to the doors of his perception.

He can’t square the intellectual apex predator circling the DHD with Everett Young’s description of his neighbor. Nick Rush was supposed to be a Fields Medalist so lost in his head he didn’t realize he was living under a gun. Delicate. Impractical. No common sense. No physical stamina.

Nothing is unfolding as advertised.

He should’ve asked more questions. Forced the briefing deeper than a checklist of LA-Hard Security Protocols and ten minutes of advice on how to avoid upsetting Earth’s most famous cryptographer. None of what he’d been told had prepared him for anything that’d happened. None of what he’d been told helps in assessing the threat level of his current situation.

He suspects that threat level is quite high.

The buried hidden tech on the planet presses into Sheppard’s nerves, vast and dark and full of longing. It’s hungrier than his city.

The city.

Atlantis isn’t his.

“Can’t determine much without a software interface.” Rush trails his fingertips along suspended glyphs, as though analyzing current with skin. “My experience with DHD circuitry is more theoretical than practical.”

“You’re doin’ fine,” Sheppard says.

The wind ripples through the grass.

Rush watches the energy translate itself through the sea of leaves. He hooks a hand over his shoulder and angles his head, as though trying to ignore something.

The man can sense it. The machine yearning of Ancient technology. Sheppard should be concerned, but all he feels is seen. “You have the gene.” The words come soft. They’re not a question.

“I have several.” Rush looks at him with eyes like falling rain. “As do you, I’d guess.”

“Yup.”

The grass hisses. The sunlight crashes down. They stand in silence, weathering the barrage of alien energetics.

“This might be kinda teleological for the middle of a mission-gone-wrong, but, do you have a feeling about whether this might be—” Sheppard hesitates on the cusp of the question, then tips into the decision he’s already made. “Real?”

“As opposed to simulated?” Rush trails a hand through thigh-high streamers of grass. His fingers close around a long, thin leaf. He breaks it free, as if testing the structure and consistency of the world. “Wish y’hadn’t asked that.”

“Me too,” Sheppard confesses.

Rush examines his broken stem of grass.

“I’m getting a strong tech vibe from a planet that doesn’t look like it has much of it to speak of.”

“Is that what it is?” Rush presses two fingers to his temple.

“That’s what it is,” Sheppard confirms, avoiding the raw edges of his own thoughts.

The DHD glitters under the harsh light of a pale star. The woman in white watches them, her gaze too keen.

“We came here for a purpose,” Rush says, his eyes on the hologram. “And we were given clearance to proceed.”

Sheppard hesitates. A sixth sense tells him that if they touch the DHD with intent again, there’s a good chance they could transport themselves back. Of course, if they do that, they won’t have what they came for. It’s unlikely they’ll be offered a second chance.

“We start something,” Sheppard says, “and we may be on the hook for finishing it. You up for that?”

“Yes.” Rush moves toward the radial arc of metal that stands like a reef in a sea of grass.

Sheppard glances once more at the silent hologram. Her shadowed eyes are full of subtle approval. He gives her a what-the-hell shrug and strides after Rush.

Together, they pace the perimeter of the ring. There’s only one opening in the low metallic wall. He can feel the vibration of waiting energy thrumming along his nerves.

“Wait,” Sheppard extends a hand to stop Rush from stepping through. “Tell me, as best you can, what we should think about as we cross this threshold. The cypher is quantum, right? You got an image for me? Any additional detail? I need something more than the words ‘cypher key’. I’m worried it’s my lack of precision that brought us here.”

“So you implied.” Rush’s expression turns guarded. Complicated. “I don’t think it was you.”

Sheppard lifts his eyebrows.

“I’ve no bloody evidence for anything I’m about to say.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“This—” Rush stops, like he’s trapped in the same wordless knowing that Sheppard lives with every day, that he conceals from McKay, from Keller, from Ronon, an inarticulate knowledge that only Teyla understands, with her Wraith genetics, her porous dreams and mind. “This feels superlative,” he says.

“Like we’re in some kind of bonus round?” Sheppard asks.

“Precisely.”

“The structural and energetic modification of the DHD itself may be the quantum key. A functional priming to prepare for drawing power from the heart of a naquadria-laced planet.”

“If that’s true,” Sheppard says slowly, “you’ve got your cypher. So what are we doing here? What are we thinking when we step beyond this ring?”

“Progressing the unlocking.”

Sheppard nods, his mind full of the early days on Atlantis, misted mornings walking ocean-level piers. It’s as concrete an image as any. He offers Rush his open hand. “We go through together,” he says. “Every door. Every arch. Every energy field. Every platform.”

With slow poise, like he’s conferring the theory of favor, Nick Rush takes John Sheppard’s hand.

Their fingers slide past one another, interlace, settle into a grip.

There’s no knee-jerk pullback from Nick Rush, no fear of rising homoerotic charge, no fear of charge at all. His hold is strong and balanced, full of physical melody. And even if Sheppard lives the rest of his days in a drought of human contact, a desert-life of touchless longing, he’ll remember the way Nick Rush held his hand in the thigh-high grass of an alien sea.

“On three,” he says.

“What do you think will happen?” Rush asks.

“Let’s just say that I’m gonna be surprised if we end up standing in a patch of grass beyond this ring, holding hands and feeling stupid,” Sheppard replies. “Think unlocking. Think survival. Think walking a little further into the fog.”

Rush nods.

“One.”

He eyes the gap in the metal, aware of the barrier pressing against his mind with disquieting expectancy, as if it feels his presence. Beside him, Rush shifts his free hand to his temple, like his fingertips focus his thoughts.

“Two.”

Sheppard fills his mind with step after step along a floating naquadah bridge in the misted early morning. Rush is beside him, dressed in charcoal Expedition gear. Across the bridge is the key to the lock in the Milky Way gates, a way to survive, a way to defeat the Wraith, a way to defeat the Ori, a way to bring back the Starlit Age of Discovery, a way to keep it alive, a way to push back against the chaotic, entropic drag that favors short term exploitation over long term exploration.

“Three.”

He tightens his grip. Atop the images he holds in his mind, he lays down his strong and physical desire to stay with Nick Rush through everything coming.

The world dissolves in a wave of white.

Room 1, attempt 1

Sheppard opens his eyes to a long narrow room without windows. Time-tarnished naquadah panels soak up the blue track lighting that runs the junction between ceiling and walls. They stand within the bounds of a decorative semicircle inlaid into the floor, flush with the wall at their back. Opposite them is a door. Maybe fifty feet away.

He doesn’t have his gun.

“Don’t move.” Sheppard tightens his grip on Rush’s hand.

His nerves sing in warning.

There’s only one way out of the room.

Glowing Ancient text threads an irregular pattern over the floor in an illuminated ribbon, weaving like a transformed sine wave. One end of the text ribbon connects to the inlaid circle they stand within. The other end leads to the center of the opposite doors. Sheppard studies the lit-up letter. It’s a single phrase, repeated over and over and over again.

“Yearning hurts, and what release may come of it feels like death.” Rush speaks the words aloud.

Self-conscious, called out by architecture and inlaid light, Sheppard lets go of Rush’s hand, reaches for his missing rifle, then shoves his hands in his pockets. “Aw c’mon,” he mutters.

Rush quirks an unnecessarily sexy eyebrow. “I see your gun is missing.”

“Yep.”

In silence, they contemplate the far door.

“This is a trial, I’m guessing,” Sheppard says. “A chance for us to prove ourselves. Show what we’re made of. Happens sometimes with Ancient tech. Usually—” his longing for McKay closes his throat. “Usually they just reject you if you fail. They don’t kill you.”

“Usually?” Rush echoes.

“Yeah. Usually.” They look at the far door in silence. “But we’re committed now, so—”

Rush nods.

With the kind of instinctive synchronicity it should take months to develop, they step out of the inscribed circle.

Force fields spring to life along the lateral walls, brilliant blue and strong enough to audibly hum.

“Aw crap.” Sheppard rocks onto the balls of his feet, pushing Rush ahead of him. “Go. Run.”

The fields begin to close.

He pushes off, powering to peak speed over the span of a few strides. Rush, ahead, faster than Sheppard, tears through the narrow room. The breath burns at the back of his throat as he digs for every last scrap of speed.

But this is instinct, not an answer.

Running?

No way.

They aren’t gonna make it to the far door before the fields meet.

Rush slows, understanding this is a puzzle and they’ve chosen wrong.

Sheppard feels the static charge of the closing fields, sees coming blue-white walls in his peripheral vision. He grabs Rush’s jacket, hauls him in, forces him down, maximizing contact even as he presses his own thoughts into the unknown voracity waiting beneath the surface of the world.

Stop stop stop stop stop stop stop—

But energy crashes in from either side, competing walls of charge that overwhelm his biological circuitry, that stop his heart and stop his thoughts and slap his mind out of existence.

Sheppard falls. 

He gasps for air.

His heart hammers out a terrified rhythm against his ribs, against his throat. He grips the grass around him, working it into the hold he still has on the material of someone else’s uniform.

Rush.

They’re on the ground.

In the grass. In the center of the ring where they’d started.

The mathematician’s back is to his chest. Sheppard’s arms are around the man. He tries to let go, but it’s hard, as though his muscles have been contracted for days. He has to unfold each muscle group, stepwise, with effort.

“Nick,” he says. “Nick.”

Rush is just as contracted, so tense he’s shaking. They unwrap and disentangle themselves, gathering thoughts and wits and heartbeats Sheppard wasn’t sure would come again. They sit shoulder to shoulder, in the deep shadow of the waist-high naquadah wall that whispers and sings with the scrape of windblown grass.

“I think we actually died?” Rush breathes.

“Yep. Definitely.”

“Can—” Rush swallows. Tries again. “Can we conclude anything from that?”

Sheppard shakes his head. “Computational reset and true corporeal reset aren’t distinguishable.”

They listen to the wind in the grass.

“We should try again,” Rush whispers.

A man after his own heart.

In more ways than one.

In every way that counts maybe.

But.

“Nope,” Sheppard replies. “We’re outta here. Someone who isn’t a Fields Medalist can do the magical quest. Cam Mitchell loves this kind of thing. Proving himself. Right up his alley.” His muscles shake and try to veto standing, but he gets it done. He offers Rush his hand.

Rush takes it.

Sheppard draws him to his feet and steadies him, a hand on his hip. Testing a boundary. Crossing it, when Rush doesn’t pull away in thigh-high grass. He might say something full of risk and ruin, he might do something rash—

But the world beats him to it.

Clear of the grass, he sees the center of the naquadah circle.

It’s empty.

The DHD is gone.

“Shoulda seen that one coming,” Sheppard tells the wind.

Weaponless, wordless, he widens his stance and braces against the wild riot of his own fear, the soak and seep of Ancient tech that leaches into his mind like groundwater.

“Was it ever there?” Rush asks. “How much of this is happening? How much of this is applied ontological phenomenology?”

Computational. Energetic. Actual. Sheppard works the options. “There are three possibilities I can see.” He stitching the words together with all the casualness he can muster post death-by-force-field. “One—all of this is virtual, meaning we’re completely, even now, decoupled from our physical bodies. Two—some of this is virtual, meaning we were physically transported here, we’re currently—” he claps a hand over Rush’s shoulder, “corporeal, but when we stepped through the barrier, we had a virtual experience. Three—none of it is virtual and we physically died in there but got some kind of reset. Energetic, physical, or temporal. Take your pick, we don’t have enough data to know.”

Rush looks him over, then looks deep, like he’s easing a bent wire past the tumblers of Sheppard’s mind.

“I wouldn’t mind knowing,” Sheppard says, under the pale sky, “but I think at this point, we just make it through this thing.”

“Agreed.” Rush looks to the gap in the wall.

Room 1, attempt 3 

Rush, besieged and aggravated and low key glorious, stands at the edge of the inlaid circle, one hand hooked over his shoulder, the other on the trim line of his hip. “If you’ve a better solution, feel free to propose it.”

“If I weren’t here,” Sheppard says, his back to the cold wall, “it wouldn’t work.”

“Ah, but you are here.” Rush looks back and quirks an eyebrow. “If we can’t even assume this place exists, we don’t know it’s the same for every participant or set of participants. Maybe you’re required”

Eh. What’s another death in the grand scheme of things?

“All right.” Sheppard bends low, bridging his hands. 

Rush steps into his grip and onto his shoulders, steadying himself on the wall.

Sheppard straightens slowly. Only when he’s sure he’s balanced does he look up.

Rush has both hands in the shallow recess housing the lighting that runs the perimeter of the room. The light puts glacial highlights in his hair, more shine than blue. He frowns, and Sheppard leans into the crush of high tech bonding after a death or two in the afternoon.

“See anything?” he asks, his palms flat against the time tarnished wall.

“Lights.” Rush reaches deeper. “I’m—”

The snap and flash of arcing current. The fall of sparks. Before Sheppard can do anything about it, Rush is thrown backward with enough momentum to pull Sheppard over. They hit the floor, sprawled beyond the confines of the circle. The mathematician’s head cracks against the metal.

The fields go live, humming angrily.

Rush doesn’t move.

Sheppard’s peripheral vision is a menacing wall of blue.

His pulse pounds. There’s a deep terror in the back of his mind, planted there by all the times he’s died before. His heart, his nerves, his body know what’s coming. Kneeling next to Rush, he seals one hand to the floor, one hand to the mathematician’s forehead.

Please, he asks the room. Please stop this.

Rush shifts. His eyelids flutter. Open.

“Hey,” Sheppard says, warm and slow, like death isn’t seconds away, “close your eyes, touch the floor, and ask the fields to stop, maybe.” He gives Rush the smile that’ll never come when he poses for pictures.

The menacing hum rises.

He shuts his eyes.

Room 1, attempt 5 

He’s shaking. He shifts his weight to try and hide it.

“Do you think,” Rush rasps, pale in the blue light, shivering against the wall, “there might be a physical limit?”

“It uh,” Sheppard stops. Regroups. “It sure feels that way. Let’s—” his throat contracts, swallowing the rest of his sentence. He tries again. “Let’s sit down.” 

He can’t control his slide to the floor. Rush does no better. They collapse against the back wall, inside the safe confines of the inlaid metal circle.

“This a typical day for ya, then?” Rush asks.

Sheppard grins. “Don’t usually die this much.”

Rush smiles back, wicked and conspiratorial.

Sheppard makes a mental note to try and develop a massive crush on the next person he’s locked in  a death loop with. Really makes the time go by.

“You’re holding up pretty well,” Sheppard said.

“Whatever Colonel Young told you should be viewed with extreme suspicion.”

“He said you were pretty scrappy.”

“Scrappy.” Rush huffs. “I doubt that’s all he said.”

“Eh. Everett’s Everett,” Sheppard says philosophically. “He’s decided you’re his people, so, yeah, he’s gonna pull a gun when you stub a toe. It’s what he’s like.”

“Must be hard to live that way,” Rush sighs.

“Hard to live most ways,” Sheppard offers.

Wordlessly, Rush nods.

Across the room, dark and ominous, the far door waits.

“Let’s try to be smarter, maybe,” Sheppard whispers.

“After you,” Rush etches the idea of a bow.

“Running isn’t fast enough,” Sheppard begins. “Messing with the walls was a no go, psychic projection gets us nowhere.” He looks at the script on the floor. “How good is your Ancient?”

“Respectable.” Rush studies the repeating phrase. “Skewed toward technical vocabulary and constructions. Yours?”

Sheppard makes an equivocal hand gesture. “Desiderium.” He reads the first word of the flowing script. “You went with ‘yearning,’ but it might be ‘want.’ Might be ‘desire’. Then we have ‘vulneo’, which is—” Sheppard breaks off as his shoulder twitches involuntarily. “An odd choice.”

“Maybe not,” Rush says. “It’s used in a technical sense t’indicate the distress or warping of field lines.”

Sheppard sits forward. “The letters weave directly from this circle to the far door. An unbroken line. Maybe they warp the oncoming field. If we follow them—” he trails off, his inner ears pricking with the echoes of something promising.

“Explain to me, mechanistically, how such a thing might work.” Rush settles back against the wall, radiating skepticism. “The fields are visible and their approach is uniform.”

“You’re making enough assumptions regarding field boundaries and uniformity that it’s worth a shot,” Sheppard counters.

Rush cracks an eyelid. “I’ve met enough colonels to know that you’re atypical.”

Sheppard feels a warmth powerful enough to shave the edge off the worst of his shaking. “Don’t out me.” He hauls himself to his feet and offers Rush his hand. “It’d crush McKay.”

The mathematician meets him, grip for grip, and Sheppard pulls him up.

“In that case,” Rush says, “I’m sorely tempted.”

Sheppard doesn’t have any words in response to that, so he turns around and steps out of the semicircle, planting each foot along the line of text like he’s walking a sinuous tightrope.

The fields advance with a terrifying buzz. They rush his peripheral vision like a wave. His left hand warms. Then the side of his face.

He keeps walking, foot by foot.

“This won’t work,” Rush says from behind him.

“Probably not, no.”

The field hits, slapping him to the floor, passing over, passing through, stopping his heart, stopping his—

Room 1, attempt 6

They sit against the dark wall, shivering, looking toward the opposite door.

“Yearning hurts,” Rush says.

“AKA you wanna warp a field,” Sheppard whispers.

“And what release may come,” Rush says.

“AKA your flavor of error,” Sheppard whispers.

“Feels like death,” Rush says.

“Hurts like a bitch.” Sheppard finishes. “That’s just mean.”

“I concur,” Rush tips his head back, shuts his eyes, and tries not to shake with the aftershocks of a shorted out nervous system.

“I hate puns,” Sheppard rasps.

“I’ll cosine that,” Rush says.

Sheppard snorts. He presses his right hand into his breastbone, like that’ll do anything for the fluttering feeling in his chest.

“Flavor of error,” Rush says. “An interesting alternate to ‘release’.”

“Yeah it sort of has a—‘release’ as in ‘you’ve released the cosmic dice’ type vibe,” he admits, closing his own eyes. “Don’t ask me where I get that from. Feels packed in there though. A sense of physical letting go.” Eyes shut, Sheppard shakes a pair of invisible dice, casts them into nothingness.

“Stay there,” Rush says.

Sheppard’s eyes fly open because hell no is he staying anywhere—

Rush is on his feet. Stepping out of the circle.

The walls snap on with the blue-white glow that’ll be haunting his dreams if this room doesn’t kill him. He scrambles to his knees, already too late, too slow—

But Rush steps back within the confines of their semicircle.

Shit.

He pauses, on hands and knees, watching the fields approach.

“There must be a way to avoid it,” Rush says, cool and philosophical and eyeing his own death like a guy with a clipboard docking points for style. “This is the only remaining possibility I can see.”

The fields advance.

Sheppard’s mouth goes dry with hope and fear and physical want.

The fields skirt the inlaid semicircle on the floor and crash into and through each other, energy passing through energy, splitting into greens and yellows in a slow chromatic dance.

“Well this is fair fuckin’ embarrassing.” Rush looks into the shifting spectral watercolor hazing up the room.

“Oh yeah,” Sheppard breathes, on all fours. “Humiliating.”

Rush looks down from the apex of John Sheppard’s sexual orientation, arches a brow, and says, “Get up,” like he knows it’s the opposite of what Sheppard wants to hear.

It’s probably for the best that this will be the first and last mission they ever share.

Sheppard scrambles up. “You don’t think this haze is just as lethal?”

“Oh, I’m sure the extant energy is still capable of killing us,” Rush says, “but I think now you’re correct about the path through the room. With visual emissions alone, y’can see it.” He points to the ribbon of text. Along the glowing line, the pastel energy haze is markedly thinner.

As he follows Rush along the line of Ancient text, Sheppard clears his throat. “We’re not gonna tell anyone how long it took us to figure this one out, right?”

“Never,” Rush confirms.

They reach the end of the ribbon to find another semicircle of safety ringing the threshold of the far door. As soon as they step within its confines, the familiar Ancient door controls light up. Sheppard takes Rush’s hand and palms the panel.

Beyond the opening is a yawning void.

They step through together.

Room 2, attempt 1

The chamber is circular, windowless, and brightly lit. There’s an object on a pedestal in the center of the space. Sheppard looks at it, then just as quickly looks away, angling for an escape, for an exit, for any alternative. But there’s no door. No windows. He reaches behind himself to press a hand to the smooth naquadah alloy at his back.

Already he feels sick, deaths and deaths beyond the hard line of his own fatigue.

There’s no escape from this room.

Under shining white light, on a beautifully-wrought pedestal, there’s a triple bladed weapon. Meant to be worn like a glove. Wielded like a knife.

This has to be his fault.

The Ancients had crafted beautiful things. Shields that feel like home. Cities that greet him, displays of light that curl around the hand and mind. Tapestries of color that, stripped of function, could hold their own in any art museum. Things that keep their beauty and their gemstone energy through loneliness, through dark, through time. They don’t fade under sun, erode with wind or water, or wash away in the rising sea.

So this has to be his fault.

“Maybe it’s not what it looks like,” Rush whispers.

“Oh,” Sheppard says, already aware of how sharp his coming death will be. “I think it is.”

“I don’t understand,” Rush says, but he does.

“It’s a test of resolve.” Sheppard’s eyes don’t leave the bladed gauntlet.

“Who are they to judge the rest of existence?” Rush demands.

Sheppard gives the man a wan smile. “The guys with the keys, I guess.”

He circles the weapon. It’s made of a delicate, silver metal. The grip is a contoured bar, meant to be held in a closed fist. Three scythed blades radiate from the back of the metal guard. It dictates a punch-and-swipe style that matches Sheppard’s skill with a concealed backhand blade.

Not so good for a math professor.

As soon as he puts it on, he’ll be fighting.

Maybe, when he’s dead, the room will present Rush with something else.

It’s a hope.

“I’m probably not gonna make it,” Sheppard says, all flint. “Not the first time.”

“Make an effort,” Rush snarls, all spark.

“Yeah,” Sheppard breathes.

He looks at Rush, all his apology on his face for the way he’s about to die. They way they both are.

Rush frowns, docking points for style.

Sheppard threads his fingers through the weapon’s grip and snatches it from its suspension field with a clean, quiet tone.

“Left,” Rush shouts.

Sheppard pivots, and the blade comes up in an instinctive block.

Blade meets blade with a clanging sound.

He gets a look at his opponent and stumbles back, tripping over his feet.

He’s facing himself.

Well-rested, unsurprised, artificial, dressed in clothes of Lantean cut and wielding an identical gauntlet weapon. His throat closes, recalling the last time he’d had a fight like this, facing off against a crystalline entity within the mind of Rodney McKay. He’d been perfectly matched in that mirror-image fight; there’d been no way to win without McKay’s help, but McKay isn’t here.

“Don’t suppose we could talk this out?” he asks, circling himself.

“This isn’t a talking room,” his alter ego says, confident and snide, the way Sheppard himself might turn, universes to the left and right, where his intelligence hasn’t broken the bones of his life, where he hasn’t stripped its strength in return, the way he’s done here.

They close with a flurry of blows and blades, then separate again.

“Yeah.” Sheppard spits blood onto the floor of the room, keeps his eyes off the Fields Medalist stepping laterally along the wall edging away from the fight. “I’m getting that.”

He closes with himself again, another punishing exchange that leaves his opponent with a bloodied slash across his cheek. “McKay’s not here to help you,” his alter ego hisses. “You’re outmatched. Outclassed.”

Sheppard scrambles to free himself from an outside hook takedown, gets his shoulder sliced open in the process. He’s rolling clear, he’s up—

And Nick Rush goddamn leaps at the Lantean demon bearing down on Sheppard.

It’s astonishingly committed, astonishingly vicious. It catches Sheppard’s focus, stops his momentum and his train of thought. But the mathematician can’t engage. He crashes through Sheppard’s alter ego like the man’s an aura of projected light, hits the central pedestal, falls.

His black clad opponent, undistracted, unaware of Nick Rush, closes for the kill.

Sheppard tries to get his weapon up.

Too slow. Three blades slash across his throat.

He tries to speak but there’s no sound. Just the flow of something warm and wet beneath his collar. His hand presses to his neck. He chokes on a mix of blood and air.

His alter ego walks into his own vanishing, disgusted.

Feet away, Nick Rush stares at him in frozen horror.

His vision grays.

It’s only the end when you give up. That would’ve been a great thing to say before he’d gone and let his vocal cords get severed. He tries to put the message into his eyes, but it’s hard while he’s asphyxiating.

The world goes cold and dark.

Dimly, distantly, he feels icy fingers prying the gauntlet off his hand.

Sheppard gasps beneath a twilit sky. His hands fly to his throat. There’s no blood. He can breathe. Sure. Yes. Air in. Air out. Sekkari seeds and simulations. He’s okay. He can breathe. He’s always been able to breathe.

  

“Nick,” he calls, his hand still at his neck. He kneels in the tall grass, breathing hard. “Rush,” he manages, louder this time.

No answer.

“RUSH!!” he shouts, because he can. Because if this is Altera, then everyone on this planet is dead. Dead and watching. His eyes water. He’d seen a Star Trek once about suffering as entertainment.

It’s getting dark.

Maybe Rush is dead, maybe they both are, have been all along—

A hand falls on his shoulder. He flinches, every muscle in his body contracting in reaction as Rush drops down next to him in the long grass, an opaque, trembling silhouette against the pale red of the just set sun, fading fast in a thin atmosphere.

“Hey.” Sheppard tries for casual. Fails. He hears the strain in his voice, the tears trying to form. He swallows hard. There’s gotta be a world out there where he PTSDs his way free of the Air Force, works in retail, buys too many guns, hoards water, waits for the end of the world.

If McKay were here, he’d find a way to hold it together, but McKay’s not here and that’s why this is so bad, there’s nothing to counter all the horror in Sheppard’s head. No Rodney McKay with his shouty desire for snacks and his ability to build a nuclear bomb out of grass and nothing. Sheppard can’t do this. He can’t face himself. The fucked upedness of his own head and soul is depthless. It has no end. He can’t face it down. He can’t. He can’t. Not without McKay. His throat is closed so tight he’s sure his vocal cords have their own sliced-through memories, separate from nerve and mind and the idea of air.

Nick Rush puts a hand on his shoulder.

Like it’s an invitation, Sheppard pulls him into a hug. He can’t apologize. He can’t speak at all.

Rush pats his shoulder. “Next time,” the mathematician rasps solicitously, “l’ll go first. Y’can give me pointers.”

Room 2, attempt 4

Sheppard leans into the wall, dehydrated as hell, hypoglycemic, and tries to pretend that he’s under stained glass, taking teaching lessons from Teyla.

“Guard up,” he snaps, projecting strength through a throat that may never work right again. “Drive and swipe. Block. Block. Now! He’s open!”

Rush slices through his mirror image’s cheek, blinding the thing. The Lantean vision cries out, one hand clapped to its face, blood sheeting from its closed eye.

“Good!” Sheppard shouts. “Back up. Guard up.”

“You’re the worst kind of ideologue,” the black-clad version of the mathematician hisses.

“Shit talking is a great sign,” Sheppard says encouragingly.

“Unfeeling,” Rush’s alter-ego snarls. “Uncharitable.”

“Don’t block high.” Sheppard channels Teyla, tries to keep his cool. “You open yourself up. Duck instead.”

“Don’t you wish,” Rush’s alter-ego snarls, tangling and trapping blades with a neat catch-and-torque trick that feels like the room is cheating, “Gloria had never met you?”

The name ‘Gloria’ hits like a physical blow, and the thing starts twisting the trapped blades, forcing Rush’s arm up.

Sheppard’s heart is in his throat. It takes up all the space, no words come.

“You made Gloria miserable,” the black-clad mathematician snarls, positioning for an arm bar.

“Thought this wasn’t a ‘talking room,’ asshole!” Sheppard finds his tongue.

“You tortured her.” The thing’s face is ghastly, blood sheeting down from that sliced open eye.

“Step in,” Sheppard shouts. “Right ankle!”

But it’s too late. Rush can’t shift his weight. His opponent’s cranking down on that arm bar. “She followed you, and for what. To die in a place she never wanted? Separated from everything she knew and loved?”

“Nick,” Sheppard says, “don’t listen.”

“Left, at the end, with nothing but you, absorbed in yourself, absorbed in the mathematics—”

“Don’t listen,” Sheppard whispers.

Room 2, attempt 5

His breath burns his throat. He stumbles, falls, and turns it into a sloppy roll.

“Do you think of Elizabeth?” His double asks, as casual as Sheppard might be, sparring with Teyla beneath silver filigreed windows, “or is she an ‘it’ to you now?”

A blade bites into his right shoulder as he tries to dive beneath his alter-ego’s guard.

“You sent her to her death,” it says, as casual and friendly as he gets, when he goes for his kills.

Sheppard tackles the thing. Fatigue slows his blade. He doesn’t connect. They grapple on the floor. The thing flips him, pinning him on his back. Across the room, he sees Nick Rush, watching. Sheppard gives him the least reassuring smile in all existence.

“But it was worse than that, y’know,” the thing pinning him smiles. “Worse than death.”

Sheppard swipes upward with the blades, feels them connect with the thing’s gauntlet. Feels them lock. Feels the beginnings of torque. Feels fingers close over his throat, cutting off his air.

“She won’t die out there in the vastness of space.” His alter ego cocks his head, miming consideration. “Can a machine go mad?”

Sheppard tries to draw breath. Can’t. Tries to free an arm. Can’t.

“Unable to move, unable to hear herself speak in a vacuum,” his black-clad opponent continues. “Isolated. Forever. Kept conscious by a power source that’ll last eons.”

His vision grays.

“Eternal torment,” his own voice whispers casually. “To create a machine that feels is a cruelty.”

Icy fingers close over his gauntleted hand, sliding between the blades.

Nick Rush is kneeling over him. His hand is reaching through Sheppard’s doppelgänger like he isn’t there, emerging from his chest, doubling Sheppard’s grip with worlds more leverage.

The pressure lifts on Sheppard’s throat as his own face blurs and morphs, becoming a horrible chimeric blend of him, of Rush, of shifting light and vertiginous movement.

He ekes out a breath.

Another.

Rush twists their grip. The thing they’re fighting loses form. They strike into the already shredding heart of nothingness.

The blade vanishes.

They collapse in a tangle.

Sheppard pulls in air, high and tight and harsh. Rush, on top of him, shakes with fatigue.

“We,” Sheppard rasps before he’s ready. “We probably.” He runs out of air. Wraps an arm around Rush. Breathes a little more. “We probably should’ve thought of that.” He pulls in another breath. “Earlier.”

“Probably.” Rush shivers.

“That was smart,” Sheppard breathes, utterly spent. “You’re great.”

“Colonel,” Rush begins, polite and tentative and sprawled atop him in a way John Sheppard really hopes his inevitable nightmares won’t leave out.

“We just killed an amalgamation of ourselves. What do you think about calling me John?”

Rush ignores this. Instead, he says, “The vacuum of space is approximately three degrees Kelvin.”

“Cool.” Sheppard grins exhaustedly at the ceiling.

“Was that a bloody pun?” Rush mutters.

“No. We got murdered by a pun; I’ll never be over it.”

Rush digs an elbow into Sheppard’s ribs with a deliciously sharp pain, then sits with atop him with a satisfying press of hips. The mathematician looks down at him and John Sheppard has never wanted to have messy, post-fight, adrenaline sex on the floor of an alien room as much as he wants it in this moment.

And then Rush says, “At three degrees Kelvin, processor speed would slow to almost nothing.”

Oh.

This is about Elizabeth.

He doesn’t want to understand but he does, and it’s horrible. He’s pinned to the floor, he’s killed himself, he’s been killed by himself, he’s watched an absolutely incredible civilian do the same and he is not ready for the guy to knife his exposed ribs like this. He wants to turn away, he’s doing it, he’s trying, but—

“Doesn’t that make it worse?” A tear leaks from his eye.

“No,” Rush says quickly. “It makes it better. From context, I gathered that she became a machine, yes?”

Sheppard looks away. Tries to get up. Rush doesn’t let it happen.

“At three Kelvin, her subjective experience prior to system failure would be quite short, even if, within our temporal reference frame, the absolute time is long.”

Sheppard can’t take this. He writhes his way free. Pulls away. Crawls away. Tries to control his body, his face, his mind, doesn’t have much luck with any of it. “Yeah okay.” He sits. Pulls his knees to his chin. “Thanks.”

The mathematician, still on the floor, looks over at him. His dark hair tangles in a fan over the metal, pulls all kinds of highlights out of the cruelly bright light. Pale. Sweat-soaked. In a windowless room his eyes still manage to steal the quality of smoked quartz, carved up and tossed like Athosian Omen Stones under a full moon.

He wishes he had some fact about the universe, some 2.7 degrees Kelvin offering that might make something better for the other man, but he doesn’t.

“Why does Everett think you can’t handle yourself in the field?” he asks.

“Probably because I developed heat exhaustion in my own apartment,” Rush admits.

“Come to Atlantis, maybe.” The words cut as they come, he wants it so much. “You’d like it.” And the city would like you, he doesn’t say.

“No,” Rush says. “Can’t. No cyphers there.”

Sheppard nods.

It feels right to him. It feels like his life. Snapshots of missed chance. Chaya Sar in a back garden, an agony of light. Rodney McKay with the sea in his eyes and stars under his fingertips, talking about Jennifer Keller. He’s never gonna hold a candle to pure math. He wouldn’t try. He’ll just take this day and bury himself in it to the hilt.

“I get it,” he says.

Sloppily, with strength he doesn’t have, he staggers up. He checks his hip on the room’s central pillar. He extends a hand to Rush.

“C’mon. Let’s go get killed.” 

From the floor at his feet, Nick Rush gives him a soul-stealing grin.

Room 3, attempt 1

“I’m so upset.” Rush stares at a fluctuating swirl of color that stretches from floor to ceiling, barring the far door.

“Thaaaaat’s a zeta function, isn't it?” Sheppard drawls, and leans against the back wall of the room.

“More like the zeta function.”

“How lethal are we thinking this is gonna be?”

“It’s destroyed many an aspiring academic career,” Rush replies.

“You don’t think we’ll actually have to prove the Riemann Hypothesis, do you?” Sheppard asks weakly. He slides down the wall, like his legs are made of water.

“I fuckin’ hope not.”

“Me too.”

Sheppard studies the deadly swirl of color blocking the far door. “Let’s try and come up with The Smart Thing before we die five more times.”

“Agreed,” Rush says, cutting the kind of silhouette against colored math that makes Sheppard wish he was better at art.

“Y’know,” Sheppard offers, “when SG-1 takes these kinds of pan-skill-set tests they end up having to—” he waves a hand, “demonstrate they understand the concept of pi and fight knights with broadswords. Like: clang, clang, Cameron Mitchell wins.”

Rush turns, all shivery grace and Romantic Era complexion. “Pi? Y’fuckin’ serious?”

“Yeah. Want a power bar?”

Instead of answering, Rush steps to his side, slides down the wall, and sits. Shoulder-to-shoulder, hip-to-hip. It’s nice. 

Sheppard unzips a pocket. His fingers close around a chocolate bar. He opens it, cracks off a chunk of chocolate, and offers it to Rush.

Best date he’s ever had.

“This isn’t a power bar,” Rush points out.

“In the Rodney McKay Universe it is.” Sheppard tries not to sigh, and sucks on chocolate.

Rush looks up at the pastiche of pastel that’ll probably end their lives. “It must be adaptive.”

Sheppard, his mouth full, makes a questioning sound.

“This test, I mean. The trial. If SG-1 is pointing at the radius of a circle and stabbing at knights with broadswords—which does seem like them, by the way—we are a bloody nightmare.”

Sheppard tries not to choke on his chocolate as he stares at the multicolored complex plane that stands between them and their goal. Yeah. It makes sense. Cameron Mitchell believes in truth and order and had a grandma who loved him. He gets crushes on pretty girls who can’t help but like him back. He knows who he is. He believes he’s the Right Guy doing the Right Thing.

He doesn’t know what math is like, in its depths, beneath the architectures of physics and chemistry it supports.

“Okay, well, try to be stupider,” Sheppard rasps.

“Try to be less lethal,” Rush whispers. “Think about fuckin’ kittens or somethin’ next time.”

“Oh you know that one would turn out badly.”

Sheppard tries to file the edge off his smile.

Nick Rush doesn’t bother.

Sheppard passes him another piece of chocolate. “So how does the Riemann Hypothesis kill you, do y’think?”

“Oh, in some horrific, topological way, no doubt.”

“Great,” Sheppard replies. “I hope it’s slow. Lasts a long time.”

“Maybe we can pass through at the critical line.”

“The critical line being—”

“R[s]=1/2,” Rush traces a vertical line to their right. “In the complex plane.”

“Nice.” Loudly, Sheppard says, “I believe passing through at the critical line is gonna work just fine.”

“It’d better work,” Rush replies, all cute sulk, licking chocolate off a finger. “Fuckin’ pi. I don’ believe it.”

Made brave by death and math, Sheppard says, “We’ve died, like, a lotta times.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“Would you ever want to—” His throat clamps shut. He reminds it of what it feels like to be sliced open. “Would you ever want to get a coffee?”

Nick Rush, amused, incredulous, his expression illuminated by the complex plane across the room, says, “What?”

“I’ll buy.” Sheppard’s all gutsy panic and death-carved want. “I have so much Earth Money. I’m never here. There. I never buy anything. Or not. Forget it. It’d be weird. Would it be weird?”

“It’s now feeling quite a bit more ‘weird’ than first it sounded,” Rush says, with knifeplay glee edging the words, then, “Colonel Young told me I’d like you,” like he’s just as good with a blade in the hand as he is with a blade on the whetstone.

And Everett. There’s a man who would keep them both in line. Sheppard longs to be told no. Wants someone to hold him down. Someone to make him over. Wants to turn to architecture that shines in the sun and doesn’t change. Wants to be maintained. Challenged by storm and sea and plate tectonics.

“Are y’sure ‘coffee’ is what y’want?” Rush asks, like he knows it’s not.

“What I’ve always wanted,” Sheppard says, all crawling truth and civilizational cling, “is to date a Fields Medalist.”

Nick Rush smiles at nothing, slow and demonic, like he’s reading the invisible subtext of Sheppard’s soul out of the empty air. “What an unlikely thing.”

“That’s kinda been the point,” Sheppard admits.

“I’m sure. And yet, here we are, atop the shifting sands of probability,” Rush says.

“Yeah?” And even after all the adrenaline John Sheppard has spent down, he has enough in the bank to dry his mouth and wet his palms.

“My interest in coffee and small talk is low.” Rush’s expression turns open, wistful, deeply sad, like he’s letting Sheppard down gently. “But you’re something of a cypher,” he continues, digging back into that demonflame charisma. “And I do enjoy studying those. Working them open. Taking them apart.” There’s a predatory bite to the words and Sheppard lets them sink deep. Take hold.

“Sounds like a date to me,” he manages.

Room 4, Attempt 3

“If you already know the candle light is fire,” Rush shouts over the hiss of blue flame, “then—what?”

Sheppard struggles to breathe in searing, oxygen-poor air. He presses his hands to his head, dredging for something, anything from his subconscious, from the place Atlantis occupies when he sits in the chair.

“Cena olim cocta est,” Sheppard screams at the walls, aligning his voice and mind. “Fulmen micat. Scintillae cadunt ut stillae. Si iam scis lucernam ignem esse, tunc cena olim cocta est—”

Room 5, Attempt 5

“How many of these rooms,” Sheppard says, back to the wall and so far behind the curve it’s killed them both countless times, “do we think there are?”

“You’d know better than I would,” Rush replies in a cracked whisper.

“I wasn’t thinking about it. I’ve never heard of a trial like this lasting so long.”

“When we began,” Rush says, “I assumed seven rooms.” He takes a breath. “Or ten. Wasn’t even something I articulated to myself at the time. But now—” miserably, he opens a hand.

“Why?”

“The gate,” Rush whispers. “Or the cypher set.”

“Thought you had nine a’those guys.”

“I think there’ll be a tenth to get the ordinal lock.”

“I like it. But, for us, seven’s better.”

“Mmm hmm,” Rush agrees.

They sit in silence and darkness, looking into an empty, waiting room.

“Okay,” Sheppard tenses, readying himself.

Rush presses him back. “I can do it,” he says.

Neither of them speak.

There’s a terrible set to Rush’s shoulders, as though he’s pouring himself into a bronze casting, waiting for it to set.

“What’s it gonna take?” Sheppard asks.

Rush looks into the dark. “Y’sense it. The pattern, I mean. Once it activates. Physically, you sense it.”

“Yeah.” Sheppard shuts his eyes, recalling the faint pull through the tug of a deadly electrostatic field, like trying to follow the brush of featherdown in a world of wind. “I’m a kinesthetic kinda guy.”

Rush smiles faintly. “Really? I’d never’ve guessed.”

“You’re ducking my question.”

“I hear it,” Rush admits. “The pattern is auditory. But music takes a toll.”

Sheppard waits, but nothing more comes. He thinks of Johnny Cash’s verse in the song Highwayman. The way the band played it without words after Cash died. He hopes he’ll live long enough to hear it again.

“What kind of toll?” he asks.

“Music is tied to more than just memory,” Rush rasps. “It’s wired into the way my mind works. It’ll lever open a door it’ll be hard to shut again.”

“I know the feeling.” Sheppard thinks of the way the silver stair in Atlantis lit beneath his boots in welcome.

Rush staggers up, one hand on the wall, and steps beyond the inlaid semicircle on the floor.

The dim room blooms with deadly floral light sculptures. Rush is a dark silhouette amid a watercolor palate of pastel poison. Nightshade and oleander. Foxglove and hemlock. Pegasus plants he can’t name, plants Teyla’s warned him away from. All of them etched like poisoned spirits on a dead room, their edges indiscernible.

Rush cocks his head, listening.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t tread the path Sheppard’s killed himself to map, all whisper-petal soft through thorn of deadly charge. He raises his hands. He shuts his eyes. He stands like he’s in front of an orchestra, waiting for his heartbeat to settle. Waiting for the moment to call the music in.

And he does.

Sheppard can’t hear it, but he feels the bass-drop moment the garden shifts, unmakes itself, rearranges. It happens over every square centimeter of his skin. It shivers his muscles, vibrates his bones, alters the rhythm of his heart.

And, as those patterns change, Nick Rush slides deeper into a floral curtain of energetic poison.

Sheppard recalls Chaya Sar, the way her banished light expanded to eat the world. He’d felt the razored edge between sex and death in a Proculan garden, the centrality of selection, flowering, dissolution. She’d shared herself, and in herself was the inarticulate truth that relational congruence, that sexual alignment was a recasting of everything that made them what they were. She’d done it to him. For him. Made him hers.

Whatever symphony is happening in this envenomed light garden, it’s more than sonic. He’s meant to participate in the remaking.

Like Nick, he’ll need to change himself to go on.

In the dark he comes to his knees, tips his chin up, casts his sightless gaze beyond the vegetal light. He’s breaking his build to do this. The whole architecture of self. The steel and exposed bone that survived the childhood that made him what he is. He craves order. He violently rejects it. It’s the twin engine that powers every good and stupid thing he’s done: the decorated pilot who got busted to Antarctica because he couldn’t follow the orders he knew, going in, the Air Force would always give him; the major on an alien planet who wouldn’t do a damn thing his CO said, except to shoot the man when he asked; the overpromoted colonel who finally found a leader he’d loved, a leader he’d follow anywhere and who’d sanctioned her transformation into a machine and stranded her in a cold void for a functional eternity.

And that’s what he has to deepen. That’s what he has to fuel. That same conflicted engine that powers his personal hell. His desire for structure. His desire to take out load building walls in every hierarchy he encounters. His care for his physical body. His total disregard for it. The value of life. The value of letting it go on a moment’s notice.

He stands. Steps over the line. Follows the man of his dreams into a shifting haze of death.

That’s how it’s done.

His body, tuned to the unheard harmonies of Atlantis, shows him the way in a high stakes choreography of responsive rhythm that reminds him of Teyla’s Athosian katas, flowing from life through death and back to life. The dance of evasion takes his words, silences his thoughts, strips sound from the world and sight from his eyes.

With the lid lifted on all he is, with more pouring in, he feels the fire/water energy of Nick Rush, like a flame in a lighthouse, like the bright emitting beacon at the spire on Pinnacle Quay. He allows it to guide him on, through this maze with walls that stretch the gates of touch and proprioception.

Near the far door, with its inlaid semicircle of safety, Nick slips deep into the tempting EM mist that hums beneath all they’ve done and seen.

Sheppard feels it happen.

There’s a coming-apart flicker to Nick’s energetics, a pattern-level weakening.

Sheppard, steps behind him, toe-tips to boot heels. He seals them together, back to front, muscle to mind. No words come, so he speaks with his body. You can’t come apart, he says, with the slide of his hands down Nick’s arms, the press of his quads to Nick’s hamstrings, the fit of their hips, his breath in Nick’s hair, because I’m holding you together.

Nick lifts his hands. Spreads his fingers. Sheppard works his own through the gaps, curls them over bridged skin, slides them over heart lines and head lines, life lines and fate lines.

The energetics in the room ripple into compliance.

The way clears.

Their minds don’t.

Nick doesn’t move. His head tips back, resting against Sheppard’s shoulder. On the edge of a garden of energetic death, his exposed throat smells like sweat and sage and star-powered life. Sheppard takes his weight like he’s collapsing down fruit from the tree of Quantum Vacuum. Virtual to actual. Energy to mass.

Speech, a distant memory, is wholly inaccessible.

He sweeps Nick into his arms and carries him out of the garden. 

Room 6, attempt 1

They fall.

Out of energy, into the crush of physicality.

Into water.

Brackish and dark.

Sheppard inhales, tastes shed leaves and weak salt. His vocal cords lock. He loses Nick. He struggles, writhing in a world without light or air or orientation. His connection to the thrum of invisible energetics has been slapped out of him by the cold, by the shock, by a visceral fight for survival that he’s losing. That he’s lost before. That he’ll lose now.

Something is actively pulling him down.

A roaring begins, deep and low in his ears.

He kicks wildly, bends at the waist, scrabbles at his ankles trying to free himself, tangling further.

His lungs ache.

His absent vision goes.

He—

He’s on his back. The stars spread above, dense and thick and unfamiliar.

The wind is in the grass.

Sheppard coughs, curling onto his side, retching up the memory of water.

He pulls in sips of air around the constriction in his throat.

His clothes and hair are dry.

“Nick.” No sound comes.

On hands and knees in whispering grass he sweeps the dark.

Whatever he’d found in himself in the subterranean death garden hasn’t wholly left. He can sense where to search, which quadrant out of three hundred and sixty degrees he should sweep.

His fingertips find a break in the grass and USAF fatigues beyond.

He runs his hands over Nick Rush, ankle to thigh, thigh to hip, hip to chest. Nick doesn’t move, and Sheppard crushes the grass as he comes, pressing it flat, creating more and more space for the starlight to fall. Under two alien moons he straddles Rush’s hips, preparing himself for the rhythms it takes to pound life into someone’s chest.

He won’t need it.

Rush looks up at him, eyes open, chest rising and falling under alien starlight.

He can’t speak. It will be all right, Sheppard tries to say, with his eyes, with his hands, with the press of his weight into the man’s hips. It will be all right because we will make it all right and for no other reason.

“Yes,” Rush rasps. “Yes I know.”

Room 6, attempt 4

The room is dark. They balance on a lip of stone. Blue light rings the ceiling above their heads. It’s cold. Below their ledge is a still plane of black and lethal water, mirroring the ringed light of the mirrored ceiling in endless, nested loops. Above the lights, letters shine, forming words that describe the burning wings of raptors, a carnelian featherfire flame breaking on cliffs of salt, drawing in unspoken concepts of flux, of magnetism, of induction, of broken rings and thermal currents, hovering, rising, flaring, dispersing.

Rush faces the wall. Places his palms on cool metal, slick with moisture.

Sheppard, drawing on the strength of his core, the gift of his preternatural balance, braces his feet and bridges his hands.

Wordlessly, Nick steps up, reaches into the narrow space between dark wall and mirrored ceiling, where the ring of light nestles. His head tips back, his eyes close, his hands are buried in crystal circuits, coaxing pattern from the shining circle, forcing flux into it, lifting it through power currents that wreathe Sheppard’s skin in flicker and warmth.

Nick, standing in the bridge of Sheppard’s shaking hands, is simulating a stellar engine. A heart of fusing matter. Magnetic reconnection. Helical kink instability. Core. Cavity. Bright front.

Half dead, half hard, Sheppard holds the line through coronal mass ejection.

Don’t fall, he says with his body, with the brace of his shoulder, the press of shin to metal that can’t shine.

Nick, spent, slides down the wall and into his grip, inside the shifting sheath he makes of himself.

The ceiling lights have changed. Whole swaths of the ring have gone dark. New patterns open. An endless visual echo of mirrored mirrors lights a path across the water.

Fatigued beyond finesse, Sheppard falls into the water at his feet, pulling Nick with him. Nothing closes on ankles, on wrists.

Only seven rooms, he says with each rescue-stroke across dark water.

He follows the rippling path to the opposite door.

Room 7 

They stand, soaking and shivering in the morning light of Altera’s white gem star. Curved glass walls, shot through with arching silver lines meet overhead in a closed and clear-petaled corolla. Below the transparent glass of the floor, an abandoned cityscape spreads, vast and silent. Barely visible intersecting geodesics shimmer with shieldlight over soaring arcologies.

They’re at the tip of a spire.

Below, the naquadah bones and crystal spirit of a cemetery city spread toward a glittering sea, blue gray beyond the rolling waves of grass.

Altera.

It presses on his mind.

It rings like a bell through his body.

It yearns for him with all the power that thrums through it, unused. He need but will it, and flowerpetal glass will crack apart, separate to panes, let in the roar of a distant sea.

He has only to wish it so.

The city is abandoned; bereft in the way that only Ancient technology can ever be bereft—vibrating with subsonic, subsymbolic yearning for those who have left, for those who might return.

Altera sees him, sees Nick, sees the EM twine they make as a magnetic pole, as something to align to, a calibration like a chosen truth on the shore of a relative sea.

Nick crashes to his knees, presses hands to floor, and the room flowers with a delicate pink flare of semi-permeable shielding as the walls break and unfurl and let pale starlight fall.

Sheppard smells the sea. He hears it.

He crouches, facing Nick. Can’t hold it. Now his hands, too, are on the floor and the city spire tries to own him. Tries to lure him. Shows him a dais of crystal. A chair of silver. It flows with his blood, beats with his heart, fires with his nerves.

“This is why,” Nick breathes, spending more words than Sheppard will ever hold again. “The genetic requirement. It’s for this. So what they built could know them.”

Sheppard nods.

The cry of sea birds carries on the wind.

The silent city powers up, lights on, shields rising, spires opening, far off ZPMs buzzing summer-haze warm beneath an opening field of flowers. Its joy, its longing, its message, its want, grows through them, laying down filigree along the latticework of Sheppard’s bones.

It takes Nick.

It takes Nick faster, further, wholly possessing his hands, his mind, his voice, his thoughts, the words he speaks, the manner in which he speaks them.

“Machinam sentientem creare crudelitas est,” the city says, with Nick’s voice, looking at Sheppard through Nick’s eyes of light trapped in silver, of fire trapped in water, of sentience poured into the span of bridges, crossing sea and air and space.

Sheppard swallows, braces, finds his words. “You’re a wound,” he says, “that we can’t fix.”

“You could stay,” the city answers, threading Ancient through English circuits, forcing itself from Nick’s throat to Sheppard’s mind.

The wind sings around glass edges.

Sheppard spreads his fingers on the floor. They built you too well. He presses the concept through his palms, his knees, the balls of his feet. And I’m sorry for that.

Tears leak from the immortal electronics running behind Nick’s eyes.

Dead center in the room, a compartment opens. Silver semicircles slide back. A crystal rises from a silver ring, lifted by a forcefield into the open air. It gleams a pastel red, like trapped fire. Its carven shape suggests the lick and curl of flame.

Sheppard finds a few more words. “We’ll die if we stay.” He presses the span of his days into the glass beneath him. Our lives are short. So easily ended.

“Sparks shower,” the city agrees, as the body it inhabits weeps into the base of an open glass petal.

Frozen flame revolves within a cloud of light.

The city stands. It opens Nick Rush’s hand. It pulls the crystal from a column of unseen force.

We’ve stayed too long. Sheppard’s body trembles with the thought. A day. A night. A morning.

The city speaks in Sheppard’s language now, with Nick Rush’s turn, his step, the way he kneels in front of Sheppard, full of grace the mathematician had spent down in dark rooms, deaths back. He holds the crystal out. Take it, the gesture says.

Sheppard, scraped clean of trust and terror and everything between, hesitates.

“You were meant to die here,” the city whispers. “I was meant to kill you.”

“Why don’t you?” Sheppard rasps.

The city smiles Nick Rush’s demon smile, like existence putting one over on itself with style and verve and animal satisfaction. “They left me,” it says, and holds out the crystal.

He’s too disoriented, too unsure to take it.

The city, like the sea breeze, blows through his body, full of unending momentum, unfightable, like the wind.

Current fuses an open loop closed.

The city hands itself the crystal.

“You wanted to come home,” it says.

And, “I think I did,” it answers.

Sheppard shudders. Blinks.

His fingers are tangled with Nick’s around the frozen fire crystal.

Nick, soaked and shaking, silver leeching from his eyes, tightens his grip on Sheppard. On the shard they hold. They redouble their grips, hand over hand over hand over hand over song turned stone.

The gleam of the sun on a sentient city rises, until the city itself is gone, and only the gleam remains.