In a Clean White Room

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re gonna rescue me,” Telford whispers.

P=NP. Prove.

“Damn it, hotshot.” Young looked up, as though he could see into low Earth orbit. 

He woke alone, beside a river.

Young could smell smoke. Or, he thought he could. It was fire season.

Vala Mal Doran prays for luck to the dead false god who’d stolen her life and lived in her spine.

Telford looked away, his gaze fixed on nothing. “Do you ever wonder,” he began, “whether the story you tell yourself about your life and your choices is real?”

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

Relief isn’t a sentiment Amanda Perry typically encounters, let alone inspires.

To create a machine that feels is a cruelty.

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

Lam rested a hand atop her dialysis machine and looked up at Young, determined and wry. “This is a time of nightmares.”

Nicholas Rush was wired for D minor.

Unseeing, Teal’c stares at the sour cream, the cilantro, the Blazin’ Jalapeño Doritos, the cheese.

“‘Jacksonesque’?” Young repeated. “He’s gonna love that one. So much.”

One could not disappoint the dead. That was true. That was axiom.

“Do y’have cooking wine?” Rush asked. “I feel like lighting something on fire.”