Mathématique: Chapter 41

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?”

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

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 41

Rush sat cross-legged on his gurney. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, studying the chessboard in front of him. His attention split between the unfolding game and willpower it took not to touch the cortical suppressants affixed to his temples.

He wanted to look at them. (To take them apart.) To touch the chips of crystal inside.

Instead, he said, “You’re fairly good at this, as commissionless colonels go.”

“Commissionless?” Telford shot back, with a satisfying edge of aggression. He positioned a pawn, then looked up.

“Pretty tame for a Nick Rush insult,” Young pointed out, his bad leg propped on Rush’s gurney like he owned the thing. “You need calibrating?”

“Fuck off,” Rush said archly.

Telford smirked. “Who are you calling out of commission, Nick?” 

“A sizable and prestigious cohort of your peers.” Rush castled kingside with a calculated nonchalance.

Telford held his gaze, then castled queenside in open challenge.

“Queenside?” Young said, with poorly concealed good humor. “David, you ballsy motherfucker. He’s gonna take you apart. And did I just get called ‘significant and prestigious’?”

“You ever seen me play chess, Everett?” Telford asked, with a subtle theatricality Rush found appealing.

“‘Significant’ is a mathematical term,” Rush replied, as he pondered whether to take Telford’s suspiciously vulnerable bishop. “‘Prestigious’ referred, of course, to Colonel Carter.”

“Yeah.” Young looked at Telford. “They have this whole nerd romance goin’ on.”

Rush rolled his eyes. “I’ve never met the woman.”

“An email nerd romance,” Young clarified. 

“Smart is sexy,” Telford said with philosophical approval. “Sexy is sexy. Carter’s the whole package.”

Rush shot the pair of them a withering look over the tops of his glasses. It was wasted on Telford, who had turned his attention back to the board, but Young shifted, uncomfortable.

“You’re a dick,” Young informed Telford.

Telford shrugged. “Just an observation.”

Rush avoided Telford’s undefended bishop in favor of putting a hole in a nascent pawn skeleton of the first order.

Telford frowned.

“So what did Lam say?” Young asked Telford.

The other man glanced up. “She said she’d know by 2000 hours,” Telford replied.

Rush wasn’t clear on what Telford was waiting to find out. He’d asked, but his security clearance didn’t extend so far. Whatever it was, it was making Young and Telford anxious.

“You want dinner?” Young asked.

“Fuck no,” Telford breathed. “Do I look like I could eat right now?”

“Who says I was talking to you?” Young replied. “Hotshot, you want something from the mess?”

“No, thank you,” Rush replied. “I’ve been given to understand my likelihood of getting out of here within the next several hours is high.”

“True,” Young said. “You wanna make dinner? We haven’t done fish for a while now.”

Telford eyed Rush, amusement leaking into his features.

“Fuck off,” Rush muttered.

“You’re cooking again, huh?” Telford asked, deliberately mild.

Rush crisped up his diction. “I said ‘fuck off’.”

“He doesn’t cook,” Young explained. “He makes art outta food.”

“Got it.” Telford bit down on a smile.

“Come over for dinner.” Young eyed Telford. “You guys can turn this into a tournament. Best two outta three.”

Telford glanced at the clock. “Depends on what the blood test shows.”

“That wasn’t a ‘no’.” Young, too, glanced at the clock.

“Pardon the enquiry, but do y’have some kind of incurable disease?” Rush asked.

Telford snorted. “Enquire all god damned day, Nick. Inquire even,” he shot back, burying any proper answer beneath transparent logomachy, “now you’ve relocated to the colonies.”

“Don’t worry about it, hotshot.” Young pressed a hand into his lower back. “It’s not contagious.”

Annoyed, Rush attacked one of Telford’s pawns.

Noting the aggression of Rush’s en passant, Telford adopted a conciliatory tone. “My problem’s a little more abstract than you’re probably envisioning.”

“I’m sure.” Rush set the pawn on the table with the crisp click of plastic on chipboard.

Telford met his eyes, and Rush recalled the crack of his hand against an airborne flash drive he’d snatched mid-arc, months ago and thousands of miles away, out of the quiet air.

“You two look like you’re plotting something,” Young said.

“What are we gonna plot?” Telford dropped his eyes to the chessboard. “Two guys without security clearance, both more than a little lacking in practical compos mentis? No offense, Nick.”

“None taken.” Rush decided he’d done enough damage to Telford’s pawn structure to take (finally) that vulnerable bishop.

“How well do you two know each other?” Young asked, slow and guarded and full of late-to-the-party realization.

“Well enough,” Rush said.

Telford smiled, all understated confidence and dark promise. “You sure?” he asked, advancing his knight.

“Damn it, Rush,” Young growled, his eyes on the board.

“Checkmate,” Telford said.

Rush sighed and tipped his king.

The familiar tones of Young’s ringing phone split the stillness. The colonel glanced at the caller ID and answered. “Jackson,” he growled, “it’s 1900 hours, aren’t you—”

Young cut himself off. His expression shuttered, he pushed to his feet. “Slow down,” he said.

“What?” Telford hissed, his gaze fixed on Young, his hands hovering above the chessboard. “What’s wrong?”

Young held up a hand. He scanned the room, as if looking for a way out. “You get the plates on the van?”

Telford shot to his feet.

“Who else have you called? Jackson. Jackson. Slow down. Who have you called?” The dread in Young’s voice summoned a sympathetic chill from Rush’s bones. He swept chess pieces to the periphery of the board.

Telford crossed the room and pulled a phone from the wall. “Dispatch?” he said. “Yeah, please stand by.”

Young pulled his cell away from his ear and turned to Telford. “Vala was manhandled into a white van. Two minutes ago, if that. Jackson was too far away to get the plates. Last known location—” Young lifted his phone again. “Jackson, give me the address.”

Rush ran a hand through his hair, slow and controlled, fighting the urge to touch the metal edges of his cortical suppressors.

“Dispatch, this is Colonel David Telford. Initiate a Code Five on Vala Mal Doran. Page General Landry at home—or, wherever the hell he is. Scramble SG-1, SG-4, and SG-9 for a stat briefing. Get me a direct line to the Colorado Springs PD and—” Telford broke off with a frown.

“One Lake Avenue,” Young said, “got it. The Code Five is called. Don’t do anything stupid, Jackson—”

“What do you mean I can’t authorize that?” Telford snarled, “I’m telling you—”

“Give it here.” Young crossed the room.

“It’s Harriman.” Telford passed Young the phone.

“Walter, this is Colonel Young. I’ll authorize it. Send the pages, then get me the Colorado Springs PD. Port it down to this phone.”

“Fuck.” Telford turned away from Young, away from Rush, his hands threading through his hair. “Fuck me.”

“What’s going on?” Lam burst from the darkness of the back hall in a flare of white. The fluorescent lights reflected off her coat.

Telford shook his head.

Lam looked to Rush.

“Something happened to Vala,” Rush said. “She was forced into a car.”

“Vala,” Lam whispered, like a reflex. Her gaze shifted to Young, standing at the wall-mounted phone, speaking quietly, confidently, with the Colorado Springs Police Department.

Rush folded the chessboard.

Lam’s gaze swept over Young and Telford, turned at oblique angles to one another, their heads bowed. With measured steps, she approached his bed. She helped him collect chess pieces and transfer them to the waiting box. “Who took her?” she asked.

“No idea,” Rush replied. “I’m sure I’ll never find out.”

Young finished his call and turned to Telford. “I gotta go.” There was apology on his face, in his voice. “I gotta run this, at least until—”

“Yeah,” Telford said. “I know. You rank Cam now.”

“Stay outta trouble, hotshot.” Young glanced over his shoulder as he made for the exit. “And stay on the base.”

“Yes yes,” Rush sighed, as the colonel vanished around the frame of the door.

For a moment, Telford stood, shoulders hunched. Then he took a breath, shook himself, and stalked to the adjacent gurney. He raised the back of the bed, then climbed into it. Arms crossed over his chest, feet crossed at the ankles, he tipped his head back, as though sitting in a lawn chair, waiting for the sun to set.

Rush settled back against his own mattress, his eyes on the uninspiring ceiling.

The seconds ticked by.

“So what is it,” he asked, studying the landscapes of tiny imperfections lacing overhead concrete, “that you’re waiting for?”

Telford, lying on the adjacent gurney, didn’t look at Rush. He, too, stared at the ceiling, arms crossed, eyes alight with an abstruse avidity particular to him alone.

Rush could feel Telford trying to circumnavigate regulation. Not like a cryptographer. Like a cosmic sailor.

“An answer,” Telford said carefully, “to something I’ve been wondering about myself for a long time.”

“And this answer is something you’ll get from a medical test?” Rush asked.

“In this part of the galaxy,” Telford replied. “Not everywhere.”

“Ah,” Rush said. “Care to elaborate?”

“Maybe one day.” Telford shot him a sly side-eye. “Hotshot.”

“Shut the fuck up, won’t you?”

“It’s kinda priceless.” Telford smiled wistfully.

“Do you think y’could up my security clearance?” Rush asked, steering the conversation into safer territory. “This is bloody terrible.”

“I know,” Telford said, more bitter than dry. “Believe me, I get it. I hate the fucking bench, which is exactly where I am. Maybe for good, if Jackson gets his way.”

Rush quirked an incredulous eyebrow.

“Forget it,” Telford muttered. “Believe it or not, I know how you feel. You think I’m not dying to ask you about what you’re doing here? Why you’ve got alien tech glued to the side of your head?”

“So why don’t you?” Rush asked.

“It’s bad to look curious under scrutiny.” 

“A policy I’ve never managed to implement,” Rush said.

“No kidding.”

“But you’ve always struck me,” Rush continued, unperturbed, “as someone particularly adept at circumventing barriers.”

“Quite a compliment, coming from a cryptographer.” Telford smiled faintly. “You think you can flatter me into telling you something you’re not supposed to know?”

“I wouldn’t parse it as anything so gauche.”

“No, me neither.” 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?”

“As opposed to?”

“Being something different than what you think you are? Than what other people think you are?”

Rush quirked an eyebrow. “I hate t’say this,” he admitted, “but existential philosophers are a miserable lot. To a one. I don’t recommend a deep dive into your personal ontology.”

Telford’s expression turned bruised. “Spoken like a guy who knows.”

Together, they watched the clock creep toward 8 PM.

A few minutes past eight o’clock, Lam emerged from the back hallway, a file in her hand. “You’re clean,” she announced, without explanation or preamble.

Telford sat up. “You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. We’ll test you again at thirty and sixty days,” she said, “but you’re clean.”

Telford shut his eyes, took a breath, and bled tension from his shoulders.

“Go home,” Lam said. “Get some rest.”

“I’ll stay,” Telford said. “Vala’s still missing.”

“There’s nothing you can do for her,” Lam said, with the professional brusqueness of a curative scalpel.

“You think I don’t know that?” Telford shot back.

Rush flinched.

“Stay if you’d like.” Lam was unflappable, but for the backwards click of one heel.

“Sorry,” Telford said. “Sorry. Long time in isolation.”

Lam turned to Rush. “I was planning on releasing you,” she began, an unmistakable note of contingency in her voice.

Rush hooked a hand over his shoulder and tried to work the tension out of his neck. It didn’t go. (Not surprising.)

The extent to and frequency with which Young intervened on his behalf and the considerable weight behind that influence hit Rush with an unwelcome mental moment of inertia. He wasn’t getting out of here. Not without Young. Not without Jackson. Not without someone willing to shoulder the responsibility of facing down the bureaucracy of the SGC should the bloody Lucian Alliance decide to abduct him.

It occurred, suddenly, that his personal freedom hung by the thinnest of threads. The efforts of individual people.

“Nick, you okay?”

Rush looked up and found Telford and Lam watching him with sympathy and concern, respectively.

“There’s gotta be something you can do,” Telford said, looking at Lam. “Come on. The guy hasn’t seen a window in—how many days?”

“No idea,” Rush admitted.

“See?” Telford swept a hand to take in Rush.

Lam eyed him appraisingly. “I understand you’re anxious to get out of here, but I can’t let you go.”

Rush nodded.

“So,” Lam continued, her tone lightening, “no windows, sorry, but I can arrange for you to move freely about the base, and spend the night in one of the VIP suites. Does that sound like a reasonable compromise?”

“Yes,” Rush said, trying to keep his expression neutral.

Behind Lam’s back, Telford gave a subtle fist pump.

“So,” Telford said, contemplating his deplorable coffee as they lingered in the mess, “without violating my security embargo can you tell me what it was that landed you in the base infirmary for four days?”

“Beethoven,” Rush replied.

“Beethoven?” Telford repeated.

Rush opened a hand, swept it along an invisible asymptote of the air, then dropped it into a downbeat. Right on cue came the echo of falling fifths. (D minor.)

“That fucker,” Telford said philosophically.

Rush pulled his phone out of his pocket and texted Young.

::What’s happening?::

::Nothing good.::

“What’s the word?” Telford asked.

Rush slid his phone across the table.

Telford read the exchange, turned the screen face down, and slid it back.

He’s so deep in the run that he can’t feel his body anymore, only the rhythm of his steps, the sweat and shine in his eyes, the pressure of the city that arrives again and again, like sea. Wave after wave. His mind is architecture and math, the kinetics of a golf swing, the arc of a ball, the arc of a shield, they’re all the same. Every day he runs ellipses around the neural interface chair, falling toward it like one falls in space, as though the city drapes over a spacetime curve.

The rhythm of his run turns to bright sting. Hard surface. Stops.

On his back, he stares up into the morning sky.

He understands he’s fallen. He understands he can’t get up. The city washes over him. And on the radio—

“Sheppard, where are you?” McKay says, piers and quays away, his voice a disembodied signal coming from the radio that’s shaken loose from his ear in the fall. “Sheppard, come in.”

Rush awoke, drenched in sweat, lying in an unfamiliar darkness on an unfamiliar floor.

(Carpet? Shorn short, over concrete?)

“Fuck,” he rasped, listening for the sound of the sea, trying to banish it or call it back, he wasn’t sure which. He stood, disoriented in the dark, and crossed toward the illuminated outline of a door, fluorescent light seeping in at its cracks.

He threw it open.

Only then did he recall where he was.

Cheyenne Mountain. VIP Suite #4.

He took a breath.

(Right then.)

Was something happening to Colonel Sheppard?

He touched his fingertips to the devices at his temples.

Before he could chase the thought down, Telford came around a corner.

(Black-clad. Jeans and a leather jacket. Soigné.)

He slowed as he approached. “Nick,” he said, surprised, as though Rush was the one who’d appeared unlooked for.

“I think,” Rush breathed, confused by the bright dream, the dark room, the bright hall, “I have to solve it.

“The cypher set?” Telford looked into his eyes, gripped Rush’s shoulder in solidarity. “I know. I’ve always known.”

“Not sure they’ll let me,” Rush confessed, still fighting the dream, fighting the memory of a D minor chord.

“It’ll happen,” Telford said.

“Y’sound so certain.”

Gently, Telford shook his shoulder. “C’mon. What do you say to some coffee and a ride home, red tape be damned? You look terrible, Nick. No one can sleep here. It’s a damned temple to insomnia.”

“What time is it?” Rush asked.

“Four in the morning.” Telford gave him an appraising look, half a smile. “No one’ll stop us if we walk out with confidence.”

“Did y’sleep at all?” Rush asked.

Telford scrubbed at red-rimmed eyes. “Sleep is for the weak. Grab your stuff, I’ll grab the coffee. Meet me on level 3. I know a guy who works the NORAD exit.”

Twenty minutes later, they stood in the parking lot of the SGC beneath the starred spread of a moonless night, next to Telford’s Acura NSX, its red paint the color of a faded bruise under parking lot lights.

Rush took a breath of night air.

“Feels good to be out from under that pile of rock, right?” Telford asked.

Rush nodded.

“Toss your stuff in the back.” Telford unlocked the car with a quiet chirp.

Coffee in hand, Rush slid into the passenger’s seat.

Telford shut the driver’s side door and started the car.

For a handful of seconds, Rush heard the unmistakable, intolerable sound of Tartini’s Violin Sonata in G minor.

(The Devil’s Trill.)

He twisted the dial to static, then turned the radio off.

Telford glanced at him. “Have something against NPR?”

“Fuck off,” Rush snarled.

“Yeah okay,” Telford said mildly. “They’re BBC wannabes, I can admit that.”

“Quite,” Rush said, in the dry pull of Gloria’s poshest verbal variant.

(What the fuck was he doing to himself?)

He took a sip of something truly atrocious as Telford pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. “This is fuckin’ terrible.”

“Is it?” Telford smiled faintly. “I’ve forgotten how to be disappointed by government-issue coffee.”

“It tastes like they’re reusing the grounds,” Rush said, disgusted.

“Ugh. Did you text Everett? You should text Everett.”

“I prefer to present the information that I left the base as a fait accompli and not as a work in progress, thank you,” Rush replied.

Telford snorted. “Works for me.”

The night was dark. Streetlights were few and widely spaced.

“I hope Vala’s okay,” Telford said.

“Vala’s quite resourceful.” Rush watched the night-dark forest blur by and tried to avoid imagining what it might take to force Vala Mal Doran into a car.

“It’s not a good sign we haven’t heard from them,” Telford said, stark and truthful.

“I’m aware.”

“I should be out there.” Telford’s hands tightened on the steering wheel.

“Y’will be, I’m sure,” Rush said. “Someone needs t’counterbalance Jackson. The man’s a fuckin’ intrapersonal—” It was too early in the morning to coin a bloody phrase. He gave up and tipped his head back against the seat.

“Tell me about it,” Telford said darkly. “He gave me a book to read while I was stuck in quarantine. Les Misérables.”

“That’s so fuckin’ like him.”

“Yup.”

The yellow lines of the road shone in the Acura’s high beams.

“You ever read it?”

“No,” Rush said. “Seen the musical though.”

“Yeah. The book’s a doorstopper. But there are a million of those to choose from. Why not War and Peace? Gravity’s Rainbow? The Count of Monte Cristo? There’s gotta be some message he wants me to take from it.”

“I—” Rush broke off, lightheaded in the disorienting blur of dark forest beyond the window.

“You feeling okay?” Telford asked.

“Yes,” Rush said. “I’m fine.”

“Coffee cures all ills,” Telford said. “Even shit coffee.”

Rush managed another swallow, but it did nothing to sharpen the lethargic haze of his thoughts.

“I wish I’d asked Everett about the book,” Telford continued. “He and Jackson are getting closer by the day. I tried, but he brushed it off. ‘It’s a long book, and you’re here for a while.’ Such an Everett thing to say.”

Rush shook his head, trying to clear it.

“Daniel Jackson doesn’t know me.” Telford stared into the dark, eyes glittering. “He thinks that if I could, I’d curse the world. Like a cosmic police inspector.”

“What?” Rush breathed.

“He’s sending a message about redemption. About compassion. You accept it from on high, you dig it out of the dirt of the soul, you grow it like a garden one act at a time. That’s what the book is about, right?”

“Redemption?” Rush echoed, his elocution slurred.

“Yeah. Ways to find it. Ways to die from the lack of it. Jackson imagines he knows a thing or two about it, I’ll bet. Hell, I’m sure he does. He’d have to, just to face himself in the mirror. Just to fucking shave.”

Something was wrong with him. Something different. Something new. “Oh god,” he breathed, horror echoing in the growing gap between intent and action. His head, too heavy, tipped back against the seat. “Redemption?”

No coffee in the world was as bad as the stuff in his hand.

He’d been drugged.

“I’m sorry.” Telford glanced away from the road and, for an instant, their gazes met, dark and direct. “If it makes a difference, I’m sorry.”

Telford was working for the LA.

Rush wasted no time on confirmation or conversation. He released his seatbelt with a quiet click.

Telford looked over at him, concerned, sharp, and already slowing the car.

Rush flung the dregs of his coffee in the other man’s face.

Telford flinched.

The car swerved.

Rush opened the passenger door and threw himself into the night.

The shifting dark of night sky and lightless asphalt slammed into him. He skidded and rolled and. He braced for pain that didn’t come.

Its absence seemed like an ominous sign.

Uncoordinated, dazed, he lifted his head.

Meters down the road, Telford’s car skidded to a stop.

It was difficult to organize his thoughts. His capacity to act was limited pharmacologically, physically, psychologically. He was unprepared.

He tried to stand.

(Couldn’t.)

All he’d bought himself was a set of unfelt injuries and ten seconds of time.

The car door opened.

Rush pulled out his phone, willing himself to focus.

Telford stood opaque against a backdrop of stars.

Rush dialed Young’s number and pitched his phone into the dark forest lining the road, hoping it’d survive the arc he sent it on.

Telford walked towards him, his tread silent on the warm asphalt of the road.

There was little evidence he could leave of the miscalculations that’d brought him here. Only one thing suggested itself.

Rush pulled off his wedding ring and placed it on the surface of the road.

Telford dropped into a crouch, arriving with the smell of coffee. Two fingers pressed to Rush’s throat. Strong hands flipped him onto his back.

“Gutsy move.” Telford made no secret of his sympathy, his admiration. “If you hadn’t taken the coffee, you might’ve made it.”

He couldn’t speak. Keeping his eyes open was difficult.

“You’ll be all right,” Telford said. “You’ll be fine.”

Somehow, he didn’t think so.

His thoughts were—

His thoughts—

He

“Telford to Kiva,” Telford said, a fading voice in the darkness. “My cover’s blown to hell, but I’ve got him. Repeat, I’ve got him. Can you—”