Mathématique: Lantean Dream Team: Part 2

The city’s joy twines into him: current, stone, and blown cloud.

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

Text iteration: Witchingest hour.

Additional notes: None.

Lantean Dream Team: Part Two

Sheppard stares into mist and shine, his mind and heart blown out by a shimmer veil of welcome, the kind of thing he’d hoped for in church but found in math and on a garden path behind a temple to the Goddess Athar, Maid of Proculus. The city calls to him, drags him deep, hooking into the chunk of fire-colored crystal he carries in the breast pocket of his jacket like it finally has a fulcrum to lever him out of his humanity, away from his cortical suppressors, tuned too low to make any difference in a mist of sacred electrostatics.

His body falls away, caged by the devices at his temples.

Beside him, Nick Rush struggles, almost strong enough to circumvent his own cortical prison, but not quite. Not without help.

Acting on impulse, on instinct and desire, Sheppard pulls him free of the body he’s trying to escape.

The gate closes.

They stand at the base of the Argentea Scala. A window, styled like a waterfall, pours liquid light at their backs. The space in front of the gate is crowded with people, pale and thread-like in the misted light. Some are more present than others: McKay, hissing furiously at Sheppard’s shed corporeal aspect; Greer; James; Dr. McBride; Woolsey, at the foot of the stairs, his arms crossed, his mouth set in a grim and worried line. He can barely see Keller, bent over Rush, her blonde hair swallowed by the light. He can barely see Young kneeling next to her, his expression pinched with pain.

“So,” Rush begins conversationally, “this seems bad.”

Sheppard grins.

He can’t help it. His spirits rise like the wind, like waves whipped high. His soul is full of welcome, his mind full of architecture, engineering, the rise of towers, the spread of piers. He reaches his hand into his jacket and closes his fingers around the heart-of-fire crystal Landry had entrusted to him.

Maker, the city whispers, leaping and lapping against his mind. Maker. Maker.

The spirits of his friends kneel at his feet, but he can’t feel them. There’s not an ounce of room in his soul for worry or for grief. The city pushes everything else away.

He stares at Rush, losing himself in all he senses. Under the pouring, misting photons, the mathematician’s eyes shine pale, like the sunstone laid into the silver stair. The man is a braid of washed out fire that hides a ribbon of water. The city touches him tentatively, politely coaxing licks of flame away from his core.

Sheppard has Rush by the hand; it’s how he pulled him free. “Can I show you around?”

“Shouldn’t we—” Rush gestures at the specter of Keller, at McKay, only a little more substantial. They call back and forth to one another without looking up, speaking in half sentences and frequency modulations, trying to trap cognitions that’ve already flown the coop. 

“They’ll keep,” Sheppard says.

“Are you certain?” Rush frowns at the little cluster of concerned friends huddled around his body.

“Yeah.”

Vanessa James, a solid spirit in a room of ghosts, looks dead at Sheppard.

Has to be coincidence, but, just in case, Sheppard holds a finger to his lips.

Her expression doesn’t change.

Sheppard draws Rush up the silver and sunstone stair, out of the photonic pool at the base of the gate. The stairs, like everything else in the city, shine with their presence. He feels the tug of the crystal he carries. Knows where he’s meant to take it. Knows it’s what fights the suppressive field that protects his cortex, the field he hates. The field he needs. The field he’ll rip off when his days and his luck run out.

At the top of the stair, they turn, taking in the waterfall window behind the gate, forest-glade architecture, the stone and silver-naquadah, the light that collects at the base of the amphitheater and lingers in a mist that resists dispersal.

“It’ll be all right.” Sheppard surveys the barely there ghost-fish of humanity, swimming in an Ancient pond. Two faces are turned in their direction: Vanessa James and Daniel Jackson. “Can’t you feel it?”

“Yes.” Rush says, every tone and overtone in his voice laced with resistance. “But—have y’never read a fairy tale? They always start well enough…” he trails off ominously.

“A fairy tale, huh?” Sheppard grins, already leading the way up the spiral stair, towards Woolsey’s office, toward the pinnacle balcony beyond, where Elizabeth used to stand with her morning coffee, looking after her sea. Her sky. The stained glass of the central spire shines pale amber and washed-out aquamarine in the morning sun. “We’re gonna need a princess to rescue.”

Rush follows, soundless on the stairs.

They pass through the balcony doors into mid-morning glory. It’s nothing like the dying November they’d left behind, cold and dry, where even the snow felt stingy. The sun pours and trade winds sing through the towers, warm and strong. In the afternoon, the clouds will grow, full of energy and rain. He wants to take Rush flying, to find out what he can do with a Puddle Jumper in low atmosphere, to see the climates change with the latitude, go north, find a swath of stable ice, flat and prime for miles of skid.

Shoulder to shoulder, they admire the vast and sun-bright sea.

“Nice, right?” Sheppard leans against the rail, miming the corporeality he left on the floor a ways back.

Rush nods, but his expression is troubled as he looks at the water.

“What is it?” Sheppard asks.

“Nothing,” Rush says, but Sheppard feels the city twining itself into the other man, soothing and smoothing unease in his energetic patterns. As soon as it goes, it comes again, a cyclic healing and tearing that oscillates with no change in frequency. Puzzled, Rush says, “I’m not sure how I feel about the water.”

“Spoken like a cosmic sailor.” Sheppard senses the wild fountain concealed beneath the man’s running fire. Rush is nothing like Sheppard’s own air-and-architecture makeup. The feel of his presence is raw, more force than control. It doesn’t fit a man who works so well with structure: math and music and chemistry as cuisine. “It’s a nice view.”

“It is,” Rush agrees. “I am, I admit, still a bit hung up on the way we left our corporeal forms at the base of the gate?” He quirks an eyebrow and leans into the rail in his Lantean Expedition charcoal, better than Sheppard at projecting mass, modeling it, wearing it like an outfit.

Something in Sheppard’s core turns over. He wishes Rush had been here from the beginning. Single and interesting and interested, another city favorite, another star-bright mind to go with an underwater stellar drive, the beautiful curve of shield geodesics. 

“I think that was my bad.” He tries to close the lid on his longing, but it’s hard with the sun-warmed slate of the man’s hair stealing hues from the stained glass behind them. He pulls out the petrified fire he carries in his pocket and lets it feel the morning sun. “Landry gave me this for safekeeping on Atlantis.”

“What is it?” The fire in Rush’s presence burns a little higher as tendrils of the stone’s EM field lick toward him like flame.

“A control crystal,” Sheppard says. “One with a lot of personality. You and I brought it back at the end of our notable day. It wants to visit the heart of the city. It’s what pulled me out of my body. I brought you along for the ride.”

“Was that a good idea?” Rush asks.

“What do the fairy tales say?” Sheppard offers him the stone.

Rush doesn’t take it, but the projected illusion of his fingertips brush a glimmering facet. Atlantis presses and whispers. Different words for each of them. Sheppard tries to eavesdrop on its word for Rush, but the more he focuses, the more his mind fills with, Maker, maker, maker.

Rush withdraws his fingertips. “Nothing promising, I’m afraid.”

“I’m optimistic.” Sheppard cups his hand around the stone, instinctively shielding it from a gust of wind, as though it really were a burning flame. “I think we’re gonna get this little guy in place, then conveniently wake up in the infirmary and get yelled at.”

“Not sure that makes sense,” Rush begins.

“Ah!” Sheppard holds up a warning finger. “I’m gonna stop you right there. Optimism and pessimism are causal agents in a city that can read your mind. Don’t envision anything horrifying. We like the city, the city likes us; this is gonna go just. Fine.”

“Are we optimistic people?” Rush asks skeptically.

“We are disciplined people.” Sheppard tries to carve the words into the other man’s mind. “In this city, things go the way we say they’re gonna go.”

“I—” Rush ruefully eyes the spire above, the sea below.

“Don’t British Guy us into another Notable Day”.

Rush smirks at Sheppard and says, “Sure,” in a bad American accent.

Sheppard breathes through two overwhelming and simultaneous urges: 1) kissing the guy on the mouth and 2) flying a Puddle Jumper to infinity, never to return. Maybe, just maybe, Nick Rush has a thread of a chance at prying Rodney McKay outta the top slot in John Sheppard’s Unattanable Math Crush Hierarchy. He’s never had much real hope it’ll happen, but—maybe. Yeah.

Cool.

Um.

He should say something.

Nothing comes to mind.

“Are you all right?” Rush asks.

“Mmm hmm,” Sheppard manages. Determinedly, he turns to the stained glass balcony doors, walks through the them, and is halfway down the stairs before he regains enough equilibrium to belatedly say, “Let’s go.”

“We’ve been ‘going’ for half a spire,” Rush points out, with what is, maybe, a deliberately sexy smoke and smolder tone. 

Sheppard stares into nothingness and tries to think of something quick-witted to say. He comes up with, “Uh huh,” and a helpless desire to channel a microliter of the charm that oozes from Vala Mal Doran’s fingertips.

No charm appears before they reach the base of the spire, so he leads the way onto the northern walkway. The city rises, silver and skyward. A shining footpath stretches toward a distant pier. Calm ocean laps on either side. Another path runs a tight circle around the soaring central spire. Lacuna shine sapphire blue on either side of the floating walkway.

“The city’s built like a snowflake,” Sheppard explains. “Six piers: north, northeast, southeast, south, southwest, northwest.” He turns a clockwise circle, pointing them out. “Seawater comes up in places. Naquadah runs like a lattice, holding everything together.”

“Beautiful,” Rush says.

Tentatively, hopefully, the city braids and unbraids and braids again into the fire/water edges of the mathematician’s energetic signature. Sheppard senses it happen, understands the city is already tightly woven into the air and structure of his own spirit. As they walk along a sun-drenched pier of sea mist and shine, he invites it further. Deeper. He feels it working new paths into his mind and heart.

“We’re not dead.” Rush walks at his shoulder, learning an incorporeal grace with the kinetics Sheppard can only envy. “Correct?”

“Don’t think so,” Sheppard confirms, not too bothered about it either way.

“This a normal Wednesday for you then?” Rush asks. “Incorporeal sunlit strolls before lunch?”

“It’s a little unusual.” With a lazy confidence, Sheppard reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a pair of Air-Force aviators, just because he can. “Nice day for it.” He hands them to Rush.

Wordlessly, the mathematician slips them on. Easy as that, a little piece of John Sheppard surfs Nick Rush’s ever-breaking firewave. It feels nice. Like holding hands. Rush slips a pair of sleek, designer shades from nothingness and hands them to Sheppard.

Sheppard slides them on. “We’re cool,” he whispers, accidentally out loud.

“Ruins the effect if you say it,” Rush replies, “but I don’t wholly disagree.”

“Noted,” Sheppard says, in what is, hopefully, a very cool way.

“There ya go.” Rush gives him a bracing look, memory-free, body-free, game for most things, it seems. The man of his dreams. “Where are we headed?”

“The Lantean control chair. Access is offset from the central spire, but it’s the dead center of the city. Heart of the star drive. And a nice walk.” Sheppard swallows. “Welcome to Atlantis.”

“Thanks,” Rush says softly.

Everywhere, he sees subtle changes in the slipstream edges he knows so well. Grooves carve themselves into depressions in the metal. There’s more exposed crystal. More exposed grating. He doesn’t know why. He directs the question at the city, and—

Life, Atlantis whispers. Life.

His mind fills with light and air, water and fire, sequestered seeds, growing, bursting, flowering.

//You are beautiful,// he tells her. His mind is soaring silver, his soul of singing wind.

The city’s joy twines into him: current, stone, and blown cloud.

He feels the renewal of flowing water in the sunglasses he wears.

In the chair room, they stop holding hands with energetic eyewear. Beneath the star drive, on a bright day like this one, the room’s ceiling windows glow and ripple with the blue-green tint of strong sun driving itself through water. The room vibrates with their presence, deep and welcoming. The chair, alive and hungry with a hard and eager edge, limns itself in aquamarine.

It aches for him, for the crystal he holds, pulling deep and hard.

He kneels, holding the caught-fire stone just above the depression that awaits it.

Interesting that the chair doesn’t ache for Nick Rush, who circles it with impunity, his essence wrapping and warping into something unfamiliar, testing the air, testing the water, questing and cresting into intricate patterns Sheppard can’t feel well enough to follow. It’s only when he lowers the stone toward the waiting nest of crystal at the base of the chair—

“Stop.” Rush’s voice sharpens in warning.

Centimeters from the connection it aches for, the crystal throbs in his hand.

The sea-floor cast of the room turns deeper.

Darker.

Sheppard smells pine and moss and river water. He hears rock-split wind. Notes of lonely flute. The ghost of a cold rain whispers against his skin, spreads itself over the naquadah alloy and inlaid stone of the room.

The city rises in his mind, hard and wild and high, pulsing with inarticulate, savage longing.

Rush’s fingertips brush his own temples and he squints up, like he’s looking for the source of an overwhelming sound.

The dark and the mist and the rain and the wind and the smell of moss coalesce into a woman. She stands before the chair like it’s a throne. Her throne. She wears white, more light than color. It shines with crystal that runs like water.

He recognizes her.

Sheppard’s mouth goes dry. The stone in his hand wails for its waiting port.

With effort, he curls his hand to his chest and stands, backing away from the chair. “You.”

“John Sheppard.” Her hair falls in soft waves around her shoulders.

“You were on Altera.”

Rush steps to his shoulder. Together, they face her down. Even if Nick Rush doesn’t remember Altera, it feels nice to have him as backup. It feels, also, like maybe this isn’t an accident.

“I was,” the woman confirms.

Around him, the song of the city fades. He reaches for it, alarmed. It reaches back from the other side of a closing bubble of water and air. A tight-knit weave of hills and mist, rain and stone, cuts him off.

“Give me the crystal,” the woman says softly. “You should never have taken it. You didn’t need it. It’s causing problems.”

“Right, an’ who the fuck are you?” Rush demands, ragingly Scottish and the loose cannon Sheppard remembers from fifteen deaths deep on Altera.

“Morgan le Fay.” The words ring with power, writhe with mist. 

Sheppard doesn’t move.

“Fuck off,” Rush offers.

“Your impudence, Nicholas Rush,” Morgan begins, severe and stern.

And—

The world ends.

The world rends.

It happens with a scream, with a Banshee wail of a song, with a split of the light, with a city/ship-in-bottle contained tear. It starts at Morgan’s feet and stretches to the confines of the room, hitting the hills-of-mist sphere that separates him from the city and stopping there.

Sheppard, full of energetic, non-corporeal panic, hauls Rush onto the chair platform in an EM levering of the man’s being as he instinctively gravitates toward the energetic stability of Morgan le Fay, who isn’t causing this, who’s as startled as they are, who’s trying to shield them from whatever’s happening.

They balance together on a fault line of reality.

Before Sheppard can strike the dead flint of his rational thoughts, Morgan steps between them and the tear in the world.

Her arms are thrown wide. She plants her feet on the split between the chair room and something dark and strange.

Across from them, in a perfect half-sphere of a mismatched fishbowl, is a room that doesn’t belong. A room lit by moonlight and mirror. Starlight pours through windows, through a skylight, and collects in floating crystal prisms, wide flat bowls of water, levitating mirrors. Despite its mystical appearance, the room has modern features. He sees a silver laptop on a desk. A white yoga mat is stretched over a wooden floor. On the dark side of the light/dark split, a woman stands, her stance perfectly mirroring the stance of Morgan le Fay.

It’s not just mirrored.

It’s identical. The woman facing their Morgan is—also Morgan. The doppelgänger wears white athletic gear. Sneakers with silver laces. Her hair is pulled back in a sporty ponytail, emphasizing her sharp features. Her gray eyes catch the mirrored starlight.

Morgan versus Morgan.

What the hell?

Sheppard looks at Rush and finds Rush looking back at him.

“Still a normal Wednesday?” the mathematician whispers.

“Less so, now,” Sheppard admits.

“Demon,” their Morgan hisses at her Athleisure-sporting twin.

“Facet,” Athleisure Morgan says, her consonants sharp, like shadows on the moon. “Stand down.”

“You dare break the world,” their Morgan breathes, frost and mist and flowing gown.

“Only within your bottling of it,” Athleisure Morgan says, trim and modern and sculpted from starlight. “Hear me out.” She raises her hands, palms up, backed by the darkness of moonlit rooms. In yoga pants and a track jacket, she looks twenty-five, but Sheppard sense the bones of his home planet beneath her sporty facade. “Suffer me to pass. I don’t wish you ill. I don’t wish any of you ill.” Her eyes linger on Rush as she says it.

Their Morgan drops her hands and steps back from the shear line in the world. Athleisure Morgan crosses from moonlight and lense-light to their undersea grotto, the white of her sportswear turning pale green, blue, gold as she steps across the line. The soles of her tennis shoes are silent on the naquadah floor. She brings the smell of slate and rain-soaked greenery. “You’re important, facet,” she says to her twin, gray eyes gleaming with secrets and storms.

“You’re a Breaker,” their Morgan breathes.

“Yes.” Athleisure Morgan looks dead at Nick Rush and says, “in superposition,” like she knows he’ll know what that means.

Nick Rush is heroically unreadable: eternal flame with eyes of sea and stone. Eyes like Morgan’s. Energy like Morgan’s. That, he can’t conceal.

Athleisure Morgan looks to Sheppard. Her gaze is piercing. Cunning and dangerous and, somehow, kind. She reaches for him. Fingertips, feather-light, trace the angle of his jaw. “You’ve been claimed.”

“Chaya Sar,” their Morgan confirms, and Sheppard’s whole awareness blazes with trellised flowers, ripe fruit on gentle winds, the warmth of sun, the burst of life. “It’s weak, but it’s permanent, even through her disgrace.”

“She’s not disgraced everywhere, facet,” Athleisure Morgan says. The words are hard but her eyes blaze with kindness, and again, Sheppard’s mind bursts into its own flowering, syrup running through his spirit, easing the ache of sleepless weeks, the pain of weeks-long separation from a city on the sea.

Athleisure Morgan moves to Rush, circling him with caution. The quality of her presence turns older, more cautious mist than stone-cut power. Her water aspect calls to his, and Rush resists it, his expression impassive, his energy signature blazing with fire. She pulls back. “This one is human?”

Their Morgan frowns, then looks to Sheppard, like he might have an insight she doesn’t.

Sheppard shrugs subtly.

“You can hear as much,” their Morgan offers, uncertain.

This doesn’t reassure Athleisure Morgan. “You.” She addresses Rush, edgy, hostile, almost—afraid? “Are you human?”

“To my knowledge.” Rush is slow and cautious. He counters with a question. “You’re in superposition relative to your local aspect?” He looks meaningfully at their Morgan.

Athleisure Morgan takes a step back, startled. Frightened.

Sheppard deepens into the existential crevasse opening at their feet. This is Quantum Weirdness happening. Right here, right now. Everett, too, has a superpositioned aspect. He won’t be mentioning that. He won’t be mentioning anything. He’s blind to Quantum Privilege, to levels of observation above.

Their Morgan picks up on the weirdness between Athleisure Morgan and Rush. “Is he dangerous?”

“Profoundly,” Athleisure Morgan says.

Sheppard and their Morgan look at Rush, who opens his hands, confused and unimpressed.

“He’s frail,” their Morgan says, frown lines between her brows as she studies Rush. “His gift for Song is so powerful he barely survives its depth.”

“Not frail.” Athleisure Morgan pins their Morgan with a flint-gray look. “Inventive. Cunning. Deceitful. A true Child of Mab and an abandoned product of your downstream weaving.”

“That may be,” their Morgan says. “But there’s nothing I can do about him. I’m here for Daniel. To help him stop the war. I can’t risk any further action. You know how constrained I am. You must.”

“You’re tremendously important, facet,” Morgan tells herself. “We’re within a double glamour. Many are looking, but none can see. Claim him. Let John Sheppard seat the stone. Your local Council allowed its removal from Altera. They’ll allow it to rest here. You can argue it’s a good sight safer than other places humanity might take it.” She gives herself a significant look.

Their Morgan hesitates, resisting with a stubborn set of her chin.

“You don’t take enough care with your things,” Athleisure Morgan hisses, strangely vicious with herself. “Your projects. For all your arts, your glamours, your weaves, your deceptions, your plans, your strategies, the wishes you fulfill and the graveyards you haunt—ever you’ve let what was most precious to you slip through your fingers.” She takes a breath, her eyes brimming with rage and tears. “Have a care for that,” she snarls, pointing at Rush with two fingers.

It’s confusing. Disturbing. Even their Morgan looks taken aback, mildly offended.

“Hey,” Sheppard breaks in. “Anyone wanna catch us up?”

No one does.

Athleisure Morgan whirls, like she knows she’s gone too far. She faces the half of the world that’s starlight and moonlight streaming from sky, through lenses, off mirrors.

Sheppard looks at Rush.

Rush shakes his head, mystified.

Their Morgan steps in front of Rush, her hands on her shoulders, staring into his eyes. “It’s meaningless,” she murmurs, as their energy signatures begin to mingle. “He has so much of me already. It would be nothing more than a formality.”

“Tell me.” Athleisure Morgan doesn’t turn around. “What does he have.”

“The Song,” Morgan says gently, “the Blink. The Sundering.”

“Three? No Seal? I wasn’t sure.”

Their Morgan searches Rush’s eyes. “Three,” she confirms. “No Seal.” Her expression turns fond. “If anything, he’s a seam-ripper.”

“I need to know what happens in the claiming.” Athleisure Morgan looks to her counterpart. Her voice softens. “Please, facet. It’s your salt line that turns the tide of a multiversal war. Daniel is important, yes. But he’s not the only one.”

“Do we get a say in this?” Sheppard asks, his crystal heavy in his hand, pretty sure the answer is no. “Claim me.” He tries anyway. “I’m always game for experimentation.”

Rush gives him a battery-acid, sideways, don’t-you-dare glare, and Sheppard’s heart skips a beat.

“Impossible. Irrelevant. You’re of Moros’s line.” Their Morgan throws the comment out like an afterthought, but Sheppard clamps down on it like a lifeline.

“And Rush is yours?” Sheppard tries not to reveal the relief he feels at the implication that Nick Rush is not a long-lost cousin. “We’re not related?”

It’s been a worry.

Morgan ignores him. Her grip on Rush’s shoulders tightens.

Nick Rush fights her with feral, hard-edged fury. He’s not a strategic fighter. He fights like a demon. Like a vicious, outmatched kid with no fear of death and no belief in safety. Even without true physicality, he’s throwing himself into it, fire standing in for form, but—

Morgan’s light outshines every lesser fire.

Something in Sheppard sings in memory at the blaze of light that eats all the world he can see and sense. There’s an unweaving, a reweaving, the smell and sound and feel of spring rain. Morning dew. Endless petals flung into depthless pools. The idea of Chaya Sar stands between John Sheppard and the gong of Morgan’s fairy call.

The world bleeds color and form. Rush and Morgan coalesce. There’s a hint of green wood in the swirl of the air, young and wet and strong.

“What does he take?” Athleisure Morgan asks, still on the undersea side of the split in the world.

“Stem.” Their Morgan grips Rush’s chin. Stares into his eyes. “As most humans take. It settles beautifully.” 

“Fuck right off.” Rush wrenches himself free, stumbling into Sheppard.

Sheppard hauls him in. “Keep your cool,” he says, his hand closed around Rush’s biceps, steadying him, holding him back, giving him a hug. “It’s okay.”

“Angry little thing, aren’t you?” Their Morgan arches a bitchy eyebrow. “Even without your memories. Most humans would say ‘thank you’.”

Sheppard wraps an energetic arm around Rush’s EM signature because, while autonomy violations do suck, getting blasting into nothingness by a transdimensional being on the sheared line of your own reality sucks more. “Walk it off,” he whispers, even though there’s nowhere to go.

Athleisure Morgan looks over her shoulder, fluid grace turning to brittle poise. “There’s no thread in the weave of existence more tenuous than yours, Nicholas Rush.”She walks back toward the night, toward her suspended crystal, shining with starlight.

“Wait,” their Morgan says.

Athleisure Morgan stops on the threshold. She doesn’t turn. Sheppard feels the world begin its reweaving. Far away, closer now, Atlantis keens for him.

“Something happened to Daniel Jackson,” their Morgan says.

Athleisure Morgan stands on the line of the morning/night tear in the world. “I know,” she replies, and steps into her own vanishing.

“Stars below,” their Morgan mutters under her breath, like a curse.

The three of them stand in the intact chair room, looking uneasily at one another.

“Can we get the, uh, slow motion replay of whatever that just was?” Sheppard asks.

“Once you’ve seated the control crystal, don’t speak of any of this aloud.” Their Morgan fades like windblown mist.

Great.

That’s the most predictable part of this whole thing, honestly.

Sheppard and Rush stand alone on the base of the chair platform, looking at one another, vibrating with complimentary energetic signatures.

“You had to go and bring up fairy tales,” Sheppard breathes, giving the other man a shaky smile.

“She’s still shielding us.” Rush’s eyes are on the periphery of the room, his head cocked, like he’s listening to something Sheppard can’t hear.

“Yeah,” Sheppard agrees. “I feel it. Kind of a mist and stone and lonely moors vibe. Geometry. Geometric vibe.”

“You understand,” Rush says carefully, “it’s not only our Special Guest who has a privileged quantum state?”

“I did recall that, yeah,” Sheppard replies. “And I’m guessing, from the way that Special Guest reacted, that you may also be in—” he lifts a hand to suggest the concept of superposition.

“It’s been implied,” Rush confirms.

“By our guy?” Sheppard asks.

“By the superpositioned version of Colonel Young. Yes.”

“By my count, that takes us to four superpositioned entities,” Sheppard says. “You, Young, Athleisure Morgan, and Non-Disgraced Chaya Sar. Weird group to be in play.”

Rush, still edged up from his fairy branding, gives him a sharp look. “How do you mean?”

“I would’ve expected Jackson. Carter. Orlin. Oma Dasala. Bigger names than you and Everett; Chaya and Morgan. No offense.” He looks at the ceiling, directing himself toward any versions of Morgan who might still be listening. “No offense,” he says again, a little louder.

“Chaya Sar is the one who ‘claimed’ you?”

“Yeah. Nice lady. It didn’t feel like ‘claiming.’ She called it ‘sharing’. Definitely asked my permission. Seemed like a mutual thing. Lots more manners than you got.”

Rush shoots the walls an annoyed look. 

“Happened a few years back.” Sheppard’s mind is full, again, of flower-draped trelliswork. “Hadn’t thought about it in a while.”

Rush paces the perimeter of the control chair, a little too graceful for Sheppard to comfortably watch. More graceful now than he’d been before Morgan’s claiming. “This is the border of her glamour.” He runs his fingers through something Sheppard can’t see, liberating the sound and smell of rain. Of misted hills and dark pines.

Sheppard pulls the knife of his intellect. There’s really only one question that gets them anywhere. “Tell me about that other version of Everett.”

“He wore black fatigues.” Rush still circling, trails his fingers through the idea of mist and rain.

“Lantean fatigues?”

“No. A different cut. A different insignia. Can’t recall what it was, but I’d know it if I saw it. The fatigues were old. Frayed cuffs. Faded by the sun. His hair was a little longer, a little wilder. He wasn’t injured. He moved like he’d never been injured. He appeared from nothing on a New York City rooftop. Said the city had rendered him ‘chance-blind’.”

“Chance blind,” Sheppard repeats. “Because of the superposition, you think?”

“Presumably. I asked him about his purpose. Why he was there. He was vague. Wouldn’t answer any question directly. Gave the impression that talking to me came at great risk. Alluded to a multiversal array of variants of me, all named after classical composers.”

“Uh, what?”

“I’m Beethoven,” Rush says, tart and charming.

“Congrats. That’s a good one. Who’s Superpositioned Rush?”

“Mozart.” Rush rolls his eyes.

Sheppard snorts. “Okay, so this is, uh, more structure than I thought we were dealing with. Were any other versions of you named?”

“Actually, yes,” Rush paused, frowning. “Berlioz. Schumann. Chopin. Schubert.”

“Okay. Beethoven is sounding like a bigger deal than any of those guys.”

“Y’think it works like that?”

“I have no idea how it works.” Sheppard gives him a weak grin. “And the worst part is, we have no idea if you knew more about this before your memory wipe.”

“Fuck,” Rush breathes.

“Let’s get back to, uh, super!Everett. What else did he say?”

“He talked up Mozart quite a bit,” Rush says sourly. “Implied there was something extremely special about him. Literally said that if I recall correctly.”

“So he confirmed the reality of the multiverse, explained he was superpositioned, gave us a multiversal structure based on dead composers, named at least six of them, and—” Sheppard makes a give-me-more hand motion.

“That was it, beyond some, ah, general encouragement?”

“Encouragement? Like buck up, little pianist?”

Rush gives him a rueful look and opens a hand. “He said he’d accomplished what he’d come there for.”

“Which, in the end, was what?” Sheppard asks.

“In retrospect,” Rush stops walking his circle and turns to face Sheppard. “I think it must have been to direct me toward the Air Force, rather than the Lucian Alliance. It was because I knew Everett’s face that I stopped in that alley. Took him to dinner.”

“There it is,” Sheppard says softly. “So now, maybe, you’re where you’re where super!Everett wants you to be?”

“Maybe,” Rush agrees.

Sheppard pauses, taking stock of the Quantum Weirdness facing them. “So we’re gonna assume Athleisure Morgan knows Mozart.”

“That seems likely. Her feelings seem—complex.”

Sheppard grimaces, staring up at the blue-green undulation of the waves above the ceiling windows. “I was getting that, yeah.” He sighs. “And, was it me, or did she allude to multiversal components to our ongoing transdimensional war?”

Rush gives him an uneasy look.

“Anything else you can think of before we call it?” Sheppard holds up the control crystal. It catches the maritime light.

Rush shakes his head. Again, he swipes his fingers through the edges of Morgan’s glamour.

Sheppard crouches before the chair, the control crystal in his hand. “Can’t wait to wake up and find out if I remember this,” he says dully.

“Wait,” Rush moves like mist to catch his wrist. “If we do remember, we need a shorthand to invoke quantum-level fuckery. Observation alters quantum dynamics.”

“Anything too complicated is going to be transparent,” Sheppard says, “especially from a privileged quantum position.”

“How about a single word,” Rush says, with a troublemaker expression that sings through Sheppard’s whole being.

“You look like you’ve got something in mind,” Sheppard doesn’t bother to fight his grin; it’s vibrating through his energy signature.

“Athleisure,” Rush says, slow and sly.

“You got it,” Sheppard pauses dramatically, “hotshot.”

“Oh don’t start.” Rush releases his wrist. “You’re far too much an actual ‘hotshot’ to pull it off.”

“How do you know?” Sheppard asks. “You haven’t even seen me fly a stolen ship into an exploding star yet.”

“Do such things often, do you?”

“It’s McKay’s favorite fictional example,” Sheppard admits.

He waits for the pang that accompanies thoughts of Rodney McKay, but it doesn’t hit so hard this time. Maybe part of that is due to where he is: crouched in the shrouded heart of a silver city, a crystal lined depression open between him and Nick Rush. Morgan’s glamour sings in the walls.

Their book-page world is probably coming to an end. But at least he got to coax a sleeping city awake. Fly Ancient ships and Wraith darts, walk silver bridges over living sea with the greatest mathematician his species has ever produced, drop crystal-frozen flame into the waiting heart of Atlantis.

Rush’s hair and eyes catch the undulating ocean hues coming through the sealights overhead. 

“See you on the other side.” Sheppard plunges the crystal home.