Mathématique: Chapter 86

“Is Colonel Sheppard wearing your sleepwear?” Rush asked Young.

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

Text iteration: Witchingest hour.

Additional notes: None.

Chapter 86

Rush paced the length of his luminous room. The paneling beneath his bare feet warmed along the line he walked. Starlight and moonlight turned the space into a silvery, prismatic grotto. He had only to wave a hand to open glass doors to the maritime air.

The city itself seemed to watch him, from the tiny green shoots that twined around the grating at the perimeter of the floor, to the walls that vibrated with melodies he couldn’t quite hear, to the crystal windows overhead that let in light like they were doing him a favor.

He’d spent hours trying to conjure the superpositioned version of Everett Young from the undercurrents of the world and met with no success.

Only Atlantis kept him company, a shimmering weight against his thoughts, like the sea itself.

Together, they’d turned to working his current problem.

“Right so,” he said, soliloquizing to the city, “there’s a distinction between ‘incomplete knowledge’ and ‘intrinsic quantum indeterminacy.’ Wave functions oscillate over space and time. Per Copenhagen, observation collapses the wave function, pinning down certain features of reality. Irreversibly.”

He paused, distracted, studying his right hand.

It felt empty.

Perhaps, when organizing his thoughts aloud, he was in the habit of holding something. (A pen? A cigarette? A dry erase marker? Chalk?)

“But,” he continued, “we’re likely not dealing with Copenhagen. We’re dealing with Many Worlds. We’re playing the Grand Monte Carlo.”

Atlantis thrust a spectacular image into his consciousness. His cortical suppressors warmed, and he lost the room to current running in crystal, to an explosion of particle trajectories. The image repeated itself. Repeated itself. Repeated itself. Subtly different every time.

“Yes,” he murmured. “Well done. That’s the idea. Only—on cosmic scales. Whole realities iterating through endless fates.”

Excited, the city showed him particle trajectories in crystal. This time, it compressed each particle tree into a two-dimensional image, layering them in a stack. Like book pages.

“Yes,” he agreed, blind to the room. “Superposition.”

And the city fanned the pages of the book as though it were thumbing through them. Jewel colored, crystal-embedded particle paths blurred into one another.

“Yes,” he said again. Possessed of sudden inspiration, he asked, “Can you detect the touch of quantum privilege?”

Again, the book of crystal fanned itself, but it was restive. Confused.

He projected the image of Morgan Le Fay, her hair swept up, her track jacket of white glow, the gray of her eyes, the silver of her shoelaces. //Could you sense her presence?//

The city cut into his mind with knife-sharp longing, and it was impossible to tell if it was reacting to the image of Morgan or to his question. The book pages turned to images of her: grey eyes full of fire; her silhouette on a windswept pier, her white dress blown back, its crystal dragging over a silver quay; surrounded by light, by transparent represenations of aperiodic crystal—

A quiet knock sounded on the door that led to the colonel’s room, and the city gently slid him back into the gates of his perception.

He staggered on the flat, warm floor.

Rush raised a hand to his temple and looked at the walls, as though they might explain themselves.

Nothing was forthcoming except the knock, which sounded again, louder this time.

He strode to the door, leaving the line of warmed paneling he’d been pacing. The floor turned cool under his feet. He waved a hand and misted glass slid open to reveal Young and Sheppard.

“Hi,” Young offered.

Rush, still disoriented from navigating semi-verbal conversation with a semi-sentient machine intelligence, said, “What?”

“We woke you,” Sheppard said, trying to retreat.

Young clamped a hand around Sheppard’s elbow and hauled him back into formation. It was an odd visual, as they were both in a notable state of undress. 

“What?” Rush said again.

“I dunno.” Young eyed Rush skeptically. “Maybe he sleeps first.”

“What?” Rush brought a little more verve to bear and went on the offensive. “Make fuckin’ sense. Immediately.”

Sheppard snorted.

Young shut his eyes, scraping patience like paint. “Can we come in?”

Rush studied them. This late-night, half-dressed interruption at precisely the moment he’d been querying the city itself about superposition…was a little hard to interpret. His cortical suppressors were warm against his skin.

//!!!// Atlantis purred, clarifying nothing.

“He’s just—” Young gestured at Rush, addressing Sheppard, “—alarming sometimes.”

“I’m getting that,” Sheppard agreed.

Rush studied the pair of them, all masculine angles and dark hair in a room full of starlight. Sheppard looked self-conscious and bruised. Young looked torn between worry and amusement. He was favoring his left leg. 

Rush decided the pair of them were corporeal (and not a hallucinated answer to a question he’d posed to Atlantis). He sharpened up accordingly.

“Fuck off,” he suggested politely. Turning in the direction of his en suite kitchenette, he added, “Can I offer you some tea?”

“Hotshot, what we really need is your bed.”

“Forward of you.” Rush pointed at a pair of wrought metal stools tucked beneath a counter of pale stone. “Sit, and we’ll negotiate.”

Young snorted.

“What’s happening?” Sheppard rasped.

“Your guess is as good as mine.” Rush opened and shut mostly empty cupboards. “This en suite kitchenette isn’t remotely equipped.”

“Hotshot,” Young began, leaning into the counter and ignoring the stool, likely because it’d be hard on his hip, “we don’t need an 0200 culinary masterwork.”

“And it’s a good thing too,” Rush said, lining up three tins of Athosian tea on the counter in front of Sheppard, “because it’s a categorical impossibility.”

“You’re a categorical impossibility,” Young muttered.

“What are these?” Rush asked Sheppard, indicating the three tins.

“Uh.” The light in the room had a frosted quality, and Sheppard’s bruising stood out against the pale skin of his throat. “Tea?”

“I gathered as much,” Rush said patiently. “What kind of tea?”

“Uh, Athosian tea?” Sheppard hazarded.

“Helpful. Thanks.” Rush glanced at Young, his eyebrow faintly quirked.

Young, amused, gave him a one-shouldered shrug and a subtle shake of the head. He leaned into the counter. “You gonna construct a 0200 experiment that blows away our preconceptions about the limits of tea?”

“That’s quite—” he began, then stopped himself. He shot Young a sharp look. “Flattery doesn’t count if it was lifted from things I’ve said and can’t recall.”

Young fought down a smile. “You sure?”

(Right, so he quite liked Young.)

He turned away from the pair of them, stared at stone trimmed counters with inlaid crystal and tentatively said to Atlantis, //Mind showing me how to boil water for tea without co-opting my entire consciousness?//

//!// Atlantis replied, and into his mind the city projected the image of a sunstone panel, small and rectangular, set into the wall in the place Earth-based cabinetry would be.

He looked above the crystal-inlaid counter, located the expanse of stone, and lifted his hand. He hadn’t touched it, wasn’t even close, when it slid open, revealing a shallowly built set of shelves. Glassware glinted in the moonlight.

There were delicate cylinders of cut crystal arrayed on the lowest shelf. The middle shelf held small bowl-shaped vessels, reminiscent of Japanese teacups with inlaid strainers with irregular, biologic imperfections, as though cut from coral. The top shelf held complex, coiled glassware, vaguely reminiscent of Klein Bottles.

He pulled out three alien teacups and waved the panel shut.

//Am I meant t’prepare these individually?// He asked. //I was envisioning—// he sent the city an image of a tea kettle, heating on a stove.

In return, he received the image of another stone panel, near the floor this time, and a wide, two handled glass vessel with a lip meant for pouring.

Rush knelt, waved a hand, and pulled out his alien tea kettle. He sent a wave of wordless gratitude aimed at the city.

He stood to find his guests staring at him with very different expressions. Young: eyebrows up, mouth quirked, telegraphing so-this-is-how-it’s-gonna-be USAF patience. Sheppard: brow knitted, eyes watchful, telegraphing braced-for-bad-news USAF anxiety.

The alien tap was clear enough, and Rush filled the kettle with water. He tried to ignore the rising conversational pressure in the room.

Atlantis, too, seemed to pick up on the rising undercurrent of tension. The image it sent of resonance induction via crystal lattice flowed into this mind smoothly and subtly, like the water running in the grooves of the walls. He positioned the kettle on a naquadah counter panel and swept a finger over a faintly glowing touchpad labeled augere calorum.

Young, hands braced against the counter, his gaze direct and confrontational, said, “You’ve got a direct line with Atlantis. And it goes both ways.”

It wasn’t a question.

Rush glanced at Sheppard.

“Don’t look at him,” Young growled.

“Fuck right off,” Rush fired back, all cool-burning fire.

Sheppard stared at his hands, as emotive as a brick under moonlight.

Young took a breath, reined himself in, and said, “The pair of you, somehow, already have more bullshit in the mix than I’d have believed possible. Some of it, I’ll allow. But not this.” He fixed Rush with a direct, demanding gaze. “Do you, or do you not, have a direct line to Atlantis?”

Not in the mood to fuckin’ fall in line, Rush gestured wordlessly at the heating kettle. “Doesn’t take a genius IQ to boil water, does it?”

Young tightened his grip on unyielding stone. “Rush,” he growled.

But it was Sheppard who answered. “Yeah. He does. I do.”

Rush quirked an eyebrow at Sheppard, then opened a tin of tea. It smelled of lavender and vervain, crushed violet and spearmint. Of afternoon clarity and clear air.

“I told you,” Young growled, looking at Rush, “don’t cover for him.”

“I’ll do what I like,” Rush replied, and moved to the second tin of tea. It smelled of rich and dark, with notes of malt and citrus. A morning tea, certainly, with maritime notes of brine and wet flint.

Sheppard ran a thumb along the bruise at his neck.

Young sighed. “I get that. But you’re already on the home team, hotshot. It’d be nice if you’d consistently bat for us.”

“The ‘home team’?” Rush lifted the lid, smelling rose and toasted barley, moss and mist and cocoa. An evening tea. Or maybe a tea for clouded days, pre-dawn mornings, times without sun. “Can’t be sure, but I doubt I tow an institutional line all that gracefully.”

“The home team,” Young said, like slipping an ace out of his sleeve, “isn’t the Air Force. This is the home team.” He spiraled a finger to include the three of them. “SG-68. SG-1. Shep and his flagship unit.” He glanced at Sheppard. “You guys need a designation.”

Sheppard shrugged. “Usually people just call us McShep and Teynon.”

“Sounds like a budget legal firm,” Young said.

Rush considered this while he turned off the induction plate and shook a generous amount of Athosian evening tea into the water to steep. As affiliations went, Young’s proposal one seemed as unobjectionable as they came. But—

The dynamic between the two colonels had shifted. Even within the few hours since he’d last seen them. Sheppard looked like he’d been cracked open and was astonished to’ve been glued back together. Young had a bit more confident dynamism in his bearing, seemed a bit more sure of himself, a bit more—

Hang on.

Rush turned and scanned Sheppard, who was dressed in a T-shirt and USAF sweatpants that didn’t quite fit. They were also identical to the ones Young was wearing.

“Is Colonel Sheppard wearing your sleepwear?” Rush asked Young.

“Maybe,” Young said, equal parts amused and forbidding.

Sheppard, eyes shut, didn’t reply. He looked like he was praying for his own death.

“Are ya all right?” Rush asked him.

Given Sheppard’s eyes were closed, he didn’t notice Rush was directly addressing him, and so didn’t answer.

“Is he all right?” Rush asked Young.

“I think so?” Young side-eyed Sheppard with a mix of amusement and concern. “Take it easy on ‘im, though, just in case.”

Rush removed the tea tins from the counter and set three glasses along the sunstone surface, one in front of Sheppard, one in front of Young, one in front of himself. “So,” he began delicately, “I’m torn on whether the ‘home team’ refers to a secretive, informal operation within the SGC dedicated to high-risk innovative approaches to transgalactic threats, or—” he paused dramatically, skewering Young with directed poise, “—a threesome.”

Young, delighted, took some pains to school his expression into authoritative neutrality. “I don’t know that the two are mutually exclusive,” he said, with the understated satisfaction of an early-game checkmate.

And rightly so.

“Well reasoned,” Rush said, dry and mild.

Sheppard cracked an eyelid.

Rush poured fragrant tea through skeletonized chunks of coral.

Young leaned into the counter.

“It’s an interesting proposal either way,” Rush said. “The former incarnation being vaguely mutinous, the latter being highly incongruous with the reputation of the American military establishment.”

“Hotshot, until you get your memories back this is only gonna go so far,” Young replied.

“Agreed,” Sheppard rasped.

Young clapped the man bracingly on the shoulder.

Rush lifted the coral strainers out of each cup, trying to decide whether he felt disappointed or relieved. Bit of both, certainly. Young’s wall-of-stone reliability layered over mostly concealed passion and Sheppard’s blend of ease and intensity were attractive in isolation. Together, they made an intriguing blend.

And—he was lonely.

But, while he was certain he was attracted to men (and women), he had absolutely no idea, none, about what instincts and proclivities might emerge during a sexual encounter.

Had he been with anyone other than (presumably) his late wife?

It was possible he’d never find out. It was possible he’d have only best guesses from urges, from habits, from inferences into half-conscious motor patterns.

Like he could see into the conflict in Rush’s head, Young, mercifully businesslike, said, “First thing we need to negotiate is a system where the pair of you can sleep without getting pulled into a mutual  nightmare. At least until Keller can make some real headway with your cortical suppressors. Or whatever the hell is going on.”

Steam wafted from the teacups, floral and earthy, and coating the inside of each glass with attractive condensation. “Why is everyone so certain it’d be a nightmare?”

“Experience,” Sheppard said dully.

Rush nudged the man’s tea a little closer. “You’ve a proposal, I assume?” He directed the question at Young.

“Yeah,” Young replied. “You guys use one bed. Sequentially. If you sleep nowhere but the bed, you’ll know if the other person’s in it.”

“A mutex,” Rush said, considering.

“Knew he’d have a name for it,” Young muttered to Sheppard. “‘Mutex?’ Seriously? That’s a real thing?”

“Comes from ‘mutual exclusion.’ It’s a computer science term that ensures only one process can access a shared resource at a time.” Experimentally, he picked up the glass cup of tea. To his surprise, it was cooler than expected. The pleasant warmth beneath his fingertips suggested a heat dispersal mechanism that went beyond the qualities of simple glass.

“Cryptography.” Sheppard looked at Young like he thought the word was a complete explanation.

“Sure,” Young replied. “All I care is that it reliably works.”

“It should,” Sheppard replied, “as long as I don’t sleep offworld.”

Rush sighed, glancing at the palatial bed just visible through the open door to the bedroom. “Am I really meant to sleep in that thing?”

“Shep can go first,” Young said. “Show you how its done.”

Rush nodded. He sipped his tea, studying Colonel Sheppard’s hunted demeanor. As Rush iterated on possible explanations, accounting for the high probability that the pair on the other side of the stone counter had very recently slept together—it occurred to him that perhaps Sheppard’s altered body language was less indicative of something wrong than it was an unusually accurate representation of the man’s true feelings. No artfully casual front. Less effort expended on blocking external manifestations of emotions.

Sheppard, maybe, was feeling vulnerable and hating the experience.

Rush could relate.

Almost certainly, though, he could’ve related better at some point in the past.

Sheppard likely knew as much, might miss the person Rush had been, the person better equipped to understand the depth of his connection with alien tech, the person better equipped to understand the interplay between such secrets and how the United States Air Force might respond to them.

Or maybe it was something else. Those bruises had come from somewhere.

“I’m fine until tomorrow night,” Sheppard rasped.

“Yeah,” Young said bracingly. “We know.” Over Sheppard’s shoulder, he shot Rush a get-a-load-of-this-guy look.

“The bed would be wasted on me,” Rush said, brusque and final. “I’m still on Earth time. Per our initial agreement.”

Young rolled his eyes. “Don’t plot without me.”

Rush made an insultingly sympathetic sound. “D’you feel left out?”

Sheppard smiled faintly and sipped his tea.

“You’re damn right I feel left out. Knock it off.”

“I made one schedule with you,” Rush fired back. “It doesn’t entitle you t’conspiracy rights in perpetuity.”

“It was in the fine print,” Young said.

The bickering went on, full of ease, as they drank their Athosian tea. The moon disappeared, moving beyond the highest skylight, leaving only stars and bright water to illuminate the room. When Sheppard slid between the shell-colored sheets of Rush’s bed, he left the bedroom door open; whether in invitation or to stave off solitude it was impossible to say.

Rush and Young, another round of tea in hand, retired to the sea glass and silver table in front of the balcony doors.

“Is he all right?” Rush asked quietly, indicating the open bedroom doorframe with his eyes alone.

Young followed his gaze, turning as much as his injured back would allow. “I doubt it.”

“What happened?” Rush asked.

Young hesitated.

“You want t’be cut in on the ‘Lantean Dream Team?’ You’ll need to offer something in return,” Rush said.

Young snorted. “I’m not ‘Dream Team’ material.”

Rush tutted disapprovingly.

“Best as I can tell,” Young began, “he spent the day securing an abandoned Wraith genetics lab, full of—” the colonel trailed off.

“Wraith?” Rush prompted.

“Mutated Wraith experiments?” Young winced. Likely at the ridiculous way the words landed when spoken aloud.

“Lovely.” He grounded himself in the floral notes of his tea. The wholesome curl of the pale green shoots at the base of the walls. “And the Wraith are what, exactly? No one’s laid it out.”

Young traced the rim of his teacup. “A predatory species,” he admitted reluctantly. “One I’m planning to keep you well clear of.”

“Surely a few details wouldn’t go amiss,” Rush said, “if your goal is really to build a team versatile enough to handle civilization-ending threats.”

Shadow tangled itself in Young’s curls. His expression was difficult to read.

“The Wraith are a predatory species. Evolved, we think, from an insect. They operate in hives, under the direction of a queen. They feed on the life energy of other organisms. Drawing it directly, biochemically, through slits in their palms.” He traced a line on his own hand. “Here.”

“What do they look like?” Rush asked.

Young smiled faintly. “They look a lot like the Ghouls in Astria Porta. Teyla’s character. Long white hair worn in decorative braids. Yellow eyes.”

Rush frowned. “So—humanoid in appearance then?”

Young nodded.

“Odd.”

“Why odd?”

“Well,” he traced the rim of his teacup, “it’s not obvious t’me why a species evolved from an insect would look so—human.”

Young eyed him uneasily. “Might be worth looking into,” he said softly.

“No connection t’the Ancients?” Rush directed the question at Young and Atlantis simultaneously.

“Not to my knowledge,” Young said, but—

Atlantis blew through his mind like the icy tail of a dark comet. 

Rush shivered. His cortical suppressors flared visibly in the dim light. Pulsed warm against his skin.

“Don’t worry, hotshot,” Young said, “we’re gonna keep lightyears between you and the nearest Wraith colony. Everyone’s clear on that. Woolsey, Shep, Jackson, McKay…everyone.”

Rush nodded.

Shards of blocked thought, like splintered ice, impacted the barrier at his temples and showered through the narrow gate the tech at his temple allowed. Broken images buried themselves in his mind: sunlight lancing through ocean water like a spear beyond a glass wall; a pale blue flower in the hand of the child; the face of Morgan Le Fay, contorted with grief, wailing without sound, like something out of legend.

“You don’t look reassured,” Young said.

“Don’t I?” Rush smiled weakly.