Those Who Belong
Sep. 7th, 2011 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stringertheoryTitle: Those Who Belong
Rating: PG
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Carson Beckett, Rodney McKay, Elizabeth Weir, John Sheppard
Word Count: 2403
Categories: drama, angst
Spoilers/Warnings: None. Set during "The Return" (3.10-3.11) while the Atlantis crew is (temporarily) back on Earth.
Summary: "For those who belong nowhere, and for those who belong to one place too much to belong anywhere else." - Alden Nowlan
Carson has never been a fan of change.
Change can be messy, confusing, and chaotic. And while he enjoys variety and even a little bit of challenge, he tends to prefer when things stay the same. It isn’t the act of a routine he likes so much as the sense of familiarity—he likes to know what’s going on, where he is, what’s expected of him, who the people are around him.
Settling in at the SGC is a work in progress, but he’s beginning to feel more comfortable wandering windowless corridors and going home to a newly rented apartment every night. The routine of his job has helped with that, procedure and protocol still a comfortable fit even in the unfamiliar surroundings. They help take his mind off the missing sound of the ocean, the coldness of the concrete walls, the fact that his medical team’s names are rarely the first ones that fall into his mouth when he’s barking out instructions. Every time he hesitates a little less, finds the right name more quickly, but it still feels wrong.
It’s odd to treat people with the faces of strangers.
Carson used to know the name and face and history of every person that walked through his infirmary door. Half the time he knew what was wrong before they even opened their mouths to tell him. Now he doesn’t know what kind of trouble the next person might be bringing. He has to look for the name on their chest or wait for them to identify themselves before he can pull their file, and every day someone new comes in that he hasn’t met before. The not knowing, the unfamiliarity is the hardest part of his day. Ridiculously, it makes him feel like an ignorant medical student again, standing in a wind tunnel of information and desperately trying to absorb as much as possible as fast as possible. He knows that eventually these people will become like the family he had on Atlantis, but at the moment that future feels very distant.
He calls his mother every day, now that he can. There’s no reason for it, trying to make up for lost time, but he likes to hear her voice.
He tries to have lunch or dinner with John once a week, just to keep in touch, to see a familiar face. And he calls Rodney once a week or so and puts him on speakerphone, letting him rant about the latest failures of his “incompetent, moronic, backwards” research team while Carson completes paperwork. Carson figures it does them both good. Rodney gets to blow off some steam—which no doubt is good for his team, as well—and Carson gets some familiar sounds to drown out the silence of his office.
He goes home alone to his apartment every night, running through the names and faces of the people he met that day. He eats dinner and reads until it’s too late to avoid sleep anymore. Then he lies in bed and stares up at the shadows on his ceiling and thinks about Pegasus.
He thinks of all the people still there, facing the trouble the Atlantis expedition awakened. They left too many behind who will get help from no one else. He thinks of Teyla and Ronon, of where they might be and what they might be doing. He thinks of the work left unfinished and the work that will never be done. He thinks of stained glass and towers and an endless ocean.
Carson falls asleep thinking of home.
-00000-
Rodney misses crisis.
He thrived in crisis, he was forged in it. All his best thinking came about under pressure, when the end of the universe was looming and he was the only one who could save the day. The insane and brilliant solutions he’d come up with in the face of impossible situations—while always founded on theories that he’d had in progress for some time—were nevertheless products of the crises that had called for them. His work had taken a gigantic step forward every time he managed a last-minute save, and Atlantis had been a hotbed for such close calls.
Earth... not so much.
Sometimes he half wishes the planet would suddenly be in peril (and one Samantha Carter off in space somewhere) so that he would have the opportunity for some inspiration. He isn’t in a dry spell, no matter what anyone might say, but his research could use a bit of liveliness and nothing gets his brain cells jumping like a doomsday deadline.
The powers that be at Area 51 have certainly tried to appease him. He has his own lab, his own research team, and his choice of projects. Everyone practically fell over themselves to accommodate him, but he can’t help feeling dissatisfied. The available projects are focused on mundane subjects that he had researched dozens of times before in just as many permutations and he can’t bring himself to get excited about research on topics that are being studied the world over. He wants something new, something fresh, something... alien, and Milky Way alien isn’t cutting it. He’s craving double fudge chocolate cake and being served vanilla ice cream instead. What he wants is something Lantean, and nothing else quite matches up.
Except for when things match up too closely.
Originally, there was a Czech physicist by the name of Matějček on his research team. After two weeks, Rodney had him transferred. When asked, Rodney swore that it was because he couldn’t understand a thing Matějček said. Truth was, he sounded too much like home.
Rodney’s hands itch for the projects he left behind in Atlantis. However many pieces he was able to bring back, he can’t complete the research he started in Pegasus now that he’s back on Earth and the wasted potential haunts him. The unfinished research, the dangling theories that might never come to fruition are like tiny deaths, the snuffing out of little flames. Sometimes he wonders if this is what losing a child would feel like, what it would be like to lose part of yourself. There’s a hollow place inside him that no amount of elementary lab work at Area 51 will ever be able to fill. He misses traveling through the Stargate, he misses puddle jumpers and missions and peril.
The offer he had to join Stargate Command had been tempting. They had even promised an attachment to an SG team, giving him the chance to explore his own galaxy for the first time. But there had been hints that he wouldn’t be allowed out on every mission, and since Sheppard was heading a reconnaissance team—a strictly covert affair—they couldn’t join up. Taking those factors into consideration had severely weakened the appeal of working at the SGC and he had opted for the Area 51 position instead. He doesn’t regret the decision, but only because it was the best choice at the time. He’s still holding out for getting back to Atlantis. The chances of a return might be slim to none, but he isn’t discouraged. He’s beaten worse odds.
He’s stubborn enough to overcome statistics.
-00000-
Elizabeth takes the SGC job by default.
Choosing a position somewhere else—any one of the several she was offered just days after her return to Earth—would require far more thought and objectivity than she believes herself capable of at the moment. Options would need to be weighed, pros and cons debated, arrangements made for a relocation, and she simply isn’t up to it yet. Her mind is still too flooded with Atlantis for there to be room for anything else.
She tells herself that she just needs time to get it all straight in her head. Their exit was so sudden, so quick that she didn’t have time to truly absorb the experience, like a film that ends so abruptly it jolts you out of the story. She needs time to reflect on everything that happened, on what was gained and lost and what it all meant. Then she’ll be able to tuck Atlantis away and move on to something else. And if she’s acting more like a mourner than anything, she has the right. She did lose something. No, she thinks, she had something taken from her. It’s going to take some time to heal from that.
She doesn’t leave her apartment for days at a time. She works from home and orders take-out and has no real desire to be social, so she isn’t. She lets the answering machine take all her calls and ventures out only when necessary.
Every few days she goes to the corner market and purchases a few essentials. She tries not to make eye contact with the people she passes. They all seem to watch her with deep sympathy, as if they somehow know the weight she is carrying.
Instead, she pretends to be fascinated by the items on display, feigning deep concentration in her study of the labels of products she has no intention of buying. She drifts through the store on autopilot and turns up at the counter with nothing more than milk, bread, cheese, and a bottle of wine in her basket. There is also a random lemon in the bunch. She has no idea how it got there, but it brings back memories that make her smile, so she decides to buy it. While she waits in line, she watches the television behind the counter. She doesn’t have one in her apartment, and her trips to the store are the only times she’s aware of what’s going on in the world. Two or three times a week she gets updates on the current wars, the state of the economy, or the latest entertainment headlines. It bothers her slightly that she doesn’t really care about any of them.
There’s a growing pile of mail on her kitchen counter, most of it unopened. Some are bills, which she’ll weed out and pay just before they’re due. Others are junk mail or notes from the few friends and colleagues who were given her new address by mutual acquaintances. The majority seem to be from prospective employers. After a week, she stopped bothering to read the job offers. They were all variants of the same thing, just with different return addresses. None of the ones she read seemed promising. None of them were what she wanted.
She thinks of an office in D.C., with a view of the Mall. She thinks of an office in London, overlooking the Thames. She thinks of an office in Brussels near Cinquantenaire, in Mumbai at the top of a skyscraper, in Tel Aviv beside the sea. She thinks of anywhere she could go and everything she could do and sighs.
Earth isn’t enough.
-00000-
John isn’t used to having an office.
Before command (before Atlantis), he hadn’t merited any sort of permanent workspace, and he didn’t have—hadn’t had an office in Atlantis. Elizabeth had offered him one, even going so far as to have a suitable room found and cleaned, but he had turned her down. He had doubted he would ever use the space and figured it would be better utilized in the hands of another tenant. The entire city—from jumper bay to jumper bay—had been his office.
He’s still getting used to the windowless room they led him to his first day at Stargate Command.
Apparently all SG team leaders get their own office. What he’s supposed to do with it is beyond him. There’s paperwork, of course, but that takes hardly any time at all. Given what he went through in Pegasus—and the kinds of reports some of those events warranted—banging out a few pages on reconnaissance missions barely fills a morning. He waits for the phone to ring, sure that that would be the only reason for him having one, but it remains silent. Staring at the walls doesn’t help anything, either. There’s nothing to look at but bare concrete, and long periods of time spent admiring the emptiness gives him the strange urge to decorate. Instead, he spends as much time as possible elsewhere, working out in the gym, making himself a nuisance in one of the labs, or sulking in the mess hall and eating too much Jell-o.
He can’t find it in himself to worry about the Ori.
It’s hard to focus on a new threat when the old one is still out there. The fact that the old threat is in another galaxy doesn’t mean a thing. Distance is relative; the Stargate taught him that. He feels like he left an intruder in his house, like he opened the front door to a stranger and then walked out the back way. He feels like he’s left a man behind.
The mantra has never meant just military to him. Every expedition member they lost was left behind when they abandoned Atlantis before the mission was completed. Teyla and Ronon were left behind, the people of Pegasus were left behind, he was left behind.
Nothing seems right about his life now. It’s wrong that he has an office. It’s wrong that he works underground hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean. The Stargate here is all wrong—the wrong color, the wrong sounds, a wormhole leading to all the wrong places. It’s wrong not reporting to Elizabeth, it’s wrong seeing Carson in the SGC infirmary, it’s wrong not hearing Rodney’s constant complaining. Everything is wrong and normally that would mean he would find something else to do, something that felt right, but there’s no going back to that. The only thing right is Atlantis. He could quit the Stargate program, but after everything he’s seen, everything he’s done, where would he go? A poor substitute is better than nothing at all.
So he keeps at it, doing what he can to stay positive and perform his new job to the best of his ability. He keeps his head down and his eyes and ears open, just in case.
He can’t shake the feeling that never doesn’t always mean never.
Rating: PG
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters: Carson Beckett, Rodney McKay, Elizabeth Weir, John Sheppard
Word Count: 2403
Categories: drama, angst
Spoilers/Warnings: None. Set during "The Return" (3.10-3.11) while the Atlantis crew is (temporarily) back on Earth.
Summary: "For those who belong nowhere, and for those who belong to one place too much to belong anywhere else." - Alden Nowlan
Carson has never been a fan of change.
Change can be messy, confusing, and chaotic. And while he enjoys variety and even a little bit of challenge, he tends to prefer when things stay the same. It isn’t the act of a routine he likes so much as the sense of familiarity—he likes to know what’s going on, where he is, what’s expected of him, who the people are around him.
Settling in at the SGC is a work in progress, but he’s beginning to feel more comfortable wandering windowless corridors and going home to a newly rented apartment every night. The routine of his job has helped with that, procedure and protocol still a comfortable fit even in the unfamiliar surroundings. They help take his mind off the missing sound of the ocean, the coldness of the concrete walls, the fact that his medical team’s names are rarely the first ones that fall into his mouth when he’s barking out instructions. Every time he hesitates a little less, finds the right name more quickly, but it still feels wrong.
It’s odd to treat people with the faces of strangers.
Carson used to know the name and face and history of every person that walked through his infirmary door. Half the time he knew what was wrong before they even opened their mouths to tell him. Now he doesn’t know what kind of trouble the next person might be bringing. He has to look for the name on their chest or wait for them to identify themselves before he can pull their file, and every day someone new comes in that he hasn’t met before. The not knowing, the unfamiliarity is the hardest part of his day. Ridiculously, it makes him feel like an ignorant medical student again, standing in a wind tunnel of information and desperately trying to absorb as much as possible as fast as possible. He knows that eventually these people will become like the family he had on Atlantis, but at the moment that future feels very distant.
He calls his mother every day, now that he can. There’s no reason for it, trying to make up for lost time, but he likes to hear her voice.
He tries to have lunch or dinner with John once a week, just to keep in touch, to see a familiar face. And he calls Rodney once a week or so and puts him on speakerphone, letting him rant about the latest failures of his “incompetent, moronic, backwards” research team while Carson completes paperwork. Carson figures it does them both good. Rodney gets to blow off some steam—which no doubt is good for his team, as well—and Carson gets some familiar sounds to drown out the silence of his office.
He goes home alone to his apartment every night, running through the names and faces of the people he met that day. He eats dinner and reads until it’s too late to avoid sleep anymore. Then he lies in bed and stares up at the shadows on his ceiling and thinks about Pegasus.
He thinks of all the people still there, facing the trouble the Atlantis expedition awakened. They left too many behind who will get help from no one else. He thinks of Teyla and Ronon, of where they might be and what they might be doing. He thinks of the work left unfinished and the work that will never be done. He thinks of stained glass and towers and an endless ocean.
Carson falls asleep thinking of home.
-00000-
Rodney misses crisis.
He thrived in crisis, he was forged in it. All his best thinking came about under pressure, when the end of the universe was looming and he was the only one who could save the day. The insane and brilliant solutions he’d come up with in the face of impossible situations—while always founded on theories that he’d had in progress for some time—were nevertheless products of the crises that had called for them. His work had taken a gigantic step forward every time he managed a last-minute save, and Atlantis had been a hotbed for such close calls.
Earth... not so much.
Sometimes he half wishes the planet would suddenly be in peril (and one Samantha Carter off in space somewhere) so that he would have the opportunity for some inspiration. He isn’t in a dry spell, no matter what anyone might say, but his research could use a bit of liveliness and nothing gets his brain cells jumping like a doomsday deadline.
The powers that be at Area 51 have certainly tried to appease him. He has his own lab, his own research team, and his choice of projects. Everyone practically fell over themselves to accommodate him, but he can’t help feeling dissatisfied. The available projects are focused on mundane subjects that he had researched dozens of times before in just as many permutations and he can’t bring himself to get excited about research on topics that are being studied the world over. He wants something new, something fresh, something... alien, and Milky Way alien isn’t cutting it. He’s craving double fudge chocolate cake and being served vanilla ice cream instead. What he wants is something Lantean, and nothing else quite matches up.
Except for when things match up too closely.
Originally, there was a Czech physicist by the name of Matějček on his research team. After two weeks, Rodney had him transferred. When asked, Rodney swore that it was because he couldn’t understand a thing Matějček said. Truth was, he sounded too much like home.
Rodney’s hands itch for the projects he left behind in Atlantis. However many pieces he was able to bring back, he can’t complete the research he started in Pegasus now that he’s back on Earth and the wasted potential haunts him. The unfinished research, the dangling theories that might never come to fruition are like tiny deaths, the snuffing out of little flames. Sometimes he wonders if this is what losing a child would feel like, what it would be like to lose part of yourself. There’s a hollow place inside him that no amount of elementary lab work at Area 51 will ever be able to fill. He misses traveling through the Stargate, he misses puddle jumpers and missions and peril.
The offer he had to join Stargate Command had been tempting. They had even promised an attachment to an SG team, giving him the chance to explore his own galaxy for the first time. But there had been hints that he wouldn’t be allowed out on every mission, and since Sheppard was heading a reconnaissance team—a strictly covert affair—they couldn’t join up. Taking those factors into consideration had severely weakened the appeal of working at the SGC and he had opted for the Area 51 position instead. He doesn’t regret the decision, but only because it was the best choice at the time. He’s still holding out for getting back to Atlantis. The chances of a return might be slim to none, but he isn’t discouraged. He’s beaten worse odds.
He’s stubborn enough to overcome statistics.
-00000-
Elizabeth takes the SGC job by default.
Choosing a position somewhere else—any one of the several she was offered just days after her return to Earth—would require far more thought and objectivity than she believes herself capable of at the moment. Options would need to be weighed, pros and cons debated, arrangements made for a relocation, and she simply isn’t up to it yet. Her mind is still too flooded with Atlantis for there to be room for anything else.
She tells herself that she just needs time to get it all straight in her head. Their exit was so sudden, so quick that she didn’t have time to truly absorb the experience, like a film that ends so abruptly it jolts you out of the story. She needs time to reflect on everything that happened, on what was gained and lost and what it all meant. Then she’ll be able to tuck Atlantis away and move on to something else. And if she’s acting more like a mourner than anything, she has the right. She did lose something. No, she thinks, she had something taken from her. It’s going to take some time to heal from that.
She doesn’t leave her apartment for days at a time. She works from home and orders take-out and has no real desire to be social, so she isn’t. She lets the answering machine take all her calls and ventures out only when necessary.
Every few days she goes to the corner market and purchases a few essentials. She tries not to make eye contact with the people she passes. They all seem to watch her with deep sympathy, as if they somehow know the weight she is carrying.
Instead, she pretends to be fascinated by the items on display, feigning deep concentration in her study of the labels of products she has no intention of buying. She drifts through the store on autopilot and turns up at the counter with nothing more than milk, bread, cheese, and a bottle of wine in her basket. There is also a random lemon in the bunch. She has no idea how it got there, but it brings back memories that make her smile, so she decides to buy it. While she waits in line, she watches the television behind the counter. She doesn’t have one in her apartment, and her trips to the store are the only times she’s aware of what’s going on in the world. Two or three times a week she gets updates on the current wars, the state of the economy, or the latest entertainment headlines. It bothers her slightly that she doesn’t really care about any of them.
There’s a growing pile of mail on her kitchen counter, most of it unopened. Some are bills, which she’ll weed out and pay just before they’re due. Others are junk mail or notes from the few friends and colleagues who were given her new address by mutual acquaintances. The majority seem to be from prospective employers. After a week, she stopped bothering to read the job offers. They were all variants of the same thing, just with different return addresses. None of the ones she read seemed promising. None of them were what she wanted.
She thinks of an office in D.C., with a view of the Mall. She thinks of an office in London, overlooking the Thames. She thinks of an office in Brussels near Cinquantenaire, in Mumbai at the top of a skyscraper, in Tel Aviv beside the sea. She thinks of anywhere she could go and everything she could do and sighs.
Earth isn’t enough.
-00000-
John isn’t used to having an office.
Before command (before Atlantis), he hadn’t merited any sort of permanent workspace, and he didn’t have—hadn’t had an office in Atlantis. Elizabeth had offered him one, even going so far as to have a suitable room found and cleaned, but he had turned her down. He had doubted he would ever use the space and figured it would be better utilized in the hands of another tenant. The entire city—from jumper bay to jumper bay—had been his office.
He’s still getting used to the windowless room they led him to his first day at Stargate Command.
Apparently all SG team leaders get their own office. What he’s supposed to do with it is beyond him. There’s paperwork, of course, but that takes hardly any time at all. Given what he went through in Pegasus—and the kinds of reports some of those events warranted—banging out a few pages on reconnaissance missions barely fills a morning. He waits for the phone to ring, sure that that would be the only reason for him having one, but it remains silent. Staring at the walls doesn’t help anything, either. There’s nothing to look at but bare concrete, and long periods of time spent admiring the emptiness gives him the strange urge to decorate. Instead, he spends as much time as possible elsewhere, working out in the gym, making himself a nuisance in one of the labs, or sulking in the mess hall and eating too much Jell-o.
He can’t find it in himself to worry about the Ori.
It’s hard to focus on a new threat when the old one is still out there. The fact that the old threat is in another galaxy doesn’t mean a thing. Distance is relative; the Stargate taught him that. He feels like he left an intruder in his house, like he opened the front door to a stranger and then walked out the back way. He feels like he’s left a man behind.
The mantra has never meant just military to him. Every expedition member they lost was left behind when they abandoned Atlantis before the mission was completed. Teyla and Ronon were left behind, the people of Pegasus were left behind, he was left behind.
Nothing seems right about his life now. It’s wrong that he has an office. It’s wrong that he works underground hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean. The Stargate here is all wrong—the wrong color, the wrong sounds, a wormhole leading to all the wrong places. It’s wrong not reporting to Elizabeth, it’s wrong seeing Carson in the SGC infirmary, it’s wrong not hearing Rodney’s constant complaining. Everything is wrong and normally that would mean he would find something else to do, something that felt right, but there’s no going back to that. The only thing right is Atlantis. He could quit the Stargate program, but after everything he’s seen, everything he’s done, where would he go? A poor substitute is better than nothing at all.
So he keeps at it, doing what he can to stay positive and perform his new job to the best of his ability. He keeps his head down and his eyes and ears open, just in case.
He can’t shake the feeling that never doesn’t always mean never.