fic--At The Hour When We Are Trembling, SGA/SG1
Title: At The Hour When We Are Trembling
Author: Frostfire
Words: 36,000
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: John Sheppard/Daniel Jackson
Notes: Post S2/S9 apocafic. The Wraith make it to Earth, and John and Daniel are left to pick up the pieces. Title is from Eliot's "The Hollow Men".
I have a lot of people to thank for this. First, there's everyone who put up with me talking about it all the time, and/or read snippets of it over AIM; I won't name you all because I'd forget people, but thanks so much, everyone. Massive thanks go to synecdochic, because this story is half her baby; she encouraged and enabled and supported and basically made sure it actually happened. Thanks also to liviapenn and tesserae_, who were kind enough to read the entire thing and offer their comments. Finally, ivorygates, who was the best beta anyone could hope for; this story is more than twice as long as it was because of her. Thanks so much, everyone!
When the news comes through to Atlantis, there are about ten blank, unreal seconds where no one believes it’s happening. And then, “What?” says Elizabeth, and John’s gut clenches at the horror in her voice. He hears Wraith attacking Earth, and assembled a power source so we could dial out, and DC gone and President dead, and need whatever tech you have and anyone who can advise on Wraith tactics.
They hold an instant emergency meeting. Elizabeth’s forehead is furrowed and her eyes are dark with shock, and Rodney’s mouth is a sharply miserable line, and John would give a lot to not have to look at either of them like that. Over the course of twenty minutes, they figure out that: a) Atlantis’ manpower wouldn’t help Earth all that much, b) what Earth really needs is expertise, c) whoever goes will probably not be coming back, d) in the event of planetary apocalypse, having a secondary site of Earth-born humans would not be a bad thing, and therefore (although this last conclusion is a solo effort on his part) e) John should go.
“Excuse me?” says Elizabeth, fired up with the idea of action, and, “You really think you’re a comedian sometimes, don’t you?” says Rodney, even though he still looks a little sick.
So Rodney and Elizabeth are going too, and there’s really nothing John can do about it. He only protests for a couple of minutes, because they need to establish a temporary command structure for while they’re all gone. While they’re talking, he can see them trying not to think about the news, about Wraith in New York, Paris, Kansas, Colorado Springs. Mobs and screaming and mushroom clouds and burned, blackened bodies. This is it. This is the alien invasion. Earth is falling.
He does convince Ronon and Teyla that they need to-carry on the fight in the Pegasus galaxy, or something; he has no idea what the hell he says. He knows that Teyla’s eyes are sad and understanding while he tells her that she and Major Lorne are in charge while they try to save their planet, and Ronon grips his shoulder and says, “Kick their asses. And let us know if you need help.”
His eyes are knowing, too. Because, of course, this has happened to them, and to everyone they know. The Earth crew are the only virgins here.
But Teyla and Ronon won’t have to see it again. And everyone else John can order to stay behind, at least.
When they go, Elizabeth makes one of her citywide announcements. John barely hears it, definitely couldn’t repeat any of it afterwards. He made a farewell speech to his men a little earlier, but that went something like, “We’ll kill the bastards. Don’t let the city get blown up while I’m gone.”
All in all, it’s about two hours from getting the news to stepping through the wormhole to Earth.
It’s only about fifteen minutes after that when John realizes that point e) wasn’t the best idea, after all, and really, John’s unique talents might have been best exercised by leaving him in command of Atlantis.
“What do you mean, you don’t have anything for me to fly? Sir,” John adds belatedly. He knows the general’s name, he’s pretty sure, but he’s been busy thinking about other things. Landry and O’Neill are both somewhere else, or possibly dead. Elizabeth was whisked away to join the remaining political leaders at some undisclosed location. Rodney was whisked away to join the remaining scientists at another undisclosed location-Area 51, if you were paying any attention at all; security isn’t what it could be. But apparently, the remaining pilots are all in the sky already.
“We have a limited number of F-302s, Colonel, and they’re all in the air. And more importantly, we need you here to brief us.” The general is frowning at him: time to put the good of the planet ahead of your personal preferences, Lieutenant Colonel, is that clear?
He’s shown into a briefing room full of generals and admirals. Right after he got his promotion, he had nightmares like this. Although usually the nightmares involved something really subtle like his feet being glued to the floor.
It happens like this:
“Sir,” says someone, “Wraith ships appear to be turning toward Cheyenne Mountain.”
“ETA?” someone else snaps.
“They aren’t in a hurry, sir, they’re stopping to engage as they come. I couldn’t say exactly. Maybe fifteen minutes-oh. Sir.”
“What else is it?”
“They’re moving ground units in, too.”
“We knew it was only a matter of time before they figured out that this was a major base of operations,” says an admiral.
“It’s too soon,” says someone else. “They’ve dialed in again, but this wormhole will fail in twenty minutes. If we can hold out for twenty minutes, we can get more people through-”
“What about the leaders? The government people?” People are starting to talk over each other, panicking.
“They’re not here yet, the ships will pick them off if they try to fly-”
“The Wraith on the ground will be here before the ships, sirs-”
“Send people out on defense and prepare to arm the self-destruct,” the general snaps. Everyone quiets down. “Get yourself together, Sheppard.”
John blinks. “Me?”
“If anyone on this planet is essential personnel right now, you are. Get out there, keep yourself alive, kill some of the bastards, and be out of range when the mountain blows. And take our goddamn planet back.”
John comes to attention. “Yes, sir.” There isn’t any way to ask, but now he sort of wishes he could remember the general’s name.
When John meets the armed, well-built civilian, in the middle of a pile of dead Wraith on the outer perimeter of the final Cheyenne Mountain defense, he doesn’t recognize Dr. Daniel Jackson, SG-1. They exchange a nod and an, “Over there, on your three o’clock, a group of them. Cover me,” and that’s pretty much all the introduction they need.
They met once, before Atlantis, but John met a lot of new people then, and he can never really call Daniel to mind in that context-the memories are all a blur of new faces and yelling and crazy light-up objects. But fighting in the Colorado scrub, this civilian is precise and deadly and absolutely fearless, which John should recognize as dangerous insanity and stay the fuck away from, but he’s never been great at that kind of thing, himself. They cover each other through two separate suicide charges, bomb the fuck out of a low-flying dart, and kill Wraith until dreadlocked bodies cover the ground.
When the mountain blows, they’re out of the danger zone, but they hit the dirt and cover their heads, and when it’s over they stare out over the landscape, fire and rubble and dead people and dead Wraith, and then John’s new friend takes a breath and says, “We need to get out of here. Get people together and go…somewhere else.”
“Right,” says John, trying to remember that he’s a leader, that he might even be the one in charge at this point, and then he blinks and turns and says, “Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard,” and puts out his hand.
Daniel blinks at the hand for ten or fifteen seconds before he figures out what it’s for, and then he says, “Dr. Daniel Jackson,” and shakes. His hands are filthy and scraped, but his grip is tight, and he holds on for a few extra seconds, as if John might disappear if he let go.
The first thing they try to do is round up as many trucks and Jeeps as they can-there are a lot of them, someone in the mountain was thinking about the need to get away after the place blew-and look for people to drive them. There are about fifty people left, mostly airmen and a few officers.
The second thing they try to do is talk strategy.
“Well,” says Daniel. “Most of Earth’s major governmental seats, as well as our defense platform in Antarctica and our Stargate, have been destroyed.” He says it really fast, like maybe if no one understands the words, it won’t really be true. “So…”
“So…” says John.
“Uh,” says Daniel, “maybe Area 51? It’s…possible the Wraith haven’t found it.”
“Area 51,” says John. “Good plan.” Rodney, he thinks, is at Area 51, and if there’s anyone who could get them out of this, somehow, miraculously-
John takes a minute, while they’re checking the trucks and Jeeps to see if their helpful transportation-provider thought to throw in supplies also-which he, she, or they did, thank God; there are MREs, first aid kits, extra gasoline, some tents-and says as casually as he can, “So, you’re one of the Stargate program’s flag team. Why’d they toss you out here all by yourself?”
Daniel rubs his forehead with a dirty hand, leaving a black streak behind. After a second he says, “Everyone else had something to do.” He laughs, short and bitter.
“Know the feeling,” says John.
They work for a little longer, while John thinks about Ronon, who lost everything, and what he can be like when he’s remembering his world. “I’m sorry,” he says, finally, “about everyone-in the mountain.”
“Why?” says Daniel. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Right.
After a second, Daniel says, “I’d rather not talk about it.”
John can understand that. “Okay,” he says. “Sure.”
The first time Daniel saw people get life-sucked, fighting outside the mountain, he didn’t flinch. They were too busy shooting for a heart-to-heart at the time, but John kind of almost brings it up later.
“It’s really freaking creepy,” he says, in the darkness of their camp in the godforsaken middle of Utah. “What the Wraith do.”
They’re close enough that John can feel the body heat coming from the dark tent area in front of him, distinct from the night chill of the dark tent areas on all other sides. Daniel’s quiet for a minute, and then, “It doesn’t work on me anymore.”
John, only starting to get used to Daniel’s special method of non-communication, tries and fails to parse that. Daniel says, “Ten years of traveling to other planets, fighting aliens. I’m sure there’s something out there that’s bad enough to-to shock me, to,” he grins, just for a second, “creep me out. But that wasn’t it.”
“They were the first thing I saw,” says John, remembering Athos and darkness, and Sumner and the queen. “The first thing that wasn’t just cool.”
“Yeah, that would have creeped me out,” says Daniel.
John remembers this can’t be happening, this can’t happen, nothing can make this happen, this isn’t real. He can see the black-on-black outline of Daniel’s form, lying still and breathing easily in their very own alien-infested night. “Sort of,” he says.
A couple of days into their road trip, when John notices Daniel shirtless, leaning over their Jeep to get something in the passenger’s seat, the first thing he thinks is that he wouldn’t mind hitting that.
The second thing he thinks is that the apocalypse hasn’t killed his sex drive after all, which leads to the third thing, which is No sleeping with anyone you work with. He’s been through this a few times already on Atlantis-it’s automatic with the Marines, but beyond that he had to firmly turn it down, first with Teyla, then with Ronon. It’s doable.
The fourth thing he thinks is that instinct has spoken, and it’s said yeah, this guy’s with me. He’s surprisingly okay with that.
They have to take back roads, out-of-the-way routes, sometimes just driving over the terrain when it’s flat, because the highways are clogged with refugees. People are fleeing the cities, running into the mountains and the desert, already starting to starve. John thinks about it-better slow death by starvation, or quick death by life-sucking?
John, personally, would rather starve.
When they pass people, Daniel watches them with guilty eyes, but he never says anything, so John doesn’t have to say, We can’t help them, there are too many, we need to save supplies for ourselves so we can survive and fight.
It’s all true, but John is glad he doesn’t have to say that while people are starving to death before their eyes.
John’s worried, at first, that they’ll have to deal with people trying to join them, and he’s not sure what they’ll be able to do with a bunch of frightened civilians; they aren’t set up to provide long-term care, but he doesn’t think he could just turn people away-and what would he do if they wouldn’t go, shoot them?
But the frightened civilians run away from the Jeeps. John wonders what their fellow humans have been doing to them, just in the past few days, but he remembers the bodies they’ve passed, and doesn’t go after them to find out.
The people who do end up coming after them, a few days into the drive-into the occupation-are the people that, if necessary, John would have no problem shooting. There are some militia guys who want their Jeeps, and they do actually have to shoot a couple of those before they go away-John never does find out what their militia was for, though-and then there are the garden-variety assholes, bullies, and muggers who just want more stuff and are stupid enough to think a military group is going to let down its guard. Most of them are scared away by a display of weapons.
One of the airmen, Bosman, is killed when a guy comes after them with a gun. John sees the guy’s face for just a second before a few dozen P-90 shots take him down. His eyes are crazy.
They reach Area 51.
It’s a bigger crater than Cheyenne Mountain was. The ground is solid glass in places.
None of them are really surprised. John thinks, Rodney, but it’s distant and blank in the face of the yawning crater, black and still smoking. They all stare at it for a while, and eventually they turn around and start out again.
John is pretty sure that their cross-country roadtrip starts out as a basic, brain-stem-level desire to get the hell away. They have to establish a base of operations somewhere, but no one wants to be anywhere near the two big holes where people used to defend the planet.
But they’ve barely started out when Daniel has come up with absolutely solid reasons for heading to Connecticut or Vermont or fucking Maine, which is pretty much as far from Colorado as it’s possible to be in the U.S. of A.
“We need to think in the long-term,” says Daniel to their few dozen people, over their campfire in the middle of the desert. “New England is sparsely populated, doesn’t have as big a military presence as other areas, or as many possible threats from humans in violent fringe groups as places like the Southeast or the Northwest, and we’re more likely to be able to find low-tech means of subsistence, like single-family farms, and houses with fireplaces.”
John is pretty sure that Daniel wasn’t thinking about any of those things back at Area 51, when, after ten minutes of standing around and breathing in dust and smoke, he pointed east and said, “That way.” But it’s as good a place as any.
“Vermont,” says John. “There’s an old fallout shelter near Burlington. It’s Air Force-built, left over from the fifties atomic bomb era. It’s big. Complex. Underground. Still has tons of fifty-year-old emergency supplies, generators, whatever.”
Daniel’s eyes say thanks for backing me up, while out loud, he says, “Good. Somewhere to go.”
John thinks about the Stargate, gone up in a radioactive puff of smoke. He’s trying to remember before the program, when Earth was the only place to go, when the sum total of his travel options were contained on this one planet. It’s harder than he thought it would be.
And even then, he could fly.
They make their way across the country, slowly. They pass crashed cars, stopped cars, cars on fire, mangled cars with dead bodies twisted around inside them, cars with people living in them. When the terrain is easy enough, they usually drive next to the road instead of on it. A lot of the vegetation has burned, too, and often they’re driving on charred black dirt.
They see more people, people in the cars and people in towns, in fields, dirty and bloody and hungry, hiding and fighting and trying to stay alive. There are bodies everywhere-men, women, and kids, shot, smashed, burned, knifed, beaten, raped. And life-sucked, broken husks littering the ground, crunching under feet and wheels in some places-but there aren’t any more of those than there are of the plain old dead. John sees it all and doesn’t know what to feel. Daniel watches from the passenger side of their Jeep; it’s all he does for days, and his face is blank the entire time.
John thinks that he should be more upset about all this than he is.
It’s Earth. The Wraith have made it to Earth, and they’re killing innocent people, burning cities, toppling governments, turning six billion lives into everyone’s own personal horror movie. D.C. is gone, Cheyenne Mountain is gone, London and Paris and Tokyo are gone.
And John is angry. He sees the thousands and thousands of old, drained bodies, and he wants to punch something, shoot something, blow something the hell up. Better than that, he wants to reverse the process, life-suck the Wraith and see how they like it.
He bets they could find a way to use Wraith-energy as a power source, too.
He’s angry, but he isn’t-
The men are living in their very own Resident Evil. He sees their eyes. This is the end, this is it, they’ve seen whatever, the seven seals or the sea of fire, and they’re just hoping to take some of the bastards with them when they go.
John sees cities gone, homes destroyed, and yeah, he wants to blow the Wraith out of the sky. But hanging over all of that-somehow, he swears to God that somehow, they will fix this, and he’ll be able to get back to Atlantis.
The days crawl by. They drive all day, except when they have to stop and threaten to shoot people, stop and actually shoot people, stop and actually shoot Wraith, or maneuver the Jeeps around road obstacles. John thinks that’s the best part of the day for some of the airmen, being able to get out of the Jeeps and use some muscle, do something. The Rockies especially are a fun and distracting time for all.
They’re attacked pretty much every time they come near a population center; apparently, once they subdued the military forces, all of the Wraith decided to go eat buffet style. Usually it’s just one or two of them, out on their own, seeing a bunch of people and thinking, free lunch!
Occasionally there are more, and sometimes they recognize John and Daniel’s group as a threat. They attack twice in Utah; no casualties the first time, but an airman and a sergeant, Flanagan and Stanford, die in the second. In Colorado, they lose O’Brian in the first attack, and Powell in the second, which happens when they’re detouring to avoid going anywhere near Colorado Springs.
Daniel drops down at their shared campfire the night after the second attack and says, “No one’s fault, we couldn’t have seen it coming, it’s a terrible thing but if we’d gone through Colorado Springs it might have been worse, I’m very sorry he’s gone.” He’s close enough for John to see the circles under his eyes, the fine lines under the dirt on his face.
“Rough day?” says John.
“People think I’m sensitive and caring.” Daniel rubs his eyes.
“It’s a curse,” says John, who had a reputation as a casual CO and so occasionally had to deal with things he never wanted to hear about ever, back on Atlantis.
“Yeah,” says Daniel. “I’m considering developing a less approachable image.”
In Kansas, a couple of darts find them when they’re camped out for the night. They scatter and take whatever cover they can find-John ends up under one of the Jeeps, cursing Kansas and its fucking endless open fucking soybean fields-but the darts get Lachlan, Brighton, Nguyen, Schmitt, Carver, and Hernandez.
“That’s eleven dead,” says Daniel, head in his hands, voice muffled. “Because we’re going somewhere else. Maybe we should have just stayed in Nevada.”
“They knew we had a major facility there,” says John. “They’re probably sweeping the area regularly.” Well, maybe. “Anyway, we can’t stop now. There’s no cover in this fucking state.”
Daniel spends the mornings hopping from Jeep to Jeep, talking to their men and women, trying to keep any of them from going totally nuts. John spends the afternoons doing the same. For a couple of hours around lunchtime, they stay in the same Jeep. John drives, and Daniel reads books he’s stolen from bookstores along the way, turning pages with careful fingers, tuning everything else out. Sometimes John watches him and thinks about War and Peace, wonders if he could just grab a copy and sit down with it again. He doesn’t think so.
John really works on getting to know the men, because it’s what you do, and because it’s stupid to command people whose strengths and weaknesses you don’t know. He’s been avoiding long-term plans, but he’s not going to be able to avoid thinking ahead forever, unless he wants to desert or die, so.
Thorman is a lieutenant-was a lieutenant, under the former government of this area of land, although John knows better than to say stuff like that out loud-who’s holding up well, among the best of them. No, she says, I didn’t have much family, sir. My aunt’s a tough old lady, I’m sure she made it. And if a Wraith got her, I bet she poisoned him. Yes, sir, I’m prepared to fight to the end to get these fuckers off our planet. No, sir, I have no plans to do anything stupid.
McConnell is a major. He’s the next ranking officer under John, but he’s quiet, careful, and he doesn’t look too enthusiastic about his new end-of-the-world assignment. When John talks to him, he’s by the book. Yes, sir. No, sir. I appreciate your talking to me, sir. But his eyes follow John, when he goes on to the next guy.
Xu is a sergeant, second-generation American, wishes he could check on his folks in Sacramento but knows it isn’t going to happen. He’s been at the SGC for six years and faced impending apocalypse before; he understands what’s going on. Yes sir, I’ll follow Dr. Jackson’s orders. No, sir, I don’t know all that much about the Wraith. But I’m learning, and his face is a mask. We’re all learning, sir.
Ellsworth is an airman, had a wife and a kid back in Colorado Springs. After the Wraith attack and the mountain’s explosion, pretty much nobody survived in the city; their best guess is that what’s left of it is occupied territory now. John doesn’t remember seeing Ellsworth around until just before they left that day, so he has the suspicion that Ellsworth went to find them and didn’t-or did. He says, Yes, sir, I want to kill the Wraith alien fucking bastards. Yes, sir, I will follow orders. Nothing else to do anymore, sir. His eyes are empty. John leaves him and moves on.
He learns all their names and ranks, a little something about every one of them, tries to work out which ones need watching, which ones probably won’t go insane within the first couple of weeks, and which ones he might actually be able to rely on to get things done.
It’s stressful. In addition to their little lunchtime drives, he ends up coming over to Daniel at the end of every evening, because no one’s going to bother them when it looks like they’re having a meeting. Daniel will say something like, “Probably about another week to go,” or, “At this point, I almost miss the Goa’uld,” or, “Why the hell didn’t they include coffee with the emergency rations?” and John will sprawl on the ground, facing away from the main camp, and watch Daniel talk, and pretend for a little while that the group of grieving, desperate people behind him doesn’t exist.
Sometimes, instead of the broken world on either side, he lets himself think about the long cool hallways of Atlantis, the ocean sound around everything, the colored glass and lights, and his hands will clench on the steering wheel until he’s afraid his fingers will break.
On one of those days, he’s breathing slowly and carefully to keep himself from snapping and running for the hills, when Daniel clears his throat, quietly.
“You know,” he says, “some of the Wraith writing reminds me of a script that we saw once on P3X-498.”
And he just keeps on talking. John blinks, wonders for a second what the hell is going on-but Daniel is an archaeology geek, at least theoretically, and this is his thing, isn’t it? so he keeps driving and lets the words fall over and through and into his ears. They’re words like logosyllabic, and orthography, and epigraphical analysis, and he has no idea what it all means, why anyone would think it was important, but-
It’s sort of soothing. If he thinks about it hard enough, he’ll realize it reminds him of a mellower Rodney; so he doesn’t think, and he listens, and his hands slowly relax.
They never, thankfully, run into groups of Wraith too big to handle. John discovers that although Daniel is really good at shooting things, he isn’t a battlefield commander. No surprise there, and he takes John’s-well, John decides to think of them as suggestions rather than orders, because he’s pretty sure that’s how Daniel sees them, too. So John commands, and Daniel stays in the ranks and shoots as well as any of them, and despite the casualties, they beat every group of Wraith that’s stupid enough to come after them on the ground.
And it’s helpful. The only time these guys have ever encountered Wraith in the flesh was during the Cheyenne Mountain defense, which, even if they killed a bunch of the life-sucking bastards, was definitely a loss for their side. It’s good for morale, such as it is, to actually be able to take some of the Wraith down, to figure out that they do die, with enough bullets in them.
But they’ve lost eleven people, and John is not happy about how big a percentage eleven is of their total force. Every time someone dies, John can see everyone looking around at their little group, doing the math, and thinking at this rate, we aren’t going to last. And watching the men looking at the ancient bodies-John has never been the best commander in the universe, but he knows it’s his job to do something about those looks.
Having a destination helps. But John still kind of wishes they had a psychiatrist along with them.
“This sucks,” he says to Daniel by their campfire in Missouri, after the day of three-three-Wraith attacks (only one casualty, but one was enough. And it was Michalowski. John liked Michalowski).
Daniel raises his eyebrows. “Yes,” he says, in his duh voice. John is becoming familiar with that voice, and it sometimes causes him to wonder why no one, on any of the other sides or on this one, has killed Dr. Jackson before now. (Possibly it has something to do with the fact that Daniel really is supernaturally good-looking, especially for a geek. John can’t help looking, sometimes, the same way he occasionally notices Ronon’s shoulders, or Teyla’s legs, or even Elizabeth’s mouth or Rodney’s ass. It’s instinct, and it’s not like he’s getting any anywhere else. And it’s a distraction from their situation, which, after all, sucks.)
“I’m waiting for a mass suicide or a mutiny,” says John. “I can’t talk these guys out of being depressed. The world’s overrun by aliens. What am I supposed to say, cheer up? It’ll be okay?”
“God knows,” says Daniel. “If you figure it out, tell me.”
Even after a nightmare week and a half living in each other’s pockets-feels like years, at this point-John doesn’t know Daniel Jackson all that well. But even laying the good-looking part aside, he’s pretty fucking glad he has him around. He tries to picture doing this all by himself, and shudders.
In Ohio, Ellsworth commits suicide.
He’s up close with a Wraith, and he just drops his weapon. John sees it, but he can’t shoot the Wraith without shooting through Ellsworth, and his second of hesitation costs him another Wraith getting through his own guard. By the time he kills it and gets over to Ellsworth’s position, it’s over.
The Wraith is a little glazed over, happy and full. John shoots it full of bullets until it collapses and dies. A couple of the others have noticed, and he can feel the shock sort of rippling through the ranks.
The rest of the Wraith are dead pretty fast, and afterward everyone just stands around and stares at Ellsworth’s body. John’s thoughts are torn between Jesus fuck and a semi-hysterical and you thought morale was bad before. His eyes lock with Daniel’s, but Daniel is just blinking at the body, not looking like he’s going to be much help.
“Okay,” says John finally, “volunteers?”
Masohar, who was about as close to a buddy as Ellsworth had, as far as John could see, and Thorman come forward. John gives them shovels and goes to sit with Daniel. He drops down close enough to feel Daniel’s body heat, an antidote to the dried-up husk twenty feet away. Daniel’s sweating, panting a little-John forces himself to calm down, and doesn’t watch him breathe.
They’re both quiet, watching the rest of the men, who’re mostly in shock. Masohar and Thorman dig silently, and John can hear every shovelful of dirt falling to the ground.
When the grave’s almost finished, Masohar says something to Thorman, leaves his shovel, and comes over to John and Daniel.
“He wouldn’t have told you this, sirs,” he says, looking uncomfortable, “but I-you should know. A Wraith got his baby. He saw his baby daughter-like that. And after that, well, I wouldn’t blame him. Sirs.”
“We don’t blame him, airman,” says Daniel, and his voice is soft.
John very carefully doesn’t crawl out of his skin while Masohar is watching. “No one would blame him,” he says instead, and Masohar nods.
“Thank you, sirs,” he says, and goes back to digging.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” says John after he’s gone.
Daniel’s gone blank again, but he says, “I hate this.”
He doesn’t usually say stuff like that; but then, neither does John.
They hold a memorial service over the grave, and then they get in their Jeeps and start off again. John is not in the habit of praying, but he’d almost consider starting if it meant that he’d never have to see anything like that again.
They have to loot for their supplies. John doesn’t like it, the men don’t like it, and Daniel-aside from books, apparently-really doesn’t like it, but they all know it’s necessary. So whenever they stop somewhere with stores, they try for nonperishable food, gasoline, and weapons (all of which are usually gone already, but sometimes they get lucky) and anything else they decide is useful. It turns out that they have a couple of tech guys with them, Kiehl and Jacobsen, both lieutenants and already buddies from before, and they find whatever electronics haven’t already been looted and load them into one of the Jeeps. John’s not absolutely convinced about this at first.
“What,” he says, “you think we’ll be getting emails after all this?”
“Actually, sir,” says Kiehl, “the Internet was originally created as a means of communication in the event of a nuclear war. It’s not going to disappear just because there was an alien invasion.”
“Oh,” says John, realizing once again that he has no idea how things like email actually work-Rodney, he thinks, should be here, being disdainful-and says, “Well, go ahead, then.”
Weird.
He brings it up with Daniel, later.
“Oh, that’s absolutely true,” says Daniel, “and, of course, the Wraith aren’t interested in taking over things like that-I mean, they aren’t interested in taking over at all. As long as the basic political and military infrastructure is gone and there aren’t any obvious technological accomplishments in use, like advanced weapons and transportation, they aren’t going to interfere.” He’s talking with his hands, getting into it.
This is the point at which John would usually roll his eyes and tell Rodney to shut up, but it’s the first time he’s really seen Daniel get excited, so he watches, fascinated. “It’s an interesting contrast with the Goa’uld,” Daniel continues, “who wanted power, who wanted the infrastructure, with themselves at the top of it. All the Wraith want is food. They aren’t going to know or care that we’re communicating with each other unless it directly interferes with their food source.”
“Yeah,” says John, and now he’s depressed, “we’re their candy store. Who cares what we’re doing, as long as there’s six billion people running around for them to snack on.”
He has to wonder how many people there are now. And how long it’s going to take the Wraith to go through them all.
Even though the main thing John should be worrying about outside of their group-he’s pretty sure-are the dozen or so Hive ships in orbit, the main thing he is worrying about is Elizabeth.
She was secreted away with the remnants of the world’s leaders, or whoever-Daniel seems to think that O’Neill was with them, so some military people, too-so it’s possible they’re alive, somewhere. Waiting, planning, working on taking Earth back, or maybe just trying to keep themselves safe until they can build up an army.
He knows they didn’t go to the alpha site, because the time between first seeing the Wraith ships and the mountain coming under attack was only a few hours-“We called you first thing,” Daniel said-and there just wasn’t time to get people to Colorado, which is nicely ironic given their ability to cross millions of light-years in a couple of seconds. (And then the Wraith dialed in, and there was nowhere anyone could go.) So they’re somewhere on Earth, and if John had any fucking idea of where to look, he’d be there right now. (He’d have to sneak away, because he’s pretty sure that if Daniel caught him deserting, he would be seriously unhappy, but Daniel, for all his experience, isn’t military, and John could do it. He thinks he’d be looking over his shoulder for a while afterward, though.) Once they get themselves set up, he knows what Kiehl and Jacobsen’s major priority is going to be, Internet-wise.
He doesn’t know why the hell he let her come through the Gate.
And Rodney-
He’s not thinking about Rodney.
Three weeks after the destruction of the SGC, they fight their way through another stretch of forest and two-lane highways and reach a hill covered in trees, the kind of hill New Englanders call a mountain because they don’t know any better. And underneath it is their new base of operations.
“Home sweet home,” says John, surveying the long gray corridors with a flashlight. “And now aren’t you glad we didn’t order curtains from the decorators?”
“We’re used to it, sir,” says Thorman, smiling a little. “It looks just like the SGC. Orders?”
So John assigns people to the tech guys to see what they can do about getting the electricity working and setting up the equipment, assigns other people to food stores, people to unpacking and inventorying everything in the Jeeps, more people to figuring out what kind of security this place can be set up with, and then he runs out of people, so he stops.
“Huh,” says Daniel. “We’ve got a base.”
“That’s usually what they call it, yeah,” says John. “We could call it something else if we wanted to, though. No one could stop us.”
And even with the whole apocalypse thing, just saying those words gives John kind of a rush. It’s like how, in the back of his head where no one else would notice, he was secretly a little disappointed when Earth found Atlantis again after a year on their own.
“Names are important,” says Daniel absently. “If we call it a base, it is a base. Everyone will feel more secure.”
John would say that he wasn’t being serious-and who would take that seriously? Sometimes he thinks the linguistics geeks are the worst ones of all-but he’s pretty sure that Daniel’s already forgetting the conversation. His attention, at least, is on Kiehl, who’s walking past with an armful of wiring.
“Do I want to know what they’re doing with all of that?” Daniel asks after a second.
“Probably not,” says John. “I walked past Jordan halfway inside a wall panel, about ten minutes ago. I figured it was better not to ask.”
“Okay,” says Daniel. “Who knows. We might end up with cable.”
“What, television was originally meant to be a post-apocalyptic communications device, too?” says John. “I didn’t know that. I wonder if we’ll get MTV.”
Daniel laughs, and it’s maybe the first time John has seen him do it. It crinkles up his eyes and makes him look like a real person, in some real world somewhere. John grins. He learned a long time ago that television references can make some seriously unfunny things more funny.
Although it’s even better if there are aliens around to not understand the references, and that makes him think of Teyla and Ronon, and seriously, John, good fucking call there, because they’re on Atlantis and free to make fun of every single one of the Star Trek series for the rest of their lives, and not here.
Daniel’s laughter fades out, and John says, “Hey, I think it’s your turn to pick a room. Hope you like gray.”
Once everything’s pretty much set up, John pays Kiehl and Jacobsen a visit.
“It’ll take us a while to get identities set up, sir,” says Kiehl. “It’s pretty crazy online right now. Think about all the freak Internet paranoid schizophrenics that existed before, and multiply that by a real alien invasion.”
“Fine,” says John, “but when you’re up and running, your first priority is to see if you can find anyone from the SGC or the government. Or any government. But most especially Elizabeth Weir or General O’Neill.”
“Yes, sir,” says Kiehl.
“And any other resistance groups that might exist,” John adds, as an afterthought.
“We’ll see what we can do, sir,” says Jacobsen, “but let me tell you, I can already predict what it’s going to be like. We’re going to have to figure out who’s just sitting in their basement posting Death to the Wraith! versus who’s being serious, who says they have actual manpower and ordinance, who’s lying about having manpower and ordinance, and then any of those guys might be Wraith or Wraith-allied humans.” He shakes his head.
John is used to tech people telling them they can’t do things, when what they really mean is we can’t make things as beautifully perfect as our experience in lab simulations tells us is theoretically possible. The trick is to pretend to be listening, unless it’s a crisis situation, in which case they just need their asses kicked out of Ivory Tower Land. “Do what you can,” he says, and leaves them to it.
Next up is a strategy meeting. They meet up in the room that Daniel’s picked for himself.
“Gray,” says John. “I really like it. Can you give me the number of your interior designer?”
“Yeah, that’s…funny,” says Daniel absently, like he started the sentence and then forgot about it, and the end came out on autopilot. He’s taken the opportunity to shower in something other than rain for the first time in a while, and he’s half-dressed and damp, sexy in a military communal-shower-porn sort of way (stop that, John tells himself), sitting cross-legged and bent over reports he’s somehow managed to make people generate. “These tech guys of yours are very efficient.”
“You know,” says John, “technically they’re your guys, too.” He looks around for a place to sit; the room is devoid of furniture. Rather than the concrete floor, he sits on the bunk next to Daniel. He’s conscious, suddenly, of how much he needs a shower.
“Technically,” says Daniel, still fixed on the papers in his lap “I’m not military, so I can’t be their commanding officer. But I won’t debate the point. These tech guys of ours. And someone came up with this map, have you seen it? It’s very helpful. I have no idea where they got it. I don’t even know where they got some of the major equipment they’re using.”
“A couple of the bases we went by,” says John. “What map?”
Daniel holds it up between two fingers, not looking up. It’s a map of the area: topography, population centers, roads, and so on, out a hundred miles in each direction, pre-invasion. “I think we should keep whatever operations we’re going to be running outside of this perimeter at the very least, to keep the Wraith from focusing any activity on this area,” says Daniel.
“Sure,” John says, and, “So, operations. We kill as many Wraith as we can, we-capture some darts, maybe?” They’re forty guys in Vermont, he doesn’t say. What the hell kind of effect can they have?
“Well,” says Daniel, and he finally looks at John, “we don’t have anywhere to put darts right now,” with a perfectly straight face. “I think we should try networking, first. Obviously we’re too small an operation to make any real dent in the Wraith forces, and we’d need ships and more weapons to do anything in orbit, where it’s all happening.”
“That’s Kiehl and Jacobsen’s thing,” says John.
“Right,” says Daniel, “so what we do until they get something up and running is reconnaissance.”
Which makes sense. “Figure out which cities are the furthest gone, which ones might have some kind of infrastructure left,” says John. “See if we can find bases with leftover munitions.”
“Exactly,” says Daniel. “We’ll take a day or two to get ourselves fully settled in here, and then we’ll send out a team. Somewhere not too big, first. Maybe Hartford or Harrisburg.”
“Sounds good,” says John, and wow, it’s almost like they have a plan.
The road trip had some effect; the men have started to make friends, form groups, hang out together. John’s in favor; hopefully a-support network, or whatever a shrink would call it, will help with morale and maybe prevent more suicides, please God. And John is grateful for Daniel, because how often does a commanding officer actually get someone to hang out with on equal terms in situations like these?
“So,” says John, many drinks in. “You did it.”
Last night, John took a Jeep and slipped up to Burlington, where he left the Jeep under the cover of the forest and went into the city on foot, crept around, and stole as much alcohol as he could find intact, until he couldn’t carry any more. Since it looked like the guys were starting to become buddies, it was time to do something to take their minds off of the end of the world. So they’re celebrating their new home sweet home.
John and Daniel spent a carefully-calculated amount of time with them, and then made their escape. Now they’re in Daniel’s room, which has sort of become their hangout place, and soon after they got there, John decided it was time to get to know his co-leader a little better. So far, he’s discovered that Daniel makes a face whenever he takes a shot, which is pretty funny to watch.
“I did a lot of things,” says Daniel. He toys with his shot glass, spinning it around with a finger on the rim. His hands are careful, precise.
“Ascended,” John says. “Became a white energy being thing.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Daniel flips the shot glass in the air, catches it. “I don’t remember it.”
“Oh,” says John, and after a second, “I never got it. Lots of meditation involved, it was kind of boring.”
“Right now I might not mind going back,” says Daniel, and laughs a little, stretching over John to reach for the bottle. “Despite the company.”
This is not something that John is for, but he doesn’t think Daniel can just do it on command. For one thing, John’s pretty sure he’d have been gone by now.
“I could’ve done it,” he says. “They offered.”
“Yeah, we do that sometimes,” says Daniel. He takes another shot, looking abstracted.
Part 2
Author: Frostfire
Words: 36,000
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: John Sheppard/Daniel Jackson
Notes: Post S2/S9 apocafic. The Wraith make it to Earth, and John and Daniel are left to pick up the pieces. Title is from Eliot's "The Hollow Men".
I have a lot of people to thank for this. First, there's everyone who put up with me talking about it all the time, and/or read snippets of it over AIM; I won't name you all because I'd forget people, but thanks so much, everyone. Massive thanks go to synecdochic, because this story is half her baby; she encouraged and enabled and supported and basically made sure it actually happened. Thanks also to liviapenn and tesserae_, who were kind enough to read the entire thing and offer their comments. Finally, ivorygates, who was the best beta anyone could hope for; this story is more than twice as long as it was because of her. Thanks so much, everyone!
When the news comes through to Atlantis, there are about ten blank, unreal seconds where no one believes it’s happening. And then, “What?” says Elizabeth, and John’s gut clenches at the horror in her voice. He hears Wraith attacking Earth, and assembled a power source so we could dial out, and DC gone and President dead, and need whatever tech you have and anyone who can advise on Wraith tactics.
They hold an instant emergency meeting. Elizabeth’s forehead is furrowed and her eyes are dark with shock, and Rodney’s mouth is a sharply miserable line, and John would give a lot to not have to look at either of them like that. Over the course of twenty minutes, they figure out that: a) Atlantis’ manpower wouldn’t help Earth all that much, b) what Earth really needs is expertise, c) whoever goes will probably not be coming back, d) in the event of planetary apocalypse, having a secondary site of Earth-born humans would not be a bad thing, and therefore (although this last conclusion is a solo effort on his part) e) John should go.
“Excuse me?” says Elizabeth, fired up with the idea of action, and, “You really think you’re a comedian sometimes, don’t you?” says Rodney, even though he still looks a little sick.
So Rodney and Elizabeth are going too, and there’s really nothing John can do about it. He only protests for a couple of minutes, because they need to establish a temporary command structure for while they’re all gone. While they’re talking, he can see them trying not to think about the news, about Wraith in New York, Paris, Kansas, Colorado Springs. Mobs and screaming and mushroom clouds and burned, blackened bodies. This is it. This is the alien invasion. Earth is falling.
He does convince Ronon and Teyla that they need to-carry on the fight in the Pegasus galaxy, or something; he has no idea what the hell he says. He knows that Teyla’s eyes are sad and understanding while he tells her that she and Major Lorne are in charge while they try to save their planet, and Ronon grips his shoulder and says, “Kick their asses. And let us know if you need help.”
His eyes are knowing, too. Because, of course, this has happened to them, and to everyone they know. The Earth crew are the only virgins here.
But Teyla and Ronon won’t have to see it again. And everyone else John can order to stay behind, at least.
When they go, Elizabeth makes one of her citywide announcements. John barely hears it, definitely couldn’t repeat any of it afterwards. He made a farewell speech to his men a little earlier, but that went something like, “We’ll kill the bastards. Don’t let the city get blown up while I’m gone.”
All in all, it’s about two hours from getting the news to stepping through the wormhole to Earth.
It’s only about fifteen minutes after that when John realizes that point e) wasn’t the best idea, after all, and really, John’s unique talents might have been best exercised by leaving him in command of Atlantis.
“What do you mean, you don’t have anything for me to fly? Sir,” John adds belatedly. He knows the general’s name, he’s pretty sure, but he’s been busy thinking about other things. Landry and O’Neill are both somewhere else, or possibly dead. Elizabeth was whisked away to join the remaining political leaders at some undisclosed location. Rodney was whisked away to join the remaining scientists at another undisclosed location-Area 51, if you were paying any attention at all; security isn’t what it could be. But apparently, the remaining pilots are all in the sky already.
“We have a limited number of F-302s, Colonel, and they’re all in the air. And more importantly, we need you here to brief us.” The general is frowning at him: time to put the good of the planet ahead of your personal preferences, Lieutenant Colonel, is that clear?
He’s shown into a briefing room full of generals and admirals. Right after he got his promotion, he had nightmares like this. Although usually the nightmares involved something really subtle like his feet being glued to the floor.
It happens like this:
“Sir,” says someone, “Wraith ships appear to be turning toward Cheyenne Mountain.”
“ETA?” someone else snaps.
“They aren’t in a hurry, sir, they’re stopping to engage as they come. I couldn’t say exactly. Maybe fifteen minutes-oh. Sir.”
“What else is it?”
“They’re moving ground units in, too.”
“We knew it was only a matter of time before they figured out that this was a major base of operations,” says an admiral.
“It’s too soon,” says someone else. “They’ve dialed in again, but this wormhole will fail in twenty minutes. If we can hold out for twenty minutes, we can get more people through-”
“What about the leaders? The government people?” People are starting to talk over each other, panicking.
“They’re not here yet, the ships will pick them off if they try to fly-”
“The Wraith on the ground will be here before the ships, sirs-”
“Send people out on defense and prepare to arm the self-destruct,” the general snaps. Everyone quiets down. “Get yourself together, Sheppard.”
John blinks. “Me?”
“If anyone on this planet is essential personnel right now, you are. Get out there, keep yourself alive, kill some of the bastards, and be out of range when the mountain blows. And take our goddamn planet back.”
John comes to attention. “Yes, sir.” There isn’t any way to ask, but now he sort of wishes he could remember the general’s name.
When John meets the armed, well-built civilian, in the middle of a pile of dead Wraith on the outer perimeter of the final Cheyenne Mountain defense, he doesn’t recognize Dr. Daniel Jackson, SG-1. They exchange a nod and an, “Over there, on your three o’clock, a group of them. Cover me,” and that’s pretty much all the introduction they need.
They met once, before Atlantis, but John met a lot of new people then, and he can never really call Daniel to mind in that context-the memories are all a blur of new faces and yelling and crazy light-up objects. But fighting in the Colorado scrub, this civilian is precise and deadly and absolutely fearless, which John should recognize as dangerous insanity and stay the fuck away from, but he’s never been great at that kind of thing, himself. They cover each other through two separate suicide charges, bomb the fuck out of a low-flying dart, and kill Wraith until dreadlocked bodies cover the ground.
When the mountain blows, they’re out of the danger zone, but they hit the dirt and cover their heads, and when it’s over they stare out over the landscape, fire and rubble and dead people and dead Wraith, and then John’s new friend takes a breath and says, “We need to get out of here. Get people together and go…somewhere else.”
“Right,” says John, trying to remember that he’s a leader, that he might even be the one in charge at this point, and then he blinks and turns and says, “Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard,” and puts out his hand.
Daniel blinks at the hand for ten or fifteen seconds before he figures out what it’s for, and then he says, “Dr. Daniel Jackson,” and shakes. His hands are filthy and scraped, but his grip is tight, and he holds on for a few extra seconds, as if John might disappear if he let go.
The first thing they try to do is round up as many trucks and Jeeps as they can-there are a lot of them, someone in the mountain was thinking about the need to get away after the place blew-and look for people to drive them. There are about fifty people left, mostly airmen and a few officers.
The second thing they try to do is talk strategy.
“Well,” says Daniel. “Most of Earth’s major governmental seats, as well as our defense platform in Antarctica and our Stargate, have been destroyed.” He says it really fast, like maybe if no one understands the words, it won’t really be true. “So…”
“So…” says John.
“Uh,” says Daniel, “maybe Area 51? It’s…possible the Wraith haven’t found it.”
“Area 51,” says John. “Good plan.” Rodney, he thinks, is at Area 51, and if there’s anyone who could get them out of this, somehow, miraculously-
John takes a minute, while they’re checking the trucks and Jeeps to see if their helpful transportation-provider thought to throw in supplies also-which he, she, or they did, thank God; there are MREs, first aid kits, extra gasoline, some tents-and says as casually as he can, “So, you’re one of the Stargate program’s flag team. Why’d they toss you out here all by yourself?”
Daniel rubs his forehead with a dirty hand, leaving a black streak behind. After a second he says, “Everyone else had something to do.” He laughs, short and bitter.
“Know the feeling,” says John.
They work for a little longer, while John thinks about Ronon, who lost everything, and what he can be like when he’s remembering his world. “I’m sorry,” he says, finally, “about everyone-in the mountain.”
“Why?” says Daniel. “It wasn’t your fault.”
Right.
After a second, Daniel says, “I’d rather not talk about it.”
John can understand that. “Okay,” he says. “Sure.”
The first time Daniel saw people get life-sucked, fighting outside the mountain, he didn’t flinch. They were too busy shooting for a heart-to-heart at the time, but John kind of almost brings it up later.
“It’s really freaking creepy,” he says, in the darkness of their camp in the godforsaken middle of Utah. “What the Wraith do.”
They’re close enough that John can feel the body heat coming from the dark tent area in front of him, distinct from the night chill of the dark tent areas on all other sides. Daniel’s quiet for a minute, and then, “It doesn’t work on me anymore.”
John, only starting to get used to Daniel’s special method of non-communication, tries and fails to parse that. Daniel says, “Ten years of traveling to other planets, fighting aliens. I’m sure there’s something out there that’s bad enough to-to shock me, to,” he grins, just for a second, “creep me out. But that wasn’t it.”
“They were the first thing I saw,” says John, remembering Athos and darkness, and Sumner and the queen. “The first thing that wasn’t just cool.”
“Yeah, that would have creeped me out,” says Daniel.
John remembers this can’t be happening, this can’t happen, nothing can make this happen, this isn’t real. He can see the black-on-black outline of Daniel’s form, lying still and breathing easily in their very own alien-infested night. “Sort of,” he says.
A couple of days into their road trip, when John notices Daniel shirtless, leaning over their Jeep to get something in the passenger’s seat, the first thing he thinks is that he wouldn’t mind hitting that.
The second thing he thinks is that the apocalypse hasn’t killed his sex drive after all, which leads to the third thing, which is No sleeping with anyone you work with. He’s been through this a few times already on Atlantis-it’s automatic with the Marines, but beyond that he had to firmly turn it down, first with Teyla, then with Ronon. It’s doable.
The fourth thing he thinks is that instinct has spoken, and it’s said yeah, this guy’s with me. He’s surprisingly okay with that.
They have to take back roads, out-of-the-way routes, sometimes just driving over the terrain when it’s flat, because the highways are clogged with refugees. People are fleeing the cities, running into the mountains and the desert, already starting to starve. John thinks about it-better slow death by starvation, or quick death by life-sucking?
John, personally, would rather starve.
When they pass people, Daniel watches them with guilty eyes, but he never says anything, so John doesn’t have to say, We can’t help them, there are too many, we need to save supplies for ourselves so we can survive and fight.
It’s all true, but John is glad he doesn’t have to say that while people are starving to death before their eyes.
John’s worried, at first, that they’ll have to deal with people trying to join them, and he’s not sure what they’ll be able to do with a bunch of frightened civilians; they aren’t set up to provide long-term care, but he doesn’t think he could just turn people away-and what would he do if they wouldn’t go, shoot them?
But the frightened civilians run away from the Jeeps. John wonders what their fellow humans have been doing to them, just in the past few days, but he remembers the bodies they’ve passed, and doesn’t go after them to find out.
The people who do end up coming after them, a few days into the drive-into the occupation-are the people that, if necessary, John would have no problem shooting. There are some militia guys who want their Jeeps, and they do actually have to shoot a couple of those before they go away-John never does find out what their militia was for, though-and then there are the garden-variety assholes, bullies, and muggers who just want more stuff and are stupid enough to think a military group is going to let down its guard. Most of them are scared away by a display of weapons.
One of the airmen, Bosman, is killed when a guy comes after them with a gun. John sees the guy’s face for just a second before a few dozen P-90 shots take him down. His eyes are crazy.
They reach Area 51.
It’s a bigger crater than Cheyenne Mountain was. The ground is solid glass in places.
None of them are really surprised. John thinks, Rodney, but it’s distant and blank in the face of the yawning crater, black and still smoking. They all stare at it for a while, and eventually they turn around and start out again.
John is pretty sure that their cross-country roadtrip starts out as a basic, brain-stem-level desire to get the hell away. They have to establish a base of operations somewhere, but no one wants to be anywhere near the two big holes where people used to defend the planet.
But they’ve barely started out when Daniel has come up with absolutely solid reasons for heading to Connecticut or Vermont or fucking Maine, which is pretty much as far from Colorado as it’s possible to be in the U.S. of A.
“We need to think in the long-term,” says Daniel to their few dozen people, over their campfire in the middle of the desert. “New England is sparsely populated, doesn’t have as big a military presence as other areas, or as many possible threats from humans in violent fringe groups as places like the Southeast or the Northwest, and we’re more likely to be able to find low-tech means of subsistence, like single-family farms, and houses with fireplaces.”
John is pretty sure that Daniel wasn’t thinking about any of those things back at Area 51, when, after ten minutes of standing around and breathing in dust and smoke, he pointed east and said, “That way.” But it’s as good a place as any.
“Vermont,” says John. “There’s an old fallout shelter near Burlington. It’s Air Force-built, left over from the fifties atomic bomb era. It’s big. Complex. Underground. Still has tons of fifty-year-old emergency supplies, generators, whatever.”
Daniel’s eyes say thanks for backing me up, while out loud, he says, “Good. Somewhere to go.”
John thinks about the Stargate, gone up in a radioactive puff of smoke. He’s trying to remember before the program, when Earth was the only place to go, when the sum total of his travel options were contained on this one planet. It’s harder than he thought it would be.
And even then, he could fly.
They make their way across the country, slowly. They pass crashed cars, stopped cars, cars on fire, mangled cars with dead bodies twisted around inside them, cars with people living in them. When the terrain is easy enough, they usually drive next to the road instead of on it. A lot of the vegetation has burned, too, and often they’re driving on charred black dirt.
They see more people, people in the cars and people in towns, in fields, dirty and bloody and hungry, hiding and fighting and trying to stay alive. There are bodies everywhere-men, women, and kids, shot, smashed, burned, knifed, beaten, raped. And life-sucked, broken husks littering the ground, crunching under feet and wheels in some places-but there aren’t any more of those than there are of the plain old dead. John sees it all and doesn’t know what to feel. Daniel watches from the passenger side of their Jeep; it’s all he does for days, and his face is blank the entire time.
John thinks that he should be more upset about all this than he is.
It’s Earth. The Wraith have made it to Earth, and they’re killing innocent people, burning cities, toppling governments, turning six billion lives into everyone’s own personal horror movie. D.C. is gone, Cheyenne Mountain is gone, London and Paris and Tokyo are gone.
And John is angry. He sees the thousands and thousands of old, drained bodies, and he wants to punch something, shoot something, blow something the hell up. Better than that, he wants to reverse the process, life-suck the Wraith and see how they like it.
He bets they could find a way to use Wraith-energy as a power source, too.
He’s angry, but he isn’t-
The men are living in their very own Resident Evil. He sees their eyes. This is the end, this is it, they’ve seen whatever, the seven seals or the sea of fire, and they’re just hoping to take some of the bastards with them when they go.
John sees cities gone, homes destroyed, and yeah, he wants to blow the Wraith out of the sky. But hanging over all of that-somehow, he swears to God that somehow, they will fix this, and he’ll be able to get back to Atlantis.
The days crawl by. They drive all day, except when they have to stop and threaten to shoot people, stop and actually shoot people, stop and actually shoot Wraith, or maneuver the Jeeps around road obstacles. John thinks that’s the best part of the day for some of the airmen, being able to get out of the Jeeps and use some muscle, do something. The Rockies especially are a fun and distracting time for all.
They’re attacked pretty much every time they come near a population center; apparently, once they subdued the military forces, all of the Wraith decided to go eat buffet style. Usually it’s just one or two of them, out on their own, seeing a bunch of people and thinking, free lunch!
Occasionally there are more, and sometimes they recognize John and Daniel’s group as a threat. They attack twice in Utah; no casualties the first time, but an airman and a sergeant, Flanagan and Stanford, die in the second. In Colorado, they lose O’Brian in the first attack, and Powell in the second, which happens when they’re detouring to avoid going anywhere near Colorado Springs.
Daniel drops down at their shared campfire the night after the second attack and says, “No one’s fault, we couldn’t have seen it coming, it’s a terrible thing but if we’d gone through Colorado Springs it might have been worse, I’m very sorry he’s gone.” He’s close enough for John to see the circles under his eyes, the fine lines under the dirt on his face.
“Rough day?” says John.
“People think I’m sensitive and caring.” Daniel rubs his eyes.
“It’s a curse,” says John, who had a reputation as a casual CO and so occasionally had to deal with things he never wanted to hear about ever, back on Atlantis.
“Yeah,” says Daniel. “I’m considering developing a less approachable image.”
In Kansas, a couple of darts find them when they’re camped out for the night. They scatter and take whatever cover they can find-John ends up under one of the Jeeps, cursing Kansas and its fucking endless open fucking soybean fields-but the darts get Lachlan, Brighton, Nguyen, Schmitt, Carver, and Hernandez.
“That’s eleven dead,” says Daniel, head in his hands, voice muffled. “Because we’re going somewhere else. Maybe we should have just stayed in Nevada.”
“They knew we had a major facility there,” says John. “They’re probably sweeping the area regularly.” Well, maybe. “Anyway, we can’t stop now. There’s no cover in this fucking state.”
Daniel spends the mornings hopping from Jeep to Jeep, talking to their men and women, trying to keep any of them from going totally nuts. John spends the afternoons doing the same. For a couple of hours around lunchtime, they stay in the same Jeep. John drives, and Daniel reads books he’s stolen from bookstores along the way, turning pages with careful fingers, tuning everything else out. Sometimes John watches him and thinks about War and Peace, wonders if he could just grab a copy and sit down with it again. He doesn’t think so.
John really works on getting to know the men, because it’s what you do, and because it’s stupid to command people whose strengths and weaknesses you don’t know. He’s been avoiding long-term plans, but he’s not going to be able to avoid thinking ahead forever, unless he wants to desert or die, so.
Thorman is a lieutenant-was a lieutenant, under the former government of this area of land, although John knows better than to say stuff like that out loud-who’s holding up well, among the best of them. No, she says, I didn’t have much family, sir. My aunt’s a tough old lady, I’m sure she made it. And if a Wraith got her, I bet she poisoned him. Yes, sir, I’m prepared to fight to the end to get these fuckers off our planet. No, sir, I have no plans to do anything stupid.
McConnell is a major. He’s the next ranking officer under John, but he’s quiet, careful, and he doesn’t look too enthusiastic about his new end-of-the-world assignment. When John talks to him, he’s by the book. Yes, sir. No, sir. I appreciate your talking to me, sir. But his eyes follow John, when he goes on to the next guy.
Xu is a sergeant, second-generation American, wishes he could check on his folks in Sacramento but knows it isn’t going to happen. He’s been at the SGC for six years and faced impending apocalypse before; he understands what’s going on. Yes sir, I’ll follow Dr. Jackson’s orders. No, sir, I don’t know all that much about the Wraith. But I’m learning, and his face is a mask. We’re all learning, sir.
Ellsworth is an airman, had a wife and a kid back in Colorado Springs. After the Wraith attack and the mountain’s explosion, pretty much nobody survived in the city; their best guess is that what’s left of it is occupied territory now. John doesn’t remember seeing Ellsworth around until just before they left that day, so he has the suspicion that Ellsworth went to find them and didn’t-or did. He says, Yes, sir, I want to kill the Wraith alien fucking bastards. Yes, sir, I will follow orders. Nothing else to do anymore, sir. His eyes are empty. John leaves him and moves on.
He learns all their names and ranks, a little something about every one of them, tries to work out which ones need watching, which ones probably won’t go insane within the first couple of weeks, and which ones he might actually be able to rely on to get things done.
It’s stressful. In addition to their little lunchtime drives, he ends up coming over to Daniel at the end of every evening, because no one’s going to bother them when it looks like they’re having a meeting. Daniel will say something like, “Probably about another week to go,” or, “At this point, I almost miss the Goa’uld,” or, “Why the hell didn’t they include coffee with the emergency rations?” and John will sprawl on the ground, facing away from the main camp, and watch Daniel talk, and pretend for a little while that the group of grieving, desperate people behind him doesn’t exist.
Sometimes, instead of the broken world on either side, he lets himself think about the long cool hallways of Atlantis, the ocean sound around everything, the colored glass and lights, and his hands will clench on the steering wheel until he’s afraid his fingers will break.
On one of those days, he’s breathing slowly and carefully to keep himself from snapping and running for the hills, when Daniel clears his throat, quietly.
“You know,” he says, “some of the Wraith writing reminds me of a script that we saw once on P3X-498.”
And he just keeps on talking. John blinks, wonders for a second what the hell is going on-but Daniel is an archaeology geek, at least theoretically, and this is his thing, isn’t it? so he keeps driving and lets the words fall over and through and into his ears. They’re words like logosyllabic, and orthography, and epigraphical analysis, and he has no idea what it all means, why anyone would think it was important, but-
It’s sort of soothing. If he thinks about it hard enough, he’ll realize it reminds him of a mellower Rodney; so he doesn’t think, and he listens, and his hands slowly relax.
They never, thankfully, run into groups of Wraith too big to handle. John discovers that although Daniel is really good at shooting things, he isn’t a battlefield commander. No surprise there, and he takes John’s-well, John decides to think of them as suggestions rather than orders, because he’s pretty sure that’s how Daniel sees them, too. So John commands, and Daniel stays in the ranks and shoots as well as any of them, and despite the casualties, they beat every group of Wraith that’s stupid enough to come after them on the ground.
And it’s helpful. The only time these guys have ever encountered Wraith in the flesh was during the Cheyenne Mountain defense, which, even if they killed a bunch of the life-sucking bastards, was definitely a loss for their side. It’s good for morale, such as it is, to actually be able to take some of the Wraith down, to figure out that they do die, with enough bullets in them.
But they’ve lost eleven people, and John is not happy about how big a percentage eleven is of their total force. Every time someone dies, John can see everyone looking around at their little group, doing the math, and thinking at this rate, we aren’t going to last. And watching the men looking at the ancient bodies-John has never been the best commander in the universe, but he knows it’s his job to do something about those looks.
Having a destination helps. But John still kind of wishes they had a psychiatrist along with them.
“This sucks,” he says to Daniel by their campfire in Missouri, after the day of three-three-Wraith attacks (only one casualty, but one was enough. And it was Michalowski. John liked Michalowski).
Daniel raises his eyebrows. “Yes,” he says, in his duh voice. John is becoming familiar with that voice, and it sometimes causes him to wonder why no one, on any of the other sides or on this one, has killed Dr. Jackson before now. (Possibly it has something to do with the fact that Daniel really is supernaturally good-looking, especially for a geek. John can’t help looking, sometimes, the same way he occasionally notices Ronon’s shoulders, or Teyla’s legs, or even Elizabeth’s mouth or Rodney’s ass. It’s instinct, and it’s not like he’s getting any anywhere else. And it’s a distraction from their situation, which, after all, sucks.)
“I’m waiting for a mass suicide or a mutiny,” says John. “I can’t talk these guys out of being depressed. The world’s overrun by aliens. What am I supposed to say, cheer up? It’ll be okay?”
“God knows,” says Daniel. “If you figure it out, tell me.”
Even after a nightmare week and a half living in each other’s pockets-feels like years, at this point-John doesn’t know Daniel Jackson all that well. But even laying the good-looking part aside, he’s pretty fucking glad he has him around. He tries to picture doing this all by himself, and shudders.
In Ohio, Ellsworth commits suicide.
He’s up close with a Wraith, and he just drops his weapon. John sees it, but he can’t shoot the Wraith without shooting through Ellsworth, and his second of hesitation costs him another Wraith getting through his own guard. By the time he kills it and gets over to Ellsworth’s position, it’s over.
The Wraith is a little glazed over, happy and full. John shoots it full of bullets until it collapses and dies. A couple of the others have noticed, and he can feel the shock sort of rippling through the ranks.
The rest of the Wraith are dead pretty fast, and afterward everyone just stands around and stares at Ellsworth’s body. John’s thoughts are torn between Jesus fuck and a semi-hysterical and you thought morale was bad before. His eyes lock with Daniel’s, but Daniel is just blinking at the body, not looking like he’s going to be much help.
“Okay,” says John finally, “volunteers?”
Masohar, who was about as close to a buddy as Ellsworth had, as far as John could see, and Thorman come forward. John gives them shovels and goes to sit with Daniel. He drops down close enough to feel Daniel’s body heat, an antidote to the dried-up husk twenty feet away. Daniel’s sweating, panting a little-John forces himself to calm down, and doesn’t watch him breathe.
They’re both quiet, watching the rest of the men, who’re mostly in shock. Masohar and Thorman dig silently, and John can hear every shovelful of dirt falling to the ground.
When the grave’s almost finished, Masohar says something to Thorman, leaves his shovel, and comes over to John and Daniel.
“He wouldn’t have told you this, sirs,” he says, looking uncomfortable, “but I-you should know. A Wraith got his baby. He saw his baby daughter-like that. And after that, well, I wouldn’t blame him. Sirs.”
“We don’t blame him, airman,” says Daniel, and his voice is soft.
John very carefully doesn’t crawl out of his skin while Masohar is watching. “No one would blame him,” he says instead, and Masohar nods.
“Thank you, sirs,” he says, and goes back to digging.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” says John after he’s gone.
Daniel’s gone blank again, but he says, “I hate this.”
He doesn’t usually say stuff like that; but then, neither does John.
They hold a memorial service over the grave, and then they get in their Jeeps and start off again. John is not in the habit of praying, but he’d almost consider starting if it meant that he’d never have to see anything like that again.
They have to loot for their supplies. John doesn’t like it, the men don’t like it, and Daniel-aside from books, apparently-really doesn’t like it, but they all know it’s necessary. So whenever they stop somewhere with stores, they try for nonperishable food, gasoline, and weapons (all of which are usually gone already, but sometimes they get lucky) and anything else they decide is useful. It turns out that they have a couple of tech guys with them, Kiehl and Jacobsen, both lieutenants and already buddies from before, and they find whatever electronics haven’t already been looted and load them into one of the Jeeps. John’s not absolutely convinced about this at first.
“What,” he says, “you think we’ll be getting emails after all this?”
“Actually, sir,” says Kiehl, “the Internet was originally created as a means of communication in the event of a nuclear war. It’s not going to disappear just because there was an alien invasion.”
“Oh,” says John, realizing once again that he has no idea how things like email actually work-Rodney, he thinks, should be here, being disdainful-and says, “Well, go ahead, then.”
Weird.
He brings it up with Daniel, later.
“Oh, that’s absolutely true,” says Daniel, “and, of course, the Wraith aren’t interested in taking over things like that-I mean, they aren’t interested in taking over at all. As long as the basic political and military infrastructure is gone and there aren’t any obvious technological accomplishments in use, like advanced weapons and transportation, they aren’t going to interfere.” He’s talking with his hands, getting into it.
This is the point at which John would usually roll his eyes and tell Rodney to shut up, but it’s the first time he’s really seen Daniel get excited, so he watches, fascinated. “It’s an interesting contrast with the Goa’uld,” Daniel continues, “who wanted power, who wanted the infrastructure, with themselves at the top of it. All the Wraith want is food. They aren’t going to know or care that we’re communicating with each other unless it directly interferes with their food source.”
“Yeah,” says John, and now he’s depressed, “we’re their candy store. Who cares what we’re doing, as long as there’s six billion people running around for them to snack on.”
He has to wonder how many people there are now. And how long it’s going to take the Wraith to go through them all.
Even though the main thing John should be worrying about outside of their group-he’s pretty sure-are the dozen or so Hive ships in orbit, the main thing he is worrying about is Elizabeth.
She was secreted away with the remnants of the world’s leaders, or whoever-Daniel seems to think that O’Neill was with them, so some military people, too-so it’s possible they’re alive, somewhere. Waiting, planning, working on taking Earth back, or maybe just trying to keep themselves safe until they can build up an army.
He knows they didn’t go to the alpha site, because the time between first seeing the Wraith ships and the mountain coming under attack was only a few hours-“We called you first thing,” Daniel said-and there just wasn’t time to get people to Colorado, which is nicely ironic given their ability to cross millions of light-years in a couple of seconds. (And then the Wraith dialed in, and there was nowhere anyone could go.) So they’re somewhere on Earth, and if John had any fucking idea of where to look, he’d be there right now. (He’d have to sneak away, because he’s pretty sure that if Daniel caught him deserting, he would be seriously unhappy, but Daniel, for all his experience, isn’t military, and John could do it. He thinks he’d be looking over his shoulder for a while afterward, though.) Once they get themselves set up, he knows what Kiehl and Jacobsen’s major priority is going to be, Internet-wise.
He doesn’t know why the hell he let her come through the Gate.
And Rodney-
He’s not thinking about Rodney.
Three weeks after the destruction of the SGC, they fight their way through another stretch of forest and two-lane highways and reach a hill covered in trees, the kind of hill New Englanders call a mountain because they don’t know any better. And underneath it is their new base of operations.
“Home sweet home,” says John, surveying the long gray corridors with a flashlight. “And now aren’t you glad we didn’t order curtains from the decorators?”
“We’re used to it, sir,” says Thorman, smiling a little. “It looks just like the SGC. Orders?”
So John assigns people to the tech guys to see what they can do about getting the electricity working and setting up the equipment, assigns other people to food stores, people to unpacking and inventorying everything in the Jeeps, more people to figuring out what kind of security this place can be set up with, and then he runs out of people, so he stops.
“Huh,” says Daniel. “We’ve got a base.”
“That’s usually what they call it, yeah,” says John. “We could call it something else if we wanted to, though. No one could stop us.”
And even with the whole apocalypse thing, just saying those words gives John kind of a rush. It’s like how, in the back of his head where no one else would notice, he was secretly a little disappointed when Earth found Atlantis again after a year on their own.
“Names are important,” says Daniel absently. “If we call it a base, it is a base. Everyone will feel more secure.”
John would say that he wasn’t being serious-and who would take that seriously? Sometimes he thinks the linguistics geeks are the worst ones of all-but he’s pretty sure that Daniel’s already forgetting the conversation. His attention, at least, is on Kiehl, who’s walking past with an armful of wiring.
“Do I want to know what they’re doing with all of that?” Daniel asks after a second.
“Probably not,” says John. “I walked past Jordan halfway inside a wall panel, about ten minutes ago. I figured it was better not to ask.”
“Okay,” says Daniel. “Who knows. We might end up with cable.”
“What, television was originally meant to be a post-apocalyptic communications device, too?” says John. “I didn’t know that. I wonder if we’ll get MTV.”
Daniel laughs, and it’s maybe the first time John has seen him do it. It crinkles up his eyes and makes him look like a real person, in some real world somewhere. John grins. He learned a long time ago that television references can make some seriously unfunny things more funny.
Although it’s even better if there are aliens around to not understand the references, and that makes him think of Teyla and Ronon, and seriously, John, good fucking call there, because they’re on Atlantis and free to make fun of every single one of the Star Trek series for the rest of their lives, and not here.
Daniel’s laughter fades out, and John says, “Hey, I think it’s your turn to pick a room. Hope you like gray.”
Once everything’s pretty much set up, John pays Kiehl and Jacobsen a visit.
“It’ll take us a while to get identities set up, sir,” says Kiehl. “It’s pretty crazy online right now. Think about all the freak Internet paranoid schizophrenics that existed before, and multiply that by a real alien invasion.”
“Fine,” says John, “but when you’re up and running, your first priority is to see if you can find anyone from the SGC or the government. Or any government. But most especially Elizabeth Weir or General O’Neill.”
“Yes, sir,” says Kiehl.
“And any other resistance groups that might exist,” John adds, as an afterthought.
“We’ll see what we can do, sir,” says Jacobsen, “but let me tell you, I can already predict what it’s going to be like. We’re going to have to figure out who’s just sitting in their basement posting Death to the Wraith! versus who’s being serious, who says they have actual manpower and ordinance, who’s lying about having manpower and ordinance, and then any of those guys might be Wraith or Wraith-allied humans.” He shakes his head.
John is used to tech people telling them they can’t do things, when what they really mean is we can’t make things as beautifully perfect as our experience in lab simulations tells us is theoretically possible. The trick is to pretend to be listening, unless it’s a crisis situation, in which case they just need their asses kicked out of Ivory Tower Land. “Do what you can,” he says, and leaves them to it.
Next up is a strategy meeting. They meet up in the room that Daniel’s picked for himself.
“Gray,” says John. “I really like it. Can you give me the number of your interior designer?”
“Yeah, that’s…funny,” says Daniel absently, like he started the sentence and then forgot about it, and the end came out on autopilot. He’s taken the opportunity to shower in something other than rain for the first time in a while, and he’s half-dressed and damp, sexy in a military communal-shower-porn sort of way (stop that, John tells himself), sitting cross-legged and bent over reports he’s somehow managed to make people generate. “These tech guys of yours are very efficient.”
“You know,” says John, “technically they’re your guys, too.” He looks around for a place to sit; the room is devoid of furniture. Rather than the concrete floor, he sits on the bunk next to Daniel. He’s conscious, suddenly, of how much he needs a shower.
“Technically,” says Daniel, still fixed on the papers in his lap “I’m not military, so I can’t be their commanding officer. But I won’t debate the point. These tech guys of ours. And someone came up with this map, have you seen it? It’s very helpful. I have no idea where they got it. I don’t even know where they got some of the major equipment they’re using.”
“A couple of the bases we went by,” says John. “What map?”
Daniel holds it up between two fingers, not looking up. It’s a map of the area: topography, population centers, roads, and so on, out a hundred miles in each direction, pre-invasion. “I think we should keep whatever operations we’re going to be running outside of this perimeter at the very least, to keep the Wraith from focusing any activity on this area,” says Daniel.
“Sure,” John says, and, “So, operations. We kill as many Wraith as we can, we-capture some darts, maybe?” They’re forty guys in Vermont, he doesn’t say. What the hell kind of effect can they have?
“Well,” says Daniel, and he finally looks at John, “we don’t have anywhere to put darts right now,” with a perfectly straight face. “I think we should try networking, first. Obviously we’re too small an operation to make any real dent in the Wraith forces, and we’d need ships and more weapons to do anything in orbit, where it’s all happening.”
“That’s Kiehl and Jacobsen’s thing,” says John.
“Right,” says Daniel, “so what we do until they get something up and running is reconnaissance.”
Which makes sense. “Figure out which cities are the furthest gone, which ones might have some kind of infrastructure left,” says John. “See if we can find bases with leftover munitions.”
“Exactly,” says Daniel. “We’ll take a day or two to get ourselves fully settled in here, and then we’ll send out a team. Somewhere not too big, first. Maybe Hartford or Harrisburg.”
“Sounds good,” says John, and wow, it’s almost like they have a plan.
The road trip had some effect; the men have started to make friends, form groups, hang out together. John’s in favor; hopefully a-support network, or whatever a shrink would call it, will help with morale and maybe prevent more suicides, please God. And John is grateful for Daniel, because how often does a commanding officer actually get someone to hang out with on equal terms in situations like these?
“So,” says John, many drinks in. “You did it.”
Last night, John took a Jeep and slipped up to Burlington, where he left the Jeep under the cover of the forest and went into the city on foot, crept around, and stole as much alcohol as he could find intact, until he couldn’t carry any more. Since it looked like the guys were starting to become buddies, it was time to do something to take their minds off of the end of the world. So they’re celebrating their new home sweet home.
John and Daniel spent a carefully-calculated amount of time with them, and then made their escape. Now they’re in Daniel’s room, which has sort of become their hangout place, and soon after they got there, John decided it was time to get to know his co-leader a little better. So far, he’s discovered that Daniel makes a face whenever he takes a shot, which is pretty funny to watch.
“I did a lot of things,” says Daniel. He toys with his shot glass, spinning it around with a finger on the rim. His hands are careful, precise.
“Ascended,” John says. “Became a white energy being thing.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Daniel flips the shot glass in the air, catches it. “I don’t remember it.”
“Oh,” says John, and after a second, “I never got it. Lots of meditation involved, it was kind of boring.”
“Right now I might not mind going back,” says Daniel, and laughs a little, stretching over John to reach for the bottle. “Despite the company.”
This is not something that John is for, but he doesn’t think Daniel can just do it on command. For one thing, John’s pretty sure he’d have been gone by now.
“I could’ve done it,” he says. “They offered.”
“Yeah, we do that sometimes,” says Daniel. He takes another shot, looking abstracted.
Part 2