Whoever Fights Monsters, by rokeon
Title: Whoever Fights Monsters
Author: rokeon
Spoilers: Michael
Notes: For Enclosed Spaces, I just edited out the part that described the cell. And I really wish I could take another look at this in the morning, but the deadline is tomorrow and I'm already down to four hours of sleep before I have to get up to catch my flight. Somebody please tell me if this makes sense outside my warped mind.
It's like getting a damage report from the puddlejumpers: there's a tingling in the back of his mind that something is wrong, but he has to read the words on the screen to get the details. So he knows that his right arm hurts, knows that muscle and bone from fingers to elbow feel like he reached into a meat grinder, but it's an intellectual awareness rather than genuine agony.
It's the same absence of sensation he had when his wisdom teeth were removed.
His body is immobilized, but his mind is racing. He remembers watching the hiveships' fire falling on the shield like so much pyrotechnic rain, remembers McKay estimating that a constant bombardment would deplete the ZPM in just a few days. He remembers the cloak and the nuke, faking a self-destruct because there was no other way to stop the siege they couldn't win.
He's furious and he's terrified and both emotions have the same codeine-distance he described to Elizabeth that day in the infirmary. What anger he has is directed inward as much as out: he's the one who wanted a bioweapon, the one who urged Beckett to keep working after the clusterfuck with Ellia. He's the military commander who made the decision to test the finished retrovirus, the one who had no problem killing Bob but let Michael go back to the hive because he had a human face
Ever since Teyla found that abandoned lab they've known that the Wraith had the technology to alter human DNA.
He's the military commander who keeps track of every aspect of the expedition's security: patrols, tactics, missions, and debriefings. It's his job to stay updated on everything from the science team's discoveries to the Athosians' crops. Everyone who goes offworld has to know the address to the alpha site, but he's also memorized their principal trading partners and the most interesting Ancient sites.
The pain, the fear, and the anger are all fading. Soon the only thing left will be the hunger.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Author: rokeon
Spoilers: Michael
Notes: For Enclosed Spaces, I just edited out the part that described the cell. And I really wish I could take another look at this in the morning, but the deadline is tomorrow and I'm already down to four hours of sleep before I have to get up to catch my flight. Somebody please tell me if this makes sense outside my warped mind.
It's like getting a damage report from the puddlejumpers: there's a tingling in the back of his mind that something is wrong, but he has to read the words on the screen to get the details. So he knows that his right arm hurts, knows that muscle and bone from fingers to elbow feel like he reached into a meat grinder, but it's an intellectual awareness rather than genuine agony.
It's the same absence of sensation he had when his wisdom teeth were removed.
His body is immobilized, but his mind is racing. He remembers watching the hiveships' fire falling on the shield like so much pyrotechnic rain, remembers McKay estimating that a constant bombardment would deplete the ZPM in just a few days. He remembers the cloak and the nuke, faking a self-destruct because there was no other way to stop the siege they couldn't win.
He's furious and he's terrified and both emotions have the same codeine-distance he described to Elizabeth that day in the infirmary. What anger he has is directed inward as much as out: he's the one who wanted a bioweapon, the one who urged Beckett to keep working after the clusterfuck with Ellia. He's the military commander who made the decision to test the finished retrovirus, the one who had no problem killing Bob but let Michael go back to the hive because he had a human face
Ever since Teyla found that abandoned lab they've known that the Wraith had the technology to alter human DNA.
He's the military commander who keeps track of every aspect of the expedition's security: patrols, tactics, missions, and debriefings. It's his job to stay updated on everything from the science team's discoveries to the Athosians' crops. Everyone who goes offworld has to know the address to the alpha site, but he's also memorized their principal trading partners and the most interesting Ancient sites.
The pain, the fear, and the anger are all fading. Soon the only thing left will be the hunger.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
- Friedrich Nietzsche