Mount Smoky, by Sophonisba [scars challenge]
-title- Mount Smoky
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Suitable for general audiences. Spoilers for "The Intruder." Crossover, although I think you could get by without knowing anything but Ruritania. Het and femslash pairings, canon and non-canon, mostly past and in reference only. Takes place in my asymptotic-to-canon AU, which is significant for one clause of one sentence.
-timeframe- During and after one of the flashbacks in "The Intruder."
-characters- Simon, Elizabeth, Angelique
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. The rather well-known and loved series of books I have crossed it with is not mine, either, but by Anthony Hope. Nor is the other television series I have brought into the mess, a creation of Arena Productions, Sam Rolfe, and Ian Fleming. One of the background ideas in this story was inspired by justabi's " We Used To Be Friends," but I picked it up and ran in a different, crossovery, evil direction with it. Some of the dialogue is taken from the SGA second-season episode "The Intruder."
-word count- 2197
-notes- In this ficton, at the end of World War II, Ruritania was split along the Ore Mountains watershed between East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Most of the German population of the latter was displaced and settled elsewhere. The Rassendylls are related to the von Elphbergs. The title is taken from a traditional American song, more familiar these days from its various schoolyard versions.
-summary- She'd thought her heart had broken the last time. She hadn't known
then what heartbreak was.
Mount Smoky
"I met someone."
For a perfect, blessed second, Elizabeth Weir heard the words without their making sense.
Then her own gasp echoed in her ears, and denial surged to her forebrain. He had met someone who offered him a partnership. He had met someone who made him an offer he couldn't refuse. He had... slept with someone.
You didn't have to tell me! echoed in her head as she whirled to face the dinner she had spent so long preparing. I wasn't ever going to tell you!
Even if she had wanted to, as she had wanted, desperately. Even if for so long her first instinct with all her worst problems had been to bring them to Simon.
Simon, I... I slept with someone. Someones. The woman who is quite possibly my best friend on that distant outpost, and a man who cherishes me as I do you; and I wish to my soul I hadn't.
It was... we were all going to die. We were all going to die, and I'd been working so hard, for so long, and I wanted just a little something for myself. A moment to, as Teyla puts it, "love hard against the night." And I knew even right afterwards it was a mistake; I should never have betrayed you, and I've been paying for it every day since.
And then we didn't die, and I still had to face them. I think, I hope, I haven't ruined my friendship with Teyla; her culture plans around this, she said she would have done as much for any of the command staff, maybe she has, I don't know, that's not a question I have the right to ask. Not of them. Not of Teyla. Not even of Rodney, not anymore.
But Dr. Zelenka -- Radek, you remember Radek Zelenka? -- we were, I think we were, I think we could have grown to be in time, if we had lived out our lives without ever regaining contact with Earth, if you were gone from me --
Simon, do not be gone from me!
-- but even then, even so, we might have grown a lasting connection had I not wantonly broken it in my own selfish loneliness, thinking only of my own pleasure and not of the feelings of the man who saved my life. I was wrong, I know I was wrong, and deserve to be repaid in kind, but... but...
"You were gone for a long time, Elizabeth."
A long time, yes, a long cold time without you by my side, working with two men who had argued their wives onto the expedition, seeing them draw strength from each other when I had no one. Why did I not marry you out of hand before we left? Why did I not push harder to bring you with me, knowing we might never return? You would love -- you would have loved Atlantis, her towers, her balconies, her gardens that we are beginning to make green again.
A long time? Our ancestors -- Robert's and Elisabeth's and yours, if not mine -- subsisted on one red rose once a year for three long years! It has not been half that; could you not have waited? Could you not have trusted me?
Sixteen years I have known you; for fifteen years have we been affianced, fifteen since I persuaded you to my side, sixteen since I took that one last walking tour of Europe and Elisabeth Zenda (von Elphberg und Wittelsbach), great-granddaughter of Queen Flavia, knocked me down with her Lamborghini and into an adventure straight out of the nineteenth century. All this time I have been waiting and hoping. All this time I have been working -- having married once to disoblige my family -- to incline said family to leave us to ourselves, in some space of the world not worth the bother of overriding.
Not even Antarctica -- but Atlantis, yes, in Atlantis we could be happy, in Atlantis we need only bring the best of our birthworld; granted, one may be killed by Wraith, but it is no worse than men have lived with before. Than some men are living with now, to hear some of the Marines tell their tales.
And there is someone else?!
Simon, what has become of us?
Had she ever even known him?
In Antarctica, when she'd known that she would be offered Atlantis, she'd wondered and worried over what to do about Simon.
"The trouble is that he's both outside the program and too well-connected to drop off the face of the earth," Daniel had said, well-meaning. "We're having a hard enough time getting to take Carson here and Corporal Kaur, and she at least is married to Dr. Singh and otherwise alone in the world."
"Maybe you could tell him part of everything?" Carson had offered, face creased with familiar worry lines. "That you'd be gone indefinitely and out of contact?"
"He's my fiance. He deserves a voice in any decision I'd make. How can I ask him to make a decision when he won't have all the facts?"
Rodney, passing by, had stopped and snorted. "If he's any kind of man at all, he wouldn't stand in the way of you flying as far and as high as you can."
Startlingly poetic for Rodney. Is that why... she'd wondered, but never had both the courage and the presence of mind at once to ask.
Maybe she'd never known either of them.
Behind her, Simon walked away. Elizabeth stared into the candle flame; in the middle of the deepest red, there was a spot of clarity around the wick, a nucleus of invisible heat.
Golden as I'd kept my hair then, saffron as Elisabeth's, and as red as Robert Rassendyll's before it goes all to nothing, not even the color mine is now.
I was so happy making this dinner, even with the near-disaster with the vegetables. Finally it was all coming together, and we would be in Atlantis with nearly everyone I'd ever loved. I never saw this coming. I never see this coming. Hasn't it --
She'd thought her heart had broken the last time. She hadn't known then what heartbreak was.
She'd even told Simon about it.
"So we'd held each other and promised we'd get through it somehow and told each other our future was what we made of it, and the next day I came home and he'd cleaned out all his stuff -- and my cat's stuff -- and left a note saying 'Taking the government job, taking Tzu Hsi, live long and prosper, the divorce papers are in the mail.'" She'd shaken her head. "I hadn't had any idea things were that kind of wrong. It just... it came out of nowhere. That's the worst part, that I hadn't known it had gone wrong until it was over."
Simon's voice had been warm and quiet as he wrapped his arms around her from behind. "Maybe... maybe he couldn't bear to see you in pain?"
She'd laughed, with an edge but without the wild bitterness she'd have laden it with the year before. "For what, the first time in his life? I wouldn't have thought he was that good an actor."
"Maybe he was just a jerk, then."
"He was a jerk." She'd laughed again. "It's just... I used to think it was endearing."
They'd laughed together.
She should have realized, all this week, the way Simon had been behaving, that all was not sound. She'd known he'd been hesitant to put his name down. She should have known he was hesitant about going.
Hesitant? He never had any intention, from the first!
But she hadn't -- hadn't even known anything had gone wrong with them, with Elizabeth-and-Simon, until he'd declared it over...
Slowly, she licked her thumb, and put out the candle. Then she sank to her knees, and folded her arms on the edge of the table, and laid her head on them.
"Betsinda?" The familiar voice cut through to her some time -- a short time, a long time -- later. "That Simon said I should go in to you when I told him I was concerned with your welfare -- I came to meet with him when I couldn't reach you."
Elizabeth hastily pushed herself to her feet and turned to face the one woman whose attentions to a growing girl had obviously been motivated more by boredom than by calculation of effect. With an effort, she summoned the remains of her self-control to slow her to physical graciousness at least. "You knew. About Simon. Is that why you kept leaving messages?"
"Darling, why else?" It might be a losing battle that Angelique was fighting with her encroaching years, but she was hotly contesting every inch of the way. "If you would answer your telephone once in a while -- they have an invention called 'caller id' now, it's quite useful -- at any rate, we'd found no evidence that he'd told you, so I came in person. Did he only speak just now?"
Elizabeth didn't bother to mention that she had Caller ID. "He said... there's someone else." Her hard-won ethics battled for a moment against her desperate desire to know before she blurted out "Who...? It can't be Elisabeth again, he wouldn't have said he met her..."
"It certainly isn't her." Her visitor sniffed, taking a leather folder from under her arm and handing it to Elizabeth. "Even the NID stopped keeping more than the most cursory track of her after her fourth marriage... here. Natalie Bridger, alias thus and such, born in 1964, former delinquent, former convict, former operative for the NID, one of the red herrings they cut loose and left us chasing our own tail when we finally outright took it over."
Elizabeth opened the folder and stared down at the surveillance photos and reports. "Natalie's" short blonde hair was obviously graying brown at the roots; her still-lovely face was comfortably padded, and her laugh lines, while distinct, were not as evident as the crows' feet at her eyes. Her figure, too, had been more obviously let go than Elizabeth's own, although the second page noted that she worked out enough to be in more than reasonable shape. Apparently, she currently worked at a dog-sitting agency, and had met Simon when called to care for Lovell. In one shot, she and Simon were laughing as Lovell nearly knocked her over, leaving pawprints on her tan slacks.
"We could have a team on her in two minutes," Angelique said, uncharacteristically gently, "or set the duly constituted legal authorities -- " her tone made its habitual mockery of the words -- "after her in three."
Elizabeth stared down at Natalie Bridger's life, and memories welled up.
--Simon in Berlin, smiling. "My father would never have forgiven me if I wasn't here to support you, Ey-Liz. Or should I call you -- "--
--With Simon in the gardens of the White Palace. "Simon, would you feel the same way about me if I were nobody? Or if I were a 'Daughter of the Mob,' or the like?"--
--Standing shoulder to shoulder with Simon, mind desperately searching for the words to persuade him that this wasn't the nineteenth century, that he didn't need to make so great a sacrifice, staring at a face that, save for long privation, would have been identical as a reflection. "So, cousin, I have heard you not only play the stateswoman and the special agent better than myself, but the lover as well... no, Simon. You made a promise to Elizabeth Weir, I was told. For my part, I release you of any of my share in it; go and speak with Miss Weir." Quiet, sad laughter. "Let it be known by those who know that I too can play the queen's part in one last thing, at least."--
--Speaking with -- begging -- the heads of the "family" who'd reared her, and their grudging agreement that they would let one Simon Wallace alone if she did them a few small favors. Knowing that, had she been stronger, she would have left him alone if not with needy, near-spoiled Elisabeth; fearing that it was too late anyway; and believing, with all the fervor of a college student who has survived disaster and gone on, that there was hope and that some day, somehow, she would at last win free.--
And yet it was not these in the end that moved her, but memories of AP English courses and a birdlike grey-haired woman calling on students to read "Courage is more than a man with a gun in his hand" and "All right, then, I'll go to hell!" and "My mother was an Ape, and of course she couldn't tell me much about it. I never knew who my father was."
"You promised to let Simon alone," Elizabeth said, steadily, evenly. "So let him and the woman he has chosen alone."
Simon!
"Betsinda."
"Besides," she told Angelique, "he wouldn't come back to me, even so."
And she wished, child's wish that it was, that for one moment she could be someone who would not know this to be true.
-author- Sophonisba (saphanibaal)
-warnings- Suitable for general audiences. Spoilers for "The Intruder." Crossover, although I think you could get by without knowing anything but Ruritania. Het and femslash pairings, canon and non-canon, mostly past and in reference only. Takes place in my asymptotic-to-canon AU, which is significant for one clause of one sentence.
-timeframe- During and after one of the flashbacks in "The Intruder."
-characters- Simon, Elizabeth, Angelique
-disclaimer- SGA, of course, is not mine. The rather well-known and loved series of books I have crossed it with is not mine, either, but by Anthony Hope. Nor is the other television series I have brought into the mess, a creation of Arena Productions, Sam Rolfe, and Ian Fleming. One of the background ideas in this story was inspired by justabi's " We Used To Be Friends," but I picked it up and ran in a different, crossovery, evil direction with it. Some of the dialogue is taken from the SGA second-season episode "The Intruder."
-word count- 2197
-notes- In this ficton, at the end of World War II, Ruritania was split along the Ore Mountains watershed between East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Most of the German population of the latter was displaced and settled elsewhere. The Rassendylls are related to the von Elphbergs. The title is taken from a traditional American song, more familiar these days from its various schoolyard versions.
-summary- She'd thought her heart had broken the last time. She hadn't known
then what heartbreak was.
Mount Smoky
"I met someone."
For a perfect, blessed second, Elizabeth Weir heard the words without their making sense.
Then her own gasp echoed in her ears, and denial surged to her forebrain. He had met someone who offered him a partnership. He had met someone who made him an offer he couldn't refuse. He had... slept with someone.
You didn't have to tell me! echoed in her head as she whirled to face the dinner she had spent so long preparing. I wasn't ever going to tell you!
Even if she had wanted to, as she had wanted, desperately. Even if for so long her first instinct with all her worst problems had been to bring them to Simon.
Simon, I... I slept with someone. Someones. The woman who is quite possibly my best friend on that distant outpost, and a man who cherishes me as I do you; and I wish to my soul I hadn't.
It was... we were all going to die. We were all going to die, and I'd been working so hard, for so long, and I wanted just a little something for myself. A moment to, as Teyla puts it, "love hard against the night." And I knew even right afterwards it was a mistake; I should never have betrayed you, and I've been paying for it every day since.
And then we didn't die, and I still had to face them. I think, I hope, I haven't ruined my friendship with Teyla; her culture plans around this, she said she would have done as much for any of the command staff, maybe she has, I don't know, that's not a question I have the right to ask. Not of them. Not of Teyla. Not even of Rodney, not anymore.
But Dr. Zelenka -- Radek, you remember Radek Zelenka? -- we were, I think we were, I think we could have grown to be in time, if we had lived out our lives without ever regaining contact with Earth, if you were gone from me --
Simon, do not be gone from me!
-- but even then, even so, we might have grown a lasting connection had I not wantonly broken it in my own selfish loneliness, thinking only of my own pleasure and not of the feelings of the man who saved my life. I was wrong, I know I was wrong, and deserve to be repaid in kind, but... but...
"You were gone for a long time, Elizabeth."
A long time, yes, a long cold time without you by my side, working with two men who had argued their wives onto the expedition, seeing them draw strength from each other when I had no one. Why did I not marry you out of hand before we left? Why did I not push harder to bring you with me, knowing we might never return? You would love -- you would have loved Atlantis, her towers, her balconies, her gardens that we are beginning to make green again.
A long time? Our ancestors -- Robert's and Elisabeth's and yours, if not mine -- subsisted on one red rose once a year for three long years! It has not been half that; could you not have waited? Could you not have trusted me?
Sixteen years I have known you; for fifteen years have we been affianced, fifteen since I persuaded you to my side, sixteen since I took that one last walking tour of Europe and Elisabeth Zenda (von Elphberg und Wittelsbach), great-granddaughter of Queen Flavia, knocked me down with her Lamborghini and into an adventure straight out of the nineteenth century. All this time I have been waiting and hoping. All this time I have been working -- having married once to disoblige my family -- to incline said family to leave us to ourselves, in some space of the world not worth the bother of overriding.
Not even Antarctica -- but Atlantis, yes, in Atlantis we could be happy, in Atlantis we need only bring the best of our birthworld; granted, one may be killed by Wraith, but it is no worse than men have lived with before. Than some men are living with now, to hear some of the Marines tell their tales.
And there is someone else?!
Simon, what has become of us?
Had she ever even known him?
In Antarctica, when she'd known that she would be offered Atlantis, she'd wondered and worried over what to do about Simon.
"The trouble is that he's both outside the program and too well-connected to drop off the face of the earth," Daniel had said, well-meaning. "We're having a hard enough time getting to take Carson here and Corporal Kaur, and she at least is married to Dr. Singh and otherwise alone in the world."
"Maybe you could tell him part of everything?" Carson had offered, face creased with familiar worry lines. "That you'd be gone indefinitely and out of contact?"
"He's my fiance. He deserves a voice in any decision I'd make. How can I ask him to make a decision when he won't have all the facts?"
Rodney, passing by, had stopped and snorted. "If he's any kind of man at all, he wouldn't stand in the way of you flying as far and as high as you can."
Startlingly poetic for Rodney. Is that why... she'd wondered, but never had both the courage and the presence of mind at once to ask.
Maybe she'd never known either of them.
Behind her, Simon walked away. Elizabeth stared into the candle flame; in the middle of the deepest red, there was a spot of clarity around the wick, a nucleus of invisible heat.
Golden as I'd kept my hair then, saffron as Elisabeth's, and as red as Robert Rassendyll's before it goes all to nothing, not even the color mine is now.
I was so happy making this dinner, even with the near-disaster with the vegetables. Finally it was all coming together, and we would be in Atlantis with nearly everyone I'd ever loved. I never saw this coming. I never see this coming. Hasn't it --
She'd thought her heart had broken the last time. She hadn't known then what heartbreak was.
She'd even told Simon about it.
"So we'd held each other and promised we'd get through it somehow and told each other our future was what we made of it, and the next day I came home and he'd cleaned out all his stuff -- and my cat's stuff -- and left a note saying 'Taking the government job, taking Tzu Hsi, live long and prosper, the divorce papers are in the mail.'" She'd shaken her head. "I hadn't had any idea things were that kind of wrong. It just... it came out of nowhere. That's the worst part, that I hadn't known it had gone wrong until it was over."
Simon's voice had been warm and quiet as he wrapped his arms around her from behind. "Maybe... maybe he couldn't bear to see you in pain?"
She'd laughed, with an edge but without the wild bitterness she'd have laden it with the year before. "For what, the first time in his life? I wouldn't have thought he was that good an actor."
"Maybe he was just a jerk, then."
"He was a jerk." She'd laughed again. "It's just... I used to think it was endearing."
They'd laughed together.
She should have realized, all this week, the way Simon had been behaving, that all was not sound. She'd known he'd been hesitant to put his name down. She should have known he was hesitant about going.
Hesitant? He never had any intention, from the first!
But she hadn't -- hadn't even known anything had gone wrong with them, with Elizabeth-and-Simon, until he'd declared it over...
Slowly, she licked her thumb, and put out the candle. Then she sank to her knees, and folded her arms on the edge of the table, and laid her head on them.
"Betsinda?" The familiar voice cut through to her some time -- a short time, a long time -- later. "That Simon said I should go in to you when I told him I was concerned with your welfare -- I came to meet with him when I couldn't reach you."
Elizabeth hastily pushed herself to her feet and turned to face the one woman whose attentions to a growing girl had obviously been motivated more by boredom than by calculation of effect. With an effort, she summoned the remains of her self-control to slow her to physical graciousness at least. "You knew. About Simon. Is that why you kept leaving messages?"
"Darling, why else?" It might be a losing battle that Angelique was fighting with her encroaching years, but she was hotly contesting every inch of the way. "If you would answer your telephone once in a while -- they have an invention called 'caller id' now, it's quite useful -- at any rate, we'd found no evidence that he'd told you, so I came in person. Did he only speak just now?"
Elizabeth didn't bother to mention that she had Caller ID. "He said... there's someone else." Her hard-won ethics battled for a moment against her desperate desire to know before she blurted out "Who...? It can't be Elisabeth again, he wouldn't have said he met her..."
"It certainly isn't her." Her visitor sniffed, taking a leather folder from under her arm and handing it to Elizabeth. "Even the NID stopped keeping more than the most cursory track of her after her fourth marriage... here. Natalie Bridger, alias thus and such, born in 1964, former delinquent, former convict, former operative for the NID, one of the red herrings they cut loose and left us chasing our own tail when we finally outright took it over."
Elizabeth opened the folder and stared down at the surveillance photos and reports. "Natalie's" short blonde hair was obviously graying brown at the roots; her still-lovely face was comfortably padded, and her laugh lines, while distinct, were not as evident as the crows' feet at her eyes. Her figure, too, had been more obviously let go than Elizabeth's own, although the second page noted that she worked out enough to be in more than reasonable shape. Apparently, she currently worked at a dog-sitting agency, and had met Simon when called to care for Lovell. In one shot, she and Simon were laughing as Lovell nearly knocked her over, leaving pawprints on her tan slacks.
"We could have a team on her in two minutes," Angelique said, uncharacteristically gently, "or set the duly constituted legal authorities -- " her tone made its habitual mockery of the words -- "after her in three."
Elizabeth stared down at Natalie Bridger's life, and memories welled up.
--Simon in Berlin, smiling. "My father would never have forgiven me if I wasn't here to support you, Ey-Liz. Or should I call you -- "--
--With Simon in the gardens of the White Palace. "Simon, would you feel the same way about me if I were nobody? Or if I were a 'Daughter of the Mob,' or the like?"--
--Standing shoulder to shoulder with Simon, mind desperately searching for the words to persuade him that this wasn't the nineteenth century, that he didn't need to make so great a sacrifice, staring at a face that, save for long privation, would have been identical as a reflection. "So, cousin, I have heard you not only play the stateswoman and the special agent better than myself, but the lover as well... no, Simon. You made a promise to Elizabeth Weir, I was told. For my part, I release you of any of my share in it; go and speak with Miss Weir." Quiet, sad laughter. "Let it be known by those who know that I too can play the queen's part in one last thing, at least."--
--Speaking with -- begging -- the heads of the "family" who'd reared her, and their grudging agreement that they would let one Simon Wallace alone if she did them a few small favors. Knowing that, had she been stronger, she would have left him alone if not with needy, near-spoiled Elisabeth; fearing that it was too late anyway; and believing, with all the fervor of a college student who has survived disaster and gone on, that there was hope and that some day, somehow, she would at last win free.--
And yet it was not these in the end that moved her, but memories of AP English courses and a birdlike grey-haired woman calling on students to read "Courage is more than a man with a gun in his hand" and "All right, then, I'll go to hell!" and "My mother was an Ape, and of course she couldn't tell me much about it. I never knew who my father was."
"You promised to let Simon alone," Elizabeth said, steadily, evenly. "So let him and the woman he has chosen alone."
Simon!
"Betsinda."
"Besides," she told Angelique, "he wouldn't come back to me, even so."
And she wished, child's wish that it was, that for one moment she could be someone who would not know this to be true.