The One We Loved and Left Behind by Signe (PG)

[laceymcbain.livejournal.com]

Fandom: STARGATE ATLANTIS
Pairing: Gen.
Author on LJ: oxoniensis
Author Website: grooves as spirals
Why this must be read: Another great author who hasn't appeared on the rec list here yet, and I'm doubly happy I can rec this just as her birthday approaches. It's a beautiful story about love and loss - about the team's love for Atlantis, how she changes them, and what leaving her behind would mean.

Many of the themes in the story have been explored before: an almost sentient Atlantis with a connection to John Sheppard; how the team would cope with leaving Atlantis behind. However, I don't think anyone's done it with quite this elegance. It's believable, and told with a certain distance, so that the story carries a sense of inevitability, which is perhaps what makes the story so profoundly sad. There is seemingly nothing the characters can do to change the outcome, and yet they have to try until all possibilities are exhausted. Until they themselves are exhausted.

The story's not completely without hope, but it is a moving comment on how the exploration of other worlds is not without cost. Definitely a story that deserves a much wider audience.


It starts, like bad things often do, so gradually that no one notices. Or, if they do notice that something is wrong, or even not so much wrong as not quite right, they put it down to a system error, user error, tiredness, any of a hundred excuses that have been valid before and will be valid again.

But it isn't an error.

And with hindsight, of course, it's obvious. The clues they missed, the warnings they ignored. Hindsight's a taunting bitch.

*

Elizabeth's is the first warning they can be certain of. Earlier clues may have been there, but they'll never be sure. They were too busy trying to survive – they need to remember that. They were caught up in the day-to-day business of living, so there wasn't time to look at everything, measure everything, listen to everything. They all tell each other that – that it wasn't their fault, they couldn't have seen the problem any earlier – but they all still blame themselves.

Elizabeth especially, now they understand how it started. Their Elizabeth, that is, even though, technically, it wasn't her that started it, and there was no way she could have guessed what might happen.

The other Elizabeth's warning is on tape though, so they can listen to it repeatedly and kick themselves for not seeing the meaning in it. Not hearing anything more than the ramblings of a ten thousand year old woman who could barely keep awake for a more than a few minutes at a time.

"It's too warm," she said. Beckett took her temperature and pronounced it normal – as normal as could be expected for a woman who'd been frozen for a thousand years, he added, and McKay interrupted to say she hadn't been frozen, per se, that metabolic stasis was something altogether different from simple freezing, and that carried on for a while – and no one thought anything of it. And then they were too excited about the possibility of finding the outposts with the stored ZPMs, and it was too late to listen to her anymore, even if they had understood the need, understood the warning in those three simple words.

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