The Many Worlds Space Show Crossover Challenge

Professional publication opportunity

2013-04-11T14:23:42Z

My name is Angelia Sparrow. I've been a member here for some years and written a few multiverse stories.

These days, I run Inkstained Succubus Press.

We've got an anthology call out right now that begs for talented writers to get published and get paid. Filed off is a collection of fanfiction turned into original fiction. Any fandom, any pairing, any heat level.

If your story is between 5000 and 10000 words, and you'd like to give this a try, check out the submission guidelines at http://www.inkstainedsuccubus.com All anthologies pay royalties on a quarterly schedule.

(We have a number of anthologies open right now, and are always reading stand alone work)

Thank you for your time, and my apologies if you see this more than once.

Fic: Everything You Ever (ST:VOY/Farscape, Q&Scorpius)

2009-08-03T19:31:44Z

Massively late, but better late than never. This was for June 24th, prompt: "Q & Scorpius". I believe that was originally Andraste's prompt, once upon a time, so this story is dedicated to her. :-) Also, works in references to two of my previous years' Multiverse fics.

Everything You Ever

fic (An Officer and a Con Artist) Andromeda/ST:TNG)

2009-06-30T13:27:31Z

Title: An Officer and a Con Artist
Fandoms: Andromeda and Star Trek: The Next Generation
Author: karrenia
Words: 1186
Rating: General Audiences
Prompt: June 30, Andromeda/Star Trek Q and Uncle Sid
Disclaimer: Andromeda belongs to Tribune Entertainment and Fireworks Productions as do all of the characters mentioned here. Star Trek: The Next Generation and all of the characters who appear here or are mentioned belong to Paramount and its various creators, producers etc; they are not mine.

"An Officer and a Con Artist" by Karen

"You ever have one of those days when you've felt like someone was walking over your grave; let me tell you something it sounds just as bad it feels. For someone in my line, wait, scratch that, make that profession. There that sounds much better; it is not uncommon to escape one narrow escape only to plunge headlong into another close shave; but this last experience was different, and don't ask me to explain exactly what made it so damn different, but I can't not then and certainly not now."

"Call me Uncle Sid," he began with off-center wry grin.

"Why should we?" growled the big dark man in the mustard yellow uniform; a security officer of some sort he had been duly informed.

"Well... It started as an ordinary day, relaxing with a glass of sherry in my office with a few when should show up standing right smack dab in front of desk, a desk where I currently had my feet up and a stack of data wafers that I had planned to peruse once I had thoroughly enjoyed the benefits of my latest successful scam. That last scam, oh it was a thing of beauty, but I digress because I'm talking about 'him."

"Could you be a bit more specific," Doctor Beverly Crusher prodded she ran a hand-held medical device of some kind over his prone frame on the examination table and frowned at the results. For a man of his age and obviously standard of living
the usual vital signs read as all within normal, however there was the troubling fact that his white blood count was abnormally high and there were elevated levels of chronotron particles in his blood stream as well as residues of a chemical agent that was slightly
more troubling in that she could identify it. If pressed she might think it was an illegal substance of some kind but without further testing she could not be certain.

She made a mental note to press the man further on the matter..

In the back of her mind Beverly realized that the readings were consistent with another stranger who had recently visited the ship, one Okuna who had claimed to be a time-traveler from a future timeline and had then been revealed as someone who had quite literally stumbled

across a piece of future technology but in reality had been from Earth's past In the back of her mind Beverly thought, "This can't be right. I doesn't make any sense. And even if half of what this Uncle Sid was true than he had an encounter with the space-faring
entity known as Q.'

In a few moments her suspicions were confirmed when Uncle Sid said. "He called himself Q. And here's the kicker, except for the clothes and the accent everything else about him, on the surface that is, was the same?"

"The same as what?" asked Captain Picard.

Sid finally sat up straight up in the examination table for the first time since the 'interview' had begun and made and held direct eye contact with the captain. "Look, I got rights! If this is some kind of weird interrogation I deserve to know straightaway!"

That was when Counselor Troi stepped in and attempted to calm him down. "Just relax. There is nothing to be concerned over. It is just that when you said the stranger who came to visit you in your office called himself Q?"

Sid continued to ramble on "At least I had to assume I figured it was safe to assume to designate the stranger with that gender, but one never really can safely assume nowadays, can they?

Sid shrugged and continued with his narration, conscious of the eyes on him; and a half-remembered tune from Old Earth began to weave through his memory and perhaps unaware that he was doing so he began humming along in tune with that same melody.

"Do continue," urged the one identified to him as Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

"Well he had sandy hair and wore an official looking uniform with silver studs on the collar of a design and cut that I had never seen before," Sid continued his nonchalant attitude and unshakable confidence in himself and his ability to either outwit or out talk his way out of any given situation no matter how difficult shaken by his sudden and quite unexpected transport and subsequent appearance in the sickbay of a ship called "Enterprise."

He then flashed a cocky and ingraining smile at the female doctor and then another at the dark haired female crew member they called Counselor Troi who then exchanged meaningful glances with each other and their captain when Sid had begun his narration.

"Yeah," Uncle Sid replied sitting back and appeared somewhat mollified in both his tone and demeanor. "Like I was saying, the kicker of all this was that he had my face! My damn face. And trust me it wasn't a mask. I mean, isn't that what one naturally assumes when you're confronted with one's very own personal doppelganger?"

"Doppelganger? Mr. Data?

"A word originating from an Old Earth language known as German. It is believed to have supernatural overtones and if one should be confronted one it is assumed that he or she may soon experience a traumatic experiences even up to foretelling one's untimely demise.. Also....."

Captain Picard held up his hand to silence the android with the yellow eyes. Sid had seen androids before in all shapes and sizes even prior to the fall of the High Guard Commonwealth and he felt he knew pretty much what they were like and how they would react and he understood that Picard would naturally engage the android for information but not want to continue to listen while it rambled on the definition, entomology and syntax of the word. There were limits, it seems even in this, to borrow a time-honored phrase, 'brave new world' in which he currently found himself in.

"What are you trying to say," growled Mr. Worf.

Uncle Sid turned to the big security officer. "What I'm trying to say is that Q, or whatever the hell he wants to call himself, looked exactly like me. And then before I could blink or protest snapped his fingers and I ended up in your
damn infirmary!"

Picard nodded. "It makes a certain kind of logic, as eccentric as that sounds. Q, as we've all seen from previous experiences is well incorrigible, mischievous and quixotic. But why assume the identity of man that you are planning on..."he trailed off.

"Shanghaiing?" supplied Dr. Crusher.

Picard nodded. "Exactly, Doctor."

"I don't know. All know is that I am utterly exhausted. It's been a difficult day or night, oh what the hell." Sid rolled over on his side and glanced over at Dr. Crusher. "Doc, give me another shot

"Thank you for your cooperation Uncle Sid," continued Captain Picard, and I realize how trying this must be for you."

"Jean Luc, " she replied. "Perhaps it would be a good idea to pick this up in the morning?"

"Make it so," Picard replied.

Fic: Connection (Farscape/Blake's 7)

2009-06-29T21:01:54Z

Title: Connection
Author: AstroGirl
Fandoms: Farscape/Blake's 7
Characters: Jenna Stannis & Pilot
Rating/Warnings: G-rated. Mild spoilers for FS's "The Way We Weren't" (season 2) and B7's "Spacefall" (episode 2).
Length: 379 words

CONNECTION

Tentatively, Jenna touches one of the creature's arms. Its wrinkled gray surface is warm and dry, and softer than it looks. He ought to be terrifying, she thinks. But he's not. He's beautiful.

"And you're physically connected to the ship?" she asks, a touch of wonder in her voice.

"Not only physically. Moya and I are neurally linked."

"Neurally? Does that mean you have access to each other's minds?" She hesitates before the last word, unsure whether it applies. Does a living ship have a mind? A computer can, if it's sophisticated enough, but she hasn't enough experience with animals to know how complex they need to be before they develop something she'd call a mind.

"In a manner of speaking," says Pilot. "We can communicate a variety of thoughts and emotions. And I am tuned into Moya's perceptions. I feel what she feels."

Jenna closes her eyes for a moment, remembering the feeling of Zen in her mind. Completeness and connection and a keen, tender awareness of her own human self, complex and flawed and beautiful. And beneath it all, half-understood but deeply felt, the sensation of what it was like to be Zen, to have a hyperspace reactor for a heart and starlight falling naked on your skin.

"Like being completely known," she says, barely a whisper.

"Excuse me?" says Pilot. And then, surprised, "Are you crying?"

She isn't, not really. Not much. Jenna Stannis has never been someone who cries. But a massive claw gently brushes a drop of moisture from her cheek.

She touches the claw as he begins to pull it back, curling her hand around it softly. "Tell me what it's like," she says. "Tell me all about yourself. And about Moya."

"Are you sure?" he asks, slowly. As alien as his face is, she can read it with no difficulty. Why are you interested in me?, it says. I'm only the Pilot. People mostly only expect me to fly the ship. She knows that feeling. It's part of why she left the Federation.

"I'm sure," she says. "Tell me everything. From the beginning."

He hesitates for a moment. Then, "When I was young," he says, "I so very much wanted to see the stars..."

Jenna holds his claw, and listens, and smiles.

Fic: From the Stars, Knowledge (Star Trek: Voyager/ Firefly)

2009-06-29T15:29:38Z

Title: From the Stars, Knowledge
Author: mandysbitch
Fandoms: Star Trek: Voyager/Firefly
Characters: Janeway, Voyager and Firefly ensembles.
Word Count: 8371
Author's Notes: Written for multiverse5000, June 26. My prompt: "Voyager's new holoprogram is a space western." My apologies for being late - but I made it in the end!

These ships aren’t even warp capable. She doesn’t know how they stay in the sky.

A Harvest of Wild Oats [Marvel Universe/Firefly, gen]

2009-06-29T05:24:43Z

Title: A Harvest of Wild Oats
Prompt: Marvel Universe/Firefly. It turns out that Corsair is Malcolm Reynold's father.
Characters: Alex, Scott, Nathan, Corsair, Mal
Rating: PG
Word Count: 6,000
Summary: What begins as an intergalactic fishing trip only manages to get more complicated.

Notes: Post-Serenity. For the X-folks, takes place after Alex's aborted wedding, when Cable was holed up drunk in a safehouse after demoralizing circumstances, and some time during New X-Men. I say this for general orientation, but any backstory is explained in the fic, so is not important for reading comprehension.

A Harvest of Wild Oats

FIC: Still Breathing Hope (Blake's 7/ST:TNG)

2009-06-27T06:57:01Z

Title: Still Breathing Hope
Author: Kathryn Andersen kerravonsen
Fandoms: Blake's 7/ST:TNG
Written For: Multiverse 2009 multiverse5000 prompt for June 27th
Summary: A dying Cally is offered a choice. AU for "Terminal".
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 900
Author's Note: I thought I wouldn't be able to do this, but I did!
More notes here

It should have hurt to breathe. The beam that had her pinned had surely broken her ribs when it knocked her down. But she felt no pain. In fact, she felt nothing at all; nothing below her neck. That's when Cally realized she was as good as dead. A broken back wasn't something that they could fix, even with the resources of the Liberator. And the Liberator was gone.

She hoped Vila had made it out of the complex alive. She doubted very much that anyone would be able to make it back inside; the destruction was too great. A tear trickled down the side of her face; this was the worst kind of death: purposeless, silent, and alone.

She kept breathing. She could hear the creak and rumble of aftershocks; the underground complex moaned and twisted in pain, as she could not. She wondered if she would bleed to death before she was no longer able to breathe. She blinked as grit and dust drifted in the air.

One more breath. And another. She closed her eyes. Time passed, slow as a glacier. It was minutes or hours later when she heard the footsteps. She opened her eyes, but all she saw was the cracked roof. She licked her cracked lips, and tried to call out, but all that came out was a moan. But it was enough; the footsteps turned in her direction.

A shadow over her, a hand checking the pulse on her neck.

"Cally?"

She recognised the voice. //Avon!//

"How badly are you hurt?"

//I am dying.//

"Not yet," Avon said. It was hard for her to tell whether it was a denial or a statement of fact; his voice would have been just as flat in either case.

//My back is broken; that's not something I can recover from.//

"Probably not," he said dryly.

//Don't leave me.//

"It looks like you're the one who is leaving." Nonetheless, he cradled her cheek in his hand, a touch too tentative to be called a caress.

They were silent.

Suddenly, Cally felt a presence that hadn't been there a moment ago.

"How touching."

The dim light illuminated a figure dressed in flowing crimson robes, in the form of a man with a sardonic smile and very short hair. He wasn't a man, of course. His presence was much more powerful than any human or Auron.

//Avon! Behind you!//

"He can't hear you at the moment," the figure said. "Much more convenient to have our little chat without interruptions."

She realized that Avon hadn't moved or reacted to the presence of the other.

//What have you done to him?//

"Nothing... permanent," the figure said.

//Let him go!//

"Or you'll - what? Punch me in the nose? You can't even stand up."

//I will not cooperate with you.//

"Please yourself," he said. "You can call me Q."

//Q? What sort of name is that?//

"It's my name."

//You are not one of the gods.//

"Me? One of those frauds like the Thaarn? Of course not."

//What do you want with me, Q?//

"I want to make you an offer."

//An offer I can't refuse? I refuse.//

Q laughed. "Oh, you remind me of Jean-Luc; so self-righteous, the both of you." He stepped closer, and crouched down beside her. "Do you want to die?"

//Not pointlessly. Do you?//

"Q can't die, not in the way you mean. But I can get you out of this..." He waved his hand over her still body.

//What is your price?//

"My price?"

//These kind of bargains usually have a price.//

Q smirked. "Well, there would have to be somebody else lying here instead of you."

//No.//

"No?"

//I will not buy my life with another's.//

"Not even an enemy's life?"

//Servalan is dead.//

"No she isn't."

//Even if I believed you, my answer is still no.//

"Why?"

//I told you I would refuse.//

Q smiled. "Oh, I so like it when they're a challenge." He put a hand on his chin. "Hmmmm. You want do destroy the Federation don't you? I could give you that power."

//Really? And your price for this offer?//

"You would never be able to see your friends again. In return, I would give you the power of the Q. You could reshape the Federation in your own image."

//That would make me a worse tyrant than Servalan. No. I refuse.//

Q frowned. "I offer you the power of a god and you refuse?"

//It gets easier with practice.//

"Not even a little tempted?"

//It is not the temptation, but the action, that matters.//

"So you are tempted," Q crowed.

//Who would not be? But I do not want to become like you, toying with mortals for your own amusement. Leave me. Let me die in peace.//

"No, I don't think I will," Q said slowly. He snapped his fingers, and pain like fire burned through her nerves. She gasped. He snapped his fingers again, and the pain vanished, but she could feel her limbs, pinned beneath the fallen girder. He snapped his fingers a third time, and the weight pressing her down became lighter. Q leaned forward and whispered in her ear, "Good luck, daughter of Auron; you're going to need it."

Then he vanished.

Cally blinked and stared at where he had been.

"Cally, what is it?" Avon said.

Cally cautiously moved her fingers, then her arm. There was no pain, but she could feel, she could move.

"It looks like I'm going to live after all," she said.

Author's Note:
The prompt for this was ST:TNG/Blake's 7: Q with any combination of Blake's 7 characters or universe.

This is a completely different story than what I had intended when I claimed the prompt. It was going to be crack!fic with Avon and Q, but then when I was listening to the song "Don't Cry" by Hayley Jensen, my muse waved a flag in front of my face and said "This! This! Doesn't this song remind you of Cally's death?" and I listened.

Fic: Unwilling Oracle (PG, Farscape/Deep Space Nine)

2009-06-26T07:04:15Z

Title: Unwilling Oracle
Author: beatrice_otter
Fandoms: Farscape/Star Trek: Deep Space 9
Characters: John Crichton, Kira Nerys
Word Count: 1869
Written For: Multiverse 2009 (multiverse5000 ), June 25
Summary: John Crichton has wormholes in his head. On Bajor, this makes him an oracle whether he wants it or not.
AN: I don't think I really did this prompt justice, not least because I had problems writing Crichton's voice. I would love to see what someone else could do with it.

( She’d worked with the Emissary for seven years; she could handle this. )

FIC: Three Fates, Watching (B7/TOS, PG13, 1/1)

2009-06-24T21:09:27Z

Title: Three Fates, Watching
Author: kangeiko
Fandoms: Star Trek: The Original Series / Blake's 7
Characters: mirror!Kirk, Blake
Rating: PG13
Timelines: Pre-series (mirror!TOS), The Way Back (Blake's 7).
Summary: When Jim Kirk is six years old, his parents make a deal on his behalf.
Author's Note: Written for multiverse5000, this was ridiculously hard to write, and is possibly version 8 or 9 of attempt 6 to write this story. Many thanks to alittlebriton and mizzykitty for their invaluable assistance; if it makes any sense, it is entirely up to their efforts.

Three Fates, Watching

Star Trek /Blake's 7 Cally and Spock Prompt "Telepathy"

2009-06-24T00:12:33Z

Title: Exploring Differences
Word Count: 1666
Rating: Gen
Disclaimer: Star Trek and Blake's 7 do not belong to me, they belong to their respective creators.
Notes: is a sequel to The Rescue

Spock! Her delight sang through his mind. Spock almost smiled in return before he firmed his mental control.

“I see you are somewhat recovered.” Spock said, halting by the bed in his usual relaxed pose. His long arms lightly clasped behind his back.

“Sorry, I did it again.” Cally smiled wanly. “Just it hurts to speak aloud.”

“Ah, in which case, I shall ensure privacy before we continue.” Spock began to turn away. A sound somewhere in between a laugh and a groan escaped Cally. Spock regarded her with a raised eyebrow.

“Is that necessary?” she gasped when she could speak.

“I would prefer it. I find it difficult to maintain emotional control when conversing mentally.”

Cally settled back against the pillow as she awaited his return. In spite of the painkillers it felt like her whole body had lost a fight with Vila's mythical Warg Strangler. Dr McCoy had offered to to give her stronger medication, but Cally had refused. She preferred to be alert. Even when she knew, intellectually, there was nothing on the Enterprise that was a threat. The word "Federation" had her tensing in fear. She closed her eyes, trying to distance herself from the pain. She had no wish to inflict that on the Vulcan.

She sensed his return like a cool hand on her forehead. Which on the surface was ridiculous, considering Vulcans had a higher body temperature than humans. Unlike them however, his presence always felt cool to her as his mental shields allowed only the slightest of emotions to escape.

Are we private then? her amusement permeated the words inside his head.

“We are.” Spock informed her gravely as he took a seat next to her bed. He stretched out a hand, his long, slim fingers brushed her face lightly as he sought the contact points that his people used to initiate mental contact. Aurons had no need to touch to communicate with their minds.

Dr McCoy has instructed me to keep this brief. He does not wish me to tire you. Spock's mental contact rippled through her. Cally smiled, it was not just McCoy who was concerned. For a race that espoused emotional control, Spock's feelings were all too easy to sense. However she wouldn't dream of insulting him by pointing that out.

You are amused? Spock's puzzlement echoed around the phrase.

A little, Cally replied. For an Auron, speaking mind to mind was never considered a private matter.

Never? Spock raised an eyebrow.

Cally could feel a blush rising. Not among friends or clone sisters, no.

I did not wish to cause you discomfort, Spock apologised. For A Vulcan, speaking mind to mind is rare.

So how often have you done it? The question slipped out before she had time to call it back. Spock's touch on her face had not been tentative, but confident and practised.

That is considered private. His rebuke was gentle.

Now it's my turn to say I'm sorry. Spock gasped as her guilt, embarrassment and regret washed over him. He had a mental flash of a much younger Cally overcome with mortification for “speaking” out of turn.

Cally took a deep, calming breath trying to regain her own balance and composure. Pain lanced through her as she shifted slightly. Her moan of agony was echoed by Spock as he broke the contact between them. He sank into the chair by the bed and closed his eyes as he fought to regain control and resettle his features into their normal impassive mask.

I think McCoy was right I need to rest. Her words drifted into his mind without a hint of the torment Spock now knew she felt. He opened his dark eyes and studied her.

Cally was staring straight up at the ceiling, deliberately not meeting his gaze. A single tear tracked from her eye to the pillow cradling her head. If he accepted her words at face value, he would leave her to battle the pain on her own.

He found that idea unpalatable. Dr McCoy had already mentioned her unwillingness to take strong analgesics. However could she learn the techniques a Vulcan would normally employ to block it? To instruct her, he would have to expose himself to her pain once more. He considered her for along moment, noticing the ragged rise and fall of her chest as she sought to contain the pain herself.

“If you would allow it, I may be able to help,” Spock offered. Her eyes flew to his face and then closed tight. A wave of pain and nausea washed over him as he reached out and gently touched the meld points at the side of her head and face.

Cally's agony was not just physical, but mental too. His contact with her mind, had reminded her all too sharply of how much she had lost when Servalan had destroyed her people. The bond she shared with her sisters brutally severed by their terrible deaths.

At first there was only pain. It seared Spock like white, hot fire. He had just controlled his reaction to that when anguish and an aching aloneness engulfed him in a suffocating black tide. He battled against the emotions washing over and through him. He was aware his own face had grown wet from tears Vulcans were not meant to shed.

In spite of the turmoil, he continued to reach for Cally. Finally, deep within, he could sense the core of her being curled up tight against the emotions and pain that surrounded her.
Spock! You shouldn't be here. Cally protested, trying to push him out of her mind.

Spock resisted initially. However, realising it was causing her more pain, he reluctantly withdrew. He could not force the meld as he did not wish to harm her further. He lifted his hand away from her face as he came back into himself. Slowly, shakily he wiped the tears from his face. With the contact broken Spock endeavoured to regain control of himself. Spock closed his eyes willing his heart to beat more slowly, instead of pounding like a trip hammer. Calm settled over him once more, easing the turmoil inside his mind.

Cally lay unmoving on the bed, her hands balled into fists as she fought against the torment that gripped her. He reached out his hand again to make contact and then hesitated. He would not benefit Cally if he became overwhelmed again, nor did she appear to welcome his intrusion. Perhaps a different approach was required.

His long fingers encircled her wrist. Spock closed his eyes as he tried to sense what she was feeling. Even though his perception of her emotions was dimmed. Spock could feel them ripping her apart inside.

Cally I am here! Spock projected to her, uncertain if she would be able to hear him. Cally's hand turned and she grabbed his wrist, her fingers clutching him tightly as if seeking an anchor to cling to.

Spock! So alone! Fear and desolation knifed through him. Spock ignored the rational part of his mind that advised a breaking of the contact to protect his own self.

I am here Cally, Spock responded, projecting calm along with the thought.

Cally's turbulent emotions rushed through him with the force of a howling hurricane. Spock could feel his shields crumbling before their onslaught, scorching his mind with liquid fire. Spock hung on firmly to his own sense of being. He knew It was only a matter of time before he lost himself totally. Spock continued to project tranquility and peace to her, trying to soothe the pain and fear that was radiating from her.

Spock! Cally reached desperately for him.

I am with thee, Spock reassured her. You are safe.

It hurts! Cally moaned as her pain knifed through them both.

Let me help, Spock whispered in her mind. His teeth clenched from the agony they shared. Spock gently advanced further into her mind. He took great care not to cause her any more pain. Finally, his probing thoughts found what they were seeking. The pain was a incandescent fire, burning at the centre of her being. Briefly wishing a Healer was monitoring them in the event of anything going wrong, Spock exerted pressure on the appropriate nerve endings.

The cessation of pain was so abrupt it sent him reeling slightly away from her.

No! don't go! Cally pleaded, terror enveloping her.

I will stay with thee, Spock informed her gravely.

What did you do? Cally sighed There's no pain!

I have blocked it, temporarily. Spock replied I will have to remove the block soon, to avoid damaging you.

Oh, how soon? Cally raised a querying eyebrow.

Spock considered her for a moment. I am not sure, your physiology in that respect is not similar to human. However 12 hours should be sufficient. Once you are rested, if you are willing, we will see if you can learn to control the pain yourself. I suggest you try to get some sleep.

Now that is the best offer I've had all day. Cally smiled.

The tension inside Cally slowly eased as he continued to assure her of his cool presence. As he felt her mind spiralling down into a natural sleep, Spock withdrew. He still maintained a light connection with her slumbering mind.

He opened his eyes to find Dr McCoy glowering over him, a medical tricorder in his hand.

“Just what the hell do you...” Bones began.

Spock placed a hand over his lips, indicating silence. “She is sleeping doctor I would prefer it if you did not wake her.”

“I thought I told you to keep it short” McCoy hissed in a loud whisper.

“Indeed.”Spock replied. “Now if you do not mind I too would prefer to rest.” He closed his eyes. Spock heard McCoy stomping off, muttering under his breath. Most of the words, Spock couldn't decipher but "Vulcan" figured in among them.

Fic: Oaths Between Men and Lions (Babylon 5/Space:Above and Beyond, PG-13)

2009-06-23T03:52:49Z

Title: Oaths Between Men and Lions
Author: bessemerprocess
Fandoms: Babylon 5/Space: Above and Beyond
Character: Susan Ivanova/Shane Vansen
Rating: P
Disclaimer: All television shows, movies, books, and other copyrighted material referred to in this work, and the characters, settings, and events thereof, are the properties of their respective owners. As this work is an interpretation of the original material and not for-profit, it constitutes fair use. Reference to real persons, places, or events are made in a fictional context, and are not intended to be libelous, defamatory, or in any way factual.
Summary: Vansen adapts.
Notes: thanks to janamara for the beta. For mutliverse5000

Oaths Between Men and Lions

Fic: Cloud City Blues (in Eight Bars) [Doctor Who / Star Wars]

2009-06-22T22:37:00Z

TITLE: Cloud City Blues (in Eight Bars)
AUTHOR: alsodinosaurs
CHARACTERS/PAIRING: Donna Noble, Lando Calrissian, Ten
RATING: PG
WORDCOUNT: 2800
SUMMARY: A city in the clouds. It sounded a lot better in theory.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Written for the prompt Doctor Who/Star Wars: Donna Noble and Lando Calrissian.

The spot where they had parked the TARDIS earlier was suffering from a rather painful lack of time and space ships.

FIC: A Heart That Beats in Time With Yours (Firefly/SGA)

2009-06-22T07:10:36Z

A Heart That Beats in Time With Yours
by Shaye

SUMMARY: She was fine. Really. (Kaylee in Atlantis; sequel to The Monster in the Closet)
RATING: PG-13
LENGTH: 2200
NOTES: For Multiverse 2009. Posted without the benefit of beta-reading, so all errors are mine. This is a sequel to the story I wrote for Multiverse 2006 in which Kaylee and Rodney were imprisoned together by Reavers - that story dealt with potentially triggery content, and this one deals with the aftermath, so be forewarned. You probably don't have to read that one first, but this might make more sense if you do. This story is set after Serenity/after SGA 2.20, so at this point there's no Keller, and Kaylee's presence on Atlantis isn't meant as a commentary on that score.

+++

Kaylee woke slowly, the world a haze of unfamiliar voices and undefined sensation. She fought it for a long time, drifting in and out, surfacing only long enough to know that she didn't want to move just yet, repelled by the sharp smell of antiseptic and the specter of pain that hovered just beyond her grasp.

When she finally opened her eyes, squinting against the brightness of the room, she saw a pale, bleary mass at her bedside. A hand reached out to squeeze her own and someone said, "Thank god, you're awake!"

She blinked gummy eyelids, tried to reach up and rub them, but her arms felt like they were made of lead. "Simon?" she asked, surprised at the weakness of her voice.

There was a pause, and the hand in hers withdrew. "N-no. What do you - do you remember anything?" It didn't sound like Simon.

Kaylee blinked again, and her vision cleared. She knew the anxious figure peering down at her. It was Dr. McKay, his features full of angry red scars where someone had removed all the metal the Reavers had shoved into his face. She frowned, letting her eyes slip closed again as everything came back to her. It was all kind of a blur after the two of them escaped, and he did whatever it was he had to do in order to get home. She knew he asked her to come along, and she accepted. She vaguely recalled him dragging her through what looked like a wall of water at the alpha site, and a flash of colored lights that reminded her of the time she'd eaten those bad mushrooms. There wasn't anything after that, but she figured that was enough.

"Yeah," she said dully. "I remember it all." He squeezed her hand again and didn't ask her who Simon was, and for that she was grateful.

+

It was a couple of weeks before they released her from the infirmary, and even then she couldn't quite walk on her own. One of the nurses had helped her bathe and wash her hair, though, and she felt clean for the first time in...

Well. She felt clean.

Rodney came to wheel her off to her new quarters. She smiled a little when she saw him, reaching up to tweak the ear the Reavers had cut up so bad. It looked a little pink maybe, but otherwise good as new. "Hey. What's this?"

He smirked, giving her chair a good push to get them going. "Oh, Carson has this machine that regrows tissue. Looks good, doesn't it?"

It did, and come to think of it, the scars on his face looked like they were fading fast. Pretty soon, Kaylee bet, there wouldn't be anything there at all. "That the same thing Doc says he's going to use on my leg?"

The nasty wound the Reavers had given her on her calf would take awhile to heal, even with Dr. Beckett's fancy machines. She'd gotten a good look at her leg once when they changed the bandages, and Kaylee was just grateful that she'd never really seen it when the infection was at its worst.

"Yep," he said, rounding a corner and pausing a moment to let a chattering group of people pass.

Kaylee waited until they were out of earshot, toying with the tie on her robe. "Won't be long," she said, unaccountably nervous, "and it'll be like nothing bad ever happened."

Rodney stopped and looked down at her, stricken. He took a deep breath and said, "You're going to have to see Heightmeyer. I've started already. Elizabeth insisted."

"Who's Heightmeyer?" Kaylee asked, worried she wouldn't like the answer.

"The shrink," he sighed, and started pushing her chair again.

"Huh."

They rolled on in silence for a moment, then they came to a junction and Rodney said, "Hey, you hungry?"

As a matter of fact, she was. They entered the mess, as he called it, and for the first time Kaylee realized this was an actual military installation. He'd never really mentioned that part. She wasn't too sure how she felt about that, since all their equipment was shiny and it reminded her just a little of the Alliance. But Captain and Zoe had been soldiers too, and for now at least, Kaylee was content to assume that these people were the good guys.

"Oh, you should meet Shepherd," Rodney said, and changed directions.

"Shepherd what?" Kaylee asked, feeling a little pang.

Rodney frowned. "Uh, John Sheppard. Lieutenant Colonel. He's my teammate. Oh, and the military leader of Atlantis."

"Oh," Kaylee said, thinking of strawberries. Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard gave her his apple, which was really nice. But not quite the same.

+

Dr. Heightmeyer turned out to be a real nice lady, with long blonde hair and a soft, genuine smile. Kaylee felt instantly at ease around her, which made it all the worse when she started asking these gently devastating questions and Kaylee just fell apart.

She knew, of course she knew what a shrink was, but it wasn't until then that Kaylee realized they were going to try to make her talk about what happened on that Reaver ship. She didn't even know how long she'd been their plaything, but it was months and months and that wasn't something you got over just by talking.

She was fine. Really. So long as she didn't talk about it or think about it, she was fine. Just like all the other bad stuff that had happened to her - getting tied up by Jubal Early, for instance. Given enough time, she could even think about those things. See, fine?

Kaylee wasn't sure what she thought the shrink was going to do, actually. Maybe talk about being here, separated from all her friends with no way of going back. The decision was easy at the time - no way she could really go back after what she'd been through anyway. Better to start fresh. Put it behind her and move on with her life.

Except when she started thinking about what it really meant that she'd never see them again - Simon, and the Captain and Inara and everyone - and her family, her Ma and Pa and all of them - Kaylee realized maybe she did have something to talk about on that score after all. And that seemed fine with the doc, too.

Dr. Heightmeyer tried a few more times to ask her about the Reavers, tried at least to understand. "They fought the Wraith, and they're, what," she said, "human? Really?"

Kaylee clenched her teeth tight and thought about Miranda. "Were," she gritted out. "They were."

Heightmeyer frowned, and when she said, "It's okay, we don't have to talk about it if you don't want to," Kaylee was under no illusions that she meant it on a permanent basis.

Really, she'd been fine.

+

Kaylee walked away from Dr. Heightmeyer's office on her own two feet, unsteady due less to her still-healing leg than because of the fact that she was shaking.

She bypassed the turn that would take her to the control room, where Rodney said he'd wait for her, and walked instead down a series of passages that she didn't think she'd ever seen before, but Kaylee was used to the twisty layout you might find in a spacefaring vessel. She walked until the lights started to get dim, and the crowds she passed in the corridors started to thin out and then finally dissipate altogether. She was looking for something, she just didn't know what.

It was really quiet this far away from everyone, but there was something else, almost like something she couldn't quite hear. Exhaustion hit her all at once, in a wave, and she carefully lowered herself to the ground, leaning back against a bulkhead and closing her eyes.

She sighed, slowly relaxing enough that the shaking stopped. She felt more comfortable here than she had in a long while. Her palm pressed into the floor, and her eyes snapped open when she suddenly realized why.

Rodney had told her, hadn't her? It's a city that's almost alive, he'd said, back on that Reaver ship when she'd agreed to come with him. She'd forgotten, hadn't felt it. Hadn't had a chance to.

But now Kaylee pressed her ear to the bulkhead, caressing the crystalline structures that let off a warm glow, and she heard it. The city had a heart that beat in time with her own and a soul that never slept, watching over them all.

Kaylee grinned, looking upward and marveling at what she'd never seen before. She hauled herself to her feet and followed the low throb of the city, half-heard and half-felt in the hand she trailed along the wall.

She rounded a corner into a room twice as bright as the passageway. A big chair was placed right in the center, lit from the inside with more crystals and looking like a throne out of some kind of fairy tale. Kaylee approached it slowly, and carefully stepped up on the platform and sat down.

It was a lot more comfortable than she thought it would be. She felt strange, almost like there was a question pushing at the back of her mind, or a word on the tip of her tongue, but somewhere just out of reach. She's almost alive, she thought, and said, "Hello? Anybody there?"

There was no answer, not inside or out. That didn't matter - Serenity wasn't alive but Kaylee could understand her just the same. She felt safe here. Comfortable. Dr. Heightmeyer's office and the Reavers were far behind her now.

The next thing she knew, Rodney was frantically shaking her by the shoulder. She started awake, clutching at the arms of the chair. He was holding a little datapad in his hand and babbling frantically about not being able to find her and talking to Heightmeyer and thinking the worst.

"It's okay," she said, wiping sleep from her eyes and running a hand through her hair. "I just felt like walking, that's all. I could feel her."

"Her?"

"Atlantis. I could just feel her, and I started walking and I ended up here."

Rodney rolled his eyes. "Think about where we are in the universe," he said, sounding bored and a little disgusted.

"But I - I don't know where we are in the universe."

He made an impatient gesture. "Doesn't matter. Just think 'where we are in the universe.'"

She did.

"Well?" he asked. "Are you going to do it or what?"

"I am. Nothing happened."

His whole demeanor changed, then. He was almost cheery. "Huh. Guess you don't have the gene after all. When you said you could - I was so sure. What did you mean when you said you could feel her?"

Now was Kaylee's turn to roll her eyes. She climbed out of the chair, giving it a little caress and promising to come back soon. "I'm a mechanic. She's a machine. It's really not that hard."

Rodney shot her a look, leading her out of the room and back toward a transporter. "Isn't that my line?" he grumbled.

+

The guts of a puddlejumper were different from any other shuttle she'd ever worked on, but once Dr. Zelenka gave her a quick rundown of the systems to get her started, Kaylee had caught on pretty fast, and they let her work on them a lot. It was a gorgeous day, the sun shining in a cloudless sky, and so they'd parked the jumper out on one of the landing pads to tinker around with her touchy environmental system. Radek was small, but Kaylee was smaller, and it was a pretty tight fit. She adjusted a connection that seemed a little loose and hit her comm. "Try it now," she said.

She could feel something start up, a tiny slice of Atlantis living here in the jumper. "Yes, that's better," Radek said over the comm. "O2 levels are much closer to normal. I think if we let her run for awhile it might stabilize."

Kaylee climbed out of the maintenance hatch and shimmied out from underneath the jumper. She wiped the sweat from her brow with a greasy hand and looked out over the water. In a little while she'd have to go get cleaned up for her appointment with Heightmeyer, but things were getting better for her even there.

She'd never seen an ocean this pretty, the waves clean and sparkling in the sunshine. A breeze was coming off the water, carrying the scent of salt. Under her feet, she could feel the low vibration of Atlantis, always there once you knew what to look for. Kaylee breathed deep, hands on her hips, and laughed at the feel of the wind in her hair.

--

end

Fic - Maintenance Request (BSG/Cyteen)

2009-06-21T04:10:26Z

Title: Maintenance Request
Author: slybrarian
Fandoms: Battlestar Galactica / Cyteen
Rating: PG
Words: 1,050
Prompt: multiverse5000 -- "The Fleet jumps, and finds itself over Cyteen." for skieswideopen
Notes: I had a horrible case of writer's block while working on this prompt, not to mention a lot of other projects. I had a lot of ideas, but I just couldn't write any of them down in a way that satisfied me. Hopefully at some point I'll manage to do this prompt more justice with the politics and ethical discussions that it deserves.

Summary: In which Grant converses with centurions.

(By your command.)

Fic: Winter Where You Are (Sarah Jane Adventures/Firefly, G)

2009-06-21T04:03:44Z

Title: Winter Where You Are
Author: st_aurafina
Fandoms: Sarah Jane Adventures, Firefly
Prompt: Doctor Who Universe/Firefly: Luke Smith and River Tam
Rating: G
Word Count: 1860
Summary: Clyde has helped Luke sort out some confusing issues, but even he can't explain why the universe is named River.
Notes: Thanks to andrastewhite for making Multiverse happen, and lilacsigil for the beta. (And the title!)

Winter Where You Are on Livejournal
Winter Where You Are on Dreamwidth

Fic: the song you're singing is a prayer (but your god is tone deaf) [Kara Thrace/Inara Serra]

2009-06-20T13:54:49Z

Title: the song you're singing is a prayer (but your god is tone-deaf)
Author: pogrebin
Fandoms: Battlestar Galactica/Firefly
Spoiler Warning: BSG's series finale
Characters: Kara Thrace, Inara Serra
Prompt: Kara Thrace and Inara Serra have very different approaches to life. June 20th.
Word Count: 2250

( You can find anything you want on the Prometheus, but most of the time Kara goes there in search of another drink once the Galactica bar cuts her off. Kara/Inara )

Feedback.

Wild (Dune/Firefly, PG13)

2009-06-18T03:24:38Z

Title: Wild
Rating: PG13
Fandoms: Dune/Firefly
Author: __marcelo
Word count: About four hundred words.
Prompt: Serenity transports spice.
Thanks to: tigerbright and cesy.

"You can't have her." It was a good phrase. Short and to the point. Mal was proud of it. It'd have had more weight if he'd been standing and not bleeding out quite so much while saying it, but you couldn't have everything.

The gao yang jong duh goo yang just smiled at him, carefully cleaning his blood from her fingers. "You understand of course that the spice we contracted you to smuggle here was in fact a ruse to have you bring her to us, but you will still receive full payment for it."

Mal cursed, tried to stand, and fell against the alley wall. "Since when do you Bene Gesserit witches work with those Alliance bastards?"

"We don't. River was created as a weapon against us. Those who turned her into what she is wanted someone with our abilities but under their control. Trapped by the polarities of their world-view, they didn't realize how self-contradictory was this goal. We understand her, and we will take care of her."

"You don't want me." The voice came from a shadow that Mal would've sworn was empty a second ago. River walked into the moon-lighted alley, alternately looking at Mal, the witch, and the moons. She was carrying a small axe.

The Bene Gesserit grinned like the shit-selling bastard she was. "And what do we want, River Tam?"

"You want to play with my son on the sand." River rubbed her flat stomach. "Tame the worm and dam the waters."

Mal coughed a laugh from the ground. "Great."

River looked at Mal with fondness. "Not yet," she said. Then she turned toward the Bene Gesserit. "He says your music is boring."

River adjusted her grip on the axe. The Bene Gesserit seemed to produce a knife from thin air.

Mal lost consciousness right then.

Hours later he found himself slowly recovering in Serenity's infirmary, surrounded by, well, everybody. Maybe they had a betting pool about whether he'd pull off or not.

"River saved your life, Captain. Again." Simon sounded faintly surprised. "I cannot fathom why she feels the need."

"Silly brother," she said, popping her head from behind him. "He will be a good father."

.finis.

Fic: Unreal Things (BSG/SG-1, PG, Daniel)

2009-06-17T16:36:09Z

Title: Unreal Things
Author: beatrice_otter
Fandoms: Battlestar Galactica/Stargate: SG-1
Spoiler Warning: BSG in its entirety
Characters: Daniel Jackson, Ellen Tigh
Written for: multiverse 2009, June 17
Original Prompt: Battlestar Galactica/Stargate Universe: BSG's Daniel turns out to be Daniel Jackson.
Word Count: 2312
Summary: Daniel knew what his mother looked like. He’d seen her in pictures. He saw her die. But he didn’t see her in his dreams.
Rating: PG

( When Daniel was young, when he first went into foster care, he had nightmares. )

Multiverse fic: John Crichton/Farscape entry

2009-06-16T05:06:53Z

Title: Riding Roller Coasters for a Living
Author: elliejane
Fandoms: Farscape/Torchwood
Characters: John Crichton, Torchwood team
Rating: G
Word Count: 10,400 approx
Written for: Multiverse 2009
Notes: This fic is a tad AU. Set at the beginning of the Natural Election epsidode in Season 4 of Farscape. In the actual episode a wormhole opens, and plant-based hijinks ensue. In the fic, the wormhole opens and other hijinks entirely ensue. The Torchwood part takes place in Season 2 before the events of Reset.
Summary: An American scientist shouldn't be running around Cardiff wearing leather, holding a nice piece of alien technology.

AN: Apologies for the lateness of this fic. It was due on the 13th, but due to real life, I couldn't post it then. I'll post this link to the explanatory entry made earlier, as well.

Read more at my journal

Multiverse 2009 entry: Out of the Fire

2009-06-15T18:47:10Z

Title: Out of the Fire
Author: : Kernezelda (kernezelda)
Fandoms: Blake's 7 & Farscape
Characters: Jenna Stannis, Talyn
Disclaimer: None of mine.
Rating: PG
Notes: Thanks to astrogirl2 for a fast beta. Set in Farscape post-Season Three, in Blake's 7 pre-GP.
Word Count: 3031

She woke with a gasp, grabbed frantically at controls no longer there. Jenna's eyes opened wide and as quickly shut, half-blinded by a fierce white-red glow. Behind closed lids, fireworks flared green and black. The shape of her dying ship painted itself across her vision.

She felt along her body, found herself securely strapped into a life capsule, its interior barely larger than a large man; Gan would have had to scrunch himself tight. Venturing to open her eyes again, Jenna blinked against tears and forced herself to focus on the control panel. The display made no sense. No signs of other ships, none of the planetary beacons that guided legitimate craft into Gauda Prime's orbit. GP's sun no longer hung from its central position in the solar system. And further confusing her surely-mistaken readings - the stars in this region of space were none that she knew.

Jenna noted with vague satisfaction that she was alone in space, so it was very likely her desperate maneuver had taken the gunrunners on her tail along with her battered ship. She bit her lip at the death of the Venture, and then harder when she realized Blake couldn't possibly know she had survived.

But first things first. There would be time to make plans later; at the moment, Jenna Stannis needed to learn where she was, where the capsule could put down safely, and how to find a way back to space she knew. She wriggled and worked her muscles, testing for injury that her first half-awake exam could have missed. A person in shock could die of blood loss without ever realizing it. But she was whole, uninjured save for bruises and a bump on the side of her head, and a bloody scrape along the back of one hand.

The instruments showed that the capsule had fuel and air for three days, provisions, too, a rule of thumb that only the most foolish spacer or ignorant planet-lubber would ignore. Jenna was neither, and carefully began to scan for local planets or stations or ships that might be within reach, or within sensor range of her hail. At this point, she had nothing to lose if she fell into the hands of the Federation; though false identification papers lay in her jacket pocket, and were the best money could buy, the alternative of a slow death drifting through unknown space did not appeal.

Jenna had been incarcerated before. She had escaped before. Not on my own whispered the small voice at the back of her mind. Not in a place - a space - I've never seen before. She suppressed it ruthlessly. There was always a way.

She just hoped she didn't die before she found it.

*

Cosmic dust raked along Talyn's metal skin, raw sensation clawing at his receptors. Parts of his body lay open to space. The void in his mind grew larger, ripping at memories, confusing what little sense he could make of unfiltered data. Crais was gone from him. The Sebacean's body - what was left of it - lay at the back of the bridge, but no DRDs came to clean. A few clustered at the edges of torn hull, encouraging new growth. Others - all that remained intact, all that Talyn could find - struggled to repair circuity, re-wire connections, jury-rig his mechanoid portions without adequate parts.

Talyn floated in empty space and watched pieces of his own hull drifting with him. He had not expected to survive. Young as he was, as confused and unhappy and frightened, too much of Crais filled his mind, and there had been no thought of after. Just before. A Sebacean's image that his captain called brother: a child and then a burning corpse. A pale alien who had exiled Crais and stolen his ship - a Peacekeeper ship, but not alive as Talyn was. Aeryn Sun, small in Crais' mind, and then as large as Talyn himself, joined to them, a wholeness, unity. Her voice was the first he remembered. She had rejected Crais. She had rejected Talyn and gone with the Human.

The vision of another Leviathan swam across Talyn's mind. All the DRDs stuttered in their work and fell silent under the burst of emotion and static. His mother, calling for him while shots blasted into her - while Talyn tried to drive her away....or destroy her. A low groan accompanied the flexing of his tail-ends, moving inward for starburst. But no surge of energy accompanied the motion. Talyn forced himself to become calm again. DRDs began to move again. Moya was alive. It was part of the plan, that she should hide while her crew worked with Crais to destroy his enemy.

Talyn didn't know if it had worked. Perhaps Moya was gone, as Crais was. His thoughts dipped and swirled like the dust and detritus around him, that endlessly brushed against his half-burnt hull. Some of it, though, was harvested in passing - food and fuel for re-building.

He could do nothing, yet. Talyn subsided, hanging in space he neither recognized nor found markers for in his star charts. He hurt. He was alone, and helpless. He was terrified.

*

A green light popped on and beeped loudly. Jenna jerked upright. "Damn!" She rubbed the crown of her head where it had impacted with the open door of the storage unit. Twisting, one of the last packets of rations in hand, she squinted at the control panel. "Yes!"

She opened the packet and munched absently while sorting out the reading. An object had just passed within sensor range, one that moved too erratically to be natural, though the vague configuration at this distance was nothing Jenna or the computer could identify. She didn't hesitate. Little food remained, oxygen levels would soon fall below normal, and she was more than tired of being cramped in the life capsule with limited mobility and limited toilet facilities. She had been broadcasting a distress signal for days, and now she tinkered within the open panel beneath the controls to boost the signal, though it sucked up power reserves that she'd been hoarding. If she was wrong, if this attempt failed, yet left her powerless for another... So be it. She was a free trader, first and last, and no woman worth her salt would pass on even a risky chance for life in favor of a lingering death.

If it came to it, Jenna had the medical kit and its supplies. She'd not wait to suffocate.

*

Talyn stirred. Something brushed against his mind, a signal. He scanned nearby without result, then fanned his senses outward. There! A small vessel, tiny and of unknown design. Not quite simultaneously, a survey of his own structure revealed that much of his hull had been re-grown. Thin yet, fragile still, but a barrier between internal areas and the cold vacuum of space. As yet, very little of Talyn beyond the bridge and the chambers immediately adjacent could support life. Crais' quarters were ruined. Talyn hadn't sent DRDs to clean there, either. And on the bridge...

The signal increased in strength. Talyn hesitated. He wanted to rush toward it, wanted it to contain a being he knew - wanted Aeryn Sun's warmth, or even the Banik's presence, confusing though his guidance had been. He would even accept the despised Human, a competent technician if nothing else. Drexim levels increased with Talyn's indecision, pushing him to move forward or retreat, urgency rising. Mist seeped through cracks in bulkheads, through the floors. A DRD scrambled from hull repair to fix this new problem.

Talyn didn't recognize the signal's code. It was as alien as its source. What if the other ship was armed, and hostile? His main cannon was gone, and he was in no condition to fight. Or...flee. Starburst was beyond him, and might be for monens longer.

It would be safer to ignore the signal.

Safer.

But he was alone. He had never been on his own before.

Talyn re-checked the sensors. He brought his internal weapons online, ready to spring forth. He drew several DRDs from their work and sent them to the hangar bay. Slowly, he altered course, turning against the slow river of particles that had fed him for days.

He was a warrior. He would investigate the signaling vessel. And if its inhabitants proved a threat, he would destroy them. Or die trying.

*

The approaching ship was like nothing she'd ever seen. Jenna craned her neck to peer out the capsule's small, thick window. Her eyes widened at the martial coloring, the scored and scarred hull. A warship, but moving slowly. And it had responded to her beacon. Jenn took a breath and opened a hailing channel. "Are you receiving me? This is Jana Tanner, of the civilian courier Venture."

There was no reply. Jenna toggled the switch off and on, but the readout for the ship remained steady. "Can you hear me?"

A warbling tone filled the capsule, arhythmic and loud. Jenna dialed the volume down rapidly, shoulders drawing up around her ears. A static-laced voice followed. It sounded male, but its language was alien. Jenna shuddered - what if, by some bizarre quirk of physics, she'd been flung into the Darkling Zone? Or worse, near Epinal, where the chances for a humanoid, much less a Human, were slim to worse than none.

"I can't understand you," she said. "Please, can you help me?" She refrained from banging her fist on the control panel. Surely they could see that she was in a life capsule, and no threat. But that was a pirate tactic, as well, one that Jenna had fallen prey to herself. She bit her lip and hoped those in the alien vessel weren't thinking the same thing.

A different voice spoke, then another and another. One sounded female, and the last one... Was that an Earth language? It wasn't Standard. "You!" she answered. "I understand you, hello?"

After a long pause, the warbling started up again. The capsule shook. Jenna grabbed the edges of the control panel as she lost balance, falling on her rear end on the flight couch. The ship grew nearer, larger. It was pulling her in. She touched the small gun at the small of her back, flattened her palm over the papers in the jacket's inner breast pocket. She was as ready as she'd ever be to greet her potential rescuers.

*

The docking web failed just before the pod touched down. The four DRDs scattered back, low hums and beeps protesting the sudden crash of metal on metal. The pod came to a horizontal rest, with what looked like a hatch containing a small window on top. The DRDs circled back in. After a few microts, the door slowly opened. A sebaceanoid figure crawled out and straightened, female in form, her arms at her sides. She regarded the DRDs ranged around her, then spoke and lifted her hands, palm-upward. One DRD moved forward while the others arrayed their weapons to cover it. It lifted up a small syringe of fluid and jabbed it into the woman's calf.

She shouted and flung herself back, kicking the DRD and sending it half-flying. "--the hell?!" Her arm went behind her back, and then a small device - a weapon - appeared in her hand. "What did you just do?"

Talyn sent orders. The DRD that had been attacked righted itself, and the four of them surrounded the woman. Electrical charges to her lower limbs urged her forward. With a scowl, she moved, her weapon still tight in her hand. Talyn watched her progress through the few corridors that held breathable atmosphere. The air there was thin, and she began to cough. He prioritized life-support for the bridge. By the time the little parade arrived, the oxygen mix and temperature had risen to Sebacean comfort levels.

The bridge doors slid apart, the DRDs guided the woman inside, and Talyn scanned her before she'd taken two steps. It confirmed what the earlier communication had implied: she was Human, not Sebacean. Talyn fought the urge to shoot her down on the spot.

She drew closer, unaware of his scan or his weapons waiting in their ceiling compartments. Her eyes, large and brown, examined the bridge. Her nose wrinkled. She spoke, but of course no voice replied. And then she turned.

*

Jenna had been injected with something, had been stung by the defense units, and had been marched through wrecked corridors. She had not yet seen a living soul. Until now, and what lay before her could hardly be called living. It was a man, or what had once been a man. She slammed her hand over her mouth and backed away, fighting the urge to vomit. The scent of decay should have warned her. Whoever he had been, his death had not been an easy one.

"There must be someone alive here." Someone had spoken to her, someone was directing the ship and the small machinery. "Whoever you are," she called out, trying not to breathe in the odor that permeated the flight deck, "I mean you no harm. You rescued me. I'm very grateful."

*

He could kill her easily. Humans were not Sebacean. They were inferior beings. They could and were willing to corrupt their betters. It would mean nothing to Talyn, the death of another of Crichton's race. As he had failed with Crichton himself, and so lost Aeryn Sun, and later Crais.

But if he killed the Human...

Talyn required assistance. He was far from healed. There were tasks which Sebaceans - Humans - could do that DRDs could not. He needed materials and equipment that he could neither grow nor manufacture via the DRDs.

He needed help, as this Human had needed his. And there was no one else. Crais and Aeryn had left him behind. Moya was far, far away, if she yet lived (as she must live).

Talyn spoke no verbal language. He had no desire to piece together Crichton's from various recordings. If this Human was to prove of value, she must learn to understand him. And that would require far closer contact than Talyn wanted.

He had the means. And the power to do what he must.

Behind the woman, a panel in the floor slid back. A mobile cable rose soundlessly, carrying a small round device, black with blinking red lights. Talyn judged the distance to micrometer precision. Humans and Sebaceans were quite similarly configured. The cable drove forward and slammed into position at the back of the Human's neck. Yellow hair flared outward as she was driven to her knees. Strands of it caught beneath the device. She screamed. Her body spasmed. Talyn watched, and hated her for not being Crais, for not being Aeryn Syn. He waited for her mind to touch his.

*

It was like lightning flashing through her body, her nerve endings seared and her eyes blinded by white. Jenna flailed at the deck, saw stars and saw the blood-red corridors she'd walked through, saw rooms and machines and people she'd never known. She saw her mother dying, and a man dying on a bed with a dark-haired woman at his side. She felt coldness in her limbs, felt space against her skin, and information poured into her mind, more and more, aliens and alien tongues, Humans who weren't, a dark-haired man with a beard who was herself, as she was the Liberator and was... Talyn!

Jenna bolted upright from the deck and fell back again. She rolled onto her back and panted. Her eyes felt as if they'd been glued open, her arms and legs twitched without direction. "Tal--" She moistened her dry mouth, tried again. "Talyn?"

It spoke inside her head.

This ship was nothing like the Liberator. Its voice was not like Zen's. And it was inside her head. Jenna finally dragged a hand up, scrabbled at the back of her neck, felt warm liquid flowing under her fingertips. Blood, she thought, dizzy with sights and sounds and sensations rushing through her mind - and pain bright and sharp in her/its/their flesh. "What've you done?"

She spoke in Federation Standard, and he - this ship was a he, it was alive in a way Liberator had never been - he spoke in tones, pulses of light. She felt what he needed, saw what he had done to her. Her fingers clenched tight on the device, its many prongs buried in her flesh, clamping it tight to her neck - and a central spike drilling down to the nerve cells. A cold sweat broke out on her skin. So close, too close, he could paralyze her in an instant. Cold satisfaction slipped into her mind.

"Why do you hate me?"

Because of the other one, the man like her, the Human.

Jenna looked at her bloodied hand, at the strands of hair clinging to a finger. She dragged herself to her knees and began to pull herself upright, using one of the red-tinted metal seams for support. She sagged against it and stared up at the light display in the ceiling, the red-black-white circles on the deck.

She swallowed hard, breathed deep and smelled the corpse (Crais-mentor-Captain). She was alive. She'd taken her risky chance, and she was still alive. Not like it had been aboard Liberator, when the merge of ship and Human had made her feel known, innocent in a way she hadn't been since girlhood. No, this was very different, and very, very dangerous.

Raising her chin, Jenna wiped her stained fingers on her trousers, then slapped her palms together. She felt the linkage in her mind, two-way and something she, too, could learn to use. The ship - Talyn - had tried to overwhelm her. And he still could, no doubt. But he needed her aid, as she had needed his. Jenna Stannis was no one's slave, whether they be Human, alien...or a living starship.

Talyn was a ship, and Jenna was a pilot.

She narrowed her eyes and spoke. "You need my help. I need information. Let's work together and see what we can do."

FIC: the waste lands [Doctor Who / SGA]

2009-06-14T23:54:22Z

Title: the waste lands
Author: vanitashaze
Rating: PG-13
Fandoms: Stargate: Atlantis & Doctor Who
Pairings: River Song / the Doctor
Prompt: Atlantis in its heyday.
Notes: Title taken from the T.S. Eliot poem of the same name; the People are, if you didn't pick that up already, the Ancients. This story was slated for a slot on the 13th, but is actually being posted on the 14th, because I misread my calendar. And in conclusion, am I stupid? Yes I am.

Summary: They're so guilty, the two of them. Or, the adventures of the Lonely Gods.

THE WASTE LANDS

It comes to her in the night, like a lover, a ghost. This dream she's had since childhood. Except that's not right - it doesn't feel like a dream, it never has, but more a blood-memory, a shur, something bad, something wicked. A nightmare. It always starts the same. A forest; trees scratching up the night sky, their shapes dark, sinister and their edges vague, like they're not even sure where they end or begin, their borders or existence. There's a man by her side, pale face lit up like a 'Lantean tower. Crooked nose and full lips. His color bleeds into the landscape, too. She loves him. "Run," she screams. They're running. "Hurry!" And she knows, suddenly, that they're not running. They're being chased. And it comes. Out of the trees, it comes. Corpse-pale, a blur of sound and hunger and teeth. And it reaches for her and the man fires and it hisses and she screams -

- And Roni wakes up in twisted, sweat-soaked sheets, bellowing in terror like an animal. Shaking, she will run a hand over her eyes. She should meditate; Gais would say that the nightmare is a manifestation of her guilty spirit. She won't, though. Never does. Instead she'll walk on the East Pier and fall asleep in tomorrow's department meeting, and every waking moment she can spare she'll spend in her lab. Her title is biologist but it would be closer to call her magician. She reads hidden things: unravels thousands of years in an hour, mysteries as big as a planet or as small as a cell, or the bodies of the Noa, the Furlings, the Asgard; the histories they carry writ on their genes. The 70% of the universe still colliding in their bodies.

Biology is not, by and large, important to her People, but they appreciate their own beauty, and this she can show them easily. She reads the history of themselves. She will find her own peace, when there is peace to be found. She will survive, when there is not.

*

In fact, Roni does sleep though the department meeting, as she suspected she would. It was very beautiful last night; she stayed out later than expected. The Flagisalis were singing, and Atlantis brought their song into herself so that Roni could hear them. The pier hummed. She has lived here all her life and barely recognizes the touch of her home in her head, but wouldn't know what to do if it stopped; what she would ever do with that lonely place, the .0028% of her that will never stop listening.

Like most Ancients, Roni's never stopped to think about life for the humans, what it must be like for them. To believe they are alone. To be spinning through space unanchored, uncalled for by anything but human voices. What it would mean for her, to leave Atlantis and all its kin that they've spread across the Fifth Shining System, the technology they take with them even on the shortest of excursions - brooches and blasters, message-relayers and voice-keepers, eggs that light up the darkness even when fire would do. Trivial things; the addict's guilty little hit. Most likely, she never will think about it. Too soon, her People will fight a war. They will leave behind the wreck Atlantis has become: sink their beautiful, insane city underneath the sea.

They won't stop to think about it either. But they'll find out.

*

Normally her lab is cool and quiet, calm whispering over everything like the slight steady flow of the air filters (in with the new and out with the old -); not a child's calm, but an adult's, a calm of efficiency and progress. A hospital orderliness. It's peaceful, almost, and that's an odd veneer for the work they do here - biology is so rude, so much of the time, strange and necessary and never neat - but then again, there's a certain removal to this science, a feeling of watching the universe blossom 1 x 10⁹⁹⁹ times removed from you. She's dealt with bone scrapings taken from the graves of their ancestors, cheek swabs from her own mouth, but it's hard to recognize oneself in a cell culture.

The lab today isn't calm. It's quiet, yes, no one raises their voice above a whisper, but there's something moving through her Apprentices and Assistants, electricity traveling through water; a nervous tremor passing along brushing hands, a murmured word, a moment's glance. They're feeling something.

"What's going on?" Roni demands. "Did I give you permission to gossip?"

The tremor jolts; voices rise and fall, surrounding, pulling her in as surely as drift on the tide. A completed circuit. She feels it too: anger, and fear.

"Didn't you hear?" Eos says, in her dreamy way. "They found another body."

*

("I do not understand," Chayen says. "Why are they doing this?"

"They hate us," Eos says, lightly.

"But we created them," Chayen says. "They should be grateful."

Eos shakes her head. What is there to say? Chayen does not love his father. The humans do not love them.)

*

As a general rule, Roni's People don't abide with history. They don't like it; they've tried writing it, but even then it tends to wear thin in places, and show the way things really went down. Mistakes they've made speak themselves in the margins. Achievements they've claimed for themselves show themselves to belong to others. The People are a proud race; they're proud of their history, even though they have no reason to be.

Perhaps they are not so proud of their history, then. Perhaps they are proud of their stories. Perhaps they are proud of their dreams.

*

The first time she meets him in his new body, it will be in the ashes of one of Atlantis' sister cities, Helike, with her trinium towers and burning libraries. She will be crying. There were gardens here, once; sturdy tubers and broad-faced flowers and trees like whips, taken from a hundred human worlds and brought to Helike, to her whorls of color and growth. Her first kiss was thick with this clean, vibrant smog. Among all the things lost in the last salvo, in the fires, this will not be one of them. By the time Helike falls, collapsing finally into the ashes of herself, her gardens will be long gone. For years there will have been no one left to tend them.

"Shh," he murmurs, and rocks her as she would a child. "Shh. It's alright."

Life during wartime is strange, surreal, a glimpse of a once-familiar world from the bottom of a well; everything blurred. Names, dates, bodies. Since coming here she's slept with people she wouldn't even recognize, had she seen them again, and some she knew only by sight. She remembers not the sex but some characteristic of their bodies: Assistant Physician's dark, supple skin; the soldier whose hair was so blonde her eyelashes seemed almost translucent; the parabola the Aurora's second officer made when he arched, came. Helike is burning but it has been snowing ashes for weeks, as the husks that the Wraith jettisoned from their ships burned up in atmosphere.

Roni thinks this is the end, and allows herself to fall apart accordingly. In fact, her People will fight for decades yet.

"I don't even know your name," she whispers. As if it matters.

"Oh, that's right," he says, "I suppose we haven't met yet." And then, a brush of lips above her right eyebrow: the slightest of kisses. As if they were lovers, and not strangers thrown together by war. "I'm the Doctor."

"Roni," she says.

"I know," he says. And for a moment - just long enough for the first tower to fall - she believes him.

*

"With the Council's kind help, we have pushed the boundaries of science as we know it, but in our quest we have neglected our duties. The human worlds have become overpopulated," Lir says passionately. He spreads his hands; he's nailing himself to a cross. "They do not have enough space, enough resources. They suffer, Councilors, for our neglect."

"What do you propose we do?" one of the senior Councilors asks. Her rich voice cuts through the ravages of her face, a river through desert. She was beautiful, and is now sympathetic. She lost half of her face to a human's shard-studded club on a goodwill mission, as she traveled to find out who was killing her People as they kept watch over experiments. "Liberty," the man had cried. She ran him through.

"We must introduce a natural predator," Lir says. "Slow to breed but hard to kill; the opposite of a human, but not too different - a biped, for instance. Something to even the balance."

*

"Biologist Roni," Lir says. "My old friend Roni. You're looking beautiful."

"What do you want?" Roni snaps. She's busy. Her Assistants and Apprentices work with nervous hands; more and more of them sneak out during breaks to fuck on the balcony across the hall, any and every combination, brief glimpses through the windows: Eos' breast in Chayen's mouth, Mizar swallowing Chayen down, Eos and Mizar kissing behind the curtains they make of hair and hands. Her children think they know fear, and desperation. She thinks they're being unutterably silly, and in a few years, will do the same.

"A challenge," he says. So lightly.

"I do not have time for games," she says.

"Good," he says, "because I am not playing."

She looks at him then; the lines that carve themselves into his high forehead, the fervor burning in his eyes. He believes what he's doing is right. He always has. "If you want a weapon," she says, "go to the Physics."

"No," he says. "No, Roni, I need your help."

"Whatever you are planning, I can guarantee they do not deserve it," she says.

"They hate us, Roni," he says. "They would kill us all if they could. Please. They -" killed Alon, she hears, they killed him and left Lir to grieve "- are building ships. Some fool taught them how to."

"So destroy the ships," she says.

"We already have. They're building more; they've taken our gates, our gifts to them, and used them to spread the knowledge of how to destroy us. They have," he spits, "a coalition."

She closes her eyes. That's what she will remember, lifetimes later, whenever she thinks back to this moment; that she closes her eyes.

"What do you want?" she says.

"A predator," he says.

"On Kardon they have these things called bee'shaks," she says. "Savage, actually. Lots of teeth. I'll get someone to find you one."

"Roni," he warns.

"Not just a predator, then," she says, and slowly, he nods.

"Not just a predator," he agrees, and sighs. Runs his hand through the hair he has left. It seems as if it has been hours since Alon died, but decades for Lir, as if he had taken the time and wrote it into his face. They years they had are compressing his body, crumbling him. One day he'll be nothing but dust and a clever tongue, held together by wicked ambition.

"We need a bogeyman," he says. "A nightmare. So they won't forget."

Immediately she thinks of: teeth. And blood. She wasn't joking when she offered him a bee'shak. Even her People have an instinctual fear of things that go riprendsnarl in the night. But her intellectual mind quickly takes over, unfolding it for her like a puzzle, a work of art. The creature must be self-sustainable. It cannot feed on meat, for then her People's other experiments would be threatened, and the humans could appease them with livestock. The creature must be resilient. The creature must be strong, to grapple with a full-grown human. Should it have wings, hands, should it swim or walk on the land?

Above all else, though, it must be terrible. Like nothing they've ever seen before, or will again. It must be terrible enough that the Council can hold onto its leash and the humans will settle, for even the thought of it terrifies, this creature that will be too terrible for anyone to actually utilize. The threat will be enough. It's a brilliant plan, she realizes; build one, let it loose once or twice, and save hundreds of lives, maybe thousands. With this thing at your disposal, you could eliminate war itself - not just between the humans and the People, but among the humans themselves, the few volatile colonies that have already began to tear themselves apart. This creature Lir envisions will destroy destruction, forever, and she will build it for him.

"A ghost, Lir," she says. "That's what we need. Not a monster - you're right - a nightmare. Something that shouldn't even exist."

"Though I certainly hope it will," he parries back, smoothly -

"- No, but that's the brilliance of it, Lir. Think of it, please. Something half-legend, where the stories, the idea of it, is so much more powerful - " her mind spinning, a thousand concentric circles a minute "- we don't need it to attack people, friend, we need it to haunt them."

"A wraith," he supplies.

"Yes," she says. "Yes. That's right. I'll make you a wraith."

Already, she can see it in her mind: the hand reaching for her out of the dark, pale fingers curled inwards, and in the palm, a opening like a black hole, like a mouth, like hunger itself.

(Her mind filters out the screams.)

*

In the end, they will make a death in their own rough image.

*

"Do you know anything about paradoxes?" he will ask, one day, far in her future, deep in his past. They're walking the streets of Rome, for once silent; the Romans are in mourning for their Caesar, cut down on the steps of the Forum, but they won't be for long. The whole city is a Potentia in overload. Counting down. Twenty-eight half-cycles. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six.

"Not much," she says.

"Odd," he comments, and shuffles forward.

Sometimes she likes this second, newer Doctor, free of all the stuttering and muttering and jumping about. It's refreshing, in a way. Steadying. She's had enough of fire; she'd would much prefer to wrap her life around stone. Even if getting answers is akin to wringing blood out of one.

Finally, her curiosity gets the better of her. "What is?"

"That you don't know much about paradoxes," he says. "Which, by the way, are tricky things. The temporal ones. Did I ever tell you about Yan-Ylan? Whole planet exists because of one. Strange place. Though not as strange as Barcelona. They have dogs with no noses," he confides.

"Why is it strange?" she asks, undeterred. Then again: he's just as silly as ever.

He smiles briefly, sadly. "You created one."

"I'm pretty sure I'd know if I created a paradox," she says. "I've created a lot of things -" he won't meet her eyes, never does "- but not one of those."

"Ah, but how would you ever know?" he asks. "You're in it right now."

They stop, face each other. She fingers the necklace he bought her, beaten gold coins brought a quarter-way around the globe - precious, and expensive, as if they were a treasure, as if that journey was such a great feat. Years ago, she might have said it wasn't, but she's learning about humans now, about the way they think of things. A caravan guard and two bandits died for a necklace her People would have given a child. It means something. It does. In this way, the Doctor has been friend and mentor both, for he's teaching her how to think of these things. How to watch, observe, and never belong.

(She spares herself the more familiar lecture, which goes along the lines of: They're so guilty, the two of them. The lonely Gods. Creators and destroyers both, sometimes in the same move. The last of their kinds. They're playing a game of bavat with the universe, or perhaps against it, and she can never quite shake the feeling that some day, one of them is going to lose.)

"Not long, now," he comments, lightly, and they survey the empty street. Waiting for the first cobble to be thrown.

Fourteen half-cycles. Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven. Ten.

"You know," she says, "I've been thinking of going to one of the great human Universities. In the fifty-first, maybe."

"Oh, really?" he asks. "What for?" His hand finds hers as they prepare to run. Don't leave me. She's still surprised at how childish a god can be.

"Archeology," she says. I won't. (In her head, she amends this to: Not for long. It will probably hurt her more to leave the TARDIS than its occupant.)

"I'm a time traveler, I laugh at archeologists," he says, but grins, a little slice of manic. She squeezes their clasped hands, gently.

Five half-cycles. Four. Three. Two. One -

*

"Chayen, you are driving me to the point of insanity," Roni grounds out. "Insanity is a very steep cliff and I swear to you I will fall over quickly if you do not stop giving me null results. Please, please. I beg of you. By the Council, give me something good."

"I'm sorry, Roni, the simulations are not working," he reports glumly. "There is nothing strong enough to survive such a procedure, and even if they were, they'd fall apart in days. We simply don't have enough time."

"We'll think of something," she says. "We must."

"Why?" he says. "Roni, it's a grand ambition you have, but listen to yourself. We are Biologists, not conjurors. How are we to make ourselves a ghost?"

"Did I ask you, First Assistant Chayen?" she snaps, and he shrinks back. She's hurt him; she knows that he thinks of her as a friend rather than a superior.

"No," he says, distantly. Respectfully, and she grinds her teeth. Respect doesn't salve the frustration any more than familiarity did. "I am sorry, Biologist Roni."

"It's alright," she says, and of course, that's when the sirens start.

*

The klaxons are shrieking. She spots Mizar down the hallway, fighting to get to his home knot of Biologists. "WHAT IS IT?" she shouts, already coughing. "I DON'T KNOW," he shouts back. "HELON GAS, BUT THERE'S NO FIRE." Already the Scientists are pouring out of their labs and into the hall, blood in a clot, fighting to get this way, that way, there, anywhere. She gets elbowed in the ribs and doubles over, gasping, before someone pulls her upright.

"Roni, listen to me," the man says, urgently. She can barely hear him over the din. "You must not use the Iratus bugs."

"What?" she tries to ask, but he shouts right over her.

"Listen to me," he says - snarls. Face more animal than the things she's trying to create. He's something very old and powerful wrapped up in the body of a funny-looking man wearing odd clothes, and she's never been more frightened, or fascinated, in her life. "The Iratus bugs. You cannot use them. You're going to create something horrible." And suddenly: lets go of her, gravity and tides, she's swept into frantic melee of people and he's running the other way.

"Wait!" she calls over the crowd. "Please! Who are you? How do you know my name?"

And then, belatedly: "What's an Iratus?"

*

In the end, it's Lir who gets credit for her creation. It's Lir the Council decorates and proclaims Second Scientist - as if he knew anything about science - and First Counselor for the Council on Human Development; it's Lir who drinks the bitter, herb-scented drink they keep for these occasions of commencement, brewed in secret and served up in flutes of flamed Potentia glass. It's supposed to make you lucky, and wise, but Roni knows for a fact that it just makes you slightly giddy and sends you to bed. Still. It shouldn't be Lir. It should be her up there, she thinks, sour with jealousy, but she's wrong. It's not really even her creation, anymore: she spliced and splinted it, twisted it together from chitin and skin, but it was the Physics who built the temporal-distention environment she needed to speed the process. Roni found the idea in the Gallifrean fables from the Seventh Shining System, of ships more creature than machine, but it was Eos who grew their clever little Darts. Roni took Mizar for a walk on the docks, but it was he who saw the freighter's transporter beams, a gift from the Asgard, and insisted that they be installed in the Darts. It will be the Council that decrees her original batch of seven be cloned, for sustainability, and that the cloning facility have such a light guard, for secrecy. It will be her creations themselves that turn their clever little Darts into Hives.

Destruction is, by and large, a group effort. In ten thousand years, a man will destroy 5/6s of a solar system with the tools they have left behind. He will take the credit for it, as Lir took his. Unlike Lir, he will have actually deserved it, but like Lir, too, he was not alone in his mistake. There were underlings. There were the People themselves. There was a pilot.

Like scientists everywhere, the People's Scientists fight over ownership, but spark ideas off each other like stones rubbed together; when they are hurled, they take the whip of fire with them. Had Lir spread the credit more evenly among the Scientists, a more precise hierarchy might have emerged, but he didn't, and the remaining webs of inspiration and theft will be too complicated for the Council to unravel. They will need their Scientists, now, too much to piece out individual blame. They will also need a hung man, but that will not be too difficult.

It was Roni's idea. Lir took the credit.

This is what will save her, years away from this boisterous congratulations ceremony, when the first bombs hit.

*

The second time she meets him, she simply passes him in the hallway.

"Excuse me," she says, distracted.

"You're excused," he replies.

*

("Oh, oh," she croons, as she lifts the Iratus bug out of its cage. She's never seen anything so Council-damned ugly in her life. "Hello, beautiful.")

*

The third time they meet, her ship has taken a direct hit, and her lab is on fire. Not from the Wraiths' beam weapons, damn them, but from a combination of exposed wiring and circulatory plasma for the Hippaforalkus' beams - highly flammable, and the smoke mildly toxic when inhaled. She's going to die, but slowly. Chayen is already dead, caught by the initial explosion. Thank the Council for small favors, she thinks, fuzzily, and then someone is dragging her through the smoke, bumping her over a doorstep, and then she's - what? In a cave? In a stomach? In an enormous plant? "Thank you," she tries to say, but can't stop coughing, spitting up gobs of black sputum. Her head is spinning like a planet in orbit.

A face swims into view. "It's alright, deep breaths," the face says. "Should probably get you some oxygen." But the face doesn't do anything but make a face - ha, she thinks - and picks at his ruined clothes. The both of them are covered in oily black smoke.

"So much for this suit," he mutters, and that's when her head clears enough to gets her first proper look at her rescuer.

"You again," she croaks. The man from Helike. Younger than her, odd clothes, shadowed brow and thick hair like a Flagisalis' curved fin. A soldier, probably, from the edge to his eyes, and she takes the time to mourn someone turned old so young. Except - not, really; he's old in the way she's only ever seen once before in her life, in a corridor with alarms going off in her ears and in her head, a warning being shouted in her face. Or was that this man? She's not sure. He has a spaceship, must be, that appears bigger on the inside, for Council's sake. She's not sure of anything.

"Me again," he agrees, and that's when she remembers - oh, Chayen - and throws up black bile all over his conductor-toed shoes.

*

("Rubber," he says despairingly. "It's called rubber."

"It's conductor and I'll have none of that," she says, only half-teasingly. "Rubber's a human word."

The old lady doing her shopping on Bristol Street looks at her rather oddly after that, but she's People, and more than that, deeply unsettled. The twenty-first century is like going for a walk in a cell culture. Not only have the animals escaped from the zoo, they've invented shopping malls and cable TV.)

*

Her first week on-board the TARDIS is boring and brief. She sleeps, restlessly, pumped full of oxygen and inoculations and whatever else this weird ship can think up; she explores, and cries in brass-edged saunas and rooms full of hats. For the most part her rescuer seems perfectly fine with leaving her alone, as if he trusts her already. He's either an exceedingly foolish man, or an exceedingly powerful one. The first week she doesn't much care one way or another. But the ship itself is a comfort beyond belief. Looking back, she thinks it might have kept her sane. "I can hear it," she tells him, during one of their brief intersections, this time in the kitchen. He doesn't look surprised, but then again, he seems to know everything about her, from her name to the way she takes her xe - dark and bitter, and apparently he knows this as well, that she talks to his ship, and that his ship talks back. It's not Atlantis; it's different. Possibly more sane, possibly a bit less. But it speaks to her; fills that .0028%. It's enough, for now.

But, Council, she misses her home.

"This is a TARDIS," she says.

"Ye-es," he says.

"And you can take me anywhere in space or time," she says.

"Have you been reading ahead in the vacation brochures?" he asks, vaguely perturbed.

"Then take me to Atlantis," she says.

*

"Chayen," she sobs out against his chest, "Eos, Mizar, children -"

*

So, alright.

She's mature enough to admit that was a mistake.

*

There's a woman they visit, every hundred years or so, tucked away in the sunken blue depths of Atlantis. The Doctor knows who she is, but won't tell her. "I'd like to pretend that I didn't," he says, hands in pockets. "That she doesn't have a destiny, as great and terrible as yours." He considers, for a moment. "As mine. I came here as a child, and pretended just that. That we were just two people, lost in the vastness of space and time. I think I fell in love with her once or twice."

Roni touches the forcefield of the stasis chamber, feeling the slight buzz and tingle against her fingers. She can imagine him as a little boy, a little Time Lord, falling for the woman behind the glass. She can imagine herself doing the same. She'd like to leave her handprints on this woman, the last of her kind; kiss that spot on her neck, there, the faint lines at the corners of her eyes; palm that imagined dip in her thigh. Laugh with her. See her smile. And yet -

"She's beautiful," she says, and steps back. "But she's not People."

"No," he says.

"So it will rise again, one day," she says.

"Yes," he says.

"Good," she breathes. "Good."

*

She will leave him more times than she can count: sometimes for minutes, sometimes for days. He leaves her more times than she can count: for the same. When they meet it always seems one knows more than the other. She'll leave him to go to the Chenna markets on Wednesday and on Thursday he'll come back in a different skin. He seems to alternate between bodies, between personalities, but there are two that are most common: the manic besuited one with hair like an Earth hedgehog, and the dark, intense young man, barely out of his teens. About two lifetimes, then, she estimates. Two lifetimes spent on her, and she feels infinitely treasured, and more hunted than the woman in her nightmare.

"Roni, my Roni," he murmurs. Dragging his lips up her collarbone. He's not bad at sex, though it's taken her one and a half lifetimes to get him into bed.

"Theta," she moans, and he freezes. Sits up. Disentangles himself from her; figures, she thinks.

"How did you -" he asks.

"You told me," she says. "Or, you will."

He smiles, but beneath it another expression moves, like the human expressions one can sometimes glimpse underneath a Wraith's sneers. It's the same expression he uses on people who say things like, the death of minions is regrettable but necessary. Sometimes she thinks he would never travel with her - would condemn her, even - except for the fact that he's as trapped as she is, the paradox she wove like she used to weave DNA.

"I keep aiming for you but we never really connect, do we?" he says.

"We don't need to," she says, and repeats herself, like the broken earth record he played for her. She feels like she's been shouting this across the constellations, the whole of space and time, for as long as they've met; maybe longer. Every word they've ever said to each other has been a variation on these four. "We don't need to."

*

("You will deal with our queen," the male says. It sounds unsure, and looks it, or at least as much as a semi-insectoid can.

"Hold on a moment -" Lir protests.

The Wraith glance at each other for a moment, and then turn back to Lir, resolve stealing across their features. "You will deal with our Queen," it repeats, and this - this is not a request, or even an order. This is a threat.)

*

"You know, I've been alive for decades," she says, rather drunkenly, "and I didn't even know where my name came from until today. I don't even think my People knew; there were civilizations in Pegasus before us, I suppose we just picked some things up. The way of the world, and all that. Cross-contamination, cultural diffusion -"

"Oh, big words," he jokes.

"I do have a degree," she informs him, and cuffs him on the shoulder.

("Ow," he complains. She ignores him.)

"Roni. From The Roni," she says. "In the K'etshan tradition. It's the name of a mythic river, from which all oceans spring. They wrote a ballad about it. It's actually quite beautiful."

"I had a friend once," he says. "She probably heard it once. Her name was Rani - well, Ushas, but she called herself Rani. A lot like you. Quite clever with the, the genes and things."

"Would I have liked her?" she asks.

"Probably not," he says.

*

"Roni, archeologist," she says in K'etshan. The TARDIS' translation circuit will spit it out as River Song.

*

The first time he meets her, she dies.

It is perhaps the most fitting punishment she could bestow. Death after death after death, trailing out behind him like the list of his crimes. By the time he meets her, she's grown cocky, all traces of the People scrubbed out of her speech, replaced by fifty-first century slang; not eager for her death but certainly ready for it. Her last thought is that Theta will thank her for this, someday. They're the only ones they trust enough, to set down each others' sentences.

The first time she dies, he brings her back to life. Traps her, in an artificial world, with children and nothing real.

This, too, is a punishment, one she justly deserves. All this - normalcy, it's what her People died fighting for, and what they will never have, because of her. But eternity, looping around a hard drive? The idea is unbearable. She thinks of the woman under the sea, living her life in a handful of minutes; waiting for ten thousand years. Roni wonders how long she can last, like this.

She won't realize it, but the answer is forever.

fin.

Multiverse 5000 2009: A Merry Meeting Be Wished

2009-06-14T14:23:06Z

Title: A Merry Meeting Be Wished
Author: Mara (marag)
Fandoms: Stargate: Atlantis and Vorkosiganverse
Characters:John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Teyla Emmagen, Ronon Dex
Disclaimer: Sadly, none of these characters are mine. I sure wish, though.
Summary: John Sheppard and his team are *definitely* not in Kansas anymore.
Rating: G
Notes: This occurs some vague time in (I suppose) an AU SGA season three or so, and in the Vorkisganverse, after Diplomatic Immunity.

* * * * *

John fought the urge to strangle Rodney. Okay, the SGC generally disapproved of military members of the expedition strangling civilians, but in this case, it was also a matter of Rodney likely being his only chance to get back to Atlantis.

But honest to god, if Rodney didn't shut up soon...somebody was going to kill him.

"...the most ridiculous timing. Why did you drag me out on this mission to god only knows what stupid planet just when I was on the verge of solving that perennial power transfer problem? And now thanks to your incompetence, we're in some kind of alternate universe and I'm probably going to meet myself and oh god, I look terrible with a goatee. What if--"

"Shut. Up." Ronon's growl was barely audible, but Rodney's mouth closed with an audible click.

John sighed in relief as the flow of words cut off, but he winced internally as all three members of his team turned toward him as one, waiting for him to decide what to do.

"Well," he said with a sigh, "I guess we're going to have to go look for--"

"I think you should step away from the ship," a voice said from the trees.

John rolled his eyes. No, really, he'd had just about enough of this. "Do it," he said.

The others stared at him, but followed as he walked away and sat down on a nice, comfortable stump. Out of the treeline stepped...a dwarf?

Rolling his eyes harder, John decided that now the universe (whichever universe it was) was laughing at him.

"I'm really very sorry about this," the dwarf said, running the hand that wasn't holding a small blastery-looking thing through close-cropped dark hair. "But I need your ship. It's a matter of urgency, lives at stake, etc."

"Sure. Take it," John said. He waved at the ship. "We weren't getting anywhere anyway."

The dwarf narrowed his eyes, but sidled up the ramp of the jumper quickly, finding the door closure without too much trouble.

Rodney glared. "What in hell are y--oh. Right."

A moment later, Ronon and Teyla got it too.

"Ronon, if you would..." John pointed at the jumper door.

Ronon pulled out his own blaster and waited, looking grim at someone having gotten the jump on him. John picked at a hangnail. Teyla sighed and rubbed her forehead. Rodney went back to typing fiercely on his laptop and muttering about alternate universes, string theory, and stupid Genii weapons.

It took 20 minutes, which meant that dwarf was either more desperate than most...or stupider. Idly, John wondered which it was.

Finally the door opened and the dwarf stepped out, weapon conspicuously held between his fingertips and hands up in the universal gesture of surrender. "Er...sorry?" he said.

Ronon jerked his chin and the dwarf dropped his gun and kicked it down the ramp.

John stood and stretched. "Come out."

"Um, if I could ask," the dwarf said as he marched resignedly down the ramp, "how did you lock it anyway? I've never *seen* a security system like that and I'd love to buy the technology." His eyes were bright and eager.

Teyla tilted her head. "Buy it or steal it?"

The guy's whole face, with ridiculously mobile features, collapsed. "Yes, I suppose this does look bad, but I really don't generally go around stealing ships. Well, not from people who haven't tried to kill or clone me, at least. But I really need to get back to Barrayar, and soon. It's not entirely hyperbole when I say the fate of my entire planet is at stake."

Rodney waved a hand without looking up from the laptop. "Uh-huh, been there, done that, bought the t-shirt."

Teyla, who had been standing beside John, and obviously doing more thinking than anyone else, leaned closer. "What now, John?"

"I'm hoping you have a suggestion," he said, brought to honesty by exhaustion.

"Perhaps we might introduce ourselves and, ah, consider that we've acquired a source of local information?"

John nodded, turning back. "So who are you, anyway?"

("Not exactly what I had in mind," Teyla murmured.)

The dwarf's lips twitched in amusement and he considered John for a long moment before bowing slightly at the waist. "I have the distinct honor to be Lord Auditor Captain Miles Naismith Vorkosigan of Barrayar. And my name will be mud if I don't get home with what I've learned. I was *supposed* to have half of ImpSec ready to deliver me, but they seem to have been waylaid by some of my enemies. Which, I suppose, doesn't narrow the possibilities down all that much."

Obviously the name and the planet were supposed to mean something to him. John shrugged. "I would say it's nice to meet you, except that you tried to steal our ship."

"I said I was sorry!"

Rodney could be heard muffling a snicker, but John ignored him. "I'm Col. John Sheppard, that's Dr. Rodney McKay, this is Ronon Dex, and that's Teyla Emmagen."

"Gentlemen, milady." Vorkosigan bowed again, bowing more deeply to Teyla, who bestowed on him a much nicer smile than John thought the man deserved.

"The question," Teyla said, "is what we do with you now."

"I seem to hear that a lot," Vorkosigan said with a sigh.

"Me too," John said. Vorkosigan grinned at him, and for a moment they were in complete accord.

"So, where did you say you were from?" Vorkosigan asked.

Out of the corner of his eye, John saw Rodney's head finally lift from the laptop. "We didn't say," Rodney said, his voice sharp.

"I noticed that." Vorkosigan seemed to have forgotten that *he* was the prisoner. "You're *really* not from around here, are you?"

"Just because we have a cool lock on our ship?" John tried to keep his expression easygoing.

"Because you have a ship, computer, and uniform, all in a style I've never seen before."

"And you've memorized every ship and uniform in the universe?" Rodney scoffed.

"Yes." The clearing was momentarily silent as John and his team contemplated that flat statement. Finally Vorkosigan shrugged. "Also, you didn't immediately try to shoot me or hold me for ransom after I gave you my name and title. That pretty much eliminates you as residents of most of the planets in this system."

"Lord Auditors of Barrayar acquire that many enemies?" Teyla asked.

"Not most of them, no. I'm just lucky, I suspect." His lips twitched in definite amusement. "So, where *are* you from?"

"That's...complicated," Teyla said.

"You look like you're having some trouble with something," Vorkosigan said. "Perhaps I might propose a trade?"

"A trade?" Rodney stood up. "You can't even get off-planet without trying to steal someone else's ship and you want to *trade*?"

Vorkosigan stood up straight, and even though he was still well over a foot shorter than Rodney, there was something... "On my honor as heir to my father, Count Vorkosigan, and my honor as an Imperial auditor, I offer you my assistance in any legal endeavors, if you can help me get home."

Rodney just gaped at him, and John found himself fighting a feeling of awe. There really was something about the man. "How are you at interdimensional travel?"

Vorkosigan blinked once, his eyes darted around, and then widened. "Oh. I didn't realize anyone had figured out how to activate that giant ring."

"I don't think anyone here *has*," Rodney said. "The problem was on our end."

"Interesting." Vorkosigan frowned for a moment. "Well, I can certainly get Barrayar's best scientists on the subject, if that would help."

"You can just do that?" Ronon asked, sounding dubious.

That quick grin again, which made John want to grin back. "Right, you're not from around here. Yes, an Imperial auditor can do that. I can do and say pretty much whatever I want. The difficulty most of the time is in figuring out what I *should* do or say. My wife would probably point out I don't often think long enough. My cousin Ivan would say I don't think at all."

Teyla chuckled, giving John a pointed look. He looked away.

"Wait," Rodney said, hands on his hips. "You're just going to blithely take us home and offer your help? How do you know *we're* not escaping criminals?"

"You're acting fairly trusting yourself. Besides, I tried to steal your ship and you haven't shot me yet."

Rodney paused. "Point."

* * * * *

It took over an hour for Vorkosigan and Rodney to get the jumper properly oriented to find Barrayar; the Ancient technology seemed displeased with something, acting sluggishly when asked to chart the entirely new stars.

And John discovered there was something more annoying than Rodney ranting: Rodney and this Vorkosigan guy arguing.

"And just when did you get your degrees in astrophysics, anyway?"

"I don't need a degree to tell you that you don't have the faintest ideas of the hazards in *this* universe!"

"Please. If you haven't got wacky space vampires, then I don't care."

"Space va--you're just making that up."

John rubbed his temples. "Rodney, focus, please. I'd like to get home before Elizabeth needs to report us all missing or dead. Again."

* * * * *

In the end, the universe continued to show its tremendous sense of humor, which John found entirely unamusing. After more wrangling than his nerves could take--especially with Rodney *and* Vorkosigan both vibrating like tuning forks--the jumper finally lifted off, with an estimated arrival on Barrayar of two days.

John finally relaxed as he piloted the jumper up, the familiar sensation reminding him that things weren't hopeless. They had a jumper, food, water, and a plan. What could poss--

Which, of course, is right when he realized they weren't alone. "Teyla," he said as a ship slightly larger than their own hove into view. The ship had a somewhat similar shape with one tiny difference: it was bristling with energy signatures that screamed "weapon" at him.

"Yes, I see it," she said tartly from the copilot seat. "I believe they are trying to hail us, but the jumper does not wish to patch them through."

John did the equivalent of yelling mentally at the jumper, essentially informing it if it didn't behave, he was going to break it down into its component parts, by god, and let Ronon use them for target practice. The jumper sulked, but cooperated.

"Unknown vessel," a voice said, "you have a dangerous fugitive aboard. Give him up and we will allow you to continue unharmed."

Vorkosigan said something that was probably an obscenity on his planet, if tone was anything to go by.

John looked at Teyla, who nodded her assent as she spoke in her dipomat's tones. "I'm afraid I don't know anything about a fugitive. We are a peaceful ship and we mean no harm."

"Give us Vorkosigan. He is carrying classified weapons data stolen from our research laboratories. He is a criminal, a thief."

John glanced over his shoulder at Vorkosigan, who didn't look especially surprised.

"Is that true?" Teyla asked, after muting the comm.

"It depends on your definitions of several terms. I *am* carrying classified weapons data, because they're planning to use those weapons to kill a significant number of people on Barrayar. I did steal it, but I would say rather that I'm a spy, not a thief." He shrugged.

The jumper alerted John. "It looks like they're arming their weapons."

Teyla turned the comm on again. "I repeat, we are a peaceful ship."

"Give us Vorkosigan or we will destroy your ship."

Vorkosigan cursed again. "What kind of weapons have you got?"

Rodney was bent over studying the readings. "Nothing like that. What the hell are they doing on this planet? Nuking cities for fun and profit?"

A snort. "Very much like that. Hand me over. I can't get innocent bystanders killed."

"What?" all of them said, more or less in unison.

Holding out his hand, he dropped a small object into Teyla's hand. "Take this to Barrayar. Insist on speaking to General Allegre. ImpSec will argue a lot, but once they get a good look at your ship, they'll know something's going on. Tell them I sent you, and that I said I spoke with the Emperor's Voice."

"What?" John was used to things moving fast, but honestly, he'd had a really bad day.

"I spoke with the Emperor's Voice. They're to assist you in any way necessary and damn it, they need to read the chip I'm sending. And tell...when you get a chance, tell Ekaterin I'm sorry." He clenched a fist. "Now hand me over to them and get the hell out of here before they realize I'm not carrying the chip."

"No," Teyla said.

"Make that hell, no," Rodney added. "I get enough of that crap from the colonel here. I hate self-sacrificing idiots."

Vorkosigan's mouth opened and closed. Ronon smacked him on the back. "Get used to it," he said. "That's him being nice."

"I assume you have a plan?" Vorkosigan said. "Since we have about two minutes before they blow us out of the sky?"

"That gives us at least an entire minute to come up with a plan," Teyla said.

"I'm just glad Ivan isn't here to hear that," Vorkosigan muttered to himself.

"You said nobody knows here how to work the Stargate...the ring?" John said, brain working furiously.

"As far as I know."

Teyla's eyebrows rose and Ronon nodded in satisfaction.

"Are you thinking what I--"

"Yes, Rodney. Get ready to synch dialing the gate."

"Oh crap." Rodney dove for the controls.

"What are you g--"

"Thank the Ancients for inertial dampeners," Teyla said as the jumper made a sudden dive for the vicinity of the Stargate.

John ignored it as their pursuers yelled at him. "You ready, Rodney?"

"Not really!"

"In 5, 4, 3, 2...now!"

The Gate dialing sequence completed and a wash of energy came out in what John privately always described as a "fwoosh." And a large slice was taken out of the ship pursuing them, which promptly plummeted to the ground as John headed out into space.

Vorkosigan was staring at the monitor, which showed the destruction behind them. "Wow," he said finally.

"Cool, huh?" Rodney said with characteristic smugness.

"Mmm. I think I'm very glad you've decided you're on my side." He paused. "Not to sound ungrateful, but why exactly *did* you decide that?"

John shrugged. Rodney was back at his laptop muttering to himself. Ronon just grinned.

Teyla looked around at them, then at the little man. "I believe Colonel Sheppard would say that you seem like our kind of crazy."

John looked over at her. "I would?"

"Yes, you would," she said with a firm nod.

"Well, if the lady says so, who am I to argue?"

Vorkosigan leaned back in his chair and started to laugh. "I can't *wait* for all of you to meet Gregor."

--end--

My prompt was: Stargate/Vorkosigan Saga: Miles's ride off-planet has vanished and he has important intelligence that must be delivered to Barrayar. That's when he runs into a somewhat confused-looking group of people and their small, but apparently space-worthy, jumper.

Fic: Game Over (ST:TNG/Firefly)

2009-06-14T05:20:03Z

Title: Game Over
Author: Alara Rogers alara_r
Fandoms: ST:TNG/Firefly
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Wash becomes a Q
Notes: This story contains major, major, major spoilers for the Firefly movie "Serenity". More notes about sources in the post itself; follow the fake cut.

Game Over

Fic: "This is what will be" (BSG/Star Wars)

2009-06-13T16:45:21Z

Title: This is what will be
Author: inlovewithnight
Fandoms: BSG/Star Wars
Rating: PG
Prompt: How would a Jedi react to the Cylons?
Notes: Thanks to sionnain for beta'ing. Title from Bruce Springsteen's "Magic."

This is what will be

Re: John Crichton/Torchwood fic, due 13th June

2009-06-12T12:51:03Z

This is a post to let folks know that my John Crichton/Torchwood fic, due in on the 13th, will be posted on the 14th. I hadn't realised at the time, but the due date clashes with my attendance of a sci fi convention! I have sent a message to one of the mods/admins, and I'm hoping that this is ok to do.

eta: Just got in from the con, and it's too late to do anything but quickly amend this post and then crash (is the UK here and is getting on for midnight). Will post story tomorrow, and hope for forgiveness.

eta: story is posted now. You can find it at this link to my journal.
Read more at my journal