----
After that, its turtles all the way down.
----
Sometimes she thinks about the universe. She thinks about the stars she once understood as tiny points of light and meaningless beauty, flecks of dust on an infinite blanket of night. She never actually believed that the Earth rested on the back of a great, noble tortoise, but for what she truly knew she might have just as well. Science had answers and logic and reason, but to her they were no more than trinkets and trifles and notions that were too big, too lofty to grasp. So instead they were nothing.
The day she sat in a cold, sterile room and listened to spinning tales of interplanetary heroism and otherworldly triumph those stars became everything. The sky that slept above her became less abstract and more real. We'd been there, we'd seen it, we'd breathed it. The points of light came alive.
Still, for all she's learned and touched, some of the mysteries of youth and innocence remain. As she stares into the blackness hovering behind her closed eyelids she wonders – wonders what's beyond the universe that she's now immersed in; what's outside the pieces she can just barely see.
She tries not to dwell on it, not to spend time pondering things even science can't explain. That train of thought always leaves her frustrated and anxious and inevitably leads to brooding over philosophical clichés like the meaning of life. We're born, we live, we die, but no one tells her to what end. No one tells her what the endgame is or why one should even bother.
It's when her brain swirls with questions like these that she wants to believe in a god. She needs an entity, a higher power to claim responsibility for everything, someone to have a master plan – to give purpose to a purposeless existence. She wants to know where she's going and what she should do when she gets there, how to get there. She needs someone to tell her why things happen the way they do or why they don't. To tell her it will be all right.
And somewhere deep inside – somewhere painfully selfish – she wants to believe in a god because she needs someone else to take the responsibility.
--
"Major," she calls breathlessly as she enters the bay, her team and a handful of Athosians spilling tentatively from the jumper. Elizabeth halts her movement when she sees the unfamiliar face of a warrior beauty, her head slightly bowed, and she smiles. He actually did it.
"You shot up the gateroom," she says with a tilt of her head and the raise of one brow. As the tension evaporates and her fingers unclench she bites her lip to swallow a grin.
He looks up, eyes dark and thick and crawling with something she's certain she doesn't want to identify. On her tongue she tastes the salty sting of blood and when her gaze flicks back to the returning crew she does a hurried count. Sergeant, lieutenant, sergeant, Athosian, another…
"Sumner?" she asks, straining forward on her toes to better see inside the small ship.
Major Sheppard grinds his teeth and hisses a "no" before breezing past her and through the doorway.
Her breath catches for a moment and she has to force herself to exhale.
--
At night she hears screaming. She doesn't recognize the voices – she's certain she could identify the cries of those she surrounds herself with, even more so than she could recognize their laughter – and these are not them. The screams that reverberate across her darkened room are those of anonymous victims of the Wraith, imagined perhaps, but sometimes she believes, almost knows, that they're real. That somehow she's plugged into the universe and that the amplified dirges of culled populations are channeled directly into her ears because she needs to hear them, feel them. Because her team awoke the monsters that destroyed a galaxy, the monsters that are working to do it again.
Because someone has to hear them.
--
"…understood." Her fingers dig into the flesh of her biceps and she burns under the gaze of a dozen pair of hollow eyes. "What's the status of the other two?"
Rodney answers quietly and she knows that the pain she's swathed in now isn't hers alone. The sensation that pricks at the ends of her nerves is multiplied. It's theirs. It's his.
"You can't do any more out there, Rodney, return to Atlantis."
As she straightens her spine, lumbar to atlas, she takes a brief moment and wishes for numbness, for just enough strength to carry on.
--
She stands on the gangway outside of her office to watch as Sheppard's team returns reluctantly home. Teyla's head is down-turned and Ronon stares at a fixed point on the wall. Even from a distance she can see the tightness of John's jaw and the shadow that clouds his eyes. She offers a welcome home but it struggles to leave her throat and comes out merely a whisper.
Teyla's gaze flicks up to meet Elizabeth's and her head shakes once.
She hates to ask but she has to know.
"You didn't find him?"
John slams his fist into the doorframe before he clears it and a knot settles itself firmly in her chest.
"We found him," Teyla answers softly, "but not before they did."
--
The words she hears over the communications link are scratchy and distant but the message is clear.
"Medical personnel are on their way," she informs her off-world team. "ETA ten minutes."
She knows it's too late for Thomas and Lee, but tries to hold on to the belief that Martinez will make it through.
She tries to hold on, but her tendril of hope has become thin and frayed, its substance weakened by past failures and disappointments – and when she reaches for it she does so warily, afraid that maybe this time when she grasps it, it will snap completely.
--
She drops her hand from her mouth even as John continues to shout.
"Carson? Carson!"
She grips the edge of the panel and wills her knees not to give out, not to buckle as the tremors increase in their vigor and spread, radiating intensity up through her thighs.
"Sergeant," John barks, "report! What the hell is going on up there?"
She swallows against the tightness in her throat and blinks against the tears. Struggling, swimming against the weight of her heart in her chest, she knows – she knows.
The answering silence pierces her spirit with a fire the likes of which she's never felt before.
Rodney crumbles into himself and John slams his palm against the console again and again and again. The reverberating echoes shake the room.
--
"Lorne? Lorne!" John's chest heaves and his teeth grind in anger as he presses harder on his earpiece. "Major, respond!"
A sharp crack sounds and Elizabeth flinches as another piece of the ancient city crumbles, plummets to the ocean floor. She watches, frozen in place as what's left of her heart shatters like glass, jagged fragments splintering into nothingness and slipping beneath the swell of the angry sea.
"Fuck." John turns to her and his fingers painfully, forcefully encircle her wrist. "You're getting out of here, now."
She tries to yank free but it only causes his grasp to tighten. She pulls again and succeeds in nothing but causing herself more pain. She wants to stay – wants it to end like this.
The self-destruct alarm rings persistently in the background, the faint sounds of the expedition entering the open wormhole breaking the rhythmic monotony.
--
She stands against the grey sky, moisture from the dew-stained grass soaking her designer heels and shepherding a chill that seeps into her bones. Across from her, behind her, beside her men and women stand together as they fall apart – faces as dark as the clothing they wear, as the wounds they carry. She can feel Ronon and Teyla fight the urge to shift uncomfortably in their Earth clothing, and John in his service dress. They don't belong here, none of them do. Her own voice echoes in the stillness, recounting tales of heroism and glory.
They are hollow even to her.
She tightens her fingers around the cold, harsh metal of the dog tags in her palm and knows the ghost of this sensation will never leave.
Her words conclude and a clergyman offers a final prayer. She closes her eyes to the sound, tilting her head to the heavens to ask if there is a god. Elizabeth waits for a response, a feeling, anything that can assure her someone or something is there. She wants to ask forgiveness, absolution for the sins that she feels are hers.
A slight breeze blows a wisp of hair across her face and she waits.