Author: dirty diana
Recipient: Tafkar
Rating: PG-13 for violence
Fandoms: Stargate: Atlantis and Battlestar Galactica
Summary: "If this is Earth, she thinks they better keep moving."
"It's a mistake, Lee." Kara stands to face him, defiant despite the left arm that lies coddled in its makeshift sling. The air is cool and damp on the surface of this green planet, bearing the slightest hint of rain.
Lee shrugs. He can't remember the last time that he smelled rain, or watched storm clouds moving in over a clear sky. He checks his pistol, double checks it, and then straps it on against his thigh. His hands are steady, his fingers blackened with dirt. "Not everyone shares your mistrust of strangers, Lieutenant."
"Strangers?" Helo shakes his head, at the mouth of the clearing, with his gun laid on his knees. His eyes dart continually past them, past them, past the trees. He searches for signs of danger. "They're human, aren't they? Not walking toasters. It's a start."
"Doesn't mean they won't shoot to kill." Kara's fingers toy idly with the bandage around her left bicep, stained dark with blood. A surface wound. Lee had sewn the flesh together, in a messy, jagged line, swearing as he did so. "Does it?"
There are circles underneath her eyes. None of them have slept in days, on the jaded edge of a long patrol. "Who shot first?" he asks her, and she shrugs, spitting her anger into the dirt.
"Maybe I should be the one to go." Karl stands suddenly, but doesn't holster his weapon.
Lee shakes his head. "If I don't come back..."
"Frak, Lee..."
"You fix that Raptor and you take Lieutenant Thrace..."
"I can take care of myself."
"...and you get out of here. You find the nearest planet in this system, and you wait for the Galactica."
"What if they don't find us?"
"It's the Galactica. She'll find you."
Kara sits on a damp, mossy rock, taking a breath that catches in her throat. She traces a finger along her bandage, and winces at the resulting sensation. Then she scowls, in disgust.
Helo watches her, with an expression like sympathy. He's bruised himself, bleeding at the mouth. "Took you down good though, didn't it?"
"Frak you."
Helo's soft expression fades, his eyes darting once more, to take in his surroundings, listening past the silence. "You think this is it?" he asks her.
"Think this is what?"
"You know."
"What?"
"Earth."
Kara shrugs. She had thought of it, in the beginning, when Lee had lost pitch and she had gone in after him, tumbling towards orbit. Falling fast, going in after Helo, the first lucky shot. Bringing in the cat.
They still don't have an ID on the that had shot Helo down. Cylon, maybe. But there are no Cylons this far out, or shouldn't be.
Or maybe there is no place so far they'd be able to stop running. This place doesn't look like an Earth, doesn't smell like it, smells too raw and fresh and alive. "Figured Earth would have more people," she says.
"Maybe they used to. Maybe something got them, the same way the Cylons got us."
Karl talks about the Cylons a lot now. Kara has noticed that. "Maybe." Kara shifts her arm slightly, welcoming the ache. If this is Earth, she thinks they better keep moving.
No sign of movement." Teyla makes her report, standing completely still, her hands touching her sidearm. "They hold their position."
"They hold the gate, you mean." His voice barely is light, but John's mad. He's furious at himself, for the siege that he's thrust them into, on a nothing planet, a routine mission.
Teyla nods.
"I don't see what the problem is." McKay unwraps a protein bar, taking a bite. From nervousness as much as hunger. "They're not Wraith, are they? Not so scary. Let's go take it back."
"Are you offering to lead us into battle?" Teyla asks, but McKay's face doesn't show any awareness that she's making fun of him. Teyla's voice rises, faintly scandalized. "They are people. Like us."
"So..."
John shakes his head, ignoring them both. With his hands, he shields both his eyes, so that he can watch the sky. "So they can shoot at us some more with their fighter jets? I don't think so. Not yet."
"They missed."
"It was close enough."
McKay rolls his eyes, chewing stubbornly on his snack.
"It is not logical," Teyla says, slowly.
John nods. He's noticed.
"That people we just met should be trying to kill us?" McKay asks.
"That they have advanced so far in technology. The jets, as you say. The ways of the Wraith do not permit this."
"Perhaps they do what the Genii do," McKay suggests. "Hide underground."
"Perhaps."
John still watches the sky, looking for more falling spacecraft.
Lee walks slowly, with his hands in the air. He makes noise as he pushes through the undergrowth, leaving tracks in the mud, splashing loudly through each wandering stream that he crosses.
He doesn't not for a moment believe that this is Earth, Earth is a fever-addled dream held by his President before she closed her eyes for the last time, a bedtime story told by his father, a rainbow's end for them to chase until something new appears in the distance.
But if this place has no Cylons, then that's a beginning.
When he sleeps, Lee believes that they will die in uncharted space, still running. The fleet, together, above the stars.
Not here, shot on the planet that looks too much like home.
He keeps his arms above his head.
"What do you think it is?" Kara keeps her hand on the metal ring, vaguely warm despite the coolness of the air. She studies the wide symbols, like nothing that she recognises.
Helo shrugs. "Religious, maybe?"
This place does feel like a temple, once he mentions it. The air is thick and still, the path to the clearing well-worn, the tracks ground to sand. The feet, she thinks, of the pious. Of pilgrims.
"Frak." She clutches her arm, the bleeding eased but not stopped. She has bruises all over, from ejecting from the Viper. She never was any good at waiting.
"You heard the CAG." Helo watches her. He doesn't trust Lee these days, doesn't call him by his name. Doesn't trust anyone. Maybe. But he trusts Lee's rank, as if there's a difference. "We stay here."
She looks at him, catching his eyes for an instant. Frowning. Helo has always had her back, ever since flight school, the two of them lining up to catch hell from the instructors, wincing through the pain of twin hangovers. He's always had her back, despite trying to catch Sharon's attention, but now there's Caprica and his first love and nothing about him is the same. "You serious?" she asks him. "You going to leave Apollo to the aliens?"
"Least it's not the Cylons." Helo reaches for his water bottle. "You really want to help, you could check out the Raptor."
Kara rolls her eyes. Her knowledge of the Raptor systems is rudimentary, and he knows it.
"Then keep watch," Karl tells her, and gets up, disappearing from her view.
She watches him for full minutes, tracking his way across the river, away from the gate. She lets him continue his path, away from her, towards the camp. He holds himself with the tense precaution of someone trained for anything. Teyla keeps her distance.
When he is out of sight again, she radios in.
"Just one of them?" Major Sheppard asks suspiciously.
"One," Teyla repeats. She kneels for a moment, bowing unconsciously to meet the earth, fighting dizziness. She is aware of a dull, persistent humming in the back of her head. The Wraith are not far. They are never far. "You feel he is a decoy."
"Well." She is learning to read the meaning of the spaces between John's words, the literal and the sarcastic. "Yeah."
"His movements are strange. He makes no attempt to hide himself."
Major Sheppard does not consider this for long. "You think you can take him, Teyla?"
She doe not have a tendency to brag. The concept was unfamiliar on Athos. She has no need to set herself apart. But she knows that John considers her brave, and she appreciates his faith. "I believe I can.
He doesn't ask her twice. "Bring him in."
"You think to bargain?" she asks curiously."
"I think to figure out what the fuck is going on."
"Acknowledged."
Teyla rises and moves again, following the tracks on the bank of the river.
Kara walks back and forth in one rigid line.
Beyond her immediate line of sight, she can hear Helo working on the Raptor, knows that he's opened the guts of her and is crawling along her side. Helo knows that Raptor as well as he knows anything. Kara doesn't doubt that he'll get them in the air.
She doesn't doubt Lee either.
What she doesn't trust is this place, too close an echo of home to be safe. Or real.
She doesn't think that this is Earth. She believes that they will find that place, she believes it when she prays.
But she doesn't believe that it will be this easy or this bloodless.
The thought of blood causes another twinge in her arm, and she fingers the survival kit that lies in the dirt. Water, dry packaged food, enough morpha to dull the pain.
She won't be any good to Lee or Karl, though, not like that.
Helo emerges from the crash site, wiping the grease from his hands.
"Well?" she asks him impatiently.
"I can get her up," he says with a shrug. "Going to take a while."
"You always were a slowpoke."
"How's your arm, Thrace," he asks her, with a matching light tone. "Sure you don't need to lie down?"
Kara checks her watch. Lee has been gone eighty-five minutes. Too long, she thinks. Too long.
He is aware of being followed long before his stalker comes close enough to be heard. Lee stops, but not in time, and soon he is choking, breathless, gasping for air with his face in the dirt. The impact of solid bone and muscle knocks him out for a long, immeasurable second, the bright day turning to black.
Moaning a wordless protest, he struggles to get up.
"Do not move." A woman's voice, then, and a woman's knee in the centre of his back. "I do not wish to hurt you."
"Fair enough," Lee mumbles breathlessly. He tastes dirt, and blood. "Who are you?" He feels the tinge of laughter.
"Perhaps, for now, I will ask the questions."
"Ask away."
"What is your name?"
"Captain Lee Adama." His title spills out of his chest, and sounds wrong, the way that it always has. "Of the Battlestar Galactica."
She has hold of his arm, between his elbow and his wrist, and twists slightly. The pain shoots up to his shoulder, and Lee swallows a groan of pain. "Name," she repeats stubbornly. "What you wish to be called."
"Lee."
"Is this your home, Lee? We believed it to be uninhabited."
"No."
"How did you get here? Through the gate of the Ancestors?"
"Through the what?
He can hear more questions in the subtle shift of her body. His burden is lightened, suddenly, and the pain in his arm eases. A hand reaches down, to help him from the forest floor. "Come."
Rodney McKay paces irritably over the hilly square of land that holds their makeshift camp. "I don't understand."
"And here I thought you were the smartest guy on Atlantis." Colonel Sheppard squats against the ground, in a deceptively careless pose. His gaze flicks constantly to the sky, head turning at each new sound. Rodney can hear only the wind.
"I don't understand why we're just sitting here. We need that gate."
"Feeling cut off from your coffee supply, McKay?"
"Fuck." When the colonel resorted to meaningless sarcasm, there was no use reasoning with him. Not that there was under normal circumstances. Rodney sighed, loudly. "I hope Teyla's okay."
"She's okay. Look."
Sheppard is standing, his body on guard, before the foliage parts. Rodney jumps in surprise at the unexpected noise.
The captive is dressed in a uniform of some sort. Vaguely reminiscent of the Genii, Rodney thinks with a frown, and glances sideways at the colonel, whose still and dangerous stance suggests that he has noticed it too.
Rodney has seen hostages, has been one. This man does not walk like a hostage, he does not have the eyes of one, brightly taking in everything around him. If Teyla bested him in a fight, he shows no sign of it.
John sees that too, and before anyone can protest, the butt of his rifle shoves the victim squarely in the chest.
"His name is Lee," Teyla explains, with only one curt frown of disapproval.
Lee doubles over with a grunt, as Colonel Sheppard shoves him again. "Genii?"
"What?" Lee asks, the word drawn slowly. His eyes tighten only slightly around the sides, with pain.
"I do not believe so. He seems to have no knowledge of the stargate. And if the Genii had achieved space travel, we should have heard of it long before now." She extends a hand, holding Lee's gun.
Rodney snatches it before John can, studying it curiously. "If they have so little knowledge of the stargate, why are they holding it from us?"
"Holding what?"
John doesn't seem to hear, his eyes dark. "Why were they shooting at us, I think is the better question."
Lee stands. Weaponless, but Rodney moves back instinctively. "That was a misunderstanding," he says quietly. "Are you in charge here?"
"I am."
"Captain Lee Adama of the Battlestar Galactica."
Colonel Sheppard stands slightly straighter, acknowledging the greeting. "Colonel John Sheppard."
"One of my pilots is wounded."
John cracks an almost-smile. "Yeah? You think we're even?"
Captain Lee Adama shrugs.
"Yeah, well, I'd like a little more information first. McKay." John calls Rodney's name twice, to get his attention. "Rodney. Cover him."
Rodney fumbles for his sidearm, holding it straight in front of him. Teyla vanishes silently, back into the forest.
Both Vipers are beyond saving. Kara barely ejected before impact, and a steady line of blue smoke wafts into the atmosphere.
Helo salvages what he can.
Something crawls out of the undergrowth, startling him. Karl has drawn his weapon before he can think, and the rodent scurries, unworried, across the ground and back into the shadows.
"Frak." Helo holsters his pistol and goes back to work, aware that he is losing daylight, the sun steadily sinking.
Kara pops into view, her gait slowed by a vague limp.
"You think Lee will come back?"
"He's not going to leave us here, if that's what you're suggesting."
"No," he agrees. "But he's been distracted."
"Frak, Karl." Kara sounds frustrated. Helo can see how much pain she's in, and knows that she isn't aware of how much it shows. "You've been distracted."
"Yeah?" he asks her.
"Yeah," she says, turning away from him. On the ground now, nothing is moving.
She got tired of waiting. Lee's tracks are easy to follow. He evaded the jagged stone cliff, and went down to the river, wide and shallow, banked by thick, green mud.
Kara draws her pistol. Lee has been gone too long. And there are things in the galaxy as evil as the Cylons, something that she thinks they've all been too quick to forget.
She brushes her hair out of her eyes, and keeps marching.
The crack of a branch surprises her too late.
Her gun flies without warning out of her hand, and the impact with which she hits the ground rams her injured arm, still in its sling.
She lets out a shout of frustration, and with an elbow smashes her unseen attacker, yelling again to distract herself from the pain. She's fought through worse.
A woman, dark and muscular, with an expression on her face that Kara recognises.
It's been too quiet.
"Starbuck?"
He doesn't raise his voice above a whisper. He draws his gun, stalking quietly out of the shelter of the Raptor into the sun, shading his eyes with his free hand. "Starbuck?"
The clearing is silent. The imprint of lightly treading boots take a direct path away from the sun, in the direction Apollo had first taken.
"Frakking Kara," he mutters, and puts his gun away once more.
The stench of fuel leaking from the Raptor is worse when he returns to the metal ring. Helo climbs into the cockpit, and tries the comms one more time. Silence is the only answer.
"Don't worry." The voice sounds like Sharon's, and it's beside him all the time now. "You'll find it."
"A comm signal?" he asks, despite himself.
She shakes her head. "A path home."
That's a cool story." Colonel John Sheppard's expression hasn't changed, except for slow, considered blinking as he listens. "That's a very cool story. Isn't it, McKay?"
The other man looks surprised to be spoken to, breaking the flow of Lee's outpouring of words. There are things that he's left out, scores of almosts and near-misses. His father. His President. So many people that almost didn't make it, and people that didn't make it at all. The reasons that they're out here, trying to plot a course for a place that no one has ever seen.
There will be time for that.
McKay holds his weapon trained on Lee's torso. Lee sits very, very still, with his hands in his lap.
"Yeah," McKay agrees. "Could be a movie."
"You believe it?"
McKay pauses, his gun tilting dangerously as he scratches. Then his hands are steady again, pointing with measured casualness at Lee's coolly beating heart. "You asking me if I think it's possible? Artificially constructed beings taking over the galaxy? Remind me to tell you about the Replicators sometime."
John Sheppard's face doesn't change. "You've told me about the Replicators," he says slowly. "I'm asking if you think that this guy is telling the truth, or if I should shoot him in the head and go take back our gate."
"That's our story," Lee says quietly. He glances up to see the sun dipping in the sky, and knows that he's been away too long. "I'm a little curious to hear yours."
"Yeah?" John Sheppard shakes his head. "Well, we haven't lost our warship, that's for sure." His mouth catches the trace of something that could be a smile, as the sun vanishes behind the clouds.
Teyla has bruises already forming, from the first one, along her back and the length of her thighs, where he managed to topple her to the rocky ground. This one seems to find every single injury, whether by luck or a strange kind of telepathy. Teyla bites her lip, wrenching by force the other's weapon out of her hand. Her own weapon lies strapped to her side. They are not here for killing.
She has her own weaknesses to exploit, and grabs hold of the arms that hold her, eliciting a cry of pain. The blood drips warm onto her fingers.
"Do not fight," she says calmly. "You make it worse."
The first pop is barely audible, a puff of smoke erupting from Kara's damaged Viper. The second is a concussive blast that sends Helo sprawling to the ground.
"Frak."
Helo picks himself up carefully, testing the strength of each limb. His left foot will take almost no pressure, sending searing shots of pain through his ankle every time he tries to stand.
He has to get up, he thinks, has to get up, has to get up. If he doesn't get up, the Raptor won't fly, and if the Raptor doesn't fly.. Kara and Lee. The pain curdles his thoughts, and makes them unrecognisable.
With one last pop, Kara's Viper burns the last of its fuel. They should have enough, though, if the Raptor will fly.
"She'll fly." Sharon's voice is distant, but her image clear, covered in shadows by the sun that dips behind the cliff face.
Helo stumbles.
"Okay, let's say we do believe him." McKay waves his gun in an impatient gesture. Lee eyes his own weapon, left carelessly on the ground. "What then? Are we going to sit around talking all day? Is that the brilliant plan?"
John Sheppard is already on his feet, with his weapon pointed over Lee's shoulder.
Kara lands gracelessly in the dirt, one hand raised weakly to cushion her fall.
From this distance, the sound of the explosion is muffled.
Helo pulls himself up with a grimace. The entire forest seems to be on fire now, a mirage made worse by the setting of the alien sun.
"You can do it," Sharon tells him.
Kara left the supplies that she pulled from her Viper on the ground, a few feet from the metal ring. An entire medic kit. Karl's ankle throbs uncontrollably.
He pulls the supplies, limping, into the shade of a tree. The ring makes him nervous, prickling with a source of energy that he can't define. A strange thing to worship, Karl thinks briefly, and then bows his head in the opposite direction, tracing the sources of his wounds.
"You're okay," she says. "It's okay."
He cleans the trickles of blood on his skin, shaking his head.
"Why are you ignoring me, Helo?"
"Cause you're not really here, Sharon." The antiseptic stings.
"You're sure about that?" She sounds calm and sincere, like Sharon never sounded. In the half-light, her smile is perfect. Helo doesn't look up again.
"I'm positive."
"Yeah."
The pain pulses in his leg, harder now. And Karl barely hears the sound of the metal ring opening behind him.
By the time he turns around, the creatures are through, and it's too late.
"It's okay," Sharon whispers, and holds his hand as the pain eases.
"This the way home you were talking about?" he asks her, and she only shakes her head. He doesn't hear the rest of her words, but it sounds like a prayer.
"How many are you?"
Kara hears the coolness in Lee's voice as he stoops to pick her up. No one moves now to stop them. Kara doesn't need to feign her weakness, holding tight to Lee's outstretched hand. She feels Lee's eyes flick over her and drop. She knows that he's seeing the paleness in her face, and the blood that soaks the right side of her uniform.
"Teyla."
Teyla jumps when John speaks, but hears the order, and moves forward towards the woman, with a hand open to catch her if she stumbles again. At the first grazing of the woman's bloody shirt, she pulls back.
"I will not hurt you."
The woman shakes her head. Her voice is strong. "No."
"Lieutenant," Lee murmurs against her ear, a gesture so unguarded that Teyla fights the urge to turn away. "Let them help you. That's an order."
"How'd this happen?"
The man, the leader sounds worried, and Kara fights a breathless laugh. "One of you shot me as we were coming in. Remember?"
Lee's fingers tighten around her elbow.
The conversation is brief. John holds it with his back to Teyla and McKay, studying the newcomers with careful eyes.
"Forget them," McKay is saying, tapping his energy scanner distractedly. "Any second now, that Dart we saw is going to bring back reinforcements. You really want to wait around for that?"
"They're military," John says quietly. "Both of them."
"So?"
"So it lends credibility to their story." John shrugs. "That's all."
"The Genii are soldiers," McKay says.
"The Genii think they're soldiers."
"What's the difference?"
John shrugs again. "Forget it."
"She's not in good shape." Teyla interrupts them quietly. The lines around her eyes are tight, as she studies McKay. She cannot comprehend, John knows, the idea of so many lives never touched by the Wraith. Her knuckles are bleeding, but she doesn't seem to have noticed. "Surely Dr. McKay is not suggesting that we abandon her to die."
"What?" McKay asked. "No I'm merely suggesting that we give some thought to saving ourselves. Besides, maybe you should have thought of that before you beat her up."
"I was defending myself," Teyla says.
"Exactly."
"Shhh." John raises his hand. "No one's leaving anyone yet. I'd like to check out the source of that explosion, for starters."
"Their abandoned craft," Teyla suggests.
"Maybe."
"Oh, sure. You just want to put all our lives on the line so you can go play with an intergalactic jet."
John inhales sharply, still watching the two pilots, folded into the crooks of each others' bodies. He's operating on too little sleep, and he still doesn't know exactly what he's stumbled into. "I'm doing a threat assessment. Those two surrendered because they had no choice. Doesn't mean the rest of them will, when their spaceship gets here."
"Oh." McKay is quiet, for once. "Huh." Then taps his scanner, and frowns. "Hmmmn."
John turns briefly around. "What?"
"Massive energy surge."
"Massive energy surge?"
"The kind consistent with an open gate," McKay explains.
John raises his eyes once more to the sky.
Kara dies as the sun sets, on a planet she doesn't know the name of. She lays her head on Lee's shoulder. She's growing steadily warmer, from the inside out.
"How are you feeling, Starbuck?"
"Feeling fine, sir."
"I told you to stay put."
"You tell me a lot of things, Lee. I even heard some of them. Sorry," she adds, shutting her eyes tight against a light so bright that it hurts. "Lords of Kobol," Lee murmurs quietly in her ear, but Kara doesn't hear the rest. Her head falls forward.
The comms on the Raptor crackle with atmospheric static, fading persistently out and in.
"Galactica to Helo. Helo, this is the Galactica, please come in."
The distant voice is drowned then, beaten into the ground by the certain sound of an army on the march.
Lee doesn't cry, as he pulls Kara's tags from her chest and closes his fist. He doesn't know if this is a beginning or an end, he only knows that sometimes you have to roll a hard six.
"What's that mean?" Colonel Sheppard looks at him curiously. They're already on the move.
"I don't know." Lee shrugs. When he reaches for his gun, no one stops him, and that tells him more than anything just how frakked they are. "Something my father used to say."
The dark is falling. Lee has already said the only prayer that he knows.