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Title: Immutable Differences (1/3)
Author: Ceitie
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard, Ford/OFC
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: Up to The Siege 2
Word Count: 5,116
Summary: “Personally, I almost prefer the life-sucking aliens.”
A/N: This is the extended version of a fic that was written for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sga_flashfic Missing Persons challenge, Scena con Variazione. Thank you ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
of_evangeline and blacknoise for being such wonderful betas!
Immutable Differences
Part One
The wormhole half-flung him into Atlantis’ gate room, but Colonel Dillon Everett took it in stride. He shook his head to cast off the momentary dizziness and walked easily into the room. The soldiers lining the walls of the gate room slowly lowered their weapons, and Everett echoed their actions, knowing that his people would follow his lead.
There was something odd about the soldiers who now stood at attention in the gate room, something that sent the hairs prickling up on the back of his neck with its wrongness. He diverted the disturbance to the back of his mind, too busy taking in his new surroundings.
Atlantis was impressive, from what he could see of it. He took note of the room’s size and dim lighting as well as the shrieking klaxons that echoed off its tiled walls, but focused his attention on the three people rushing down the large central staircase towards him.
A man whose jacket sported panels of command red hurried down from the upper level, along with a woman in military gray and a second woman in a red flight suit. Everett tried to suppress a frown when he realized that he didn’t recognize any of them. He scanned his memory of the Atlantis expedition personnel files; he’d reviewed the files quickly and meticulously while preparing for the mission, but he found himself at a loss to match identities to the faces before him. It was possible, he reasoned, that they were some of the Pegasus galaxy natives who were apparently allowed free run of the city, rather than expedition members, but if that was the case –
“Who are you people and where’s Dr. Weir?” Everett asked brusquely.
The man opened his mouth to reply, but one of the women spoke first.
“Who are you?” she shot back, somehow sounding at once angry, hopeful and suspicious.
Everett eyed her flight suit and disgruntled expression, wondering if she was the leader of the natives who lived on the planet’s mainland, the alien who had become a member of Major Sheppard’s team. He thought both the flight suit and the soft curves of her body made that unlikely. The woman who stood next to her was a far better candidate for the infamous Teyla Emmagan. She was dark and wiry, dressed in a military uniform, and held a P90 easily.
Everett felt realization hit him like a lightening bolt, as the source of the niggling sense of strangeness became instantly clear. The soldiers in the gate room were women. Every last one of them. Considering the fact that nearly all of the military personnel that had made the trip to Atlantis had been male, something really fucking weird was going on. Everett didn’t allow his friendly demeanor to slip, but he felt adrenaline surge through him as he began reassessing the situation. He answered the woman’s question, but kept his eyes on the man in command colours.
“Colonel Dillon Everett, United States Marine Corps. I need to see Dr. Weir immediately,” he said, looking for a reaction, trying to size up what was going on. The reports of a certain Sergeant Bates were abruptly flashing through his head, and he wondered if the natives had somehow taken control of Atlantis. He watched as the three strangers exchanged a series of quick glances, and tightened his grip on the weapon at his side.
The man turned away from the two women, looked Everett straight in the eye and said, “I’m Dr. Weir.”
Everett blinked and let out a short, astonished laugh. Despite the presence of the women, he said, “Bullshit,” out of pure surprise, but the woman in the flight suit broke in.
“Look, it’s true, alright?” she said, rolling her eyes. “She’s Dr. Weir, I’m Dr. McKay and that’s Major Sheppard, there was an accident with Ancient technology and now we’re all the opposite gender, how mind-bogglingly bizarre, blah blah blah.”
Everett dropped his smile. “I don’t have time for this. Cut the crap and tell me where I can find Dr. Weir, or,” he raised his weapon slightly, “we’re going to have a serious problem.”
The dark woman tensed, eyeing him. She muttered, “You don’t have time for this…”
The man shot her a warning glance and the woman in the flight suit ignored them both, glaring at Everett. She waved her hand in an exasperated, hurry-it-up gesture. “I assume you’ve seen our pictures, Colonel, so take a closer look, see if you notice any, shall we say, striking similarities?”
Her voice rose in pitch and speed. “If you could skip right past the shock and disbelief to the acceptance phase, that’d be great, seeing as we’re in the middle of an evacuation here and as of now there’s maybe six minutes left until the self-destruct goes off. So instead of asking stupid questions, why don’t you just tell us what you’re doing here?”
The other two were nodding along in frantic agreement, and Everett finally managed to peel his jaw off the floor. He closed his mouth and stared hard; the resemblances that he had missed before became suddenly apparent, like an optical illusion that appeared only after he twisted his head and squinted his eyes. He felt a tilt, like his well-ordered universe had tipped on an angle without any warning. Somehow he managed to keep his mouth from falling open again.
He turned to the thin, elegant man and asked uncertainly, “Dr. Weir?”
“Yes,” Weir said, crossing his arms over his chest.
Everett straightened his shoulders and tried to regroup, but did not quite succeed at casting off his disorientation and restoring his former self-assurance.
“General O'Neill sends his compliments on a job well done under extraordinary circumstances.” He saluted, swallowed, and continued. “You are relieved.”
~/~
Twelve days earlier.
Radek was walking back from the mess hall, eating the remains of a mostly stale muffin, when the whole city thrummed like a plucked guitar string. For nearly ten seconds he felt the ground under his feet buzzing and trembling while his teeth rattled and the muffin tumbled out of his unsteady hand. It was not unlike standing next to a set of very powerful speakers at a rock concert, Radek thought wildly, and then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
He activated his comm, and winced as Rodney’s bellow slammed its way into his ear.
“- the hell just happened?”
Dr. Weir’s voice rang out over the babble of similar questions. “Rodney, Grodin says that there was a huge power drain in one of the storage rooms by the West Pier. There are two life signs out there.”
“It was us, Dr. McKay.” Radek recognized the worried voice of James Naicker, one of the engineers in his division who had been sent out to search for any helpful Ancient devices whose function hadn’t yet been confirmed, on the off chance that one of them would be the key to somehow defeating the three approaching Hive ships.
Naicker continued, “Dr. Brar and I seem to have accidentally activated one of the devices in Storage Room J385, and I – I think that it was the source of the power drain and that strange hum. But it’s turned off now, I’m quite sure.” Radek could hear the man cringing, and sighed sympathetically.
“Oh, isn’t that just wonderful. Never mind the fact that the Wraith are bearing down on us as we speak – ”
Rodney sounded like he had been aching for an opportunity to scream at someone for hours, so Radek interrupted before Rodney could rip the poor man limb from limb over the public comm.
“Do not start, Rodney. I will go to West Pier and handle the problem, yes? Go back to the database.”
Rodney grumbled but signed off. Dr. Weir said warmly, “Thank you, Dr. Zelenka.”
Radek felt heat rise into his face in response.
He said, “No thanks is needed. Naicker, Brar, do not touch anything until I get there,” and headed for the nearest transporter, wondering if he had time to stop by the mess hall to get a new muffin.
Forty-five minutes later, Radek was still searching through the database for information about the mystery device. He had sent Naicker and Brar away to check in at the infirmary after they’d explained to him what had happened. Dr. Brar, a linguist with the ATA gene, had brushed the large cube-like machine with her shoulder, at which point it had turned on with that kidney-tingling hum. It had turned off by itself about ten seconds later, despite Naicker’s rapid search for a way to disconnect its power and Brar’s mental commands of Off! Off! They had both seemed a little shaken by the experience but otherwise unaffected; Radek figured it would do no harm to have Beckett look them over before they returned to their search.
He had confirmed that the device was indeed turned off and no longer draining power, but had made little headway in discovering exactly what it was. The storage room seemed to contain mostly medical equipment with a smattering of miscellaneous items, none of which had been examined in any great detail by the science team.
Radek had left his comm switched to the private channel that he and Rodney used, not wanting to be disturbed by idle chatter or requests. He was surprised when Rodney contacted him less than an hour after he had reached the storage room. Radek straightened up from his hunched position over the console, rubbing the bridge of his nose. A headache had been burgeoning behind his eyes for the past ten minutes, and it was a little difficult to concentrate on Rodney’s voice.
“Zelenka, respond,” said Rodney. He sounded – strange. As though he were making an effort to speak calmly, and Radek felt a shiver of trepidation.
“Yes, what?” he answered.
“Have you made any progress on what that machine did when it turned on?”
Radek snorted. If all Rodney wanted was a progress report – “I have been here for less than hour, what do you think?”
“Because in the last thirty minutes, fifteen people have reported to the infirmary with headaches and high fevers,” Rodney hissed, any sense of calm thrown to the wind, “and somehow I’m guessing that the timing isn’t simply an amusing coincidence.”
Radek froze, hands stiff and unmoving over the console.
“I’m sending Kusanagi down to help, and I’ll join you as soon as Carson does his voodoo and figures out what the hell is going on.” Rodney no longer sounded like he was hovering on the edge of panic, but the current of fear was still obvious beneath his curt words. Radek was not reassured.
Still, he cleared his throat and said as steadily as he could, “I see. I will work faster.”
“Right. Do that.”
Then there was silence, and Radek stared through the gloom of the storage room at the metallic device sitting innocently next to the far wall, and tried not to let his hands shake. He took a deep breath, and changed his comm back to the public channel in case someone needed him.
Miko Kusanagi joined him five minutes later, and they acknowledged each other with quick nods and strained smiles. Radek left the console to her and set upon the device with his tools, which proved to be a more difficult endeavor than he had imagined. It took him nearly an hour to find the trick of removing the casing from the side panel without resorting to the sheer blunt force of a crow bar, and by that time, his head had begun to throb painfully and he was leaning hard against the wall to his right so as not to slide to the ground.
He knew Miko wasn’t doing any better; she was supporting herself against the console, still doggedly typing away despite the flush in her cheeks and the glassiness in her eyes. Radek had ordered her to go the infirmary but she had looked at him carefully and said, “I will go if you accompany me, Dr. Zelenka,” and after a moment, he had turned back to the machine without a word.
By the same tacit agreement they had both changed their comms to a private science channel after the requests on the public channel for a med team – to the living quarters, to the mess hall, to the training room, to the control room – became so frequent and panicked that they couldn’t listen any longer.
He heard a noise at the doorway and looked up; it took a long time for his eyes to focus enough to identify the newcomers. Rodney walked into the room with Major Sheppard beside him, both men looking as though they might collapse at any moment. Rodney was sweating and shivering, hugging his jacket around himself, and Sheppard swayed where he stood, one hand clutching the wall for support.
“Radek,” Rodney said hoarsely. “Tell me you’ve figured this out.”
Radek shook his head, and then blinked away the resultant dizziness. “No, Rodney, I am sorry. We need more time.”
“We don’t have time,” Sheppard said, leaning full-length against the wall and closing his eyes.
Radek didn’t ask how many people had been stricken by the illness, or if anyone had died. Instead, he asked, “Why has Atlantis not activated its quarantine protocols?”
Rodney grimaced. “Carson was trying to figure that out. He said that whatever causing this isn’t infectious. Apparently Atlantis knows that a quarantine would be useless.”
“Are you certain that this device is the cause of the illness? If we still do not even know what is happening to us – ” Miko spoke up, only to be cut off by Rodney.
“Those idiots turning on that goddamn machine is the only weird thing that happened before everyone started to get sick; that makes the timing a little suspicious, don’t you think?” Rodney’s glare was too pained to carry its usual clout.
From his position against the wall, Sheppard said, “Post hoc, ergo proctor hoc? Careful, Rodney, your logical fallacies are showing.” He started snickering softly.
Radek smiled despite himself at Rodney’s sour expression, but his amusement vanished as Sheppard, still snickering, slid down the wall and onto the ground. Radek tried to rise from his crouching position to go to Sheppard’s aid, only to stagger hard into the wall, grunting in pain as he struck his shoulder. Rodney and Miko were already pulling Sheppard into a sitting position by the time Radek regained his balance and made his way across the room.
“Major? Come on, focus, look at me,” Rodney said worriedly, propping Sheppard up against the wall while Miko pressed her wrist to Sheppard’s forehead. Radek took in Sheppard’s dazed eyes and chattering teeth, and the fact that Rodney looked like he was only a few minutes away from joining Sheppard on the floor, and knew that they were out of time.
“Rodney. Take him to the infirmary. We will continue to try and fix this,” Radek said.
Rodney shook his head, not taking his eyes off of Sheppard. “The infirmary’s past capacity already. And I have to stay and help you; no one else is coming.”
Radek flinched, and ignored the small, frightened noise that Miko failed to stifle.
“He is nearly unconscious and so are you; there is nothing more you can do here. Take him to his quarters, somewhere where you can bring down his fever.” Or at least let him lie comfortably in a bed, so he won’t die on the floor of this storage room, Radek did not say. Rodney would not be receptive to that sort of pragmatism.
Rodney took a deep breath, then his shoulders slumped and he nodded tiredly. “Okay. Okay.”
Radek tried to hide his shock at how easily Rodney had given in, and the resulting indication of just how badly Rodney was suffering. Rodney leaned forward and wrapped his arm around Sheppard’s waist, hauling him to his feet. The two of them wavered for a moment before Rodney steadied them against the wall. Sheppard’s head was drooping, he seemed unaware of his surroundings and yet he somehow managed to remain standing.
Rodney headed for the door, pulling Sheppard along with him, but he turned his head as he reached the doorway, looking at Miko and then Radek. He said, “Good luck,” and walked out without waiting for an answer.
Radek said, “And to you as well,” anyway.
After Rodney and Sheppard had left, events took on an odd, feverish haze. Radek continued to work listlessly on the device, but his thoughts kept wandering and he would find himself staring down at his motionless hands, some unknown amount of time having slipped by without his notice. At some point, Miko had left the console, placed her jacket on the floor and curled up on top of it, muttering something about a short rest.
Radek could still see her on the floor out of the corner of his eye. He wanted to go and check on her, make sure she was alright, make sure she was breathing, but his whole body ached and he didn’t think he would be able to make it to the console, even if he crawled.
He wondered if the Wraith would arrive in a fortnight and find a city full of corpses. Perhaps even at this moment someone else was thinking the same thing, and arming the self-destruct in order to save whatever remained of their city from the Wraith’s grasp.
Radek realized he was staring up at the ceiling, and that that was because he was lying on his back on the floor. He was suddenly, fiercely glad of the messages that they had sent to Earth, imagined his brother and sister and their families watching the video, listening as a dead man described the rising of a city from the ocean.
Even as Radek slid into unconsciousness, he saw Atlantis behind his eyelids, water streaming down in the sunlight, towers singing up into the sky.
~/~
Rodney opened his eyes, and immediately closed them again with a strangled moan. His head no longer felt like it was about to explode, but his eyes and every inch of his skin stung and itched, his whole body feeling achy and out of sorts. He lay on his back and breathed in and out through his nose until the pain dissipated somewhat.
A nap would have been really nice right about now, Rodney reflected wearily, but Sheppard’s quarters were chilly and he was lying on the floor. His back was already letting him know that it did not appreciate such treatment. With a sigh, he cracked his eyes open again and pushed himself up into a sitting position.
And froze in place, staring down at the front of his shirt; there were – bulges – under it that he was reasonably sure hadn’t been there before. He reached up with one shaky hand, poked and squeezed tentatively, then yanked his shirt up to his armpits and gaped at what most definitely appeared to be breasts. Breasts. On his chest.
Rodney was usually of the opinion that profanity was for people who were too stupid to come up with more creative insults, but certain situations called for exceptions to the rule. This, he decided numbly, was one of them.
“What the fuck.” The sound of his own voice was all wrong, much too high, and a horrible suspicion was clawing its way forward from the back of Rodney’s mind. He thrust a frantic hand down the front of his pants, and the suspicion very abruptly became fact. Swallowing down nausea, he scrambled to his feet and flung himself towards the bathroom, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with the door-frame when his vision blurred with a head rush.
He careened into the bathroom, intending to empty his stomach into the toilet, but stopped when the transparent wall of the shower cubicle shifted to its reflective form, apparently at his subconscious mental command. He stopped in front of it and stared.
A strange woman in an ill-fitting uniform stared back at him.
For a moment the cognitive dissonance was so strong, he nearly turned his head to see if a woman was standing behind him. Then something snapped into place in his brain, and he recognized himself again, or at least this fun-house mirror version of himself. Same features, pale round eyes and slanted mouth, only – not quite, all the rough edges of his face smoothed into some smaller, finer version. He raised his hand and ran it through his hair, sweat-sticky and standing up in small tufts, absently noting the disappearance of his receding hairline.
He was almost sure that he was shorter, and every time he looked at his transformed body he got the incalculably creepy feeling that he was looking at his sister’s, or at least one with the same wide shoulders and hips and full breasts. Rodney shuddered, and tried to ignore both the sickness rising in his stomach and the cold sweat that was breaking out across his skin. It was entirely possible he was going into shock.
Turning away from the mirror, he leaned his head against the bathroom wall, swallowed hard twice, and turned on his comm. Before he could say anything, his ear was flooded with voices, most of them panicked, demanding assistance and med teams and the need to know what the hell was going on. Not a single voice was familiar, and Rodney only had to listen for a few moments for understanding to dawn, bright and terrible and unwelcome.
He turned his comm off and walked unsteadily out of the bathroom, towards the bed on the other side of the room. All he had seen of Sheppard while hurtling towards the bathroom had been a snoring lump almost entirely wrapped in sheets, spiky dark hair emerging from one end of the heap. After the gut-deep terror of – Rodney checked his watch – yesterday, when he had half-carried Sheppard into his quarters with the certainty that the two of them would die there, Rodney supposed that he should have checked on Sheppard right away. But things like spontaneous sex-changes tended to be distracting, and if Sheppard was snoring he was breathing, and what could Rodney have done to help him if anything else had been wrong?
Now he circled around the bed to where Sheppard lay twisted in sheets, half turned on his back. Rodney knew as soon as he saw Sheppard’s too-small hand curled over the edge of the bed, but he reached out and carefully pulled the sheet away from Sheppard’s face and torso anyway. Breasts, check. Subtly changed but still familiar face, check. Woman, check. And of course Sheppard was still ridiculously attractive, Rodney thought with a kind of numb resignation.
Sheppard muttered in his sleep and turned his face into the pillow, but didn’t wake up. Rodney spread the sheet back over him and walked into the bathroom, where he preceded to sit down on the floor and have a brief but heartfelt fit of hysterics. He waited until he had his breathing under control again before standing up and washing his face. He felt sick and itchy and not at all ready to deal with this, but he activated his comm anyway.
The babble of voices was still going strong. Rodney said loudly, “Elizabeth? This is McKay,” and waited. He tried not to let the sound of his own voice creep him out too much.
Almost immediately several of the voices began demanding information from him, but he remained silent until he heard a man’s voice say, “Rodney, this is Elizabeth. Command channel, now.”
He switched to the command channel. The first thing Elizabeth said was: “Rodney, thank God. Do you know where Major Sheppard is?”
“Yes, I’m with him in his quarters right now,” Rodney said. “He’s fine. Well, that is to say – um, I mean, he’s – changed, and he’s still asleep, but I think he’s fine – ”
Elizabeth mercifully cut him off. “Good, good. Peter’s in the control room with some techs, Carson’s trying to put the infirmary back together, and Bates is sending guards to the gate room; the rest of the science team is being told to gather in the mess hall.”
“There are riots going on in the halls right now, aren’t there?”
Elizabeth made a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I think it would be best if you and I talked to as many of the scientists as possible at one time, don’t you? To get everyone calmed down, and to reassure them that – that we’ll find a way to –” She trailed off.
For once in his life, Rodney managed to restrain himself from pointing out the reality of the situation, which was that they had no idea what had happened to them and even less knowledge on how to reverse it, if it could be reversed. Elizabeth sounded as if she was already teetering near the breaking point. He said, “Yes, of course. I’ll wake up the Major and be right there.”
“Good. Tell John to go to the main gym, that’s where Bates is organizing the Marines.” She hesitated then said, “Rodney? Are you alright?”
“No, not at all,” he answered truthfully. “And you?”
This time the laugh was real. “I’ll see you in the mess hall, Rodney. And hurry. Weir out.”
Rodney flicked off his comm and headed for the bed. He felt a little better now that he had a purpose, but he was fairly sure that waking up Sheppard and having to explain this whole insane situation to him was going to get rid of any good feelings pretty damn quick.
Rodney grabbed Sheppard’s shoulder and shook it lightly, saying, “Major, wake up. Naptime’s over.” Sheppard’s nose twitched and his eyes opened, then closed again, and he scrubbed at them with one hand. He looked puffy and cranky and more than a little like a sleepy five-year-old, making the naptime remark strangely apt. Sheppard always took a few seconds to completely wake up, although once he was awake he was an irritatingly peppy morning person. It was bizarre to see Sheppard’s grouchy waking-up expression on the not-quite-familiar face of a woman.
Suddenly Sheppard’s eyes snapped open and he jerked away from Rodney, moving back so quickly that he nearly fell off the other side of the bed. He was staring up at Rodney in wary confusion.
“Who are you, and why are you in my room?” Sheppard asked. Then he frowned, and coughed experimentally.
Rodney rolled his eyes. Oh yeah, this was going to be a blast. “It’s me. Rodney.”
Sheppard stared blankly, and Rodney added, “McKay.”
He didn’t give Sheppard a chance to say anything, certain that whatever was about to come out of Sheppard’s open mouth would be entirely unhelpful to the situation. “Before you say anything about that being impossible, take a look at yourself, Major. We now have further proof that the Pegasus galaxy as a whole is on a quest to utterly fuck us over, this time with the admittedly original tactic of an Atlantis-wide sex change.” Rodney tried to cross his arms, and scowled when his brand-new breasts got in the way. “Personally, I almost prefer the life-sucking aliens.”
Sheppard’s mouth opened and closed a few times in an unattractive manner, then he looked down at himself and flinched, hard. Rodney turned away, uncomfortable, leaving Sheppard to his discoveries; he took the opportunity to grab his jacket up from the floor from where he’d peeled it off and dropped it yesterday in a fit of feverish heat. He contemplated his shirt for a moment, which was now too loose in the shoulders but almost obscenely tight across the chest, and pulled his jacket on and zipped it up to the neck.
When he turned back to the bed, Sheppard was staring at him again.
“Rodney,” Sheppard said slowly. “You – we – ”
He was pale and wild-eyed and breathing too quickly, and Rodney realized that Sheppard was freaking out and felt a whole new wave of panic washing through him. Sheppard could not freak out, because if Sheppard was freaking out there was no way in hell Rodney would be able to hold it together, and then they would both be freaking out and Elizabeth would kill them.
“Look, Major, this is no time to panic. You have to go to the gym and – yell at some Marines, or whatever it is you do with the Marines, and I have to go and yell at a bunch of crazed, rioting scientists so it really would be best –” He could hear his voice getting higher and higher, rising to a strident pitch that he felt distantly impressed at being able to hit, even with his new vocal cords.
Sheppard said, “Rodney, calm down.” It came out sounding more like an automatic response rather a genuine attempt to soothe, but the familiarity of the gesture seemed to ground Sheppard. The wildness went out of his eyes, and he climbed out of the bed with determined casualness. The effect was ruined somewhat when he stumbled on shaky legs and Rodney had to reach out and catch him by the arms.
Oh, Rodney realized, centimeters away from Sheppard’s surprised face, there was another difference: he was looking Sheppard right in the eye; they were the same height. A slow current of heat flowed lazily through Rodney’s chest, making its way lower, and he became abruptly aware of their proximity, of his hands on Sheppard’s arms and Sheppard’s mouth, mostly unchanged, so very close to his. Rodney’s hands opened and he took a quick step back, trying not to meet Sheppard’s eyes.
He only dared to glance up from his shoes when Sheppard mumbled, “Thanks,” and – was Sheppard blushing?
Sheppard spun away, searching the room until he made a beeline for his boots, saying over his shoulder, “So I have to go to the main gym, right?”
Rodney nodded, uselessly, and backed towards the door. “Yes, that’s right, and I have to go meet Elizabeth. In the mess hall, which is a little ways from here so I’ll just be going and – you’ll be alright?” It suddenly occurred to him that he didn’t want to leave Sheppard alone.
A pause, then, “Other than a few aches, I’m good. Go, Rodney.”
Rodney nodded again, staring at the slim line of Sheppard’s back and ass as he bent over to reach for his boots. Hating himself just a little, Rodney said, “Right,” and forced himself to walk out the door. He had panic-stricken scientists to corral.
~/~
Part Two
Author: Ceitie
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard, Ford/OFC
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: Up to The Siege 2
Word Count: 5,116
Summary: “Personally, I almost prefer the life-sucking aliens.”
A/N: This is the extended version of a fic that was written for the
sga_flashfic Missing Persons challenge, Scena con Variazione. Thank you of_evangeline and blacknoise for being such wonderful betas!Immutable Differences
Part One
The wormhole half-flung him into Atlantis’ gate room, but Colonel Dillon Everett took it in stride. He shook his head to cast off the momentary dizziness and walked easily into the room. The soldiers lining the walls of the gate room slowly lowered their weapons, and Everett echoed their actions, knowing that his people would follow his lead.
There was something odd about the soldiers who now stood at attention in the gate room, something that sent the hairs prickling up on the back of his neck with its wrongness. He diverted the disturbance to the back of his mind, too busy taking in his new surroundings.
Atlantis was impressive, from what he could see of it. He took note of the room’s size and dim lighting as well as the shrieking klaxons that echoed off its tiled walls, but focused his attention on the three people rushing down the large central staircase towards him.
A man whose jacket sported panels of command red hurried down from the upper level, along with a woman in military gray and a second woman in a red flight suit. Everett tried to suppress a frown when he realized that he didn’t recognize any of them. He scanned his memory of the Atlantis expedition personnel files; he’d reviewed the files quickly and meticulously while preparing for the mission, but he found himself at a loss to match identities to the faces before him. It was possible, he reasoned, that they were some of the Pegasus galaxy natives who were apparently allowed free run of the city, rather than expedition members, but if that was the case –
“Who are you people and where’s Dr. Weir?” Everett asked brusquely.
The man opened his mouth to reply, but one of the women spoke first.
“Who are you?” she shot back, somehow sounding at once angry, hopeful and suspicious.
Everett eyed her flight suit and disgruntled expression, wondering if she was the leader of the natives who lived on the planet’s mainland, the alien who had become a member of Major Sheppard’s team. He thought both the flight suit and the soft curves of her body made that unlikely. The woman who stood next to her was a far better candidate for the infamous Teyla Emmagan. She was dark and wiry, dressed in a military uniform, and held a P90 easily.
Everett felt realization hit him like a lightening bolt, as the source of the niggling sense of strangeness became instantly clear. The soldiers in the gate room were women. Every last one of them. Considering the fact that nearly all of the military personnel that had made the trip to Atlantis had been male, something really fucking weird was going on. Everett didn’t allow his friendly demeanor to slip, but he felt adrenaline surge through him as he began reassessing the situation. He answered the woman’s question, but kept his eyes on the man in command colours.
“Colonel Dillon Everett, United States Marine Corps. I need to see Dr. Weir immediately,” he said, looking for a reaction, trying to size up what was going on. The reports of a certain Sergeant Bates were abruptly flashing through his head, and he wondered if the natives had somehow taken control of Atlantis. He watched as the three strangers exchanged a series of quick glances, and tightened his grip on the weapon at his side.
The man turned away from the two women, looked Everett straight in the eye and said, “I’m Dr. Weir.”
Everett blinked and let out a short, astonished laugh. Despite the presence of the women, he said, “Bullshit,” out of pure surprise, but the woman in the flight suit broke in.
“Look, it’s true, alright?” she said, rolling her eyes. “She’s Dr. Weir, I’m Dr. McKay and that’s Major Sheppard, there was an accident with Ancient technology and now we’re all the opposite gender, how mind-bogglingly bizarre, blah blah blah.”
Everett dropped his smile. “I don’t have time for this. Cut the crap and tell me where I can find Dr. Weir, or,” he raised his weapon slightly, “we’re going to have a serious problem.”
The dark woman tensed, eyeing him. She muttered, “You don’t have time for this…”
The man shot her a warning glance and the woman in the flight suit ignored them both, glaring at Everett. She waved her hand in an exasperated, hurry-it-up gesture. “I assume you’ve seen our pictures, Colonel, so take a closer look, see if you notice any, shall we say, striking similarities?”
Her voice rose in pitch and speed. “If you could skip right past the shock and disbelief to the acceptance phase, that’d be great, seeing as we’re in the middle of an evacuation here and as of now there’s maybe six minutes left until the self-destruct goes off. So instead of asking stupid questions, why don’t you just tell us what you’re doing here?”
The other two were nodding along in frantic agreement, and Everett finally managed to peel his jaw off the floor. He closed his mouth and stared hard; the resemblances that he had missed before became suddenly apparent, like an optical illusion that appeared only after he twisted his head and squinted his eyes. He felt a tilt, like his well-ordered universe had tipped on an angle without any warning. Somehow he managed to keep his mouth from falling open again.
He turned to the thin, elegant man and asked uncertainly, “Dr. Weir?”
“Yes,” Weir said, crossing his arms over his chest.
Everett straightened his shoulders and tried to regroup, but did not quite succeed at casting off his disorientation and restoring his former self-assurance.
“General O'Neill sends his compliments on a job well done under extraordinary circumstances.” He saluted, swallowed, and continued. “You are relieved.”
~/~
Twelve days earlier.
Radek was walking back from the mess hall, eating the remains of a mostly stale muffin, when the whole city thrummed like a plucked guitar string. For nearly ten seconds he felt the ground under his feet buzzing and trembling while his teeth rattled and the muffin tumbled out of his unsteady hand. It was not unlike standing next to a set of very powerful speakers at a rock concert, Radek thought wildly, and then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
He activated his comm, and winced as Rodney’s bellow slammed its way into his ear.
“- the hell just happened?”
Dr. Weir’s voice rang out over the babble of similar questions. “Rodney, Grodin says that there was a huge power drain in one of the storage rooms by the West Pier. There are two life signs out there.”
“It was us, Dr. McKay.” Radek recognized the worried voice of James Naicker, one of the engineers in his division who had been sent out to search for any helpful Ancient devices whose function hadn’t yet been confirmed, on the off chance that one of them would be the key to somehow defeating the three approaching Hive ships.
Naicker continued, “Dr. Brar and I seem to have accidentally activated one of the devices in Storage Room J385, and I – I think that it was the source of the power drain and that strange hum. But it’s turned off now, I’m quite sure.” Radek could hear the man cringing, and sighed sympathetically.
“Oh, isn’t that just wonderful. Never mind the fact that the Wraith are bearing down on us as we speak – ”
Rodney sounded like he had been aching for an opportunity to scream at someone for hours, so Radek interrupted before Rodney could rip the poor man limb from limb over the public comm.
“Do not start, Rodney. I will go to West Pier and handle the problem, yes? Go back to the database.”
Rodney grumbled but signed off. Dr. Weir said warmly, “Thank you, Dr. Zelenka.”
Radek felt heat rise into his face in response.
He said, “No thanks is needed. Naicker, Brar, do not touch anything until I get there,” and headed for the nearest transporter, wondering if he had time to stop by the mess hall to get a new muffin.
Forty-five minutes later, Radek was still searching through the database for information about the mystery device. He had sent Naicker and Brar away to check in at the infirmary after they’d explained to him what had happened. Dr. Brar, a linguist with the ATA gene, had brushed the large cube-like machine with her shoulder, at which point it had turned on with that kidney-tingling hum. It had turned off by itself about ten seconds later, despite Naicker’s rapid search for a way to disconnect its power and Brar’s mental commands of Off! Off! They had both seemed a little shaken by the experience but otherwise unaffected; Radek figured it would do no harm to have Beckett look them over before they returned to their search.
He had confirmed that the device was indeed turned off and no longer draining power, but had made little headway in discovering exactly what it was. The storage room seemed to contain mostly medical equipment with a smattering of miscellaneous items, none of which had been examined in any great detail by the science team.
Radek had left his comm switched to the private channel that he and Rodney used, not wanting to be disturbed by idle chatter or requests. He was surprised when Rodney contacted him less than an hour after he had reached the storage room. Radek straightened up from his hunched position over the console, rubbing the bridge of his nose. A headache had been burgeoning behind his eyes for the past ten minutes, and it was a little difficult to concentrate on Rodney’s voice.
“Zelenka, respond,” said Rodney. He sounded – strange. As though he were making an effort to speak calmly, and Radek felt a shiver of trepidation.
“Yes, what?” he answered.
“Have you made any progress on what that machine did when it turned on?”
Radek snorted. If all Rodney wanted was a progress report – “I have been here for less than hour, what do you think?”
“Because in the last thirty minutes, fifteen people have reported to the infirmary with headaches and high fevers,” Rodney hissed, any sense of calm thrown to the wind, “and somehow I’m guessing that the timing isn’t simply an amusing coincidence.”
Radek froze, hands stiff and unmoving over the console.
“I’m sending Kusanagi down to help, and I’ll join you as soon as Carson does his voodoo and figures out what the hell is going on.” Rodney no longer sounded like he was hovering on the edge of panic, but the current of fear was still obvious beneath his curt words. Radek was not reassured.
Still, he cleared his throat and said as steadily as he could, “I see. I will work faster.”
“Right. Do that.”
Then there was silence, and Radek stared through the gloom of the storage room at the metallic device sitting innocently next to the far wall, and tried not to let his hands shake. He took a deep breath, and changed his comm back to the public channel in case someone needed him.
Miko Kusanagi joined him five minutes later, and they acknowledged each other with quick nods and strained smiles. Radek left the console to her and set upon the device with his tools, which proved to be a more difficult endeavor than he had imagined. It took him nearly an hour to find the trick of removing the casing from the side panel without resorting to the sheer blunt force of a crow bar, and by that time, his head had begun to throb painfully and he was leaning hard against the wall to his right so as not to slide to the ground.
He knew Miko wasn’t doing any better; she was supporting herself against the console, still doggedly typing away despite the flush in her cheeks and the glassiness in her eyes. Radek had ordered her to go the infirmary but she had looked at him carefully and said, “I will go if you accompany me, Dr. Zelenka,” and after a moment, he had turned back to the machine without a word.
By the same tacit agreement they had both changed their comms to a private science channel after the requests on the public channel for a med team – to the living quarters, to the mess hall, to the training room, to the control room – became so frequent and panicked that they couldn’t listen any longer.
He heard a noise at the doorway and looked up; it took a long time for his eyes to focus enough to identify the newcomers. Rodney walked into the room with Major Sheppard beside him, both men looking as though they might collapse at any moment. Rodney was sweating and shivering, hugging his jacket around himself, and Sheppard swayed where he stood, one hand clutching the wall for support.
“Radek,” Rodney said hoarsely. “Tell me you’ve figured this out.”
Radek shook his head, and then blinked away the resultant dizziness. “No, Rodney, I am sorry. We need more time.”
“We don’t have time,” Sheppard said, leaning full-length against the wall and closing his eyes.
Radek didn’t ask how many people had been stricken by the illness, or if anyone had died. Instead, he asked, “Why has Atlantis not activated its quarantine protocols?”
Rodney grimaced. “Carson was trying to figure that out. He said that whatever causing this isn’t infectious. Apparently Atlantis knows that a quarantine would be useless.”
“Are you certain that this device is the cause of the illness? If we still do not even know what is happening to us – ” Miko spoke up, only to be cut off by Rodney.
“Those idiots turning on that goddamn machine is the only weird thing that happened before everyone started to get sick; that makes the timing a little suspicious, don’t you think?” Rodney’s glare was too pained to carry its usual clout.
From his position against the wall, Sheppard said, “Post hoc, ergo proctor hoc? Careful, Rodney, your logical fallacies are showing.” He started snickering softly.
Radek smiled despite himself at Rodney’s sour expression, but his amusement vanished as Sheppard, still snickering, slid down the wall and onto the ground. Radek tried to rise from his crouching position to go to Sheppard’s aid, only to stagger hard into the wall, grunting in pain as he struck his shoulder. Rodney and Miko were already pulling Sheppard into a sitting position by the time Radek regained his balance and made his way across the room.
“Major? Come on, focus, look at me,” Rodney said worriedly, propping Sheppard up against the wall while Miko pressed her wrist to Sheppard’s forehead. Radek took in Sheppard’s dazed eyes and chattering teeth, and the fact that Rodney looked like he was only a few minutes away from joining Sheppard on the floor, and knew that they were out of time.
“Rodney. Take him to the infirmary. We will continue to try and fix this,” Radek said.
Rodney shook his head, not taking his eyes off of Sheppard. “The infirmary’s past capacity already. And I have to stay and help you; no one else is coming.”
Radek flinched, and ignored the small, frightened noise that Miko failed to stifle.
“He is nearly unconscious and so are you; there is nothing more you can do here. Take him to his quarters, somewhere where you can bring down his fever.” Or at least let him lie comfortably in a bed, so he won’t die on the floor of this storage room, Radek did not say. Rodney would not be receptive to that sort of pragmatism.
Rodney took a deep breath, then his shoulders slumped and he nodded tiredly. “Okay. Okay.”
Radek tried to hide his shock at how easily Rodney had given in, and the resulting indication of just how badly Rodney was suffering. Rodney leaned forward and wrapped his arm around Sheppard’s waist, hauling him to his feet. The two of them wavered for a moment before Rodney steadied them against the wall. Sheppard’s head was drooping, he seemed unaware of his surroundings and yet he somehow managed to remain standing.
Rodney headed for the door, pulling Sheppard along with him, but he turned his head as he reached the doorway, looking at Miko and then Radek. He said, “Good luck,” and walked out without waiting for an answer.
Radek said, “And to you as well,” anyway.
After Rodney and Sheppard had left, events took on an odd, feverish haze. Radek continued to work listlessly on the device, but his thoughts kept wandering and he would find himself staring down at his motionless hands, some unknown amount of time having slipped by without his notice. At some point, Miko had left the console, placed her jacket on the floor and curled up on top of it, muttering something about a short rest.
Radek could still see her on the floor out of the corner of his eye. He wanted to go and check on her, make sure she was alright, make sure she was breathing, but his whole body ached and he didn’t think he would be able to make it to the console, even if he crawled.
He wondered if the Wraith would arrive in a fortnight and find a city full of corpses. Perhaps even at this moment someone else was thinking the same thing, and arming the self-destruct in order to save whatever remained of their city from the Wraith’s grasp.
Radek realized he was staring up at the ceiling, and that that was because he was lying on his back on the floor. He was suddenly, fiercely glad of the messages that they had sent to Earth, imagined his brother and sister and their families watching the video, listening as a dead man described the rising of a city from the ocean.
Even as Radek slid into unconsciousness, he saw Atlantis behind his eyelids, water streaming down in the sunlight, towers singing up into the sky.
~/~
Rodney opened his eyes, and immediately closed them again with a strangled moan. His head no longer felt like it was about to explode, but his eyes and every inch of his skin stung and itched, his whole body feeling achy and out of sorts. He lay on his back and breathed in and out through his nose until the pain dissipated somewhat.
A nap would have been really nice right about now, Rodney reflected wearily, but Sheppard’s quarters were chilly and he was lying on the floor. His back was already letting him know that it did not appreciate such treatment. With a sigh, he cracked his eyes open again and pushed himself up into a sitting position.
And froze in place, staring down at the front of his shirt; there were – bulges – under it that he was reasonably sure hadn’t been there before. He reached up with one shaky hand, poked and squeezed tentatively, then yanked his shirt up to his armpits and gaped at what most definitely appeared to be breasts. Breasts. On his chest.
Rodney was usually of the opinion that profanity was for people who were too stupid to come up with more creative insults, but certain situations called for exceptions to the rule. This, he decided numbly, was one of them.
“What the fuck.” The sound of his own voice was all wrong, much too high, and a horrible suspicion was clawing its way forward from the back of Rodney’s mind. He thrust a frantic hand down the front of his pants, and the suspicion very abruptly became fact. Swallowing down nausea, he scrambled to his feet and flung himself towards the bathroom, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision with the door-frame when his vision blurred with a head rush.
He careened into the bathroom, intending to empty his stomach into the toilet, but stopped when the transparent wall of the shower cubicle shifted to its reflective form, apparently at his subconscious mental command. He stopped in front of it and stared.
A strange woman in an ill-fitting uniform stared back at him.
For a moment the cognitive dissonance was so strong, he nearly turned his head to see if a woman was standing behind him. Then something snapped into place in his brain, and he recognized himself again, or at least this fun-house mirror version of himself. Same features, pale round eyes and slanted mouth, only – not quite, all the rough edges of his face smoothed into some smaller, finer version. He raised his hand and ran it through his hair, sweat-sticky and standing up in small tufts, absently noting the disappearance of his receding hairline.
He was almost sure that he was shorter, and every time he looked at his transformed body he got the incalculably creepy feeling that he was looking at his sister’s, or at least one with the same wide shoulders and hips and full breasts. Rodney shuddered, and tried to ignore both the sickness rising in his stomach and the cold sweat that was breaking out across his skin. It was entirely possible he was going into shock.
Turning away from the mirror, he leaned his head against the bathroom wall, swallowed hard twice, and turned on his comm. Before he could say anything, his ear was flooded with voices, most of them panicked, demanding assistance and med teams and the need to know what the hell was going on. Not a single voice was familiar, and Rodney only had to listen for a few moments for understanding to dawn, bright and terrible and unwelcome.
He turned his comm off and walked unsteadily out of the bathroom, towards the bed on the other side of the room. All he had seen of Sheppard while hurtling towards the bathroom had been a snoring lump almost entirely wrapped in sheets, spiky dark hair emerging from one end of the heap. After the gut-deep terror of – Rodney checked his watch – yesterday, when he had half-carried Sheppard into his quarters with the certainty that the two of them would die there, Rodney supposed that he should have checked on Sheppard right away. But things like spontaneous sex-changes tended to be distracting, and if Sheppard was snoring he was breathing, and what could Rodney have done to help him if anything else had been wrong?
Now he circled around the bed to where Sheppard lay twisted in sheets, half turned on his back. Rodney knew as soon as he saw Sheppard’s too-small hand curled over the edge of the bed, but he reached out and carefully pulled the sheet away from Sheppard’s face and torso anyway. Breasts, check. Subtly changed but still familiar face, check. Woman, check. And of course Sheppard was still ridiculously attractive, Rodney thought with a kind of numb resignation.
Sheppard muttered in his sleep and turned his face into the pillow, but didn’t wake up. Rodney spread the sheet back over him and walked into the bathroom, where he preceded to sit down on the floor and have a brief but heartfelt fit of hysterics. He waited until he had his breathing under control again before standing up and washing his face. He felt sick and itchy and not at all ready to deal with this, but he activated his comm anyway.
The babble of voices was still going strong. Rodney said loudly, “Elizabeth? This is McKay,” and waited. He tried not to let the sound of his own voice creep him out too much.
Almost immediately several of the voices began demanding information from him, but he remained silent until he heard a man’s voice say, “Rodney, this is Elizabeth. Command channel, now.”
He switched to the command channel. The first thing Elizabeth said was: “Rodney, thank God. Do you know where Major Sheppard is?”
“Yes, I’m with him in his quarters right now,” Rodney said. “He’s fine. Well, that is to say – um, I mean, he’s – changed, and he’s still asleep, but I think he’s fine – ”
Elizabeth mercifully cut him off. “Good, good. Peter’s in the control room with some techs, Carson’s trying to put the infirmary back together, and Bates is sending guards to the gate room; the rest of the science team is being told to gather in the mess hall.”
“There are riots going on in the halls right now, aren’t there?”
Elizabeth made a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I think it would be best if you and I talked to as many of the scientists as possible at one time, don’t you? To get everyone calmed down, and to reassure them that – that we’ll find a way to –” She trailed off.
For once in his life, Rodney managed to restrain himself from pointing out the reality of the situation, which was that they had no idea what had happened to them and even less knowledge on how to reverse it, if it could be reversed. Elizabeth sounded as if she was already teetering near the breaking point. He said, “Yes, of course. I’ll wake up the Major and be right there.”
“Good. Tell John to go to the main gym, that’s where Bates is organizing the Marines.” She hesitated then said, “Rodney? Are you alright?”
“No, not at all,” he answered truthfully. “And you?”
This time the laugh was real. “I’ll see you in the mess hall, Rodney. And hurry. Weir out.”
Rodney flicked off his comm and headed for the bed. He felt a little better now that he had a purpose, but he was fairly sure that waking up Sheppard and having to explain this whole insane situation to him was going to get rid of any good feelings pretty damn quick.
Rodney grabbed Sheppard’s shoulder and shook it lightly, saying, “Major, wake up. Naptime’s over.” Sheppard’s nose twitched and his eyes opened, then closed again, and he scrubbed at them with one hand. He looked puffy and cranky and more than a little like a sleepy five-year-old, making the naptime remark strangely apt. Sheppard always took a few seconds to completely wake up, although once he was awake he was an irritatingly peppy morning person. It was bizarre to see Sheppard’s grouchy waking-up expression on the not-quite-familiar face of a woman.
Suddenly Sheppard’s eyes snapped open and he jerked away from Rodney, moving back so quickly that he nearly fell off the other side of the bed. He was staring up at Rodney in wary confusion.
“Who are you, and why are you in my room?” Sheppard asked. Then he frowned, and coughed experimentally.
Rodney rolled his eyes. Oh yeah, this was going to be a blast. “It’s me. Rodney.”
Sheppard stared blankly, and Rodney added, “McKay.”
He didn’t give Sheppard a chance to say anything, certain that whatever was about to come out of Sheppard’s open mouth would be entirely unhelpful to the situation. “Before you say anything about that being impossible, take a look at yourself, Major. We now have further proof that the Pegasus galaxy as a whole is on a quest to utterly fuck us over, this time with the admittedly original tactic of an Atlantis-wide sex change.” Rodney tried to cross his arms, and scowled when his brand-new breasts got in the way. “Personally, I almost prefer the life-sucking aliens.”
Sheppard’s mouth opened and closed a few times in an unattractive manner, then he looked down at himself and flinched, hard. Rodney turned away, uncomfortable, leaving Sheppard to his discoveries; he took the opportunity to grab his jacket up from the floor from where he’d peeled it off and dropped it yesterday in a fit of feverish heat. He contemplated his shirt for a moment, which was now too loose in the shoulders but almost obscenely tight across the chest, and pulled his jacket on and zipped it up to the neck.
When he turned back to the bed, Sheppard was staring at him again.
“Rodney,” Sheppard said slowly. “You – we – ”
He was pale and wild-eyed and breathing too quickly, and Rodney realized that Sheppard was freaking out and felt a whole new wave of panic washing through him. Sheppard could not freak out, because if Sheppard was freaking out there was no way in hell Rodney would be able to hold it together, and then they would both be freaking out and Elizabeth would kill them.
“Look, Major, this is no time to panic. You have to go to the gym and – yell at some Marines, or whatever it is you do with the Marines, and I have to go and yell at a bunch of crazed, rioting scientists so it really would be best –” He could hear his voice getting higher and higher, rising to a strident pitch that he felt distantly impressed at being able to hit, even with his new vocal cords.
Sheppard said, “Rodney, calm down.” It came out sounding more like an automatic response rather a genuine attempt to soothe, but the familiarity of the gesture seemed to ground Sheppard. The wildness went out of his eyes, and he climbed out of the bed with determined casualness. The effect was ruined somewhat when he stumbled on shaky legs and Rodney had to reach out and catch him by the arms.
Oh, Rodney realized, centimeters away from Sheppard’s surprised face, there was another difference: he was looking Sheppard right in the eye; they were the same height. A slow current of heat flowed lazily through Rodney’s chest, making its way lower, and he became abruptly aware of their proximity, of his hands on Sheppard’s arms and Sheppard’s mouth, mostly unchanged, so very close to his. Rodney’s hands opened and he took a quick step back, trying not to meet Sheppard’s eyes.
He only dared to glance up from his shoes when Sheppard mumbled, “Thanks,” and – was Sheppard blushing?
Sheppard spun away, searching the room until he made a beeline for his boots, saying over his shoulder, “So I have to go to the main gym, right?”
Rodney nodded, uselessly, and backed towards the door. “Yes, that’s right, and I have to go meet Elizabeth. In the mess hall, which is a little ways from here so I’ll just be going and – you’ll be alright?” It suddenly occurred to him that he didn’t want to leave Sheppard alone.
A pause, then, “Other than a few aches, I’m good. Go, Rodney.”
Rodney nodded again, staring at the slim line of Sheppard’s back and ass as he bent over to reach for his boots. Hating himself just a little, Rodney said, “Right,” and forced himself to walk out the door. He had panic-stricken scientists to corral.
~/~
Part Two
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