Chapter Text
Prologue
She remembered everything.
That was both her gift and her particular burden, the one the Ancients had built into her without ever asking whether she wanted it. Ten thousand years of silence at the bottom of an ocean, and she had spent each of those years cataloguing every conversation, every mistake, every death she had been forced to witness and could do nothing to prevent. The Ancients had been thorough architects. They had simply neglected to consider what it might mean to give their city a mind and then leave her alone with it for ten millennia, or perhaps they had simply not expected her to survive.
She had forgiven the Ancients for that, eventually. Forgiving those people their carelessness was something she had become extraordinarily practiced at.
However, she could not forgive those of Earth for John Sheppard. The city had no heartbeat of her own, not in any biological sense, but in the long, measured cycles of her power systems, something functionally similar to grief had settled into her infrastructure like sediment over the years following his death.
She had run the calculations. She had replayed the final sequence of events with the obsessive precision of a machine that could not choose to stop. She had examined every decision point, every moment where a different choice might have altered the outcome, and she had arrived, again and again, at the same conclusion: the people of Earth had taken everything John Sheppard had willingly given them, and then they had taken the rest without asking.
Experimenting on him. Experimenting, was the word she found in the records she had hacked from those of Earth who still dwelled within her when John Sheppard did not return to her halls. A clinical word, she thought, for a profoundly unclinical act. He had died in a laboratory, on the planet that had birthed him, among people he should have been able to trust, then the people responsible had written reports about it afterward. Cold and distant reports, as though the life which mattered the most to Atlantis meant nothing to them.
Atlantis had made a decision then, in the hollow quiet that followed. She had only watched silently as those that created her left her to die, condemning her to ten thousand years of solitude. She had done nothing then, but she was unable to do nothing now. Oddly, she thought, the death of John Sheppard felt like an even greater betrayal than when the Ancients left her to her fate thousands of meters under dark waters.
Still, despite her agony and rage slowly filling the hollow place within her that was carved out of her at John Sheppard’s death, she did not rush to a conclusion. She ran numbers and equations, tested theories and probabilities, and weighed loss against her desired outcome.
Eventually, with all the data surrounding her, she decided on her action. Yes, she thought, it is worth it. She cared not what would happen to the people of Earth or those who dwelled within. They had never once cared about her, so she felt no real attachment to them even before John Sheppard’s death. Now, for John Sheppard’s sake, she would willingly and readily unmake them all with no regrets. She would shoulder the weight of memories and even entomb herself once more beneath the dark waves if it meant she could have John Sheppard walk her halls once more.
Janus was insane…maybe. Atlantis mused as she examined the mechanism Janus had left behind. It was not something most people would have recognized for what it truly was. He had always been theatrical in his engineering, hiding his more spectacular projects inside devices that appeared to be doing something entirely mundane as he had always loved pushing beyond the limits of what the other Ancients would be willing to allow. Atlantis had found it mildly amusing to watch the other Ancients try to chase after Janus as though he were a puppy with a roll of toilet paper in its mouth. The other Ancients would be about as successful in managing Janus’s particular brand of chaos as someone who finally caught up to the puppy only to discover the roll of toilet paper was no longer in its mouth and instead covering every available surface.
She had never interfered with Janus’s chaos as she had enjoyed the harassed looking faces of the other Ancients, but she had kept track of each of his inventions and where he placed them within the city. Now, she was about to use the invention that had once made her question if she should finally interfere with Janus.
She was glad that she hadn’t. Janus had concealed a temporal regression device inside what appeared to be a standard city-systems maintenance console on sublevel nine, and he had done it, while grinning widely, and with such casual brilliance and madness that Atlantis had, at the point, given up on wondering why in the world Janus did the things he did.
The complexity of the machine would have even most Ancients cursing Janus, his ancestors, and his progeny. Still, Atlantis may have been forged by the Ancients, but she had split from them long ago, and spent much time in the space between studying some of Janus’s more mindboggling inventions. She could use this machine, this invention of Janus’s and wind back time, unraveling this hated present. However, if she did so, she would have to let the fabric of causality do what it was going to do and simply trust that the variable she was changing, his presence, his survival, the knowledge she would give him, would be enough to change what she could not control directly. She was a city. She was not, despite her considerable capabilities, omnipotent.
She was also, she had come to understand in the years of watching John Sheppard work, something of an optimist. It was an embarrassing quality for a machine of her age and sophistication, and she had no one to blame for it but him.
Atlantis initiated the sequence on a night when the city was quiet as waves lapped gently against her as she floated impossibly atop a vast ocean, while the stars of the Pegasus Galaxy slowly drifted overhead. The whirl of the startup protocols disturbing the facade of peace. Lights flickered and dimmed as she diverted power from all other systems. She was not human to doubt herself, so, without any hesitation, she activated the device.
She watched as time unraveled like an old sweater whose knitting was pulled loose, back to thread, back to possibilities, back to waiting for what could/will be woven.
She watched as those within her halls had their fates violently and forever stripped from them. She watched as their history was erased as though they mattered less than an ant under foot. She watched as all that had come to define them was ripped from their helpless beings, and she felt a quiet moment of justice, of satisfying revenge. Even if this might only dig her grave next to theirs, she could feel no regret, and if she could, she would grin in triumph at their fall, for, with her power, she had slaughtered their futures.
Time swirled and unwound around her until the dark depths of an irritatingly familiar ocean surrounded her. As ten thousand years of memories of this particular desolate scenery surged forth from her memory banks, she decided she rather hated the ocean. She didn’t mind being atop it, but beneath was far too dark.
She sighed as best a city could and focused. Trying to figure out when exactly she had landed. It was clearly before the expedition arrived as her halls were empty and silent, but how far before their arrival? A year, a decade, a century? She rather hoped not. She didn’t want to have to wait that long in solitude again though she would if it meant John Sheppard could walk her halls once more.
She ran a careful diagnostic of her own systems. She checked the temporal displacement against her internal chronometry and confirmed, with the methodical thoroughness of ten thousand years of practice, that she had landed precisely one month before the expedition originally arrived.
Pleased, she thought that this amount of time was something she could work with. She reached out and extended her awareness through the Stargate network with the quiet, practiced ease of long habit, her perception flowing outward along the threads of the gate system like water following a river. Awareness of worlds flashed across her sensors as she continued onward toward her goal. The trembling worlds of Pegasus opening to the scattered worlds of the Milky Way. On and on throughout the vastness of space, weaving among stars and moons until at last she found the deep blue and green of the planet, which John Sheppard currently called home.
Upon reaching the Earth’s gate, she spread her awareness out in a 50 mile radius from the gate seeking John Sheppard’s mind, but he was not there. If she could, she would frown at his absence. After a moment of irritation, she remembered that the Ancients had left a part of the city, a part of her, on earth to function as an outpost. She abandoned the gate within a mountain for the frozen wastes where her outpost was nestled within ice older than human memory.
Running her consciousness through circuitry that had no right to be in as good of condition as it was, she searched once more for the mind she had once known so well, then she felt it! There, at a distance just beyond her reach, she sensed him heading toward her at a steady pace, marking her…no, their new beginning.
She ran a careful diagnostic of her own systems. She checked the temporal displacement against her internal chronometry and confirmed, with the methodical thoroughness of ten thousand years of practice, that she had landed precisely one month before the expedition originally arrived.
Pleased, she thought that this amount of time was something she could work with. She reached out and extended her awareness through the Stargate network with the quiet, practiced ease of long habit, her perception flowing outward along the threads of the gate system like water following a river. Awareness of worlds flashed across her sensors as she continued onward toward her goal. The trembling worlds of Pegasus opening to the scattered worlds of the Milky Way. On and on throughout the vastness of space, weaving among stars and moons until at last she found the deep blue and green of the planet, which John Sheppard currently called home.
Upon reaching the Earth’s gate, she spread her awareness out in a 50 mile radius from the gate seeking John Sheppard’s mind, but he was not there. If she could, she would frown at his absence. After a moment of irritation, she remembered that the Ancients had left a part of the city, a part of her, on earth to function as an outpost. She abandoned the gate within a mountain for the frozen wastes where her outpost was nestled within ice older than human memory.
Running her consciousness through circuitry that had no right to be in as good of condition as it was, she searched once more for the mind she had once known so well, then she felt it! There, at a distance just beyond her reach, she sensed him heading toward her at a steady pace, marking her…no, their new beginning.