Post-Vengeance
Sep. 29th, 2008 12:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
callmemajorIt’s part of his job, this cleaning up of other people’s messes. So when he gets sent to the Teranans’ planet (former planet) to clean up Michael’s mess, it’s not unexpected.
He’s known since the beginning that what they did to Michael was not only wrong, it was dangerous, and it was bound to come back and bite them in the ass.
But he’d never expected this.
An entire civilization, one they’d helped save, destroyed. Not just destroyed. Mutilated. Discarded like garbage. Left to rot in much the same way. (And there are dozens of worlds like this, dozens of planets Michael has turned into his laboratories in retaliation for the ostracism they forced on him.)
And with each grave dug (because it’s the least they can do, really, to dig them each their own grave), he becomes less and less like the picture-perfect, hardened, battle-worn 2IC he’s made himself into, and more and more like that queasy, first-time-off-world, hand-still-shaking-on-his-gun geologist, vomiting at the sight of Lieutenant Ritter’s body, racked up as a warning for the rest of them.
It’s our fault, is the thought that keeps running through his head, and that’s the part that makes this so very hard to live with. They put the Teranans on this planet. They provided Michael with the gate address (knowingly or not). And every single body buried is like facing Ritter all over again.
By the time he gets back to Atlantis, sits through a quick physical and debriefing, the smell of death still seems to be all around him, and he desperately needs to shower, to scrub the stench from his skin again and again until he smells like himself again, until he smells (feels) alive again.
But, as usual, the universe (or the Landlord) has other plans.
He’s known since the beginning that what they did to Michael was not only wrong, it was dangerous, and it was bound to come back and bite them in the ass.
But he’d never expected this.
An entire civilization, one they’d helped save, destroyed. Not just destroyed. Mutilated. Discarded like garbage. Left to rot in much the same way. (And there are dozens of worlds like this, dozens of planets Michael has turned into his laboratories in retaliation for the ostracism they forced on him.)
And with each grave dug (because it’s the least they can do, really, to dig them each their own grave), he becomes less and less like the picture-perfect, hardened, battle-worn 2IC he’s made himself into, and more and more like that queasy, first-time-off-world, hand-still-shaking-on-his-gun geologist, vomiting at the sight of Lieutenant Ritter’s body, racked up as a warning for the rest of them.
It’s our fault, is the thought that keeps running through his head, and that’s the part that makes this so very hard to live with. They put the Teranans on this planet. They provided Michael with the gate address (knowingly or not). And every single body buried is like facing Ritter all over again.
By the time he gets back to Atlantis, sits through a quick physical and debriefing, the smell of death still seems to be all around him, and he desperately needs to shower, to scrub the stench from his skin again and again until he smells like himself again, until he smells (feels) alive again.
But, as usual, the universe (or the Landlord) has other plans.
